Ulysses S. Grant was the greatest general in American history-better than Lee, better than Eisenhower and better than Patton. No less an authority than Eisenhower himself said as much. (See here, second item.)
However, Grant’s presidency has been greatly maligned. He is under-appreciated, underestimated, misunderstood and undeserving of his presidency’s lousy reputation. If there was such a creature as historical justice, Grant would be immortalized on Mount Rushmore. While Grant will never rank among the greatest of presidents, he deserves to be remembered among those ranked “above average.” And certainly, I would hazard that next to Washington, Grant’s two terms were the most consequential, most far-reaching and the most pivotal of all the great peace-time presidents. It would take far, far too much space to explain here the reasons why; so, you’ll need to investigate the following books yourself. Stephen Ambrose, in To America, and James McPherson, the dean of Civil War historians, agree that President Grant’s presidency deserves better treatment. Also, Alvin Felzenberg gives President Grant high marks in his fascinating 2008 study, The Leaders We Deserved (And a Few We Didn’t).
Note: I deliberately did not include two books: William McFeely’s Grant: A Biography (1982) and Geoffrey Perrot’s U.S. Grant: Soldier and Patriot (1982). I truly dislike McFeely’s book, because for all intents and purposes, he dismisses Grant as an incompetent liar, racist and butcher-building on the skewed and wrongheaded diatribes against Grant for much of the 20 century. Even though it won the Pulitzer Prize, the book’s treatment of Grant is risible. McFeely seems to have bought in to the negative biases concerning Grant, and he even admitted he was “bored” with many aspects of Grant’s presidency. Perrot’s book, on the other hand, reads too much like hagiography, and does too much to gloss over Grant’s faults and failings.
12) Alan Nevins’ Hamilton Fish: The Inner Workings of the Grant Administration (1932)
While making quite a damning portrait of President Grant (unjustly), Nevins nevertheless spotlights one of America’s greatest secretaries of state, Hamilton Fish. With Grant’s full support, Fish settled Civil War claims against England, thereby establishing international rules of arbitration that are still in use and provided some of the basis for the foundation of the League of Nations and United Nations.
11) Brooks Simpson’s Let Us Have Peace: Ulysses S. Grant and the Politics of War and Reconstruction, 1861-1868 (1991)
Until Simpson completes his duology on Grant (see #8), his earlier work on Grant’s budding political career will serve nicely. It’s particularly valuable for examining Grant’s clashes with Andrew Johnson.
10) William McFeely’s and Neil Giordano’s Grant: An Album: Warrior, Husband, Traveler, “Emancipator,” Writer (2003)
I like this book much better than McFeely’s full biography, because that work is not rehashed in this coffee-table book. Rather, this is a scrapbook of Grant’s life. What was it like to be the first “superstar” in American history since George Washington? You can get a glimpse right here.
9)Sir James Marshall-Cornwall’s Grant as Military Commander (1970)
This highly accessible tactics and strategy book, written by a British officer and linguist, examines Grant’s military history and finds him a man of practicality and common sense, not brilliance.
8) Brooks Simpson’s Ulysses S. Grant: Tragedy and Triumph, 1822-1865 (2000)
This is the best full one-volume biography on Grant’s life until the end of the war. Simpson’s book is balanced and is neither fawning nor damning. The author presents a much better and richer portrait of Grant than the stupid caricature of popular culture. It serves as a much-needed counter to McFeely’s damning and Perrot’s fawning works.
7) Josiah Bunting III, Ulysses S. Grant (2004)
Bunting’s biography is the Grant entry in the late Arthur Schlesinger Jr.’s The American Presidents series. It’s an excellent biography; the only downside is that he spends more time on Grant’s military career than his presidential career.
6) Frank Scaturro’s President Grant Reconsidered (1998)
Scaturro’s work was designed both to begin the rescue of Grant’s presidency from its undeserved and unjust historical reputation, and call out the lazy, biased, incompetent or racist scholars and historians who put him there. You can take almost any biography written on Grant’s presidency during the 20th century and set it aside, because even Pulitzer Prize winners managed to miss President Grant entirely. It’s particularly valuable for Scaturro’s demolition of the so-called “scandals.”
5) John Russell Young’s Around the World with General Grant: A Narrative of the Visit of General U. S. Grant, Ex-President of the United States, to Various Countries in Europe, Asia, and Africa, in 1877, 1878, 1879 (1879)
When he left the White House in 1877, Grant and his wife, Julia, went on a 2½-year goodwill tour around the world. During the tour, Grant gave Young impressions of generals that aren’t found in his Memoirs, and presented a defense of his presidency that is often overlooked. Michael Fellman published an abridged version in 2003 that cuts out a lot of the unrelated fluff.
4) Horace Porter’s Campaigning with Grant (1897)
Porter became an aide to Grant in 1863 and remained at Grant’s side for the next 10 years. At the end of the century, he published what is rightfully considered the best eyewitness account of General Grant in action during the second half of the war. Few Civil War collections are without this book, and it’s re-released every decade or so.
3) Lloyd Lewis’ Captain Sam Grant (1950) and Bruce Catton’s Grant Moves South (1960) and Grant Takes Command (1968)
For Grant’s military career, you can still find no better treatment than this trilogy begun by Lloyd Lewis (it was his last work) and completed by Bruce Catton, the mid-20th century’s dean of the Civil War. The volumes are beautifully written and deal rather harshly with the persistent rumors/complaints that Grant was a butcher and a drunkard. The trilogy is a little less balanced than Brooks Simpson’s single volume, but it remains the best third-party retelling of Grant’s life to 1865.
2) Jean Edward Smith’s Grant (2002)
Following in the same vein as Simpson and Scaturro, Jean Edward Smith (biographer of Cassius Clay and John Marshall) wrote the best, most accessible full biography of Ulysses S. Grant to date. While presenting nothing new on Grant’s military career, Smith gives an admirable and very necessary positive evaluation of Grant’s presidency. Nowhere near the hagiography of Perrot’s work, it’s quite balanced and eye-opening, especially for anyone who believes that Grant was a racist, a butcher and a drunk, and too stupid to be president. Smith makes the case that Grant was the original civil rights president, that Grant prevented the genocide of the Plains Indians, and that the “scandals” are way overblown.
1) Personal Memoirs of U.S. Grant, 1885
The general who defeated the Confederacy tells how he did it. His friend and publisher Mark Twain called them the greatest military memoirs since Caesar’s. Thomas Nast, the famed political cartoonist, declared: “He wrote as he talked, simple, unadorned, manly. He was the most complete and masculine person I ever knew, and his book is the most complete book I have ever read.” Grant wrote his magnificent Memoirs while in a race against terminal throat cancer. He did not write much of his presidency or anything else past 1865 (other than a conclusion) so unfortunately he was unable to defend here what honestly was a positive, progressive and decent administration. (See Jean Edward Smith’s book above.) Grant’s Memoirs have never gone out of print as far as I know-they’re that good.
