Title: Frederick Douglass
Author: William S. McFeely
Publisher: W.W. Norton & Company
Date: 1991
Rating: three stars out of five (two stars for the presentation, four stars for the research)

What this book is / is not
Frederick Douglass is a full-length biography of the greatest American anti-slavery leader and reformer of the 19th century. It is the most recent biography to be written on Douglass. It is not, however, a terribly exciting book or a well-written one, for that matter—despite the author’s excellent research.

Main thesis
Frederick Douglass was an extraordinary man, and one of the greatest of all Americans. He was proud, quick to anger, generous, and a true fighter.  He was born sometime in the 1820s (or before; Douglass was never sure) as Frederick Bailey in eastern Maryland on the Chesapeake. Young Frederick was sent from master to master, and barely knew his mother. His most fortuitous time was spent in the Auld household in Baltimore, where he was almost a brother to young master Thomas and was taught the Bible by Sophia Auld.

When Douglass escaped to freedom—and married another escapee, Anna—he at first became a preacher.  But soon Douglass found a different calling: fighting the very thing he had escaped from. His destiny was not to spread the gospel, but to fight for freedom for all Negroes. But Douglass recognized early on that getting rid of slavery would be only the beginning. There were invisible chains in the “free” North and that discrimination against black men and women was palpable and constant.

When Douglass published his The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass in 1845, people couldn’t believe that a black man could be so “articulate.” Many charged that his first mentor, the famed abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison or someone else had written it. In Narrative, Douglass wrote strictly about himself, and gave very scant details about his original family or anything else. Douglass would publish two subsequent versions of his autobiography. (He has been charged with inaccuracy in all three versions, a charge which unfortunately is true, but it doesn’t detract overall from any of the three works.)

Douglass proved to be one of the great speakers of the age, having taught himself to speak well by using a copy of The Columbia Orator (a collection of great speeches and soliloquies from plays) while he was still a slave. People literally flocked to hear him speak, and sometimes would even interrupt other speakers with calls that Douglass take the stage.

Before the war, Douglass would continually fight with other abolitionists to assert his independence, even over associating with whom he wanted to. Long after the war, and after Anna had died, he married a white woman, feminist Helen Pitts, which scandalized both whites and blacks, though long-time friend and compatriot Elizabeth Cady Stanton approved. The prejudice in the north against blacks was sometimes subtle, sometimes open. Douglass always felt it, but either ignored it or defied it, in his relationships with white women (as traveling, business or anti-slavery companions) and white men. He was often expected not to be able to handle finances—even when he handled the finances of The North Star (his newspaper) poorly and really did need some help.

Douglass slowly broke with his “father” mentor Garrison when he became convinced that political action was necessary to end slavery; he joined with Gerrit Smith and the Liberty Party, an obscure third party which really had no chance at much of anything. He even got tangled with John Brown before Brown’s raid on Harper’s Ferry in 1859, but disapproved of Brown’s methods. Douglass would eventually abandon the Liberty Party for the new Republican Party, and remain with it for the rest of his life. After the war, he was disappointed that he was not offered much of a place at the political table, but became a strong supporter of President Grant, the only post-war president who truly cared for the rights of freed blacks (and took strong measures to ensure those rights).

Douglass would eventually land a post as ambassador to Haiti, a post that made him extremely proud. He would return to battle once more late in life at the behest of Ida B. Wells over lynching of blacks in the South. He died in 1893.

Jaw-Droppers
The prejudice of some of the fellow abolitionists is amazing. Some of them really were condescending, and to them Douglass was more like a novelty, or a tool, than a compatriot. But the sentiment wasn’t that widespread.

There were often tensions within anti-slavery circles, as sometimes other causes fought for equal prominence, such as worker’s rights. But as long as Douglass was on the scene, slavery and black equality was the foremost—even the only—issue.  

Also, just learning things about Douglass that I hadn’t known, such as some of the details of his post-war career, and his 1840s campaign in Great Britain to get the Free Church of Scotland to return all donations from Southern churches, because the money came from slavery.

Doe the author succeed?
Unfortunately, no; at least not for me. The reasons have to do with the author’s style and presentation. See below.

