There Was a War

Grant by Ron Chernow.  Penguin Press.  1074 pp. $40.00. *****

A friend of mine once told a story about General Patton, that after he died he asked St. Peter to take him back in history and show him the greatest general who ever lived.  St. Peter agreed, and they traveled back in time to a small shop where a man was cobbling shoes.  “How is he a great general?” Patton said.  “He’s just sitting there repairing shoes.”

“There wasn’t a war,” St. Peter said.

If the War Between the States had never happened, it’s safe to say that we would never have heard of an obscure American named Ulysses S. Grant, who had distinguished himself in the Mexican-American war, but subsequently retired from the army because of a scandal about a drinking problem.  He was an utter failure at civilian life, never found anything that he could profit at.  It was only because the Union army needed soldiers, and needed leaders, that Grant was reinstated in the army, and it was because Lincoln kept going through incompetent generals, that Grant—along with his friends Sherman and Sheridan—emerged as the leaders of the Union effort.  This man who was then popular because he “won” the war—also because he showed respect to the defeated army—became a two-term president, an important world figure, nearly ran for a then unprecedented third term, and ended his life by writing a brilliant memoir.  None of that would have happened without the intervention of a dreadful and brutal war.

The first thing to be said about this Grant biography is that it is beautifully written and put together, and that Ron Chernow deserves all the plaudits he has received for his previous biographies, including Hamilton, which inspired the current musical.  People sometimes call a biography “novelistic,” and Grant isn’t that; Chernow doesn’t try to recreate scenes, the way less skillful biographers do.  He nevertheless has a superb talent for telling a story and keeping a narrative moving; though I was definitely aware that it was taking me a while to finish this book (I’m a slow reader, and we’re talking 959 pages of small print), I wasn’t bored for a minute, even when the book got into political squabbles that have long been forgotten.  I’m not a history or a civil war buff, and ultimately read this book because my son gave it to me for Christmas and my wife raved about it.  But I’d happily read more Chernow.  Good writing makes everything interesting.

First a word about Grant’s bad habits: I had the impression that he was a chronic alcoholic, and that he smoked a million cigars until he finally got throat cancer and died of it.  About the cigars I was right.  But Grant was actually the kind of alcoholic who couldn’t tolerate booze at all: one sip of liquor and he began slurring his words, and soon he was staggering all over the place.  He knew he had a problem, and when he was young tended to drink only when he was on a little holiday, away from his work and home and family.  He seemed to think he could contain the episodes.  But he never drank when he needed to be alert, and by the time he was president drank almost not at all, turning his wine glass over at the many banquets he attended.  He eventually lectured as part of the temperance movement, though he may never have entirely escaped his weakness.  There was rumors of extreme benders all his life.

The other thing I’ve always heard about Grant—at least ever since I moved to the South and encountered my first Southern Gentlemen, at Duke University in the mid-sixties—was that he wasn’t terribly skilled as a general, just had superior manpower; he sacrificed huge numbers of men in battles with Robert E. Lee and didn’t worry about casualties, knowing that if he kept blundering along and didn’t care how many men he lost he would eventually prevail.

At least according to Chernow, that isn’t true either.  Grant suffered agonies after the battles where he lost many men; the sacrifices his men made affected him deeply.  It’s true that having superior manpower was part of his strategy, but Grant was a lifelong student of military history, and planned his strategy intricately.  None of the other generals that Lincoln went through was able to do what Grant did.  The truth was that all the generals in that strange internecine war knew each other at least by reputation, and had often fought together previously.  Grant eventually knew that the two men—and the only two—that he could depend on were Sherman and Sheridan.  He knew that his long slow strategy of confining Lee in Virginia would eventually prevail.  He just needed to have the nerve to stick to his guns, so to speak, and he did.

Though he suffered agonies when he confronted the casualties, Grant always reacted cooly in battle—he was instantly focused, and fearless—and also, all his life, showed no emotion when confronting difficult news.  He was a great man to have around in a crisis.

Grant’s presidency was marred by corruption and by the difficulties of Reconstruction; he was excellent at judging military talent, but weirdly incompetent at judging people in civilian life, and was bamboozled by con men more than once.  As I’ve often felt while reading history, it’s instructive and humbling to read the difficulties of the past, because they put modern things in perspective.  The open racism of that period is astonishing to a modern reader, and the crimes of groups like the Ku Klux Klan are horrific to read about, far beyond anything we encounter today.  Grant was not initially—before the war—an abolitionist, and his in-laws were from Kentucky and sympathetic to the South.  But as the war went on he became convinced that it was all about slavery—not states rights, as some Southerners claim—and he was a strong advocate for African Americans after the war.  They were among his biggest fans.

It’s impossible to sum up so massive a book, or so varied and interesting a life, in a few pages.  What strikes me more than anything is that Grant was an apparently ordinary man who was made extraordinary by his times.  That was true even of his writing, which was a late blossoming talent: he had written all his life, wrote his own speeches as President, but it wasn’t until he had gone bankrupt and really needed money that he turned to his memoirs, and it wasn’t until an editor encouraged him that he began to put the kind of detail in his writing that brought it alive.  He had a superb talent for that, and is known as one of the great memoirists among military men.  It was his friend Mark Twain—another apparently ordinary man who concealed extraordinary talents—who eventually published the memoirs, and made a pile for them both.

Walt Whitman summed the man up well in Specimen Days: “What a man he is! what a history! what an illustration—his life—of the capacities of that American individuality common to us all. . . .  he proves how an average western farmer, mechanic, boatman, carried by tides of circumstances, perhaps caprices, into a position of incredible military and civic responsibilities . . . may steer his way fitly and steadily through them all. . . . nothing heroic, as the authorities put it—and yet the greatest hero.”