BOOKS, ARTS & MANNERS42 | http://www.nationalreview.com OCTOBER 30 , 2017tolerated the use of slaves by his wife in
the 1850s, and even owned one slave,
William Jones. But in 1859, without con-
sulting the Dents, he unilaterally eman-
cipated Jones, and from 1862 onwards
he embraced both emancipation and the
recruitment of black soldiers for the
Union armies.
As president, no one before Lyndon
Johnson was a more forthright defender
of black civil rights than Grant. He
hailed the 15th Amendment as “a mea-
sure of grander importance than any
other one act of the kind from the foun-
dation of our free government to the pre-
sent day.” He took a hard hand to the Ku
Klux Klan through the three Enforce -
ment Acts of 1870–71, and his reelec-
tion in 1872 was in large measure a vote
of gratitude from southern blacks who
saw Grant as their champion.
What Chernow cannot drive away,
however, is the disappointment of
Grant’s missed chances. Grant re -
sponded vigorously to the Klan, but he
sketched out no grand, positive plan for
Reconstruction. He clashed needlessly
with the Washington power structure,
especially with Charles Sumner, only to
find his own allies undependable or cor-
rupt. He pursued the chimera of annex-
ing Santo Domingo long past the point
of reason or viability. But some of those
missed chances were probably beyond
his grasp anyway. What little political
leverage he retained after fighting with
Sumner was wrecked by the Panic of
1873, which brought a Democratic
majority back to the House of Repre -
sentatives in the following year’s elec-
tions and spelled the de facto end of black
voting rights.
Grant was an innocent: a decent man
who, fundamentally, disliked military life
and paled at the sight of blood, who trust-
ed shysters and con men and was ruined
by them, and who then was killed by
throat cancer triggered by his 20-cigar-a-
day habit. But let those who too readily
express contempt of Grant remember two
sterling moments in the man’s life: the
generosity at Appomattox, which headed
off a nightmare future of Confederate
insurgency, and the singular assurance he
sent to Abraham Lincoln after the battle of
the Wilderness: “If you see the President,
tell him, from me, that, whatever happens,
there will be no turning back.” Mayor de
Blasio might think twice beforetrifling
with such a man.gigantic Wall Street Ponzi scheme. When
it collapsed in 1884, Grant was worth
exactly $80. (He did some impressive
salvage work in his final days, writing his
Memoirsbefore dying in 1885.)
Curiously in the context of the PC
disapproval of Grant, this image of
Grant-the-failure has been energetically
challenged by most of his modern biogra-
phers. Still more curiously, Grant has not
been wanting in modern biographers:
There have been seven colossal biogra-
phies of Grant in the past 35 years,
dwarfing the number devoted to all the
major figures of the Civil War era except
Lincoln. Of these, only William Mc -
Feely’s (in 1981) portrayed Grant
according to the dark legend of the
butcher; the others are defenders of
Grant’s reputation, sometimes to the
point of aggressiveness.
To this crowded field comes now the
reigning king of popular American
biographers, Ron Chernow, fresh from
his repeated and dazzling successes in
delivering up the lives of George
Washington, Alexander Hamilton, and
John D. Rockefeller. Do not, however,
expect a hip-hop musical to emerge
from this one. Chernow’s Grantis the
bulkiest of the increasingly bulky
Grants. McFeely’s, which won the
Pulitzer Prize for biography, consumed
608 pages; Chernow presents us with
1,104. But Chernow is also the least
likely entrant into the Grant field. Of
the recent major biographers, he is the
least familiar with Grant’s milieu as a
19th-century American soldier and
Gilded Age politico, and, at his worst,
he possesses no ear at all for the
niceties of Civil War military history.
He is frequently content to repeat silly
clichés about Grant’s being the author
of “a stark new brand of modern war-
fare” or of “a theory of total warfare.”
How any war fought with single-shot
muzzle-loading weapons, supported
logistically by mule-drawn wagon
trains, could be construed as “modern,”
or how a conflict in which Grant
repeatedly paroled the enemy troops he
captured could be considered “total,” is
never examined.
Chernow is at his best in his valiant
struggle to redeem Grant’s character,
which even he admits to finding “emo-
tionally blocked” and “colorless.”
Among the qualities that endear Grant
to Chernow—and that endeared Grantto those who knew him—are his un -
fussy informality, his “extraordinary
grasp of military detail,” “his indiffer-
ence to personal danger,” and “his quiet
self-confidence.”
Chernow does not believe that his
subject was a saint: “Grant never
declined invitations to honor him and
glowed before worshipful crowds.” And
he concedes that Grant was primarily a
reactive personality who could often
seem torpid and inactive—until the
descent of a crisis pushed him into a
flurry of intelligent and irresistible
activity. As a husband to Julia Dent
Grant, he was loyal beyond fault, despite
the lifelong contempt of his slave-owning
Dent in-laws; he was a doting father
even when his grown children embar-
rassed him.
Chernow successfully recruits our
sympathy for Ulysses Grant, the man in
private, even as he refuses to dismiss
(as the great Bruce Catton did in his
multi-volume Grant biography) the sin-
gle greatest problem with which Grant
struggled—alcohol. Chernow accepts
that Grant was an alcoholic and that he
could not hold anything beyond the
smallest dose of liquor without becom-
ing silly and unsteady. But Grant under-
stood this weakness, fought it all his
life, and fought it successfully when he
had Julia and his faithful chief of staff
John Rawlins to keep him on the
wagon. Chernow is right to insist that
none of Grant’s frequent falls from tem-
perance ever influenced a decision that
involved the lives of his soldiers or the
fate of his country.
Chernow is also determined to
sponge away the damage Grant did to
himself with the notorious order ban-
ning Jews from his military department
in Mississippi. Grant issued the order in
a fit of pique caused by his father’s
blowhard attempts to trade on his son’s
reputation and become a middleman for
illegal trade in captured cotton with
Jewish brokers. Grant struck out wildly,
and lived to regret it. Lincoln swiftly
directed him to revoke the order and
Grant spent the rest of his life apologiz-
ing for it as “inflicting a wrong.”
Chernow bends over backward to
make Grant as much a friend of African
Americans as the 19th century was likely
to yield. Grant’s family were Methodist
and abolitionist by persuasion. By mar-
rying into the slave-owning Dents, hebooks_QXP-1127940387.qxp 10/10/2017 10:41 PM Page 42