Mr. Bouie said - An earlier version of this column mischaracterized the role of Nathan Bedford Forrest in the founding of the Ku Klux Klan. He didn't start it, he was its first grand wizard. I'm sure glad I got that straight.
1
This poses an interesting thought. Somebody might help me, but I think that the loss of the South while traumatic, it wasn't fully squashed. Keeping the 'south shall rise again', and erecting statues to the losing side is still confusing to me (now having to deal with the consequence of removing these monuments, names, etc from our history). Post WW2 era Germany kept the Nazi party from re-establishing itself (for the most part). What else could have been done to bring the South back to the table?
2
Ulysses Grant enforced reconstruction during his term of office. He did it by force, indicting and punishing white-supremacy militias, including the KKK.
Reconstruction was ended by the deal cut by the Democrats in the Hayes-Tilden presidential election. The Democrats allowed the Republican Rutherford Hayes to win the Presidency, in exchange for Hayes withdrawing Federal troops from the South—troops that U. S. Grant had put there!
6
There's a lot of blame to around, as Reconstruction short circuited, and Jim Crow gave angry whites the opportunity to reconsolidate the racial pecking order they considered their right. One man isn't responsible for this, even if he dropped the ball, at a critical time. This is a collective guilt, shared by Americans, up to today, as inequities in schooling and opportunities are shrugged off, by future leaders who are intent on looking at their cell phones. It's hard to blame them, since public schools fail to adequately teach this history. The East Saint Louis racial pogrom of 1917 was a historic murderous convulsion, but half a century later, local schoolrooms were silent on the issue, and you only heard about it if you knew elderly African-Americans who were touched by it. Never again became over and over again.
24
In both word and deed, Grant did all he humanly could for emancipated African-Americans during his presidency. Throwing mud at this profoundly decent man is despicable.
9
Carpetbaggers!!!!
Grant’s demise!!
Those of us who are white, and who are realists, need to prepare for strange times.
Beginning in 2013, certain segments of the left began to lose their minds, they were consumed by rage, and they started lashing out in a most peculiar way. Part of this was due to Obama. He was supposed to be their savior, but they still lost their homes, their meager savings, and then as the economy recovered they watched as the wealth gap between whites and blacks yawned ever greater.
Under Obama, racial justice was supposed to be more attainable, but more black people than ever were going to prison and suffering family breakdown. And so when criminals like Michael Brown were justifiably killed in acts of legitimate law enforcement and self defense, they burned their own communities and rioted. They viciously attacked white people like “Permit Patty” and “BBQ Becky” for deigning to call the police on black people, and now they lash out at things that happened 150 years ago, going after dead Presidents, Civil War memorials, and red-lining.
But it’s all futile. Breakthroughs in population genetics race ahead, and everyday it becomes clearer that there are indeed significant group differences between the races, and these impact intelligence and behavior. And it’s becoming ever clearer that where large groups of black people concentrate, dysfunction is found. And so Wakanda sparks joy, as ridiculous as that is.
This attack on reality and search for someone to blame will only intensify.
6
This author is heavily off the mark. He needs to read Ron Chernow’s new book, GRANT. Grant was heavily invested to black rights and did MANY things to defend black rights and property, far exceeding what was normally expected at the time. This article is poorly researched and based on previous articles written by the author, he is looking to denigrate white racism. Again. And I suspect everything he writes will be be towards that.
7
Facts, meaning, and information are not the same thing. In the current sociopolitical climate, where allegations are often accepted as facts, the worst conceivable interpretation put on an individual's or group's actions or comments, and an isolated bit of stupidity or insensitivity is considered eternally damning, it is important to consider any "fact" in context and as part of a person or group's history, something to be evaluated for its actual contemporaneous meaning, not simply in isolation.
As to the eponymous Grant's tomb. In the Fifties, Grant's tomb was made famous to millions of Americans by the Jewish actor and comedian, Groucho Marx who, on his popular TV quiz show, "You Bet Your Life", would ask any contestant who failed to answer other questions, "Who is buried in Grant's tomb?" If they answered correctly -- and some actually did not -- he then would offer them the monetary prize.
That was the same Grant who, as General, had excluded Jews from Tennessee, Kentucky and Mississippi in General Order No. 11.
A little perspective, knowledge, and humility would be nice from Times opinion writers (producers of most Times copy these days, as the paper's motto appears to have changed to "All The Partisan Views That Fit We Print", its Help Wanted sign saying "Real Journalists Need Not Apply").
Not sure what history books the author read - if any - but his understanding of Johnson is deeply flawed and his knowledge oh Grant a travesty.
4
There should be a board game titled "How I woudda done it" that gives points for creative rewriting of history based on how many context factors have been ignored. Sanctimony is the quickest path to power.
3
The failure of reconstruction to assimilate newly freed black slaves into the socio- economic life of America is the answer to the why of the great disparities in wealth, education and political power that exist in the black community today. The suppression of black inclusion created a generational problem for blacks seeking full participation in the American promise. The denial of this particular stretch of history is a prominent feature of a white supremacist ideology that believes the inherent inferiority of blacks explains the racial disparities more than the systematic oppression unleashed on former slaves. America still struggles to accept full responsibility for the stain of slavery on our nation. Just mention reparations in the comments and you will see a denial articulated comparable to those that would deny the Shoah.
2
Interesting Jackson followed Lincoln and Trump followed Obama.
1
This is an ignorant and intellectually lazy column. It is unworthy of Jamelle Bouie.
Like many of the other commentators, I advise anybody who cares about the truth to read Ron Chernow's biography.
US Grant was the absolutely outstanding strategic commander of the northern forces in the civil war and one of the few mid 19th century historic figures who recognized people of color as fully human and fully worthy of all the rights of man. Do him justice people.
8
Mr Bouie, you remind me of the radical republicans of that period, 100% right but 100% wrong on how best to achieve equality for blacks.
Lincoln ended slavery in five yrs in the WH. The radical republicans could not do it from year one, ie 1776.
Grant earned the title of savior of Lincoln (who saved us all black and white re democracy) and defender of the union by winning the Civil War.
While he certainly has domestic scandals and was a dud in the WH, the two radical exceptions (and I use the pun on purpose) were his policy on freed blacks and Indians.
Due to his policy of eight yrs, blacks had the right to vote, took over many legislators and in reality had more power in the south then, than they do today.
Then the extremists took over, the Klu Klux Klan in the south and whites in the north who did not care about blacks rights.
You wanted Grant to be perfect Mr Boulie, he wasn't. However if he was president today, he would run rings around the demagogue in the WH now and all other WH hopefuls on either side,
4
It would be good if white people could come to understand that is is not only their morals that are hurt by racism, but also their economic interests, plain and simple.
« ...mire the South in poverty and disadvantage. »
When your neighbor struggles, you are not better off, but worse off.
2
While U.S. Grant and his GOP were the 'last' chance to change the trajectory of the defeated south, their failure has many fathers. There is a reason the Republican Party renamed itself the "National Union Party" at its national convention in Baltimore in 1864. The "Union" was anything but. Democrats, themselves divided between peace-Democrats (Copperheads) and War Democrats, nominated Gen. George McClellan of the latter camp. The GOP had itself fractured and Lincoln was facing the breakaway Radical Democratic Party, which to its credit (message to Ralph Nader and Jill Stein) much later withdrew rather than be a third party spoiler. With Union defeats and a nation tiring of war and ripe for the picking by the resurgent Democrats, Lincoln saw gold in selecting Andrew Johnson as VP who like Lincoln, was born poor, an opponent of the antiquated plantation economy of the south, a hitherto fervent unionist, even refusing to resign as Senator when Tennessee succeeded, and later military governor of Tennessee. And if we are to lay blame anywhere, it must be at the feet of Lincoln's choice who as president let bigotry escape to rule the range. Though Lincoln, knowing what he knew then, can hardly be faulted, for without union, there could be no rights or future for Blacks in the south. The road to hell is paved with good intentions. And as Grant discovered to his chagrin, by the time he took the oath of office, the die had been cast.
“The Jews, as a class violating every regulation of trade established by the Treasury Department and also department orders, are hereby expelled from the department within twenty-four hours from the receipt of this order.”
Order issued by General Ulysses S. Grant, 1862
1
There's a lot of blame to go around, as Reconstruction short-circuited, and Jim Crow gave angry whites the opportunity to reconsolidate the racial pecking order they considered their right, and violently punish black Americans for the defeat of the Confederacy. One man isn't responsible for this, even if he dropped the ball at a critical time. This is a collective guilt, shared by Americans, up to today, as inequities in schooling, opportunities, and justice are shrugged off, by future leaders who are intent on looking at their cell phones. It's hard to blame them, since public schools fail to adequately teach this history or tell them why it's important. The East Saint Louis racial pogrom of 1917 was a historic murderous convulsion, but half a century later, Saint Louis public schoolrooms were silent on the issue, and you only heard about it if you knew elderly African-Americans who were touched by it. Never again, in America, became over and over again.
2
Many poorer southern whites left after the Civil War for the West and brought along their anti-federalist mind-set... hence many of the Red states today.
3
Way overdue statement of the truth. I've read so many white lies about reconstruction despite the fact that DuBois black reconstruction was published in the 1930s. The only questions are why has it taken the times so long to find a columnist of this caliber and why haven't the white columnists been telling the truth instead of propping up the racism of the odious Charles Murray?
2
>racial domination, social exclusion and economic inequality
Notice the sleazily contradictory, Leftist package-deal of racism and mans independent mind. It is precisely economic inquality that ends racist collectivism. Social exclusion is another package-deal. Race is not a rational base for social exclusion but Leftism is .
No one won the civil war. All those people died for nothing. We'll be going there soon again, for much the same reasons with the very same white people. White people for whom the bible itself ordains their superiority. We will never remove the stain of slavery from the constitution and or the minds of those who not only wrote it in but practiced it. This "originalist" will use the constitution itself to fulfill its mission of keeping white racism and misogyny in our lives and continue to make life in this country a living hell for everyone else.
1
Grant won the Civil war for the anti-slavery party, and as a president, walked close to what could pragmatically be achieved.
What is your aim in attacking a champion of your own cause?
38
Well I may not know alot, but there is one thing I do know, Grant was a far far better man than I'll ever be. If I had been in his place, I would have hunted down every Confederate military officer and hung them all from the nearest tree. No "trial" for any of them.
5
Welcome to the New York Times, Mr. Bouie. I am hopeful that you will able to present the same inciteful analysis that you crafted at Slate. It appears that you have not lost any steps with your move.
2
Anyone calling for people to have their land taken away for no violation of law but just to make socialists sleep better is definitely living in the wrong country.
If there is ONE solid guess for a country where this will never happen, the United States is it.
But, then again, Delta is ready when you are!
3
Excellent piece,This country is based on racial supremacy by whites. We fought a war and we are still having the same conversations today and
nothing changes or moves forward .
Yes we had a minority President with an administration that was brilliant and diverse.
This current administration is full of ignorant racists and liars, last week we had Mr. Meadows crying at a hearing upset about his racism that was unmasked to the world. Then the old video tapes were shown of Mr. Meadows being a racist towards President Obama
If only so many incidents had never happened in our history maybe we could of been a country that welcomed everyone vs what we are today putting children into cages
1
Maybe the northern white people were so generally racist that they saw the despicable southern traitors as more like them than innocent black people.
3
Okay, from now on, no more Party-of-Lincoln pride until its highly accountable charge for our "new birth of freedom" -- when we were but "four score and seven years" old -- is paid in full. In Reparations still outstanding.
Win/lose capitalism, after all, is the binary operative which can't write off the vanity for which our Gettysburg dead are otherwise damned.
This is such an unfair characterization of Grant’s role in reconstruction. Maybe Grant would have done things differently if he had 150 years of historical analysis, as the author does. But even so I don’t think he would have done what the author suggests, which would probably have destroyed white southerners’ economic prospects further, and been akin to post-ww1 Germany. And the penalties exacted on Germany after ww1 definitely led to ww2. It’s not a far stretch to imagine that former Confederates would scapegoat former slaves and BOOM you have not just a second civil war, but an all-out race war.
Sure, Grant probably should have more fully enfranchised former slaves. But why blame grant alone? Hayes, Johnson, Garfield, Arthur, etc, did far less than Grant to reconstruct the nation. And I don’t blame anyone who was overly cautious in the interest of maintaining peace after the bloodiest war in world history.
40
Of all the people to vilify for "not doing enough", Grant may not be the one. It should be hard to vilify the hundreds of thousands of Northerners who gave their lives to this cause, the resistance of the rest to slavery and their sacrifices, the real horror of Southern terrorists in Kansas. In that sense, no people sacrificed more to overcome the real villains of racism, the Southerners. A people viscerally committed to the subjugation and dehumanization of Africans from the earliest times of this nation and never ending, even now. All people are racists, but whites have indelibly marked darker skin as the index of inferiority for the world.
But, above all those who did something about it, in their personal and professional lives, Grant stands tall. Better to celebrate the good in those so carelessly and frivolously criticized through the long lense of today's chic. This same author idolizes the Lincoln who never intended to free the slaves until it became a war strategy. Everyone could have done better. Grant did far better than most.
4
Grant was not the first president to ignore and exacerbate race relations and the anti-black social and economic hierarchy of the South. Perhaps worse than Grant who lost opportunity to change the South was Woodrow Wilson.
Wilson made changes in the federal government in hiring of blacks and promoting of segregation that destroyed what progress had been made since Grant and Lincoln. Wilson was born December 28, 1856, Staunton, Virginia, U.S. and his father served as a chaplain in the Confederate army. His father's church was turned into a hospital. No doubt this had an influence on young Wilson who was about 9 years old when the war ended. "...Wilson held racial views that mirrored the then prevailing indifference of white Northerners toward injustices meted out to African Americans. Several of Wilson’s cabinet members were Southerners, however, and they demanded that segregation be introduced into the federal government. Wilson permitted such efforts to go forward." (John Milton Cooper, Professor of History, University of Wisconsin, Madison).
Wilson who needed Southern political support did more damage through his support of limiting jobs and opportunities to blacks in the federal government. Many were fired. Wilson's policies set back hard-won advancement of the upcoming black middle class. The damage to civil rights and equality for blacks was also catastrophic. Wilson was indifferent to blacks on a scale far larger than Grant. Wilson's tomb for blacks needs noted.
5
"And without a three-pronged assault on racial domination, social exclusion and economic inequality, race hierarchy would survive, as it does now, diminishing the promise of American democracy."
Please feel free to explain why President Obama didn't fix the problem.
3
Very thought provoking and as always the last one standing is the one who will write the history and rewrite the history
1
"The government would distribute land, but to railroads and Western settlers, not blacks"
The question that raises, to me, is why more blacks did not become Western settlers. The government did not own much land in the South to distribute. It did own massive amounts of land in the West, which it distributed in ways designed to encourage growth in that region. There was no legal methodology to redistribute land in the South, which was in the hands of private owners, not the Federal government.
6
"For nearly four years, Americans had suffered through the tumultuous presidency of Andrew Johnson, who drove the nation to political crisis with his virulent racism, erratic behavior and leniency toward the defeated secessionists."
Fascinating history lesson. Apparently, Andrew Johnson was Donald Trump before Donald Trump.
4
So Grant wasn't enough of a super hero? Only saved the union did he? I imagine you could have done that before breakfast, right?
Wow. Racism is deeply imbedded in America - the Trump presidency proves it. Even with the Trump nonstop attacks on minorities of every color, he is at about 46%
approval rating. Trump has shown us very clearly how ugly America still is.
From what I have read, Grant was a gentleman in all situations. That is pretty amazing when you think about the horrid carnage he dealt with in the civil war on a daily basis. Who could of blamed him if after winning the war, he simply said "That's it, I've had enough - time for a long rest". But he then went on to the unthankable job of president.
During the war, there were constant attacks on Grant for drinking.
Who wouldn't be driven to drinking - dealing with what he had to do? There is great story about this, though unconfirmed. Supposedly, some elderly women from the Daughters of the American Revolution requested a private audience with president Lincoln, which he granted.
"Mr. President", one exclaimed, "we have proven reports of General Grant drinking in the field."
"General Grant, drinking?" asked Lincoln.
"Yes Mr. President, proven"
Grant quickly turned to his secretary, John Hay - "secretary Hay, I want an immediate investigation to find out exactly what Grant is drinking - and then send a barrel of it to every general in the Union army!"
No words now will change Grant's super hero status.
3
America's Original Sin (Slavery) and Secondary Sin (Jim Crow) are the White Man's (and Woman's) Burden which he (and she) alone must come to grips with and ultimately heal this Nation. Southern Whites, especially, must assume their historical responsibility, and seek penance and Racial Forgiveness. Until they lift the "Veil of Ignorance" as James Baldwin warned us, America will continue to fall short of it's promise stated in the U.S. Constitution.
2
It's the 1877 deal that's the most ignominious moment in US history. More than 600.000 die to resolve the conflict at the heart of the US idea; and just a few years later we just walk away, leaving the same secessionists in power.
This time around they don't physically leave. They force everyone they don't like to leave the protection of our laws and the Constitution. But they'll keep the slave labor part, just dress it up as sharecropping.
Took them awhile. But now they are coming back for us, installing the same kind of theocratic, authoritarian government the South has had for many years. Stopping them requires us to understand how this happened in the first place.
4
This is a great piece, and as an enhancing sidebar I'd draw attention to Booker T. Washington and the Atlanta Compromise, particularly given that we hear from WEB DuBois (who ultimately rejected Washington's accomodationist approach).
Understanding this leaves a lot out, Washington pushed an approach in which blacks agreed to submit to white rule, work as laborers, give up voting rights, higher education, and pursuit of equal public services in exchange for not getting lynched.
The economic situation played a huge part in this, as southern blacks needed jobs as immigrants were pouring into the country.
2
It is not as if the plantation owners were going to hand their
land over to anyone who wanted 40 acres, nor would the
new farmers have the money and tools to work the land.
Ignored in all these discussions in the state of near poverty
most rural whites found themselves at the end of the war and would continue to find themselves well into the 20th Century.
The landed gentry knew this and used it to turn poor whites
against even poorer blacks to get the sharecroppers they
wanted to work their lands.
5
The author wanted President Grant to rip up land deeds using what, martial law? The Federal Government likely had very little land to distribute in the South settled for 2 centuries. My guess is the author wanted Grant to punish the South, taking every asset much like William of Normandy did in 1066 and creating a new ruling order. Well, that was just not going to happen. The South was not a defeated enemy, not in the mindset of 1870.
