Book Review - Grant by Ron Chernow

In 1885, Ulysses S Grant died a hero. Revered in the north for his victories against the Confederacy in the American civil war, he was respected in the south for his generosity towards disbanded rebels, whom he permitted to return home in peace after their commanders’ surrender. 

Following the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, Grant became the face of the Republican party, and was twice elected president, serving from 1869 to 1877. His administration was mired in financial scandal, but out of office Grant restored his reputation, travelling the world as an unofficial ambassador. 

At the end of his life, bankrupt after a bad investment and dying in agony of throat cancer, he recaptured people’s imagination, finishing the manuscript of his memoirs just before his death.

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Since then, however, as Ron Chernow argues in his new biography, Grant has suffered in public memory. His drinking – notorious in his lifetime – dominates his legacy, while his achievements as a soldier and as a politician have been dismissed. 

A generation of white southerners cast General Grant as a dullard and a butcher, victorious only because of overwhelming material advantage. In this “Lost Cause” myth, President Grant is carpetbagger-in-chief, imposing brutal military government on “innocent” southern whites. 

To historians of the Gilded Age, Grant as president was the creature of robber barons. And historians of Reconstruction, Chernow complains, have assailed Grant from every angle: he was too harsh with the south or too lenient; too quick to send in the army or too quick to withdraw it.

This is biography by attrition. Across nearly 1,000 pages, Chernow argues for his subject’s greatness. Where contemporaries considered Grant’s drinking a moral failing, Chernow paints his struggle with alcoholism as heroic. 

The book closes with a sketch of Mark Twain and William T Sherman reminiscing (over drinks) after Grant’s funeral in New York City. Twain, who published Grant’s memoirs, regretted not pushing him to include his binges, vows of abstinence and falls from the wagon in the finished book. 

“Put the drunkenness in,” Twain said, “ – & the repentance & reform. Trust the people.” Chernow takes Twain’s regret to heart, offering a sensitive and nuanced account of a talented man struggling with addiction, at a time when American society was awash with alcohol, but pitiless towards alcoholics.

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Against the claim that Grant was a mediocre general, Chernow portrays him as a talented administrator. He may have enjoyed a material advantage over the rebels, but he used it decisively and skilfully, preventing Confederate forces from prolonging the war. 

In contrast to claims about Grant’s corruption in office, Chernow casts him when president as a simple soldier, loyal to his supporters and naive in trusting the wealthy civilians who showered him with gifts. And during Reconstruction, Chernow insists, Grant faced an impossible dilemma. 

He could either pull federal troops from the south and abandon African American citizens to well-armed white supremacists, or keep his troops in place, and risk losing control of the national government to the Democrats, who would then take federal troops from the south.

Chernow, the author of acclaimed biographies of George Washington and Alexander Hamilton (the latter inspired Lin-Manuel Miranda’s musical), is expert at explaining the friendships and antipathies of elite American politics. 

He is less nuanced when explaining the wider social and economic forces at work in American life in the 19th century. Grant was born in Point Pleasant, Ohio, across the Ohio River from slave-holding Kentucky. 

A Methodist and abolitionist, he nonetheless married into a slaveholding family from Missouri. Chernow describes antebellum America as “two incompatible worlds … the enterprising free labour economy of the North and the regressive world of southern slavery”. Grant’s father, Jesse Root Grant, is portrayed as a colourful, boasting hustler, as against his father-in-law, “Colonel” Dent, an unrepentant slaveholder and Dixie buffoon, to symbolise the division between north and south. And yet the Ohio Grants and the Missouri Dents were connected by an economic and political system with a common interest in slave labour. Jesse Grant was a successful tanner. Northern leather (along with many other manufactured goods) was in high demand in the south; southern cotton fuelled the textile mills of the north. The worlds of slavery and freedom overlapped in more than personal relationships.

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Original review on: www.theguardian.com