American Ulysses

BRIAN: Today, we’ve been talking about the afterlife of presidents, what they do when they’re out of office, and how we think about them once they’re gone. If there’s one president Americans have been arguing about since pretty much the moment he left office in 1877, it’s Ulysses S. Grant. So we called up a friend of the show, David Blight, to talk about how Grant’s reputation has changed over time.

Blight’s been reading and reviewing the latest crop of Grant biographies for the New York Review of Books, and he says there’s one thing all Grant’s many biographers can agree on. Before the Civil War, Grant’s reputation wasn’t even up for debate.

DAVID BLIGHT: Grant was by any measure near complete failure in life in the 1850s.

JOANNE: He’s not kidding. Grant had gone to West Point as a young man and had a solid, if unexceptional, early career in the army. He fought in the Mexican-American war and married well, but he also developed a drinking problem and ultimately resigned his commission. Soon, he found himself taking a succession of odd jobs and struggling to support his growing family.

BRIAN: There’s a scene of him. He ends up selling wood on street corners, basically?

DAVID BLIGHT: Yeah, he ended up in a–

BRIAN: This sounds like something out of The Wire.

DAVID BLIGHT: I know. I know, yeah. This, you can’t make this up. He ends up selling wood, firewood, in an old faded blue army coat on streets of St. Louis in the late 1850s. He’s a true nobody and a failure who becomes virtually everything.

NATHAN: Grant, of course, went on to become the general who led the Union Army to victory over the Confederacy. He was elected president not once, but twice. And during his presidency, he established the Department of Justice to preserve the civil rights of newly emancipated black citizens and suppress the emerging Ku Klux Klan. But his record as both a general and a president is a mixed one.

During the war, he developed a reputation as a battlefield butcher, willing to wage total war regardless of southern casualties or the survival of his own men. And as president, his name also became synonymous with corruption and scandal.

DAVID BLIGHT: He got overwhelmed, caught in the crosshairs, tangled by these various scandals. And there are four, five, six of them right on through his second term. And frankly–

BRIAN: Which of these scandals did the most damage to his reputation?

DAVID BLIGHT: Gosh, they all did. Maybe the whiskey ring, actually.

BRIAN: So many scandals, so little time.

DAVID BLIGHT: There were. But let’s just say the whiskey ring was this amazing cartel. I guess it wouldn’t surprise us today that much, but an amazing cartel set up by members of the federal government and then Congress people, cabinet officials were in on the take. It was all about stealing the money from excised taxes paid on whiskey.

BRIAN: And what was Grant’s culpability in all of this, David?

DAVID BLIGHT: A couple of his own relatives were in on it, like a brother and a brother-in-law.

BRIAN: As Grant left office in a cloud of scandal, he and his wife Julia left Washington. The question was, what came next?

DAVID BLIGHT: Well, Brian, that’s a fascinating part of the Grant story, because at the end of his second term, he is embattled with this reputation of scandal, and the Republican Party was embattled with it, no question. And Democrats are running headlong against it every way they can. It’s called Grantism. They just run against Grantism.

But there are also a lot of Republicans who wanted him to run again. And let’s remember there was no amendment requiring two terms then, but he did not run. And the handwriting was on the wall, the Republicans needed somebody knew. They needed somebody relatively unknown, and they found one in Rutherford B Hayes.

And then what Grant does, it’s amazing. He has this huge burden of celebrity and fame, and it really was. There was this phenomenon when the presidency was over that was called Grant mania. Grant couldn’t go anywhere, the classic paparazzi celebrity problem.

And when he leaves the presidency, he doesn’t have much money. Rich people started giving him houses. Seriously, I don’t know. There were six or seven of them, and he was given a house in Philadelphia. He was given a house in New Jersey. He was eventually given a house in the Upper East Side of New York.

And so he and Julia decided to go on a world tour. They went all over Europe. They went down to the Mediterranean. They went to part of the Middle East. They went to Asia. They went to China and Japan. And everywhere, they went they were feted in grandeur by heads of state, by monarchs, kings, queens.

BRIAN: So David, why is this? What was it about Grant that made him so attractive to the paparazzi?

