Ulysses S. Grant, a reluctant hero, has a tireless champion in his editor.

Historian John Y. Simon has spent his career immersed in the words of an American icon. As a result of keeping company with Ulysses S. Grant, he knows the life, the family, the friends of this singular man. He knows his values, his character, his satisfactions and disappointments. Above all, he knows his penmanship.

Simon, who wrote his dissertation at Harvard on Congress and the Civil War, is an authority on Grant and Abraham Lincoln and the time in which they lived. In 1962 he began editing The Papers of Ulysses S. Grant, a massive project that has contributed much to our understanding of American history by publishing Grant's military and presidential papers, correspondence, and other documents.

The pairing of editor and subject has proved to be a most felicitous match. Earlier this year, Simon was recognized with a Lincoln Prize for Special Achievement for the project, which has completed 26 volumes to date of a planned 34 or so. The award, administered by the Lincoln and Soldiers Institute at Gettysburg College, is one of the most prestigious a U.S. historian can receive.

"It is inconceivable that any historian would write on the Civil War without having these volumes at hand," the award jury said. "John Y. Simon has been an ambassador to the academic and public world, demonstrating the quality of Civil War scholarship."

For many years now, Simon has been one of the "go-to" guys for commentary on Grant, Lincoln, and the Civil War. He has been a consultant to PBS as well as Hollywood, the National Endowment for the Humanities as well as state and local historical societies. He has spoken at dozens of colleges and universities; been a commentator on National Public Radio, C-SPAN, and the History Channel; and even lectured aboard the Mississippi Queen, during a Civil War seminar. He is in demand to furnish forewords and essays for books on the era and has edited many collections of articles. All this, of course, is in addition to teaching history at SIUC.

When Kevin Kline was preparing to play Grant in Wild Wild West, he called Simon to find out what the president had acted and sounded like. Kline later sent Simon an autographed still from the movie with his thanks inscribed at the bottom. The framed photo, in which a costumed and bearded Kline looks almost a dead ringer for Grant, hangs on Simon's office wall. "It was a terrible movie," Simon confides, "but it wasn't his fault; he's a very good actor. He was a delight to talk to."

The Grant project was born out of a burgeoning interest in Civil War history. The Civil War Centennial Commissions of Illinois, New York, and Ohio established the Ulysses S. Grant Association in 1962 to publish Grant's papers. They named Simon, who was then teaching history at Ohio State University, as executive director and editor.

"I'd always been interested both in documents and in the period in which Grant lived," he says. "I've always thought that if I had been born earlier, I would have edited the Lincoln papers, but they were done by the time I grew up. I sort of fell into the project of doing the Grant papers, but it was a logical one."

The Grant Association began at the Ohio Historical Society, but moved to SIUC in 1964. It is headquartered in Morris Library, tucked away in several windowless cubbyholes on the third floor. The National Historical Publications and Records Commission, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and SIUC fund its work.

In its 40 years on campus, the project has accumulated more than 100 file cabinets full of photocopies of Grant documents--some 250,000 items in all, a sea of words. The originals, Simon explains, are "all over the country and all over the world." Many are in the National Archives and the Library of Congress, but many are in other libraries and museums and in private hands.

"The collecting phase went on for the first few years, and our first volume appeared in 1967, which is about par for the course for a project like ours," Simon says. "But the collecting never really stops.

"We still get new tips on where things are. We find all sorts of things by accident, or are led by one document to another that might be pertinent. Nowadays, eBay has brought a lot of stuff out of attics and made us aware of items that would not otherwise have come to our attention."

What about discoveries made too late for a particular volume?

""We have not had any major discoveries, but we have had minor ones," he says. "It's inevitable for this type of project.

"We originally put those in what I called the Drawer of Shame--things we missed. But it's more than one drawer now, and we're already planning a supplement volume." Still, he says with a wry smile, nothing has turned up after the fact that has caused him "any intense grief."

Indeed, the Grant project has been lauded by critics for its consistently high quality. Simon gives much of the credit to his staff of editors--currently William Ferraro, Aaron Lisec, and Dawn Vogel--and to the graduate and undergraduate students who assist them, doing everything from proofreading to library research. (Lisec and Vogel both started with the project as graduate students.)

