Ulysses S. Grant, who died on July 23, 1885 days after he finished writing his widely acclaimed autobiography, today makes an encore appearance in today’s #stampoftheday, which is an 18-cent stamp issued in 1938.
While I wrote about Grant in May, I’m returning to him because in mid-June, protestors in San Francisco tore down a statue of Grant. That struck me because while I knew that Grant was the last president who had owned a slave, I also knew that he generally had a good record on racial issues. In fact, I learned that after he died, none other than Frederick Douglass observed: “To him, more than to any other man, the Negro owes his enfranchisement. 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.”
As readers of these posts know, Douglass didn’t mince words. So his praise made me want to know more.
Raised by anti-slavery parents, Grant married a woman from a slave-owning family, a decision that so upset his parents that they refused to attend the wedding. After Grant left the Army in the 1850s, he moved to his in-laws’ farm and woodlots, where he sometimes oversaw work down by slaves owned by his in-laws, who at one point gave one of those slave to him. But in 1859, facing financial problems, Grant, who could have sold the slave or hired him out, decided to free him instead.
Grant rejoined the Army when the Civil War started and ultimately rose to be the Union’s top general. He promoted the use of Black troops and insisted that those soldiers be treated as equals. When Confederate General Robert E. Lee proposed a prisoner exchange, Grant said captured Black soldiers would have to be part of the deal. When Lee refused, Grant ended the negotiations.
As commander of the army occupying the South after the war, Grant didn’t punish Confederate military leaders or soldiers. But he also moved to protect the ex-slaves issuing orders requiring the Army to protect ex-slaves from “Black Codes,” laws that would have reinstated slavery. He also ordered the Army to protect Blacks from rising violence. Over the next few years, Grant split with President Andrew Johnson, a virulent racist who advocated lenient treatment of the slaveholding states and few rights for the newly freed Blacks.
Elected president in 1868, Grant called in his first inaugural address for passage of a Constitutional amendment giving African American men the right to vote. (The measure passed in 1870.) When the new Ku Klux Klan and other groups used terror to stop Blacks from voting, Grant responded forcefully, most notably by imposing martial law on several South Carolina counties in 1871.
However, Grant’s commitment waned as such intervention became increasingly unpopular in the North, particularly in a recession that began in 1873 during Grant’s second term. Notably, his administration declined to send troops to quell growing violence in Mississippi where whites because, according to his Attorney General, people were “tired of the autumnal outbreaks in the South.” Nevertheless, Grant didn’t fully give up the fight. In January 1875, he told Congress he could not “see with indifference Union men or Republicans ostracized, persecuted, and murdered.” Congress refused to strengthen the laws against violence, but instead passed a sweeping law to guarantee blacks access to public facilities. Grant signed it as the Civil Rights Act of 1875, but there was little enforcement and the Supreme Court ruled the law unconstitutional in 1883.
Grant’s record in other areas is similarly mixed. He tried to end violence against Native Americans and pushed back against calls from many leaders (including William Tecumseh Sherman) for exterminating all Native Americans. In an address to Congress in 1869, Grant argued that “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.” Grant reformed the notoriously corrupt system that licensed traders to do business with-and often cheat-the tribes, asking respected religious groups, starting with the Quakers, to nominate worthy candidates for those positions.
While his proposed long-term solution-“placing all the Indians on large reservations, as rapidly as it can be done”-hardly seems enlightened today, he also insisted on “giving them absolute protection there.” Such actions, Douglass stated meant that “the Indian is indebted [to Grant] for the humane policy adopted toward him.”
Other aspects of Grant’s life were similarly complex. During the Civil War, he expelled Jews from the military district he controlled. But as president, he appointed far more Jewish men to federal office than any prior chief executive, perhaps more than all prior presidents combined.
While personally honest, many of Grant’s appointees were not and he left office under a cloud. In the subsequent decades, historians generally viewed his presidency as a failure and were mixed on his record as a general (with some saying he was too willing to accept massive casualties on both sides). In more recent years, Ron Chernow and others have led a reexamination of Grant, arguing that his poor reputation stemmed in part from a concerted effort by those who wanted to obscure the true history of slavery, the Civil War, and the violent resistance to Reconstruction.
The reality, historian Gregory Downs, author of three books about Reconstruction, wrote in a San Francisco Chronicle op-ed written after Grant’s statue was torn down, is that “Grant was not always heroic. He is precisely the kind of figure we should wrestle with because he raises deep questions about the relationship among slavery, emancipation, the Civil War and settler colonialism. For too long, we as a country have shied away from that engagement. By acting rashly…the members of the mob [that tore down the statue] denied residents a chance to do so. Now, the question for us is whether we can fulfill both obligations: to take our nation’s history seriously – including the most dishonorable parts – and to model a democratic and inclusive process of discernment, debate and discussion. Can we reason together?”
I couldn’t agree more.
Be well, stay safe, fight for justice, wrestle with our past, and work for peace