2018 PEN World Voices Festival: Ron Chernow

and then he does extraordinary things you start out you know prior to the age of 39 or 4 it was a life of almost unmitigated failure and that he seems destined for a life of obscurity and he still is this small-town provincial figure who then the war breaks out and he begins to grow into this world historical figure but we talked the other day on the phone and you were playing Seth but still they're always traces of that small-town provincial figure so this is someone who gained like in the case of Hamilton Hamilton kind of transcends his origins and never looks back so you're kind of not aware of that you know kid in the Caribbean whereas with that Grant even as it becomes general-in-chief of the Union Army with a million soldiers under his command even as he becomes a two-term president there are stuffy's moments where you feel the reversion to type to that small-town provincial person that he had been I thought there's something profound in it too about talent and merit and what people are good or bad at and and and people can be awful at one thing and glorious at another and you know at one point grant grant grabbed is stuck is a leather goods Clerk in Galena Illinois and there's a great passage in there where you're just like he's just an awful store clerk yeah like he just had teaches sigh you would fire the guy as a store clerk like he doesn't bother to get up to attend to the customers he like gets the math wrong on the bills this is and and you know it just made me I had this glimpse of it when I was reading it about how many people do we encounter our lives who we encounter in one form in one interaction that has some kind of berry greatness within them you think about all the people that walk in that leather goods store and thought oh my goodness this dude now this is a book unlike this is a story unlike any that I have ever written because I felt like well the other people that I had written about somehow if I could use this expression they were built for a success and they went from strength to strength to strength and again to fair back to Hamilton for a moment I mean the earliest surviving letter we have from Alexander Hamilton when he's this impoverished clerk in the Caribbean when he was 14 years old his very first a letter to his friend Ned Stevenson's I wish there was a war he's already dreaming of Military Glory he already has his tremendous you know fantasies about success grant is unlike any of the figures that I've written about and frankly unlike most of the great figures in history because he was lacking and that kind of you know whole thing ambition is a Shakespearean term grant did go to to West Point but again almost in a passive-aggressive style his father who was a very tight fisted avaricious Tanner wanted grant to go to West Point not because he had any hopes that his son would have a career in the military much less that he would end up general-in-chief but his father was a real tightwad and West Point was free vocational education so grant didn't want to go but he didn't have any say in the matter so he goes to West Point it's sometimes said that he was very lackluster he graduated or in the middle of his class but what struck me was that here's a young man he has no spacious you know dreams by the time he graduates from West Point in the middle of his class his highest ambition is to be an assistant math professor at the academy not a fool Myatt math professor mind you but an assistant math professor so he's really kind of lacking in ambition and when I found so interesting about doing this book is that you know when I was writing about Washington Hamilton Rockville Morgan all of those figures had a very strong feeling as I was researching their lives that their drive their intelligence their energy their ambition that if they had not succeeded in what they eventually did they would have succeeded in something again they've kind of built craft for a success whereas grant is one person he has to mesh with his historical moment and it's a very precise set of circumstances so you're absolutely right his his working as a clerk in his father's leather goods store in Illinois and he'd been there for only a year when he took the job he had to agree to work as a clerk jr. to his young younger brothers you can imagine how great that felt in his late thirties he's married you know he has four children so he's this junior you know forgettable clerk in this store the civil war breaks out he still had the West Point education he'd fought in the Mexican War for four years so four months later he's a colonel six months later he's a brigadier general twelve months later he's a major-general and then by the end of the war this person who had never had anyone working for before his general in chief of the Union Army has a million soldiers under his command it was far and away the largest military operation in American history but you know the funny thing is that he seems to take this in stride in a certain way you think that the history repeated business failures before the war and the fact that you know it was kind of a nobody at the time the war breaks out you think that he would not have either the courage where the confidence to do what he does but instead he starts he becomes a colonel and he's doing this like he was born to play this role there's no insecurity quite the contrary he's very daring he's very audacious he does lots of stuff that no other Union General with dared to do you you do a really good job of sort of drawing out this this way in which he's a kind of yeah he's kind of unassuming almost mediocrity in civilian life but you know even in the Mexican War he's he shows that he has a he just has a he's a natural genius for warfare interestingly you know during his four years in the the Mexican War he was quartermaster that sounds very and a mundane and non heroic bettah fact it was extremely important because with the quartermaster as the quartermaster gathers supplies for the troops it could be everything you know from you know horses to ammunition and so he is studying and he is learning the nuts and bolts of an army he is learning the art of warfare not only in terms of tactics and strategy but he's learning the art of warfare from a logistical standpoint this later on what happens in the Civil War and he's great at tactics and strategy - but Civil War this is kind of a big bureaucratic operation grant ends up being in charge of four different very large armies scattered across a fifteen hundred mile front where and it's his mastery of the telegraph and railroad and coordinating all of these operations that will be very central to his success so your absolute right Chris I mean grant is kind of picking up these different talents along the way you also he shows courage as quartermaster in the Mexican War he was never obligated to see any combat he could have hung back and he would have been well within his rights he made a point of actually fighting in every battle so this is someone I love this wonderful line from Walt Whitman about grant where he said nothing heroic and yet the greatest hero he also it's also a amazing character study of a person who struggles with addiction and in some ways one of the most significant I've ever encountered because here's someone who is I think we would in modern terms we would say he's an alcoholic yeah he but but but his and this is something that the devil's him his entire life it brings him to his lowest point when he essentially washes out of the Army describe both his relationship to alcohol and the reputational effects it had on reputation effects have been huge we were talking about this story ography before you know and historically anyone who really wanted to sell you the reputation of grant you know would refer to him as a drunkard and it was always that word drunkard and I found that interesting because drunkard is a very very loaded word drunkard implies that alcoholism is a moral failing it implies that this person is indulging almost kind of