The Real Gen. Ulysses S. Grant (Not the Southern Lie)

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I'll kick this off with a truly historic date in American history. I fully expect all of those defending statues of Confederate figures as "history" to be honoring this significant historical event. I mean unless their defenses aren't really about history but what are the odds of that?

The publicly available link in the story is worth a read as well.

April 9th is a glorious anniversary: the day Gen. Ulysses S. Grant, Commanding General of the US Army, received the surrender of Robert E. Lee, a renegade US Army Colonel who was a leader of a violent rebellion against the United States, which killed hundreds of thousands of Americans. Grant offered generous terms to Lee and the other traitors making up his army. Six days later President Lincoln was assassinated in Washington, DC.

Lee was an able tactician but lacked the strategic genius that made Grant the towering military figure of the US Civil War. His Memoirs are one of the great works of American literature, quite apart from his fame and prominence as General and President. Certainly it is the greatest work of literature written by an American political figure. I wrote about both here.

The reality of the past is unchanging, as immutable as time proceeds only in one direction. But our perceptions of it, our understanding of its meaning and the stories we tell about it are perpetually in flux. Humans are story-telling creatures. Many of the great artifacts of human intellection are analytic, mathematic, visual. But at the deepest and most penetrating level we understand the world through stories, narratives. The production of these narratives become histories in themselves.

Nowhere is this more viscerally apparent than in the century of valorization of the traitors who led the pretended state called the Confederate States of America. This even goes down to the deep valorization of Southern military culture and the Confederacy’s top generals. This goes for Lee himself, a very skilled tactician but a highly conventional commander. This applies equally to the denigration of the commanders and common soldiers of the North whose reputations were downgraded as an offering to the wounded pride of the South.

Last year I wrote about the process of reclaiming the public memory of Grant’s greatness and the story of the Civil War and Reconstruction which still looms over the present today.

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This is an earlier paywalled piece by Josh Marshall on Grant and how the post-war South created myths to salve their butthurt.

As Confederate monuments appear to be facing what may be a final reckoning, consider the other side of that coin. The United States has few if any monuments or statues dedicated to the horrors of slavery, to abolition or to the heroes of Reconstruction. Monuments mark a society’s civic values and embraced identity. By this measure, it is not simply the ubiquity of Confederate memorials but the non-existence of the others which speaks volumes.

In 2018 I wrote this post about Ulysses Grant and his Memoirs, which is one of the great works of American literature, likely the greatest written by any public figure. (It’s one of my favorites from the last few years.) Grant was a white General and President. He is no stand-in for the kind of largely non-existent monuments I describe above. But I note him here because Grant’s own historical reputation is part of the same story.

For most of the 20th century Grant was viewed as a winning if unglamorous general and a failed President, one whose presidency was marred by rampant corruption on the one hand and subservience to congressional radicals on the other. While Confederate monuments were popping up across the South during the early 20th century, Grant’s Tomb in upper Manhattan fell into a period of neglect and disrepair which lasted for decades. It has only partly been restored.

What is important to understand is that Grant’s dimmed reputation was driven in large part by the need to discredit Reconstruction and valorize the Confederacy. Particularly its generals like Robert E. Lee. In many ways the South lost the war but won the peace. Winning the peace meant discrediting the victors. And mostly that meant discrediting Grant both as general and as President. Because Grant was a staunch supporter of Reconstruction from the first to last day of his eight year presidency.

Lincoln certainly remained permanently unloved in the South. But the cult of the martyred Lincoln was too powerful and entrenched for the pro-Southern historians of the late 19th and earlier 20th centuries to dislodge. Combined with this, it was universally understood that Jefferson Davis, the only President of the Confederacy, was simply too insubstantial a figure to be the symbol of Lost Cause mythology and propaganda. That led to a focus on Lee, who was at least a largely successful general. Elevating Lee meant diminishing Grant.

The truth, to the extent people living in time can ever divine it, is quite different. Lee was a skilled tactician but a largely unimaginative general. Grant was a true innovator whose use of mobility warfare anticipated the course of military history through the first half of the 20th century. Also, he won.

The need for Southern culture to lie about him and to elevate their own with myths in order to make themselves feel better has a familiar right-wing/Republican feel to it. Reagan? Elevated by myth and beyond reproach, even for his traitorous deal with Iran and the Contras. Clinton? A constant stream of nearly all false accusation and lies. George W.? He was so dumb that they had trouble glorifying him but that didn't stop them from using the defense Bush Derangement Syndrome when people called him out on his actual actions. Obama? Well we all know about those 8 years of right-wing meltdown. Trump? Elevated and defended with cries of Trump Derangement Syndrome. Biden? Closet socialist. Senile. Puppet. AAAAAHHHH!!!