Grant: A Biography
by William S. McFeely
Summary
William S. McFeely's biography follows Ulysses S. Grant from a childhood in Ohio spent around his father's tannery, a trade Grant hated, through West Point, where he graduated in the middle of his class and excelled mainly at horsemanship, and into the Mexican War, a conflict Grant fought in and later called unjust even as it taught him the tactics he would use against many of the same fellow officers in the Civil War. The book follows the years of failure that came after, when Grant resigned his commission, tried farming, tried real estate, and finally reached a kind of stability clerking in his father's leather goods store in Galena, Illinois, just before the war that would remake his life began.
McFeely traces Grant's rise from a colonel of Illinois volunteers to command of every Union army, following the victories at Fort Donelson and Vicksburg that split the Confederacy along the Mississippi, the costly Overland Campaign against Robert E. Lee, and the surrender at Appomattox in April 1865. The book gives serious attention to Grant's presidency, his support for the Fifteenth Amendment and his prosecution of the Ku Klux Klan alongside the corruption scandals that damaged his administration, and closes with his final act, racing throat cancer to finish his memoirs, which secured his family's finances after his death in 1885.
McFeely writes as a critical biographer rather than an admiring one, arguing openly that Grant's genuine talent for war did not extend into either business or the presidency, and reading the book means following a life shaped as much by repeated failure as by one extraordinary, decisive gift. It suits a reader who wants Grant's reputation examined rather than simply celebrated, by a historian willing to say plainly where he thinks Grant fell short.
Historical Context & Significance
Grant: A Biography won the 1982 Pulitzer Prize for Biography and the Francis Parkman Prize; that year's finalists were Gay Wilson Allen for Waldo Emerson and David McCullough for Mornings on Horseback, a book about Theodore Roosevelt's own early years that followed two years after Edmund Morris had covered the same subject. McFeely, a Yale trained historian who helped establish the university's African American studies program, wrote the book as a deliberate reassessment of Grant's reputation.
McFeely went on to write a biography of Frederick Douglass in 1990 that was itself a finalist for the 1992 Pulitzer Prize for Biography, continuing the focus on Reconstruction era history that Grant had begun. His critical reading of Grant, presenting him as a man of limited talents who happened to be extraordinary at exactly one thing, shaped later scholarly debate even as more recent biographers have argued for a more favorable reassessment of Grant's presidency.