Criticism
The good thing about McFeely’s biography is that the author does not always accept at face value what Douglass wrote. McFeely investigates the surrounding circumstances to determine whether Douglass’ version of events matches—or seems to match—events or the motivations that Douglass assigns to various people in his life, especially Thomas Auld. It is this alertness that prevents McFeely’s work from slipping into fawning hagiography, despite his obvious admiration for his subject.

For example, he challenges Douglass’ loose facts in his curious “open letter” to Thomas Auld published in The North Star in 1850. In it he seemed to hold Auld responsible for all the evils of slavery—but wound up saying that were Auld under his roof, he would shelter him and keep him safe. McFeely corrects Douglass on facts that do not fit the paper record.

But I was extremely annoyed at McFeely’s tendency to subjectively decide what Douglass was thinking and feeling rather than using the actual paper record then speculating on possibilities. Instead of giving us a portrait of who Douglass was according to Douglass himself and his contemporaries, with all of the enigmatic possibilities and pitfalls that go along with biography of men long-since dead, McFeely wrote as if he knew exactly what Douglass himself was thinking and feeling—even if Douglass himself didn’t even know!

For example, Douglass was a powerful speaker, and not just with his voice. He had a presence that commanded the room. In a very flowery, even haughty way, McFeely examines whether this led to his having female groupies of a more sexual nature, but curiously remarks that the proper gentleman that he fashioned himself out to be just didn’t do things like that—without even speculating that Douglass wouldn’t cheat on his wife. This speculation is just one of the many frustrating things about this book. True, there is a dearth of details on Douglass’ first wife, but why not speculate that he remained faithful, in the absence of evidence otherwise?

And one thing that I hated – and I do mean truly, utterly disliked – about McFeely’s work is that he doesn’t let Douglass speak enough for himself. Douglass’ speeches, newspaper columns and autobiographies are not excerpted at any length, and the impressions we get of the subject come more from his contemporaries and from the historian’s interpretation than from Douglass himself. For example, Douglass’ July 5, 1852, speech is arguably his greatest. “The Meaning for the Fourth of July for the Negro” certainly ranks among the most powerful of all the speeches against slavery, and should stand with MLK’s Letter from a Birmingham Jail or Lincoln’s second inaugural address as among the greatest in the land.

McFeely barely builds to the speech—even springing it on the reader in the middle of a discussion of his relationship with the English white lady Judith Griffiths—and spends a total of one page on it. He excerpts only a small portion of speech before analyzing it. For such an important talk, you’d think that McFeely would have given much more attention than that.

It almost seems as if the author is more concerned with having his say on Douglass than letting the reader let us hear Douglass speak for himself.  McFeely’s earlier work, Grant: A Biography, which won a Pulitzer Prize (undeserved in my opinion), is in a similar vein because McFeely misses Grant entirely, leaving the reader with a terrible and grossly incorrect impression of Grant. In that work, Grant is left unable to speak for himself either.  

Finally, my ultimate criticism: I don’t feel like I got to know Douglass through this book. It’s almost as if I got to know this book about Douglass.

Main takeaway lessons
If there were ever a second Mount Rushmore created, Frederick Douglass would have to be on it.  

But just as modern-day civil rights leaders and white liberals would do well to heed the actual words of Martin Luther King Jr., they would equally do well to listen to Frederick Douglass before continuing to push for things like race-based quotas, affirmative action, reparations and race-based “solutions.” From Douglass’s 1865 speech, “What the Black Man Wants”:


Do I recommend this book?
Half-heartedly, but only for the most serious students of Douglass.  Otherwise, I’d recommend his autobiographies: Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass (1845), My Bondage and My Freedom (1855), and The Life and Times of Frederick Douglass (1892). This generation needs a much better biography of Douglass, one that’s easy to read, and lets Douglass’ prolific written and spoken words flow.

It’s truly sad that there are seemingly a couple of new books out every year about the Kennedys, Lincoln, the founding fathers, etc., but only on full-length biography of one of America’s greatest sons in the last 40 or so years.

Note: the following three entries are interconnected.  

Title: The Marble Man: Robert E. Lee and His Image in American Society
Author: Thomas Connelly
Publisher: Louisiana State University Press
Date: 1978
Rating: 4 starts out of 5

What this book is / is not
This fascinating study examines the admirers, fans and supporters of Gen. Robert E. Lee who all but deified him as the icon of the noble South and the Lost Cause mythology. However, it’s not an in-depth biography of Lee (a really good one has yet to be written that neither damns him nor fawns over him).

