7 Essential Books on Ulysses S. Grant

By John Reeves, author of Soldier of Destiny: Slavery, Secession, and the Redemption of Ulysses S. Grant.

The birthplace of Ulysses S. Grant, 1822

This year marks the 200th anniversary of the birth of Ulysses S. Grant. Below are seven essential books to commemorate this important milestone in American history:

1.  The Personal Memoirs of Ulysses S. Grant
Grant’s memoirs might be the finest that have ever been written by a president. One historian, who has been critical of Grant, said of the memoirs, “There is conciseness, totality, and strength, but what is perhaps most striking is the timeless quality of the prose. It has classical force.”

A poet has described Grant’s writing as “fatless prose.” Upon taking command of the Union Army, Grant wrote General Meade, “Lee’s army will be your objective point. Wherever Lee goes, there you will go also.” The writing here is remarkable for its clarity.

The recent edition of Grant's memoirs from the team at the Grant library at Mississippi State is now THE gold standard. Every Grant enthusiast must own this edition.

2.  Grant by Ron Chernow
Many readers might learn about Grant for the first time by reading Ron Chernow’s excellent biography of the United States general. Currently our most successful biographer, Chernow is a fine writer, who presents a sensible and balanced view of Grant. For more on this compelling book, you can read my review of it.

3.  Grant by William McFeely
The late William McFeely won the Pulitzer Prize for his biography of Grant. It’s well-written and based on impressive archival research.

Lovers of Grant might be disappointed, however. McFeely is extremely critical of the general and two-term president. He writes, “I am convinced that Ulysses S. Grant had no organic, artistic, or intellectual specialness.” McFeely also believes Grant was a butcher who didn’t value the lives of his men highly enough. Alas, McFeely never proposes what alternatives were available to Grant. Was it really possible for Grant to defeat Lee, while keeping casualties down?

4.  A Personal History of Ulysses S. Grant by Albert D. Richardson
Published in 1868, the journalist Albert Deane Richardson wrote one of the earliest and best biographies of Grant. A contemporary of the general during the Civil War, Richardson interviewed hundreds of Grant’s associates and family members. This book is particularly strong on Grant’s private life. Sadly, Richardson was eventually killed by a jealous husband of a woman he was having an affair with.

5.  Ulysses S. Grant: His Life and Character by Hamlin Garland
Garland was a popular 19th century writer who wrote a one-volume account of Grant’s life. The book was based on extensive interviews with soldiers and family members who knew Grant well. These interviews, conducted many years after the events in question, are handled carefully by Garland. Anyone who wants to study Grant seriously should read Garland’s biography.

6.   U.S. Grant: American Hero, American Myth by Joan Waugh
Waugh asks the important question, “Why did Grant’s star shine so brightly for Americans of his own day, and why has it been eclipsed so completely for Americans since at least the mid-twentieth century?” The first half of this book is about Grant’s life and accomplishments. The second half is about how we remember him. This work seems particularly relevant right now as we try to reevaluate Civil War personalities.

7. Captain Sam Grant by Lloyd Lewis
This is the best account of Grant’s early life, covering his youth and pre-Civil War Army career. There’s also excellent material here on Grant’s father, Jesse Root Grant. This outstanding narrative concludes with Colonel Grant taking command of his regiment in 1861.

John Reeves is the author of A Fire in the Wilderness: The First Battle Between Ulysses S. Grant and Robert E. Lee. He’s also currently working on a biography of Ulysses S. Grant.

The First Military Burials at Arlington National Cemetery

The site of the first burials at Arlington National Cemetery, June 1864. Image: National Archives.

The creation of Arlington National Cemetery in Virginia occurred immediately after one of the worst days of violence and horror in American history.

On May 12, 1864, during the Battle of Spotsylvania Court House, Union troops under Ulysses S. Grant engaged in bloody combat with Confederate forces commanded by Robert E. Lee for almost 24 hours. At the western tip of Lee’s fortifications—forever remembered as the Bloody Angle—the contest was particularly murderous. A reporter for the New York Times wrote, “In this angle of death the dead and wounded rebels lie, this morning, literally in piles—men in the agonies of death groaning beneath the dead bodies of comrades.” The fighting at Lee’s fortifications began at 4:35 a.m. on Thursday, May 12 and finally ended around 3 a.m. on Friday, May 13. Later that Friday, roughly 65 miles away in Arlington, Virginia, the first two Union soldiers would be buried at a new cemetery on the estate where Robert E. Lee and his family had lived prior to the war.

