Download or read book Crucible of Command written by William C. Davis and published by Da Capo Press. This book was released on 2015-01-06 with total page 689 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A dual biography and a fresh approach to the always compelling subject of these two iconic leaders—how they fashioned a distinctly American war, and a lasting peace, that fundamentally changed our nation

Download or read book Personal Memoirs of U S Grant written by Ulysses Simpson Grant and published by New York, C. L. Webster & Company. This book was released on 1885 with total page 606 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Faced with failing health and financial ruin, the Civil War's greatest general and former president wrote his personal memoirs to secure his family's future - and won himself a unique place in American letters. Devoted almost entirely to his life as a soldier, Grant's Memoirs traces the trajectory of his extraordinary career - from West Point cadet to general-in-chief of all Union armies. For their directness and clarity, his writings on war are without rival in American literature, and his autobiography deserves a place among the very best in the genre.

Download or read book Grant Lee written by John Frederick Charles Fuller and published by . This book was released on 1957 with total page 344 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book The Generals written by Nancy S. Anderson and published by Wings. This book was released on 1994 with total page 550 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Dual biography of the two greatest generals of the Civil War, Ulysses S. Grant and Robert E. Lee.

Download or read book Lee and Grant written by Gene Smith and published by Open Road Media. This book was released on 2016-10-04 with total page 370 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A biography of the two gifted Civil War commanders from a New York Times–bestselling author: “A great story . . . History at its best” (Publishers Weekly). Their names are forever linked in the history of the Civil War, but Robert E. Lee and Ulysses S. Grant could not have been more dissimilar. Lee came from a world of Southern gentility and aristocratic privilege while Grant had coarser, more common roots in the Midwest. As a young officer trained in the classic mold, Lee graduated from West Point at the top of his class and served with distinction in the Mexican–American War. Grant’s early military career was undistinguished and marred by rumors of drunkenness. As commander of the Confederate Army of Northern Virginia, Lee’s early victories demoralized the Union Army and cemented his reputation as a brilliant tactician. Meanwhile, Grant struggled mightily to reach the top of the Union command chain. His iron will eventually helped turn the tide of the war, however, and in April 1864, President Abraham Lincoln gave Grant command of all Union forces. A year later, he accepted Lee’s surrender at the Appomattox Court House. With brilliance and deep feeling, New York Times–bestselling author Gene Smith brings the Civil War era to vivid life and tells the dramatic story of two remarkable men as they rise to glory and reckon with the bitter aftermath of the bloodiest conflict in American history. Never before have students of American history been treated to a more personal, comprehensive, and achingly human portrait of Lee and Grant.

Download or read book Lee and Grant at Appomattox written by MacKinlay Kantor and published by Sterling Publishing Company. This book was released on 2007 with total page 148 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From a Pulitzer Prize winner comes the story of an unforgettable moment in American history: the historic meeting between General Robert E. Lee and General Ulysses S. Grant that ended the Civil War. MacKinlay Kantor captures all the emotions and the details of those few days: the aristocratic Lee’s feeling of resignation; Grant’s crippling headaches; and Lee’s request--which Grant generously allowed--to permit his soldiers to keep their horses so they could plant crops for food.

Download or read book The Man Who Saved the Union written by H. W. Brands and published by Anchor. This book was released on 2013-05-28 with total page 754 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the two-time Pulitzer Prize finalist, bestselling historian, and author of Our First Civil War—a masterful biography of the Civil War general and two-term president who saved the Union twice, on the battlefield and in the White House. • “[A] splendidly written biography ... Brands does justice to one of America’s most underrated presidents.” —Dallas Morning News Ulysses Grant emerges in this masterful biography as a genius in battle and a driven president to a divided country, who remained fearlessly on the side of right. He was a beloved commander in the field who made the sacrifices necessary to win the war, even in the face of criticism. He worked valiantly to protect the rights of freed men in the South. He allowed the American Indians to shape their own fate even as the realities of Manifest Destiny meant the end of their way of life. In this sweeping and majestic narrative, bestselling author H.W. Brands now reconsiders Grant's legacy and provides an intimate portrait of a heroic man who saved the Union on the battlefield and consolidated that victory as a resolute and principled political leader. Look for H.W. Brands's other biographies: THE FIRST AMERICAN (Benjamin Franklin), ANDREW JACKSON, TRAITOR TO HIS CLASS (Franklin Roosevelt) and REAGAN.

