Description
Full color 10″ x 13 1/2″ ad for the John Hancock Mutual Life Insurance Company. This ad has a very good drawing of U.S. Grant sitting on a stool in front of a tent as nighttime is beginning to fall. He is sitting there and seems to be pondering what steps to take in battle. The ad headline says that “He showed us the glory of quiet courage…“. The ad text states that “In 1860 history was about to tap Ulysses Grant for a mighty big job. He didn’t seem to be the right man at all. He’d never had much luck with jobs, though he had tried half a dozen. The important thing was this: he never gave up and he never whined. Grant’s whole early life trained him in the tough business of hanging on when all seemed black and hopeless. He passed his course in the school of hard knocks. Grant could take it. It was odd that he had never become a professional soldier in the first place. He never liked army life. To his quiet, sensitive nature, war was an abomination. Yet when war came, he went back into the service. Nobody paid much attention to him until he took Fort Donalson, with the whole garrison. Then suddenly he was famous. The public, weary of generals who fell back and made excuses, hung upon his every word. Thus the character molded under the buffets of earlier years revealed itself. In the red moment of sudden danger, when other men panicked, Grant was cooler than ever. The more desperate and confused the situation, the keener his concentrated energy. At such times he thought fast, straight and clear. And he fought. Above all, said Lincoln, he fought. Grant didn’t hold much with textbook tactics. He applied common sense to the mechanics of war. Too many generals, he said, were always wondering what Napoleon would do. After Appomattox they sent him to the White House. He had his troubles, both there and afterwards. But he met them all without flinching of side-stepping. When cancer put a term to his life, he was nearly penniless. In order to provide for his family and despite almost constant suffering, he wrote his memoirs, racing death to the last word. In this as in all things, Grant never admitted defeat. And at last he won, most gloriously. This is the human side behind the white tomb in New York’s Riverside Drive. It is a story which should hearten and inspire every American when the way is hard and the night is long”.
Source: August 20, 1956 Life magazine.