Main thesis
The “Lee Cult,” while seeking to elevate Lee, trashed the reputations of men such as Gen. James Longstreet who disagreed with the Lee Cult or dared to defend themselves. Lee’s reputation as a great American general survives to this day almost intact, despite the fact that he fought vigorously against the United States.

What the “Lee Cult” accomplished is the exception to the rule that the victors write the histories.

Jaw-Dropper
One of the most amazing expositions in this book is the persistent Lee Cult charge, led by Jubal Early and S. Pendleton, that Longstreet lost Gettysburg.  Longstreet, Lee’s “old war horse” and his second-in-command, may not have been at his absolute best in July 1863 – neither was Lee – but he did not lose the battle. The lasting and untrue charges of the Lee Cult revolved around Lee ordering Longstreet to attack at sunrise on July 2, the second day of the battle. By not attacking until 4 p.m., the charge goes, he cost the South the battle and the war. But there was no such order given. After the war Longstreet secured testimony from Lee’s three top aides (Taylor, Marshall and Venable) who wrote that they knew of no such “sunrise” attack order. Besides, such an order was impossible for the 1st Corps commander to fulfill, because much of Longstreet’s corps was not yet on the field at sunrise. Nevertheless, the charge persisted because of Longstreet’s unpardonable “sins” of criticizing Lee, hinting wrongly that he was the genius behind Lee and joining with his old friend Ulysses S. Grant and the Republicans after the war. Many modern analyses of the war still repeat the charge that Longstreet lost Gettysburg—even a century after Lee’s top aids, who would know, testified that no such order was given. (Note: the testimonies of Taylor, Marshall and Venable are reprinted in Longstreet's memoirs, From Manassas to Appomattox.)

Does the author succeed?
For the most part. He’s on firmer ground when concentrating on the Lee Cult than on Lee himself.

Criticism
Robert E. Lee is actually a polarizing figure. There is a battle in Civil War circles over whether he actually caused the South’s defeat by fighting costly battles that the Confederacy could ill afford. Connelly’s book, published in the late 1970s, is considered the first “Lee bashing” book. While I think Connelly’s book is brilliant, I sometimes think he wrote it to pick a fight.

Main takeaway lessons
More than any other book, this gave me a critical eye toward not only how history is shaped by events and personalities, but also how it can be manufactured to fit an agenda. The Lee Cult and the largely mythological Lost Cause dominate studies—and even entertainment—of the Civil War to this day, 140 years later.

Do I recommend this book?
Absolutely. Even if you aren’t at all interested in the Civil War, you should read this book because it will give you a lot of insight into how people will twist, bend, turn and distort words and events to fit their reality—even if that reality never existed. The modern equivalent to the Lee Cult is the leftmedia and liberal Democrats’ “reality-based” version of Iraq, which flies in the face of what most of the soldiers who are there in the field repeatedly say.

Title: President Grant Reconsidered
Author: Frank Scaturro
Publisher: Madison Books
Date: 1999
Rating: 4 ½ stars out of 5

What this book is / is not
This book examines the critics of President Grant, and explores the disingenuousness of their books and faultiness of their research. It is not a biography of Grant.

Main thesis
Along the same lines as Connelly's book (see above) is Scaturro’s work, designed both to begin the rescue of Grant’s presidency from its undeserved and unjust historical trashcan, and call out the lazy, biased, incompetent and/or racist scholars and historians who put him there. You can take almost any biography written on Grant’s presidency during the 20th century and toss it aside, because even Pulitzer Prize winners (William McFeely) managed to miss Grant entirely. Start with Jean Edward Smith’s biography (profiled below) to begin to understand the real President Grant.

As with the “Lee Cult,” there has been an “Anti-Grant Cult” (my term) that began before Grant even left the army. If you want to understand how badly Grant has been treated, imagine what the history of George W. Bush would be like if the primary sources were his harshest enemies like the New York Times, C-BS News, Michael “Stupid White Fat Man” Moore, Newsweek and the faculty at UC-Berkeley; or what the history of Bill Clinton would be like if the primary sources were his harshest critics like National Review and Fox News. In either case, you’d get a very skewed view.

