MANY PEOPLE helped me while I was working on this book, and I am troubled that I will not succeed in naming them all. I have been the beneficiary of assistance from skilled archivists across the country, and I particularly want to mention the help of Sara Jackson and Oliver Orr. Librarians at Mount Holyoke College—Anne Edmonds, Nancy Devine, Phyllis Joyce, Irene Cronin, and Dorothy Fiegenbaum—were of immeasurable assistance.
I have had generous financial support from the American Council of Learned Societies, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Faculty Grants Committee of Mount Holyoke College. I spent particularly enjoyable and productive periods of work at the Huntington Library and the Institute of Historical Research and I am grateful for the differing but equally excellent hospitality in California and London.
Everywhere I went, the surprisingly large and heterogeneous community of fans of Ulysses Grant encouraged me. My interpretation of Grant will not please all of them, but I hope the fact that I have taken him seriously will. While disagreeing with his policy with respect to access to materials, I am much indebted to John Y. Simon, who has done a splendid job as editor of the published papers of Grant’s early career.
It is a particular pleasure to say a word of thanks to the students in my Civil War and Reconstruction seminar. As they have climbed across our immense (and sturdy) table refighting Shiloh they have taught me much about Grant. Several of them have done prodigious and useful research on particular aspects of his career, and I especially want to mention Judi Sanzo, Christopher Clarke, Nancy Ledogar, Andrea Roschke, Michael Tomana, Harriet Winer, Carol Ann Drogus, Andrea Mattei, Brenda Tinker, and Monique Chireau. Another historian, Eliza McFeely, contributed much to the book’s preparation, as did Kathleen Heath and Dorothy Snow.
Conversations with historians like Russell Weigley, Robert Schwartz, and Willie Rose, in sometimes brief but often critically important moments, were of great assistance. R. Hal Williams and Howard C. Westwood read the whole of the manuscript in an earlier draft, and their patient and thorough criticism was immensely valuable, as was that of Adolf Wood. My editors at Norton have been excellent; James Mairs has been wonderfully steadfast and Esther Jacobson’s disciplined hand greatly strengthened the book. Joseph Ellis’s candid and constant encouragement was indispensable, and Sarah Youngblood, Marjorie Kaufman, and Mary McFeely labored over the manuscript with more skill and love than its author deserved.
W.S.M.
York, Maine
August 1980