DAVID BLIGHT: Again, frankly, I think it was the General Grant, because he still gets called–

BRIAN: Because it was General Grant.

DAVID BLIGHT: He still gets called General Grant, even on the world tour, who had also been president. Let’s not forget, but it was the General Grant. And I think Chernow’s book in particular is good on this. He shows how there was just this hunger for a hero in the 19th century, and Grant just fit the bill.

A silent man, a bit of an enigma. You can’t entirely understand him, but by God, he defeated the South. And if you could just overlook some of the stuff in his presidency, you had the real thing here, an American hero, a guy from nowhere who was nobody who became everything.

But anyway, it comes back. It’s about 1878, 1879. Now, he’s only got five, six years to live, as we know, but he didn’t know that. And he sets himself up as this kind of increasingly rich famous Gilded Age gentleman living on the Upper East Side of New York, and he was just going to live into retirement and get rich until his entire fortune was destroyed in this Ponzi scheme, and he ends up utterly broke.

And then, of course, decides to write the memoirs, which become the greatest deathbed writing in American letters, the most famous, perhaps, military autobiography ever written. Grant finished those memoirs as he was dying of throat cancer when he couldn’t really even speak anymore and he could hardly even eat anymore. And the two volumes of the Grant memoirs made Grant’s family back something in the neighborhood of $450,000 almost overnight.

It’s a heroic literary story that Grant goes out with, which is yet another reason– let’s face it– that biographers are attracted to him. Because this was the soldier, the general, the great strategist who not only became president– and you know, maybe we can say wasn’t that successful as a president.

BRIAN: Sure.

DAVID BLIGHT: But in the end, he’s actually known for his writing.

BRIAN: How did those memoirs change Grant’s legacy?

DAVID BLIGHT: Oh, good question. From that day forward, he dies and the memoirs are published within a month or two. They sold like crazy. They were sold by– part of the story’s very moving– union veterans volunteered– sometimes were hired, but volunteered to go door to door around the country selling subscriptions for the two volumes of the Grant memoirs.

So it became a kind of a GAR, a Grand Army of the Republic tribute to Grant. And hundreds of thousands of people, of course, bought the book, probably read it. Or even if they didn’t read it, you had to have Grant’s memoirs on your shelf.

But what happens to Grant’s legacy is interesting but the 20th century. By the 1890s, the whole civil war reconciliation story has really caught hold. The Union of North and South, the denying of the war being about slavery, the power of this cultural force of the Lost Cause has really sunk in–

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BRIAN: The demise of reconstruction.

DAVID BLIGHT: Exactly, and the celebration of the defeat of reconstruction–

BRIAN: Right.

DAVID BLIGHT: Which is Grant’s presidency. So in a sense, Grant won the war, but he was defeated in reconstruction. And by the early 20th century, it’s the historical moment for what, at least a couple of decades, of the development of the Robert E. Lee cult. It’s that period when so many of the Confederate monuments that we’ve recently been arguing about were all put up and built.

And for decades, Grant was not ignored. There were a few books on him here and there. But Grant, he didn’t vanish, but he kind of was put aside in American memory during this year of the Lost Cause, that Lee cult, and a time when you had to look hard to know that abolitionists had any role in the Civil War here except for causing the war.

BRIAN: Much has been made about the Jefferson-Hamilton teeter totter seesaw, if you will. Is it right to put Lee at the other end of the seesaw with Grant sitting on it?

DAVID BLIGHT: Oh, I think so. Well, first by the military historians, for sure. This is an old debate. Who was the better general? Who was the better tactician? Who was the better strategist, and so forth and so on.

But I do think you do have a seesaw here in the sense that the Grant revival now is showing us that we’re writing about a different civil war. It’s is not your granddaddy’s civil war anymore as it was in the blue versus the gray of the Civil War centennial. It’s the war to save the Union, but it’s especially the war that ended slavery and then reinvented the American republic.

And if that’s the Civil War you’ve come to write about, you’ve come to learn about, you’ve come to believe in, then Grant’s story’s right there at the heart of it all. He’s a thread all the way through it.

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NATHAN: David Blight is Professor of American History at Yale University. You can catch his review of two of the newest biographies of Grant in the New York Review of Books.