Download or read book If it Takes All Summer written by William D. Matter and published by UNC Press Books. This book was released on 1988 with total page 484 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Analyzes the Battle of Spotsylvania, in which Grant attempted to prevent Lee from reaching the Confederate capital of Richmond

Download or read book Grant vs Lee written by Chris Mackowski and published by Savas Beatie. This book was released on 2022-04-15 with total page 337 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Engaging, entertaining, educational, and eclectic, this collection of brief essays . . . provides hope for the future of accessible Civil War history.” —A. Wilson Greene, author of A Campaign of Giants: The Battle for Petersburg With the election looming in the fall, President Abraham Lincoln needed to break the deadlock. To do so, he promoted Ulysses S. Grant—the man who’d strung together victory after victory in the Western Theater, including the capture of two entire Confederate armies. The unassuming “dust-covered man” was now in command of all the Union armies, and he came east to lead them. The unlucky soldiers of George G. Meade’s Army of the Potomac had developed a grudging respect for their Southern adversary and assumed a wait-and-see attitude: “Grant,” they reasoned, “has never met Bobby Lee yet.” By the spring of 1864, Robert E. Lee, commander of the Army of Northern Virginia, had come to embody the Confederate cause. Grant knew as much and decided to take the field with the Potomac army. He ordered his subordinates to forgo efforts to capture Richmond in favor of annihilating Lee’s command. Grant’s directive to Meade was straightforward: “Where Lee goes, there you will go also.” Lee and Grant would come to symbolize the armies they led when the spring 1864 campaign began in northern Virginia in the Wilderness on May 5. What followed was a desperate. bloody death match that ran through the long siege of Richmond and Petersburg before finally ending at Appomattox Court House eleven months later—but at what cost along the way? This book recounts some of the most famous episodes and compelling human dramas from the marquee matchup of the Civil War. These expanded and revised essays also commemorate a decade of Emerging Civil War, a “best of” collection on the Overland Campaign, the siege of Petersburg, and the Confederate surrender at Appomattox.

Download or read book How Robert E Lee Lost the Civil War written by Edward H. Bonekemper and published by Sergeant Kirkland's Press. This book was released on 1999-10 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book challenges the general view that Robert E. Lee was a military genius who staved off inevitable Confederate defeat against insurmountable odds. Instead, the author contends that Lee was responsible for the South's loss in a war it could have won. Instead, as this book demonstrates, Lee unnecessarily went for the win, squandered his irreplaceable troops, and weakened his army so badly that military defeat became inevitable. It describes how Lee's army took 80,000 casualties in Lees first fourteen months of command-while imposing 73,000 casualties on his opponents. With the Confederacy outnumbered four to one, Lee's aggressive strategy and tactics proved to be suicidal. Also described arc Lee's failure to take charge of the battlefield (such as on the second day of Gettysburg), his overly complex and ineffective battle plans (such as those at Antietam and during the Seven Days' campaign), and his vague and ambiguous orders (such as those that deprived him of Jeb Stuart's services for most of Gettysburg). Bonekemper looks beyond Lee's battles in the East and describes how Lee's Virginia-first myopia played a major role in crucial Confederate failures in the West. He itemizes Lee's refusals to provide reinforcements for Vicksburg or Tennessee in mid-1863, his causing James Longstreet to arrive at Chickamauga with only a third of his troops, his idea to move Longstreet away from Chattanooga just before Grant's troops broke through the undeemanned Confederates there, and his failure to reinforce Atlanta in the critical months before the 1864 presidential election. Bonekemper argues that Lee's ultimate failure was his prolonging of the hopeless and bloody slaughter even afterUnion victory had been ensured by a series of events: the fall of Atlanta, the re-election of Lincoln, and the fall of Petersburg and Richmond. Finally, the author explores historians' treatment of Lee, including the deification of him by failed Confederate generals attempting to resurrect their own reputations. Readers will not fred themselves feeling neutral about this stinging critique of the hero of The Lost Cause.

