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American Ulysses: A Life of Ulysses S. Grant Hardcover – Deckle Edge, October 4, 2016

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• Print length 864 pages
• Language English
• Publisher Random House
• Publication date October 4, 2016
• Dimensions 6.46 x 1.7 x 9.52 inches
• ISBN-10 1400069025
• ISBN-13 978-1400069026
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Amazon.com review, about the author, excerpt. © reprinted by permission. all rights reserved., product details.

• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Random House; First Edition (October 4, 2016)
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 864 pages
• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1400069025
• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1400069026
• Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 2.7 pounds
• Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6.46 x 1.7 x 9.52 inches
• #381 in American Civil War Biographies (Books)
• #792 in US Presidents
• #1,070 in Black & African American Biographies

About the author

Ronald c. white.

Ronald C. White is the New York Times best-selling author of the presidential biographies A. Lincoln: A Biography and American Ulysses: A Life of Ulysses S. Grant. USA Today said, “If you read one book on Lincoln, make it A. LINCOLN. His biography of Grant won the William Henry Seward Award for Excellence in Civil War Biography.

White is also the author of Lincoln’s Greatest Speech: The Second Inaugural, honored as a New York Times Notable Book, and a Washington Post bestseller. The Eloquent President: A Portrait of Lincoln Through His Words [2005], was a Los Angeles Times bestseller. White’s essays and reviews have appeared in The New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, Christian Science Monitor, and Harper’s. He has lectured at the White House and been interviewed on the PBS News Hour. He has spoken on Lincoln in England, France, Germany, Italy, Mexico, and New Zealand.

He attended Northwestern University and is a graduate of UCLA and Princeton Theological Seminary, earning a Ph.D. from Princeton University. He has taught at UCLA, Whitworth University, Colorado College, and Princeton Theological Seminary. He is a Reader at the Huntington Library in San Marino, California, and a Senior Fellow of the Trinity Forum in Washington, D.C. He lives with his wife, Cynthia, in Pasadena, California.

White’s forthcoming books are Lincoln in Private: What His Most Personal Reflections Tell Us About Our Greatest President [May 4, 2021], and Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain: A Biography [2022], both to be published by Random House.

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Personal Memoirs of U. S. Grant, Complete by Ulysses S. Grant

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The 10 Best Books on President Ulysses S. Grant

Essential books on ulysses s. grant.

There are countless books on Ulysses S. Grant, and it comes with good reason, beyond being America’s eighteenth President (1869-1877), as commanding general, he led the Union Armies to victory over the Confederacy in the American Civil War.

“The friend in my adversity I shall always cherish most,” he acknowledged. “I can better trust those who have helped to relieve the gloom of my dark hours than those who are so ready to enjoy with me the sunshine of my prosperity.”

In order to get to the bottom of what inspired one of America’s most consequential figures to the height of political power, we’ve compiled a list of the 10 best books on Ulysses S. Grant.

Grant by Ron Chernow

Ulysses S. Grant’s life has typically been misunderstood. All too often he is caricatured as a chronic loser and an inept businessman, or as the triumphant but brutal Union general of the Civil War. But these stereotypes don’t come close to capturing him, as Chernow shows in his masterful biography, the first to provide a complete understanding of the general and president whose fortunes rose and fell with dizzying speed and frequency.

Before the Civil War, Grant was flailing. His business ventures had ended dismally, and despite distinguished service in the Mexican War he ended up resigning from the army in disgrace amid recurring accusations of drunkenness. But in war, Grant began to realize his remarkable potential, soaring through the ranks of the Union army, prevailing at the battle of Shiloh and in the Vicksburg campaign, and ultimately defeating the legendary Confederate general Robert E. Lee. Grant’s military fame translated into a two-term presidency, but one plagued by corruption scandals involving his closest staff members.

More important, he sought freedom and justice for black Americans, working to crush the Ku Klux Klan and earning the admiration of Frederick Douglass, who called him “the vigilant, firm, impartial, and wise protector of my race.” After his presidency, he was again brought low by a dashing young swindler on Wall Street, only to resuscitate his image by working with Mark Twain to publish his memoirs, which are recognized as a masterpiece of the genre.

