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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 23 October 2020
1 Ulysses S. Grant, Memoirs and Selected Letters, ed. Mary Drake McFeely and William S. McFeely (New York: Lib. of Amer., 1990) 5, 1111. All subsequent borrowings from Grant's Memoirs and his notes to his doctor are from this edition and are documented parenthetically in the text. For a discussion of Grant's capacity for “intense concentration” and a reading of the Memoirs as “another one of [the author's] victories,” see Edmund Wilson, Patriotic Gore (1962; New York: Norton, 1994) 134, 139.
2 Grant, Chronology, Memoirs 1157–61. This chronology condenses that found in William S. McFeely's Grant: A Biography (New York: Norton, 1982). For a more recent account of Clemens's involvement, see Craig E. Miller, “Give the Book to Clemens,” American History Apr. 1999: 41–59.
3 Adam Badeau, Grant in Peace (Hartford, 1887) 460–61.
4 Henry Adams, The Education of Henry Adams, ed. Jean Gooder (London: Penguin, 1995) 441.
5 John Keegan, The Mask of Command (New York: Penguin, 1988) 234.
6 While Wilson alludes to Grant's admiration for Taylor and discusses at length the Appomattox episode, he does not comment on this direct echo (142–43, 150–51).
7 Bruce Catton, Grant Takes Command (Boston: Little, 1969)389–90.
8 To many, Grant as a military commander seemed, quite simply, a “butcher.” In the words of one Southerner, he was “bullheaded. […] He don't care a snap if they fall like the leaves fall. He fights to win. […] He is not distracted by a thousand side issues. He does not see them. He is narrow and sure, sees only in a straight line.” Recorded by Mary Chestnut in her diary; see Mary Chestnut's Civil War, ed. C. Vann Woodward (New Haven: Yale UP, 1981) 520.
9 When Grant resigned from the army in California in 1854, it was Buckner who lent him the money to get back home to Saint Louis. Grant does not allude to this loan in the Memoirs. Buckner made another loan to Grant in the 1880s and served as a pallbearer at his funeral.
10 Shelby Foote, The Civil War: A Narrative, 3 vols. (1958; New York: Random, 1986) 1: 212–13.
11 Casualty figures obtained from Foote 1:351.
12 Herman Melville, “The Fall of Richmond,” Battle-Pieces and Aspects of the War (1866; New York: Da Capo, 1995) 135.
13 Thomas B. Buell, The Warrior Generals: Combat Leadership in the Civil War (New York: Crown, 1997) 249; Don E. Fehrenbacher and Virginia Fehrenbacher, eds., Recollected Words of Abraham Lincoln (Stanford: Stanford UP, 1996) 11.
14 Catton suggests that although Grant “began by restating the old ‘unconditional surrender’ theme,” he “did not really mean it.” See This Hallowed Ground: The Story of the Union Side of the Civil War (Garden City: Doubleday, 1956) 263–64. Elsewhere Catton proposes that Grant ultimately “persuaded himself” that the paroling of the prisoners was an advantageous condition. See Never Call Retreat (Garden City: Doubleday, 1956), vol. 3 of The Centennial History of the Civil War, 205. There is serious disagreement among historians about the significance of Grant's veto of his subordinates' vote at the “council of war.” J.F.C. Fuller and William C. Davis claim that it was Grant who favored negotiation, while his council insisted on Pemberton's unconditional surrender. See Fuller, The Generalship of Ulysses S. Grant, Civil War Centennial Ser. (1929; Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1958) 155, and Davis, Stand in the Day of Battle (Garden City: Doubleday, 1983), vol. 2 of The Imperiled Union: 1861–1865, 189–90. John Keegan and Shelby Foote, on the other hand, claim that it was the council that favored negotiation and Grant who insisted on unconditional surrender. See Keegan 199 and Foote 2: 610–11. The most complete version of events can be found in Bruce Catton, Grant Moves South (1960; Boston: Little, 1988).
15 Grant's predictions about low Confederate morale proved partially correct. Hundreds of Pemberton's troops refused even to sign their paroles because they preferred spending the rest of the war in prison to spending it on the battlefield. “Many deserted,” Grant concludes, “and fewer of them were ever returned to the ranks to fight again than would have been the case had the surrender been unconditional and the prisoners sent to the James River to be paroled” (383). Some of the paroled soldiers did make their way to the battles of Chattanooga, where they fought “armed with cast-off weapons.” See Peter Cozzens, The Shipwreck of Their Hopes (Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1994) 25.
16 Foote2: 610–11.
17 “Letter to Erastus Corning and Others,” 12 June 1863, The Portable Abraham Lincoln, ed. Andrew Delbanco (New York: Penguin, 1993) 280. More generally, Edmund Wilson reads Grant's Memoirs as “part of that vision of the Civil War that Lincoln imposed on the nation” (159).
18 Melville 136. George B. McClellan's instructions to his troops in 1861 provide an instructive comparison with Grant's vision of complete conquest. “Bear in mind that you are in the country of friends, not of enemies: that you are here to protect, not to destroy.” McClellan continued: “Remember that I have pledged my word to the people of Western Virginia, that their rights in person and property shall be respected. I ask every one of you to make good this promise in its broadest sense. We come here to save, not to upturn. […] Show to the world that you differ from our enemies in the points of honor, honesty and respect for private opinion, and that we inaugurate no reign of terror where we go.” See The Civil War Papers of George B. McClellan, ed. Stephen W. Sears (New York: Da Capo, 1992) 35–36.
19 Walt Whitman, “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd,” Leaves of Grass, ed. Sculley Bradley and Harold W. Blodgett (New York: Norton, 1973) 328–29.
20 Fehrenbacher and Fehrenbacher 315.
21 Buell 247.
22 Badeau 450–51.