ULYSSES S. GRANT [Hiram Ulysses Grant was born at Point Pleasant, in southern Ohio, April 27, 1822. His father, Jesse R. Grant, was a young tanner of good family, who soon afterward set up in business for himself in Georgetown, Ohio. Grant spent the first seventeen years of his life in and about Georgetown. He was appointed to West Point in 1839, and was entered by mistake as Ulysses S. Grant. He graduated at the middle of his class in 1843. He passed through the Mexican war, serving gallantly, being twice breveted for distinguished action. He served six years at northern posts, resigning, in 1854, from Humboldt Bay, Cal. He reëntered service as colonel of the Twenty-first Illinois Volunteers, in 1861, and in four years rose to the sole command of the armies of the United States. He was elected President in 1868, and served two terms. He passed round the world in 1877-79, receiving the greatest honors ever shown to an American. He allowed his name to stand for nomination the third time, and was defeated in the Convention of 1880. He moved to New York, entered business, and was dragged down to ruin by the failure of the firm with which he was connected. Finding himself old, poor, and attacked by incurable cancer in the throat, he set himself to work to write a book which should tell the story of his life and shield his wife from want. He died before the book, his Personal Memoirs, was entirely finished, on July 23, 1885.] It was reserved for Ulysses Grant in the last year of his life to amaze his friends by writing a book. Every one knew of his reticence, no one had thought of him as writer. He had never considered himself in any sense a literary man, but had held in high admiration men like Halleck and Scott, who had the power to express themselves in the elevated style which seemed to him good literature. Until dire necessity forced him to the task, he had never given a thought to the recording of his great deeds. Having made history, he left to others the task of writing it. And yet he had already written more than most literary men. In that long row of volumes, fat and portly, called The Official War Records, his mind, along certain lines of thought, had found the fullest expression. Literally hundreds of thousands of words written by his own hand are there preserved. No one can study the enormous bulk of these despatches, letters, and orders without coming to a high admiration of the marvellous command which General Grant possessed over details of widely separated plans and campaigns. Nothing confused or hurried him. In fact, he spoke best as he thought best, when pushed hardest. One cannot fail to be impressed, also, by the nobility and lack of self-consciousness in all that he wrote. In this immense output, it is safe to say there is not one line discreditable to him. After the war closed, his official career as President again demanded from him much writing of a certain sort. It could not be said, therefore, that he was without practice in the use of the pen. But in all this writing the idea of form was absent. He was occupied with the plain statement of fact, or of his opinions. Of the narrative form he had made little use, except in letters during the Mexican war. When he set himself to write his memoirs, he began where he had laid down the pen after the war. He confined himself to the He told again the simple and forthright statement of the facts. story of his campaigns. His first paper was upon the disputed battle of Shiloh, concerning which he had never before made a complete report. He passed from this to a succinct and masterly statement of the siege of Vicksburg; and, having prepared himself for pure narrative, turned back to the story of his boyhood, his life in Mexico, and on the coast. In this order the great drama of his life unfolded itself naturally and easily under his pen. The peculiarity of his mind was such that no phrase for effect, no extraneous adornment, was possible to him. He was, as a friend well said, "almost tediously truthful." It was his primary intention to express himself clearly and with as few words as possible. The workings of his mind were always direct and simple. Whatever the complications going on around him, no matter how acrid the disputes and controversies of subordinates, in the midst of the confusing clash of opinions, charges, and counter-charges, Grant himself remained perfectly direct, calm, and single-minded. His mind digested every fact within reach, and cleared itself before he came to speech. He never used words to cover up his thought, seldom to aid his thought, but only to express his thought. The circumstances under which the larger part of his story was written show clearly his will power and his manner of composition. For months he was unable to eat solid food, water felt like hot lead passing down his throat, and he was unable to sleep without anodynes. A malignant ulcer, incurable and insatiate, was eating its way into his throat at the base of the tongue. Speech became difficult, and at last impossible. During the time that he was still able to speak, he dictated much of the story. Wasted to pitiful thinness, and suffering ceaselessly, he was obliged to sit day and night in a low chair with his feet outthrust toward the fire. His mind was abnormally active, filled with the ceaseless revolving panorama of his epic deeds. At times he was forced to the use of morphia to cut off the intolerable movement of his thought. The sleeplessness which was a natural accompaniment of his disease was added to by the task