He has a complicated history when it comes to slavery – married into a slave-owning family and eventually purchasing a human himself. However, Ulysses S. Grant’s words on the issue resonate today as America reckons with its systemic racism.
Commanding general of the Union Army during the Civil War and afterward President of the United States, the unassuming Grant is an enigmatic figure, largely misunderstood; remembered mostly for being a drunken general and a hapless president with a corrupt administration. He was not perfect in either role, but, to the contrary, neither was he inept or corrupt.
As general, he understood his Confederate opponents, their strengths and weaknesses, and confounded them with risk-taking strategies that often won the battle. He refused the surrender of Confederate officers unless they released their slaves. As president, he advocated for the 15th Amendment that gave African Americans the right to vote, created the U.S. Department of Justice, which fought the Ku Klux Klan, and the agency that is today’s National Weather Service.
In September of 1875, President Grant appeared in Iowa for a gathering of about 200 members of the Army of the Tennessee, the former band of Union soldiers named for the Tennessee River who fought under Major-General Grant during the Civil War.
Grant said to the veterans, “If we are to have another contest in the near future of our national existence, I predict that the dividing line will not be Mason and Dixon's but between patriotism and intelligence on the one side, and superstition, ambition and ignorance on the other.”
The very contest that he predicted began almost immediately after the Confederacy’s surrender in 1865 with cries of “the South will rise again” and rise of the Klan. Fear, ignorance and ambition has bedeviled society and politics since; duly elected officials of all stripes and station have sought to deny African Americas the rights afforded to all Americans under the Constitution.
Since the war ended 157 years ago, some “historians” have framed the Confederate’s lost cause as a “states’ rights” issue rather than a slavery issue. The Constitution grants states the power to govern at the local level; not create a confederacy and wage war. According to legal historian Paul Finkelman, Southern states seceded because free states exercised “their states’ rights in opposing slavery.”
In its purity and essence, the Confederacy was about slavery, the economic system that provided cheap labor to enrich already wealthy landowners. The men who led the sedition, and the generals who fought for the cause under the Confederacy’s Stars and Bars flag, were traitors to the nation they once swore oaths to defend—against enemies, foreign and domestic.
 |
| General Grant at Cold Harbor, Virginia, in 1864. |
Grant himself was ambivalent about slavery, he stood neither for nor against it. Much to Grant’s abolitionist parents’ dismay, his wife’s family believed, righteously, in owning humans. Some of those slaves helped build their home, during which Grant worked alongside them, treating them as his equal, which his in-laws and neighbors sorely disapproved. A year before the Civil War, Grant’s father-in-law sold him one slave, 35-year-old William Jones, who Grant freed before the outbreak of hostilities.
In 1862, the war’s second year, Lincoln issued a presidential decree, which changed the legal status of slaves to free. Many of them fled north to enlist in the Union Army because of the Emancipation Proclamation’s promise. The decree hardened the Confederate’s resolve to fight for an institution that never benefitted the average Southerner.
In his memoir, penned shortly before his death in 1885, Grant wrote, “The great bulk of the legal voters of the South were men who owned no slaves; their homes were generally in the hills and poor country. Their facilities for educating their children, even up to the point of reading and writing, were very limited; their interest in the contest was very meagre--what there was, if they had been capable of seeing it, was with the North; they too needed emancipation.”
 |
| Confederate dead on the battlefield at Antietam |
Grant said to the veterans, “If we are to have another contest in the near future of our national existence, I predict that the dividing line will not be Mason and Dixon's but between patriotism and intelligence on the one side, and superstition, ambition and ignorance on the other.”
The very contest that he predicted began almost immediately after the Confederacy’s surrender in 1865 with cries of “the South will rise again” and rise of the Klan. Fear, ignorance and ambition has bedeviled society and politics since; duly elected officials of all stripes and station have sought to deny African Americas the rights afforded to all Americans under the Constitution.
Since the war ended 157 years ago, some “historians” have framed the Confederate’s lost cause as a “states’ rights” issue rather than a slavery issue. The Constitution grants states the power to govern at the local level; not create a confederacy and wage war. According to legal historian Paul Finkelman, Southern states seceded because free states exercised “their states’ rights in opposing slavery.”
In its purity and essence, the Confederacy was about slavery, the economic system that provided cheap labor to enrich already wealthy landowners. The men who led the sedition, and the generals who fought for the cause under the Confederacy’s Stars and Bars flag, were traitors to the nation they once swore oaths to defend—against enemies, foreign and domestic.
As an Ohioan from an abolitionist home, Grant understood that President Lincoln’s reason for war was foremost to keep the nation, North and South, whole; Lincoln knew the union of the state could not survive with slavery.
Grant himself was ambivalent about slavery, he stood neither for nor against it. Much to Grant’s abolitionist parents’ dismay, his wife’s family believed, righteously, in owning humans. Some of those slaves helped build their home, during which Grant worked alongside them, treating them as his equal, which his in-laws and neighbors sorely disapproved. A year before the Civil War, Grant’s father-in-law sold him one slave, 35-year-old William Jones, who Grant freed before the outbreak of hostilities.
In 1862, the war’s second year, Lincoln issued a presidential decree, which changed the legal status of slaves to free. Many of them fled north to enlist in the Union Army because of the Emancipation Proclamation’s promise. The decree hardened the Confederate’s resolve to fight for an institution that never benefitted the average Southerner.
