Ron Chernow: Ulysses S. Grant

[Applause] hi everybody I'm Jeremy Ron so I'm really excited to be here with my friend Ron Schara now Ron and I got to be friends in the course of our involvement with Hamilton an American musical and it's really exciting to be here tonight because in the course of that friendship we never once had a conversation about ulysses s grant and I haven't seen him since before I read the book so everything you're gonna hear tonight is a completely original fresh conversation with my friend about this before we start there are two fun pieces of news to share about Ron's book the first is a piece about the book they just went up on the website of the Atlantic putana haci Coates who has become a genuine authority on this era has just deemed Ron's book he has written of it that it hits like a Mack truck of knowledge and that stupid doesn't stand a chance which is going to look great on the paperback that's that's the second best new piece of news about Ron's book that has broken today I'll let Ron tell you the first best piece of news yeah the other nice piece of news and it just appeared on the Internet is that Lionsgate and Appian Way have bought the movie rights to grant and just wait no no and Appian Way is probably a lot of you know is the production company of Leonardo DiCaprio who will be the producer and one of the executive producers will be yours truly there we go but the most important thing that happened today is that I get to appear in front of this beautiful Chicago audience forget everything else [Applause] so one of the things that your book convinced me is that ulysses s grant is about a hundred times more interesting a figure than I realized yeah I only know that because you wrote the book and I read it how did you know that and feel it deeply enough that you decided at some point you're willing to spend a couple years of your life with this guy well you know in terms when I decided to write the book I had always had a fantasy about doing a big sweeping saga of the Civil War and reconstruction and grant is really the figure who unites those two periods because they're really two acts of the same drama and I always felt that Americans know an enormous amount about the Civil War it's very impressive they know where every general they know every battle but they're usually know little or nothing about reconstruction and I feel that to know everything about the Civil War and nothing about reconstruction means to use a theater metaphor which seems apt sitting next to Jeremy to know everything about the Civil War and nothing about reconstruction means that you've walked out in the middle of the play and the play has a very different ending from the one that it seems to at Appomattox you know so what I look like what I look for I look for figures who created basic building blocks in American society which I think that Grant had had done there's also a kind of perverse contrarian streak in my nature that came out when I decided to do Hamilton where I felt that he had been you know forgotten and misunderstood and demonized and I felt that grants life had been so belittled and distorted by myths and you know if you go to I don't know how many people offending in the audience have been to Grant's Tomb and grant is buried in Grant's Tomb despite Groucho's joke that it's the largest mausoleum in North America and it reflects the importance that the Americans assigned to grant at the time that they thought that after Abraham Lincoln he was the second most important American the second half of the 19th century and I really felt that it was you know a time to you know dust him off and bring back well one of the things that struck me about the book is how unlikely it was that he ended up in that position I mean from reading the book I got a new appreciation of the fact that as late as you know three years before the war started this is not the phrase you use but he was a total loser right he had faked he had washed out of the army a little more elegantly in the work but you know we don't have a lot of time but this is someone who was I mean it's it's poignant it's horrifying all the things that he had to put up with and suddenly he comes out of the phone but with any Superman yeah I mean you know when the civil war breaks out he's almost 30 as a wife and four children in desperation he's been forced to go to his overbearing father and beg for a job in his father's leather goods store in Galena Illinois in the Mississippi where he takes a job junior to his two younger brothers as a clerk in the store this was like the ultimate humiliation for him and so Grant is pushing 40 it looks like this is going to be a completely obscure you know forgettable life they won't you know even married a footnote in history books and then the confederacy fires on Fort Sumter grant had gone to West Point so he still had all of that military lore steward in his mind he had served with distinction for several years in the Mexican army and so the war breaks out there's a desperate shortage of trained officers and so here this clerk who was failed in one business venture after another who was drummed out of the army for drinking in disgrace two months after Fort Sumter he's a colonel four months later he's a brigadier general ten months later is a major-general and by the end of the war he's general-in-chief with a million soldiers under his command this man who had never had a single person you know employed for him before so I think that I don't know that there's a more improbable or kind of dreamlike transformation and one things you're asking you know what tracted me to the story well the other people that I'd written about I felt that they were like kind of you know racehorses built to run there were thoroughbreds they were going to succeed in whatever they did because they had a drive and ambition and and a focus you know when you read about Alexander Hamilton even as a teenager that he's going to soar in the wild blue yonder whereas in the case of grant certainly the Heiser as high as the highs in my other book but the lows are is low are much much lower than anything before and this is someone who keeps hitting bottom and success is a very very kind of you know slippery slope that he keeps falling back from so you've got there's the whole middle section of the book is the war and it's following his campaign Grant starts in the West and that makes his way to the east and you give a sense of real drama you really feel the stakes in these battles and I'm always curious I mean there is a rich tradition of fiction the non-fiction books about war about combat you've written about it and Washington book in the Hamilton book yeah do you have a do you we just as a technical question are there books that you go back