Ulysses S. Grant, the heralded Civil War general and the 18th president of the United States, was born in 1822 about 25 miles from Cincinnati in the tiny river town of Point Pleasant, Ohio. A year later, Grant’s family moved to Georgetown, Ohio, in Brown County, where he would spend the rest of his childhood before heading to the United States Military Academy in 1839.
Ron Chernow’s new biography, simply titled Grant, argues that this Ohio connection had an obvious and undeniable impact on Grant’s worldview and his decisions concerning slavery, the Civil War, Reconstruction and beyond. As the commanding general of the United States Army for President Abraham Lincoln, he defeated the Confederates. As the Republican president from 1869-1877, he made sure the rights of newly freed Southern slaves were protected.
“Grant grew up in this borderland between slave states and free states,” Chernow says by phone from his home in Brooklyn, N.Y. “He was born maybe 30 or 40 yards from the Ohio River, and the Ohio River at that time had great political significance. On one shore was the slave state of Kentucky and on the other shore was the free state of Ohio. On winter nights when the river would freeze over, you would actually have fugitive slaves escape across the river to freedom in Ohio.”
Like Chernow’s previous efforts — including his biographies on George Washington, which won a Pulitzer Prize, and Alexander Hamilton, which inspired Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Tony-winning musical, Hamilton — Grant is an impressively researched and elegantly written tome about one of our county’s most important figures. In fact, Chernow says the United States as we know it might never have endured if it weren’t for Grant’s unique background.
“It’s not too far of a stretch to say that the Grant who was able to perceive the world from both the viewpoint of the slave-owning South and the free North, and his ability to see and understand both sides of the conflict, really goes back to his childhood, because he’s growing up in this border area,” he says.
Chernow spent four years researching his subject’s life, pulling from the unusually robust volumes of Grant’s papers, as well as from Grant’s own incisive memoir, one of the most acclaimed books of its kind.
“As I went back and looked closely at the memoirs, I realized that my job as a biographer was to talk about those things Grant didn’t want to talk about in his memoir,” Chernow says. “So I realized that was not as big an obstacle as it might have seemed at first, because what Grant wrote about, he wrote about brilliantly, but he was very selective. And because the man was dying of cancer as he was writing the book, quite naturally he wanted to avoid a lot of unpleasant topics from his earlier life.”
Among the topics Chernow sheds light on are Grant’s notorious binge drinking, his oft-troubled presidency and his various failed businesses both before and after his military and political careers. Yet for all of Grant’s flaws, Chernow continues to go back to the man’s vital impact on a nation that nearly tore itself apart during the Civil War — a topic, as we’ve seen with recent events, we’re still arguing about today.
“One of the things I liked about Grant that was quite unlike the other people whom I have written about — all of them were hungering for fame and glory, which Grant was not — was that he just did his patriotic duty, and of course in doing that the fame and glory came his way,” Chernow says. “He was very much respected by his soldiers because he was not a self-aggrandizing sort of general. He was not trying to glorify himself at all, and that very plain, unadorned style played very well with his soldiers. He was only concerned with winning the war.”
“At the same time, because of his history, the business failure prior to the war, I think he also understands the psychology of defeated people, which is very important in dealing with the South after the war,” Chernow continues. “I think that Grant, having served in the Civil War as a general, having run so close to Abraham Lincoln, really inherits Lincoln’s legacy as his own — the preservation of the Union and protection of the 4 million former slaves who then become American citizens.”
That, in Chernow’s estimation, makes him a worthy subject for a biography. ©
This article appears in Nov 29 – Dec 6, 2017.
