by Ron Chernow
Many Grant biographies dwell at length on the Civil War, then quickly skip over his presidency as an embarrassing coda to wartime heroism. He is portrayed as a rube in Washington, way out of his league. But Grant was an adept politician, the only president to serve two full consecutive terms between Andrew Jackson and Woodrow Wilson. Writing in 1888, British historian James Bryce assigned him to the “front rank” of presidents with Washington, Jefferson, and Lincoln.19 After that his reputation tumbled, his presidency degraded to an unfair cartoon of an inept executive presiding over a scandal-ridden administration. Recent biographies have begun to rehabilitate Grant in a long overdue reappraisal. While scandals unquestionably sullied his presidency, they eclipsed a far more notable achievement—safeguarding the civil rights of African Americans. Even eminent historians have gotten wrong—sometimes badly wrong—Grant’s relationship with the black community. Typical is the view of C. Vann Woodward: “Grant had shown little interest during the war in emancipation as a late-developing war aim and little but hostility toward the more radical war aim of the few for black franchise and racial equality.”20
In truth, Grant was instrumental in helping the Union vanquish the Confederacy and in realizing the wartime ideals enshrined in the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments. The Civil War and Reconstruction formed two acts of a single historical drama to gain freedom and justice for black Americans, and Grant was the major personality who united those two periods. He was the single most important figure behind Reconstruction, and his historical reputation has risen sharply with a revisionist view of that period as a glorious experiment in equal rights for all American citizens instead of a shameful fiasco.
What has been critically absent from Grant biographies is a systematic account of his relations with the four million slaves, whom he helped to liberate, feed, house, employ, and arm during the war, then shielded from harm when they became American citizens. Frederick Douglass paired Grant with Lincoln as the two people who had done most to secure African American advances: “May we not justly say . . . that the liberty which Mr. Lincoln declared with his pen General Grant made effectual with his sword—by his skill in leading the Union armies to final victory?”21 For the admiring Douglass, Grant was “the vigilant, firm, impartial, and wise protector of my race.”22 More recently the historian Sean Wilentz has ratified this verdict: “The evidence clearly shows that [Grant] created the most auspicious record on racial equality and civil rights of any president from Lincoln to Lyndon B. Johnson.”23
The imperishable story of Grant’s presidency was his campaign to crush the Ku Klux Klan. Through the Klan, white supremacists tried to overturn the Civil War’s outcome and restore the status quo ante. No southern sheriff would arrest the hooded night riders who terrorized black citizens and no southern jury would convict them. Grant had to cope with a complete collapse of evenhanded law enforcement in the erstwhile Confederate states. In 1870 he oversaw creation of the Justice Department, its first duty to bring thousands of anti-Klan indictments. By 1872 the monster had been slain, although its spirit resurfaced as the nation retreated from Reconstruction’s lofty aims. Grant presided over the Fifteenth Amendment, which gave blacks the right to vote, and landmark civil rights legislation, including the 1875 act outlawing racial discrimination in public accommodations. His pursuit of justice for southern blacks was at times imperfect, but his noble desire to protect them never wavered.
Perhaps the most explosively persistent myth about Grant is that he was a “drunkard,” with all that implies about self-indulgence and moral laxity. Modern science has shown that alcoholism is a “chronic disease,” not a “personal failing as it has been viewed by many.”24 Because Grant’s drinking has been scrutinized in purely moralistic terms, his admirers have felt the need to defend him from the charge as vigorously as detractors have rushed to pin it on him. The drinking issue, both real and imaginary, so permeated Grant’s career that a thoroughgoing account is needed to settle the matter. This biography will contend that Grant was an alcoholic with an astonishingly consistent pattern of drinking, recognized by friend and foe alike: a solitary binge drinker who would not touch a drop of alcohol, then succumb at three- or four-month intervals, usually on the road. As a rule, he underwent a radical personality change and could not stop himself once he started to imbibe. Alcohol was not a recreation selfishly indulged, but a forbidden impulse against which he struggled for most of his life. He joined a temperance lodge in early adulthood and lent the movement open support in later years. While drinking almost never interfered with his official duties, it haunted his career and trailed him everywhere, an infuriating, ever-present ghost he could not shake. It influenced how people perceived him and deserves close attention. As with so many problems in his life, Grant managed to attain mastery over alcohol in the long haul, a feat as impressive as any of his wartime victories.
