#368： The Courage and Resilience of Ulysses S. Grant
Episode Stats
Summary
General Ulysses S. Grant is a historical figure who is often portrayed in a not so flattering light. Many Americans know him as a drunk and a businessman who found himself thrust into generalship during the civil war and led the Union to victory not because of his military genius, but simply because he happened to be on the side that had more men and more weapons. The story then goes that Grant parlayed his military success into a career in politics where he led a failed presidential administration mired in corruption and later died penniless. That s the story you often hear about Grant. But my guest argues that this common betrayal doesn t come close to capturing the complexity of this American leader.
Transcript
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brett mckay here and welcome to another edition of the art of manliness podcast and before we
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get started i'm going to do a little silicoe here so bear with me yesterday january 3rd
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marked the 10-year anniversary of when i started theartofmanliness.com the very first article i
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published was how to shave like your grandpa which is about safety razor shaving i know that's how a
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lot of you discovered the site didn't think it was be my full-time job i was a second year law student
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25 years old i thought i'd be an oil and gas attorney but here we are 10 years later been a
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wild and crazy ride since then we've published some books based off the site started the podcast
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which has grown into this this thing i never imagined it would grow into a lot of people to
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thank to get where we are today first my wife my partner in crime in this thing kate thank you with
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the editing the writing then just taking care of the administrative tasks also jeremy anderberg our
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managing editor jack of all trades podcast producer and all the other people who've contributed
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the art of manliness either via content or helping with the back and stuff thank you to all of you
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guys and also thank you our audience there are readers podcast listeners thanks to you guys who've
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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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for sticking with us and thanks for all you joined us along the way there's you've got a million
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choices places to check and get content or read things so it means a lot to us that you've decided
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that we're one of those options one of those things you do also thanks for the letters of
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support you've given us over the years and encouragement it really means a lot so uh
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thank you and here's the 10 more so let's get started with today's show because it's a good
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one i'm excited about ulysses s grant is a historical figure who's often portrayed in a
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not so flattering light many americans know him as a drunk and a businessman who found himself
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thrust into generalship during the civil war and led the union to victory not because of his
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military genius but simply because he happened to be on the side that had more men and more
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weapons the story then goes that grant parlayed his military success into a career in politics
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where he led a failed presidential administration mired in corruption and later died penniless that's
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the story you often hear about grant but my guest today argues that this common betrayal doesn't come
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close to capturing the complexity of this american leader in fact if you look at grant more closely
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you can find a shining example of courage resilience and quiet dignity my guest's name is ron churnow
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and he's the author of several seminal best-selling biographies including ones on alexander
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hamilton that's the one that that musical everyone's talking about is based on george
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washington and john d rockefeller in his latest biography he's trained his lens on the life of
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ulysses s grant ron and i began our discussion talking about grant's upbringing and how it
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influences unflappable yet passive personality we then discuss the real extent of grant's alcoholism
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and how it hurt him throughout his career and how he managed it throughout his life ron then
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explains how someone who had such a passive and tender personality developed an aggressive new
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military strategy that would serve as a template for modern warfare from there we look at the
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lessons that can be learned from the way grant handled lead surrender apomattox courthouse and
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reconstruction we then discuss grant's presidency including whether grant was the blame for the
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corruption in his administration and the oft overlooked successes he had while president and
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we end our conversation with the argument that grant's quiet dignified professionalism is a much
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needed example in today's flashy and overly self-promotional world really great show after the show's over
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all right ron churnow welcome to the show it's a pleasure to be here with you brett so you have
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written some of the most influential biographies in the 20th and 21st century of course there's
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hamilton which was adapted into the hit broadway musical biography about washington john d rockefeller
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and your latest is about general ulysses s grant my first question is a two-parter first generally
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how do you decide which figures you're going to spend i imagine years researching and writing about
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yeah i now spend about five or six years you know per book and i always say that for a biographer
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there's no more important question than the choice of subject because if you choose the wrong person
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nothing can go right if you choose the right person nothing can go wrong it gets a little bit
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like marriage in that uh in that respect and i think that i've been very very lucky
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in the people that i've chosen and one of the things that i look for i'm looking for more than
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just telling an interesting yarn although i hope the person has had a fascinating life but i've kind
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of been looking for the people whom i felt were creating basic building blocks of american politics
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and business and society and where i felt that their story was also uh the perfect vehicle for
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telling the story of an entire period of american history so that this is a history lesson for the
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readers but i hope that it's so entertaining that they don't notice that as they're absorbing all of
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this information and why grant this time well grant you know i had i always had a fantasy about
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doing a big sweeping dramatic saga of the civil war and reconstruction and grant is the figure
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who really unites those two periods had abraham lincoln lived he would have been the uh the figure
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but grant is right in the center of everything happening in both the civil war and reconstruction
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and i felt that while americans tend to know a lot about the civil war and sometimes in extraordinary
