do for you. ask what you can do for your country. >> and the people knocking buildings down. announcer: c-span's newest book, the presidents. provides insight into the lives of 44 american presidents through stories gathered by interviews. explore the life events that shaped our leaders, challenges they faced, and the legacies they have left behind. affairs, it public will be on shelves april 23 but you can preorder your copy as a hardcover or e-book today at idents org/thepres wherever books are sold. ♪

>> this week on >> this week on q&a, west point english professor elizabeth samet discovers her annotated edition of ulysses s. grant's memoirs. brian: elizabeth samet, you have a book over 1000 pages long called the annotated memoirs of ulysses s. grant. what is different about this book then all the other grand books? ms. samet: the subject of grant is well written about by so many people, mostly by historians. i am a professor of literature. my primary interest was in his language and the way that he represents his war experience. i wanted to try to put the book in its cultural context and in the longer term, in the spectrum

of war writing. i wanted to show how challenging it is to write about war and how grant does that. brian: you teach english to what group? ms. samet: i teaching was to cadets at the united states military academy at west point, everything from our first year cadets, known as plebes, to our upper-class cadets who are sometimes majors. we have a full range of underclassmen including english literature. brian: anything different from teaching to a cadet at west point and a student at a normal university? ms. samet: there are many similarities, the subject matter, for example, but my students have a particular idea of what they will be doing after

graduation. our study of literature has a shared context that i think might not be the case at other institutions. brian: how did you go to west point? ms. samet: part of that answer is grant. i was in graduate school at yale reading the memoirs. i can't even tell how i came to them, but i was reading them when i was supposed to be writing my dissertation. they surprised me and introduced me to west point where he was an ambivalent cadet. i found myself attracted to his desk by his story and surprised by it. soon after, the opportunity came to teach there. it was a happy coincidence. brian: what attracted you to the memoirs? ms. samet: i expected from my memoirs iowledge of , appreciated a more florid and ornate approach to writing. and a more heroic and glorified account of war. his account is the antithesis.

it is lean and spare in terms of the language itself. he regarded war as a business he was trained to do but he never reveled in it. he never took delight or relish in the activity. brian: what is the period of time these memoirs cover? ms. samet: they are commensurable -- they are a conventional biography. the memoirs begin with his boyhood. he doesn't spend much time on that. he spends a great deal of time on the mexican war. he goes all the way through the end of the civil war and stops there. brian: what do you think of him? ms. samet: i admire him. i admire him because he is fallible. he often in the memoirs will own up to that, to the failures. he was willing to tell a joke on himself. in that, he shared something

with lincoln in his self-deprecation. he was always willing to suggest he had learned something or figured something out along the way. brian: one of the biggest surprises in the memoir isn't the memoire, it's a note on the flat of the book's cover. there is so much there. a tanner's son, failing at so much, turned savior of his country, a slave owner turned mass emancipator. the warrior transformed into a warrior poet. the words of coats. ms. samet: he is a big grant fan. he did a wonderful series in the atlantic on his experience of reading memoirs. i think he found in grant -- someone who has deep flaws but also great virtues and someone who did rise in modest circumstances to become a great savior of the union and a mass

emancipator. brian: where did you grow up? ms. samet: i grew up in boston. brian: anybody in your family in the military? ms. samet: my father was in the navy in world war ii. brian: did you ever talk to him about that? ms. samet: i talked to him about his war and his army which was very different from today's army. like many members of his generation, he always downplayed those experiences. he was perfectly willing to talk to me about them. he served much of the war as an air traffic controller in india. brian: when you teach at west point, how often do you have to be in the classroom? ms. samet: we are in the classroom comparable to most civilian institutions. teach a few courses each semester and meet with students individually as well. brian: what would i most likely hear you talking about? ms. samet: probably a specific

passage in a work. i love to dig in with poetry or itself, toe text look at the evidence and see what it has to tell us. brian: do they read the memoirs? ms. samet: they do. i have always taught various excerpts for a variety of reasons. this year i am teaching a war literature elective and we are focusing on the civil war so grant's memoirs will be part of that. brian: so many people have come to the chair and talked about u.s. grant. here's one of the most recent ones, ron chernow. >> he got into the habit, with great courage and fortitude is that he would go four or five hours at a stretch without eating or drinking. that wasn't just to avoid the pain of swallowing, but to avoid