willfully and gleefully you know indulging this problem and so what's happened in in recent years in grants bog raphy most of the biographies have been very admiring but it became the fashion if you were out admiring book of grant say oh the whole alcoholism business that was overblown these were kind of you know for malicious and anonymous letters from his enemies whereas the more I studied it he was an alcoholic but rather than kind of you know quote-unquote drunkard who was just indulging this freely when he's in his twenties he joins the temperance lodges was someone who struggles with alcoholism his whole life no but has made the story complicated and I think why a lot of barbers got it wrong is that there were a lot of people who work very closely with grant over you know period of days weeks months and they said oh you know I was by grand side two or three months I never saw him drink this as well not even a seven yeah at dinner yeah but what became clear and I have something like 170 page references on the drinking so if you're interested in this there's a lot this is your book that there was a very very clear pattern that emerged that unlike a lot of alcoholics who might be drinking every day grant was a binge drinker he would go typically for two or three months without touching a single drop of alcohol to that extent you had an unusual degree of control over it but he would then do he never wanted for instance during the war he never wanted his soldiers or his officers to see it he never drank on the eve of battle he never drank during battle he never drank in a situation of responsibility but what he would do after the battle when the pressure was off he would then await an opportunity where he was go to a nearby town for two or three days and have a bender and get it out of a system and then Sherman for one came back and said that grant had an amazing ability to come back fresh as a rose as he said and I have well a description from one person who described grant coming back from others vendors and he said that grant got of his horse they kind of straightened himself up and he pulled this jacket down and he marched into his tent and he was General Grant again and I ended up discovering an enormous amount about grants problem for the simple reason that when the war breaks out there's a young lawyer from Galena named John roll and somebody hires as his his chief of staff Rollins who was the son of an alcoholic agrees to become grants chief of staff on one condition that grant promise never to touch a drop of alcohol if he does that he Rollins will will quit grant did have a lot of a lot of lapses Rollins however felt that grant was so important to the Union effort that he hung in there but Rollins luckily during much of the war was writing to his fiancee then wife on an almost daily basis and this became a monomania with Rollins so that believe it or not we actually have his chief of staff writing and almost daily a piece the boss and the drinking problem for the if you haven't read the book Rollins is an incredible case almost Shakespearean figure this this just he's an odd he's odd by Grant and and and sort of loyal to the death to grant but also maddened by him and and and the drinking drives him bonkers he's constantly in an almost kind of comic way trying to throw himself in front of Grand alcohol there's two women who board a train car after a grand military victory in attempt to hand the general two bottles of wine and Rollins like thrusts himself in front of them and grabs the wine away writes about it to his the Beyonce because he's so desperate to sort of keep he views it as sort of his mission it's like he's fighting this he's fighting his own Union he's fighting his own little war yeah there's another that I love that grants mother believe it or not sends through a a relative a bottle of wine for grant and so Rawlins looks at the bottle said where'd this come from this came from the generals mother and Ron said and the whole grand family's pack of fools so he has this yeah he soon he has a sort of lifetime struggle with this and is kind of disciplined disciplined form of a sort of addiction talk about this sort of what it is about him I you know people that are Civil War buffs obviously you read a lot about crank Ramos obviously a towering figure what is it that I mean he turns the tide of the war and I think it's it's not crazy to say that almost I'm almost single-handedly turns the tide of the war or his army does and at some level one could say that it's because he just wants he wants to win it in a way that it's unclear that the other generals do yeah well I think you know given his history of business fail again back in the 1850s he and his wife Julia they're living in st. Louis he's trying to make a go at farming he fails he ends up selling fire but on street corners in st. Louis when Christmas he has to pawn his watch to buy gifts for his family it gets kind of it's it's just an extraordinarily sad story but I think Chris what happens the war breaks out and I think that Grant has nothing to lose in everything to the gay and I think there is a sense of mission there is a sense of opportunity grant would never have been you know crass enough to put it that way but I think that that pre-war history number one kind of gives him a daring you know there's sort of a motivation to do great things and I think that the other thing there's something I say in the book is speculation but I something guy intuitively felt was that all the years of failure had taught grant certain lessons about patience and perseverance and in the war the drags on for four years by the latest estimate we know that 750,000 people died during the the Civil War staggering number of millions more you know maimed wounded and so I think the fact that Grant had this kind of sense of perseverance it was in his nature but I think that it also came out of that experience of having to pardon the pun soldier on you know in in in peace and that was important as anything also kind of very interesting go back to what we were saying a moment ago grant has amazing confidence for someone who's known only failure and William Tecumseh Sherman who had very very interesting observations about grant as a general one of the things that he singled out was Grant's optimism in in battle I mean here you have to picture these Civil War battles were thousands of people are being you know blown apart you know the the smoke and ash and fire and limbs flying in blood spattering but he said that grant always had the opt the optimism he had the faith that he would win the battle and Sherman said I can only compare that optimism to the faith that a Christian has in his Savior you know it's it's on some you know irrational psychological level he always thought that he would win it's kind of hard to know where that comes from given the fact that there had been so much you know failure the the experience of the war also starts him on a certain kind of ideological trajectory that I think is is crucial and in some ways it tracks Lincoln's he where is he before the war how would you describe his politics where is he politically politically he was a he was a Douglas Democrat he'd grown up in a Whig household grant before the war the only vote would he ever get cast for president was for James Buchanan in 1856 not grants greatest vote by a longshot but he got us up in this contradictory situation because he's born in 1922 in southwest corner of Ohio right near the Ohio River picture this free state of Ohio on one side slave-owning state of Kentucky on the other in fact drink grants childhood when the Ohio River would freeze over it was not unusual on a winter night for fugitive slaves to sprint across to freedom so there were it was an area where there was a lot of sympathy for slave holding and then there was kind of also very active abolitionist community as well he ends up marrying to a man named Julia dent right out of West Point he's posted to Jefferson Barracks in st. Louis Julia's father Colonel Frederick dent is a big