Translating Thought into Action: Grant’s Personal Memoirs

When I put my pen to the paper I did not know the first word that I should make use of in writing the terms. I only knew what was in my mind, and I wished to express it clearly, so that there could be no mistaking it.

So wrote Ulysses S. Grant in the summer of 1885, a few weeks before he died of throat cancer. He was describing the scene in Wilmer McLean’s parlour at Appomattox Court House 20 years earlier, when he started to write the terms for the surrender of the Army of Northern Virginia. But he could have been describing his feelings in July 1884 as he sat down to write the first of four articles for Century magazine’s Battles and Leaders series on the American Civil War.

These articles were incorporated into Grant’s Personal Memoirs, two volumes totaling 285,000 words written in a race against the painful death that the author knew was soon coming. The result was a military narrative that Mark Twain in 1885 and the literary critic Edmund Wilson in 1962 judged to be the best work of its kind since Julius Caesar’s Commentaries. In 1987 the British military historian John Keegan pronounced Grant’s memoirs “the most revelatory autobiography of high command to exist in any language.”

Grant would have been astonished by this praise. He had always been loath to speak or write for the public. Even as president of the United States he had confined his communications to formal messages, proclamations, and executive orders drafted mainly by subordinates. After a postpresidential trip around the world, Grant bought a brownstone in New York City in 1881 and invested his life’s savings in a brokerage partnership of his son and Ferdinand Ward, a Wall Street high roller. Ward made a paper fortune in speculative ventures of dubious legality (of which Grant knew nothing). In 1884 this house of cards collapsed and left Grant with $180 in cash and $150,000 in debts.

Casting about for some way to make money, Grant overcame his reluctance to write for the public and accepted a commission from Century to write articles on the campaigns and battles of Shiloh, Vicksburg, Chattanooga, and the Wilderness for $500 per article. This amount would make no dent in his debts but would at least put bread on the table.

While working on the articles, Grant was diagnosed with throat cancer, incurable and fatal. Knowing that his time was limited and wanting to provide an income rather than crippling debts for his family after he was gone, Grant almost signed a book contract with Century for publication of his memoirs. About this time, Grant’s friend Mark Twain stopped by for a visit and asked to see the contract. Twain had recently established his own publishing company, whose first book would be The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Twain later recalled that, when he read Grant’s contract, “I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry.” Century had offered the standard 10-percent contract that “they would have offered to any unknown Comanche Indian whose book they had reason to believe might sell 3,000 or 4,000 copies.”

Anticipating that Grant’s memoirs would sell a hundred times as many, Twain persuaded Grant to sign up with his own company for 70 percent of the net proceeds of sales by subscription. It was one of the few good financial decisions Grant ever made. The Personal Memoirs earned $450,000 for his family after his death, which came just days after he finished the last chapter.

Grant’s perseverance in his battle against this grim deadline attracted almost as much public attention and admiration as had his victory over the Confederacy two decades earlier. Both were triumphs of will over adversity. They demonstrated a clarity of conception and an elegant simplicity of execution that made a hard task look easy. To read Grant’s memoirs with an awareness of the circumstances in which he wrote them is to gain insight into the reasons for his military success. In April 1885, when he had completed about half of the narrative, Grant suffered a severe hemorrhage that left him apparently dying. But by an act of will, with the support of Twain and the help of cocaine for the pain, he recovered and resumed writing.

Whether consciously or subconsciously, Grant revealed in his description of Gen. Zachary Taylor, under whom Grant had served as a 24-year-old lieutenant in the Mexican-American War, many of the qualities that contributed to his own success. “General Taylor was not an officer to trouble the administration much with his demands, but was inclined to do the best he could with the means given him.” So was Grant. “No soldier could face either danger or responsibility more calmly than he. These are qualities more rarely found than genius or physical courage.” The same was true of Grant. “General Taylor never made any great show or parade either of uniform or retinue.” Neither did Grant. “In dress he was possibly too plain, rarely wearing anything in the field to indicate his rank.” Nor did Grant. “Taylor was not a conversationalist”—neither was Grant—“but on paper he could put his meaning so plainly that there could be no mistaking it. He knew how to express what he wanted to say in the fewest well-chosen words, but would not sacrifice meaning to the construction of high-sounding sentences.” This describes Grant’s own writing perfectly, in his memoirs as well as in his wartime orders to subordinates.

