Gen. Ulysses S Grant States His Motivation in Fighting the Civil War: To Preserve “Free Government”

Ulysses S. Grant was the great Union military hero of the Civil War. Nobody made a greater contribution to victory on the battlefield then he.  What was his main motivation? Biographers as well as contemporary acquaintances assert that Grant was painfully shy, a man who gave little of himself away, even to friends. His wartime letters are mainly military in content, with none of the "why we fight" that one finds in speeches of Lincoln, for example. But here, seemingly uniquely, he relates his feeling to his cousin.

Orlando H. Ross was a cousin of Ulysses S. Grant. In 1861 he was named special messenger at Grant's headquarters, and later that year was made a mail agent in the Post Office Department between Cairo, Illinois, and Paducah, Kentucky. This led to his being placed in charge of military mail for the Army of the Tennessee, at times running past enemy fortifications in an effort to make deliveries. He was commissioned a 2nd lieutenant in the 20th Illinois Infantry in October 1862, and less than four months later he received a promotion to captain, serving as aide-de-camp on the staff of General Grant. On August 31, Ross wrote Army Adjutant General Lorenzo Thomas tendering his resignation, which was endorsed by Grant on September 2, "Approved and respectfully forwarded." Many in the army regretted his resignation, with Gen. Lew Wallace writing Ross, "It gives me pleasure, since you feel it a duty to yr. family to leave the service, to acknowledge yr. your excellent conduct throughout the war. It is greatly to be wished that you could remain in the army. Few persons have discharged their duty with so much zeal, and energy, and so entirely to the satisfaction of yr. superiors."

Ross requested and received a similar letter of recommendation from his cousin and commander, Ulysses S Grant. In it, Grant for once inserted his own personal characterization of the war, if briefly. Autograph Letter Signed, three pages, "Head-Quarters Armies of the United States," City Point, Virginia, September 5, 1864, to Ross. The letter appears to be unpublished, and does not appear in the Grant Papers.

"In approving your resignation it gives me pleasure to bear testimony to the services you have rendered to the country through three years of the rebellion now being waged against free government. As Assistant Special Agent of the Post Office Dept., the Western Army was deeply indebted for the order and regularity established, more by your labor and energy than that of any other person, in conducting their Mail through a hostile country. In that capacity you excelled. It will afford me pleasure to recommend you for a similar position in the Civil service of the Government should you desire it. In all positions you have been placed in as Aide-de-Camp you have shown a commendable energy and zeal which if continued in civil life will make you friends and secure to you and family a competency through life. Bespeaking for your success and enjoyment after more than three years service in the tented field, I subscribe myself, your friend, U. S. Grant."

We cannot find another example of Grant's use of the phrase "free government" during the Civil War.  The phrase clearly had a deep resonance for him. We know this from the fact that his few other known uses of that specific phrase, all post-war, were in important contexts. One was in his message to Congress in 1870 announcing ratification of the 15th Amendment, which prohibits federal and state governments from denying a citizen the right to vote based on that citizen's "race, color, or previous condition of servitude." The other was his 1874 Thanksgiving Proclamation, in which he said "The blessings of free government continue to be vouchsafed to us." Later, defining for a group of poor students in a charity school the opportunities available to them to the United States, he said "There is no position whatever under this free government to which you are not all of you eligible."