slave holder had 30 slaves also a real as far as I could tell yeah I think that's an accurate description and so when they get married which was 18 of 28 after the Mexican War that the entire grand family boycotted the wedding in st. Louis because they were an abolitionist family the idea of Ulysses marrying into a slave owning family in Missouri was really anathema to them and the two families you know this breach was never healed in fact believe it or not Grant's mother who was alive during both his terms as president never came to Washington because the the dense grants unless the dense boots into the white that was and she didn't want to have to deal with the dance but when the war breaks out Colonel dent is horrified that Ulysses joins the Union side and is heard to say my son-in-law ever comes on my property I'm gonna shoot him like a worthless rabbit you know so grant is kind of caught in the middle of this abolitionist family on the one hand overbearing slave owning father-in-law on the other by grants own admission he's not a hero on the abolitionist question but there is one thing that happens that's very significant grant was willing during his farming period in the 1850s he was worried he was willing to work side by side in the fields with blacks some of them free some of them slave and in fact there was a lot of criticism in the neighborhood at the time of a white man working alongside blacks he owned one slave we think probably as a gift from his father-in-law and was man named William Jones and in March 1859 grant goes to the federal courthouse in st. Louis and he frees William Jones this was a period of extreme extreme financial desperation for grant where he could have made a lot of money by selling William Jones he could have made a lot of money by hiring William Jones out and instead he frees them so you could see kind of the seeds there in fact Tennessee Coates writing about my book made a wonderful comment he said the single most courageous action of any American president became president was grant freeing his one slave at a moment of such extreme poverty in 1859 but then what happens his conversion to the cause of abolition it's slow but very powerful during the war okay I have to picture grants army is the army that is penetrating into the heart of Mississippi which means it's grants army that's going into the heart of the cotton Kingdom and the large plantations and so it happens first hundreds then thousands and tens of thousands of fugitive slaves run away and come to Grant's camp and Frederick Douglass said after the war there was no Union General who did a better job in terms of feeding caring for housing employing blacks but there was still a tremendous debate in the Union Army as to whether or not these fugitive slaves would make good soldiers it was a very widespread feeling among union officers the blacks lacked courage they lacked discipline every kind of you know racial slur that you can imagine but then in June 1863 there's a battle it's right around the time the full of X berg there's a battle on the Mississippi in place called Milliken's Bend this is to have a profound impact on Grant's life Jefferson Davis had announced that any blacks who were captured during the Civil War one of two things would happen to them they would either be murdered outright on the battlefield where they would be sold back into slavery at that battle of Milliken's men was the first time that black soldiers were really tested and battles sort of much more important than we know well another Fort Wagner the glory one but this battle was actually in many ways more important what happened at that battle because I think they're 1000-2000 black soldiers indeed when they were captured by Confederates they were there the skulls were bashed in with them it was completely mutilated horrible things the black soldiers fought with such extraordinary courage even knowing what could happen to them that grant became the single biggest convert in the Union Army to training recruiting equipping blacks and this is extremely extremely important because as Frederick Douglass said you know once the black man had a badge on his shoulder and a musket in his arm very difficult to deny that black soldier and the black community citizenship and then Norma's amount flows out of that well that's where the those are the seeds of what would sort of flower in his his presidency I mean before we get there though there's the there's the fact that you've got the sort of - there's sort of these two axes that I think it's interesting to take a second to think about grant that don't necessarily go in line which is how the the political views about how the south should be dealt with as the war is coming to a close and the the level of vengeance verse magnanimity that should be shown to the south and then positions on the full equality citizenship and protection of America's new black citizens who've been freed and interestingly the you have people who are really vengeance oriented in their views of the south and really racist and also you have people that are quite magnanimous but also very committed to racial equality and I think maybe you can say Andrew Johnson is actually kind of in the beginning that first camp and grants in the second a bit but but talk about these two big debates that Grant is gonna be sucked into as the war is coming to a close yeah I mean that you're absolutely right there these two contradictory impulses okay what happens at Appomattox Courthouse is you all know from school Grant was extremely magnanimous in victory the Confederate soldiers were starving he immediately issues I know 25 to 30 thousand rations he allows the soldiers to retain their horses and their sidearms he did not allow the Union troops to gloat or even celebrate after the victory grant to his everlasting credit grant refused to enter Grant never and his wife Julia wanted him to enter Richmond and Grant said Julia don't you realize how bitter defeat is for these people and how how humiliated there would be you know if I entered Richmond so he never did in fact after the war there was a proposal to create a large historical painting for the rotunda of the US Capitol that would show Lee surrendering to grant grant vetoed that because he said that will only humiliate and embittered the south so grant briefly it becomes this heroic figure in the south he becomes major figure you know a kind of reconciliation but then what happens particularly after Lincoln dies grant really inherits Lincoln's agenda zuzo and that agenda being preservation of the Union and protection of the four million former slaves who are now citizens so while he is trying very hard to maintain this conciliatory posture towards the south at first grant feels partly based on his conversation with Robert Lee Grahn feels at first that the south is chastened that the South accepts that slavery is gone that the blacks are going to be citizens that does not last very long the South begins to pass things called the Black Codes this happens right after the war but the Black Codes were the Black Codes essentially through the blacks into a state of serfdom I mean it wasn't slavery but the the Black Codes turned them effectively into indentured servants so that one of the Black Codes in South Carolina if a black was caught on the on roadway if the black had violated his or her employment contract person was subject to arrest that is they were legally changed not change with legally chained to the plantations to work from sunrise to sundown if they left they were subject to arrest and you know all of the states had laws like this and so they were pretty much forced to go back to working on the same plantations that they had before okay that was sort of one thing then even kind of much darker 1866 in town called Pulaski Tennessee they're a group of confederate veterans who meet to form a social club and they call it the Ku Klux Klan and at first it is just kind of a a social club of a club for confederate veterans then they begin to March and then they begin