The Art of Manliness - #368： The Courage and Resilience of Ulysses S. Grant

00:00:00.000 brett mckay here and welcome to another edition of the art of manliness podcast and before we

00:00:18.000 get started i'm going to do a little silicoe here so bear with me yesterday january 3rd

00:00:21.520 marked the 10-year anniversary of when i started theartofmanliness.com the very first article i

00:00:25.800 published was how to shave like your grandpa which is about safety razor shaving i know that's how a

00:00:29.600 lot of you discovered the site didn't think it was be my full-time job i was a second year law student

00:00:33.860 25 years old i thought i'd be an oil and gas attorney but here we are 10 years later been a

00:00:37.780 wild and crazy ride since then we've published some books based off the site started the podcast

00:00:42.020 which has grown into this this thing i never imagined it would grow into a lot of people to

00:00:45.920 thank to get where we are today first my wife my partner in crime in this thing kate thank you with

00:00:50.880 the editing the writing then just taking care of the administrative tasks also jeremy anderberg our

00:00:55.640 managing editor jack of all trades podcast producer and all the other people who've contributed

00:01:00.080 the art of manliness either via content or helping with the back and stuff thank you to all of you

00:01:05.080 guys and also thank you our audience there are readers podcast listeners thanks to you guys who've

00:01:10.700 been with us since the very beginning i know a lot of you and if i have to interact with you thank you

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00:01:27.840 support you've given us over the years and encouragement it really means a lot so uh

00:01:31.340 thank you and here's the 10 more so let's get started with today's show because it's a good

00:01:35.620 one i'm excited about ulysses s grant is a historical figure who's often portrayed in a

00:01:39.500 not so flattering light many americans know him as a drunk and a businessman who found himself

00:01:44.400 thrust into generalship during the civil war and led the union to victory not because of his

00:01:48.520 military genius but simply because he happened to be on the side that had more men and more

00:01:53.080 weapons the story then goes that grant parlayed his military success into a career in politics

00:01:57.400 where he led a failed presidential administration mired in corruption and later died penniless that's

00:02:02.360 the story you often hear about grant but my guest today argues that this common betrayal doesn't come

00:02:07.020 close to capturing the complexity of this american leader in fact if you look at grant more closely

00:02:11.720 you can find a shining example of courage resilience and quiet dignity my guest's name is ron churnow

00:02:17.080 and he's the author of several seminal best-selling biographies including ones on alexander

00:02:20.940 hamilton that's the one that that musical everyone's talking about is based on george

00:02:24.500 washington and john d rockefeller in his latest biography he's trained his lens on the life of

00:02:29.000 ulysses s grant ron and i began our discussion talking about grant's upbringing and how it

00:02:33.120 influences unflappable yet passive personality we then discuss the real extent of grant's alcoholism

00:02:37.960 and how it hurt him throughout his career and how he managed it throughout his life ron then

00:02:41.400 explains how someone who had such a passive and tender personality developed an aggressive new

00:02:45.580 military strategy that would serve as a template for modern warfare from there we look at the

00:02:49.500 lessons that can be learned from the way grant handled lead surrender apomattox courthouse and

00:02:53.220 reconstruction we then discuss grant's presidency including whether grant was the blame for the

00:02:57.440 corruption in his administration and the oft overlooked successes he had while president and

00:03:01.620 we end our conversation with the argument that grant's quiet dignified professionalism is a much

00:03:06.080 needed example in today's flashy and overly self-promotional world really great show after the show's over

00:03:10.980 check out the show notes at aom.is slash grant

00:03:13.760 all right ron churnow welcome to the show it's a pleasure to be here with you brett so you have

00:03:25.100 written some of the most influential biographies in the 20th and 21st century of course there's

00:03:29.680 hamilton which was adapted into the hit broadway musical biography about washington john d rockefeller

00:03:36.020 and your latest is about general ulysses s grant my first question is a two-parter first generally

00:03:43.020 how do you decide which figures you're going to spend i imagine years researching and writing about

00:03:49.040 yeah i now spend about five or six years you know per book and i always say that for a biographer

00:03:55.560 there's no more important question than the choice of subject because if you choose the wrong person

00:04:02.360 nothing can go right if you choose the right person nothing can go wrong it gets a little bit

00:04:07.400 like marriage in that uh in that respect and i think that i've been very very lucky

00:04:11.080 in the people that i've chosen and one of the things that i look for i'm looking for more than

00:04:16.700 just telling an interesting yarn although i hope the person has had a fascinating life but i've kind

00:04:21.620 of been looking for the people whom i felt were creating basic building blocks of american politics

00:04:28.680 and business and society and where i felt that their story was also uh the perfect vehicle for

00:04:36.620 telling the story of an entire period of american history so that this is a history lesson for the

00:04:43.820 readers but i hope that it's so entertaining that they don't notice that as they're absorbing all of

00:04:49.120 this information and why grant this time well grant you know i had i always had a fantasy about

00:04:55.660 doing a big sweeping dramatic saga of the civil war and reconstruction and grant is the figure

00:05:03.440 who really unites those two periods had abraham lincoln lived he would have been the uh the figure

00:05:08.260 but grant is right in the center of everything happening in both the civil war and reconstruction

00:05:12.780 and i felt that while americans tend to know a lot about the civil war and sometimes in extraordinary

00:05:19.160 detail they knew little or nothing about reconstruction and if you know everything about the civil war

00:05:24.340 and nothing about reconstruction you have as it were walked out in the middle of the drama

00:05:29.380 because the north wins the war militarily but one could probably argue that the south then wins the war

00:05:36.180 politically afterwards and so grant was a very very important figure in terms of giving me that lens

