Grant: A Biography

by William S. McFeely

"Combines scholarly exactness with evocative passages....Biography at its best." Marcus Cunliffe, The New York Times Book Review; Winner of the Pulitzer Prize. The seminal biography of one of America's towering, enigmatic figures. From his boyhood in Ohio to the battlefields of the Civil War and his presidency during the crucial years of Reconstruction, this Pulitzer Prize-winning biography traces the entire arc of Grant's life (1822-1885). "A moving and convincing portrait....profound understanding of the man as well as his period and his country." C. Vann Woodward, New York Review of Books "Clearsightedness, along with McFeely's unfailing intelligence and his existential sympathy...informs his entire biography." Justin Kaplan, The New Republic Illustrations

Genres: Biography, History, Presidents, Civil War, Nonfiction, American History, Politics

492 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1981

Reviews

[Eric Byrd · Rating 4 out of 5]

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)

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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.

[Dan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Grant: A Biography garnered William S. McFeely both the Pulitzer 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)

[Christopher Saunders · Rating 3 out of 5]

Pulitzer Prize-winning biography of the Civil War General and 18th President hasn't aged well considering the huge amount of Grant revisionism in recent decades. McFeely presents the consensus narrative of Grant as a personal wash-out, a butcher general who won the war through brute attrition tactics rather than strategy and a miserable failure of a President. He's loathe to praise Grant for anything beyond perseverance and determination, presenting even his brilliant campaigns at Vicksburg and Chattanooga as badly mismanaged and won largely by forces (skilled subordinates, Confederate incompetence) beyond Grant's control; instead he focuses on near-failures like Shiloh and the catastrophe at the Crater as if they're the sum total of his military leadership. McFeely inexplicably devotes a twenty page chapter to the failed Hampton Roads peace conference while spending all of two on the Wilderness and Spotsylvania, for an example of how skewed his priorities are. He's not entirely wrong in his assessment of Grant's presidency, but his near-exclusive focus on corruption over the good faith, if only partially successful efforts to enforce Reconstruction and deal equitably with the Indians makes his portrayal hard to swallow. Nor does his constant insistence that Grant was a frothing racist, which seems unfounded by the historical record. Elegantly written and passionately argued, but presenting little of scholarly merit.

[Clif · Rating 4 out of 5]

Grant was a failure, repeatedly. Right up until the Civil War everything he tried his hand at didn't work out. He wondered about his future and how he could survive economically. He had gone to West Point and had served in the Mexican War though not at a high rank. Dropping out of the military, he ended up in Galena, Illinois selling leather goods under the direction of his younger brother.

Then, events stepped in and the demand for trained officers for the Union Army meant anyone and everyone who had been to West Point was needed. Even then, Grant needed the assistance of his representative in Congress to get him appointed to a command.

Once in charge of a body of men, he quickly demonstrated his military ability that, after several successes with the Army of the Tennessee, gained the attention of President Lincoln after the victory at Vicksburg. He was dogged in pursuit of the Confederate Army, realizing that with the superior number of Union soldiers and in the face of determined resistance, the only path to winning the war was attrition and that had to produce victory before the resistance to the war in the north could bring some agreement short of unconditional surrender.

With the Civil War over, Lincoln dead and President Johnson reviled as sympathetic to the South, the presidency was Grant's by popular acclaim.

Before reading this book, my take on Grant's presidency was that he was often drunk and allowed corruption far beyond the norm. William McFeely puts the claim of too much drinking to rest. On only two occasions, neither of which involved his official duties, is there evidence of his having too much to drink. As for corruption within his administration, there was a great deal particularly in regard to awarding Indian trading post concessions. The Indians were notoriously defrauded, a practice curiously denounced by none other than George Custer of Little Big Horn fame. Grant did not like sacking those he had appointed and either looked the other way when evidence was presented, or protected the wrongdoers after believing their professions of innocence. Nobody claimed that Grant himself was less than honest.

McFeely quite properly makes Reconstruction a major topic. Grant was sympathetic to the plight of the freedmen who, though initially truly free to hold political office and live where and as they wished, were relentlessly pushed back into servitude and political impotence by white Southerners determined to restore antebellum conditions as much as possible. Grant even went before Congress and read detailed accounts of the murder and mistreatment of freedmen, but was determined not to be seen as a military dictator by sending troops to enforce the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments that the Radical Republican Congress had passed (while southern states were not in Congress to vote against them).

In addition, Grant feared a guerrilla war in the South if he did commit troops. He wanted no more bloodshed added to the ocean spilled in the Civil War. Though some of the southern states now had Republican governors who wanted to see justice done, and there were freedmen willing to form militias and some did so, the balance of power without federal troops made it impossible to achieve obedience to the new laws of the nation. As the years of Grant's two terms passed and freedmen were steadily deprived of their voting rights, Southern statehouses went to the Democratic Party and the promise of the end of slavery was dashed. It should be mentioned that Grant did have an attorney general for a short time, Amos Ackerman (pronounced with a long A), who relentlessly pursued the KKK, but whose efforts ended with his departure.

Grant was taciturn, seldom given to any display of emotion with laughter a rarity. He was a man of few words though he expressed himself very well in writing (McFeely highly praises Grant's book on the Mexican and Civil wars). He was a loving and affectionate father and a devoted husband to his wife Julia. He was a man of the common people and this was greatly appreciated by the masses who adored him.

Because of his fraught early years, Grant felt great insecurity about his future, even after his time as president. He craved financial success and in pursuit of it after leaving the White House, failed with a Mexican railroad investment, going hat in hand to a Vanderbilt to bail him out. Julia had taken to White House life with gusto and the two of them felt so secure and comfortable there that a future anywhere else was depressing to both.

No homebody, Grant, his wife and an entourage spent the two years after his second term travelling the world holding a hope that a third term might be coming, but it was not to be. Republican loss of Congress and the readmission of the southern states changed the political scene. On tour he was rapturously received by the working people of Britain. Even in the South he was respected, not despised as Lincoln had been.

Indian affairs and black/white relations get a prominent place. One realizes that Grant faced a terrible problem in what to do about the stubborn refusal of the South to allow black people to be full citizens, yet their abandonment after a great war in which hundreds of thousands had lost their lives with the specific purpose of freeing the slaves is shocking. I read with disgust of the leading role that Grant's son Fred played in making life hell for the first black man admitted to West Point while Fred was an upperclassman.

But Ulysses S. Grant was a good man and this is an excellent book about him.

