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What it argues
Ron Chernow's biography of Ulysses S. Grant is a comprehensive rehabilitation of a man whose reputation has been shaped for a century by Lost Cause mythology — the Southern-generated narrative that dismissed Grant as a butcher whose only military advantage was a willingness to sacrifice lives, and whose presidency was a corrupt failure. Chernow's documented argument is more complicated and considerably more sympathetic: Grant was a military genius, a man of genuine moral courage on the question of race and Reconstruction, and a president whose administration was damaged by subordinates he trusted too freely but whose commitment to Black Americans' civil rights was the most serious of any nineteenth-century president except Lincoln.
The early biography is the story of a failure. Grant was a decorated Mexican War officer who, after being stationed at a miserable post in California far from his wife, developed a serious drinking problem, resigned his commission under pressure, and spent the 1850s failing at farming, firewood selling, and real estate. He was thirty-eight years old, broke, and working as a clerk in his brothers' leather goods store in Galena, Illinois when the Civil War began and offered him a second chance.
What it gets right
- 1.
Grant's military reputation was deliberately degraded by Lost Cause writers who needed to explain the Confederacy's defeat without crediting Union superiority. Chernow documents this campaign of revisionism.
- 2.
Alcoholism in the nineteenth century was not understood as a disease. Grant's drinking was episodic rather than continuous — he drank heavily during certain periods, not during campaigns — and its actual effect on his military performance is more ambiguous than the mythology suggests.
- 3.
The Vicksburg campaign, which Grant designed and executed independently, is one of the most brilliant in American military history. Its success depended on a strategic improvisation that broke the conventional rules of campaigning.
What it covers
Who wrote it
Ron Chernow is an American biographer whose works have won the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, and the National Book Critics Circle Award. His biographies of Alexander Hamilton, George Washington, and Ulysses Grant are among the most widely read in American popular history. Grant, published in 2017, received the Pulitzer Prize for Biography in 2018. Chernow spent five years researching the book and worked with the Ulysses S. Grant Presidential Library, which contains extensive primary source material not previously available to scholars. He has described Grant as his most unexpected subject — a man whose reputation required the most substantial revision.
