Much of American Ulysses: A Life of Ulysses S. Grant is devoted to Reconstruction. The North beat the South militarily in just four years but then spent at least 12 years with the army running around imprisoning unconvinced Confederates, removing elected local and state politicians, etc.
Grant negotiated a surrender that prevented the Federals from prosecuting the Confederate military officers:
To further Lee’s letter and application, Grant decided to speak with the president. One of the first things out of [Andrew] Johnson’s mouth was his determination “to make all treason odious.” He asked, “When can these men be tried?” “Never,” Grant responded, “unless they violate their paroles.” He told Johnson he had made “certain terms” with Lee. If “I had told him and his army…they would be open to arrest, trial, and execution for treason, Lee would never have surrendered, and we should have lost many lives in destroying him.” Shaken, Grant walked back to his headquarters and described his conversation with his staff: “I will not stay in the army if they break the pledges that I made.” The bottom line: “I will keep my word.” Recognizing Grant’s enormous popularity, Johnson gave in and directed Attorney General Speed to drop the charges against Lee. On the same day, Grant wrote Lee to inform him that his word at Appomattox would be honored. In the weeks that followed, scores of Confederate officers who trusted Grant applied for pardons through him.
Even the KKK was initially pretty harmless:
Although the Ku Klux Klan ultimately symbolized white terrorism in the post–Civil War South, the group did not start out that way. The Klan was organized in 1866 in Pulaski, Tennessee, a market town near the Alabama border, by six young Confederate veterans who wanted to establish a social club. A few college men among them, recalling the Greek-letter fraternities then becoming popular in the South, suggested the group adopt the Greek kuklos, meaning “circle” or “band,” and then extend it by alliteration to “Ku Klux Klan.”
But fights broke out anew with unpersuaded locals:
The Richmond Examiner, the loudest voice of dissent in the Confederate capital during the war, continued its combative tone after the war. When Grant learned the Examiner reprimanded Richmond women for attending a ball hosted by Union general Alfred Terry, he instructed Terry to “take immediate Military possession” of “the dangerously inflammatory” paper and to “prohibit the publication of the paper until further orders.” Examiner editor H. Rives Pollard hurried to Washington to speak with Johnson. After meeting Pollard, Johnson referred Pollard to Grant, requesting if he “ ‘makes satisfactory explanation,’ and promises to do better hereafter, you will be as moderate with him as possible.” Later that day, Pollard wrote Johnson promising “to give a cordial support to the Union, the Constitution & the laws of the land.” Sensing an opening, Pollard concluded, “The policy of your administration will continue to receive the support of the journal.” Grant did not buy Pollard’s “explanation.” That day he wrote Pollard a letter, which he also sent to the president. “The course of the ‘Examiner’ in every number which I have seen has been such as to foster and increase the ill feeling existing towards the Government of the United States.” Grant believed “it to be for the best interests of the whole people, North and South, to suppress such utterances.” Anticipating Johnson’s question—under what legal authority?—he answered, “The power certainly does exist where martial law prevails and will be exercised.”
One year after Appomattox, Grant had grown concerned that the magnanimous peace he had negotiated was stalling, if not stopped. On April 2, 1866, Johnson had issued a proclamation declaring that the “insurrection…is at an end.” His order precipitously reestablished civil rule throughout an increasingly chaotic South. At Johnson’s direction, Stanton issued General Orders No. 26 on May 1, 1866, directing military courts to give up their authority to civilian courts. Grant read with alarm this proclamation that ended martial law and military tribunals “except in cases of actual necessity”—the meaning of which phrase would become hotly debated in the coming months. In an interview with The New York Times in May, Grant declared, “I find that those parts of the South which have not felt the war…are much less disposed to accept the situation in good faith than those portions which have been literally overrun by fire and sword. A year ago, they were willing to do anything; now they regard themselves as masters of the situation.” On the anniversary of the triumphant grand march in Washington, Grant understood how much had changed in the South in the short span of one year.
