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  • History Over Memory:New Perspectives on Civil War Leadership
  • Richard B. McCaslin (bio)
Joan Waugh . U. S. Grant: American Hero, American Myth. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009. x + 373 pp. Illustrations, maps, notes, and index. $32.50.
Chester G. Hearn . Lincoln, the Cabinet, and the Generals. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2010. xiv + 357 pp. Notes, bibliography, and index. $39.95.

It has been more than a century and a half since the Civil War began, and the flood of published scholarship on the subject shows no sign of abating. Instead, this anniversary of that violently transformative event seems to have spurred historians to renew their efforts at defining its every aspect. The emergence of scholarly discussions focused on myth and memory have added more opportunities for intriguing perspectives, with the result being books such as these two works, from an academic scholar and a popular historian respectively. Both of these worthwhile works are efforts to put aside popular myths and present a more accurate image of prominent Federal leaders: Ulysses S. Grant by the first author and Abraham Lincoln by the second. Lincoln has endured as a popular symbol of the best motives for fighting to preserve the Union, while Grant has arguably been demonized as the North and South have settled upon a historic vision of the war that allows them to coexist peacefully, if not always entirely without conflict. In the process of creating these images, the real men behind the public facades may have been lost, and with them a more substantive understanding of the bloody war that forever transformed this nation. Both authors contribute to the cause of advancing history—to a proper search for truth through research—over the competing claims of memory, which are too often grounded in the desires of successive generations to create narratives that offer affirmation in place of introspection.

Many historians apparently find great comfort in settling into comfortable scholarly niches, and they can be remarkably intolerant of writers who boldly step outside their literary boxes. Unless, of course, such brazen pioneers produce a book that is so well written, and has such persuasive arguments, [End Page 72] that any grumbles about pedigree and precedence seem petty. Joan Waugh defied prospective critics by doing just that. She established her credentials in Civil War memory in a coauthored book on that subject, then delivered the Frank L. Klements lectures on Ulysses S. Grant's memoirs, and then finally coedited an anthology that focused, in part, on the cultural legacy of the Civil War. Having done all that and more, she deftly blended both history and its sometimes underappreciated stepchild, biography, in this work to explain the waxing and waning of Grant in popular memory.

Waugh intersperses myth throughout her well-researched narrative of Grant's life, using the stories told about him to provide an effective analytical framework. Grant often played roles that would have served as fine models for a later novelist seeking to create the ultimate antihero. He proved quietly efficient in the Mexican War, but the politics of the peacetime army and the vagaries of the antebellum economy left him a clerk in his father's store on the eve of the Civil War. Grant returned to the army when the Civil War began and doggedly overwhelmed the Confederate defenders of Forts Henry and Donelson, having already maneuvered his gray-clad opponents out of Kentucky; but this did not get him invited to a greater command in the East. While it can be argued that getting surprised at Shiloh led to outraged criticism of him and almost led to his political exile, Grant did win that battle, and he survived his critics. In less than two years, he forced the surrender of another enemy army at Vicksburg, broke the siege of Chattanooga, and traveled east to assume overall command of the Federal armies. Once again, in a story that is too good not to be true, Grant was not recognized initially at the Willard Hotel, where the clerk assigned him to a room better befitting one of the host of ordinary officers passing through the national capital. Grant subsequently won the showdown with...

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