[Gerry · Rating 4 out of 5]

We get to examine the life in whole of General Ulysses S. Grant and our 18th President in this work. Certainly no short task for authors who decide to undertake the biographical account of any person who held such a Military capacity followed by an election to the Presidency of the United States. It is not my intent to make this a long review, so I will keep to points I personally found “interesting” within this book on Grant. This book was published in 1981 and it was important to myself that I read a book older in publication rather than newer. The revisionism that has occurred in American History has been a degrading attempt to often paint things not as they were> but rather what people would prefer to believe was the truth without examining the historical facts of the era to which they are reading and attempting to study for whatever the personal agenda may be socially.

Hiram Ulysses Grant Ulysses pronounced Ul-is-is came from a working class family, more on the successful side than the other way around. His father was an effective storekeeper and tanner. Ulysses attempted both and despised both attempts at working these functions. He was a lousy accountant when he worked on the storefront side as a clerk. He preferred to be alone and loved horses – was considered the best professional equestrian in his 1843 class at West Point and he graduated 21 of 39. During his matriculation at West Point he grew to despise this as well – his father had the appointment set, as he really did not know what to do with the young man that was his son. He preferred to be alone while at West Point and preferred to read novels than conduct his studies – this would have a profound impact on his written account (later) on the Mexican-American War of 1846-1848. When Ulysses Grant’s appointment was signed by U.S. Congressman Thomas L. Hamer he knew “Hiram Ulysses Grant” only by “Ulysses” and gave Grant his “S” as a middle initial based on his mother’s maiden name. Grant liked it and stuck with it for the remainder of his life. After graduation from West Point he had hoped to be assigned to the Cavalry but was instead assigned to Quartermaster.

The impact his Father had on him was never fully explored in this work as were other areas of his young life. The author did make an honest attempt but, in my opinion, fell short in this one mere facet of the Generals overall life. He did not earn favor with his Father and it seems there was much more negativity that flowed from Father to Son than the author was able to explore. In my opinion this is where is oft inability to be more of a secure self-reliant person originates. He did have his personal success as we know in battle and he did have good children that loved both he and his wife Julia. The family man in Grant and the author in Grant were both a success. His Presidency was an unfortunate consequence of lack in ability to do in the White House what he had accomplished on the battlefield in two American Wars.

There were contradictions that existed in General Grant that cannot be ignored. On the one hand where he enjoyed being alone, after graduation from West Point and being married he never truly wanted to be “alone.” Not wanting to be without his wife is perfectly understandable; however, the contradiction continues when on the same day of his resignation from the U.S. Army while posted to California he also wrote another letter accepting his promotion to Captain (???) He was a depressed spirit during this posting in California and found comfort in the bottle – he drank because he was depressed and not the other way around.

Overall, in this book I came to feel sorry for the young Grant, respected highly the soldier capabilities of Grant, appreciated sincerely his family qualities, and was saddened at his inability and lack of desire to make Reconstruction what it was intended to be during his Presidency. I came away believing that had President Lincoln not been assassinated, had President Johnson not been the turmoil runt that he was that Reconstruction would have been managed and most importantly enforced to the point of why the War Between the States had been fought for in the first place. The country became stronger and had the outcome not been the conclusion it had been then the United States could not have fought as it had during the First World War but would have been less effective and possibly negligible during the Second World War as one United States of America.

I recommend this book for its upfront honesty and ability absent of political correctness (and other agendas) of the life of General and President Grant.

[Socraticgadfly · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is the Grant bio I’ve been wanting for years and didn’t know existed.

It’s definitely NOT a hagiographic bio, which Chernow, Ron White and H.W. Brands all are, contra apologists for them, and which Jean Smith also is, from what I’ve read. This is one reason many people hate it.

Another is the wrongful presumption or assertion that it’s dull, that McFeely can’t tell a story as part of telling history. That’s simply not true. He may be understated, and is definitely not purplish, but can indeed tell history as story. His narration of Grant’s contretemps with President Johnson after the passage of the Tenure in Office Act, with side notes about Stanton, is illustrative of the story-telling.

The third reason I think that many don’t like this bio is that McFeely has a thesis, and it’s that they dislike. The thesis, as I see it, is not about Grant and corruption, but rather about a Grant far more devious and conniving in many ways than they’d like to admit.

Three incidents from 1865 will suffice well to illustrate.

Chronologically, the first is Grant’s insertion of himself into the Confederate peace commissioners’ mission, and his playing of politics while denying he was doing any such thing. Grant would do this for three-plus more years.

Second was his throwing Sherman under the bus, or to the wolf called Stanton, over his original surrender-plus deal with Joe Johnston. I’m not as sanguine as McFeely about the original deal being not that much different from Appomattox. But, the Grant reaction is the biggie.

The third is Grant’s post-war trip to the South to report on “conditions in the field.” McFeely does not contrast it (unlike the Klan book, insert link) with the later and more thorough visit by Carl Schurtz with much more truthful conclusions. Rather, he says that, even in his short time, Grant could have visited other people and locations than he actually did.

That, in turn, leads to the fourth reason I think some dislike this book. While no Andy Johnson, McFeely presents a Grant who was always on the more conservative side of Reconstruction for both race and class reasons.

That all said, the big verdict?

It’s 4.75 stars. It’s not quite an absolute 5 stars, as I’ll note in going beyond the overview, for some more generally good details but a couple of minor dings.

The first is Shiloh. This is not really a military bio of Grant, for better or worse. That said, McFeely appears to agree with all other modern biographers that the Shunpike incident was entirely Lew Wallace’s fault. I don’t.

That that said, McFeely does go on to say that Grant could have won day two without Buell’s fresh troops. He also faults Grant for not having a more forceful pursuit. Hold on to that idea.

On the military side, we then go to Chattanooga. McFeely again faults Grant for not having a forceful post-battle dispute, after Lookout Mountain and Missionary Ridge. He adds that, before Grant got called eastward to Washington for his promotion and third star, that he was wintering, not in Chattanooga, but Nashville.

From there, it’s to the Wilderness/Overland campaign. McFeely wonders why Grant didn’t try flanking Lee’s left rather than right. Maybe he was afraid there was too much chance of leaving Washington exposed? This isn’t a “ding,” just food for thought.

McFeely does ding Grant’s part in the debacle of the Crater and other incidents in the Petersburg siege.

Finally, on the military side, I’ve read some comment and analysis about Sheridan being slow to launch Five Forks. McFeely doesn’t cover that one.

Grant as non-political politician from City Point 1865, through the other 1865 events, is referenced briefly above. McFeely extends this to the whole tussle over the Tenure in Office Act, Grant not wanting to be Secretary of War but not wanting anybody else to fill the position — including Sherman, and maneuvering well through this as a non-political politician, and it is covered well.

