Grant’s complicated legacy explored
Ulysses S. Grant’s standing among the presidents has improved in recent years, with acclaimed biographies by Ron Chernow and others offering a new perspective on his time in the White House.
But the 18th president who led the Union armies to victory in the Civil War still leaves a complicated legacy, especially when it comes to his relationship to slavery. That relationship is the centerpiece of John Reeves’ “Soldier of Destiny: Slavery, Secession and the Redemption of Ulysses S. Grant.”
Reeves’ book isn’t a comprehensive biography, and it doesn’t cover Grant’s time in the White House. But it gives readers an enlightening look at how he benefited from slavery years before he helped end the institution.
Reeves traces the evolution of Grant from someone who “actively participated in the slave culture of St. Louis” before the Civil War. Reeves is fair and blunt in depicting the role slavery played in Grant’s life as he tried to provide a “respectable middle-class lifestyle” for his family. “And this lifestyle, it must be remembered, was dependent on the ownership of human property,” Reeves writes. He also points out the ambivalence Grant displayed about slavery before the Civil War.
But he also examines the characteristics and skills that it took for Grant to go from an officer who was forced to resign from the Army to one of the most revered military heroes in history. Reeves doesn’t shy from highlighting the stains upon Grant’s military legacy, including the reports of drinking that dogged Grant. He also devotes a chapter to the order Grant issued expelling Jewish people from a military district, an effort that was intended to halt illegal cotton speculation and remains a “black mark on his character,” Reeves writes.
Reeves manages to stitch Grant’s flaws and virtues into a thought-provoking portrait of a key historical figure who never lost faith in himself or his country. — Andrew DeMillo, Associated Press
Pay attention to the preface of “The Bishop
and the Butterfly,” since it reveals to whom the title refers, but those nicknames barely recur in the book.
I had a handle on the “Butterfly,” con artist Vivian Gordon, whose 1931 murder connected her to then-governor Franklin Delano Roosevelt and other New York luminaries. But the “Bishop” appears so infrequently in the first half of Michael Wolraich’s nonfiction book, subtitled “Murder, Politics and the End of the Jazz Age,” that I forgot who he was.
That’s due, I suspect, to the book’s black-andwhite cover positioning it as true crime in the vein of Erik Larson’s “The Devil in the White City,” when it’s really an absorbing history of the downfall of New York City’s Tammany Hall political machine, with a splash of murder.
The bishop (Judge Samuel Seabury, who presided over Tammany’s end) and butterfly are major figures in Wolraich’s book, but it’s not really about them. Instead, it explores how Tammany ruled New York politics for the better part of a century and nearly prevented FDR from winning a couple of political offices on the way to his presidency.
Gordon emerges fully formed in Wolraich’s account. She was jailed for prostitution, and her other unsavory activities included blackmail. But in an era when some powerful men believed women were meant to be seen and not heard, it’s clear that her conviction was the result of her husband’s manipulations and that her permanent separation from her daughter was a tragic miscarriage of justice.
I was intrigued by Wolraich’s account of Tammany and the connections he makes between the politics of 100 years ago and 2024. There’s a sense throughout the book that the world doesn’t work so differently today and that we could be just one splashy murder away from a similar comeuppance.