There is no doubt that Ron Chernow tells a beautiful story in his recent biography of Ulysses S. Grant. He is especially compelling in discussing the fight for Black civil rights during Reconstruction. But throughout, the author takes his subject’s side in controversy after controversy, even when the evidence doesn’t support it. And Chernow has a seriously deficient understanding of Grant, of the Civil War, and of military matters, in […]
A forthcoming book posits that the “Civil War’s Most Persistent Myth” involves the existence or non-existence of Black Confederate soldiers. Yet, the Amazon description admits that it “largely originated in the 1970s.” Many myths concerning that conflict have persisted well beyond fifty years. I would nominate a far older and much more egregious example of distorted history. General Ulysses S. Grant has acquired a sterling reputation as an officer and […]
James M. McPherson, in his introduction to the Penguin Classics edition of U.S. Grant’s Personal Memoirs, noted how Horace Porter served on Grant’s staff from the Wilderness to Appomattox. McPherson concluded that, Porter’s “own version of those events, entitled Campaigning with Grant, is next in value only to Grant’s memoirs as a firsthand account of command decisions in that campaign.” Porter in his own preface maintained that, “While serving as […]
I located Sgt. William H. Busbey’s post-war article about his being near Grant’s Savannah headquarters and on Tigress during the trip to Pittsburg Landing on April 6th in the Chicago Inter-Ocean. Some obvious errors make it not completely reliable, and it may be completely unreliable, but it does make for interesting reading: “I was at Savannah in April, 1862, associated with the work of the Adams Express company . Myself […]