Next? Two items related to Fred Grant, one a ding, one a why is this missing item which becomes a ding.

The first? Wiki’s page on Fred says that many historians claim McFeely conflated two incidents and that Fred was never personally involved in the racial harassment of James Webster Smith, West Point’s first Black cadet. (Fred was in his senior year when Smith entered.)

The “why isn’t this here?” issue is a clear example of what appears to be nepotism, even if Ulysses’ string-pulling can’t be proven. Just two years after his graduation, Fred was already a brevet lieutenant colonel who was attached to Sheridan’s staff. Even if McFeely can find zero paperwork related to this, still, why didn’t he mention it? I mean, it fits with Grant’s other corruption.

The Whiskey Ring? McFeely says flat-out that Grant perjured himself in his testimony supporting Babcock.

Finally? Reconstruction. Going back to Grant’s post-war but pre-presidential years, McFeely shows that Grant was always trying to play the two ends of Radicals and conservatives against the middle. As president, McFeely notes Grant’s fear of being seen a dictator by using the army as police. He then adds that Grant could have established “a vastly strengthened constabulary of United States marshals” — and of course, did not, nor ask Congress to fund that.

I personally have long thought that Grant was at least fairly conservative on Reconstruction, and McFeely seems to have the details.

Finally, McFeely notes the complicated relationship Grant had with his dad, brother Orvil, and his father-in-law and brothers-in-law.

Below is extensive notes, of which the above are a summary, behind a spoiler alert. A few of the notes are about thoughts McFeely provoked, not the book itself or Grant himself.

More than Chernow or Brands, looks at Grant’s family history and legend-making that arose, like the claim that an ancestor fought in the American Revolution, riffing off his dad of the same name fighting in the French and Indian War, but it didn’t actually happen.

Business failings in late pre-war Army in California and Fort Vancouver? Yes, in part, Grant may have been a “mark,” but largely, even tho in a quartermaster position in the Mexican War, he simply had no business sense, McFeely says. Suggests this is why his brothers didn’t offer him a position after Mexico.

Post-war time in Mexico, though not perfect as a human being, he was apparently much better than most fellow officers.

Per Grant’s description not of the ethics of the war, but of actual fighting, McFeely says he was one of those people that wasn’t so much built for the military but was simply built for war.

Does a lot of early description of Julia, and indicates how much they seemed to be two incomplete people without being in the presence of the other. Notes her pretentiousness.

Fort Humboldt? Yes Grant may have drunk, but the depression behind it — fueled by his maleficient commanding officer — was a large part of the problem.

Beyond a bit of pretentiousness she never dropped, Julia never changed her attitude toward slavery. And, already on page 72, McFeely notes that Grant as president “honored his wife’s prejudices,” with high cost for black Americans.

Skips lightly over Shiloh, and like all other bios, seems to blame Wallace and not Grant for the Shunpike, though noting Grant’s first orders were oral.

That got me to wondering if McFeely would turn out to be too hagiographic of Grant the general, even tho not of Grant the person? I told myself to an eye out on Cold Harbor. And The Crater. And why, if he talks about it at all, Five Forks was slow in launching. I mean, McFeely does say that Grant didn't fully trust Sheridan (or Sherman).

McFeely relates Grant's June 6-7, 1863, two-day, two-spree drunk, and him drinking once before that. So, that refutes low-star reviewers who claim he doesn’t talk about Grant’s drunkenness.

He mentions also a possible drunk, late summer, New Orleans, but thinks a startled horse is more likely. That even more refutes low-star reviewers.

Side note: Lincoln making Grant commander of all western forced exempted Banks in Louisiana. I am not sure I had seen that one before. Why? Cotton speculation tied to Abe, as with friends of Abe and Spoons Butler in Virginia? Rosewater Reconstruction getting a pliable political general? Both? (They’re not mutually exclusive.

Stanton's orders for the department of the west, besides letting him fire Rosecrans for Thomas, also apparently indicated he could basically ignore Halleck.

Thomas, unlike Howard and Hooker, didn't reach out to Grant on arrival at Chattanooga. Doesn't excuse pre-Nashville suspicions of Thomas but does provide background.

There’s a great description of how immediately Grant assessed the whole situation at Chattanooga — and acted.

He does note that Grant did not get a complete victory here, and that he didn't pursue Bragg down to Atlanta that winter, and didn't even winter himself in Chattanooga, but Nashville. McFeely also says he had a grudge against Thomas and Army of the Cumberland for the laurels at Missionary Ridge.

Great on how Grant "managed" Meade and Meade eventually realizing it, but not until almost the end of the war.

I think another reason low-star reviewers don’t like it is that it’s not a military history. Only about 150 pages are about the Civil War years.

Could Grant have flanked Lee’s right rather than trying the left?

For those bitching about the time spent on the peace commissioners at City Point? Grant was intruding into politics and McFeely is showing him at this and being disingenuous about it. The back-and-forth between him and Eckert is very interesting and foreshadows Sherman and Johnston at Goldsboro. Mcfeely says that when the meeting with Lincoln happened, the commissioners, especially Campbell, thought Lincoln didn’t realize just how starving the South was and the leverage this gave him with Jeff Davis.

He throws early presidential reconstruction Grant under the bus. Beyond noting how short his fall 1865 fact-findng trip was, he says Grant saw what and who he wanted to see, and talked to whom he wanted to.

Sherman was rumored as a Stanton replacement in 1866. Grant feared this, not so much for personal friendship, as the possibility of Sherman becoming a Johnson toady and then, perhaps, imperiling Grant’s political future.

Corruption? In 1866, the money for Grant’s Cincinnati home.

Ackerman was fired as AG not just for pressing too hard on the Klan but also for not signing off on railroad line conniving by Collis Huntington as represented by Ackerman’s predecessor, Hoar.

Where DID Fred Grant’s racism, like that toward West Point plebe James Webster Smith come from? (IF it’s true; other historians say McFeely has conflated two incidents and relies on secondhand statements.) And, it’s interesting that his father wouldn’t rebuke it.

On the “redeemer” movement, which he rightly calls “counterrevolutionary” (a word I’ve not seen before) he notes Grant’s refusal to do more in 1875 — and his wiliness in this. Via his cabinet, he makes it clear all other alternatives to federal troops must clearly be exhausted. Then, closer to election time, after Adelbert Ames has telegraphed a request, he was informed that was no good — something in writing, in the mail, was required. And, of course, that gave Grant time to stall.

McFeely notes Grant’s fear of being seen a dictator by using the army as police. He then adds that Grant could have established “a vastly strengthened constabulary of United States marshals” — and of course, did not.

