Around the World with General Grant

After leaving the office of the presidency in 1877, Ulysses S. Grant embarked on a journey worthy of his legendary namesake, an around-the-world tour that took him from Europe to the Middle East and Asia over two and one-half years. Accompanying Grant was journalist John Russell Young, a wartime associate who was working in Europe as a correspondent for the New York Herald when Grant first arrived in England. On assignment for the Herald, Young joined the former president's entourage and faithfully recorded every detail of the grand tour―the sightseeing, official visits, travel conditions, and Grant's candid discussions with heads of state and other notables about the Civil War and other matters of state. So far from home, Grant felt free to speak his mind about his fellow Union officers, his Confederate adversaries, and the conduct of the war, at far more length than he would in his celebrated but close-to-the-vest memoirs. These salty reminiscences of the war give this travelogue its greatest importance for posterity.

First published in two volumes in 1879, Young's account has been carefully abridged by historian Michael Fellman and is now available to modern readers in a single volume that, besides his adventures abroad, distills Grant's unvarnished memories and judgments of his wartime and executive experiences. We read Grant's opinions of such Civil War figures as Stonewall Jackson ("Jackson's fame as a general depends upon achievements gained before his generalship was tested, before he had a chance of matching himself with a really great commander."); George McClellan ("It has always seemed to me that the critics of McClellan do not consider this vast and cruel responsibility―the war, a new thing to all of us, the army new, everything to do from the outset, with a restless people and Congress."); and Joe Johnston ("I have had nearly all of the Southern generals in high command in front of me, and Joe Johnston gave me more anxiety than any of the others. I was never half so anxious about Lee... Take it all in all, the South, in my opinion, had no better soldier than Joe Johnston."). An intimate portrait of one of America's most brilliant―and thoughtful―military men, Around the World with General Grant is a classic work of American journalism and history. It is also a vivid and insightful travel book, filled with reflections on exotic places and on Western, particularly British, imperialism as America was on the reluctant verge of entering the world stage.