They were also as it happens, written by some scandal. And really, by the end, they’ve lost credibility in many ways. When he left office after that second term, it coincided with the end of reconstruction and the beginning of what we often call the “Jim Crow South.” The return of really repressive measures in African-Americans. 

Grant went on. He did a world tour. He traveled all the way to the Far East, and then ended his life in New York City. During the last few years of his life, he was bankrupt. The book that we’re going to talk about today is actually the product of that. 

In the 1880s, he first suffered a fall on an icy New York City sidewalk. He went bankrupt and then discovered that he had inoperable cancer. It was this series of catastrophes. He ended up working a deal with Mark Twain who sold the book by subscription. This ended up leaving his family to be financially secure because of the book he sold. 

It’s sort of a model later for sales in the sense that this army of salesmen were actually veterans of the Civil War. They went across the country and sold thousands and thousands of copies of this and earned over half a million dollars. Today, that would be a great deal more for Julia, his widow. 

The reason that some of your listeners might not know about Grant now is that his reputation really sort of fell precipitously. It was eclipsed by Lee. There’s a whole complicated story of the way we remember the Civil War which of course is in the news today with the discussion of Confederate monuments and taking them down. 

Grant was a kind of casualty of the way we ended up remembering the war and sort of thinking about the southern lost cause version of the war, rather than one grand champion that is death.

Sean Murray  5:13  

His book, “Personal Memoirs” is the subject of our conversation today. You recently released an annotated version of his memoirs, which you edited. It’s a wonderful read. What I like about the book is along the way, you have all kinds of footnotes, graphics and images to provide context to Grant’s story. 

It’s helpful because Grant was writing to an audience that really understood because they had lived through the Civil War. They were familiar with the generals, the people in his staff, and the characters that come up in his memoirs. The audience today may not be familiar. 

You introduce each character but also provide all kinds of maps and references to modern culture, to Shakespeare, and to other writers. It really makes the reading of Grant’s personal memoirs more entertaining. I want to applaud you on that. 

It’s a fabulous book, one that I had not read until just recently. I have to say, I hope listeners take up the challenge to read it. It’s a little bit long, but it’s definitely worth the investment. 

Grant’s wife is just an amazing story. Grant grew up in, I’d say, sort of a middle class family and rose to being the Commanding General of the Army to the presidency. But along the way, he suffered a lot of setbacks. It wasn’t a straight road. 

So as we go through his life, I was hoping we could pull out some lessons. What can be learned from Grant that we can apply to live a better life? How do we become better leaders in our communities? How do we make society a better place like he did? Maybe we could start with his childhood.

Elizabeth Samet  6:55  

He’s born in Ohio in 1822. His father is a tanner. He did reasonably well at that job. It was a trade that was hard. It was extremely unpleasant. You can only imagine the smells. I write a little bit about this. It was brutal work. Grant absolutely hated it. He didn’t want to work in the tannery. But he found that he had a natural aptitude for animals, for horses in particular. 

He would do anything around the house that had to do with horses. He would always manage them. It gave him a kind of independence at a very young age that I don’t think he would have had necessarily. And because he was such a good manager of horses, his father used to let him roam really far distances. Sometimes with a wagon where he would carry passengers, or goods, or things like that. 

He found himself traveling around. One of the things that he mentioned early on in the memoirs is that he developed at that period a superstition. If he gets lost, he never wanted to return the way he had come. But he would find some other way to get back. 

And what that did, I think, was to give him a real feel for terrain, direction and the nuances of the landscape. That ended up for him being key. It was one of the things that all of his staff officers knew about him. Everybody suggested his success as a battlefield commander. He owned a great deal to this. 

He could look at a map briefly and understand intuitively the whole terrain and the whole battle space. He would travel by horseback because he was such a good equestrian. At that time, battles were getting unwieldy in terms of their size and the length of the line. 

But a good horseman could effectively travel the whole line and see the whole battlefield. Grant would do that often under fire. This was much to the chagrin of his staff officers who had to follow him around. He had this intuitive grasp of terrain, and how he would attack a certain objective.

Sean Murray  9:10  

I love that story too. It really stood out when I was reading his memoirs. There’s another thing I took away from that story, in addition to his command of geography, which is just incredible. As he’s talking about these battles, or writing about the battles, what 20 years some time after they fought, he seems to still have such a great command of what was going on in the land. I’m sure he had some notes to work from. It’s quite amazing. 

The other thing I took away was just this idea that he pushes forward. When he would get lost as a young boy, he didn’t like to go backwards. If you look at the way he commanded his armies and the way he fought in the Civil War, he did not like to go into retreat. He took the initiative and moved forward. 

In this, he set himself apart from most of the other generals that Lincoln was trying to promote and then fire in succession. Lincoln was trying to find someone like Grant that would push forward and take the initiative.

Elizabeth Samet  10:05  

His errors in contrast to those colleagues whom you mentioned were always those of aggressiveness. There were considerable errors. They were always about pushing forward, or pursuing the enemy after victory. He was infuriated when the commanders working for him refused. Even when their troops were exhausted, he wanted people to pursue the victory right after the retreating army. When that didn’t happen, he was just infuriated.

Sean Murray  10:32  

So he wins a commission to West Point. There was a war to the commission to West Point. He ends up traveling as a young cadet back to West Point, the military academy. What can we learn from his time there?

Elizabeth Samet  10:46  

In some ways, I think he is what you might call an accidental soldier. His father tells him that he’s going to West Point and he relates the story in the memoirs. His father said: “I got you the commission,” and he said, “What commission? I don’t understand.” 

His father said: “You’re going to West Point.” He said, “No, I’m not.” And his father said: “Yeah, I think you are.” And so Grant then says: “Well, I guess if he thought I was, then I would be going.” 

He doesn’t want to go. The young man whose spot he took had actually failed out and sort of come home in some chain. Grant was schooling in Ohio. At that time, Ohio was sort of modest. It was okay, but not a great education. This would have been considered at the time in the far west of the nation. The frontier. He was not particularly confident about his preparation. He was afraid that he wouldn’t pass the entrance exams. Let alone the whole course. 