00:05:42.540 through which to look at all of these events well and despite being such a central figure in both the

00:05:48.120 civil war and reconstruction grant often gets low overlooked as a president even sometimes a

00:05:55.020 military commander a lot of the praise is given to some of the southern because they're oh they

00:05:59.280 they were the best at you know at west point like general lee why do you think that is well you know

00:06:04.160 um one thing i should have mentioned in terms of how i choose subjects is i have a contrarian streak

00:06:09.360 in my nature so i love nothing more than to take a figure whom i feel has been forgotten or neglected

00:06:14.840 or misunderstood in some way i did this with hamilton people forget now that the musical is such a

00:06:20.100 sensation when i started working on hamilton in 1998 people had forgotten who he was and he was

00:06:25.940 fading into obscurity and i felt that with grant grant had been one of the major americans of the second

00:06:32.820 half of the 19th century probably second only to to lincoln you just have to look at the size of

00:06:38.400 grant's tomb which is the largest mausoleum in north america to realize you know how important he was

00:06:44.340 considered at the time so how did that kind of get lost over the the years well i think what

00:06:49.880 happened after the the civil war that the south badly battered and defeated in an attempt to

00:06:56.680 restore its pride a school of thought of historians and confederate generals and politicians started

00:07:03.080 called the the lost cause which really began in many ways to rewrite the story of the of the civil war

00:07:10.020 instead of the civil war being caused by slavery they said the war had been caused by states rights

00:07:15.840 and they really kind of wrapped the confederacy in a rather romantic aura so that robert e lee was

00:07:23.200 considered not only the great general but a perfect and aristocratic figure as well and as part of that

00:07:30.500 glorification of lee there was a corresponding denigration of grant and then what happens after the civil war

00:07:37.480 when grant is after all is during his two terms as president he's president overseeing reconstruction

00:07:43.480 which much of the white south hated you know they really had a vested interest in running down his

00:07:51.440 presidency which did have a lot of scandals that was not an invention of you know southern historians

00:07:58.140 at all but i tried to show in the book that the scandals while they happened and they were

00:08:03.760 important were not nearly as important as other things that happened in grant's presidency that

00:08:09.840 have been forgotten such as his successful campaign to crush the kukvux clan which i think was one of

00:08:16.860 the most farsighted and courageous actions undertaken by any american president it was huge so let's get

00:08:24.940 into grant himself because this after reading this book i i fell in love with grant he was just an

00:08:30.100 interesting character had his demons that he fought but i think that made him stronger in the

00:08:35.040 process grant was known throughout his life for his unflappable cool temperament was that was that

00:08:42.160 something he had to consciously develop or was that just his genetics and due to his upbringing

00:08:46.660 it's a very good question but because he grows up in southwestern corner of ohio in a very strict

00:08:54.400 methodist household and he has these two completely dissimilar parents his father jesse was a kind of

00:09:01.940 arrogant pushing thrusting kind of character his mother hannah was very kind of prim and quiet and 0.99

00:09:09.220 pious and grant clearly seems to to imitate his mother in that respect now whether that was genetic or

00:09:17.420 whether that was an identification uh with her it's hard to say i wish that we could put ulysses on the

00:09:23.240 couch but we uh but we can't but one thing that we know both from his behavior as a child and his

00:09:28.160 behavior as adult is that he had an aversion to the kind of bragging in which his father engaged and so

00:09:37.200 if there was a genetic component to this modesty it was certainly something that was reinforced by his

00:09:44.360 constantly reacting against this father who was always pushing him forward and ulysses was always

00:09:51.940 pushing back and develops almost a kind of what we would call passive aggressive personality as a

00:09:58.220 child and i think it also created that stubbornness that he became known for you see that in terms of

00:10:04.140 his resisting his father rather stubbornly throughout his childhood well and that sort of passiveness

00:10:09.960 that's how he got his name ulysses s grant yes i mean that's kind of says it all because he was

00:10:16.600 really he was born hiram ulysses grant which saddled him with the very unfortunate initials of h ug or hug

00:10:23.820 well you can imagine the merciless teasing from the other boy so he dropped the hiram he became ulysses

00:10:30.500 grant and then what happened his father decided that he was going to go to west point ulysses didn't

00:10:36.560 decide that it was go his father decided for him and ulysses went reluctantly and when the local

00:10:41.540 congressman nominated grant for the academy he made a mistake and sent in the name as ulysses

00:10:47.220 s grant in that bureaucratic era stuck and grant in later years would when asked what the s stood

00:10:54.280 for would tell people it stood for absolutely nothing but it kind of was a statement about him

00:10:59.240 it has a symbolic quality that um this name that we know him by was something imposed on him

00:11:07.660 rather than something that he had fully chosen and another paradox with grant was he was

00:11:14.560 unflappable cool almost fearless i mean like we'll talk about in the war like bombs would be going off

00:11:20.180 by him he would just would ignore it but at the same time he had this aversion towards just death

00:11:25.420 like even even when he ate food like the meat had to be like charred to a charcoal briquette

00:11:31.080 yeah that's exactly right you know what happened when he was uh growing up in the small towns in

00:11:35.560 southwest uh ohio his father was a tanner and in the main town of his boyhood georgetown uh the

00:11:42.040 tannery was directly across the street from their two-story house and so the fumes from the tannery

00:11:47.080 would waft into ulysses second floor bedroom and he found it revolting there was nothing that he hated

00:11:53.840 more than working in the tannery not only because the odors there would be rats running around it was a

00:11:59.060 very vile atmosphere and this left him with a permanent squeamishness so that for the rest of

00:12:06.180 his life he could never eat meat swimming in its own blood or juices every meat would have to be