Appeals began arriving from southern governors requesting both withdrawal of federal troops and permission to replace them with state militias. When Johnson forwarded a request from the legislature of Mississippi, Grant replied, “The condition of things in the State of Mississippi, does not warrant the belief that the civil authorities of that State ‘are amply sufficient to execute the laws and good order.’ ” When a similar request came from the governor of Alabama, George Thomas, departmental commander, prepared to approve the governor’s request but passed it up the chain of command. Grant countermanded the decision of a senior commander. “For the present,” he responded, “and until there is full security for equitably maintaining the rights and safety of all classes of citizens in the states lately in rebellion, I would not recommend the withdrawal of United States Troops from them.”
States had to ratify the Fourteenth Amendment to get back into Congress. A lot more time and effort was spent insisting that people support this amendment than was put into working out the long-term consequences in an era of trains and steamships. Much of the current fight over immigration seems to stem from the first sentence of the amendment:
All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.
They couldn’t imagine a U.S. with 325 million residents and transportation so cheap and fast that some of the world’s poorest people would be able to show up here, have babies, and thus become parents of U.S. citizens.
The Federal government and military exercised more direct control over Indian-related issues and Grant was reasonably effective in changing U.S. policies toward the people from whom we stole the land that we hadn’t stolen from Mexico:
In his conclusion, Grant engaged two vexing national issues. First, he promised the “proper treatment of the original occupants of this land—the Indians.” He favored “any course toward them which tends to their civilization and ultimate citizenship.” No president had ever discussed the rights of American Indians in an inaugural address.
At the beginning of Grant’s administration, the nation’s policy toward Indians roiled in turmoil. More than 250,000 Indians, living in more than one hundred tribes and governed by some 370 treaties, had been pushed involuntarily west of the Mississippi. A mosaic of different languages, religions, and forms of governance, Indians, as the first inhabitants of the land, confronted the menacing advance of white settlers lured by gold and new western lands and protected by twenty thousand soldiers.
Grant had seen the clash of civilizations firsthand on his inspection tour of the Great Plains nine months earlier in the summer of 1868. He witnessed white settlers heading west in ever-increasing numbers. He worried about the prospect of increasing conflicts between Indians and settlers. If Grant had earlier pitied the Indians, now he had a passion to find a solution to a long-simmering problem.
Grant read first [from the new Board of Indian Commissioners] report in November with interest. It began by boldly acknowledging that the history of the United States’ dealings with Indians was “a shameful record of broken treaties and unfulfilled promises.” Challenging prevailing opinion, “the testimony…is on record…that, in our Indian wars, almost without exception, the first aggressions have been made by the white men.” The report further declared, “Paradoxical as it may seem, the white man has been the chief obstacle in the way of Indian civilization.” The main body of the report consisted of proposals. It recommended that Indians live on reservations and the United States eliminate the treaty system, enhance schools, and encourage Christian missions.
Grant had a similar dream to Martin Luther King’s, albeit expressed in more prosaic terms:
… after his reelection, Grant welcomed a delegation of African American leaders from Philadelphia to the White House. They came to thank him, declaring he was “the first President of the United States elected by the whole people.” They wanted him to know that for them he represented “the practical embodiment of our republican theories.” Grant responded, “In your desire to obtain all the rights of citizens I fully sympathize.” He spelled out what he meant: “A ticket on a railroad or other conveyance should entitle you to all that it does other men.” In that spirit he told them, “I wish that every voter of the United States should stand in all respects alike. It must come
Grant’s dream wasn’t realized until the Eisenhower era of desegregation of schools and public transit at the earliest. That’s 1865 to 1957.
Maybe Americans who disagreed would have been convinced faster if they’d had Facebook and Meryl Streep?
How about political affiliation? An African-American’s vote could be predicted with near-certainty in Grant’s day. He looked forward to that ending: “Treat the negro as a citizen and a voter, as he is and must remain, and soon parties will be divided, not on the color line, but on principle. Then we shall have no complaint of sectional interference.” What about in the last few elections? Black Americans voted for Obama by a 95:4 ratio in 2008, a 93:6 ratio in 2012, and for Hillary 88:8 in 2016.
More: read Much of American Ulysses: A Life of Ulysses S. Grant
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