Ulysses S. Grant

Ulysses S. Grant led Union armies, served as the nation’s eighteenth president, and became a military memoirist. Grant and Schurz on the South is an 1872 campaign pamphlet pairing Grant’s letter about postwar conditions with extracts from Carl Schurz’s 1865 report to President Andrew Johnson. Its composite form places two assessments of Reconstruction in direct conversation. Personal Memoirs of U. S. Grant, Complete is Project Gutenberg’s single-file title for Grant’s originally two-volume memoir, issued by Charles L. Webster and Company across 1885 and 1886. Grant covers his early life, the Mexican-American War, and the Civil War through the surrender at Appomattox. Mark Twain helped secure favorable publication terms and advised him, but surviving manuscript evidence confirms Grant’s authorship. He finished the work shortly before his death. Read together, the pamphlet and memoir show different kinds of historical writing: one assembled for immediate political debate, the other a sustained retrospective shaped by command experience and documentary checking.