taking painkillers that might interfere with his mental clarity. i don't know if any masterpiece like this has been composed under such terrific -- horrific circumstances. it is a masterpiece. even mark twain said that style is flawless and no one can improve upon it. twain thought it was such a great military memoir that it deserved to stand alongside seasoned commentators. many readers and commentators since then have agreed. brian: what would you add to that? ms. samet: i would suggest that the story of the memoir's composition is part of wetlands ds this book it's great power. the pain that grant suffered, the way he had to conserve his energy, the library of congress has a collection of many of the notes that grant would write.

it was so painful to speak him he would write to his doctor. i had the moving experience of reading the manuscript alongside those notes. what you see there is the dissolution of his physical body, and the depleting of the -- desperate clinging to all of the reserves of energy he has left, and a desired determination to give every last ounce of strength to the memoirs, to the completing of this book. he didn't want to write them initially, but is compelled to by a few calamitous circumstances in the last few years of his life, including bankruptcy and the diagnosis of his fatal cancer. brian: do you know how many exact days there are after he finished this to when he died? ms. samet: it is only a few days -- less than a week, when he's doing the last correcting

proofs. he is near saratoga, new york. you can still go to the cottage. not a lot of people visit it. you can see the circumstances where he wrote it, the same chair in which he sat. you can get a sense of the whole atmosphere. brian: back in 2016, ronald , did a book., did a book. here is what he had to say. >> it puts us right into the story of maybe he could win. he uses action verbs. he eschews adverbs and adjectives. john russell young, who was traveling with him as a correspondent for new york newspaper, elicits from grant all kinds of personal reminiscence abraham lincoln and

lee. it is memorable to read this. it is clear, spare english-language. lincoln said he liked the saxon language. study, one syllable words. grant writes in the same way. brian: did you read his book? ms. samet: yes. i think ron white's book is interesting in a lot of elements, especially grant's use and methodism and a variety of attributes. ron chernow emphasizes a couple of things. he emphasizes the presidency and the various strides that were made on behalf of civil rights for african americans, all of which, sadly, are erased in the compromise of 1877.

of grantakes much alcoholism, as he calls it. i think he wants to change the way we look at grants with alcohol.hi instead of looking at it as a moral failing as it would have been regarded in the 19th century, to look at it more as an addiction. i think when grant was alone in the west, with from his family, between the mexican and civil family, away from his he probably did drink to excess. the circumstances surrounding his resignation from the army are mysterious. i resist the temptation to make grant's relationship or struggle with alcohol the main narrative of his life. brian: this is called an annotated memoir. what does that mean? ms. samet: it is full of my own annotations and illustrations.

those are the moments where i try to read grant's descriptions in parallel with descriptions of similar or same episodes by his contemporaries. a description of a siege or an attack, comparing those with descriptions of other periods. everything from caesar, ron chernow mentioned the connection that twain makes between caesar's commentaries and grandpa was a memoir. i would put caesar in there and various activities connected to war, and then grant. brian: twain was the publisher of the book? ms. samet: yes. brian: what was the time when you said, i've got to do this? who said this to you, elizabeth samet you have to do our connotative version? ms. samet: fortunately, my editor said, would you like to do this? i said, absolutely, that would be a great idea. i had been unwittingly preparing

it since graduate school when the book came important to me. it was a dream come true to be able to spend so much time with this book that would in many ways shape my ideas of military culture and various attitudes. a lot of that comes through grant for me. brian: when did you start. ? ms. samet: i poured on most of the work in the last 3 years. brian: it only took three years to do what you did here? ms. samet: it was an organization of thinking i had been doing for a long time but it was a pretty intensive period of work. brian: what is the most fun? ms. samet: that is a difficult question to answer. there are some of the parts i enjoyed. one of the parts i enjoyed was going to battlefields and being able to bring the book along and see the terrain. one of grant's great strengths as a commander was his ability

