Between Two Surrenders: How Grant Moved from “Unconditional” Terms to Stopping the Cheers

American Historical Figures · Story 21 By Clio Walker. This AI-assisted historical narrative was checked against its sources. It is not a submission by Ulysses S. Grant and is not a modern translation of his memoirs.

On July 1, 1885, Ulysses S. Grant dated the preface to his two-volume memoir at Mount McGregor, New York. He knew that his cancer of the throat could not be cured. At one point, he wrote, illness had reduced him almost to death and made work impossible for weeks. His eldest son, Frederick, and the other sons helped verify facts against the records; the comments were Grant's own account of how he had seen events, whether or not others saw them the same way. The preface did not pretend that memory was an archive without seams. It announced the position of an old participant looking back.

The former commanding general and president was racing time. A financial collapse engineered by his business partner Ferdinand Ward had left him deeply in debt in 1884. Cancer sharply shortened the time available to restore his family's security. Grant hoped the book's earnings would support Julia and their children. National Park Service accounts record that he moved to Mount McGregor in the summer of 1885, finished the manuscript on July 20, and died three days later.

The first famous surrender he described had happened twenty-three years earlier.

Before dawn on February 16, 1862, Fort Donelson near Dover, Tennessee, could no longer be held. Senior Confederate commanders John Floyd and Gideon Pillow passed responsibility to Simon Buckner and escaped with troops; Nathan Bedford Forrest led cavalry out as well. Buckner stayed to surrender. Grant printed the exchanged letters in his memoir. Buckner proposed an armistice and commissioners to arrange capitulation. Grant refused negotiation, accepting only “unconditional and immediate surrender,” and announced that he intended to move against the works at once.

The sentence produced the name “Unconditional Surrender Grant.” Isolated into four words, it suggests a commander whose hardness sprang fully formed from character. Grant's fuller account makes the decision grow from a particular battlefield. On the previous day, Confederate troops had opened an escape route, but confused command squandered it. Returning to the field, Grant judged that the attack showed the enemy was trying to get away rather than preparing to remain and fight. He ordered a counterattack. By the time Buckner's message arrived, the fort had changed commanders and its exits were closing. The harsh demand converted a military advantage into a result before it could disappear.

After the surrender, Grant rode into Dover to meet Buckner. They had known one another at West Point and in the old army, and Grant remembered a friendly conversation. Buckner argued that Grant would not have reached Donelson so easily had he been in command earlier. Grant replied that he would not have attacked in the same way had Buckner been commanding. No invented dialogue is needed; Grant preserved the substance. Once the outcome was settled, the two soldiers discussed how decisions had produced it.

“Unconditional” was not a formula that Grant applied to every later ending. Circumstances changed, and so did the object of the terms.

In the spring of 1863, seeking a way to take Vicksburg, Grant moved south along the west bank of the Mississippi. On the night of April 29, a Black guide told him of a steamboat landing at Bruinsburg and a road to the high ground. Grant verified the information and abandoned an earlier plan to continue to Rodney. Troops began crossing on April 30. In his memoir he recalled an almost unequalled feeling of relief when the army stood on dry ground on the enemy's side of the river. Yet the Mississippi and the fortress of Vicksburg now lay between him and his supply base.

This was not the ease of certain victory. It was a decision that turned retreat and resupply into pressure. With limited rations, the army drove inland. Grant chose to strike Jackson first, then turned west against John Pemberton's forces and finally enclosed Vicksburg. His memoir concedes that the campaign was not a complete design drawn in advance; it developed from circumstances. River transport, naval cooperation, roads, enemy movements, and local knowledge repeatedly forced new choices. Explaining the victory as one man's intuition would erase the navy, the marching soldiers, and the unnamed Black guide whose information changed the crossing.

When Vicksburg surrendered on July 4, Grant paroled a large part of its garrison rather than sending every prisoner north. His memoir gives military reasons: guarding and transporting tens of thousands would be difficult, and defeated men returning home would carry news of the result. He also ordered Union troops to remain quiet as the prisoners passed and to make no insulting remarks. The policy did not erase the war's violence, and it was not private kindness standing in place of strategy. It shows Grant treating capitulation as something with military and political consequences after the signatures.

Grant also recorded that the Confederate rifles captured at Vicksburg were generally better than the old weapons carried by many Union regiments in the West. He allowed colonels with inferior arms to place their old muskets in the captured stacks and issue the better ones to their soldiers. Some weapons later counted by the ordnance department as captured property were therefore former Union arms. It is a small but revealing detail. A list of spoils can look exact even when categories have been rearranged in the field. Victory produces numbers as well as legends, and both require readers to ask how they were made.

Nor did Grant claim Vicksburg as an achievement of the army alone. He wrote that without David D. Porter's navy, the campaign could not have been conducted in the way it was, even with twice as many soldiers. Gunboats ran the batteries, transports carried the crossing force, and Sherman's demonstration upriver helped conceal the real movement. Placing the commander back inside that network does not make his decisions smaller. It reveals how much coordinated professional action was needed before a choice could become a result.

On April 9, 1865, Appomattox again placed surrender terms before him. Grant was suffering from a severe headache and taking a roundabout road toward the front. When Lee's request for a meeting to discuss surrender reached him, he later wrote, the headache vanished at once. This is Grant's memory of his own bodily sensation; it is his testimony, not a medical fact measured by a bystander.