00:12:12.400 burned to a crisp he said he could never you know eat the flesh of anything that walked into two legs he

00:12:18.280 was extraordinarily finicky about food and those were kind of childhood aversions that he never

00:12:25.460 overcame kind of funny for a man who was derided as this filthy butcher that he was really so squeamish

00:12:33.340 that's interesting let's talk about grant he goes to west point uh what was he like as a cadet

00:12:38.480 at west point well you know it's often said that he that he was a disaster he was really i would say

00:12:44.380 lackluster he graduated in the middle of his class 21 in the class of 39 he didn't distinguish himself

00:12:52.000 in terms of tactics or artillery or anything like that his best subject was was math in fact it's

00:12:58.220 very funny that his highest ambition when he graduated from the academy was to be an assistant

00:13:03.240 math professor there not a full math professor an assistant math professor that was the height of his

00:13:08.500 ambition but one quality that really stood out to me when i was examining his years at west point was

00:13:15.180 that the other cadets respected his quiet judgment so people would come to him to arbitrate disputes and

00:13:25.040 that's kind of where i begin to see the military leader this the person who was the calm center of

00:13:30.820 the storm someone who is known for his fairness for almost a kind of judicial temperament and you see

00:13:38.400 the way that the other cadets respected him not because i mean there are certain boys who are respected

00:13:44.000 because they're very charismatic or others because they're you know they're great athletes are very dynamic

00:13:48.260 that was not the case with grant it was sort of these quieter virtues that people picked up on and that

00:13:53.980 really anticipates the way that his men reacted to him there was no kind of flash and strut

00:14:00.340 about grant as a general it was just quiet competence and people respected his sense of honesty and a sense of

00:14:08.120 fairness so after he graduated from west point he went to go serve in the mexican-american war what was

00:14:14.700 his position there what did he do well that you know that experience this kind of for four years

00:14:19.300 he's down in texas louisiana and then mexico during the mexican war and it was extremely important

00:14:25.060 to his training as a general because he was the quartermaster let me say a couple of things

00:14:30.140 that being the quartermaster quartermaster is the person in other words who's coming up with

00:14:33.580 all the provisions and supplies and so this is perfect training because he becomes a master of

00:14:40.700 the logistics of moving you know supplies to the troops and when it comes to the civil war

00:14:46.620 he's going to be overseeing armies kind of across the 1500 mile area so kind of the movement of troops

00:14:54.220 and materiel and the mastery of supplies is going to be a very important component of his success as a

00:15:01.880 general so that's one thing the other thing that i loved kind of researching when he's actually in

00:15:06.880 the mexican war itself was that as the quartermaster he was not obligated to be in any combat that is

00:15:15.300 he had a position behind the lines which he had chosen to take it he could have avoided any danger but he

00:15:21.280 voluntarily chose to be in combat in every single battle so this is true true bravery and there

00:15:30.440 there were moments that he did things that were extraordinarily daring at one point they were low

00:15:35.540 on ammunition and he got on you know horseback in this town and he kind of rode along the side of

00:15:43.060 the horse kind of his body slung on the side of the horse and so the horse is kind of dashing

00:15:48.420 across these intersections where it's being fired at by the the mexicans and grant almost kind of like a 1.00

00:15:54.420 rodeo you know rider is on the other the far side of the horse you know sort of grabbing onto the top

00:16:01.880 of the saddle and so i think it shows his bravery and it also develops this nuts and bolts knowledge

00:16:09.380 of the way that an army works so grant was really someone who knew the army from the top to the bottom

00:16:16.280 and did he have any interactions with any of the confederate soldiers and how did that help him

00:16:21.900 later on during the war it was absolutely important because you know what's interesting for anyone who's

00:16:27.260 read about the civil war you read about the uh the mexican war and the entire it's the same cast of

00:16:32.200 characters um uh the only difference being a same cast of characters both union and confederate generals

00:16:38.800 they all you know had their first military experience in the mexican war the only difference being the

00:16:44.760 chief generals are people like winfield scott and zachary taylor who were not well winfield scott was

00:16:49.880 involved at the very beginning of the civil war but not for long but you know people would be the

00:16:54.580 significant union and confederate generals in the mexican war you know their kind of rank of captain

00:16:59.900 major grant is gets to know robert lee lee lee was already a major so lee was a little bit older and

00:17:08.180 and and higher up and already doing very very impressive things but i think that that experience was

00:17:14.160 absolutely crucial for grant because he had a superb memory and he had like an inventory of all of these

00:17:21.520 generals who would later face him and so during the war he would repeatedly make reference to having

00:17:28.800 known these confederate generals during the mexican war and that he knew their strengths and weaknesses

00:17:35.240 and there were quite a number of battles where his sense particularly in certain cases his sense of the

00:17:41.960 perceived incompetence of confederate generals made him more sure of himself and certainly more

00:17:48.960 aggressive so it was a very important experience but i was struck by grant was you know people often

00:17:55.200 complain about oh like this year at thanksgiving everyone's like don't talk about politics at

00:17:59.020 thanksgiving but like grant like his best friend his best man at his wedding was general longstreet

00:18:04.560 you know his father was an ardent democrat which at the time they were pro-slavery how did grant manage

00:18:12.180 that those those divisions those schisms politically in his personal life well it's a very good question

00:18:18.340 you know because grant is fighting long for the firing for on fort sumter grant is fighting his own

00:18:23.620 private civil war he's born into an abolitionist strongly abolitionist family in ohio he marries into a

00:18:32.760 slave owning family in missouri and he's caught in a crossfire between on the one hand this overbearing

