As president, Grant was a staunch upholder of Lincoln's plan of Reconstruction, defending the full integration of black men into the legal, economic and political institution of the United States. Therefore, since he was also the general who won Abraham Lincoln's war, Grant was a primary target in the South's subsequent revisionism of the run-up to war and the war itself, turning itself into the victim of the war they started, their loss into the Glorious Cause and writing slavery out of the history all together. While turning Robert E. Lee into the contrasting saint, Grant's character was shredded: a drunk butcher of men, enabler of that other butcher, Sherman, dishonorable and incapable. He could never have defeated the chivalrous, brilliant Lee except he had unfair advantages.
Northerners played into that game, starting with Henry Adams, who held a grudge against President Grant. Grant didn't provide Charles Sumner, an old, close Adams's family friend, with the office Sumner wished for. President Grant believed the Senator, never fully recovered from the vicious caning by South Carolinian Rep. Preston Brooks in 1856, and now elderly, wasn't up to it. Gore Vidal followed the sly insinuations Adams insinuated into his novel of post-war D.C., Democracy. In 1876, the post-Civil War volume in his Chronicles of Empire series, Vidal painted a thoroughly mendacious portrait of Grant as pathetic, incompetent and unpopular.
During his long, painful death from throat cancer Grant wrote Personal Memoirs of Ulysses S. Grant, published by Mark Twain. The Memoirs was organized in two parts. The first section, though it deals only briefly with his early life, is a plain but nevertheless vivid account of growing up in a small Ohio community in the Jacksonian era. It smoothly segues into his time at West Point. Then he describes his experience in the Mexican-American War, which, Grant states, as well-understood at the time, that he like so many others in the U.S., heartily disapproved of this war, for it was an unjust war made by and for the benefit of the Slave Power, which the nation as a whole had to finance. The Memoirs was enormously successful as a work of history, and as a publishing venture. In literary judgment it ranks with Julius Caesar's The Gallic Wars. The Memoirs has never been out of print.
Grant's funeral procession became an historical "Pageantry of Woe," as Americans of every class and region flocked to pay respects to the man, who with Lincoln saved the Union, who had exercised particular magnanimity to General Lee at the Surrender at Appomattox. On the day of his funeral, churches in hamlets, small towns and cities everywhere observed special commemoration.
His tomb is in New York City's Riverside Park, overlooking the Hudson River.
1 comment:
Grant is a giant, a true Hero in every sense of the word. Totally decent, a man who loved his wife dearly all his life long, though she was a devout Christian and he was not, they had no differences over religion or religious observance. He despised slavery, and he loved the Union.
It's this passionate love of the Union that I've not yet succeeded in wrapping my head around, living in these eras in which the U.S. proves itself over and over to be run by evil, self-serving, selfish corporate interests. That may be the difference then, between then and now? But then the Slave Power was as much self-serving and evil as Cheney and Enron ....
Isn't it interesting how successful Twain / Clemens could be at making money for others, while losing it for himself. He did the world a huge service by taking over the Grant Memoirs project. Not to mention the service he did for the Grant family, gone bankrupt in the failure (1884) of his son's brokerage firm, Grant & Ward. Not only did he lose the family's money, but the money of many of his friends who had invested their funds with his son's firm. Grant was determined to pay back his friends, and terrified of what would happen to his wife and children, because now he was ill with the cancer that would kill him.
Some info on the bankruptcy of Grant & Ward here.
The small, but lovely book, Grant and Twain: The Story of a Friendship That Changed America (2004) by Mark Perry, is where I learned first about the history of the writing of The Memoirs. Having read The Memoirs, when this book came out, I was there!
Edited to Add: Despite their mean-spirited, personal pettiness toward Grant,I deeply admire Vidal's Chronicles of Empire, and Adams is an essential historian for anyone who wishes to understand the United States, the early Republic, the Louisiana Purchase, the War of 1812, the U.S. fixation on Cuba and so much more. Adams is our first 'professional' historian -- a founder of American History as a discipline -- and a great historian.
Love, C.
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