Personal Memoirs

Ulysses S. Grant (1822–1885) was born Hiram Ulysses Grant in Point Pleasant, Ohio, and worked on the family farm until his appointment in 1839 to the U.S. Military Academy at West Point. There, he was erroneously registered as “U. S. Grant”—a change that he would adopt for the rest of his life. He served in the Mexican War (1846­–1848) under Generals Zachary Taylor and Winfield Scott. After the outbreak of the Civil War, Grant was appointed colonel of a militia regiment, and moved up through the ranks of the army, eventually becoming lieutenant general with command of all the armies of the United States and leading the Union army to victory in 1865. From 1869–1877 he served as the eighteenth president of the United States. Encouraged by his friend Mark Twain, Grant began preparing his memoirs in 1884. The Personal Memoirs of U. S. Grant were completed just a few days before his death on July 23, 1885.

James M. McPherson, the George Henry David Professor Emeritus of United States History at Princeton University, is the author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning Battle Cry of Freedom, as well as the award-winning books The Struggle for Equality, For Cause and Comrades: Why Men Fought in the Civil War, and Tried for War: Abraham Lincoln as Commander in Chief, among others. In 2007, he was the first recipient of the Pritzker Military Library Literature Award for lifetime achievement in military history, and in 2009, he was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.