00:18:38.920 abolition abolitionist father and this no less overbearing slave owning father-in-law and i think

00:18:46.380 that and grandpa's own admission you know did not start out as a raving abolitionist after all he did

00:18:51.580 marry into a slave owning family but i think that it gave grant an understanding of the culture of both

00:18:58.500 north and south i think that one can plausibly argue that you know his behavior at appomattox

00:19:05.360 courthouse where when lee surrenders grant is very magnanimous that he was someone who understood

00:19:11.860 the psychology of the south as well as the north and may have come from the fact that in his personal

00:19:18.980 life he had for many years by the time of the war had straddled that north south you know free labor

00:19:25.660 slave labor divide so in a way he was the perfect person for that moment so grant had a you know i

00:19:33.480 would say it wasn't lackluster but just nothing nothing outstanding about his military in the mexican

00:19:38.660 war after the mexican war he becomes a civilian and tries to do put his hand in business but that didn't

00:19:44.480 go very well for him yeah i mean you know first he's posted he still is in the regular army he's posted

00:19:50.260 to a series of frontier garrisons where he's kind of lonely and depressed and he starts drinking he

00:19:56.040 can't be with his wife and children because he can't afford it he's drummed out of the army in 1854

00:20:02.680 in a drinking episode and then he returns to st louis he and his wife julia are on property that they

00:20:09.040 had received as a wedding gift from colonel dent grant's slave owning father-in-law grant really makes

00:20:15.060 he tries to get tries to make a go of it at farming but pales and not for lack of hard work he's reduced

00:20:22.220 by around 1857 he's reduced to selling firewood on street corners in st louis when one of his old army

00:20:30.600 buddies runs into him and grant looks all you know disheveled and depressed and he's aghast and he says grant

00:20:38.060 what are you doing and grant says i'm trying to settle the problem of poverty and that and that christmas

00:20:44.300 grant has to pawn his watch in order to buy gifts for his family so he's really hitting bottom

00:20:50.820 at that uh point and grant was never never lucky in in business before the war yeah well he wasn't

00:21:00.880 lucky afterwards either we'll talk about that but not me exactly yeah yeah well let's talk about as you

00:21:04.820 brought up his alcoholism uh that's something he's known for that he was just a drunk and but what was

00:21:11.240 his relationship with alcohol really like were the rumors overblown or did he really have a problem

00:21:15.920 with alcohol well you know a number of recent uh biographies admiring biographies of grant of

00:21:21.840 you know the the reputation for drinking you know was all overblown and those were stories

00:21:26.860 invented by malicious rival generals during the the war i i found you know that i detailed i researched

00:21:34.360 this in great detail that grant was a genuine alcoholic he had all the earmarks of an alcoholic by his own

00:21:40.320 admission he couldn't take just one drink it became then a second a third and a fourth

00:21:45.220 also by everyone's description even a single glass of alcohol he would begin to slur his words and

00:21:52.780 stumble about and he would undergo this personality change from a very repressed character to a very

00:21:58.440 jovial character i think that the reason there's been so much confusion on this issue

00:22:03.780 because i discovered that grant had a definite pattern of drinking he was a periodic drinker he was a

00:22:09.000 binge drinker he could go for even two or three months without touching a drop of alcohol only to

00:22:15.500 have a two or three day bender and what i discovered he never drank on the eve of a battle certainly never

00:22:20.220 drank during battle but he had enough control over the problem that after big battle when the tension

00:22:25.900 was off he would then make a side trip to another town where his soldiers could not see him and then he

00:22:32.840 would indulge and according to sherman he could come back smelling fresh as a rose you know from this so

00:22:40.540 that there were a lot of people who worked very very closely with him you know who and well honestly

00:22:44.280 said i never told him some touch touch a drop of liquor and i discovered why because he had enough

00:22:50.640 control that they did not see him you know in these episodes so it might have been like a psychological

00:22:56.800 release because the guy was super buttoned up right very buttoned yeah i mean it's a combination of

00:23:02.440 someone you're absolutely right someone who on the one hand was very tightly buttoned up and on the other

00:23:07.720 hand is carrying unbearable pressure i mean it's kind of more than a figure of speech to say that grant

00:23:14.700 was carrying the weight of the nation on his shoulders particularly the other you know union general so many of

00:23:20.760 them proved incompetent that it was it was all up to to grant and before lincoln brought grant east in

00:23:29.200 march 1864 you know the eastern in the virginia theater of the war grant had been you know preceded by

00:23:35.640 about five or six miserable failures as as generals so he was facing tremendous pressure and remember

00:23:44.540 these you know these civil war battles were gigantic and bloody it could be as many as uh

00:23:50.460 hundred hundred fifty thousand men uh going into um to battle the casualties could run up into the

00:23:57.900 thousands or even tens of thousands in uh certain uh cases and grant said later in the war because

00:24:03.900 people were impressed during battle he would kind of fire off these orders but grant you know after

00:24:09.000 the war talked about the fact that he knew that every order he gave was going to however you know

00:24:14.680 successful it was was going to lead to the deaths of hundreds or thousands of

00:24:20.040 men and you know how inwardly paralyzing that could feel so i can completely understand why

00:24:26.800 someone with his drinking history or even someone not with his drinking history would crave the release

00:24:33.020 of that tension periodically so as you said you mentioned when the civil war started the union

00:24:39.740 was that they were actually having a hard time against the confederacy despite outmanning and out

00:24:44.860 arming them what what did grant do different from the generals that were in charge at the beginning

00:24:50.160 that allowed him to start having these victories yeah it's a you know it's a it's a very very good

00:24:58.340 question because i think that well first of all because of grant's pre-war failures i think that

