Ron Chernow
Biography
Ulysses Grant owned one slave in his lifetime: William Jones, a gift from Grant's obnoxious father-in-law. This was in 1858, and Grant was down and out. He'd resigned from the army under a cloud. He'd failed in business, was failing at running the farm he'd named "Hardscrabble," eking out a living by selling firewood on street corners, reluctantly taking handouts from his wealthier relatives. The gift of a slave was a substantial windfall. Grant could have sold Jones for a good $1,500 (and in 1858 money, $15 a month was a living wage).
So Grant freed William Jones.
I've plucked that anecdote from Grant's rich soil not just because it's admirable--although it is--but because it seems to me that it illustrates one of U.S. Grant's fundamental character traits: he lacked duplicity. One can only guess at his reasoning, but plausibly it went something like this:
- I own a slave.
- I don't like slavery [Ron Chernow documents this thoroughly].
- Therefore I should free my slave.
That same clear-eyed assessment of the facts served Grant well as a general. While others were havering about what the enemy might do, or quoting learned authorities about Napoleon, Grant simply observed that he had an army and a duty to use it. He was not a stupid man or an unsubtle tactician, in spite of what later (mostly Southern) writers said, but he didn't delude himself either. War means fighting.
Before and after the Civil War, though, this trait served Grant badly. He consistently lost money by trusting dishonest men. The corruption of his presidency never touched him personally, but he had immense difficulty in understanding that his associates were conniving, scheming, self-seeking manipulators. Over and over, in Ron Chernow's telling, Grant assumed that other men were like him: straightforward, candid, and consistent. It ruined him, eventually, and it did his posthumous reputation no good either.
You'll gather that I liked this book. It's 959 pages long, and I finished it in a couple of days. Like its hero, it has its flaws; but, again like its hero, its flaws are in many ways merely the defects of its virtues.
A character study is what it is, too--not an examination of historical trends or an academic exercise in thesis-proving. Rather, Grant is most certainly an example of the great-man school of history. Some people may well deplore it on those grounds. It's not an unfair point--noble white males have been decidedly oversold in the past--but, as a matter of plain observable fact, sometimes the person on the ground really does make a difference. Grant certainly did; you need only to contrast his behavior with that of other Union generals to see as much.
The occupational hazard that comes with the great-man school of history is a tendency to be a little too kind to your subject. Chernow doesn't fully resist; I think he makes Grant out to be a bit more steely-eyed in the defense of southern freedpeople than he really was, for example. On the other hand, the former "definitive" biography (by William McFeely) was quite certainly far too harsh. Much as with Chernow's other works--you may possibly have heard of this one?--the portrait that emerges is that of a flawed, great, and ultimately sympathetic man.
I don't usually recommend anything but books in this space, but all the hype about Ken Burns's documentary The Civil War is 100% true. For written Civil War history, try James McPherson's Battle Cry of Freedom or Bruce Catton's Centennial History of the Civil War.
I've read that Grant's operational orders were so clear and unambiguous that West Point still uses them as the standard example of how to write orders.
ReplyDeleteI've read the same thing. His Personal Memoirs are still perfectly clear and wonderfully readable, too. I'm tempted to suggest that the directness and clarity of his writing is tied in with his overall personality.
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