Taken For Granted
Ulysses S. Grant was once a towering figure in the American consciousness. The first man since Washington to possess military command over all United States Armies, President of the United States, celebrated equestrian, war hero, civil rights champion for freedmen, and a (posthumously) celebrated author.
Time, however, is a fickle mistress and Grant’s reputation has suffered. Not without some due reason. His administration was plagued by corruption. He issued controversial wartime orders, such as the expulsion of Jews from areas under his military control, he tried and failed to implement a more conciliatory policy towards Native Americans.
Still, Grant oversaw the ratification of the 15th Amendment, used the power of the Federal government to fight and prosecute the KKK including military forces, attempted to pass more civil rights legislation and protect black Americans from paramilitary violence and repression. This all came about after playing a central role in crushing the rebellious Confederacy.
That fact that he sometimes failed is not a mark against him. To the contrary its what makes him even more notable. The totemic figures of the Founding Fathers (Washington, Franklin, Jefferson, etc.) are far enough removed from present day that they mostly live on in as cultural touchstones rather than as flesh-and-blood people in the minds of most Americans. Grant was close enough to the age of modernity, and presiding over a war that half the country lost, that he didn’t take on the superhuman characteristics of the Founding Mythos. As such, he must be defended as a man rather than an idea.
In some ways this makes it easier. The attacks on Grant, much like the attacks on the Founding Fathers are made in a ideological sphere more so than on the basis of careful weighing of personal merit and historical significance. It’s easier to say that defending Jefferson is done out of kneejerk cultural ideology than Grant.
What bothers me so much about this ideological battle is the flattening of history. In doing so they misrepresent the character of one of the greatest and most underappreciated figures in American history.
Lets set the record straight on Grant’s slave ownership: Grant married into a slave-owning family. He tried his hand at farming on land next to his father-in-laws estate and likely had help from his father-in-laws slaves. He later moved onto the farm itself.
It is easy for someone in 2020 to condemn him for moral cowardice and I don’t even entirely disagree. However, the assertion that someone else in Grant’s position, nearly broke with a family to feed and dealing with his father-in-law, would have the fortitude to act much differently is a laughable example of hubris. Grant was not an abolitionist before the war (his father was) but he had a distaste for slavery.
There is only record of Grant personally owning one slave. A man named William Jones. It’s unclear when Grant acquired him as a slave. Whether he purchased, or more likely, was gifted the slave. A man he set free in 1859.
““I Ulysses S Grant of the City and County of St. Louis in the State of Missouri, for diverse good and valuable considerations me hereunto moving, do hereby emancipate and set free from Slavery my negro man William, sometimes called William Jones(Jones)of Mullatto complexion, aged about thirty-five years, and about five feet seven inches in height and being the same slave purchased by me of Frederick Dent-And I do hereby manumit, emancipate & set free said William from slavery forever.””
It is also notable that Grant did not sell Jones despite his own near bankruptcy but chose to free him.
This is not a defense of Grant’s reluctant use of slaves or his apparent owning of a slave but to consider that in the totality of Grant’s life the moral weight of his actions against slavery are far greater than his brief and negative interactions with it directly.
Grant’s sin is not being a saint. But most saints are boring. Saints are meant to be aspirational but it’s difficult to aspire to divine grace. What makes Grant an intriguing figure is that he was painfully human and still managed greatness. There is a kind of denial of humanity intrinsic to these mob actions. In the quest for perfection they are casting down greatness and often offering up feeble defenses for these repugnant actions:
Of course the emancipation of Juneteenth was made possible because of Grant. But the more interesting part of the defense is how quickly and immediately the connotation of “slave-owning” shifted. What was contextually meant to mean owning of slaves probably working a plantation in your imagination is suddenly an strictly legalistic definition. He attempts to scrub all context away and flatten the argument to justify desecrating the memory of one of the greatest champions of civil rights.
It’s often the case with tankies (kneejerk defenders of communist dictatorships) when defending Stalin, Mao, Lenin etc, that they aren’t REALLY defending the character of the person. Because they are indefensible and on some level they know that. Rather, they are defending an idea, the figure is not acting as a person but as a totem. Their attacks work on the same level. They do not attack a US president because of character defects but as symbols of a corrupt and evil system.
A similar mindset is at work with the present iconoclasm. A narrow ideological/moral purity is attempting to assert itself and a new flawed historical mythos is being written. The same ideological underpinnings of the flawed 1619 Project are manifesting with these acts of vandalism. IF you think I’m being too outlandish, Jones herself agrees with me:
I have no qualms about historical revisionism. Proper historiography work changes the way we understand and contextualize the past all the time. However, there is a danger in replacing one flawed mythological version of the past with an equally flawed one that leans the other direction.
Grant was not a perfect man. That is precisely what makes him great. Criticize him as much as you want, there is plenty to criticize, but don’t you fucking tell me tearing down his statue and posting on Twitter means you’ve done anything for Americans of any race.
You aren’t fit to lick Grant’s boots.
