Grant Cottage: A Poignant, Dramatic Tribute and a History Museum That Works

A couple of weeks ago, I visited the Museum of Racing and Hall of Fame in Saratoga. Afterward, I drove a few miles north to Mount McGregor and a tiny house museum called Grant Cottage. There, at Grant Cottage, in the summer of 1885, Ulysses S. Grant (1822–1885), the general who won the Civil War and former president, dying of cancer and destitute via a Ponzi scheme, valiantly finished his autobiography. It wasn’t an ego trip, though Grant did discover he loved to write and was good at it. He was desperate for the fortune that the book would make and desperate to leave this life with his wife, Julia, financially secure.

The Personal Memoirs of U.S. Grant, published in two volumes in 1885 and 1886, is still the best presidential autobiography, though it stops with the war’s end in 1865. It was the bestselling autobiography in 19th-century America. It’s Grant’s coming-of-age story and war memoirs. The books, still a great read, are spartan, precise, and just, pristine in each respect, never strident, with optimism and melancholy in equipoise. He knows the rhythm of the English language and how to deploy it, by instinct.

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Brian T. Allen

Brian T. Allen is National Review’s art critic.

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A couple of weeks ago, I visited the Museum of Racing and Hall of Fame in Saratoga. Afterward, I drove a few miles north to Mount McGregor and a tiny house museum called Grant Cottage. There, at Grant Cottage, in the summer of 1885, Ulysses S. Grant (1822–1885), the general who won the Civil War and former president, dying of cancer and destitute via a Ponzi scheme, valiantly finished his autobiography. It wasn’t an ego trip, though Grant did discover he loved to write and was good at it. He was desperate for the fortune that the book would make and desperate to leave this life with his wife, Julia, financially secure.

The Personal Memoirs of U.S. Grant, published in two volumes in 1885 and 1886, is still the best presidential autobiography, though it stops with the war’s end in 1865. It was the bestselling autobiography in 19th-century America. It’s Grant’s coming-of-age story and war memoirs. The books, still a great read, are spartan, precise, and just, pristine in each respect, never strident, with optimism and melancholy in equipoise. He knows the rhythm of the English language and how to deploy it, by instinct.