to but that have been written about war fiction or non that you take as inspiration as models or as cautionary tales ways not to write about combat no I felt that you know I had enormous number of books on Civil War I read enormous number of grandpa aggravates and I felt that in many of them the kind of rich drama and atmospherics you know we're missing when I started working on the book I should explain a so-called friend came up to me one day and said Ron how do you write a great biography of someone who wrote a great autobiography and I have to say that I was kind of reeling from that question for several weeks then I you know realized that for me my job as biographer is to talk about what grant didn't want to talk about and I mean there can some small emissions from the great personal memoirs like there's no mention it was two-term presidency for starters but there's no mention of the drinking issue there are no mentions of the business failures but of course the greatness of the book lies in the description of the battles so how do i you know compete with that and i realize you know number one you're seeing in grant's memoirs you're seeing the war through his his eyes so what i want through the reader to see grant in the battle because you know when you read grant you're sort of looking out through you know the window of his vision and also you know it was it was sort of fun in a way to compete with grant on this because you know grant had this very spare extraordinarily effective style but i think that there was an opportunity to do something very kind of richly atmospheric and particularly i had done having done hamilton in washington you know i had been through the Revolutionary War twice and the Revolutionary War battles were really very small and compact compared to the Civil War there might be two or three thousand people in the battle suddenly like Shiloh you know there are a hundred thousand people there they're twenty-four thousand casualties in a 48-hour period and so the the horrifying scale of the carnage of the Civil War there was kind of a fascination for me in writing about it because it was like sort of nightmarish industrial-scale death for the for the first time they'd never been anything like it in American history and what was also wonderful was that the the soldiers in the Civil War was a very highly educated group of soldiers there were a lot of college graduates there were enormous number of people who were writing letters and diaries and so I found and I was doing the Revolutionary War was often kind of you know frustrating in terms of trying to capture all of these details you know that would bring it to life whereas with the Civil War its bottomless you know you can get you know as many you get thousands of you know people recollecting you know this battle from every conceivable angle and then at the same time you know in the when you're writing about the 18th century people don't gossip as much in the 19th century everyone is gossiping about everyone else which is great for a while and and and also when you're writing about 18th century figures newspapers at the time they were sort of more like I don't know the New Republic today you know they kind of had essays often anonymous essays with Roman pseudonyms 18th century newspapers didn't do profiles they didn't do interviews they didn't do features so you have all of these you know Civil War camps that are swarming with correspondence then also there were many biographies of Grant done during his lifetime and so I was able to use the research of those biographers who had done oral histories with people who knew grant from the time that literally he was a baby till the the week that he died and so I found for me I just kind of kept marveling at the resources at hand which I felt really because grant and these battles come alive and extraordinary anecdotal material of all these reminiscences so right so this is one of the things as obstruct by in the book is the richness of the writing I mean everyone I assume everyone here is going to go out and get the book I'm just telling you then give yourself some time because the book is a thousand pages long right but how do you know but no but this is it's a question I mean there's a way there are grant biographies that are 150 you know there are live like penguin lives length there's a way to do a life of grant that's really short there's a way to do it that's the length of your Hamilton book or your Washington book yeah and there's this version how did you know this was the version that you needed to do well you know I felt that somebody the biographies of Grant were really silver histories in disguise and I want to change the whole shape of grande biographies because in most grant biographies the four years of the Civil War might be about ninety percent you know of the book and I really felt that this man led nine lives and I wanted to you know devote attention to all of them for instance after he leaves you know the president say he takes an around-the-world tour for two years and four months and he meets every conceivable you know prince and potentate and Emperor and president prime minister in the world meets Queen Victoria meets you know Bismarck or even the period between the end of the Civil War and the start ups two-term presidency where he still is general-in-chief and briefly Acting Secretary of War and it's an extraordinarily dramatic period number one the South during Reconstruction is placed under military rule it's carved up into five military districts they're reporting to grant grant is effectively in the Czar of the South he also finds himself right in the middle of the whole impeachment controversy with Andrew Johnson so I've never had a book I was saying to you backstage I mean this is in many ways even though wood so it was so long and challenging this was in many ways the most fun for me to write because I felt oh my god you know this is wall-to-wall action I felt just so blessed I would wake up thinking oh my god I get to do Shiloh today oh my god I get to do a Vicksburg or Appomattox what whatever was really rather thrilling and I found with all of the other books there were always sections of the book that I felt as a dutiful historian I had to cover I mean for instance with Hamilton I had to do the Federalist Papers you know that that would be a very significant mission was it fun for me to write about the Federalist Papers and sort of give you an overview you know of those 85 essays no they're the most exciting sections to read no but I really felt again as kind of a dutiful historian that I had to do that because it was such a significant part of his life Grint more than any other book I never had a day like that where I said oh I have to write about that it was