Rehabilitating U.S. Grant

For decades, historians put Ulysses S. Grant in the basement of American Presidents, but maybe that judgment was a bit harsh:

Waugh describes how the estimation of Grant, especially as a political leader, has itself had a curious and telling history. That his presidency has ranked so low for so long—his current, somewhat improved standing places him roughly on a par with Calvin Coolidge and Gerald Ford—says practically nothing about Grant’s public reputation during, and especially just after, the Civil War. Immediately after Appomattox, Grant was of course hailed in the North as a savior; and then, following Lincoln’s assassination, he became the greatest living hero of the war.

...During his presidency, to be sure, the Democratic press condemned Grant as at once feeble, conniving, and imperious—attacks similar to those that the Democrats had made on Lincoln. But even nastier rebukes came from members of Grant’s own party, the so-called Liberal Republicans, including Charles Sumner and Carl Schurz, who for a combination of reasons—displeasure with Grant’s executive appointments, disgust at his friendliness with party organization polls, opposition to his resolute Reconstruction policy, all of it colored by a snobbish hauteur—came to despise the president. The most famous slurs emanated from Henry Adams, who lived just across Lafayette Square, and who WASPishly joked that Grant’s initials stood for “uniquely stupid.” Many years later Adams observed that “the progress of evolution from President Washington to President Grant, was alone enough to upset Darwin.” The bien pensants at the Nation called Grant “an ignorant soldier, coarse in his taste and blunt in his perceptions, fond of money and material enjoyment and of low company.” When Grant died in 1885, the New York Tribune praised his military career, but charged that “the greatest mistake of his life was the acceptance of the presidency.”

But as Waugh shows, Grant’s admirers greatly outnumbered his detractors, and his death brought a tidal wave of emotional eulogizing.

...Grant’s standing began to erode drastically after 1920 owing to several currents, cultural and intellectual, that emerged from diverse quarters. First, the rising racist, pro-Southern, so-called “revisionist,” or “Lost Cause” school of American historians, pioneered at the turn of the century by William Dunning of Columbia University, portrayed Grant as a sociopathic killer during the war and a tyrant during Reconstruction. General Robert E. Lee, the man whom Grant had defeated on the battlefield, now became widely viewed as the war’s supreme military genius, lionized in the South and respected in the North as the gentleman-soldier who supposedly embodied the courage and the gallantry of the doomed Confederacy. Abraham Lincoln became the true giant of the Union cause, regarded even by some in the South as the compassionate patriot who, had he lived, would have spared the country the folly and (for Southern whites) the humiliation of Reconstruction. But Grant, by contrast, seemed to possess not an ounce of decency or forgiveness. Demonized as an inept, even crooked president, he emerged from these accounts as the lowlife who presided over what Dunning crudely called the “blackout of honest government” during the Reconstruction years, and who personally ushered in the crimes and excesses of the Gilded Age.

The disillusionment among the American intelligentsia over World War I—and over the claims that waging war advanced democracy—further damaged Grant’s image during the 1920s, a view later reinforced in the public mind with entertainment spectacles like the book and film versions of Gone With the Wind. The leftist climate of the 1930s led to renewed attacks on Grant’s presidency as an emblem of Gilded Age dishonesty. And the rising historians of the 1940s and 1950s, even as they challenged both the Dunning School and Depression-era leftist simplicities, affirmed that Grant’s political career was disastrous. Richard Hofstadter, among the most respected new historians, could write in 1948, without fear of contradiction, that “Grant’s administrations are notorious for their corruption.”

...The civil rights and Vietnam War era brought renewed sharp attacks on Grant, most skillfully in William S. McFeely’s acclaimed work Grant: A Biography—as a vicious Union commander and, at best, a half-hearted defender of the ex-slaves during Reconstruction, whose unenlightened views on race led him to waver and finally to retreat from resisting the violent forces of white supremacy. Curiously, in the 1960s and 1970s, even after an outpouring of new scholarship had finally overturned the racist, anti-Grant interpretations of the Dunning School, Grant himself remained an object of contempt. “Sensitive intellectuals, then and since,” the distinguished Civil War historian Charles Royster observed in 1992, “have looked at Grant’s career and marveled that he could hold his head up without shame or remorse.”

...Waugh leaves it to others to advance what she calls the recent upswing in Grant’s standing, which has included the renovation of Grant’s Tomb in 1997 as well as a refreshingly fair-minded PBS documentary in 2002. The imminent Civil War sesquicentennial of 2011 to 2015 augurs a full recasting of popular as well as scholarly understanding of the war and its major figures, including, inevitably, Grant. Perhaps then, Waugh concludes, visitors to the tomb “may be able to see all the tangled, complicated, but ultimately inspiring dimensions of a man who truly is both an American hero and an American myth.”

If indeed justice is done and truth is served, those visitors will be inspired by far more than certain particular dimensions of Grant. A superb modern general who, with Lincoln, finally unleashed the force required to crush the slaveholders’ rebellion, Grant went on, as president, to press vigorously for the reunification of the severed nation, but on the terms of the victorious North and not of the defeated South. Given all that he was up against—not simply from Confederates and Southern white terrorists but, as president, from high-minded factional opponents and schismatics from his own Republican Party—it is quite remarkable that Grant sustained his commitment to the freedmen for as long and as hard as he did. The evidence clearly shows that he created the most auspicious record on racial equality and civil rights of any president from Lincoln to Lyndon B. Johnson. He also formulated some remarkably humane and advanced ideas on subjects ranging from federal Indian policy to public education. Given the limitations imposed on executive power by the Constitution, it is all the more remarkable that he acted as boldly as he did.