Rehabilitating U.S. Grant

I’ve just realized a long-standing goal by reading the memoirs of Ulysses S. Grant (1822-1885). I’ve wanted to do that since reading about them in Mark Twain’s own memoirs many decades ago. Twain had bailed out the ailing ex-President when he was on his death bed by agreeing to edit and publish his autobiography, helping provide for his family after he was gone. Grant’s wife and children were made more than financially whole by the remarkable achievement, and Twain also helped himself out of financial difficulties. The two volume book covers only up to the end of the Civil War, and thus not Grant’s Presidency. As a consequence, it is chiefly a book of military history, about Grant’s career as an officer in the Mexican American and Civil Wars. It gets quoted several times in Ken Burns‘ 1990 Civil War series. I’ve always been inspired by that anecdote from early in Grant’s career, when he was fairly terrified of engaging with the enemy, then led his troops to the top of a hill — only to learn that the enemy had fled. The fact that his opponents were just as scared as he was gave him courage, a lesson he wrote that he never forgot. It was that spirit that made him the man for the job of winning the war. His methods were bloody, but they won battles, and ended the war expeditiously following years of ineffective dithering by his predecessors.

By contemporary standards, Grant was a liberal. He is outspokenly critical about the wrongness of the Mexican-American War in his memoir, and just as confident about the rightness of the Civil War. As you might expect, his writings are perhaps excessive in matters of military detail for the taste of general readers. It’s a rare case where I feel an instinct to…um, abridge. Just a little, for flow. Other than that, it’s an extremely valuable point of view from which to consider the war and the challenges Grant had to face in order to become the man who won it.

Grant’s existing writings whet the appetite for additional volumes concerning his Presidential years. I’ve long felt in my gut that Grant’s standing needs to be elevated in the rankings of great Presidents. He was Lincoln’s only true successor in the project of post-war Reconstruction. (Andrew Johnson resisted those policies, hence his impeachment and low standing in most rankings by historians). That Reconstruction was foiled by the returning Southern States, the Democrats (a very different party back then), a bad economy, and corruption and ineptitude within his own administration make it seem likely that Reconstruction was doomed in its time no matter who was President. All evidence points to Grant having been foursquare in favor of improving life for black Americans. He signed the Fifteenth Amendment into law, created the U.S. Justice Department, and prosecuted the leaders of the first KKK. He also appointed the first Native American, Ely S. Parker, as Commissioner of Indian Affairs. He was the first President to reform the American Civil Service, the federal government having mushroomed in size during the Civil War. These are just some of his major accomplishments.

When I was a kid in school, Grant’s legacy was maligned by the tendency of textbooks to reduce him, as with the later Harding, to his scandals. But nearly every Republican administration that followed Grant’s was marred by corruption on some level (particularly his successor, Hayes, whose election at all stank to high heaven). This fact of life suggests systemic problems, issues with the character of the American political class, rather than failings of Grant himself in particular. In retrospect, it seems as though Grant was singled out and scapegoated in his day and ever after by those with an agenda of preventing equal rights for black Americans. These systemic problems are as bad as ever in our times. Recognizing this, modern historians have boosted Grant’s standing in recent years, elevating him to the top 20. My inclination is to rank him still higher, certainly higher than Truman, LBJ, Reagan, Clinton, Obama, and likely Biden, who are all currently still above him in most polls. (I would lower JFK, too, on these lists, though not lower than Grant).

So today, FWIW, we add him to our Travalanche Hall of Presidents.

Here are some of the better known depictions of Ulysses S. Grant on screen:

Donald Crisp, The Birth of a Nation (1915)

E. Alyn Warren, Abraham Lincoln (1930) and also Secret Service (1931), and Operator 13 (1934)

Joseph Creaghan –played Grant nine times!

Harrison Greene, Tennessee Johnson (1942)

Haha I WISH that photo depicted Harrison Greene’s costume as U.S. Grant in this cockamamie bio-pic about Andrew Johnson. The truth is I couldn’t find one, but you must admit that this snap of him from one of his many films with the Three Stooges gets us pretty close, especially after the General had had a couple of pulls from his flask.