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facing a formidable enemy. After enormous losses and having been fought to a standstill, Grant moved away from the Wilderness engagement, but in a direction not normally experienced by Union troops under previous generals: Rather than limping back to Washington, D.C., he headed south.

After a series of bloody campaigns ending with the siege and collapse of Confederate defenses near Richmond, the Union Army surrounded and cornered the remnants of Lee's fleeing army at Appomattox, where Lee surrendered. This surrender was at the cost of more Union casualties under Grant's generalship than there were soldiers in the entire Confederate Army. Grant knew what the costs of victory were and accepted the responsibility, even in the face of being called a "butcher" by the Northern press.

It was in victory where Grant displayed his finest traits as a leader. President Lincoln's guidance to Grant as the war was ending was to "let em up easy." Lincoln knew, and Grant agreed, that the key to stanching our nation's four-year bloodletting was to allow southerners to quickly return to the Union with full citizenship. Grant set the example with his generous surrender terms to Lee and the gallant Confederate army. Grant treated the defeated south with gentility and respect and probably avoided a protracted guerrilla war that would probably have extended the conflict indefinitely.

Years later after two not-very-distinguished terms as President, knowing that he was dying, Grant fought his last battle with time and illness. Having lost his considerable wealth in a fraudulent investment scheme and facing financial ruin, Grant wrote his wartime memoirs. With the backing of his publisher, Samuel Clemens, Grant wrote one of the bestselling books ever to have been published in the United States, "The Personal Memoirs of U.S. Grant."

Grant's style is best represented in one touchingly modest passage in the last paragraphs of this remarkable work:

"The universally kind feeling expressed for me at a time when it is supposed that each day would prove my last, seemed to me the beginning of the answer to Let us have peace.'"

He concludes his work by expressing his own view of his leading role in the conflict and hopes for healing:

"[T]he war between the States was a very bloody and very costly war. One side or the other had to yield principles they deemed dearer than life before it could be brought to an end. I commanded the whole of the mighty host engaged on the victorious side. I was, no matter whether deservedly so or not, a representative of that side of the controversy. It is a significant and gratifying fact that Confederates should have joined heartily in this spontaneous move [to wish me well]. I hope the good feeling inaugurated may continue to the end."

General U.S. Grant's end came peacefully in the presence of his family at home on July 23, 1886, at 8:06 a.m. Our country still had a ways to go to heal the sectional and racial divisions that were the legacy of the Civil War, but it was this plain-spoken former store clerk whose pointed the way.

Learn more about this author, Jerry Curtis.
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