This is U.S. Grant’s bicentennial year, so you’ll keep hearing about the great general from me. Here’s what I said earlier this year:
April 27th marked the 200th anniversary of the birth of our greatest general since Washington, Ulysses S. Grant, the man who saved the Union in the daring Vicksburg Campaign, & who eventually commanded the Union armies to victory all the way to Lee’s surrender at Appomattox on April 9, 1865, vindicating the principles of the Declaration of Independence as ratified in the Constitution. He is the great American who enacted Lincoln’s policy even after his martyr-like assassination on April 15, 1865. At the end of that eventful month, Grant turned 43, & he was the greatest man alive.
Today is the anniversary of his death—July 23, 1885, not long after his 63rd birthday, so I post it again: Here’s my essay for L&L on Grant’s thinking on political aspect of the Civil War.
Later in the year, I have a much larger essay coming out, on his wonderful Memoirs, in Modern Age. Read the Memoirs—wonderful summer reading!
The Memoirs are praised by many of sterling judgment. I'm sure the recent biography by Chernow is very good, even if it never gets made into a musical by Lin-Manuel Miranda, but I do want to put in a plug for the one Grant bio I did read large parts of, the one by the scarily-prolific (and sometimes slap-dash) H.W. Brands. https://www.alibris.com/The-Man-Who-Saved-the-Union-Ulysses-Grant-in-War-and-Peace-H-W-Brands/book/21915575?matches=148 Excellent work. Among many others, Brands also has a fine book on the Gilded Age, called American Colossus, and a mercifully-short bio (who'd want to linger?) of Woodrow Wilson.
I will also note that while I do love accounts of battles and military strategy, even became a Gettysburg expert when 10-years old, that the adult pol-sci head me went straight to the parts of the Brands bio that dealt with Grant's presidency. It's such an important period, to try to grasp why Reconstruction nearly totally failed in the face of D-party intransigence, and why a very good and intelligent man, Grant, was unable to turn the tide in that great struggle, and also was unable to keep some corruption problems from growing, which later ingrate Americans who wrote history books made so much of, to the unfair detriment of his reputation.
Dunno the Brands bio. Agreed about the drama of Reconstruction. Worth telling the story...