My Dearest Julia by Ulysses S. Grant

During his army years, Grant wrote hundreds of intimate and revealing letters to his wife, Julia Dent Grant. Presented with an introduction by acclaimed biographer Ron Chernow,  My Dearest Julia  collects more than eighty of these letters, beginning with their engagement in 1844 and ending with the Union victory in 1865.

They record Grant’s first experience under fire in Mexico (“There is no great sport in having bullets flying about one in every direction but I find they have less horror when among them than when in anticipation”), the aching homesickness that led him to resign from the peacetime army, and his rapid rise to high command during the Civil War.

Often written in haste, sometimes within the sound of gunfire, his wartime letters vividly capture the immediacy and uncertainty of the conflict. Grant initially hoped for an early conclusion to the fighting, but then came to accept that the war would have no easy end. “The world has never seen so bloody or so protracted a battle as the one being fought,” he wrote from Spotsylvania in 1864, “and I hope never will again.”

American Ulysses by Ronald C. White

Based on seven years of research with primary documents – some of them never examined by previous Grant scholars – this is destined to become the  Grant biography of our time. White, a biographer exceptionally skilled at writing momentous history from the inside out, shows Grant to be a generous, curious, introspective man and leader – a willing delegator with a natural gift for managing the rampaging egos of his fellow officers. His wife, Julia Dent Grant, long marginalized in the historic record, emerges in her own right as a spirited and influential partner.

Grant was not only a brilliant general but also a passionate defender of equal rights in post-Civil War America. After winning election to the White House in 1868, he used the power of the federal government to battle the Ku Klux Klan. He was the first president to state that the government’s policy toward American Indians was immoral, and the first ex-president to embark on a world tour, and he cemented his reputation for courage by racing against death to complete his Personal Memoirs .

Grant Takes Command by Bruce Catton

In the summer of 1863 after the climactic battle at Vicksburg, Lincoln’s government was more interested in Ulysses Simpson Grant than any other man alive. Although he was their most successful soldier, few men in Washington had even met him. Over the next several months his face, his morals, his total conduct would become commonly known and discussed by a nation tragically divided by the Civil War. Richard Henry Dana, Jr., was later to describe him as having “no gait, no manner, and no station – and as looking like “nobody at all.”

Grant Takes Command gives a detailed and revealing portrait of Grant during the last year and a half of war, and in essence, tells the story of how the war was won.

The Personal Memoirs of Ulysses S. Grant

Completed just days before his death and hailed by Mark Twain as “the most remarkable work of its kind since the Commentaries of Julius Caesar,” this is the now-legendary autobiography of Ulysses S. Grant.

Though Grant opens with tales of his boyhood, his education at West Point, and his early military career in the Mexican-American war of the 1840s, it is Grant’s intimate observations on the conduct of the Civil War, which make up the bulk of the work, that have made this required reading for history students, military strategists, and Civil War buffs alike.

Captain Sam Grant by Lloyd Lewis

This biography covers Grant’s youth and young manhood from 1822 to 1861. The narrative examines Grant’s birth, his days at West Point; his courtship and marriage, his experiences during the Mexican War, and his subsequent time as a civilian before his comeback as a soldier during the Civil War.

Let Us Have Peace by Brooks D. Simpson

Simpson argues that during the 1860s Grant was both soldier and politician, for military and civil policy were inevitably intertwined during the Civil War and Reconstruction era. According to Simpson, Grant instinctively understood that war was ‘politics by other means.’

Moreover, he realized that civil wars presented special challenges: reconciliation, not conquest, was the Union’s ultimate goal. And in peace, Grant sought to secure what had been won in war, stepping in to assume a more active role in policymaking when the intransigence of white Southerners and the obstructionist behavior of President Andrew Johnson threatened to spoil the fruits of Northern victory.