2
I think Grant's biggest mistake, in hindsight, was not to hang R.E. Lee immediately after the surrender. Lee was, after all, a traitor to his Nation.
I have always wondered how Johnson ended up on Lincoln's ticket, my study of history has not solved that mystery.
Trying to readmit the Southern states without any acknowledgement of their treason was a huge mistake. A mistake we are still paying for to this day.
2
Would that today's children get some exposure to our more truthful history.
reconstruction was just an early example of u.s. nation building that by it's nature spawns a rock and hard place finality pitting enslaved/oppressed populations v. entrenched /entitled ones upon occupation and beyond. cuba, iraq, latin america, vietnam...
1
In the antebellum period white Americans never understood or even attempted to understand the cumulative adverse effects of 250 years of slavery, including the debilitating effects of black Americans be told and treated as if they were less than human, inferior to whites, and incapable of learning. That white supremacist continued for another 100 years despite the defeat of slavery and changes to the Constitution giving legal equality to black Americans. The continuation was due to the unwillingness of the vast majority of white Americans to enforce those equal rights in the face of a resurgence of virulent Southern racism, accompanied by lynchings and other violence.
I can't imagine how terrifying and spirit-smothering life must have been for a black man, woman or child in many parts of the USA from 1865 to 1965, especially after the radical Republicans, erstwhile protectors and enforcers of the rights of black Americans, died off or abandoned the nation's anemic Reconstruction. That today's Republicans have been doing their utmost to suppress or even abrogate one of the most important of the hard won rights gained by black Americans as a result of the Civil War, their right to vote, has got to be one of history's biggest ironies.
I wonder how today's Republicans can look at themselves in a mirror when they think about their forbears like Lincoln, Sumner and Stevens? Or if they think at all...about history of course.
3
Oh,come on.
Grant never "acquiesced to racism" in relations with the freed slaves or for that matter with indigenous peoples.
Reconstruction ended after the 1877 election when federal troops were withdrawn from the defeated confederacy. We know what came next, from being elected to numerous offices during Grant's presidency to lynchings, Jim Crow, racism,the great migration to today's black lives matter. To blame this great president for what occurred after he left office is incorrect.
3
It is hypocritical for Mr. Bouie to blame Grant for the South's continual opposition to treating non-whites the same as Whites. Concerning race relation, the South is just now entering the 20th Century.
1
MUDBOUND
In Mississippi in 1800, each acre of cotton absorbed
185 worker hours per year and substantial capital -
Compared to 56 worker hours per year in upstate New York
For an acre of wheat (after an all-told investment of around $20).
Setting aside considerations of climate,
Let’s say a healthy young man could work 3,000 hours per year.
This means that a lone white settler could farm 18 acres near Natchez
And 60 acres near Syracuse.
So what was needed in the South
Was a populous peasant under-class
While an enterprising man could find
Liberty and independence in the North.
Clearly something had to give.
1
Thanks for this thoughtful, carefully researched and nuanced portrayal of Grant. It's important to understand racism and white supremacy not just as a function of racist villains but also as a function of the people hailed as heroes who faltered and failed to follow through. Grant knew what to do, had the power to do it and ultimately failed to follow through.
2
Grant did have failures in his presidency, notably in terms of governmental corruption. He was, nevertheless, a strong president with a progressive agenda in support of republican values and human rights. One example not mentioned in this article is that he sought to implement a more humane policy toward the Native American tribes in the West.
President Lincoln inaugurated a revolutionary United States government with his Emancipation Proclamation that took effect in the midst of civil war on January 1, 1863. Lincoln and Grant were the two distinguished leaders of this revolutionary government. The counterrevolution of 1877, engineered by Southern politicians in cahoots with budding Northern industrialists and railroad interests, undid many Civil War gains and established acceptance of racism and subservience to corporate wealth as among the guiding principles of the nation.
Despite all of the achievements in social progress and civil rights that have occurred since then, to a very large extent this counterrevolution has never ended. Just look at Trump. It is the counterrevolutionaries who have led the campaign to diminish Grant's presidency.
6
Your sentence, "Grant entered office committed to the fortunes of the formerly enslaved. But by the end of his administration, he had acquiesced to white racism and financial power, largely withdrawing from the South and leaving its black citizens at the mercy of a reinvigorated class of owners...," could easily apply to President Obama's administration. Using symbolic gestures to "change hearts and minds" doesn't work as well as changing the material and economic situations for a generation or two. I hope the Democratic voters can tell the difference between the candidates who will offer symbols and those who will offer changes to the real conditions like the distribution of wealth, education, and opportunity.
2
Distribution and re-distribution of land are two different things. Any attempt to re-distribute private plantation land in the South would have been litigated up to the Supreme Court and failed. On the other hand, Federal public lands could be distributed to corporations building transcontinental railroads, states so they could sell the land and endow Land Grant colleges, and homesteaders -- all Lincoln programs designed to aid individuals aspiring to rise from subsistence agriculture, to knit together sections of a growing nation and to educate the middle classes in useful trades. Mr. Bouie doesn't explain why freedmen could not have taken advantage of homesteading in the West -- or how many actually did. It was no small thing for Grant to fight the Klan, in the courts too as his US Attorney appointees were just as important in reducing the Klan as the Army. The Klan rose again in the 20th Century. US Grant died in 1885. Anyone who doesn't think Grant was smart, perceptive and humane should read The Personal Memoirs of US Grant.
8
Hard to follow the logic of being so critical of Grant, especially in context of what passes as president at this time.
An illustration of his character would be to review how
Albert A. Michelson, our first Nobel Prize winner, who discovered the speed of light was constant, and the importance in Modern Physics, was appointed by Grant to US Naval Academy.
It makes good reading.
8
It seems profoundly unfair to blame Grant for the failure of Reconstruction. Grant did more to use the power of the federal government to enforce the rights of newly freed African Americans than any politician of his era. And of course, without his skills as a military leader, those rights might never have come into being.
Reconstruction was a collective failure of the American people. The former confederates failed to accept their former slaves as fellow citizens and equals. The northern states, wearied by war and subject to many of the same racial prejudices, lacked the resolve to force the South to accept the new reality. It is true that Grant failed to persuade Americans to fulfill the promises of a multiracial democracy contained in the 14th Amendment, but that can also be said of every president since 1789.
10
The greatest generals of the United States became presidents: First, Washington, who didn't do everything right as president, but set the tone for all presidents to come. Second, Grant, who did his best to protect the former slaves and help their education and advancement despite the odds against him. Third, Eisenhower, who built up the infrastructure of the nation, but warned us of the military-industrial complex that was becoming very powerful. All worked hard to advance the country and tried to guard us against its dangers. All three personified what it means to be a citizen of this republic. All three were called to be president and all answered the call.
11
While I acknowledge the equity of redistributing land from plantations, it would never have passed the Supreme Court at the time. Remember, this is the Court that struck down the Civil Rights Act that would have prohibited discrimination in public facilities and eventually gave birth to Plessy v. Ferguson. Article V prohibits the taking of life, liberty or PROPERTY without due process of law. It never would have happened and frankly I doubt even the Radical Republicans would have supported it.
3
@Jsailor The subtext/function of this column, like so many recent NYT/HuffPo columns, is to build support for reparations and repealing Article V, if necessary.
1
Grant did not fail but fought relentlessly to save our nation and the rights of all of our citizens, black and white. The true villains were our founding fathers who created a Constitution which ignored the issue of slavery and ultimately led to a deadly and tragic civil war and race relations which have taken 200 years to repair.
10
this Southern mindset and political power had the came influence over the New Deal and the social/economic programs enacted after WW2, such as the GI Bill, FHA, student loans, etc. which created enormous wealth for white Americans. the black population of America deserves and needs restitution to level the playing fields once and for all. Restitution in the form of federal aid to buy homes in nice suburbs, attend reputable colleges, job training and job preference, etc. etc.
3
@edward murphy Have you ever heard of Affirmative Action?
Let's not forget that Frederick Douglas was a great admirer of Grant. He saw that Grant had fought hard for the rights of black folks. I agree.
17
Spot on. I am disillusioned with the Grant legacy in regard to racial reconciliation. He and others in the military and business class of the North can rightly be faulted for their failure to advance racial justice in the North as well as the South. Perhaps after such a long and bloody conflict they were just ready to move on. The march into the Gilded Age was beginning and poor whites and blacks were pitted against each other in their struggle for jobs and economic opportunity.
2
@Kevin McGrath And they have been pitted against each other ever since.
1
Grant and other Republicans promoted equal rights for the freed slaves but were thwarted at very turn by Democrats.
On the other hand, expropriating Southerners' real estate to give to freed slaves would have been a step too far and probably unconstitutional.
8
This column smacks of revisionist history. In fact Grant on numerous occasions sent in federal troops to combat the KKK, and southern whites attacking black citizens. He sent in federals to govern hot beds of violence such as Louisiana and South Carolina to assure voting rights, and begin a reconstruction, with which even Abraham Lincoln would have struggled. One need only research Frederick Douglas’ assessment and high regard for Grant to fairly assess the great man.
Considering we are still dealing with these issues today makes Grant’s efforts at reconstruction some 160 years hence even more compelling and heroic. Racism is still rampant yet only a modicum of its virility after the war. I suggest the author and some of Grant’s detractors read Chernow’s magnificent biography, and Grant’s own memoirs for a fair synopsis of his life and times.
17
I recently completed Ron Chernow’s biography of US Grant. It’s a massive tome. On every page, you feel Grant’s anguish about the consequences of the massive inequality of blacks and whites. He was among the first to encourage the use of black troops in the Union army and he appointed black men to government posts when he became president. His wife’s family were Southern and owned slaves, so he lived the conflict of the two opposing views of slavery. But he always believed in the Union and abhorred slavery. After the war ended, he worked to protect freed slaves from the horrible bigotry and murderous actions of the KKK. But he was human. In an attempt to get re-elected, he sacrificed his principles and pulled back on a final push to eradicate the KKK. I was disappointed in his actions at that point. He later regretted pulling back, but it was too late. On balance, however, I think Grant deserves more credit for preserving the Union and citizenship for blacks and restraining the KKK than many want to give him today.
8
To build change economic or social, it will take generations not two Presidential cycles.
Even though we have elected a President of color, we still have a racial divide that has existed from the beginning of the Republic.
Drumpf is only a manifestation of it...he has made public display accepted. In other times, it stays in the shadows.
White economic angst caused by the growth of the global economy, has made accepted to blame social groups for one's lot in life.
Americans not taking responsibility or accountability...who knew?
1
did the opinion writer even read any of the biographies of this national hero, this is less an opinion column then a price of historical revisionism. My God the country had been ripped apart, with a brother vs brother civil war with millions violently killed. Grant did a historically significant tremendous job of knitting it back together such that their were no. future civil wars, and he did it with enough skill so that the nation survived intact the great depression and 2 world wars. He did all he could in his power given that we are a democracy and not a dictatorship to advance the cause of Southern Blacks. To attack him because he also did not violently impose radical land redistribution (which was never done ever in this country, much less after it was torn asunder) is like saying FDR was a failure because he did not achieve universal health care and an inflation indexed universal living wage. Where is the fact checking?
13
Wow, Mr. Bouie. This may be the most naive and silly opinion piece I have read in years. To blame Grant for the failure of reconstruction and the reversal of racial progress is simply ridiculous. A president of the US can't change the embedded racism of an entire region with an executive order.
Sure, there were times when Grant could have sent more troops or sent more troops faster. But even if there had been several millions of blue coats patroling the streets of the 19th century South, that would not have changed the belief systems of an entire culture that to this day views African Americans as inferior and lacking equal status. But it might have reignited the war.
To blame Grant the way you have is to suggest that the POTUS actually has the power to alter tradition with the stroke of a pen.
Grant was far from a perfect president. He too was naive. But I suspect few individuals could have lived a more dedicated life. There would be no USA as we know it today were it not for Grant's incredible efforts in the face of one defeat after another.
Of course, after watching the Michael Cohen hearing and observing the behavior of several southern Representatives, it occurred to me that we might as well have let the South go it's own way. For some, that embedded racism will never vanish. Perhaps this is an example of epigenetics.
10
The failure to support reconstruction cannot be blamed on Grant. He worked diligently to change the tides of racism ever since being convinced of its fallacy in the midsts of the war. As president he filled his administration with African Americans. A huge step in disproving the ideology of white supremacy which was popular throughout the country even with many abolitionists. He also fought to keep federal troops in the south but was thwarted by both his racist generals and a racist congress.
I’m sorry to see Grant maligned here. He was ahead of his time as far as race was concerned. To view him through a 21st century lens is undeservedly harsh. It would make more sense to look under the surface and consider the capitulation of abolitionists such as Horace Greeley and Charles Sumner who helped defeat Grant’s efforts to sustain Reconstruction.
11
This opinion piece is not just about history, it is an attempt to account for the current state of American affairs. It is assiduous in its historical account, but it isn't an attack on Grant. As far as I can see, it is an attempt to account for how we still in America practice so much cultural and institutional racism. That's not at the feet of Grant, it's at the feet of the racist institution. But to say that Grant solved it would also be false.
1
It is ridiculous to blame Grant! The South's economic folly was to base its economy and utopian vision solely on Agriculture.
7
Grant should be on Mt. Rushmore.
White's and Smith's bios of Grant are excellent. While Chernow did his homework and is a fluid writer, his gratuitous insistence that Grant was a lifelong alcoholic seriously marred his bio.
John Y. Simon, whose life's work was the study and documentation of Grant, said the evidence of Grant's being a drunkard was "meager."
Grant's intentions and actions re Reconstruction were correct. His position became unpopular and untenable in the North after being violently resisted in the South.
Mark Twain called Grant "a truly great man." He was right.
7
This blames Grant for Johnson’s sins. There was a vanishingly small window after the Civil War when land distribution could have taken place. It’s true the Republican Congress rejected Stevens’ proposal to do so through statute. But as Eric Foner writes, land could have been redistributed simply through tax laws: Confiscating the land of traitors who didn’t pay during the Civil War.
Johnson not only refused, but announced land would be returned to slaveholders — a brazenly dishonorable Act that instantly built a legal wall around former Confederates that Grant could not have overcome. Moreover, Grant continued to appoint African-Americans to federal offices throughout his term, and defended voting rights for after it ceased to be popular (his one very bad mistake on this front — the refusal to intervene in Mississippi in 1874 — he bitterly regretted). But by that point, Johnson, in all his vindictive racism, had created an citadel for white supremacy no one could destroy.
6
Southern racists lost the Civil War but they won most of the significant battles during Reconstruction. Southern revisionists spun tales of their own nobility, gentility and bravery during the War, while flattering their foes and offering the beguiling hand of reunion and friendship. They promoted the lies that slavery was not the cause of the War and that African-American victims of kidnapping and coercion were happy with their second class citizenship. American still has textbooks and citizens who were brainwashed by the opponents of Reconstruction, and they are determined to Make America White Again.
6
I have always been a fan of President Grant. He was a handsome, intelligent, educated, gentleman who was often identified as a drunk by “know nothings.”. Many times I refuted a tale often told at a historic ranch near San Diego, which claims he rode his horse into the home there. First of all, he was never in San Diego...his son and wife came here after his death. (And, the beautiful hotel they built still welcomes “well heeled” visitors to our city by the sea.)
And, why would he have done such a thing? But, I digress. U.S. Grant wanted to bring the South back into the Union
with freed slaves living peaceful, fruitful lives. He did not succeed in that, but he was a great man, soldier and President. It was the South that failed.
7
So U.S. Grant, the man who literally won the civil war and ended slavery, is now regarded as"problematic?" This is the modern left.
10
Ultimately, Lincoln did not end slavery. Grant did—by winning the war.
10
I suppose this is unwelcome news, but everybody ultimately stands on their own two feet and makes their own way. That means you might have to try twice as hard, or harder, to get where others get with half the effort, but it's the only sure way. Forget rehearsing historical mistakes and alleged wrongs; forget reparations, set-asides, quotas, etc., just get to work and do your best. You may not get to the promised land but your children, or their children, will. When you're seen as somebody whose skills and go-ahead spirit are needed in any enterprise, you're not only welcomed, you're sought out--and at a premium. If you're seen as a 'special needs' person with a chip on their shoulder, or a burden on the organization or your fellow workers, you're not wanted, you're tolerated, at a discount. Does this have anything to do with race? No. Have I said something you don't know is true?
4
If they had redistributed ex-Confederate large land holdings to the newly freed slaves, there wouldn’t have developed an underclass who then resorted to share cropping. When General Sherman ordered land for the freed slaves along the Sea Island coast, the government was moving in the right direction. Johnson overruled all this and of course that ended any economic help freedmen would receive, restablishing economic slavery.
3
I’d argue that the assassination of Pres. Garfield was as bad as, if not worse than, the assassination of Pres. Lincoln.
James Garfield was laser focused on righting the wrongs of slavery in the south.
2
Maybe it's time to start paying reparations. Reparations might not be as cool as the Green New Deal, but it might cost less.
We should do reparations first, otherwise, with the GND in place, 40 acres and a mule will be the only thing we can afford.
2
@Mike Assuming you're not being facetious, this is what Mr. Bouie and NYT want you to think. That's the purpose of this column.
1
Sounds like the Republican Party hasn't changed in its firm commitment to exploitation of the poor and those of non-european ancestry and to institutional racism.
1
During Reconstruction the United States during faced an insurrection in the southern states that used the tactics of terrorism to suppress the newly emancipated Black slaves. Many of the terrorists were former CSA officers and soldiers. Grant used the U.S. Army to suppress the terrorism out of necessity because the civil authorities in the former slave states could not (in Black governed states) or would not (in White governed states). Perhaps Grant gave up too much to Lee at Appomattox by letting Lee’s soldiers retain their weapons. The CSA simply regrouped with the same officers and men in the form of KKK or like associations. The US has been fighting these same terrorists on and off over the same issues ever since. They are still among us.
6
It is absurd to blame Grant for living in a time when people did not have that same idea that we do of the impact of a way of life (slavery) on both the blacks and whites who lived under the system, after all, a decade before Grant became president he worked behind a plow on a very primitive farm with a house that he built (essentially a log cabin). And the north was truly tired of the war. That they could not imagine the extent of Southern evil is not really their fault.
5
Grant did the best he could was a decent man he was known to give out of his own pocket to to veterans before pensions.
Had Lincoln not been assassinated he would have been investigated for the explosion of veterans returning home by the profiteering son of the secretary of war.
I think a better target would be Wilson, but it’s all conjecture isn’t it?
2
From reading Chernow, on Grant, I understand the Republican party abandoned reconstruction in the South and pretty much stranded Grant politically on the issue.