to arm and essentially the Confederacy rises again in the form of the Ku Klux Klan which by 1867 1868 is murdering thousands thousands of blacks without a single prosecution so you know at this point this grant does general-in-chief is still in South is divided into five military districts grant is still general-in-chief so he is overseeing the five military commanders in the south and this really didn't permit an intermediate ground you know it's hard to to look back and sort of find that sort of nice intermediate conciliatory path when that was happening that he will ultimately you know become president after the the the Johnson debacle and you know I think it's fair to say that this it's the central thing that he the central credit to him as a historical figure as a president is the way that he supervises reconstruction and particularly breaking the back of the clan yeah you know to give you a sense because the clan this was a reign of terror across the south you know we hear a lot about terrorism these days but it's interesting this was by far by far the largest outbreak of mass domestic terrorism in our history think that this is a piece of history Americans but no but it really is kind of a black hole of American history there was no southern sheriff who had arrest a member of the Klan there was no southern white who would testify against a member of the Klan there was no southern jury that would convict a member of the Klan you know I thought a lot as I was doing the the book I was shocked by the scale of the violence against the black community and also white Republicans in the south you know we we all know about the horrifying death of Emmett Till in 1955 14 I think in Mississippi we know about the bombing of the Birmingham Church the four teenage girls in 1963 it's a terrible thing to say but true those deaths would not even have rated a footnote in the violence of the early years after a civil war where blacks were being massacred on a given day sometimes dozens of them even hundreds of them without a single arrest being made and so what happens when grant becomes President Grant is the single moving force behind the passage of something called the ku klux Act this was April 1871 which gave him quite extraordinary powers to combat the Klan grant was getting hundreds thousands of letters from black and white Republicans and south describing what was going on the ku klux Act gave him the power sweeping powers to suspend habeas corpus to declare martial law Hera's a crusading Attorney General named Amos Ackerman who was originally from the north but moved to the south before the war and Ackerman brings 3,000 indictments against the Klan they get more than a thousand convictions the Secret Service was actually drawn into doing detective work against the Klan u.s. army members are involved in arresting members of the Klan federal attorneys in the south are prosecuting them in federal courts and grant crushed the Klan Frederick Douglas has said by 1872 this slaughter and scourging of our people have ceased the Klan that we know it was a revival of the Klan that dates from the 1910s and 1920s a lot of the same methods I mean the under stuff the night rider's on horseback in the hoods all of that goes back to 1860s and 1870s they didn't do the cross burning there are certain differences but basically it was you know the same spirit but it was not the same organization then what happens because the Ku Klux Act has outlawed all of these kind of night riding and hooded militias the that movement that white supremacist movement begins to morph into groups called the white League and the white line and the Knights of the white camellia and there are these other groups they're not military groups but they're still kind of terrorists in in nature and so during during this period you've got so that you know the the the the states are being admitted back into the union the view of the passage thirteenth fourteenth and fifteenth amendment and you know it's it's grant is committed to in a way that not all members of Republican Party are to a full full suffrage and full equality a full citizenship I mean and and throws the weight of the federal government behind that and then something starts to happen to the Republican Party in the south and I think it's worth talking about this for a second there's an amazing moment in it in the book in which grant is is you know going to these cabinet reading these accounts of what's happening the South and Hamilton fish who's the Secretary of State writes in his diary oh god grant came in again and read this whole thing about what's going on the south and someone was castrated yada yada it's getting kind of tedious and that and it's always epitomizes public opinion of northern Republicans as time goes on who really do kind of just start to I think through their natural racism frankly and the the difficulties of the intransigence of the South just kind of start to flag yeah you're absolutely right I mean it's it's it's just absolutely fascinating what happens to the Republican Party because the Republican Party of course is born than 1850s it's the party of abolitionism well initially in slavery not extending into the territories but becomes the party of abolitionism and then adjourned grants presidency it begins to evolve into this more business-oriented party kind of begins to preview more of the Republican Party that we know in the twentieth century but there are essentially two groups this party is split right down the middle and it's a little counterintuitive because on the one hand there are these party bosses who are very close to business they're you know they're hip deep and patronage and corruption but actually they're kind quite loyal to the abolitionist agenda you wouldn't expect that and then there's this other group that we called liberal Republicans and they actually mounted a serious challenge to Grant when he ran for election 1872 when he ran against Horace Greeley these liberal Republicans whom you would expected they would be the ones who would be carrying the banner of abolitionism and they would be the ones liberal Republicans who were worried about blacks and South it was exactly the opposite when Horace Greeley ran as the liberal Republican candidate against grant his you know platform stressed Home Rule which was essentially a euphemism for returning you know the fate of blacks in the south to the tender mercies of the white community he said north and south we have to clasp hands across the bloody chasm this was his famous phrase and that liberal Republican group they were all of these kind of you know do good good government assertive people but they were very elitist you know Boston and New York they identified with the white southern elite they were very upset about corruption and grants administration and then some of the reconstruction governments but it was really liberal Republicans who abandoned Grant and the northern public generally it was a terrible situation Chris because the weather there was definitely racism and that counted more and more heavily not just in the Democratic Party but in the Republican Party too and then finally there's a kind of fatigue with well how long we gonna keep the federal troops in the in the south because the white South really was intransigent you know they did not let up on this and so what happens even grant during his second term begins to retreat from reconstruction and begins to demand more and more that the southern states is assailed the kind of biracial reconstruction governments that they do more militarily to cope with the you know when these other white supremacist groups but he gets and the first time he really retreats from it as a Mississippi in 1875 governor Adelbert Ames fascinating courageous character originally from the the north and is you know braving these terrible attacks from white supremacists you know grants attorney general there was a an episode where dozens of blacks were killed in Grant's attorney general deadwood three-pound says you're gonna have to