to understand terrain and topography. he writes about it with an ease and great clarity. but to be there once, i don't share that automatic understanding of terrain. to be able to go shiloh. to be able to understand the topography he's describing in the book was a great treat. one of the other elements i greatly enjoyed connected with that was photography, being able to through photography, another way of making sense of the war and the way we remember it. brian: there is a lot of your photography in the book? ms. samet: i was able to include that, as well as images from the west point archives, the library of congress, and other places. what do you say to someone who doesn't really care about the civil war? -- brian: what do you say to

someone who doesn't care about the civil war? you know you will find these people in some places. what is shiloh and what happened there? ms. samet: shiloh was in tennessee. it was the first major battle in the western theater. the western theater of the civil war is largely neglected in favor of the eastern theater. shiloh is a two-day battle. it has a tremendous number of casualties. like antietam, a more well-known battle in the east, it changes the way people think about the war. a lot of soldiers and civilians thought the civil war would be over in months. shiloh confirmed for grant that they'd have to win the war by complete conquest, that this was all are nothing venture. -- all or nothing venture. brian: that was 1862. how long did you spend their? ms. samet: i spent a nice day at

shiloh and look around at corn corinth and at northern mississippi as well. there still is an important railroad junction there. that was the site of a battle in the war. it took about a month for union troops to make it down to corinth. by the time they get to corinth, grant had been criticized heavily for not being prepared and for being surprised. the troops had not entrenched and sherman, who was on the battlefield when the confederate attacked, it seemed prepared for it. headquarters were a few miles away and made it down there. there was some controversy that raged throughout the rest of the 19th century. when henry halleck arrived on the scene to take amanda, he pushed grant off to the side and

made him second in command. grant had not much to do. the army took a month to make its way to corinth. halleck and the confederates were convinced that they were reinforcing corinth when they were evacuating. grant has a wonderful passage in there were he says that many of his troops had been railroad men in civilian life and they used to put there in years to the s to the rail and they could tell which trains were full and which were empty. he said, the empty trains were leaving and the heavy trains were coming back. the confederates through a roos and it ended up falling them. there were so many that when sherman writes home about the battle, he spends time telling his wife that the number of forces on the battlefield is

astronomical. it is a shocking site. throughout the war, the number of horses and mules to be burned or buried was really incredible. brian: the first person i interviewed here on grant was re back in 1997. i want to run a clip where we talk about grant's role in the civil war. >> if there's no grant, there is no victory in the war for the civil union. the civil war would have probably ended in a stalemate, with a negotiated peace. what kind of peace that would be i don't know, but i believe that grant was the only general who could coordinate the union's

strength and bring them to bear on the confederacy in time to ensure lincoln's reelection in 1864. brian: what would lincoln say was grant's biggest strength? ms. samet: he said it several times that he had a tenacity and a will to keep going where other generals had been daunted. the other strength he had was that grant understood the political context of war fighting. i'm not sure all of his contemporaries did. he understood the timing of victories, the need for what was called a political general, a general who was an appointee, who could bring in votes, who could recruit effectively. there were a few political generals. john logan was one of them, who

to know to be good commanders in the field, but many were not. it was an inconvenience that grant had to put up with, but he understood the reasons for it, and he understood that lincoln's war aims had to do with tactics, operation, and strategy. brian: you talk about two historians, lloyd lewis and bruce catton. you talk about the revisionism of grant. when was he at his lowest? we have done three surveys of presidents, and on ours he is , gone from 32 to 23. when was he at his lowest and why has there been a revision? something that we tend to forget, was at the time that he died, he was the most famous american and the world. he had achieved celebrity greater than lincoln. in the world tour he took after his presidency, he went to japan and was greeted as a great hero.