He’s reluctant. Mainly, he says that at least he got to travel. He did. He goes on his first railroad and on steamship. He’s delighted to travel and see new places which as we’ve discussed, is something he loved to do. 

And then when he gets there, he really doesn’t take to it. He’s the best equestrian at the whole academy. Everybody finds that out pretty quickly. He loves that. He doesn’t love the course of studies, although he’s very good at math. I think during his career at West Point, some people have made it worse than it really was. It was a modest career. 

As I said, he was good in math and in horsemanship. He admits that he was terrible in tactics. He was bored by tactics completely. He was not very good at it. He spends all his time, he says, reading novels. That’s the part of course that I, as an English professor quite loved. He goes to the library, and then of course, cadets would lend books to one another. 

One of the few surviving letters we have of that period in his life is he’s writing to a publisher in Philadelphia saying, “I ordered these novels. Where are they?” His taste was typical of the 19th century. It was a lot of Sir Walter Scott, James Fenimore Cooper, and Washington Irving. 

He spends a tremendous amount of time doing this, as he says, “Most of it.” But he also tells us that he read novels but not those of a trashy sort. I like to think that his novel reading actually gave him a feel for language and expression which we see in those early letters. They are humorous, precised, and detailed. But then of course, in the memoirs written later in his life, we could see that he has a particular gift of language. 

In addition to his field for terrain, one of the other great attributes of his leadership, as everyone agrees, is his ability to write a clear order, or a clear dispatch. His goal in this, and maybe we’ll talk more about this when we get to his experience in the Mexican War, was to put his meaning so plainly that there could be no mistaking it. It is something I love to quote for my own students who are embarking on military careers.

Sean Murray  13:44  

It’s a great ideal to put out there as a writer. You can see that he really delivered on that in his memoirs. They have a certain style. It’s very direct. It’s not ornate. It tells the story as it is in plain sentences, or mostly in plain vocabulary. He obviously picked up something from all that reading. 

I think great writers are great readers. I recently had Andrew Roberts on to talk about Winston Churchill. He talked about Winston Churchill’s wide ranging interest in reading and how that impacted his writing. It was also very good. 

Let’s talk about the Mexican War. He graduates from West Point. He goes on to serve pretty quickly in the Mexican War, which sort of seems like a prelude to the Civil War in so many ways. He is in contact with a number of officers whom he’ll eventually either serve with, or fight against in the Civil War. 

However, you also see him as a young officer studying the leaders that he’s serving, and working out what eventually will be his leadership style. I found those really fascinating parts in his memoirs. What can you say about that? There’s a couple of generals that he is introduced to.

Elizabeth Samet  14:56  

The chapters on the Mexican War are only a few in the beginning of the book. Actually, it’s among my favorite parts of the memoir. As you’ve noted, you see his powers of observation. Not only of nature but of human nature. His letters of the period are actually full of descriptions of the Mexican landscape. 

He fell in love with the country and would go back there. Later, it was really a spectacular place for him in terms of the setting in congrue with this as it was because he was there in the war. One of the things that’s so interesting to me about the memoirs are these sort of miniature portraits of his commanders in the beginning. And then later on, of his colleagues and subordinates. In them, you get a really clear picture of how they performed under pressure. He would remember their strengths and weaknesses. 

He was introduced to several commanders in Mexico. He notices some of their behavior under pressure in particular. The two for whom he works, General Zachary Taylor, who later became president of course, and general Winfield Scott. They had nicknames. Taylor is “Old Rough and Ready” and Scott is “Old Fuss and Feathers” sort of suggests a little bit I think about their personalities.

Grant has at the end of the 10th chapter in the memoirs a lovely sort of parallel portrait of the two men. He thinks that they’re both excellent commanders. He learns a lot from them. But they have two radically different styles. 

Scott, whom Grant had first encountered when he was first a cadet, and Scott who was the General and Chief of the Army for years, throughout decades, throughout the 19th century. He came as a huge man. Grant was a very slight man. He saw Scott at a parade for the first time. It was a dazzling display. 

Scott used to like to wear all of his dress uniforms. He had a big staff. He did this in Mexico as well. He traveled with the staff. He also wrote orders, as Grant described them “with a view to how they would be read in history.” He used to like to refer to himself in the third person. This sort of bombastic style was not Grant’s. 

Taylor on the other hand, I think Grant modeled himself after Taylor. Taylor used to wear a straw hat and a farmer’s suit. He didn’t really like uniforms. He used to sit sideways on his horse and watch the battle. He liked to see it for himself as Grant would. Scott used his staff for that, which is not necessarily a bad thing, but it’s a different way of managing. 

And so, instead of seeing through the eyes of the staff, Taylor wanted to see for himself. That’s how Grant operated as well, whenever he could. The other thing about Taylor, in addition to not liking uniform, and pomp and circumstance, was that he wrote and spoke clearly. He said he was no conversationalist, but on paper. 

This is the first time in the memoirs, we hear this phrase, he could put his meaning so plainly that there could be no mistaking it. That phrase becomes a keynote for Grant. He will repeat it later on, when he is writing the terms of surrender at Appomattox at the end of the Civil War. 

I think this idea that these clear, precise orders and communications is what would really be the most efficient way to manage and lead. I think it became very important for Grant. It’s something that he would use in the future. But the other thing that I love about this portrait is that even though he’s poking a little fun at Scott, he knows that Scott is not his type of general. 

He does recognize Scott’s strengths. I think that’s really important because in the Civil War, Grant is forced to work with many different people. All of whom have strengths and weaknesses. He usually knows how to capitalize on someone’s strengths, and to sort of make his peace with the various flaws in their styles or approaches.

