The Annotated Memoirs of Ulysses S. Grant

The Papers of Ulysses S. Grant #5

by Ulysses S. Grant, Elizabeth D. Samet (Editor)

With kaleidoscopic, trenchant, path-breaking insights, Elizabeth D. Samet has produced the most ambitious edition of Ulysses Grant’s Memoirs yet published. One hundred and thirty-three years after its 1885 publication by Mark Twain, Elizabeth Samet has annotated this lavish edition of Grant’s landmark memoir, and expands the Civil War backdrop against which this monumental American life is typically read. No previous edition combines such a sweep of historical and cultural contexts with the literary authority that Samet, an English professor obsessed with Grant for decades, brings to the table. Whether exploring novels Grant read at West Point or presenting majestic images culled from archives, Samet curates a richly annotated, highly collectible edition that will fascinate Civil War buffs. The edition also breaks new ground in its attack on the “Lost Cause” revisionism that still distorts our national conversation about the legacy of the Civil War. Never has Grant’s transformation from tanner’s son to military leader been more insightfully and passionately explained than in this timely edition, appearing on the 150th anniversary of Grant’s 1868 presidential election. 83 illustrations

Genres: History, Biography, Civil War, Nonfiction, Memoir, American History, Presidents

1152 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1885

About the author

Ulysses Simpson Grant, originally Hiram Ulysses Grant, in Civil War victoriously campaigned at Vicksburg from 1862 to 1863, and, made commander in chief of the Army in 1864, accepted the surrender of Robert Edward Lee, general, at Appomattox in 1865; widespread graft and corruption marred his two-term presidency, the eighteenth of the United States, from 1869 to 1877.

Robert Edward Lee surrendered to Ulysses Simpson Grant at Appomattox in 1865.

Robert Edward Lee, Confederate general, surrendered to Ulysses Simpson Grant, Union general, at the hamlet of Appomattox Court House on 9 April 1865 to end effectively the Civil War.


The son of an Appalachian tanner of Ohio, Ulysses Simpson Grant of America entered the military academy at 17 years of age in 1839. The academy graduated him in 1843. In 1846, three years afterward, Grant served as a lieutenant in the Mexican War under Winfield Scott and Zachary Taylor. The conflict concluded in 1848.

Grant abruptly resigned in 1854. After struggling through the succeeding years as a real estate agent, a laborer, and a county engineer, Grant decided to join the northern effort.

Abraham Lincoln appointed Grant to brigadier of volunteers in 1861; he in 1862 claimed the first major capture of fort Henry and fort Donelson in Tennessee. A Confederate attack at the battle of Shiloh surprised him, who emerged, but the severe casualties prompted a public outcry. Following many long initial setbacks and his rescue of the besieged at Chattanooga, however, Grant subsequently established his reputation as most aggression and success to Lincoln. Named lieutenant in 1864, Grant implemented a coordinated strategy of simultaneous attacks, aimed at destroying ability of economy to sustain forces of the south. He mounted a successful attrition against his Confederate opponents to courthouse in 1865.

After Andrew Jackson, four decades earlier, people elected duly popular Grant as a Republican in 1868 and re-elected him in 1872 as the first to serve fully. Grant signed and enforced congressional rights legislation to lead Reconstruction.
Grant built a powerful, patronage-based Republican Party in the south and strained relations between the north and former Confederates. Sometimes, nepotism produced scandal of his Administration; people coined the neologism to describe his politics.

Grant left office in 1877 and embarked upon a two-year world tour. Unsuccessful in winning the nomination for a third in 1880, left destitute by a fraudulent investor, and near the brink of death, Grant wrote his Memoirs, which were enormously successful among veterans, the public, and critics. However, in 1884, Grant learned that he was suffering from terminal throat cancer and, two days after completing his writing, he died at the age of 63. Historians typically rank Grant in the lowest quartile for his tolerance, but in recent years his reputation has improved among some scholars impressed by his support for rights for African Americans.

Reviews

[Fergus, Weaver of Autistic Webs]

I’ve marked this marvellous book as "read" - but I haven’t yet, completely. What gives, man?

Listen, it’s this. A week from next Wednesday, I'll turn 73. Atropos is now clearly self-consciously coughing and clearing her throat as she waits in the wings next to me - to snip short the thread of my life (read all about her in Wiki)!

Am I concerned?

Not so much, cause I’ve lived my brief life as an utter flux. My wife and my neuroleptics have taught me that. "Carpe diem - quam minima credula postero" (google that too, while you’re up).

And Tomorrow? “A perpetual possibility only in the world of speculation!”

So I’ll probably never have such a prolonged span of life - or attention - to complete these endless (but also endlessly humble and unassuming) two volumes of memoirs (Heh, heh - I’m now only on the Spanish-American War).
***

But I know what I need to know now.

The eminent American historian Victor Davis Hansen, in a recent address to Hillsdale College - you can watch it on YouTube - tells us the secret of Grant's wonderful humility.

You see, the horrors of War had taught him "the tragic vision." By that, Hansen means the incontrovertible fact that while the world is by and large a good place, it is also filled with evil.

The bad guys just don't stop being bad. Some folks are sheep, but others will always remain goats. Goat go for control; sheep just Are what they are.

The Christian sheep, then, are Thawing. Goats get uptight and freeze solid. Therefore the afterlife is a process of melting - until we are at last one with Love.

And that melting, then, is Hell - or Purgatory!

But it is remains true that in this current life we are forced, in any liberal democracy, to never let our guard down. Our media tries to help by channelling us into ruts. We need to be true to our own feelings, in spite of this.

Stand on guard for your gut feeling. Even sheep are wary.

Collective feelings are forced upon us. We must stand our own ground of rugged individuality. That collective heartlessness is not our own loving heart.

Life's not fun and games. It remains what it always has been: an obstacle course. As my laconic brother used to say so well, you snooze, you lose. Especially now, as Isabel Dalhousie repeats.

And Grant holds our attention throughout this mammoth memoir by refusing to sleep, himself! He can connect us ethically with our subconscious wariness of a new, startling and off-centre reality around us all, now.

Even though we may not be aware of it - I mean the frantic drive to control us all.
***

The ugly fact is that now we live in an off-centre age. And we may rue the day, like Hamlet, that ever we were born to set it right.

Yet it behooves each of us to try to do exactly that: set it right, at least in our own hearts. It's not our fault that we can't be at one with our world. For that world is now polarized.

But we can do that - within our private world - right now, by making Grant's tragic moral vision our own. That will protect us from the goats and their chaos.

The world we live in has now become intractable -

We must now constantly know which side our own bread is buttered on -

For that is our heart's desire! And its peace...

While life outside remains a Battlefield.

[Eric · Rating 5 out of 5]

There is one West Pointer, I think in Missouri, little known, and whom I hope the Northern people will not find out. I mean Sam Grant. I knew him well at the Academy and in Mexico. I should fear him more than any of their officers I have yet heard of. (Rebel Gen. Ewell, May 1861)


Grant’s Personal Memoirs (1885) define understatement but not modesty. Grant shows rather than tells what a badass he is. In recounting the war, Grant rarely quotes himself or relates his conversation but to a drop some tough guy quip or poised martial-arts musing. That kind of thing may have sounded self-effacing in times given to martial speechifying and self-praise in the third person, but nowadays we expect the Hero to be a man of few but compelling words (Hemingway learned his craft under Gertrude Stein, who as a Grant-venerator once planned to co-write the general’s biography with Sherwood Anderson). Here’s Grant shooting the breeze with the third-in-command of a rebel fort he’s just taken:

I had been at West Point three years with Buckner and afterwards served with him in the army, so that we were quite well acquainted. In the course of our conversation, which was very friendly, he said to me that if he had been in command I would not have got up to Fort Donelson as easily as I did. I told him that if he had been in command I should not have tried in the way I did.