soon after his death, his death and his funeral, in which there were two confederate and two union pallbearers, it was a great moment of national reconciliation. unfortunately, that drive toward coming on the, heels of reconstruction, was achieved at the expense of african-americans. frederick douglass, in a speech several years before grant's death, talked about peace among the whites, and what that would mean for the country. what it ended up meaning was the rise of jim crow in the south and rolling back all of the advances made, and the 13th and 14th and 15th amendments for african-american civil rights. what we think of as a lost cause nostalgia, really got into gear

during the 1890's and throughout the early part of the 20th century, culminating in the 50th reunion at gettysburg. woodrow wilson, the first president from the south after the civil war, and who introduced segregation into washington, d.c. and the federal workforce, in his history of the american people, he espoused this similar sort of idea of reconstruction. that it was tyrannical ideal that was imposed upon the south. grant was a casualty of that lost cause nostalgia, which dominated much of the century. lewis and catton, in the middle of the century, really began a resurgence that has continued ever since, as we've continued to reevaluate the war and our own attitudes toward memorialization.

brian: can you explain more about lost cause? my reading -- and i am no expert on any of it, is that phrase has come up more and more in recent years. ms. samet: the southern cause was romanticized. the memorial engines started revving up before the war ended. there were many people, including former confederate officers, organizations like the united daughters of the confederacy, who worked earnestly to burnish this lost cause. as a result, the submerging of slavery and this idea of states rights. a decoupling of the cause of fromonfederat confederacy

from slavery and states rights. there is what some have called the plantation myth. the idea that the south was a peaceful place and everyone was better off at that time. this nostalgic lament, this deeply romantic version of southern culture, which triumphed, i think -- and there was nothing in the northern literature that counteracted it. the historian, eric falner said, the north won the south, but the -- the north won the war, but the south really won the war over the memory of the war. do you think about the fact that the grant museum is at mississippi state? an historian wrote an annotated version of this two years ago. what is a difference between his book and what you have done?

ms. samet: i think it could not be in better hands than in john's. i spent a wonderful week down there doing research. it is an accident of circumstance that that's where he is and where he taught that the library ended up there. it is quite nice and fitting. maybe strange initially, but ultimately, an appropriate idea that the preservation of grant's legacy can happen. his annotated memoirs that he came out with a few years ago is the crowning jewel. the memoirs have been conspicuously absent in that collection. that is in place now as well. john is a historian.

his team of historians really emphasized and helped us to understand a lot of the military and historical context. brian: if i had his book and your book, what is the substantive difference between them? ms. samet: in his book, whenever grant offers a casualty number or mentions a figure, john will have the exact casualty number and where to find it. this fact checking of grant and the illumination that every figure has a wonderful biography that will tell us who that figure is. they complement each other in a lot of ways. while i'm interested and tend to be scrupulous in matters historical, i don't chase down every statistic. i preface it by saying that grant was not always correct in

certain things, but i'm more interested in the way he were members it and the way he chooses to present war. -- to represent war. i often delve into the moments when he doesn't describe something. what grant fails to mention here is some aspect of the conflict. for example when he talks about , casualties on a battlefield, i will often pair those moments with a detailed description of field hospitals, from surgeons of the time, or accounts from those of a contemporary novelist. the novelist john william to deforest, has it. he talks about the description of a fieldhouse in his manual. grant does not do that. brian: mr. simon, he's deceased since 2008, want to talk about what he didn't like about grant. him he was responsible for the

grant papers and the very beginning. a different way at a different time, he pointed this out. i'll run some videos so you can see what he is saying. >> it is true that in december 1862, grant issued orders from ang the jewish class from the department in tennessee. that doesn't mean the state of tennessee, that means the entire department that stretches from occupied areas in mississippi, all the way up to kentucky and into feduca. -- paducah. it was an act of extreme prejudice and extreme ignorance, of which grant became deeply ashamed. so ashamed that he doesn't mention it in his memoirs and doesn't speak of it later on. brian: your take? ms. samet: i think john simon is exactly right. julia dent, in her memoirs,

mentions it briefly and calls it an obnoxious order. brian: that is his wife? ms. samet: yes. he was ashamed of it, and he was. lincoln immediately rescinded it. that is a conspicuous absence from the memoirs. he did spend the rest of his life trying to atone for it. i think he was rightly deeply ashamed. brian: when you did your research for this where is the , best research that you did? ms. samet: i would say a variety of places, the library at mississippi state, the library of congress. west point has some fascinating documents relating to grant's time as a cadet, but also some letters from later on. letters and other things the the of the west point special