Sean Murray  18:38  

Just to touch on the idea of Grant’s ability to write clear orders, one of the delights of the memoirs is the fact that Grant just republishes the orders as they were written. At times, he will refer to these. “These are the orders I gave at that point.” You’ll get to read Grant’s orders to his subordinates, or sometimes a letter back to Washington or to President Lincoln. 

It’s fascinating that you get to kind of peek in and see that. Also, to your point about being gentle on weaknesses, he doesn’t seem to settle scores in his memoirs. It’s not vindictive in any way, like you sometimes see in today’s political memoirs. He seems to go out of his way to point out the strengths of the people he worked with. At times, he gently points out weaknesses, especially when it’s an adversary. He uses that weakness in a way to gain an advantage.

Elizabeth Samet  19:33  

Mexico was so important in that because of course, he was fighting on the same side with many of those he would oppose. He filed away all those observations he had made about them. They did come in handy later on.

Sean Murray  19:44  

There is one observation in Mexico that really stood out. Grant’s watching what might have been one of the first battles. He’s observing a line of I think he says, over 1,000 armed soldiers moving towards a larger Mexican army that’s also armed. They’re moving towards this confrontation. Taylor is the leader. 

Grant observes that Taylor must feel a fearful responsibility at that point. Grant is just a young officer. He’s not really in charge of a combat brigade or anything. He’s a quartermaster. He’s more in charge of the supply and the supply lines. Yet, he recognizes and is able to put himself into Taylor’s shoes. Again, it’s sort of a prelude because you know that he’s going to feel that risk and fearful responsibility in a very big way. He’s observing and learning.

Elizabeth Samet  20:38  

I’m glad you point to that passage because that’s where he goes on to say that this sort of sense of common responsibility is a more important quality and a rarer quality than, I think he says, “Physical courage or genius.” He realizes that that ability is what sustains Taylor. 

I think ultimately, Grant’ own sense of common unflappable nature is one of the hallmarks of his leadership. Of course, that’s not necessarily something that can be taught. I think that that’s really interesting. I think it’s good fortune as much as anything else. 

In Mexico, that’s where he figures out courage under fires and something you can predict, I think. He does figure out there that he is physically courageous, and that he is not fazed by the bullets flying by. He doesn’t really brag about that but he realizes it as a fact about himself. It helps enormously. 

There’s a famous moment later on after the Battle of the Wilderness in the Civil War in 1864. He’s writing a dispatch and an enemy shell lands in front of them. He just looks up and then goes back to writing. Some soldiers who were, I think it was from the Wisconsin regiment, who were watching this took to saying that, “Ulysses don’t scare worth a damn.” It became a real point of pride that this guy who was leading them was also really indifferent to enemy shells landing in front of him.

Sean Murray  22:02  

He certainly had that temperament. He discovered that in the Mexican War. And then after the Mexican War, he goes into what feels like a midlife crisis. He shipped off to the West Coast, which is a fairly remote place at that point. It was the West Coast, the United States, San Francisco, and then up close to where I live in Oregon Country.

Elizabeth Samet  22:21  

It’s one of the places but he’s throughout the Pacific Northwest, but that’s the place where it’s really brutally isolated. It’s called a midlife crisis. I sort of think of it as the lost years. He’s out there in that part of the country where at that time it was really rugged. I mean, it’s still rugged, but it was a territory. 

The army posts were very isolated. The army was a hard drinking army at that time, in general. There wasn’t much else to do out in the Pacific Northwest. The army officers were sort of celebrated for their hard drinking out there. That’s where the stories that did spring up about Grant’s relationship to alcohol, or his alcoholism as some have called it through all those stories that emerged. 

The other things to do in that period were hunting and fishing. We know from other officers who did that, like George Crook. That was great if that was your thing but it was not Grant’s thing. He hated hunting. He didn’t like the sight of blood. He couldn’t understand why people would kill things. I mean, it sort of seems strange to a soldier, but that’s why I kind of think of him as a reluctant soldier in many ways. 

He read and he was miserable. We have his letters to his wife from that period. He wants to resign. They’re miserable. “Why don’t you write to me more? The mail comes only occasionally. Weather’s terrible. Officers try to make some extra money doing various things.” Everything he tries, fails. 

He writes back to Julia, his wife, and he says, “I would resign all this except for poverty, poverty, poverty. That’s what scares me in the face.” He doesn’t know what to do. Those are absolutely miserable, sad years. 

He passes over them very briefly in the memoirs. This is not something he dwells on. For several reasons, I think they’re a source of embarrassment. But I also think that he probably rightly so, his audience doesn’t really want to hear about this necessarily. Instead, the audience wants to hear about the Civil War primarily, which I think he’s right about. I think regardless that the great story of his life is the Civil War. And so that’s what he does. 

But it’s a really unhappy period. Then he finally comes home. His wife’s family is from St. Louis. He spent some time there. Again, he fails with almost everything he does. It ends up before the civil war breaks out, he is working in Galena, Illinois, in his father’s leather goods store. 

He’s a clerk in the leather goods store. This is not something that he envisioned doing. He had a kind of fraught relationship with his father, which was only made worse by the fact that when he married Julia, he married into a slaveholding family. Grant’s own father was an abolitionist. 

This was a very representative story of the period. It caused an unsurprisingly great deal of friction. This was not exactly what he wanted to be doing. But then the Civil War broke out. It sort of saved him in the sense that this is what he happened to be good at.

Sean Murray  25:14  

You’re right. He doesn’t talk a lot about this period. But you mentioned, I think, in a note in the memoirs that at one point, he married into a slave-owning family. He was granted a slave, I believe, by his father-in-law. He was struggling with poverty at that time. He had a young family. He had the opportunity to either sell this slave and reap the profit to help relieve his poverty, or grant freedom to the slave. He liked to grant slave freedom. 

I think it speaks to his moral courage and his ability to live up to his values since he was raised by an abolitionist family. The other thing that I find interesting when you look at the arc of his life, and you see the highs and the lows, he’s really extreme. 