always oh I have to write about this wires a certain thick thick skin for your imaginative experience of these people though I mean I one of the things that struck me is finally Appomattox happens so grant and Lee they meet in that house and the war is over and then it gets worse in some ways because what happens in the when Johnson is president this is what you said about the military rule in the south and and something that feels unnerving Lee timely now is then you immediately see the way the south is is going to try to unravel the result of the war absolutely young and can you talk about that because grant is in some ways the e pivotal figure in trying to stop trying to resist the undoing of what he had achieved right I mean grant Kent comes to represent too you know completely different impulses you all know the story that at Appomattox grant who had been the scourge of the south grant suddenly becomes the savior of the south because he's extraordinarily magnanimous at Appomattox Courthouse the Confederate soldiers are famished he immediately issues 25,000 rations he allows the Confederate soldiers who surrendered to retain their horses and mules which was very important since a lot of them were farmers he allows the Confederate officers to retain their sidearms he does not allow his men to gloat or celebrate his wife Julia wants him to enter Richmond which has fallen and had been the capital of the Confederacy and Grant says Julia don't you realize how bitter defeat is for these people you know would you want me to enter you know and throw it in there in their face and in fact after the war there was a proposal to put in the rotunda of the US Capitol a painting of Lee surrendering to grant and grant vetoed it he thought that the South would be embittered and humiliated by that okay so for all these things he's kind of beloved by the South but then what happens there is such a violent backlash against the the war and against reconstruction because the four million former slaves are now full-fledged citizens and then with the Fifteenth Amendment and Grant was probably the foremost force behind it because four million blacks now American citizens are given the right to vote at least black males and the white South is petrified because 36% of the population in the south was black there were two states South Carolina and Mississippi were a majority the population was was black and so the Ku Klux Klan which was formed in 1866 as a social club for confederate veterans suddenly morphs into this terroristic militia organization that comes to rule every county in the south and suddenly thousands of blacks are being murdered without a single prosecution right and grant as president appoints a crusading attorney general named Amos Ackerman who brings 3,000 indictments against the Klan wins more than a thousand convictions at a time when no southern Sheriff would arrest a member of the Klan no southern jury would convict a member of the Klan no southern white would testify against the Klan so suddenly grant to it Appomattox and this is the story everyone knows was seen as the symbol of north-south reconciliation suddenly as he's forced to send in federal troops in federal marshals to crush the Ku Klux Klan which he does suddenly he's being accused of bayonet rule and he's you know grant the new Caesar so instead of being the symbol of reconciliation he's considered you know the symbol of northern oppression and this is a struggle that grant will have throughout his life and frankly I think had Abraham Lincoln lived he would have had that same strike well that's and I like to think he would have reacted the same way right I mean you see you document the way this cycle starts happening immediately I mean in 1866 the or the guns are still warm from the shooting and it's and it requires federal intervention to protect the rights of black citizens in the south and then that intervention causes a backlash so the backlash leads to more violence and the violence leads to more need for federal intervention and it just keeps going and going and going so they're pretty rapidly you have the the you have such widespread violence that it's poignant to see grant realizing he seemed to I mean at least what I get the the what I what I the sense I get from the book is that it wasn't just he was more determined to stop it is that he had a more acute sense of where this was gonna lead if there wasn't some way to get this out to come to it so this has completely undoing the verdict you know of the the war and the interesting thing is President Andrew Johnson who followed Lincoln he sent grant on a tour of the South this was December 1865 so about six months seven months after Appomattox and grant comes back and he does a report saying that the white South is very chastened you know that they were going to be very cooperative but then the backlash begins in the backlash alas is very topical and you know pertinent to the to the moment because a group of southern historians in a group of southern generals called the Lost Cause school essentially begin to you know the South could have reacted in one of two ways to the Civil War the South could have said that you know because of the madness of its political leader as you know and the madness of its generals that had been led into this suicidal war was actually something like about 1/4 or 1/5 of the entire male population of the south tella population south was wiped out by the the war this was a catastrophe for the south on so many levels so the you know the white South could have kind of risen up in righteous indignation against its own leaders for having led them into the folly and the badness and yes the treason of the Civil War instead the opposite happens that these Lost Cause school writers and generals begin to completely rewrite the history of the civil war they begin to romanticize it they start out by saying that slavery was a great blessing to the slaves and the slaves were all kind of happy and contented they say that the cause of the Civil War it was not slavery but states rights they'll hard to imagine that 750,000 people died in the cause of states rights they began to argue that Lee was the superior general not only was your far superior General to grant but he was a perfect Christian gentleman and he was this honorable aristocratic sounding familiar to anybody well the interesting thing is you know what I'm describing and then also the you know the the view was the reconstruction instead of being a noble experiment in trying to create a biracial Society that it was this fiasco of corrupt carpetbag politicians and illiterate black legislators the amazing thing is you know if I were to ask people in the audience what - this day is still the most famous Hollywood movie about