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What Will You Remember About This Chapter?
by
Micheal Hickerson
A few years ago, I read
The Personal Memoirs of Ulysses S. Grant
. Some have described it as the best book ever written by a U.S. President. It’s certainly one of the best biographies I’ve ever read. Grant wrote the book as he was dying of cancer, intending it to provide for his family after his death. (Mark Twain won the bidding war to publish the memoirs by promising Grant a 75% royalty.)
Selective Memory
As I read Grant’s memoirs, I was struck by how little Grant wrote about his civilian life. Most of the book details Grant’s military career, first as a young West Point graduate in the Mexican-American War, and then as a general during the American Civil War. Grant covers the seven years between the end of his first military commission and the start of the Civil War in just a couple of pages.
I’m sure this was largely a business decision: Grant and Twain knew that the reading public would be far more interested in Grant’s remarkable military career than in his unremarkable life outside the army or his disastrous presidency.
The contrast, though, between Grant’s descriptions of his Civil War campaigns and his civilian is so great that I wonder if there’s something more going on here. When writing about specific battles, Grant includes incredible detail, including specific formations, landmarks, equipment problems, and logistical issues. He has a novelist’s eye for memorable details, such as the soiled and torn shirt he wore to accept Lee’s
surrender at Appamattox
—while Lee was dressed in his finest dress uniform.
Those seven civilian years, meanwhile, are glossed over in a handful of paragraphs. I have to wonder if Grant chose not to remember those years in the same level of detail. His Civil War career is one of the most remarkable runs in military history. Grant rose from an obscure volunteer colonel to commander of Union forces in only four years, and he repeatedly solved military problems that stumped generals with far better credentials.
In contrast, his civilian life was full of disappointment. He failed as a farmer (twice), as a bill collector, and as a leather goods salesman, and he often had to rely on family members for new career opportunities. Midway through the Civil War, Grant had become a committed abolitionist, but as a farmer in Missouri in the 1850s, Grant acquired a slave from his father-in-law and put him to work on his farm. Grant moved his family several times during this time period as he tried to find some way of supporting them.
Is it any wonder that Grant devotes so little of his memoirs to this period of his life?
Imagining Different Memoirs
What if someone had asked Grant to write his memoirs in 1859? What would he have said about himself? A professional soldier with an undistinguished career, retired at 32, now trying to make it—and failing—at the simplest kinds of work. No one, especially not Grant himself, would have imagined that six years later, he would be celebrated by half the nation as the greatest of heroes (and hated by the other half as the greatest of villains). Or that ten years later, he would become the youngest elected President up to that point in American history.
Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards. – Søren Kierkegaard
If someone had asked Grant to write his memoirs in 1868, while he was on his way to an Electoral College landslide victory, what kind of book would it have been? At this point, Grant’s struggles in the 1850s would have appeared to be an anomaly, his earlier military career reinterpreted to make his later success more explicable. The arc of his life would have been clear: upward, an inevitable course towards victory in both war and peace.
From his deathbed, however, where he actually wrote his memoirs, Grant’s life appears much more complicated. Historians generally consider his presidency
one of the worst
, with numerous corruption scandals. After leaving office, Grant’s attempts at business again failed, and he was financially ruined by a Ponzi scheme run by his son’s business partner. As he lay dying of cancer, his memoirs were a last-ditch attempt to capitalize on his celebrity to rescue his family from poverty. I doubt anyone thought the result would be a literary and historical masterpiece.
Grant’s time as a Civil War general, then, is not a part of an upward arc describing his rise; it’s the apogee of his career. Clearly, it always was, but the failures bookending his military success create a stunning contrast.
Further, could Grant’s early failures have created the opportunity for him to become a great military commander? If, say, his leather good’s store had been a terrific success, or if (it pains to write this) he had had success using slave labor on his farm, would he have been so eager to volunteer for service in the Union army?
Which Chapter Is This?
At what stage of your memoirs are you? Is this the time that you will focus on and remember as your greatest success? Or will this time in your life pass by in only a few words during a transitional paragraph?
Is this one of your chapters of triumph, or a chapter of disappointment?
In job interviews, we are often asked, “Where do you see yourself in five years?” I want to turn that question on its head:
In five years, how will you see yourself now?
On your deathbed, will this time be a story worth a million dollars, or a chapter that you would rather forget? Your moment of victory, or your failed leather goods store?
In truth, we can't know what chapter of our lives we're currently on until, like Grant, we're on our deathbed. Very few of us will have such a pivotal role in ending a great evil like slavery, and perhaps even fewer of us will have the experience of writing our memoirs so close to the end of our lives. Still, Grant's story both comforts and challenges me.
I take comfort in Grant's story because it reveals that there is hope in unexpected places. This washed-up thirty-something, with no apparent prospects, becomes one of America's greatest generals in less than five years. The man who couldn't keep a farm afloat—elected to two terms as President. When nothing seems to be going right, I think about Grant's improbable success.
When things are going well, though, I think of the nature of Grant's success and his subsequent fall. Here was a man who succeeded at little but making war, whose presidency was scandal-ridden and post-presidency was dismal. Like many successful people, Grant rose to wealth and fame through his singular strength, and then found himself without the resources to cope with his new position.
Grant's up-and-down story, while extreme, should remind us that our stories are incomplete at any given moment. Our success or failure, as defined by the world around us, is dependent on a million little moments that we may never even recognize. Rather than putting too much faith in our upward mobility (or despairing too much in our downward spiral), we ought to look beyond our story to The Story that shapes in the entire cosmos. Where do we fit in the overarching Story of Creation, Fall, Redemption, and Restoration? How can we be faithful to the Story that God is writing through our lives?
When we come to the end of our lives, let us be able to look back and see the major chapters as those when we were faithful to the callings given to us. I hope that I'll be able to recall those moments with the same clarity as Grant when he recalled the battles he fought and won. I hope to be able to rejoice in world-changing victories, but even if I am not, God's victory will be my own.
This post was originally published at
the author's website
and is reprinted by permission.
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