Grant as usual understates his point: when he says he “knew” Buckner he really means that he had sized him up while they were fighting Indians and Mexicans together. Grant mentions that while at West Point he “got to know” many future rebel officers; it was a while before I realized this bland statement amounted to saying they’d already measured dicks and he wasn’t afraid of them. Grant knew his opponent at Vicksburg, Pemberton, to be a waffling martinet, and correctly gauged what gambits he could get away with. It’s all very macho, but with none of the overt theater of machismo. Grant is white guy macho: the strong silent type, the unheroic hero, unconscious greatness…all that Gary Cooper shit. After a century of westerns and noir, Grant’s mud-spattered impassivity and hardboiled laconism are pretty familiar, even thought befitting a solider; but his contemporaries strove to appear splendid. Grant’s predecessors in the high command carefully trimmed their Napoleon III goatees, stuck their hands in their coats like Napoleon I (Grant’s doing that on the Penguin cover, alas; at the prompting of Matthew Brady, we’ll say), and believed mastery of military science to inhere in officers who had published cribs of French tactical manuals.


Grant’s heroic citizenship appeared more citizenly than heroic. But for subtle signs (the way he wore his hat, the gleam in his eye) Grant looked what he had been, a tannery clerk and hardscrabble farmer. He was not a physically or sartorially distinctive man. Upon promotion to Lieutenant-General and Commander of the Armies of the United States, an exalted rank last held by George Washington, he made no concession to pomp beyond having the gold-braid shoulder bars sewn to his “traveling suit,” a dusty private’s uniform. Analogously, Lincoln ascended the national Valhalla, the Washingtonian realm of togas and fasces, with little significant softening of his gangly hillbilly mien. Matthew Arnold reviewed Grant’s memoirs and spoke for the times when he said that to foreign observers Robert E. Lee was the heroic figure in the picture—Lee the pious aristocrat, son of Old Virginia and of George Washington’s trusty lieutenant “Lighthorse Harry,” his manner a Castiglionian gloving of aggressive power in courtly self-control and tender sentiment. To Arnold and other Europeans, says Trilling, Americans only made sense as transplanted Englishmen, and so gravitated to Lee and others of cultured colonial stock. But the nation’s animating political genius Lincoln, and its greatest warlord Grant, emerged from demotic obscurity in the middle-west; as did the men of Grant’s and Sherman’s Army of the Tennessee, “tan-faced” settlers’ sons who proved the champion fighters of the war. Mars Robert and the Planter-Cavaliers were being phased out. At Harvard in the tense 1850s, Henry Adams, great-grandson of John, found an unlikely friendship with Lee’s second son Roony, himself later a general of the Rebel cavalry. Their affinity struck Adams, after a lapse of years, as the fraternity of dying eighteenth century dynasties, the last of the mandarin statesmen embracing the last of the commanding Virginians. “As an animal, the Southerner seemed to have every advantage, but even as an animal he steadily lost ground.” (Replace the Southerner with the Indian and it still works.)


Herman Melville toured the front in 1864, even rode with Union cavalry pursuing the Confederate guerilla Mosby. In his poem “The Armies of the Wilderness,” Grant appears as “the silent General,” ominously still, “like a loaded mortar.” Melville’s is an accurate wartime impression of this taciturn man who restricted his self-expression to plainspoken summons of earth-shaking industrial firepower; but the image is inadequate in light of the Personal Memoirs, a work in which policy statement, social observation, and the driest of dry wit combine to make Grant, in the words of a recent biographer, “the historian of the Union cause.” Grant--plainstyle chronicler to Lincoln’s refulgent poet.


Grant articulates the North’s optimistic ideals and progressive prospect, the 19th century American Dream his people brought to the fight. He’s elated by greater speed, better communication, settlement, urbanization, technology, growth, progress, mobility. The military academy that educated him was a cutting-edge realschule; other colleges were founded on Latin and Greek, West Point on engineering and chemistry; instruction in the humanities took the form of lectures on Christian Ethics; graduates bridged rivers and laid railroads across the expanses. A bootstraps meritocrat like Lincoln, Grant beheld with horror the degradation of the slave, and with perhaps greater horror the kinky warping of the master and the feudal immobility of the poor white. The South’s neglect of public amenities like good roads and free public schools seemed, to Grant, as reprehensible as the enslavement of blacks. To Grant the war accomplished two ends, moral and imperial: slavery was wicked, was rightly abolished; also the South was rescued for America, whereas independent, he thinks, it would have in time wilted to an enervated, troglodytic banana republic squatting on exhausted soil, the Sutpen household of Absalom, Absalom! writ large, barren of enterprising whites, vulnerable to Haitian-style revolution, and prey to the incursions of European powers. To Grant the course of empire demanded Union, and I like that the first edition used Grant’s initials in the title, The Personal Memoirs of U.S. Grant. U.S. Grant: federal impersonality joined to a personal name, like G.I. Joe; and having “U.S.” for initials is way better than being called Captain America. I wasn’t surprised when Grant concluded the book with suggestions for American power, in particular urging a strong navy. The fleet thus built in the 1890s came in handy when America bum-rushed the remains of overseas Spain and established itself as a Pacific and an Atlantic power. As pater patriae, Grant is no Washington--but he’s close.


Nowhere does he mention his surrenders to bourbon; but I heard he drank when bored, so whenever he mutters about the loss of momentum during lulls in campaigning, I assume he’s coping with the frustration of inactivity by getting wasted. I like Grant. Magnanimous and unselfish in life; reliable and clear-headed in war; subtle and funny in prose. A solid guy, indispensable like Lincoln. He’s touchingly curious and keen on travel. A restless and wondering boy, he spent his free time away from the plow on horseback, exploring. His chapters on the Mexican War are an adventure story like The Voyage of the Beagle or In Patagonia. Leaving the White House in 1877, he launched upon a world tour. Joyce has the British army brat Molly Bloom remember the thunderous salute that greeted Grant’s flotilla, when it touched at Gibraltar.


It is also impressive that he emerged unbroken from the humiliating hardscrabble prewar decade to lead the nation’s armies in its most desperate struggle. When I read about Grant pawning his watch to buy Christmas presents for his kids one bleak prewar December, I understand Gertrude Stein’s remark that the thought of Grant made her weep, though she probably had his drawn-out death from throat cancer in mind. Grant commenced these memoirs for money, after a Ponzi scheme ruined his family; in same month, he received the terminal diagnosis; he wrote racing death. It is one of the great pictures of American history, the cancer-wracked old man, writing all day out on the porch, under blankets, his throat sealed after decades of cigars, unable to speak or eat, and refusing morphine in order to keep his mind clear for writing (he didn’t refuse the cocaine-laced ice water, though). Meanwhile press and public keep vigil over the former president’s deterioration…newspapers fill with the tributes of former comrades and former foes.


But Grant was always his best under pressure; the Union is the proof. A staff officer once saw a shell explode over him as he sat on a log writing out an order; Grant continued writing; when he handed the order over, its perfect flow of penmanship betrayed no sign of the shellfire interruption. If any dying pauper was to write a cool, calm, lucidly funny memoir, it was Grant; and he must have been heartened by the 400,000 prepublication orders gathered by Mark Twain, his publisher. Twain hired on thousands of Union veterans who dressed in faded uniforms and old medals to canvass the North for subscriptions. Grant died a week after putting down his pen, and posthumous bestsellerdom gathered a fortune to his widow.



You shall not be
The grave of your deserving. Rome must know
The value of her own. ‘Twere a concealment
Worse than theft, no less a traducement,
To hide your doings and to silence that
Which, to the spire and top of praises vouched,
Would seem but modest. Therefore, I beseech you—
In sign of what you are, not to reward
What you have done—before our army hear me.

Coriolanus, I, ix


Grant more nearly impersonated the American character of 1861-65 than any other living man. Therefore he will stand as the typical hero of the great Civil War in America.

Sherman, 1866

[Janet Roger · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wilfred Owen makes his well-known introduction to a 1920 collection of his poems: "My subject is War, and the pity of War. The Poetry is in the pity." I was half way through Grant’s memoirs when his next line came to mind: "This book is not about heroes. English Poetry is not yet fit to speak of them...".

