"Grant", By Ron Chernow

This new biography of our eighteenth president seeks to upgrade the image of Grant among historians. It seems to have succeeded, as Grant is now ranked in the middle of the latest C-SPAN rankings, instead of near the bottom as he used to be. Chernow's thesis is that, while Grant got many of the small things wrong, he got the big things right.

It is a very thorough book, running to about a thousand pages.A major theme running throughout the book is Grant's guileless, overly trusting nature. This caused him to keep men in office who turned out to be crooks. Similarly, after his presidency, he trusted a bonds trader with all his savings, and all of his children's savings, only to learn too late that the guy was a narcissistic crook.

Another theme is Grant's ability to make major decisions in an instant. As a Civil War general this trait stood him in good stead, and he was much admired for it. However, as a president the result was just the opposite, as he seemed incapable of consulting with others before making decisions. For example, he kept his cabinet appointments secret from everyone, and then announced them en masse on his first day in office. He was lucky in getting a top-notch Secretary of State in Hamilton Fish, but his other appointments were mostly failures.

Misplaced loyalty was another theme, as Grant refused to abandon his bad appointments, even after they had proven to be failures at their jobs, or, in many cases, crooks.

Grant's great strength as president, according to Chernow, is his humane treatment of the freed slaves. He acted as best he could to use federal power to protect blacks from the persecution they faced throughout the South during his presidency. However, during the last two years of his presidency, the north had grown tired of being in charge of the southern states, and Grant became limited in what he could get away with politically in policing the south.

Similarly, Grant was humane and inclusive in his treatment of Jews during his presidency, atoning for a Civil War blunder in which he issued an order banishing all Jews from the three southern states under his control. He said later that he had issued the order in haste, and had he thought about it first he never would have issued it. At any rate, at his death Jewish organizations were universal in their praise of his humane treatment of Jews during his lifetime.

A major foreign policy accomplishment was his peaceful resolution of a conflict with Great Britain over Britain's providing the ship Alabama to the South during the Civil War. The Alabama inflicted great damage on the North, and the more radical element in the North blamed it for prolonging the war by several years. Grant and his Secretary of State Fish were able to get Britain to agree to binding international arbitration of the claim, resulting in an award that settled all issues and made it possible for the U.S. and Britain to become good friends, instead of going to war. This is said to be the first such use of arbitration to settle an international dispute.

My own conclusion after reading his book is to elevate Grant to a slightly higher ranking, but not quite all the way to the middle of the pack.