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The Ulysses S. Grant Association |
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The Ulysses S. Grant Association |
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Anyone who has been required, in the line of duty, to spend many hours examining the letters, dispatches, orders and reports in those bulky and usually dusty volumes, The Official Records of the War of the Rebellion, is likely sooner or later to notice an unexpected phenomenon: he gets so that he can generally identify the material that was written by General Ulysses S. Grant without waiting to see the signature. This of course does not apply to some of the routine items that were whopped together for the general by a diligent staff officer, but for messages and dispatches written by Grant himself the rule holds up pretty consistently. Once the man has settled into his stride - say after the Fort Donelson campaign - his style becomes readily identifiable. All of a sudden here is a man speaking and you can recognize his voice.
This is not true of very many of the long-gone contributors to the Official Records. Sometimes you can recognize William Tecumseh Sherman, who takes off at times with an unmistakable soaring intensity. Henry Wager Halleck now and then betrays himself with his air of a prim and rather petulant clerk trying to rid his desk of the last arrears of correspondence. There are a very few others. Mostly, however, the stuff is all of a piece.
But Grant's stands out. Quite simply, it had its own style. It was, to begin with, always very clear. The man knew exactly what he wanted to say and knew exactly how to say it so that the man at the other end of the line would get it without any chance of misunderstanding. It was not a polished style at all, and now and then it contained locutions which would pain a teacher of rhetoric. The man was just plain careless about spelling, and at times he would spell the same word two or three different ways in one letter. But the style was there, and it was a style many a professional writing man might like to have.
There was never anything flabby about it. What Grant wrote never rambled, made the same point twice, or stabbed around in a blind hunt for an obscure target. He had an extremely clear mind, and his prose style reflected it. He had a knack for coining an occasional phrase or sentence that stands alone and lives on; he had, as well, a quiet sense of humor that will be remembered by anyone who has read his Memoirs.
All of this is by way of preface (which Grant himself would have compressed into two sentences) to the remark that the collected writings of U. S. Grant are at last being put together so that everybody can get at them.
About one year ago representatives of the Civil War Commissions of New York, Illinois and Ohio considered the matter and set up a not-for-profit corporation, the Ulysses S. Grant Association, which is now engaged in collecting and arranging all of the significant things written by this gifted American soldier. Under the direction of the editor of this project, Dr. John Y. Simon of the Department of History of Ohio State University, what Grant put in writing is being brought together and prepared for publication. Especial stress is being laid on Grant's private letters. Some of these have been published before--too often, with prissy editorial corrections by men who felt that the general's works really ought to be dressed up a bit before they were presented to the public--but thus far there has been no place the student or the general reader could go to get a look at all of Grant's writings. In the end, a really definitive edition of the writings of U. S. Grant will be presented in book form as an appropriate tribute in the centennial period of this soldier's greatest endeavors.
It is not, of course, just because Grant wrote well that his documents need preservation. This soldier was actually one of the outstanding men in American history: a plain, unvarnished, homespun man who spoke perfectly for his times and who somehow managed to do an enormous job for his country during that country's most crucial years.This is a venture in both history and literature. Grant is worth knowing, and he is also worth reading. What he had to say finally makes, as Mark Twain put it, "something which will bring to American ears, as long as America shall last, the roll of his vanished drums and the tread of his marching hosts." In preparing and presenting the body of his writings for the benefit of the American public, the Ulysses S. Grant Association is honoring both the general and itself.
Bruce Catton
To the Ulysses S. Grant Chronology