How did Civil War champion become a disgraced figure, and the champion of slavery become a hero?

[bigtree]

Will Dobson ?@WilliamJDobson
How did Ulysses S. Grant become an embarrassment of history and Robert E. Lee a role model? http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/history/2015/04/appomattox_how_did_ulysses_s_grant_become_an_embarrassment_of_history_and.html?wpsrc=sh_all_dt_tw_top … via @slate


____The answer begins with Reconstruction. As best as possible, President Grant was a firm leader of Reconstruction America. Faced with the titanic challenge of integrating freedmen into American politics, he attacked the problem with characteristic clarity and flexibility. He proposed civil rights legislation (and would be the last president to do so until Lyndon Johnson, a century later), and deployed troops to hot spots across the South, to defend black Americans from white supremacist violence. And while there were failures—at times he was too passive in the face of white violence, too paralyzed by petty politics—there were real victories too. After Congress passed the Enforcement Acts—criminal codes that protected blacks’ 14th and 15th Amendment rights to vote, hold office, serve on juries, and receive equal protection of laws—Grant authorized federal troops to confront the Ku Klux Klan and other groups of anti-black terrorists. Declaring them “insurgents … in rebellion against the authority of the United States,” Grant and his subordinates—most notably Attorney General Amos Ackerman and the newly formed Department of Justice—broke the Klan and restored some peace to the Republican South.

In using federal power to prosecute white supremacists and support Reconstruction governments, Grant had tied his fortunes to those of freedmen and their allies. They were grateful. Grant won re-election in 1872 with the vast backing of black voters in the South, as well as former Union soldiers in the North. Appalled by his use of force in the South, his enemies dogged him as an enemy of liberty. Indeed, for as much as scandal plagued his administration, it’s also true that many cries of corruption came from angry and aggrieved Democrats, who attacked military intervention in the South as “corrupt” and “unjust.” Opponents in the North and South reviled Grant as a “tyrant” who imposed so-called “black domination” on an innocent South.

Grant wasn’t blind to his critics, and he devoted his presidency and post-presidency to defending both his record as general and the aims of the war he won. “While I would do nothing to revive unhappy memories in the South,” he once declared, “I do not like to see our soldiers apologize for the war.”

Facing him was a phalanx of Southern sympathizers and former Confederates, from ex-president Jefferson Davis to polemical writers like Edward Pollard, who would give the name “Lost Cause” to the movement to redeem and defend the former Confederacy. Born out of grief and furthered by a generation of organizations (like United Confederate Veterans and the United Daughters of the Confederacy), proponents of the Lost Cause would wage a battle for the nation’s memory of the war. To them it was not a rebellion or a fight for slavery; it was a noble battle for constitutional ideals. As Davis put it in his two-volume memoir and defense of the Southern cause, The Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government, slavery “was in no wise the cause of the conflict, but only an incident,” and the South was fighting against “unlimited, despotic power” of the federal government and its “tremendous and sweeping usurpation” of states’ rights.


Grant’s post-facto nod to Lee would stand as a powerful symbol of reconciliation. Blight writes, “Grant’s passing was invoked as a moment of national unity. Some Confederate veterans’ groups in the South passed resolutions of honor and sympathy for their former foe.” Two of his pallbearers were former Confederate generals—appointed by Democratic President Grover Cleveland—representatives of a nation united in mourning and eager to move on. Exhausted by Reconstruction and the battles over black rights, white Northerners were eager to put the past behind them and reunite with their Southern cousins. The Lost Cause was a template for doing just that. White Americans didn’t want to dwell on the challenges of race and emancipation, and the South’s narrative of honor and sincerity—aggressively pushed by Confederate veterans and their supporters—allowed everyone to celebrate the individual greatness of men like Lee and Grant, even as the latter never abandoned his view that the Southern cause was slavery and that the North was right to wage the war...


read more: http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/history/2015/04/appomattox_how_did_ulysses_s_grant_become_an_embarrassment_of_history_and.html?wpsrc=sh_all_dt_tw_top

related:

President Ford Restores Robert E. Lee's Citizenship After 100 Years
http://burnpit.legion.org/2011/08/president-ford-restores-robert-e-lees-citizenship-after-100-years

[malthaussen]

1. Well, for one thing, Grant was a pretty bad president.

And Bobby Lee was such an affable old stick, it's hard for most people to find fault with him. I'm an exception to that, btw, although I wouldn't demonize the man.

