The Rest Is History
ABOVE THE ENTRANCE TO GRANT’S TOMB IN NEW YORK CITY, FIGURES representing Peace and Victory frame an inscription. The slogan’s brevity belies the difficulty of the idea: LET US HAVE PEACE.
On a recent afternoon, the biographer Ron Chernow perched on a nearby bench to discuss his latest offering, Grant, a sweeping study of the Civil War general and U.S. President whose body lies within that monument. Gazing up at North America’s largest mausoleum, Chernow recalls that Walt Whitman dubbed Ulysses S. Grant and Abraham Lincoln the two “towering majestic figures” of the Civil War.
“Most living Americans can’t understand why someone like Walt Whitman would have talked about Ulysses S. Grant in the same breath,” Chernow says. “If they came up here, I think most of them would be startled.”
For a man who studies the past, Chernow has a knack for connecting with the present. Titan, his John D. Rockefeller biography, emerged in time to draw comparisons to Bill Gates, amid antitrust complaints facing Microsoft. And Alexander Hamilton had a modern message for Lin-Manuel Miranda, whose musical
