Who’s Buried in the History
Books?
March 16, 2010 11:55
pm - from the NY Times - orig pub date March 13, 2010
By SEAN WILENTZ
Princeton, NJ
RONALD REAGAN deserves posterity’s honor, and so it
makes sense that the capital’s airport and a major
building there are named for him. But
the proposal to substitute his image for that of
Ulysses S. Grant on the $50 bill is a travesty that
would dishonor the nation’s bedrock principles of union,
freedom and equality — and damage its historical
identity. Although slandered since his death, Grant, as
general and as president, stood second only to Abraham
Lincoln as the vindicator of those principles in the
Civil War era.
Born to humble circumstances, Grant endured personal
setbacks and terrible poverty to become the
indispensable general of the Union Army. Although not
himself an abolitionist, he recognized from the very
start that the Civil War would cause, as he wrote, “the
doom of slavery.” Above all, he despised the Southern
secessionists as traitors who would destroy democratic
republican government, of which, Lincoln said in his
first inaugural, there was no “better or equal hope in
the world.”
When one Union general after another proved unequal
to the task of leading the army, Lincoln personally
elevated Grant, who, with William Tecumseh Sherman and
Secretary of War Edwin Stanton, devised the strategy of
“hard war” to defeat the slaveholders’ Confederacy. “I
cannot spare this man,” Lincoln was reported to have
said of Grant after the bloody Battle of Shiloh in 1862.
“He fights.”
Had his wife not declined to go to Ford’s Theater the
night of April 14, 1865, Grant might well have been
killed himself. With Lincoln’s assassination, Grant was
left as the greatest Union hero of the Civil War. He
chafed under the neo-Confederate presidency of Lincoln’s
successor, Andrew Johnson, won the Republican
presidential nomination in 1868 almost by acclamation
and was elected twice — the only president to serve two
successive full terms between Andrew Jackson and Woodrow
Wilson.
As president, Grant was determined to achieve
national reconciliation, but on the terms of the
victorious North, not the defeated Confederates. He
fought hard and successfully for ratification of the
15th Amendment, banning disenfranchisement on account of
race, color or previous condition of servitude. When
recalcitrant Southern whites fought back under the white
hoods and robes of the Ku Klux Klan, murdering and
terrorizing blacks and their political supporters, Grant
secured legislation that empowered him to unleash
federal force. By 1872, the Klan was effectively dead.
For Grant, Reconstruction always remained of
paramount importance, and he remained steadfast, even
when members of his own party turned their backs on the
former slaves. After white supremacists slaughtered
blacks and Republicans in Louisiana in 1873 and
attempted a coup the following year, Grant took swift
and forceful action to restore order and legitimate
government. With the political tide running heavily
against him, Grant still managed to see through to
enactment the Civil Rights Act of 1875, which prohibited
discrimination according to race in all public
accommodations.
Grant did not confine his reformism to expanding and
protecting the rights of the freed slaves. Disgusted at
the inhumanity of the nation’s Indian policies,
he called for “the proper treatment of the original
occupants of this land,” and directed efforts to
provide federal aid for food, clothing and schooling for
the Indians as well as protection from violence. He also
took strong and principled stands in favor of education
reform and the separation of church and state.
Grant’s presidency had its failures and blemishes. On
the advice of his counselors, Grant appointed men to the
Supreme Court who wound up gutting much of the
legislation he himself championed. This included the
1875 civil rights law, which the court declared
unconstitutional in 1883.
Certainly, Grant’s administration was tainted by
oft-remembered corruption scandals. But Grant was never
seriously implicated in any of them, although emboldened
Democrats and disloyal Republicans, with the help of a
sensationalist press, did their best to make the
president appear the villain. (Grant ill-advisedly
decided to present a stoic public face instead of
fighting back.)
In reality, what fueled the personal defamation of
Grant was contempt for his Reconstruction policies,
which supposedly sacrificed a prostrate South, as one
critic put it, “on the altar of Radicalism.” That he
accomplished as much for freed slaves as he did within
the constitutional limits of the presidency was
remarkable. Without question, his was the most
impressive record on civil rights and equality of any
president from Lincoln to Lyndon B. Johnson.
After Grant left the presidency in 1877, he was
widely hailed as the most famous and admired living
American, his alleged transgressions overcome by a
fabulously successful two-year world tour. He was still
beloved at his death in 1885 — a reverence embodied by
his monumental tomb in Manhattan, overlooking the
Hudson.
But Grant came in for decades of disgraceful
posthumous attacks that tore his reputation into
tatters. Around 1900, pro-Confederate Southern
historians began rewriting the history of the Civil War
and cast Grant as a “butcher” during the conflict and a
corrupt and vindictive tyrant during his presidency. And
the conventional wisdom from the left has relied on the
bitter comments of snobs like Henry Adams, who slandered
Grant as the avatar of the crass, benighted Gilded Age.
Though much of the public and even some historians
haven’t yet heard the news, the vindication of Ulysses
S. Grant is well under way. I expect that before too
long Grant will be returned to the standing he deserves
— not only as the military savior of the Union but as
one of the great presidents of his era, and possibly one
of the greatest in all American history.
Now, Ronald Reagan also has historic achievements —
chiefly, discarding the advice of his hard-right
supporters, embracing the Soviet leader, Mikhail
Gorbachev, and taking the first important steps toward
ending the cold war. On the other hand, his record on
domestic affairs — especially his unsubtle winking at
pro-segregationist Southerners and his administration’s
fiercely reactionary policies on civil rights — was
appalling.
To honor Reagan’s genuine achievements by downgrading
those of Grant would deepen our chronic historical
amnesia about the Civil War and Reconstruction, the
central events of the first 250 years of American
history, and their legacy of nationalism, freedom and
equal rights. It’s hard to imagine that Ronald Reagan,
whose modesty was part of his charm, would have approved
of such a disgraceful act toward another president from
Illinois.
Sean
Wilentz, a professor of history at Princeton, is the
author, most recently, of “The Age of Reagan: A History,
1974-2008.”
The original can be read
here.
