Our 18th president gets the big bio treatment — and the revelations will surprise you
RON Chernow has a thing for misunderstood men.
He painted a compelling portrait of a financial juggernaut in “Titan,” his 1998 biography of John D. Rockefeller Sr., and won a Pulitzer for his 2010 “Washington: A Life,” a psychologically revealing account of America’s first president. Oh, and who could forget “Alexander Hamilton,” which brought the boy genius Founding Father to the masses, spawning a Tony-winning musical adaptation?
Chernow is back with “Grant” (Penguin Press), out Tuesday, a doorstopper biography that resurrects a largely forgotten 18th president and war hero — the one on the $50, buried in a tomb in Riverside Park and dismissed by some as a mere “drunkard” and “a butcher.”
As 959-pages of “Grant” proves, he was so much more.
“Grant led nine lives, and all nine lives are extraordinary,” Chernow told The Post. Though don’t expect “Grant: The Musical” to hit Broadway anytime soon. “I don’t think that Grant’s life moves to a hip-hop beat,” Chernow said. “Hamilton was young, dashing and romantic. He lent himself perfectly to be the star of a musical. But I do think that Grant’s life is no less dramatic.” Here are nine facts from the book that prove his assertion:
Ulysses S. Grant wasn’t his real name
Ulysses S. Grant was not the president’s given name — he was born Hiram Ulysses Grant (with the “unfortunate initials” H.U.G., leading to lots of schoolyard teasing). Grant dropped Hiram and went with Ulysses. The “S” came later when a mistake in his West Point application gave him his middle initial. The name stuck and cadets called him “Uncle Sam Grant.”
He was a horse-riding prodigy
When Grant was a child, a circus came to his hometown of Georgetown, Ohio, and put out a challenge to all the young men: Try to ride this wild pony. Ulysses mounted the pony with ease. His father recounted what happened next: “Presently out came a large monkey and sprang up behind Ulysses . . . Then the ringmaster made the monkey jump onto Ulysses’ shoulders, standing with his feet on his shoulders and with his hands holding onto his hair . . . A few more rounds and the ringmaster gave it up; he had not come across a boy that the pony and the monkey both could not dismount.”
He had a romantic side
Ulysses was profoundly attached to his wife, Julia Dent, and Julia in turn was Grant’s most ardent advocate. The two were so lovey-dovey that family members complained. In one of the book’s most touching passages, Julia admits that she visited a doctor about fixing her strabismus, a cross-eyed condition which made her so selfconscious that she posed in profile. Grant’s response: “Did I not see you and fall in love with you with these same eyes?”
He had his own personal Civil War
Julia came from a slave-owning family, while the Grants were ardent abolitionists. The infighting got so bad that the Grants refused to attend their son’s wedding. When Grant joined the Union army, Julia’s brother joined the Confederacy. Julia’s father, Colonel Dent, swore that if “his worthless son-in-law ever came on to his land, he would shoot him as he would a rabbit.”
He abhorred bloodshed
Grant’s detractors have long denigrated him as “the butcher” for the massive casualties the Union sustained on the battlefield under his command. This deeply distressed the general. “They call me the butcher,” Grant said, “but do you know I sometimes could hardly bring myself to give an order of battle? When I contemplated the death and the misery that were sure to follow,f I stood appalled.”
He armed former slaves
Grant did not join the war as an ardent abolitionistli — that came on the battlefield as he freed black men and women from bondage. He became the first to arm former slaves, a controversial decision backed by Abraham Lincoln, who said, “The bare sight of 50,000 armed and drilled black soldiers on the banks of the Mississippi would end the rebellion at once.”o Eventually 178,000 black troops fought forf the North, many of them former slaves.
Grant and Lincoln’s wives hated each other
Though Lincoln and Grant became close friends — theirs was a very intense mutual-admiration society — the same could not be said of wives Mary Todd Lincoln and Julia Grant. To be fair, Mary Todd was not the easiest person to get along with (her nickname? “Her Satanic Majesty.”) After the war, when the Grants visited the capitol, the Lincolns invited them to be their guests at Ford’s Theatre. Julia refused because she “objected strenuously to accompanying Mrs. Lincoln.” This likely saved their lives, for Grant was high on John Wilkes Booth’s to-kill list.
He was broke when he left the White House
Having sacrificed his military pension to pursue politics, Grant couldn’t even afford to live in New York City after he left office. A group of Wall Street admirers gave Grant a $250,000 retirement fund, and another donated over $100,000 for him to buy his dream house at 3 E. 66th St., steps from Fifth Avenue with a view of the park. But in New York he met misfortune again when he made a Wall Street “friend” named Ferdinand Ward, who convinced him to invest in and lend his name to a brokerage firm. Grant and his three sons plunked down their life savings into the firm — only to learn afterwards it was a Ponzi scheme. Grant, who thought he was worth $1 million, had only $80 in the bank, while his wife was worth a mere $130 when the scheme went public in 1884.
Mark Twain published Grant’s memoirs
Soon after he lost his fortune, Grant found out that he was sick, too, with cancer of the tongue. Though he hated self-publicity, he decided to publish his memoirs to take care of his wife after his death. When author Mark Twain heard this, he offered Grant a sweetheart publishing deal. Grant agreed, and wrote for four to five hours every day, despite horrific throat pain. While writing, he stopped eating and dropped 65 pounds, nearly starved to death and was zonked out on brandy and cocaine infusions (to drown out the pain) and somehow still managed to deliver 275,000 words in a year. Twain said that it was the cleanest copy he’d ever seen. The twovolume memoir, published after Grant’s death in 1885, was a smash hit that “rivaled that other literary sensation of the 19th century, ‘Uncle Tom’s Cabin’ ” and set up Julia with a $400,000 nest egg until her death in 1902.