On Personal Memoirs of U. S. Grant

It is the best memoir any American president has left, and it was written by a dying man against the clock. Ulysses S. Grant, ruined by a swindle and stricken with throat cancer, raced to complete his Personal Memoirs in his final months so that the royalties would clear his family's debts. He finished days before he died in 1885, and the book, championed by Mark Twain, became both a financial rescue for his widow and a permanent classic of American prose. The circumstances of its writing are part of its greatness: there is no time here for vanity or evasion.

What surprises every first reader is the prose. Grant writes with a clarity and restraint that the literary men of his age could not match, plain, direct, unadorned, never reaching for effect. He describes the most consequential events of the Civil War, battles he commanded that decided the fate of the republic, in the same level, matter-of-fact voice he uses for the small details of army life. The absence of self-glorification is itself remarkable in a victorious general's memoir. He gives credit, admits error, and declines to dress his decisions in retrospective wisdom. The style is the man: the same quiet competence that won the war, turned to the page.

That plainness is not artlessness. It is a deliberate refusal of the inflated rhetoric of his era, and it makes the book readable today when more ornate productions have gone stale. Grant proves that the clearest writing about the gravest matters is often the most powerful, the same lesson Common Sense and the Gettysburg Address teach on these shelves.

The Memoirs belong in a library of the republic because they are the firsthand account, by the man most responsible for it, of how the Union was preserved by force of arms. The Civil War was the great test of whether a government of the people could survive an armed attempt to break it, and Grant was the instrument of its survival. To read his account is to understand that the republic's continuance was not inevitable, that it was won at appalling cost by specific decisions made by fallible men under unbearable pressure, and to hear it from the one who bore the most of that weight.

The book largely stops at the end of the war and does not cover his troubled presidency, which is part of why it reads so cleanly, it is the soldier's story, not the politician's. It sits naturally beside Lincoln's wartime words and the Reconstruction histories elsewhere in this collection, the military spine of the story those documents and histories surround.

The Personal Memoirs are public domain and freely available. Read them for the prose, for the inside view of the war that saved the Union, and for the example of a man telling the truth plainly when he had every reason and no time for anything else.