Then after Sumter there was a humiliating scramble for a colonelcy of Illinois volunteers, a meteoric but controversial rise in the western theater of war, finally full command of all the Union armies and the grand theater of the surrender at Appomattox.īut Chernow is not writing a civil war history in fact, civil war buffs that want the usual battlefield details will be vaguely dissatisfied. In 1860 he was a business failure reduced to selling firewood on the streets of St Louis. War rescued him from a life of obscurity and disappointment. An Everyman of the mid-19th century America, whose two terms as president remain sadly opaque to many Americans. But he was also a binge drinker and a business failure in civilian life, whose presidency was scarred by betrayal and scandals, though he himself remained scrupulously honest. Author of the Memoirs, the only work of literary genius by any American military man. The greatest general of the American Civil War. Anyone with a blushing acquaintance of history knows the story of his life.

Grant’s two terms as president, and the story fills the second half of Ron Chernow’s new and consequential biography of Grant, easily the most enigmatic and underrated of all U.S. Reconstruction was the great challenge of U.S. Often, their only hope was the United States army’s garrisons in the south, placed there for their protection and for enforcing federal laws by the president of the United States, Ulysses Simpson Grant. Many more thousands who dared to raise their voices were beaten, threatened and driven from their homes. Returning southern soldiers, facing newly enfranchised former slaves and their northern allies, began a reign of murder, intimidation and brutality against newly enfranchised African Americans and white Republicans that threatened, as one federal official said, “a second civil war.” Thousands of blacks were murdered. In the years following the Civil War, the American south descended into chaos.

Ron chernow biographies