Sometimes when we read memoirs of great leaders, we often see the high points and we don’t see the low points. I think so much of his leadership, moral courage, and being gracious to his adversaries, and things like that grew out of this experience of seeing the lows in life. I don’t think he appreciated people looking down on him when he was low. And so he never seems to do that to others. I found that also really appealing. I think it’s admirable, I should say.

Elizabeth Samet  26:35  

You can call him many things. He’s been called many things, but cool is not one of them. I think he did have a unique sympathy. I mean, it’s sort of the same sympathy he had for animals and for human beings. Evidently, the one of the few times he ever lost his temper during the Civil War was when he saw a teamster beating a mule or a horse. One of the staff officers writes about this. Grant’s just outraged and he wants the man punished. This is a man who never loses his cool but when he sees this hopeless animal being abused, it awakens all his rage and frustration.

Sean Murray  27:07  

Very telling. Well, let’s move on to the Civil War because it is really the high point of his leadership and career. How does he go from being a clerk in a small leather goods store in Galena, Illinois at the outbreak of the war in a very short time to becoming the Commanding General of the Union Army?

Elizabeth Samet  27:28  

It really is a meteoric rise, as was the case, of course, with many in the Civil War. A lot of people sort of started as captains and ended up as generals if they survived. And so you have these really young general officers. Some of them in their 30s. It’s kind of amazing. 

But war has that flexibility which is sort of built-in. The army that time was even more flexible in that way than today. When he was starting out, he was sort of helping because he does have experience in logistics and as a quartermaster. In the regular army, he helps the governor of the state recruit troops, get organized, and he really keeps writing. He wants to have his own command and he doesn’t get it. And then he finally gets one. He gets command of a regiment. 

It’s a regiment that’s completely unruly. He sort of gets it into shape, even though he looks very unprepossessing, and no one can quite believe he’s the new commander. He has this lovely moment where he talks about, I mentioned how bad at tactics he was at West Point. He gets the same manual. He only has the party’s tactics. It’s sort of embarrassing to the Federal Army, but the author of the tactics ended up fighting for the Confederacy. 

They just put a blue cover on that. They all use the same tactics. He looked at these updated tactics. He just found out that some of the commands had changed but it was essentially the same thing. He’s ready to march troops around. He realizes that this space he has is available. They would be marching over the farmhouse next door and so he realizes he can’t do that. 

He just sort of uses common sense. He was not a big stickler. He was not a by-the-book kind of guy in that way. He didn’t let it bother him. He said, “I’ve pretty much figured it out.” No one knew that he hadn’t read past the first chapter of this text. 

He’s not a great Martinet. Many Civil War officers were not a strict disciplinarian. He does have particular priorities. And so he finds himself in command of this regiment. He thinks that it’s going to be his first engagement. He’s ordered to follow Confederate Colonel named Thomas Harris through Missouri. 

Grant can’t find Harris. Grant was sort of wandering the countryside. He expects that Harris will be close by. And that Harris should send out scouts but he doesn’t. Grant keeps going. He comes to sort of the crest of the hill. He looks down below and he realizes that the camp that the Confederates had just occupied has been recently vacated. 

He says there that he learned a valuable lesson. The lesson was that the enemy was just as afraid of him as he was of the enemy. He also revealed something else there, I think. It’s this question of moral courage, which is a term you mentioned and a term that he talks about a lot in the memoir. Sometimes he has it, sometimes he doesn’t. There, he doesn’t. He says so. It’s one thing to be responsible for yourself as he largely was in the Mexican War. It’s yet another to be responsible for a whole command. And so risking your own life is very different from risking that of others. 

This is his first moment in that position. He has to figure things out. You can’t necessarily always lead from the front. You can’t always be aggressive. You can’t take certain risks when other people are depending on you, as you might if you were sort of a freelance operator, as he ended up being in the Mexican War. As you said, because he was a quartermaster. But he found his way into many battles nonetheless. So he sort of figures out that command has a slightly different proposition.

Sean Murray  30:41  

That passage really struck me too because I think he said at one point that he would have given anything to be back in Illinois at that moment. He was too embarrassed not to just continue on. He never goes back again. He was kind of like how he was as a young boy in his travels. He just builds off of that and continues. 

One of the things I noticed at this point in his career was his understanding of supply lines. He gets more and more responsibility. He has more regiments that report to him because he knows how armies are supplied. What I saw was that he understood that some pipelines can be a strength and weakness for his army, and also the enemy’s army. He needs to use that to his advantage. 

The campaign where he makes his name is the Vicksburg Campaign. He uses that knowledge of supply lines to his advantage. Maybe you could talk about that because I’m guessing that it’s a rather famous campaign in military history.

Elizabeth Samet  31:34  

Yes. Your point about his knowledge of logistics and his understanding of supply, I think is a key one. I think Grant’s biographer, Jean Edward Smith says it best. He says that Grant’s armies were never the best dressed. They were never the most disciplined, but they never wanted for ammunition, for food, or for clothing. This idea that he realized these are the very unromantic aspects. This is not leading charges. This is not sort of the really glorious, or the images of war that the 19th century deemed glorious and worthy of writing about.

But really, to many people boring details of figuring out – how are you going to feed all of these people? And how are you going to get the ammunition where it needs to be? And so Grant has always recognized the significance of that. That was from his quartermaster responsibilities in Mexico.

Sean Murray  32:23  

The flip side of that is that he’s always thinking about “How can I cut off my enemy’s supply?” and using that to his advantage too.

Elizabeth Samet  32:31  

The Vicksburg Campaign is sort of part of the culmination of his activities in the Western Theater of the Civil War. For those listeners who haven’t sort of studied the Civil War, the two main theaters are the Eastern Theater and the Western Theater. 

The Eastern Theater is largely in Virginia. The more well-known of the two theaters of the Civil War. But the Western Theater is really where Grant makes his name. He spends most of the war there because he doesn’t get to the east until the winter of 1864. 

As you said, he gets more responsibility. He rises in rank. He scores an important victory at Fort Donelson before Vicksburg. If we have time, let’s just talk a little bit about that battle because it’s so important. 

