James Lee McDonough, Grant: The Making of a Legendary Military Leader. W. W. Norton, November 2026.
John Reeves, Grant’s Betrayal: Power, Corruption, and the Theft of the Black Hills. Pegasus, November 2026.
Ulysses S. Grant’s once badly diminished reputation has been on the rise of late. From the 1860s through the turn of the twentieth century, political enemies and historians alike maligned Grant as a dim-witted, drunken butcher of a general and a corrupt president. Even those more sympathetic toward Grant tended to paint his generalship as much more successful than his presidency. Over the past 25 years, however, scholars have placed Grant in a considerably more favorable light. In these new assessments, he was a brilliant military strategist and tactician who was sensitive to the lives of the men under his command.
More remarkable is their positive consideration of his presidency. Scholars such as Brooks Simpson, Joan Waugh, and Charles Calhoun have been joined by popular writers like Ronald White and Ron Chernow in defending Grant against much of the criticism of his performance in the Executive Mansion. They note that despite the Gilded Age scandals that rocked his administration, Grant was not personally corrupt. Moreover, they argue that he was a good and effective president, who struggled mightily to reconstruct the broken nation and who championed the nascent promise of Black civil rights by founding the Department of Justice, quelling the Ku Klux Klan, and employing the US military to enforce fair and free elections.
This more generous understanding of his time as commander-in-chief is evident in Grant’s rise in the C-Span and Siena College presidential polls, which consider traits such as leadership skills, relationships with other branches of government, and moral authority. Once a bottom-dweller in mid-twentieth century rankings, Grant now sits in the middle of the pack. Though the science of such measurements is inexact, they do serve as a useful barometer of reputational change over time. As both scholars and the general public have developed a better understanding of how complicated the Civil War and Reconstruction eras were, they seem to share a new appreciation for Grant’s military and political leadership during difficult circumstances. It’s also possible that in an era in which Americans are so engaged with questions of presidential power and decision making, Grant’s struggles in the Executive Mansion are particularly resonant.
This scholarly reconsideration of Grant has, in turn, compelled more writers to examine his military and presidential strengths and weaknesses, leading to a steady stream of Grant scholarship. Two new additions to the field include James Lee McDonough’s Grant: The Making of a Legendary Military Leader and John Reeves’s Grant’s Betrayal: Power, Corruption, and the Theft of the Black Hills.
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McDonough’s volume focuses on Grant’s crowning military achievement—his campaign to capture Vicksburg—and his prior life and military exploits. Although this is a well-worn path for Grant scholars and military historians alike, McDonough’s treatment is engaging and insightful. A prolific author of Civil War histories, he chronicles both Grant’s strategic and tactical blunders and successes with precision. While readers won’t learn much that is new, they will enjoy McDonough’s telling of this epic military campaign.
McDonough also gives careful consideration not only to the climatic and logistical challenges Grant faced during the long slog to Vicksburg, but also to the venomous army politics that dogged his reputation early in the war, his frustrating efforts to halt the illicit cotton trade that sustained Confederate farmers and lined the pockets of unscrupulous Unionists, and the tricky issue of wartime emancipation.
Grant is engaging and accessible. McDonough’s descriptions of the Vicksburg campaign are efficient and clear, and, unlike the soldiers about whom he’s writing, never gets bogged down in the many false starts and failures it took to capture the city.
The book’s weakness is its uneven structure, as McDonough offers a 300-page treatment of Grant’s early life and his military career between 1861 and the summer of 1863, then hastily wraps up the war and the rest of Grant’s life in a mere forty pages. As McDonough explains in the introduction, he originally envisioned a more comprehensive biography before deciding to focus on Vicksburg, a change in tack that alters the pacing of the book.
McDonough clearly admires Grant. In addition to his praise for Grant’s military prowess, he devotes much coverage to the general’s developing antislavery convictions early in the war, his efforts to establish refugee camps for freedom seekers, and his ultimate support for enlisting Black men in the Union army. He is also empathetic toward Grant’s rationale for antisemitic General Orders No. 11, which banished Jews from his military district in December 1862. The order was part of Grant’s effort to eliminate the illicit cotton trade between Confederates and northern merchants and still stands as one of the most infamous and reprehensible policies that he, or any US official, has ever issued. McDonough offers several reasons Grant might have resorted to this order, none of which, in his view, diminish what he characterizes as Grant’s general lack of prejudice toward racial or religious minorities.
