GRANT AND HALLECK: CONTRASTS IN COMMAND
ISBN 0-87462-329-4; 33 pp.
Ulysses S. Grant and Henry
W. Halleck both resigned from the United States Army as captains
in the summer of 1854. During the Civil War, they would both rise
to command northern forces against the Confederacy. Except for
these similarities, little in these men's lives and careers matched.
Halleck was one of the golden boys of the Old Army, scholarly,
bright, and ambitious. Grant was considered a failure by most
of his colleagues and a drunk by a few. Yet command opportunities
in the Civil War brought out the best in Grant and the worst in
Halleck. Simon draws on his unmatched knowledge of Grant to show
how the personal and military qualities of this unassuming but
determined commander emerged to make him commander-in-chief of
Union forces and savior of the Union, while the hapless Halleck's
cautious, narrow-minded, and tradition-bound generalship eventually
made him "irrelevant" to the Union war effort.
John Y. Simon received his PhD from Harvard University and has
been editor of the Papers of Ulysses S. Grant at Southern
Illinois University since the early 1960s. Under his supervision,
twenty volumes of the papers have been published; an estimated
fifteen more will be produced. In addition, he edited The
Personal Memoirs of Julia Dent Grant (1975) and Ulysses
S. Grant: Essays and Documents (1981). Simon is the dean
of American documentary editors, a founder of the Association
for Documentary Editing, and the author of scores of articles,
essays, and published lectures on many aspects of the Civil War
era.