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detail they knew little or nothing about reconstruction and if you know everything about the civil war
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and nothing about reconstruction you have as it were walked out in the middle of the drama
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because the north wins the war militarily but one could probably argue that the south then wins the war
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politically afterwards and so grant was a very very important figure in terms of giving me that lens
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through which to look at all of these events well and despite being such a central figure in both the
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civil war and reconstruction grant often gets low overlooked as a president even sometimes a
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military commander a lot of the praise is given to some of the southern because they're oh they
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they were the best at you know at west point like general lee why do you think that is well you know
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um one thing i should have mentioned in terms of how i choose subjects is i have a contrarian streak
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in my nature so i love nothing more than to take a figure whom i feel has been forgotten or neglected
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or misunderstood in some way i did this with hamilton people forget now that the musical is such a
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sensation when i started working on hamilton in 1998 people had forgotten who he was and he was
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fading into obscurity and i felt that with grant grant had been one of the major americans of the second
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half of the 19th century probably second only to to lincoln you just have to look at the size of
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grant's tomb which is the largest mausoleum in north america to realize you know how important he was
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considered at the time so how did that kind of get lost over the the years well i think what
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happened after the the civil war that the south badly battered and defeated in an attempt to
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restore its pride a school of thought of historians and confederate generals and politicians started
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called the the lost cause which really began in many ways to rewrite the story of the of the civil war
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instead of the civil war being caused by slavery they said the war had been caused by states rights
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and they really kind of wrapped the confederacy in a rather romantic aura so that robert e lee was
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considered not only the great general but a perfect and aristocratic figure as well and as part of that
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glorification of lee there was a corresponding denigration of grant and then what happens after the civil war
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when grant is after all is during his two terms as president he's president overseeing reconstruction
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which much of the white south hated you know they really had a vested interest in running down his
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presidency which did have a lot of scandals that was not an invention of you know southern historians
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at all but i tried to show in the book that the scandals while they happened and they were
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important were not nearly as important as other things that happened in grant's presidency that
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have been forgotten such as his successful campaign to crush the kukvux clan which i think was one of
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the most farsighted and courageous actions undertaken by any american president it was huge so let's get
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into grant himself because this after reading this book i i fell in love with grant he was just an
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interesting character had his demons that he fought but i think that made him stronger in the
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process grant was known throughout his life for his unflappable cool temperament was that was that
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something he had to consciously develop or was that just his genetics and due to his upbringing
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it's a very good question but because he grows up in southwestern corner of ohio in a very strict
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methodist household and he has these two completely dissimilar parents his father jesse was a kind of
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arrogant pushing thrusting kind of character his mother hannah was very kind of prim and quiet and
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pious and grant clearly seems to to imitate his mother in that respect now whether that was genetic or
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whether that was an identification uh with her it's hard to say i wish that we could put ulysses on the
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couch but we uh but we can't but one thing that we know both from his behavior as a child and his
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behavior as adult is that he had an aversion to the kind of bragging in which his father engaged and so
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if there was a genetic component to this modesty it was certainly something that was reinforced by his
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constantly reacting against this father who was always pushing him forward and ulysses was always
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pushing back and develops almost a kind of what we would call passive aggressive personality as a
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child and i think it also created that stubbornness that he became known for you see that in terms of
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his resisting his father rather stubbornly throughout his childhood well and that sort of passiveness
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that's how he got his name ulysses s grant yes i mean that's kind of says it all because he was
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really he was born hiram ulysses grant which saddled him with the very unfortunate initials of h ug or hug
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well you can imagine the merciless teasing from the other boy so he dropped the hiram he became ulysses
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grant and then what happened his father decided that he was going to go to west point ulysses didn't
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decide that it was go his father decided for him and ulysses went reluctantly and when the local
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congressman nominated grant for the academy he made a mistake and sent in the name as ulysses
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s grant in that bureaucratic era stuck and grant in later years would when asked what the s stood
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for would tell people it stood for absolutely nothing but it kind of was a statement about him
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it has a symbolic quality that um this name that we know him by was something imposed on him
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rather than something that he had fully chosen and another paradox with grant was he was
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unflappable cool almost fearless i mean like we'll talk about in the war like bombs would be going off
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by him he would just would ignore it but at the same time he had this aversion towards just death
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like even even when he ate food like the meat had to be like charred to a charcoal briquette
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yeah that's exactly right you know what happened when he was uh growing up in the small towns in
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southwest uh ohio his father was a tanner and in the main town of his boyhood georgetown uh the
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tannery was directly across the street from their two-story house and so the fumes from the tannery
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would waft into ulysses second floor bedroom and he found it revolting there was nothing that he hated
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more than working in the tannery not only because the odors there would be rats running around it was a
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very vile atmosphere and this left him with a permanent squeamishness so that for the rest of
