The Highest Calling, page 12
DR: Final question for you. Let’s suppose you had an opportunity to interview Abraham Lincoln. What one question would you like to ask him?
TW: I’d love to ask him about his mother. He almost never talked about his mother. She died when he was very young, about nine years old. That may be where his depression comes from. There’s this pain inside of him. I think overcoming trauma helped him to be a great man and a great president, and it helped him to be a president during a time of trauma. The Civil War is like a body that’s being torn apart. The two halves of the country are being ripped apart, and hundreds of thousands of young men are being killed. He survived the deaths of his mother and his sister and probably a young woman he loved named Ann Rutledge.
His survival made him strong. You feel that steel inside of Abraham Lincoln. I’m pretty sure he wouldn’t want to talk about it, but it’s fascinating from the point of view of a historian. He spoke so little about himself. He was incredibly modest. He rarely used the word I in any of his speeches, which is unusual. Most politicians say the opposite. I’d love to try to understand a little bit more about who he was as a child, as a young man, and the adversity he overcame to become Abraham Lincoln.
5 RON CHERNOW
on Ulysses S. Grant
(1822–1885; president from 1868 to 1877)
Many presidents have had midcareer turnarounds that took them from near oblivion to the presidency. But surely none can rival that of Ulysses S. Grant.
He had been a West Point graduate and fought with some distinction in the Mexican-American War (ironically not far from his later rival Robert E. Lee); but Grant resigned from the military in circumstances that suggest he was pushed to do so for having had, on more than a few occasions, too much alcohol while on duty. (Grant seemed to have had a near-lifelong addiction to alcohol, though rarely had it interfered with his military duties.) Out of the military with no commercial skills, Grant worked for a while, unhappily, under his two younger brothers in their father’s leather business in Illinois, and essentially tried to become a farmer on his brother-in-law’s and father-in-law’s land in Missouri. That did not work well either. To support his family, he chopped trees on his land and personally sold the resulting firewood on street corners in nearby St. Louis.
Amazingly, the Civil War began in 1861 and seven years later Grant was elected president of the United States at age 46. How could such a turnaround occur—selling firewood to make ends meet and then becoming president of the United States?
Because of his military experience, Grant volunteered to help the Illinois militia and ultimately became its leader. When he proved successful in his militia-led attacks on the Confederate Army, he was brought back into the Union Army to lead further attacks against Confederate forces. Grant seemed more willing than other Union generals to fight Confederate forces directly. He was criticized at the time by some who said that his battle successes were due to his willingness to throw his large forces into battle, even if that resulted in substantial Union deaths and casualties (which it did).
But Lincoln was more concerned with victories than casualties, and with none of his other generals willing to be as bold—or able to be as successful—as Grant, the president eventually made him the lieutenant general of the Union Army (its most senior position). And while the result was a good deal more Union casualties, Grant took the fighting directly to Lee and his forces, until Lee felt compelled to surrender at Appomattox Court House, effectively ending the war and making Grant a national hero.
Because of his affection for what Grant had done for him and for the country, Lincoln invited him and his wife, Julia, to Ford’s Theatre on the night of April 14, 1865. But the Grants declined (apparently because Mrs. Grant did not want to spend an evening with Mrs. Lincoln, whom she regarded as quite unpleasant). The Grants decided to take a train to visit their children in New Jersey instead. If Grant had attended the play, Our American Cousin, that evening, would his military entourage have been able to stop John Wilkes Booth from assassinating Lincoln? One can never know.
With Lincoln’s assassination, Andrew Johnson became president, but he turned out to be not as committed to Reconstruction in the South as Lincoln had been. Grant had a number of disputes with Johnson, and left government and became a candidate for president in 1868. In part because of Johnson’s clashes with Grant and Congress over Reconstruction, the House impeached Johnson, but the Senate failed to convict by one vote.
Because of his military hero status, Grant was asked to serve as the Republican nominee for president in 1868. He decided to do so, and was elected relatively easily, defeating a former governor of New York, Horatio Seymour. Unfortunately, Grant’s presidency was not as successful as his military efforts. He was too trusting of some businessmen and his own officials, and a number of scandals tarnished his reputation. And economic problems in the country—the Panic of 1873—prompted Grant to not seek a third term.
After leaving office, and following a well-received tour around the world, Grant entrusted almost all his money to his son’s investment company. But that company turned out to be fraudulent due to the son’s partner’s actions. So Grant was essentially broke. To rebuild his wealth, he changed his mind on writing a memoir, and published it with a company owned by the family of Samuel Clemens (Mark Twain). Grant finished his memoir just as he died from throat cancer. But the book was very well written (scholars often say it is one of the best memoirs written by a president, though it deals only with Grant’s life up to the presidency). The family’s finances were restored by the book’s commercial success.
Ron Chernow is one of America’s finest biographers, and I had a chance to interview him about his book Grant for a Congressional Dialogues session at the Library of Congress on February 12, 2019.
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DAVID M. RUBENSTEIN (DR): Your books on the House of Morgan, Rockefeller, the Warburgs, they’re epic books, so it must take a long time to write them. How did you get trained to do that?
