It All Began. . .

It all began with a scrawled note on a term paper. “You can write history,” Professor Woodward wrote. It was all I needed to get started. As a teacher who has graded a good many papers, I can imagine the comment was his quick way of not writing a long critique. But, at the time, I took the comment at face value. And haven’t forgotten it. My later close friendship with Vann Woodward argues that I was correct to think he meant it. Over time I have come to think the verb in the sentence, “write,” was the key word rather than the noun “history.” A historian is what I became, but what has obsessed me has been the act of writing.

In 1961, I left a job in a New York bank, aiming to be a teacher. In graduate school, that goal remained as I began to think about teaching at the college level. I was also mindful of what was going on in America in those days, especially the Civil Rights Movement. I began to think I might be able to understand the 1960s if I got a hold on what happened in the 1860s. It was in a seminar in Reconstruction history that I encountered C. Vann Woodward and his note on my term paper.

My choice for a dissertation was a study of the Freedmen’s Bureau, focusing on its head, O. O. Howard. A biography of Howard was announced by another historian, and Woodward urged me to find a different topic. Stubbornly, I didn’t take his advice. I ended up with a monograph on the Bureau with only a truncated biography of Howard. Yankee Stepfather has had its uses as one of the many books that came along in those Civil Rights–era days that corrected history’s view of the former slaves dealing with emancipation. Thanks to Sara Jackson at the National Archives, I quoted hand-written contracts from the spring of 1865 that were signed by planters and signed with an X by former slaves, calling for work “in the usual way.” (I did not cover Howard’s fascinating and ill-fated later career in the West.)

When I announced next that I wanted to write a biography of Grant, Woodward pronounced it a life’s work, but I wasn’t deterred. I had seen the picture of the general standing outside his headquarters in 1865 at City Point. A nice-looking guy, too nice for the nasty line of work he was in: war. He reminded me of the nice-looking men I was teaching who were facing the possibility of being drafted into the Vietnam War. I spent hours in my office discussing their reluctance to be drafted into a war they didn’t approve of. Curious about men and war, I began work on Grant.

The work wasn’t far along when a move from New Haven altered how I was to write. I was no longer under the constraints of a university. The pressure to write was now solely on my shoulders. It was a blow to leave Woodward at Yale, but, as I came to realize, leaving was an essential element in my development as a writer. For better or worse, I was on my own.

For three years, I was the dean of the faculty at Mount Holyoke College, which does not suggest that I was working full time on Grant. But I hadn’t lost my way entirely. When the college renovated a house for my family and me, I insisted on a study in the attic; and, religiously, I spent a little time every morning at the writing table. When I escaped from administration and took cover in the history department, I went on with my research, writing as I went. For all of the years I was working on Grant, I am sure that people were saying either that I was a war lover writing about the great Civil War general or that I would never finish.

In the spring of 1978, I thought I was finished. The manuscript went off to...