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his life he could never eat meat swimming in its own blood or juices every meat would have to be
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burned to a crisp he said he could never you know eat the flesh of anything that walked into two legs he
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was extraordinarily finicky about food and those were kind of childhood aversions that he never
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overcame kind of funny for a man who was derided as this filthy butcher that he was really so squeamish
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that's interesting let's talk about grant he goes to west point uh what was he like as a cadet
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at west point well you know it's often said that he that he was a disaster he was really i would say
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lackluster he graduated in the middle of his class 21 in the class of 39 he didn't distinguish himself
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in terms of tactics or artillery or anything like that his best subject was was math in fact it's
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very funny that his highest ambition when he graduated from the academy was to be an assistant
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math professor there not a full math professor an assistant math professor that was the height of his
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ambition but one quality that really stood out to me when i was examining his years at west point was
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that the other cadets respected his quiet judgment so people would come to him to arbitrate disputes and
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that's kind of where i begin to see the military leader this the person who was the calm center of
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the storm someone who is known for his fairness for almost a kind of judicial temperament and you see
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the way that the other cadets respected him not because i mean there are certain boys who are respected
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because they're very charismatic or others because they're you know they're great athletes are very dynamic
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that was not the case with grant it was sort of these quieter virtues that people picked up on and that
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really anticipates the way that his men reacted to him there was no kind of flash and strut
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about grant as a general it was just quiet competence and people respected his sense of honesty and a sense of
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fairness so after he graduated from west point he went to go serve in the mexican-american war what was
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his position there what did he do well that you know that experience this kind of for four years
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he's down in texas louisiana and then mexico during the mexican war and it was extremely important
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to his training as a general because he was the quartermaster let me say a couple of things
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that being the quartermaster quartermaster is the person in other words who's coming up with
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all the provisions and supplies and so this is perfect training because he becomes a master of
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the logistics of moving you know supplies to the troops and when it comes to the civil war
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he's going to be overseeing armies kind of across the 1500 mile area so kind of the movement of troops
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and materiel and the mastery of supplies is going to be a very important component of his success as a
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general so that's one thing the other thing that i loved kind of researching when he's actually in
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the mexican war itself was that as the quartermaster he was not obligated to be in any combat that is
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he had a position behind the lines which he had chosen to take it he could have avoided any danger but he
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voluntarily chose to be in combat in every single battle so this is true true bravery and there
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there were moments that he did things that were extraordinarily daring at one point they were low
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on ammunition and he got on you know horseback in this town and he kind of rode along the side of
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the horse kind of his body slung on the side of the horse and so the horse is kind of dashing
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across these intersections where it's being fired at by the the mexicans and grant almost kind of like a
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rodeo you know rider is on the other the far side of the horse you know sort of grabbing onto the top
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of the saddle and so i think it shows his bravery and it also develops this nuts and bolts knowledge
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of the way that an army works so grant was really someone who knew the army from the top to the bottom
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and did he have any interactions with any of the confederate soldiers and how did that help him
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later on during the war it was absolutely important because you know what's interesting for anyone who's
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read about the civil war you read about the uh the mexican war and the entire it's the same cast of
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characters um uh the only difference being a same cast of characters both union and confederate generals
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they all you know had their first military experience in the mexican war the only difference being the
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chief generals are people like winfield scott and zachary taylor who were not well winfield scott was
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involved at the very beginning of the civil war but not for long but you know people would be the
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significant union and confederate generals in the mexican war you know their kind of rank of captain
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major grant is gets to know robert lee lee lee was already a major so lee was a little bit older and
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and and higher up and already doing very very impressive things but i think that that experience was
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absolutely crucial for grant because he had a superb memory and he had like an inventory of all of these
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generals who would later face him and so during the war he would repeatedly make reference to having
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known these confederate generals during the mexican war and that he knew their strengths and weaknesses
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and there were quite a number of battles where his sense particularly in certain cases his sense of the
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perceived incompetence of confederate generals made him more sure of himself and certainly more
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aggressive so it was a very important experience but i was struck by grant was you know people often
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complain about oh like this year at thanksgiving everyone's like don't talk about politics at
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thanksgiving but like grant like his best friend his best man at his wedding was general longstreet
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you know his father was an ardent democrat which at the time they were pro-slavery how did grant manage
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that those those divisions those schisms politically in his personal life well it's a very good question
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you know because grant is fighting long for the firing for on fort sumter grant is fighting his own
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private civil war he's born into an abolitionist strongly abolitionist family in ohio he marries into a
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slave owning family in missouri and he's caught in a crossfire between on the one hand this overbearing
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abolition abolitionist father and this no less overbearing slave owning father-in-law and i think
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that and grandpa's own admission you know did not start out as a raving abolitionist after all he did
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marry into a slave owning family but i think that it gave grant an understanding of the culture of both
