Grant: A Novel

PRAISE FOR THE NOVELS OF
MAX BYRD

GRANT

“[A] serious, intricate novel … adroitly deploys a small ensemble of Washington socialites, journalists, and politicians … Byrd builds his characters with a remarkable accretion of details.”

—The New York Times Book Review

“An excellent portrait of one of our greatest generals.”

—National Public Radio

“Outstanding … sure to strengthen Byrd’s reputation as one of America’s finest historical novelists … 
Grant
is typical of what Byrd does so well—combine a minimum of fictional characters with splendid research, vivid imagination, and above all, historical accuracy to portray a truthful profile of a famous American.”

—Associated Press

“A fascinating read for any serious student of the period.”

Publishers Weekly

JACKSON

“Rich, thickly peopled … The heart of the book—its great, almost Homeric centerpiece—is an enthralling, masterly account of the Battle of New Orleans in 1815…. With
Jackson
, Mr. Byrd has vaulted … into the front rank of American historical novelists.”

—The Wall Street Journal

“Byrd’s eye for texture and detail brings 1828 and the beginnings of the Jacksonian era alive.… He makes the story come alive and then keeps it moving.”

—Raleigh
News & Observer

“This book is for everyone, whether student of history or not, for its wonderful insights into the people and times of our infant republic.”

—
Library Journal

“Brings history back to life.”

—Nashville Banner

JEFFERSON

“So authoritatively does Mr. Byrd conjure up the day-to-day details of Jefferson’s life, so knowingly does he describe the atmosphere of pre-Revolutionary France, that the reader practically forgets that his novel is based on thousands and thousands of researched facts. Indeed,
Jefferson
has the organic intimacy of a novel that has sprung full-blown from the imagination of its creator.”

—
The New York Times

“Absolutely splendid historical fiction that resonates with international, provincial, and individual passion and drama.”

—Booklist

“Max Byrd wins the anniversary prize for best book of the year about Jefferson.… It adroitly combines in-depth historical research with the fast-moving plot of a suspense story.
Jefferson: A Novel
can satisfy the appetites of both casual novel readers and serious scholars.”

—
The Georgia Review

EXTRACTS FROM A REPORTER’S NOTEBOOK

—NICHOLAS P. TRIST
,
June 1880

New York is for Ulysses S. Grant. Never defeated—in peace or war—his name is the most illustrious borne by living man. Vilified and reviled, ruthlessly aspersed by unnumbered presses—not in other lands, but in his own—assaults upon him have seasoned and strengthened his hold upon the public heart. Calumny’s ammunition has all been exploded; the powder has all been burned once—its force is spent—and the name of Grant will glitter a bright and imperishable star in the diadem of the Republic when those who have tried to tarnish it have moldered in forgotten graves; and when their memories and their epitaphs have vanished utterly.

—SENATOR ROSCOE CONKLING

nominating speech, Chicago Republican National Convention, 1880

He was unquestionably the most aggressive fighter in the entire list of the world’s famous soldiers. He never once yielded up a stronghold he had wrested from his foe. He kept his pledge religiously to “take no backward steps.” For four years of bloody and relentless war he went steadily forward, replacing the banner of his country upon the territory where it had been hauled down. He possessed in a striking degree every characteristic of the successful soldier. His methods were all stamped with tenacity of purpose, originality, and
ingenuity. He depended for his success more upon the powers of invention than of adaptation, and the fact that he has been compared at different times to nearly every great commander in history is perhaps the best proof that he was like none of them.

—COLONEL HORACE PORTER

aide to General Grant, 1864–65

S
TART WITH HIS HORRIBLE MOTHER
.

Hannah Simpson Grant, lately deceased. Not much missed. In his eight full years in the President’s Palace in Washington City, Hannah Grant never once visited her famous son. During the war, when a group of neighbors came rushing in one day to tell her about Grant’s brilliant victory at Vicksburg—the single most intelligent act of generalship in American military history—she just stood up and left the room without a word: life was Fate, Hannah claimed to believe, whatever happened was God’s will; to praise somebody for doing God’s will was a sin. When Grant came home after winning the war, she met him at the door and said, “Well, Ulysses, you’re a great man now, I guess,” and went back into her kitchen.

Horrible mother, worse father.

Jesse Root Grant had arrived in Hannah’s home town of Point
Pleasant, Ohio, in June of 1820, all alone, without encumbrance of family, to go to work in the tannery.

He was twenty-five years old. Two decades earlier his drunken, newly widowed father, Captain (from the Revolutionary War) Noah Grant, had moved out to Cincinnati from Pittsburgh, part of that first big emigration season of 1799, when land-hungry settlers started pouring west into Ohio like water through a broken dam. But Noah Grant was a restless and footloose man, and in the year 1805 he decided to pull up stakes and decamp again, this time in the direction of Kentucky. Before he took off, however, he simply deposited his five younger children on the doorsteps of various flabbergasted neighbors and relatives and left the two oldest ones to cope for themselves, Susan (age thirteen, who would soon marry) and Jesse (age eleven).

And if ever there was somebody born to cope, it was horrible Jesse Root Grant. If Hannah Simpson was silent and torpid, waiting passively with her hands in her lap for whatever God’s will might turn out to be, Jesse more than made up for it with activity and obnoxious bluster.

Point Pleasant was a quiet township of almost two thousand people then, the majority of them farmers and Southern transplants, and as soon as he got out of the stagecoach and put down his valise on the hotel steps, Jesse set about enlightening them one and all on the great subjects of the day. He was going to be rich, he announced, and that would be a good thing for the town. He was a Democrat and a Mason. He was against slavery and in favor of abolition, and he had his doubts about the politics of that arch-Southerner Andy Jackson. One week after he climbed down from the coach his first Letter to the Editor appeared.