Reviews for Grant: A Biography

The average rating for Grant: A Biography based on 2 reviews is 4.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2012-04-30 00:00:00 David Peebler Not a float; June was a busy month... I laughed and nodded when McFeely cited, as evidence Ulysses Grant felt complete only in battle , the fact that Grant finished the Mexican War with two big promotions and a sterling combat record despite never having been assigned combat duties. He was his regiment's quartermaster, the supply guy in the rear of the column, back with the mules. But dude could not stay out of a fight. During the final assault on Mexico City, future adversary Robert E. Lee and the spearhead of US troops were pinned down under fire before San Cosme gate. Earlier, during preparations for the assault, Grant had, on his own hunch, reconnoitered a church whose belfry looked to him as if it could command the back of the San Cosme defenses. Now he rounded up some volunteers, unpacked a portable mountain howitzer, darted and dodged over the intervening terrain, parlayed with the padre in a politely intimidating Spanish, mounted the belfry, reassembled the gun, and began lobbing shells that scattered the Mexican troops. I once saw, but cannot locate for a link, the ad for Old Crow Bourbon that celebrated this feat (the image used was Grant in Mexico by Leutze, the painter of Washington Crossing the Delaware). In a 1950s print campaign, the distillers of Old Crow advertized the Famous Americans - Henry Clay, Mark Twain - who had once relished or praised the unrecoverable ancestor of their product. It seems they were eager to enroll Grant in the pantheon, or at least associate their brand name with the mythical fighting whiskey of Lincoln's famous and possibly apocryphal quip. Warned by the paper-pushers that "Grant Drinks," the president said he wouldn't insist on proof of the allegation beyond the name of Grant's favored brand ' so that he could send barrels of it to his other generals. (I love that so much!) We know that Lincoln did say, "I can't spare this man; he fights." I had heard that McFeely's book, a Pulitzer Prize winner, was flawed by the author's dislike of his subject. I found disappointment instead of dislike; and besides, the object of a biographer of the underrated and caricatured Grant, McFeely writes in the preface, is not to make the reader like Grant, but to take Grant seriously. If you want to know why Grant is important, read this book. McFeely will not tell you why Grant was a great commander or how he won his campaigns (Grant will tell you that, in his modest and frightful Zen way), but he will introduce you to one of the defining figures of the nineteenth century, of the "bourgeois ideology" in all its nation-building grandeur and dollar-worshipping grotesquerie. This book made me think that Grant is an opaque figure ' is opaque to us, and was to those who dismissed him during his interwar ennui ' because his importance cannot be comprehended in a quick glance. And a quick glance is all we're prepared to give historical figures ' just as a quick glance was all the people of St. Louis were prepared to give the sullen sphinx who sold cordwood on the street corner, draped in a faded blue army overcoat. Ulysses and Julia Grant emerge from this book naïve and obscure people, rootless and rather alienated. Mayakovsky's line about America's never-quite secure "lower middle-class mass" is apt; Julia's father was one of those unprepossessing Southern farmers who because he owned a handful of slaves demanded to be addressed with that undiscriminating regional honorific, "the Colonel" (Twain is acidic on this affectation). Ulysses' brilliant campaigns in Mississippi and Tennessee, and his conclusion of the Civil War in the political theater of Virginia - his willingness to face what Lincoln called "the arithmetic" of the North's numerical superiority, the relative replaceability of the Army of the Potomac (let's fight nonstop, for a month, and when both armies are broken, we'll just get a new one; the other guy, we know, won't be able to get a new one, a plan which will go hand-in-hand with Sherman's idea to march through the Confederacy's economic heartland and burn it down) - elevated the Grants to the White House, to the heights of celebrity and power. The society of which Grant was idol and ruler was one in profound confusion. Grant's friend Mark Twain ' he roasted the general at one of those frenzied veterans' banquets that for me capture the triumphant but traumatized "Gilded Age" North, feasts supplied with orgiastic amounts of whiskey and brandy, oysters and steaks, with drunken toasts and old camp songs shouted far into the night ' said that where Americans had formerly "desired" money, after the war they fell down and worshiped it ' and worshiped it no matter how it was acquired. I had tried to package, into a pithy or at least readably convoluted sentence (sorry about that shit above), synonymous testimonies of the postwar coarsening of American public morals; but why compete with Lionel Trilling's essay on Twain? And the war that brought an end to the rich Mississippi days also marked a change in the quality of life in America which, to many men, consisted of a deterioration of American moral values. It is of course a human habit to look back on the past and find in it a better and more innocent time than the present. Yet in this instance there seems to be an objective basis for the judgment. We cannot disregard the testimony of men so diverse as Henry Adams, Walt Whitman, William Dean Howells, and Mark Twain himself, to mention but a few of the men who were in agreement on this point. All spoke of something that had gone out of American life after the war, some