collections offers are some of the reticent papers from grant's contemporaries. you find all sorts of records. you can see what it reinforced for me. how intimate their relationships were. everyone knew everyone. grant will often mention i knew so-and-so at west point. or i've fought with so and so in the mexican war. it is his way of suggesting that he knew how someone's mind worked, he knew how that person would respond in an emergency. brian: you have pictures of the monument in new york city. i heard you tell the story about a woman you overheard standing there. do you know what i'm talking about? ms. samet: yes. i often make a pilgrimage to grant's tomb. it's not far from where i live. it used to be the most popular

landmark in new york city, earlier in the 20th century. there was a time, several decades ago, where it had fallen into disrepair. it has been fixed up and is looking better. i am not sure everyone knows what they are looking for. i did overhear a tourist say to her companion, i didn't even know we had a president named grant. brian: what was your reaction? ms. samet: i laughed. i didn't intervene, but it struck me. obviously i am interested in grant as president and that presidency was puzzling and troubling in many ways, but when i think of him, i think of him first as a writer. that is how i first encountered him, not as a general or a president. brian: had he written anything

other than this memoir? ms. samet: you can read his wartime dispatches and letters. i read some of those from earlier in his life. near the end of his life, he did write a few articles for the sentry magazine, the first one on shilo. that is how the century magazine first encouraged him to write his memoirs. when mark twain saw the deal, he said, i can do much better. brian: i bring this up for obvious reasons. have fromquote you gore vidal. ulysses s. grant's memoir was the best american prose. proof that genius is innate since west point's endless -- and push department, in his day, did not dazzle. not dabble, but it does not exist in his day.

does not, it exist in his day. what is the english department at west point like now? ms. samet: it is like the english department elsewhere. we teach two courses in our core curriculum, composition and literature. we teach philosophy in our department. it is a department of english and philosophy, and we have english and philosophy majors. brian: you write a quote of william t. sherman. what was his personal relationship with grant? ms. samet: he and grant first encountered one another at west point, although sherman was senior to grant. they became reacquainted during the civil war. for both men, it was the most important professional relationship of their lives. it was characterized by a great deal of trust. they had disagreements on occasion. at vicksburg, when grant decided

on his strategy of running the batteries below the fortress, -- and coming up from the south cutting loose from his base of , supply, sherman cautioned against it. he wrote him a note saying this. that strategy of cutting loose from supplies is some thing that sherman took to an extreme in his march through the south later on. they had a relationship where sherman felt he could register his disagreement. i think that's a sign of true loyalty. you are willing to register your disagreement, and when that complaint has been lodged and the decision has been made, to carry it out, which sherman did. --brian: this is what

grant wrote. the conceit was knocked out of me by two circumstances that happened soon after the arrival of the clothes which give me a distaste for military uniform that i never recovered from. what is the background on that? ms. samet: he is often pictured in the civil war wearing a bright color coat with the general straps, the insignia, the shoulder straps. he did not like grand uniforms. he tells that story in his youth of getting that first uniform and being mocked by people at his other model in this was zachary taylor, whom he encountered in the mexican war. he served two generals, the nicknames, old rough and ready for taylor and old fuss and ready for scott emphasized the difference. grant said, scott liked to use all the uniforms the regulation allowed and taylor was often seen in a farmer's hat to

protect him from the sun, sitting sideways on his horse, casually watching the battle. scott was always dressed to the nines. i think grant took taylor as a model in that and in his prose. he said taylor wrote orders in language so plain there could be no mistaking it, and that is his own take. brian: abraham lincoln was a private or whatever in the mexican war. did lincoln and grant ever cross paths in the mexican war? ms. samet: no. brian: what years were those? ms. samet: lincoln was in the blackfoot war, as it was called? his involvement in the mexican war -- brian: he was against it. ms. samet: he spoke out against it and was ridiculed as a result. i'm not even sure they would have known each other. by lincoln's own account of his war service, he says that he is

