Some suggestions on reading by and about USG!



Basic Works:



Grant, Ulysses S., *The Personal Memoirs of U.S. Grant, *New York: C.L.
Webster & Co., 1885-86. Considered by many to be one of the two or three
greatest military histories or biographies ever written, ranking with
Caesar’s *Gallic Wars*. Originally published in two volumes with a variety
of bindings and sold door to door. My favorite is the “shoulder strap”
editions, with Grant’s as the first of a long line of similar
autobiographies by Civil War Union generals, each with the author’s top
rank pictured on the spine.



It is available in various editions, both hard- and paperback, but the best
is *Personal of Memoirs of U.S. Grant**, Lincoln: University of Nebraska
Press, [1996] with an introduction by Brooks Simpson. Second choice would
be the edition edited at the time of the Centennial by E.B. Long and
published by Indiana University Press as one of their fine collections of
Civil War reminiscences. Ulysses S. Grant: Memoirs and Selected Letters:
Personal Memoirs of U.S. Grant and Selected Letters, 1839-1865 (Library of
America, 1990), in addition to the Memoirs, includes 174 letters, many of
them to his wife, Julia, which offer an intimate view of their affectionate
and enduring marriage. The book also includes “Notes to the Doctor written
while completing the memoirs” and a chronology. Mary Drake McFeely and
William S. McFeely wrote the notes and selected the letters for this
volume. *



*The definitive edition is the final volume of The Papers of Ulysses S.
Grant: The Personal Memoirs of Ulysses S. Grant, The Complete Annotated
Edition, edited by John S. Marszalek, published in 2017 by Harvard
University Press.*



*The Personal Memoirs are also available in HTML markup on the Internet at *
http://home.nycap.rr.com/history/grant.html .



John Y. Simon, ed., *The Papers of Ulysses S. Grant*, Carbondale: Southern
Illinois University Press, 1969-2012, 32 volumes. Volumes two to fourteen
cover the Civil War, sixteen through eighteen post-war; nineteen to
twenty-seven the presidency, twenty-eight to thirty-one, the final years
and thirty-two, supplemental documents. They are available on line at
http://digital.library.msstate.edu/cdm/landingpage/collection/USG_volume



Julia Dent Grant, *The Personal Memoirs of Julia Dent Grant [Mrs. Ulysses
S. Grant]*, edited by John Y. Simon, with an introduction by Bruce Catton,
New York: 1975. Julia was the first First Lady to write memoirs, in this
case, for her family. One of the great love affairs in American History.
Grant fell in love at first sight with the sister of his West Point
roommate and the affection was mutual! Julia always knew that the captain
would make good and, with her love and support, he did.



Biographies:



Brooks D. Simpson, *Ulysses S. Grant: Triumph over Adversity, 1822-1865*,
New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2000. Incomparably the finest biography of
Grant and one of the finest biographies of anyone written in years. Simpson
believes that Grant was a Great Captain – but Grant was also a human being
and Simpson is unafraid to point out the whole Grant, greatness and
pettiness. Most Civil War biographers prefer to make their Heroes Saints (
*vide* Douglas Freeman on Lee) or Villains (Sears on McClellan or almost
all biographers on Ben Butler). Simpson is a refreshing change from that
mold. This is the first of a two-volume biography that will carry Grant
through the presidency and his post-White House years.



Lloyd Lewis, *Captain Sam Grant*, Boston: Little Brown, 1950

Bruce Catton, *Grant Moves South*, Boston: Little Brown, 1960

Bruce Catton, *Grant Takes Command*, Boston: Little Brown, 1868



A trilogy, started by Sherman’s biographer and completed after Lewis’
death, by one of the most gifted of Civil War writers. *Captain Sam
Grant *finishes
with Col. Grant taking command of the Twenty-first Illinois,* Grant Moves
South* covers the war through Vicksburg and *Grant Takes Command* the
balance to Appomattox. All three are extremely entertaining reading.



Col. Andrew Conger, *The Rise of U.S. Grant*, originally published in 1931,
reprint with an introduction by Brooks D. Simpson, New York: Da Capo Press,
1996. A graduate of Harvard, Col. Conger (1872-1951) taught at the Army
Staff College at Fort Leavenworth, and this is a professional military
man’s examination, literally a staff college study, of how Grant matured
and grew in the first two years of the war from Belmont to Chattanooga.



Maj. Gen. J.F.C. Fuller, *The Generalship of Ulysses S. Grant*, originally
London: 1929, reprinted, Indiana University Press, 1958, reprinted New
York: Da Capo Press, n.d.



Maj. Gen. J.F.C. Fuller, *Grant and Lee*, London: 1932; reprinted



Gen. Fuller was a British Army officer, a veteran of the trenches,
disgusted and saddened by the lack of leadership shown in the First World
War. These two books are part of his successful attempt to use military
history to train the next generation of leaders. Fuller’s conclusions are
that it was Grant who was the premier general of the Civil War, not Lee. It
brilliantly refutes the idea that Grant relied on brute strength to achieve
his victories, demonstrating that Grant mastered mobility, surprise cool
judgment and strategic coordination to make him the premier Civil War
general.



