Vermont Hero: General Lewis A. Grant

By George S. Maharay
Illustrated, maps, endnotes, bibliography, index, 317 pp., 2006. iUniverse, 2021 Pine Lake Rd., Suite 100, Lincoln, NE 68512, $22.95 plus shipping.

Reviewer: Michael Russert
Michael Russert, a member of the North Shore Round Table of Long Island and the Company of Military Historians, has a MALS plus 60 hours in American Studies. He is Coordinator of The New York State Veteran Oral History Program.

Review:
People interested in Civil War biography may find the title Vermont Hero by George S. Maharay familiar. Well they should, as he wrote a book of the same title in 2001. The hero of that biography was Maj. Gen. George J. Stannard, while the subject of this most recent study is Maj. Gen. Lewis A. Grant.

Born in Bennington County, Vermont, Lewis A. Grant, a lawyer in 1861, was commissioned a major in the newly formed 5th Vermont Infantry Regiment. The 5th Vermont served in the Vermont Brigade, as opposed to the Second Vermont Brigade or "Stannard's Vermont Brigade." While Stannard's Brigade served only nine months, the First Vermont Brigade, with which Grant was associated, served for the duration of the war.

Although Grant lived from 1829 to 1918, George Maharay devotes little space to Grant's prewar and postwar career, although he had been Assistant Secretary of War (1890-1894) under President Benjamin Harrison. Thus, this book is an examination of Grant's military service during the Civil War.

The author makes use of a range of primary and secondary sources; however, it appears that there is no large collection of Grant's writings extant. Thus, the author relies heavily on Grant's official communications during the war such as his after-action reports and postwar speeches on his military service.

These are supplemented by unpublished letters of brigade members and the published writings, such as those of Wilbur Fisk whose letters to a Vermont newspaper have twice been published in book form.

Unfortunately, the author failed to utilize more recent secondary battle accounts, often relying on Esposito's The West Point Atlas of American Wars published in 1959. He failed to make use of the most recent studies of the Peninsula Campaign (using Webb's 1881 account), Chancellorsville, The Overland Campaign or Sheridan's Valley Campaign.

Overall Maharay's biography, the first ever of Lewis Grant, is readable and informative. He uses Grant's wartime and postwar writings concerning his role in the war. The lack of wartime correspondences limits the ability of an author to portray his subject in depth. Maharay provides some measured analysis, however he remains quite partial to his subject.

Vermont Hero is a self-published, on-demand publication, suffering from some of the common faults of such an endeavor. There are some spelling errors - it is Semmes's Brigade not Semme's and it is George Steuart, not Stuart.

The author states that the Vermont Brigade engaged the 55th Georgia "from an unknown brigade" during the conclusion of the Gettysburg Campaign. In the summer of 1863 the 55th Georgia was engaged in eastern Tennessee.

There are careless editing errors; for example, on page 135 the subject of a sentence is missing. The accounts of the Mule Shoe at Spotsylvania on pages 135 and 139 are contradictory. The numerous illustrations from 19th-century sources are dark and unclear, and the maps from the same sources are not helpful. Finally, the index is brief and selective.

Lewis A. Grant was a Vermont hero, a recipient of the Medal of Honor, and he was wounded on several occasions. He was an outstanding example of a man with little military experience who was a better-than-average regimental and brigade commander. Vermont Hero is a first, but certainly not a definitive, biography of this man's fine service during the Civil War.