IMO, Lee's popularity mostly rests on romance and star quality.

-- Mal

[bigtree]

2. read the article

...you've offered the classic simplification without acknowledging ANYTHING redeeming about Grant's leadership of the Northern victory, his reconstruction efforts, or his efforts to assist blacks after emancipation.

[malthaussen]

4. Because I was answering the literal question,

Why is Lee more popular now than Grant? If you want a discussion on the relative merits of the men, that's a different question. Frankly, I'll take Grant every time and give you change, too.

-- Mal

[bigtree]

5. as I said

...the article answers that question more precisely than 'Grant was a pretty bad president."

While true that his administration was scandal-ridden, there are many aspects of his presidency regarding his attention to the plight of blacks which are ignored and dismissed - much of that dismissal over the course of history a consequence of the denigration and oppression of the black population after Reconstruction.

"...Indeed, for as much as scandal plagued his administration, it’s also true that many cries of corruption came from angry and aggrieved Democrats, who attacked military intervention in the South as “corrupt” and “unjust...

...as historian David Blight writes in Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory, Lost Cause advocates would canonize Lee as a “blameless Christian soldier, a paragon of manly virtue and duty who soared above politics”—but it would fuel other narratives: that the nation should honor Southern bravery, that the Union’s victory was one of numerical superiority and not tactical skill (it’s in this that we see the claim that Grant was a “butcher” of men, despite all evidence to the contrary), that Reconstruction was a disaster of federal overreach, and that white supremacy was the proper order of things in the United States"

Three books on Grant I would recommend reading:

'The Civil War and Reconstruction' by, J.G. Randall and David Donald

'Grant Takes Command', by, Bruce Catton

'Grant - A Biography' by, William S. McFeely

[malthaussen]

9. Well, you can toss in "is regarded" to the statement about his presidency if you want.

No question, the article describes what happened. I'd think there were people in the GOP who were angry and aggrieved, too, that Reconstruction wasn't even severer than it was. Since Grant, in common with most of the successful US generals, was basically a moderate, he had the pleasure of being despised by both sides of the political spectrum. Accordingly, his character was assassinated virtually from the moment the guns stopped firing -- even before, if you will, since opponents were always likely to bring up the canard about his drinking. What I find interesting is that, outside the US where there is pretty much no vested interest in the merits of Lee and Grant, the former is still usually canonized, or at least beatified. The man had a good press, that's for sure. There's interesting racism there, too, IMO, as I have seen comments condemning the US Civil war as the "suicide of the Anglo-Saxon race." It is not only in the US that White Supremacy is influential, after all, and somehow Lee and the CSA are regarded as champions of that cause. I doubt, rather, that Mr Lee though much about it at all (which is not to say that he didn't take it for granted). I'd suggest that, since Grant was instrumental in crushing the hopes of the White Supremicsts, his demonization by them would have been inevitable whether he had been elected President or not.

-- Mal

[bigtree]

10. great summation, Mal

...nice addition to the article.

[tabasco]

12. I suppose Grant was a bad president

He was re-elected in a landslide.

Grant was not corrupt but his second term was ruined by scandals. Grant was too trusting of scheming businessmen. That was his fault.

I really do not believe that Grant was "disgraced." That's going a bit too far.

[malthaussen]

14. Reagan was re-elected in a landslide, what's your point?

So, for that matter, was Nixon.

More people remember Grant as a general than a president, anyway. Which is instructive, actually. But post-Lincoln there weren't many memorable Presidents in the 19th century anyway. The corrupt businessmen manipulated more executives than U.S. Grant,

-- Mal

[tabasco]

17. Reading comprehension not your strong suit?

A shitty response was really not necessary, but I'll be happy to play the game.

My point, which I stated rather clearly, is that Grant was not personally corrupt. He did not have a good background or good instincts in civilian leadership, but he meant well.

Reagan and Nixon were total scumbags who were corrupt.

[bigtree]

16. how would you describe the reflexive view expressed by so many when referring to him

...as a 'bad president?' Do you believe he is as venerated in our observances of American history as Robert Lee?

Would 'discredited' be a better term to describe his damaged reputation and his reduction in worth and character?

