These papers cover Grant's post-presidential tour and his comments on the war and his presidency.

In the spring of 1865, after the end of the Civil War and the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, two men bestrode the national government as giants: Andrew Johnson and Ulysses S. Grant. How these two men viewed what a post-war America should look like would determine policy and politics for generations to come, impacting the lives of millions of people, North and South, black and white. While both Johnson and Grant initially shared similar views regarding the necessity of bringing the South back into the Union fold as expeditiously as possible, their differences, particularly regarding the fate of millions of recently-freed African Americans, would soon reveal an unbridgeable chasm. Add to the mix that Johnson, having served at every level of government in a career spanning four decades, very much liked being President and wanted to be elected in his own right in 1868, at the same time that a massive move was underway to make Grant the next president during that same election, and conflict and resentment between the two men became inevitable. In fact, competition between Johnson and Grant would soon evolved into a battle of personal destruction, one lasting well beyond their White House years and representing one of the most all-consuming and obsessive struggles between two presidents in U.S. history.

“Tolling, slowly tolling, the alarm bells of all America sent to every heart this morning the news, long expected and long dreaded, that Ulysses S. Grant was dead,” announced the Boston Globe on July 23, 1885, just hours after the one-time Commanding General of the U.S. Army and former President of the United States had passed on. Taking note of the extraordinary tributes and declarations of love expressed by people in all regions of the country, black and white, as Grant endured a months-long struggle with throat cancer, the paper asserted that such praise had “sweetened the draught from Death’s chalice, till all the bitterness of the deadly poison had passed away, and it was but as drinking from the Holy Grail.” In this work, Ulysses S. Grant--The Story of a Hero, Garry Boulard chronicles the career of one of the most consequential figures in American history. Rightly regarded as a great military commander whose skills and strategic vision combined to bring about the end of the Civil War, thus also forever obliterating a slavery that had entrapped nearly 4 million people, Grant would serve two controversial terms as president, working assiduously to foster a regional and racial reconciliation of the country. At the time of his death, he had just completed his monumental two-volume Personal Memoirs of U.S. Grant, since praised by generations of historians and regarded as one of the most important works in all of American non-fiction literature.

Faced with failing health and financial ruin, the Civil War's greatest general and former president wrote his personal memoirs to secure his family's future - and won himself a unique place in American letters. Devoted almost entirely to his life as a soldier, Grant's Memoirs traces the trajectory of his extraordinary career - from West Point cadet to general-in-chief of all Union armies. For their directness and clarity, his writings on war are without rival in American literature, and his autobiography deserves a place among the very best in the genre.