The kind of land reform noted in this article I suspect was not even an idea in 1868 and the speculation that it would have worked is an alternative history story.
What we should understand, is slavery and Jim Crow have everything to do with poverty which is prevalent among US blacks today. Jim Crow did not cease until my early adult years, and the racism of Trump and his followers has shocked me to understand it is not entirely over yet, despite the election of Obama.
4
@John Howe So, what do you want from whites specifically, given that Affirmative Action has been in place for 60 years?
1
Right here, in Clinton, Ms. we live besieged by the history of Grant- his genius as a military leader and the every day reality of his admitted failure as President to follow-through and push for total change in the south.
Right down the railroad track is the site of the Battle of Champion's Hill, the battle that Churchill recognized as one of the most crucial struggles of the entire Civil War, and the strategic endgame of Grant's brilliant, audacious campaign, to cut-out and besiege Vicksburg.
But also, right over the tracks and up the hill is the site of what became known as the Clinton Riot, Sept. fourth 1875.
What started as a barbecue and a political meeting by Black Republicans and Carpetbaggers ended in an organized, violent prelude to Jim Crow and a signal form used throughout the south for the reclaim of political power by the white ex-Confederates.
And since Grant refused to send Federal troops everything went downhill from there and has continued going downhill for the last 150 years...
In hindsight, it was another critical moment in history that required a revolutionary commitment to societal change and a refusal to back-down and accept anything less than total victory for the nation. From time to time these moments occur.
The Civil Rights Act of 1964 put a bandage on the wound that has never completely healed and still requires treatment- an almost chronic condition.
Have we arrived at another one of those moments?
2
The Republicans did this wrong and that wrong. At least they tried. Not a word on the Democratic Party, the real villains.
2
Over a million people came out for Grants funeral, more than Lincoln’s must have done something right!
6
Grant tried very hard to provide a level playing field for all people of the South regardless of race. He helped pass the most important amendments ever at that time to the constitution. He sent the US Army to suppress the KKK terrorists. The amendments he had passed have been used countless times to expand the freedoms all Americans enjoy . Unfortunately, as is so obvious even today, the political power of group identity is far greater than the power of the common good. Grant could win a savage war but could not change what's in the hearts of men.
4
God help us (including me) open our eyes.
1
Have you bothered asking Bernie Sanders how he plans on solving black inequality in America? Tanehesi Coates did. Bernie has stated repeatedly he will do nothing for black people. So much for standing on principle over party. Historically speaking, Grant is considered a failure because of the scandals during his presidency. One hundred and fifty years ago, you expected Grant to solve race relations while today you gladly go along with Bernie, who ignores the problems of black people?
5
One of the biggest mistakes made following the civil war was the failure to treat the confederates as what they were: Traitors in support of one of the worst causes in world history. The southern ruling class that supported secession, including elected officials in the Confederate government, officers in the Confederate Army, and the plantation class should have been liquidated, either shot or hung from the nearest tree. Any individual who took up arms against the union should have never been allowed to vote again.
Land should have been redistributed, the former slaves and the children of the traitors should have been educated. Our country would be a much better place now, if not much earlier if we would have stamped out these traitors and their white supremacist ideology.
3
What's the point of this column? It does nothing more, it seems to me, than gratuitously attempt to trash Grant, who did more for freed blacks than any single other person during his time. Condemning him for not doing more is somewhat akin to suggesting that he should also have worked harder to send men to the moon.
5
"Without a sustained federal presence, blacks could not secure their political gains.".....I think the author fails to grasp the extent of the slaughter of the Civil War which took the lives of more than 600,000 Americans. To accomplish the desired outcome would have required the active occupation and participation of Union troops for many years. After Lee's surrender there was no stomach for continued conflict. The country wanted the war to be over and the healing process to begin. At the time the continued activity of Federal forces in the south was just not a realistic option.
3
This fine article should, of course, mention the role of the Supreme Court in blocking African Americans' access to their civil rights. For every move taken by the Republican Congress to right the wrongs of slavery (the Fifteenth Amendment, the Enforcement Acts, the Civil Rights Acts of 1866 and 1875), the Supreme Court set aside convictions and reduced the rights of former slaves (the "Slaughter-House Cases", U.S. v. Cruikshank, U.S. v. Reese). But they didn't stop there.
The Supreme Court also set aside the rights of African Americans to serve on juries (Strauder v. West Virginia), and upheld the discrimatory Separate Car Acts in the southern states in Plessy v. Ferguson, establishing the principle of "separate but equal". This continued in Supreme Court decisions upholding school desegregation (Cummings v. Board of Education, Lum v. Rice) and limitations on voting rights (Giles v. Harris, Williams v. Mississippi). Of course this continued until the 1950s, when the Court's horrible series of decisions were finally reversed in Brown v. Board of Education, and the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts of 1964 and 1965.
Thus, the Supreme Court was central in reversing the progress of Reconstruction, the Constitutional Amendments and the Congressional Acts and complicit in continuing the obstruction of the civil rights of African Americans into the 20th century.
3
An interesting take. It is a bit different than my own.
Was this path politically feasible? Given the attachment to property rights, was the land reform proposed by the Radical Republicans a real political possibility? Thaddeus Stevens was in a very distinct minority in his own party. It wasn't only Southern society that was constructed on the basis of a racial hierarchy. Remember, the drive for exclusion of racial minorities was spearheaded by white workers and their representatives.
4
Applying 21st sensitivities to 19th century issues with but a superficial grasp of the historical and political realities of the time undermines both the argument, as well as the credibility of the current day progressive principles that are based on it.
6
@Rob
Could not agree more with the comment. History is what people in the past, thought, did, dreamed about, etc. It is not our opinion of what they did. Repeat. History is not our opinion of what they did. History is what they did, not what we wish they did. The past stands by itself to be interesting. It doesn’t need Monday morning quarterbacking to be interesting. Monday morning quarterbacking is not history.
7
I agree that history is what was done. Period. But the writers comments are focused or premised on what Grant did not do. It is very easy to define or narrow the focus for one's point of view if that vakue of history is just the facts. But a study of history should be open enoigh to analyze the path not taken. Otherwise the glib "You are doomed to repeat it" has no relevance for the study. In short, the path not taken before can indeed lead to the mitigation of paths incorrectly taken regardless of the reason. I would guess there are history that analyze failings for the purpose of lessons learned for the future betterment.
1
History is indeed what they did. And it is what we are doing in Afghanistan. A country that aided and abetted in an attack on our country. Followed by a long war with high ideals of change, so it would not happen again.
Followed by complacency, distraction, acquiescence, and soon, desertion. Pulling out federal troops.
The Confederacy ultimately won the peace. And so will the Taliban. But no big deal- it’s only women that will essentially return to neo-slavery; of the mind, dreams, free movement, education, rights.
So obsessed today with rooting out any indices of racism....blackface, tokenism, Private jokes in admittedly bad taste, we ignore the new global class of slaves. Women. But hey, we’re tired. And so many of our....allies....hold slaves, what can we do?
And we don’t even have Supreme Court decisions to blame on this desertion.
Fascinating discussion of a formative if forgotten moment in US political, racial and yes economic history. The inextricable historical connection between these categories is also the best argument for the only thing that will take this country into a livable future: reparations to the descendants of slaves on a scale that, coupled with the Green New Deal, fundamentally reorganizes our economic life as a nation.
4
@Keef In cucamonga
If Reconstruction is a forgotten moment in history then everything is a forgotten moment.
1
Zimbabwe tried land redistribution with disastrous results. Perhaps it might have worked better under Reconstruction since the ex-slaves did have some idea of how agriculture works (which was not the case in Rhodesia). It's an interesting idea to ponder.
3
@kwb Zimbabwe is liberals' template...
Some of the same issues that foiled reconstruction exist today so blaming post bellum politicians rings hollow. More than ever education is the key not federal troops. One only has to look at the failures of public education today to see the magnitude of the problem. We’ve thrown many resources at the problem but progress is slow.
3
Ron Chernow’s biography of Grant, like his earlier work about Hamilton, highlights the limitations that our democracy places on great leaders. Grant felt strong sympathy for freed blacks and took heroic early steps to protect them from injustice, including the deadly violence perpetrated by former Confederate soldiers, opportunistically encouraged by the Democrats. Grant’s weakness was a lack of political skill, preventing him from keeping the nation’s attention (especially that of northern Republicans) on southern justice when their interests and imaginations had shifted to the more novel issues of westward expansion.
This op-ed’s criticism of Grant for not being willing to launch a second Civil War in order to effect a radical redistribution of wealth and power is similar to those who castigate Obama for not accomplishing more in the face of Republican Congressional intransigence (itself driven by the vestiges of the same persistent Southern racism). Leaders can do only so much without resorting to dictatorial assertiveness. We need to be grateful that our fallible presidents (all of them) have accomplished as much as they have despite being limited by the will of the people.
9
I think this is a good column but a bit one-sided. It would have been helpful if the author had noted in concrete detail some of the many things President Grant did to help the black population of the South, some of them quite radical for their time.
Goodness, this was a man who put federal troops on the ground in the South in those days to protect black people against whites who wanted to oppress them.
Was Grant perfect? No. But Frederick Douglas was glad to express his appreciation and gratitude to Grant for all he had done for the cause. The villain was the Republican Party that turned away from it’s pro civil rights stance for blacks for reasons the author notes here. That sawed the limb out from under President Grant.
7
A number of commenters recommend reading Grant's memoirs.
If you do, be sure to get The Complete Personal Memoirs, not just the Civil War Memoirs. The former includes wonderful scenes from his childhood, his love of animals - especially horses, and a picture of life in the early Midwest.
5
2% of the American population died during the Civil War. That would be the equivalent of 6 million today. 23% of the Union forces and 24% of the Confederate forces were killed The country was exhausted from swimming in this river of blood. Reconstruction failed because the Republic was mentally and materially exhausted. Nothing was worth the price of a repeated conflict. Focus on other things, i.e. westward expansion. Leave the South alone. Withdrawn our troops and put the past behind us. Grant saw first hand the carnage and wanted nothing more than peace with the South. Terrible results but certainly understandable. One should never forget that without Grant the South would have gained their independence and the scourge of slavery would have continued. This article does not do justice to the greatness of this man.
14
In revolution, one must destroy the power of the old regime. Three major experiences confirm this rule.
The present article gives us the first example. Following the victory of America's Second Revolution, the Civil War, the remnants of the planter class, the ante-bellum Southern elite, needed to be suppressed. That is, such people should have been banned from political activity for, say, twenty years.
Neglecting this rule made for the sorry outcome of Reconstruction, when an attenuated but still vicious version of white rule returned.
The second example is in our own time, the outcome of the largest non-violent revolution in history, the Russian overthrow of the USSR. Yeltsin chose to reform the economy first, and the political structure later. This was fatal.
He should have banned, say, 20,000 party and economic bigshots from politics and administration, again for something like 20 years. Instead they were left to grab off the economy (the Oligarchs) and maintain the secret police network (Putin and the rest of the KaGaBisty---KGB agents)
The sad dénouement of the Russian story parallels the fine Grant account here.
Third, a counterexample, successful, is Germany under Allied Occupation, following its defeat in WWII. This time large numbers of ancien regime notables were indeed banned from politics, for years.
This aided, importantly, the transformation, a revolution really, of Germany into the modern liberal society that we know.
4
One could just as well have framed this opinion piece in terms of the Democratic Party's role in destroying Reconstruction as being a permanent stain on their party for which they can never fully atone, forgiven or forgotten.
5
@Jack
No. We don’t associate slavery, segregation, Jim Crow, lynchings with the political party of the Confederacy and the party that held virtually every federal and statewide office for 100 years following the Civil War. Every other organization is to blame except the Democrat Party.
Du Bois was wise, and prescient (as usual) recognizing the propensity of people to see threats to their "very existence" in changes. We need only look at the success Reagan had with some folk in saying that Medicare would make people tell their children about a time "when Americans were free." Now we have Republicans saying that the Green New Deal is just what Stalin dreamed of. That fear stopped the ERA.
4
A recent book, Unredeemed Land by Erin Stewart Mauldin, looks at southern serfdom, environmentally destructive farming, and poverty. I haven't gotten hold of it yet, but to judge from the preview information, the postwar South looks like an environmental and economic tragedy. https://global.oup.com/academic/product/unredeemed-land-9780190865177?q=southern%20agriculture&lang=en&cc=us#
1
The whole story of slavery - and the assault on Native peoples - is a mortal sin on America. If there is blame to be fixed, it would be upon the 17th century settlers who bought and relied on African slaves as labor. And the blame would not stop there. The framers of the U.S. Constitution accommodated the institution of slavery. The 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments attempted to end enslavement and provide citizenship to formerly enslaved people, but far into the future after the Civil War and these Amendments, Jim Crow crippled any chance for normal economic advancement. The high level politics preceding the Civil War included deep disloyalty within the fraternity of the ruling class. We need to conduct a of truth and reconciliation commission in our country before we can ever hope for meaningful progress. I don't think any "failings of a great man" theory will explain away the legacy of slavery and the economic penalties unfairly imposed on formerly enslaved peoples or, for that matter, on the prospects for poor whites.
6
@Rosemary Galette
Actually it was the British that encouraged and permitted slavery to take hold in North America. It’s the United States that had to extinguish it at an unthinkable cost. While the British supported the Confederacy.
In contrast, no one blames 19th century Russian serfdom on the Soviet Union but it seems everyone blames the United States for events that occurred before it existed. Nobody would ever claim the Tudors or Stuarts is US history.
3
@Shamrock there was slavery in Africa before the British brought it to the US. And there was slavery in the West Indies, as well, and in Brazil. And, for all we know, in Asia. Weren't Chinese subjects actually buried alive with their "owners"
Odd coincidence to see this from Mr. Bouie as I'm in the midst of Chernow's biography of Grant at the moment. As impressed as I am with Grant and as much as I revere President Lincoln, I've come to doubt there is much either man could have done to substantially alter the path of the country after the civil war. To have changed that path would have meant a continuation of the war by other means for at least 15-20 years and it's hard to see anyone (let alone successive administrations) having the stomach or support for that. Hard to blame them for wanting the immediate agony to stop. What we started as a nation in 1619, abetted for 240 years while building an economy on it, was always going to take far more than 150 years to correct. Especially with conflicted and cross-cutting social currents.
13
What a beautiful and concisely stated description of reconstruction history. It offers an understanding of the dilemma of that time and our time. Perhaps in the moment of our time. We can do better. It is clear Grant could not. I see nothing in your essay that faults him alone. Grant a misconceived man, a great writer, and a great warrior fought well. He in the end surrendered. The takes a Mandela to not fight the battle of ones enemies and win. Many of billiant and noble minds of our country during our civil war lay dead.
4
This is an excellent article that helps us understand that the Civil War and its aftermath are not simple matters of good guys in the North fighting to free the slaves and bad guys in the South trying to keep slavery. Racial justice and economic justice are and have always been much more complicated national problems. (Lots more statues to pull down than you thought!)
4
Thanks for an informative, brief summary of Grant’s failure to implement Reconstruction. Foner’s book is excellent. Others have noted that Grant was too trusting of his Cabinet and others in DC whose motivations were for profits rather than social justice. The panic of 1873 put the country into a severe economic depression which also robbed it of the resources/money needed to do Reconstruction adequately. So did underlying racism in the North. As well meaning as he might have been Grant was unable to overcome all of these forces.
2
Grant was a shrewd and effective military leader but he was not a talented politician or effective president. His administration was marked by corruption and economic depression, not just by lost opportunities at Reconstruction.
America after the Civil War was a wounded country, rather too eager for quick fix solutions in the form of great leaders. Nothing America faces now quite compares to the devastation of its mostly deadly war, but a similar impatience with the step-by-step challenge of building a competent Congress able to enact useful and progressive laws, and a similar eagerness to resort to popular "heroes" or nowadays heroines,
is widespread again. It does not auger well for the future of the Republic.
6
This isn't about race. This is about class. Abolishing slavery had robbed the Southern elite of one means to stay on top. So it was expected that they would look for other means. Of course poor whites had little interest too in seeing the black rise but their input was less relevant.
When Grant adopted the protection of property as a principle he adopted the point of view of the Southern elite.
Could Grant have done otherwise? I doubt it. There are periods in history when politicians and the public are convinced that there are things that are more important than the protection of property. But such periods tend to be short. By the time Grant became president the window had largely closed.
11
Another example of revisionist history is the fable that the civil war was fought to end slavery. As Abraham Lincoln wrote in 1862:
"I would save the Union. I would save it the shortest way under the Constitution. The sooner the national authority can be restored; the nearer the Union will be "the Union as it was."
If there be those who would not save the Union, unless they could at the same time save slavery, I do not agree with them.
If there be those who would not save the Union unless they could at the same time destroy slavery, I do not agree with them. My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and isnot either to save or to destroy slavery. If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it, and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone I would also do that.
What I do about slavery, and the colored race, I do because I believe it helps to save the Union; and what I forbear, I forbear because I do not believe it would help to save the Union.
I shall do less whenever I shall believe what I am doing hurts the cause, and I shall do more whenever I shall believe doing more will help the cause."
Mr Bouie should take into account the prevalent racism of that age. Many in the north (and even down south) considered slavery to be an abomination, but they would not grant equal rights to the freedmen and therein lies the problem.
4
The Civil War was fought to preserve slavery.
The North responded not only to preserve the Union, but, as federal troops came to see the horrors of slavery at first hand, to end the evil system. It is vital to bear in mind that northern views, and certainly Lincoln's, evolved swiftly. See Eric Foner's splendid book, The Fiery Trial. As soon as slavery was abolished, the southern rationale for fighting the war evolved as well, from the truth - protecting slavery - to a lie, namely, the so-called Noble Cause.
16
@jmb1014
The Emancipation Proclamation was intended to prevent France and Britain from recognizing the confederacy.
Lincoln was a highly intelligent man and a consumate poitician. He abolished slavery, but only in the southern states. The Proclamation applied in the ten states that were still in rebellion in 1863, and thus did not cover the nearly 500,000 slaves in the slave-holding border states (Missouri, Kentucky, Maryland or Delaware) which were Union states. Those slaves were freed by later separate state and federal actions.
So slavery was illegal in the south but not so much up north to appease the slave holders of the border states...
1
@jmb: The North's economic success rested on slaves as well, although we called it something different: "Child Labor" for delicate work, "Mill Girls" for repetative work; immigrant coolie labor for back-breaking tasks at starvation wages. The economics were the same: An inability to advance out of station.