RON CHERNOW (RC): My dirty little secret is that I never took a history class. Everything I’ve written about in my adult life has been self-taught. I did two degrees in English literature, one at Yale and one at Cambridge. I thought that I wanted to be a novelist. So for 10 years after I got out of school, I was a freelance magazine writer. I was constantly scribbling short stories that were never published, and then I started writing these books in my midthirties, and I suddenly realized that God had created much better stories and situations and characters than I could ever invent. But all of that training and narrative from the magazine writing and from studying literature and writing stories flowed into the work.
DR: When you write a book, do you do the research for five years and then you write for five years?
RC: Grant took six years. It was four solid years of research, two solid years of writing. Strangely enough, the two years of writing coincided with the opening of the Hamilton musical, so I was telling people that I had two full-time jobs. Mornings and afternoons during the week I was writing Grant, and then evenings and weekends I was at the show. I was going round the clock. I’m amazed that the book is as coherent as it is, because I wasn’t during that period.
DR: Let’s talk about Grant. In the twentieth century, when you saw surveys of presidents of the United States, he was typically near the bottom—Buchanan, Grant, and so forth. Why did you pick him as a topic, and do you think it’s unfair he was so poorly rated?
RC: In the first survey of presidential historians, back in 1948, Grant ranked next to last. The only president who ranked lower was Warren Harding. It was the two corruption presidents. Three years ago, Grant had risen to number 28. In the most recent poll he’d risen to 21, so he’s now in the upper half. This is the fun of history. History’s an argument without an end. We’re always reevaluating people, and I think that Grant’s reputation will rise higher. And so I felt that Grant, as a president but also as a general, was ripe for rehabilitation.
DR: Some people said that as a general he won battles by just having more bodies to throw into them, and lots of people got slaughtered on his side. Is that a fair criticism of his generalship?
RC: It doesn’t really stand up to analysis. If you look at the percentage of soldiers who died in Grant’s battles, it’s pretty much the same as with Robert E. Lee’s or anybody’s Confederate army. It’s interesting that Ulysses S. Grant, during the Civil War, captured three entire Confederate armies. He captured an army of 13,000 at Fort Donelson in Tennessee in 1862. He captured the Confederate army at Vicksburg in 1863—31,000 soldiers. And then, of course, he captured Lee’s army at Appomattox Court House. Robert E. Lee never captured a single Union army, so why has there been all of this glorification of Lee, and why is Grant denigrated as the butcher?
DR: He’s also widely thought to be an alcoholic. Is that a fair criticism of him?
RC: Yes. When I started the book, it always seemed the conversation about Grant was whether he was a drunkard or not. But drunkard is a loaded word. It has this moralistic sense that this is an unscrupulous person who’s gleefully indulging his habit. What I found was that Grant was a binge drinker who would and could go for two or three months without touching a drop, and then he would have a two- or three-day bender. He had a tremendous sense of responsibility. He never drank on the eve of battles. He certainly never drank during battles. But then after the battles were over, when the pressure was off, he would slip away to a little town where his soldiers wouldn’t see him, and he would go off on a spree, as they called it.
DR: Did he know Robert E. Lee before the war?
RC: They had met during the Mexican War. Now remember that Robert E. Lee was 15 years older than Ulysses S. Grant. During the Mexican War, Lee was on General Winfield Scott’s staff, and he came over to Grant’s brigade. Grant vividly remembered meeting Lee. Lee told Grant at Appomattox Court House that throughout the war he had tried to remember meeting Grant and couldn’t. But Grant said that meeting Lee during the Mexican War was very important, because there was a mystique of Lee that he was this invincible general. Grant said that having actually met Lee, he knew that he was a mortal and that he could beat him.
DR: When Lincoln was assassinated that night, the Grants were invited to go. It is said that Julia Grant didn’t like Mrs. Lincoln and didn’t want to go. Had General Grant been there, do you think Lincoln might not have been assassinated?
RC: The story was this. A few weeks before Lincoln was assassinated, Abraham and Mary Lincoln visited the Grants in City Point, Virginia, where Grant had his headquarters. There was a military review where Mary Lincoln and Julia Grant rode out together. When they arrived at the parade ground, Mary Lincoln saw the beautiful young wife of Major General Edward Ord on horseback next to Lincoln. Mary Lincoln was having severe psychological problems at that point, flew into a jealous rage, started berating Mrs. Ord, who burst into tears, having no idea what this tirade was about. Julia Grant then intervened to try to protect Mrs. Ord, and as often happens when you intervene in an argument, Mary Lincoln turned on Julia. So the night the Lincolns went to Ford’s Theatre, Lincoln felt that the country wanted to see the victorious president and the victorious general. Julia Grant refused to go because Mary Lincoln was going, so the Grants made an excuse. They went up to a house they owned in Burlington, New Jersey. It’s one of the great ifs of history. If Grant had been there, one possibility is that he would have been killed. Grant also, with his great military instincts, might have sensed danger. Grant probably would have had an entourage of military aides there, so Julia Grant’s refusal to spend the evening with Mary Lincoln may have changed history.