the Civil War you would all say Gone with the Wind and Gone with the Wind completely reflects what I just said this was this kind of a southern propaganda campaign which was influential not only in the South but throughout the nation and part of that was creating this you know image of grant is this you know drunken bumbling general who's somehow some mysterious reason managed to defeat Lee and that he was then a corrupt president and so I really felt that in in in doing that you know it's a question of undoing 150 years of propaganda and the South was extraordinarily successful at doing it and you know unfortunately what happened is it's the reason we're fighting over the Confederate monuments now because of the success of that lost code school we never had in this country kind of Truth and Reconciliation process of really talking about slavery so you're the person that put on the spot about this because ulysses s grant isn't here to answer it for us a general who works in the White House just said that the civil war happened because of a failure to compromise what would your general who worked in the White House say about that you know he would have said that the country had been doing nothing but trying to compromise ever since the creation of the country I mean the Constitution itself it was crafted as an exercise in compromise over the issue of slavery the slave trade was protected you know for 20 years slaves were counted each slave was counted as three-fifths of a person for the purpose of electoral representation and then we have the Missouri Compromise in 1820 in Missouri's admitted as a slave state in Maine as a free state and we have the compromise of 1850 I mean we you know had been compromising the entire history of the country up until that point and finally there was no compromise in fact I was talking about grants around the world tour and he had a fascinating conversation with Bismarck and he said you know we realized when the war started that we had to destroy slavery that slavery was a stain upon this country that we could not be republic and have people being bought and sold like cattle and he said there was no compromising with these people and we had to destroy slavery and we had to destroy the Confederacy and so I think that Grant would have been horrified right so when you talk about that that way it's your admiration for him comes through but I was struck by you spend you know we get to see a lot of aspects of Grant's life and there are places in the book where you are tough on him the way that he hired people he should not have hired and gave them authority should I'm giving them there are places where you stand back a little bit there's a I was struck by after Coldharbour he and Lee tried to make a deal to I think it was to collect the wounded from the battlefield and that place you don't say who was right who was wrong you sort of say this is the debate make of it what you will and then there are places where you are much more willing to come right out and say what you think about him like when you say that I I think it's the next to Lincoln granted more for the freed slaves than any American like how do you know just from page to page like is it just your strongest opinions make it in is it that you want to is it that or or is it that where the evidence you have a strong opinion but you but there's an equally strong sort of counter argument to be made how do you know yeah I mean you're kind of making judgments throughout the book there's no very strong feeling you know I think that it's important that a bag of her at least start out with the presumption that he's going to sort of like or admire the person I think that if the biographer starts out by disliking the person it can become very ugly and end up in but Joyce Carol Oates called pethau Griffey you know so I think you should least assume from the beginning you know that it's going to be an admiring book if then as you get into the research you find out otherwise fine but I have always felt since I've written about very major figures that a great person can carry the weight of his or her defects I don't feel that my job as a biographer is to pretty up this person and particularly since as it turns out all the people that I've written about you know I ended up to a greater or lesser degree admiring I go out of my way to present every unpleasant fact about this person you know that is known because you know my greatest fear is a reviewer saying well of course chernow admired grant because he didn't talk about a B C and D I want to make sure ABC and they you know are in the book and I think that as in in real life we don't know perfect people and we have you know varied and often contradictory impressions of people in our lives or you know people in the public sphere yet we end up having a coherent you know sense of them so that yes I mean there were a grant for instance when it came to business and this was consistent from time he was a boy to the last year of his life was incurably naive he's constantly blindsided by unscrupulous people who were scheming around him there seems to be absolutely no learning curve not on this but sapling beginning it from 20 to I don't know how long do you live 60 something the same like shocking naivete about other people yeah and even though he's been you know deceived so many times a year before he dies grant has entered into a partnership with a young man named Ferdinand Ward who was lionized as the young Napoleon of Wall Street and grant in his innocence fancied that he was worth several million dollars only to wake up one morning and discover that the whole thing was a gigantic Ponzi scheme and that instead of being a multi-millionaire that he was worth exactly eighty dollars and not only was a former president who the United States and war hero yeah he I mean this was he was the victim of the Bernie Madoff of his day and not only had Ulysses and Julia Grant invested their life savings in wards operation but all three of grandsons and that was completely blind in fact Julia interestingly enough Julia was occasionally suspicious of Ward which of course anyone should be I mean Ward was promising people fifteen or twenty percent returns per month per year would have been suspicious but Ulysses per month and when Julia expressed you know some suspicions about Ward you know Ulysses said to Julia I wish our sons you know were as smart as and and he said you know he was so not even so gullible that at first when he found out that the whole thing was just a big Ponzi scheme he said he couldn't believe it he said it took a day or two for it for it really to sink in that this had happened now if he had never been cheated before it would have been one thing but he'd been cheated throughout this entire