# Nine Counties *Ulysses S. Grant and the Power He Would Not Spend Twice* — Legendary Biographies No. 237 - **Subject:** Hiram Ulysses Grant (Ulysses S. Grant) - **Written by:** Vivian Ashcombe - **Shelf:** Power & Politics / American Politics - **Published:** 2026 - **Extent:** 226 pages, 6 × 9 in, 60# uncoated cream, black ink - **EPUB:** $3.99 — EPUB 3 · DRM-free · reads on Kindle, Kobo and Apple Books (ISBN 979-8-90623-517-6) - **Audiobook:** $5.99 — Unabridged · measured from the masters · read by Edmund Hartley (ISBN 979-8-90623-627-2) Buy it, or read the opening free: volumes/237-nine-counties.html ## About this book The Personal Memoirs were finished in pencil seven days before their author died, and they saved his widow from destitution. Ulysses S. Grant wrote the last page in a borrowed cottage on Mount McGregor and died there of cancer of the throat on 23 July 1885. A congressman filling a West Point vacancy in 1839 had written Hiram Ulysses Grant down wrong, and Grant never corrected it. The same signature appears on the surrender terms at Appomattox and on the proclamation suspending habeas corpus in nine counties of South Carolina. Grant is the only American, this book argues, who held the maximum available quantity of federal power twice, in two different offices, and can therefore be graded twice on one question: what will you spend power on when spending it is unpopular? On 17 October 1871 he suspended habeas corpus across nine South Carolina counties and had more than six hundred Klansmen arrested. The Ku Klux Klan ceased to exist as a functioning body, and in November 1872 the South held the freest election of the Reconstruction period. In September 1875 Governor Adelbert Ames of Mississippi asked for exactly the same help. Grant answered that the whole public were tired out with these annual autumnal outbreaks in the South. There was a governor's election in Ohio five weeks later, carried by under six thousand votes. The distance between those two pieces of paper is the subject. Everything else bears on it: the tannery, Mexico fought superbly by a man who thought the war a crime, Donelson, Shiloh, Cold Harbor, then the presidency at full length. Amos Akerman, dismissed over a railroad quarrel eight weeks after breaking the Klan. Black Friday, Colfax, the Whiskey Ring, and the morning in May 1884 when an ex-President walked out of his own firm worth eighty dollars. This is not a rehabilitation and not a prosecution. It dismantles the drunk, the butcher and the crook, and declines the shape of the recovery that replaced them. Appomattox at a higher price. ## Contents 1. Hiram 2. Chapultepec 3. Fort Humboldt 4. Hardscrabble 5. Unconditional Surrender 6. Shiloh 7. Paducah 8. Bruinsburg 9. Cold Harbor 10. McLean's Parlor 11. Ad Interim 12. Black Friday 13. Nine Counties 14. Colfax 15. Babcock 16. The Ohio Election 17. The Indiana 18. Ferdinand Ward 19. The Peach 20. Mount McGregor 21. Riverside Drive ## Questions **Who is Nine Counties about?** Hiram Ulysses Grant (Ulysses S. Grant). The title never carries the subject's name: it names one concrete thing out of the life — in this case Nine Counties — and the name goes on the line underneath. **Is this an authorised biography?** No. No subject, estate, label or foundation had approval over the text, and none paid for a word of it. The cost of that independence is that no new interviews were conducted for the book; it is built from the public record, and it says on the page where a scene is reconstructed rather than documented. **Can I read some of it before buying?** Yes — the whole opening chapter and the writer's foreword, free and in full, with no email address and no account. That is 4,865 words of the book. **How long is it?** About 69,500 words, 21 chapters, 226 pages in the paperback. ## The writer Vivian Ashcombe spent twenty years as a foreign correspondent before she started writing books. She reported from Moscow, Jerusalem, and Kyiv for the Financial Times and The Atlantic, with stretches embedded in Tehran and Damascus. Her biographies trace power and the people who hold it. Drawing on decades of notebook-shorthand and archival research, her books examine the intersection of public policy and private influence. In her biographies, including The Consulate, The Moscow Exile, and The Pont de l'Alma Tunnel, she reconstructs historical events through meticulous primary-source analysis. She lives in south London, where she spends her spare time restoring mid-century furniture and volunteering at a local community archive.