Undisputed Classic 5

Nonfiction Classic. This is a classic memoir, one man's answer to what Robert Penn Warren called "...the anguishing problem of man’s responsibility vis-à-vis the blank forces of history."  

The Personal Memoirs of Ulyssess S. Grant

Grant says as a child he developed the superstition that when lost or blocked he should always figure out a way to go forward, over the terrain, never turning back. As a general on horseback, Grant had a supernatural grasp of terrain and how he should engage the enemy most effectively given the lay of the land and bodies of water. An advocate of forward movement, he thought that military errors came out of not pursuing a retreating enemy with alacrity and his own errors were out of being overly aggressive.

At West Point, he was good at math and horsemanship but poor at tactics. He says he was a great novel reader but not of the trashy sort. He liked Scott, Cooper, and Irving, all popular writers of the day. One wonders if he got a sense of the importance of a distinctive style from all that reading of fiction though his plain style was not at all like the romanticism of that trio.

Grant fought in the Mexican War, which he called an unjust one, and his summary of the issues of that forgotten conflict is interesting. Acting as a quartermaster, Grant learned that writing clear orders was a key skill for an officer.  

His portraits of colleagues and commanders tell of how they acted under pressure; for example, Taylor and Scott had very different styles, with Scott being bombastic and showy and Taylor very unassuming, quiet and modest, and wanting to see action at the front with his own eyes. 

He also learned from Taylor that a calm and unflappable manner was a crucial quality of leadership. It seems super-human to not flinch even with shells falling nearby but both Taylor and Grant were legendary among the men and officers for their grace under pressure. It is also telling that Grant did not go hunting and the only times he publicly lost his temper were when he saw teamsters beating defenseless mules and horses.

After the Mexican War, Grant was assigned to duty in California. This is where the stories about alcohol abuse started, perhaps because Grant binged when he was bored (he doesn’t mention alcohol at all, assuming his readers had no interest). Grant was also anxious about the foremost American bugbear, being a failure. He does not detail this down period in the memoirs, as he assumes his audience did not care about reading about his unhappy period just before the Civil War. When the war broke out, Grant was working as a clerk his father’s store to support his young family.

The war saved him in the sense that he was able to do something he was good at, finally. The author of the textbook on tactics ended up generaling for the Confederacy but Grant studied the text nevertheless, though he did not get past the first chapter. He learned about moral courage – that the enemy has as much or as little of it as anybody else had so he refused to intimidated by the dash and daring of the adversary. A realist, he had understanding of the urge to bolt among green troops but knew with battle experience they would be brave and reliable under fire. Risking the lives of one’s men was a heavy responsibility for him. In the early days of the war he also learned much about supply and logistics, knowledge that he was later to use in the siege of Vicksburg. Grant’s men were just about never short of food, clothing, or ammunition.

After the trial and error process that lead to victory at Vicksburg, he went on to victory at Chattanooga. Lincoln decided that Grant was the fighting man he needed and appointed him to make the hard tactical, operational, and strategic decisions that brought about the end of the war. Sherman said that Grant was able to make the decisions with the scanty information he had, not the complete and accurate information that other generals yearned for as they dithered. Grant showed his legendary calm even in dreadful battles like Wilderness, a dry forest with trees, brush, and soldiers in flames where they fought by ear because the smoke made it impossible to see.

What doesn’t this memoir have? Nothing about the two-term presidency. Nothing about Julia his wife (their letters are lost too). No score settling. No confusion or soft-pedaling about the cause for which the adversary was fighting. No stuff about the “allure of battle;” in the aftermath of day one of Shiloh, this:

During the night rain fell in torrents and our troops were exposed to the storm without shelter. I made my headquarters under a tree a few hundred yards back from the river bank. My ankle was so much swollen from the fall of my horse the Friday night preceding, and the bruise was so painful, that I could get no rest.

The drenching rain would have precluded the possibility of sleep without this additional cause. Some time after midnight, growing restive under the storm and the continuous pain, I moved back to the log-house under the bank. This had been taken as a hospital, and all night wounded men were being brought in, their wounds dressed, a leg or an arm amputated as the case might require, and everything being done to save life or alleviate suffering. The sight was more unendurable than encountering the enemy's fire, and I returned to my tree in the rain.

Grant was dying of cancer of the tongue as he wrote this book (he smoked 20 cigars a day). Despite pain and fatigue, he wrote up to four and five hours a day, in pencil. The manuscript, in fact, shows his handwriting, sure on good days, but shaky on bad days. The prose is spare with no wasted words; it has been praised by writers such as Sherwood Anderson, Gertrude Stein, Sinclair Lewis, and Edmund Wilson. Those interested in war memoirs or lean non-fiction prose may be into this 1200-page book.