Fort Donelson is in Tennessee, in the northwest part of the state. It’s among all of these rivers. I went out there because I don’t have the grasp of terrain that Grant has. I wanted to see as many of these battlefields as I could. You really see the winding river country there and the importance of these strategic points in the river. Donelson was one of them. 

Grant cooperates with the Navy, which I think is another important aspect of his command. He makes use of all the resources available. The Navy commanders are pleased to work with him and he wants to take advantage of what they have to offer. 

At Donelson, he meets up with an old friend from West Point, Simon Bolivar Buckner. He is someone whom he also fought in Mexico. He knows Buckner pretty well. Buckner is left in command of this fort by several of the superiors who sort of runoff in the night and leave Buckner holding the bag. Grant ends up taking the fort. They have this exchange. This is sort of really what seals Grant’s fame, I think. 

Buckner is the first Confederate General who has to surrender. He assumes that it’s going to work like how it did for Fort Sumter. Fort Sumter opened the war. The Union commander, allowed by his adversary and former student, General Beauregard, allows Major Anderson out. The troops marched out of Fort Sumter with bands playing, with flags, and all sorts of things. The sort of standard for Civil War courtesy has begun. 

Buckner expects the same sort of courtesy from Grant. He writes in a letter saying, “What are the terms?” Grant writes this letter back, which is really quite wonderful. I’ll just quote it if I may. Grant says, “I just got your note proposing an armistice and appointment of commissioners to settle terms of capitulation.” Then Grant says, “No terms except an unconditional and immediate surrender can be accepted. I propose to move immediately upon your works.”

Buckner is shocked and chagrined. He calls this response ungenerous and unchivalrous. But he also says, “I have no choice.” And so Grant, whose initials are now US, becomes “Unconditional Surrender.” All the newspapers talk about it and everything else. 

At the very end, they meet in a hotel called the Dover Hotel where you can actually still go and see the room where the two men met. Buckner said: “If I had been in command, you wouldn’t have taken the fort the way you did.” And Grant said: “Yeah, if you’ve been in command, I wouldn’t have tried the way I did.” 

There’s this great moment where he really knows his opposite number there. It’s one of those strange moments. I think people tend to romanticize it as this war between brothers. I think that’s kind of distorting. But what is important is the intimacy among adversaries and the fact that they didn’t know each other so well, and who was going to be able to take advantage of that knowledge. Grant was able to do that. 

Grant goes on as you said, to Shiloh, which also was not an unalloyed victory. The Union troops there were taken by surprise. Grant turns it around. It’s a two-day bloody battle. I think it shows for a lot of people that this war is very different from the one they thought would be over in 20 minutes. It’s no more games. This means that this is really a dire situation. 

Grant says that it’s from Shiloh where he realizes that this is going to be a war of attrition. They would have to grind it out. What he ends up doing now in this sort of operational level is this great sweepsouth to Vicksburg. 

Vicksburg is a commanding fort on the Mississippi River. So the river is used for so much traffic, and for supplies, and everything. The one who owns the control of the Mississippi is in a huge strategic advantage. This is where as you suggest, Grant uses supply lines to his advantage and eventually decides to live off the land. 

This is where he realizes that if he eats up all the supplies, there will be no supplies for the Confederate Army or for the Confederate civilians. That becomes a huge part of the strategy. It is to wear out the Confederacy. 

He ends up cutting loose from these supplies. William T. Sherman, his friend and subordinate writes in this note and says, “You don’t want to do that.” And Grant says, “I’m doing it.” And of course, that’s the strategy Sherman will use in his march through the South. But at this point, he’s kind of frightened of doing this. But Grant says that this is what they’re going to do. 

It ends up working. It wouldn’t have been possible. It would have been so cumbersome to stretch out those supply lines. He just decides to eat the food that is available there, and the forage, and everything else.

Sean Murray  37:43  

It’s an amazing decision. You get a peek into his decision process when you read the memoirs because he talks about how it came to him. He molded over it. He wasn’t quite ready to commit to it. And then at some point, he does.And when he does, he fully commits. 

Again, he realizes that his own supply lines can be critical but can also be a detriment. It’s tough to defend them. They draw the soldiers and the logistics out. When he cuts loose, he realizes that he has more freedom. He can move faster. He uses everything to his advantage. It takes a huge risk, though. It could have backfired but he was able to take more risk, I’d say than the generals before. And so then, he captures Vicksburg.

Elizabeth Samet  38:33  

It was an extraordinary maneuver. It’s a lot of trial and error. Part of the reason that he breaks loose from suppliers is that his big supply depot in Holly Springs, Mississippi is raided. That sort of reinforces his great weakness of sort of relying on. That’s when he cuts loose. He runs the batteries, he uses naval transport to run beneath the batteries of Vicksburg, and goes south of the fort. 

The terrain was very difficult. He tried to hack his way through the swamps. Nothing was working. But he kept saying that it was better to keep the troops occupied than to sit there idle, to be doing something always was key for him, never to be idle. He ends up defeating Johnston’s army, which is coming from the east. 

Everybody’s saying, “What are you doing? You should wait for reinforcements.” He says, “I’m not waiting.” And then he invests in Vicksburg. That siege goes on for quite a long time. And then finally, the Confederates were starving in Vicksburg.  There are many dramatic accounts of life in Vicksburg at that time. Many people living in caves actually dug out to escape the shelling, eating their own animals, and eating whatever they could. 

After that, he comes back north a bit to Chattanooga, which at the time is under siege. This is sort of a remarkable moment there, where many of his skills come into play. It’s all new to him. He rides in the middle of night and sort of gets briefed by everybody, and then looks at the map. He proceeds to write out the orders for the whole campaign.

He opened up the supply line because Chattanooga were starving. This was the Union troops. It’s around this time that he called East after Chattanooga, to Washington. After Vicksburg, in particular, Lincoln realizes that Grant is the guy for him. And there has been just a sort of cavalcade of generals who couldn’t make decisions and weren’t aggressive. There were so many of them, and they wouldn’t follow up their victories or they just couldn’t. 

