Excerpt from The Military Education of Grant as General
In a conversation a few weeks ago an officer of high rank in our army, who had himself exercised a higher command during the late war, said to me: "I become more and more curious to learn the habits and nature of the military geniuses of the past. I suppose they were geniuses - but we did not have any such in the late war. In that the leaders were all mediocre people who knew very little and who owed their positions to other qualities."
Many years ago this same baffling lustre of fable, shadowing the lives and deeds of past military heroes and making of them creatures of a different sort from the men of our own time, led me on a quest into the secrets of their genius. And, if I now choose Grant as a typical case for critical investigation it is not from any desire to evade the questions connected with the leaders in later wars or to divert attention back into the now neglected realm of our former military history, but because Grant is one of the most recent examples of a military leader concerning whom we have access to the sources requisite, and yet far enough removed to permit their dispassionate examination.
The spirit of this inquiry is not one of captiousness. The subject is approached with a sincere admiration for the character and ability of the man who, through his own efforts and profiting by his opportunities, developed a capacity beyond that of any other general of his time or of his nation. Others may have possessed greater talents; no other has proved them by his actual conduct in command of great armies in a war of magnitude.
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