Orvil Grant had three trading post ownerships, re the Belknap scandal. John Dent 2.

Soy Boy’s review is here. “Accusations”? None that I have seen. It’s just not hagiographic enough for him. https://www.goodreads.com/review/show... Actually, insinuations that James Wilson was gay are an accusation.

Someone in a poor review called Grant high-level autistic. Tho I told that person I despise forensic psychology, I will say, that if we do it, maybe he had hypomania.

[William Guerrant · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is one of those rare books that is so good that I read it slowly because I was reluctant to finish it. The author has an interesting and somewhat unusual style, skillfully blending the bare historical facts with his judgments, commentary and opinions, but without (imo) harming the quality of the historical narrative. Occasionally he interrupts the story with passages like this one, which helps keep the text lively:

"Once again Grant was close to silence, a difficult quality to measure in a man, and one which in his case must be read in two ways. There are many men in America who are articulate only to the extent of hinting in cliches at what is locked within them. They talk disparagingly of the weather and of people different from themselves; they joke about sex and theorize solemnly about ways to make money; and as they do so, they work monotonously at something they have no interest in talking about. Their predictable, ritual conversations with one another enable them to endure. Sometimes the talk stops, as it did for Grant at Fort Humboldt; then such a man cannot keep going. The void that remains is terrifying. Grant had known that silence as he sought another kind. He wanted a silence born of confidence and command, a time when he could listen to other men's chatter but have no need to add to it himself. This is the silence not of a man deadened to the world, but rather of one come alive to engage it."

Readers expecting this biography to focus especially on the Civil War years will be disappointed. Despite consisting of nearly 600 pages of some of the smallest font I have ever seen in a book, the text seems to hurry through the events that made Grant famous, focusing instead on Grant's political history, which is fascinating and deserving of the attention.

In the concluding paragraphs of the book, after noting that there are competing camps of historians who either admire or disparage Grant and his legacy, the author writes: "The present study will not sit well with either school of historians. Grant did not make war for reasons or in ways that ennoble the Civil War. He did not rise about limited talents or inspire others to do so in ways that make his administration a credit to American politics... All the present study has tried to do is to take him seriously as a man. Now, almost a century after he died, myths of glorification or denigration can be discarded. This is the generation of his grandchildren's grandchildren, and these Americans--who are not in all ways different from the person Grant was--deserve to know a man they would recognize if they met him in a crowd."

[Jerome Otte · Rating 4 out of 5]

A critical, lively and well-researched biography of Grant, often at odds with more recent portraits of the man. McFeely’s Grant comes off as simple, pragmatic, and unpretentious.

McFeely portrays Grant as an almost bloodthirsty warrior who had no problem with carnage and was generally insensitive to suffering. While Grant was known for his simplicity and modesty, McFeely argues that this was a carefully crafted image and that Grant’s presidential ambitions were more obvious than they seem. He is also critical of Grant’s Reconstruction policies. However, he does a great job telling the story of Grant’s presidency and the drama of this particular time period.

McFeely portrays Grant’s relationship with Lincoln in a critical light, arguing that Lincoln was always fairly skeptical about the general. While probably true at first, more recent research does suggest that Lincoln eventually grew to appreciate Grant’s ability. McFeely also blasts Grant for the Cold Harbor fiasco but never really covers Grant’s own personal regret over that affair. McFeely’s treatment of Civil War strategy and Grant’s contribution in this area also feels rather inadequate, and the the treatment of the campaigns isn’t particularly in-depth. McFeely’s treatment of Grant’s presidency is a little dull, and deals more with the issues and controversies of the era than with Grant himself.

While not always admiring of Grant’s public life and military career, McFeely is more favorable on Grant’s private life, such as his marriage with Julia and his obvious gifts as a writer. How Grant produced his memoirs while suffering from throat cancer is one of the most interesting parts of the book.

McFeely's writing can also be humorous here and there: "That every boy has the chance to be president is the official fantasy of the American republic" and "In May 1864 Ulysses Grant began a vast campaign that was a hideous disaster in every respect save one---it worked."

A lot of times the author indulges in psychobabble, like McFeely’s suggestion that Grant grew a beard due to sexual frustration, and there are some odd sentences that do stand out, like calling war a “colossal sick joke” and "Although a Virginian, Thomas was not a cordial host" and “By the summer of 1876 there was no one around the White House who gave a damn about the black people” and “Since one of the reasons for war is to have an excuse to do some drinking, it is not surprising that there was an enormous amount of it done during the Civil War.” And a lot it quite speculative, like McFeely referring to a letter from Grant referring to a black “boy” and then arguing that it was William Jones, even though Jones was in his thirties at the time. Of course, McFeely also argues that Grant did not care much about the situation of American blacks, despite his efforts against the KKK and his advocacy of the 15th amendment.

At times, McFeely's writing is breezy: "Ulysses Grant in his throwaway lines---in his throwaway life---kept trying to get people to see the colossal sick joke. All you do is take the nicest guy on the block---the one who will not be diverted by dreams of vainglory or revenge or by the nonsense of masochism---and knowing he is not good for much else, let him act on the bold fact that war means killing the guy on the other side, or at least scaring him badly enough so that he will quit fighting."

An interesting book with a rich narrative, although it can get a little stale and dense at times.

[Steve · Rating 4 out of 5]

http://bestpresidentialbios.com/2014/...

“Grant: A Biography” is William McFeely’s Pulitzer Prize winning 1981 biography of the Union general and eighteenth president. McFeely is a historian and retired professor of history. He has authored numerous books including biographies of Frederick Douglass and Thomas Eakins.

Although considered a seminal work on Grant, this biography is sometimes criticized for being too harsh toward its subject and for relying too frequently on psychological interpretation. But while the author is quick to criticize Grant (this former president certainly provides much to criticize), in the end McFeely’s appraisal is reasonably well balanced.

I see no fault in McFeely’s psychological assessment of Grant, either. What is a biographer’s job if not to observe and fully assess his or her subject while distinguishing between fact and conjecture? In Grant’s case the task is all the larger due to his complicated and sometimes contradictory character. And McFeely’s judgment of Grant seems largely on-the-money.

But while McFeely’s biography keeps itself firmly centered on Grant, his few real friends and his cadre of astonishingly poor advisers, it is unwilling to stray very far to provide context. Readers hoping to see the Civil War through Grant’s eyes, for example, will be disappointed. Although McFeely describes Grant’s great battles, rarely does he clearly describe the setting or discuss the broader scene.

