Book Notes

BOOK NOTES The Papers of Ulysses S. Grant: Volume I, 1837-1861. Edited by John Y. Simon. (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1967. Pp. xxxix, 459. $15.00.) In his graceful preface to the Grant Papers, Bruce Carton remarks: "Most men who saw U. S. Grant during the Civil War felt that there was something mysterious about him. He looked so much like a completely ordinary man, but what he did was so definitely out of the ordinary, that it seemed as if he must have profound depths that were never visible from the surface." This volume will do much to dissipate the "something mysterious" that has surrounded the early years of Grant and has pervaded much of the writing about him. In popular usage, and among professional historians who should know better, we find Grant emerging from the frontier village of Galena and without apparent training or aptitude, becoming the military genius of his day. Fortunately, this romanticized version of Grant's life has been revised considerably and the process will be aided greatly by the publication of his papers under the auspices of the Ulysses S. Grant Association and the Southern Illinois University Press. Grant's life prior to the Civil War, the years covered by this volume, was marked by failure but he also knew a moment of success. And this success was connected with war, that with Mexico. His record as a junior officer, mainly confined to commissary duties, was not dashing but was steady and showed the celerity and grasp of events that characterized the general. In September, 1846, he wrote to Julia Dent, his fiancee, that after only two battles in five months he was thoroughly tired of the war. As for his part: "If we have to fight I would like to do it all at once and then make friends." These words could aptly describe his relations with the Confederacy fifteen years later. In that same year, 1846, one of Grant's superiors wrote of him with unusual prescience. "I have found in Lieutenant Grant a most remarkable and valuable young officer. I anticipate for him a brilliant future, if he should have an opportunity to display his powers when they mature." And it requires little imagination to see hints of the Vicksburg maneuver in what Grant wrote about the attack on Mexico City in the fall of 1847. "If Santa Anna does not surrender the city, or peace be negotiated, much more hard fighting may be expected, as I foresee, before the city is captured. My observations convince me that we have other strong works to reduce before we can enter the citv." Grant had decided, from scouting reports and study of the maps available, that the army could have passed the city on the north and attacked its weakest defenses. "It seems to me Üiat the northwest side of the city could 378 have been approached widiout attacking a single fort or redoubt, we would have been on solid ground instead of floundering through morass and ditches, and fighting our way over elevated roads, flanked by water where it is generally impossible to deploy forces." He modestly concluded, however, diat die "opinion of a lieutenant, where it differs from that of his commanding general, must be founded on ignorance of die situation," and his criticisms were to be judged accordingly. These letters and otiiers give a full description of die Mexican War as seen by Grant; and description not limited to military movements but perceptive observations of die land and people and some radier acid comments on Polk's political direction. Pervading all is his passionate love for Julia Dent, a touching, poignant longing for his sweedieart. These could be the letters of any soldier far from home but tiiey are particularly affecting when die reader recalls diat tiiey are from die pen of die man later termed iron fibered, unflinching, unemotional. Taken collectively, die papers printed here (some 80 per cent hitiierto unpublished) comprise die first series of the Grant Papers. The next will be Civil War and Reconstruction, followed by the Presidential years and post Presidential years. The present volume is an excellent beginning for die proposed fifteen...