Grant Memoir

Grant Memoirs First Edition
Grant Memoirs Barnes And Noble
Personal Memoirs Of Us Grant
Grant Memoirs Annotated

The sick, aging warrior put down his pen. It was July 18, 1885, and Ulysses S. Grant had just finished his memoirs. The hero of war had no way of knowing his final determined act would also make him a literary hero. In terrible pain from throat cancer, hour after hour and day after day he had pushed himself to write his recollections from his cottage atop New York’s Mount McGregor. He knew the end was near. “Man proposes and God disposes,” he wrote. “There are but few important events in the affairs of men brought about by their own choice.”

Grant wrote the memoir in part because he had lost all his money in a financial scandal and hoped the sales of the book would provide income for his wife, Julia, and their children. But the general and president also wanted the world to know his thoughts about the Civil War and his role in the conflict. The result of his death-defying determination was the creation of one of the greatest pieces of nonfiction in all of American literature, a memoir that dozens of historians have used as a source to produce studies of the war, and that uncounted people have read for personal enrichment. The publication of such a work would have been extraordinary even if it had been accomplished by a completely healthy man, much less one who was deathly ill.

Near the end: Ever curious about world events, Ulysses S. Grant takes a short break from writing his memoirs to read the newspaper on the porch of his cottage atop New York’s Mount McGregor. (Hulton Archive/Getty Images)

The contemporary readers of Grant’s memoirs had no problem understanding what he was saying and recognized the names mentioned in the book. After all, in the mid-1880s, the United States was still populated by people who had experienced the war. Most of the war’s veterans were about 40 years old, and their wives and families were similarly young. But in 2018, of course, all Civil War veterans are long gone, and the average reader has limited knowledge about what Grant was describing. Therefore, a modern version, edited to explain the details, was absolutely essential if this classic was to remain understandable to a wide audience. It was to that end that I, ably assisted by David S. Nolen and Louie P. Gallo, began work on an annotated version of The Personal Memoirs of Ulysses S. Grant.

It was very important that the editors allow Grant to speak his mind and allow him, unencumbered, to express what he believed. After all, the memoirs emphasize Grant’s perspective. He said as much in his preface, “The comments are my own, and show how I saw the matters treated of whether others saw them in the same light or not.”

Grant Considered among the greatest of military memoirs, these two volumes were an immediate bestseller. With the help of his publisher, Mark Twain, Grant wrote to the last month of his life to leave a legacy for his family after being defrauded a year earlier of his estate.

Grant, and seventh from Samuel. Mathew Grant’s ﬁrst wife died a few years after their settlement in Windsor, and he soon after mar-ried the widow Rockwell, who, with her ﬁrst husband, had been fellow-passengers with him and his ﬁrst wife, on the ship Mary and John, from Dorchester, England, in 1630. You may know that the Memoirs originated in four articles Grant agreed to write for the Century Magazine, which ran a series on civil war battles told by the generals involved. He had turned down.

As the editorial team worked on the memoirs, certain passages stood out as emblematic of Grant’s personality and his blunt nature when it came to expressing his opinion. The determination he conveyed during the Civil War was evident during an instance when he described having to swim a swollen creek on horseback to be sure he proposed to his fiancée, Julia Dent, before he left for the Mexican War. After recalling the incident, he ruminated, “One of my superstitions had always been when I started to go anywhere, or to do anything, not to turn back, or stop until the thing intended was accomplished.” What an insight into Grant’s role in the Civil War and in the writing of his memoirs.

Nor did Grant hold back on political opinions, stating exactly what he believed. For example, regarding the Mexican War of 1846-48, in which he served as a junior officer just a few years past his West Point graduation, he wrote that “the occupation, separation and annexation, were, from the inception of the movement to its final consummation, a conspiracy to acquire territory out of which slave states might be formed for the American Union.”

Stiff and New: Newly minted Brig. Gen. Ulysses S. Grant poses in full military regalia in a ca. August 1861 image. Grant usually eschewed such finery, and related in his memoirs the taunting he received from a stable boy when he wore his uniform home after he left West Point. (CORBIS/Corbis via Getty Images)

When it came to the Civil War, once again he saw slavery’s dire role: “The cause of the great War of the Rebellion against the United States will have to be attributed to slavery.” Despite believing that slavery, which he disliked, was the cause of the war, he was initially not ready to become part of the military to end it. When his father decided that he wanted to send him to West Point in 1839 so that Grant could receive a free education, the 17-year-old rebelled. “But I won’t go,” Grant insisted. His father stood firm, Grant recalled. “He thought I would, and I thought so too, if he did.” Even when he arrived at the military academy, Grant remained unhappy. “A military life had no charms for me,” he insisted.