What I’ve rarely seen McFeely criticized for is his writing style. There are great writers who decide to become historians, and historians who elect to become writers. McFeely seems to fall into the latter category. His biography does not flow like the narrative of someone whose primary gift is prose. It more often has the feel of a legal brief that has been re-written by an English professor with a love for complex sentence structure.

Although well written from an academic point of view, important messages and themes seldom jump off the page for the average reader. More often, they have to be teased from the text. Between the important nuggets of obvious wisdom are paragraphs of sometimes arduous supporting (or even seemingly tangential) detail.

In general, if there is a simple way to make a point, McFeely will steer clear and find a more complex way of achieving the same result. His text is dense and potent and requires the reader to progress at a slower-than-average pace for full comprehension.

If this biography does not quite seem intended for the mass market, neither is its natural audience limited to historians and presidential scholars. It is simply a comprehensive, old school book heavy on facts and light on extraneous image-setting. Rather than taking the time to animate his study, McFeely focuses on the daunting task of understanding how the failed businessman, the war hero and the strangely out-of-touch president could be just one man. It is a task he performs masterfully.

In the end I liked – but did not love – McFeely’s biography of Grant. Although it is comprehensive, detailed and penetrating (most of the hallmarks of a great biography, in my view) it is not consistently accessible or engrossing. Nevertheless, this Pulitzer Prize winning biography provides a solid, thorough and revealing look at one of our most enigmatic presidents.

Overall rating: 3¾ stars

[Alex Hope · Rating 2 out of 5]

A very generalized biography. I loved the fact of how unbiased it was, as well as the fact that a lot of images you find in this book are not the first google searches of “U.S. Grant.” Yet, the book is fairly dry and the author barely analyzes anything. Grant’s alcoholism problem is barely mentioned, as well as overall such a man is hard to describe on 500 pages of text. I have no idea how this got a Pullitzer prize, maybe I myself am stupid because I do not get the point.

[Joseph Rose · Rating 4 out of 5]

Although the author arrives at just conclusions about much of Ulysses S. Grant's generalship and personality—he dares to challenge the standard view of Grant as a great commander with a firmly upright character—the book's grasp of the military aspects of the Civil War is sometimes lacking. It's very elegantly written, which is hardly surprising for a winner of the Pulitzer Prize.

[rmn · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a fantastic biography and not just because Grant led a bizarrely incredible life but because of the author's not well hidden disdain for Grant (no really, he kind of hates the guy). Even so, it is exceptionally well written and focuses more on the big picture of the United States during Grant's life and how Grant fit in to it rather than just a boring recitation of what Grant did everyday like such banalities as what kind of oatmeal he ate on some October morning in 1874 which many other biographers tend to do (and maybe you should take note of that for your next biography Mr. Chernow).

As for Grant, like many mid to late 19th century presidents (Jackson, Lincoln, Garfield, etc.), he was a Horatio Alger rags to riches story (though the riches never quite really came) with the slight twist that he was pretty much a failure at everything but war (and drinking). To say he lucked in to his success is a bit disingenuous (because he was really good at killing soldiers, both his and those of the enemy, and he was really good at preparing and running a war), but without the Civil War, he would have just been a failed destitute farmer.

When the war broke out, the Union needed trained military men and Grant fit the bill having graduated undistinguishingly (and that probably isn't a word) from West Point, having served in the army during the Mexican War (though as a quartermaster, not even a frontline soldier), and having stayed in the army for a couple years after that though without rising at all through the ranks. It's amazing, the Union needed men and he was a man. But they didn't just need men, they needed men to lead so pretty much anyone with any military experience was made a General. Thus all of a sudden Grant went from poor failed farmer to General in the Union army (though one of hundreds I believe, and in charge of a nothing little regiment in the now Midwest).

It was then that Grant became Grant. While he started as a General in an out of the way location, he gradually won confrontations and battles and built up his reputation to the point that he became commander of the entire army where he was supposedly a brilliant military strategist with an ability to see the big picture (ie. we need to kill a lot of Southerners) which seems at odds with his inability to succeed in private business. The author lauds Grant for his ability to keep everything in his head and hand write all of his orders himself with little input from others.

Anyway, you all know what happened in the war (spoiler alert: the Union won) and Grant became the face of victory as the conquering General with the folksy ways and he rode the wave of popularity all the way to an ineffective presidency. The eight years Grant was in office were marked by a failure to deliver real reconstruction (or even try to) and a cabinet filled with graft and scandal. Maybe the country needed a kind of ineffective figurehead to heal over those years, but it seems like a wasted opportunity where someone could have created real change.

Post-presidency Grant toured the world, drank, and got swindled (and you all should really read this book ) only to save his family by publishing his memoirs before he died which proved to be lucrative. A truly amazing life.

As for the author's interpretation, he paints Grant as a bit of a simpleton in everything but war. He is almost astounded by Grant's success and yet has a lot of respect for Grant the General and Grant's ability to see many steps ahead. The author's biggest criticism of Grant seems to be that he was a common man and yet left the common man when he became president, preferring to hobnob with the rich in his lifelong attempt to be a social climber and to be accepted by high society businessmen (and perhaps to prove himself to his father). It's quite a psychological profile.

Anyway, the book is good. Read it.

[Aaron Million · Rating 3 out of 5]

Fairly thorough, if not sometimes caustic, biography about the Civil War General and two term Republican President. McFeely seems to engage in quite a bit of psychology throughout the book - trying to explain Grant's actions and words as him attempting to be someone who mattered or who had been able to be successful at life. While I am sure there is some truth to that, any person can be subjected to that kind of scrutiny and be made to look as if he or she is attempting to fulfill or conquer some deep, inner psychological impulse or desire. Example: on Grant's around the world trip in the late 1870s, he and his party want to travel to the top of Mt. Vesuvius but are unable to get there. McFeely declares that, once again, Grant did not quite make it to the top. Hmm. I think that might be reading too much into something that was extremely difficult to do.

The overall portrait that McFeely paints is not a pretty one, but I do think - that psychoanalysis aside - it is an accurate one. While to say that Grant was a "butcher" in the Civil War might be unfair, he certainly did use his overwhelmingly troop strength and supply to his advantage. The two most disappointing things that I found: 1) Grant and Robert E. Lee bickering back and forth about notes of surrender when many men on both sides lay in the fields dying and in desperate need of medical care; 2) his obvious lack of concern with how blacks were being treated in the South during Reconstruction.

Grant seemed to be me to be a man of somewhat limited means who, by good fortune mixed with some skill and luck, came into positions of power. His wife Julia comes across as an uppity snob, his children as somewhat spoiled and disregarding of others, and Grant himself was greatly hobbled during his presidency because he refused to address the rampant corruption that gutted his administration. He deserves to be ranked as one of the worst presidents. His standing as a great general is more secure, yet can be questioned on many levels (Cold Harbor being one of them).