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north and south i think that one can plausibly argue that you know his behavior at appomattox
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courthouse where when lee surrenders grant is very magnanimous that he was someone who understood
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the psychology of the south as well as the north and may have come from the fact that in his personal
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life he had for many years by the time of the war had straddled that north south you know free labor
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slave labor divide so in a way he was the perfect person for that moment so grant had a you know i
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would say it wasn't lackluster but just nothing nothing outstanding about his military in the mexican
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war after the mexican war he becomes a civilian and tries to do put his hand in business but that didn't
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go very well for him yeah i mean you know first he's posted he still is in the regular army he's posted
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to a series of frontier garrisons where he's kind of lonely and depressed and he starts drinking he
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can't be with his wife and children because he can't afford it he's drummed out of the army in 1854
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in a drinking episode and then he returns to st louis he and his wife julia are on property that they
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had received as a wedding gift from colonel dent grant's slave owning father-in-law grant really makes
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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
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by around 1857 he's reduced to selling firewood on street corners in st louis when one of his old army
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buddies runs into him and grant looks all you know disheveled and depressed and he's aghast and he says grant
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what are you doing and grant says i'm trying to settle the problem of poverty and that and that christmas
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grant has to pawn his watch in order to buy gifts for his family so he's really hitting bottom
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at that uh point and grant was never never lucky in in business before the war yeah well he wasn't
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lucky afterwards either we'll talk about that but not me exactly yeah yeah well let's talk about as you
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brought up his alcoholism uh that's something he's known for that he was just a drunk and but what was
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his relationship with alcohol really like were the rumors overblown or did he really have a problem
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with alcohol well you know a number of recent uh biographies admiring biographies of grant of
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you know the the reputation for drinking you know was all overblown and those were stories
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invented by malicious rival generals during the the war i i found you know that i detailed i researched
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this in great detail that grant was a genuine alcoholic he had all the earmarks of an alcoholic by his own
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admission he couldn't take just one drink it became then a second a third and a fourth
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also by everyone's description even a single glass of alcohol he would begin to slur his words and
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stumble about and he would undergo this personality change from a very repressed character to a very
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jovial character i think that the reason there's been so much confusion on this issue
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because i discovered that grant had a definite pattern of drinking he was a periodic drinker he was a
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binge drinker he could go for even two or three months without touching a drop of alcohol only to
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have a two or three day bender and what i discovered he never drank on the eve of a battle certainly never
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drank during battle but he had enough control over the problem that after big battle when the tension
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was off he would then make a side trip to another town where his soldiers could not see him and then he
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would indulge and according to sherman he could come back smelling fresh as a rose you know from this so
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that there were a lot of people who worked very very closely with him you know who and well honestly
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said i never told him some touch touch a drop of liquor and i discovered why because he had enough
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control that they did not see him you know in these episodes so it might have been like a psychological
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release because the guy was super buttoned up right very buttoned yeah i mean it's a combination of
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someone you're absolutely right someone who on the one hand was very tightly buttoned up and on the other
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hand is carrying unbearable pressure i mean it's kind of more than a figure of speech to say that grant
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was carrying the weight of the nation on his shoulders particularly the other you know union general so many of
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them proved incompetent that it was it was all up to to grant and before lincoln brought grant east in
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march 1864 you know the eastern in the virginia theater of the war grant had been you know preceded by
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about five or six miserable failures as as generals so he was facing tremendous pressure and remember
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these you know these civil war battles were gigantic and bloody it could be as many as uh
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hundred hundred fifty thousand men uh going into um to battle the casualties could run up into the
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thousands or even tens of thousands in uh certain uh cases and grant said later in the war because
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people were impressed during battle he would kind of fire off these orders but grant you know after
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the war talked about the fact that he knew that every order he gave was going to however you know
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successful it was was going to lead to the deaths of hundreds or thousands of
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men and you know how inwardly paralyzing that could feel so i can completely understand why
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someone with his drinking history or even someone not with his drinking history would crave the release
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of that tension periodically so as you said you mentioned when the civil war started the union
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was that they were actually having a hard time against the confederacy despite outmanning and out
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arming them what what did grant do different from the generals that were in charge at the beginning
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that allowed him to start having these victories yeah it's a you know it's a it's a very very good
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question because i think that well first of all because of grant's pre-war failures i think that
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he becomes very early in the war a colonel and a brigandier general and within 10 months he's uh
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10 12 months he's major general and so i think that grant because it was pre-war failure he has
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nothing to lose and everything to to gain you know in this in this war just from a personal
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standpoint and he is i mean he shows speed flexibility daring he is aggressive and he's confident in his
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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
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
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
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
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
00:50:40.220
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