Ulysses S. Grant Died 130 Years Ago. Racists Hate Him, But Historians No Longer Do.
Why everything your teacher told you about the Union general and U.S. president was wrong.
Posted: 07/23/2015
After Ulysses S. Grant, the 18th
president of the United States, died 130 years ago today, a million and a
half Americans watched his
funeral procession. His mausoleum was a popular tourist attraction in
New York City for decades. But for most of the 20th Century, historians and
non-historians alike believed Grant was corrupt, drunken and incompetent, that
he was one of the country's worst presidents, and that as a general, he was
more lucky than good.
A generation of historians, led
by Columbia's William A. Dunning, criticized Grant for backing
Reconstruction, the federal government's attempt to protect the rights of black
southerners in the 1860s and early 1870s. Black people, some Dunning school
historians suggested, were unsuited for education, the vote, or holding office.
Grant's critics were "determined the Civil War would be interpreted from
the point of view of the Confederacy," said John F. Marszalek, a historian
and executive director of the Ulysses S. Grant Association. "The idea that
Grant would do things that would ensure citizenship rights for blacks was just
awful and so he had to be knocked down."
Grant's "presidency was
basically seen as corrupt, and it took place during Reconstruction, which was
seen as basically the lowest point of American history," said Eric Foner,
a civil war historian at Columbia University. "Whatever Grant did to
protect former slaves was naïveté or worse."
In recent decades, that's all
changed. The Grant you learned about in school isn't the one your kids will
read about in their textbooks. And that's because historians are in the midst
of a broad reassessment of Grant's legacy. In just nine years, between 2000
and 2009, Grant jumped 10 spots in a C-SPAN survey
of historians' presidential rankings, from 33rd to 23rd -- a bigger jump
than any other president. His reputation as a military leader has risen,
too.
"Public opinion is behind what
historians are saying about Grant," Marszalek said. "Too many people
in the public hold the old Lost Cause view
that Grant was this butcher and incompetent and corrupt and a drunkard, which
wasn’t true."
One of the reasons for the change
in Grant's reputation is an increasing acceptance among historians that
Reconstruction pursued worthy goals.
"We now view Reconstruction
... as something that should have succeeded in securing equality for
African-Americans, and we see Grant as supportive of that effort and doing as
much as any person could do to try to secure that within realm of political
reality," said Brooks Simpson, a historian at Arizona State University.
"We see him as on the right side of history."
You have to go almost to Lyndon
Johnson to find a president who tried to do as much to ensure black people
found freedom. John F. Marszalek
Many historians now point to
Grant's decision to send U.S. troops into South Carolina to crush the Ku Klux
Klan as particularly praiseworthy, Foner said.
"You have to go almost to
Lyndon Johnson to find a president who tried to do as much to ensure black
people found freedom," Marszalek said.
Grant also suffered because of
inevitable comparisons with Robert E. Lee, the Confederate general. He was
accused of running a "war of attrition" that required "no real
military talent," Foner explained. But "as those older views have
abandoned, Grant's reputation has risen, especially among military
historians."
Grant is now praised for having a
strategic view of the war, rather than focusing solely on the area around
Virginia, as Lee so often did. And he gets credit for believing in civilian
control of the military. When some of his officers were upset about black
soldiers serving in the Union Army, Grant "said, 'Look, this is the policy
of the government, and the Army has to carry it out. ... If there's anyone who
can't deal with it, resign right now,'" Foner said.
Foner also thinks increased praise
for Grant's memoirs has boosted the president's reputation. Simpson doesn't buy
that, noting that famed literary critic Edmund Wilson was praising Grant's
memoirs as a "unique expression of the national character" in the
1960s, when Grant's reputation as a president was at its nadir.
As the Confederacy's reputation rises
or falls, Grant's rises or falls in the opposite direction. Eric Foner
The big question now is whether
public opinion will follow that of historians. Simpson thinks the shift is
starting, noting that Grant is now portrayed more favorably in high school and
college textbooks and television documentaries. His memorial in Washington and
his tomb in New York have been repaired since the 1980s. And he's been shown in
a positive light in popular media, including the 1999 Will Smith vehicle
"Wild Wild West," in which he was played by Kevin Kline. On
Wednesday, Rick Perry -- the governor of a state that fought against Grant in
the Civil War -- praised the Union general in a speech, saying he had
"come to symbolize the healing of our nation campaigning under the banner,
'let us have peace.'"
"We’re always re-evaluating
past historical figures in light of present events, and those changes take a
lot of time to fix themselves in the public mind," Simpson said.
Perhaps the best way to track
Grant's popularity will be monitoring the image of his foes.
"As the Confederacy's
reputation rises or falls, Grant's rises or falls in the opposite
direction," Foner said.
"As we get more critical of
Robert E. Lee and the Confederacy, Grant's reputation is going to go up,"
Simpson agreed. "Grant's reputation says as much about us as it does about
his time, because it's about what we value."
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