Ulysses Grant doesn’t do heroism either, even though these memoirs mostly follow the uptick in his military career brought about by the American Civil War. Like Owen he understands the limits of the form. As he tells it, his war was anyway - at one level - strictly prose.

He was an ex-middle-ranking infantry officer. Out of uniform he’d enjoyed no great success. Then, pushed by the opening shots in a cataclysm, he rejoined a Union army where regular soldiering was at a premium, and promotion for those who’d had experience of it, an express train. Surely though, there had to be much more than opportunity and timing to the stratospheric advancement of Ulysses Grant? Well of course, yes there was. Once he’d made an early, eye-opening discovery as a now-senior officer - that an opposing confederate commander had been just as anxious about squaring up to Grant as Grant had been about him - he took to front-foot leadership like a duck to water.

Of the Second World War Churchill says, “I felt as if I were walking with destiny, and that all my past life had been but a preparation for this hour …” Grant doesn’t have the grandiose style, either in his memoirs or, you believe, as a man. Even so, you’d be forgiven for thinking that his hour was likewise in his stars. His childhood he scarcely mentions. At West Point he’s a middling graduate, happy to leave the academy. Then, needing to support his new wife, he decides to stay on in the army, goes to the Mexican-American War, discovers something he’s good at and - though he can’t know it - casts his own future greatness.

Churchill being Churchill, had the absolute certainty of not failing when the hour came. From 1861 on, Grant at least acted as if he thought so too. On the breakout of civil war he grabbed at a commission (he’d quit the peacetime army as a captain seven years before) and booked a place on that promotions express. Within months he was Brigadier General of volunteers. Before the year was out he’d been noticed by Lincoln no less, as someone ready to press the fight.

Perhaps, in the ensuing four years of slaughter, it was that first eye-opening lesson about his adversary that gave Grant his instinct always to press the fight. Win, lose or draw on the day, next day he was ready to go again. And again. And again. In the end Grant’s certainties, like Churchill’s, came good. Like Churchill’s the certainties were supported by a remorseless, bloody logic that he well understood. In a grinding war where it had immensely superior numbers, industry, wealth and resources, there were short odds that the Union would inevitably be the last man standing. Winning was a matter of the political and military will to accept the costs and let the numbers prevail. Lincoln’s was the political will. Grant, he saw, was the general who would stay on the front foot and share in accepting the costs.

The memoirs are an immense achievement, written against the clock of a lifetime’s cigar-smoking, almost twenty years after the war closed. His distance from the events no doubt colors the account. Grant can relate, reflect, analyze and come to conclusions about the fighting, the politics and the waste. He’s not above anecdote, and while heroics are not a part of his vocabulary, he knows and remembers courage, doggedness and sacrifice, and names where he saw them. Similarly he knows the horror, the maimings and the endless fields of dead. So did Robert E. Lee.

For days before their endgame around Appomattox, with one last bloody confrontation with the Army of Northern Virginia in prospect, Grant had been laid low by a migraine. It disappears, he says, on the instant of receiving the Confederate General in Chief’s letter of the surrender of the remnants of his army. Terms are quickly agreed. Their last battle is cancelled along with Grant’s migraine. Good for him and good for Lee; because it’s sobering to realize that - even after four years of carnage, and as one-sided as the odds were that day - in different hands the two armies might still have fought it out to annihilation.

In effect Grant’s memoirs end there, in the meeting with Lee at Appomattox Court House. The war elsewhere takes its cue and winds up, and we’re left to understand that these few years of soldiering defined Grant to himself as much to us. What went before reads simply as his unknowing preparation. What followed, even the presidency, could hardly have been more than anticlimax. Of his personal or his inner lives we learn next to nothing, except in the broadest way. We have to be content that there are four earthshaking years that he needs to write about and make sense of, in clear, steady, stylish prose. For Wilfred Owen they would have been his years of pitiable war. For Churchill they would have been his destiny.

You may enjoy some other of my related reviews:

Memoirs of General W.T. Sherman https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...

The Civil War, Vol. 1: Fort Sumter to Perryville: Shelby Foote https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...

A Diary from Dixie / As written by Mary Boykin Chesnut https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...

[Jan-Maat]

I read this because of a review. The reviewer wrote that they had read this book to their Father while in was in hospital. The image of that situation struck me. What with one thing and another it was the kind of thing I could imagine doing myself, although as it happened the only book I ended up reading to my father in hospital was The Cruel Sea, Grant's Memoirs will always be appropriate as a choice of end of life reading since they were written as he was dying of throat cancer.

The use of language is very direct and precise, there's a clear sense of narrative direction. The earliest recollection of his West Point years and service during the Mexico War link into the Civil War story. It was of course written partly in reaction to the mass of memoirs written, particularly by former Southern Generals, as a continuation of the war by literary means (partly to provide money for his family who had been ruined by the financial speculation and adventures of his son). In common with those memoirs it is fighting a war on two fronts. Against the former enemy and against the former rivals. Grant was dying of cancer and the memoir was dictated to a stenographer until the constrictions of his throat made this impossible. But it remains clear and precise.

The meaning of the book to me is in the acceptance of responsibility entails the active search for achievable objectives and the articulation of those objectives in the form of a plan. This imparts the text with direction and clarity. There's a sense that in order to control that particular complex situation acting was better than reacting.

[Tim Null · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read Grant's memoirs some decades ago. Heather Cox Richardson says this about U.S. Grant and his Memoirs: "[Ulysses S. Grant] was a brilliant general and ,..., a brilliant writer, who's Memoirs helped to spark the realist movement in American literature, but he was never welcome in Washington's established political circles." See page 118 of To Make Men Free: A History of the Republican Party.

[Ted · Rating 4 out of 5]

The cause of the great War of the Rebellion against the United States will have to be attributed to slavery… It is probably well that we had the war when we did… our republican institutions were regarded [by the nations of Europe] as experiments … and monarchical Europe generally believed that our republic was a rope of sand that would part the moment the slightest strain was brought upon it. Now it has shown itself capable of dealing with one of the greatest wars that was ever made…



President Grant, mid 1870s
(Wiki)

My personal rating for this book is somewhere between 4 and 4 1/2. But I can understand any rating between 3 and 5. Much of the book consists of detailed accounts of military actions and campaigns, more detailed than one would find in a typical military history.


The man.

Ulysses S. Grant served in the Union Army during the American Civil War, from 1861 through the end of the war. In April of ‘61 he had reenlisted (at the age of 38), and two months later was promoted to Brigadier General by Lincoln, who believed him to be a good commander, in light of the good reputation he had gained during the Mexican-American war. By the time the war was over Grant was in charge of all the fighting men of the North, having been promoted to lieutenant-general of the Union Army.

Grant was elected the 18th President of the United States in the 1868 election, and returned for a second term in 1872. He was a popular president through most of his two terms, but in his last several months in office his reputation was damaged severely by his association with scandals involving his personal secretary and his Secretary of War.

Following his term in office (1869-1877), Grant spent two years touring the world with his wife Julia. Enormous crowds turned out to greet him in Britain and Ireland. Returning to the U. S. with his savings depleted, he first attempted to revive his fortunes by standing for a third term as Republican nominee in the elections of 1880. However, Grant lost the nomination to James Garfield. As his savings continued to dwindle (he had lost his military pension when elected to the Presidency), Grant made investments first in the Mexican Southern Railroad Co., then in Grant & Ward, an investment banking concern which his son had established. Both of these ventures turned out disastrously. After repaying a personal $150,000 loan to William Vanderbilt with all of his Civil War mementos (which were not worth that much) Grant and his wife were basically destitute. (Imagine if you can a former President of the U.S. ever reaching that state today!)