handle this yes yourself are you gonna either have to use the white militia or the black militia and Ames writes back and he says well if you these are white militia they're not at all equal to in size to the militia of these white supremacist groups and then he says if we use the black militia there's just gonna be a race war you know in it then it's gonna become you know war of black versus whites and so grant finally retreats from this very kind of noble and courageous policy that he's had and then what happens by the 1876 election with Rutherford B Hayes Hayes it's one of the famous disputed elections interesting he was also Florida there was Florida in South Carolina Louisiana so finally this deal is negotiated where Hayes agrees to recognize whoever called the Redeemer governments he's really kind of white supremacist governs Hayes agrees to recognize the white supremacist governments in the South agrees to full federal troops out of the south and so the disputed election is resolved in favor of Brotherhood V Hayes who was a Republican but this ends they this ends reconstruction foreign to me the the book is very clear on this that the the the period under Grant is a high-water mark of racial equity in the United States for what I think you can arguably say 80 or 90 years I don't that doesn't strike me as a crazy hyperbolic I mean the majority the the lower house is South Carolina state's legislature majority black there is a black US senator from Mississippi who serves or several black members of Congress black black citizens appointed throughout the federal government you talk about the numbers and they're actually kind of I mean you know that there were if this is a really a glorious glorious chapter that's unfortunately been completely forgotten we had during Reconstruction we had 2,000 blacks who held office at the state or local level we had 14 blacks in the House of Representatives we had two blacks in the US Senate this is amazing the first kind of class in 1870 the first six you know black congressmen four of them had been born into slavery three of the six were from South Carolina the cradle of the Confederacy this is really an amazing thing that we did and I mentioned to you the other day I would love to tell this story because there was no there was a civil rights movement in this country we know the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s but we don't know the civil rights movement that late 1860s 1870s I just want to tell you a story which I think will make the point during that period between the end of the civil war in Grant's to terms as president that four-year period the South is carved up into five military districts the five commanders are reporting to Grand so I'm going through grants papers and when de I read the following telegram from Phil Sheridan Phil Sheridan was the commander on the ground in Louisiana and this is what he wrote it said dear general we desegregated streetcars in New Orleans this week and he precedes to say that up until that point blacks and whites rode on separate streetcars in New Orleans he said that black streetcars had a star on the side but he said that finally the black community in New Orleans decided that they couldn't take this anymore they said blacks began to pile on to the white only streetcars the streetcar companies then appealed to Sheridan as the commander what to do and Sheridan said to them unless you desegregate the streetcars you won't be allowed to operate on the streets of New Orleans and he finishes the letter on this cheery note by saying blacks and whites are now happily riding side-by-side and streets of New Orleans okay just stop and think a moment what I just told you was 90 years before Rosa Parks refused to get up on the bus in Montgomery Alabama this had all happened before we don't know the names of those blacks who were piling onto the white only streetcars and who actually won with amazing speed and and success and so there were so many of these sorts of things going on in the south that we don't know about it's good because it's amazing historical amnesia well can I ask you an on I'm gonna ask you an honest Oracle question a more sort of speculative kantar factual one you can't help but wonder whenever you immerse yourself in this period of time like what could have been done differently and you know there's one of those strange things about reading the grant book and immersing yourself I find whenever you're reading about the Civil War reconstruction it it in me it inspires this kind of this sort of thirsty rage this I I want them crushed destroyed driven out you you're you're rooting for you know when when when Sherman is writing these dispatches back to Graham he's just like we are going to march through their lands and we are going to burn everything to the ground and we're gonna take their cattle and you're sitting minier go go go go go because because it is such a it is such a monumental tower of evil that has been constructed in the American South it is and it needs to be destroyed and it needs to be torn down and and yet there's this sort of question of like what could have been done differently was it was it necessary to have military occupation of the South for 60 years like well is there a universe in which the gains that are made in reconstruction are preserved well you asked it terrific and very very profound question and I'm not sure I'm not sure there was an answer this is the first time I've ever written a book where I felt that at the center of the book was an American tragedy you know that the essence of tragedy being irreconcilable conflict okay I was saying before you know there were all these fugitive slaves who then fought for the north there was no way they could be denied citizenship okay so you have well Lincoln was still alive the 13th amendment abolished slavery because the Emancipation Proclamation was a military order so they wanted to make that permanent they had to do that given what had happened in the war and with all the runways slaves once you've abolish slavery ok so what's gonna be the status of these people then you passed the 14th amendment because you make them citizens and 14th amendment gives them you know equal protection before the law then if they're kind of citizens who have to give them the right to vote so you passed the Fifteenth Amendment which gives blacks at least black men the right to vote okay here's this white South with this ideology of you know racial superiority it's sort of been drummed into their head you know over many generations suddenly blacks have the right to vote and picture the situation it's not an easy thing to get your head around in South Carolina in Mississippi blacks were the majority of the population I mean this is still to this day kind of big factor in American politics so South Carolina Mississippi have majority blacks overall african-american population in the south at the time was a 36% so it's clear that if blacks have the right to vote and it was impossible to deny them the right to vote and here's this you know in a white community that has been accustomed to lording it over the blacks and running everything who we're now going to be forced to share power with these people who recently they're slaves and they were they were completely intransigent and full of you know well violence that I was talking about before almost without exception was directed against black voting so that these are if there was a political rally blacks were trying to register blacks were trying to vote that was where it was because if the blacks dared to exercise the right to vote they were not only going to have significant pair in a lot of states there might actually be states where they controlled and so I don't really it was a tragedy one thing though I will say and and and I think it's always striking to me is it you know we tend to sort of I think we err too much and letting historical figures off the hook a little bit for for determinations they make and we say well you can't go back and apply our modern morality