ONE MORE SUMMER, ONE MORE LINE.
Genl U. S. Grant famously described his 1864 Overland Campaign with a line, "I propose to fight it out on this line if it takes all summer." That campaign took more than the summer, but ended the war, at a lower human toll than that levied by his predecessors in the east. Twenty years later, the now past-President Grant lent his name to a Ponzi scheme (as events transpired) set up by Gilded Age hustlers Ferdinand Ward and James D. Fish. The Ponzi scheme unraveled, and Mr Grant contracted a cancer.
To provide his survivors with an income, he, in partnership with Mark Twain, contracted to write his memoirs. Grant's Final Victory: Ulysses S. Grant's Heroic Last Year, is the account of that writing. Book Review No. 11 will note that it is a lot more. Samuel Clemens, for instance, deserted to Nevada from a Missouri Rebel unit that was being pursued by the 21st Illinois Regt, then under the command of Col Grant. President Grant expressed regret about the conquest of the Southwest from Mexico, and anticipated the potential of the U.S. as a world military and commercial power. The reader will also learn of a Presidential appointment of a three-year-old grandson to West Point (yes, there was a Genl Ulysses Grant in service in both World Wars) and of other contemporary military histories of the Civil War that might make for instructive reading.
(Cross-posted to Cold Spring Shops.)