Grant Moves South by Bruce Catton

While a succession of Union generals – from McClellan to Burnside to Hooker to Meade – were losing battles and sacrificing troops due to ego, egregious errors, and incompetence, an unassuming Federal Army commander was excelling in the Western theater of operations. Though unskilled in military power politics and disregarded by his peers, Colonel Grant, commander of the Twenty-First Illinois Volunteer Infantry, was proving to be an unstoppable force.

He won victory after victory at Belmont, Fort Henry, and Fort Donelson, while brilliantly avoiding near-catastrophe and ultimately triumphing at Shiloh. And Grant’s bold maneuvers at Vicksburg would cost the Confederacy its invaluable lifeline: the Mississippi River. But destiny and President Lincoln had even loftier plans for Grant, placing nothing less than the future of an entire nation in the capable hands of the North’s most valuable military leader.

Grant and Sherman by Charles Bracelen Flood

They were both prewar failures – Grant, forced to resign from the Regular Army because of his drinking, and Sherman, holding four different jobs, including a much-loved position at a southern military academy – in the years before the firing on Fort Sumter. They began their unique collaboration ten months into the war, at the Battle of Shiloh, each carefully taking the other’s measure.

They shared the demands of family life and the heartache of personal tragedy. They shared similar philosophies of battle, employed similar strategies and tactics, and remained in close, virtually daily communication throughout the conflict. They were incontestably two of the Civil War’s most important figures, and the deep, abiding friendship they shared made the Union’s ultimate victory possible.

The Best Books About Ulysses S. Grant

Posted: 5/29/20

BY: The Civil War Monitor

We recently asked a number of top Civil War historians to let us know their favorite books about Ulysses S. Grant. The results are below. The books are ranked in order of popularity and accompanied by selected explanations from our panelists.

“One of the classic military autobiographies of all time.” — Allen C. Guelzo

“Chernow’s biography of Grant is the best—the fullest, best researched, and most readable—of the large number of Grant bios.” — James M. McPherson

“It is my favorite because of McFeely’s complex and engaging portrait of the man.” — Lesley Gordon

Other Selected Books:

Captain Sam Grant by Lloyd Lewis (4%) Grant by Jean Edward Smith (4%) Let Us Have Peace by Brooks D. Simpson (4%) American Ulysses by Ronald C. White (4%)

This information appeared in the Monitor ‘s special issue Grant vs Lee .

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Book Review: 'Soldier of Destiny' traces Ulysses S. Grant's complicated route before the White House

Book review - soldier of destiny - apnews version 3x2.

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Ulysses S. Grant's standing among the presidents has improved in recent years, with critically acclaimed biographies by Ron Chernow and others offering a new perspective on his time in the White House.

But the 18th president who led the Union armies to victory in the Civil War still leaves a complicated legacy, especially when it comes to his relationship to slavery. That relationship is the centerpiece of John Reeves' enlightening “Soldier of Destiny: Slavery, Secession and the Redemption of Ulysses S. Grant.”

Reeves' book isn't a comprehensive biography, and it doesn't cover Grant's time in the White House. But it gives readers an enlightening look at how he benefited from slavery years before he helped end the institution.

Reeves traces the evolution of Grant from someone who “actively participated in the slave culture of St. Louis” before the Civil War. Reeves is fair and blunt in depicting the role slavery played in Grant's life as he tried to provide a “respectable middle-class lifestyle” for his family before the war.

“And this lifestyle, it must be remembered, was dependent on the ownership of human property,” Reeves writes. He also points out the ambivalence Grant displayed about slavery before the Civil War.

But he also examines the characteristics and skills that it took for Grant to go from an officer who was forced to resign from the Army to one of the most revered military heroes in history. This includes a detailed look at the key battles he faced during the Civil War.

Reeves doesn't shy from highlighting the stains upon Grant's military legacy including the reports of drinking that dogged Grant throughout the years. He also devotes a chapter to the order Grant issued expelling Jewish people from a military district he oversaw, an effort that was intended to halt illegal cotton speculation and remains a “black mark on his character,” Reeves writes.

Reeves manages to stitch Grant's flaws and virtues into a thought-provoking portrait of a key historical figure who never lost faith in himself or his country.

