NF David Blight Reviews Chernow's "Grant" and Grant's "Personal Memoirs"

Non-Fiction
From the review:

Ron Chernow, the author of prize-winning biographies of George Washington, John D. Rockefeller, and Alexander Hamilton, has written an expansive new life of Grant. It is a work of striking anecdotes, skillful pacing, and poignant judgments. Chernow’s primary subject—and that of numerous previous Grant biographies—is the nature of Grant’s character. We see him survive an odyssey during which many enemies tried to destroy him, including formidable demons within himself.
 
More from the review of Chernow:

In 1854, with borrowed funds, the “guileless” Grant made it to New York, where he was cheated out of his money on the streets and managed to be jailed for drunkenness. By the time the hapless soldier borrowed more money from his West Point friends James Longstreet and Simon Buckner—later to become Confederate foes—and made it to Ohio, he was broke, a failure, and at odds with his domineering father. In the next five years Grant, with his wife, Julia, and his growing family of four children, tried farming and real estate in her native Missouri. He failed miserably at those as well and then sold firewood on the streets of St. Louis in an old faded army coat, prompting Chernow to call him “a bleak defeated little man with a mysterious aura of solitude.”

Here Chernow falls into one of the traps of Grant biography: presenting his years as a down-and-out as a kind of inevitable prelude to his later greatness. Grant’s “momentary disgrace,” he writes, “can be seen in retrospect as his salvation, preserving him for the starring role in the Civil War.” Walking around with a “stoop” in 1859, he hardly looked fit for anything so lofty. Historians should resist the teleology of destiny, no matter how good the story.

On Grant’s ideologically divided families, Chernow shines. Julia Dent, whom the young officer met through a West Point roommate, came from a slaveholding family; her father, “Colonel” Frederick Dent, presided over a plantation, White Haven, southwest of St. Louis. In 1850 the Dents owned thirty slaves. Julia would change her views drastically during the war, partly through loyalty to her husband. She became a Unionist, but her family remained staunch Confederates. Grant’s father and mother were abolitionists. He grew up in Ohio, rigorously opposed to slavery at least “in theory,” as Chernow points out. But in the tumultuous 1850s, because of his marriage, Grant was obliged to live in the midst of slavery and was nearly disowned by his own family for it. His parents refused to attend his wedding.
 
Military history is not Chernow’s strength, although he does take account of Grant the strategist, especially the general’s “preternatural tranquility” in the worst of combat. Grant possessed a remarkable talent for military logistics, for anticipating his enemy’s moves or flaws, and especially for taking the offensive. In that calm, while thousands of men killed one another and bullets swarmed about Grant’s body, Chernow believes we find the “riddle of [his] personality.”
 
Blight engages the historiography @Bee

As the scholar Joan Waugh observed, Grant’s “reputation is often determined by whether or not the historian in question believes that the Civil War was a ‘good war.’”1Since at least the 1950s Grant biographies have followed roughly that pattern. From the 1890s to the 1930s, when the Lost Cause tradition predominated and Robert E. Lee developed into a national cult figure, Grant’s fame waned, and serious historians gave him less attention. The modern Grant revival began with Lloyd Lewis, whose celebratory Captain Sam Grant (1950) took the story to the brink of war in 1861. Lewis died just as his book appeared. Later in the 1950s, Bruce Catton, the country’s most prolific narrative historian of the Civil War, took up the Grant story in three books published over more than a decade. Both Lewis and Catton had lived as adults through World War II; no concerns about the justness of war kept them from giving Grant an ennobling biography.

The next stage in the Grant revival came in the 1980s and early 1990s, with the work of William S. McFeely and Brooks D. Simpson. McFeely’s Pulitzer Prize–winning 1981 biography was a post-Vietnam, post-Watergate treatment of Grant. He became in McFeely’s masterful prose the fascinating, dark author of the savagery of the Civil War, not merely its sublime strategist. In 1995, Andrew Delbanco drew on McFeely to claim Grant as founder of the doctrine of massive force, or “annihilation,” used in the world wars of the twentieth century. To Delbanco, Grant was a cultural precursor of the “dead-eyed murderers” in modern American literature, such as the killers in Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood, and the “modern monster” to whom Lee surrendered at Appomattox. In 2006, Harry S. Stout did not forgive or explain away Grant’s responsibility for the carnage of 1864 in Virginia, raising the issue of “just war” doctrine at a time when most historians were avoiding it. Grant, he insisted, sought to shorten the war by the relentless slaughter of his foe.3

Simpson challenged the idea of Grant as a failed, inept president in his fine book Let Us Have Peace: Ulysses S. Grant and the Politics of War and Reconstruction, 1861–1868 (1991) and wrote a superb second treatment of the general’s full military career, Ulysses S. Grant: Triumph Over Adversity, 1822–1865 (2000). He rejected the Vietnam-era, antiwar sensibility in Grant biography and anticipated the recent surge in thick volumes on the former captain’s strange political career. Simpson resurrected the two terms of Grant’s presidency from the dustbin of history, showing that one can never understand Reconstruction if one only considers Grant corrupt or irrelevant.
 