00:25:03.660 he becomes very early in the war a colonel and a brigandier general and within 10 months he's uh

00:25:09.960 10 12 months he's major general and so i think that grant because it was pre-war failure he has

00:25:15.200 nothing to lose and everything to to gain you know in this in this war just from a personal

00:25:20.760 standpoint and he is i mean he shows speed flexibility daring he is aggressive and he's confident in his

00:25:30.240 aggression let me just give you a few things that william tecumseh sherman said about grant of

00:25:35.700 chris sherman was grant's chief commander and knew him best he talked about grant's simple faith

00:25:42.540 in success he said i can liken it to nothing other than a christian's faith in his savior that grant

00:25:48.740 always believed that he was going to win and that this gave him confidence and gave him the confidence

00:25:54.620 to be aggressive sherman also said that gave him the confidence there was always a moment in every battle

00:26:00.420 he said where the outcome seemed to be hanging in the balance where the commander on either side who

00:26:06.080 had the confidence to take the offensive you know would win and grant was always that person

00:26:11.500 and sherman said that grant seemed to know he used the word divine the hour who went to kind of you know

00:26:17.980 strike back at the enemy and so you would think that this might be a trade common to generals it was not

00:26:25.340 there were many generals particularly in the union army uh in the east they were whining they were

00:26:31.140 procrastinating they just wanted to drill and train you know and equip their army but not lead them into

00:26:37.180 battle they always felt that the more you know the more training they had the better they were going

00:26:43.180 to be grant had a very different attitude because grant realized that every day every week that went by

00:26:49.000 of his training his own armies that the enemy was simultaneously strengthening you know their

00:26:56.040 armies and so the delay did not necessarily work in your favor you're not the only one you know who

00:27:01.700 was reinforcing your army so there are kind of a lot of you know different things i think also

00:27:07.000 you know we get into a different kind of discussion in terms of when grant becomes general in chief

00:27:12.320 in march 1864 you know and there i think the answer uh is a few things number one he decides that

00:27:18.940 all of the various union armies have been operating in separate theaters of war independently of each

00:27:25.260 other he decides that he's going to coordinate them and kind of simultaneously launch armies over

00:27:31.640 1500 mile area so he's really supervising four distinct armies at the same time he can do that

00:27:38.440 couldn't have been done any previous where he could do that because of the telegraph and the railroad

00:27:43.500 and again very very important his mastery of logistics goes back to what we were talking about

00:27:49.380 before about grant as quartermaster sherman said i was contrasting lee and grant sherman said lee would

00:27:56.540 attack the front porch grant would attack the bedroom and the kitchen i'm not sure what sherman meant

00:28:03.200 about the bedroom but i know what he meant about the kitchen which they would cut off your food supply so 0.75

00:28:08.540 that when he has during the last year of the war he has lee pinned down in richmond and petersburg in

00:28:14.000 virginia lee's army is being fed by five railroads in one canal and grant systematically cuts off

00:28:20.700 all five of the railroads and the canal you know starving lee out and then lee is finally forced to

00:28:27.800 give up richmond and petersburg and he flees out to appomattox courthouse where grant and sheridan et al

00:28:35.900 uh surround lee's army and capture it and effectively end the war so he's in a lot of ways grant introduced

00:28:43.300 modern warfare and that we're you know we see today absolutely modern modern warfare yeah because he's

00:28:48.700 he's exploiting the technology of warfare and interestingly enough by the time he became general

00:28:53.780 in chief in 1864 a lot of grant's conclusions had become lincoln's conclusions as well the north had

00:29:00.760 superiority in manpower and manufacturing but it would only really work if there were simultaneous

00:29:10.420 attacks along a very kind of long front because what had been happening before that since the south

00:29:16.500 had a smaller population was that if one place was attacked by the union army you know confederate

00:29:22.240 army would then kind of rush all these reinforcements there then there was another attack then they would

00:29:27.000 rush the reinforcements there but grant realizes that if you you know attack both of those places

00:29:33.180 simultaneously neither can reinforce the other and then suddenly the south would begin to feel

00:29:39.360 the weakness that it had in terms of population and manufacturing ability so he was a very he was a

00:29:47.680 very great strategist and i think the image of him just as a you know but journey through you know

00:29:52.640 tens of thousands of young men against the enemy it doesn't hold up because if you look at uh virginia

00:29:59.080 going back to urban um mcdowell and um george mcclellan there'd been joe hooker ambrose burnside george

00:30:09.140 gordon mead who am i leaving out john pope they had the same advantage in terms of northern population

00:30:14.580 manufacturing and they had not been able to defeat the confederate army early in virginia it was grant

00:30:21.300 who was able to to do that so something more was going on than simple you know northern superiority

00:30:27.720 and manpower and materiel so we you mentioned earlier grant's being magnanimous when lee surrendered

00:30:35.500 it was unconditional but he he still allowed lee and the confederate soldiers to maintain some dignity

00:30:41.820 and honor in the process how how did lee and and the south in general respond to grant's magnanimity

00:30:48.000 oh very positively you know grant allowed the confederate soldiers to keep their horses and

00:30:53.300 mules he allowed the officers to keep their firearms the confederate army was really starving at that

00:30:58.300 point he issued 25 000 rations and most importantly he did not allow his men to

00:31:03.100 gloat or even celebrate in any way he refused he refused to enter richmond after the fall of richmond

00:31:11.460 even though it was the capital of the confederacy he said to his wife julia he said defeat is bitter

00:31:15.720 enough for these people without my kind of throwing it in their their face he was really very very high

00:31:21.340 minded and so he became you know at least briefly heroic in the south for his generosity because he had

