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U.S. Grant History Chat, Episode 5: Elizabeth Samet
Transcript
- Hello, everybody. This is Nick Sacco, Park Ranger at Ulysses S. Grant National Historic Site in St. Louis, Missouri, and this is episode five of the U.S. Grant History Chat. It is my distinct pleasure to be interviewing Dr. Elizabeth Samet, who is the author of the Annotated Memoirs of Ulysses S. Grant. And so to kind of kick off our interview with Dr. Samet today, many of you watching might recognize her from her participation in the recent documentary on the History Channel on Ulysses S. Grant. Dr. Samet, we would love to hear a little bit about what that process was like. What was it like being on the documentary and just kind of give us some insights. We'd love to hear about that.
- Well, it was a great treat for me to be a part of that endeavor so long in the making. We filmed a while ago, and of course, when you film those interviews, you know only what you've said and you don't really have any idea of how it will fit in with the rest of the narrative. So I watched along with everyone else at the premiere, and of course that was not how anyone imagined it, that would happen during a period of crisis, but I think that the Memorial Day date was very appropriate and I think that it garnered a lot of viewers as a result of that timing. Seeing it all unfold and seeing the ways in which the film was crafted was really a great treat for me, and to be able to see, it's so hard of course to fit an entire life into six hours, so I was happy to see both his earlier life as well as the Civil War, and then of course at the end, also the presidency and the writing of the memoirs. Of course, the memoirs are so important to me. There's never enough time in these things devoted to the memoirs for my taste, but I think they did give a great flavor of how he finished them up in the cottage in Mount McGregor, New York.
- Sure, absolutely. I think what's interesting too with a lot of these documentaries, it's almost like pieces of a puzzle where you have all these different historians but then you're also adding these dramatic scenes, these sort of historical reenactments, and you got to kind of put the pieces together, and to your point, you can easily spend a six hour documentary on the memoirs alone, so it was nice to at least see a little bit of the mention of the memoirs in there. And to that point, your recently published annotated memoirs. I've had a chance to flip through them. I thought they were beautifully illustrated and your annotations, your explanations in the memoirs are very helpful for modern readers, but understandably this is a huge undertaking that you did. What kind of motivated you to start this project in the first place, and what was that process like creating this annotated edition of Grant's memoirs?
- I would say that most of the work in a concentrated fashion took place over the last several years, but I realized as I was editing that as I was working on it, that in some strange way I had been working on it for 20 years in that I first found the memoirs a long time ago in graduate school, actually. My specialty is literature, not history. I read this fascinating book and I can't even do the archeology anymore of how I got there, but instead of writing my PhD dissertation, I was reading this book and it didn't conform to any expectations that I had about what a 19th century general would sound like or write. It seemed totally self-effacing. It did not have the kinds of rhetorical flourishes and the sort of purple prose that we associate with many 19th century writings about war. One of the things initially very early on in the memoirs, in one of the first chapters, Grant writes about his experience as a student at West Point, saying that he spent most of his time actually reading novels. That charmed me immediately, of course, as someone whose specialty is literature, and he read Scott and Cooper and Washington Irving and sort of was very typical in that sense of a 19th century reader, and so it gave me a window into 19th century culture, and also at the time, I found it, I have to say difficult to trace some of the battles. I've since visited many of the sites, and so now when I read it, whenever I go to visit a site I will read that chapter in the memoirs as preparation and then to be able to see the actual site. That was of course one of his great gifts as a soldier and as a commander, was this ability to look at a map once. He just had this wonderful facility, this almost photographic memory for the terrain and the topography. I don't have that, so it was great to be able to actually visit the sites, and I think the documentary did a nice job with that as well, showing us sort of, things like that. And so I was acquainted with the memoirs for a long time and then the opportunity came to edit them, and I was just thrilled. And so that was a nice sort of coincidence really, and it was great.
- Sure, sure. I guess along these lines, a question that just popped in my mind here. Have you had a background, with your literature background, have you had any other interactions with other writings about the Civil War, say Ambrose Bierce or somebody else like that that's kind of stuck out to you as well?
- Yes, in fact, one of the things that I worked hard to do in the annotations, because of course I'm deeply indebted to all of the historians, the military historians who analyzed and annotated the memoirs, but my primary interest was in trying to situate this book and to situate Grant into a literary and a cultural context as well, and so I looked at a lot of memoirs, at a lot of non-fiction and a lot of fiction, including Bierce, also De Forest, his novel about the Civil War, Ms. Ravenel's conversion and his journals and diaries, and I think De Forest is an undervalued writer who, like Bierce, did not look at the romantic aspects of combat but looked at the grim brutality of it all. I think that that was what Grant, actually, I think that's what he figured out about war as early as his experience in the Mexican War, but it's surely shaped his attitudes toward the Civil War and to the way he wrote about it. So I try to include all kinds of memoirs from the time and also fiction, poetry, to sort of think about what this memoir means to the history of war writing.
- Absolutely, that's really wonderful. It's one of the great insights of the memoirs, because it does provide that, your annotated memoirs provides that larger literary context as well, certainly. In your research, when you were working on the memoirs, what was one of the big insights or takeaways or perhaps a discovery that you made in these years of studying the memoirs, maybe one passage that you go back to all the time?