Blight's assessment of the biographer's affections:

Chernow’s life of Grant inevitably repeats the work of some of these predecessors, but it has its own insights. The greatest challenge of Grant biography is also its richest opportunity: to explain what Chernow calls the “split personality” of a man of such passive, numbing failure who somehow acquired the “breathtaking audacity” to become the mastermind of the Union’s victory. Chernow writes this story as a kind of homespun national epic. He attends carefully to the ironies of sectionalism, race, and slavery that defined the era and permeated Grant’s life. Chernow is one of Grant’s affectionate biographers: it is hard not to love a soldier on the right side of a just war who drinks too much, smells perpetually of cigars, rarely wears uniforms of his rank, is expressionless and tough, and who, as Lincoln put it about his military leadership, “makes things git!” Chernow gives us a troubled, humble warrior, a man lost and yet found through amazing feats if not grace.
 
Some criticism of Chernow's style and judgments:

Because of overreliance on Grant’s Memoirs, some errors of fact or problems of judgment mar this gracefully written book. An unschooled reader will get lost in Chernow’s descriptions of long and logistically complex campaigns, notably Vicksburg and Chattanooga in 1863. It seems odd to claim that Grant “doesn’t receive the credit that properly belongs to him” for Sherman’s conquest of Atlanta. Grant did have “genuine compassion” for defeated Confederates, but Chernow’s claim that they “had been restored as…countrymen” at Appomattox is not quite right. The famous meeting with Lee had been a military surrender, not a peace treaty. Chernow miscasts Lincoln’s Second Inaugural as a “forgiving” message, stressing only the final paragraph and ignoring the profound retribution expressed in the first three. Chernow also declares Congress’s override of President Andrew Johnson’s veto of the Civil Rights Act of 1866 “unprecedented.” In fact, President John Tyler had been overridden once and Franklin Pierce five times.

In style Chernow will leave some readers puzzled. He relies excessively on giving detailed portraits of figures in Grant’s life at the expense of explaining their significance. And students of the Radical Republicans, who conceived Reconstruction legislation and constitutional protections for freed slaves, may wonder at the claim that “it was Grant who helped to weave the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments into the basic fabric of American life.”
 
Blight says that Grant's fame was milked for all it was worth after the war:

Chernow eagerly joins the defense of Grant’s troubled presidency. The former general, who after the war was “a helpless casualty of his own fame,” may have been a reluctant, inept politician, but he was hardly without ambition. After the war Grant enjoyed a new, modern kind of fame, played out in the press and before enormous crowds. Everyone wanted a glimpse of the stern captor of Vicksburg and the benevolent conqueror of Lee with the cigar stub in his mouth. Wealthy people gave him houses in Georgetown, in Galena, Illinois, in Philadelphia, in New Jersey, and eventually in New York City. Everyone close to him, including his wife, plied his fame for personal gain.
 
Blight on corruption and Grant:

“Grant mania” brought a showering of gifts and, once he was in office, a litany of scandals to which his name is forever tied. Chernow tells most of these stories of sordid corruption well: the successful effort of Jay Gould and others to corner the market on gold and drive up its price; the Crédit Mobilier railroad fraud network; the extensive Whiskey Ring, in which many government employees and congressmen, as well as a few of Grant’s relatives, pocketed millions in excise taxes; and numerous cases in which shamelessly corrupt Indian agents bilked the tribes on their newly formed reservations...Chernow believes that his hero was merely a “life-long naïf” whose personal morality ought to go unchallenged. His Grant was an incorruptible man overseeing an age of fee-based spoils and endless bribery.

But is it enough to conclude that Grant just never got over his boundless susceptibility to con artists and Ponzi schemers like Ferdinand Ward, who eventually took the former president, his good name, and every penny he had for a disastrous ride off a cliff? Is Grant merely the victim, not to be blamed for the corruption of his son, a brother, and an assortment of cabinet officials and close aides? A certain charm emerges from this story when it is kept safely in the past. The 1870s, argues the historian Richard White in The Republic for Which It Stands, his new book on Reconstruction, was a time when “random corruption” became a “centralized operation,” when the “profit motive” became inextricably hitched to “public service.”5 Grant by no means created such a world, but he sat haplessly at its reeking center.
 
