We can speak of “settled law.” Not so with biography. The verdict is always out on appeal, and the subject accountable to more litigation. Discovery yields new evidence, and additional litigants take up the case. This is especially so with Ulysses S. Grant.
Even at blockbuster length, Ron Chernow’s Grant is not definitive. So much, he suggests, is still questionable. How did this peacetime failure become a great general? Why has this great general been dismissed as a poor president? Even Grant’s military greatness has been called into question. Was he a butcher, as Mary Lincoln and many other detractors charged? Did he simply rely on the North’s superior size to overwhelm the outnumbered South? Did he succeed in spite of his alcoholism? Or has his drinking been exaggerated, a canard perpetuated by politically motivated critics?
Chernow addresses all these questions but also rectifies the very shape of Grant’s biography, performing at the same high level he attained in his acclaimed biographies of Washington and Hamilton (the latter of which famously became the basis for the Broadway musical). Earlier biographies of Grant tend, not surprisingly, to dwell on his finest hours, his victories in the Civil War, followed by shorter accounts of his anticlimactic presidency. How, then, to do justice to the complaint of Grant’s friend Mark Twain, fed up with press accounts of Grant as a gifted warrior but feckless president: “It makes me sick—that newspaper nonsense. Grant was no namby-pamby fool; he was a man—all over—rounded & complete.”
The biographer takes a two-track approach: closely following, in chronological fashion, the events of Grant’s life, giving due proportion to each phase, but also pausing, at strategic points, to consider the nature of the man—his sensibility and physical presence. Grant did not make the same sort of impression on his contemporaries and biographers that most great men have made. Unlike Robert E. Lee, Grant did not look or behave like the common notion of a leader. He was not tall, did not look commanding (except on a horse), and, in fact, could be called nondescript. To add to this unprepossessing profile, the usually taciturn, shy, and modest Grant seemed, until the start of the Civil War, a man without ambition or prospects—in short, a loser who had been forced to leave military service because of his drinking and then made a botch of farming and business ventures, frequently falling prey to con men who cost him his investments. Grant’s marriage to Julia Dent, the daughter of a proud slave owner, was delayed for years—in part because her haughty father thought this Northern ne’er-do-well beneath his notice and undeserving of his daughter’s hand. Grant did not have a pedigree or the manner of a man in command of himself let alone of other men.
Even after Grant began to rise in the ranks of the Union Army, after rejoining at the start of the Civil War, he could appear to fellow soldiers as an unassuming, even retiring figure, unfit for leadership. In one incident, a bullying soldier shadowboxed with Grant, trying to bait the newly appointed colonel, but Grant walked on, refusing to involve himself in a petty fight. The incident is a perfect representation of the man who could not be sidetracked by minor skirmishes. He was no tactician, the word that might be applied to the agile Lee. Rather, Grant was a grand strategist, unswerving from his goal of unconditional surrender.
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So how, in Chernow’s telling, did Grant become a great general, a much better president than has been generally supposed, and a great man? It was partly a matter of events, partly of character, and, perhaps most of all, the result of Grant growing into the roles—roles that were assigned to him but that he also sought, however quietly and circumspectly. When his moment in history arrived, Grant was ready to salute his destiny.
Chernow does not make the mistake committed by some biographers of backdating, so to speak, Grant’s greatness—although subtle indications of Grant’s singularity emerge early on even as most of his contemporaries take no notice. At West Point, it is true, he seemed no more than average. In fact, he had dreaded enrollment and actually hoped Congress would defund the institution, since Grant feared he would fail and disappoint his pushy father and his “emotionally arid” mother. Yet Grant had two outstanding skills: mathematics and horsemanship. All his life Grant loved to ride fast horses and to race them, and his ability to plot a campaign on a map, to measure the distance between and to victories was phenomenal. The engineering works of his campaigns—the astounding length of the pontoon bridges over which men and materiel flowed—made the transport of troops and equipment virtually miraculous. Even when Lee, with excellent intelligence reports, knew where Grant moved, the rapid deployment of many thousands of troops astounded the rebel general and energized President Lincoln.
Grant’s early inability to distinguish himself was due, in part, to self-doubt compounded by drinking. He was not an aggressive drunk or a manly alcoholic; his drinking made him look silly and pathetic, so he lost the respect of his superior officers. His other weakness, a naïve trust in his fellow man, led to several failures to make a living. At one point, a destitute Grant had to borrow money just to keep himself clothed.
The Civil War saved him—that much of Chernow’s narrative is familiar. But here is also where this new biography begins to alter perceptions of Grant. Naïve though he might have been in some respects, Grant began to develop a political sensibility that outclassed his contemporaries. He was not stiff and uncompromising like the arrogant Lee. Nor did he despise politics, like Sherman. Grant read his superiors, especially Lincoln, with acumen and understood the changing nature of the war—that it had become more and more about the end of slavery and the promotion of equality for all races. Whereas Sherman continued to disparage blacks and saw them merely as an encumbrance to his fast and fiery march through the South, Grant had the liberated slaves trained as soldiers.