AP book reviews: https://apnews.com/hub/book-reviews

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Wide Awakes: the young Americans who marched the north to civil war

Smithsonian curator Jon Grinspan discusses his dramatic new book about a spontaneous movement that helped elect Abraham Lincoln – and frightened the slave-holding south

H istory is really the only thing I can do,” Jon Grinspan says, smiling. “I worked in restaurant kitchens, I did other things, but really history is it. If I ever have to stop, I don’t know what I could do. It’s like I’m a one-use tool.”

He’s being modest. But he definitely does history. A Philadelphia native who studied at Sarah Lawrence in New York and got his PhD from the University of Virginia, Grinspan is now a curator of political history at the National Museum of American History in Washington DC.

He’s also the author of a new book, Wide Awake: The Forgotten Force That Elected Lincoln and Spurred the Civil War , which casts a bright torchlight on to a fascinating if brief episode in 1860s America with strong echoes in the divided nation of today.

The Wide Awakes were a political movement, begun in Hartford, Connecticut, around the elections of 1860, growing spontaneously and nationally as a way for young men to publicly support Republican anti-slavery candidates, most prominently Abraham Lincoln. Members wore capes, often bearing a painted eye, carried flaming torches and wore military hats and approximations of uniform as they marched in opposition to the slave-holding south.

In his small Smithsonian office, after a trip to the museum stores to see a Wide Awake torch, the last coffee cup used by Abraham Lincoln and other precious relics, Grinspan describes how he found his way to the Wide Awakes.

“I always looked down on the civil war as a teenager, because it seemed so cookie-cutter and kind of hokey, very un-human and dry. And then in college we started reading Eric Foner ” – the dean of civil war-era scholars – “and he made the factions in 19th-century America look human, kind of tribal. I got into it from there.”

As a curator, Grinspan is responsible for telling the story of US democracy – hence the giant cardboard pencil in the corner, emblazoned with the words “Write In Ralph Nader”. As it happens, the evocation of the third-party candidate who maybe cost Al Gore the presidency in 2000 points to one of Grinspan’s driving interests: turnout.

When he learned how many Americans voted in 19th-century elections, particularly around the civil war, “that made me want to find more. Turnout over 80%? What’s the story behind it? And that kind of guided me into trying to find the human stories, and from there it just seemed so exciting.

“Also, growing up in the 1990s and early 2000s, politics seemed so dry and tame in America. Turnout was lower in the 90s than at any time since the 1920s. So looking back to the 19th century, when democracy seems so much more vibrant and engaging and conflicted, I got into this world that was completely different. And then over the last 20 years, our world has come to look much more heated, for mostly negative reasons, so it feels like I got into something really niche that has become somehow relevant.”

‘Guys with torches in the night’

Grinspan found the Wide Awakes “at grad school, in need of an idea for my thesis. I got so into it I essentially bombed all my classes the first year. They threatened to throw me out, but I just felt the Wide Awake story wasn’t being told and I wanted to tell it.

“So I got pretty fixated on it and I submitted a piece to the Journal of American History. And then, right when I was on the cusp of being kicked out, the Journal said, ‘We’re gonna run this in our Lincoln Bicentennial , which is 2009.’ From there, I had some great professors who said, ‘Just be ruthless in doing the work you want to do.’ And, pat myself on the back, it turned into a career, right?”

Right. The Wide Awakes are known but they flourished briefly, before a civil war in which most were subsumed by the Union army. Grinspan has room to move.

“There’s a little scene in the preface of this book where a professor turns to his computer, goes on a newspaper database, plugs in ‘Wide Awake’ and gets 15,000 hits for 1860,” Grinspan says. “And yet the group had been so neglected.

“It usually gets a paragraph in good books on 1860. They’ll describe Wide Awake marches somewhere, maybe around the Chicago Republican convention in May. They’re outside. But then you’ll get 35 pages on the fight for the Republican nomination and you’ll get a biography of Edward Bates [Lincoln’s attorney general] at 15 pages. But you have this mass movement, hundreds of thousands of people? And I’m gonna get a paragraph?”

