Biography offers a second look at U.S. Grant

This post was published in The Wilson Times March 23, 2019.

As a native North Carolinian with two great-great-grandfathers who served in the Confederate army and were killed in the Civil War, I never was a great fan of Ulysses S. Grant. But after reading Ron Chernow’s 1,000-page biography of Grant, simply titled “Grant,” I’m more sympathetic.

I thought I knew what I needed to know about Grant, the Union general who took over after President Lincoln had fired or demoted all of his predecessors, including McClelland, Hooker, Meade, Burnside, Butler, etc. Unlike his predecessors, Grant did not reverse course and head back to the Potomac after being defeated or badly outflanked by Robert E. Lee’s troops. From reading a number of Civil War books, my image of Grant was of a man who used superior manpower and resources to decimate the Confederate Army of Northern Virginia and ultimately force Lee’s surrender. Grant stubbornly kept his Army of the Potomac on Lee’s heels until Lee finally had no place to go.

That stubbornness also showed itself at Cold Harbor, where Grant ordered consecutive, suicidal charges against an entrenched Confederate line. Union troops were so resigned to dying as they prepared for one more hopeless charge that they pinned their names, written on scraps of paper, onto their clothing so their bodies could be identified after the killing was over. Critics North and South called Grant “a butcher.”

In a thousand pages, I should certainly learn a lot about Grant, and I did. I have a greater appreciation of the man who rode his Civil War fame to become the 18^th president of the United States. I’m still not convinced that Grant was a great military tactician, but his strong determination to finish his work, whatever it was, served him well in war.

Grant had a troubled childhood with a domineering, unloving father, and his marriage to Julia Dent gave him a difficult father-in-law, who was a demanding, slave-holding plantation owner who never liked his son-in-law and his anti-slavery family. Grant went to West Point for the free education and was not the best student. He resigned from his Army career and tried to succeed in private business but repeatedly failed.

Chernow frequently asserts that Grant’s lack of business success was the result of an inability to judge people who would take advantage of him. Grant lacked a healthy skepticism about dishonest people. As a result, Grant found himself broke more than once. The worst loss came after his two terms in the White House, when a slick financial adviser fleeced him of his life’s savings, leaving his family destitute.

One critic said Chernow has a tendency to see only the good in the subjects of his biographies, and that is certainly true of “Grant.” It is difficult to swallow the author’s excuses for Grant’s ignorance of basic personal finance and his trusting of shysters who saw him as an easy mark. Nevertheless, Grant was very successful as a military strategist, lauded by some as the greatest general of the century. His presidential terms were fairly successful but difficulties arose from Grant’s tendency to surround himself with untrustworthy people, making his presidency perhaps the most scandal-ridden in U.S. history.

One aspect of this history is the federal government’s failure during Reconstruction to stop violence against newly emancipated African-Americans. Chernow documents numerous incidents of violence and murder of former slaves and their families by Ku Klux Klan members and other white supremacists. Grant was more willing than others to call out federal troops to defend civil rights in the former Confederacy, but his actions were not enough to stop the murdering racists determined to keep the black population, as well as white Republicans, from voting, despite the 13^th, 14^th and 15^th Amendments. The failure to protect the rights of citizens should be an embarrassment to all Americans, and it has shaped U.S history for 150 years. The public and elected officials both North and South ignored cries for justice.

I don’t recall the U.S. history courses I took making clear just how widespread violence, intimidations and flagrant murders were in the post-war South. When I was in school, Reconstruction was taught as a lamentable era of scandal, graft and wasteful spending by state governments run by former slaves, some of whom were illiterate. The larger issue, it is obvious, is the refusal of many whites to accept the results of the Civil War that killed 600,000 Americans, gave former slaves the right to vote, and left half the nation destitute, its economy destroyed and its greatest form of wealth — African slaves — eliminated without compensation.

This biography of Grant is worth reading just for what it tells us about the Radical Republicans vs. white supremacist Democrats during Reconstruction. But there is much more in those thousand pages.

Hal Tarleton is a former editor of The Wilson Daily Times. Contact him at haltarleton@myglnc.com.