"George Washington is dead," Rachel told her son. There is a homely story-such tales cannot be authenticated-that Noah's son Jesse, the father of Ulysses Grant, just shy of his sixth birthday, came upon his mother, who was alone and weeping. Noah, by trade a cobbler and by character an idler, would soon move the family again: first to Fawcettstown, Ohio, on the Ohio River, thence to Deerfield in the Western Reserve. Here he and Rachel built a cabin on the Monongahela River, not far from modern Pittsburgh. Ulysses Grant's grandfather, Captain Noah Grant, had fought in the Revolution, lost his first wife, remarried, and moved to western Pennsylvania. But Grant's paternal forebears had been moving west for two centuries: from Plymouth, Massachusetts, to the Connecticut River valley, across New York State and Pennsylvania. It was known that Matthew Grant had landed in Massachusetts Bay in 1630. Grant, it is true, was "ancestried" in a way that Lincoln was not. No doubt, too, the instinctive rapport between Abraham Lincoln and his new lieutenant general owed much to their common heritage as westerners-as James Russell Lowell said of Lincoln, "out of the very earth, unancestried, unprivileged, unknown"-and was demonstrated most powerfully in their common understanding of the needs of the South in the days just before, and just after, Appomattox. Grantand son, Galena, Ill.," a traveler so small and dusty that the clerk did not recognize him an unpretentious guest who could not, it appeared, have cared less. He was "brought east." The small vignette of Grant's arrival in the grand lobby of Willard's Hotel in Washington, in March 1864, is an enduring cameo of American popular history: the most famous man in the country, next to Abraham Lincoln himself, signing the register as "U.S. Ohio was the easternmost of the states being carved from the old Northwest Territory, but to New England and New York, to the original states of the Atlantic seaboard, it seemed still a remote West: raw and bountiful, unfettered, rich in possibility.įorty years later, in 1862, it was as a western general that Grant achieved the sudden celebrity that seems peculiarly American, after his victory and successful demand for an unconditional surrender at Fort Donelson-a Union triumph that thrilled the country and resuscitated its hopes and confidence and, just two years after that, it was as the famous leader of the western armies that he was selected to command all Union forces. The country thereabouts was less than a generation removed from raw frontier, Ohio having achieved statehood only nineteen years earlier, and the village of Point Pleasant, some twenty-five miles southeast of Cincinnati, was but a tiny huddle of cabins and rude frame houses. He was a child of the great Valley of Democracy, born on April 27, 1822, a hundred yards from the north bank of the Ohio. This information appeared in the Monitor's special issue Grant vs Lee.For most of his life Ulysses S. Simpson (4%) American Ulysses by Ronald C. “It is my favorite because of McFeely’s complex and engaging portrait of the man.”Ĭaptain Sam Grant by Lloyd Lewis (4%) Grant by Jean Edward Smith (4%) Let Us Have Peace by Brooks D. “In my view, Catton understood Grant the general and Grant the man better than any other Grant biographer.” Grant Moves South / Grant Takes Command by Bruce Catton (9%) “Chernow’s biography of Grant is the best-the fullest, best researched, and most readable-of the large number of Grant bios.” “This book is perfectly balanced in so many ways: It integrates Grant’s military career and his presidency, illuminates his personality as wellĪs his image and legacy, and it both reaches out to general readers and offers news insights for the scholarly experts.” Grant: American Hero, American Myth by Joan Waugh (18%) “Grant had a way of telling his story that left you believing he must be right in a lasting masterpiece of American literature.”Ģ. “One of the classic military autobiographies of all time.” The books are ranked in order of popularity and accompanied by selected explanations from our panelists.ġ. We recently asked a number of top Civil War historians to let us know their favorite books about Ulysses S.
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