simplicity, some innocence, some peace. None of them was under any illusion about the amount of ordinary human wickedness that existed in the old days, and Mark Twain certainly was not. The difference was in the public attitude, in the things that were now accepted and made respectable in the national ideal. It was, they all felt, connected with new emotions about money. I said McFeely seems disappointed by Grant, an intelligent and sensitive man who because of a "dangerous" naïvete and circumambient cultural poverty, deferred to oligarchs and market manipulators in the monetary policy of his administration, and trusted them in the management of his post-presidential fortune, and even in the use of his name, in the Ponzi scheme which, for a while, was able to masquerade as a respectable Wall Street brokerage firm, Grant & Ward. (McFeely affects a bewilderment that Grant, who had been a poor man, an economic victim, could defer so eagerly to the interests of the wealthy; but he knows Grant wanted to join them.) Weeks after Grant found out he was broke, he was diagnosed with throat cancer; and wrote his Personal Memoirs while dying a horrible death - slow starvation as tumors expanded and blocked his esophagus - and in full view of a media circus. "Grant was destitute and on display as an object of national pity…but this very degree of humiliation laid the base for his last and greatest victory. He would treat his countrymen to another performance of heroism." Penning famously "unmistakable" battlefield directives under shell fire is good practice for writing a lucid deathbed book - a book that started as a patriotic pity-bestseller (widowed Julia was well provided for by royalties) but never went out of print, and has survived to classic status. Motherfucker could write! People who dismiss Grant as a drunken nonentity evade the fact that his book has long outlasted the generation taught to revere it. I didn't quite follow McFeely on the twists of Grant's monetary policy, but his naiveté is apparent enough, and totally normal for Americans of that day (and to a great extent, of ours): the unquestioning belief in "progress," without much idea of what "progress" (read "convenience") means - or what it can destroy; the smug confidence that because republics (read "democracies") are few and embattled, they are less rapacious than monarchies (read "dictatorships"), and are virtuous underdogs; the denial of class barriers enabled by the belief that because financiers and industrial robber barons do not constitute a hereditary aristocracy, then any working man with enough gumption can rise and join them; and finally, the outright worship of money, or at least the assumption that the amassment of riches signals virtuousness and moral strength, an assumption which I suppose is as the same as worship. McFeely calls Grant "the enshrined hero of a noble cause and the wayward antihero of sham values" - line that perfectly places Grant as symbol of time in which the free labor ideology was becoming a fig leaf for a new plutocracy. (Grant's a much better symbol than Lincoln, whom some historians like to describe as a "corporate" or "railroad" lawyer - that he often was, but the railroads of the 1850s weren't the monstrous and ungovernable conglomerates of late century.) Few scenes illustrate this ambiguity better than his reception in Newcastle, England, in 1877, at the outset of his post-presidential world tour. The working and middling classes of England had cheered the Union cause as the struggle of tradesmen and small farmers against an arrogant slave-owning aristocracy, and thousands of workers from the North Country poured into Newcastle to see Grant that day. He reviewed a procession of guilds and unions and workingmen's associations - miners, plumbers, "brass molders and finishers," carpenters and joiners, chainmakers, mill sawyers and machinists. And there is poignancy in the tanners of Elswick parading past with a banner that read, "Welcome back, General Grant, from Arms to Arts." Grant was a tanner's son and he despised the trade, returned to it only when he had five mouths to feed and no other options. He didn't want to be one of them. I've read that in her Four in America, Gertrude Stein, indulging a sort of solemn biographic burlesque, wrote the latent lives or alternative careers of famous Americans. Henry James, who enjoyed reading military memoirs and in a spell of deathbed delirium thought he was Napoleon, is a general. Grant is a religious guru - Edmund Wilson found this bit persuasive, in view of Grant's "majestical phlegm, an alienation in the midst of action, a capacity for watching in silence and commanding without excitement," and he cites a letter in which Sherman said that Grant's power lay in his "simple faith in success, which I can liken to nothing else than the faith a Christian has in his Savior." For me elements of Grant's character and life could to be arranged to suggest a poète maudit - the irony, the contextual vertigo, being that Grant's alienation from and unfitness for the bourgeois hustle made him admire the hustle rather than scorn it. Grant stirs ironic Baudelairean echoes, at least in me. Baudelaire placed the solider among the few noble, that is immemorial and pre-capitalist, occupations, alongside that of the priest and the poet ("to know, to kill, to create"). When we consider that Grant found easy what others found hard - that he failed utterly as an entrepreneurial farmer, the typical profession of his male peers, but could administer and inspire the largest armies the modern world had then seen - how can we fail to recall Baudelaire's "The Albatross," in which The Poet is likened to a bird majestic on the wing but clumsily vulnerable on the hard ground of daily