Book Review: Grant

Grant
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:

1. I own a slave.
2. I don't like slavery [Ron Chernow documents this thoroughly].
3. 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.

Chief among these virtues is the astoundingly complete and consistent portrait of Grant as an individual. Ron Chernow deftly picks out the major-key themes that defined Ulysses Grant--his modesty, his quiet humor, his odd combination of clear thinking and naïveté, his battle with alcoholism--and threads them through the narrative. Sometimes it gets repetitive; about the eight time that we're given a dissection of when and why Grant fell off the wagon, for example, we could reasonably take the explanation as a given. But as a character study, it's absolutely convincing.

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.

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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.

Book Review: Iron Dawn

Iron Dawn: The Monitor, the Merrimack, and the Civil War Battle That Changed History
Richard Snow
History

This is another book that reminded me of the pure, unadulterated joy of reading. Iron Dawn reads like a novel, but it's all true. Richard Snow has crafted a tightly-focused and wholly convincing story, complete with momentous implications and a ticking-clock countdown.

It's particularly a pleasure to salute Snow's technique. The first half of the book, especially, is organized by character. Each chapter focuses on a particular person, while also advancing the story inexorably forward. This is a hard trick to pull off, but when it works it's a brilliant way of organizing a large cast of characters--it entirely avoids the "wait, who was he again?" phenomenon--while still making overall sense of events.

For anyone who's interested in naval history, or the Civil War, or technology, or ships, or who just likes a good old-fashioned exciting story, it's hard to imagine a book that would push more buttons better than Iron Dawn. It doesn't require any particular specialist knowledge to read, but it could easily give you the desire to acquire some.

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There are quite a number of distinguished books that come to mind as companion pieces. Iron Dawn would pair well with:

• For an eye-popping history of a crucial naval battle that reads like a novel: Incredible Victory, by Walter Lord, which is one of the best histories ever written of anything.
• For the Civil War in general: anything by Bruce Catton, one of Richard Snow's predecessors at American Heritage magazine. This Hallowed Ground is a good place to start.
• For a similar use of the progress-by-character technique, with the additional feature that it's a closely related topic: Robert Massie's Dreadnought, which chronicles the Anglo-German naval rivalry leading up to World War I. I may have to reread this now.
• For a Civil-War topic that finally got the detailed investigation that it turned out to deserve: Amanda Foreman's A World on Fire richly chronicles the British response to the war.
• For naval history that's true but also works like a countdown-style thriller: Erik Larson's Dead Wake.

Book Review: Lincoln's Greatest Case

Lincoln's Greatest Case: The River, the Bridge, and the Making of America
Brian McGinty
History, biography

This is the first half of an excellent book combined with the second half of a decent book.

The "Greatest Case" monicker is not mere hyperbole. In 1856, the Rock Island Railroad opened the first bridge across the Mississippi. Two weeks later, the steamboat Effie Afton collided with one of its piers. The boat sank; the bridge was damaged. The steamboat owners sued for damages. Had they won, they might have halted bridge construction across navigable waterways--an outcome that would have pleased, among others, Secretary of War Jefferson Davis: river transport favored the South, and in any case Davis wanted a southern railroad rather than a northern one (to promote the spread of slavery).

These are the big issues that the first half of Lincoln's Greatest Case brings up, and a fine job it does therein. It also gives an excellent portrait of Lincoln as a lawyer (one of the best in Illinois) and as a soon-to-be-famous man.

The second half of the book is the story of the trial. It's interesting, readably told, and perfectly clear, but:

• It wasn't primarily Lincoln's case; he was one of three lawyers, and not the leading one. His role in the case wasn't minor, but neither was it the starring part--and much of it consisted of preparing documents and doing research.
• It's a courtroom drama without the drama. Real life is seldom as satisfying as fiction, and real lawsuits aren't John Grisham territory. McGinty does a good job narrating the course of the trial, but he can't disguise the fact that it was kind of ... routine. Neither the verdict nor the journey getting there contains any surprises.
• McGinty also has a slight tendency to lose himself in lawyerly byways. For example, there's a solid page-and-a-half of text on pp. 104-105 that could have been replaced with the single sentence "Lincoln almost certainly visited the bridge in person before the trial."

Lincoln's Greatest Case is a good read for anyone who's specifically interested in Lincoln himself, the 1850s, or trials for their own sake. If you want an introduction to the period, Bruce Catton's classic The Coming Fury (volume 1 of his Centennial History of the Civil War trilogy) is a better place to start; if you're interested in Lincoln, Doris Kearns Goodwin's Team of Rivals deserves the praise it's received.

States' Wrongs

When I lived in Texas, I occasionally had to listen to people espousing one of the Big Lies of U.S. History. Namely, “The Civil War wasn’t about slavery, it was about States’ Rights!” The South, says the narrative, was defending its rights against the oppression of Washington. (Stop me if this sounds familiar.)

It’s certainly true that, during the 1850s, several states witnessed an unprecedented level of federal interference in their internal affairs—thitherto considered sacrosanct. There were mass protests and even riots against government law enforcement. In at least one case, the U.S. army marched in and enforced, at gunpoint, a flagrant violation of state law in favor of federal power (at the then-enormous cost of $40,000). In another case, a woman killed her own daughter rather than submit to the armed U.S. Marshals who stormed her house amidst gunfire. In yet other cases, the locals broke into courtrooms or forcibly liberated prisoners rather than see their laws violated.

The states whose right were thus trampled on were, of course, all in the North

The laws in question were “personal liberty” laws, meant to exclude slavery. The expansion of Federal muscle was in enforcing the Fugitive Slave Law.

Southerners, far from being oppressed by the jackbooted thugs of Washington, cheered them on. Similarly, while Southern states frequently invoked their right to “nullify” federal laws that weren’t to their taste, they were outraged when Northern states tried to do the same thing.

And when war did break out--when seven southern states seceded rather than obey the results of a perfectly legal election, before Lincoln even took office--what was the intolerable, radical straw that broke the camel's back? What tyrannical principle was it that was so deeply embedded in the Republican platform that preemptive secession was the only way to defend Southern liberty?

It was this: that slavery should be left alone, but prevented from expanding.

Funny kid of oppression, that.