Book Review: Grant by Ron Chernow

And once again in this trying year, I found myself reading the right book at the right time.

Ron Chernow’s Grant is a fantastic book, which does a great job of showing how crucial Ulysses S. Grant was to both the Union army as well as the presidency (which is a change from when I was in school and Grant was generally seen to be a failed president). Yes it’s long (over 1,000 pages before you even get to the appendix!), and yes there’s a ton of characters (don’t try to remember them all – the important ones will stick with you), but it is well worth the read.

There are several themes to this book. One of the first is to dispel the myth that Grant was a dullard. Yes, Chernow acknowledges, Grant was a terrible businessman – at the outset of the Civil War Grant was selling firewood on a street corner. However, that was because he was too trusting, not because he wasn’t smart. This is critical in the Civil War, where the common thought is that Grant only won his battles by overwhelming his opponents with larger forces. While Grant did have his share of brute force battles that earned him the name “The Butcher”, he did employ a great deal of strategy in most of his battles, and his forces had a lower casualty rate than any of his opponents. There’s a reason Grant was successful where “smarter” generals like McClellan failed.

A second theme was how Grant’s alcoholism, as much as he was able to learn to control it, became his fatal flaw. Grant did have an obvious problem with alcohol after graduating from West Point that followed him through the Mexican-American war and later in outposts in the West. While at a fort in the Pacific Northwest, Grant was drunk so often that he was thrown out of the army (and on arrival in New York City shortly afterwards was probably thrown in jail for drunkenness). For the rest of his life, there were isolated reports of drunk episodes, but for the most part he was able to find a way to keep himself sober; however, he continued to be berated as a drunk by his opponents regardless of his later control over the disease.

The biggest theme that stands out, though, at least in these times, is his unyielding support for African Americans. Grant decided early in his life that he opposed the idea of slavery (although despite this he did a wife who grew up with slaves in a house of a unrepentant future Confederate sympathizer). In joining the Union army he was not just fighting for his country (like Sherman was, for example, but actually fighting against slavery).

As we see African Americans continue to be oppressed in this country, as we continue to see them killed by police and denigrated by conservative politicians, the question may come to you: didn’t the Union win the Civil War? How could we have arrived at this point if the pro-slavery forces were defeated 150+ years ago? As you can see throughout Grant, just about every decision made regarding ending the Civil War was the wrong decision. This started even before the Civil War had been won – President Lincoln didn’t know he would be assassinated, so he never left a plan for what to do with freed southern slaves, and didn’t think twice about running with Andrew Johnson as his Vice President in the election of 1864. Johnson had always seemed to be opposed to the Confederacy, as well as slavery in general; however, once President of a recently-reunited nation, he threw his lot in with poor white southerners (kind of like the Trump of the 19th century) and approved of measures that kept African Americans in de facto slavery. He was opposed by the Radical Republicans in Congress, who were fiercely protective of former slaves; however, they gambled everything on impeaching Johnson, lost the removal by one vote, and pretty much disappeared. Even Grant, who cared deeply about the plight of freed southern slaves, got in on the bad decision-making; Johnson surprisingly agreed to allow Grant to go on a fact-finding mission to the South to see first-hand how African Americans were faring, but Grant was so successfully wined and dined by the gentry when he was down there that he told newspapers that everything was going fine (even Grant realized how big a mistake he made shortly afterwards).

With so many bad decisions already made during Reconstruction, Grant did everything he could during his presidency to further equality, by pushing for laws and Constitutional amendments that would end discrimination, by allowing the Army to occupy the South even after the war’s end, by keeping states from re-joining the Union until they agreed to anti-discrimination laws. But by the late 1860s, and especially by the early 1870s, the bad decisions that had plagued the immediate end of the Civil War had come to roost, and the South had the leverage; while the states agreed to laws they rarely enforced them, and the emergent KKK kept African Americans and white Republicans from running for office or even voting. By the end of Grant’s presidency, with Union states sick of struggling with the new South, southern whites were massacring African Americans with impunity, and the speaker of the house was a former Confederate.

Chernow really highlights all of those terrible decisions that led us to reckoning we are experiencing now. But he also highlights how Grant did his best to fight for equality and against discrimination, and while he wasn’t as successful as he had hoped to be, he was far from a failed president.

Overall, not only an important book, but also a fascinating book. Nine out of ten hot dogs.