life, "the cripple who can fly"? How can we read of Grant's imperturbability in battle, the concentration and self-command he felt under fire, and not think of Baudelaire's Albatross-Poet, "who haunts the storm and laughs at the archer"? There is also a sartorial affinity, an imaginatively bridgeable distance, between the plutocratic president and the anarchist dandy, between the consummate Yankee and the poet who, in his partisanship of the Virginian Poe, disdained Yankees. "Though sometimes thought of as the most unkempt of our presidents," writes McFeely, "Grant was, in fact, exceedingly well tailored," clad in the black frock coat of the nineteenth century power elite, usually from Brooks Brothers. Baudelaire, for all his execration of the bourgeois, embraced the black frock coat as the "outer skin of the modern hero," and might have been alluding to his own subtly tailored and soberly colored wardrobe when he wrote: …as for the eccentrics, who used to be easily distinguishable by their violent contrast of color, they content themselves nowadays much more with discreet differences of design and cut than of color. But I feel a little silly trying to imagine certain of Grant's features - his failures, his floundering impracticality, the listlessness and ennui and drinking that shadowed his unused energies - as they might be manipulated into a Baudelairean persona of articulate alienation and mythopoeic guignon, when McFeely has so brilliantly portrayed those features in Grant's actual social context. The historical Grant had no oppositional artistic mythos to sanctify his oddness; he was desperate to catch up, and when he reached a high place, to stay there. Ulysses and Julia Grant were common people who valued respectability, as their respective memoirs indicate: his are about the two wars he fought so well in, to the exclusion of anything about his difficult civilian existence; hers seem, at least from the excerpts McFeely provides, a genteel romance not unlike the memoirs of Elizabeth Custer, a sentimental fantasy of events in which horses are "bonny steeds" and her father's (few) slaves "our old colored people"; a book in which her severely depressed husband's resignation from the army, under a cloud of alcoholic rumor, is recorded thus: "Captain Grant, to my great delight, resigned his commission…and returned to me, his loving little wife." This book is excellent social history. Excellent political history, too: I've harped on Grant the man as representative of a cultural and economic era, but McFeely also places the Grant's administrations in a seemingly appropriate importance. Grant oversaw the Federal government's gradual walk-back from Reconstruction (I had heard that he busted the KKK in his first term, which is true except that his Klan-busting attorney general was appointed for unrelated reasons, and sacked when he tried to regulate the railroads); pivotal Indian policy (Grant was considered a liberal here, because he pushed policy in which Native Americans were to be "resettled" (forced onto) reservations and brainwashed of their religions and languages, and made Christian farmers; the other side of the debate advocated wholesale extermination; this is a terrible world); and the beginnings of U.S. overseas imperialism, trying to make the Caribbean a U.S. lake, before the navy or the public was quite ready. He spent a lot of political capital trying to convince Congress to annex the Dominican Republic and make it a state; he thought blacks could be encouraged to emigrate there and boom! the Negro Problem would be solved, and the United States would have a naval fortress in the Caribbean. McFeely, and some other historians I've skimmed, argues that Grant's presidency appears inconsequential because his main achievements were in foreign policy, and were aimed at the long game. Grant laid the foundation for the twentieth century Anglo-American alliance with a treaty that resolved all the old border disputes (the U.S. agreed to never invade Canada) and secured some maritime restitution from the British - during the Civil War Confederate commerce raiders built in Liverpool shipyards had decimated the American whaling and merchant fleets. The epilogue of his memoirs is a choppy delirium of advice to the nation: build a big-ass navy...cough...dominate the waters...cough...the Civil War was insane but putting it off would have put us behind in the race to build empires...cough...and we showed the world how badass and warlike we are...USA! USA! Still trying to get my head around this guy. He won the Civil War for the North, and re-established the Union which today has grown into the vastest consolidated power since the fall of Rome. He fought some of the greatest campaigns in history; was never defeated, and after the war was twice chosen by his countrymen as their President. If there is not food for myth here, where shall we seek it? His story is as amazing as Napoleon's, and as startling as Lenin's; yet enigma he lived and enigma he died, and though occasion was propitious and circumstances were favorable, enigma he remains. (J.F.C. Fuller, 1932) ----------- Shoddy exploitation followed Grant right to the grave. He was already the enshrined hero of a noble cause and the wayward antihero of sham values. McFeely doesn't quite pull off his Edmund Wilson impersonation but this book is still awesome. Review to follow, if I can digest. Grant's is one of the essential stories of the nineteenth century. I love that during Grant's two-year world tour Li Hung Chang and Bismarck both greeted him with something like: "I too fought and won massive wars and consolidated a future Great Power. Welcome to the Club." And in a bizarre upheaval of court practice, the Emperor Mutsuhito shook his hand.