In his memoir, penned shortly before his death in 1885, Grant wrote, “The great bulk of the legal voters of the South were men who owned no slaves; their homes were generally in the hills and poor country. Their facilities for educating their children, even up to the point of reading and writing, were very limited; their interest in the contest was very meagre--what there was, if they had been capable of seeing it, was with the North; they too needed emancipation.”
Interestingly, the socio-economic status of the Southerners that Grant described sounds similar to many of former President Donald Trump’s core white supporters. On election night 2016, the Republican declared, “We won the evangelicals, we won with young, we won with old, we won with highly educated, we won with poorly educated! I love the poorly educated.”
Trump exploits the ignorance and fears his poorly educated supporters have of the 21st century’s whirlwind of social, economic and technologic change that have left them, particularly those who are white, no longer feeling that sense on invulnerability they once could rely on, even if it was always an illusion. Their ignorance leads them to believe in non-existent racial superiorities and unfathomable, but dangerous, conspiracy theories. Remember Pizzagate?
Trump’s narrow election win that year was not by popular ballot, where Democrat Hilary Clinton won with 2.8 million more votes, but by the Electoral College, where about 78,000 voters in three white counties in Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin handed it to him, according to data scientist Hamdan Azhar and the Cook Political Report. The Electoral College, by the way, was formed in part so slave-holding states could have equal representation because roughly 40 percent of the South’s population was comprised of slaves who, of course, could not vote.
Trump’s four years as president sharpened racial tensions stoked by his social media rants on Twitter and rally speeches: increased killings by police of innocent African Americans and Hispanics, voter suppression in Republican strongholds, a ban on Muslims who seek to enter the country, separating Central and South American immigrant children from their parents, gassing peaceful Black Lives Matter protestors, a white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Va. during which a white supremacists killed a white woman activist, and on.
Trump’s divisiveness emboldened some of his gun-toting racist, anti-Semitic supporters to attack non-whites and non-Christian whites. As they did in 2016, the Klan again endorsed him in 2020.
Trump’s election in 2016, the subsequent increase in white supremacist organizations and activities, and the insurrection by his (predominantly) white supporters on Jan. 6, 2021 that followed his defeat for a second term in both the popular and Electoral College vote—all dying gasps from a white cohort that believes whites should always dominate American society.
This misguided belief that the United States is reserved for white European descendants to rule socially and politically was diminished by Democrat Joe Biden’s defeat of Trump, 51.3% to 46.9%, in 2020.
Nonetheless, it remains a dangerous belief in the minds of a minority of white voters. Since the 2020 election, just nine months ago, predominantly white conservative Republicans in GOP-controlled states such as Georgia, which Biden won narrowly and where Democrats took two U.S. Senate seats (one of them Georgia’s first African American senator), are gulping for air as they take extraordinary steps to pass one bill after another to suppress minority voters.
Like elections, legislation has consequences. Enacting restrictive-voting laws is one thing, but put into practice, these laws could have an unintended consequence such as suppressing the vote for everyone, not just minority voters. Nevertheless, voting reform legislation now under debate in Congress should nullify some of the worst impulses of these state laws to ensure voting his accessible and fair for everyone.
White supremacy was never a general view of the Founding Fathers, although 17 of them owned slaves as did the nation’s first 12 presidents. However, they affirmed unequivocally that “all [people] men are created equal.” Despite this aspiration, racism has eaten away at the American soul for well over 200 years.
 |
| Black Lives Matter protestors in Ohio in 2020. A rude awakening awaits—within 10 years, demographic changes in the nation will cause about a 4% decline in the white majority (this does not include Hispanic or Latino), from about 59.7% to 55.8%. By 2045, the white population is expected to become a minority. The cry of “The South will rise again!” seemed possible not too long ago: Confederate flags flew from the capitol buildings of Southern states, U.S. military bases were named after Confederate generals, and across the South (not to mention parts of the north and west) stone and bronze edifices had been erected to honor slave owners, politicians and generals of the Confederacy. Despite Trump’s attempts to stop this movement last year, flags and monuments came down; Mississippi’s governor signed legislation to take down their Stars and Bars, and in Richmond, once the capital of the Confederacy, protestors toppled a statue of Jefferson Davis, the Confederate president, while the city’s mayor ordered the removal of other Confederate statues. The military promises to change military base names and the once dismissed Black Lives Matter protests against police brutality became a nationwide and international movement of people of all colors in 2020. In his post-presidency, as he toys with supporters about running for president again in 2024, Trump regretted not sending the military out to stop BLM from protesting, no doubt some red meat for his white supremacist supporters. That Trump decided not to issue the order is telling on two levels. First, the nation’s military leaders, in particular Gen. Mark Milley, told Trump BLM protests against racism were just that, protests, not an insurrection. That made him aware that “his generals” would not follow his order. Second, Americans of all color are standing up to what Time Magazine called the “Overdue Awakening” to systemic racism. Grant, despite having crushed the slave-holders’ rebellion, is nonetheless called out not only for owning a slave, but for his treatment of Jews during the Civil War and for waging an illegal war against the Plains Indians as president. In San Francisco, protestors toppled his statue. Grant was humble and compassionate. I wonder whether he would have thought.
In his memoir, Grant recalled the 1865 meeting at Appomattox, Va. when Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee surrendered to him: “I felt like anything rather than rejoicing at the downfall of a foe who had fought so long and valiantly, and had suffered so much for a cause, though that cause was, I believe, one of the worst for which a people ever fought, and one for which there was the least excuse.” This present period in our history may well be the final battle of the Civil War, when a South reckons with its slave-holding history instead of wallowing in a mythical past, and we enter the final days of systemic racism in the United States. |