This question of “plain meaning” was crucial. There were plenty of Civil War examples of ambiguous or confusing orders that affected the outcome of a campaign or battle in negative ways. Grant’s orders, by contrast, were clear and concise. Gen. George Meade’s chief of staff wrote that “there is one striking feature of Grant’s orders; no matter how hurriedly he may write them on the field, no one ever has the slightest doubt as to their meaning, or even has to read them over a second time to understand them.” Grant wrote his orders himself instead of relying on staff officers to draft them. Col. Horace Porter, who joined Grant’s staff in 1864, was impressed by the quiet efficiency of Grant’s paperwork, which “was performed swiftly and uninterruptedly, but without any marked display of nervous energy. His thoughts flowed as freely from his mind as the ink from his pen.”

How can this description be reconciled with Grant’s recollection that, when he sat down to write the surrender terms at Appomattox, he had no idea how to start? “I only knew what was in my mind.” In these eight words lie the explanation for Grant’s ability as a writer: he only knew what was in his mind. Once unlocked by an act of will, the mind poured out the words smoothly.

Grant had another and probably related talent, which might be described as a “topographical memory.” He could remember every feature of terrain over which he traveled and find his way over it again. Equally important, he could describe the terrain in words that enabled others to understand it. Grant could also look at a map and visualize features of geography and topography he had never seen. Porter noted that any map “seemed to become photographed indelibly on his brain, and he could follow its features without referring to it again.”

In the last year of the war, Grant was general in chief of all Union armies but made his headquarters with the Army of the Potomac in Virginia. From there he issued orders to several armies disposed over fronts a thousand miles from one end to the other. In his map-oriented mind he could visualize the relationships of these armies to roads and terrain, and he knew how to move them to take advantage of the topography. He could transpose this image into words that could be understood by others—though the modern reader of his memoirs would be well advised to have a set of Civil War maps on hand to match the maps in Grant’s head.

During the last stages of his illness, unable to speak, Grant penned a note to his doctor: “A verb is anything that signifies to be; to do; to suffer; I signify all three.” It is not surprising that he would think of verbs at such a time; they are what give his writing its terse, muscular quality. As agents to translate thought into action, verbs offer a clue to the secret of Grant’s military success, which also consisted of translating thought into action. Consider these orders to Gen. William T. Sherman at two different stages of the Vicksburg Campaign:

You will proceed…to Memphis, Tennessee, taking with you one division of your present command. On your arrival at Memphis you will assume command of all the troops there…and organize them into brigades and divisions.…As soon as possible move with them down the river to the vicinity of Vicksburg, and with the cooperation of the gunboat fleet…proceed to the reduction of that place….

Later:

Start one of your divisions on the road at once with its ammunition wagons.…Great celerity should be shown in carrying out this movement. The fight might be brought on at any moment—we should have every man on the field.

In the manner of Caesar’s “Veni, vidi, vici,” these sentences bristle with verbs of action: “Proceed…assume command…organize…move…proceed to the reduction of…start…show great celerity.” Note also the small number of adjectives and the absence of adverbs except in those phrases that reinforce the importance of key verbs: move as soon as possible; start at once; the fight may start at any moment. Or take Grant’s famous reply to Gen. Simon B. Buckner’s request to negotiate terms for the surrender of Fort Donelson: “No terms except an unconditional and immediate surrender can be accepted. I propose to move immediately on your works.” Not an excess word here; the three adjectives and single adverb strengthen and clarify the message; the words produce action; they become action.

Action verbs and active voice characterize most of the Personal Memoirs. Their stylistic qualities are one of the reasons they are such a pleasure to read. Grant did lapse into the passive voice more often in the later chapters, a lapse that corresponded with his irreversible decline toward the end of his life.

The will to act, symbolized by the prominence of active verbs in most of Grant’s writing, illustrates another facet of his generalship—what Grant himself called moral courage. This was a quality different from and rarer than physical courage. Grant and many other men who became Civil War generals had demonstrated physical courage under fire in the Mexican-American War as junior officers carrying out the orders of their superiors. Moral courage involved a willingness to make decisions and take the initiative. Some officers who were physically brave shrank from responsibility, because decision risked error and initiative risked failure.

This was George B. McClellan’s defect as a commander; he was afraid to risk his army in an offensive because he might be defeated. He lacked the moral courage to act, to confront that terrible moment of truth, to decide and to risk. Grant, Robert E. Lee, Stonewall Jackson, Philip Sheridan, and other Civil War commanders had moral courage; they understood that without risking failure they could never achieve success.

Grant’s memoirs are a military autobiography. They devote only a few pages to Grant’s early years and to the years of peace between the Mexican-American War and the Civil War. And they do not cover his less-than-triumphant career after the Civil War. But perhaps that is the way it should be. Grant’s great contribution to American history was as a Civil War general. In that capacity he did more to shape the future of the United States—and the world—than anyone else except Abraham Lincoln. Both in their substance and in the circumstances of their writing, Grant’s memoirs offer answers to the big question of Civil War history: Why did the North win?