That is precisely what happened with Grant, as his political enemies (like the hypocritical “reformers”) and the self-anointed intellectual elite (like Henry Adams) and racist Reconstruction historians (like the Dunning school) and highly judgmental post-modern historians (McFeely) succeeded in becoming the “final” word on Grant. Although in Grant’s time he was revered in the same breath as Washington and Lincoln, historians, scholars and political enemies have succeeded in trashing what was truly one of the best presidencies. (See Smith, Grant, for the reasons why and also a discussion about the “scandals” and Grant’s real and laudable accomplishments.)

Some of these historians and intellectuals were biased against Grant because they opposed him personally. Some were lazy and neglected to use Grant’s actual papers! Some built upon the previous erroneous works of others and compounded the errors. But mainly they trashed him because of Grant’s enforcement of Reconstruction and a real failure to understand Reconstruction both in the context of the Gilded Age and Grant’s strong belief in it. For example, the Dunning school of thought tore Grant’s presidency to shreds in part because they – like the so-called “reformers” and of course the Democrats before them – despised Reconstruction and therefore Grant. But latter-day historians, like William Gillette in his Retreat from Reconstruction, 1868-1879, (1982) attempt to paint Grant as an obstacle to Reconstruction, and it is his inattentiveness and lack of a coherent policy that caused Reconstruction to fail!

It’s nonsense, of course, and it is Gillette’s thesis that is incomprehensible – as well as most other historical treatments of Grant, and not Grant’s policy toward the South. For in fact Grant was that rarest of presidents: a politically courageous man who did the right thing even in the face of mounting hostility from all sides, especially the racist Democrats as well as many in his own party who were more concerned about power than doing right by America’s blacks.

Jaw droppers
The hostility of historians toward Grant is amazing, but the reasons why, that Scaturro uncovers, are just mindboggling. They just don’t “get” him, nor understand what he tried to achieve. It's very similar to the irrational hostility toward George W. Bush.

Does the author succeed?
Yes. (How could he not?)

Criticism
None, really.

Main takeaway lessons
Grant was the first president to fight for equal rights for blacks based on the simple belief that they deserved it no less than anyone else. He used the full weight of the federal government as much as he could during peace-time--and more than any other president in peace-time, ever – to protect America’s must vulnerable people. But his fight was a doomed fight. (The best analogy I can think of is Atticus Finch defending the prejudged Tom Robinson in To Kill a Mockingbird.) Because racism was so ingrained in America at that time, what Grant sought to do was simply not possible--at least, not then. There are some historians like Gillette who believe that had Grant been a really slick politician, Reconstruction would have worked. But that, too, is hogwash, because even slick politicians can’t change deep-rooted attitudes and beliefs with mere political skills.

But despite Grant’s valiant losing battle, some people did notice and were grateful—and looked forward to a better day when there were more Grants in the country than white supremacists and Klansmen and Redeemers:


So wrote the great Frederick Douglass, who was absolutely right in his assessment of Grant and of the nation. Because when lesser men succeeded Grant as president, and Reconstruction was abandoned, black Americans essentially had to start over. Yet most historians have dismissed Grant as a racist, a butcher and a dullard too stupid to be president. While Grant may never rank among the greatest of presidents, he deserves to be remembered among those ranked “above average.” And certainly, I would hazard that next to Washington, Grant’s two terms were the most consequential, most far-reaching and the most pivotal of all the great peace-time presidents. Scaturro’s book is but the beginning of the struggle to re-right the wrongs done to one of the nation’s greatest sons.

In about 20 years or so, I can envision a book titled “President George W. Bush Reconsidered.” Perhaps I’ll even write it myself.

Title: Grant
Author: Jean Edward Smith
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Date: 2001
Rating: 4 ½ stars out of 5

What this book is / is not
This is an incomplete yet critically important, meaty one-volume history of the life of Ulysses S. Grant, the victor of the Civil War and 18th president of the United States. Smith’s examination of key aspects of Grant’s two administrations is vitally important to understanding a man who is wrongly labeled a failed president.