entire life one of my never drains cousins Eliza Shaw said grant assumed that everyone else was as simple and honest as he was and I guess that you know we can't see things in other people that we don't have in our own nature and grant and I think that thing was grant had experienced so much failure in life you know he said late in life I always like to try to trust a man long after other people had given up on him but also in the last year of his life he was asked what had given him the most pain in life and he said to be deceived by friends there wasn't just friends right so we have this sort of common experience of being involved with Hamilton while having a book of American history sort of the best are you next going into the show I didn't know by telling Lynne I'm ready but you you know you had this you had this extraordinary experience not just of seeing your biography of Alexander Hamilton become this phenomenon this is like I've said it's like being in a science-fiction movie watching what's happened with the show but while you are working on this book I think you're spending a lot of time around the theater right so that there's this you and and you had been I don't know if this was part of the introduction but Ron was around a lot of the development of Hamilton Lynn won it Ron around to give notes to give feedback you know Lynn always said that he wanted historians to take the show seriously and so it was important to him to have Ron around so I wonder from from a storytelling perspective from a craft perspective does that experience of being inside a theatrical production shape the way you think about this story yeah absolutely I mean it was a marvelous experience because I met Lynn in the fall of 2008 I think there was only one person I can you probably didn't see this anyone see Lynn's tweet today because this is November 1st he reposted a tweet from November 1st of 2008 this is something to the effect of can't wait to meet Ron chernow I really retreating it he put as his we just you wait kid so sorry yeah and I think that maybe the only other person on earth who heard about Lin's desired to do Hamilton before me is the gentleman sitting to my right and cus Jeremy was in charge of public events at the Public Theater and Jeremy Jeremy was really the one who was instrumental in having Hamilton originate at the the public in spite of the initial skepticism Oscar is just the head of our desk you know it's really you know it was really good than that it was in the summer of 2008 the first time I met Lynne we went out for drink the publicist for ignites his first show fixed us up when we went out and we drank a whole bunch and I asked him what was next and he said that he was reading this biography by Ron chernow he was in the midst ill reading it at that point of Alexander Hamilton and he wanted to make a hiphop mixtape out of Hamilton's life which I thought was hilarious but now here we are yeah as Lynn likes to say they're not laughing now but you know it was fascinating so it was really seven years of working with them and but I really you know admired about Lynn and I hope that a little bit of this rubbed off was that linen kind of taking it eight hundred page book and boiling it down to a show of a little under three hours everything had to be condensed yeah and so it was fascinating to watch Lynn because he had to kind of put his finger on kind of you know the dominant traits of the character kind of what is the essence of this relationship in fact I think I'd probably tell you the story you know he said to me one day he was trying to figure out what was the essence of the relationship between Hamilton Washington and he said to me with Washington have seen Hamilton as a younger version of himself and I said absolutely because when Washington was in his early 20s he was in charge of all the armed forces in Virginia and he led his men into a massacre and he regretted it for the rest of his life and then you know the next time I saw a version of the show you know Washington comes out and he's singing to Hamilton let me tell you what I wish I'd know when I was young and dreamed of glory right you know so it was interesting for me Jeremy because I had always been a writer and I found you know visa v-lin I was really in the position of an editor I felt like it was an editor working with a writer of genius you know where you kind of say one or two things and then when you see the rewrite it's really quite extraordinary you didn't have to you know give him very much you know criticism or feedback to get this extraordinary rewrite and I was always just I was fine I know if I've told you this story probably because Jeremy did this great book Hamilton the Revolution you know with Lynne which is really the definitive account of the creation of the show but when Lynn came over and to my place in in Brooklyn he sat on my living room couch started snapping his fingers and he sang the opening number I know well it is a sacrament that he sang the second song meant that it was the first one and the reason that I the reason I know that I'm right sorry Lynne is that when he finished singing it he said what you think and I said that's the most extraordinary thing I've ever heard you've taken the first 40 pages of my book and he's like shrink-wrapped that you know into this four-minute song and Kennedy no but what I was thinking and I didn't say this to Lynne was pal either I write very long as you're very tight it was a little bit embarrassing you know that he had kind of boiled on but it's 40 pages accurately into this four minute song and so I did as I was you know writing it I mean the length of the book would seem to contradict completely what I'm saying but sometimes I would kind of make this mental you know reference to Lynn and what kind of Lynne would pluck out as the essence of a particular moment yeah Lina and Tommy Kayla's directors for sure brain I encourage you to do this if you're a fan of Hamilton or if you're if you're a writer used like the craft of stories listen to Hamilton and then read Ron's biography and what's astonishing is the distillation of the key points because as Lynn Lynn sort of said the flippantly that he could have done five shows about Hamilton's life and that's true but that but the ruthlessness of figuring out what would make one coherent show is to me like the cut sir as impressive as the songs because there are things in that book do you think for sure or like how could you make a musical and leave incident X out but somehow you make those choices you know yeah so we're almost out of time and I want to open it up to questions but there so the theme of the the theme of the festival this year is belief you have now spent years immersing in the founding of the country more years immersing