To America; Personal Reflections of an Historian

by Stephen E. Ambrose

• ISBN13: 9780743202756
• ISBN10: 0743202759
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2002-11-19
• Publisher: Simon & Schuster

Summary

One of the most popular historians of our time looks back on his life--and on America's history--in a valediction that powerfully weaves together personal experience and historical insights. After touching on the founding fathers, the Battle of New Orleans, the early encounters with the Plains Indians, and topics up to the present day, Ambrose's last chapter is entitled "America's Secrets of Success."

Author Biography

Stephen E. Ambrose is the author of numerous books of history, including the New York Times bestsellers The Wild Blue, Nothing Like It in the World, Band of Brothers, Citizen Soldiers, Undaunted Courage, and D-Day, as well as multivolume biographies of Dwight D. Eisenhower and Richard Nixon. He lives in Bay St. Louis, Mississippi, and Helena, Montana.

Table of Contents

Table of Contents

Preface: Storytelling

One: The Founding Fathers
Two: The Battle of New Orleans
Three: The Indian Country
Four: The Transcontinental Railroad
Five: Grant and Reconstruction
Six: Theodore Roosevelt and the Beginning of the American Century
Seven: Democracy, Eisenhower, and the War in Europe
Eight: The War in the Pacific
Nine: The Legacy of World War II
Ten: Vietnam
Eleven: Writing in and About America
Twelve: War Stories: Crazy Horse and Custer and Pegasus Bridge
Thirteen: Writing About Nixon
Fourteen: Writing About Men in Action, 1992-2001
Fifteen: The National D-Day Museum
Sixteen: American Racism
Seventeen: Women's Rights and Immigration
Eighteen: The United States and Nation Building
Nineteen: Nothing Like It in the World

Acknowledgments Index Copyright © 2002 by Ambrose & Ambrose, Inc.

Excerpts

Chapter Five: Grant and Reconstruction Ulysses S. Grant was the most popular American of the nineteenth century, both at home and abroad. According to historian Geoffrey Perret he was even more popular than Abraham Lincoln. As no one held a plebiscite during the century, it cannot be proved. And what about Jefferson? Jackson? Or, my wife insists, Mark Twain?To the people of the nineteenth century, Grant was the only Union general who beat Robert E. Lee, so he was the Man Who Won the War. But after being at or near the top to his contemporaries, Grant in the twentieth century fell precipitously. He became "Butcher Grant." To the nineteenth-century mind, he was the President who tried to bring about reconciliation with the South, but by the twentieth century his presidency was so disgraced by scandal that Americans ranked him at the absolute bottom of all the Presidents, behind even Andrew Johnson.The cause of such extraordinary shifts in opinion was certainly not anything Grant did, or did not do. His record is his record. No investigative reporter or historian uncovered documents showing that President Grant had conspired to do this or that, or that he secretly used his positions to enrich himself, or to commit any other criminal or immoral act. Historians teaching the American history survey courses in the twentieth century denounced General Grant for his drinking, his recklessness, his wanton disregard for the lives of his troops, his appalling waste of the tools of war, his bullheaded insistence on attack, and more. They taught that President Grant ran a corrupt administration that was guilty of widespread financial scandal, that abandoned the newly freed African Americans to the mercies of their former owners, that turned the care of Native Americans over to do-gooder religious types, who knew nothing and learned even less, and otherwise was a disgrace. Worst of all, Grant turned the party of Lincoln from one of hope for the common man and for the newly freed slave into the party of big business. Those of us sitting at the professors' feet absorbed what they said and went out to teach it ourselves.The historians were enunciating and sharpening the public's changed perception of what Grant had done, and why. Before World War I, people regarded Grant's losses in battle as regrettable but necessary. But after the losses incurred between 1914 and 1918, Grant came to be regarded as a general who was no different from Field Marshal Douglas Haig, or Joffre, or Ludendorff, or any of the other generals who want only to sacrifice their men's lives for their own glory. No longer were Grant's losses inevitable, yet suffered in a good, indeed a supreme cause -- they were after 1918 regarded as inexcusable. Instead of praise, they brought on Grant's head calumny.Actually Grant was a great general, as good as any America ever produced, far better than most. In his first campaign in the Civil War, in Missouri, he learned a lesson that he adopted as his constant guide: the enemy general is more afraid of me than I am of him. He was determined to win, whatever the cost. He personified an axiom used by Dwight Eisenhower in World War II, that in war, everything is expendable, even generals' lives, so long as you win. He won at Fort Donelson, at Shiloh, at Vicksburg, at Chattanooga. The essential elements in his victories were his willingness to make decisions and the will to carry them out. After the Chattanooga campaign, his chief of staff, General John Rawlins, said of him, "It is decisiveness and energy in action that always accomplishes grand results, and strikes terror to the hearts of the foe. It is this and not the conception of great schemes that makes military genius."Grant displayed his tenacity and force of will most effectively in the Wilderness Campaign of 1864. After a drawn battle, the kind that his predecessors in command of the Army of the Potomac used as a reason to withd