A short life of the author
Ulysses S. Grant wrote the greatest military autobiography in the English language — a book composed under the most dramatic circumstances imaginable, by a dying man racing against throat cancer to finish a manuscript that would provide for his family after his death, and the result was not a gasping, sentimental deathbed document but a work of prose so clear, so direct, so free of vanity and self-justification that it has been admired by every generation of readers since its publication. Mark Twain, who published the Memoirs through his firm Charles L. Webster & Company, called it the finest thing of its kind since Julius Caesar’s Commentaries. Gertrude Stein ranked Grant’s prose with Lincoln’s as the finest written by any American. Matthew Arnold found it superior to anything produced by the professional literary men of Grant’s era.
Point West to Appomattox
Hiram Ulysses Grant was born in 1822 in Point Pleasant, Ohio, the son of a tanner. He attended the United States Military Academy at West Point (where a clerical error changed his name to Ulysses S. Grant), served with distinction in the Mexican-American War under Zachary Taylor and Winfield Scott, and then resigned from the army in 1854 under circumstances that have been debated ever since — the most common explanation is that he was drinking and was given the choice of resignation or court-martial.
For the next seven years, Grant failed at everything he tried: farming, selling firewood on street corners, working in a customs house, clerking in his father’s leather goods store in Galena, Illinois. He was thirty-nine years old, a failure by every conventional measure, when the Civil War began in 1861.
The war transformed him. Within three years, this small, unprepossessing, quietly determined man — who looked, as one observer noted, “as if he had determined to drive his head through a brick wall and was about to do it” — had captured Fort Henry and Fort Donelson, survived the near-disaster of Shiloh, taken Vicksburg in the most brilliant campaign of the war, broken the Confederate siege of Chattanooga, and been appointed commanding general of all Union armies. In 1864–1865, he ground down Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia through relentless pressure, accepting casualties that horrified the North but that reflected a clear-eyed understanding that the Confederacy could not replace its losses while the Union could. On 9 April 1865, Lee surrendered at Appomattox Court House, and the war was over.
The Presidency and After
Grant served two terms as president (1869–1877). His presidency was marked by genuine achievements in civil rights — he vigorously enforced the Reconstruction amendments and prosecuted the Ku Klux Klan — and by scandals that damaged his reputation, though Grant himself was never personally corrupt.
After leaving office, Grant invested his savings with the firm of Grant & Ward, which turned out to be a Ponzi scheme. He was ruined — bankrupt and humiliated. Then he was diagnosed with throat cancer, caused by a lifetime of cigar smoking. Facing death and destitution, he turned to writing.
The Personal Memoirs
Mark Twain offered Grant a contract with extraordinarily generous terms — 75 per cent of the net profits — and Grant began writing in the summer of 1884. He worked with ferocious determination, writing by hand even when the pain in his throat made it nearly impossible to speak, dictating when he could no longer write, and refusing morphine because it clouded his mind.
The Personal Memoirs cover Grant’s life from his birth through the end of the Civil War. The prose is remarkable for what it is not: it is not boastful, not self-justifying, not sentimental, not evasive. Grant writes about war — its confusion, its horror, its moments of decision — with the same clarity and directness with which he had conducted his campaigns. His account of the Vicksburg campaign is the finest sustained military narrative in American literature. His portrait of Lee at Appomattox — generous, precise, free of triumphalism — is one of the most admired passages in American prose.
Grant finished the manuscript on 16 July 1885 and died on 23 July. The book was an enormous commercial success — sold door-to-door by Twain’s subscription agents, it earned Grant’s family approximately $450,000 (over $14 million in today’s dollars).
Collecting Grant
Personal Memoirs of U.S. Grant (Charles L. Webster & Company, 1885–1886, 2 volumes) in first edition is the primary target — one of the great American books. The first edition was issued in both cloth and leather bindings; the leather bindings are more common. Signed copies are extremely rare and valuable. Grant’s wartime letters and documents are actively collected by Civil War specialists.