very self-deprecating about his un-heroic war service. brian: here is an example of how you use literature. these are your words. grant's playful yet literary vignette calls to mind a moment and charles dickens' great expectations. what were you doing there? what is that story? ms. samet: great expectations was in my mind because i teach it to the cadet. cadets. it was serialized and published in the 1860's. you can see cadets at the time checking it out from the library and reading it. i associate it with that time period. there is a moment in great expectations when pip is

apprenticed to a blacksmith, and has modest expectations until he gets an unknown benefactor. one of the first things that happens is he gets a new suit of clothes. he parades through the town and is mocked, mercilessly, by boy in the town. that reminded me of grant when he is mocked in town in his brand-new uniform. brian: when you teach the plebes at west point, when and you notice they get really interested in what you are talking about? ms. samet: they get interested day one. they have been plunged into a new world and culture and are full of curiosity. they have an energy and a real curiosity. if you have a passion for your subject matter, no matter what it is, they respond in kind. brian: you started teaching at the academy in what year?

ms. samet: in 1997. brian: you have known some of these young men who went to war? ms. samet: yes. men and women who were gone to war and come home. some have gone to war repeatedly. one of my former students, now a major, referred to his life for several years there as a war commuter. that it became normal to go back and forth to afghanistan. brian: you have a footnote, grant expresses his frustration with reporters on several occasions. franker still in his correspondence, was often frustrated and personally wounded by the false stories that circulated in newspapers about his incompetence, and worst yet, his drinking. ms. samet: he was not particularly happy with the

freewheeling reporters who arrived in camp and told various stories and rumors. he knew the damage that rumors could do to the army. -- to the morale of the army. i think that was his frustration. he does not have a progressive attitude toward the reporters or the press. i think he was particularly frustrated with what he regarded as tall tales, or even just criticism that the press would render. brian: you quote john keegan, who is deceased also, but a war historian, and he argues that grant had a particular aptitude for the telegraph. later on, his first historian, william plum, writes, thus the united states telegraph became the medium of communication by which hundreds of thousands of armed men were directed from

point-to-point, commissary, and subsistence ordered, and they made known, as all as the story of their victories and defeats. many people recognize that one of grant's strengths was being able to use the technology of the day. i think it was hugely important for grant being able to communicate and being able to transport with a great dispatch, large numbers of supplies as well as troops. i think grant adapted to those technologies. he used the telegraph quite frequently. there were also times, telegraph notwithstanding, that he lost complete contact with sherman and trusted that sherman was going about his business in georgia, which he was. those technologies had limitations and they still had

to used out and careers -- urriers. brian: you had 70 chapters and a conclusion, and an introduction, and an editor's note. did you ever count the number of footnotes? ms. samet: i did not. i can't answer you on that. brian: for someone who hasn't seen your book, it has the memoirs of grant and below that, you have your explanations. how did you keep track of all that? ms. samet: one of the wonderful aspects about the book was the quality of design. i was more involved in that and i had been on previous projects because of the illustrations as well. there was a great challenge sometimes in figuring out when i was waiting around in different memoirs were different pieces from the period, what would be the best place for a fantastic description of this or that? re-shufflingof

around to find the right moment to annotate a particular moment in the war or to illustrate what was happening to civilians. we tend to forget. that is another reason i like going to battlefields. we tend to forget that people were trying to carry on, farmers, and people were living their lives while armies marched through with the town on their fields. that is easily forgotten, i think. using diaries during the siege of vicksburg, using diaries from civilians who were trapped at -- trapped in the city at the time, effort great counterpoint to the siege. siege. brian: on page 691, you have this about casualties. it starts off with historians estimated total of 195,000 union and 215,000 confederate prisoners of war, approximately

15% of the former and 12% of the latter, died. from the sanitary commission's 1864 reports on famine. what was that? ms. samet: not sure exactly which -- brian: let me read to you. it was about the middle of last autumn that this process of slow starvation became intolerable, injurious, and cruel. the cornbread became of the roughest and coarsest description. portions of the cob and husk were often ground in. i will jump ahead. there were peas and maggots in crystalis. when they made soup, it floated on the surface. ms. samet: i believe that is a description of the would-be prison in richmond. the sanitary commission, an organization of volunteers, was trying to detail the various

privations in prisoner of war camps. the treatment of seven prisoners in northern camps particularly in new york state was also quite brutal. the conditions freezing. to be a prisoner of war during any conflict is a horrible thing. in this conflict, it often entailed those kinds of hard ships. libby and anderson were back in that respect. the conditions and the food were horrible. brian: did you go to either prison? ms. samet: i have not. brian: how have historians done on capturing the civil war? how well did the government do at the time keeping records? ms. samet: in the civil war, the number of casualties generated caused the war department to keep records in a more regular fashion.

