Memoirs and Selected Letters : Personal Memoirs of U.S. Grant, Selected Letters 1839-1865
New York : The Library of America, 1990 ISBN 9780940450585
Many times when I have been reading military history have I come across a statement alluding to the classic nature of the Memoirs of Ulysses S. Grant. I have long been meaning to read them, and now I have. I should probably have read much more of the American Civil War before I did so: for while this is a great book, I struggled with the narrative owing to my lack of knowledge of the progress of that War, and of Grant's role in it. Despite that I found this book hard to put down.
While the book is entitled Personal Memoirs, it does not cover the whole of Grant's life, merely his life up until the end of the Civil War. He of course went on to become President of the United States for two terms before his death from cancer in 1885. The book focuses mostly on Grant's military career, from his enlistment through to the end of 1865.
Grant had a frontier childhood, where he learned to be self-sufficient at an early age (he was entrusted with overnight journeys to town in his early teens), and where he developed a love of horses. His father pulled some strings to enable him to enrol in West Point, where he was a middling to good student. Grant states that fighting was not something that really interested him, and in fact he spent the early part of his time as an officer trying to get the position of teacher of mathematics back at West Point. That did not eventuate, and soon enough he found himself fighting in Mexico, where he got a taste of what it was like to fight, and what it was like to command.
Grant never saw himself as a leader, and in fact left the army after a period of time spent in Oregon and California. He worked in business with his father and brothers until the Civil War broke out. As a former regular army officer, he was asked by the Governor of Illinois to assist in gathering the militia units for initial training. At first Grant declined all offers to lead troops, but was eventually persuaded to fight, and soon became the commander of the armies in the West, where he won many victories and opened up the Mississippi for the Union.
He was then appointed to overall command of the Union troops and drove the Confederates to surrender with a strategy of denying them their supplies combined with relentless campaigning, relying on the Unions' greater numbers and industrial capacity to overwhelm the Confederates. In this he succeeded, and famously took General Lee's surrender at Appomattox to effectively end the War.
His Memoirs show Grant to be a man who, like many truly great generals, loathed the pain and wastage of war, and who was constantly seeking to find ways to reduce the carnage and to find peace. It seems ironic to write in such a way of a man who oversaw so much slaughter, but it's clear from his writing that at all times the battles he fought were fought for what he saw as good strategic reasons: on more than one occasion in the Memoirs he bemoans attacks and expeditions that he sees as merely a waste of lives and material without any advantage to be gained.
He also bemoans so many lost opportunities to follow up victories with action, missing the chance to perhaps end the war early. The failure to take Mobile when the Mississippi battles were won being a point Grant returns to in this book more than once. The politics of the Civil War were labyrinthine, intense and damaging, more so than many other conflicts: there were many reasons for this: obviously partly because the Civil War was truly a case of brother fighting brother (Grant knew many Confederate officers personally, and liked some of them on a human level) but also partly because of the way the Union army was raised and run.
Because much of the Union Army was comprised of volunteers, who enlisted on a state-by-state basis under officers who were often politicians or other leaders of society rather than military personnel, the command and control that Grant had over his forces was not absolute. Add to that the political interference from Congress, the President and other members of the executive, and Grant sometimes had a very hard task to implement strategies and even tactics that he knew were most beneficial. Time and again in the Memoirs we read of a General not obeying Grant's orders, or of Grant having troops taken away from his command when he was on the verge of a bigger victory. Sometimes the past is another country, and it bodes the reader of these Memoirs well to remember that while Grant was a General, he was not a General as we think of them now.
However, Grant is one of the major figures that imagined a time when modern generalship could come to be. He fully understood the importance of logistics, and while striving hard to destroy the logistical structure of the Confederate forces, he always was thinking carefully about the supply of his own troops. It was this attention to depriving the enemy of the tools of war while ensuring his own access to them that was decisive in his final victory.
While anyone who writes a Memoir is going to be self-serving, the Grant we get to know through these writings is essentially a humble man, who was trying to win a terrible war for the country that he loved. While he didn't hate the Southerners, he hated what they had done to his beloved Union. He wanted to win the war in the quickest way possible, and that led to him approving of the tactic of destruction undertaken by Sherman and Sheridan during their campaigns in the Shenandoah Valley and through Georgia. It was ugly, but it was effective in bringing the South to its knees without having to engage in huge set-piece battles. Grant knew he had to destroy the Confederate armies to win the war, but tried to do so without exterminating them.
This Library of America edition of the Memoirs contains much more besides: a selection of his letters, which show other sides to Grant than he chooses to reveal in his book, more political, more troubled about money and investments, as well as showing him to be a loving husband and father. There is a useful and detailed chronology of his life, as well as some of his final notes to his doctor, written when his throat cancer stopped him from being able to talk.
Which takes me to the final point that I think is worth making about this book: it is amazing that we have it at all. Grant had always said that he would not write a memoir or anything about the war, but his mind was changed by the fact that he lost all his money after a bank in which he had invested went bankrupt. He turned to writing to help pay his bills, firstly with some articles on the Civil War for magazine publication but then, encouraged by Mark Twain (who was a friend of his) he embarked on his memoirs. This was also about the time he learnt of his cancer, and it was literally a race against time for him to complete the work before his death. That he did so is a fact for which we can all be thankful.
I can see why many praise this book highly. This Library of America edition is wonderful, and after finishing it I realize that I have started my journey into the Civil War - I wonder where to next?
Cheers for now, from
A View Over the Bell
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