Thinking Like Grant

Ulysses Grant is one of the singularly interesting figures in United States history. Renowned as the victorious commanding general of the Union Army at the end the Civil War, and also as a President, his fascinating story is in his memoirs, which I've been reading lately, thanks to a tip from my friend Adam.

It is easy to see him only in his glory, as the conqueror over the slaveholding states of the South. But his memoirs show a more nuanced story. I'm particularly fascinated by the campaign he waged through Kentucky down through Tennessee and into Mississippi, initially inland (having taken Memphis), but then creeping from the west side of the river through the bayous, bypassing Vicksburg, and making a daring live-off-the-land raid inland to seize Jackson, the capital, outflanking all of the Confederate defenses along the river itself.

The more fascinating part for me has been in the role that railroads of those aforementioned states played in Grant's strategy to storm through the South. The movement of his troops, keeping together supply lines inland from Memphis is wartime and violent echo of the way through varied railroads were originally planned, chartered, financed and built. The same kind of thinking went into both processes somehow.