in its greatest crisis at least so far I haven't read the news yet from today but you said earlier that you like to find the figures who you think created some of the essential sort of institutions of American life you said it more concisely than that but what do you believe about America yeah what do I believe marry good well you know I think that what I've been thinking a lot about lately Jeremy no particularly since Charlottesville you know you write a history book and you hope that people will find it entertaining you know maybe summer afternoon you know or a winter night that they'll you know escape into one of these sagas and get pleasure from it but I increasingly feel a sense of mission about history because really for the first time I live I'm afraid that we will forget who we are as people and it makes me realize you know I've written about people with Hamilton and Washington wrote beautiful constitutions you know created all these marvelous institutions and and doctrines and then with you know Lincoln and Grant so expanded our sense of American citizenship and the composition of the country and as Lincoln said gave us a new birth of freedom but what I really feel that the end of the day democracy is something that exists in the mind of every one of us and the mind is really shaped by memory and that you know American politics it boils down to the stories that we tell each other and I think that we're still you know fighting the civil war of 150 years ago because there are these competing narratives and I think that there was a lot of unfinished we're still dealing with the unfinished business of the of civil rights and of the of the Civil War and in you know in Hamilton then talks about you know the American experiment and I think that you know it's incumbent upon each generation to kind of renew and redefine that revolution but I think that it's important now because I think that there's a kind of real crisis of forgetfulness and I think that if we've kind of done a good deed in our lives it's being involved with Hamilton that at a time when I was afraid that there was a sort of creeping you know historical illiteracy in amnesia that we've stimulated you know millions of people treat about American history and particularly interested so many American children and teenagers I don't know that that exactly answers your question but that's kind of what's been on my mind lately on this subject Oh memory I mean I think that the way we do it the way we keep them in the way that we lose them in the way that we distort them yeah and especially when generals on the White House start offering their historical opinions so but there's a famous or let me see if I can get it right who controls the present controls the past and who controls the past controls the future and I really I really feel that at the at the moment you know it's one reason why it's you know so you know important our political leadership because then it's a question of our leaders you know help us to remember certain things and forget others right so we'd love to hear from you there are a couple of microphones circulating in the audience the individuals holding the microphones are asking that you raise your hands if you have a question this is being recorded so please stand up and only speak when you've got the mic in front of you otherwise it will be lost for all time take it away thank you for your insight what did you learn about what Abraham Lincoln saw in the man who you described as a loser up until the civil war that led Lincoln to give grant as much power as he did yes wonderful question and I really loved writing about the relationship between grant and Lincoln because what happens you know I feel one of the problems with so much Civil War historiography is that there's kind of a relentless focus on what was happening in the east you know with Lee Army of Northern Virginia army of Potomac and if you look at the kind of that part of the the war Lincoln is dealing not only with one you know failed general after another you know in Virginia but one whining procrastinating general after another not only losing but then they're turning around and blaming him and constantly clamoring for more troops but you get a very different sense of the Civil War and from the northern standpoint a much less bleak view of the Civil War because out west grant is winning one battle after another it seems to be very lopsided war you know in the West in terms of you know Union victories and Fort Donelson in Vicksburg and you know Chattanooga etc and so after the the fall of Vicksburg which was right at the same time as Battle of Gettysburg Lincoln made this statement about Grant that man has been a more comfort to me than any other general in this war he said from now on Grant is my man and I am grants he said wherever grant is things move on another occasion he said that can't spare that man he fights and I think I devote a lot of the book to a discussion of vagrants struggle with alcoholism and Lincoln and war secretary Edwin Stanton are besieged with both signed and anonymous letters talking about grant grants drinking and I think that had it not been for all the rumors of grants drinking I think the probably grant would have been brought east as general-in-chief earlier and when he finally does come east in March 1864 I think that he and Lincoln form a deep bond when they're both kind of Westerners they both have kind of a wry sense of humor but Lincoln actually by that point was a better strategist than most of his generals in the east Lincoln realized that the way to win the war was by coordinating all the various Union armies in the various theatres of war so they become a single fighting union unit grant had become to exactly the same opinion and one thing that I try to emphasize in the book which I felt had been insufficiently emphasized before was that I feel that the bond between Lincoln and Grant was not simply the kind of military bond that they both had a similar sense of strategy at that point but a political bond that Grant who by his own admission did not start out the war as kind of you know raving abolitionists grant profoundly internalized as the Lincoln's war agenda first preservation of the Union and then emancipation of the slaves and grant becomes the foremost champion of arming the former slaves 179,000 blacks ultimately serve in the you know army you know grant tells Lincoln that arming the blacks and recruiting them as troops will be the heaviest blow yet dealt the Confederacy and that was exactly what Lincoln wanted to hear in Lincoln you know replied if fifty thousand you know blacks in uniform appear on the banks of the Mississippi the Confederacy will surrender at once so good question thank you next so my question is like