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(More customer reviews)I have always been ambivalent about Ulysses S. Grant, both as a General and as a President. His record as a General was one of success, but at the expense of an enormous amount of blood. His administration was rocked with scandals, so severe that had they happened in modern times, it is unlikely that he would have survived as President. Yet, his greatest failing was also his greatest strength. He was a man of utmost character and principle, and he found it difficult to understand that other people did not share those traits. Lacking this sense of cynicism towards others, it was impossible for him to anticipate the unsavory actions of his nonmilitary associates. This is all the more unusual, because he never had any difficulty discerning the deceptive practices of his battlefield opponents.
This tape has forced me to rethink my opinion of Grant the General. His record of successive victories is largely unmatched in American military history, and his conquest of Vicksburg was one of the most well-planned military operations in the history of the world. He also was a great strategic thinker, understanding that the fall of Vicksburg doomed the Confederacy. Until I viewed this tape, I had no appreciation for Grant as an original military thinker. After seeing the descriptions of how he carried out many of his campaigns, it is clear that he was a great military commander and the person most responsible for the Union victory.
My opinion of his presidency has also been rather low, but this tape has forced a serious upward revision. He faced enormous problems, the intransigent elements in the South refused to accept anything but apartheid, and if Grant made a mistake, it was in realizing that military defeat did not change the attitudes in the South. He just could not comprehend the deep hatred for blacks that was a fundamental part of the psyche of so many southern whites.
This tape also reminds us that the United States citizenry has experienced terrorism in the past. The white supremacist groups that arose after the Civil war terrorized blacks and white sympathizers for almost a century. People were brutally killed, homes burned and bombed so that black people were forced to accept a denial of their rights as citizens. Grant did all he could to help the freed slaves, but the country had no stomach for any additional federal action and most people just wanted the whole problem to go away. Ironically, the one solution that may have worked was for the U.S. to annex the Dominican Republic and turn it into a state that black people could migrate to. Grant proposed the plan to congress, but few were willing to accept a black run state on equal terms with all others.
This tape is one of the best in the biography series produced for PBS. Grant is truly an American hero, and like so many, was humble in his enormous success. If he had not been there to save the union, it is doubtful that Lincoln could have done it. I enjoyed this tape so much, I watched it twice just to see if I had missed anything the first time.
Click Here to see more reviews about: American Experience - Ulysses S. Grant, Warrior President (2002)
Ulysses S. Grant was an American paradox. A failed businessman, he became a brilliant military strategist whose destruction of a defiant South gained him the label "butcher." Elected president in 1868, Grant lacked the skill to deal with reconstruction and the nation's economy. His two terms were rocked by racial conflict and corruption scandals. Financially ruined, Grant spent his final days battling cancer to finish his war memoirs
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