Smith offers nothing new concerning Grant’s Civil War service. Readers looking for an in-depth examination would do better with Brooks Simpson’s superior Triumph Over Adversity and Bruce Catton’s classic Grant Moves South and Grant Takes Command. However, as an introduction to Grant, and an objective, honest overview of Grant’s presidency, Smith’s book serves quite nicely.

Main thesis/ jaw droppers
I’ve combined these two sections because historians have indeed gotten Grant wrong—often deliberately so. All of these are more or less jaw-droppers, because they fly in the face of everything you’d hear about Grant in history textbooks, on Wikipedia and elsewhere. This is the real Grant, as his contemporaries knew and recalled him:

First. He was the original “civil rights” president. During Grant’s eight years, he pressed for civil rights long after the country as a whole had tired of “waving the bloody shirt” in support of the freedmen. The general-turned-president spent his eight years in office making sure the “verdict” of Appomattox was not overturned. The Justice Department was formed under Grant specifically to enforce federal authority in the South and preserve the rights of the freedmen. Two of Grant’s attorneys general, Amos T. Ackerman and then George H. Williams, oversaw Grant’s presidential Reconstruction policies through the five Enforcement Acts and the Ku Klux Klan Act. Through their actions—driven by Grant—they smashed the Klan and thereby rendered it impotent for 50 years. Thanks to Grant’s forceful actions, violence in the South against freedmen dropped, and it was only when the threat of reprisal was removed that violence escalated again.

Grant’s support for the 13th amendment before he became president was instrumental to its passage, and the 14th and 15th amendments became law based on President Grant’s full and unswerving support. He suspended habeas corpus and sent in federal troops to enforce suffrage for blacks, believing that the freedmen should enjoy the same political rights as anyone else. The 1872 elections, which Grant won in a landslide, were the fairest in the South until the 1960s. He tried to annex Santo Domingo (modern-day Dominican Republic) not, as has been long thought, in a bungled attempt to add territory to the US. Rather, Grant sought to make the black-dominated island into three or four US states on the theory that if they were successful, then they would serve as models for successful, peaceful government dominated by blacks. The annexation effort of course failed, and whether it was noble or wrongheaded is beside the point: it was an example of novel thinking from someone dismissed as a dullard.

Second. Grant’s secretary of state was one of the most celebrated in the nation’s history, Hamilton Fish. With Grant’s full support, Fish enacted methods of international arbitration that are still used and served as the part of the foundation of the United Nations. Through Fish, Grant made peace with England over Civil War claims, thereby strengthening and deepening the ties between our two nations. It would be fair (well, almost) to say that our true friendship with England began during Grant’s presidency.  

Third. Grant avoided war with Spain over Cuba—twice—despite enormous public and congressional pressure. He knew that the desire to add Havana to the Union was motivated by nothing more than greed. Thirty years later we would fight the highly dubious Spanish-American War—and Grant probably would have disapproved.

Fourth. On the financial/economic front, Grant prevented the greedy cornering of the gold market by Jay Gould and Jim Fisk in a brilliant counter-stroke that flooded the market with government gold (instead of the small amount regularly scheduled to be sold). Contrary to what “history” says, the actual paper record proves that Grant was not fooled by what Gould and Fisk planned and warned his treasury secretary a full two weeks in advance of what they were scheming and to prepare accordingly.

In his second term, Grant single-handedly prevented the amazingly harmful inflation bill of 1874 from becoming law. Designed by a Congress and Wall Street desperate to do something to combat the Panic of 1873 (an economic depression second only to the Great Depression), the bill would have creamed the already-struggling economy while benefiting only a few. Immediately following that victory, Grant supported the Resumption of specie payment Act of 1875, thereby restoring US credit and avoided turning a financial crisis into a financial disaster. The Panic ended abruptly when the act became effective in 1879.

Grant also reduced taxes, cut the deficit by $435 million and national debt by $300 million. In sum, Grant pursued what today would be considered fiscally conservative policies, which stopped inflation, raised the nation’s credit, and reduced taxes and the national debt in response to the absolutely worst economic crisis America had ever faced up to that time.