William S. McFeely, *Grant: A Biography*, New York: W.W. Norton, 1981. In
his Pulitzer Prize-winning biography of Ulysses S. Grant, historian William
McFeely portrayed the soldier-statesman-president as a liar, a battlefield
butcher of men, and a racist. His viewpoint was impacted by the American
adventure into Vietnam and is outdated.



Ronald C. White, *American Ulysses: A Life of Ulysses S. Grant* (Random
House, 2014). Ronald C. White argues that we need to once more revise our
estimates of Ulysses S. Grant in the twenty-first century. White, a
biographer exceptionally skilled at writing momentous history from the
inside out, shows Grant to be a generous, curious, introspective man and
leader—a willing delegator with a natural gift for managing the rampaging
egos of his fellow officers. His wife, Julia Dent Grant, long marginalized
in the historic record, emerges in her own right as a spirited and
influential partner. Grant was not only a brilliant general but also a
passionate defender of equal rights in post-Civil War America. After
winning election to the White House in 1868, he used the power of the
federal government to battle the Ku Klux Klan. He was the first president
to state that the government’s policy toward American Indians was immoral,
and the first ex-president to embark on a world tour, and he cemented his
reputation for courage by racing against death to complete his Personal
Memoirs.



Ron Chernow, *Grant* (Penguin Press, 2017). Pulitzer Prize-winner and
biographer of Alexander Hamilton, George Washington, and John D.
Rockefeller, Ron Chernow returns with a sweeping and dramatic portrait of
one of our most compelling generals and presidents, Ulysses S. Grant.
Chernow has produced a portrait of Grant that is a masterpiece, the first
to provide a complete understanding of the general and president whose
fortunes rose and fell with dizzying speed and frequency. His military fame
translated into a two-term presidency, but one plagued by corruption
scandals involving his closest staff. All the while Grant himself remained
more or less above reproach. But, more importantly, he never failed to seek
freedom and justice for black Americans, working to crush the Ku Klux Klan
and earning the admiration of Frederick Douglass, who called him 'the
vigilant, firm, impartial, and wise protector of my race." After his
presidency, he was again brought low by a trusted colleague, this time a
dashing young swindler on Wall Street, but Grant resuscitated his image by
working with Mark Twain to publish his memoirs, which are recognized as a
masterpiece of the genre.



Geoffrey Ward, *A Disposition to Be Rich: Ferdinand Ward, the Greatest
Swindler of the Gilded Age* (Vintage Books, 2013). The compelling
behind-the-scenes story of the greatest swindler of the Gilded Age, whose
villainy bankrupted Ulysses S. Grant and stunned the world of finance—told
by his great-grandson, award-winning historian Geoffrey C. Ward. Ferdinand
Ward, the son of a Protestant missionary and small-town pastor, moved to
New York at twenty-one and, in less than a decade, made himself the
business partner of a former president and established himself as the
“Young Napoleon of Finance.” In truth, he was running a massive pyramid
scheme. Drawing from thousands of family documents never before examined,
Geoffrey C. Ward traces his great-grandfather’s rapid rise to riches and
fame, and his even more dizzying fall from grace, in a narrative populated
with mistresses, crooked bankers, corrupt New York officials, and a
desperate kidnapping scheme. Here is a great story about a classic American
con artist.



Russell F. Weigley, *The American Way of War: A History of United States
Military Strategy and Policy*, Wars of the United States Series,
Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1973. Weigley was the leading
American scholar of general military history and this survey from the
Revolution to Vietnam, devotes two chapters on the Civil War: one each on
Lee and Grant. But turn further in the book and chapter 14, on World War II
in Europe is entitled “The Strategic Tradition of U.S. Grant: Strategies of
the European War.” The United States Army has always admired and loved
Robert E. Lee – but they fight their wars, from North Africa to the Gulf,
like Grant.



And, finally, Thomas M. Pitkin, *The Captain Departs: Ulysses S. Grant’s
Last Campaign*, with a forward by John Y. Simon, Carbondale: Southern
Illinois University Press, 1973. The fascinating, heroic and tragic fight
with cancer and the need to finish his memoirs before he died is told here.
He won the battle, although he did not live to see the result. Mark Twain
was his publisher and, on February 27, 1886, Twain handed Julia a check for
$200,000, the largest commission check in history (the equivalent of $5
million in 2015 dollars – and no income tax to worry about!). All told
Twain’s firm, C.L. Webster, sold over 300,000 copies of the two volume
memoirs in all its various bindings and somewhere between $420,000 and
$450,000 was paid to Julia in royalties.



Web Sites:



The Ulysses S. Grant Homepage, http://www.mscomm.com/~ulysses/ , a private
venture, is filled with photographs and different memories of USG by his
contemporaries.



There! That should keep you busy!


On Sat, Dec 29, 2018 at 2:08 PM Charles Cogar <[log in to unmask]>
wrote:

> Hello,
>
> There are many editions of this book. Which edition is the one with which
> Mark Twain was involved? That's the one I want to buy.
>
> Thank you,
>
> Charles Cogar
> Louisiana Missouri
>