PART ONE
A Life of Struggle
CHAPTER ONE
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Country Bumpkin
ON APRIL 27, 1822, Ulysses S. Grant was born in Point Pleasant, Ohio, tucked away in the rural southwestern corner of the state near Cincinnati. The tiny, boxy house, constructed of wood and painted white, stood a short stroll from the Ohio River with Kentucky clearly visible on the far shore. Under its slanting roof the residence was humble, consisting of a single open room with a fireplace. Point Pleasant was little more than a nondescript cluster of makeshift cabins overlooking bustling river traffic.
Delivered by a stern-faced, bearded abolitionist, Dr. John Rogers, the plump baby weighed in at ten and three-quarters pounds, with reddish-brown hair and blue-gray eyes. For many weeks, his father, Jesse Root Grant, and mother, Hannah Simpson Grant, conferred with relatives to find a suitable name for the hefty infant. The choices bandied about suggest a literate clan with high expectations for the child. Hannah opted for Albert to honor Thomas Jefferson’s treasury secretary, Albert Gallatin, while her father opted for Hiram as a “handsome” biblical name. Hannah’s stepmother evinced “enthusiastic admiration for the ancient commander, Ulysses,” recalled Jesse Grant, and urged “that the babe should be named Ulysses.”1 Some accounts claim the matter was settled by plucking names from a hat. Whatever the case, the family agreed on Hiram Ulysses Grant, which translated into the unfortunate initials H.U.G. The boy would show a decided preference for Ulysses and gradually discard Hiram, especially when other boys “teased him about his initials.”2 But this didn’t halt the taunts since Grant was known as “Ulyss” or “Lyss,” soon bastardized by malicious schoolmates into “Useless Grant.” The name Ulysses S. Grant was the product of a later bureaucratic error that stuck.
Jesse Grant worked as a foreman at the tannery just up the hill. At six feet tall, he was a large, imposing man, always considerably taller than his son, with broad shoulders and a florid complexion, who wore his silk hat low over large golden spectacles. He was a bumptious type common in small towns on the American frontier, a self-assertive windbag and congenital striver, brimming with schemes and bright ideas. Voluble and opinionated, he delighted in verbal combat. With his brusque manner and sharp-elbowed style, he went through life brawling with people in business and politics. Smart and enterprising, he kept a sharp eye on the main chance—one neighbor sneered he would “follow a dollar to hell”—and his business success and self-promotion tended to gall more modest people.3
Jesse proudly traced his ancestry to two early Puritan settlers, Matthew and Priscilla Grant, who emigrated from Dorset County in England and arrived in Dorchester, Massachusetts, in 1630. “My family is American,” Ulysses later declared proudly, “and has been for generations, in all its branches, direct and collateral.”4 Before long, Matthew and his son Samuel, traveling south to Connecticut, helped settle the town of Windsor on the Connecticut River. While Matthew served as town clerk and surveyor, his male descendants were strongly drawn to arms. One of them, Noah Grant, fought and died in the French and Indian
War along with his brother Solomon. As a confirmed abolitionist, Jesse Root Grant delighted in showing off an original muster roll made out by Captain Noah Grant in 1755 that bore the words, “Prince, negro” and “Jupiter, negro” as company members.5 Far more controversial was the military record of Jesse’s own father, another Noah Grant. In his Memoirs, Ulysses credited this Noah Grant with having fought in the Revolutionary War from Bunker Hill to the fall of Yorktown.6 Unfortunately, no biographer has been able to unearth documentary evidence to substantiate this wartime service.