Earlier in the war, deceased Union soldiers were buried at the cemetery at the Old Soldiers’ Home a site three miles north of the White House in Washington, D.C. By May 1864, roughly 8,000 soldiers had been buried at this asylum. President Abraham Lincoln had access to a cottage on the grounds of the Old Soldiers’ Home, and spent considerable time there from 1862 to 1864. On May 13, 1864, however, the cemetery at the Old Soldiers’ Home had reached capacity and “the Secretary of War directed that a new site be selected on Lee’s farm, at Arlington, Va.”

Secretary of War Edwin Stanton and Quartermaster General Montgomery Meigs previously agreed that Arlington—an 1,100-acre estate situated across the Potomac River from the nation’s capital—would become the New National Military Cemetery, where soldiers who died in Washington area hospitals would be buried in the aftermath of the Wilderness Campaign. A graduate of West Point, Montgomery C. Meigs had worked and socialized with Robert E. Lee before the war. The efficient and talented quartermaster general became a bitter foe of all secessionists once the fighting began, however.

The first two burials at Arlington took place on May 13, 1864, the exact day the Soldiers’ Home cemetery had filled up. There would be six more burials on May 14, 1864. By the end of June 1864, there were 2,600 Union soldiers interred at Arlington. In her classic book Reveille in Washington, Margaret Leech wrote, “The cemetery at Soldiers’ Home was full, and at Arlington fresh graves began to blot the green acres which surrounded the mansion of Robert E. Lee. While death rattled across the Long Bridge, every incoming steamer carried its consignment of corpses.”

Below are more details on the first eight burials at Arlington National Cemetery. All of the first graves at Arlington were dug by one of Lee’s former slaves, Jim Parks, who would later recall the spot where, as Grant’s campaign continued, “coffins had been piled in long rows like cordwood.” Parks was also a young man at the time just like the soldiers he buried. Each of the early graves received a pine headboard, painted white with black writing. Later headboards would be replaced with marble gravestones.

The list of first burials at Arlington. Image: National Archives.

MAY 13, 1864

Private William Christman, 67th Pennsylvania Infantry
The first burial at Arlington, on an especially unlucky Friday the 13th, was of Private William Christman of the 67th Pennsylvania Infantry. Christman, a farm laborer during peacetime like so many Civil War soldiers, was only twenty years old. He had enlisted on March 25, 1864, but never saw combat. On May 1, he was diagnosed with the measles; he died on May 11 at Lincoln General Hospital in Washington, D.C. While Christman had been in the hospital, his regiment, the 67th Pennsylvania, had been outflanked on the early evening of May 6 during the waning hours of the Battle of the Wilderness, while serving as part of Brigadier General Truman Seymour’s brigade.

Image: by author.

Private William McKinney, 17th Pennsylvania Cavalry
The second burial on May 13, Private William McKinney, also died of illness. This isn’t surprising. Soldiers were two times more likely to die of an illness than from a battlefield wound, during the Civil War. McKinney had been admitted to an Alexandria, Virginia, hospital with a diagnosis of pneumonia, and died on May 12, 1864. A former sawmill worker, McKinney joined the 17th Pennsylvania Cavalry on March 16, 1864. He was only seventeen years old. It’s very likely that William’s father, John D. McKinney, attended the funeral at Arlington.

Image: by author.

MAY 14, 1864

Private William Blatt, 49th Pennsylvania Infantry
Blatt was mortally wounded during the Battle of Spotsylvania Court House on May 10, 1864. While participating in Colonel Emory Upton’s famous assault, Blatt was shot in the head. Still alive, he was transported to Washington, D.C., but eventually died at the Sixth Street Wharf, before he could be taken to Armory Square Hospital. More than half of Private Blatt’s regiment suffered casualties during the attack on May 10. Today, Blatt is remembered as the first battlefield casualty to be interred at our preeminent national cemetery.

Image: by author.

Private William Reeves, 76th New York Infantry
Within moments of the beginning of Grant’s Overland Campaign on May 5, 1864, a Minie ball tore through Reeves’ left cheek and exited his right cheek. He was eventually transported to Washington, D.C., and admitted to Stanton General Hospital on May 11. Just one day later, Reeves suffered a secondary hemorrhage. Surgery proved unsuccessful and Reeves died of exhaustion at 4:00 a.m. on Friday, May 13, eight days after he had been shot in the Wilderness. He was only nineteen years old. I write about the experiences of Private William Reeves, during and after the Battle of the Wilderness, in my book A Fire in the Wilderness: The First Battle Between Ulysses S. Grant and Robert E. Lee.

Image: by author.

Private Peter Rawson, 1st New Jersey Infantry
Rawson, who came from a poor family, was marked “absent, sick” by his unit on March 25, 1864. He died in Carver Hospital in Washington, D.C.

Private William Starks, 5th New York Cavalry
Starks was eighteen when he enlisted on March 30, 1864 in New York. According to regimental records, he died at Camp Stoneman in Washington, D.C., on April 20, 1864.

