Posted on 07/24/2015 2:30:32 PM PDT by the scotsman
'After Ulysses S. Grant, the 18th president of the United States, died 130 years ago today, a million and a half Americans watched his funeral procession. His mausoleum was a popular tourist attraction in New York City for decades. But for most of the 20th Century, historians and non-historians alike believed Grant was corrupt, drunken and incompetent, that he was one of the country's worst presidents, and that as a general, he was more lucky than good.
A generation of historians, led by Columbia's William A. Dunning, criticized Grant for backing Reconstruction, the federal government's attempt to protect the rights of black southerners in the 1860s and early 1870s. Black people, some Dunning school historians suggested, were unsuited for education, the vote, or holding office. Grant's critics were "determined the Civil War would be interpreted from the point of view of the Confederacy," said John F. Marszalek, a historian and executive director of the Ulysses S. Grant Association. "The idea that Grant would do things that would ensure citizenship rights for blacks was just awful and so he had to be knocked down."
Grant's "presidency was basically seen as corrupt, and it took place during Reconstruction, which was seen as basically the lowest point of American history," said Eric Foner, a civil war historian at Columbia University. "Whatever Grant did to protect former slaves was naïveté or worse."
In recent decades, that's all changed. The Grant you learned about in school isn't the one your kids will read about in their textbooks. And that's because historians are in the midst of a broad reassessment of Grant's legacy. In just nine years, between 2000 and 2009, Grant jumped 10 spots in a C-SPAN survey of historians' presidential rankings, from 33rd to 23rd -- a bigger jump than any other president.'
(Excerpt) Read more at huffingtonpost.com ...
It is very well written. Mark Twain thought it was a classic.
Yeah, how did he end up entombed in NYC?
At Appomattox Grant told his troops, upon the surrender: “They are our countrymen again.”
You have to admit, that is class.
I read that some time ago. Very interesting.
“A decent general, an awful president. He knew how to win on the battlefield, but he got rolled by evil men in the political arena.”
So very true.
“I say these things because I hate the Confederates.”
Then you must, of course, also hate the Founding Fathers, the Continental Army, etc. Because they did the same thing the Confederates did. One won, the other didn’t.
I have his picture hanging in my man cave, along with a door knob from one of his homes on a army post.
Not really an expert, but I think NYC railroad baron Jay Gould bought the broke Grant a home there.
Well, the parking lot, anyway.
Find out what Grant drinks and send a barrel of it to each of my other generals!
Abraham Lincoln (1809 - 1865)
It is a very good.
That is a classic! LOL
So the South would vote for Ginger and the North for Mary Ann or vice versa? : )
Stick to ice fishing not comedy.
Amen to that. From Grant by Jean Edward Smith: “. . ., on June 7, 1865 a federal grand jury sitting in Norfolk indicted Lee, Johnston, Longstreet, and a host of other Confederate generals for treason.” (Not surprisingly the New York Times began the crusade to try Lee for treason.)Grant was angry about this and reminded people that the terms he imposed at Appomattox “met with the hearty approval of the President at that time, and of the country generally.” But this wasn’t enough for President Johnson who declared he wanted “to make treason odious,” stating that Lee and other rebels had to face punishment. According to Hamlin Garland Grant who rarely lost his temper, was livid. Grant: “I have made certain terms to Lee, the best and only terms. If I had told him and his army that their liberty would be invaded, that 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. My terms of surrender were according to military law, and so long as General Lee observes his parole, I will never consent to his arrest. I will resign the command of the army rather than execute any order to arrest Lee or any of his commanders so long as they obey the law.” Johnson backed down. That’s not only class but magnanimity. Smith’s words are apt: “If Appomattox was Grant’s finest hour, his determination to protect those who surrendered there ranks a close second.” Just so. And lest we forget the late Shelby Foote, a unrepentant rebel, admired Grant and his “four o’clock in the morning courage.” I don’t understand the disdain with which people write about Grant. He was one of the greatest captains in history. He was totally without guile or pretense. There was nothing of the martinet about him. He was as unflappable and imperturbable as any general in history. He deserves better than what’s been written about him. I also find it interesting that John Singleton Mosby and Grant became good friends after the war. Yes, that Mosby, the Gray Ghost, who hung several Union cavalrymen in retaliation for Custer’s doing same to some of Mosby’s partisans. Grant truly meant it when he said, “Let us have peace.”
I was born and raised in Rochester, NY, and there was a Parker in my high school gym class (1960's). Wish I'd known about Ely Parker back then. I would have asked her if she was related because she was definitely Native-American.
And had that happened, Southern partisans would have taken to the mountains, the pine forests and the swamps to wage guerrilla warfare, and the Civil War would have continued as a low-intensity conflict, perhaps for decades.
There was plenty of barbarism in wars that occurred between 1648 and 1861--France's scorched-earth policy in the Rheinpfalz in 1688-1689, the bombing of Dresden by the Prussians in 1756, the Wyoming Valley Massacre in 1778, atrocities perpetrated by revolutionary France in the Vendée, by Napoleon in Spain, by the Mexicans in Texas, and on and on.
He did. He never allowed anyone to speak ill of Grant after the war.
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