Chernow On Grant

Chernow’s life of Grant inevitably repeats the work of some predecessors, but it has its own insights. The greatest challenge of Grant biography is also its richest opportunity: to explain what Chernow calls the “split personality” of a man of such passive, numbing failure who somehow acquired the “breathtaking audacity” to become the mastermind of the Union’s victory. Chernow writes this story as a kind of homespun national epic. He attends carefully to the ironies of sectionalism, race, and slavery that defined the era and permeated Grant’s life. Chernow is one of Grant’s affectionate biographers: it is hard not to love a soldier on the right side of a just war who drinks too much, smells perpetually of cigars, rarely wears uniforms of his rank, is expressionless and tough, and who, as Lincoln put it about his military leadership, “makes things git!” Chernow gives us a troubled, humble warrior, a man lost and yet found through amazing feats if not grace.

From “The Silent Type” by David W. Blight for the New York Review of Books; Image from Hulton Archive/Getty Images

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