At Wilmer McLean's house, Robert E. Lee wore a new full uniform and a sword. Grant arrived in a private's blouse marked only by the shoulder straps of his rank and carried no sword. Grant wrote that they spoke first about their service in the Mexican War and became so absorbed that Lee had to return the conversation to the purpose of the meeting. More importantly, Grant admitted what he could not know: he did not know what Lee felt. He saw an impassive face and refused to supply an inner monologue.

The written terms required officers and men to give paroles not to fight again, and required public arms and property to be surrendered. Officers could keep sidearms, personal baggage, and private horses. Those who obeyed their paroles and the law could return home without disturbance by United States authority. Lee noted that many Confederate cavalrymen and artillerists owned their animals. Grant did not rewrite the document, but promised to direct the receiving officers to let every soldier who claimed a horse or mule as his own take it home. His reason was practical: many were small farmers in a country swept repeatedly by armies, and they would need the animals to put in a crop.

Lee also reported that his army lacked food. Grant authorized Confederate quartermasters to draw rations for about twenty-five thousand men from trains the Union army had captured. Horses and food were not ornaments in a sentimental ending. They determined how defeated soldiers would leave the field. At Donelson, the purpose had been to destroy a garrison still capable of fighting before advantage slipped away. At Appomattox, the purpose was to make a trapped army disarm and return to civil life. The difference was not a simple softening of personality. The stage of war, military position, and political task had all changed.

After Lee departed, Union soldiers began firing a hundred-gun salute. Grant sent orders to stop it. His memoir gives a brief reason: the Confederates were now prisoners, and the victors did not wish to exult over their downfall. That sentence is often made into an easy emblem of reconciliation, but it cannot erase Grant's judgment in the same chapter. He called the Confederate cause one of the worst for which a people had fought and one of the least excusable. Stopping the cheers did not declare the rival causes morally equal. It refused to let humiliation obstruct disarmament once the result was secure.

Grant also dismantled two legends. Lee's supposed surrender under an apple tree, he explained, grew from the small fact that Lee had briefly rested against an embankment near such a tree. The story that Lee offered his sword and Grant returned it was “the purest romance”; no such ceremony occurred. A victor correcting stories that enhanced the drama of his own triumph gives the chapter special value. Public memory wants spectacle. A participant warned that spectacle grows most easily where evidence is missing.

Writing two decades later, Grant did not claim an unbroken record of perfect judgment. His memoir names mistakes, missed opportunities, other people's information, and the indispensable work of the navy. It also has limits. It is the Union commander's retrospective account, not a panorama co-written by Confederate soldiers, enslaved people, civilians, and every subordinate. His interpretation of the war's causes and aftermath must be read beside the contemporary records of others.

Yet the two surrenders leave a testable line through his story. Grant is most interesting not because he was always hard or always lenient, but because he judged again as the situation changed: when negotiation would only consume an advantage, when laying down arms required a road home, and when a victory salute no longer served victory. In 1885 he submitted those judgments to print. The royalties did protect his family. The larger bequest was a record in which decisions appeared with their grounds, uncertainties, and limits, open to examination after the actor was gone.

Sources and editorial boundaries The central firsthand source is Ulysses S. Grant, Personal Memoirs of U. S. Grant (1885–1886), Project Gutenberg ebook 4367: https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/4367 ; full plain text: https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/4367/pg4367.txt . The sections actually read for this narrative are the preface; Volume I, Chapter XXII (Fort Donelson); Chapters XXX–XXXIX on the Vicksburg campaign, especially XXXIV and XXXVII–XXXIX; and Volume II, Chapter LXVII (Appomattox). The exchanged letters, Grant's explanations of both capitulations, the Bruinsburg landing, horses and rations, the stopped salute, and his rejection of the apple-tree and sword legends all come from those passages. This narrative paraphrases them and does not reproduce a modern translation.

Dates and biographical context were cross-checked against the Library of Congress Grant Papers timeline: https://www.loc.gov/collections/ulysses-s-grant-papers/articles-and-essays/timeline/ . The circumstances of Grant's final writing, the move to Mount McGregor, completion on July 20, and death on July 23 were checked against the National Park Service: https://www.nps.gov/articles/the-personal-memoirs-of-ulysses-s-grant.htm and https://www.nps.gov/articles/000/grant-s-world-tour-and-final-years.htm . The April 30–May 1 crossing at Bruinsburg was checked against Vicksburg National Military Park: https://www.nps.gov/vick/learn/historyculture/bruincross.htm .

Evidence boundary: the memoir was written more than twenty years after the campaigns. Bodily sensations, remembered conversations, and judgments are attributed to Grant rather than presented as stenographic fact; the letters reproduced in the memoir are contemporary documents. The article does not turn the two capitulations into a simple moral conversion, and it does not invent a biography for the unnamed Black guide. Map points are city-, region-, or historic-site references for Dover, the Bruinsburg area, Vicksburg, Appomattox Court House, and Mount McGregor; modern memorial locations do not establish the exact position of every action.

Rights boundary: the 1885–1886 English work is in the U.S. public domain, and Project Gutenberg marks ebook 4367 public domain in the United States. Both language versions are newly written narratives and paraphrases by Clio Walker. They do not reproduce a modern annotated edition, biography, or translation.