what made you realize that you wanted to like study history and like be a part of this study of like American history I mean for me it feels a little weird cuz I feel like I'm like the only young person here well like well like I mean this is I really like you know this moment of like being here like hearing Ron Kendra like talk about history like I really like history and like I think if lin-manuel Miranda was here I'll be freaking out a little more about like you know already I'm like already like happy that I'm here and so like I want to know like what made you realize that this was like the type of study that you want to do in the future I'm sorry I I think I think the question is if I understand it it's why did he want to become a historian in the first place right good question well you know my my story is that kind of my dirty little secret is that I never studied history in college I did two degrees in English literature and the reason that I never took history courses was because at that point I wanted to be a novelist so as I was taking a course in the 18th or 19th century novels that had these gigantic reading lists and the history courses also had gigantic reading list and I could never figure out how I could do both at once so I managed to sneak through Yale College in Cambridge University without studying history so everything that I've written about has actually been self-taught but it's funny because I started writing these books when I was in my mid-30s and when I started doing my first book the house of Morgan I don't know if this is the answer you expected to hear but I suddenly had a discovery that as I started working with original historical documents fact I was I was up in Cambridge Mass I was doing research for the house of Morgan at the Harvard Business School Library it's coming through the papers of a Morgan partner named Thomas W Lamont and the first day of research I read Thomas W lemons complete correspondence with Nancy Astor Charles Lindbergh Franklin Roosevelt Benito Mussolini in Herbert Hoover this is my first day of doing historical research and that night I remember was a warm September evening I was walking through the streets of Cambridge after dinner and these characters were buzzing around in my mind and I suddenly stopped and I said oh my god this is what it must feel like for a true novelist you know that his creator her creations becomes so alive and I it was an important discovery about myself that I had the same emotional and imaginative response to real people in real events that you know a great novelist a great playwright would have to invented figures and so I really think as I particularly loved you know the Victorian novel I was loved Dickens and Eliot and Thackeray and those novelists and suddenly I found myself writing these kind of you know big sagas teeming with characters and plot and subplot and that I was writing those very novels that I had dreamed of writing but with materials that I myself could never have invented that's kind of only part answer that's probably more than one thank you next whoever's comment if you've got a microphone fire away well since we have lots of generals around now is wondering what people like meat and McClellan thought of grant and how they carried on their careers after the war was over how people like me did McClellan carried on you know after after the book you know the the the Civil War as as I got into the the book this will come as no surprise if you've read a lot about the Civil War in the generals there was so much unbelievable backbiting and pettiness among the generals they were all constantly copping about each other when you know Grant who of course had enormous difficulty defeating Lee in Virginia you know when grant was asked after the war who's the greatest Confederate General he said Joseph johnstun and Joseph Johnson was not a particularly difficult you know adversary during the the war Lee conversely when he was asked who was the greatest Union general instead of saying grant who had in fact surrounded and captured his entire army Lee replied the greatest Union General was George McClellan who of course had been a disaster you know as a Union general so you all kind of you know squawked about each other you know me squawking about him McClellan did one nice thing that I found about grant that I think speaks volumes about him after he became General in chief in March 1864 there had been all of these Union generals you know McClellan and Burnside the others all of whom had been cashiered for their failures and grand proposed to Lincoln bringing them back and these were all people who had been very critical of grant among other things this was really very noble and grant felt that it was very important again he had a strong political instinct he felt that it was very important that this be seen is a bipartisan war and that this would be something that would create political unity and actually it didn't come about because his magnanimous gesture to those generals was rebuffed by those generals you know who in fact did not want to come back but it was kind of very unusual that he wanted to to do that particularly McClellan had you know spent the entire war kind of condescending to grant you talked about the difference in the way you had to do historical research in xviii versus the 19th century earlier on it seems like we've got a lot of materials to deal with for the 20th century so that 150 years from now people can look back and see what happened in the 20th what do you think is gonna happen with the 21st century as far as yes these are all wonderful one questions that I think that you know most historians are concerned of a dearth of materials you know because of emails and the and the internet I sometimes kind of think it might actually be the opposite of a super abundance of materials because we're actually going through the day it's funny you know that I've often thought you are me that if the internet had been invented first and then the telephone that everyone maybe same thought everyone would be thinking can you believe it that we used to sit there typing write these messages to check that now we could just try to pick up the phone and call absolutely you know instead the internet came in Custer was the new thing we all sort of went back typing so we're all sort of sitting there typing letters again so I think that the I think the legitimate concern of historians is even though we're now throughout the day you know leaving more traces of ourselves than ever before that the difficulty is that the retrieval technology might not you know be there so there might be all this stuff you know locked up in an early 21st century hard drive but you know given you know the technology that will prevail twenty-five