Grant also harbored anti-military feelings, even when he reentered the army to fight in the Civil War. He was frightened of battle, especially leading men into combat. When Captain Grant took command of the 21st Illinois Infantry in 1861, he once again came face to face with conflict.

“My sensations as we approached what I supposed might be ‘a field of battle’ were anything but agreeable. I had been in all the engagements in Mexico that it was possible for one person to be in; but not in command. If someone else had been colonel and I had been lieutenant-colonel I do not think I would have felt any trepidation…”

After a night of sleep, Grant still did not feel better. He marched his men toward the enemy and “my heart kept getting higher until it felt to me as though it was in my throat. I would have given anything then to have been back in Illinois, but I had not the moral courage to halt and consider what to do; I kept right on.”

When he saw the valley below and saw that the Confederate “troops were gone. My heart resumed its place. It occurred to me at once that [Confederate Missouri State Guard Brig. Gen. Thomas A.] Harris had been as much afraid of me as I had been of him….From that event to the close of the war, I never experienced trepidation upon confronting an enemy, though I always felt more or less anxiety. I never forgot that he has as much reason to fear my forces as I had his. The lesson was valuable.”

Life Partner: Julia Dent married Grant on August 22, 1848. She had a lazy eye, often posed for images in profile to hide it, and recalled that as a child she “used to cry” about her looks. But Ulysses saw nothing but beauty in the woman he loved. (Hulton Archive/Getty Images)

Grant’s admission that he found combat frightening is an important insight into his attitude. Too often, people believe that Civil War officers were fearless supermen, when in reality they were often frightened. And, as Grant indicated in his memoirs, it is also important to remember that command is not an easy task. Grant is often pictured as a butcher, an individual who threw his men into battle casually and needlessly. In fact, he felt, as they did, the fear of combat. War was not a romantic adventure; it was a place of terror, gore, and death.

Yet when he fought Robert E. Lee in Virginia in 1864-65, Grant fought him with all he had. He believed strongly that the only way to defeat the Army of Northern Virginia was to destroy it, to attack all Confederate forces on all fronts at the same time, and to wear away their fighting strength. Other Union generals had tried to outmaneuver Lee and his Confederate army and capture places rather than destroy their armies; they had failed.

Grant began his final campaign on May 3, 1864, in Virginia’s wilderness. He expressed his plans and the results he expected bluntly. “The campaign now begun was destined to result in heavier losses, to both armies, in a given time, than any previously suffered, but the carnage was to be limited to a single year and to accomplish all that had been anticipated or desired at the beginning of that time. We had to have hard fighting to achieve this. The armies had been confronting each other so long, without any decisive result, that they hardly knew which could whip.” As Grant realized, the next year saw desperate fighting, high casualties, but eventual victory for the Union troops.

Grant is often pictured as a butcher, an individual who threw his men into battle casually and needlessly. In fact, he felt, as they did, the fear of combat.

In April 1865, the war came to an end in Virginia with Grant’s all-out warfare wearing Lee’s forces down until the Confederates had insufficient manpower to fight back. After a bloody year, Grant broke through the lines at Petersburg and then pressed on to Richmond. He was clearly in command of the situation. What followed was a series of letters in which Grant called for Lee’s surrender, and Lee tried to delay so he could get the best terms possible. His first letter to Lee on April 7, 1865, was a classic. Grant wrote: “[T]he results of the last week must convince you of the hopelessness of further resistance….I feel that it is so, and regard it as my duty to shift from myself the responsibility of any further effusion of blood, by asking of you the surrender of that portion of the Confederate States army known as the Army of Northern Virginia.”

Despite the hard war that he believed in, Grant made clear in his memoirs that he had a softer side, too. Instead of gloating about the beating he had inflicted on Lee and his army, Grant indicated that “my own feelings, which had been quite jubilant on the receipt of his letter, were sad and depressed. I felt like anything rather than rejoicing at the downfall of a foe who had fought so long and valiantly, and had suffered so much for a cause, though that cause was, I believe, one of the worst for which a people ever fought, and one for which there was the least excuse.”

In the field: Grant studies a map at his headquarters near Cold Harbor, Va., in 1864. He is accompanied by staff members Lt. Col. Theodore Bowers and Chief of Staff John A. Rawlins. (Library of Congress)

Grant also realized the appeal of Abraham Lincoln, the tragedy of his death, and the coming to power of Andrew Johnson. “Mr. Lincoln, I believe, wanted Mr. Davis to escape, because he did not wish to deal with the matter of his punishment….He thought blood enough had already been spilled to atone for our wickedness as a nation….He would have proven the best friend the South could have had, and saved much of the wrangling and bitterness of feeling brought out by reconstruction.”

