Grant's Papers

The other day while doing research on John Marszalek for the upcoming Rocky Mountain Civil War Symposium I saw a link that the Papers of Ulysses S. Grant are now available online. Marszalek is the head of the Papers after the passing of John Simon a could years ago.

Having the papers online is a fantastic resource. It helped me solve two riddles almost immediately. One was that at Shiloh the first staff member to give Lew Wallace an order was A.S. Baxter. All sources only use his initials, its a small riddle but I wanted to use his full name in a project if possible, and I found it (Algernon). The second riddle was that I had a source that claimed Grant wrote a letter to Alfred Mathews, but I did not know when. The letter appeared in a footnote in the Papers which I would not have had the patience to search for manually but now that the Papers are digitized online it took only a few minutes to solve that riddle.

I'll use it a lot on future research projects. In the past the only copy I knew of locally was a half hour drive downtown. I hardly ever have the time anymore to get there so this is a really helpful resource for me.

To search the collection yourself click here