1
Democracy's development was arrested, sure as Grant is the occupant of his bellweather tomb. Mr Bouie, our contemporary detective found Reconstruction's exact lane of departure .. from the promise of democracy.
Our grotesque missteps began immediately. In that context, further study of "US History after 1865" seems somewhat pointless. The thrust of Mr Bouie's "three-pronged assault on racial domination, social exclusion and economic inequality" is .. to endeavor at a path lost a century and a half ago.
New leaders, young and older, can sign me up for all new thinking. Out with the old thinking. Completely out.
2
“And without a three-pronged assault on racial domination, social exclusion and economic inequality, race hierarchy would survive, as it does now, diminishing the promise of American democracy.”
Please talk about the ways that race hierarchy continues to survive. I’m not saying it doesn’t. But we need to have a better idea of what sort of current relatively widespread and consequential behavior you’re talking about.
Nowadays the danger exists that an idea such as “race hierarchy continues to survive” will serve in practice as a group identifier. Agree and belong to one group, disagree and belong to another group.
But what sort of things, what concrete examples, are you talking about? If we knew, perhaps the idea could instead serve to enlighten and guide, to appeal to reason and conscience and the experience of the listener.
5
@Jack start with the systematic obstruction of every effort made by Black people to own property over all the generations since emancipation, up to and including the present day. Thus Black people’s wealth on average is about a tenth of that of white people. Add to that the deliberate sequestering of Black people for decades in areas deprived of many of the basic needs for healthy living. Add to that the abysmal education offered in persistently segregated schools. Add to that disparities in the distribution and quality of health care. Add to that the stunning differentials in the criminal “justice system.” Should I go on?
Well, numerous business schools, starting with Stanford began a study where they send out identical resumes that only differ by whether the name on the top is "black" or "white". It's pretty standard for them to find a 2:1 response difference.
The willingness of employers to hire white over black is so dramatic that black men with college degrees have the same unemployment rate as white men with felony convictions.
Also, read "The Case for Reparations" in The Atlantic for a thorough breakdown of how blacks in the mid 20th century were denied the opportunity to generate middle class wealth, so that their children and grandchildren today start with so much less.
@Sarah Lechner
Yes, although I think it would be good to go even further into the details and make even clearer stories about how these things affect people today. A book that was available back when I went to college in the 70s called “Black Rage” did a pretty good job of what I’m talking about for that time.
I also think that in expanding on the sorts of things you bring up it will be important to avoid the use of conclusory language and to be very careful when attributing thoughts and motives to others.
And presenting practical solutions while talking about costs and benefits and showing the nexus between the proposed solution and the identified problem will be important.
One wonders how much better managed Reconstruction might have been if two people had lived long enough to get it established properly: Abraham Lincoln and Thaddeus Stevens (who died Aug. 11, 1868, not long after Andrew Johnson avoided being removed from office).
7
This is too harsh an attack on Grant. He cared deeply for African-Americans and fought hard for them during the war and continued those efforts after it.
The problem was that after four years of war and several years of Reconstruction, Northern support for the freed slaves eventually waned. Republicans no longer had the energy and stamina to continue to stand up to the near universal white Southern efforts to re-subjugate the former slaves, this time through a type of serfdom which was only somewhat better than slavery itself. With a worn out North having tired of fighting the good fight, there was only so much that President Grant could do.
21
Bouie definitely comes away with a more negative view of Grant from Foner's work, and others, then I did. However, there is also some reading malice into incompetence going on. Grant was a famously poor judge of character in choosing his cabinet.
7
Ulysses S. Grant was famously trusting, which is why, having entrusted his savings to a swindler, he died impoverished; it was his dogged, agonized writing of his autobiography despite jaw cancer that saved his widow from penury. And Mark Twain's determination to see it published.
Ulysses S. Grant was a giant. He saved the Union, he fought to get African Americans civil rights, he sent the army against what was becoming the Ku Klux Klan.
Our Southern brethren have rewritten history to elevate Robert E. Lee -- starting with slandering Grant.
Heck, every kid my age even knew the name of Lee's horse: Traveler.
3
Again Bouie dishonors himself by writing this revisionist column. It doesn't surprise me considering the majority of his opinions. Grant was a great President. Grant had a big country to govern and the south was just a part of it. The USA was not connected with the transportation, communications/media of today. Considering what Grant had to run a country with he did a fantastic job. Mr. Bouie should read Grant's memoirs and some of the great biographies available today then re-write this column.
19
I'm not now confident enough to talk about Grant. Him aside, much of what is said here is thoroughly correct. I've not yet read Richard White's book, though I have it. But I've read Eric Foner's massive work twice (yes, I'd love a cookie).
The Economist reviewed White's book upon its release. That review can be perused here: http://economist.com/books-and-arts/2017/08/24/how-technology-and-capitalism-shaped-america-after-the-civil-war
"... Mr White is so keen on exposing the destructive side of capitalism that he downplays the creative side. During this period America replaced Britain as the world’s most important economy. Great companies seized on new technologies and innovative management techniques to reduce the price of basic commodities, sometimes by as much as 90%, as in the case of steel and oil. And millions of people, many of whom came from Europe in boats, were given the chance of achieving the republican dream of a house of their own."
Bouie is so keen on playing up the worst aspects of American history, he quite often "forgets," or rather, ignores, the best. Property rights have often been misused and abused, but they were essential to American economic growth, not only encouraging entrepreneurialism but also foreign investment. The South is this nation's biggest, most repulsive scar -- and reconstructive surgery needs redoing. But on the whole, considering the horrors of humanity, the world is fortunate to have America as its dominant power. Long may it be so.
13
I think the point Bouie is making is that black lives were once again being sacrificed on the altar of capitalism. If that is an indictment of capitalism, it is a well-deserved.
1
Babies and bath water come to mind.
All the could'a, should'a, would'a in the world won't change the need for superiority that most people feel in our society, which from its' very outset was designed to support inequality.
The revered first settlers were no different then, than their descendents are today.
It happens everywhere that men, regardless their hue, rule.
Now that women are taking their much needed role in our governance things will, however slowly, change; and believe it or not the change will be for the better.
7
Mr. Bouie, I think you are too hard on Grant and have misread the lessons taught in Professor Foner's magnificent history of Reconstruction. I also recommend Ronald White's biography of Grant. (2016) Yes, the plantations could have and should have been broken up, but there was much progress made in the South under Grant's administration. Most critically, he kept the army there to protect the fledgling popular and often Black state governments. The 1877 retreat was one of the great tragedies of America's history, but it came not because Grant turned his back on the South's former slaves but because, starting with Lincoln, many Republicans did not want to impose harsh punishment on southern traitors and, more importantly, because northern Americans, as much as Southerners, were fundamentally racist. Grant could not have altered the outcome, a result made inevitable by the racism baked into the American political and social DNA. As you note, we are still paying the bitter price for this republic's original sin. On that Lincoln was surely right in his Second Inaugural address: this country cannot escape the judgment of God.
15
Judging someone through the lens of hindsight: the prerogative of and the danger for the historian.
From the vantage point of hindsight, President Grant blew it, as it were. Alas he was a politician and not a prophet. And, as Prof. White points out, changes in Southern white society could not be mandated and were not about to happen quickly.
12
Grant didn't blow it. Between them, exhausted northerners and a furious South did.
What I believe is missed here is the relative economic hardship that the Southern states endured for almost 100 years after the Civil War. If there had been an economic reconstruction to act in concert with a social and political reconstruction, perhaps the South, black and white, would have stood a better chance of fulfilling the dream of social justice.
5
@ThirdWay: It was the old south’s ruling castes that perpetuated the conditions that doomed the south to economic stagnation in the post-Reconstruction period. Jim Crow, poor or non-existent public education, suppression of voting rights, and repression of labor made the south the equivalent of a third world country.
17
Bouie's argument is for economic reconstruction. But it would have required two things (1) radical land reform as addressed here, and (2) a refusal to return to the gold standard, which impoverished American, especially Southern farmers through the late 19th Century.
2
Fred, as it was, so the South is today. Only now, they are dragging the rest of us into their third world status.
Grant's First Tomb.
In at least the Fifties, Grant's tomb was made famous to millions of Americans by the Jewish actor and comedian, Groucho Marx who, on his popular TV quiz show, "You Bet Your Life", would ask any contestant who failed to answer other questions, "Who is buried in Grant's tomb?" If they answered correctly -- and some actually did not -- he then would offer them the monetary prize.
That was the same Grant who, as General, had excluded Jews from Tennessee, Kentucky and Mississippi in General Order No. 11.
I mention these two bits, because in the current sociopolitical climate, where allegations are often accepted as facts, the worst conceivable interpretation put on an individual's or group's actions or comments, and an isolated bit of stupidity or insensitivity is considered eternally damning, it is important to consider any "fact" in context and as part of a person or group's history, something to be evaluated for its actual contemporaneous meaning, not simply in isolation.
Facts, meaning, and information are not the same thing.
7
I love the question, ”Who is buried in Grant’s Tomb?” Because everyone gets it wrong including Groucho. NOBODY is “buried” in Grant’s Tomb. Grant and his wife lay in sarcophagi on the lower level of that magnificent structure on the Hudson, which is definitely worth a visit. So, in homage to the late Bill Safire, being entombed above ground in a sarcophagus is not the same as being buried. Gotta love Groucho, though. My hero.
3
That order was rescinded by Grant, and Grant apologized. Move on.
3
"Grant, by contrast, backed the rights and privileges of freed black Americans. He supported the 15th Amendment to the Constitution extending voting rights to black men and deployed federal troops against vigilante groups like the Ku Klux Klan (itself started by a former battlefield foe."
Good God, man. What, in 1869, would have satisfied you? General, and then President, Grant put more effort into improving the lot of freed slaves than, literally, anyone. Arguably, he did more to advance the cause of human/civil rights than any other for the next 90 years.
To judge him through the prism of "Yeah? Well, it's not enough!" is selfish and weak. The tendency to demand any action that doesn't solve EVERYTHING as accomplishing NOTHING is actually harmful. Why try anything if the internattering nabobs are going to whine?
It is exhausting reading the incessant criticism of those who did the best they could with the cards they were dealt. What have YOU done to make the world a better place? Get published?
"...work for wages as rational individuals responding to market incentives. 'The free labor social order,” writes Foner, 'ostensibly guaranteed the ambitious worker the opportunity for economic mobility, the ability to move from wage labor to independence through the acquisition of productive property...'"
Fun fact! Them's the rules of the game!
28
It is hard not to draw deep inspiration and many lessons from U.S. Grant
However Grant may have failed on land, labor, and other policies once U.S. President, his readily available memoirs are a sprawling portrait of a man who endured mind boggling hardships commanding scores of thousands of Union soldiers throughout the vast South, building bridges, ships, and forts, destroying enemy supplies, commandeering civilian food supplies for his troops, diverting the course of entire rivers, both enduring defeat and masterminding overwhelming victories, and so on. He prohibited his troops from boisterous celebration after the surrender at Appomattox so as to not humiliate the Southern troops
He was entirely for the U.S. and entirely against slavery. Paraphrasing two of his many striking observations:
“The biggest winners of this war will be the South when they lose it. They are fighting for the cause of their peculiar institution of slavery, which most civilized people regard as abhorrent, and which devalues work and labor for everyone, retards manufacture of higher products, and causes a moral decay”
“The North remained a democracy throughout the War, with elections and a free press. Some of the opinions printed in the free northern press bordered on treason. Education, civil society continued. In contrast, the South was one huge military camp ruled by martial law. Almost every white male from age 14 to 60 was involved in the rebel army”
26
Jamelle Bouie, in a very short span of time, has emerged as the most thoughtful, least captured-by-the-establishment opinion columnist at the Times.
9
A good article, but it betrays a lack of understanding about the political and social realities of both the Civil War and the Reconstruction eras. First, racially, whites in the North and South were mostly united in their bigotry of African Americans. This can be seen in letters at all levels of society, and the failure of Reconstruction. For most northerners, they weren't fighting to end slavery, they were fighting to save the country. Ending slavery was an extension of the war effort and a means to an end. The Reconstruction Amendments are a testament to a brief and fleeting period of RADICAL reform. It didn't represent the mainstream view. But its also important that while we can condemn Grant for not doing more in hindsight, its worth noting that he was heralded as a defender of African Americans throughout his presidency for trying to help them. He was handicapped (himself included) by the views and outlook of his times. The idea that there was going to be some kind of racial utopia in which Southern lands would be redistributed to freedmen after the Civil War is a socialistic fantasy. It would never happen in 1865 any more than it would today. An honest person would admit that Grant, like Lincoln, was faced with the much larger, and important task of saving the country. Lincoln saved it, and Grant had unenviable task of trying to sew it back together. Any man would be damned in history under such conditions. Sadly, Grant did the best he could with hand he was dealt.
16
The price of reconciliation came at the expense of African-Americans, no doubt.
4
Indeed
The headline has it as backwards as the fictional storyline. Johnson began the sabotage which was followed up on by the confederates and former slavers intentionally sabotaged their chance to have a modern economy not based upon neo-slavery because they were white supremacists. Grant, was kind toward the losers and this kindness was repaid by the same viciousness we see today in the south [don't let a party name confuse you, view the interests being protected.] If this is the best the Times can do it is easy to see why it is losing, or has already lost what was once major cred.
7
i dont understand.
The Confederate lands should have been razed to the ground, the Rebs sent to prison camps, and honest hard working Northern soldiers should have been granted lands to rebuild America.
6
@MoneyRules In other words, we should have ignored the Constitution so many Union soldiers died for.
Men and women are essentially social animals! Failing to address that dynamic is where this wordy revisionist essay shows the writers poor understanding of southern history!!!
4
What’s amazing about this piece is that Mr Bouie managed to use the word ‘Democrats’ only once.
As an aside, the fact that there remains a state park named in Tennessee for the murderous Southern general and early member of the KKK, Nathan Bedford Forrest, is scandalous.
I object to the current leftist mania for tearing down statues and rewriting history but that park needs to be renamed, perhaps after the black Union soldiers he ordered massacred after the Battle of Fort Pillow (e.g., the Fort Pillow Martyrs Freedom State Park).
9
Just as Pres. Lincoln delivered citizenship and the right to vote to Black America, Pres. Grant put hands and feet on the right to vote for the former slaves.
The Ku Klux Klan itself, the military force of resistance force create by the Democratic Party, was indeed started by loyal Democrat Nathan Bedford Forrest.
Thank God the Republicans defeated the Dems in the Civil War, no?
6
The north need only to look towards its own racist past to explain why Reconstruction policy was abandoned.
3
Ant the Antebellum/Jim Crow plantation mentality endures still, especially in my Alabama and in Mississippi. These plantations are not growing cotton, but the corporations that run and rule the state governments.
7
Mr. J. Bouie, I think that Mr. Grant has been suffered the worst kind of public reputation, that I can think of. He ended the civil War, and was generous with the defeated South, even allowing the Confederate soldiers to keep their side arms. The fool who followed Lincoln did the South no favors in his wholesale capitulation to Property owners in the south. Grant tried as best he could to lift up the former slaves, and opened up opportunities to Black Americans with civil jobs, and much else. He was hamstrung by the twin forces of the KKK and the Southern Democrats, who refused to allow Black citizens to vote freely. Also the phony " States Rights " issue which haunts this Country till this day. There were riots and murder in the streets, which Grant tried to stop with Federal troops. No man tried harder to help the Black Americans move up during and after the Civil War. His reputation to this day is in tatters by unforgiving and inaccurate accounts that are still being spread. You are a smart man, as most would agree, after reading your opinion pieces. On the subject of Mr. Grant, I would suggest you dig a little deeper.
18
Let them Secede, permanently this time. Let’s see how long before they are starving and begging for Help. The GOP: perpetually upholding the REAL welfare queens, and loathing those that provide the welfare.
Seriously.
12
Grant, above all, wanted but two things: freed blacks to have full equal rights - and the former southern states readmitted with dignity back into the Union. And he well understood those two goals were at the opposite end of the spectrum. To suggest that he should have torn apart Southern plantations in a post war version of Sherman's March smacks of a modern revisionist rewriting benefiting from a century and a half of hindsight. Yes, Reconstruction ultimately failed, but to lay it solely at Grant's feet is wrong.
289
@Rick Morris
Reparations are never easy or entirely fair. The wealth of the South had been built in part by slave labor. The decades of Jim Crow that followed the Civil War added to unfair treatment of blacks in the US. This was not solely a southern problem. We cannot know what would have transpired had slaves been compensated for their labors after the Civil War. Not compensating them surely has contributed to the divide that remains a major blemish on America’s otherwise exceptional democracy.
38
@Rick Morris
You are correct in stating that Grant seriously tried to protect freed blacks in the south while admitting the rebellious states back into the Union. Grant's problems were acerbated by a dwindling lack of enthusiasm for protecting the rights of African-Americans among officials of the Republican Party as Grant's term expired. The so-called "Radical" Republicans passed sweeping laws to protect blacks and then gave Grant little power to enforce those laws in the South. Ron Chernow"s definitive biography of Grant explains all of this in detail.
The fact was that the North was exhausted and tired of war so the population was ready to give the southern states back to white supremacists without much of a fight. Grant tried his best to overcome this lack of interest but was unable to do so. The inability of the North to enforce civil rights after the war led to the consequence of delaying those rights for a century.
18
@J. Larimer
Compensating slaves might have made for even more bitterness and even more decidedly divisiveness in America.
5
Ulysses S. Grant was, by all means, a mediocre man.
He was just lucky to be literally the only West Point graduate at the right time, in the right place. Those were much simpler times, when a diploma really made a huge difference. He's textbook "the war(circumstance) made the man": had the Civil War never happened, he would've vanished from History for sure.
Besides, his legacy was further tainted by his awful presidency -- the result couldn't have been different, since, as I said before, he was a mediocre man. So, he kind of fell into oblivion in America's political history (becoming instead just the Civil War general).
12
@VK He was a talented general, who won the war that no other Northern general seemed to be capable of. He was not the only West Pointer in the Union Army, only the best in a senior leadership position.
105
@VK,
Grant was by no means a medicore man. He was an exceptional man. He was by far the best general in the Civil War and perhaps the most successful general in US History. His Vicksburg campaign was a masterpiece in defeating two confederate armies in sequence capturing the 2nd after the successful siege of Vicksburg.
Beyond being a great general and underrated President, Grant 's memoirs are acclaimed as great work in American literature. Writing under extreme pressure (he was dying of throat cancer), Grant wrote his memoirs that withstand the test of time with their clarity, specificity, and simplicity.
Grant's contribution in US history equals is substantial and I believe warrants more praise than others such as Teddy Roosevelt.
