In the afternoons, Grant would edit his morning’s writing, pausing to search for just the right word to express an idea or action. White describes Grant’s routine in that last year of life: In American Ulysses: A Life of Ulysses S. Samet’s words, “the leader of an army that preserved a nation and emancipated four million people.” I headed the horse towards the other bank and soon reached it, wet through and without other clothes on that side of the stream.Īs he was completing the Memoirs that would financially set up his beloved widow Julia for life, he realized something else about himself: “I think I am a verb instead of a personal pronoun.” The modest man was only, in West Point professor of English Elizabeth D. So I struck into the stream, and in an instant the horse was swimming and I being carried down by the current. I have frequently started to go to places where I had never been and to which I did not know the way, depending upon making inquiries on the road, and if I got past the place without knowing it, instead of turning back, I would go on until a road was found turning in the right direction, take that, and come in by the other side. One of my superstitions had always been when I started to go any where, or to do anything, not to turn back, or stop until the thing intended was accomplished. Twain rooted Grant on to do what he had been doing seemingly his whole life: going straight on at the task at hand. Here is how he evaluated these Memoirs, which he helped persuade his dying and debt-ridden friend to complete: “General Grant’s book is a great, unique, and unapproachable literary masterpiece.” Twain told Grant that the writing was akin to that of Caesar’s Commentaries in its “clarity of statement, directness, simplicity, unpretentiousness, manifest truthfulness, fairness and justice toward friend and foe alike, soldierly candor and frankness, and soldierly avoidance of flowery speech.” This was an extraordinary man! Mark Twain thought so too. There were churches in that part of Ohio where treason was preached regularly, and where, to secure membership, hostility to the government, to the war and to the liberation of the slaves, was far more essential than a belief in the authenticity or credibility of the Bible. Then, 15 years ago, as soon as I read a few pages into his Personal Memoirs (1885), I realized I was rolling along on writing that was a perfectly engineered road, with gentle banks, thrilling momentum, ever new vistas, and, finally, historical perspectives that shouldn’t sound contemporary in the 21st century but do: As I got back up to speed on Civil War history, he became for me even less than a mythical hero and actually less imaginable as a person. By the time I moved to New York as a grown-up and lived across the street from his tomb, my reverence had been displaced (how could I admire someone who had led so many men to their deaths and whose armies had killed so many people?), but I got accustomed to visiting with my baby son the ever-temperate mausoleum and peering at the raised polished red granite caskets of Grant and his wife. When I was a boy reading Civil War histories that were way over my head, I admired the slight and ruffled, soft-spoken commander, vividly imagining him to myself. At the turn of the 20th century, he was seen with George Washington and Abraham Lincoln as one of the United States’s three great presidents. At that point, the younger Grant, a West Point graduate but now a civilian shopkeeper, had no idea that he himself would become the Union’s savior and the United States’s war hero in his own time, respected eventually even in the South. Grant wrote his father at the start of the American Civil War. “THERE ARE BUT two parties now, Traitors & Patriots, and I want hereafter to be ranked with the latter,” Ulysses S.
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