Grant Summary

Ron Chernow’s "Grant" is a sweeping biographical history of Ulysses S. Grant, the Union general and two-term president whose reputation Chernow seeks to redeem from the "butcher" and "corrupt" caricatures of earlier scholarship. The book follows Grant from his hardscrabble Ohio boyhood, his years at West Point, his undistinguished antebellum army service, and his failed civilian ventures in St. Louis and Galena, through the Civil War and Reconstruction. Chernow’s central argument is that Grant was a far more principled, capable, and consequential figure than the Gilded Age corruption narrative allows—an honest man surrounded by dishonest subordinates in his presidency, and a committed defender of Black civil rights and federal Reconstruction in the South. Chernow’s distinctive framework reads Grant’s life through the interplay of his personal integrity, his strategic genius, and his self-destructive loyalty to friends and family. Key episodes include the 1862 capture of Fort Donelson, which earned him the "Unconditional Surrender" nickname; the Vicksburg campaign, which split the Confederacy and made his reputation; and Overland and Petersburg, where his aggressive attrition warfare against Robert E. Lee proved decisive. The book also treats Grant’s presidency in detail: the Enforcement Acts against the Klan, the fight for the Fifteenth Amendment, the controversial Credit Mobilier and Whiskey Ring scandals, and his 1877 world tour. A widely noted throughline is Grant’s relationship with his father, Jesse, his wife Julia Dent, and figures like William Tecumseh Sherman and Abraham Lincoln. Chernow draws heavily on Grant’s own Personal Memoirs, which Grant completed, dying of throat cancer, in 1885. The biography unfolds against Reconstruction, the rise of Ulysses S. Grant as national hero, and the political corruption of the era.