To add injury to insult, Grant learned in 1884 that he was suffering from throat cancer. Prior to this a publisher had suggested that Grant write his memoirs. After some negotiating for a better royalty, Grant’s friend Samuel Clemens (Mark Twain) eventually became the publisher. Grant began writing in the late summer of 1884, just as he learned about the cancer. He completed the task in under a year, doing his last work on the proofs on July 14, 1885. Nine days later he died.



The Book.

Twain famously called Grant’s book “the best [memoir] of any general’s since Caesar”, and in the forward to this edition Jean Edward Smith states that it is by far the most successful memoir of any U. S. President.

While the first claim is likely true, the second is somewhat misleading. Although Grant was a President of the U.S., and although these are his memoirs, they are not Presidential memoirs. The work concludes with the end of the Civil War, except for a ”Conclusion” tacked on at the end, from which the quote I’ve begun with is taken. Nowhere is it mentioned that the author served as President. So this is not Grant’s memoirs of his time in office.

Besides the cutoff of the memoirs at a point twenty years before the author’s death, likely attributable to his state of health when he began writing, I wished that a more minor problem could have been fixed – the maps.

Although the book’s index is serviceable, and the TOC is very useful, having an actual description of the topics for each of the seventy chapters, the book’s maps are inadequate for following the detailed descriptions of the different campaigns. Grant commanded troops at many important battles - Shiloh, Vicksburg, Atlanta, Spotsylvania (The Wilderness), Richmond – and each of these actions is covered in detail in his memoir. But the maps provided lack way too many important locations mentioned repeatedly in the text.

There is no question that Grant was a more than competent writer. (Some have found the prose so good that they have suggested Grant himself couldn’t be responsible, that the book must be the work of Clemens.)

William McFeely, in his 1982 Introduction, dismisses these claims, stating that “the best means we have to explain how (Grant) came … to a mastery of prose is to look back at the way he wrote during the war.” He goes on

On his first night in Chattanooga … Grant listened to the conflicting stories of generals, each seeking to excuse himself for his part in maneuvers that had left the Union forces almost trapped … (then) Grant moved to a table and, in pencil, wrote orders that moved almost every unit of the western armies. These orders, like hundreds he wrote in the four years of the war, were models of terse, clear prose. He almost never lost control of syntax; only rarely did he have to enter, with a carat, a word omitted in the quick, steady movement of his pencil.

Many of Grants’ orders written during the war are included in original footnotes that Grant added to the text. These orders do invariably follow in style quite closely to the prose style of the memoirs. There is no misunderstanding of Grant’s meaning, no haziness, no ambiguity in what he is saying, describing, or ordering. The example given by Smith of Grant’s “brevity, precision, and clarity” is his order to Meade concerning the strategy that will be employed in the Virginia campaign of 1864: “Lee’s army will be your objective point. Wherever Lee goes, there you will go also.” This is pretty amusing actually. This wonderfully terse order appears as the first two sentences in a paragraph that runs on for six more sentences. The paragraph itself sits in the middle of a ten-paragraph order. Admittedly, this “order” is not really an order as such, it is a detailed explanation of the coming campaign to Meade.

So, how does all this terse, clear, expository writing become tedious at times? Well, here’s what we have in the book.

Chapters 1 and 2 cover Grant’s ancestry, boyhood and years at West Point. (14 pages)

Chapters 3-13 cover the causes and prosecution of the 1846-1848 war with Mexico. (77 pages)

Three brief chapters cover the years 1848 to 1860, during which time Grant married, served on the West Coast for several years (apart from his growing family, whom he could not support on his military salary in California), and finally resigned his commission in 1854 to rejoin his family. (19 pages)

Chapters 17-70 cover Grant’s experiences in the Civil War. (467 pages)

Thus, 33 pages about Grant’s life outside the context of war; 544 pages about wartime experiences.



Grant at Cold Harbor. June 1864
(Encyc. Brit.)


Many of these wartime experiences are interesting, particularly the final 250 pages, from the time Grant was appointed leader of the Union Army (on March 9 1864 - a commission held only by Washington previously) to the end of the war. Naturally this section of the book contains more on grand strategy than prior sections. And having ascended to this commission Grant came to be personally acquainted with President Lincoln, with whom he had several direct discussions, and many correspondences. Thus in this last part of the book, we find Grant’s reminiscences and observations about Lincoln’s character, his feelings about the war, and his lack of wanting to “punish” the South for its secession, which Grant himself entirely agreed with. I found all these to be fascinating.

Some of the other reflections and beliefs that Grant writes about are the effect of war events on Lincoln’s successful reelection; Sherman’s Atlanta campaign, followed by the March to the Sea; the tremendous loss of life in the 1864 Virginia campaign; and his explanation of this campaign. Regarding the last, his belief that the war had to be brought to a speedy end, and his explanation of the very different political realities of the North (a democratic republic) and the South (an armed military state).

I’ll conclude with a quote about Lincoln, and his assassination.

It would be impossible for me to describe the feeling that overcame me at the news of these assassinations, more especially the assassination of the President. I knew his goodness of heart, his generosity, his yielding disposition, his desire to have everybody happy, and above all his desire to see all the people of the United Sates enter again upon the full privileges of citizenship with equality among all.

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[Justin · Rating 5 out of 5]

Twain famously compared Grant's Personal Memoirs to Caesar's De Bello Gallico, to stress not only the quality of the work, but more importantly to increase book sales. The comparison makes sense superficially: both memoirs were written by the leading generals of the day in a concise economy of style; both men were instrumental in cementing their respective nations' transformation from republic to Empire; and the works of both men were celebrated by the foremost men of letters of the day (Cicero's equanimity of judgment was such that though he despised Caesar, he could not help but admire the precision of his Latin).

But that comparison only goes so far, and illustrates a key difference between the two men: while Caesar's Commentaries may have been a model of economy and efficiency, they were in no way commensurate with his identity and personality. He was reckoned (by Cicero, again) as Rome's finest declaimer and orator, an extrovert whose charisma, charm, and guile secured his political ascent well before he could claim any martial victories of note.

Grant's Memoirs, on the other hand, are a perfect reflection of Ulysses S. Grant the person: terse, but descriptive; precise, yet determined; simple, yet nuanced. And beyond those traits particular to himself, Grant was an exemplar of the 19th-century army officer. In a time where misunderstood orders could easily create chaos and havoc (and thus lead to calamity), it was imperative that officers, particularly commanding officers, be able to write well. And write well he did, without the superfluous flourishes that were popular at the time; his unadorned, plain, reductive style was somehow fitting, considering the subject.

While his master, Lincoln, was himself master of his own style of American English by way of Shakespeare and Blackstone (traces of which one might see in, say, Henry James) Grant's style seems to neatly pre-figure Hemingway's declarative minimalism (though without the burden of the latter's insecurities). And so the two chief architects of the Union victory were also, however inadvertently, the literary progenitors of the American empire.

An impressive achievement by a dying man.

[GoldGato · Rating 5 out of 5]

Stunning. I thought Julius Caesar and Winston Churchill could write of war and leadership but Grant's memoirs blew me away. Written while he was dying in an effort to provide future funds for his family, the great American Civil War general created a classic review of his life in a style that reminded me of an old John Ford western. Stoic, efficient, self-effacing. My image of him changed, as I knew only of his victory in war and failure in politics.

They say that managers do the thing right, whereas leaders do the right thing. In this regard, Ulysses S. Grant fell under the latter banner. He was not a functionary. This makes his writing more focused, as he basically left his ego at the door. How he was able to do this with the pain of cancer, his body withering away...herculean.

Book Season = Autumn (days are numbered)

[Clif Hostetler · Rating 3 out of 5]

Within the genre of memoirs, I've always had the impression that this book stands out as a historically significant example. Mark Twain even maintained that it should be considered equal in profoundness to Julius Caesar's Commentarii de Bello Gallico, (Commentaries on the Gallic Wars.) In the late 19th century Grant's memoir was a leading best seller.

As a child I remember seeing this tome perched on a prominent high shelf in the local rural town library and wondering to myself if anybody ever read that really big book. What I saw back then may have been the original two volume edition, but my memory isn't clear on that detail.