Again, it has to do I think, in large part with risks. They were unwilling to take risks. I think Grant always knew that war forced him to make the best of several bad decisions. There were bad options. There was going to be a cost to every decision.

I think that’s something that a lot of his fellow generals couldn’t sort of bend their minds around. No decision would be risk free. No option would be casualty free. But this was sort of the grim truth of warfare.

Sean Murray  41:03  

He certainly didn’t like suffering. In fact, he mentions at one point that the optimal strategy would be the one that would end the war as quickly as possible and alleviate all the suffering. Even if that strategy in the short term was going to cause a lot of suffering and death to his army. 

He sort of recognized the big picture. We have to go through this to solve this problem once and for all. There’s a point in his memoirs where he’s sort of contrasted between Sherman. You mentioned Sherman. Sherman goes on to this campaign where he marches to Atlanta and marches to the sea, where he has completely cut off from his own supply line. Sherman learns from Grant and moves on. 

I think it was in one of your annotated notes. You mentioned that Sherman says that Grant doesn’t mention talks about this because he’s too modest. But Sherman himself says that he had more history in the military and more knowledge. He has studied more tactics and strategy. But Grant is a better leader than he is because Grant’s able to make decisions with the information he has. 

I think that’s a great lesson for all of us today because we have access to so much information. The internet is just right there for us as we’re making business decisions or investment decisions. We can wait for perfect information, or try to make a decision that has a 99% probability of success. 

Grant wouldn’t have waited for that. He would have moved forward and made decisions. I think there’s a lot to be said to that in today’s environment to be successful. You can’t be completely risk averse or wait for perfect information. Certainly, Grant didn’t.

Elizabeth Samet  42:46  

I think we shouldn’t confuse that with the notion of winging it, or not preparing, but a sort of an acceptance that perfect information is an illusion. We’ll never have it. Waiting indefinitely will only make a bad situation worse.

Sean Murray  43:03  

One other story from this part of the war that touched me was, I think it was after Shiloh. But Grant was trying to get some rest at the end of the battle. He was tired. It was rainy. He decides to go into a field hospital to try to get warm and to rest. There’s so much suffering there, that he can’t take it. 

You can see that at times, he lets his guard down a little bit. When you read his memoirs, he can come across a little cold hearted at times because he’ll say, “800 killed in that battle or 5,000,” or, “It’s just a number.” But at some point, he does sort of open up. He was so touched by that. He had to remove himself and go sleep under a tree. He has some words of sympathy for his soldiers.

Elizabeth Samet  43:48  

He goes into this makeshift hospital, in this cabin. You can imagine what Civil War medicine was like. In fact, in addition I included some illustrations from the history of the Civil War surgeons and the instruments, which they had to work with were fairly primitive. 

The anesthesia was pretty much nil. You could have just imagined the screams, the blood, and the piles. Amputations were the sort of signature operation of the war. And so you can imagine it looked like a slaughterhouse. It probably looked very much like the tannery that Grant hated so much as a child. 

It’s pouring rain. His ankle is injured from a fall that he had taken from his horse. He’s just sitting out there under a tree in the rain because he could not endure the field hospital. Sherman actually writes about that in a newspaper article decades later. That’s where that famous exchange with Sherman, whether it’s true or not, I don’t know, but it sounds good. 

It is consistent with Sherman’s account of Grant’s ability to make decisions, even though Sherman was a much better student of military history. Sherman says he finds Grant in the rain, sitting with his slouched cat and a cigar under a tree. Sherman said: “Well Grant, we’ve had the devil’s own day because the first day at Shiloh was pretty bleak.” 

Grant just sort of looks up and says: “Yeah, I’ll look at them tomorrow though.” And of course, that’s what they do. That was a scene of that great sort of signature moment between the two that Sherman does recount later on in life. 

There is another moment that I think is really important that gives a window on to Grant’s humanity is also from Shiloh. It is when the Union soldiers on the first day at Shiloh were accused of cowardice by their commanders. Grant is irate about that. 

He suggests that a lot of these troops were aggrieved. They had never been in battle before. He said that the first impulse is to run away. That’s a human impulse, and who could be blamed for that. And so instead, he blames their officers for not maintaining order. He also says that he never levels the charge of cowardice. It’s only a few people in the memoirs who get accused of being cowardly, but he wants to rescue the reputation of his army there. 

That’s not for self aggrandizement purposes. Many of the soldiers had retreated to the banks of the river. They were sort of cowering under the riverbank. He says that it’s because they lacked organization and leadership. They were not cowards. These were the same soldiers who would go on to perform value in later encounters. But that’s another moment, I think where his understanding and sympathy for his troops manifest.

Sean Murray  46:24  

After the success of Vicksburg and Chattanooga, Grant is invited back to Washington to be sworn in as Commanding General of the Union armies and the federal armies. He meets President Lincoln for the first time. A few portraits in this memoir that I really enjoyed is the relationship between Grant and Sherman. The one is the relationship between Grant and Lincoln. And the third one, for me was the relationship between Grant and Lee, which we’re about to get into. 

Lee is of course the Commanding General of the Confederate Army. One thing he hears from the officers in DC when he arrived. He sorted this fresh off his victories in the West. And now he’s coming to the Eastern Theater. He has never met Bobby Lee before. He’s never had to fight against Bobby Lee. I’ve never heard Robert Lee referred to as Bobby Lee. But I’m sure they knew him so well, right. It’s kind of funny. 

It’s obvious that he realizes that people still don’t fully trust him or believe in his ability, even though he believed in his own ability. It’s a reminder that if you put yourself in Grant’s shoe at that time, you don’t really know how the Civil War is going to turn out. We know now. But he really needed to have that confidence. He had to push through doubters. It’s something that we all have to do as leaders to overcome our own self doubt, or maybe others to achieve our vision. He certainly did that.

