HEADLEY, Joel Tyler. Four Volumes on Ulysses S. Grant.

Grant and Sherman; Their Campaigns and Generals.

New York: E.B. Treat & Co., 1866.

8vo.; brown cloth stamped in gilt and blind.

First edition. Sabin 31150.

The Life of Ulysses S. Grant, General-in-Chief U.S.A.

New York: E.B. Trat & Co., 1868.

First edition. Savin 31155.

The Life and Travels of General Grant.

Philadelphia: Hubbard Bros., 1879.

8vo.; green cloth stamped in gilt and black.

First edition, with Jesse R. Grant’s ownership signature on the front free endpaper.

The Life of Ulysses S. Grant.

Kansas City: Kansas City Publishing Co., 1885.

8vo.; brown cloth stamped in gilt and black.

First edition.

Joel Tyler Headley (1813-1897) was one of the most prolific and popular authors of nineteenth century America. A minister’s son, he was born in Walton, New York and prepared, with considerable misgivings, to follow his father’s footsteps into the pulpit. He studied at Union College and Auburn Theological Seminary, and answered the call of a congregation in Stockbridge, Massachusetts. In the summer of 1842 he suffered a nervous breakdown and went to Italy to recuperate. He wrote travelogues for New York newspapers, and collected them in 1844 as Italy and the Italians, the success of which led him to abandon his religious career and devote himself to writing. He published another set of travel pieces, Letters from Italy in 1845, and the following year he succeeded Henry J. Raymond as the associate editor of the New York Tribune, publishing in quick succession two highly successful historical biographies: Napoleon and his Marshals (2 vols., 1846) and Washington and his Generals (2 vols., 1847). Poor health disabled him again in 1847 and he retreated to the Adirondacks, from where he wrote still another bestseller, The Adirondacks, or the Wild Woods (1849). By 1853 200,000 copies of his books were in print. He was, long before Dwight McDonald coined the term, a quintessentially middlebrow writer. In 1866, The Nation described Washington and his Generals as one of the five secular books to be found on the typical American’s bookshelf. The public thought of him as a serious, respected scholar, but in fact many of his books were hastily slapped together, derivative compilations from other sources, lacking in any scholarly or literary originality. Poe, for one, despised him and called him “the Autocrat of all the Quacks.”

Every great man should have a biographer like Headley: sunny, adulatory, never critical, his Grant was simply the plainspoken savior of the republic. In an 1868 biography he celebrated Grant as a Cincinnatus, uninterested in the humbug of politics. He recycled chunks of that book to fill out two later volumes, which continued Grant’s biography through his post-presidential world tour, and into his retirement. As president, “amid the clamors of excited men and the demands of vindictive passion, he remained unmoved, and breathed the very spirit of kindness and generosity, and exhibited a patriotism that put to shame the partisan zeal of those who constituted themselves his advisers.” The former president showed exemplary “simplicity and modesty” on his world tour; and—Grant’s sardonic sense of humor would have appreciated this—in his final illness, the old warrior was “docile as a child” who “lay and suffered—his strong will and stern nature wholly surrendered to the will of his maker.” Not quite. Headley’s subject was writing away with grim determination, creating a book that would long outlast the entire Headley oeuvre.