From 2018 Josh Marshall.................
Thoughts on the Greatness of Ulysses S. Grant
By Josh Marshall
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January 9, 2018 12:56 p.m.
With a new biography of Ulysses S. Grant out by the man who helped put Alexander Hamilton back in the center of 21st American popular culture, I’m late to the game to sing Grant’s praises. I have not read Chernow’s book. But I have been rereading Grant’s memoirs. I began writing this post at the end of last year when the valorization of Confederate military leaders was more at the center of our public debate. But these are issues of long standing, going on two centuries. They remain as present and consequential as they’ve ever been and Grant is at the center of that.
Until relatively recently Grant, at least as President, had a poor historical reputation. His strengths as a military leader were also overshadowed in the popular imagination by Confederate generals like Robert E. Lee and others. But in both cases, much of Grant’s dim reputation was directly tied to the way national unity was built in the late 19th century on the abandonment of the country’s newly freed African-American citizens and what we might call the Union theory of the war itself. I have always found it notable that the official records of what we call the Civil War, published by the US government are entitled The Official Records of the War of the Rebellion.
We’ve noted in other posts how the Confederate statues that dot the South today aren’t actually from the post-Civil War Era. Most date from decades later when they were erected as celebrations of the triumph of Jim Crow and the restoration of ‘home rule’ in the South. In 1915 D.W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation, perhaps the first American movie blockbuster, portrayed the Reconstruction Era as one in which northern extremists, corrupt politicians and barbarous and sexually aggressively African-Americans tyrannized Southern whites until they were liberated with the help of the original Ku Klux Klan. If that was the dominant historical memory of Reconstruction – and it was in the early 20th century – the reputation of the man whose battlefield victories made it possible and who presided over it as President necessarily had to suffer.
But Grant is one of the great actors on the stage of American history: first as a general, second as President, and third as the author of what is likely the only great work of literature ever written by American President, his Personal Memoirs.
https://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/thoughts-on-the-greatness-of-ulysses-s-grant
His book is the one book that I want to Read...........
Ulysses S. Grant : Memoirs and Selected Letters : Personal Memoirs of U.S. Grant / Selected Letters, 1839-1865 (Library of America) Hardcover – October 1, 1990
The first sentence of the Memoirs marks a central theme in a single sentence of stacked clauses which capture the ordered vigor of Grant’s writing: “My family is American, and has been for generations, in all its branches, direct and collateral.”