Grant comes across in the book as a reasonable and likeable person who never aspired to a military career even though he did attend West Point Military Academy. He describes his application and resulting entrance into the academy as being completely the result of his father's initiative. His claim to having not aspired to a military career is supported by the fact that he did resign from the U.S. Army within several years after the end of the Mexican-American War.

I found the first part of the book that covered his early life, Mexican-American War, and the western campaign of the Civil War to be interesting reading that went pretty fast. But my reading bogged down when I got to the eastern campaign which consisted mostly of details of shifting such-and-such division from one place to another. I required nearly a half year to finish. The book contains a sizeable Appendix that contains the text of numerous military orders. I didn't read that stuff.

The memoir ends with the end of the Civil War. No mention is made of his presidency. I'm really sorry he didn't cover the later years which I know ended up being a disappointment for him in many ways. It would be interesting to note how he would reflect on that difficult time of his life.

It's my understanding that this memoir was written and published with the encouragement and advice of Mark Twain who made sure that the publishing process was done in a manner to would assure income for Grant's widowed wife. Grant died within a couple days of his final additions to the memoir. The book sales did indeed provide a comfortable income for his wife after his death. This was important because the Grants were not independently wealthy, and there was no presidential pension in those days.

[Dimitri · Rating 5 out of 5]

Withdrawal from the Union would've been uncontestable between the original 13 states. While Grant can sympathize with the commitment of the brave butternut rank & file to the Southern cause, he cannot with the administration above them which turned the South into 'one vast military camp.

The annotations are rich beyond measure. Every newly introduced character gets a thrifty biography. If you know your MacPherson, these will tend to be familiar. Yet the crossovers to Chinese Poetry, lengthy quotations of Shakespeare & even Cortés on Mexico are the prerogative of Mrs. Samet, whose love of literature commendably surpasses the English sphere. She makes sure to use editions avaliable in the 1880s where possible to preserve the immersion.

A secondary salutary effect of such copious footnotes is to reinforce the modernity of Grant's unadorned prose. The eye tends to cross the line from the black to the blue lettering and back without notice, in spite of 150 years' worth of academic standards between them. Not many a military historian can better Grant's campaign chronicles, even from the Lieutenant level.

Thank God he was NOT at Gettysburg, because even seen from the sterile position of the Commander, he wets your appetite to learn more about the battles in the West that never got the same amount of attention from the newspapers in the East, on which the mass popularity of ACW battles remains built.

[Cassondra Windwalker · Rating 5 out of 5]

It will be a long time before I don't hear Grant's voice in my head. This book shattered all the preconceptions and stereotypes that made up my understanding of this man. He speaks so freely of his fearfulness, until the day that fear finally becomes so commonplace in his hours that he forgets to note it. He speaks of his failings, but when describing other men, he is loath to acknowledge theirs. When he does, he speaks equally of their virtues. He wears his unflagging courage and completely apolitical loyalty to his nation like a comfortable old coat. He was fierce and unrelenting in battle, only because he so desperately wanted for the war to end and the Southern states to be reconciled. He was deeply devoted to his wife and children, longed for them constantly, but always placed his duty above his devotion. His voice is terse and dry, with a wicked sharp humor that surprises. He is thoughtful and patient in his consideration of others, be they friend or foe, black or white, man or woman, loyal soldier or terrified deserter. I expected to learn a great deal by reading this book, but I did not imagine I would enjoy it much. Upon devouring the first chapter, however, I found myself amazed that this was the man's only book. Read it. Read it.

[Linda Kenny · Rating 5 out of 5]

I don't suppose this memoir is on too many people's summer reading list but I became intrigued with Grant after visiting the cottage in New York where he spent the last days of his life finishing this memoir. He was suffering terribly from throat cancer but had hopes that the revenue generated from the sale of this work would support his wife after his death. There is another side story to this that involves Mark Twain who was the book's publisher and champion (Grant and Twain by Mark Perry). The memoir is very readable even for someone (like me) who knows little about military strategy. Grant refers to the Civil War as the "Great Rebellion" and his perspective as a colonel to his appointment as lieutenant general is frank, sometimes funny and very engaging. Volume 1 starts with his birth through the siege of Vicksburg and Volume 2 continues the story of the war to its end.

[Caroline · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is often mentioned as one of the two great military memoirs, along with Caesar’s Gallic Wars, and I can see why. The two authors combine the same crystal clear description of events, the masterful strategy, the commentary on the events that put them in the field, and the perceptive evaluation of the characters of their own warriors and the leaders of the enemy. And, as in Caesar’s later Civil War commentary, they both have experience fighting men they once served with. But in Grant’s case he fights them for a cause, not for power.

This is a huge book, and I’m not going to try to cover much of it. I do want to mention one of the most impressive aspects of Grant’s generalship, as one of my takeaways. The first half of the book addresses his youth, his experience in the ‘old army’ fighting the Mexican War, his duty on the west coast, his failures outside the Army, and the battles while he was leader in the Civil War’s western campaigns. The second covers the Civil War after he was given command of the entire army, as Lieutenant General. I was so struck by the pivot from the battle for Vicksburg, at the end of the first half, to the campaign for Richmond in the second. In the west, Grant had faced an almost impregnable site, endless water and mud, massive rivers, sloughs, bad weather, and general bad odds. His patience and strategy of allowing the men to try almost any maneuver to get forge a passage to Vicksburg through the mush during the winter, to keep the soldiers from going crazy and to prevent Washington from firing him, eventually got them to the dryer weather when he could finally undertake his own strategy to take this critical location. He succeeded, in partnership with the Navy.

The pivot to leading the Army of the Potomac in the East, which he was awarded immediately after Vicksburg, shows him at once capable of deciding on a strategy of attacking Lee and the other Southern generals along the entire line between the States simultaneously. This required careful preparation, but then massive coordination of hundreds of moving parts--very different from the focus on one location. I thought that the general who could undertake so many different types of war and motivate his officers to carry out their parts (for the most part) promptly and imaginatively was certainly a phenomenal leader.

It is also fascinating to watch Grant attribute successes and failures to individuals. At times you can see he is settling scores, but for the most part, even when a failure was really a disaster in terms of rending a hole in the strategy, he is generally able to allow that the officer had other strengths--he just shouldn’t have been in charge of a ___ (fill in the blank: company, regiment, etc.). His pet peeve was officers who dawdled when he ordered them to get going. Grant is generally even-handed when talking about the Southern officers, many of whom he knew from West Point or the old Army.

While I enjoy the strategy discussions, I am not that interested in battle scenes. I most enjoy reading about how an army is supported and overcomes obstacles through preparation work. Logistics and engineering are fascinating to me. The idea that thousands of wagons of food and forage and ammunition have to keep flowing as the army keeps moving is amazing. And the amount of time armies spend building bridges and works seems to be about fifty times as much as they spend actually fighting. There is plenty of that here, as well as Grant’s description of how he experimented with living off the (South) land early in the war, which informed his strategy throughout.

Of most value, however, is Grant’s commentary on the lead-up to the war, why the South was doomed to lose, and why it benefitted from losing. (Or perhaps not doomed, because he also states that one of his reasons for pounding ahead at all costs in the east was to got a victory somewhere to prevent the North from agreeing to some compromise that would end the war with a division between the two combatants.) He thought slavery was abhorrent, and the men who prompted the rebellion treasonous. But when it was over, he wanted it to be over--no retribution. Grant thought Johnson’s Reconstruction steps disastrous. But he also had an idealistic idea that had Lincoln lived all would have gone easily. My recent reading of Foner’s book on Reconstruction suggests that the persistence of plantation structure and black labor that wanted small farms in the south would have led to trouble no matter what.

Two other thoughts. One, the memoirs don’t emphasize the carnage, although he frequently gives body counts of battles and emphasizes that had an officer done this or that, the war would have ended sooner and fewer lives would have been lost. But the rendition of the destruction is endless. Roads, railroads, cities,...so much gone. Grant can’t say a bad word about Sherman. I must read another perspective.

