Colby Cosh: The real American odyssey of Ulysses Grant

Portrait of Lt. Gen. Ulysses S. Grant, who commanded Union forces during the Battle of Cold Harbor in June 1864. Photo by Handout/Library of Congress/KRT

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.