What general does not want more troops? And yet Grant rarely requested more from Lincoln, who had been hectored almost to death by General George McClellan’s constant calls for reinforcements. Grant made do with what he had, a grateful Lincoln noted. And Grant pressed on, always on, never retreating, although, Chernow admits, he sometimes made rash decisions that resulted in unnecessary deaths.
In Chernow’s narrative, Grant has a sidekick, Major General John Aaron Rawlins, Grant’s tubercular double who began as his adjutant and became his conscience, constantly monitoring his superior, chastising Grant when he gave way to drink, and becoming a supporting pillar of Grant’s life. In this regard, Rawlins was second only to Grant’s wife, Julia, who during the war was often at her husband’s side, making certain he refrained from the liquor that diminished his power and authority. Chernow carefully assesses reports of Grant’s drinking, rejecting some, provisionally accepting others. In the end, Grant’s drinking does not seem to have been a problem during any major Civil War engagement. His relapses often occurred while his wife or Rawlins were not present and when the battle had already been decided.
As to the charge of butchery, Chernow finds his subject not guilty. It is true Grant had superior numbers and could count on replacements that were not available to Lee. But the main problem, as Chernow sees it, is that Grant fought an offensive war, whereas Lee often conserved his men by expertly maintaining well-dug-in defenses on his native Virginia soil. In fact, Chernow might have made more of this point by emphasizing how Lee botched Gettysburg, the only time he tried a major offensive, when he had to withdraw with devastating losses.
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As president, especially during his first term, Grant made the mistake of thinking that what worked in the Army—maintaining secrecy and his own counsel—would serve him well in the White House. He often blundered because he did not take advice or show his hand to trusted advisers. He would not even share his handwritten first inaugural address with his inquisitive wife before he delivered it. Gradually, Grant did learn to call on old political hands, especially his brilliant secretary of state Hamilton Fish. But Grant could not command the loyalty and probity of cabinet officials corrupted by political power and the desire for personal enrichment. Politicians did not behave like Sherman or Sheridan, executing orders with integrity, dispatch, and aplomb. The president was not personally corrupt, as Chernow, like earlier biographers, shows, but Grant really did not understand the problem of conflicts of interest. He saw nothing wrong with accepting gifts of houses and other generous offers, especially since he had only a modest income and thought of these perks as the kind of tributes that Wellington and other generals had traditionally accepted as their due.
In Chernow’s account, Grant’s tenure in office was nearly as heroic as his exploits during the war. President Grant remained true to the legacy of President Lincoln in enforcing the rights of liberated slaves and beginning the work of reconciliation and reconstruction in the South. Here is how Chernow sums up the first term:
What happened next, in Chernow’s view—one that is supported by many historians—is that Northerners, and especially the Republican party, grew weary of policing the South, of ensuring that blacks were able to exercise the right to vote and to hold public office. To be sure, Republican governments in the South were corrupt, but at least they provided opportunities for black officeholders, many of whom acquitted themselves respectably. Overwhelming evidence reveals that thousands of African Americans were murdered and otherwise intimidated in the postwar South. Grant, nearing the end of his second term, seemed to relinquish his leadership role in Reconstruction, signaling defeat.
But then—and what a gift to biographers!—Grant came up with a third act: the writing of his acclaimed memoirs, a literary classic. Although some critics have claimed that Grant’s memoirs were ghostwritten by Mark Twain, the Library of Congress manuscript is in Grant’s own hand. There is besides plenty of other evidence of his writerly gifts: He was a great reader of novels and wrote letters and orders and responses to Lincoln, for example, that are exemplary for their concision and terse wit. Twain deserves credit insofar as he instilled enthusiasm in Grant for leaving behind the legacy of his memoirs, which, Twain accurately predicted, would sell 300,000 copies, netting Grant’s wife Julia nearly half a million dollars. Grant had never supposed he would write a book, let alone some 300,000 words of meticulous prose. But as with his military career, he kept at it, spending the last year of his life triumphing over excruciatingly painful throat cancer, battling to restore his fortune—which had been once again robbed from him in a Ponzi scheme.
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This is a biography written to be popular. Chernow is a Grant partisan, and we readers have a rooting interest, as we would with a Hollywood hero, in Grant’s success. But Chernow does not blink at Grant’s failings, which resulted, again and again, from his unwillingness to examine carefully the charges against his corrupt associates.
Chernow has one prominent shortcoming—common among biographers. He pretends to know more than is possible. So he resorts to that desperate dodge of “must have,” the locution favored by biographers who believe they know their subjects so well that the blanks can be filled in. A couple examples, out of 52 must haves, will suffice:
And:
Did Grant feel hurt? Angry? Disappointed? Did he tremble? Who knows? The urge to assign thoughts and emotions in order to make a good story, to turn a biography into a novel, really ought to be resisted when the biographer has such a good story to tell without fudging it.
Carl Rollyson is the author of American Biography and the forthcoming This Alarming Paradox: The Life of William Faulkner.
