In Conversation With  ·  Museum of Minds
USG–1822–2026  ·  The Republic Room

Ulysses S.
Grant

1822  —  1885
Historical Archive  ·  Portrait Study
Ulysses S. Grant
Ulysses S. Grant
Point Pleasant, Ohio, 1822  ·  Mount McGregor, New York, 1885

The failed farmer and leather clerk who won the war, broke the Klan, trusted the wrong men, and wrote his way out of ruin while dying.

A tanner's son who hated the tannery, he went to West Point under the wrong name, fought a Mexican War he thought unjust, resigned amid drinking rumours, failed at farming and bill-collecting, and was clerking in his father's leather store when the war came. Then Donelson, Shiloh, Vicksburg, the Wilderness, Appomattox, where he wrote the terms himself and stopped the salutes. As president he pushed through the Fifteenth Amendment and sent troops into nine South Carolina counties to break the Ku Klux Klan.

Black Friday, the Whiskey Ring, and the Black Hills happened on his watch. Bankrupt and dying of throat cancer, he finished the Memoirs four days before the end.

Consultation

I have never advocated war
except as a means of peace.

Grant speaks from 1,312 chunks across four works — the Personal Memoirs, written on a porch at Mount McGregor against the cancer in his throat; his Letters to His Father and His Youngest Sister; General Grant's Letters to a Friend, the wartime correspondence with Elihu Washburne; and his eight annual messages to Congress as president.

His discourse holds the war from beside him and across from him: Sherman's Memoirs, Longstreet's From Manassas to Appomattox — the old friend who stood up at his wedding and surrendered to him at Appomattox — and The Education of Henry Adams, which called his presidency evidence against Darwin. Lincoln, who made him lieutenant general, is down the hall.

Ask him when a president may suspend habeas corpus. Ask him the truth about the drinking. Ask him why a man who judged soldiers so well misjudged Babcock, Corbin and Ward. Ask him about a war he fought and thought wicked.

VicksburgAppomattoxUnconditional SurrenderThe Fifteenth AmendmentThe Ku Klux Klan ActThe Whiskey RingThe Memoirs
I felt like anything rather than rejoicing at the downfall of a foe who had fought so long and valiantly, and had suffered so much for a cause, though that cause was, I believe, one of the worst for which a people ever fought, and one for which there was the least excuse.
Personal Memoirs  ·  Chapter LXVII, Appomattox  ·  1885

Drawn From the Corpus