- It's a hard question, the hardest question I'm asked usually, because there are so many passages and I've spent so much time with it that there are passages I sort of carry around with me and they help explain the world to me sometimes. One of the passages is from early on in the memoirs where he's talking about the two commanders he worked with in Mexico, General Winfield Scott and General Zachary Taylor, who were really opposites in many, many ways except in the fact that they were successful commanders. Grant has this wonderful passage in the early chapters about these two generals and about how they write and talk. I found that fascinating that that's what he would concentrate on, less on how they fought, but instead how they talked and how they wrote. I really think about someone who was so conscious of the way that he spoke, the way that he communicated, and I think that that's a really interesting and perhaps understudied aspect of military culture. So that's one of the passages that sticks with me. That's the end of Chapter 10, and it's just a wonderful little portrait of these two men. The memoirs, it's full of these wonderful little portraits of different commanders, different people he encountered, and they'll just come up in a paragraph and he's able to distill someone's character in that way. The person's character that I think he finds most mysterious is that of Lee, and so the passage that I think of, that I often go back to because it has significance for Grant but I think it also has significance for us as a country and particularly now we're dealing not only as we have this discussion, not only with the pandemic but with protests and violence across the country. And I think that much of this violence is rooted in our history, and I think that part of what Grant's memoirs offers is a corrective to what's commonly called the lost cause mythology that demoted slavery as one of the causes of the Civil War and instead turned to the phrase state's rights. I think that Grant was not confused at all about the nature of the Civil War, about the issues being fought over, and I think that he would have been slightly mystified about the ways in which we have since remembered the war. So this passage where he meets with Lee at Appomattox kind of emphasizes for me the way that he understood the war and the way that he understood his role in it. If we have the time, I'm happy to read just a little bit of the chapter. It's from Chapter 67, and one of the things that makes it typical is that he always is dispelling the romance of war and he's always saying look, it's a great story, but this is what really happened. One of the myths that grew up was that of the apple tree, that there was a famous apple tree there, so he starts with that. Before stating what took place between General Lee and myself, he writes, I will give all there is of the story of the famous apple tree. Wars produce many stories of fiction, some of which are told until they are believed to be true. The War of the Rebellion was no exception to this rule, and the story of the apple tree is one of those fictions based on a slight foundation of fact. As I have said, there was an apple orchard on the side of the hill occupied by the Confederate forces. Running diagonally up the hill was a wagon road which at one point ran very near one of the trees so that the wheels of vehicles had on that side cut off the roots of the tree, leaving a little embankment. General Badcock of my staff reported to me that when he first met General Lee, he was sitting upon this embankment with his feet in the road below and his back resting against the tree. The story had no other foundation than that. Like many other stories, it would be very good if it was only true, and that's sort of typical of Grant's understated humor as well. And then it goes on to talk about his acquaintance with Lee. I had known General Lee in the old army, that's of course in the Mexican War, and did not suppose, owing to the difference in our age and rank, that he would remember me. Well, I would more naturally remember him distinctly, because he was the Chief of Staff of the Engineers of General Scott in the Mexican War. When I had left camp that morning, I had not expected so soon the result that was then taking place, and consequently was in rough garb. I was without a sword, as I usually was when on horseback on the field, and wore soldier's blouse for a coat with the shoulder straps of my rank to indicate to the army who I was. Grant, of course, had this famous dislike for military uniform.
- Absolutely.
- When I went into the house, I found General Lee. We greeted each other, and after shaking hands took our seats. I had my staff with me and a good portion of whom were in the room during the whole of the interview. What General Lee's feelings were I do not know, as he was a man of much dignity with an impassible face. It was impossible to say whether he felt inwardly glad that the end had finally come or felt sad over the result and was too manly to show it. Whatever his feelings, they were entirely concealed from my observation, but my own feelings, which had been quite jubilant on the receipt of his letter were sad and depressed. I felt like anything rather than rejoicing at the downfall of a foe who had fought so long and valiantly and had suffered so much for a cause. Though that cause was, I believe, one of the worst for which a people ever fought and one for which there was the least excuse. I do not question, however, the sincerity of the great mass of those who were opposed to us. And then he goes on to describe the terms and he dispels the rumor of the sword, you know, the celebrated hand over the sword. The story ran in newspapers long after that, but he said it's the purest romance.
- Sure, absolutely. That's one of my favorite passages from the memoirs as well, because I think Grant, in his mind he's willing to acknowledge the sincerity and sort of the sacrifices that were made by these Confederate soldiers, but he's still not, he's not giving them a full break, and he's still asserting the the importance and significance of what the Union cause was all about as well. With the rise of lost cause literature in the 1880s and going on from there, we can see Grant is sort of offering a rebuttal to that interpretation of the war in this passage.
- Right, and when he was young, when he was lieutenant in the Mexican War, he was fighting in a war in which he did not believe. He's clear about that in the memoirs. I think at the time he thought less about the cause, but he had that experience. He said that was a purely political war, an unjust war, and the Civil War he believed in was a war of principle, and so you can see that I think very clearly in this depiction of what happened at the surrender.
- Absolutely, I fully agree 100%. Well, this has been really wonderful. Thank you to Dr. Elizabeth Samet for speaking today with us a little bit about her Annotated Memoirs of Ulysses S. Grant. I know you've written a couple of other books too along the lines of the Civil War. You can maybe tell us a little bit about that to wrap up our interview.
- Sure. One of the things that I did before this book actually was an anthology of leadership. It's not just military leadership, but it does certainly involve some Grant and a lot of Lincoln. I think there's much to be learned from reading his work as well, obviously.
- Sure, well fantastic. Thank you so much, Dr. Samet. We look forward to seeing your progress with your book here, and those who haven't seen the documentary, look out for Dr. Samet on the documentary as well. Thank you.
- Thank you, Nick, I appreciate it.
Description
You saw her in the History Channel's "Grant" documentary, and now she's here for the U.S. Grant History Chat! Dr. Elizabeth Samet joined Ranger Nick to discuss her Annotated Edition of Ulysses S. Grant's Personal Memoirs and what sparked her interest in Grant's life.
Duration
16 minutes, 1 second
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