Of the new edition of Grant's memoirs, Blight writes:

A new edition, the most thoroughly annotated ever produced, provides the general reader and scholar alike with detailed access to the general’s early life and military career. The editor, John F. Marszalek, and his colleagues at the Grant Papers at Mississippi State University have brought together a wealth of helpful information for all future readers and researchers on Grant, his two wars, and his era. The notes are a scholarly achievement, and they could have helped Chernow craft part of his military narrative. Grant probed deeply into his memory and his documents while enduring unbearable pain from throat cancer, which rendered him near the end unable to speak or eat. He settled a few scores, put a few myths to rest, described campaigns and battles with his distinctive clarity, defended himself, hid many elements of his life, and told his favorite stories with an abiding humility.
 
Blight on corruption and Grant:


But is it enough to conclude that Grant just never got over his boundless susceptibility to con artists and Ponzi schemers like Ferdinand Ward, who eventually took the former president, his good name, and every penny he had for a disastrous ride off a cliff? Is Grant merely the victim, not to be blamed for the corruption of his son, a brother, and an assortment of cabinet officials and close aides? A certain charm emerges from this story when it is kept safely in the past. The 1870s, argues the historian Richard White in The Republic for Which It Stands, his new book on Reconstruction, was a time when “random corruption” became a “centralized operation,” when the “profit motive” became inextricably hitched to “public service.”5 Grant by no means created such a world, but he sat haplessly at its reeking center.

...Grant chose to destroy Lee’s army in 1864 by costly, aggressive infantry assaults, some of them, like Cold Harbor and the Crater at Petersburg, disastrous. Grant was at times sickened by the carnage he personally caused, but as he ordered General Philip Sheridan to make total war on the Shenandoah Valley he wrote, “Eat out Virginia clear and clean as far as they [Confederates] go, so that crows flying over it for the balance of this season will have to carry their provender with them.” Chernow denies the old charge against Grant as a “butcher,” although clearly the general led a ghastly bloodbath. Most still conclude that his ends justified his means—a debate that may never end.


I read this review a couple of days ago when @Bee posted a link. Rereading it, once again I’m wondering about the fact that David Blight highlights some of the old charges against Grant, namely corruption and butchery.

When it comes to bloodbaths, such as the passage quoted above, why does Grant have to take full responsibility for the “carnage he personally created?” It would seem to me that Lee should share the responsibility, along with their respective commanders in chief, Lincoln and Davis. It puzzles me that Blight depicts Grant as somehow creating carnage in a vacuum, since bloody fighting characterized the Eastern Theater long before Grant arrived, and Grant’s signature campaign at Vicksburg did not feature nearly as high a casualty rate.

I also wonder that Blight revives the charges of corruption, laying at his feet the corruption of members of his cabinet, his son and brother. One impression that I got from the Chernow book was that by the end of his presidency
there had been so many investigations of corruption of people associated with Grant that the effect must have been numbing and Grant must have felt besieged and defensive. I got the impression that by the time Orville Babcock was investigated it would have seemed logical to think that this was another in a long string of attempts to finger people close to Grant. Were his brother and son really corrupt?

I raise these questions because Blight, like Chernow, is something of a celebrity, so their opinions will be widely accepted. I thought that Chernow often relied on unreliable sources, such as Rawlins, on Grant’s drinking. What are Blight’s sources on bloodiness and corruption and are they reliable?
 
"What we get from Chernow’s book, in the end, is the Grant that the general himself tried to impose on us."

David Blight has given us a rather elegant pan of the the Chernow book.
 
David Blight's friend Richard White has a Reconstruction book out, The Republic for which It Stands. He agrees with his friend's negative view of Grant. For an Ivy League professor to disapprove of Grant is like snow falling in Maine in December. Is this news?
Edited.
 
If you read Bain's book on the Transcontinental Railroad it is overwhelmingly obvious that Grant had nothing to do with Credit Mobilier. That was Lincoln's fault for letting Durant get involved, and New York's fault for making every railroad builder insecure. Every railroader began to look over his shoulder once Jay Gould seized the Erie Railroad.
 
I think one should compare David Blight to Eric Foner. Foner is not exactly a Grant fan either. But I always took Foner to be very concerned with the alternatives? What if the United States had lost?
What if the US Army had enforced Andrew Johnson's reconstruction and supported his run for President?
Edited.
 
David Blight's friend Richard White has a Reconstruction book out, The Republic for which It Stands. He agrees with his friend's negative view of Grant. For an Ivy League professor to disapprove of Grant is like snow falling in Maine in December. Is this news? Edited.

Why is this ?
 
In the 21st century we cannot tell how much Grant drank. That was an issue that Lincoln, Stanton, Seward and Halleck to investigate. Meade, Sherman and Porter could have exposed this problem. Mrs. Grant knew this was an issue and she stuck it out with Grant.
He wasn't even unusual. He drank as a young adult and drank less and less as he got older.
 
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