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For the voters who elected him president -- and for the president who elevated him to command the Union armies -- Grant's greatest quality was that he was a winner. He brought Lincoln victory in the West, when other generals were timorous. He conducted a masterful campaign at Vicksburg. And he was the one Union general that Lee could not evict from Virginia. Lee parried Grant for a year and inflicted such casualties on the Federals that Northern newspaper-readers were drained of any enthusiasm for the hard-slogging campaign and the long siege of Petersburg. But Grant's dogged pursuit had its reward: he finally cornered the Grey Fox and ended the Confederacy's only hope.

BUNTING SEES GRANT'S MASK of command as both a virtue and a liability. It helped establish his reputation for coolness under fire, but it also served to buttress the arguments of his critics: that he was unfeeling, morally obtuse, an insensate butcher. Bunting erases the caricature; and in addressing Grant's much-maligned presidency, he discerns that as in war so in peace, Grant set himself one overriding goal, a goal that justifies a word that is rarely applied to Grant: the word is "noble."

Like most Northerners, Grant began the War Between the States caring far less about slavery than he did about preserving the Union. But as the war developed, so too did Grant's sense that abolishing slavery would be the war's second -- and necessary -- great accomplishment. As president, Grant's highest purpose was to honor the cause for which his men had died. Thus his platform: to enforce the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, to protect the freedmen, to maintain unity within the Republican Party, and to conciliate the South. He did the best he could to achieve these aims. But few mark his presidency as a success.

Like most military men turned politicians, Bunting observes, Grant was a "closet moderate." That moderation distanced him from the Radical Republicans. But his insistence on equal rights for blacks also alienated those in North and South who thought political and civil equality for the Negro was a mere rhetorical sop for idealists; they denied that it was a legitimate and enforceable goal of political action. But what Grant said, he meant: and he meant that the black man be given his rights as a full American citizen. Grant felt similarly about the American Indian, whom he wanted integrated into American society -- while his old colleagues Generals William Sherman and Phil Sheridan thought "Native Americans" should be sped to their happy hunting ground in the sky.

As a politician, to compare Grant to his British contemporaries Disraeli and Gladstone is to feel a tremor of the truth of Henry Adams' dismissal of the mud-spattered general turned president. But if one looks at Grant's military correspondence -- crisp, clear, and fluidly composed, written without pause and only rarely with correction -- and if one reads his memoirs, routinely ranked as the best of presidential autobiographies and one of the best of military commentaries, the comparison does not seem so bad at all. As Grant once said about learned soldiers, they "always knew what Frederick the Great did at one place, and Napoleon at another. Unfortunately for their plans, the rebels were always thinking of something else." Admittedly, Grant was no soaring Victorian polymath, but he never claimed to be, and to his credit, he never took his eyes off what he thought truly mattered. No one could accuse him of affectation, or hypocrisy, or using a smokescreen of words to obscure plain, cold, hard reality.

Bunting's is a deft, marvelously written, and perceptive biography of Grant. It carries no excess baggage. It is certainly the best short book on America's under-appreciated 18th president.

p> H. W. Crocker III is the author of Robert E. Lee on Leadership ; the prize winning comic novel The Old Limey ; and Truimph: The Power and the Glory of the Catholic Church . All are available in paperback. This review ran in the February issue of The American Spectator . br> /p>

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