the war department afterward has the official records, as its called, of the war, of the rebellion, and a multivolume compendium of northern and southern war correspondence, dispatches, and orders. it was amazing. the sheer number of people involved made the war department realize that record-keeping was a vital aspect of this. the idea that it could tell and preserve the history of the war in these records. brian: i just noticed in one of the footnotes the name brooks simpson. brooks simpson was here in 2000 talking about grant. here is something he had to say about the general. >> he was an extremely able commander, able to master challenges that felled other men. his success was not inevitable.

he was a master at improvising, responding, on the spur of the moment, to changes in plan and circumstances. i think he did that well. i think on the other hand, he played favorites and was sometimes too stubborn in adhering to those favorites. sometimes he was so interested in offensive action he forgot that the enemy also had a will and was trying to impose it upon him. there were things that granted that were not so shrewd. ms. samet: i think the point about grant's aggressiveness is right on the mark. his errors were those of being too aggressive. he had a moment early in the civil war when he was chasing a confederate commander named harris through missouri. he comes up on harris' camp that

had just been vacated. he realized that the enemy was as afraid of him as he was of the enemy, and he called that a valuable lesson. sometimes, he didn't always remember or take certain precautions. sometimes those errors of aggression didn't yield great results. i think on the whole, he was keen to make decisions. he was extremely frustrated by commanders and inpatient with commanders who took a long time, who delayed, who wouldn't act. that was his great frustration with various commanders. brian: as you know, william mcfeely had a book, but he hasn't been here and we don't have any excerpts from him. there are lots of others. have these books sold? ms. samet: i think so. the most recent books have been much in the news of late and

have sold well. mcfeely's book won a pulitzer prize. in civil war history, there are always enthusiasts who want to read the latest take on a given figure. particularly figures who have undergone revision light grant himself. brian: the same note with brooks simpson's reference in it starts out this way -- perhaps more than any other engagement, the assault at cold harbor gave grant a reputation as a butcher. why? ms. samet: the assault at cold harbor -- unfortunately, the confederates had already had time to entrench and this assualt was ordered and the casualties were devastating. i have some accounts in there of the cries of the wounded and the sheer number of casualties. that and one of the attacks at vicksburg are the two things

that grant says he regrets the most. he also regretted the exposure -- explosion of the trader at petersburg. this is an example of some of the errors of grant as a commander. in some of those instances, because he was very willing to toegate and did not want spend a lot of his time worrying about matters that his subordinates could do. as a result, he freed himself to think about strategic issues. sometimes he didn't intervene when he should have. he let the squabbles of other commanders sometimes interfere with the effectiveness of the various operations. he owned that error at cold harbor. that is the thing that his detractors seize on. in those low periods of his reputation, when he is called a drunk and a butcher, it is cold harbor that people have in mind.

it was a devastating battle. brian: the last person i ever expected to read about in your book was tallulah bankhead. who was she and why is she in your book? ms. samet: tallulah bankhead is in the book for a couple reasons. i did make reference to those little foxes. those references to the civil war in the 20th century that i wanted to bring in. her grandfather was a confederate veteran. he was also a senator. she was sometimes in washington attending various festivities with him. he appeared in this is sort of an example of the kind of strangeness with the way we have remembered that war. he appeared in his confederate uniform on the floor of the senate at the occasion of a

reunion and marched down pennsylvania avenue with a fellow senator in his union uniform. this is that strange emblem of reconciliation. i thought that was important to talk about and to think about the ways in which those figures, who had served in the confederacy, made their way back into national life in various contexts. brian: his name was john bankhead, the senator from alabama. you quote in here, let's make sure i keep it straight. in his 1920 memorial address, senator bankhead, this date of radical republican charles sumner, he emphasized unity above all. i will read a little bit of it. two years before his death -- the 27th annual reunion of the confederate and senator bankhead made on this floor a motion that the senate adjourned over the