Private William Gibbons, 5th Michigan Infantry
Gibbons enlisted at age thirty at Pontiac, Michigan, on February 4, 1864 and joined his unit at Camp Bullock, near Brandy Station, Virginia, on March 9, 1864. He died of disease on April 22, 1864 at Lincoln Hospital in Washington, D.C.

Henry Smith, Civilian Employee, Quartermaster General’s Office
Smith had been working as a teamster before his death on May 14, 1864.

SECTION 27

Section 27 today. Image: by author.

The first burials at Arlington, at the far northeast corner of the estate—in what became known as Section 27—would soon become the site where African American civilians and soldiers were buried. Quartermaster General Meigs would demand that white soldiers be buried closer to the Lee mansion in the future. By mid-1867, there were 3,450 African Americans buried in Section 27. Only a relative handful of white soldiers—Christman, McKinney, Blatt, Reeves, and the others listed above—remained alongside them.

7 Essential Books on the Civil War

William Faulkner once wrote,

For every Southern boy fourteen years old, not once but whenever he wants it, there is the instant when it’s still not yet two o’clock on that July afternoon in 1863, the brigades are in position behind the rail fence, the guns are laid and ready in the woods and the furled flags are already loosened to break out and Pickett himself with his long oiled ringlets and his hat in one hand probably and his sword in the other looking up the hill waiting for Longstreet to give the word and it’s all in the balance, it hasn’t happened yet, it hasn’t even begun yet…

He’s, of course, referring to Pickett’s charge — General Robert E. Lee’s “desperate gamble” — on the third day of the battle of Gettysburg. Neither side knew it at the time, but the Union victory at Gettysburg probably decided the war, though it would continue for almost two more years.

Sometimes, it feels like it’s “not yet two o’clock on that July afternoon” for both northerners and southerners. We still seem to be fighting the Civil War in contemporary America. It may have ended in 1865, but the wounds are still fresh. Just recently, we’ve been debating how we should remember Confederate leaders and whether or not the war was preventable. And we continue to try to understand our past as a slaveholding society.

Having written a book on Robert E. Lee, I thought it might be helpful to recommend seven essential books on the Civil War. With well over 50,000 books written on the subject, a definitive list is impossible. These books, however, are outstanding starting points.

1. Battle Cry of Freedom by James McPherson
This Pulitzer Prize-winning narrative will appeal to anyone interested in the Civil War. In a recent interview, McPherson said, “To understand the society in which they live, Americans need to understand how it got that way, and the Civil War determined a large part of how it got that way.” This book has been helping Americans better understand the Civil War for 30 years now.

McPherson is an outstanding historian who also happens to be a fine writer. In Battle Cry, there are insightful portraits of McClellan, Lincoln, Grant, and other important figures. Despite being almost 900 pages with lots of footnotes, it reads like a thriller. An early reviewer of the book in The New York Times wrote, “Mr. McPherson is wonderfully lucid. Again and again, hopelessly knotty subjects (for example, Lincoln’s relations with the radical Republicans) are painlessly made clear.”

2. Freedom National by James Oakes
President Lincoln, in his Second Inaugural address, stated that, “One-eighth of the whole population were colored slaves, not distributed generally over the Union, but localized in the southern part of it. These slaves constituted a peculiar and powerful interest. All knew that this interest was somehow the cause of the war.” James Oakes, in this excellent book, recognizes the central importance of slavery in the war, and focuses on the origins and implementation of the abolition of slavery in the United States.

In his provocative and compelling account of emancipation, Oakes argues that Republicans, from the very beginning, “insisted that slavery was the cause of the rebellion, and emancipation an appropriate and ultimately indispensable means of suppressing it.” Oakes also persuasively shows that destroying slavery turned out to be much more difficult than everyone expected. The great historian of American slavery, David Brion Davis, has written of this book, “Oakes brilliantly succeeds in distilling from a great mass of facts a series of clear themes and arguments that provide a new perspective on one of the central events in American history.”

3. This Republic of Suffering by Drew Gilpin Faust
This creative and moving book is “about the work of death in the American Civil War.” Chapters are titled “Dying,” “Killing,” “Accounting,” etc., and each one offers an incredible amount of information on the specific area relating to death. Readers learn that the survivors of the war “lived the rest of their lives with grief and loss.”

The chapter on “Burying” is especially haunting. We’re told that after the Battle of Gettysburg, “an estimated six million pounds of human and animal carcasses lay strewn across the field in the summer heat, and a town of 2,400 grappled with 22,000 wounded who remained alive but in desperate condition.” One boy remembered, according to Faust, that everyone went around with peppermint oil to counteract the smell of the carnage. One of the enduring results of the Civil War is that the government had to take over responsibility for the burials of fallen soldiers. This gem of a book provides us with many different ways of viewing the war.