This is a well-written book. McFeely does a great job describing Grant's experiences in the Mexican War, his generalship during the Civil War, and his disappointing presidency. I would have liked to have seen more written about his attempt at a third term in 1880 and how it was denied him at the Republican National Convention, and also more about why his tomb is where it is.

[Christie Bane · Rating 3 out of 5]

If you are looking for the definitive Grant biography, one that does its best to give you every little detail of his life that has survived the 100+ years since he was president, this is your book. If you are looking for a quick overview of a moderately interesting president, this book will become a specter of dread as you become more and more certain that it's going to go on forever and you will never get through it.

This is not to say that Grant wasn't an interesting guy. He was, for sure. The most interesting thing about him was that he failed at SO MANY things before he succeeded at being a Civil War general. He failed at every business venture he started (and failed at more after his eight years in the White House). He was a completely unremarkable individual until his military service in the Civil War, which was how he rose to greatness.

Most people, if they know anything about President Grant, know either that he was an alcoholic or that his administration was primarily known for corruption. While he certainly got drunk sometimes, nothing in this exhaustively researched biography made me think that he was drunk all the time or that his drinking had any significant effect on the way he ran the country. The corruption is another matter. That happened all over the place in his administration, and involved some of his closest friends; however, he himself was never implicated in anything more serious than defending his friends who were clearly guilty.

Grant was president during a very difficult time in U.S. history -- the Reconstruction years. So he didn't do the best job with reconstruction -- well, who the hell would have? I personally don't believe there was a way for reconstruction to happen quickly and painlessly, and I also believe that Grant did as well as anyone could have when handed that giant mess.

Other things I didn't know about Grant:
*He once remarked that Venice would be a nice city, if they drained it. (Couldn't agree more.)
*He went on a world tour after he left the White House.
*He had a soft spot for Mexico. (Me too.)
*He was dying of throat cancer while he was writing his memoirs, and had to race to get them done before he could let go of life peacefully.

I would sum up this book thusly: Interesting President; biography much too dense for me (but can't say it wasn't well-researched).

[Steven Meyers · Rating 2 out of 5]

As compared to other biographies I've read, 'Grant' was a disappointment. Maybe it was the subject matter. The reserved Ulysses Grant was not a reservoir of colorful anecdotes. Also while the material is clearly presented the writing had no flair to it. Some may like the author's style but there were sections that practically put me to sleep. Mr. McFeely Pultizer-Prize winning biography was published in 1981. His pop psychology of what made Grant missed, I believe, more current knowledge about how the brain works. Because of our family's situation, I've become quite adept at picking out individuals who have high-functioning autism a.k.a. Asperger's. It almost certain based upon the traits depicted in Mr. McFeely's work that Ulysses Grant was one.

The biography has some interesting information but avoids getting into too much detail about General Grants Civil War battles. More time is spent during his presidential administration but, considering the rogue's gallery of corruption during his tenure, it also felt like the author skimmed over the eight years. Grant's life from his birth to the start of the Civil War covers a mere 75 pages in the paperback edition. Mr. McFeely's book covers the key points such as his involvement in the Mexican-American War, his attendance at West Point, the many failures as a businessman, his reputation as a binge drinker, the battles he fought during the Civil War, his actions towards Native Americans, Black Friday (1869), racism, the birth of the Ku Klux Klan, the Depression of 1873-1879, the Whiskey Ring, Reconstruction, and his iconic memoirs. Mr. McFeely covers the election of Grant's presidential successor but a more detailed and entertaining version can be found in Roy Morris Jr's 'Fraud of the Century: Rutherford B. Hayes, Samuel Tilden and the Stolen Election of 1876.'

On researching other Ulysses S. Grant biographies, more reviewers seemed pleased with other options such as 'American Ulysses' by Ronald C. White and 'Grant' by Jean Edward Smith. If you know little about Grant, as I did, it may be to your advantage to read one of the two mentioned in the previous sentence. I learned a lot about our 18th President from the biography but it felt incomplete.

[Joe Kramer · Rating 3 out of 5]

So, I finally finished this book on Ulysses S. Grant that I got for Christmas. Damn, who knew this would be such an exhaustive read. Needless to say this book was very, very, very thorough.

Here's what I learned...here's this guy U.S. Grant from Ohio, he goes to West Point, fights in the Spanish American War, fairly standard stuff – some interesting perspective on Mexico and our countries actions in that war.

Than he goes back home, to Galena, IL, where for at least ten years he fails at basically everything he does, makes all sorts of bad decisions, bad business deals, screws up a lot of stuff, has no money, etc.

Than the Civil War breaks out.

He's like; hell, I was a captain the last time we were at war I should be at least that again - if not more (it is the Civil War after all). So he goes down, gets made a captain again, but just because there are so many bad decision makers at the start of the war he keeps rising through the ranks... pretty soon he's a General, and the next thing you know this guy is leading the entire Union Army, sitting at the side of Abraham Lincoln - crazy.

All in all those years of screwing up made him a better judge of people, that and he was a very effective communicator when it came to issuing orders and working hard so he wind up being a pretty good General and an effective tactician.

Than for a couple of years he screws around in Washington (he's still head of the Army) overseeing a bunch of screwed up reconstruction policy. Than, basically because he won the war he gets elected President where he oversees a bunch of really screwed up Indian policy and hands out a bunch of crooked deals to his war buddies, which people hate.

Near the end of his life he goes on an around the world tour to places like Great Brittan and Japan, etc. Then, even as he's dying from smoking ten cigars a day he manages to pen one of the most prolific general/presidential biographies ever written, which saves his wife and family from bankruptcy upon its publication.

Now he’s the subject of a really bad riddle, on a bill that people are looking to break and a park in Chicago.

