Personal Memoirs of Ulysses S. Grant

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Completed just days before his death and hailed by Mark Twain as "the most remarkable work of its kind since the Commentaries of Julius Caesar," this is the now-legendary autobiography of ULYSSES SIMPSON GRANT (1822-1885), 18th president of the United States and the Union general who led the North to victory in the Civil War.

Though Grant opens with tales of his boyhood, his education at West Point, and his early military career in the Mexican-American war of the 1840s, it is Grant's intimate observations on the conduct of the Civil War, which make up the bulk of the work, that have made this required reading for history students, military strategists, and Civil War buffs alike.

This unabridged edition features all the material that was originally published in two volumes in 1885 and 1886, including maps, illustrations, and the text of Grant's July 1865 report to Washington on the state of the armies under his command.
Destitute and wracked by throat cancer, Ulysses S.

Grant finished writing his Personal Memoirs shortly before his death in 1885. Today their clear prose stands as a model of autobiography. Civil War soldiers are often celebrated for the high literary quality of the letters they sent home from the front lines; Grant's own book is probably the best piece of writing produced by a participant in the War Between the States.

Apart from Lincoln, no man deserves more credit for securing the Northern victory than Grant, and this chronicle of campaigns and battles tells how he did it. (The book also made a bundle of money for his family, which had been reeling from the failure of Grant's brokerage firm.) This is not an overview of the entire Civil War; as the North was beating the South on the third day of Gettysburg, for example, Grant was in Mississippi capturing Vicksburg.

But it is a great piece of writing, one that can be appreciated even by readers with little interest in military history. --John J. Miller