4. The Fiery Trial by Eric Foner
This Pulitzer Prize-winning book, by one of America’s finest historians, traces the evolution of Lincoln’s “ideas in the context of the broad antislavery impulse and the unprecedented crisis the United States confronted during his adult life.” It’s extremely well-written and based on a mastery of the source materials.

Foner focuses on Lincoln’s tremendous capacity for growth, writing “Lincoln’s career was a process of moral and political education and deepening antislavery conviction.” Of The Fiery Trial, David Brion Davis writes, “While many thousands of books deal with Lincoln and slavery, Eric Foner has written the definitive account of this crucial subject, illuminating in a highly original and profound way the interactions of race, slavery, public opinion, politics, and Lincoln’s own character that led to the wholly improbable uncompensated emancipation of some four million slaves.”

5. A Stillness at Appomattox by Bruce Catton
No list of Civil War books would be complete without something by Bruce Catton — one of the finest writers of history for a general audience. This one, a narrative account of the Army of the Potomac from the Wilderness to Appomattox, won a much-deserved Pulitzer Prize.

I’m in awe of Catton’s writing. Here he is on the opening hours of the Battle of the Wilderness:

The whole Wilderness seemed to be boiling and smoking, with dense clouds going up to blot out the sunlight. From the rear, Warren pushed the rest of his corps into the fight, and there is no coherent story to be told about any of it: it was all violent confusion, with occasional revealing glimpses to be had in the infernal clogged mist.

And here he is on Grant at the end of the second day in the Wilderness, “The army had rubbed elbows with sheer catastrophe that night and Grant knew it, and when he was alone he could be as much tormented by suspense as anyone else.” This book is good history and outstanding storytelling. I can’t recommend it enough.

6. Lincoln’s Code by John Fabian Witt
In December 1862, Francis Lieber was asked to draft a “code of regulations” drawn from the “laws and usages of war.” He eventually produced a code consisting of 157 articles covering a wide variety of rules and regulations relating to war. In May 1863, Lieber’s code, “General Orders №100,” was approved by President Lincoln. Witt argues that Lieber’s creation had a significant impact on the Civil War and still affects the law of war in the 21st century.

This is a fascinating and important book that allows the reader to analyze the main events of the war from a legal perspective. For example, Witt shows how Lieber’s work gave legal sanction to the Emancipation Proclamation, even though his code was primarily designed to establish limits on waging war. This outstanding work also provides the reader with a framework for understanding the wars of the 20th and 21st centuries.

7. Race and Reunion by David Blight
This book is about how Americans remembered the Civil war in the fifty years or so after 1865. Blight explores “the ways that contending memories clashed or intermingled in public memory…” During this time, we see the emergence of the Lost Cause tradition, which became extremely popular in both the North and South.

Race and Reunion is particularly relevant right now, as Americans reevaluate the ways in which they remember Confederate leaders. David Blight, who has a book coming out on Frederick Douglass in October 2018, is one of the leading public historians in America today.

In conclusion, I’ll suggest several books on Civil War military history:  Chancellorsville by Stephen Sears; The Battle of the Wilderness, May 5–6, 1864 by Gordon Rhea; and General Lee’s Army by Joseph Glatthaar.

What America Keeps Forgetting About Robert E. Lee

I wrote this piece about Lee for History News Network. Click here to read the piece titled "What America Keeps Forgetting About Robert E. Lee."

REVIEW: Publishers Weekly

Here's a review of The Lost Indictment of Robert E. Lee that appeared in Publishers Weekly. Click here to read it. 

REVIEW in New York Journal of Books

Here's a review of The Lost Indictment of Robert E. Lee that appeared in the New York Journal of Books. Click here to read the review. 

Interview on Civil War Talk Radio

I was interviewed recently about The Lost Indictment of Robert E. Lee on Civil War Talk Radio. Click here to listen. 

The Lost Indictment of Robert E. Lee at The American Civil War Museum

I will be talking about The Lost Indictment of Robert E. Lee at The American Civil War Museum in Richmond, Va., on Saturday, September 22 at 1:00 pm. More details are here. 

The Lost Indictment of Robert E. Lee at the National Archives

I'll be talking about The Lost Indictment of Robert E. Lee at the National Archives in Washington, DC, on Wednesday, June 13 at 12 noon. Additional details on the event can be found here. 

The Lost Indictment of Robert E. Lee at Politics and Prose

I'll be talking about The Lost Indictment of Robert E. Lee at Politics and Prose in Washington, DC, on Saturday, June 9 at 1:00 pm. For more information click here.