Grinspan thinks some neglect of the Wide Awakes comes from “a little bit of elitism”, history focused on great leaders. But “the Wide Awakes aren’t entirely a pretty story. And after the war, it’s much easier to valorise Lincoln than to focus on the guys with torches in the night.”

After the war, and Lincoln’s assassination, the Reconstruction years saw Ulysses S Grant, the general who became president, face down the Ku Klux Klan, torch-bearing night-raiders who terrorised Black people in the southern states.

But the Wide Awakes had a dark side of their own. Like the Republican party , they emerged from a primordial soup of anti-immigrant feeling.

“These white Anglo-Saxon Protestant Republicans were pretty hostile to the Irish Democrats and specifically Catholics,” Grinspan says. “The Wide Awakes in the 1850s are a nativist club. They are in nativist fights in Brooklyn, in Boston. You see accounts from Irish immigrants saying, ‘We stayed away from that group over there wearing the white hats.’ Because a ‘wide awake’ hat was the symbol of the group. And then the Wide Awakes in 1860, they take the same name just four or five years later. If you had started a movement called the Tea Party in 2015, people would have had associations. It’s a lot of the same people. They’re cheered on by the same newspapers like the Hartford Courant, which is massively anti-Irish.

“But they grow out of it. I think they find a better conspiracy to fight.”

By 1860, the southern grip on Washington was strong. The slave-owning states resisted change through an unrepresentative Congress and a supreme court tilted their way. The parallels with Washington today are strong, though labels have changed and it is Republicans who now pursue minority rule .

“You look at the behavior of the slave-owning elites and they are doing everything they can to control Congress and control the supreme court, to determine the future of the nation,” Grinspan says. “It’s kind of funny that we hate conspiracy theories, but every once in a while one is accurate.”

Another feature of Grinspan’s book that echoes strongly today concerns southern reactions to the Wide Awakes, which ranged from dismissive to angry to frightened. Particularly scarifying was the presence – remarkable enough in the segregated north – of Black men among the torch-bearing marchers.

“John Mercer Langston was as far as I know the first Black Wide Awake. He starts the club in Oberlin, Ohio, then later becomes a Reconstruction congressman, a really prominent figure. I knew when I started work on the Wide Awakes there were Black men involved, but I didn’t realise how compelling this story was.

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“A lot were fugitives from slavery. They connect the dots to underground abolitionists in Boston, who were fighting slave catchers in the 1850s. They come out publicly with the Wide Awakes, marching in uniform, 144 African Americans with 10,000 white Wide Awakes. They’re not just claiming public space or claiming partisan identity: they’re in military uniforms, a tiny minority in a sea of white people. It’s a bold move.

“And those same guys, when the war breaks out, they organise the home guard and then they organise the 54th Massachusetts Regiment, the most prominent African American fighting force in the war. I see the Wide Awakes at a turning point there.

“And in the south and the Democratic north, people go crazy when they learn about Black Wide Awakes. They start posting disinformation broadsides for Black Wide Awake events, real events in Pittsburgh and Chicago where we know there were no African Americans, just to gin up anger and get people to vote Democratic.”

It all sounds familiar, evocative of rightwing fear and anger in summer 2020, when protests for racial justice spread and Trumpists insisted shadowy, black-clad anti-fascists, “Antifa”, threatened chaos and bloodshed.

Rightly, Grinspan is wary of pat journalistic comparisons. Generously, he says the Wide Awakes were alarming to many.

“After the 1850s, when there’s so much chaos in America, so much street fighting and Bleeding Kansas and the Know Nothing gangs, people marching in order, in silence, sends a political message. It’s saying, ‘We actually are the people in this republic right now who can organise things. The Democrats can’t even stay together as a party and we have matching uniforms.’ They’re not armed but it’s not a big jump from torches to muskets, as they always say.”

Lincoln’s victory in 1860 was followed by civil war but it also caused the Wide Awakes to fade from the scene. Members wanted to escort the new president to Washington but despite knowing of threats to his life, Lincoln turned down the offer.