"The work we do is sometimes a mystery to the public," says Simon. "Congressmen will say, 'We don't want those documents edited, we want them published just the way they were written.' They don't understand that good documentary editors share that goal.

"What we do, we hope, is like an art restorer who's concerned about presenting the original painting just as it was created. But that's not always easy, and there are [editorial] questions that come up along the way.

"For example, crossed-out words: do we drop or include them? We've always included anything that was crossed out in the original document, because it does give some clue as to what people were thinking.

"We don't make a big deal about correcting spelling, punctuation, and grammar. People are really far better at reading documents [from other eras, or with mistakes] than some editors give them credit for. Anyone who goes to the mall sees all these ampersands on door signs and attractive misspellings, like 'lite' beer. That doesn't need a translation. It isn't necessary to spell it correctly in brackets to communicate to the public."

Beyond tracking down documents, the chief editorial challenges lie in deciphering handwritten documents, deciding which merit inclusion (it would require far too many volumes to print them all), and researching and writing copious explanatory notes.

"We've certainly learned how to read Grant's writing, and that of most of his good friends, very well," says Simon, "which isn't a talent to be sneezed at, because there are a lot of people who can't cope with 19th-century handwriting. Some handwritings are just plain tough. In cases where bad handwriting is complicated by paper deterioration, we will spend a lot of time trying to figure out just what somebody wrote."

Letters from Grant during his campaigns in the Mexican-American War caused many Excedrin moments: they were in so-called "criss-cross writing." To save on scarce paper and expensive postage, Simon explains, correspondents would fill up their sheet of paper, then give it a quarter-turn and fill it up again.

Simon's intent has been to publish anything with historical or personal significance. "Everything [included] has represented my vision of what I wanted in this edition," he says--and not just the letters and other documents that Grant wrote, but those he received as well.

Modern documentary editing places considerable emphasis on incoming letters, which put the primary figure's own letters in context, Simon explains. Incoming correspondence is especially valuable where the presidency is concerned, he says.

"People write to the president who wouldn't write to anyone else. In Grant's case, we have letters from former slaves, from Indian chiefs, from women, from Unionists in the South who had been victims of the Ku Klux Klan, from just ordinary Americans who are impoverished and desperate--people who aren't well known in history at all--as well as having correspondence from the well-to-do and influential. We really open a window on American society by printing a great number of these incoming letters."

Simon's expertise makes him in demand as a consultant to other editorial projects, including The Papers of Jefferson Davis and The Legal Papers of Abraham Lincoln. He has headed the Association for Documentary Editing and the Illinois Association for the Advancement of History and has served on countless advisory boards.

Whereas Simon's career has been shaped by both choice and duty, Grant's was shaped almost entirely by the latter. It's fitting that he began his memoirs with the proverb "Man proposes; God disposes," Simon points out. "He didn't think that he had chosen his careers, but that they'd been chosen for him. He had wanted to be a teacher, a farmer, a financier--everything that blew up."

He certainly never wanted to be a soldier, but his father shipped him off at age 17 to West Point, a place he detested. Among his few consolations there were his talent at mathematics (at one point he planned to be a math professor) and the fact that he could borrow novels from the library.

He served with great bravery in the Mexican-American War, a conflict he considered "aggressive and unwarranted" on America's part, Simon wrote. He married Julia Dent in 1848 and resigned his army commission in 1854 to try to support his growing family by farming. But setbacks eventually led him to take a job as clerk in his father's leather-goods store in Galena, Ill.

When the Civil War began, he volunteered his services out of a sense of obligation. "Nobody particularly wanted him until the governor of Illinois gave him a chance with an unruly regiment that he whipped into shape," says Simon. Despite his own trepidation (see sidebar), Grant quickly distinguished himself, winning key victories at Fort Donelson, Shiloh, Vicksburg, and Chattanooga.

Grant's approach to his military campaigns was aggressive; he wanted to keep moving. Like Lincoln, "he felt it was important to win this war quickly," Simon says. "He seemed to be aware that more men died of disease than died of wounds in battle, and the longer the war lasted the more men died. Furthermore, the task of the North was to put down the rebellion before it got tired of trying to do it."