Download or read book Grant written by Ron Chernow and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2017-10-10 with total page 1106 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The #1 New York Times bestseller and New York Times Book Review 10 Best Books of 2017 “Eminently readable but thick with import . . . Grant hits like a Mack truck of knowledge.” —Ta-Nehisi Coates, The Atlantic Pulitzer Prize winner Ron Chernow returns with a sweeping and dramatic portrait of one of our most compelling generals and presidents, Ulysses S. Grant. Ulysses S. Grant's life has typically been misunderstood. All too often he is caricatured as a chronic loser and an inept businessman, or as the triumphant but brutal Union general of the Civil War. But these stereotypes don't come close to capturing him, as Chernow shows in his masterful biography, the first to provide a complete understanding of the general and president whose fortunes rose and fell with dizzying speed and frequency. Before the Civil War, Grant was flailing. His business ventures had ended dismally, and despite distinguished service in the Mexican War he ended up resigning from the army in disgrace amid recurring accusations of drunkenness. But in war, Grant began to realize his remarkable potential, soaring through the ranks of the Union army, prevailing at the battle of Shiloh and in the Vicksburg campaign, and ultimately defeating the legendary Confederate general Robert E. Lee. Along the way, Grant endeared himself to President Lincoln and became his most trusted general and the strategic genius of the war effort. Grant’s military fame translated into a two-term presidency, but one plagued by corruption scandals involving his closest staff members. More important, he sought freedom and justice for black Americans, working to crush the Ku Klux Klan and earning the admiration of Frederick Douglass, who called him “the vigilant, firm, impartial, and wise protector of my race.” After his presidency, he was again brought low by a dashing young swindler on Wall Street, only to resuscitate his image by working with Mark Twain to publish his memoirs, which are recognized as a masterpiece of the genre. With lucidity, breadth, and meticulousness, Chernow finds the threads that bind these disparate stories together, shedding new light on the man whom Walt Whitman described as “nothing heroic... and yet the greatest hero.” Chernow’s probing portrait of Grant's lifelong struggle with alcoholism transforms our understanding of the man at the deepest level. This is America's greatest biographer, bringing movingly to life one of our finest but most underappreciated presidents. The definitive biography, Grant is a grand synthesis of painstaking research and literary brilliance that makes sense of all sides of Grant's life, explaining how this simple Midwesterner could at once be so ordinary and so extraordinary. Named one of the best books of the year by Goodreads • Amazon • The New York Times • Newsday • BookPage • Barnes and Noble • Wall Street Journal

Download or read book The Lost Indictment of Robert E Lee written by John Reeves and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2018-07-15 with total page 261 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: History has been kind to Robert E. Lee. Woodrow Wilson believed General Lee was a “model to men who would be morally great.” Douglas Southall Freeman, who won a Pulitzer Prize for his four-volume biography of Lee, described his subject as “one of a small company of great men in whom there is no inconsistency to be explained, no enigma to be solved.” Winston Churchill called him “one of the noblest Americans who ever lived.” Until recently, there was even a stained glass window devoted to Lee's life at the National Cathedral in Washington, D.C. Immediately after the Civil War, however, many northerners believed Lee should be hanged for treason and war crimes. Americans will be surprised to learn that in June of 1865 Robert E. Lee was indicted for treason by a Norfolk, Virginia grand jury. In his instructions to the grand jury, Judge John C. Underwood described treason as “wholesale murder,” and declared that the instigators of the rebellion had “hands dripping with the blood of slaughtered innocents.” In early 1866, Lee decided against visiting friends while in Washington, D.C. for a congressional hearing, because he was conscious of being perceived as a “monster” by citizens of the nation’s capital. Yet somehow, roughly fifty years after his trip to Washington, Lee had been transformed into a venerable American hero, who was highly regarded by southerners and northerners alike. Almost a century after Appomattox, Dwight D. Eisenhower had Lee’s portrait on the wall of his White House office. The Lost Indictment of Robert E. Lee tells the story of the forgotten legal and moral case that was made against the Confederate general after the Civil War. The actual indictment went missing for 72 years. Over the past 150 years, the indictment against Lee after the war has both literally and figuratively disappeared from our national consciousness. In this book, Civil War historian John Reeves illuminates the incredible turnaround in attitudes towards the defeated general by examining the evolving case against him from 1865 to 1870 and beyond.

Download or read book Grant and Lee written by Edward H. Bonekemper, III and published by Regnery Publishing. This book was released on 2012-12-10 with total page 722 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Grant and Lee: Victorious American and Vanquished Virginian is a comprehensive, multi-theater, war-long comparison of the command skills of Ulysses S. Grant and Robert E. Lee. Written by Edward H. Bonekemper III, Grant and Lee clarifies the impact both generals had on the outcome of the Civil War—namely, the assistance that Lee provided to Grant by Lee's excessive casualties in Virginia, the consequent drain of Confederate resources from Grant's battlefronts, and Lee's refusal and delay of reinforcements to the combat areas where Grant was operating. The reader will be left astounded by the level of aggression both generals employed to secure victory for their respective causes, as Bonekemper demonstrates that Grant was a national general whose tactics were consistent with acheiving Union victory, whereas Lee's own priorities constantly undermined the Confederacy's chances of winning the war. Building on detailed accounts of both generals' major campaigns and battles, this book provides a detailed comparison of the primary military and personal traits of the two men. That analysis supports the preface discussion and the chapter-by-chapter conclusions that Grant did what the North needed to do to win the war: be aggressive, eliminate enemy armies, and do so with minimal casualties (154,000), while Lee was too offensive for the undermanned Confederacy, suffered intolerable casualties (209,000), and allowed his obsession with the Commonwealth of Virginia to obscure the broader interests of the Confederacy. In addition, readers will find interest in the 18 highly detailed and revealing battle maps, as well as in a comprehensive set of appendices that describes the casualties incurred by each army, battle by battle.

