In the spring of 1885, when he was less than three months away from death by cancer, General Ulysses S. Grant had a spirited exchange of letters with Adam Badeau, who was supposed to be helping him write his memoirs. The debate implicates Union General, and then U.S. President-to-be, Ulysses S. Grant for owning slaves at the time of the Civil War. The letters of Pvt. As president, I wrote every official document, I believe, usual for presidents to write, bearing my name. He wrote this book against pain and death, and he stuck to it as long as he could hold a pencil—not because someone else could not finish the thing for him, thereby assuring his family a proper estate, but simply because as a writing man he wanted the book done his way. Many of them are to his wife, Julia, and offer an intimate view of their affectionate and enduring marriage; others, addressed to fellow generals, government officials, and his congressional patron Elihu B. Washburne, provide a fascinating contemporary perspective on the events that would later figure in the Memoirs . Obviously, money was not all that mattered. Details about Civil War Letter Jun 16 1863 General Grant Vicksburg Fight, Read Description See original listing. From Abraham Lincoln to George G. Meade [Draft], July 14, 1863. Ulysses S. Grant was a West Point graduate who fought with distinction in the War with Mexico, but found post-war life in the West unbearable and resigned from the Army in 1854. Gen. U.S. Grant (later the 18 th President of the United States from 1869-1877), along with Gen. W.T. Transcripts are provided for each handwritten page. Badeau had been Grant’s military secretary during the final year of the Civil War, and some time after the war he had written a three-volume Military History of Ulysses S. Grant . Yet with all of this it is fair to say that the manuscript required from the editor no more work than might be given to the manuscript of any professional writer who had been compelled by approaching death to leave his final pages in a slightly disorganized state. The meeting will be via Zoom at 7 p.m. Tuesday, Dec. 1. Grant began his military career as a cadet at the United States Military Academy at West Point in 1839. Correspondents in the latter group include Rufus King and Ulysses S. Grant. Autograph Letter Signed (“U.S. 'TERMS OF SURRENDER' LETTERS SIGNED BY CONFEDERATE GENERAL ROBERT E. LEE. Read more >>, The magazine was forced to suspend print publication in 2013, but a group of volunteers saved the archives and relaunched it in digital form in 2017. © Literary Classics of the United States, Inc. When the Civil War began, he offered his services and soon took command of a volunteer regiment. 1199 pages, LOA books are distributed worldwide by Penguin Random House. After the war, he settled in Watervliet, New York, and entered the lumber business. This Library of America volume also includes 174 letters written by Grant from 1839 to 1865. Why, if money was all that mattered? BRUNSWICK COUNTY — E.C. Specifically, he wanted $1,000 a month, payable in advance, plus ten per cent of the entire profits from the memoirs. Why endure the work of composition—accompanied, as it must be in Grant’s case, by the fearful pain of death-in-the-throat—when a journeyman like Badeau could do the work? On April 9, 1865 Confederate General Robert E. Lee agreed to the Terms of Surrender as laid out by Union Lieutenant General Ulysses S. Grant, in effect ending the bloody conflict known as America's Civil War. From R.E. From a letter from Waters Whipple Braman to his Uncle on July 5, 1863: (1.36 MB) Camp of … Heaven grant there may be an end soon. Mosby despised slavery and believed the South had seceded to protect it. From Abraham Lincoln to George G. Meade [Draft], July 14, 1863. On May 5 he rejected Badeau’s claim in the most plain-spoken terms—and in the course of writing the letter unwittingly demonstrated that by the oddest turn of fate he had actually become what Badeau supposed himself to be: a man of letters. For Lt. General Ulysses S. Grant and tens of thousands of Federal and Confederate troops fighting further south, the war stretched out for several more months. Grant was combating poverty as well as cancer. Grant wanted something more. General Grant in Love and War The officer who gained glory as a warrior in the Civil War also had a domestic side. … One more little touch. It might be added that Grant died just two days after he had written his final words. It was nearly two decades after the end of the war, when Grant was researching the Official Records for his memoirs, that he finally found out what a committed foe he had had in Halleck, and how close he had come to dismissal and disgrace. The terms of surrender for the Army of Northern Virginia were drafted and signed here, leading to the capitulation of the most important Confederate army and the beginning of the end of the American Civil War. Lee To U.S. Grant Head-Quarters, Army of Northern Virginia April 9, 1865. This Civil War letter to General Sanford, written on May 30, 1861, describes her distress at the occupation of her home, Arlington House, by Northern troops. The prose style in which he took such pride is marked above all by clarity of expression. Twenty years after Appomattox, stricken by cancer and facing financial ruin, Ulysses S. Grant wrote his Personal Memoirs to secure his family’s future. As a soldier I wrote my own orders, plans of battle, instructions and reports. Many of them are to his wife, Julia, and offer an intimate view of their affectionate and enduring marriage; others, addressed to fellow generals, government officials, and his congressional patron Elihu B. Washburne, provide a fascinating contemporary perspective on the events that would later figure in the Memoirs. Robert E. Lee to Ulysses S. Grant, April 9, 1865 Duplicate. BRUNSWICK COUNTY — E.C. General, The letters, addressed to Braman's family in Troy, include one written to his uncle after the Battle of Gettysburg. This Library of America volume also includes 174 letters written by Grant from 1839 to 1865. Ulysses S. Grant: Memoirs & Selected Letters, “The Grant autobiography…is a powerful, riveting, endlessly fascinating book, gracefully written—every word—by Grant himself….” — San Diego Tribune, From “lovelorn, insecure