Book Review - "Grant," Ron Chernow (Penguin, 2018)

  

I have a confession to make: I've had this book on my bookshelf for almost three years at this point thanks to a friend who knew my love of Sam Grant, and only just now finished it.  This was not due to a lack of interest, or a lack of quality, but because my reading hours have been spent elsewhere and this was my bedtime book.  It goes in the same category of books as The Gulag Archipelago and Robert Caro's The Years of Lyndon Johnson as a book that I had to force myself to put down as I read it, so perhaps it was not ideal pre-bed reading.

It begins and ends with the riveting story of Grant's final months, as he races his own death to finish his Memoirs.  I was broadly familiar with the story, and the circumstances of Grant's unexpected penury that forced the legendarily reticent general to start writing, but Chernow's description of Grant's condition, and his determination in the face of his own suffering and mortality, gave the story something of a passion-play aura.

This aura is the biggest weakness, if it can be described as such, in Chernow's biography of Grant.  To compare it to another excellent biography, Robert Caro's Years of Lyndon Johnson, he very clearly both admires and likes his subject, where Caro is fascinated with Johnson while often clearly ambiguous in his feelings about Johnson's attitudes and tactics.  Chernow does not shy away from the man's faults, but even the faults wind up being discussed as virtues - his credulity, mainly.  Grant's struggle with alcoholism winds up being cast, as I believe it should, as an actual struggle rather than as his opponents liked to portray it, as an abject surrender by Grant to the bottle.  The only time that Chernow engages in unalloyed disapproval of Grant's personality is during his discussion of President Grant's foreign policy, namely his obsessive attempt to annex Santo Domingo, and in how Grant, as president, began to see other politicians as potential presidential rivals.

At the same time, those same personality traits, namely the ability to pursue an objective with single-minded determination, and the ability to read his opponents when he considered them opponents, served Grant admirably at other times.  Chernow lays this bare as well, pointing out that only a man who could dig in as hard as he did on Santo Domingo would be determined "to fight it out on this line if it takes all summer," and only a man with an expansive vision for the Justice Department would see a potential political threat in his own popular attorney general.

For what it is worth, Chernow does not explicitly state his biases, but he is fairly clear about them, and about how they relate to the source material about Grant's life.  At no point does he provide an unsupported opinion or drift away from his biography into editorial territory.  He rightly points out that Grant's administration continued the massive expansion of federal power that began in the Lincoln administration and paused under Johnson, and, using Grant's own words and actions, paints a picture of Grant's commitment to civil rights.  His overall tone winds up being defensive of Grant's legacy, partly because there is more than a century of scholarship that frequently paints his administration as corrupt and his tenure as Commanding General as one of butchery, and a critical examination of his campaigns, his peacetime command, and his time in office shows a much more complex, and generally much better, legacy.  In simple numbers, Grant's record appointing minorities of all stripes, whether that's Ely Parker as Superintendent for Indian Affairs, the number of women appointed as postmasters, or Frederick Douglass to the Santo Domingo commission, was mind-boggling by the standards of the hundred years that followed him; it is in the personal details of his writing letters of recommendation for his black butler's son to Harvard that Grant's personality really shines through, and it becomes clear that these moves were not mere political expediency, but were deeply personal to this most deeply personal of men.

For several reasons, this record was not the one that history received.  First was vocal Southern hagiography and apologism, starting basically the day after Appomattox and never truly ending, where Lee was a peerless general and Grant was a butcher, and Reconstruction was a policy of oppression.  Second was that Reconstruction itself made big-government solutions unpopular; it was expensive and did not bear visible fruits to the North, which had its own home-grown racism problems.  Third was that there was a concerted and mostly unsuccessful effort, starting during the Civil War, by his own side to paint Grant as an incompetent, corrupt drunk, that continued into his presidency.  This included everything from Halleck claiming credit for Grant's battlefield successes to the very real scandals of his presidency, which never quite touched the president himself.  Fourth and finally, Grant was, even according to his opponents, a tremendously modest man, never given to self-publicizing.  This allowed his opponents to do most of setting the record, and required a deeper look to find the man himself.

Overall, Grant emerges from Chernow's book as a flawed human being, but both a great man and a good one because of those flaws.  A less flawed man would not come across as human; a more flawed man would drift into Caro's description of Lyndon Johnson, who is equally fascinating but not equally admirable.  Where there are sources ascribing behavior to Grant, such as in India where he supposedly drunkenly groped every woman in sight, or his alleged drinking binge after Vicksburg, Chernow discusses the affairs in detail and explains why he finds the incident credible, what he finds credible about it, and what is probable fabrication.  Generally, he falls on the side of crediting Grant, but not crediting him without reason.  For instance, in the India incident, he points out there is no other account from this supposedly very public drunken spell, there are no other records of Grant being a womanizing drunk, and Julia Grant was one of his most reliable controls, and she was present in the account.

Julia Grant emerges from the account as a character in her own right, though Chernow views her slightly less favorably than his main subject; her love of life in the White House, compared to the toll it takes on her husband, and her rose-tinted view of her life in the antebellum South, compared to his views as a convert to the abolition of slavery, both color her in Chernow's eyes.  Still, she comes across as one of the prime reasons that Grant did not collapse utterly any number of times, whether that is in Missouri during their bad years, in the White House during their good years, or at Long Branch after the Ward & Grant affair toward the end.  She comes across not merely as his wife, but as the woman he loves and respects, and more important than either of those, as his closest friend.

In the final analysis, Chernow's biography of Grant is an excellent book.  He does justice to his subject without drifting into hagiography or hiding Grant's failings, and shows a consistently sympathetic but fair treatment throughout the book.  Those would be adequate, but he does so with a style that engages the reader and keeps them engaged consistently through the book.  I would recommend it for anyone looking for a character study, any student of American history, or any military-history student, at any level.