The New “Grant” Miniseries Is Based on a Bio by Ron Chernow. How Good Was the Book?

Yale historian David Blight wrote a mixed review of Ron Chernow’s “Grant” in the New York Review of Books when the biography appeared in 2018. The book is the main published source for the new History Channel miniseries of the same name that premiers this Memorial Day. There is no telling right now of how much the television version sticks to the book, but I thought posting a few of Blight’s observations on the book might help when watching the series.

Chernow is the author of biographies of George Washington, John D. Rockefeller, and Alexander Hamilton. The Hamilton biography became the basis for the Broadway musical. Blight writes of the Grant biography that “it is a work of striking anecdotes, skillful pacing, and poignant judgments. Chernow’s primary subject—and that of numerous previous Grant biographies—is the nature of Grant’s character. We see him survive an odyssey during which many enemies tried to destroy him, including formidable demons within himself.”

Blight says that Chernow falls into some of the same traps that earlier biographers of Grant fell into, but that he does a good job of describing Grant family dynamics:

In 1854, with borrowed funds, the “guileless” Grant made it to New York, where he was cheated out of his money on the streets and managed to be jailed for drunkenness. By the time the hapless soldier borrowed more money from his West Point friends James Longstreet and Simon Buckner—later to become Confederate foes—and made it to Ohio, he was broke, a failure, and at odds with his domineering father. In the next five years Grant, with his wife, Julia, and his growing family of four children, tried farming and real estate in her native Missouri. He failed miserably at those as well and then sold firewood on the streets of St. Louis in an old faded army coat, prompting Chernow to call him “a bleak defeated little man with a mysterious aura of solitude.”

Here Chernow falls into one of the traps of Grant biography: presenting his years as a down-and-out as a kind of inevitable prelude to his later greatness. Grant’s “momentary disgrace,” he writes, “can be seen in retrospect as his salvation, preserving him for the starring role in the Civil War.” Walking around with a “stoop” in 1859, he hardly looked fit for anything so lofty. Historians should resist the teleology of destiny, no matter how good the story.

On Grant’s ideologically divided families, Chernow shines. Julia Dent, whom the young officer met through a West Point roommate, came from a slaveholding family; her father, “Colonel” Frederick Dent, presided over a plantation, White Haven, southwest of St. Louis. In 1850 the Dents owned thirty slaves. Julia would change her views drastically during the war, partly through loyalty to her husband. She became a Unionist, but her family remained staunch Confederates. Grant’s father and mother were abolitionists. He grew up in Ohio, rigorously opposed to slavery at least “in theory,” as Chernow points out. But in the tumultuous 1850s, because of his marriage, Grant was obliged to live in the midst of slavery and was nearly disowned by his own family for it. His parents refused to attend his wedding.

Blight discusses the evolution of Grant biographies up to Chernow:

“As the scholar Joan Waugh observed, Grant’s “reputation is often determined by whether or not the historian in question believes that the Civil War was a ‘good war.’”1Since at least the 1950s Grant biographies have followed roughly that pattern. From the 1890s to the 1930s, when the Lost Cause tradition predominated and Robert E. Lee developed into a national cult figure, Grant’s fame waned, and serious historians gave him less attention. The modern Grant revival began with Lloyd Lewis, whose celebratory Captain Sam Grant (1950) took the story to the brink of war in 1861. Lewis died just as his book appeared. Later in the 1950s, Bruce Catton, the country’s most prolific narrative historian of the Civil War, took up the Grant story in three books published over more than a decade. Both Lewis and Catton had lived as adults through World War II; no concerns about the justness of war kept them from giving Grant an ennobling biography.

The next stage in the Grant revival came in the 1980s and early 1990s, with the work of William S. McFeely and Brooks D. Simpson. McFeely’s Pulitzer Prize–winning 1981 biography was a post-Vietnam, post-Watergate treatment of Grant. He became in McFeely’s masterful prose the fascinating, dark author of the savagery of the Civil War, not merely its sublime strategist. In 1995, Andrew Delbanco drew on McFeely to claim Grant as founder of the doctrine of massive force, or “annihilation,” used in the world wars of the twentieth century. To Delbanco, Grant was a cultural precursor of the “dead-eyed murderers” in modern American literature, such as the killers in Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood, and the “modern monster” to whom Lee surrendered at Appomattox. In 2006, Harry S. Stout did not forgive or explain away Grant’s responsibility for the carnage of 1864 in Virginia, raising the issue of “just war” doctrine at a time when most historians were avoiding it. Grant, he insisted, sought to shorten the war by the relentless slaughter of his foe.3

Simpson challenged the idea of Grant as a failed, inept president in his fine book Let Us Have Peace: Ulysses S. Grant and the Politics of War and Reconstruction, 1861–1868 (1991) and wrote a superb second treatment of the general’s full military career, Ulysses S. Grant: Triumph Over Adversity, 1822–1865 (2000). He rejected the Vietnam-era, antiwar sensibility in Grant biography and anticipated the recent surge in thick volumes on the former captain’s strange political career. Simpson resurrected the two terms of Grant’s presidency from the dustbin of history, showing that one can never understand Reconstruction if one only considers Grant corrupt or irrelevant.”

Blight criticizes Chernow’s assessment of Grant’s post-war career:

Chernow eagerly joins the defense of Grant’s troubled presidency. The former general, who after the war was “a helpless casualty of his own fame,” may have been a reluctant, inept politician, but he was hardly without ambition. After the war Grant enjoyed a new, modern kind of fame, played out in the press and before enormous crowds. Everyone wanted a glimpse of the stern captor of Vicksburg and the benevolent conqueror of Lee with the cigar stub in his mouth. Wealthy people gave him houses in Georgetown, in Galena, Illinois, in Philadelphia, in New Jersey, and eventually in New York City. Everyone close to him, including his wife, plied his fame for personal gain…

“Grant mania” brought a showering of gifts and, once he was in office, a litany of scandals to which his name is forever tied. Chernow tells most of these stories of sordid corruption well: the successful effort of Jay Gould and others to corner the market on gold and drive up its price; the Crédit Mobilier railroad fraud network; the extensive Whiskey Ring, in which many government employees and congressmen, as well as a few of Grant’s relatives, pocketed millions in excise taxes; and numerous cases in which shamelessly corrupt Indian agents bilked the tribes on their newly formed reservations…Chernow believes that his hero was merely a “life-long naïf” whose personal morality ought to go unchallenged. His Grant was an incorruptible man overseeing an age of fee-based spoils and endless bribery.

But is it enough to conclude that Grant just never got over his boundless susceptibility to con artists and Ponzi schemers like Ferdinand Ward, who eventually took the former president, his good name, and every penny he had for a disastrous ride off a cliff? Is Grant merely the victim, not to be blamed for the corruption of his son, a brother, and an assortment of cabinet officials and close aides? A certain charm emerges from this story when it is kept safely in the past. The 1870s, argues the historian Richard White in The Republic for Which It Stands, his new book on Reconstruction, was a time when “random corruption” became a “centralized operation,” when the “profit motive” became inextricably hitched to “public service.” Grant by no means created such a world, but he sat haplessly at its reeking center.

Let us see how the TV version navigates these issues.

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