“If he brings a bodyguard to Washington,” Grinspan says, “if he has 5,000 or 100,000 Republicans in uniform come with him, he drives away Democrats, he drives away Kentucky, Maryland, Missouri, slave-owning border states.”

Prompted, Grinspan makes an apt comparison.

“I mean, January 6, you can see how you can rile up your supporters,” he says, of the day in 2021 when Donald Trump sent supporters, most in what passed for Maga uniform, some in tactical gear, to attack Congress itself.

“When Mussolini marches on Rome, he brings his blackshirts with him. There are so many examples of a leader mobilising people this way. And Lincoln has the self-restraint not to do that. He puts it out through John Hay, his young secretary, to the young Wide Awakes in Springfield, Illinois: ‘Go to Washington as individuals. Don’t come as a company. If you want to come to the inauguration, that’s fine.’

“But there are still secret Wide Awakes in the crowd and they have the uniforms on.”

‘People keep finding objects’

Grinspan has ideas for his next book – which will be his fourth – and will continue to engage the public at the Smithsonian. Nonetheless, the publication of Wide Awake is a culmination, of sorts, of 17 years of consuming work.

“At first I felt I discovered something no one else knew about,” he says. “And then I thought, ‘I’m done.’ But people kept coming to me with more Wide Awakes stuff. I wouldn’t have written this book five or 10 years ago but people keep finding objects. I still find references in diaries I read. And there was a sort of neo-Wide Awake movement in 2020,” around protests for racial justice.

It seems Grinspan will never truly let go of the Wide Awakes. They’re part of his job, after all. Downstairs, in the conservation department, we approach another relic, spread out to be viewed with care.

It is a Wide Awake cape, owned and used by George P Holt of New Hampshire then stored in an attic for 100 years or more. Originally bright white with violet lettering, it has faded and frayed with time. But the painted eye, arranged to stare from the wearer’s breast, is as piercing as on the day it was made.

Wide Awake is published in the US and in the UK by Bloomsbury

• Abraham Lincoln
• American civil war
• History books
• US politics

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Civil War relics of Gen. William T. Sherman up for auction, bidding begins Tuesday

Some 500 pieces of American history unseen even by scholars are coming to light through an auction taking place through Fleischer’s Auctions of Columbus.

The two-day auction, “Civil War & African American History: Wm. T. Sherman Collection,” which goes live at 9 a.m. Tuesday, features personal effects of Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman ranging from his wartime sword and uniform rank insignia to a family Bible and a copy of Ulysses S. Grant’s memoirs, both with notes meticulously written by Sherman.

The collection was consigned directly by Sherman’s descendants after generations of careful preservation.

“None of these have ever been seen before. They were passed directly from Gen. Sherman to his son, Philemon. He passed them on to the family of his older sister (Minnie Fitch),” said Danielle Linn, senior specialist with Fleischer’s.

“These items are not known to scholars. They give a rare and unprecedented glimpse into the life of one of the most important figures of the 19th century.”

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The Sherman artifacts are part of a larger auction, lots 78 through 128 in Fleischer’s spring sale. Also included are Revolutionary War and Wild West items and a collection of African American relics, including rare photographs of Sojourner Truth, the scrapbook and effects of a Tuskegee Airman killed during World War II and a recruitment broadside written by Frederick Douglass urging Black men to enlist during the Civil War.

Linn said many of the Sherman items were collected by the general after the Civil War.

“He was such a public figure, so he had copies of biographies about him and his role in the war sent to him by the authors. In a few, he’s offered his own edits and annotations,” she said.

A staunch defender of Ulysses S. Grant, Sherman amassed a series of journal articles about the general who led the Union armies to victory over the Confederacy. One such article maligning Grant sparked what Linn called “the first Twitter war before the internet.”

“The article essentially said that Grant would have disappeared from history had it not been for the untimely death of Charles (Ferguson) Smith. It implied that Grant’s rise was serendipitous instead of based on his skill and leadership,” she said.