which he had set himself to complete, but he did not allow himself to cut his work short on that account. Yet no trace of his suffering is to be found in the book. He dictated slowly, but almost without hesitation, and his thought grouped itself naturally into paragraphs, and seemed to be almost perfectly arranged in word and phrase, ready to be drawn off like the precipitation of a chemical in a jar. In all this, he was precisely conforming to his life-long habit, which had been to speak only when he had something to say and had deliberated how to say it. As he grew weaker, the amount of his dictation slowly decreased, and at the last ceased altogether. His work was done. The book surprised the world by its dignity, clarity, and simplicity of style. It displayed no attempt to be humorous, and yet became so, with rare effect, at times. Its author did not attempt to be picturesque, nor to magnify his importance on the battle-field. He was dispassionate. If he criticised his fellows, or his subordinates, he did so without anger and without envy. He rewrote many parts of his story in order that he should not do an injustice. He had no hatred of his enemies when he was commander in the field, and he had none when he wrote the story of his life. Grant always had very distinct limitations as a writer. He was a bad speller, and occasionally he lost himself in loose grammatical construction. He was at his worst whenever he attempted congratulatory orders to his troops, and at his best when detailing the movements of an army. There was something inexorable in the swift march of his words at such times. His friends said: "The book sounds like the general." His speech had always been singularly plain; even as a boy, he used straightforward AngloSaxon words, without slang, without profanity, and almost without dialectic peculiarities. Throughout his life he retained this purity and simplicity of diction, and in his memoirs these qualities are found raised to their highest power at a time when to express his thought in any form was an agony requiring the greatest effort to overcome. These "personal memoirs " form a great book. It is not all the work of General Grant's hand, but the best of it is his, and the temper and tone of it are almost wholly his. The first volume is entirely his own, and is the best, although it is not exactly in the order in which it was written. It is a great book; but after all it fails, as any such book must, to express the life of its author. It expresses rather his attitude toward life. His natural reserve and his habit of understatement would not allow him to tell the complete story of his defeats, nor permit him to record his triumphs. Naturally, the black shadows of the past are left out, as well as the blazing high lights. No man can attain eminence such as his, without suffering from the bitter enmity and savage criticism of those who fancy themselves set aside or superseded. The book is like him dispassionate, even-tempered, expressing thought, but never emotion. It is a great book, but it is not in any sense the inner story of its author's life. It is merely the obvious, almost the prosaic side of the life of one of the three preeminent men in American history. The time has not yet come when the story of his struggles and his triumphs can be fully told-probably it will never be told. HAMLIN GARLAND WOLVES AND POLITICIANS WHEN Our party left Corpus Christi it was quite large, including the cavalry escort, Paymaster, Major Dix, his clerk, and the officers who, like myself, were simply on leave; but all the officers on leave, except Lieutenant Benjamin — afterwards killed in the valley of Mexico - Lieutenant, now General, Augur, and myself, concluded to spend their allotted time at San Antonio and return from there. We were all to be back at Corpus Christi by the end of the month. The paymaster was detained in Austin so long that, if we had waited for him, we would have exceeded our leave. We concluded, therefore, to start back at once with the animals we had, and having to rely principally on grass for their food, it was a good six days' journey. We had to sleep on the prairie every night, except at Goliad, and possibly one night on the Colorado, without shelter and with only such food as we carried with us, and prepared ourselves. The journey was hazardous on account of Indians, and there were white men in Texas whom I would not have cared to meet in a secluded place. Lieutenant Augur was taken seriously sick before we reached Goliad and at a distance from any habitation. To add to the complication, his horse-a mustang that had probably been captured from the band of wild horses before alluded to, and of undoubted longevity at his capture gave out. It was absolutely necessary to get forward to Goliad to find a shelter for our sick companion. By dint of patience and exceedingly slow movements, Goliad was at last reached, and a shelter and bed secured for our patient. We remained over a day, hoping that Augur might recover sufficiently to resume his travels. He did not, however, and knowing that Major Dix would be along in a few days with his wagon-train, now empty, and escort, we arranged with our Louisiana friend to take the best of care of the sick lieutenant until thus relieved, and went on. I had never been a sportsman in my life; had scarcely ever gone in search of game, and rarely seen any when looking for it. On this trip there was no minute of time while travelling between San Patricio and the settlements on the San Antonio River, from |