Grant

In the preface to his 2017 biography Grant, Ron Chernow lays out a bold mission. He wants to overturn what he calls the "Grant as failed president" narrative—a story so deeply embedded in American memory that most people accept it without question. The general who won the Civil War, the man who served two terms in the White House, is remembered as a drunkard and a failure, a president whose administration was overrun by corruption and scandal. Chernow argues this picture is not just incomplete. It's wrong.

The puzzle is striking. How did a man who ended the bloodiest conflict in American history, who fought for racial equality at a time when most white Americans wanted to look away, become reduced to a caricature? Chernow offers an answer: Grant's legacy was shaped by a generation of Southern historians who wanted to romanticize the Confederacy, and by a Northern public that grew tired of Reconstruction. The myth of Grant the drunk, Grant the incompetent, served a purpose. It made it easier to forget what the war had been about, and easier to abandon the promises made to four million newly freed African Americans.

Chernow is not the first biographer to take on Grant, but his approach is distinctive. He doesn't try to explain away Grant's flaws. Instead, he reframes them. The alcoholism that has haunted Grant's reputation becomes, in Chernow's hands, a story of struggle and redemption rather than a fatal character defect. Grant fought his demons, sometimes lost, but never let them define his presidency or his command. Chernow draws on newly available letters and documents to show a man who was deeply aware of his weaknesses, who worked constantly to overcome them, and whose greatest achievements came precisely because he understood the cost of failure.

The book's central argument rests on Grant's role in Reconstruction. Here, Chernow makes his most forceful case. Far from being indifferent to the fate of African Americans, Grant was the first president to actively use federal power to protect civil rights. He pushed through the Fifteenth Amendment, which guaranteed Black men the right to vote. He signed the Ku Klux Klan Acts, which made it a federal crime to conspire to deprive citizens of their rights. He deployed federal troops to break up white supremacist violence. Chernow presents this as Grant's most important legacy—a record that stands in stark contrast to nearly every president who followed him in the nineteenth century.

The alcohol issue is woven throughout the narrative, but Chernow handles it with care. He doesn't sensationalize Grant's drinking or treat it as a source of cheap drama. Instead, he presents it as part of a larger pattern: a man who struggled with depression, who found it difficult to be away from his family, who used alcohol to cope with the crushing weight of command and the isolation of the presidency. Chernow argues that Grant's ability to function at the highest levels of military and political leadership despite this struggle makes his achievements more remarkable, not less.

There is also the question of Grant's character. The popular image is of a blunt, inarticulate soldier who stumbled into politics. Chernow offers a different portrait. He shows Grant as a man of deep feeling, capable of tenderness with his wife Julia and his children, capable of fierce loyalty to his friends and subordinates. He was also a man of unusual humility. Unlike many generals and politicians of his era, Grant did not seek fame or power for their own sake. He accepted command because he believed the Union had to be preserved. He accepted the presidency because he believed Reconstruction had to be completed. When those goals were achieved—or when he could no longer achieve them—he walked away without regret.

Chernow's biography runs nearly a thousand pages, but its thesis is clear from the opening chapters. Grant has been misjudged by history. The failure of Reconstruction, the corruption of his administration, the scandals that tarnished his presidency—these were real, but they were not the whole story. Grant was also the man who crushed the Confederacy, who freed the slaves, who fought the Klan, who wrote one of the greatest memoirs in American letters while dying of throat cancer. He was a man of contradictions: a reluctant soldier who became a brilliant general, a quiet man who rose to the highest office in the land, a loyal friend who trusted the wrong people, a president who saw the promise of racial equality and tried, against overwhelming odds, to make it real.

The question Chernow leaves us with is not whether Grant was a great man. It's why we have chosen to remember him as a failure when the evidence suggests something far more complicated. What does it say about a nation that forgets its most important president? And what does it say about us that we still need to be reminded of what Grant actually did?