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Author Joan Waugh, a distinguished professor of history at UCLA, set out to discover how a man so revered in his lifetime could have fallen so far.
She begins "U.S. Grant American Hero, American Myth" with his humble birth on the Ohio frontier and early laboring in his father's tannery, which he hated. He showed real skill at handling horses, but had no head for business. His life changed when his father was able to get him an appointment to West Point.
Grant did not want to go, and was not a distinguished student (he graduated 21st in a class of 37), but the Mexican War came along and he turned out to be a natural leader. His talents lay in combat, however, and the boredom of a peacetime post in California led to drinking and an early resignation from the Army. He was married now, with two young sons, and he returned to his wife Julia's home in Kentucky to try farming. This did not succeed, nor did subsequent jobs in real estate and in his father's leather store, but then the Civil War broke out.
Now the story becomes familiar. He went back in uniform and quickly rose to command an army in the West. After several bloody victories, he faced the seemingly impregnable Confederate stronghold at Vicksburg, Miss.
When Vicksburg finally fell on July 4, 1863, Lincoln realized he had found a general who would fight and put him in charge of the Army of the Potomac, opposing Lee's powerful Army of Northern Virginia.
Beginning with George McLellan, one general after another had failed against Lee's skilled leadership, and it took Grant over a year and the war's heaviest casualties, but finally the long bloody war was over. On April 14, 1865, a grateful president brought him to Washington, relished in details of the surrender, and invited him to join the presidential party at Ford's Theater that night. But Grant was in a hurry to see his children and was heading home when Booth fired the fatal shot.
Grant had little interest in politics, but felt it his duty to accept when the Republicans chose him for president in 1868. The country was deeply divided over Johnson's impeachment and Reconstruction, and Grant felt he was the country's best chance for reconciliation. He sat out the campaign in Galena, Ill., but won fairly easily. Unfortunately, his disinterest in politics led him to appoint old friends and relatives to his administration -- many of whom took advantage of Grant -- and he was blamed for the resulting scandals.
Still a national hero when his second term ended, he and Julia took off on a triumphant world tour, ending it more popular than ever. He was inundated with offers to speak and to write when he was struck down with throat cancer. He also was wiped out financially by another business failure, and agreed to write his memoirs to earn enough to support his family. One of the most dramatic episodes in literary history is the dying Grant, willing himself to stay alive long enough to finish. His book won wide acclaim and is still in print.
When he died Aug. 8, 1885, less than a week after the book was completed, the nation -- North and South -- mourned, ranking him with Lincoln and Washington. So what went wrong? Unfortunately the author never quite answers this question. She devotes a chapter to the seven-year fight over where he would be buried, and another to the six years it took to raise the money and build his tomb, and leaves the last few pages to provide an answer.
His tomb has been victimized by neglect and vandalism, which she cites as a metaphor for his declining reputation. She talks about the veneration of Lee and glorification of the Lost Cause, typified by the enormous success of works sympathetic to the South such as "Birth of a Nation" and "Gone with the Wind." His standing has gone up and down over the years, and she clearly hopes that books like this will restore his reputation. Was he a "drunken butcher" or one of our greatest heroes? Everyone will have to provide their own answer.