What seems certain is that Noah Grant’s life went sadly awry. During the war, he married and fathered two children before becoming a widower. Then, afterward, he moved to western Pennsylvania, just east of Pittsburgh, where he married Rachel Kelly, a capable housewife who bore him several children, including Jesse; they ultimately moved to Deerfield, Ohio. When Rachel died in 1805, Noah was saddled with seven children from two marriages. His father was born rich and died poor, Jesse maintained, because the “long period of soldiering spoilt him for all financial business”—ironically, the charge Jesse later leveled at his eldest son.7 After his wife’s death, Noah took to drink, depleting an ample inheritance. In Jesse’s words, his father “lost something of his self-control, and acquired the fondness for stimulants,” a fact worth flagging because of the hereditary component in alcoholism.8 As a result, Jesse Root Grant had to support himself from age eleven, while the younger children were farmed out to relatives and neighbors. Jesse developed a robust streak of independence, defining himself in contrast to his shiftless, alcoholic father and showing a chronic zeal for self-improvement.
After working as a farmhand for three years, Jesse performed chores for an Ohio Supreme Court judge, George Tod, whose family showed unusual kindness to the talkative young man. Finding Jesse illiterate, Mrs. Tod tutored him, taught him to read, and even paid for the only five months of schooling he ever enjoyed. For someone largely self-taught, Jesse was remarkably articulate, but he smarted from a sense of his deficient education and crammed in four weeks of English grammar lessons right after his marriage. So graciously had the Tods treated him that Jesse forever regarded them “with all the reverence he could have felt if they had been parents instead of benefactors,” Ulysses noted.9 Mrs. Tod encouraged Jesse’s ambitions, fostered his love of reading, and urged him to cultivate a marketable trade.
Determined to master tanning—a lucrative business at a time when people needed bridles and saddles—Jesse apprenticed with his older half brother Peter, who owned a tannery in Maysville, Kentucky. One is struck by how quickly the headstrong Jesse Grant latched on to his calling; he was never one to squander time or dither over decisions. Quite courageously, Peter Grant headed the local abolitionist society, denouncing slavery as “the blot which stains our government.”10 During his Maysville stay, Jesse beheld the corrupting effects of slavery and later chided his Kentucky and Virginia relatives for depending “too much on slave labor to be trained in self-reliance.”11 The depth of his antislavery convictions prompted him to leave Kentucky when his apprenticeship expired. “I would not own slaves and I would not live where there were slaves and not own them.”12 His next job came in an Ohio tannery owned by Owen Brown, father of militant abolitionist John Brown. Jesse resided in the Brown household and came to admire John’s “purity of character” and “physical courage,” but later faulted him for being “a fanatic and extremist in whatever he advocated.”13 After hanging out the shingle for his own tannery in Ravenna, Ohio, Jesse contracted a debilitating “fever and ague” that forced him to discontinue business briefly before going to work at the Point Pleasant tannery.
Full of vim and drive, Jesse searched for a worthy partner and found her in the pious, frugal Hannah Simpson, who was almost five years his junior when they married in June 1821. She had grown up outside Philadelphia, the third child of John Simpson, a farmer who had uprooted his family and moved to southwest Ohio two years earlier. The Simpsons owned a substantial amount of land and some neighbors saw Hannah as marrying down. “At the time of our marriage, Mrs. Grant was an unpretending country girl; handsome, but not vain,” Jesse wrote, boasting that the Methodist Episcopal Church had “never had a more devoted and consistent member.”14 As if intent upon monopolizing all future marital discussions, Jesse had tracked down a bride as thrifty with words as he was loquacious; he never stopped talking while Hannah never started. An early photo shows the bearded Jesse bristling with irrepressible energy, his big fists resting on his thighs, while the self-effacing Hannah sits small and strangely placid beside him, a quiet woman withdrawn behind her spectacles and content to be so. Slim and erect, she was quietly refined and never called attention to herself, displaying an unbending sense of duty toward God, family, and country. Blessed with grit, she possessed all the domestic talents, from milking cows to baking cookies, required of a small-town bride.