00:31:29.580 been you know kind of bogeyman of the south before then and then people saw how you know gracious he

00:31:35.380 could be in um in victory it didn't it didn't last long and not because of grant but because of the

00:31:42.440 situation that you know developed in the south as blacks were given citizenship and under the 13th

00:31:49.080 amendment equal rights under the 14th and then voting rights under the 15th which then provoke a very

00:31:54.920 violent uh backlash in the white south so let's talk about his presidency did he really want to be

00:32:01.220 president or was this another instance of grant passively being carried into something against his

00:32:07.360 will i think it was a little bit of both i think that grant was always more ambitious than he cared

00:32:15.020 to admit after all you know sherman was constantly warning him sherman thought the ways of washington

00:32:20.580 were evil and always you know it was always warning grant not to go to washington not to be drawn into

00:32:27.880 the political world so this was something that grant did willingly i think he also realized that his

00:32:32.960 political attractiveness was greater if he seemed to be kind of the bashful modest hero which had you know

00:32:39.060 large element of reality to it so grant just kind of swept along but grant has a way of sort of being

00:32:45.340 there to be swept along in a way that shows he is very much in sympathy with what is happening with him

00:32:54.220 he was he was the great hero of the uh of the war so he occupied this uh special place but i think that's

00:33:00.040 something that he he wanted and this happens with all presidents once in office you know they get a

00:33:05.520 taste of power they get accustomed to you know being in in the white house and they're all very

00:33:11.240 reluctant to to give it up what was his uh leadership style as president he kind of carry try to carry over

00:33:17.180 that military style leadership or did was he able to adapt yeah it's an interesting story particularly

00:33:22.940 since we have you know president who also had never been elected to office before although grant had much

00:33:27.840 more experience in the ways of washington because he'd been general in chief he was general in chief

00:33:33.440 you know in the war department in washington after the war for four years he was even acting secretary

00:33:38.360 of war for a time so he wasn't as much of a stranger as let's say trump is to the white house but still he

00:33:45.420 made a lot of mistakes by his own admission because his style during the wars commander had been very

00:33:50.680 very secretive and kind of intuitive and uh impulsive and so but he doesn't do it first

00:33:57.300 to his later regret he doesn't really consult people enough he doesn't bet his appointees he makes a lot

00:34:04.380 of mistakes in terms of appointing uh people but i think that there is a learning curve and he certainly

00:34:10.280 does better as time goes on but i think that you know one clear weakness of his presidency

00:34:16.200 is in the appointment area although there were some really outstanding people whom he picked

00:34:22.660 hamilton fish who served all eight years as secretary of state is i think one of the really great

00:34:27.260 secretary of states in american history amos ackerman who uh for a time is his attorney general and

00:34:33.800 from georgia and uh brings 3 000 indictments against the ku klux klan and crushes the

00:34:40.080 the klan in the south and there were other examples of really you know major achievements by his

00:34:45.520 appointees so it was not as is sometimes you know caricature that this was just completely you

00:34:52.440 know crony ridden administrational that there was an element of of that but as i was saying earlier

00:34:58.440 it's not the whole story of his presidency and as a result you know in 1948 historian arthur schlesinger

00:35:06.780 jr did a poll of american presidential historians and they ranked grant second from the bottom they said

00:35:13.180 that only warren harding of the early 1920s was was worse the most recent poll grant is written to

00:35:19.840 number 22 which puts him exactly at the midway point and i think that it's going to rise i i you know i

00:35:26.460 don't think that he's a great president of the caliber of washington or lincoln but i do think that

00:35:33.140 he's a major major president even despite the uh the flaws in his administration so let's talk about

00:35:39.040 some of his successes as president because we talk about the corruption and i think you make a good

00:35:42.880 point in the book that if if it was another person besides grant there probably would have been

00:35:47.540 corruption anyways because it was the gilded age government had expanded etc yeah it was a corrupt

00:35:53.300 era and also there'd been enormous expansion in the federal government you know because of the the war

00:35:58.000 there were numberless opportunities for graft and god knows people took advantage of it there'd been a lot

00:36:03.660 corruption in the previous administration of india johnson there'd been a lot of corruption under

00:36:07.860 abraham lincoln as as well but you know the government federal government greatly expanded after the

00:36:14.640 the war enormous amount of corruption uh going on washington also state and local um level and you

00:36:20.380 know grant you know rightly or wrongly becomes associated with that i i'd say wrongly to the extent that

00:36:27.080 grant himself was not personally corrupt he never condoned the corruption in fact he quite rigorously

00:36:33.440 prosecuted the corruption most of the cases but as happens when something is on your watch you get

00:36:40.860 stuck with it and then there is one case it's so-called whiskey ring investigation where whiskey

00:36:45.220 brewers were cheating the government on revenues they owed and one of the confederates of this 1.00

00:36:51.420 conspiracy was a man named orville babcock who'd worked for grant for 14 years he was effectively

00:36:57.020 as chief of staff and grant is completely blind to how unscrupulous this guy is to the point where

00:37:04.940 a major mistake grant um offers to sit for a deposition in babcock's behalf and it's taken and babcock is

00:37:16.540 acquitted i mean that's kind of the place where grant clearly crosses the line but even even there you

00:37:23.720 know he ended up bringing the administration brought 350 indictments against the um the whiskey ring and

00:37:31.020 so grant would prosecute in fact he'd said early in that investigation he made this famous statement

00:37:35.520 that no guilty man escape so grant's record with scandals is not you know a great one but there are some

00:37:43.520 redeeming features there what do you think his successes are like what do you think people should

00:37:48.500 know about his presidency well you know i think that in terms of the issues lingering from the the