168
If you get a chance read Chernow's excellent biography of Grant. It provides a great reappraisal of Grant. I don't think Grant's success during the war was as much related to luck as to his superior generalship. His consistent victories in the west stood in stark contrast to the losses sustained by union generals in the east. Those victories were the reason Lincoln ultimately selected him to lead the entire Union army.
114
With a long life behind me and studying enough of American history, too, I've reached the conclusion that the worst disaster and tragedy that has befallen America was the premature death of Abe Lincoln barely after the start of his second term.
Based on the intelligence, wisdom, and compassion he had already displayed toward the South, I believe he could have and would have created his "new birth of freedom" for the entire country, including in the South. He may not have gotten bigoted and racist attitudes to change in the North and the South, but he could have and would have accomplished so much that Andrew Johnson failed to do.
Lincoln's greatest mistake as president could be his selection of Johnson as his running mate in 1864.
Reconstruction was in nearly all ways the Southern victory they couldn't accomplish in war.
186
@Bruce Stern
I believe that the worst disaster and tragedy that has befallen America was to readmit secessionist states to the union. Think of all the southern reps and senators who have thwarted progressive reforms from the end of the civil war right up until today— Lindsay graham and Ted Cruz come immediately to mind.
38
Well written comment but, two points:
Lincoln chose Johnson as VP to present something of a fusion ticket at a time when his re-election was doubtful.
Lincoln’s assassination was America’s great tragedy. We can be grateful, at least, that no one got him earlier. He had been a target from the moment he started his presidential campaign.
15
@Bruce Stern, excellent points to ponder. Assistance please.....were there not slaves and disparity through out both the South and the North starting in the 17th century, If so, it would seem right that we all share in the inequality burdened by all minorities regardless of geographic or political ideology? And as a white male I can say I will never know this sting , but can only emphasize, and for that to my brothers and sisters I apologize.
7
the tragedy of Reconstruction is the failure to immediately re-distribute plantation land from the white owners and war makers who abused it to the black slaves who worked it for 250 years.
had the freed slaves been given their 40 acres and a mule, as was only just, our history would be very much more benign.
tory land was taken during the revolution, to good effect.
sherman started to do it. had lincoln lived, it's not clear how he would have handled this most critical of transitions, but having grown up impoverished, it's hard to imagine him leaving the former slaves destitute....and thus an easy target for the KKK and the likes of Andrew Johnson.
by the time grant took the white house it was too late. he was a good man and did some pretty great things during Reconstruction. but without a land base with which to start, it took southern blacks a century to be able to stand their ground politically. and we still have the likes of trump and cruz and mcconnell fighting to keep them impoverished and disenfranchised.
153
@harvey wasserman
To think that ANY American leader familiar with our founding documents would have even considered seizing lands or any property from private individuals simply out of some socialist or cozy sentiment is the best fantasy I have read this year.
6
@The Observer Not so fantastic as it would seem. Sherman acceded to the freedmen's requests for land redistribution. Thaddeus Stevens tried to make it federal law but failed. Earlier - in 1820's when land was cheap in "the West" after the Revolutionary War - Thomas Skidmore proposed dividing all property in the nation equally among all citizens and criticized Jefferson for, unlike the French, specifying a political right to pursue "happiness" instead of acquiring property. And, in the late 1840s, the abolitionist John Brown collaborated on the "Timbuctoo" agricultural land ownership experiment in upstate NY that was sponsored by the radical philanthropist/abolitionist/presidential candidate Gerrit Smith (consulting Frederick Douglass), aimed specifically at landless free Black Americans. So it is not a desert. Some 19th century Americans, including some leaders, were definitely thinking about these issues.
8
@The Observer, Tell that to the Cherokee (or any Native American). Part of the irony is that the federal government did take and redistribute the land of Native American tribes after the Civil War who had aligned with the Confederacy. The plantation oligarchy's wealth was also built on nothing more than theft. Poor whites -- tenant farmers -- didn't suffer the same deprivations of freedmen, but in the South it wasn't just freedmen who were pushing for land redistribution after the war.
6
No one knew more than Grant the reason the war had been fought, what had been sacrificed, and the reasons the 13th, 14th, and 15th amendments had been passed. No one saw the rise of a white aristocracy ruling class in the South as more detrimental or tried harder to help the freed slaves until Eleanor Roosevelt was first lady. The problem was the country was ready to move on.
Grant responded to many violations of black rights in the South by sending federal troops. But the army was getting smaller and the quality of the soldiers was getting worse and less professional, there were Indians to fight and pioneers to protect, and there was simply no will and no money to keep sending troops to the South to re-enfranchise blacks or protect their rights.
He failed to prevent Jim Crow and that can't be denied or ignored, but blaming Grant alone is to ignore the will of the nation.
209
@jkemp And as Chernow made clear in his biography of Grant, the new voting rights of blacks increased the congressional voice of southern states substantially. With Johnson's lead, that voice turned mostly secessionist and one too loud to simply be 'put down' without a second Civil War, one the North surely had no stomach for.
11
@David Greenspan
I think reparations would have ensured a second Civil War as well.
What did former slaves do once they were freed in terms of making a living? Were there 'jobs" so to speak? Did most leave for the north? What can I read about their lives during "reconstruction?"
3
This is such a disappointing column. Grant was a genuine national hero for executing (finally) a winning strategy to defeat the Confederacy on the battlefield. He was motivated by three imperatives: obey and execute the orders of the President; do everything in his power to restore the United States; and lastly, to insure as much as possible that the slave-based racism of the South would be kept in full check.
Grant accomplished all of these missions, Of course, he could have done even more, but all we have to go on is what he did do as President. Grant, personally, abhorred slavery as an abomination, and the only thing that was worse in his mind was the disloyalty of fellow military officers (including Lee) who abandoned the Union out of a misplaced loyalty to slavery-dominant states.
There are numerous biographies of Grant, all of which are superb. But none of them are at all better than Grant's own majestic memoirs, written as he was dying of throat cancer and motivated to to provide for his family. It is among the greatest of all memoirs by a man of uncommon stature.
299
@PaulB67
No.
What decided the Civil War was the Sea.
The Confederates simply didn't have any conditions to deploy a fleet -- precisely because they were a slave society (slave labor is enough for simple labor, such as agriculture and mining, but not for complex tasks, such as industry and, specially, the naval industry -- even the Romans and the Spartans already knew that).
The hope for the Confederates was that the British Empire would act quickly and recognize them as a sovereign country (a la Bay of Pigs). They didn't and couldn't have a fleet -- but the British could.
The recognition never came, and the North blockaded the Mexican Gulf up to the coast of Virginia, essentially besieging the South. Then came the decisive battle of New Orleans, which gave control of the port to the Union. The North then gained access to the Mississippi Delta, thus carving up the Confederate heartland.
This is what de facto ended the war, since on land battles were essentially either mirror matches (since all the generals were graduates from West Point, so they received the same military education) or suicide missions (this was one of the reasons there were so many casualties, besides the rifle thing).
To top it off, the timely fall of Atlanta (1864) essentially gave Lincoln the reelection, so any hope of demoralization of the Republican party and collapse from within of the North was gone.
12
@VK
To add to your point, the mighty British Empire (including Canada) having failed to destroy the US during the War of 1812, conveniently put aside their revulsion against slavery and supported the Confederacy for over two years until the Battle of Gettysburg in July 1863.
It was their third attempt to destroy the United States after the Revolution and the War of 1812. It was only the Confederate loss at Gettysburg that showed the British that the Union would ultimately prevail.
And yet they wonder why barely 51 years later the US was reluctant to join them in a war in Europe mostly between rotting empires in 1914 — ‘late to the party,’ etc.
25
@VK The capture of Atlanta, and every other Union victory after Grant assumed supreme command, was ultimately his doing.
The Navy certainly helped, and in riverine warfare as a combined arm with Grant's Army.
Whether they were capable of it or not, the South was not going to turn its slaves into armed sailors. An earlier op-ed said that freedmen were 25% of the Union Navy, but I don't know how that accurate that is.
14
I believe that Grant was devastated by his inability to secure economic and political equality for African Americans. Ron Chernow's biography of Grant offers a different perspective. Grant's presidency was marred by scandal; he trusted people who betrayed him. He was clearly ineffectual at correcting an economic system dependent agriculture and free labor, but I believe he genuinely cared. I recommend you read Chernow's biography.
119
@Anne Marie
YES! The enormity of replacing a deeply intrenched and then violently uprooted slave-labor driven economy with an egalitarian one cannot be overstated.
3
The writer does Grant an injustice by not making clear that the scandal and corruption he alludes to has never been considered to have involved Grant himself but rather his appointees and inner circle. Grant, in fact, left office still a national hero of stalwart character. For a more comprehensive understanding of Grant during reconstruction I recommend Ronald C. White's recent biography of Grant.
82
@don healy
Yes. The tragedies of Grant's administration are actually tragic, full of pathos. The betrayal of a person who did real good, but could have done so much more. The heart aches.
3
Don't forget that labor militancy was on the rise in the North, which meant that Reps would have to deal with cries of "wage slavery" in Chicago, Baltimore, New York, New England, the Ohio River valley, and along the new railroad lines, all while addressing Black Codes, sharecropping, the KKK, and White Supremacy (North and South). "Free Labor" quickly lost its liberating power and settled into Social Darwinism. Except for the brief periods of the New Deal and Great Society, Social Darwinism has ruled the ideological roost ever since, a doctrine which supported the flow of money and power to the GOP organization. It's not a pretty picture. Grant's instincts and irrelevance illustrate the death of Free Labor and the birth of Social Darwinism. We have yet to free ourselves from such toxic nonsense.
3
Seriously I don't things could have turned out any other way.
On the Monday night of the last week of his life Abraham Lincoln gave a speech from the White House during which he proposed giving some increased rights including voting to black Civil War veterans.
John Wilkes Booth was in the audience. And he reportedly remarked in disgust about N..words and said that Lincoln was a dead man. Booth made good on his boast that Friday.
Andrew Johnson was no Abraham Lincoln. Nor was U.S. Grant. The myth of the noble lost cause for states rights and sovereignty replaced slavery as the reason behind the Civil War. Reconstruction became Jim Crow separate and unequal.
Son of the Confederate South Woodrow Wilson made separate and unequal while black federal government policy and practice. Harry Truman ended that for the military by executive order. And Eleanor Roosevelt implored her husband to do likewise during World War II. John Kennedy was no Lyndon Johnson when it came to black civil rights legislation.
31
Do me a favor. Read Grant’s memoirs, which he wrote under the extreme duress of the latter stages of throat cancer. Read it, and ask yourself, where was this man’s heart? Part of what made him a great general was he believed in the Union cause.
Could the South have been more effectively integrated economically? Probably, but, given the intrinsic advantages of the plantation class and the whites, you tell me how. It’s not effectively integrated now; look at the Georgia governor’s race.
Theodore Roosevelt said Grant was one of our three greatest presidents. If he is to be the subject of historical revisionism, it should be upward if anything.
121
@Phaedrus
"Probably, but, given the intrinsic advantages of the plantation class and the whites, you tell me how."
Some form of land redistribution, not necessarily as total as some may have portrayed the idea.
"It’s not effectively integrated now; look at the Georgia governor’s race."
That was not inevitable and in fact, springs from the very lack of an equitable resolution and fairer economic outcome.
4
Mr Bouie will find that there are far more worthy targets of his ire than a war hero who fought mightily and successfully to free slaves in our country, but, after the war, found he could not free civilians of their hatred, prejudice, and racism.
8
I only read the first few sentences and couldn’t help but stop at “But the laudable commitment from Grant and the Republican Congress to the political rights of the former slaves”...what has happened to the party of Lincoln in these past 150 or so years??
3
Since antisemitism is much in the news, it’s important to remember Grant’s declaration as commanding general:
“The Jews, as a class violating every regulation of trade established by the Treasury Department and also department orders, are hereby expelled from the Department [of the Tennessee] within twenty-four hours from the receipt of this order.
Post commanders will see to it that all of this class of people be furnished passes and required to leave, and any one returning after such notification will be arrested and held in confinement until an opportunity occurs of sending them out as prisoners, unless furnished with permit from headquarters.”
He later apologized, as they often do.
2
Lincoln reversed this command.
Grant felt that Jewish peddlers were cheating the troops. Who knows? I don’t think Grant was inherently anti-Semitic.
1
And we are still paying for this massive mistake and injustice today. It will haunt us until we finally collapse. The Civil War is still being fought down here and the South will continue to be a huge drag on the nation. In my opinion, there really was no way to change the southern culture. It is a stain on the nation and should have been eradicated. It singlehandedly developed one of the most brutal systems of slavery ever devised by man. Grant did not recognize this. The only real answer was to remove all the southerners and ship them out west to the SW territories and totally start over. Then Native Americans, who we treated despicably, should have been brought back and the South divided between the former slave and Native American populations. The North could have maintained control until functioning states were reestablished. We would be much better off today if this had happened. So, not only did the Founders of this country insure we were headed for a bloody civil war by not addressing the slavery question during the founding of our nation, but we totally botched it up again even after we fought it.
51
@Jeffrey Tierney
It is so nice to hear a simple, practical solution that hardly anyone could possibly object to. And so easy
to carry out!
8
@Jeffrey Tierney
Sounds like a strong argument for the secession. It was the denial of secession by Lincoln that insured a bloody civil war. I guess if genocide is more to your temperament then you have to live with yourself. BTW, Native Americans sided with the South to no small degree, General Stand Waitie of the Cherokees for example. The Mississippi Choctaws for another. The punishment was to allow white invasion of Oklahoma.
@Jeffrey Tierney The SW territories? I would have shipped them to Antarctica.
1
Mr. Bouie,
This article was a very nice read about a particularly bad chapter in American History and it's on going sequels. Your phrase, "a three-pronged assault on racial domination, social exclusion and economic inequality, race hierarchy would survive, as it does now, diminishing the promise of American democracy." does looks like many big cities and rural areas today for many groups. I don't understand the greed, ignorance, and meanness of some Americans and why the rest of us let them get away with it.
4
The recent Chernow and Ronald White biographies of Grant have done much to rehabilitate his reputation. Grant generally earns kudos for his attention to the sufferings of the former slave, but northern opinion had grown tired of the racial issues raised by slavery and the Civil War. Without Congressional backing, Grant's options were limited.
We would do well to praise his personal modesty and courage during his heroic efforts to write his memoirs (considered the best ever by a former President) while dying of throat cancer.
4
I wonder why Grant (and others) didn’t formulate a plan to give blacks land in the west? Would be problematic as a frontier morality is, but would have given a better option to those who wanted their own land ..... alongside immigrants from Europe who started to pour in after the Civic War ended the Part I of America and began Part II.
Excellent synopsis of how "freed" slaves ultimately were re-enslaved by economic deprivation and segregation. And it shows the Republican Party already deeply beholden to the wealthy who did not want to pay the price for actually rehabilitating the South. Grant was powerless in the face of their wealth and power, as have been so many Republican politicians since.
What is also shown here is that while segregation was ended with the Civil Rights Act, economic inequality was maintained, preventing the full assimilation of blacks into mainstream society, a condition that still exists today. And this is why the solution to racial bias and exclusion must be rooted in an expansion of the economic recovery to the middle and working class and the poor. Economic security is the surest path to acceptance and self respect, and that in turn, builds on itself, allowing victims to assume responsibility for their own lives
Racial justice is begotten by economic justice, and that must be the first priority. Trying to force racial justice first will only incite resistance, and that has been the response to most initiatives that attempt to right the past wrongs by "reverse discrimination". Let's push for an economic renaissance of the 99%, and ensure that it's without regard to color or gender, and we will then see equality for all.
3
We have inherited a societal mess. It is beyond complex and fragmented. We keep trying to change this mess that we now promulgate, but I agree with so many that the only way to change things is for each person to be aware of themselves and stop dwelling so much on the mass mess.
1
Mr. Bouie, you are serving up a surface reading of Grant's presidency--the kind some H.S. history books present. Left out of your account is Grant's single-handed dismantling of the KKK and his commitment to pursuing the ideals of the Emancipation Proclamation. Not certain if you have a history background, but, before issuing value judgements on Presidents, be certain you fully understand the social context a President was operating in. The North has grown tired of the problem, the South was exerting every effort to subvert civil rights legislation ---Grant was alone, all alone in his pursuit of equal rights---should add, he tried valiantly to provide support for Native American rights, which, were also opposed by most in Congress. Suggest you read the lastest biography of Grant by Chernow---he paints a very different picture from the one you present in this piece.
36
It is odd that this thoughtful piece neglects to mention Ron Chernow’s excellent biography of Grant.
Chernow reports exhaustively how Grant tried to reverse the pro-South policies of Johnson, enforcing civil rights legislation aggressively.
Late in his second term Grant retreated pragmatically from some of his earlier zeal for civil rights, but only as his own party also retreated.
Grant advocated a robust assertion of federal power over the states, earning him the scorn of even his old friend Sherman. Grant was a believer in hard currency, insisting upon a return to the gold standard, which worked a hardship upon all debtor farmers, both black and white. But the nation’s war debts were largely retired under his administration
Chernow paints Grant as a fervent abolitionist by conviction and not by expediency. It may be convenient now to critique Grant’s failure to assure equal rights of all laborers, but he was not hesitant to send in federal troops on multiple occasions to thwart recurring acts of Southern terrorism.
He was a man of more sincere conviction than some accounts might now recall.
25
Is it true that Abe Lincoln had a plan to repatriate the former slaves back to their homelands as part of his southern rehabilitation plans before his assassination? I’ve heard that yarn before, but it has never been substantiated. It was said that the then Secretary of the Treasury was against it because it would have been to expensive what with the high costs of the war to be paid off?
@Moe
I think Lincoln denounced colonization after signing the Emancipation Proclamation, however, Grant hatched a scheme c. 1870 to annex Santo Domingo and make it a black state. I think his real reason was the desire to exploit the island's natural resources.
Uncharacteristically, Frederick Douglass agreed to take part in exchange for a governmental position there, but his Radical Republican ally Thaddaeus Stevens vehemently opposed him. Grant's predecessor Andrew Johnson had also had the same idea. (Source: Frederick Douglass by William S. McFeeley)
The Hayes-Tilden Compromise effectively ended Reconstruction and federal protections for African Americans, however, I've been reading a book on Barack Obama's reading list called "How Democracies Die" by Levitsky and Ziblatt.
It mentions an 1890 effort by Republicans to restore black suffrage as guaranteed in the 15th Amendment, the Federal Elections Bill, aka the Lodge Bill after Henry Cabot Lodge, it was endorsed by Republican President Benjamin Harrison and passed the House.
