Colby Cosh: The real American odyssey of Ulysses Grant

The release of Christopher Nolan’s much-awaited Odyssey gives me — me and every other SOB with a lease on some newspaper real-estate — an excuse to blab about culture, specifically a delightful book I discovered earlier this year: John Russell Young’s Around the World with General Grant (1879). Most travel writing leaves me cold, but Young’s book is a product of unique circumstances, and I’m convinced it should have a much more prominent place in American literature than it holds. It is, in many ways, the forgotten sibling of Grant’s own war memoir, which remains in the front rank of all American nonfiction.

Young was a 36-year-old journalist for the New York Herald who was recruited to tag along with retired U.S. president Ulysses S. Grant on an epic tour of the world that lasted from May 1877 to September 1879. (This gives the book added spice for a journalist of today, of course: imagine taking on a two-and-a-half-year assignment. With expenses covered!) Grant, exhausted by factional politics, had just left the presidency under a spreading cloud of scandal, but he had — at that moment — a large fortune built on investments and private gifts, and an intact personal reputation.

Grant felt an obligation, after a long life of military and political service, to spend some leisure time in close company with his wife and to show the poor woman the world. As a notoriously shy and reserved person, averse to public speaking, he hoped to be able to do this privately, without fuss — but he was inevitably received with rapture by gigantic crowds as the heroic liberator he was. Much of Young’s text is dedicated to public addresses of welcome by notable admirers, and to the brief, but exquisitely judged, Grantian replies.

The Grants roamed all over Europe, saw the Middle East and the Holy Land, and visited the civilized parts of Asia; he met the Pope, Prince Bismarck, Queen Victoria and the emperors of Germany, Austria-Hungary and Japan. Nothing quite like this had happened, nor could have, before the age of the steamship. New social protocols for officials and royals to receive ex-presidents had to be devised almost everywhere Grant set foot.

In other words, Young’s book gives us an early glimpse of the emerging phenomenon of the American global superstar. Young had reported on the Civil War as a young man, but he doesn’t seem to have known Grant well before the trip, having been chosen by the Herald for Republican bona fides and for his own extensive travel experience. He won Grant over fast, and Grant’s table talk and opinions begin to crowd into the book as we wend our way eastward. You learn a lot about Grant’s character from his memoirs, obviously, but the extempore material and the observations in Around the World are indispensable for the three-dimensional picture.

When the Grant entourage reaches Burma, in volume two, the book goes completely into a wormhole as the ex-president begins to reminisce about the tour itself; starts talking about the famous personages he met earlier in the narrative; and unburdens himself about his own involvement in the history of the 19th century. One reads, with a coldness spreading over one’s back, about Grant’s postwar scheme for keeping the defeated Confederate army intact and turning it against the French-backed Empire of Mexico as “an outlet for the disappointed and dangerous elements in the South.” Grant, who dropped the idea at the urging of Secretary of State W.H. Seward, acknowledges that this might have led to the re-establishment of slavery in Mexico — and perhaps war with France.

But Napoleon III’s regime, Grant observes, collapsed instantly under the pressure of war with Germany in 1870. This leads the general to a scornful discussion of the supposed threat posed by British official recognition of the Confederacy in the Civil War. The result of such an intervention, Grant tells Young, would have been Anglo-American war — but Grant argues that the English couldn’t really have stopped Sherman from marching into Georgia or the Army of the Potomac from Richmond. And at that point, he adds, “Canada would have become ours. If Sheridan, for instance, with our resources, could not have taken Canada in 30 days, he should have been cashiered.”

So much the better for Britain and her empire, Grant goes on to add, speaking to the 21st century through Young with words of uncanny import. “I do not want an inch of (Britain’s) territory, nor would I consider her American possessions worth a regiment of men. They are as much ours now as if they were under our flag. I mean that they are carrying out American ideas in religion, education and civilization. Perhaps I should say that we are carrying out English ideas. It is the same thing, for we are the same.”

This is not the practical-minded, mulish Grant you find in the newer history books that have revived his reputation; and Young’s book is no ordinary travelogue. It remains only for me to remind the reader that Grant’s tour of the world is very naturally described as an “odyssey,” and that the name “Ulysses” is the Latin version of “Odysseus.” As it happens, one of those new Grant books is dedicated to the 1877-79 tour, and the tin-eared author, probably unable to resist the publicity effects of the Nolan movie, has given it the awkward name Ulysses’s Odyssey.

Grant and his fellow travellers were aware of the coincidence, particularly as they travelled in the Mediterranean and saw the same scenes that the original Odysseus/Ulysses is said to have encountered. You can certainly feel the superstitious dread of Young, an excellent writer with a slightly preposterous personality, as the sloop USS Vandalia passes between Scylla and Charybdis. Louis Picone’s new book might be wonderful, I don’t know, but Young’s book is in the public domain, and not difficult to find online.

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