Grant’s Memoirs: A Review

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Feb 13

Personal Memoirs of Ulysses S. Grant: The Complete Annotated Edition
David S. Nolen, Louie P. Gallo, eds. Belknap Press: 2017, 816pp, $32.29
Grant, Ron Chernow, Penguin Books, 1104pp, $14.18.

Given that 2025 marks the 160th anniversary of the end of the American Civil War, it seems appropriate to consider one of America’s statesmen, Ulysses S. Grant and his highly regarded Personal Memoirs, written neck break speed, as he was rapidly dying from tongue and throat cancer. He was hoping to leave his wife Julia the means for a comfortable life after his passing. He wrote in excruciating pain with a tumor the size of a baseball hidden beneath a scarf wrapped around his neck; and he was encouraged in the endeavor by his friend Mark Twain who published the memoirs after their completion. He did so, with enormous success and the Memoirs are regarded as one of American’s great literary efforts. They have been reprinted by the Library of America together with 174 of his letters, many to his wife Julia. In his epic biography, Grant, Ron Chernow recounts Grant’s process and suffering and adds, “To worsen matters, he was afflicted by painful neuralgia and had three large teeth extracted. All the while, he limped about from the Christmas Eve mishap.”

The Memoirs: Style and Substance

The Library of America edition suggests that Grant’s writing reflects his skill as a military commander:

Grant’s writing is spare, telling, and quick, superbly evocative of the imperatives of decision, motion, and action that govern those who try to shape the course of war. Grant wrote about the most destructive war in American history with a clarity and directness unequaled in our literature.

The Memoirs are occasionally salted with Grant’s laconic wit. After his appointment to West Point, he wrote, “I then bought a work on algebra in Cincinnati; but having no teacher it was Greek to me.” On a journey to Austin in the course of the Mexican War, his comments on Texans might even today engender pride among its citizens: “The journey was hazardous on account of Indians, and there were white men in Texas whom I would not have cared to meet in a secluded place.” Preparing for battle near the Resaca Channel of the Rio Grande Basin (now a Texas state park), Grant recalls, “We could not see the enemy, so I ordered my men to lie down, an order that did not have to be enforced.”

Grant’s comments on his academic life at West Point are equally spiced with self-effacing wit. He recalls that, though mathematics came easy, “In French . . . my standing was very low. In fact, if the class had been turned the other end foremost I should have been near the head.”

He was an avid reader, in contrast with the slander that he was no more than a philistine and drunken boor, so much so that at times his leisure reading competed with his classroom obligations. He read several British novelists as well as Washington Irving and James Fenimore Cooper. He said he stayed away from “trashy” novels.” As is often the case with successful leaders, Grant read historical non-fiction intensely.

Grant’s self-deprecation colored his other activities. In one episode of the Mexican Resaca battle he admitted, “I had been there but a short time when an order to charge was given, and lacking the moral courage to return to camp—where I had been ordered to stay—I charged with the regiment.” When he was given various posts in the “Rebellion,” he expressed self-doubt about his abilities. Toward the last stages of the war, his troops staged a successful amphibious assault on Fort Fisher located on the what is now called North Carolina’s Outer Banks. However, earlier assaults on the Fort, Grant admits, were “a gross and culpable failure.”

Reports From Battle and Judgment of Character

The Memoirs begins with Grant’s upbringing, but his attention is centered on his experience in the Mexican-American War and the Civil War. His insider’s view of the conflicts should be interesting to anyone, even devoted Civil War buffs. The month-long Battle of Atlanta is gripping; and one wonders how any soldiers fought and survived the Battle of the Wilderness, which was the first time Grant and Lee had faced off. It was, Grant admits, an inconclusive war of attrition with 29,000 horrid casualties.

Grant recalls that Sherman encountered primitive I.E.D.’s: “torpedoes that the enemy had placed in the ground, set to explode when stepped on by man or beast.” One such bomb detonated under an officer’s horse, leaving the horse in fragments and the officer’s leg so badly mutilated that amputation was the only cure. Sherman’s solution was crafty, as he places his prisoners of war in the vanguard, “moving them in a compact body in advance, to either explode the torpedoes or dig them up.” The result was no more explosions.

Grant notes that although Sherman’s March was at the time—and subsequently—controversial, he was convinced it was necessary and morally defensible so that, “I want to state here that no question upon that subject was ever raised between General Sherman and myself.” Grant does admit that his chief of staff was bitterly opposed to the plan and since he could not dissuade Grant, he appealed to Washington, but to no effect.