Review # 2 was written on 2020-02-29 00:00:00 Rafael G Somarriba Grant: A Biography garnered William S. McFeely both the Pulitzer Prize and Francis Parkman Prizes in 1982 Here I go reading yet another biography on Ulysses S. Grant, my seventh. I have read at least one biography on each of the Presidents, but why so many on Grant? There are a couple of reasons. First, the best biographers are drawn to the stories of the greatest of presidents like Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln, Grant, TR, and FDR. All of these men had compelling and complicated life stories that could fill volumes and there is an over abundance of material in the way of written correspondence. The corollary to all this is that biographies about lesser figures don't sell many copies, even when they are well done. Secondly, Grant as the victorious general in a major war, has a biographical dimension that only Washington can lay claim to. The Civil War was the cataclysmic event in American history and Grant was right in the midst of it and on the winning side. And it was not just his mettle in battle that was unique. The Union victory would not have come about if it were not for the advantages in moving troops and keeping supply lines open. Grant, a former supply officer, was uniquely and supremely talented in this arena. This skill set is discussed often in the book. I got an inkling that I might like this particular bio while reading the chapter covering the Mexican American War in which Grant, Lee, Sheridan and Sherman were young lieutenants. Perhaps Grant was being revisionist when he wrote this in his memoirs years later but he viewed the Mexican American War as little more than a land grab for slave states that could have been solved by buying the land. Looking back to the 1840's in a voice rare to Grant, he pronounced a moral judgment and discovered retribution: The Southern rebellion was largely the outgrowth of the Mexican War. Nations, like individuals, are punished for their transgressions. We got our punishment in the most sanguinary and expensive war [Civil War] of modern times. Refreshing. But this biography is not an exercise in hero worship and felt more balanced than the others I've read. For that reason along with the superb organization of the book I give it high marks. McFeely acknowledges that Grant's accolades as the great general are all well deserved. But there was something more. McFeely digs into Grant's correspondence during the Civil War and unexpectedly finds a man who was politically savvy. In 1861, having been out of the service for nearly eight years, Grant refused an offer to join the Volunteer army until he was made colonel. A month later he was promoted to Brigadier General due to a lack of experienced West Point grads. Of course he knew the importance of military experience and how it would affect promotions Grant also used his frequent silence both in person and correspondence to great effect - often withholding updates to his military superiors until he had achieved his own aims. Grant was an avid reader of newspapers and absorbed information of all kinds, including politics, like a sponge. He didn't feel the need to speak until he was sure of the right decision. A great quality in a general but perhaps not a president. In short his superiors underestimated him to their own detriment even as Grant did end runs around them. And most fortunately for Grant, Lincoln was a believer in Grant. Although popular as a president, Grant stumbled his way through reconstruction, played a regrettable role in the Indian Wars, fell victim to the ills of patronage that embarrassed his administration, and despite his patriotism and honesty was acutely susceptible to financial speculation. McFeely posits that Grant's bad decisions as president may have had less to do with incompetence. The post Civil War era had a disproportionate percentage of scheming and corrupt individuals. Grant simply didn't have the style of leadership in that political system to overcome it. He carefully cultivated his image as a hero and since he was generally aware of corrupt forces he tried to distance himself. After leaving office there are a few chapters near the end of the book that followed the Grants on their nearly two year trip around the world where they were hosted by dignitaries. And Grant was very popular the world over. Interestingly Grant was planning a return to politics for a non-consecutive third term. The timing of his return ' he and Julia returned from their world tour early and the fanfare from the press eventually dried to a trickle prior to the nominating convention ' and Grant's reluctance to promote himself in person at the convention cost him a third term in office. He would have won the general election had he pressed it. He brooded for a while and was concerned about his lack of money. When Grant was diagnosed with throat cancer he worked at a fever pitch to finish his autobiography. Samuel Clemens encouraged him and helped him publish, and the autobiography became a bestseller and Julia at long last became financially secure. Grant died just days after completing the autobiography. 5 stars. Highly recommended. Although not a short book at five hundred pages, there is an economy to McFeely's prose and reliance on well placed quotes that kept the story moving along. Here are my favorite biographies (or partial biographies) on Grant. In order they are: 1. A Stillness at Appomattox (1953) by Bruce Catton 2. Grant Goes South: 1861-1863 by Bruce Catton (1960) 3. Grant: A Biography by William S. McFeeley (1981) 4. Grant by Ron Chernow (2017) 5. Grant Takes Command: 1863-1865 by Bruce Catton (1969) 6. Grant by Jean Edward Smith (2001) 7. Personal Memoirs by Ulysses S. Grant (1885)