Lastly, the role of technology. Early in the book (when he was in California after the Mexican War) Grant tells of an Army officer who was a bad sailor, and had been send round the horn seasick three times because every time he finally arrived at his destination orders caught up with him that said he should have been posted on the opposite coast. Similar delays dog the fighting in the Mexican war. But by the Civil War the troops are moved by train, and telegraph lines are strung up all over the battlefields. Grant seems able to communicate with almost all of his officers most of the time. Amazing changes in a very short time.

At some point I will try to read Drew Gilpin Faust’s book on the effect of all the dead on America during the decades following the Civil War: This Republic of Suffering . It will be hard. My own family was half Quaker pacifist, and half recent-immigrant-in-hiding, as I interpret their absence from the 1860 census. It was somebody else’s fight and they didn’t want to be part of it. They escaped fighting, but it sometimes seems as if the rest of us will never escape the consequences.

[Daniel · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of the greatest books I have read, it holds a surprising literary quality that few biographies hold. He puts you in the battlefield, and his vivid memory added by his brilliant expression, brings you back to the 1860's. READ IT!

[Alan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Quite fine--the best presidential autobiography, including Obama's, simply because "Sam" Grant writes of the film-makers favorite subject: wars, Mexican onward.* Along his way to Mexico City (Battles of Molino del Rey and Chapultepec) under Winfield Scott, he hears his first wolves. Now, Grant was very good at numbers; he is asked how many wolves he hears. No fool, he estimates low--20? Nope. Two.
On John Brown, "It was certainly an act of an insane man to attempt the invasion of the South, and the overthrow of slavery, with less than 20 men"(5). (Grant's father lived with Brown's in Deerfield, Ohio.)

"The trouble with the Mexican army was lack of experience among the officers, which led them after a certain time to simply quit, without being particularly whipped, but because they had fought enough"(Webster & Co, 1885, p.85).
Decades since I read it, not now on my shelf, but Twain published it, and made needed money on Grant. From my few notecards, I will relay his literal trench humor on his first prisoner when the ground had been charged over before, "like the soldier who boasted he had cut off the leg of an enemy. When asked why not his head, he replied, 'Someone had done that before.'"(p.46)
On a ship, a mutiny and Grant pitched into the sea. As forthe black market in tobacco, its difficulty of obtaining probably why everybody used it. G opposed dueling, mostly fought for the lack of moral courage to decline (27).
To attack Santa Anna, engineers made mountian roads to attack their rear--supervised by Capt. Robert E Lee, and Lieutenant George McClellan. Neat to see the Civil warriors on the same side prior. They also mounted a 3 pounder cannon in the steeple of a church, which the priest first opposed.
Delightful tales of Mexican mules, who would rear or lie down unexpectedly. Also, on artillery--Taylor's artillery, mostly 6 pounders, but a couple of howitzers; the Mexican artillery hurt no-one on their advance, because it came through tall grass, so the men parted to let it pass.
At battle of Monterey, engineers under Lieut George Meade (later victorious at Gettysburg); General Worth advanced in the plaze, through buildings, cutting through walls. Engineers provided US Army superiority early on.

At West Point, Grant entered by a vacancy created by the dismissal of Dr Bailey's son. Grant, "A military life had no charm for me--encampment, wearisome." He rarely read his West Point lessons, but lots from the library,"Much of the time, I am sorry to say, was devoted to novels, but not those of the trashy sort--all of Bulwer's, Cooper's, Marryat's, Scott's, and Irvings." At the Congressional debate in 1839, about abolishing West Point, Grant was in favor of so doing. He also strenuously opposed the annexation of Texas, regarded as one of the most unjust wars ever waged by a stronger against a weaker.

* Grant, of all soldiers, deserves to brag a bit, but he entirely avoids the stock character, Miles Gloriosus / Boastful Soldier, that Shakespeare's Roman source, Plautus, titles his play. (Think what Shakespeare does with Falstaff the soldier, and the Welsh and Irish soldiers in Henry IV & V, and others.)

[Lauren Sapala · Rating 3 out of 5]

I have such mixed feelings about this book, which is why I’m giving it three stars.

On one hand, I was deeply disappointed. I have been interested in the Civil War for years, and particularly curious about Abraham Lincoln and Ulysses Grant. The title of this book—The Complete Personal Memoirs of Ulysses Grant—led me to believe that he would cover his entire life, or at least all of the important parts of it, in the telling. However, after hearing about his childhood and service in the Mexican War, and then going through an extremely protracted description of every battle of the Civil War in which he was involved, the book abruptly ends after peace is made between North and South. Grant’s experience during his term as President of the United States was something I was really looking forward to reading about so I was surprised and a bit bummed to find it omitted altogether.

The other aspect that disappointed me was that “protracted description” I mentioned above. Now, I have been known to read and enjoy some dry books. I love history and I understand that sometimes history is just dry, there’s no way around it. But dry does not begin to convey what I went through reading hundreds and hundreds of pages on battles, skirmishes, troop movements, and details of captures, supplies, and correspondence. Grant might have been a great general, but he was not a great memoir writer. A lot of this description was mind-numbingly boring.

However, there were gems sprinkled throughout the book. I very much enjoyed hearing about Grant’s boyhood, his time in the Mexican War, and his observations and brief character sketches and studies of the other generals he worked alongside in the Civil War, and especially President Lincoln and Secretary of War Stanton. His analysis of the causes and effects of the war, and the advantages and disadvantages of both sides was also very interesting.

If you are actually a military scholar and literally want every little detail of each battle, you might find this book useful. If you’re someone like me, however, and you just want to read a good history of the Civil War, I’d skip this one.

[Rob · Rating 4 out of 5]

An interesting book that is well written but not a personal memoir in the modern sense. This is not a tell all, voyeuristic baring of the soul. Grant is a 19th Century American. I have to admit to liking the 19th Century Americans. They were down to earth blistering realistic people. He assumed that his potential readers were more interested in why he was famous. He was not famous for being famous. He was famous for prosecuting the war to a successful conclusion for the Union. What he thought about the war and how he out generaled the Confederates WAS important.
And this is interesting. I was fascinated by how one ran a 19th Century army. Forage for horses was a strategic resource. It was possible for an army to live off the land by stealing from the surrounding civilian population . The cavalry were sent to go behind the enemy lines to destroy lines of communication and transport much like how air-force would be used in the 20th Century.
This is a book about the campaigns of the Civil War but we do get a glimpse of the man. Grant decided toward the end of the war to avoid annihilating the trapped Confederate armies. The description of the tactics and instructions given to his armies can be a little tedious. This is leavened however by the description of the political problems of dealing with politically appointed generals, a vindictive Halleck who often persecuted his underlings and Lincoln and his cabinet who often interfered in the day to day running of the war. There were also many levels of competence amongst his officers. Some were cowards, some overly defensive and many just could not lead men and some could not follow orders. In Sherman he found a partner who had the perfect balance of aggression, competence, attention to detail and initiative.
Grants views on slavery, the Mexican War, the Confederacy and the various myths about the war (which are still extant) are extremely interesting and alone are worth the effort of reading this rather large book.

[Carol Bakker · Rating 4 out of 5]

I've heard for decades how readable Grant's memoirs are. Friends, it is true. Kudos — huge kudos — to the narrator Robin Field. If ever a voice perfectly paired with a book, his did. Listening to him made me feel like I was sitting on a veranda with General Grant next to me, telling me what it was like being a farmer, a salesman, and a general.* I have a few other audiobooks narrated by him queued up.

I had a mentor who emphasized the value of first-person accounts. He showed me, by example, how to search out the work of an eyewitness. There is a tension, though; knowing how I myself frame a story in order to make me look better; I wonder about skewed truth. Setting aside that possibility, I came away from this thinking that he was a decent and amiable man.