00:37:53.400 civil war there are successes so he feels you know the twin aims of the war preservation of the union

00:37:58.840 abolition of slavery and i think his great achievement is that he feels a personal responsibility

00:38:06.140 for safeguarding the four million african americans who'd been enslaved who are now not only free but are

00:38:14.100 full-fledged american citizens thousands of them were murdered in the south by the clan grant crushes the

00:38:21.440 clan i think that's the great achievement of his administration but there are others kind of less

00:38:27.820 known there's a major major dispute with england that could easily have led to war over something

00:38:33.260 called the alabama claims the alabama but it's a ship during the civil war outfitted in union shipyards

00:38:40.020 and it had preyed on union shipping throughout the war after the war the federal government wants kind

00:38:47.620 of major compensation from the british government for the raids and instead of going to war over the

00:38:54.220 issue grant and his secretary of state hamilton fish pioneer in something that's brand new they

00:39:01.140 submitted to international arbitration and not only does the united states get a lot of money

00:39:06.080 in the international arbitration wars avoided and they have established a new mode of dealing with

00:39:14.200 international uh conflict kind of major achievement uh grant takes really the first you know halting

00:39:20.300 steps he should have gone further but he takes the first halting steps towards uh civil service uh

00:39:26.200 reform makes major effort to clean up corruption on the indian reservations although the whole story 0.82

00:39:32.420 of what happens to native americans during grant's administration is not a pretty one at the end

00:39:38.060 even though you know grant's intentions were very good major major uh achievement that i was really

00:39:45.300 amazed that grant appoints hundreds and hundreds of blacks to uh public office including you know we

00:39:50.780 have a uh suddenly a black ambassador to to haiti and to liberia kind of first you know black diplomats

00:39:57.500 he appoints even though he had from the war had a reputation of being anti-semitic he appoints probably

00:40:04.000 more jews to public office than all the other 19th century presidents uh combined and even his first

00:40:10.560 uh commissioner of indian affairs uh elai park elai parker is a full-blooded seneca sachem indian and 0.62

00:40:18.300 so we talk about diversity now it seems to have been almost the one who invented it in fact

00:40:26.080 uh frederick douglas who was a regular visitor to the white house uh said during the 1872 election

00:40:31.700 said grant had been the firm wise vigilant and partial protector of my race and he

00:40:37.020 counted in one department alone grant had appointed 250 blacks to office so his appointment record was

00:40:46.040 really outstanding in terms of groups that had been excluded uh from federal jobs before what was

00:40:53.620 grant's life like after the presidency did he still still stoic and cool as ever or did he become more

00:40:59.740 expressive what what did he do in his later years well you know he did he did something very very

00:41:04.020 interesting he always had kind of wanderlust and so he did an around the world trip that lasted for

00:41:11.020 two years and uh four months he met with every head of state every king queen emperor president prime

00:41:17.760 minister you name it grant um met them and he really pioneers a brand new role for the post-presidency

00:41:24.920 because he is meeting with these heads of states and he's having serious political discussions

00:41:29.600 and he begins to engage in a certain freelance diplomacy actually uh arbitrates an offshore island

00:41:36.500 dispute between japan and china no ex-president had ever done anything like that we're much more

00:41:42.060 accustomed today of ex-presidents you know let's like going to the middle east to monitor elections

00:41:46.920 or things like that what when grant was doing these things it was completely unheard of and

00:41:51.860 grant had always been very very shy about public speaking i mean his typical speech was like a 60

00:41:56.640 second speech he would get up and make some jokes how he couldn't give a give a speech and then sit

00:42:01.740 down well he suddenly you know his first stop on the tours in england and liverpool manchester and

00:42:07.660 other places you know 100 200 000 people turn out grant suddenly is forced to make speeches and

00:42:13.640 turns out he's a very good speaker like everything he put his mind to you know he ended up doing it

00:42:18.880 well and enjoying it more so the round the world trip was a great triumph for him and it was widely

00:42:27.060 reported in the press what was going on americans felt very proud as he went around the world meeting

00:42:32.280 these heads of state and so you know his reputation keeps rising during the trip to the point when he

00:42:38.580 returns to the united states he decides that he's going to make a run to be nominated a third time by the

00:42:46.080 republican party in in chicago and he almost does it he loses rather narrowly to james uh garfield

00:42:55.700 but he very nearly got it and just as he experienced business failure early in his life he also had a

00:43:02.940 just a serious business setback later in his life oh god yeah i mean he was he was the victim of the

00:43:09.620 burning made up of his day again grants you know unbelievable naivete never deserts him so um

00:43:17.200 about three four years before he dies he enters into a partnership on wall street

00:43:21.660 with a young man named ferdinand ward who was lionized as the young napoleon of finance

00:43:29.000 grant imagined that thanks to ward's financial wizardry that he grant is worth several million

00:43:35.900 dollars to be many million dollars today um and then he wakes up one morning in 1884

00:43:42.980 and discovers that instead of being worth several million dollars he's worth exactly eighty dollars that

00:43:49.660 all the profits had been fictitious and um ward like bernie madoff had been running

00:43:55.620 a big ponzi scheme all the profits were fictitious around the same time grant is

00:44:02.020 diagnosed with cancer of the throat and tongue which is a very excruciating way to die and so he

00:44:08.280 had always said that he would never write his memoirs of the civil war he thought it was pretentious

00:44:13.620 but now he's afraid gee he's dying cancer when he dies he was afraid that his wife julia would be

00:44:19.880 left destitute so he agrees to write his memoirs and they become the great bestseller of the 19th

00:44:28.480 century and considered kind of the classic military memoir in american letters and and mark twain