fifty or hundred years later they may not be able to you know sort of get into it and and retrieve it but you know we believe you know I mean in New York you can't go into an office building in New York without the guard at the desk downstairs taking your picture you know so we have you know tens of thousands of pictures of ourselves everywhere so I kind of vacillate between you know the dirty and the super abundance theory the other thing that I think is very very important and it really has changed the lives of all researchers is that things used to be kind of permanently lost different written records let me just give you an example of what I'm talking well you know when I started my first book was published in 1990 and in order to find newspaper and magazine articles about your subject there was something called the readers guide to periodical literature I remember that is that still produced and so you would kind of look your subject up and there were certain newspapers and there were certain magazines that were covered by that readers guide periodical literature but if it wasn't it could be completely lost so there were like thousands of newspapers and magazines that just completely you know disappeared whereas now with the Internet I mean there's this automatic retrieval of such a vast you know universe of information that that problem of things disappearing which was a real problem then there was also the problem of sort of books disappearing you would not be aware of it now and I you spent a lot of time in the library now in the age not only of Amazon but of you know a be ebooks and you know ex-libris and all of these sites I can have some obscure out of print book you know about grant that was maybe published you know in 1877 my desk the next day I can't tell you how that has revolutionized research and made it so much easier and more pleasurable things that would have been kind of permanently lost to researchers are now quickly at our fingertips alright and it's nice that when it comes to find all those emails years from now we know the Russians have copies of all of them do we have time for one more we have time for one more question there's a question you see someone over there we will have the book signing directly behind us after this question after the last question if you don't want your book signed you can go ahead and leave if you would like your book signed if you would like your book signed please stay seated and will dismiss you by Rose will just help the process go nice and smooth okay we can do one more yes oh not thanks for a wonderful conversation notwithstanding Lynne Manuel's wonderful shrink wrapping ability if there were what what are a couple of vignettes from Hamilton's life that did not make it into the play well I know one thing that both Linda and I were heartbroken about we wanted Benedict Arnold in it not only because of the fascination with Benedict Arnold but what happened after the discovery of Arnold's treachery Arnold had been in charge of West Point and he flees down the Hudson River and not long afterwards Washington and Hamilton and laughs had arrived at Benedict Arnold's house and they go upstairs and Arnold's wife Peggy is lying upstairs and she was heard a very very young and beautiful and she's in this you know negligee and she's feigning this mad scene and believe it or not and I hear these you know three very powerful intelligent men in Washington Hamilton and Lafayette who are completely suckered in by this lady in her meds scene and you could almost you know in the descriptions that Hamilton wrote you could almost send some kind of salivating you know watching this this woman and so I think we were both kind of heartbroken that that scene did not find its way into it it would have been very funny and we would have had been dick Donald I know Linda has also said Hamilton's main adversary in New York State was governor George Clinton he was like a sixth term governor he was a real boss of New York State and Lynne said to me one day he said imagine one if I'd been able to work George Clinton and how many kind of Clinton puns we could have introduced into the pledge I read you I'll let you have the last word you remember things particular things that Lynne wanted I remember him saying that he wanted to have George Clinton the show so he could use the Parliament Funkadelic kind of song and I remember I mean there was that parade right with a Hamiltonian or whatever they were gonna call it was renamed New York City that's one of those things reading the book like we've got a huge parade like what a great thing to put like a giant parade is not there or for that matter the the slavery debate what a cabinet battle number three you need things in the second act of a show to be advancing the plot and the point of what they did with slavery is they didn't do anything so it doesn't move the plot at all no and you know and I have to say I was so startled at so many of the things that Lynne included in the show I could remember you know because I would you know see it every time there was a new version of the of the show and I can remember sitting there you know one time thinking oh my god he's doing the papers oh my god he's doing the Neutrality Proclamation oh my god he's doing the assumption of state debts I mean no one else but I'm so happy that you just did that I've never heard no one's ever done that when talking about the neutrality problem you know no one would have you know dared to do these things you know seemed so technical and esoteric in different things that I thought for certain Lyndon would you know not dare to touch with the ten-foot pole he he did and he even you know the one entire scene that was cut out in the movement from the public theater to when it went down Broadway and around the country we actually had a scene of the whiskey rebellion that was quite charming so Lynn was just absolutely fearless and there were kind of essential points in Hamilton's career that he wanted to include and so the - you know rap battle cabinet debates actually some of the things that I thought would be the most intractable and the most impossible to do became some of the most successful scenes in the play and now like Lynn we are out of time yeah so please say thank you to out right now thank all of you good night [Applause] [Music] [Applause]

Channel: Chicago Humanities Festival

Views: 39,704

Rating: 4.7474747 out of 5

Keywords: chicago humanities festival, chf, humanities, chicago, festival, Ron Chernow, Jeremy McCarter, Ulysses S. Grant, United States Civil War, Lost Cause, Robert E. Lee, U.S. Presidency, Alexander Hamilton, Hamilton, biography, Reconstruction, American History

Id: 7qouiKJIKw4

Length: 60min 17sec (3617 seconds)

Published: Wed Nov 15 2017