Josiah Bunting

A brief, to-the-point biography of Grant - of the sort Grant himself might have approved. Pres. Grant's accomplishments for civil rights, suffrage and national unity have been forgotten due to the scandals his contemporary and historical opponents made great hay out of. Bunting makes this case, but not as forcefully as he might have. For example, he brings up that Congress hadn't had a raise in 20 years, but never ties that to the general culture of corruption he seeks a solution to.

The book seems like a very good starting point for reading about Grant, but not a good stopping one. It's very much an overview and doesn't spend much time on the details. (Think strategy, not tactics, like Grant)… (more)

This is a relatively weak entry in this series. The author is a military man who is far too interested in analyzing Grant's generalship; in a short-format series such as this, one needs to cut to the chase and not waste two chapters on a career with only a tangential relationship to evaluating a president--as though anybody could analyze Grant as a commander in two chapters anyway. The author also thinks that Grant was a fine president, which is his prerogative, but to be a revisionist, a historian needs to do a much better job than Bunting does of explaining why the conventional wisdom is wrong. He does enumerate the scandals, in a formulaic, dry section, but the voices of the old-time historians who considered the scandals disqualifying in their evaluation of Grant's administration are very muted.… (more)

Grant possessed that rarest quality among American presidents: nobility of character. As a military strategist he possessed quiet compassion, firm judgment and humanity. Then, where other historians hold Grant's administration responsible for many of the failures of Reconstruction, the author believes Grant was in his era "the central force in the achievement of civil rights for blacks, the most stalwart and most reliable among all American presidents for the next eighty years." What's more, Bunting does as good a job as possible in making sense of Grant's difficult presidency.… (more)