THE ASCENSION OF ULYSSES S. GRANT

 

It is amazing how much a construed perception, even if with elements of truth, can become an accepted narrative, scrutiny and reevaluation not even considered. In the case of Ulysses S. Grant and his placement in the canon of United States Presidents, how it happened is less surprising that it happened at all.

Throughout the 20^th century and even early in the 21^st, Grant was consistently found just above the bottom of presidential rankings, just above Hoover and Harding. And yet, looking at the man’s last years, such a standing would seem inconceivable. This is not only because he led the Union Army to victory. In fact, a common and uncontested talking point I myself was thought in history class was that the North the Civil War in spite of Grant’s leadership. The root of such reading is not hard to see. Lee’s first mistake, after all, was simultaneously underestimating Grant and overestimating his own troops, but to suggest that Grant was a man unprepared and unschooled in military science is wrong on many levels.

Rather, Grant’s greatest esteem came before and post-presidency. Certainly, Mark Twain thought Grant worthy of commemoration, encouraging him to chronicle his life in his later years. The result was Personal Memoirs of Ulysses S. Grant, a two-volume introspection published by Twain himself in July 1885. Within weeks of the publication, Grant succumbed to throat cancer. His funeral was attended by veterans of both the Union and Confederate armies, such was he respected as the man who lived up to Lincoln’s vision of Reconstruction “with malice toward none”.

And then, in the early 20^th century, Grant’s reputation suffered an unprecedented blow. It’s true that his presidency was marred by scandal and corruption seeing both the resignation of his personal secretary General Orville E. Babcock, who cheated the federal government out of millions in liquor excise taxes, in a collusion with distilleries that would come to be known as the Whiskey Ring and the dishonorable resignation of his Secretary of War William W. Belknap to avoid impeachment for the Indian Trading Post Scandal. But Grant himself was never implicated in these or other embarrassments (such as the creation of a faux railroad company intended to inflate the cost of railway construction). If anything, his greatest failing in these regards was his unrelenting insistence in seeing the best in people and his deliberate blindness to the darker impulses of his associates.

It’s possible that Grant’s legacy, with his unwavering commitment to loyalty and honor, could have survived even this scandalous presidency had not a renaissance for the Lost Cause of the Confederacy plagued the early decades of the 20^th century. Groups like United Daughters of the Confederacy played no small role in defaming Grant in their overall vandalism of history, overemphasizing his scruffy appearance, his alcoholism and turbulent years in office.

As time has shown, it is dangerous to underestimate the reach of such campaigns. As Daniel L. Fountain, history professor at Meredith College, observed, “The UDC relentlessly lobbied legislatures for public school textbooks that presented a pro-Confederate version of regional history and successfully blacklisted other books. By targeting the region's middle- to upper-class children, they ensured an army of future teachers and leaders would carry forward and defend their message for decades to come. Embedding their version of Confederate history into the sacred spaces of Southern society (the home, cemeteries, churches, city squares, street names, colleges and schools) made erasing it physically difficult and personally painful."

With the advent of film, television and ultimately the internet the influence of such teachings extended beyond the South. This tied in with a biography of Major General Henry Halleck, Lincoln’s Chief of Staff during the war, by Stephen Ambrose published in 1962, who had reservations about Grant’s skill early on but later grew to respect his approach to battle, all but ruined Grant’s standing by the latter half of the 20^th century, reducing the hero of the Civil War as something of a failed chump in the public eye.

If there was a shift in the consensus toward Ulysses S. Grant I was largely unaware of it until Siena College Research Institute updated its presidential ranking in 2022. Grant came in at 22, just making the top half of the list. Since the 2010 ranking, Grant began rising in rank to a firm mid-tier.

Undoubtedly, increased awareness of the historical distortions of groups like the UDC is partially responsible. Nonetheless, I became suddenly intrigued by the man who I had learned to think of as at best an unlikely war hero. His memoirs proved the real eye-opener in a way a self-serving autobiography could never be. The humility and empathy present throughout the massive work is of the sort that cannot be faked. What emerged was not the shabby drunk who unwittingly led the troops to victory but rather a dignified humanitarian whose legacy far extends the war.

Reconstruction proved a battle in itself and it is hard to imagine any president would have navigated it with ease. Nonetheless, Grant’s initiatives in the decade following the Civil War are worthy of consideration.

Grant, for his part, made a genuine effort to help the former Confederate states build their way back up into the Union. This would manifest itself, however, in a way many of the former enemy soldiers he was trying to make amends with would come to resent. The passage of the 15^th Amendment, one of Grant’s first orders of business upon taking office in 1868, guaranteed every male citizen the right to vote regardless of race or former status.

Indeed, as willing as Grant was to forgive former traitors he was as quick to stomp put any emerging threat to the Union. Born out of Southern resentment, the Klan was the most violent stoker of lingering aggression. Spurred by the rising violence toward Blacks and Union sympathizers, Grant established the Justice Department in 1870. For the first few years of its existence the Department’s focus was the eradication of the Klan. Within two years, the hooded spooks had been annihilated.

As Frederick Douglas observed after Grant’s death, “When red-handed violence ran rampant through the South, and freedmen were being hunted down like wild beasts in the night, the moral courage and fidelity of Gen. Grant transcended that of his party.”

His response to the escalating violence toward Native Americans during his presidency may not hold up as well, but it must remembered that it came at a time when calls for tribal extermination from members of Congress. As Ron Chernow wrote in his biography of Grant, “Whatever its shortcomings, Grant’s approach seemed to signal a remarkable advance over the ruthless methods adopted by some earlier administrations.”

Grant flatly stated, “A system which looks to the extinction of a race is too horrible for a nation to adopt without entailing upon itself the wrath of all Christendom.” His solution, transferring tribes to reservations, would bring its own set of problems, many of which continue to this day. It is not inconceivable, however, to believe that at the height of the Indian Wars, reservations seemed the only way to ensure an end to the violence. He would appoint Ely S. Parker, of the Tonawanda Seneca Nation, as his Commissioner of Indian Affairs.

“Grant saw absorption and assimilation as a benign, peaceful process, not one robbing Indians of their rightful culture,” Chernow wrote. It goes without saying that Grant’s vision was not the typical outcome, Native Americans being denied full citizenship until almost forty years after his death. Nonetheless, Grant began the push for extending voting rights to the First Nations.

One of Grant’s last acts in office was the establishment of Yellowstone as the first national park in America, a move that would give birth to modern conservation and blossom into America’s pride, our parks and our land.

More than anything, the legacy of Ulysses S. Grant was greatly elevated in the last decade by two remarkable books, American Ulysses by Ronald C. White and Ron Chernow’s Grant. Collectively, both books did more to undo the damage done to his name by his enemies than any poll or even Grant, had his own writings been widely rediscovered, could have done. Grant, after all, was the first to sell himself short. In his farewell address to Congress in 1876, Grant, humbled by the scandals that shook his presidency, said, “Mistakes have been made, as all can see and I admit. But I leave comparisons to history, claiming only that I have acted in every instance from a conscientious desire to do what was right, constitutional, within the law, and for the very best interests of the whole people. Failures have been errors of judgment, not of intent.”

Perhaps, historian Elliot Drago summed it up best, “History is as complicated as the men who make it. The story of Ulysses S. Grant is no exception. For all of his pre-war failures, Ulysses S. Grant achieved his greatest successes both by presiding over those moments in which Americans rediscovered their founding principles and by fighting for those moments in which Americans became Americans once again.”