In 1885, after President Grant’s death, “The Personal Memoirs of U.S. Grant” were published. Historians then and now have made extensive use of Grant’s recollections, which have shaped how we understand and evaluate not only the Union army’s triumphs and failures, but many of the war’s key participants. Come to our April meeting, and hear Professor Frank P. Varney persuasively argue that General Grant effectively rewrote the history of the Civil War. Varney focuses much of his talk on Grant’s treatment of Maj. Gen. William S. Rosecrans, a capable army commander whose reputation Grant (and others working with him) conspired to destroy. Using primary source documents (some of them brought to light for the first time,) Professor Varney will show what really happened on some of the Civil War’s most important battlefields. You will learn that Grant’s memoirs contain not only misstatements, but outright inventions to manipulate the historical record. But can Grant’s injustices go even deeper? Prof. Varney will expose Grant’s decidedly biased reports, falsified official documents, and even how he perjured himself before an army court of inquiry. By the end of this talk, you will see that Grant intentionally tried to control how future generations would remember the Civil War, and that blindly accepting historical “truths,” without vigorous a scholarly challenge, is a perilous path to understanding the real history.

Dr. Frank Varney
Dr, Varney earned his undergraduate degree at William Paterson University, his MA, and Ph.D. at Cornell University. He regularly takes student groups to historic sites - especially Civil War battlefields - and makes frequent speaking appearances before Civil War roundtables, historical societies, and other interested groups. He has also been the keynote speaker at several veteran’s memorials. He was a briefly-retired Distinguished Professor of History until he received an offer too good to refuse. Dr. Varney currently teaches US and Classical History at St. Michael’s College, in Vermont. He has written numerous appendices, chapters, and introductions– for books by other historians - and articles, and is the author of General Grant and the Rewriting of History, 2013, and General Grant and the Verdict of History, 2023.