No. 18 in a new light
Poor Robert E. Lee. His statues are being yanked down. His commitment to slavery is routinely denounced. Yet the Confederate general is still revered in much of the white South. As a consequence, I’m willing to bet, far more Lee statues still exist than those honoring the man who vanquished him, Ulysses S. Grant. It’s implicit in Ron Chernow’s magisterial biography, “Grant,” that he’d like to change that. The man often shortchanged as a drunk, a commander who took credit for others’ generalship, and a president mired in corruption deserves far better. Not to mention a few more statues.
Like Chernow’s earlier door-stoppers, “Washington” and “Hamilton” among them, “Grant” is a biography that demands the unconditional surrender of its readers. Calling it “thorough” and “detailed” is a polite way of saying that it is very, very long. Still, I willingly submitted as the author escorted me through this man’s up-and-down trajectory. Grant was far more complicated, and thus more interesting, than we were ever taught.
Grant By Ron Chernow (Penguin Press; 1,074 pages; $40)
No doubt Grant was an alcoholic, but Chernow gives him credit for a determination to resist this “forbidden impulse against which he struggled for most of his life.” He was not a habitual drunk, but he could not drink in moderation. During battle, he remained sober and clear-eyed, while inactivity and isolation left him prey to whiskey’s curse. While serving in a remote California post before the war, a drunken spree forced him to quit the Army to avoid court-martial.
Grant’s two watchdogs against drunkenness were his wife, Julia Dent, and his military aide, John Rawlins. In the comforting presence of Julia, Grant had no need to drink. In military camps, Rawlins acted as Grant’s conscience, tugging him back from backsliding.
Ironically, the Civil War, which destroyed so many lives, rescued Grant from a record of antebellum failure. Born in an Ohio hamlet near Cincinnati, he was a small boy (only 5 feet 8 by adulthood) who spoke little and loved horses. At West Point, he was a far better equestrian than student. After the California debacle, he was reduced to working (unsuccessfully) a small farm owned by his slave-owning father-inlaw, then clerking in a leather shop run by a younger brother. Into his late 30s, his mark on the world was mostly negative.
Once given a command in the Union Army, however, he rose quickly to prominence. He had found his calling. How this metamorphosis happened even Chernow cannot adequately explain.
In any event, Grant became known as modest and without airs before his troops, astute in tactics, and, in victory, magnanimous. In battle, writes Chernow, he was “scrappy, mobile, opportunistic.” He took the offensive and refused to let a defeated enemy slip away. Early victories in Tennessee and Mississippi made him as successful in the west as Lincoln’s generals in Virginia were impotent. His conquest of Vicksburg on the Fourth of July, 1863, after a long siege, gave the Union control of the Mississippi River and cut the Confederacy in two. No wonder Lincoln elevated him to general of all the Union armies.
Lincoln and Grant enjoyed a remarkable mutual trust. The president gave his general a free hand with strategy, and Grant followed Lincoln’s lead by accepting blacks as soldiers. Grant’s detractors have argued that the Union won simply by virtue of an overwhelming superiority in manpower and resources. Chernow’s rebuttal is irrefutable: Grant’s predecessors in Virginia, with the same numbers, could not beat Lee, and he could.
During Andrew Johnson’s presidency and his own, Grant wholeheartedly supported the work of the Freedmen’s Bureau to better the lives of ex-slaves. He had no qualms about ordering federal troops to Mississippi and Louisiana to crush early versions of the Ku Klux Klan, guilty of what Chernow calls “unquestionably the worst outbreak of domestic terrorism in American history.” For Grant, Reconstruction was the essential final phase of the Civil War. Thus, the author believes, Grant made himself the greatest benefactor of black Americans between Lincoln and LBJ.
Grant’s martial success, however, could not be translated into presidential greatness. Far from it. He was too naive to get the better of cynical politicians, too willing to cozy up to titans of industry, and too trusting of corrupt subordinates.
Though, according to Chernow, Grant was “impeccably honest,” his two terms became synonymous with scandal. He simply couldn’t believe that people he had appointed would feast at the public trough. The New York City Customs House was turned into a mighty money machine for pols on the take. The Indian Ring allowed Indian agents to siphon off money intended for reservation supplies. Via the Whiskey Ring, revenue collectors carved out tax dollars for themselves.
When Treasury Secretary Benjamin Bristow notified Grant that presidential aide Orville Babcock was a prime Whiskey Ring conspirator, the president insisted on Babcock’s innocence, despite the evidence. No one so loyal would dare abuse his trust.
More than earlier Grant biographers H.W. Brands and Ronald C. White, Chernow emphasizes Grant’s pathbreaking but under-recognized role as a champion of blacks. He’s also relentless in pursuit of the alcoholism theme. He chases after every accusation of drunkenness, exposing many as false, the product of rivalrous generals and politicians.
Following his presidency, Grant toured Europe and Asia, then settled in New York, where he was set up in grand style by plutocrats. But once again, he was victimized by his own naivete. He allowed a young charmer, Ferdinand Ward, to use his name to create an investment firm, Grant and Ward, which turned out to be nothing but a Ponzi scheme.
A humiliated Grant, now penniless, was forced to take back a vow never to write a memoir. His “Personal Memoirs of U.S. Grant” was completed as the lifelong cigar smoker was dying of throat and mouth cancer. Chernow is not the first to praise it as “probably the foremost military memoir in the English language.”
Do I hear the sound of more Grant statues arising across the land?