[David Vining · Rating 3 out of 5]

Traveling through American history by way of presidential biographies continues with Ulysses S. Grant. I chose Grant by William McFeely. I also bought Chernow's biography, but that shall come later.
As a strict chronicle of the events of Grant's life, the book feels perfectly serviceable. We get the future general and president from his youth through the Mexican-American War, his struggles as an independent man, his rise to power in the Civil War, his rise to the presidency, his struggles around his key initiatives, and finally his trip around the world and his life's sad denouement. The picture of the broad strokes of the man's life feel clear and detailed enough to satisfy me.
However, the book kind of fails when trying to delve into who Grant was as a man. McFeely goes into long suppositions about the Grant's thinking that are never supported by primary documents (of which he had plenty of access to), so I was left with the impression that McFeely was making up a lot of stuff. He starts the book with references to Freud, and it's obvious that he's using Freudian thought as a way to try and dig into who Grant was, since some technique must be used to sift through the material. My probably isn't with Freudianism itself (of which I have little opinion), but the fact that McFeely drops all primary sources for long periods of time in his most important sections. Why did Grant feel like it was necessary to sacrifice so many lives of his own men to win the Civil War? McFeely uses few resources to answer that directly, instead choosing to opine. Maybe there's documentation that supports his conclusions, but they're not presented in the book itself. No quotes from Grant saying what McFeely says he believed.
It gets much worse during Grant's presidency, and McFeely treats Grant like some sort of unknowable titan from thousands of years before instead of a man who had died a century before and actually wrote quite a bit about himself in his time.
Essentially, I found the analysis thin and unconvincing, while I found the details of Grant's life admirably assembled.

[Riley Lewis · Rating 2 out of 5]

One of the must cynical and negative biographies on Grant I’ve read. It seems to me the only thing McFeely liked about Grant were him painting Indians at West Point and hiking in Mexico after the war (both interesting stories I hadn’t heard in other Grant Bios). He is dismissive of Grant as a sneaky yet humble and self promoting General. While correctly rejecting the Lost Cause theory of the white supremacist confederacy he seems to support their view that Grant was a butcher. He also loves to highlight the corruption of his presidency which is legitimate but doesn’t accept the widely held view that he was naive and ignorant of the corruption. McFeely ignores any civil rights victories of the Grant administration including the 15th amendment and the fact that the entire country gave up on reconstruction and Grant did a better job than most anyone else would have at protecting the freedmen. Obviously I wish he would have done even more but Grant was a good man. McFeely is such a skeptic of the view that Grant was not a demigod but just a man and he wanted to create flaws which leads him to take weird asides and random unneeded commentary. He should have just admitted Grant was a good man. I think it’s clear I don’t like the book and I still love Grant despite his warts under McFeely’s magnifying glass.

[Brendan (History Nerds United) · Rating 1 out of 5]

This book absolutely enrages me.

U.S. Grant is one of the most complex characters in American history. A drunk, a hero, an amazing judge of character in military matters, but a horrible judge of character in business matters. He was gifted a slave, whom he freed while broke when he could have sold him. He was madly in love with his wife at a time when that wasn’t always the case.

The first person who would tell you Grant was an extremely flawed human would be Grant. And he did, in his own autobiography.

Then you have this hatchet job by William S. McFeely which somehow won the Pulitzer Prize. It is full of amateur pop psychology. He makes wild accusations about Grant based on nothing, as far as I can tell, because he never explains why he feels that way.

Contrast that with Ron Chernow who takes great pains to explain his point of view. When he says George Washington had a complex relationship with his mother, he supports it by referencing letters between the two and placing them in historical context. Chernow’s own biography of Grant delves into his shortcomings but proves them with facts.

Don’t read this book. Awards don’t guarantee quality.

[Jerry Landry · Rating 5 out of 5]

Though I didn't always agree with him or with his policies, I have to admit that at numerous times while reading this book, I would exclaim aloud, "Poor Grant!" In some ways, Grant seems like the original hard luck kid. Though ultimately a well-known figure in American history, Grant could also have easily ended up as barely a footnote if that in our national story. McFeely does an excellent job of taking the reader through Grant's life, providing a description of the times and events directly or indirectly affecting and affected by Grant. After finishing this biography, I found myself highly interested in learning more about Grant's administration and various characters who served in the Cabinet and as advisors to Grant. For better or worse, Grant's is certainly one of the liveliest of presidencies that I've read about thus far. I would definitely recommend this book to history scholars and students but also think that casual readers would get a great deal from this book and its examination of one of the most interesting "from obscurity to fame" stories in American history.

[Jason Adams · Rating 3 out of 5]

An author that dislikes their subject

Much has been made of William McFeely’s disdain for Ulysses S Grant. In particular the strange way he handles the charge of racism against his son Frederick. McFeely conflates a number of incidents to give the younger Grant a direct hand in the admonishment of one of the first black West Point cadets, a charge that does not survive scrutiny.
Throughout the work, McFeely uses language that belittles Grant often damning with faint praise. In addition, he spends most of these pages focusing on the less savory elements of Grant’s life. Hurrying through the days on campaign in order to focus on his failures. In his epilogue, McFeely states he is merely treating his subject as a man, but his prose clearly paints that man in an unsettling way.
On cannot help but compare to the more recent work of Chernow, who somehow captures both the failures and successes of this unique character. Reading through McFeely, you cannot help but be distracted by the condescending tone.

[Christine · Rating 3 out of 5]

I wanted to like Grant. Actually, before reading this book, I'm pretty sure that I did like him in a vague way. I knew only that he had been the savior of the Civil War, and that seemed like something we should be into. But then...it turns out....that he didn't actually get into the Civil War because he believed in the cause, but because he wanted a job because he sucked at everything else. Oh, and the fact the he pretty much didn't learn jack from being the world's awesomest general and instead his crappy presidency sort of ruined everything he did there. What's that about? He was more interested in being rich and "successful" than in being a good president, or even a good person, and it's kind of his fault that the Republican party doesn't care about anyone but getting the best for themselves. So yeah...not so much Grant.

The book is exhaustively researched and gives an excellent picture of Grant the man, not Grant the legend.

[Adam Gilchrest · Rating 1 out of 5]

I didn't finish. I read until the story about the donkey from Grants childhood, then the author makes some comments about how this experience had a massive impact on Grants life and it influenced how he thought of himself thereafter or something. It’s just pure conjecture. Obviously every historian has their own individual understanding of any given topic but there was just far too much psychoanalysis going on for me. With any history book, I like when I can tell the author is ATTEMPTING to give me their honest and unbiased view of what happened. There were times I felt like McFeely was describing his own inner turmoil and Grant was only the vehicle to bring his angst to our eyes. I’m being unfair. I just didn’t like his style and the addition of conjecture without any reasonable evidence to support weird claims.

[Matt · Rating 3 out of 5]

The author makes some interesting observations about Grant -- such as his need to be seen as a success -- but he doesn't know how to tell a story. There's no flow, just a jumble of observations that don't always connect. The transitions are so indirect that it takes a while for the reader to realize he's delving into a new subject. And for someone who led as dramatic a life as Grant did, there's absolutely no emotion in the writing. The author's prose is extremely dry.

