Ulysses S. Grant’s real name was not Ulysses S. Grant. His parents named him Hiram Ulysses Grant, but at 17 he was enrolled — due to a clerical error — at West Point Military Academy under the name Ulysses S. Grant. He decided, in the parlance not of his time, to go with it. It was ultimately a more fitting name for someone who would eventually win a war to preserve the union, and then serve two terms as president of the re-United States. It was also a stroke of bureaucratic luck for a young man who didn’t have to show up at a military academy with the initials H.U.G. stenciled on his trunks.

The story of Grant’s name is a fitting illustration of how the man himself is rendered in Ron Chernow’s Grant. For all that Grant took part in, and all the influence he had, he often registers as a passive participant. He was not a righteous abolitionist before the war. He was publicly ambivalent about accepting the nomination for president, and won two races without campaigning. The scandals of his administration and his private business failures were caused by shiftless and corrupt counterparts, and not the actions of Grant himself. “He had a way,” Chernow writes, “of standing back and letting things happen.”

Compared with others who have 900-page books written about their lives, Grant led an unremarkable early life. After West Point he served as an adept quartermaster in the Mexican War, but he ultimately achieved little renown, and resigned from the military because of allegations of drunkenness, one of many allegations of alcohol abuse that would happen throughout his life. Grant returned home, started a family, struggled to find his footing financially, and was beleaguered by overbearing fathers on both sides of his marriage. He was working as a retail clerk in his family’s leather goods store when the Civil War began, and at a community meeting after shots were fired at Fort Sumter, he sat in the back row while others gave speeches. Walking home from the gathering, Grant remarked to his brother Orville, “I think I ought to go into the service.” From there, he rose to command the entire Union Army and win one of the most consequential wars in the course of human history.

In the war, Grant excelled not through his pedigree or political connections, but because he simply kept winning battles and advancing his line. Chernow provides detailed accounts of the fighting and maneuvers, but Grant’s politics, his strategic thinking, even his struggles with alcoholism are presented mostly second-hand, often through figures like Lincoln and General Sherman who loom larger on the page. The same is true in the accounts of Grant’s post-war experience in Andrew Johnson’s administration, and his own presidency. Grant fought hard for Reconstruction and labored to establish equality for freed slaves, as well as for Jews and Native Americans. He presided over the addition of the 14th and 15th Amendments to the Constitution, and stood strong against the backlash and the formation of the Ku Klux Klan — a period that echoes with unpleasant familiarity today. Grant’s words on these tumultuous times are limited, though his actions are clear.

The triumphs that defined Grant — the Civil War, Reconstruction, his struggles with alcohol — were all regrettable. He engaged in a series of slow, grinding, messy fights, and his time was not an era of American glory. During Grant’s life, hundreds of thousands died to right the wrong of slavery, and the freedom and suffrage that followed were met with shameful campaigns of violence and oppression. Unlike Chernow’s most famous subject, Alexander Hamilton, and most other pillars of American history, Grant left behind little in the way of philosophical or policy innovations. He offered few of his own thoughts to the world until his post-presidency and the years close to his death, when he was diagnosed with cancer and worked to swiftly write his memoirs. The result is a unique kind of historical biography — the story of a man’s extraordinary influence on the course of human events, without certainty that the man himself was extraordinary. This feels like the right way to tell Grant’s history. He was on the right side of a terrible period of our history, fighting battles that in a better world would never have been needed in the first place. “[N]othing heroic” as Walt Whitman wrote of him, “and yet the greatest hero.”