Grant

by Ron Chernow

the “redeemer” movement,

promulgated a view of the Civil War as a righteous cause that had nothing to do with slavery but only states’ rights—to

James Longstreet once replied, “I never heard of any other cause of the quarrel than slavery.”

When it came to African Americans, southern Democrats managed to re-create the status quo ante, albeit minus slavery.

there was finally no way for blacks to enjoy their rights without a prolonged military presence, and that became politically impossible.

Could even Abraham Lincoln have appeased the white South while simultaneously protecting its black population? It seems unlikely.

Once Reconstruction collapsed, it left southern blacks for eighty years at the mercy of Jim Crow segregation, lynchings, poll taxes, literacy tests, and other tactics designed to segregate them from whites and deny them the vote.

a terrible state of affairs that would not be fixed until the rise of the civil rights movement after World War II.

In the words of Frederick Douglass, “That sturdy old Roman, Benjamin Butler, made the negro a contraband, Abraham Lincoln made him a freeman, and Gen. Ulysses S. Grant made him a citizen.”

However much Grant enjoyed his Parisian rambles and glimpses of quotidian life, he was mystified about the charms American expatriates found there.

“How you crushed a rebellion, and afterwards ruled a nation in peace and righteousness, is known over the whole world.”

a Lucullan feast of Gilded Age extravagance

Grant dwelled on a topic he had never dared broach so freely before: that “he thought intoxicating liquors the chief cause of poverty and crime.”

Painfully aware of his mistakes as president, Grant fantasized about reentering the White House to correct those errors and redeem his reputation.

confronted head-on the view that no president should be entitled to a third term. “Who dares . . . to put fetters on that free choice and judgment which is the birthright of the American people?”

Buck claimed his father lost the nomination because he refused to cut a side deal to retain John Sherman as treasury secretary.

A BIG, ROBUST MAN with a long beard, James Abram Garfield was a remarkable autodidact, born in a log cabin in Ohio.

Mocking Hancock as an inexperienced political lightweight, Republicans printed up a pamphlet entitled “Hancock’s Political Achievements,” a work that contained nothing but blank pages.

Grant favored Nicaragua as the most practicable route from an engineering standpoint.

With his uncanny knack for self-reinvention, Grant turned into a master of the stump speech,

Garfield won by a wafer-thin margin in the popular vote column, but did better in the Electoral College,

“If the South had once obtained a firm hold of the Government they would have ruined the country and nothing short of a revolution would have rescued it from their hands again.”

the Grants, who seemed to have a congenital weakness for confidence men.

Grant’s many disappointments with business partners and treacherous White House appointees had not sharpened his instinct for fraud.

He would have benefitted from an atom of his father’s cynicism.

“The transactions of Grant & Ward constituted the most colossal swindle of the age.”

Twain later proclaimed. “He had set out to conquer not the habit but the inclination—the desire. He had gone at the root, not the trunk.”

It seems that one man’s destiny in this world is quite as much a mystery as it is likely to be in the next.

“died as a soldier dies, without fear and without a murmur.”

Grant had not addressed his struggle with alcohol.