ULYSSES S. GRANT HAD GREATNESS THRUST UPON HIM
Ulysses S. Grant was the most complicated of men
Once consigned to the near bottom of presidential rankings, Ulysses S. Grant’s reputation has improved in recent decades.
Historians have largely agreed on his commanding stature as the North’s top general in the Civil War. His tenure in the White House has been more controversial.
Ron Chernow’s magisterial biography of Grant argues that this complex, troubled man — called “stupid,” “corrupt” and a “butcher” by earlier historians and pundits — was a great moral leader in the political realm as well as the savior of the Union on the battlefield.
Mr. Chernow is a past master of adding human dimension to revered Founding Fathers and mighty business tycoons. (His biography of Alexander Hamilton inspired the hit musical about its subject.) Grant’s mixed legacy offers him a greater challenge. He meets his task by concentrating on two points — Grant’s transformation from chronic loser to conquering hero and his role as a champion of racial justice.
He sometimes forgives or softpedals Grant’s failings as a president. Ultimately, his book is a character study of a deeply flawed but undeniably great man who hid his emotions behind a stoic facade.
Grant’s early struggles make his later triumphs seem astonishing. He showed little aptitude for anything but horseback riding as a West Point cadet.
Cursed with bouts of depression and battling alcoholism, he threw away a promising army career and embarked on a series of failed business ventures. Mr. Chernow captures him before the Civil War as “a bleak, defeated man with a mysterious aura of solitude.”
Reenlisting after President Abrahma Lincoln called for troops, Grant’s life was transformed as he rose in the ranks. Mr. Chernow deftly analyzes his subject’s gifts as a commander, noting his “extraordinary grasp of military detail.” He was “a master of the psychology of war, intuitive about enemy weakness” — perhaps because of his own background of failure.
There are vivid, sometimes horrific, accounts of key battles such as Shiloh and the Battle of the Wilderness, as well as small but telling pictures of Grant coolly writing orders amidst dead bodies and bursting shells. The general’s private battles to keep away from alcohol are also dealt with.
One of the book’s key assertions is that Grant fought for the rights of freed slaves during the war and remained committed to this cause as president.
After winning the White House as a Republican in 1868, he supported Radical Reconstruction and used military power to smash the Ku Klux Klan. Grant “regarded Reconstruction as the Civil War’s final phase,” a policy that put him at odds with Northerners increasingly weary of antagonizing the white South.
Mr. Chernow supports the view that Grant had the best record on civil rights of any president between Lincoln and Lyndon Johnson.
Balancing this achievement is the widespread corruption that infected his presidency. Mr. Chernow often engages in special pleading on his behalf, downplaying his responsibility for the thieves and scoundrels he appointed to office. Grant’s blind spots are chalked up to his “innocent nature” and inability to distinguish “personal loyalty from cronyism.”
Grant seems less than innocent here — he defended crooks and forced out honest members of his administration. Setting the tone for the Gilded Age, he accepted gifts from the rich and deferred to wealthy interests in political decisions.
Grant was supported by his party’s Stalwart faction, led by ruthless bosses like Sen. Roscoe Conkling. Mr. Chernow notes the Stalwarts’ support for Reconstruction but glosses over their ruthless machine politics.
He likewise overestimates the Republicans’ “lost idealism” — in fact, the party was cozy with Northern capitalists from the start. Grant and the Stalwarts wanted to tear down racial barriers while protecting the superrich, a position not so different from that of many modern-day Republicans.
What’s most compelling about Grant is the author’s search for the keys to Grant’s personality. Mr. Chernowkeeps returning to Grant’s empathy for losers, including those hedefeated in battle.
He suggests that this explains both his defense of racial minorities and his unwillingness to abandon false friends. Grant had a superstition about never turning back — a habit that served him well in war and compromised his leadership in politics.
For all the sordidness he tolerated as president, Grant remained magnificent, no more so than when he battled bankruptcy and cancer at the end of his life. His struggles to finish his memoirs on his deathbed aremovingly told here.
Was Grant a courageous defender of human rights or a stubborn enabler of corruption? This book suggests he was both.
If Mr. Chernow can’t completely solve the riddle of the Sphinx-like Ulysses, he does succeed in giving us as complete a portrait of him as we’re likely to see for a long time.