When I went into the house I found General Lee. His account of the Confederate surrender is especially moving: “I was without a sword, as I usually was when on horseback in the field, and wore a soldier’s blouse for a coat, with the shoulder straps of my rank to indicate to the army who I was. By many accounts, Grant’s memoirs fully capture the man himself: they are well observed, often humorous, invariably charming, penetrating and lucid. It was only his inflexible determination, the quality that had made him a great general, that mastered the torments of ill-health – sleepless nights, fear of dying – to articulate his account for a devoted American audience.
When he began to write, he had begun to suffer the agonising pain of throat cancer. Grant’s memoirs are all the more remarkable for having been completed under duress. The reader finds himself on edge to know how the civil war is coming out.” has conveyed the suspense which was felt by himself and his army and by all who believed in the Union cause.
Indeed, Grant’s life story is both remarkable and moving.įor the critic Edmund Wilson, who put Grant in the exalted literary company of Walt Whitman and Henry Thoreau, this powerful autobiography is “a unique expression of the national character. Although Grant was on the winning side, he was always brutally honest about both his successes and failures, and never failed to acknowledge the grinding poverty from which the civil war rescued him. The unputdownable heart of Grant’s book is his eyewitness account of the vicissitudes of the American civil war: the outbreak of hostilities the battle of Shiloh the campaign against Vicksburg the battle of Chattanooga Sherman’s March Lincoln’s assassination and Lee’s surrender. His narrative has the simple directness of the finest English prose: the overall effect is both intimate and majestic
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