in the past what I think is striking is this is true about the burnses Trail of Tears under Jackson which is that if you go back and you read the debate in the house during the Trail of Tears there are people at the time saying this is actually an absolutely barbarous action right and in the same way that that there are there are many moments in your book grant the perfect examples the general order he issues evacuating telling all the Jews within his basically armories territory to get out of there it's a odious document but it's also recognized at the time by many people as an odious document 30 there are people at the time who are seeing very clearly what sin out of their eyes no I you know I faced this issue when I was doing Washington and Hamilton and and in both books I spent an enormous amount of time you know on the the race issue and there were certain number of people who said aren't you kind of editing that you know into the history and I said well it had been edited out I was editing it back in you know no this is really true you know James Madison for instance the Constitutional Convention said that the bane split was not between the large states in the small states were ever taught in school the main states were between the northern states in the southern states over slavery you know so these were kind of very live issues at the time and particularly you know when it comes to race relations this is something that the country has struggled with going back to the to the very founding but as I was saying you know in terms of people forgetting that there was ever this civil rights movement in the 1860s and 1870s it's very interesting what is a society we choose to remember and what we choose to forget because the Civil War you know what happened with the remembrance of the Civil War is that the Civil War became draped almost if I could put this around the kind of nostalgia that is the years went by and you can see these newsreels these old codgers you know meeting at Gettysburg and then North you know the northern and southern veterans you know hugging each other and you know so the Civil War in a way in terms of American memory allowed an outlet to the extent that you could credit the bravery of both people this actually drove grant crazy he felt that there was this false you know equivalence between it cuz he felt that and in his memoir he said at Appomattox you know he said how sad he was that day said I felt like anything but rejoicing over the downfall of a forward what so gallantly though that fellow had fought for the worst you know cause I could have imagined her something to that was worse but with the Civil War we found a way as a society started talking about it in a conciliatory fashion by kind of acknowledging the bravery and sacrifice of both we've never to this day found a way of talking about reconstruction I think that this is the reason that it has been repressed in historical memory there's a sort of final question about and then I thought maybe we'd open up to some questions that folks want to come down there some for five minutes or so you guys can come down and ask so the the ways in which would the the Achilles heel in many ways of both the grant administration in the Republican Party of the time is this kind of corruption this and you know it's the it's obviously the lost cause in the Dunning school emphasize this extremely out of context right all governments at the time we're astoundingly corrupt yeah anyways um but it is also true that they're very corrupt I mean one of my favorite things is that grant just is constantly getting gifts from rich people all the time like a bunch of rich industrials just buy them houses yeah and it's like okay I guess I'll take the house and and and there's just this like this total lack of any like regulatory propriety in the way in in any conflict of interest anything yeah no this is the real moral blindness in terms of these gifts and you know he felt that it was his due as a war hero and then also some you know get into the to the scandals which which happens you know but I argue in the book is that I think grant got kind of the big things right but he got it kind a lot of smaller things wrong and these scandals that happen the nepotism did happen the gifts you know did happen I try to spend a lot of time in the book on it and and and the mystery is why in terms of the gifts why there's moral blindness and in terms of the scandal why he was blind to all of these Rascals and they're kind of quite a number of different explanations so one of grants childhood friends said grant could never why he would sort of be blind his scandals a grant could never imagine it and yeah a grant always assumed that other people were as sincere as himself another one of grants you know West Point classmate said grant had this kind of soldierly loyalty to people you don't abandon a con comrade under fire grant himself because he'd gone through so much failure and prior to the civil war so many people had had doubted him you know he made this statement toward the end of his presidency that he had always made it a policy of standing by people long after other people had given given up on them but he also said resi and there's presidents he was asked what was the single biggest disappointment in his life and he said being deceived by friends but their moments were filled Grant was almost asking for it you notice in some of these cases you-know-who Oval Babcock who was effectively his chief of staff grant was awarded multiple times that Babcock was was corrupt and Babcock was involved in the so-called whiskey ring scandal and brantas writes this letter after Feb gagas indited writes this letter to Babcock's wife said not to worry you know I've known Orville for 14 years I can't 14 years of intimate and confidential relations and I can't imagine that I could be so grossly deceived in anyone well he was grossly deceived you know yes it's a recurring theme because there's all these people he's interacting with throughout the throughout his life that he thinks her friends and then because you have their papers they're like like trying to get them fired behind the scenes and writing all these letters but the corruption is bigger than Graham I think I mean grant becomes the figurehead but one of the things you show in the book is that it's endemic in some ways both to the operation of the government and the Republican Party at the time and and I guess this sort of may be a note that I think has some real modern resonance the Republican Party by 1876 in that contested election is the is the party of the New York Times Magazine or the part of the say the the the the the northern papers largely what we would call the northern elite the people that make culture the academics in the Ivy League university the finance ears on Wall Street and also the party of african-americans and racial equality does that sound familiar so it's it's a party that binds together that attempts to hold this coalition together that is a party of racial equality and also kind of the cultural lead and the financial lead and it doesn't hold what what ultimately is the you know the party's kind of flip you see this is right it's such a good host on MSNBC because I mean because in a way the parties do change change places later on and so much of the temperature of the idealism drains out of the the party and then you have more kind of move into you know late 19th early 20th century it's kind of more of the liberal crusading element that had been part of the Republican Party you know it still is there with Teddy Roosevelt at least uncertain you know domestic issues but then you have kind of you know Woodrow Wilson and more of that crusading impulse flips over to the Democratic side but of course with the racism right he has he has the he has the politics of Stanton Virginia yeah yeah yeah and yes of the you know for so long we were test him to thinking of the you know the Democratic Party of the the solid south you know and for it was a long time before Republicans were