young man” to resolute commander—the private side of Ulysses S. Grant, Ulysses S. Grant, “Letters from Matamoros”. I have won some and lost some. If I succeed in telling my story so that others can see as I do what I attempt to show, I will be satisfied. They know that it is not even an attempt to imitate either a literary or classical style; that it is just what it is and nothing else. Lincoln differed with Grant about how to handle the campaign, but when Grant pursued his own strategy successfully, Lincoln frankly admitted that Grant … Truly it may be considered the most cruel and awful scourge which can befall a nation. Though Grant’s forces had been depleted by more than half during the last year of the war, it was Lee who surrendered in 1865. Stricken by cancer as his family faced financial ruin, Ulysses S. Grant wrote his Personal Memoirs to secure their future, and in doing so won for himself a unique place in American letters. His chief of staff, John A. Rawlins, in the winter of 1864 complained that to get Grant’s report of the battle of Chattanooga into final shape “is a very unpleasant and I may say thankless undertaking, for the General is very tenacious of the claim that he writes his own reports and it is necessary for us to follow the text as nearly as possible.” Inasmuch as Rawlins’ own literary style was atrocious, one can only add that General Grant was well advised to impose this rule. The Civil War Letters Collection was created with the CONTENTdm software's innovative new program, JPEG 2000, which enables materials to be displayed in a higher quality, more usable online format. Wherever Lee goes, there you will go also.” Not to mention the note to Halleck, after Spotsylvania: “I propose to fight it out on this line if it takes all summer.” In this one, it is interesting to notice that Grant originally wrote “if it takes me all summer” and then went back and crossed out the word “me”; he was the stylist even then, knocking out one word in order to make a sentence more effective. The editors of this volume are Mary Drake McFeely, editor of the Southern Literature Series and Georgia History and Culture Series, and William S. McFeely, professor emeritus of American History at the University of Georgia and author of Grant: A Biography. Browse the Civil War Diaries Collection Browse the Civil War Letters Collection He was writing to U. S. Grant, who was not used to being pushed around. It would not take longer if done by an expeditious writer and as I want it done, and I thought and you thought the compensation large at the time.” (Compensation: $5,000 out of the first $20,000 in royalties, and $5,000 out of the next $10,000.). This new software includes pan and zoom capabilities which allows the user to move in and out of the image and move across the image to display the details. Besides, to work on another man’s manuscript struck Badeau as sheer drudgery, he saw his own name vanishing from sight under the great weight of Grant’s name, and anyway he wanted to write a novel; so on May 2 he wrote to Grant demanding more money. With contributions from donors, Library of America preserves and celebrates a vital part of our cultural heritage for generations to come. The better I help you to make it, the more effectually I destroy what I have spent my life in building up—my reputation as your historian. In the final weeks, when he was almost distracted by unending pain, Grant’s writing becomes a scrawl, disconnected episodes and comments are put down as they entered the man’s head, and there is obvious reliance on an editor who can fit the separate pieces into their proper place and arrange the last chapter into a coherent tale. His letters indicate a rich, complex sense of Confederate nationalism not simply tied to Lee and the Army of Northern Virginia. Jean V. Berlin and Brooks D. Simpson (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1999), 822-823. His wife, Julia Dent Grant, was the daughter of a prominent St. Louis slaveholding family. Grant thought that Badeau was asking for altogether too much money, and said so flatly. President Ulysses S. Grant with First Lady Julia Dent Grant and son Jesse in 1872. Whether he did it well or poorly, Grant was behaving like a craftsman. The reader must also be satisfied, for he knows from the beginning just what to expect. There is, for instance, his note to General Buckner: “No terms except unconditional and immediate surrender can be accepted. His letters and orders are never foggy, and some of the most memorable sentences of the whole Civil War come straight from Grant’s pen. One of his aides, Horace Porter, wrote that Grant never had a dictionary in his tent, never bothered to write a word out on a scrap of paper to see if he had it right, and altogether spelled “with a heroic audacity.”. Letters were an important aspect of the Civil War. By the time the Civil War broke out in 1861, Grant was a 39-year-old father of four with barely a penny to his name. Mark Twain’s famous verdict—that it is “a great, unique and unapproachable literary masterpiece”—is probably a little excessive, and yet the book has a quality that lifts it far above the other soldier-memoirs of its time and place. The NEH-supported work on Grant’s letters deserves special mention. If a hack could finish the job for him, well and good. Badeau had been Grant’s military secretary during the final year of the Civil War, and some time after the war he had written a three-volume Military History of Ulysses S. Grant . Civil War Letter Jun 16 1863 General Grant Vicksburg Fight, Read Description: Condition: Used. Transcripts are provided for each handwritten page. Mary Custis Lee letter to Union General Sanford, 1861 (Mary Custis Lee papers. Arthur McKinstry represent the experience of a young private in the Union Army during the Civil War. He had the pride of authorship. Grant Taylor, however, managed to hold on to many of his wife's letters and the perspective this gives on the dynamics between husband and wife is fascinating. Spelling was a minor bother to him—not because he did not know how to spell, but apparently because he just didn’t care much about it. Ulysses S. Grant went to West Point, graduating in the middle of his class. 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