Grant by Ron Chernow
Author Ron Chernow has become synonymous with massive, highly regarded accounts of some of America’s most admired men. George Washington, J.P. Morgan, the Warburg family, John D. Rockefeller, and most famously, Alexander Hamilton have all been subjects of Chernow’s popular biographies.
Though I’ve only read his Alexander Hamilton, it’s hard to imagine any work surpassing this, his astoundingly impressive Grant. Over the course of nearly 1,000 eminently readable pages, Chernow paints a robust, yet nuanced portrait of America’s 18th president that never once felt tedious or labored. I honestly could have happily read another 500 pages of this beautiful book.
It helps that Grant comes across as a remarkably likable man with a refreshingly modern moral compass coupled with human failings that are hard not to empathize with, namely struggles with alcohol and a personally destructive naivety in business and politics.
The man popularly known as U. S. Grant was born Hiram Ulysses Grant in Point Pleasant, OH (a mere two-hour drive from my home in Columbus) on April 27, 1822. Upon registering at West Point as a wide-eyed 17-year-old, his name was erroneously listed as Ulysses S. Grant, an administrative error that conferred on him the nickname of ‘Sam’ (U.S. being shorthand for Uncle Sam in his classmates’ eyes).
At West Point, Grant would meet lifelong friends like William Tecumseh Sherman and even ‘frenemies’ like James Longstreet.
Upon graduating, Grant would serve under Zachary Taylor in the Mexican War where he was assigned the role of quartermaster, Chernow recognizing how much Grant benefitted from the assignment.
The appointment was actually a godsend for Grant, turning him into a compleat soldier, adept at every facet of army life, especially logistics. With the exception of ammunition and weaponry, the quartermaster supplied everything needed to clothe and transport an army, including uniforms, shoes, canteens, blankets, tents, cooking utensils, horses, forage, and mules. Here Grant would learn not battlefield theatrics but the essential nuts and bolts of an army—the mundane stuff that makes for a well-oiled military machine. This provided invaluable training for the Civil War when Grant would need to sustain gigantic armies in the field, distant from northern supply depots.
After the war, Grant moved around to a number of different posts before eventually being assigned to Fort Humboldt in California where he began to abuse alcohol out of loneliness, boredom, and solitude. Things got so bad that he resigned from the army and returned to St. Louis and his wife Julia as well as a child he’d barely known.
This period, from roughly 1854 to the outbreak of the Civil War was the darkest period of Grant’s life. Facing poverty as well as myriad business failings, Grant, in his mid-30s, seemed to be destined for failure. That he would rise from these lows to become one of the most admired men in the world, was simply stunning. Never in my readings have I come across a future president in such abject circumstances as Grant was during this time.
By the time Lincoln was elected and South Carolina seceded, Grant was reduced to working for his brothers as a simple clerk in one of his father’s leather goods stores. He re-joined the army out of a sense of duty and no-doubt hoping to regain his lost status and confidence as a soldier.
The war would profoundly change him. By the summer of 1961, he had found early success and was thriving.
For Grant it was a dreamlike transformation: the man who had recently toiled as a store clerk, who had felt cursed by fate, who had lobbied wearily for appointment as a colonel, had been unexpectedly bumped up to brigadier general in charge of four regiments, or about four thousand men, without having fought a single battle.
Chernow’s accounts of Grant’s Civil War service make up a considerable amount of the book’s pages and rightfully so, for it is here that Grant became a national icon, winning decisive battles and taking aggressive action while Lincoln struggled through a parade of incompetent and reluctant generals back east. Grant quickly became a favorite of the President, who famously said of him, “I can't spare this man–he fights.”
Grant’s successes would see him elevated to lieutenant general, giving him command of the entire Union Army. He would go on to lead major offensives during the Overland Campaign of ‘64 including famous battles at The Wilderness, Spotsylvania, Cold Harbor, and Petersburg before finally accepting Lee’s surrender at Appomattox.
While Chernow grants Lee’s tactical genius, he sees Grant as the master strategist.
Grant was the strategic genius produced by the Civil War. He set clear goals, communicated them forcefully, and instilled them in his men. While Lee stuck to Virginia, Grant grasped the war in its totality, masterminding the movements of all Union armies. It was Grant who best apprehended the strategic interactions of the eastern and western theaters. The major victories of Sherman, Sheridan, and Thomas in 1864–65 would occur under Grant’s direct supervision, yet he is frequently denied credit for his overall guidance of the Union war effort. His epic confrontation with Lee in 1864–65 was just one facet of his farsighted leadership. “Grant’s strategy embraced a continent; Lee’s a small State,” wrote Sherman. “Grant’s ‘logistics’ were to supply and transport armies thousands of miles, where Lee was limited to hundreds.”
After the war, Grant would lead the enforcement of Reconstruction in the former Confederate states, as well as supervise the Indian Wars of the West.
He would, of course, eventually be elected President in 1868 at the age of 46, America’s youngest chief executive to date.
Grant’s first term was consumed by violence in the South as so-called Black Codes began to forge a new caste system beyond the Mason-Dixon. Primarily due to the domestic terrorism meted out by the Ku Klux Klan, the violence threatened to undo many of the gains of Union victory. Grant ferociously defended both newly freed blacks as well as white Republicans from their wrath, eventually all but dismantling the racist rabble of former Confederates known then as KuKluxers and later as the KKK.
His second term however was notorious for a series of scandals, none of which implicated the President directly, but were often the result of his less than stellar record in appointing cabinet members and other federal officials. Grant’s inexperience in political matters led him to often make unilateral decisions without the consent of his cabinet as well as place faith in former war friends whom he trusted far too casually.
Upon leaving office, Grant toured the world with Julia as a sort of quasi-official diplomat at large. He visited heads of state across Europe, eventually making his way to China and Japan before arriving back in the U.S. via San Francisco over two years later.
Grant’s vision for the country, and the world, had grown immensely in these years and he dabbled with the idea of running for an unprecedented third term, going so far as to allow himself to be promoted at the Republic Convention of 1880. Alas, it was not to be, as Rutherford B. Hayes took the nomination instead.
Finally settling in New York City, Grant and his son Buck went into partnership in a Wall Street brokerage firm with an unscrupulous fellow by the name of Ferdinand Ward, a scam artist of the highest order who promulgated a pyramid scheme that brought down banks and fortunes, including Grant. The former war hero and president was left penniless.
Soon after, Grant, a lifelong cigar-smoker, was diagnosed with throat cancer.
Wanting to create a lasting source of income for his family, Grant began writing his memoirs, published by Mark Twain, over the last few months of his life. He wrote tirelessly, completing them just days before his eventual death. They sold beyond Twain’s wildest dreams, and generated the fortune he had lost with the Ward scandal.
Chernow’s Grant is a marvelous book about an incredible man. I loved every page of it. The book’s success has seemingly restored Grant’s reputation in the eyes of the public and its themes and storylines, especially in regard to racial justice and reconstruction are more relevant now than any time since the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s.
This is a big, generous, sophisticated, and stirring biography. I can’t imagine any future presidential bio on my list surpassing it.