The Man Who Saved the Union - Ulysses Grant in War and Peace

Zusatztext 50257010 Informationen zum Autor H. W. Brands Klappentext 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. Excerpted from the Hardcover Edition 1 . The journey began generations before he was born. His ancestor Mathew Grant crossed the Atlantic from England with the Puritans in the 1630s, and subsequent Grants migrated progressively west: to Connecticut in the seventeenth century, Pennsylvania in the eighteenth, Ohio in the nineteenth. Jesse Grant, of the sixth generation of American Grants, for a time lived in Deerfield, Ohio, with a family named Brown, of whom a son, John, would attempt to start a slave revolt at Harpers Ferry, Virginia, in 1859. Jesse Grant never got much formal education and always felt the lack; he vowed that his sons would not suffer similarly. Jesse married Hannah Simpson in 1821; ten months later, on April 27, 1822, Hannah bore a son they named Hiram Ulysses on the partial inspiration of an aunt with a penchant for the classics. The boy attended private schools, since public education hadn’t reached Georgetown, in southwestern Ohio, where he grew up. At fourteen he was sent across the Ohio River to Maysville, Kentucky, to boarding school, but the experience didn’t take and he returned to Georgetown. At sixteen he enrolled in an academy in Ripley, on the Ohio bank of the Ohio River, with no greater success. He later acknowledged that the failure was his own fault. “I was not studious in habit,” he said, “and probably did not make progress enough to compensate for the outlay for board and tuition.” Yet he was no rebel. “He was always a steady, serious sort of boy, who took everything in earnest,” his mother recalled. “Even when he played he made a business of it.” For this reason his parents paid attention when he registered his preferences and dislikes. Jesse owned and operated a tannery, in which Ulys, as family and friends called the boy, was expected to work. But he detested the place and what went on there. “He would rather do anything else under the sun than work in the tannery,” Jesse recounted. Jesse remembered informing Ulys a few times that he would have to grind bark (for the tannic acid it contained). “He would get right up without saying a word and start straight for the village, and get a load to haul, or passengers to carry, or something another to do, and hire a boy to come back and grind the bark.” Other aspects of tanning were equally distasteful. In the “beam room” hides were defleshed by being drawn forcefully over beams; Ulys entered only under paternal duress and told his father that as soon as he could support himself he would never go near the smelly place again. Jesse excused him. “I don’t want you to work at it now if you don’t like it and mean to stick to it,” Jesse recalled saying. So he let the boy work outdoors. Ulys loved horses and early displayed a gift for riding and managing them. “He had the habit of riding our horses to water, standing up on their bare backs,” Jesse remembered. “He began this practice at about five years old. At eight or nine he would ride them at the top of their speed, he standing upon one foot and balan...

Product details

• Authors: H W Brands, H. W. Brands
• Publisher: Anchor Books USA
• Languages: English
• Product format: Paperback / Softback
• Released: 28.05.2013
• EAN: 9780307475152
• ISBN: 978-0-307-47515-2
• No. of pages: 752
• Dimensions: 155 mm x 234 mm x 38 mm
• Subject: Non-fiction book > History > Miscellaneous