It seems crystal-clear that Ulysses S. Grant modeled himself after his mutely subdued mother, avoiding his father’s bombast and internalizing her humility and self-control. The unflappable Hannah spoke in a low voice, never swore, and remained calm and sweet-tempered. She was kind and solicitous toward neighborhood children. One of Ulysses’s friends remembered her as a woman of “deep feeling but not demonstrative,” her reserve so resolute that she seldom joked and never laughed.15 Ulysses later praised her as “the best woman he had ever known; unselfish, devoted to her family, thoroughly good, conscientious, intelligent, of a quiet and amiable disposition, never meddling with other persons’ affairs, genuinely pious without any cant, with a strong sense of right and justice.”16 He attributed his good sense and moral compass to her beneficent influence. Molded by her always dignified presence, Ulysses grew up with a deep, abiding respect for women and never treated them lightly or flirtatiously.
Unlike her husband, Hannah doled out praise sparingly and recoiled from anything that faintly smacked of bragging. Even when her son grew famous, a journalist noted, “she not only refrained from boasting of him, but oftentimes blushed like a girl, and left the room when his praises were sounded in her ears; for it seemed akin to hearing self-praise.”17 Hating mean-spirited gossip, she regarded others charitably and shrank from spiteful comments. One day, when women in her church group groused about a drunken husband in the congregation, Hannah chimed in: “Well, Mr. A. was a good fiddler, anyhow.”18 Hannah’s tendency to trust people was a lesson that her innocent son Ulysses would learn almost too well.
Despite her sterling traits, something was missing in Hannah Grant, a maternal warmth whose absence Ulysses felt keenly. “I never saw my mother cry,” he claimed.19 Deeply repressed, Hannah never bared her emotions or discussed them with her children. As she later told a reporter proudly, “We are not a demonstrative family.”20 The Grants never showed affection openly and a curious distance always separated Ulysses S. Grant and his mother. In his Memoirs, he gave a full-blooded portrait of Jesse Grant’s willful nature but, when it came to Hannah, he mentioned her maiden name but failed to endow her with a fully rounded personality. Jesse bursts from the page, while Hannah recedes and vanishes. However infuriating Ulysses found his father, he cared deeply about his opinion. With the emotionally arid Hannah, an enigmatic silence lingered and they had a constrained relationship in later years. This strange family background made Ulysses S. Grant a man who could seem emotionally blocked, although he freely poured forth his bottled-up feelings with his wife and children later on.
When Jesse Grant planted his family in Point Pleasant, he thought the small village had a major future, but for a man of his vaulting hopes, it proved a hopelessly sleepy backwater. In August 1823, he purchased a corner lot in Georgetown, Ohio, the new county seat of adjoining Brown County, and built a two-story brick house—brick connoting wealth and standing—near the courthouse square. Jesse kept adding to the edifice during Ulysses’s boyhood since he and Hannah needed to accommodate their growing brood, soon adding Samuel Simpson (cal
led Simpson) in 1825; Clara Rachel in 1828; Virginia Paine (Jennie) in 1832; Orvil Lynch in 1835; and Mary Frances in 1839. (One notes how neatly this self-disciplined couple spaced their offspring.) A natural joiner, Jesse served as senior warden at Georgetown’s new Masonic lodge while he and Hannah participated actively in the Methodist church across from their residence, often inviting visiting ministers to stay with them.
A small but up-and-coming place of corn and potato farmers, Georgetown was an ideal spot for Jesse to situate his own tannery, which he placed across the street from his home. Nearby White Oak Creek furnished plentiful water while abundant tanbark came from adjoining forests. Jesse was reputed to be a tough but fair-minded boss, a “hard-working man,” who “brooked no laziness,” said a relative.”21 One resident recalled Jesse as “very shrewd in money transactions, but scrupulously honest. He was what might be called a Yankee gentleman with plenty of old-school gentility and home-bred culture.”22 The tannery, however, was a malodorous place that stank from lampblack and grease used to dress hides, and Ulysses, whose upstairs bedroom window stared out on the business, was revolted by the stench that regularly wafted across the street—a revulsion that lasted a lifetime.