Grant also understood that changing conditions and new technologies--the telegraph, the railroad, new weapons with a greater range--required new military tactics. The other side realized that too, but Grant had the edge as an innovator.

In his war orders, as in all of his writing, Grant was concise, direct, and clear. "Usually there's a great deal of miscommunication in wartime--people not being very clear about what they want done, or not clear about the geography," says Simon. "There are cases during the Civil War where commanders lose track of who's where. But there's no case in which we have reason to believe that a written order of Grant's was misunderstood."

Grant was no glory-monger. At Appomattox he treated Lee as an equal. He refused to march into Richmond in triumph. He squelched the raucous celebrating of his men, reminding them that the Rebels were once again their countrymen.

Grant was pressed hard to accept the Republican nomination for the presidency in 1868. Though he disliked politics and public speaking, he felt obligated to run, and was unfortunate enough to win.

Proceeding like a military man, he made key appointments without consulting with party leaders. "The idea of playing politics as president he thought demeaned the office," says Simon. "He made some very wise appointments and some very poor ones--both probably as a result of being pigheaded about it."

Grant's loyalty to his appointees often outweighed his judgment. His second term in particular was marked by scandal and corruption--though never on the part of Grant himself. (Indeed, his honesty was such that his advisors told him to avoid newspapermen, Simon notes.)

As president, Grant ran into opposition over many issues, especially his efforts to enforce civil rights laws. He agreed to stand for reelection, Simon explains, only because "he had been bitterly attacked, and he wanted some sort of vindication. But he did turn down the people who wanted to nominate him for a third term, which he could very easily have had."

"I never wanted to get out of a place as much as I did to get out of the Presidency," Grant reflected after leaving office. He later advocated a six- or seven-year presidential term with no eligibility for reelection.

Grant's presidential reputation hit a low point between the two world wars but has begun to rise in recent years, as historians take a fresh look. His presidential documents, says Simon, "repay reading even now. One I like to call people's attention to is the one where he asked for a constitutional amendment to provide for separation of church and state."

Faced with the depression of 1873, Grant proposed sponsoring some public works to give people jobs, but his own party panned the idea. "Grant listened to those people and unfortunately missed his chance to be the first New Deal president," Simon jokes. "But his instincts could sometimes be dazzlingly right."

Simon hopes to see the Grant papers to their conclusion. "We have a preliminary treatment of the rest of the Grant correspondence, so now we're working on refining it--getting the annotations in, getting these documents into some sort of coherent whole," he says. "It's not an easy job, but we can see the end of the project from where we sit."

Dawn Vogel runs the office, prepares typescripts, and does much of the proofreading. William Ferraro is working on documents from the 18-month world tour that Grant and his wife made after leaving the White House. And Aaron Lisec is working on documents from the 1880s.

In those later years, an investment swindle drove the Grants into debt. To earn money, Grant agreed to write some magazine reminiscences, which at first were "very dry," says Simon. "The editors teased personal details out of Grant--they made him conscious of the fact that readers wanted to know what he thought about the events [he was relating]."

Grant managed to adapt his style, and the magazine articles became quite popular. In 1884 Grant developed throat cancer, and his last endeavor, as he lay dying, was to write his memoirs in order to secure his family's financial future.

He succeeded: the Personal Memoirs of Ulysses S. Grant, published posthumously, sold spectacularly well. "They're well-written and candid, with a sense of humor and a great deal of equanimity," says Simon. "They treat others very fairly. They're an American classic, much admired by a host of literary figures." That would surely astonish Grant, who never considered himself a writer.

Simon plans to use the completed Papers to provide annotations for a new edition of the Memoirs. "It will help amplify what's in the Memoirs and at certain points even correct it," he says. As the Grant Association's own last act, this project must wait until all of the correspondence has been edited. "One mess at a time," Simon quips.

He has not lost his enthusiasm for Grant.

"He's important to know, and there's always more to find out," he says.

"It has been an opportunity for me to spend time with a spectacular figure in American history."

--by Marilyn Davis, ed.