I would not recommend this to a Civil War neophyte. Grant references generals by name but does not indicate which side they were on. This could get confusing.

It surprised me that Lincoln invited General and Mrs. Grant to join him and his wife at the theatre on April 9th. Grant wanted to see his children and declined. Another "what if" of history!

One of my favorite moments? "If Early had been any earlier, ..."




* - My life hack: I look at the unread books on my shelf. I find an audio version of an unread print book. I listen, read along whenever I can, but don't worry if I can't. I use the print book to look over in my pre-reading ritual, as a reference (what city is he saying?), and a source for a quote worth copying. When I'm done, poof! Book goes in the out box. I call it my read-and-release project.

[William S. · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is often called the finest presidential memoir. It doesn't, however, deal with the Grant presidency at all. Instead, it is his recollection of Civil War events, written in a race of time against his approaching death from throat cancer. With that focus, the book is magnificent - and a surprise. The strategic thinking about his famous battles is clear and comprehensible. Having read many books about the Civil War, I found myself shaking my head many times and noting "so that's how - and why - that happened." The drunk of legend here becomes a world-class strategist. Furthermore, he has the grace to apologize over the bloody fiasco at Cold Harbor, something that Lee, who shared the blame, never did. If Grant's seesaw reputation continues to rise, this excellent account will deserve much of the credit. A must resad for anyone interested in the Civil War, or for that matter, American history in general.

[Nooilforpacifists · Rating 5 out of 5]

Unexpectedly lucid and thoughtful, Grant manages to communicate the talent that made him the North's most successful general: logistics. He could view terrain, and see, instantly, not just how it should be assaulted, but how the attacking army must be supplied. (Yes, he also actually would attack, unlike McClellan.). Famously, the book was written to provide a legacy for the Grant family, and completed in two sections, the second under severe pain after jaw cancer surgery. But, unlike others, I don't find much of a difference. Yes, there's some backing-and-filling about voting Democrat, Lincoln, race relations, etc. But an easy read, and a must-read for Civil War enthusiasts.

[Sotiris Makrygiannis · Rating 4 out of 5]

A good man? For sure a General, a President, a part of American history. Wanted to be a Professor, ended up to be all the above but died almost poor because they fooled him in business. He wrote the book to make money at the end of his life. He is respectful to his enemies, he explains how the USA got new territories from Mexico by provoking them to be the aggressors. Since he knew the territories of the South, he led the campaign against the USA South rebels during the civil war. He knew his opponents, they were schoolmates. Explains why he allowed lotting at the end bc he lost a garrison with supplies and choose that man with guns are better to be controlled then go hungry. Lots of details for every battle, who did a good job and who didn't. On the subject of slavery, for sure was against it and speaks kindly about the coloured people. Very Presidential for sure and surely had the guts to admit to his own mistakes. This book is a long summary of the US Civil war, the reasons, the build-up, the campaign and much more. Need to read also the story of General Lee to see the Southerner opinions. Is over 35 hours of audiobook and has good military strategy tricks and tips but needs lots of effort to avoid being boring. A free version can be found at Librivox https://librivox.org/personal-memoirs...

[Brian Eshleman · Rating 2 out of 5]

No analysis of himselftell his circumstances, or his age. Sounds like an itinerary.

[Aaron Million · Rating 3 out of 5]

General Grant succeeds in retelling the story of the Civil War from his own unique perspective in a manner that keeps the reader wondering what would happen next - even though everyone knows what the ultimate outcome was. Grant writes in a refreshingly honest and candid prose, trying to be fair to everyone that he writes about. If he did not care for someone, as is the case with Secretary of War Edwin Stanton, he went out of his way to praise the positive qualities that Stanton brought to the table. Grant does not dwell on personalities, but he does make sure to mention how individual idiosyncrasies affected certain battles, plans, and the war in general. He is very upfront in his praise and criticism for all of the other generals that he encountered on both sides. His respect for William Tecumseh Sherman and Robert E. Lee is obvious. What I found especially interesting is that he could find good qualities in even the generals and commanders that he did not think were particularly good leaders.

Grant also shows much respect towards Abraham Lincoln, writing of how sad he was to hear of his assassination and saying that he is positive that Reconstruction would have been much different had Andrew Johnson not been President. Curiously, Grant does not comment on whether he wished he would have accepted Lincoln's invitation to attend Ford's Theatre with him on the night that Lincoln was assassinated. It is certainly one of those quirks of history where it makes you wonder "What if Grant had been there too? Would he also have been assassinated? Or, would he have saved Lincoln's life and thus significantly changed the course of history?"

Also contained in this fine work is a brief overview of Grant's early life, his time at West Point, and his service in the Mexican War in the 1840s. I find Grant to be a truly amazing figure in history - someone who, honestly, was pretty much a failure at any venture that he tried outside of the military: approaching 40 years old and relying on his in-laws for work. Yet, within eight years, he had become the most celebrated General since George Washington, one of the heroes of the North, and had been elected President. Talk about a turnaround.

I would have liked to have given this book a higher rating, but I found it hard to keep track of all of the various commanders and battlefields that were talked about. And I fully realize why this is: Grant wrote this to be read by Civil War veterans and others who were alive back then, he was not writing necessarily for posterity. So, he assumes more familiarity with the commanders and battles than someone today would probably have. There were so many generals that he spoke about, on both sides, that at times some of them seemed to run together. So, while I will not say it is a fault per se of the book, it is something that a modern reader has to deal with. Also, the map quality is exceedingly poor. They really did not give me a good sense of the layout of the land. Hopefully a newer edition will have some updated maps.

Finally, I do wish that Grant would have talked about his time as President. I recognize that these memoirs were for the Civil War only, and I knew that going in. Nonetheless, I wonder that, had he not been dying of throat cancer when he finished this book, would he have written a separate book about his experiences as President? No one knows of course, but my guess would be no as his presidency was not a good period in his life and is widely considered, both then and now, to be a failure. I think that is the same reason that there is not a single mention of his infamous drinking before the war. On the whole, this a good book and I am glad that I read it. For anyone who has a keen interest in the Civil War, I would consider it mandatory reading.

[Mark Lisac · Rating 4 out of 5]

Plainspoken and direct, but filled with acute perceptions and with incidental revelations of Grant's mind and character. You don't have to read more than about the first third to realize why he was a formidable military leader. He evidently had an innate ability to simplify a complex situation into its important elements and to tackle them head-on, but with attention to detail. And while in no way a politician, he acted with constant appreciation of how the course of his campaigns fit in with the decidedly uncertain political situation in the North. Nor was he fazed by the physical obstacles of raw landscapes or by the reputations of generals on the other side.
Much of the book consists of detailed descriptions of important battles. Even in those long sections, which may not appeal to all readers, there are flashes of insight into his temperament and of his assessment of his own and Confederate generals. His major weakness appears to have been a willingness to accept occasional poor performance by some of his own immediately subordinate commanders, giving them probably more opportunities than they deserved (he was especially vexed by failure to move troops fast or to act promptly to orders, problems that Sherman never gave him, which helped account for his high opinion of Sherman).
The war as Grant describes it sounds like a precursor of some of the coming century's military events. Some of Grant's battles featured trench warfare along the lines of the First World War. Others presented the rudiments of what became common in the Second World War: constant movement; co-ordination with naval forces; an emphasis on logistics; fights involving combined arms (infantry, cavalry, artillery and, occasionally, naval support); intensive engineering work; some amazingly sophisticated communication arrangements amid the usual reliance on couriers, especially the stringing of telegraph wires linking every major commander in the Battle of the Wilderness.
There are self-deprecating anecdotes and casual mentions of personal danger. There are also succinct judgments about great moral questions, including slavery, the treatment of civilians, and his famous comment that the Mexican War of the mid-1840s was the most unjust ever waged by a strong nation against a weaker one (notwithstanding that he served in it and gained his first combat experience there).
Grant's rose from leadership of a regiment in 1861 (after a long spell as a civilian), to commander of armies of 20,000 to 50,000 in 1862 and 1863, to overall army command in 1864-65 with a little over 100,000 soldiers within his personal area of operations. That spoke to his capacities and his ability to inspire confidence.
Unexpectedly, his writing proved to be as clear as his strategic sense, and is often engaging. His opening sentence alone — "My family is American, and has been for generations, in all its branches, direct and collateral" — rings with certainty and with the flavour of all that follows. (One wonders if Saul Bellow had read it before producing a somewhat similar first paragraph for The Adventures of Augie March.)
Would have rated this at 5 stars except that the descriptions of the Civil War battles tend to drag on a bit. Also, the edition I read (published by Library of America, not easily found on Goodreads) has finely detailed period maps but they have print so small as to require a magnifying glass; modern, streamlined maps would have aided understanding of the text. Some of the letters at the end of this edition are revealing in their own ways — his firmness and clarity in sending orders; his warm relationship with his wife and children; his maturing from a West Point cadet writing to a friend with typical youthful exuberance to a leader shouldering great responsibility but seeing clearly what had to be done at every step and ensuring that it did get done.

