Grant

by Ron Chernow

Amid this Grant mania, many newspaper readers noted that in reports of the final day’s fighting at Fort Donelson, Grant was holding a cigar—the one he received from Foote. Until that point, Grant had been primarily a pipe smoker. Now admirers flooded him with “boxes of the choicest brands” of cigars “from everywhere in the North.

Americans today know little about the terrorism that engulfed the South during Grant’s presidency. It has been suppressed by a strange national amnesia.