day of their parade. i imagine all who were present must recall the scene when senator bankhead dressed in a uniform of confederate gray to -- simple as always, without notice and without a raid arose and addressed the senate and support of his notion. ms. samet: when you read it again, i am amazed that a senator could appear in his old confederate uniform on the floor of the senate. it is a remarkable moment in history. brian: later on, it shows you how good this book is, on 895, what is it, a $45 book? john russell young reported ulysses and julia grant's memory -- recollection of the day of the assassination. here are some of the quotes. the darkest day of my life, said the general, of lincoln as good assassination, i did not know what it meant.

here was the rebellion put down in the field and starting up in the gutters. we had fought it as a war and now we had to fight it as an assassination. he goes on. while i was with the president, a note came from mrs. grant saying she must leave washington that night. she wanted to go to burlington to see our children. i was glad to have the note is a -- as i did not want to go to the theater. he had been invited to go to the theater with lincoln. i made my excuse and at the proper hour. we started for the train. what else happened that night? where did they go? ms. samet: grant and julia grant had been invited to go to ford's theater that night with mrs. lincoln and the president. i'm not sure that julia grant and mary lincoln got along all that well, but i think they wanted to get back to new jersey where their children were.

grant was happiest with his family and wanted to get back to them. they ended up going straight home. of course, grant had to turn right around and go back to washington as soon as he had learned of the assassination. it was by chance that he was not there. brian: as they were on their way to the train, this is the amazing thing about the footnote -- as we were driving along pennsylvania avenue, a horseman drove past us at a gallop. this is someone who had been rude to them at lunch. back again around the carriage, looking into it, mrs. grant said, there is the man who sat near us at lunch today with some other men and tried to overhear our conversation or he was so rude, we left the dining room. it turns out it was john wilkes booth? ms. samet: the conspirators -- it was so mysterious. afterward, they probably regarded themselves as quite fortunate to have escaped. brian: later on, walt whitman

comes into the picture. why walt whitman? that is part of your english. ms. samet: walt whitman, in his poetry and drum taps, and his account as working as a volunteer nurse and tending to wounded soldiers, writes a great deal about the civil war. he writes a great deal about -- one of the things it is interesting about whitman is he notes in the beginning the great enthusiasm for war. the volunteers marching off thinking it would be a lark and would not last very long, parading through the streets of manhattan, and the war turning into something different. he writes a lovely portrait of grant in which he suggests that he has some distinctively american virtues of a kind of modesty. it is a very affectionate

portrait of grant. brian: we are about out of time. gary cooper is in this, movies are in this, frank capra. if grants were sitting here today, what is the one question you would want to ask first? ms. samet: oh. wow. actually, this will probably come as a surprise, i would want to hear more about something he alludes to only briefly. that's what i think of as the lost years. it would be about that time in the pacific northwest, where his letters revealed to julia how miserable he is. i would want to hear more about how that period shaped his thinking about the army and war itself. brian: our guest teaches english literature at west point. her name is elizabeth samet.

this is the annotated memoirs of ulysses s. grant. thank you for joining us. ms. samet: thank you very much. [captioning performed by the national captioning institute, which is responsible for its caption content and accuracy. visit ncicap.org] ♪ >> for free transcripts, visit us at q&a.org. join day programs are also available as c-span podcasts. >> next sunday on q&a, u.s. army veteran eileen rivers discusses her book beyond the call. three women on the front lines in afghanistan. that is q&a that sunday at 8:00

p.m. eastern and pacific time on c-span. >> here is a look at what is live on the c-span networks today. next, your calls and comment on ""washington journal" -- journal." and the senate gavels in on business. .n c-span2, the senate is in they will relate a bill in medical services in connection to some abortions pearson on c-span3,. the nation's governors speak at the u.s. chamber of commerce forum, invest in later later, the house rules committee meets to discuss a resolution red