Ulysses S. Grant "Finally" Gets His Due???

Ron Chernow's "Grant," perhaps the most anticipated biography in American history of 2017, drops tomorrow and reading the early reviews leaves me asking myself, really?

Just a sampling of some of the reviews (Adam Gopnik, The New Yorker; Mike Fischer, Journal Sentinel; David Plotz, Slate), which all leave the impression that Grant is about to get the "Hamilton treatment," even if it does not ultimately result in a Broadway hit musical.

No doubt Chernow's biography (the man behind other notable biographies and who inspired Lin-Manuel Miranda to write his Broadway hit that has rescued/rehabilitated the $10 Founding Father) will become the most widely read study of Civil War General and President Ulysses S. Grant to date; however, for those of us who have been laboring in Grant's vineyard for the past two decades, all of this talk of rehabilitating the $50 president is quite odd.

Sure, the architects of the Lost Cause beat up Grant during his time and that narrative influenced their scholarly descendants and even the revisionists were influenced by William McFeely's 1981 biography that was more a product of the Vietnam War era than a study of Grant & the Civil War era. But those of us who have studied and written on Grant know that the man buried in his tomb (yes, the answer really is Ulysses S. Grant!) is much more than a failed businessman; a drunkard; a butcher; a second-rate to Robert E. Lee who only managed to defeat the great hero to the Confederacy because of sheer mathematics and firepower; a rascist whose policies who doomed the freed people in the South and the Indians on the Great Plains; and an incompetent politician who trusted those who took advantage of him and stained his administration with scandal.

Since the late 1990s, that narrative has been challenged and refuted. My own work into Grant's role between Appomattox and his election in 1868 as president (I argued Grant worked behind the scenes with leading Moderate and Radical Republicans to undermine President Andrew Johnson, actively sought the presidency to secure "the fruits of victory" achieved by the Union, & played a significant role in shaping postwar U.S. foreign policy south of the border during the French intervention in Mexico) was questioned by the late John Y. Simon, who headed up the Grant Papers project. I can vividly recall him sitting in the front row of a conference that I presented my research and afterwards telling me that he found my talk interesting but he wasn't buying my overall argument that Grant was anything but apolitical. But that work, which resulted in my Masters thesis and subsequently two scholarly articles, has held up and been supported in several studies published since the "Grant Boom" began in the late 90s (notable scholars contributing to the "Grant Boom" includes Brooks D. Simpson, Joan Waugh, Frank Scaturro, Jean Edward Smith, and most recently Ronald C. White).

It is a safe bet that Chernow's "Grant" will be a NYT bestseller and will go a far way to rehabilitating the $50 man in the public's eye (and I wish Chernow success in this venture and that he reaps his financial rewards for his magisterial biographical abilities); however, it is probably also a safe bet that it will unlikely shed anything new on the man with no middle name that Grant scholars have not already published in the first two decades of the 21st century.