A complicated man: Biography paints complex picture of controversial Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman

Sherman, who Linn said viewed his role as “a defender of the Civil War’s legacy, as well as Grant’s legacy,” was infuriated by the article. “It’s striking to me how Sherman was so adamant and passionate about his defense of Grant ,” she said.

A biography that Grant never saw to publication is among Sherman’s possessions. “This copy is incredible and super rare,” Linn said.

“To have (Sherman’s) notes reflecting on the Civil War was a remarkable piece of history and shows the relationship between the two men. Sherman was not known as a man of letters, but he inscribed his books with when and from whom he received them.”

The general also kept a copy of “Photographic Views of Sherman’s Campaign,” George Barnard’s photographic record of Sherman’s March to the Sea.

“It’s an incredible piece of photographic history. Barnard had an incredible eye and was in the right place at the right time. It’s very highly regarded in its own right,” Linn said.

“Many attribute Sherman’s victory with the Atlantic campaign and March to the Sea with allowing President Lincoln to win the election and securing the Emancipation Proclamation.”

Linn emphasized that the African American collection also holds an important place in American history.

“There are a lot of pieces of African American history, an area of history that a lot of places are realizing is underrepresented. There are a lot of pieces coming out of the woodwork of this robust and complex history,” she said.

One of the highlights for Linn is a photograph of Mat Bransford, an enslaved man who was leased to Franklin Gorin, who was the owner and manager of Mammoth Cave in Kentucky, the world's longest-known cave system.

“Mat Bransford was originally enslaved, but after emancipation, chose to stay and live out his life as a tour guide. His story is really incredible. He mapped a lot of early Mammoth Cave,” she said.

Another meaningful item is an unpublished portrait of abolitionist Charles Sumner, who was elected to the U.S. Senate in 1851.

“He was a very passionate speaker about what he believed. In the 1850s, he gave a speech condemning slavery that so enraged (South Carolina Rep. Preston Brooks), who beat Sumner almost to death in the halls of Congress,” Linn said.

To sum up the significance of the Sherman and African American collection, Linn said simply, “You can't overstate its importance.”

Columbus Mileposts - Aug. 11, 1880: Even if 'war is hell,' Sherman didn't say exactly that in his famous speech

There already has been “very strong interest” in the auction, especially the Sherman collection, she said.

“In general, we have heavy institutional interest, museums have interest, rare book libraries and private collectors.”

Bids for the “Civil War & African American History: Wm. T. Sherman Collection” auction, which runs Tuesday and Wednesday, are to be taken both in-person and in advance. To bid in advance, register at fleischersauctions.com .

Bids by proxy are also to be taken by phone. In a proxy bid, Fleischer’s is to record what items the bidder is interested in and on the day of the auction, the bidder should receive a phone call before their lot comes up and the phone proxy can bid for them.

To arrange a proxy bid, contact Fleischer’s at 614-653-6132 or by email to [email protected] .

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Geographic coordinates (latitude and longitude) define a position on the Earth’s surface. Coordinates are angular units. The canonical form of latitude and longitude representation uses degrees (°), minutes (′), and seconds (″). GPS systems widely use coordinates in degrees and decimal minutes, or in decimal degrees.

Latitude varies from −90° to 90°. The latitude of the Equator is 0°; the latitude of the South Pole is −90°; the latitude of the North Pole is 90°. Positive latitude values correspond to the geographic locations north of the Equator (abbrev. N). Negative latitude values correspond to the geographic locations south of the Equator (abbrev. S).

Longitude is counted from the prime meridian ( IERS Reference Meridian for WGS 84) and varies from −180° to 180°. Positive longitude values correspond to the geographic locations east of the prime meridian (abbrev. E). Negative longitude values correspond to the geographic locations west of the prime meridian (abbrev. W).

UTM or Universal Transverse Mercator coordinate system divides the Earth’s surface into 60 longitudinal zones. The coordinates of a location within each zone are defined as a planar coordinate pair related to the intersection of the equator and the zone’s central meridian, and measured in meters.

Elevation above sea level is a measure of a geographic location’s height. We are using the global digital elevation model GTOPO30 .

Elektrostal , Moscow Oblast, Russia