Grant beat every Confederate General he faced. He commanded the entire Union Army during the campaign that crushed the Confederacy, at a point where the Confederates still had sufficient forces to fight a defensive war
When he took office, he crushed the Klan.
He did not have the owner to redistribute land in the South, which was a shame.
He has been slandered for generations by Southern writers, worshipping at the Cult of Robert E. Lee and the Lost Cause.
Grant was over of the great men in our History.
29
Another excellent column from Mr Bouie, who is fast becoming my favorite NYT columnist. Well researched, enlightening, interesting and thought-provoking. Bravo, Mr Bouie. Keep on educating and entertaining me like this. Kudos to the Times for recognizing your talent. Brooks and Douthat could learn a lot about concise writing and intellectual analysis from you.
3
I have lately often wondered whether the sentiments of Lincoln's Second Inaugural, which were also the terms at Appomattox, were wrong. Forgiveness was given for free, no repentance was required, and no one was punished. But it's not clear what else was possible at the time, and we have the luxury of the 20-20 hindsight of a century and half to see what were the results of not hanging Jefferson Davis, the whole Confederate Congress and the generals of the Confederate Army, namely, a resurgent Confederate mentality in the north also, and that almost no white person in the South today even thinks the secession was evil in its intent and consequences - nay, they still defend statues of these men. But who could have been wiser at the time than Lincoln was? And where would an exhausted country even have found the judicial resources for so many fair trials? The evil of slavery was boundless and so far-reaching that it tortures and poisons us even today - it harms the black people most of all, but it poisons the whites also. Even those who truly reject racism must live alongside it.
14
Mr. Bouie overlooks the dispositive role of 3 SCOTUS decisions, which allowed southern whites to regain power and institute the American Apartheid of Jim Crow. In the Slaughterhouse cases of 1873, U.S. v
Cruikshank in 1876, and the Civil Rights cases of 1883, the Supreme Court ruled that the 14th Amendment did not apply to the states. That meant that the Equal Protection Clause, the Due Process Clause, and the Privleges and Immunities clause, could not be used to protect the rights of black citizens in the American South. Collectively, those decisions were far more impactful than the actions of U.S.Grant.
8
It's a pleasure to read an article that doesn't just obsess about the latest Trumpian outrage, but reaches back in history to provide background for the rise of Trump.
The Republican party at the time of the Civil War was an interesting alliance between Northern capitalists, abolitionists and free blacks. The Democratic party was an equally curious alliance between Northern workers (opposed of course to the Northern capitalists) and Southern slave owners.
This bizarre configuration, where the Democratic Party represented both the common working man and the Southern racist plantation owners lasted until the Civil Rights bills of the 1960s, and, in reaction, Nixon's "Southern Strategy" which welcomed the racist Dixiecrats into the Republican Party. A lot of Northern workers, not immune to racism themselves, followed this migration giving rise to the Reagan Democrats of the 1980s.
Now, after 150 years, the Republicans finally represent big business Capitalists and racists. It's difficult to sell this agenda to the masses however. That is why we have the rise of Nixon/Reagan/Trump blue collar racist fake populism.
In the meantime the Democrats spent most of their energy pursuing the Clintonian third way, which was basically to blow off the working man, enable outsourcing, and further the appeal of Trumpian fake populism.
The Democrats have an opportunity to return to representing the common man, and the new generation of AOC style "radicals" is cause for great hope.
8
Grant did more than any other president to bring the freed slaves into full citizenship. He had greater respect and understanding of the freed slaves than Lincoln. They came into his lines by the thousands during the war, and he knew and respected them. He sent some of his most trusted and heroic supporters to the South and they tried valiantly to bring about a real reconstruction. We today need to realize the virulent hatred of Blacks by Southern Whites. The hundreds of White Leagues broke into peaceful meetings of unarmed white and black citizens and slaughtered them in horrific blood baths. We have never faced the race hatred of the South that still exists and is being fanned by our current racist president. Grant said in his brilliant memoirs, that the cause of the rebellion of the southern states against the Union "will have to be attributed to slavery." Late in his life, he said that the only way reconstruction could have possibly worked was with a ten-year occupation of the South. This would never have been tolerated.
13
“Red River To Appomattox” is the title of the third volume of Shelby Foote’s great history of the Civil War. Grant’s greatest “sin” was in not binding Robert E. Lee in chains for treason and then hanging him.
In the chapter entitled “Lucifer In Starlight,” Foote details the pursuit and subsequent arrest of Jefferson Davis. Lee received a gentleman’s dispensation for his crimes against his own flag; Davis was subjected to the opprobrium that should have been Lee’s as well.
Grant meant well but it all ended badly. Only the South benefited from Grant’s vacillating and it bled into the political chicanery that would bear fruit in Rutherford B. Hayes.
There are those today who might believe that we’re still undergoing Reconstruction. Ask Donald Trump.
7
I don’t think this was Grant’s problem alone. Are you suggesting that the modern imperial presidency that has allowed Trump to flourish is a good thing? Should Grant have taken that role on his shoulders alone? I think not. Congress dropped the ball as well. Almost all whites were uncomfortable with taking land from owners and giving it to freedmen. As Congress tries to take power back from Trump, let’s remember that the imperial presidency is not normal and not good.
6
It's interesting that it is still the South that holds back the rest of the country. Leaders in poverty? The South. Leaders in obesity? The South. Highest rates of smoking? The South. States most likely to have absurd voter suppression laws? The South. States that take the most from the federal government but give the least? You guessed it, the South. Fighting to fly the flag of an enemy republic that took up arms against the United States of America and lost? The South.
26
A really wise choice for a subject to study right now. With all the problems we have, today, nothing reflects better on your sense of priorities that an article on Ulysses Grant. How about a four part series on Alfred E. Newman?
2
Reading Chernow's book, I was struck by a couple obstacles Grant faced:
Though the fifteenth amendment gave blacks the right to vote, Democrats used violence and intimidation to keep them away from the polls.
There was also a lot of misinformation about the extent of violence against blacks. In those days it would have been very easy for parties to "muddy the waters" to diminish Northern support for Reconstruction.
After the midterm elections in his second term, Congress had a lot of Democrats and moderate Republicans. Grant took executive action to stem racial violence, but lacked legislative support for permanent solutions.
11
There are plenty of villains in the tragedy that was the failure of Reconstruction to fulfill its promise to the newly-freed slaves. Ulysses Grant is not one of them.
30
An overall inaccurate portrayal of civil war history and a racist view of US Grant. Grant cannot fairly be blamed for the country’s lost enthusiasm for reconstruction of the South after Grant left the office of the President, for continued Southern racism after the South was defeated in the war, or for the capitalist institutions which continued to create and preserve wealth within the upper class throughout the country. Taking land (without just compensation) from Southern landowners and redistributing it to freed slaves would have been an extreme solution even by today’s standards, a violation of the Constitution, and inconsistent with Lincoln’s, Grant’s, and the progressive movement’s view of reconstruction.
32
Across the south, the federal government took lands of many. Some were fresh off the boat European immigrants with the misfortune of arriving to southern ports and states just prior to the Civil War. The government taxed every southerner into poverty and homelessness, also disenfranchising them, as well as often committing war crimes against women and children.
The war, Reconstruction + the federal government actions over nearly a 100 years, from 1860s to 1960s, stand as how to not run a war and a country - unless wholly preoccupied with power and money...taking that of others. Regionalism was always strong, even with the colonies. The first slave state was Massachusetts. But before long, the south was the nation's economic engine, with much of the south holding power in Congress. Prior to the Civil War, Natchez, MS, had more millionaires than anywhere in the nation. Yet, it was during Jefferson's presidency that southern members of Congress passed the 1807 Slave Act. The economics of the post-Civil War can't be disembodied from the 1600s, colonies, 1700s, 1800s, Europe.
FYI: Nearly 90% of all cotton grown in the south was sold to northern textile companies, as well as to the British and French. Any of them could've stopped slavery any time they wanted but didn't - until many had retooled for heavy industry manufacturing, guns and other metal goods, and until many northern corporations had sold their interest in southern plantations and the shipping transport companies.
2
Yes, there it is, right there in the preamble to the constitution of the CSA—the commitment to the equality of all peoples and the abolition of property rights in human beings, with its unfortunate effect, through the treatment of men, women, and children as beasts of burden to cause the concentration of wealth in places like Natchez. Oops, no, the opposite of that.
What a desperate attempt to diffuse blame and to avoid the role of the vicious and inhuman racism that so prevailed in the southern states! One would almost think that outside pressures forced more than 4 million slaves on the South, and that the savage terrorism of the KKK and the White League were aberrant effects of maladministration by the federal government.
4
@Daniel M
It is historical fact. We've done a disservice to 2 generations of students since the 1970s by not fully laying out and discussing the complexities of world and U.S. history. There is not clean and neat when addressing history. This is why there remain people who cling to the fringes of untruth, be it right or left, like yourself. It benefits no one, never will. History and facts are much more interesting than dogma, as well,
Foner’s central theme is that, during Reconstruction, many blacks made real and substantial progress, particularly in business and politics. Many dismiss accomplishments made during Reconstruction as unimportant. But good faith efforts were made and there were successes. Whether failure was inevitable he does not say. But any history of the period must take account of the remarkable progress made by ex-slaves when given the chance.
11
Great topic. Reconstruction was a great lost opportunity. The quesiton: why was it lost?
Lincoln makes no sense as a Republican, unless you remember he was a lawyer to the railroads.
There's the pre-war phenomenon of capitalist & moralist in alignment & coming together in the Republican party. What was it initially but political Calvanism?
Between 1850 & 1870 you have the invention of the limited liability joint stock corporation. Such an organization creates an ownership collective. In a free contract society bargaining power is everything. The corporation had enormous bargaining power advantages over individuals. In 1860 the United States had the broadest distribution of wealth in the history of the world despite 10% of its people being classified as slaves & the presence of giant plantations in the south. 30 short years later wealth was concentrated in unheard of proportions.
The interest of the capitalist and the moralist no longer aligned, yet they remained in the same party. But if you read "Empire Express" on the history of the 1st transcontinental railroad, government was up for sale for most of the 19th century.
The history is in the details but it seems to me that the interests of the Capitalist wasn't that much different than the planters & bargaining power had concentrated so much, both individually, generally (i.e. governmentally) that Republican law makers were no longer listening to the moralist in their party. Then again, not sure that they ever were.
5
Mr Bouie actually hits the nail on the head, but misses the point, on why Grant missed his chance politically. The reason had to do with the legal inability to redistribute the land to freed slaves and establish a different cultural order while doing so. If we look at the legal system and significant period rulings regarding private property, it would suggest that the United States, while vanquishing the Confederacy in the Civil War, admitted those states back into the Union and in doing so, restored the rights of property to it's inhabitants.
This would prevent the US from seizing property without Due Process and redistributing the land to freed slaves. Grant would have no doubt started a second civil war or at least a lengthy insurrection by land owners and their supporters. After seeing the slaughter of the war first hand, I doubt that Grant was willing to subject the country to another war.
The failure doesn't lie solely with Grant, but with subsequent Presidents, all of whom failed to protect the rights of all citizens, including Black Americans. It took nearly 100 years and another Republican Congress to pass significant legislation to safeguard those rights.
18
@Mike
The continued un-prosecuted deaths of black people by white terrorists (usually with a badge on) would say that those rights still aren't safeguarded.
1
Life is complicated. It doesn't work to look at Grant as if he could have done more than he did. Read his memoir-- a remarkable and introspective book. Probably more people today think, wrongly, that R.E.Lee was Noble and heroic. Grant was the real deal.
66
@Lane Wharton
They both were, which is why they were such good friends before and after the war. And it is why old soldiers and friends Lee and Grant were able to draft an intelligent agreement of mutual respect between the two armies and veterans of both sides.
1
@Maggie: Grant and Lee were by no means friends. Lee respected Grant's military prowess; Grant thought Lee was an inferior general to Jackson and Longstreet.
Grant followed Lincoln's orders at Appamattox to allow the defeated Confederates to hold on to their weapons and livery. If he had any doubts about the wisdom of Lincoln's generosity, he did not display any hesitation with Lee, who was naturally surprised and grateful for the treatment.
Both were huge historical figures on opposite sides of a historic war. But they were never friends.
11
Lee and Grant were not good friends ever. Like, never.
9
Grant & Hayes put the post-Civil War Union army at the service of industrialists to quash labor unrest and large Western landowners to secure their ranches from Indian claimants to the Western territories. Theirs is the true legacy to today's Republican party.
6
Grant only drafted that document. Grant only had the strategic sense and depth of intelligence to command an entire, continent-wide war. It takes nothing from Lee’s abilities as a battlefield tactician to observe that they were not equals in generalship.
4
A short, well thought out historical explanation of where we are at today and why. Trump in many ways is the modern day version of the Andrew Johnson presidency.
27
"But Reconstruction would topple in the face of reactionary violence. Without a sustained federal presence, blacks could not secure their political gains. Without land reform — or any effort to extricate the roots of the plantation system from the South — the oppressive logic of slavery would endure. And without a three-pronged assault on racial domination, social exclusion and economic inequality, race hierarchy would survive, as it does now, diminishing the promise of American democracy."
This short history lesson/essay is the best "opinion" column I have ever read in the NY Times.
Keep up the good work Jamelle.
24
The federal government distributed public land in the West. Nothing in US law would have permitted it to confiscate privately owned Southern land.
The Klan was not a vigilante organization. Vigilantes have as their purpose the private punishment of crime. The purpose of the Klan was racial intimidation. Nothing in common, unless you accuse the Klan's victims of being criminals, which would mean accepting the Klan's ideology.
15
The conversion of slave labor to wage labor en mass by decree would have to have been an overwhelming task. Who could possibly have accomplished this with moral, cultural, economic, and political overtones. Like the War Between the States, this national and human tragedy was not going to be solved by any one thing. Grant certainly found himself in deep water, way over his head.
3
Mr Boule asks too much of Grant. Grant defeated Lee whose statue, sadly, still stands in Charlottesville. The racism that Mr Boule thinks Grant could have reversed 150 years ago is still in action in Mr Boule's Charlottesville front yard. For example, when is the University of Virginia going to acknowledge that Mr Jefferson's Grounds were constructed entirely with slave labor? And it took the Monticello Foundation until last month to "find" Sally Hemming's private quarters linked via secret passage to her master's bedroom? And what about the lynching on property that is now the golf course at Farmington Country Club? Going back to thrash Grant who had just defeated the Confederates is nonsense to me.
43
@Daniel Friedman
First slave state = Massachusetts. Take those lands first.
1
Grant may be the most personally honest of all our presents. His problem was that he expected others to equally honest.
36
"Deeply entwined as they were with Northern capital and committed to the protection of private property, neither Grant nor the Republican Party was willing to take those steps. [land reform, etc.] Instead, they allowed Northern and Southern employers to extract profit by any means necessary, imposing peonage and sharecropping on landless former slaves. The government would distribute land, but to railroads and Western settlers, not blacks."
Most commentors seem to have missed this crucial passage. The thought-provoking article is not, as many have said "character assassination" of Grant--it goes at length into his accomplishments and good intentions.
But Bouie focuses on the realty that more than formal and legal equality is necessary even to sustain political equality, and the fact that the Republican Party--at its core the party of Northern capitalism--did not want to go there.
In fact, the interests of the system it represented no longer lay in opposing the oppression of Black people in the South, but in integrating the emerging system of semi-feudal sharecropping in the South into the larger matrix of US capitalism, in seizing and developing Native land, crushing rebellious workers, and very soon, building an international empire (starting with the seizure of Cuba, Puerto Rico & the Philippines in 1898.)
This is what actually happened, and what is happening today is the living and still horrifically developing legacy of that era.
28
This reminder is a lesson in the weakness of our government in the face of business interests. Sounds familiar.
11
@Jon Semi-feudal sharecropping was present when my father attended Signal Corps school in Virginia during WWll. My mother visited from Oregon & stayed in the home of a white sharecropper using Black labor. When my mother insisted that a very old black man coming in from the fields drink first at a fountain, he politely demurring & motioning for her to drink, the boss took her aside & declared, "Never, never, let a black man drink before yourself."
14
The author did not take into account that Grant was a moderate Republican trying to keep together a Union of Congressional Radical Republicans and Democratic southerners bent on re-establishing the antebellum South.
While allowing his fondness for fellow veterans to cloud his judgment on those willing to use him for financial gain, his policies hoped for a fair and square South for all citizens.
9
Nowhere does the author mention that the number of federal troops in the postwar South was entirely inadequate to the task. Members of the United States Army - whether black enlisted men or white officers - were regularly threatened, shot at, assaulted, arrested, and even killed in the performance of their duties - duties that included protecting newly freed people. Federal agents were overwhelmingly outnumbered by their unredeemed Southern enemies during the years of Reconstruction. That's a basic fact.
The idea of large-scale land distribution is a fallacy. The army was the only federal institution capable of carrying out a project as ambitious and complicated as Reconstruction. How do we know that? Thousands of pages of testimony by army officers and other federal agents to the Joint Committee on Reconstruction. The army couldn't prevent the murder of thousands of black people throughout the South, let alone redistribute land and make sure that land remained in the hands of black families. And the 1879 army appropriations bill made sure that the army could never be be used to enforce law in the South (or anywhere else for that matter).
The sad fact remains that in the 1860s and 1870s, most _white_ people - Northerners and Southerners alike - had no desire for black people to achieve anything like equality. To blame Grant for that failure is ahistorical.
65
@Mathilda
Many of the Union soldiers at the end of the war were not even American, some arrived on a boat from Europe and that day signed on as mercenaries to go strip the south bare. Same as was the case with post-war militias, and there were plenty of those.
1
So let's tear down his statues, too? Rehearsal for going after Washington's and Jefferson's (slave owners), and even Lincoln's (non-modern social attitudes toward race)….
8
@Longue Carabine
There is a reasonably important distinction between the statues of confederate generals and memorials to Jefferson, Washington, et al. One group are founders and patriots while the others are rebels and traitors.
6
Unfortunately, Southern culture was unredeemable and corrupt then and now. The South did not produce a single economist that figured out the dynamics of cooperation, education or capitalism and squandered 150 years of mediocre economic plans and programs due strictly to white racism. Today, it is perfectly normal to want to be a tow truck driver and drop out of school at 15. The small towns of Mississippi, Alabama, SC, and Georgia are mostly similar to the dirt poor townships of 150 years ago that Grant and General Sherman squashed
45
@terry brady
Ben Bernanke is from Georgia and South Carolina, though I don't agree with his policies. The small towns of rural America tend to be similar whether in the South or any where else.