Fifth. Elsewhere on the domestic front, Grant made a true effort to make peace with the Plains Indian tribes, thereby in all likelihood saving them from extermination. Western states supported Grant in 1868 on the mistaken belief that he—the man who destroyed the Confederacy—would eradicate the “Indian problem” once and for all. They were wrong. In the army in the 1850s Grant wrote to his wife Julia that he knew the Indians were getting shafted left and right, and when he became president, Grant reversed U.S. policy and promoted comprehensive reform designed to bring peace. Of course “Custer’s Last Stand” occurred during the final year of his administration due to Grant’s mistaken trust in Sheridan; but Grant’s policy usually was to punish those who did wrong while making fair and just peace with those who wanted peace. In fact, it’s very similar to Bush’s approach to Islamic terror.

Grant believed in treating Indians as individuals instead of just tribes. When the famed Red Cloud and other Plains chiefs visited Washington in 1870, Grant treated them just shy of visiting heads of state. Not for nothing did the Plains Indians refer specifically to Grant as “great white father.”

He pressed for citizenship for Indians—a remarkably progressive stance for the 1870s and something no president had ever before done—and sought to treat them fairly by replacing corrupt Indian agents with (presumably) un-corruptible Quakers. The corrupt agents were one of the biggest causes of troubles on the Plains. He also created a blue-ribbon panel for Indian affairs to bypass the congressional logjam on Indian appropriations, and placed his longtime friend Ely Parker—himself a Seneca chief—in charge of Indian affairs. Finally, Grant utterly refused to abandon his peace policy just to win votes in the west. Grant swept the west in 1872 except for Texas, which had to do more with Reconstruction than the peace policy.

Sixth. Grant was the only president between Lincoln and McKinley to win re-election to back-to-back terms. He won re-election in a landslide, counting among his supporters the western states, most every single black man and progressives. He crushed the liberal-Republican/Democrat alliance arrayed to defeat him—as effectively as he crushed Rebel armies in Tennessee and Virginia.

Seventh. Grant shepherded the nation through an intensely complex era that immediately followed on the heels of a decade of tremendous upheaval—especially with his calm and non-partisan handling of the election crisis of 1876, where Democrat Tilden won the popular vote but the electoral college vote was in dispute. In fact, his handling of the crisis was much better than Clinton’s in 2000. Clinton was a non-entity; Grant made sure order prevailed and the transition was peaceful, and inserted himself into the crisis in order to solve it.

To sum up points one through seven, few presidents have had to deal with such internal turmoil as Grant did.

Eighth. Yes, there were scandals. But unlike some of Grant’s successors (including a certain turkey from Arkansas), Grant was not the epicenter of scandal. And many of the scandals actually occurred during Johnson’s unfortunate term and only came to light during Grant’s terms (as has happened to George W. Bush). Other scandals merely occurred during Grant’s terms but had nothing to do with him or his administration, such as Boss Tweed and Tamany Hall. As for the “scandals” that Grant’s own people caused, it was Grant’s administration that exposed them: mainly, the Credit Mobilier scandal, which occurred before Grant became president, and the Whiskey scandal, which included some low-ranking members of his administration and would eventually bring accusations—proven unfounded—against his primary secretary, Babcock. Grant made sure that no one guilty would go unpunished—even longtime friends. But when it became clear to Grant that his attorney general, Bristow, was aiming to destroy Grant’s aide and friend Babcock in a bald attempt to win the graces of the reformers and get elected president, Grant sheltered Babcock. Grant’s defense of Babcock, done in an unprecedented five-hour closed session, ended the matter and satisfied (at the time) many of his harshest critics. But these days his defense of Babcock has been taken as evidence of corruption by protecting a crony—but really it was shielding someone from an unjust witch-hunt.

At the same time, the nature of some of the “scandals” are willfully misunderstood, as they involved the spoils system, which all presidents to that point had used without protest. Grant was the first president to press for the creation of a civil service to eliminate the spoils system. The so-called reformers, who supposedly longed for civil service reform, accused Grant of corruption primarily because Grant did not appoint them to posts! (Grant abandoned the attempt late in his second term; it took the murder of President Garfield—himself a “reformer”—for civil service to be reformed under Chester A. Arthur.)

Does the author succeed?
Yes, admirably so.

Criticism
As stated, Smith offers nothing new on Grant’s Civil War career, but this book is satisfactory for the reader or student new to Grant.

