Book Review: Grant

Grantby Ron ChernowPenguin Press, 2017Ulysses Grant, the victor of the American Civil War and the country's 18^th president has been well-served by biographers in recent years. In 2001, Jean Edward Smith's Grant appeared, a superbly readable re-appraisal of its subject as both a military commander and a president, and just last year, Ronald White's sensitive and insightful book American Ulysses was published. There have of course been many dozens of other biographies of the man, in addition to many new editions of his famous Personal Memoirs, including a brilliant new annotated version from the Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Grant's story is premium biography-fodder: loving husband, dismal business failure, promising figure in the Mexican War, unassuming but undeniably effective Union general, slightly hapless two-term Chief Executive mired in corruption, and, in a magnificent final act, dedicated author of his lucrative Memoirs, written in grueling sessions while Grant was dying of throat cancer – it has a rags-and-riches Everyman topography that invites cyclical appreciation and re-evaluation.In bookstores now is the latest of such tomes: Grant by Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer Ron Chernow, whose bestselling 2004 book Alexander Hamilton became the unlikely basis for the wildly popular Broadway musical Hamilton and whose 2010 book Washington: A Life won the Pulitzer. Those previous two doorstop biographies were polar opposites: Alexander Hamilton was a model of well-researched popular scholarship, whereas Washington: A Life was a protracted exercise in near-hysterical hagiography. This left the scales balanced, as it were; Grant could have gone either way – either a sober, critical evaluation of a complex and interesting life, or an extended whitewash of Grant's many failings, a crowd-pleasing chunk of mythology aimed squarely at the Holiday book-trade. Grant's had his share of both books, although of course far more of the latter than the former.Grant, it turns out, is a rock-solid thousand-page triumph of the biographer's art. Chernow approaches his famous subject in the only way that guarantees worthwhile results: after conducting an enormous amount of research, he then writes Grant's life as if nobody had ever done it before. Every aspect of Grant's multi-faceted story is tackled afresh, its sources sifted and interrogated with no presumed conclusions. Chernow has thoroughly familiarized himself with the easy reductions that have always attached themselves to Grant's life, but throughout this terrific book, he again and again comes to his own conclusions.Naturally, one of those persistent reductions is Grant as Butcher – a reduction that happens to be true, although Chernow is clearly reluctant to grant it full grounding:

He has been derided as a plodding, dim-witted commander who enjoyed superior manpower and matériel and whose crude idea of strategy was to launch large, brutal assaults upon the enemy. In fact, close students of the war have shown that the percentage of casualties in Grant's armies was often lower than those of many Confederate generals. If Grant never shrank from sending masses of soldiers into bloody battles, it had nothing to do with the heartless disregard for human life and everything to do with bringing the war to a speedy conclusion.

That bit about Grant's percentage of casualties often being lower than many Confederate generals is unsourced – as it would have to be, since it isn't even vaguely true. In fact, it's undercut by Chernow's own summation, which is certainly true: Grant saw with unblinking clarity that as the foremost Union general, his primary duty was to put himself out of a job – he needed to do whatever was necessary to bring the war to the aforementioned speedy conclusion. This translated directly to Grant taking basically the same approach whenever he could: encounter an entrenched or thorny Confederate position – and overwhelm it with the superior forces that were so often at his command. Indeed, whenever Grant faced a capable enemy general (much less one of the three or four genuine tactical geniuses the Confederacy managed to produce) on roughly equal terms, he generally lost. His military reputation largely rested on the superior manpower and matériel Chernow mentions in order to dismiss.But whereas after the Washington book this might be an alarming warning-bell, here instead it's the kind of small, acceptable partisanship that grows naturally when a biographer comes to like his subject. Virtually everywhere else, Chernow is sternly objective with his subject in exactly the way Grant always was with himself, and it results in an extended portrait that's both tougher and more human than any one-volume biography of this famous figure has yet been. And Chernow's talent for beautifully evoking quick, telling tableaux off to the sides of his main narrative is on full display in this big book. Readers get dozens of such moments, like the meeting between Grant and President Lincoln after the capture of Petersburg:

A beaming Lincoln bounded forward, grasping Grant's hand robustly, his joy gushing to the surface. With a droll smile he declared, “Do you know, General, I have had a sort of sneaking idea for some days that you intended to do something like this.” As they conversed on the porch, neither Lincoln nor Grant knew of Richmond's downfall. In an expansive frame of mind, Lincoln expatiated on his ideas for southern Reconstruction. Grant felt he could be open with Lincoln about upcoming battle plans. He expressed pleasure that the eastern army was defeating Lee. Otherwise western congressmen might have lorded it over their eastern counterparts after the war. Lincoln confessed he had never given the matter much thought “because his anxiety was so great that he did not care where the aid came from, so the work was done.” It is interesting to note that the astute Lincoln never weighed this question while the supposedly apolitical Grant volunteered this insight. As the two men chatted, the little yard before them filled with former slaves emancipated by the triumphant troops in blue. Lincoln and these freed people stared at one another in silent wonder. It would have been hard to say which was more surprising: the sudden freedom of the slaves or the fact that the president who brought forth the Emancipation Proclamation was there to greet them personally in their first hours of freedom.

(Lincoln often steals scenes in the book's first half; this is an occupational hazard of Grant biographies and can't really be avoided)Chernow's Grant is enormously enjoyable to read and often generously thought-provoking, particularly in its account of Grant's controversial years as President. It will steamroller that Holiday book trade, and its success will be richly deserved.