[Sean Chick · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is not just the best Grant biography, but the best biography I have ever read. Sometimes McFeely falls into making opaque conclusions and psychological suggestions, but he avoids the the twin biographers trap of falling in love with or despising his subject. He remains fair, pointing out Grant's successes and strengths along with his failures and personality defects. It also helps that this book reads like a novel.

[Bryan · Rating 3 out of 5]

This biography of Ulysses Grant was mediocre at best. While it gave a good overview of his life, I never felt the connection that a better author could have made with any 'everyman' such as Grant. As an historical book, there should have been a great deal more reference to source material. Overall, I did learn some things, but reading this book seemed like drudgery rather than a joy.

[GRANT · Rating 3 out of 5]

My issue with this book is McFeely's heavy-handed, psychological analysis of the subject, his family, and associates. We know that good history or biography has the author's interpretations, but we get too much McFeely showing off and missing the essence of the subject.

[Stephen Morrissey · Rating 4 out of 5]

Ulysses S. Grant carries one of the most elastic legacies of any U.S. president or military chieftain. He is the mighty conqueror of Forts Henry and Donelson; the stoic wall at Shiloh; the determined victor of Vicksburg and Chattanooga; and the dogged pursuer of Robert E. lee from northern Virginia to Richmond to Appomattox. But he is also the "butcher," the man who presided over the terrible battles of Cold Harbor and Petersburg, who made 1864 and 1865 into bloody monuments to the effectiveness of total war. The tug-and-pull continues into the days of Grant's presidency: seen as either an inept tool of corrupt friends and toadies, or a defender of freedmens' rights in an era where Northerners increasingly wanted to forget about the South and its problems with integrating its society. Grant was, is and will likely remain a figure of both enormous praise and scorn.

McFeely's biography sits comfortably between the poles of Grant's elastic legacy. The book, devoted more to Grant's political instincts and career as a politician than as military leader, does not heap enormous praise on Grant. At times, McFeely makes Grant out to be a stuffed shirt: a vessel for the ideas of others, or a man possessing a simple, childlike determination to "finish the job." McFeely may be at his weakest in assigning Grant much of the butcher's bill for his march to Richmond, though he does make some allowance for the fact that Grant, unlike many contemporaries, understood that a battle fought today may save more lives than ten battles fought tomorrow.

McFeely paints Grant as much more of a seeker of power than merely a simple man who finds himself as president. Unlike Washington, Grant, in McFeely's telling, yearns for the applause and respect of the Eastern Establishment, the men and women who would not have paid a second of attention to the former drunk and failed businessman. As president, he not only seeks out such commendation, but relishes in it far too much, leaving behind the "ordinary American" mentality that would have served Grant well in his politicking.

As president, Grant racks up some not insignificant victories: a peaceful eight years; agreements with Great Britain to thwart future ill will; more of a defense of African American rights in the South than his predecessor Johnson (and maybe even Lincoln). Ultimately, though, Grant fails at halting corruption within his own house, and, much more significantly, promoting a Southern integrated society by sending in federal troops to protect the gains made on Civil War battlefields. One comes away from McFeely's book with a sense of Grant's goodness, but missed shots at greatness in many respects.

Grant's legacy remains elastic to this day. Ron Chernow's excellent biography, as well as recent evidence of separatist, far-right extremism against the government, may be reviving Grant's image more and more. Wherever the legacy lands in an era, it is right to say, as McFeely does, that Grant is quintessentially American, with all the glories, contradictions and failings that such a phrase speaks to.

[Christopher · Rating 3 out of 5]

So I just finished this 522 page work, so I feel as though I have lots to say about it; then again, where do I even start?

Well, as far as the historical writing and research goes, McFeely did an exhaustive study on the man. There can be no argument that he did not provide immense detail, and as a student of history, this is generally what I'm looking for. That being said, he certainly assumes that the reader has a fairly adequate understanding of economics, banking, and currency. I'm a fairly smart guy, but I have to admit, some of that was hard for me to follow.

I'm not sure I always like the psycho-history that McFeely includes. He clearly does not like the man, but I think that a lot of the facts and events can speak for themselves, without McFeely's little digs. (When Grant went on a world wide tour after leaving office in 1877 for instance, he planned on going to the top of Mount Vesuvius. When logistics didn't allow for this to happen, McFeely writes "once again, Grant didn't make it to the top.") Come on. Leave the watered down metaphors at the door and just provide the details and facts. The book was littered with these little slights.

That being said, I learned lots, and perhaps walked away being more confused about Grant than before I read it. McFeely's closing argument seems to be that, while Grant's story is remarkable in that he rose from nothing, had failure after failure after failure, but still managed to win the Civil War then become president, for this to happen is a danger to our republic, rather than a strength. Perhaps he is right, but I suppose I refuse to see it that way. To me, history is full of these stories.

But let's talk about Grant. Was he a great general? I say yes. He understood what was necessary to win, and he executed. Was he a drunk? Probably not. He liked to drink, and so do I. Was he a bad businessman? Absolutely. Did his decency and loyalty to friends end up being his greatest flaw? Definitely. But, he did take strides to help the freedmen. He did want national unity. He did want free trade. The man had vision. Unfortunately he seemed unable to lead and execute this vision while in the White House.

[Bud · Rating 5 out of 5]

You know you've read a great biography when you learn things about the subject - especially one you admired - that are bitterly disappointing to learn. William S. McFeely approaches Ulysses S. Grant with such honesty and impartiality that the reader is sure to learn many things about Grant that may alter their view of his legacy. Facts are difficult things, but they are essential to biographies, and this stunning, in-depth account of Grant's life is no exception.
Perhaps one of the best points of this book is that McFeely covers, in detail, Grant's time in the White House, whereas many other biographies of the 18th President focus more - if not exclusively - on his glory years during the Civil War. These political years are the years when Grant's character met some of its most difficult challenges, and too often, was not able to rise to meet them as he was when he was cloaked by the military at Vicksburg or Fort Donelson. His record on civil rights and Native American rights is shown to be sorely lacking, and it's clear Grant did not have the staunch beliefs in racial equality - or the desire to exercise them - that would have been a greatly beneficial asset to former slaves in the Reconstruction-era South.
Though William McFeely is not squeamish in discussing Grant's shortcomings, this biography is no hatchet job or hardbound rebuke. And despite covering the areas in life where Grant failed, this work also elaborates on his triumphs, things that forever embedded him in the lore of American glories - while at the same time emphasizing that Grant was very much human. A poor farmer, a terrible businessman, an even worse President, but a devoted patriot, a loving father and husband, an incredibly loyal friend, and a hero of his country. Grant was flawed, but he was human, and to that, all of us - shopkeeper, farmer, general, president, parent, spouse, whatever we are - can certainly relate.