DR: You might tell the story about Mrs. Grant’s eyes and her desire to fix them and what her husband said.
RC: She was squint-eyed. She had strabismus (i.e., where one eye is not aligned with the other), and she was so self-conscious about it as First Lady, she always had pictures taken in profile, on her good side. But there’s a very touching story that during the war, while Grant was off fighting, Julia Grant consulted a doctor to see whether the eye problem could be surgically corrected, and the doctor said that it was too late in her life to do it. When Ulysses found out that Julia had consulted a doctor about this, he said to her, “Julia, why did you do that? Didn’t I fall in love with these very eyes? And I never want you to change them.” He was at bottom a very romantic man, and he was repaying a love that was no less unconditional.
Because during the 1850s, when Grant is down and out and failing at one thing after another, selling firewood on street corners in St. Louis, Julia Grant has a dream one night. She has a dream that her husband will become president of the United States. And when she wakes up and tells people the dream, everyone laughs. Nothing could have seemed more ridiculous than that this man selling firewood on street corners would someday be president of the United States.
DR: When presidents get ready to write their autobiographies, they’re always told that the gold standard is the memoir written by Ulysses S. Grant at the end of his life. It became the gold standard because it was so eloquent, so forceful and well written. How did somebody who had never written a book before write such a wonderful book? And is there any truth to the rumor that his publisher, Samuel Clemens, might have actually written it?
RC: The answer to the first question is that, for those who knew Grant, it was not surprising that he wrote such a brilliant book, because he’d always prided himself on his writing. During the war he was famous for the terseness and the clarity of his orders. As a two-term president, he wrote all his own speeches and papers and took tremendous pride in it. So he was very gifted verbally throughout his life.
There’s an interesting Library of Congress angle to the question “Did Mark Twain ghost write the famous memoir?” I got that question so much when I was writing the book that I came here to the Library of Congress and I insisted that the archivists show me the original manuscript. The manuscript is in five dark-blue leather-bound volumes. They wheeled it out. It was the most poignant day of my research. I leafed through every page. Grant was dying of cancer of the throat and tongue as he was writing, and you could see he starts out writing in a very clear, firm hand, but by the end of the manuscript it’s starting to slant and wobble. Except for a few straight paragraphs toward the end, it was all in Grant’s handwriting, so I was able to say conclusively that Grant wrote the memoirs. Twain himself said that his only help with the manuscript was relatively trivial matters of grammar and punctuation.
DR: Let’s go back to the beginning of Grant’s life. Where was he born, and what did his parents do?
RC: He was born in the southwestern corner of Ohio, south of where Cincinnati is. He was born on a bucolic stretch of the Ohio River. This is significant for his later life, because on winter evenings the Ohio River would be frozen and slaves would sprint to freedom from slave-owning Kentucky to the free state of Ohio. In a way, he was living in this border area that straddled North and South.
DR: What was his name at birth?
RC: His name at birth was Hiram Ulysses Grant, which sounded nice except that it saddled him with the unfortunate initials H.U.G. He finally tired of all the teasing from his friends and he dropped the Hiram, become plain Ulysses, and then, when the local congressman nominated him for West Point, he mistakenly added the S. As Grant liked to say in later life, the S stood for absolutely nothing.
DR: His father was very antislavery?
RC: Yes. He came from an abolitionist family. He married into a slave-owning family from Missouri, and the abolitionist Grants felt so strongly about their Ulysses marrying into a slave-owning family that, when they got married in St. Louis in 1848, not a single member of the Grant family attended, as a protest.
DR: Because her family were slave owners.
RC: Yes. Her family owned about 20 to 30 slaves.
DR: So, he grows up on Ohio, and his father is—?
RC: He’s a tanner.
DR: Did Grant like that business? Did he want to be in that business?
RC: No, Grant was revolted by the business. In fact, his father’s tannery was across the street from the house. Grant had a second-floor bedroom window, and fumes from the tannery would waft into his bedroom. He was so sickened by the fumes that for the rest of his life, he could not stand to eat meat swimming in its own juices. The meat had to be burnt to a dry crisp. During the Civil War, his favorite breakfast was oysters soaked in vinegar, washed down with a cup of black coffee and finished off with a fine cigar. That was Grant.
DR: As a young man, he gets nominated to go to West Point. Did he want to go to West Point?
RC: No, his father wanted him to go, not because he wanted Ulysses to be a general someday, but his father was a real skinflint and he saw West Point as a free form of vocational education. So Grant, quite unwillingly, went. He later said that during the time he was at West Point, there was a debate going on in Congress to abolish the academy. He said he read the newspaper every day and was rooting that Congress would abolish West Point so that he could go home.
DR: When he’s there, he’s not a great academic superstar, is he?
RC: No, he’s lackluster. He graduates 21 out of a class of 39. Quite unlike all the other people that I’ve written about, Grant completely lacked ambition. In fact, his highest aim when he graduated was to be an assistant math professor at the academy. Not a full professor, mind you, but an assistant professor. That was the height of his ambition.
