"I never wanted to get out of a place as much as I did to get out of the presidency".
William Tecumseh Sherman, who knew Grant, US civil war general, and later President (1822-1885) better than almost anyone, said shortly after his death: "Grant's whole character was a mystery even to himself — a combination of strength and weakness not paralleled by any of whom I have read in ancient or modern history." He added, with characteristic precision: "It will be a thousand years before Grant's character is fully appreciated."
Talanov, in a brief couple-of-sentences overview, typed Grant as SLE, clearly under the influence of the obsolete "butcher of the South" historiography. The Lost Cause tradition, which dominated Grant's reputation through much of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, required him to be a man who won through sheer weight of casualties, whose "strategy" was simply to throw bodies at Lee until the Southerners ran out of men to kill. This caricature maps superficially onto SLE, indeed.
The actual biographical record, however, doesn't show many SLE traits. SLE, as you can see from the type characterization on the blog, has rapid muscle mobilization and swagger, provokes conflicts, admires strength and despises weakness, is characterized by willful decisive transformation of the world under itself, and displays high arrogance and intolerance of other viewpoints. Grant was physically squeamish — he could not stomach the sight of animal blood, insisted that his meat be well done, was nauseated by rare steak, and never touched fowl. "I could never eat anything that went on two legs", he explained. He did not hunt, even as a boy in rural southern Ohio where shooting game was a standard youthful pastime. He was modest, self-effacing, soft-spoken, and mild-mannered. He seldom used foul language, disliked dirty jokes, and in the field always bathed alone in a closed tent, never allowing even his aides to see him naked. One biographer described "a broad streak of the feminine in his personality". He considered himself a failure for most of his adult life. None of this is SLE.
Grant was far closer to SLI, albeit with a LSI accent. Here I do agree with WSS, who also typed Grant as SLI, although also without elaboration.
The SLI base is visible first in what Grant conspicuously lacked. He had no grand historical self-consciousness, no sense of personal destiny (frequent among LSI-EIE dual pair, in particular in their politically ideologized state), no performance of command. He was not a dominator or status-seeker; when successful he gave credit to others; when he made mistakes he took full responsibility without deflection. His character traits were consistently described as modest, quiet, courteous, loyal — the SLI's profile: the individualist who doesn't need others to confirm his assessment of a situation, who exercises no unnecessary authority and seeks no unnecessary attention.
The physical sensitivity described above is the most direct evidence of the type. SLI's dominant function is the perception of internal physical and aesthetic states — bodily sensation, the felt quality of the immediate environment, the somatic relationship with what is being consumed or experienced (reflecting inert Si + the secondary trait of "questimity" and Talanov secondary Qe function).
Even the casualty figures that generated the "butcher" reputation require context. The Overland Campaign of 1864 produced enormous Union casualties — but Grant was fighting Lee at the peak of Confederate defensive capability, in terrain that heavily favored the defender. Historians like Gordon C. Rhea point out that the Overland Campaign's attrition was the price of the only strategy that could work given the operational constraints, and deny that Grant's main approach was to simply throw bodies at Lee. As Grant remarked, "I don't underrate the value of military knowledge, but if men make war in slavish obedience to rules, they will fail".
His LSI accent supplied the methodical discipline, so necessary in a modern general — the high tolerance for the monotony of sustained campaigns, the linear strategic persistence — while the SLI base provided the practical terrain-reading in the "just do what works, even if it doesn't follow the rules" mentality, and the absence of dramatic personal performance. His statement of operational philosophy captures the combination precisely: "The art of war is simple enough. Find out where your enemy is. Get at him as soon as you can. Strike him as hard as you can, and keep moving on." There is no strategic elegance here, no EIE's grand historical vision, no ILE's lateral conceptual innovation. Just the simplest possible description of what needs to happen, stated with the flatness of someone who genuinely believes it is that simple.
The presidency tells the other half of the story. His naive trust, the SLI's characteristic disinclination to view others' actions through the prism of lies and intrigues, left him surrounded by corrupt subordinates who exploited his loyalty systematically. The Whiskey Ring, the Black Friday gold scandal, the Credit Mobilier affair — none involved Grant personally, his honesty was never in doubt — but SLI's functional blind spot to indirect manipulation and concealed motive made him a poor judge of the people he appointed. "I have made it a rule of my life to trust a man long after other people gave him up," he said after the scandals; "but I don't see how I can ever trust any human being again." Your average LSI is more suspicious and paranoid.
His "perfect speech", deployed on multiple public occasions, was this: "I rise only to say that I do not intend to say anything. I thank you for your hearty welcomes and good cheers." The joke is both genuine and completely characteristic of SLI's relationship with public performance. LSI's, while no social butterflies, tend to be energized (in a Fe-suggestive manner) by such circumstances.
Grant's Reconstruction record is a good side of his presidency's coin, and is something that was ignored in old-style historiography. He sent federal troops to break up the Ku Klux Klan, and put more Black Americans into federal jobs than any president before him. He told Bismarck in 1878: "As soon as slavery fired upon the flag it was felt, we all felt, even those who did not object to slaves, that slavery must be destroyed. We felt that it was a stain to the Union that men should be bought and sold like cattle." And a bit more bluntly: "I don't know why black skin may not cover a true heart as well as a white one." These weren't ideological stands — Grant wasn't an abolitionist and said as much — but they show SLI's practical moral clarity, paired with a pretty straightforward judgment that slavery was wrong once the issue was put right in front of him.
The General Order No. 11 episode — kicking Jews out of the Department of the Tennessee in December 1862 — is trickier and maybe more telling. The order gave all Jews twenty-four hours to clear out of the department, based on claims that Jewish traders were running illegal cotton schemes. It was the harshest anti-Jewish order in American history. Lincoln reversed it within days. Grant later said it was the one order he truly wished he could take back, admitted he'd been wrong to blame a whole group for what some individuals did, and once he was president, appointed Jews to prominent roles. He even showed up to dedicate a synagogue in Washington — something no sitting president had ever done.
Taken together, the Reconstruction efforts and the Order No. 11 mess points to SLI's moral compass being practical and responsive, not ideological or abstract. Grant's views on race didn't come from some fixed high-minded commitment to equality — he got there through dealing with actual people and the practical reality of what keeping the Union together demanded. SLI picks up its moral bearings by paying attention to concrete situations rather than by running everything through Ti's abstract principles. That means it can stumble into the kind of group-level prejudice we saw in 1862, but it also means that when reality pushes back, the correction tends to hold.
The reluctant warrior who was physically squeamish and personally modest and constitutively unsuited to political life, who discovered in industrial-era total war a set of practical and methodical competencies that happened to be exactly what the Union needed, and which he applied without drama, without self-promotion, and without ever once turning back — all this fits SLI with a LSI accent, which is quite notable, considering that SLI is likely the least publically prominent type and the type least likely to become a politician. The argument for SLI rather than LSI primary mostly rests on the personal texture, as you can see above. But then, a SLI entirely without any accents on a more prominent type being any kind of voluntary head-of-state must indeed be a very rare animal...
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