Grant was a shrewd judge of character as a successful leader must be and he makes comments about human nature in general, as well as about the particular leaders in both of the major conflicts of which he was a part. He notes that although many men, “when they smell battle afar off, chafe to get into the fray,” even if they are noticeably subdued as they approach the danger. During the Mexican War, Grant compared and contrasted General Zachary Taylor and General Winfield Scott in a fashion worthy of inclusion in Plutarch’s Parallel Lives. In the closing chapter of the Memoirs, Grant provides a charitable, but insightful, assessment of each of his principal officers, not just of their successes and failures, but also of their underlying personalities and character.

Moral Sense and Political Philosophy

In respect to the Mexican War, Grant explained, “For myself, I was bitterly opposed to the measure, and to this day regard the war, which resulted, as one of the most unjust ever waged by a stronger against a weaker nation.” He also said, “It was an instance of a republic following the bad example of European monarchies, in not considering justice in their desire to acquire additional territory.” Accordingly, Grant thought the Civil War was national punishment for the Mexican American War. In saying so, he reminds us of Lincoln’s Second Inaugural in which Lincoln opined that the Civil War was the nation’s punishment for slavery. Perhaps both were true.

A glimpse into Grant’s political philosophy is a valuable reward of reading his Memoirs. He observed that neither party, Democrats nor Republicans, was sincerely anti-slavery. He believed that slavery should be abolished but with proper consideration for the property interest in slavery of those in the South. He also keenly observed that it was a plantation and slave owning elite in the South who drove the Civil War, not the whole population. He was especially disgusted with the claim that slavery was a “Divine” institution.

He was happy to see the reward of victory against the Confederate “Rebellion,” as he often called it: Four millions of human beings held as chattels have been liberated; the ballot has been given to them; the free schools of the country have been opened to their children. He further predicted that over time, even those in the South “will begin to wonder how it was possible that their ancestors ever fought for or justified institutions which acknowledged the right of property in man.”

In tones reminiscent of the Declaration of Independence and its Lockean influence, Grant acknowledged the inherent right of revolution if the oppression of government was sufficient to justify it. A people would naturally seek to relieve themselves of the oppression if they had the strength and means to do so, and then establish a government more acceptable. But, in an echo of the Declaration’s warning that dictates of “Prudence” must guide such an undertaking, he warned that the people who resorted to such a remedy would stake “their lives, their property, and every claim for protection given by citizenship on the success of their endeavor.”

Grant thought the Founders were so intent on uniting the country that they did not foresee the civil war. If they had, he thought, they would have “sanctioned the right of a State or States to withdraw rather than that there should be war between brothers.”

In what seemed an echo of Thomas Jefferson’s letter to James Madison dated 6 September 1789, in which he asserted that the earth “belongs to the living,” Grant thought it was “preposterous to suppose that the people of one generation can lay down the best and only rules of government for all who are to come after them, and under unforeseen contingencies.” He thought that satisfactory accommodations between the South and the North could have been achieved if calm reasonable discussions had been conducted. But such was not the case: the opportunity was spoiled by “demagogues” who poisoned the political atmosphere and Grant thought that one such demagogue was Jefferson Davis. Grant further observed that the situation was made yet more hopeless by the ineptitude of the Buchanan Administration that looked at the growing conflict “helplessly,” believing erroneously that the government had no authority to step in and bring a favorable resolution—that the Nation “had no power to save its own life.”

Grant’s Final Thoughts—In More Ways Than One

Grant’s conclusion to his Memoirs is short but compelling. He states that one lesson from the war, which is just as applicable today, is the dictum “To maintain peace in the future it is necessary to be prepared for war.” But, writing twenty years after the conflict, he feared that the U.S. was already failing to adequately prepare for its next challenge. He did not anticipate it would be a domestic war, but he was apprehensive that the growth and success of the country might provoke envy in other countries inducing them to hostilities.

Grant’s final words are an exhortation “to preserve peace, happiness and prosperity at home and the respect of other nations.” He hoped that the country was now on the cusp of a “new era of comity between “Federal and Confederate.” With his usual humility, he concludes:

I am not egotist enough to suppose all this significance should be given because I was the object of it. But the war between the States was a very bloody and a very costly war. One side or the other had to yield principles they deemed dearer than life before it could be brought to an end. I commanded the whole of the mighty host engaged on the victorious side. I was, no matter whether deservedly so or not, a representative of that side of the controversy.

Chernow writes, “In a magnificent finale, Grant finished the manuscript on July 16, 1885, one week before his death in upstate New York. He had steeled himself to stay alive until the last sentence was done and he could surrender his pen.”

The Personal Memoirs of Ulysses S. Grant give us the measure of an American statesman.