00:44:34.920 was the publisher of that yeah kind of what mark twain finds out that grant was about to sign a public

00:44:40.880 contract with the century publishers twain finds out about this and finds out that the century people

00:44:48.280 have offered grant ten percent royalty which twain feels is criminal uh he goes to grant and says

00:44:55.780 that he will give grant to twenty percent royalty for seventy percent of the profits grant ends up

00:45:01.520 getting seventy percent of the profits and twain is not his twain is really his publisher twain said that

00:45:08.480 his involvement involved on relatively trivial matters of grammar and punctuation and the memoirs are so

00:45:16.940 brilliantly written that you know people to this day are convinced that mark twain must have been the ghostwriter

00:45:22.200 that surely ulysses s grant could not have written that but i went down to the uh library of congress when i was

00:45:28.000 doing the research and i demanded uh that i be allowed to look at every page of the manuscript and just about all of it

00:45:35.180 is indeed in grant's handwriting except at the very end you could see that there are some paragraphs

00:45:42.000 that grant had dictated and they're in the hands of grant's son or his stenographer but uh twain did not

00:45:49.500 write and frankly twain could no more have imitated grant's style than grant could have been

00:45:54.120 imitated uh twain style and granted always always prided himself on his writing he prided himself on

00:46:02.000 writing all his own wartime waters he prided on writing all his own speeches and papers as president so

00:46:07.860 for the people who knew him the literary triumph of the memoirs was not as great a surprise as it

00:46:15.420 might have been for the public in general and uh yeah you describe you know just as he stoically

00:46:21.400 faced battle and war like grant did this though he was in a lot of pain with his throat cancer and

00:46:25.680 there's a picture in the book of him sitting in a wicker chair bundled in a blanket and he's just

00:46:30.900 trying to i mean you can tell he's probably in a lot of pain but he knows he has to get this done

00:46:34.300 before he dies oh absolutely yeah because he's you know he's sitting there kind of all

00:46:37.540 with a will cap on his head and he has a scarf over his neck and people said the tumor bulging

00:46:43.860 outside of his neck you know is the size of a baseball or a grapefruit uh the man is in excruciating

00:46:49.680 pain uh he said that simply swallowing a glass of water uh the sensation was like swallowing a glass

00:46:57.260 of molten lead this is a gruesome way to to die and what he ended up doing his great bravery uh was

00:47:04.020 that he found that every time he drank a glass of water or he had any food that the pain would be

00:47:10.160 terrible and he would need to take painkillers opiates they would fog his brain so every day he

00:47:15.940 would try to go for four or five hours without eating or drinking anything just so that his mind

00:47:22.060 would be completely clear for the um the writing and he he managed um he read this during the final

00:47:28.900 year of his life in great pain knew he was dying uh and managed to produce a book it's more than 300

00:47:36.740 thousand words of sparkling prose so it's an extraordinary uh achievement and a lovely thing

00:47:45.660 about writing about grant and i hope for people reading the the book is that he just continues to

00:47:51.500 surprise you with what he's he's done sometimes he surprises you you know that he keeps on making

00:47:57.340 certain blunders uh over and over uh again but he does kind of keep growing into a much bigger

00:48:03.040 and richer figure uh throughout his life and and why do you think i mean what what remains compelling

00:48:10.320 about grant in our modern age so as you mentioned at one point he was listed as this you know near the

00:48:14.680 bottom of the presidents now he's kind of rising what what do you think is going on there i think

00:48:19.620 what's going on is i love a line that walt whitman said about grant he said nothing heroic and yet the

00:48:25.480 greatest hero and i think that what he meant by that was that um grant was the type of hero who

00:48:31.520 was not trying to be heroic he was just keeping his head down and in his quiet determined fashion

00:48:38.220 doing his patriotic duty and in the course of doing that he became uh heroic but he was not driven

00:48:45.660 as many great figures in history are he was not driven by lust for fame or power or fortune or

00:48:50.900 any of those things the fame the power of fortune those things were kind of a byproduct

00:48:56.220 of doing his military duty were doing his patriotic uh duty you know and this is kind of a sense of

00:49:02.600 uh honor and modesty and integrity and patriotism unfortunately is in very short supply you know

00:49:09.280 in the modern political um uh world which is kind of a you know world of salesmanship and self-promotion

00:49:15.220 you know uh all the the time we get it from the white house but it's not limited to to the white

00:49:21.120 house you know uh it all it's kind of the style of the world that we uh live in and so i think that

00:49:26.500 there's something very very compelling the story of ulysses s grant you know came from this a small

00:49:32.040 town modest understated man you know whose credo is essentially i'll let my deeds uh speak for

00:49:40.700 themselves i'm not going to be promoting myself all the time and he always time he was a young man

00:49:46.960 he wanted to be recognized for himself rather than his telling you how wonderful he was he wanted you

00:49:54.220 to see how wonderful he was and just let his um actions speak for themselves he was an antidote to

00:50:00.500 the the world of social media well um ron this has been a great conversation um thank you so much

00:50:06.740 for your time it's been an absolute pleasure oh my pleasure thank you so much for inviting me onto

00:50:11.260 your podcast my guest today was ron churnow he is the author of some of the most influential

00:50:16.000 biographies his latest is grant it's available on amazon.com and bookstores everywhere you can also

00:50:21.060 find our show notes at aom.is slash grant where you can find links to resources where you can delve

00:50:25.440 deeper into this topic well that wraps up another edition of the art of manliness podcast for more

00:50:36.180 manly tips and advice make sure to check out the art of manliness website at artofmanliness.com if

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The Art of Manliness - January 04, 2018

#368： The Courage and Resilience of Ulysses S. Grant

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