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A series called:

The 100 best nonfiction books:

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No 55 – Personal Memoirs by Ulysses S Grant (1885)

The civil war general turned president was a reluctant author, but set the gold standard for presidential memoirs

American military commander (and future US President) Ulysses S Grant, photographed towards the end of the civil war, 1865. Photograph: Stock Montage/Getty Images

Robert McCrum

Monday 20 February 2017

According to Mark Twain, these are “the best [memoirs] of any general’s since Caesar”, but we have to take that verdict with a pinch of salt: Twain was also Grant’s publisher. 

As a one-time Confederate soldier, Twain liked to joke that it was General Grant’s prowess on behalf of the Union cause that had persuaded him to desert the colours and become a journalist.

Twain had first invited the retired president to write his autobiography in 1881, but Grant had declined the offer. 

A modest man, he had replied, “No one is interested in me”, referring to two books about him which had recently flopped. 

But when, in 1884, he was swindled out of his savings, and desperate for money, Twain’s offer seemed much more tempting.

Now, writing in pencil, or dictating to a secretary, he began to compose the book that many commentators agree sets the gold standard for presidential memoirs.

His narrative has the simple directness of the finest English prose: the overall effect is both intimate and majestic

Perhaps he was lucky. 

The unputdownable heart of Grant’s book is his eyewitness account of the vicissitudes of the American civil war: the outbreak of hostilities; the battle of Shiloh; the campaign against Vicksburg; the battle of Chattanooga; Sherman’s March; Lincoln’s assassination; and Lee’s surrender. 

Although Grant was on the winning side, he was always brutally honest about both his successes and failures, and never failed to acknowledge the grinding poverty from which the civil war rescued him. Indeed, Grant’s life story is both remarkable and moving.

For the critic Edmund Wilson, who put Grant in the exalted literary company of Walt Whitman and Henry Thoreau, this powerful autobiography is “a unique expression of the national character. [Grant] has conveyed the suspense which was felt by himself and his army and by all who believed in the Union cause. The reader finds himself on edge to know how the civil war is coming out.”

Grant’s memoirs are all the more remarkable for having been completed under duress. When he began to write, he had begun to suffer the agonising pain of throat cancer. 

It was only his inflexible determination, the quality that had made him a great general, that mastered the torments of ill-health – sleepless nights, fear of dying – to articulate his account for a devoted American audience. 

By many accounts, Grant’s memoirs fully capture the man himself: they are well observed, often humorous, invariably charming, penetrating and lucid.

His account of the Confederate surrender is especially moving: “I was without a sword, as I usually was when on horseback in the field, and wore a soldier’s blouse for a coat, with the shoulder straps of my rank to indicate to the army who I was. When I went into the house I found General Lee. I had my staff with me, a good portion of whom were in the room during the whole of the interview…

“What General Lee’s feelings were I do not know. As he was a man of much dignity, with an impassible face, it was impossible to say whether he felt inwardly glad that the end had finally come, or felt sad over the result, and was too manly to show it… General Lee was dressed in full uniform which was entirely new, and was wearing a sword of considerable value. In my rough travelling suit, the uniform of a private, I must have contrasted very strangely with a man so handsomely dressed, six feet high and of faultless form. But this was not a matter that I thought of until afterwards.”

Throughout this very substantial autobiography, like the great man he was, Grant is supremely generous to his enemies, loyal to his friends and associates, and always devoted to another civil war hero, his president, Abraham Lincoln. 

On every page, his narrative has the simple directness of the finest English prose, inspired by the King James Bible on which he had been raised. The overall effect is both intimate and majestic.

In the spring of 1885, while Grant was struggling to complete his manuscript, Twain’s subscription agents were spreading out across the US to raise advance orders for Grant’s memoirs, a two-volume set offered for $3.50. 

They were dressed in the faded blue uniforms of the Union army, often wearing medals from Shiloh or Gettysburg. Countless veterans signed up for a story that was not just a presidential memoir, but a lasting and tangible mirror to their own individual struggles and sacrifice.

When Grant finished the manuscript in July 1885, it was rushed into galley proof. 

On 23 July, having completed his final corrections, Grant died in his summer cottage on the slopes of Mount McGregor, in New York state. 

His Personal Memoirs, published a few months later, were at once acclaimed as a masterpiece.

One contemporary critic wrote that “no other American president has told his story as powerfully as Ulysses S Grant. 

The book is one of the most unflinching studies of war in our literature.” More than a century later, Gore Vidal added his own assessment: “It is simply not possible to read Grant’s memoirs without realising that the author is a man of first-rate intelligence.”

Personal Memoirs immediately sold more than 300,000 copies. It has remained in print ever since.

A signature sentence

“Mr Lincoln was at City Point at the time, and had been for some days; I would have let him know what I contemplated doing only while I felt a strong conviction that the move was going to be successful, yet it might not prove so; and then I would have only added another to the many disappointments he had been suffering for the past three years.”

Three to compare

Abraham Lincoln: Speeches and Writings 1832-1858
Omar Bradley: A General’s Story (1951)
Bill Clinton: My Life (2004)