★★★ (of 5)

• Full Title: Grant
• Author: Ron Chernow
• Year: 2017 (mine was trade paperback)
• Pages: 959*
• Genre: Biography, History
• Publisher: Penguin Books
• ISBN 978-0-14-311063-7 (trade paperback)
• Wikipedia page
• Author’s Wikipedia page

(* not including introduction, acknowledgements, maps, illustrations, notes, bibliography, illustration credits, index. Last page number in book is 1,074.)

 

Summary

Grant is of course a biography of former U.S. President and Civil War general Ulysses S. Grant, about whom much had previously been written. Author Ron Chernow is a Pulitzer Prize winner (for Washington: A Life); before this, I only knew of him as the author of Alexander Hamilton. As seen in the little white circle on the cover (image on this page), The New York Times named Grant as one of the 10 best books of 2017 (along with nine other books I’ve never heard of outside this list) and it was generally well-received among critics (and also among latter-day presidents; here is Bill Clinton’s review).

Beginning with the date of Grant’s birth, Chernow draws from hundreds of (cited) sources to tell us the story of Grant’s family and childhood, schooling (including West Point), first years of military service, the depressing interim period just before the Civil War, and of course the two things Grant is known for: his generaliship during the war and his two-term presidency afterward. If you’re curious, the page-count for each period breaks down approximately like this:

• 120 pages : pre-Civil War (the war oddly starts in the middle of a chapter called “Store Clerk”)
• 420 pages : Civil War
• 90 pages : between war and presidency
• 220 pages : two terms as president
• 100 pages : post-presidency and death

 

Praise

My primary praise for the book is the sheer amount of information. Before reading, my knowledge of U.S. Grant was as negligible as anyone else’s; I think I remember a high school teacher saying something like: “There are only two things you need to know about Grant: he was a drunkard and he was the general over Union armies in the Civil War.” If, before I read this book, someone had asked me to name 10 U.S. presidents, I doubt Grant would have been among the ones that came to mind.

Secondly, I enjoyed Chernow’s detailed citations and extensive bibliography. Somewhere I read a negative review of this book that claimed all the sources could be traced back to Grant’s Memoirs, which is absurd if you look at the bibliography of this book. Chernow heavily quotes and cites contemporary correspondence from dozens of people, many newspapers of the time, other historians, and quite a few eyewitness accounts and journals of people — not all of whom were friendly to Grant. (I don’t check every citation when I read, but I did spot-check several dozen of these and perused the notes and bibliography at the end.) When Chernow does cite Grant’s memoirs, it’s to give Grant’s point of view, but not uncritically. Where Grant’s own assertions contradict verifiable facts, leave out important information, or are questionable, Chernow is careful to note it.

Better than some historians I’ve read, Chernow is good at briefly describing places or people relevant to the narrative. His spatial descriptions of battles left something to be desired — yet they were still better than almost any other battle descriptions I’ve read in history books.

Chernow’s writing is generally accessible (not too complex or overly academic). He did slip in several words I had to look up, including: raconteur, quondam, rubicund, impecunious, elegiacally, sachem, high dudgeon, catafalque, uxorious, aperçus, habitué, lagniappe, and encomia, — which I don’t see as a bad thing. And though I knew the word “contraband”, I didn’t know that in the early days of the Civil War the term was used to refer to freed or runaway slaves as the Union armies marched through rebellious states. This was, apparently, a way to get around the still-in-effect Fugitive Slave Act; instead of following the (evil) law and returning the slaves to their owners, the U.S. Army referred to them as “contrabands of war”, thus denying the South the use of their free and forced labor.

 

Points Off For...

For my tastes, Chernow far too often got ahead of himself and began throwing in non-chronological information and narrative, only to return to his previous timeline without warning, leaving the reader wondering which time period is being discussed or in which order certain events occurred. It doesn’t help that dates are frequently used in the narrative without years attached.

Battle chronologies were sometimes mystifying. One oft-repeated example is his tendency to portray some flanking maneuver or impending surprise attack as imminent — the enemy is coming at us NOW, but then gives dates that clearly show the tension was unwarranted — because reinforcements arrived two weeks later and were effective. On multiple occasions, I flipped back a few pages to check dates, and never could reconcile the narrative.

Chernow employed a non-standard use of “(sic)” — a couple of times in his own prose which is bizarre at best. For example, he used it several times after one man’s name — Cadwallader Washburn — and not as part of a quotation. I searched online and couldn’t find a justification for using (sic) in a writer’s own prose.

There are internal contradictions. In places, Chernow will say one of Grant’s strengths was his superb ability to know which generals to trust for arduous tasks, but that statement will be surrounded by pages of Grant mistakenly giving too-tough tasks to too-weak generals. Or he’ll spend paragraphs “proving” that Grant had no political thoughts during the war and in fact stayed outside politics, but then will destroy his own point by showing how politically astute Grant was by siding with Lincoln on certain controversial matters just before the 1864 elections. Other examples are even more jarring. For example, on page 629, Chernow says Grant “refused to share a carriage with Johnson at the inaugural parade”, but page 630 says Grant — during the inaugural parade — stopped his carriage at the White House and offered Johnson a ride.

I encountered multiple editing mistakes. For example, on page 625, Chernow describes Grant’s clothing on a particular occasion, and the sentence ends with a closing quotation mark, but there is no opening quotation mark with which to match it.

 

Quotations I Found Interesting

“He wanted people to discover his strengths, not have them advertised.”

—page 13

“I claim no one no matter how exalted or high his position in life, has the right to deny an actual fact.”

—page 199-200, 2nd Lt. Patrick White

“Grant told Rawlins he found the Galena reception ‘flattering though somewhat embarrassing’ and wished the generosity had been lavished on him when he most needed it. Another time, upon receiving a costly overcoat, he commented, ‘There have been times in my life when the gift of an overcoat would have been an act of charity. No one gave it to me when I needed it. Now when I am able to pay for all I need, such gifts are continually thrust upon me.’ ”

—page 560

“Encourage free schools and resolve that not one dollar of money appropriated to their support no matter how raised, shall be appropriated to the support of any sectarian [religious] school... Leave the matter of religion to the family circle, the church & the private school support[ed] entirely by private contribution. Keep the church and state forever separate.”

—page 812, Grant speech

 

So Much More To Say

At least once per chapter, something was so interesting that I wanted to have a discussion about it or at least add another section to this review. There’s nearly a book’s worth of material about Grant being misjudged based on his appearance, for example: he cut an unimposing figure, always turned out to be smaller than people expected when meeting him, and was regularly mistaken for someone beneath his rank. No one, upon mere visual inspection, ever guessed his tactical or strategic talents. Yet another book could be written on the parallels between the 1860-70s and today (something Chernow didn’t mention but was obvious to anyone reading this while also paying attention to current news).

All of these do not necessarily make this a good or great book, but they do, I think, make it more significant.

 

Conclusion

I don’t think I would recommend this book to just anyone; perhaps only to people who demonstrate an avowed interest in history in general or the Civil War specifically. It wasn’t written as well as I’d hoped, based on all the hype, but it is packed full of useful information.

 

 

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