How did Civil War champion become a disgraced figure, and the champion of slavery become a hero? [View all]

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Will Dobson ‏@WilliamJDobson
How did Ulysses S. Grant become an embarrassment of history and Robert E. Lee a role model? http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/history/2015/04/appomattox_how_did_ulysses_s_grant_become_an_embarrassment_of_history_and.html?wpsrc=sh_all_dt_tw_top … via @slate


____The answer begins with Reconstruction. As best as possible, President Grant was a firm leader of Reconstruction America. Faced with the titanic challenge of integrating freedmen into American politics, he attacked the problem with characteristic clarity and flexibility. He proposed civil rights legislation (and would be the last president to do so until Lyndon Johnson, a century later), and deployed troops to hot spots across the South, to defend black Americans from white supremacist violence. And while there were failures—at times he was too passive in the face of white violence, too paralyzed by petty politics—there were real victories too. After Congress passed the Enforcement Acts—criminal codes that protected blacks’ 14th and 15th Amendment rights to vote, hold office, serve on juries, and receive equal protection of laws—Grant authorized federal troops to confront the Ku Klux Klan and other groups of anti-black terrorists. Declaring them “insurgents … in rebellion against the authority of the United States,” Grant and his subordinates—most notably Attorney General Amos Ackerman and the newly formed Department of Justice—broke the Klan and restored some peace to the Republican South.

In using federal power to prosecute white supremacists and support Reconstruction governments, Grant had tied his fortunes to those of freedmen and their allies. They were grateful. Grant won re-election in 1872 with the vast backing of black voters in the South, as well as former Union soldiers in the North. Appalled by his use of force in the South, his enemies dogged him as an enemy of liberty. Indeed, for as much as scandal plagued his administration, it’s also true that many cries of corruption came from angry and aggrieved Democrats, who attacked military intervention in the South as “corrupt” and “unjust.” Opponents in the North and South reviled Grant as a “tyrant” who imposed so-called “black domination” on an innocent South.

Grant wasn’t blind to his critics, and he devoted his presidency and post-presidency to defending both his record as general and the aims of the war he won. “While I would do nothing to revive unhappy memories in the South,” he once declared, “I do not like to see our soldiers apologize for the war.”

Facing him was a phalanx of Southern sympathizers and former Confederates, from ex-president Jefferson Davis to polemical writers like Edward Pollard, who would give the name “Lost Cause” to the movement to redeem and defend the former Confederacy. Born out of grief and furthered by a generation of organizations (like United Confederate Veterans and the United Daughters of the Confederacy), proponents of the Lost Cause would wage a battle for the nation’s memory of the war. To them it was not a rebellion or a fight for slavery; it was a noble battle for constitutional ideals. As Davis put it in his two-volume memoir and defense of the Southern cause, The Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government, slavery “was in no wise the cause of the conflict, but only an incident,” and the South was fighting against “unlimited, despotic power” of the federal government and its “tremendous and sweeping usurpation” of states’ rights.


Grant’s post-facto nod to Lee would stand as a powerful symbol of reconciliation. Blight writes, “Grant’s passing was invoked as a moment of national unity. Some Confederate veterans’ groups in the South passed resolutions of honor and sympathy for their former foe.” Two of his pallbearers were former Confederate generals—appointed by Democratic President Grover Cleveland—representatives of a nation united in mourning and eager to move on. Exhausted by Reconstruction and the battles over black rights, white Northerners were eager to put the past behind them and reunite with their Southern cousins. The Lost Cause was a template for doing just that. White Americans didn’t want to dwell on the challenges of race and emancipation, and the South’s narrative of honor and sincerity—aggressively pushed by Confederate veterans and their supporters—allowed everyone to celebrate the individual greatness of men like Lee and Grant, even as the latter never abandoned his view that the Southern cause was slavery and that the North was right to wage the war...


read more: http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/history/2015/04/appomattox_how_did_ulysses_s_grant_become_an_embarrassment_of_history_and.html?wpsrc=sh_all_dt_tw_top

related:

President Ford Restores Robert E. Lee's Citizenship After 100 Years
http://burnpit.legion.org/2011/08/president-ford-restores-robert-e-lees-citizenship-after-100-years