[jwirr]

3. Thank you. This is a history that I was not aware of. And the sad thing is we are still fighting it.

I think it is interesting that his presidential library is at the Mississippi State University. Why was a southern college selected to house the papers etc of a soldier who defeated them and was a northerner? I wonder if anyone even looks at the papers anymore?

[bigtree]

6. good question about his presidential paper repository

...“They want to know why Mississippi? That’s the first thing people ask,” said John Marszalek, executive director and managing editor of the Ulysses S. Grant Presidential Library.

The answer goes back to the 1960s, when the Ulysses S. Grant Association decided to collect all of his letters, manuscripts and other items in one place.

It started at Ohio State in 1962, then moved to Southern Illinois University in 1964 until 2008, when the association decided to move the collection to MSU.

“Dr. Marszalek is a nationally and internationally known scholar,” said Frances Coleman, dean of University Libraries. “When he was made executive director of the collection, that had a lot to do with its coming here.”

“It came here because Mississippi State made the best offer, the best arrangements and offered the best support,” Marszalek said.

“Our wanting the collection here was on behalf of students,” Cole said. “We recognized its value in support of history and the scholarship of history.”

It took an out-of-court settlement to get Southern Illinois University to relinquish the collection.

It’ll probably always seem a little odd for a Mississippi school to house the presidential library of the Union’s commanding general. Marszalek, Cole and the rest know the question will keep coming up.

In a nod to that continuing curiosity, the library had bookmarks printed to explain why the home of the MSU Bulldogs might be the perfect place for Grant’s legacy.

“Hold on with a bull-dog grip, and chew & choke, as much as possible,” Lincoln wrote to Grant on Aug. 17, 1864.

“See?” Marszalek said. “It was meant to be.”


http://djournal.com/lifestyle/grant-bulldogs-union-generals-papers-home-mississippi-state/

[jwirr]

8. That does make some kind of sense.

[Telcontar]

7. Ultimately, Lee was the worse general

Lee's inability to leverage the terrain and tempo at Gettysburg, as well as not keeping a reign on his subordinates, puts his military legend in question. Grant and Sherman showed a much better grasp of modern warfare, and the American Civil War/War of Northern Agression/Years of Very Angry Tourists really did usher in the age of modern war.

[n2doc]

18. Lee made major mistakes

So did Grant, and Sherman. Warfare is nearly impossible without making mistakes.

Lee did not have the room to recover from those mistakes as he did not have the reserves in men and manpower. Fortunately.


I personally think Lee deserves far more blame than he gets. He could have chosen to serve his country (he was asked, and declined), and if her had done so, I feel the war would have been over much more quickly and with less bloodshed. The Union Generals in command of the Eastern Armies in the first years of the war were terrible.

[bigtree]

11. »

[panader0]

13. Very interesting. Thanks for this post.

I was a Civil War buff as a kid many years ago, but apparently I didn't learn much about Grant's presidency.

[bigtree]

15. glad to find some readers

...I think it's a fascinating deconstruction of a man who is normally referred to as a 'failed president.' Yet, I believe Gen. Grant mirrored much of what Lincoln sought to achieve in defending the Union, as the president proclaimed at the beginning of the Civil War, ". . . to maintain the honor, the integrity, and the existence of the National Union, and the perpetuity of popular government; and to redress wrongs (of slavery) already long enough endured."

"In my hands," he spoke, "is the task of restoring peace to the present distracted condition of the country. It was not the mere matter of the separation of the Colonies from the motherland," he said, "but that sentiment in the Declaration of Independence which gave liberty, not alone to the people of this country, but, I hope, to the world, for all future time."

"It was that," Lincoln continued, "which gave promise that in due time the weight would be lifted from the shoulders of all men."

[scarletwoman]

19. Thank you for this OP! Interesting thread, too.

I'm not a Civil War "buff" at all, but I'm always glad to learn more about it.

[Retrograde]

20. Lee had the "good fortune" to die soon after

Post Civil War, Lee became head of a small college in Virginia, and was dead by 1870, so he was able to go out relatively untarnished. Grant lived on in a more public life: while he had some accomplishments as president of the US he was tarnished by the Credit Mobilier scandal, among others.

It's interesting that the most common reproduced photos of the two men tend to show Lee impeccably groomed and dressed in his best uniform and formally posed, while Grant is shown unshaven and scruffy slouching in the field.