Download or read book Grant s Victory written by Bruce L. Brager and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2020-04-01 with total page 179 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Two of the great themes of the Civil War are how Lincoln found his war-winning general in Ulysses Grant and how Grant finally defeated Lee. Grant’s Victory intertwines these two threads in a grand narrative that shows how Grant made the difference in the war. At Eastern theater battlefields from Bull Run to Gettysburg, Union commanders—whom Lincoln replaced after virtually every major battle—had struggled to best Lee, either suffering embarrassing defeat or failing to follow up success. Meanwhile, in the West, Grant had been refining his art of war at places like Fort Donelson, Shiloh, Vicksburg, and Chattanooga, and in early 1864, Lincoln made him general-in-chief. Arriving in the East almost deus ex machina, and immediately recognizing what his predecessors never could, Grant pressed Lee in nearly continuous battle for the next eleven months—a series of battles and sieges that ended at Appomattox.

Download or read book U S Grant written by Waugh and published by ReadHowYouWant.com. This book was released on 2010-07-09 with total page 694 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Grant was the most famous person in America, considered by most citizens to be equal in stature to George Washington and Abraham Lincoln. Yet today his monuments are rarely visited, his military reputation is overshadowed by that of Robert E. Lee, and his presidency is permanently mired at the bottom of historical rankings. In an insightful blen...

Download or read book The Lost Cause written by Edward Alfred Pollard and published by . This book was released on 1866 with total page 780 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book American Ulysses written by Ronald C. White and published by Random House Trade Paperbacks. This book was released on 2017-06-06 with total page 866 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • From the author of A. Lincoln, a major new biography of one of America’s greatest generals—and most misunderstood presidents Winner of the William Henry Seward Award for Excellence in Civil War Biography • Finalist for the Gilder-Lehrman Military History Book Prize In his time, Ulysses S. Grant was routinely grouped with George Washington and Abraham Lincoln in the “Trinity of Great American Leaders.” But the battlefield commander–turned–commander-in-chief fell out of favor in the twentieth century. In American Ulysses, Ronald C. White argues that we need to once more revise our estimates of him in the twenty-first. Based on seven years of research with primary documents—some of them never examined by previous Grant scholars—this is destined to become the Grant biography of our time. White, a biographer exceptionally skilled at writing momentous history from the inside out, shows Grant to be a generous, curious, introspective man and leader—a willing delegator with a natural gift for managing the rampaging egos of his fellow officers. His wife, Julia Dent Grant, long marginalized in the historic record, emerges in her own right as a spirited and influential partner. Grant was not only a brilliant general but also a passionate defender of equal rights in post-Civil War America. After winning election to the White House in 1868, he used the power of the federal government to battle the Ku Klux Klan. He was the first president to state that the government’s policy toward American Indians was immoral, and the first ex-president to embark on a world tour, and he cemented his reputation for courage by racing against death to complete his Personal Memoirs. Published by Mark Twain, it is widely considered to be the greatest autobiography by an American leader, but its place in Grant’s life story has never been fully explored—until now. One of those rare books that successfully recast our impression of an iconic historical figure, American Ulysses gives us a finely honed, three-dimensional portrait of Grant the man—husband, father, leader, writer—that should set the standard by which all future biographies of him will be measured. Praise for American Ulysses “[Ronald C. White] portrays a deeply introspective man of ideals, a man of measured thought and careful action who found himself in the crosshairs of American history at its most crucial moment.”—USA Today “White delineates Grant’s virtues better than any author before. . . . By the end, readers will see how fortunate the nation was that Grant went into the world—to save the Union, to lead it and, on his deathbed, to write one of the finest memoirs in all of American letters.”—The New York Times Book Review “Ronald White has restored Ulysses S. Grant to his proper place in history with a biography whose breadth and tone suit the man perfectly. Like Grant himself, this book will have staying power.”—The Wall Street Journal “Magisterial . . . Grant’s esteem in the eyes of historians has increased significantly in the last generation. . . . [American Ulysses] is the newest heavyweight champion in this movement.”—The Boston Globe “Superb . . . illuminating, inspiring and deeply moving.”—Chicago Tribune “In this sympathetic, rigorously sourced biography, White . . . conveys the essence of Grant the man and Grant the warrior.”—Newsday