Grant insisted that the “universally kind feeling expressed for me at a time when it was supposed that each day would prove my last, seemed to me the beginning of the answer to ‘Let us have peace.’” And, knowing that he was close to death, Grant completed his memoirs with the words, “I hope the good feeling inaugurated may continue to the end.”

Grant’s memoirs present a great insight into the general and his thinking. There is no better way of understanding this great American than by reading this outstanding self-evaluation, now published with the modern world in mind.

John F. Marszalek is W.L. Giles Distinguished Professor of History Emeritus, and Executive Director and Managing Editor of the Ulysses S. Grant Association’s U.S. Grant Presidential Library at Mississippi State University in Starkville. He led the editing of the most recent edition of Grant’s memoirs, with assistance from editors David S. Nolen and Louie P. Gallo.

I mentioned this in the post below, and it came up over the weekend on Twitter. (We were discussing the most underrated president of all time. Of course Grant came up.) A lot of really intelligent people are under the impression that Grant's lucid prose are really the result of Mark Twain's editing hand.

I was lucky enough to talk with Aaron Lisec a couple of years ago about this. Lisec is one of the editors of Grant's papers. Here is what he told me:

Completely baseless. Aside from the consistency with his diction and syntax, much of the manuscript survives, in Grant's hand, and what isn't in his hand is accounted for by letters describing secretaries hired to take dictation. You may know that the Memoirs originated in four articles Grant agreed to write for the Century Magazine, which ran a series on civil war battles told by the generals involved. He had turned down many such offers before, citing laziness, and only agreed after he lost all his money in May 1884, and had to raise funds fast.

In Volume 31 of the Grant Papers, we document how he turned in the first article, on Shiloh, and had to be gently told that it sounded like an official report--the editors came down to his summer house in Long Branch and coaxed him into rewriting it in his own voice, with his own observations. You can see how the article changed after that, and how much better the next one was, and about that time he was diagnosed with cancer and decided to turn the whole thing into a memoir, forgoing the last two articles. I could go on, but you get the gist.

This note means a lot to me because I think the assumption that drunken failure (as he is often depicted in history) like Grant has implications beyond the White House. The beautiful thing about writing is it has no real respect for credentialism. You can get various degrees in writing. (Indeed my initial plan was to get an MFA.) But a degree can't make you a writer in the way that JD can make you a lawyer.

Grant Memoirs First Edition

Great writing comes from all classes people and all kinds of experience. Edith Wharton was raised rich. E.L. Doctorow was not.

When I visit schools around the country I consistently repeat this -- not because I think school is worthless, but because, very often, there are kids in the audience who are lost, just as I once was. I don't come there to contravene their education. I don't come there to tell them to drop out. On the contrary, I try to reinforce the ethic of hard work. But they need to know that a grade in a class, is not who they are -- and I would say that whether the grade is an A or an F. I failed English in high school. And then failed British Literature in college. For whatever reason, it simply wasn't my time. But had I taken those grades as an eternal mark, I doubt I would be talking to you now.

Grant Memoirs Barnes And Noble

My sense is that people read Grant's writing, hear about the association with Twain and assume that that explains it. But what actually explains is working in a profession in which lives often hung on clear communication. It wasn't abstraction that gave him this:

It did seem to me, in my early army days, that too many of the older officers, when they came to command posts, made it a study to think what orders they could publish to annoy their subordinates and render them uncomfortable. I noticed, however, a few years later, when the Mexican war broke out, that most of this class of officers discovered they were possessed of disabilities which entirely incapacitated them for active field service. They had the moral courage to proclaim it, too. They were right; but they did not always give their disease the right name.

It was his lived experience. (And a God-given wit, no doubt.) Grant's life is a great example for young people who, like me, might find themselves lost with little immediate evidence that they will ever find their way. I hate how we have to clean this up by giving credit to Twain. It has echoes of the charges against Frederick Douglass and Obama. We hate that intelligence is so messy, that it would show itself in people we disdain or think we know.

Personal Memoirs Of Us Grant

But the fact that the best writing of the Civil War came from a frontiersman like Lincoln and middling West Point student like Grant is powerful. We should let it be true.

Grant Memoirs Annotated

As an aside, there's also a rather nasty political aspect to the charge that Grant didn't really write his memoirs which Cynic covers here.