Grant

The Most Misunderstood American

Ulysses S. Grant has spent over a century in the historical basement. His presidency is listed among the worst by historians; his personal reputation is coloured by alcoholism and business failure; his military genius has been attributed to luck or to overwhelming resources. Ron Chernow’s Grant — a 1074-page act of historical rehabilitation — argues that virtually all of this is wrong.

The corruption of Grant’s presidency involved men around him, not Grant himself. His alcoholism was real but manageable, and has been wildly exaggerated by people who wanted to diminish him. His military record was the product of genuine tactical and strategic genius applied in conditions of extraordinary difficulty. And his presidency’s commitment to protecting the rights of formerly enslaved Black Americans — which was ultimately defeated by violence and Northern exhaustion — was one of the most principled and courageous political stands of the nineteenth century.

The Civil War General

The Civil War sections of this biography are extraordinary military history. Chernow traces Grant’s development from a failed businessman to the general who, alone among Union commanders, understood how to fight a war of attrition against a determined opponent. The Vicksburg campaign — Grant’s masterwork — is rendered with the clarity of someone who has studied it for years.

The relationship with Sherman, the friction with the political class in Washington, and the final Overland Campaign that ended the war are all handled with precision and drama.

From Obscurity to Appomattox

Chernow’s account of Grant’s improbable rise is one of the book’s great pleasures. Before the war he was a near-failure — drummed out of the peacetime army amid rumours of drinking, scratching out a living chopping firewood and clerking in his family’s leather-goods store in Galena, Illinois. The war remade him. What set Grant apart from the parade of cautious, glory-seeking Union generals who preceded him was a simple, relentless clarity: he understood that the war would be won not by elegant manoeuvre but by closing with the enemy and refusing to let go. Chernow traces this through the early victories at Forts Henry and Donelson, the bloody shock of Shiloh, and above all the Vicksburg campaign — a daring, improvised masterpiece that split the Confederacy along the Mississippi and stands among the most brilliant operations in American military history. Promoted to overall command, Grant pinned Lee down in the grinding Overland Campaign and pursued him to the surrender at Appomattox, where his magnanimous terms set a tone of reconciliation. Throughout, his partnership with William Tecumseh Sherman and his deft handling of a meddling Washington political class reveal a strategist far more sophisticated than the “butcher” of Lost Cause caricature.

Reconstruction’s Champion

The most important contribution of Chernow’s biography may be its treatment of Grant’s presidency. Grant used federal power aggressively — including military force — to suppress the Ku Klux Klan and protect Black voting rights in the South. He largely succeeded until political will in the North collapsed. That history has been systematically obscured by the same Lost Cause mythology that diminished his generalship. The historian Richard N. Current’s verdict, which Chernow endorses, is striking: by backing Radical Reconstruction as far as he could, Grant “made a greater effort to secure the constitutional rights of blacks than did any other President between Lincoln and Lyndon B. Johnson,” earning the admiration of Frederick Douglass himself.

The Man and His Memoirs

Chernow’s Grant is, above all, a study in a particular kind of character: honest to a fault, almost incapable of cynicism, intensely loyal, and — disastrously — credulous about the shady men who repeatedly fleeced him. The same naïveté that produced the scandals of his presidency also made him a poor businessman who was swindled into bankruptcy late in life. The biography’s most moving passages concern its final act, when a ruined Grant, dying in agony from throat cancer, raced to complete his Personal Memoirs to save his family from destitution. He finished days before his death; the book, published by Mark Twain, became both a financial rescue and one of the greatest memoirs in American literature. Chernow also handles the lifelong charge of alcoholism with care, showing how real but manageable struggles were weaponised by enemies — often with no supporting evidence — to diminish a man they could not defeat on merit.

A Historiographical Landmark

Grant arrived as the capstone of a sea-change in how historians view its subject. A 1948 survey of historians ranked Grant the second-worst president in American history; recent rankings, reflecting a fuller appreciation of his record on race, have steadily lifted him toward the middle and beyond. Chernow — already celebrated for Alexander Hamilton, the Pulitzer-winning Washington: A Life, and Titan — brings his customary narrative power and exhaustive research to the reclamation. The honest caveat is that his sympathy occasionally tips toward hagiography, and at over a thousand pages the political detail of the presidency can move slowly. But these are small prices for the definitive modern life of one of the most consequential and unfairly maligned figures in American history — a book that, like Chernow’s Hamilton before it, has the power to reshape how a nation remembers one of its own.

For readers willing to make the commitment, it is among the most rewarding biographies of the past decade.

Our rating: 4.5/5 — A monumental rehabilitation: Chernow restores one of America’s most important figures to his rightful historical place.

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