able to vote Democrat because there was that same kind of you know for black blacks in the south it was the solid Republicans South how is Grant memorialized scene at the it went when he when he dies well you know I don't know how many of you have visited Grant's Tomb but grants tomb is the largest mausoleum in North America and so I always say to people if you want to get a sense of the high regard that Grant was held just go and look at the size of Grant's Tomb you know Frederick Douglass felt that Grant was he said that the Liberty that Abraham Lincoln delivered with his pen you know grant effected and with his sword I'll give you a couple of other things that Douglass said he said ulysses s grant was the Vigilant wise firm and impartial protector of my race and he also said very significantly said that to grant the Negro owes his enfranchisement more than any other man he felt that grant was the driving force behind the 15th amendment and grant felt that the 13th amendment was the most significant event in American history since the Declaration of Independence so if you see the tomb and the tomb for a long time then grant fell out of favor in terms of history and then grandstand was kind of taken over by the drug dealers and the homeless it's been nice in recent years to see you know they've restored it and there are more visitors and I think the restoration of the two reflects what's going on and the historiography about grant when you don't have to it was Micro Father I have a lot more I just please hi my name is Gloria Browne Marshall and I teach a constitutional law and one of the issues and and race in the law and one of the issues that I see that I haven't read your book I'm looking forward to it that wasn't really discussed was there was of course all this conflict people wanting to do good and other people saying that you know we can't afford it but I didn't hear you speak a whole lot about the role of the US Supreme Court and actually undermining what grant was doing with the individual private actions that were allowed to take place on a wrist thank you very very important omission so thank you for giving me a chance to to fill that gap now one thing that I didn't miss mentioned against part of this historical amnesia about reconstruction was that we had two Civil Rights Act there was a Civil Rights Act of 1866 and then another Civil Rights Act of 1875 and it was just reading some of these speeches that were made by black members of Congress prior to the 1875 Act where they were saying that when they traveled to Washington DC they could not sit on a first-class compartment they were signed to the smoking car which was kind of in the back of the Train and then they could not get off the train and stay at a hotel at the time so the 1875 Civil Rights Act created desegregation public accommodations but was overturned by the Supreme Court in 1883 and Allah of the landmark reconstruction legislation you're absolutely right was overturned by the Supreme Court and some of those were grant appointees you know so to that extent I think that he did not properly vet a lot of the appointees in terms of how they would rule on those sorts of things so thank you there's been a fair amount of discussion of criticism of the melting pot theory of America an argument that essentially we need to respect individual groups within society that have been oppressed because the melting pot is essentially an invitation not to all combined together but to bring in these people if they can coexist in a white America I'm wondering if you came across any discussion at that time in Grand time about what integration could look like what an integrated society could look like and was that very much inviting black people into a white America or was it a more of an effort to unite everyone around it yeah that's a very good question you know because if you look at even Abraham Lincoln's statements on race you know even Lincoln would go out of his way to tell people were not legislating social equality you know we're not gonna for interracial marriages we're not gonna force blacks and whites to socialize and there was some of that and you know in in Grant's attitude but I don't know a particular statement that he made where he was arguing for a biracial society that would sort of go to the level of the social rather than legal equality he did I could just tell you you know a few statements give you a flavor of grant there was a custom at the white house every year on New Year's Day the doors were flung open and thousands upon thousands of people would march through the Executive Mansion well grant was told the blacks and whites had traditionally entered separately grant was tell that the blacks were complaining he said well that's fine have them you know enter together at his second inaugural ball it was actually integrated inaugural ball in 1872 now this is interesting because we hear so much about friends instead Teddy Roosevelt had Booker T Washington to dinner in the White House in grant land so far beyond that during the 1872 election granted already appointed the first black ambassadors one was a bonanza Bassett and his ambassador to Haiti and then James Mullen Turner the ambassador to Liberia he integrated the staff of the White House and on and on and on and dreaming 1872 election Frederick Douglass said that in one government department alone in Washington it counted 250 black employees in 1872 one other not I just say Don that that that there's this you paint a good picture of the symbiosis that happens between both the sort of moral imperative here in the political which is that after the 15 mm when you enfranchise african-americans they then become a voting constituency with political power that you're worried about getting the votes of and so all of these decisions are now me oh yeah well thank you Chris that's very important is this which is key I mean it doesn't it doesn't in fact take away from the the sort of farsightedness but it reinforces how important oh no yeah I mean because I you know dumb on a this is a very very important point because one of the fears that Grant and the entire Republican Party in the North has at the end of the war which is that the South the white South is going to vote you know solid you know democratic but there were the so-called Copperhead Democrats in the North the kind of the Pro South or kind of anti-war Democrats in the north and so they looked at the electoral math and said you know if the white democratic South team was up with the copperheads in the north they are going to run the country and they will completely reverse the verdict of the war so the only way that they felt that they could preserve the gains of the civil war was to have black Republicans and white Republicans in the south and at first that strategy worked and then it fell apart so thank you talked about the kind of backsliding of civil rights and racial justice between the eighteen sixties and seventies and and I guess if you look at today we the rise the outright that rises in segregation in schools and our president and all that and I was wondering if you could talk about some of the mistakes that were made in allowing that backsliding and maybe some lessons we could learn for today to to kind of keep momentum going or writing up stuff yeah no it's it's an excellent question again you know with Rutherford B Hayes's victory in 1877 because it was a disputed election the Jack was he was called rather fraud be hazed or his fraudulent saying you know the troops are pulled out of the south the so-called Redeemer governments that as the white supremacist governments are in control race relations are then frozen frozen in the south until the 1950s and you have Jim Crow so the white you know South has one and then Martin Luther King civil rights movement begins to open up and then you have we have a civil rights bill 1957 there was the first civil rights bill from since the Civil Rights Act of 1875 Thunder courts have the Civil Rights Act 1964 Voting Rights Act of 1965 and gradually the