No war involving Americans has been more written about than the Civil War of 1861—65. And no one—not even Douglas Southall Freeman, Bruce Catton, or Shelby Foote, three of the war's outstanding 20th-century chroniclers—has written so tellingly or lastingly about what Southerners chose to call the War between the States as the general most responsible for crushing the Confederacy—Ulysses S. Grant. Perhaps Mark Twain—who had much to do with their publication—exaggerated when he hailed Grant's Memoirs as the greatest writing by a military man since Caesar wrote about Gaul. But Twain was right when he said Grant's account of America's bloodiest conflict, "will still bring to American ears, as long as America shall last, the role of his vanished drums and the tread of his marching hosts."

In his appraisal of the Memoirs, Henry M.W. Russell notes that British critic Matthew Arnold felt Grant was comparable to the Duke of Wellington rather than to Napoleon. If Lee was apotheosized as King Arthur, Russell notes, "Grant sought to create the image of himself as a Western Hero: laconic; careless of style, formality, and show; a supremely dangerous warrior yet bound by a code of honor that challenges the moral grounds not only of the South but of the Eastern city."