This author is challenging what we know about Ulysses Grant and the Civil War

Now, a new look at the American army general who became president in the aftermath of the Civil War. Jeffrey Brown has this edition to the NewsHour Bookshelf. He was a lumbering, brutal general and incompetent president, for he was a brilliant strategist and farsighted political leader who belongs in the American pantheon. Ulysses S. Grant, who led Union forces to victory in the Civil War and then served two terms as president, has stirred a range of responses from his own time to ours. He wrote his own acclaimed memoir and has been the subject of numerous biographies. Now comes Grant by Ron Chernow, who's made a specialty of writing of big historical figures, including George Washington, J.P. Morgan and Alexander Hamilton. That biography was the inspiration for the hit Broadway musical. Welcome to you. Pleasure to be here. So no doubt everyone, everyone starts by asking you, are we expecting Ulysses S. Grant, the musical? Well, I decided that Ulysses S. Grant's life doesn't move to a hip hop beat. You know, the problem is, since the Hamilton musical, people expect me to at appearances start snapping my fingers and singing in rhymed couplets. So I'm trying to get beyond the image of the hip hop historian. So you but you provide the research for these things. It is interesting to think about changing reputations and views of people that happen with Hamilton. I wonder if somebody came to you and said, Ulysses S. Grant, how do I capture him? This man has suffered from, you know, more misleading stereotypes that perhaps any of the figure in American history, far from being this kind of brutal and clumsy general. He was a strategic mastermind of the of the war. And it's always said that, you know, Robert E. Lee was the superior general. Lee was a brilliant tactician who had kind of an uncanny ability in individual battles to anticipate his opponent's moves. But it was really Grant who had a master plan, a comprehensive plan for ending the war by coordinating the movements of all of these various armies. So it was extremely sophisticated military strategist, just one of kind of many misunderstandings that I tried to correct in the book. He was an outsider, right, from the from what was called the West at that time. Not a sophisticated, not part of the elite. Well, also before the war, he had suffered one business failure after another. When the war started, he was working as a clerk junior to his two younger brothers in his father's leather goods store in Glynn, Illinois. The war breaks out. Grant had been at West Point. He'd fought in the Mexican War. Two months later, he's colonel. Four months later, he's brigadier general. Ten months later, he's major general. By the end of the war, he has a million men under his command. This man who had been an impoverished clerk in a leather goods store. And I think that because of his pre-war business failures, he had everything to gain and nothing to lose. It gave him a certain daring. Part of the reputation, the caricature is the drinking. Was he a drunk or not? This is something that you've looked at quite a bit. I mean, the effect of his drinking on his personality. Absolutely. I decided that this controversy, which has hung over, you know, Grant for 150 years, has to had to be settled once. To use a phrase, the hungover. Right. But what's happened historically is that Grant's opponents derided him as a drunkard. People who've written admiring biographies have tended to completely minimize the drinking problem. What I discovered, in fact, was Grant was an alcoholic. But rather than using that term drunkard, which implies a moral failing that he was indulging this in some kind of cavalier fashion. I try to treat alcoholism as a chronic disease, that this was something that he struggled with his entire life. He joined a temperance lodge from the time that he was in his 20s. And it was a problem that he finally conquered by the end of his life. You are focusing more on a lot of accomplishment, especially his work in Reconstruction, to try to make it work. Yeah. His presidency has been unfairly caricatured as one of scandals and nepotism. Those things occurred. I devote a lot of time to them. But I argue that this was really the minor story of his presidency. The major story was that he was the foremost president protecting the four million African-Americans who had been enslaved prior to the war, who under the 14th Amendment became full-fledged American citizens under the 15th Amendment, had the right to vote. This provoked the most violent backlash in the South. The Ku Klux Klan conducted a reign of terror throughout the South. Grant repeatedly sent federal troops into the South in order to reign in the Klan and then finally brought 3,000 indictments against the Klan to crush them. So as Frederick Douglass said, this is as Grant was the vigilant, firm, impartial and wise protector of our race. I feel it's a great unknown story about Grant. Before we start this, we're talking about the continuing divisiveness in this country over the Confederate monuments, some of them from that period, right? Yeah, absolutely. This is an open wound in our society. We've been left with two competing narratives of what happened during and after the Civil War. And they started building the monuments really towards the end of Grant's second term. And these Confederate monuments were built as in the spirit of defiance, as a way of rebuking Reconstruction and reasserting Southern white supremacy in the South and rolling back all of the gains of Reconstruction. You know, it's fascinating. People who know all about the civil rights movement in the 1950s and 1960s have no idea that we had a civil rights movement in this country in the late 1860s and 1870s. This is a black hole in American memory. There's such amnesia about what happened in terms of that civil rights movement and also the violent backlash that unfortunately followed it. You write these, as I said, big histories, right? Men, they've all been, who have played big roles in shaping history. And they're big books. This is another big book, right? I apologize. I can't seem to write a short book. But why? Why the focus on these kind of big figures? Well, you know, I decided to write about Grant because I'd always wanted to do a book about the Civil War and Reconstruction. Grant's life is the perfect prism for seeing those two periods. And in fact, they're two acts of the same drama. So many Americans know about the Civil War in minute detail. They know nothing about Reconstruction. It's kind of like walking out in the middle of the drama. You don't know how the play ends. So I kind of look for figures who embody big moments in American history, who are part of kind of building the structure of the country. And so it's not simply telling an interesting yarn that these were people who represented major movements in American life, hence the size of the book. All right. The book is Grant Ron Chernow. Thank you very much. My pleasure. Thank you.