I think Lee had acquired by this time such an aura that he was sort of superhuman. That was never sort of Grant’s approach to life and to things. And so, he hears that, I think in several places. One of them is around the time of the Battle of the Wilderness. This is Lee. 

Elizabeth Samet  47:59  

This guy is a man like anyone else, essentially. He doesn’t feel intimidated in that way. I think he does have that. That’s the other thing that Sherman realizes about Grant. He has this confidence that is contagious. 

Sherman, who has a more volatile personality, I think gained a lot of confidence from knowing that Grant believed in him and in his troops. I think that was hugely important. And again, I’m not sure whether that is teachable. I think if you have it, it can be enhanced and fostered. But I think there again, it was sort of being the right person in the right place.

Sean Murray  48:40  

He does mention that he believes part of his confidence comes from the fact that he never petitions for a commission. He has a sort of superstition or something that he did not say, “When am I going to get the generalship? Someone look at me. It’s time for me to be promoted.” 

I think he mentions, “I really wish I could lead a brigade in the cavalry in the army of the Potomac” which was the army on the east. I think he was in the west at the time. Someone says, “Well, why don’t you just write a letter,” and he said, “I’d rather cut my right arm off.” He believes that competence comes from having someone being confident in you. If you do your duty and when you’re ready, things will open up. It certainly worked out that way for him. I thought that was kind of interesting.

Elizabeth Samet  49:21  

I think that he had a kind of fatalism about it. He doesn’t write about this. He had some champions such as Elihu Washburn, and some other politicians. He had a lot of enemies but he had some on his side. I think he knew how to, let’s say, make the most of those relationships. Certainly in the West after Shiloh, he was almost ready to resign because he had been sort of shunted off to a job. He didn’t really command anything. 

There is this sort of strange period in the wilderness there. I do think that he did have this kind of sense that “It will come to me if I continue to do my job to win this battle, to this particular thing, and then whatever will follow.” I think you can be paralyzed by looking too far ahead as well, right? I mean, you want to take the long view, but you also can’t neglect the task at hand. I think it was important to him to maintain that balance.

Sean Murray  50:11  

Lincoln elevates Grant as the Commanding General of the Union Army. Grant proceeds to design the strategy of the final campaign of the war. Please talk about that, and how that leads to the famous Battle of the Wilderness, and eventually the surrender at Appomattox. What can we take away from this incredible campaign? 

Elizabeth Samet  50:32  

He succeeds at the tactical level at Donelson and at Shiloh. He succeeds at the operational level at Vicksburg. And then, he has to take into account the entire theater of war. He makes a couple of decisions that are key.

One of them is George Meade. He is the commander of the Army of the Potomac when Grant comes to the east.  Meade fully expects to be relieved. Grant decides not to do that. But instead, to leave Meade in place as the Commander of the Army of Potomac. That gave him all of the sort of executive and administrative responsibilities. That gave Grant the freedom to think about the big picture. He did not have to worry about the day-to-day operations of the Army of the Potomac, which is a huge job in and of itself. 

He gave Meade this job and kept him there, while Grant would be thinking about the whole picture. Grant takes this time to study terrain, while he works out how he’s going to accomplish this. The first big test is the Battle of the Wilderness. It is complicated by the terrain. It’s aptly named. It takes place in the woods. The woods catch fire. It’s very dry and they catch fire. 

It is a battle, which one of Grant’s staff officers says, fought more by the ear than the eye because you can’t see through all the smoke and the flames. It’s a battle of horrific suffering. Wounded men are burning off in the woods. Grant is sitting in a spot which is now a historic site. You can still see this sort of tree where Grant had his headquarters. This little *inaudible*. He would receive all these reports from panicked officers all over the battlefield. 

They would bring him these reports and he would essentially tell them to calm down. He would sift the facts from the exaggeration. He displayed as usual, this sort of extraordinary calm. The wilderness is sort of a draw, really, but the key comes after. 

Every general up to that point, after encountering Lee had turned north again. Grant says: “We’re going to cross the river. We’re going to keep going south.” And that’s the moment where the whole army sort of realizes that it’s not business as usual. We’re going to keep going south. We’re not going to give up. 

This is a pretty magnificent army that has been well-trained and outfitted. Now, it’s going to continue the fight. And so when they turn cells, it sort of breathes new life into this army. And there are several accounts of officers and others in their diaries who write about this change. They realize with Grant that they were dealing with someone different. 

He’s able to infuse this confidence into an entire army, all the while delegating the command of that army to Lee. He was trying not to interfere. There’s a great case study there in delegation throughout the Eastern Theater. Sometimes you could argue he delegates too much because there are a lot of generals who don’t get along with one another. They make bad decisions because of their rivalries. 

But he has a kind of principle of letting as he says, “The man on the spot makes the decision because the man on the spot is the one who knows best in the situation.” And so, he maintains that as a principle. It’s not always for the good, but I think in the main it is.

Sean Murray  53:55  

I think you’re exactly right about the momentum shift at the end of the Battle the Wilderness. When Grant decides to proceed on, he seems to understand sort of morale, esprit de corps, and momentum. The Confederate seemed to have had that little edge before. It sort of shifts there with Grant’s leadership. And now, he just keeps pushing south and trying to flank Robert E. Lee’s army. It’s really fascinating. 

It takes a while. It’s another eight months or something, but he just keeps going. Meanwhile, he’s managing the entire theater, as you mentioned, but he just keeps moving towards Richmond. And eventually, we get to the point where Lee is sort of surrounded. We get this famous meeting at the Appomattox Court House. 

Maybe you could set this stage there because I think this is really the culmination of his leadership. It came all together here at this pivotal moment in our nation’s history too. 

Elizabeth Samet  54:51  

It was during the spring of April ’65. Grant sent some notes to Lee. And then finally, Lee responds saying, “I guess they had better meet.” They end up meeting in Appomattox, in the house of a man named McLean.