[John · Rating 3 out of 5]

On some level I want to give this at least one star more, but I was maybe just a tad too disappointed. On the one hand I enjoyed Grant's clear writing, which didn't suffer from the wordiness of 19th century writing but was crisp and very modern. Grant had cancer while writing this and probably didn't have time to wax poetical.

An interesting feature of this book is its lack of ego. Grant certainly had a measured opinion of himself and spends a lot of time praising those generals who served under him, and even some of he went up against. He even defends a confederate general from Jefferson Davis who claimed this general was not dedicated to the cause. He also criticised the US for starting the war in Mexico in the 1840s, which might rattle some people. His descriptions of battles are not detailed from one POV but generally give a good run-down of what happened, and are accurate, and how war is generally a terrible business even if you're on the winning side.

Though infrequent, his humour is sometimes very on-point and hilarious. Two paragraphs stood out:

"Some of these critics claim that Shiloh was won when Johnston fell, and that if he had not fallen the army under me would have been annihilated or captured. IFS defeated the Confederates at Shiloh. There is little doubt that we would have been disgracefully beaten IF all the shells and bullets fired by us had passed harmlessly over the enemy and IF all of theirs had taken effect."

and

"It may be that Longstreet was not sent to Knoxville for the reason stated, but because Mr. Davis had an exalted opinion of his own military genius, and thought he saw a chance of "killing two birds with one stone." On several occasions during the war he (Mr Davis) came to the relief of the Union army by means of his SUPERIOR MILITARY GENIUS."

What disappointed me was the lack of personal details that one would expect from a memoir. Grant keeps a lot of his life from his readers; for instance, I learned that his wife traveled with him on many of his campaigns, but he alludes to this only a handful of times and never explains how or why this happened. Similarly, he doesn't dwell on his own presidency even briefly, only alluding to it once in the end. The detail of his overall story was impressive, but this deliberate keeping of arms length did irk me more than it should have. On the one hand you could argue that its the product of our modern minds wanting to put people on couches and dissect their thoughts, and maybe our whole 'tell all' mentality have also influenced my expectations. But Grant not wanting to do either is in line with the character I've gleamed from the book.

This is a good read for someone interested in the history of the American Civil War.

[Roger Burk · Rating 5 out of 5]

Nothing can match Grant's memoirs for straightforward clarity and directness. We wastes no time lamenting his errors, even at Shiloh and Cold Harbor, but he also lets his Union-saving accomplishments speak for themselves. He readily gives praise when it is merited, and obliquely gives criticism likewise. He enlivens the narrative with personal anecdotes, such as when he was scouting alone (to avoid attention) at Chattanooga and came across a lone soldier filling his canteen at a stream. On asking the soldier's unit, he discovered that he was a Confederate. The two had a pleasant chat and then went their separate ways. I wish the memoir could have continued through Grant's presidency, but Grant was dying of throat cancer as he finished it, alas.

This edition is annotated by a professor of English at the U.S. Military Academy, not by an historian. The pictures are more eclectic that the usual portraits, maps, and landscapes, though some of those are included too. The notes are equally diverse, covering such things as parallels in Shakespeare and the role of bicycles in war. Despite their charm, I found myself ignoring them as a distraction from Grant's admirable prose. An Afterword (nominally about Grant's tomb) rightly laments that slavery was replaced by another system of oppression, and that racial equality was not really pursued even in the North. It also grouses about the "stainless banner" revisionism that took hold in the South, which is perhaps worth no more than a condescending smile. It could have emphasized the reconciliation between North and South after the War, and the acceptance of the South back into the Union on terms of equality after they accepted the results of the War. This kind of healing is by no means common after bloody civil wars, and Grant contributed greatly to it. Three Confederate generals were among his pallbearers.

[Bob Mayer · Rating 5 out of 5]

When he became President, Ulysses S. Grant lost his army pension. After the Presidency, he went into business with his son. They became caught up in a Ponzi scheme. Grant not only lost everything, he was deeply in debt. Then he was diagnosed with terminal throat cancer-- all those cigars. He didn't want to leave his wife destitute so he agreed to Mark Twain's long standing request to write his memoirs. BTW-- in my book coming out April 12, Duty, Honor, Country, I have a scene where a young Mark Twain is in the Confederate army in Florida MO (where he was born), ready to defend it against an advancing Union column led by: U.S. Grant in his first command. There was no fight, but the two were linked ever afterward. Twain carried a copy of Grant's Unconditional Surrender letter from Fort Donelson in his pocket all his life.
So Grant wrote his memoirs, finishing just days before his death, Twain published it, and it became the highest selling nonfiction book of the 19th Century.
It's a fascinating from the mind of a most incredible man.

[Mandyhello · Rating 5 out of 5]

Not a drunk, not a butcher, not a "failure at everything but marriage and war". A great man who tried to be good. Surprisingly progressive for his time, this was a remarkable look at one of the darkest periods of American History.

[Mark Lawry · Rating 5 out of 5]

A pure national treasure. Worth reading elsewhere how Mark Twain pushed Grant along to completion. Grant was terminally ill while writing this and needed a little nudge. You can see the influence of Twain in many of the passages. Here is a line from later in the book, "Ledlie besides being otherwise inefficient, proved also to possess disqualification less common among soldiers." That's not Grant, that's Twain. I'm a terribly slow reader so 650 page books with fine print intimidate me. Don't let this stop you here. This was written to the 19th century farmer or factory worker who most likely saw few, if any, years inside a schoolhouse. This book is long but it is an easy read. Especially if you're a lover of history. If you get to about to about page 5 you will finish it.

This is a perfect 5 for all the reasons everyone else says it is. Off subject: When I was retiring from the army a Colonel suggested to me that I should go see all the U.S. National Parks and Monuments. Best advice I ever got from anyone in the military. As of this moment my family has just over 200 stamps in our parks passport. If I could do it over again I would take it one step further. Get a good book at each park. I now always ask a park ranger in the gift shops for advice on a book and get the #1 book recommended. It turns out U.S. park rangers read books. It never fails and many of my favorite books have been chosen in this manner. I got this copy at Grant's National Historical Site in St. Louis.

[Al · Rating 4 out of 5]

Having seen the recent TV special on Grant, I was motivated to read his memoirs and decided to try the annotated version. Very smart choice! While the annotations make it a very long book (clocking in at 935 full pages), they are beautifully done and add immeasurably to what would otherwise have been a drier read. Not that the memoirs themselves aren't interesting; they are, but a good deal of the text is devoted to troop movements and the like. Ms. Samet's inclusions of anecdotes, bio data on generals and others, excerpts from other texts to illustrate and amplify Grant's points--all these and more--greatly enhance the story. There are also numerous photographs, and some maps (maybe could have used a few more of those, but that's a quibble). If you're going to read Grant's memoirs, this is an elegant way to do it--and being able to do it with benefit of Covid isolation time is very helpful.