Grant: A Biography tells of the extraordinary life and legacy of one of America's most ingenious military minds A modest and unassuming man, Grant never lost a battle, leading the Union to victory over the Confederacy during the Civil War, ultimately becoming President of the reunited states. Grant revolutionized military warfare by creating new leadership tactics by integrating new technologies in classical military strategy. In this compelling biography, John Mosier reveals the man behind the military legend, showing how Grant's creativity and genius off the battlefield shaped him into one of our nation's greatest military leaders. “An outstanding contribution to General Wesley Clark's Great Generals Series...Mosier writes with great conviction and concision. It is easy to fall under his spell...What makes Mosier such an attractive writer is his iconoclasm and his ability to reargue history and biography...Written with verve and directness.” ― The New York Sun “Concise and informative . . . Mosier does an excellent job explaining Grant's genius for the art of war. . . . [A] Lucid, enlightening picture of the general and what made him truly unique.” ― Military Review “A solid description of the most effective Union general. Grant has been consistently underestimated and Mosier helps correct that.” ― Newt Gingrich, former speaker of the US House of Representatives and author of Gettysburg and Grant Comes East “Mosier has written the best appraisal of Grant's generalship ever to appear. Synthesizing and occasionally rebutting the estimates made by various experts--military historians, biographers, and prominent military men--Mosier has gone farther than anyone in proclaiming Grant to have been a military genius, one who in a number of ways surpassed both Napoleon and Wellington. This is a bold thesis, but Mosier is fully persuasive on point after point, smoothly and effectively placing Grant into perspective not only in terms of the Civil War and American military history, tradition, and doctrine, but also in favorable comparison with the greatest European generals of the past three centuries.” ― Charles Bracelen Flood, author of Grant and Sherman: The Friendship that Won the Civil War and Lee: The Last Years John Mosier is the author of The Myth of the Great War, and from 1989-1992 he edited the New Orleans Review. As a military historian, he received funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities to develop an interdisciplinary curriculum for the study of the two world wars. He lives in Jefferson, Louisiana. General Wesley K. Clark served in the United States Army for thirty-four years and rose to the rank of four-star general as NATO's Supreme Allied Commander, Europe. He is author of the best selling books Waging Modern War and Winning Modern Wars . He lives in Little Rock, Arkansas. Grant By John Mosier St. Martin's Press Copyright © 2006 John Mosier All rights reserved. ISBN: 978-0-230-61393-5 Contents Title Page, Copyright Notice, Foreword, General Wesley K. Clark, Who's Who in Grant, Important Battles and Dates in Grant's Career, Introduction, Chapter 1: An Ordinary Life, Chapter 2: From Mexico to Galena, Chapter 3: Tactics and Technology in the Age of Grant, Chapter 4: A Promising Start: Early Victories, Chapter 5: Enemies in the Rear, Chapter 6: Shiloh: Waterloo on the Tennessee, Chapter 7: Aftermath: Blaming the Victor, Chapter 8: Victory Out of Despair, Chapter 9: Vicksburg and the Fall of Mississippi, Chapter 10: Winning the War in the West, Chapter 11: The Defeat of Robert E. Lee, Chapter 12: Grant's Genius, Chapter 13: The Undervalued President, Notes, Index, The Great Generals Series, About the Author, Copyright, CHAPTER 1 An Ordinary Life Grant's early life presents us with a vexing problem. We know little about it, and Grant said even less. This statement is as true about biographical details as it is about his retrospective remarks on warfare. In his memoirs, considered one of the great works of American literature, Grant wrote wonderfully evocative descriptions of what he saw. He said next to nothing about what he felt, and surprisingly little about what he did, confining himself to bare descriptions of events. Aside from being a military genius of the first order, Grant was a perfectly ordinary human being, and there is hardly anything in his childhood and youth, his family background and education, to suggest future greatness. Grant was almost forty years old when the Civil War broke out, and one scours the records of those first four decades in vain for any clues as to his greatness. Biographers are storytellers. Very much aware that there is not much of story to tell about Grant's early years, his biographers have created one. "Triumph over Adversity" is how one of the most accomplished Grant biographers puts it, referring to a story with which almost every American is familiar: Grant, a failure in civil