While McDonough’s book is a generous interpretation of Grant’s military policies, Reeves’s book, Grant’s Betrayal, takes a dimmer view of Grant’s leadership and humanitarian impulses as president. The author focuses on the US government’s post-Civil War relations with the Ocheti Sakowin (known to the federal government in the nineteenth century as “the Sioux”), which ended in the forced dispossession of their Black Hills ancestral land in 1876 and 1877. Reeves tells this dark story with careful attention to the many diplomatic and armed altercations between the Sioux, the US military, missionaries, and officials within the Grant administration. Along the way, he offers a compelling portrait of Sioux culture and weaves a colorful tapestry of events and characters. He does an impressive job incorporating lesser-known white and Indigenous figures, especially women such as Eagle Woman, who played a crucial role in mediating between white authorities and her own Lakota people.
With these volumes, McDonough and Reeves add two readable, if not groundbreaking, volumes to the Ulysses S. Grant bookshelf. Their divergent assessments of his military and presidential achievements indicate that the debate over the Union general and eighteenth president’s character, intentions, and abilities is far from settled.
By focusing his story so narrowly on US relations with this single tribal nation, however, Reeves largely neglects the broader context and evolution of Grant’s Indian policy. Missing is a full appreciation for the eighteenth president’s initial commitment to fairness toward Native Americans and his wish to include them as partners in the nation’s bright future. Grant expressed these optimistic intentions in his 1869 inaugural address when he pledged “proper treatment of the original occupants of this land” and the “promotion of any course of action towards them that tends to their civilization, Christianization and ultimate citizenship.”
Grant hoped that the Indigenous peoples of the West would follow the model set by Ely Parker, his commissioner of Indian affairs and a Tonawanda Seneca, and become full-fledged Americanized citizens. This was an assimilationist desire to be sure, but Reeves seems to miss just how progressive Grant’s optimism about the Native American capacity for citizenship was for his time. A broad swath of the American public, including Grant’s most trusted generals who oversaw the US Army’s handling of Indian affairs in the West, were much more disparaging of the Western tribal nations, considering them to be “savage” and utterly incapable of becoming fully American.
Grant’s capacious understanding of who should be eligible for American citizenship is one of the most notable things about him in the eyes of the historians who have resurrected his reputation. He also advocated for full citizenship for formerly enslaved people in the American South. Similarly, his foiled efforts to annex Santo Domingo were premised on his hope that the island’s residents would eventually become American citizens.
Grant’s thinking defied racialist assumptions held by many white Americans, and recent scholars of the Grant administration’s Indian policy have stressed this aspect of his presidency. Especially notable are Mary Stockwell’s Interrupted Odyssey, which Reeves consults, and C. Joseph Genetin-Pilawa’s Crooked Paths to Allotment, which he does not. Stockwell and Genetin-Pilawa explore Grant’s struggles to balance his own views and the demands of his various constituencies: congressmen who demanded that they be the architects of Indian policy, Indian commissioners and missionaries who felt Grant was not pressuring Indians to civilize quickly enough, businessmen who hoped to open the West to mining and agricultural interests, and Native American leaders negotiating for treaty rights. In their thorough considerations of Grant’s predicament and his ultimate abandonment of his “Peace Policy,” these historians see great tragedy but attribute it to Grant’s pragmatism and sense of realistic resignation, rather than his knowing complicity in a “secret, rapacious conspiracy,” as Reeves argues.
Without fully appreciating how progressive Grant’s views were for his time, it’s impossible to understand how and when his commitment to Native Americans was ultimately trumped by his conviction that the West must be settled and that industry and railroads must be developed, and his pragmatism in the face of political, economic, and logistical realities. Paradoxically, Reeves misses a chance to further underscore the tragedy of the events he details by not taking full measure of Grant’s initial idealism (as Anglocentric and culturally imperialistic as it was) and the possibilities lost when he abandoned it for a more utilitarian approach.
With these volumes, McDonough and Reeves add two readable, if not groundbreaking, volumes to the Ulysses S. Grant bookshelf. Their divergent assessments of his military and presidential achievements indicate that the debate over the Union general and eighteenth president’s character, intentions, and abilities is far from settled.
Anne E. Marshall is Professor of History at Mississippi State University, where she also serves as the Executive Director of the Ulysses S. Grant Presidential Library and the Ulysses S. Grant Association. She is the author of Cassius Marcellus Clay: The Life of an Antislavery Slaveholder and the Paradox of American Reform (North Carolina, 2025) and Creating a Confederate Kentucky: The Lost Cause and Civil War Identity in a Border State (North Carolina, 2010).
