Crucible of Command: Ulysses S. Grant and Robert E. Lee—The War They Fought, the Peace They Forged by William C. Davis (review)

What do we really know about Ulysses S. Grant and Robert E. Lee? What is left after the legends are left out? William C. Davis, a prolific author, tackles these questions in a dual biography that sticks “as much as possible to . . . the directly contemporary writings of the men themselves” and of eyewitnesses (xi–xii). Davis limits his use of later writings, even those of Grant and Lee. When Lee was gathering army records after the war for the memoir he never wrote, he trusted documents more than memory. So does Davis.

Confining evidence to contemporaneous documents sets an ideal standard but one too restrictive when sources are scarce. It would, for example, rule out most of our sources for Abraham Lincoln’s early years, and it leaves few for Lee’s. The problem, Davis allows, is that young Robert “left no trace” of his eleventh through seventeenth years, spent all-but-invisible years caring for his ailing mother, and seemed a “cipher” at West Point, leaving behind only his stellar class standing and a few academy files to mark his passage (25, 500n46). Applied to Lee’s youth, Davis’s strict standard leaves him relying largely on wills, local newspapers, and letters from Lee’s mother. But when ideal evidence is in short supply, Davis admits substantiation that is less than ideal, such as the much later autobiography of William Hallowell, a teacher who made a strong impression on Lee. When Hallowell proves inaccurate on one point, Davis excuses “a forgivable lapse of memory after almost sixty years” (504n82). Relaxing the standards for Grant’s youth as well as Lee’s, Davis draws on Grant’s Personal Memoirs—though written a half-century later—as the “most likely reliable source” for stories his father told him (505n99).

When it comes to the Civil War, however, an oversupply of sources means Davis can afford strict standards indeed. So he banishes from his bibliography whole battalions of recollections beloved of Civil War buffs and from his text many stock stories found in those recollections. In Davis’s pages we hear nothing, for example, of Grant whittling for hours to calm his nerves while the Battle of the Wilderness raged and roared to his front.

Though Davis trusts Grant’s Memoirs for the boyhood years, he discounts them as too self-serving for the war years. In those 1885 Memoirs, for example, Grant declared that after the April 1862 bloodbath at Shiloh, he first realized that nothing but total conquest of the Confederacy could save the Union. Writing with hindsight two decades after the fact, Grant was pretending to foresight in 1862, a pretense punctured by Davis. Instead of the Memoirs, Davis quotes Grant’s prediction, made when the Shiloh graves still lay fresh by the Peach Orchard, that he would need only “one more fight, and then easy sailing to the close of the war” (208). Grant’s shortsighted boast was off by many hard fights and three long years; no wonder he retouched the past in his Memoirs, and no wonder Davis will not let him get away with it.

Suspect stories that never make it into Davis’s text often turn up in the endnotes, where he shreds them and scolds their purveyors. Those notes—nearly a hundred pages of them—offer a running commentary on evidence, a hornbook for historians, marred only by their omission from the index, making them less accessible. In notes overflowing with historical sleuthing, Davis uncovers and untangles false memories, conflated stories, campus rumors, and hearsay on hearsay. He has great fun, and the reader will too. Davis treats no predecessor as sacred, not even Douglas Southall Freeman, whose four volumes loom large over any study of Lee. Freeman’s evidentiary misdeeds, Davis charges, include altering a...