Horace Porter is a prime source of anecdotes that make General U.S. Grant look good. As I showed in my book, Grant Under Fire, and in an earlier article on this blog, the former staff member’s “reverential Campaigning with Grant contained innumerable, implausible justifications and apologies for his chief. It parrots many of the inaccuracies from Grant’s Personal Memoirs.”
In another major discrepancy, Porter’s hagiographical volume relates how Grant, upon his October 1863 arrival in Chattanooga, supposedly “made a profound impression upon every one by the quickness of his perception and the knowledge which he had already acquired regarding important details of the army’s condition. … I cannot dwell too forcibly on the deep impression made upon those who had come in contact for the first time with the new commander, by the exhibition they witnessed of his singular mental powers and his rare military qualities … and [I] became intensely interested in the progress of the plans he was maturing for dealing with the enemy at all points of the theater of war lying within his command.”
Porter was surely falsifying history in describing how gratified he was when Grant asked if it would be agreeable for Porter to be assigned to duty with Grant, instead of going to Washington for a desk job. Porter allegedly replied in his eagerness that “[n]othing could possibly be more agreeable, and I should feel most highly honored by such an assignment.”
This could hardly have happened. Actually, before Porter departed for the capital, he wrote a letter to his mother from Chattanooga: “I do not leave the Department with much regret now that our old hero, Gen. Rosecrans, has gone.” Just because he later switched his personal heroes, Porter shouldn’t be allowed to fabricate his little stories and have them accepted without a thought by various authors and historians.
“The winners” or their friends, write the history.