Lee, evidently says that he would rather die a thousand deaths than surrender to Grant. But he realizes that the situation is impossible. It’s taken him a long time to accept that. They meet. They are a totally different man. They are totally different soldiers. 

Grant tells the story. I think he takes a little pride in it. He describes Lee as faultless in form. He is over six feet tall. Grant is a small guy. He’s faultless. He’s wearing his uniform. He looks really good. And he said, “I didn’t even have time to change. I was in these clothes. I was riding in. I didn’t have a sword because I didn’t carry a sword. Who needs a sword?” That kind of thing. He’s in his traveling clothes. 

He’s probably mud-stained. He looks kind of rumpled as he often did. He shows up and he says that the contrast must have been very great. I think there’s a little pride in that. A lot of pride in that actually. 

They meet. Lee had been an engineer officer. In Mexico, he had done really great engineering work. Grant had benefited from that. He knew his reputation. He was Chief of Engineers for General Scott. And so he knew of Lee, and maybe they had met in the past. Lee supposedly didn’t really remember Grant. Grant remembered Lee. I think he knew something about the way Lee’s mind worked. 

He also encountered his old friend, James Longstreet. He must have been one of Grant’s best friends at West Point. There were other people he knew as well. He mentions that they all chatted with one another. They were sort of in a really weird reunion right after this war. 

I think it’s kind of a frosty meeting, quite frankly. There’s no real sympathy between the two. They’re such different characters. Grant says that he’s never been dicted. He also knows that he’s not at all confused about the nature of the war, and about the fact that this was a war of principle. 

He also knows that if Lee surrenders and dispenses the army, the Confederacy will follow. But the Confederacy really stands and falls with Lee. So instead of offering the unconditional terms that he did with Buckner, he decides to let the troops go. The officers can go with their sidearms which was a big deal for them. They can also take any animals with them. He expects that they’ll go back and farm, and resume the arts of peace. 

They have these terms. Lee surrenders. And throughout this great chapter on the surrender of Appomattox, Grant proceeds to demythologize. There’s a myth about an apple tree. The surrender takes place under an apple tree. He says that that’s a myth. But he said that with war stories, people tell them enough that fiction becomes fact, but this didn’t happen. 

He also talks about the “surrender of the sword,” which Southern Newspapers made a big deal about. He said: “The whole story of Lee handing me a sword in my hand and he gets back is all nonsense. It’s all a fabrication. Here’s what really happened.” 

I think this is important because it really sums up the quality of the memoirs unlike most 19th century accounts of war. This war in particular. France is not romantic. It is not a celebration of the glories of warfare, or of the glories of combat. It is instead an account of what is a very brutal business, and then often grim business. Grant knew that business as well as anyone. I think that’s very important. 

The other thing that he does here is that he makes very clear what happened later. It is the way we remember the war, and the causes sort of became equalized. It just became this contest between brothers, as I’ve said. Everyone was reconciled afterwards. It’s as if it never happened. 

Grant was never confused about that. He said that his adversaries were fighting for slavery. Whatever else they may have believed in and wanted was what they were defending. He says this was one of the worst causes for which anyone ever fought, and one for which there was the least excuse. I think it’s important that he realized that in ending this war, this would have huge implications for the future of the nation.

Sean Murray  59:15  

I think that’s a really important point. And you mentioned, I believe in one of your notes that you seem to have believed in the sincerity of the Confederate soldiers’ courage, suffering, and so forth. But also firmly believed in the unjustness of the cause. 

He has a hint at the end of his memoirs, which is a foreshadowing for our country and for what we’re dealing with today. He says something like, we may experience some conflict between the races again in our future.

He seemed to understand that at this point, he’d been through reconstruction. We don’t get his views of that in the memoirs. But he had seen, and I assume, he tried to make some changes in the south. He tried to lay the foundation for the equality of racism. He was really trying to achieve Jefferson’s vision of “all men are created equal.” But he failed in that eventually. The country failed in that. We’re sort of dealing with that today. 

You see it now as a missed opportunity if the leadership could have pushed it all the way across. But there had been so much suffering. You can see the reasons why they didn’t make it, but you can also see the consequences of the fact that they didn’t quite get to the ultimate goal they wanted to achieve. And that’s just what happened. We’re sort of still dealing with that in many ways.

Elizabeth Samet  1:00:34  

Throughout his administration, he worked hard to enforce reconstruction. He worked hard for the constitutional amendments that tried to secure civil rights for freed African-Americans. But by the end, the scandals throughout his second term in office, I think, weakened the credibility of his administration, making reconstruction efforts even harder. 

In the compromise that was worked out after his second term, which ensured that the Republican Party would maintain the White House, the agreement really was to withdraw federal troops. I think the north’s moral will was exhausted. We plunge the south back into a period in which the legacies we still see today. So I do think that at the end, he had to recognize that as a great failure as well.

Sean Murray  1:01:24  

Well, Grant’s life is such an amazing story. There’s so much we can take away from how he composed himself, his temperament, his ability to stay calm under pressure, his ability to delegate, his ability to understand his own strengths and weaknesses, his ability to design strategies that take advantage of his enemy’s strengths and weaknesses, and how he is able to live a complete life despite the highs and the lows. 

I really appreciate what you’ve done. It’s an incredible achievement – the annotated memoirs. I hope those in the audience can enjoy them as well. Where can people find out more about you, Elizabeth and what you’re doing?

Elizabeth Samet  1:02:00  

I’m working right now. I’ve been talking a lot about Grant. So there’s a lot of podcasts, and also some other things. I was part of History Channel’s mini series, the docu-drama on Grant. So that’s a great way to find out, I think, more about him. And then in terms of future projects, I’m doing some stuff on World War II right now, also on Alexander the Great. So those are my two current projects.

Sean Murray  1:02:24  

Well, I hope to have you back again sometime in the future. You’ve been a wonderful guest. Thank you for your second time appearing on The Good Life.

Elizabeth Samet  1:02:32  

My pleasure. 

Outro  1:02:33  

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