More anecdotes of Grant’s life would have made this a better book. It could have also used a more complete, slower exposition of the last year of Grant’s life and the struggle to write his amazing Memoirs.

Main takeaway lessons
So why does President Grant have such a lousy reputation? It’s because the history of his presidency was written by and large by his political and personal enemies (See Frank Scaturro, President Grant Reconsidered, reviewed above). Grant became a victim of “the Lost Cause,” wherein the Confederates were the natural inheritors of the Revolutionary mantle and were overwhelmed by Lincoln’s “illegal war.”  (To see this in action, read The Tragic Era by Claude Bowers, 1928, a member of the Dunning school. Then read W.E.B. DuBois’ Black Reconstruction in America, written as a response to the Dunning school. Then read Eric Foner’s definitive 1987 Reconstruction, America’s Unfinished Revolution.)

So with white supremacists controlling the history of Reconstruction for almost 100 years after his presidency ended, Grant, who fought for civil rights, needed to be destroyed. Grant’s contemporary enemies also proved far more prolific with their condemnations than his supporters were with their praises. Grant’s 1872 victory and vigorous enforcement of Reconstruction soured Grant before the intellectual class—including historians. And later-day lazy, unthinking, uncritical or Lost Cause sympathizing historians have accepted their biased verdict without question. While Smith’s book is wanting in a few areas, it is a much-needed attempt to demonstrate that Grant’s good sense did not desert him in the White House.

He did have faults, of course. He often was too trusting of people—which often got him into trouble—and he managed the military’s and the nation’s finances a lot better than his own. He did have a drinking problem, but after it cost him his first military career, he made damn sure it never hurt him like that again. (Almost every single report about him being drunk during the war or after is false and usually malicious in nature.)

In sum: Grant saved the Union three times. First by winning the war, second by winning the peace at Appomattox, and third by preserving the peace as president. He is now under-appreciated, underestimated, misunderstood and undeserving of his presidency’s lousy reputation. If there was such a creature as historical justice, Grant would be immortalized on Mount Rushmore.

Do I recommend this book?
Without hesitation.

Modern applications
Ulysses S. Grant and George W. Bush have a lot in common: both men in their times were beset by academics, journalists, career politicians and self-anointed “elites” who considered them stupid, incompetent, corrupt and failures.  Rumors concerning them are given wide consideration and accepted as truth, without evidence, by their enemies. Both men are awkward public speakers, but they each have their forte: Bush is great when he’s on fire, and Grant was brilliant with the written word.  

But both men had visions for America that transcended their presidencies: Grant had Reconstruction, and Bush has the war against Islamic terrorism, for which Iraq is the centerpiece.  Both actions were unpopular, but neither man took a poll to decide whether he should do it. Both men looked to a prior critical event as justification for “stubbornly” continuing what media, critics, elites, political opponents, etc., decried as an unpopular, failed and unnecessary policy: the Civil War for Grant, of course, and 9/11 for Bush. Grant spent his entire presidency determined that the “verdict” of Appomattox not be overturned, and Bush has, since Sept. 11, 2001, been determined that another such attack not happen—not ever. Both visions for America, and the actions that they took, had repercussions far beyond their presidencies.

In Grant’s case, there was massive pushback in the South; when Grant’s party abandoned him, and by extension, free blacks in the south, civil rights for black Americans was postponed for 100 years. In Bush’s case, the jihadists who seek our destruction have flocked to Iraq, making our job much more difficult there. Failure in Iraq—leaving will be seen as failure, by our enemies’ own words—will embolden our enemy like nothing else has before, and will mean a much, much more dangerous world than the one we live in now.

Neither man sought failure. Both wanted to win. Grant wanted victory with Reconstruction as much as he sought victory over the Confederacy. But eventually even his party abandoned Grant because they grew tired of the cause, and believed it would never work. Democrats, I believe, abandoned the Iraq cause when it became politically expedient to do so—if they ever truly supported it to begin with; the same goes with squishy Republicans. If the GOP abandons Bush’s policies in Iraq like the party abandoned Grant late in his second term over Reconstruction, the consequences for the world—not just the nation—will be severe. It will be the same for whoever succeeds Bush, because Grant’s successor, Hayes, ended Reconstruction as part of the election compromise—effectively abandoning blacks to the mercies of Democrat white supremacists.