Racism is a hard boil all over this country.
3
@terry brady
A rather broad brush on the South that overlooks hard-won progress by many African-Americans in that part of the country, especially with the growing number of African-American elected officials.
3
The only way for the north to get southern whites to behave and protect the rights of southern blacks was to sustain enough military presence to force their will over southern whites. That's an expensive proposition.
While Grant was president, his determination to make all the spilt blood worth something kept the project of protecting the constitutional rights of southern blacks alive.
Grant's Civil War experience of having blacks fight under him and fight with valor, bravery and intelligence convinced them of their equality and their deserving of equal status as citizens.
Many whites in the Republican party were racists that simply thought slavery was evil and had intended for ex-slaves to be repatriated to Africa. They had no stomach for the long and expensive battle required to truly give southern blacks their civil rights.
By the time Grant left the presidency the strong abolitionist desire to protect southern blacks was about exhausted, for many of them it was about using black votes to sustain power anyway.
So they made their deal with the Dems to abandon southern blacks just so they could control the White House for 4 more years.
So may versions of history. That one I pulled from Chernow's bio on U.S. Grant.
23
Wow. Just Wow.
Bouie really needs to read some history and Ron Chernow's Grant in particular.
Grant did a magnificent job with Reconstruction after Johnson did all he could to sink it. He had enormous empathy for freed slaves.
To fault him for not seizing the land of plantation owners and giving it to former slaves runs smack into the Fourth Amendment. It couldn't have been done.
36
@A.J. Sommer
A.J.
Thanks for the comment. Like you, I read Chernow's terrific book on Grant. Long story short, it seemed to me that the North just got tired of the responsibilities of Reconstruction. I thought Grant did about all he could do with Reconstruction.
16
@A.J. Sommer
I'm sorry sir, but it is you who need the history lesson. Grant's good intentions did nothing to stop the slaughter of blacks during Reconstruction. Nor did he champion the south's economic integration into the New Union, deferring instead to the expertise of carpetbaggers. Grant blew it, and we are still living with the cancer of bigotry his innaction begat.
1
The history of the past 150 years in America makes one thing clear:
American 'whites' will not fully embrace 'blacks' as equals until they act 'white'.
That is the 'black' dilemma , now and in the past.
Asian-Americans basically adopted 'white' modes of behavior (or even better) and now are increasingly a part of the 'white' power structure.
Or am I missing something here?
6
@Kenneth Johnson. What you’re missing is that Asians provide family structure and value education.
3
@Jackson What you're missing is that slavery destroyed the family structure of African Americans. It takes generations to rebuild the very values that slaves were so brutally denied.
Sherman should have been left in charge of a occupying army in the south and kept the union’s boot on the neck of the confederates until they truly understood that they lost the war. For decades if necessary.
All the plantations and businesses that used slave labor should have been confiscated and divided among the former slaves.
Maybe then we wouldn’t have all these arrogant, recently empowered by a racist Republican Party racists everywhere. Because you live somewhere that is civilized don’t think racism isn’t rampant. I have lived and traveled extensively for decades in the south, racism is alive and thriving.
33
@Paulie. Please tell us which Republicans you have identified as racists.
Interesting that the Democratic Party is complicit in the failure of Reconstruction.
@Paulie
Many of his men were, be it as deserters or as militia that then took over.
Why dump on Grant specifically? Because it's the 150th anniversary of his inauguration? Seems a little arbitrary. If you're going to commemorate the anniversary, Grant should be celebrated as a president who did the most during his time to protect the interests of freed slaves and African-Americans in general. I don't think Lincoln would have done more if he survived. Why not focus on the 142nd anniversary of the Hayes inauguration, which most historians mark as the end of Reconstruction and any effort by the federal government to pass a civil rights bill until the 1960s?
25
This is a disappointing essay.
Grant saved the Union in the war, rescued (or at least tried to until patience in the North wore out) the effort at Reconstruction and was highly esteemed by the community of freed slaves because of his devotion and acceptance of them. More than any of the generals of the Union army, he embraced black soldiers and treated them as equal in ability and valor to their white compatriots.
Prevailing politics bedevil many a good leader (and a case can be made that “good leader” is a generous handle for Grant), abnd they can’t be overlooked. The North lost patience for the cost of Reconstruction and when the appetite waned, so did the efforts on behalf of the freed blacks. Hence the Hayes compromise and the receding efforts at consolidating the civil war’s gains.
The author should read Grant’s memoirs and Chernow’s outstanding bio.
Suggest the
35
I noticed the two photographs are taken with a stereo camera, two shots simultaneously through two lenses a distance apart. To confirm this, I used the common though not well-known technique of placing my hand open-palmed over my nose in such a way (like thumbing one's nose) that the double shadow of my hand included both photos; then I relaxed my eyes to merge the two images. As I thought! Merging the two images creates a three-dimensional image (like a steriopticon view) of Grant. Give it a try!
I confess, I formerly worked as a photogrammetrist, making 3-D maps from stereo photographs.
5
It works! Good call. I wouldn't have thought to try.
1
Jemelle is basically advocating that Grant should have burned down the South, slaughtered the people that lived there and repopulated the region with Northerners. Let’s see - Germany and the Marshall Plan. Japan and MacArthur’s Reconstruction Plan. Nothing about our Country’s history suggests that how we have treated a defeated enemy has been anything but successful.
17
Wow, calm down; nowhere does the author suggest anything close to the hysterical accusation you're aiming at him, nor does he "dump on" Grant as so many here are charging. In fact he says:
"But the laudable commitment from Grant and the Republican Congress to the political rights of the former slaves was fatally undermined by their indifference to the vast social and economic inequality of the postwar South."
He's simply reflecting on the fact that the attempt at "Reconstructing" the South was inadequate to the job of transforming a culture and economy run rough-shod by relatively few wealthy land and business owners over the interests and welfare of a large, impoverished population of both blacks and whites. The deep south still suffers today with low levels of education, health and earning power and high levels of guns, bibles and bigotry.
3
No, he did not. What the author does indicate is that what Grant did not do (and should have done) is the equivalent of denazification after WWII.
Yes, Americans came to (West) Germans help, but at certain conditions. The old and vile institution that was nazism was to be dismantled, purged from German life. This is why even saluting in a certain way may land you in jail. The goal was to put such a taboo on nazism and everything related to it.
Even with today's resurgence of extreme right groups. you should consider this a success.
Japan? Japan was to forsworn war. Forever.
In comparison, the racist institutions were allowed to survive, albeit in a morphed format. Sure, the Confederacy was gone and the slavery outlawed, but blacks were to be segregated to their own schools with less means, certain jobs, the back of busses. That was not equality.
But that was 150 years ago. Question is how do we finally fix this?
1
Obviously this is an OpEd piece. But I fail to understand the relevance in looking at history through modern eye pieces. Even the modern eye pieces, even those worn by the most ardent American Socialists, don't get it right.
Besides, this happened 150 years ago. Like anyone will benefit anything.
The complexity of where we are today, especially the dependents of slaves, will never be explained by a few paragraphs. 50 years, trillions of dollars and 1000's of studies by 10,000's of "experts" have made little forward movement for them. Well, at least according to the media.
Maybe it's time to understand that we can't wish, I mean legislate, away things we don't like. That the best way is to contain and reshape them instead.
6
@Mark Descendants, not dependents, of slaves
1
@Mark. This is a rewrite of history trying to justify policies promoting modern reparations.
2
Even though the South lost the war, southern Oligarchs retained the power to shape society. As noted by the writer, this still reverberates today.
26
What would have happened if the former slaves had armed and organized themselves as the Klan did, and insisted on their rights? Would the Federal Army have come to their aid, or joined the former Rebels in putting them down? We’ll never know, but African-American/white relations would have been radically different, perhaps more along the lines of modern Jamaica.
3
They were outgunned. For that matter, Grant's army couldn't keep up with the rebs who eventually became the Klan.
Read Chernow's biography.
2
Grant did a remarkable job within the confines of his presidency. If anyone expected him to charge right through decades old hierarchies, just consider where we are 150 years later in the black-white conundrum.
10
For a moment, it wasn't this way. See Sherman's Field Order 15 redistributing land from slave owners to freed blacks at the end of his March to the Sea in Georgia.
It feels like one of those lost opportunities of history—Johnson became President and rescinded the order. Absent that, we might have had reparations when they could have done the most good, right after slavery was outlawed.
Yet, eventually maybe Lincoln would have backed away from the idea, too. And if he didn't, white Southern society found lots of ways to steal black people's property after Reconstruction ended. It's hard to be optimistic even in an alternate history exercise.
12
@Jake Roberts
Former slaves were emacipated.
Few black in the post-war South owned property that was available for theft by anyone.
What was stolen was their civil rights.
3
This is the first article in the NYT in some time to focus on the incomplete nature of Reconstruction.
Why are so many of the Times brilliant writers unfamiliar with the Civil War? The antebellum South, the Abolitionist threat, the Haitian Revolution of the slaves against their masters - all of these phenomena impacted the Southern psyche far more than anyone in the North realizes.
Further - the Southern slave States fought to protect slavery, and to be able to extend it to the new states of the Western US. The Northern states of the Union Federal government fought to maintain the union - but not to end slavery, unless the troops were from Vermont.
We all need to take a page from Grant in dealing with people like Jeffrey Beauregard Sessions, Lindsey Graham and Mitch McConnell. No surrender, no quarter, no stop, no quit.
Slave State Conservatives have no place in the 21st century United States.
Full stop.
43
@UTBG
Straight to leftist re-education camps with slave state conservatives, is it?
@UTBG Reconstruction is not current news. That's why you don't see many articles about it in a newspaper.
1
Why did Lincoln have to completely destroy the South anyway?
Slavery would have unraveled in the next decade anyway. Lincoln is responsible for 600,000 deaths, again that many serious injuries (cripples) and the destruction of the country with total destruction in the South. Instead of going to war, he could have compromised with the South and paid them for the freed slaves.
He chose war. He suspended habeas corpus. He had southerners in the US Army arrested and jailed. When it seemed that the Supreme Court was going to intervene, he threatened to jail the Chief Justice.
I have never understood why a state could not leave the union if it wanted to. Are we truly "united" if states are coerced by threat of force? Aren't we supposed to be just the States of America?
http://www.amazon.com/Lincoln-Unmasked-Youre-Supposed-Dishonest/dp/0307338428/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1376402729&sr=1-1&keywords=lincoln+unmasked
Lincoln…dig him up and shoot him again.
3
@Lee Zehrer writes: "I have never understood why a state could not leave the union if it wanted to."
My recall is that in five of the eleven states of the Confederacy, blacks made up an absolute majority of the population. The governments of the southern did not have representative governments that could legitimately decide whether or not to leave the Union.
6
@Lee Zehrer The South was not willing to make any concessions. It was tried. Sort of like North Korea.
4
@Lee Zehrer Your response is so full of errors that it is difficult to know which ones to correct first. Your claim that slavery was dying before 1861 would not be supported by most historians and economists. Slave prices were rising in the late 1850s, a sure sign of the institution's continued viability. During the war, when any fool could see the handwriting on the wall, Lincoln desperately tried to persuade slaveowners in Maryland and Delaware to accept compensated emancipation, but without much success.
Blaming Lincoln for the war requires you to ignore the fact that southerners tried to break up the Union despite assurances that the federal government would not interfere with slavery. By firing on Ft. Sumter, moreover, they committed the first act of aggression.
The issue of secession could not be settled by political debate, because neither side accepted the premises of the other. In retrospect, however, it would be difficult to argue that the south, much less the country as a whole, would have been better off if secession had succeeded. Poor southerners would have found themselves under the domination of a plantation elite which had instigated the war, and slavery would have survived for decades.
8
What serves capital usually wins. Jamelle Bouie writes that Grant "acquiesced to ... financial power..." which led to many of today's economic, racial, and social ills. I think Bouie is correct and the pattern is repeated today over and over again. I think Nelson Mandela similarly acquiesced in South Africa.
7
This is sloppy writing and even worse scholarship. Two main rebuttals.
First, to claim that Republican party of 1868 suddenly devolved from radical progress to blase, tired, moderate 'political professionals' on Grant's election is badly inaccurate. The moderates had been fighting for preeminence all along and Lincoln - who counted himself among them - was probably the only politician in the party who could bridge the gap.
In fact, the comment about the radicals thriving precisely because Johnson was in office is far more subtle than it's presented here. Johnson didn't really get into his death match with Congress until later 1866, but in the year prior to that there was genuine fear among Republicans of all stripes that a revived Constitutional Union party could easily dominate. Hamstringing Johnson became the first priority, and the radicals offered the most effective solutions to do so with the priority being electoral politics rather than principle. (That Johnson was incompetent enough to do so helped.)
Second, the ticking time bomb on Reconstruction was always the tolerance of the North for paying for an Army large enough to occupy the South to enforce the law. Scholarship suggests that the radical agenda was never as popular as many modern day revisionists wish it was - Spielberg's Lincoln rather bitingly makes this point - and much like after WWII, mothers and wives wanted their boys home after a decade+ away.
Grant did the best he could until he couldn't.
88
Chernow”s excellent biography of Grant gives an insight into the many battles Grant has fought during his lifetime. At one time he was so poor that he was selling firewood on the streets of St.Louis.His story is gripping and his valor in leading his troops amazing and inspiring.He was a great soldier but never wanted to be a politician.The nation wanted him to assume the presidency after the bloodiest war in the nation’s history.He reluctantly assumed the presidency although he was war worn and ready to retire.He did his best to solve the many problems of Reconstruction-he cannot be blamed for the fact that the South did not respond and there were economic problems that he could not solve.His legacy is huge-one man could not do more than he did.
41
I think you are being too hard on Grant who did much (not mentioned here) for blacks and healing the country. See Chernow's biography. The new hierarchy unfortunately spread around the nation, even to the north where redlining and other tactics prevented generations of blacks from owning real property and developing intergenerational wealth. The problem of poverty is rooted in economic reality and is solvable without big programs outside of law enforcement.
16
Wow. Tough to blame Grant. He became a true believer in eliminating slavery. Certainly advances were slower than he would have liked, however, he should be applauded for the efforts he made.
15
"With time, the Southern owner and planter class would construct a new system of race hierarchy, affirmed by the mass of poor whites, that would reproduce racial stigma and mire the South in poverty and disadvantage."
An ugly but true part of history. The Democratic Party in the South had its factions and class tensions. But it was united around enforcing Jim Crow. It is tempting to want to view the mass of poor whites in the South as victimized by an elite set of planters. And there's no question that the economic system in the South was tilted towards an elite group. But the appeal to white supremacy wasn't just restricted to the elite. Many poor white farmers in North Carolina were peeled away from fusionist movements and voted for Governor Aycock at the beginning of the 20th century. He rewarded them by building six white public schools for every one black school. Education is a key part of economic mobility, and it isn't hard to see how policies like these privileged one race in the 20th century over another. At the very least we need to be honest about this history and its lingering effects.
8
Lincoln was precisely the right man for the presidency at precisely the right time in history. Johnson was the tragic opposite. The failure of the country to address the treasonous offenses of the Confederates and to utterly outlaw their creed is in large part responsible for our modern problem of the South. After WWII, Germany managed to make Nazism not just a failed political movement of its past, but an ideology truly despised by its citizens. We are living with - and torn apart by - the failure of Johnson and the rest to do likewise then.
17
Having just read Jill Lepore's "These Truths: A History of the United States", I have to say, "What's past is prologue."
6
I think this article is somewhat unfair to Grant. I think Johnson, the second-worst President in American history, sealed Reconstruction's doom when he permitted the leaders of the Confederacy to vote and re-enter politics. Grant went as far as the politics of the time (suffused by neo-Confederates in the South) would permit.
14
Trump, rather than being like his hero Andrew Jackson, seems more like Andrew Johnson.
15
President Grant faced a hopeless situation because of Johnson's pardon of all Confederate combatants. Had the Confederate soldiers been refused citizenship and thus been unable to vote, the reconstruction of the south would have been possible without the Jim Crowe decades.
Just like today, the unrestricted pardon power of the president was used to grasp defeat from the jaws of victory.
4
@JAR Had Johnson not pardoned the Confederate combattants, the division of the nation would have continued on. There was every need to heal the wounds from the war.
4
Beyond question, Grant is the greatest military hero in our history, in my opinion. He was also a great man, with a firm belief in abolition. No one was more dejected than he, when he saw, after his victory on the battlefield, the continuation of racism, the lynchings, etc,, that persisted after Appomattox. Issues of racism continue quite virulently today well after the Civil War. Witness the President doing his damndest to keep Those People below the border. We have a latter-day Johnson in the White House. We have to hope most American voters wake up soon.
5
@C. Wayne. Maybe. That has been the go-to argument for 150 years. But that is not what happened after WWII with German Nazi's, Italian fascists and Japanese royalists. Reconstruction turned out a bit better after those wars.
The Soviet Union provides another example. After the fall of the USSR, the communists strongmen mostly lingered and beget us Putin.
I take a different view that if the Southern aristocracy and elite that led the South into war were truly scrubbed from power, I suspect things would have turned out much better to all involved, not just the former slaves. Instead the elite were allowed back into power and allowed to rewrite history with the "Southern rights" distortion and Lost Cause myths which is legacy we struggle with still today.
3
From what I've read about Grant, he made poor personal investments while managing his personal finance. So much so, he depended heavily on the royalty from his autobiography towards the end of his life to help support himself and family.
3
Sometimes, being an actual historian is exhausting. Reading something like this, with just enough carefully curated facts to occlude the larger picture, is one of those times.
Nota bene: Grant didn't really care all that much about the freed slaves. He himself said he was never an abolitionist, nor even necessarily anti-slavery. His extended family were the last slave-owners in the United States. Months after the war ended, they resisted giving them up.
4
@Greg
Oh my! Talk about misleading with carefully curated facts! Grant's extended family, as you call it, was his wife's father, who Grant never bonded, allied or meshed with. Grant was not a slaveholder and did not believe in it.
10
It's impossible to capture the depth and complexities of Grant's efforts to elevate Black Americans in a brief opinion piece. Why did you attempt such a contortion Mr. Bouie - no one is well served by a superficial, drive-by piece on this subject. A passing mention of the true villain, Johnson, who Grant fought tooth and nail, is really turning the truth on it's head.
U.S. Grant did more than any President to liberate Black's from their dismal pre-1865 fate - this is the widely accepted scholarship. He did it a time when it was not politically popular. He was the voice in the wilderness. You need look no further at the universal outpouring of affection that Grant received from former slaves and their families for decades after the war.