effects of Jim Crow begin to unwind as I was saying before I wish that I could sort of look back at what we were saying and find another path that wasn't taken but again I have a kind of tragic view that Grant and the Republican Party did what they needed to do to protect the four million former slaves in the south it then inevitably produced this violent backlash maybe some wiser political or historical head than I am you know could see how it could have turned out differently but as I was researching it I had difficulty finding that other path now that you've finished your work on grant do you have any plans on a new project and if so how do you go about selecting one yeah I always have a plans for another project I'm gonna do a book about the later years of Mark Twain and the way you know for those of you've read the grant book you know that the book ends and begins and ends actually the Twain literally has the last word and the in the grant book that Twain was not the ghostwriter the memoirs he was the publisher in 1885 so I went do a book about those final years of Twain it's a very good question for a biographer choice of subject is the most important decision by far that we make and I always say whenever I speak to writing students who were interested in writing biographies say writing biography is a lot like marriage if you pick the right person nothing wrong and if you pick the wrong person nothing go right you know and so as I was saying actually the answer to Chris's first question you know I have this kind of contrarian streak so I'm sort of looking that maybe something has been neglected I think for instance a lot of Twain's most interesting non-fiction was from those early years I I you also find I mean this is kind of irresistible for me in ulysses s grant I was writing about one of the most reticent people in history so I've now gone completely to the other extreme it was someone who has an opinion on everything you know under the Sun is brilliantly original in these spouting opinions and the reporters are you know trailing him around so I think the heft the six years of Trent needed Twain did the violence of the southern army against black soldiers whom they captured have any effect on grant or the Union Army in the way they conducted the rest of the war well one significant thing that happens after you have black soldiers is that there was a period where there was an attempt to have prisoner exchanges because they were horrendous conditions certainly Andersonville but there were pretty horrendous conditions at some of the northern prisons to grant lay down a policy from which she did not deviate I mean he told he told Robert Ely I told Jefferson Davis that he would only exchange prisoners with the south on the basis of absolute racial equality because as far as Jefferson Davis and robert e lee were concerned these black soldiers had been captured and taken back into slavery that was non-negotiable for the south that they were not the south did not consider them prisoners of war that these were recaptured slaves who had run away and grant refused to compromise on that issue and so those prisoner exchanges did not take place he also was kind of against the president exchanges because he felt that it's kind of fighting a war of a attrition and that the northern population was larger so he felt that he didn't want to return all these you know Confederate prisoners to the to the south only to extend the war first of all I just want to thank you both for taking the time um I recently just finished Gordon s woods book friends divided which is kind of a long correspondence between Thomas Jefferson and John Adams and at the end of it he makes a footnote to say how appreciative he was of historical institutions and researchers for transcribing the handwriting of kind of his subjects and since cursive is becoming more and more inaccessible to younger historians especially and I was wondering if you could just talk to some of the challenge of doing primary research with figures like go on and on about ten writings I mean that's the the vein of any history I can't tell you how many times you know now I got I've been sitting there you know long with two or three librarians kind of squinting it someone's handwriting you know I remember kiss yeah years back I said to Simon hack him has never been in that time and there was and I said again this has never been a great biography of Jane Addams and the this historian said to me have you ever seen her handwriting and it sounds funny but I would and I confess this I would walk away from a book if I had to rely you know and handwritten materials of someone whose handwriting was absolutely indecipherable a grant I was very lucky embarrassment of riches between 1967 2011 there were 32 very thick volumes of his papers published which means I didn't have to sit there and squint it not only has all the letters written by Grant has welled letters written to him it also has a lot of contemporaneous diaries letters newspaper accounts about grant those 32 vibes had 50,000 documents something called the grant Presidential Library now at Mississippi State University has an additional 25 to a 200 thousand I mean so for starters I had 250,000 documents that had been lined up for me by these very nice archivists and so I feel you know I Gordon would I mean all of us we're standing on the shoulders of the real unsung heroes of the field and they're the people who collect and squint and decipher and transcribe and annotate these papers because when you have to do it yourself had had the grand papers not existed I spent six years doing the book for years research two years writing I mean that would have been like a 25 year project to have done it was made that much of a difference the last questionnaire Tania millage closer now can you hear me good yes Elizabeth Cady Stanton was very prominent in the Seneca Falls 1848 I'm very curious about your analysis of what grant thought about the turning against women giving the men the right to vote but not the women when there was this vital women's rights movement that was just as strong as and we know the connection to the abolitionists what how did he feel about they double-crossed the women I'm very proud of it yeah I'm very proud of many things in the book and run things I'm proudest of it's the first biography of grant that really goes into this question because it was really in the 1872 election as you know the history susan b anthony cast her first and only vote for president she casted for Ulysses Grant and of course was illegal at the at the time and and she was fined for it I wish I could tell you that grant was a hero on this issue susan b anthony accosted grant many times and there was as she put it a splinter headed to the republican platform that seemed to acknowledge women's rights it was something that grant claimed to believe in but i can't honestly sit here and tell you that it was something that he acted on it and you probably know that the history that there was when the Fifteenth Amendment was passed a lot of the feminists of the day were opposed to it because it did not include women Frederick Douglass and a lot of the other african-american leaders who were in favor of women's suffrage felt that the threat to the black community was really kind of life and death you know the immediate threat and so grave that that had to be given precedence and of course there were a lot of the women leaders the women movement we felt that as well you know should be done together or not at all anyway thank you folks for come thank you very much so brought Ron and I will both be outside signing books so maybe we'll see out there thank you very much for coming thanks a lot [Applause]

Channel: PEN America

Views: 2,421

Rating: 4.7777777 out of 5

Keywords: MSNBC, Chris Hayes, Ron Chernow, PEN America, PEN World Voices Festival, PEN World Voices Festival of International Literature, Ulysses S. Grant

Id: Z3vzaqiH3ls

Length: 74min 54sec (4494 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 27 2018