Ulysses s grant autobiography4/16/2023 Here is Grant the tactician, the alcoholic, the plain and tough professional soldier, the ideal commander-but most of all here is Grant the writer as he assesses himself and the events that forged his character, as well as that of the nation. Gienapp, ed., The Civil War and Reconstruction: A Documentary Collection (New York: W. Soon, however, began the rebellion that broke the Union and recast Grant's fortune, transforming him into the leader of the victorious Union armies in the War Between the States and giving him the perspective to describe intimately the capture of Fort Henry and Fort Donelson, the battles of Shiloh, Corinth, Vicksburg, the bloody Wilderness campaign, and Appomattox. For the excerpt from Grants memoirs, see William E. Frank and unpretentious, Grant's memoirs tell the story of his boyhood in Ohio, his graduation from West Point, and the military campaigns in the West and Mexico that ended with his disgraceful resignation and a return to Illinois, where he ran the family store. ![]() He completed the manuscript in eleven months-and died a week later, on July 23, 1885. The celebrated remembrances of the man who led the Union to victory during. I expect a true history major would digest each word and battle I admit I moved past some of the dialogue as it was too detailed for me. The detail on the battles he fought and commanded are vivid and in his own words. It is even more impressive in light of the circumstances in which it was created: Faced with terminal cancer, virtual bankruptcy, and a family he would leave without means of support, he took the advice of his publisher, mark Twain, and went to work. Grant brings a first hand focus to the Civil War. Later, when I was reading a children’s book to our 5-year old grandson about Bowdoin professor Joshua Chamberlain at Little Round Top at Gettysburg, John interrupted: “We’re for the North, right?” Yes, I said, with only a scintilla of ambivalence. “And the North won, right?” I nodded assent. “Yes!” he exclaimed with an arm pump and triumphant grin.Among the autobiographies of generals and presidents, the Personal Memoirs of U.U. Was it because I never heard an alternative narrative growing up? Did the 20 years I spent in good educational institutions fail me? Was it because I had a sense from the age of 5 of who “my people” were and somehow remained loyal to them? Did I discount the Civil War because in some pale penumbra of my consciousness “we” had lost it? My understanding was twisted by my ignorance, and I did not even know it. Twain regarded Grant as a 'military genius,' a man with 'the gift of command, a natural. Though unsuccessful as president, Grant's military reputation was almost universally acknowledged (apparently Lord Wolseley was the only one to question his generalship). In a famous exchange, Mark Twain attacked Matthew Arnold for imagined slights made upon Grants Memoirs in Arnolds two-part article in Murrays Magazine of. Sometimes the contradictions are so great we don’t even know they’re there. I felt ashamed that I had not put all this together. here remains one more possible candidate for the model of Scoresby: Ulysses S. Hear more Tennessee voices: Get the weekly opinion newsletter for insightful and thought-provoking columns.įor me that book ended the Civil War. We are better off now than we would have been without it, and have made more rapid progress than we otherwise should have made. … Then, too, our republican institutions were regarded as experiments up to the breaking out of the rebellion, and monarchical Europe generally believed that our republic was a rope of sand that would part the moment the slightest strain was brought upon it.” ![]() Grant begins the conclusion of his memoirs with characteristic clarity: “The cause of the great War of the Rebellion against the United States will have to be attributed to slavery.” Grant continues: “It is probably well that we had the war when we did. Grant," in part because Larry McMurtry praised it as the best autobiography by any U.S. Eventually I decided to read "The Personal Memoirs of U.S.
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