130
Before Abraham Lincoln, the President was Southern sympathizer James Buchanan who horse-whispered into Chief Justice Taney ears just before the Supreme Court delivered the worst decision of all time, the Dred Scott decision.
And afterward, the racist Andrew Johnson graced the Oval Office into impeachment.
So on both sides of the Lincoln Presidency, there were arguably two of the worst (and racist) Presidents in American history....at least until Donald Trump face-planted himself in the Oval Office.
It's not fair to blame Ulysses Grant for America's wretched white supremacist, lowlife underbelly.
The man fought his tail off for the Union Army and deserves high praise.
LBJ had this to say about America in the 1960's, 100 years after the Civil War :
"If you can convince the lowest white man he's better than the best colored man, he won't notice you're picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he'll empty his pockets for you."
It's certain not Ulysses Grant's fault that America was - and is - a racist, white supremacist disgrace through and through founded on Native American genocide, slave labor and economic imperialism.
That's just America's White Wonder Bread society shining brightly from its hypocritical rooftops and a deplorable segment of America's population that can't see past its awful whiteness.
The state of Georgia just voted in a Jim Crow Governor in 2018, Brian Kemp.
It's the voters...and the neo-Confederate leaders who are to blame.
288
@Socrates
Somewhere in your post the word ‘Democrats’ is missing.
Even Mr Bouie was able to steel himself to mention it once.
3
@Socrates
Right on!
12
All this is good analysis, but 150 years later purely academic.
"To upend this relationship, Republicans would have to transform the property relations of the South. Without land redistribution and a measure of material equality, political rights for blacks (and whites) would falter under the weight of planter power and racial caste." Even now, a scheme like this couldn't be implemented in the political arena and would probably require martial law and military enforcement.
In the 1870s paramilitary bands of unreconstructed rebels were tinder waiting for a spark. The country had gone through a horrific, generation decimating civil war. Grant's unique talent, I think, was in negotiating the best peace possible with the recognition that healing was a slow natural process. One, sadly, still not complete. But, I don't think any of his contemporaries - or ours for that matter - could have done much better.
21
An American historian by training (but not profession), who studied under southern antebellum U.S. historians (way back when: the Genovese's before they turned to the opposite side of the political fence), I regard this piece as the most concise, nail-on-the-head assesment of the failed promise of Reconstruction I have ever read. Thank you.
11
I think president Lincoln, with the benefit of considerable hindsight, took it too easy on the defeated Confederacy. That leniency gave rise to Jim Crow, the Klan and Confederate monuments polluting the U.S. to the present day. Black families existing as sharecroppers, for example, were under another form of slavery. Also, their children could not aspire to a decent education or a viable path in life.
Honestly, I am still learning about Mr. Grant as regards his presidency, and attempting to place his decisions into historical context. I never want to cease learning, or trying to make sense of what seems senseless.
3
@Alan R Brock. The Klan and those Confederate monuments had their heyday primarily in the 1920s. I believe Lincoln was a wee bit dead by then.
4
@Alan R Brock, they should have directed general Sherman to finish the job.
@Alan R Brock--Why is everyone conveniently forgetting that Abraham Lincoln was assassinated by a disgruntled Confederate sympathizer? Therefore it's very unfair to blame the martyred president for Jim Crow and the rise of the Klan. Lincoln's main ambition was to try to heal the union after a long bitter Civil war. Unfortunately John Wilkes Boothe made sure that would never take place. It's a shame Lincoln would never enjoy being a peacetime president.
I know that this is an opinion piece but is there any fact checking on this column? There was practically no one in the federal government who was more sympathetic to the plight of freed slaves in the post Civil War South. Grant was one person, albeit the President, but he was not an autocrat. If he had his way then the African American population would have fared much better.
And doesn't the author realize that Grant had nothing to do with the 1877 compromise?
62
Everyone is a product of their time. Good historians know that. It's easy to refract the mid-19th century through a 21st century lens, but it's unfair and unhelpful. Grant and the rest did what they could. That they didn't know what we know or feel what we feel is not to their discredit. Certainly some things are wrong, and they're always wrong, as the column makes clear, but Grant did some significant things to correct them. That it takes time for battleships to turn around isn't his fault. The good thing is the ship turned. It hasn't gone 180 degrees yet, but an institution that was in place for two centuries is something one man can't right in four years, especially considering the full context in which he worked.
We need to keep at it, but it's hard to overestimate Grant's contribution to the cause.
30
@Stevenz- Given that Grant was the chap who relocated American Indians in a death march (we now know this as the 'Trial of Tears'), and who also made peace treaties with Indians and subsequently broke the treaties and wagged war against Indians when the white settlers found the Indians were in their way, I find it unlikely that Grant would have done anything more than execute policy, regardless of non-white lives standing in the way.
3
@Laurie The "Trail of Tears" took place in 1838. Are you confusing Grant with Andrew Jackson?
9
@Laurie
Nope. Trail of Tears is Cherokee and "Civilized Tribes" removal under Jackson. 1830s.
8
I don't think Grant or anyone else was going to change the south. They persisted in their version of "Slavery Light" and oppression of blacks. They successfully rewrote history to ensure that white supremacy came out of the Civil War as a viable political force and even an admired and preferred way of life. I work at a battlefield and I have met many people who hold to that vision of the US to this day. It persists in the madness of King Donnie who has let loose those white supremacists who would love to see blacks back in chains. Grant could never have stopped this from happening, and his own problems in office would have stopped him from succeeding anyway. Grant bears little or no responsibility for what happened. Our ancestors do. And we do.
43
In this Op-ed, "Transforming property relations" means taking people's land away from them at bayonet point - after the Civil War, after the South had surrendered. This contravenes the Fifth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution; it also contravenes the philosophic basis for a representative form of civilized government; see John Locke's Two Treatises of Government. Whenever Marxists or Socialists suggest this redistribution, they never explain how much force they intend to apply for their confiscations (overwhelming), never explain who gets to decide on the use of this force (think 'Vanguard Party' for those versed in Marxist-Leninist theory), and never explain what they intend to do with the people who, not surprisingly, resist. (Read, "Gulag"). They never explain that there will be no legal defense to their confiscations (think "show trials"), and no practical limit. Whoever is politically unpopular has their land confiscated for redistribution. This is what happened in Soviet Russia, in China, in Cambodia, and what Che Guevara intended for Latin America. Dressing it up in the Op-Ed section of the NYT doesn't change the fact that it is the program of the Symbionese Liberation Army (think "Patty Hearst"). Bouie's only meaning of 'democracy' is the socialist ideal of government expropriation.
11
@Tom Wolpert It is not necessary to drag in the horrific excesses of the Soviet Union, China, Cambodia et al. to make the point that land redistribution would have meant acting at odds with centuries of English legal tradition enshrining property rights and embodied in the Fifth Amendment. The Founders were, after all, men of property, some of it enslaved human beings.
4
@Tom Wolpert ... in war (civil or otherwise) to the victor goes the spoils. The theoretical framework of communism has nothing to do with what happened or the alternative solution that Lincoln, and grant failed to to adopt - make the Confederate supporters the landless, powerless mass, make the oppressed african Americans the owners of land and leaders of the machinery of government under a federal protector for at least a generation.
3
@Tom Wolpert. "Transforming property relations", so much like Reaganomics 'trickle down', Bush tax cuts and Trump's 'middle class tax cuts'. All of which strips property from the middle and moves it into the pockets of the wealthy.
Yet somehow I don't see you screaming that this violates the Fifth Amendment or is socialist redistribution. Maybe your'e screaming too softly?
2
Hey...don't blame Grant.
Look back to the ELECTION of that swill...Andrew Jackson.
Who did he run against?
John Quincy Adams.
Yes, America could have once again had President John Quincy Adams. Instead, they CHOSE Jackson.
So sure, Grant succumbed to monied interests and all sorts of political pressure...but that would have been in a vastly weakened state had the Southerners been driven into the ground after their loss in the Civil War.
That didn't occur...because like ALWAYS....Americans like their progressive politics LITE. That is, don't go a-changin' too fast now.
It's why every blessed time we talk about carbon credits, alternative energy, a living wage, universal healthcare, single payor, business regulation not deregulation...it moves at a snails pace if at all.
So no, the trouble isn't Grant. It is the American people...who from an electoral perspective have changed so very little for so very long.
71
@Jack John Quincy Adams defeated Andrew Jackson in 1824. In the election of 1828, Jackson returned the favor. For enough of the people at that time, I guess one term of Adams the younger was enough.
2
@Bruce Stern
The election of 1824 had Jackson leading, but not enough for victory, throwing the decision into the House of Representatives. Henry Clay, as Speaker, went with Adams, and convinced enough members to follow.
1
This is a fastening topic.
@ the 1787 the price of a fieldhand had been droping for most of the century. The founders couldn't yet eliminate slavery but they picked a date they for saw it would - 1807. But in the mid 1790s the cotton gin was invented and the century long trend promptly reversed. The U.S. congress managed to eliminate the internation slave trade in 1807, but it was too little too late. The value of a fieldhand skyrockted right up into 1860.
Meanwhile Hamilton in his initial reports to congress articulated a plan for the modernization of the U.S. economy to compete with England: a strong central government, tariff's to protect infant industries, heavy investment in infrastructure, a central bank to moderate currency panics and provide credit for infrastructure and new industries. Jefferson was committed to the opposite. He wanted weak government and a pastoral agricultural society.
The Northereastern states cottoned to Hamilton's views, but the South to Jeffersons. And initially, because the west was like the south, big, empty and agrarian, the west. The highpoint of this alignment was Jackson's election.
The Northeast invested in infrastructure. NY built the Erie Canal. The effect of that was to reorient the Midwest from the South to being with the Northeast. Reinforced 20 years later w/ railroads.
The Civil War was Jefferson staring down Hamilton. Hamilton's death was in a sense, perhaps, the first casualty of the civil war. Yet in the end, he won.
3
The past is never dead. It's not even past.
The US political system, with its devotion to freedoms (including speech) and property rights, is a minefield. It took the most insightful and wily politician in our history, Abraham Lincoln, to accomplish the most stupendously obvious step possible: the granting of freedom and legal rights to black men and women.
Of course fuller equality has takes a century or two to achieve: the opponents use every propaganda tool and legal subterfuge to prevent progress. And so by 1915, southern propaganda supported by the freedom of speech gave us Birth of a Nation, the Lost Cause, and numerous Confederate monuments, when by far the most honorable government and army were those of the USA, not the CSA.
Grant was great and honorable, but without the insight and wile of Lincoln, he failed to set the US on a path to true equality.
Now there would be a useful goal: train 1,000 young people to be as perspicuous and effective as Lincoln, our own Lincoln Brigade, to speed the passing away of the scourge of racism in our nation.
5
A fascinating history discourse, as usual from Mr. Boule. I wonder if any President would have done differently. I think Americans at that point—and much later—were simply not ready to embrace genuine equality. It's unclear if they are ready even today.
12
Excellent analysis, thank you Mr. Bouie. There have been multiple Presidencies that have come about after massive upheaval of the country. All of them have taken the tact to ''heal'' the country, and gloss over the atrocities of the previous years.
That is of course after the civil war, but in our recent history, there has been many as well. There have been the administrations after illegal wars and not holding those accountable that declared and initiated them. There have been several economic meltdowns that were caused by direct white collar and administrative actions, but no one of note was held responsible for those transgressions either.
After each and every offense to part of the nation, it takes a generation (more than just a Presidency or two) to come back to any semblance of where they were. Sometimes, people do not ever recover.
That could be against the backdrop of systematic racism that has gone on since the inception of the country, or the loss of massive wealth to our never ending recessions and depressions.
There are continuous administrations and Presidencies that could truly make a difference and initiate an evening of the playing field, but they have been overcome. I think this next Presidency will have that chance to correct some real injustices.
That is what it means to be a Progressive. We can heal, aye, but we are not going to forget any longer. We are finally going to do something about it.
8
All I learned about Grant in my elementary and high school education was that his administration was corrupt from top to bottom. This was part of the demonization of Reconstruction that continues to this day.
9
@Frank
Actually, Grant himself was of unimpeachable honesty and integrity. Where he failed was in trusting some of his cabinet members and other appointments too implicitly. If Grant had one major weakness, it was his relative naivete about human nature. Because he himself was so honest, he mistakenly assumed everyone else was too.
30
@Frank. And what you learn was just a wee bit of action of a man who purposefully marched Indians to their death on the Trail of Tears.
@Laurie
The Trail of Tears occurred during the presidency of Andrew Jackson.
Reading this carefully, and having recently read Chernow's (1,000+page) biography of Grant --and I should also say feeling constantly angry at persistent racism--I nevertheless cannot feel good about laying much of the blame on Grant. He did a lot of good.
I agree not enough. And so perhaps if that's your overriding point, OK. But there have been so many opportunities along the way for hundreds of politicians and millions of people to do better since then, that I just don't like singling him out in this negative way.
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@Full Name. I also recently read Chernow's excellent book and feel exactly the same.
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@Grace Hoffmann. Wasn't General Grant such an amazing human? I feel like without his leadership the Civil War might have gone very differently...
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@Full Name - Grant effectively eliminated the original Klan. That, in itself, shows where he stood.
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Tangential to this masterful piece is the fact that, despite the DOJ guidance prohibiting indicting a sitting POTUS, President Grant WAS arrested for speeding recklessly, hauled into court, forced to post a bond of $20, and released. Remember: a $20 gold Double Eagle was US Currency and, today, is worth around $1200, just in its bullion content. Grant forfeited the bond and that was the end of it.
Earlier, President Franklin Pierce was arrested for running over a woman while he was on horse-back. Eventually, he settled with her and the charges were dropped.
Clearly, the Nixonian, and Trumpian assertion that if the President does it, it is not illegal is absolutely contradicted by two precedents of Presidents being arrested and not contesting the right of law enforcement authorities to do so.
I am no lawyer but I would expect that actual legal, in-court established precedent supercedes simple department policy and guidance documents.
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If you read Ronald White's recent biography of USG it becomes quite evident that Grant was aware of the issues mentioned and tried desperately to correct them. But as a successor president, Barack Obama, discovered, any president alone only has so much power. The Republican party in the 1870s was beginning to drift from its Lincolnian roots and was becoming more and more the 'business party'. Corporations were becoming a thing. Civil rights were ultimately bad or at best indifferent for business and the rights of black people down south didn't interest the burgeoning businessmen of New York and Chicago. USG was a surprisingly kind man, considering his most famous avocation, and I think most experts would agree he was a far better general than a president. As noted, for any meaningful reform in the South to have a long-lasting effect, a full scale 'scouring of the Shire" (to borrow from Tolkien) would have been needed, with, as implied, wholesale government seizure of land and redistribution, something that would have been constitutionally questionable. Let's face it: the assassination of Lincoln was a catastrophe. He might have been able to foster some sort of reconciliation. Grant's heart was in the right place but he lacked the political skill and congressional support. Such are the tragedies of history.
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My thoughts exactly; and I also thought about President Obama, whose naïveté and inexperience allowed the GOP to thwart him at every turn.
Ulysses S. Grant never lost his abhorrence of slavery or his determination that the Civil War would not have been fought in vain. Southern politicians and s population that never list its grudge, then as now, got the better of both men.
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@brantonpa
I agree—but it’s also true that Lincoln might not have been able to foster some sort of reconciliation, in which case he’d have left a somewhat different mark on history than he did. I’m not being cynical, just realistic.
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@PL — A fair point! An eternal mystery of history.
Who would have become president in 1904, had McKinley not been assassinated and there could have been no Theodore Roosevelt? Would we have national parks today? We’ll never know.
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I am reading President Grant's autobiography and this article commits the remarkable feet of grievously overstating the powers of the presidency, particularly in the years after the most devastating war in its history, while ignoring the massive strides President Grant took to bring the country together and protect the rights of African-Americans.
There are villains in Reconstruction, but President Grant was a hero and this piece is a disservice to his memory.
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“The love of money is the root of all evil.”
None of the societal grievances, or conflicts, that we’re currently facing are new, they’ve just been amplified by the digital age.
Unfortunately for everyone who has a legitimate grievance, there is more of a financial incentive in perpetuating conflict than there is in offering any hopeful outlook.
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Based on extensive reading, your take on Grant is pretty inexcusable historical misinterpretation. It's like blaming LBJ for the Trump presidency because LBJ drove white Southerners to support the Republican Party, thereby making it the vehicle of choice for racism.
Grant fought a bitter war that cost close to a million lives (when combatants and civilian casualties are totaled) that ended slavery as a legal institution in the US. The brutality and privation of that experience is something I think all of us today can only faintly imagine, and Grant's central role in making that war successful is something you should stand in awe of.
Grant and the Republican Congress reversed the Andrew Johnson era coddling of the post-war Ku Klux Klan. When the Republican Party decided to back away from that effort, Grant was no longer able to get support for what was required - military intervention.
I will agree with you to this extent - Grant's biggest mistake was in giving generous terms to Lee and the Confederate Army he utterly defeated at Appomattox, allowing reactionary former slave-owners to mount armed resistance aimed at denying former slaves their rights as full citizens. But though he had a weakness - to wit, trusting people like Lee and other traitorous scalawags - he remained steadfast in his core beliefs and intentions. This column is a counter-productive character assassination of a worthy hero in the history of our struggle against America's greatest original sin.
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@Pete Your version jibes with what I learned in the last millennium back in high school--that Grant wanted to continue extending Reconstruction but that the northern will to PAY for the military presence required wasn't there. It would have taken longer than the endless Afghan war, with concomitant expense, and broken beyond hope any chance of reuniting the country.
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It wasn't Grant's mistake to give generous terms to the defeated rebels; that was Lincoln's decision. To understand why Lincoln made that decision, read Lincoln's second inaugural speech. Probably Lincoln hoped that by doing so warfare would end and wouldn't be continued after the combatants returned home. Unfortunately without Lincoln's leadership the planter class rose again. After 4 years of Johnson Grant was in the unenviable position of not only attempting to move the state of the newly freed to one of Independence but also had to combat terrorists who wished to prevent any semblance of advancement for the newly freed. Grant did an admirable job especially when one considers how difficult it is to maintain a long term commitment within the American political system
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@Pete
I agree with you.
Except that the traitors Jeff Davis, Alex Stephens, Nate Forest and Bob Lee were spared by Lincoln not Grant.
And I blame Woodrow Wilson for ending Reconstruction. Along with the Supreme Court decision in Plessy v. Ferguson.
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