Public Monuments and Ulysses S. Grant’s Contested Legacy

On Memorial Day, three million people watched the first part of a three-episode documentary on the life of General and President Ulysses S. Grant. Three weeks later—on the much-publicized Juneteenth holiday, no less—a statue of Grant in San Francisco was vandalized and toppled. What gives?

The motivations for this act are still unknown as of this writing, but two things are clear. Despite the largely positive interpretation offered by the History Channel, this event might suggest that the debate over Grant’s legacy is far from settled. Equally important, the debate over commemorative monuments and statues is, for better or worse, moving beyond icons celebrating the Confederacy towards people and events celebrating United States history. There are no easy answers for what the nation’s commemorative landscape will look like moving forward, but re-examining Grant’s record on civil rights might provide some insights as to why his statue specifically may have been targeted.

Early speculation about the statue’s removal on Twitter and popular media revolved around Grant’s ownership of an enslaved man before the Civil War.[1] It is true that Grant acquired William Jones from his father-in-law, “Colonel” Frederick Dent, while living in St. Louis. For five years (1854-1859) Grant worked as a farmer at White Haven, an 850-acre plantation owned by his father-in-law and worked by upwards of thirty enslaved African Americans. On the one hand, defenders have claimed that Grant only owned Jones for one year. Allegedly concerned about his role in slavery, Grant proceeded to free Jones by signing a manumission paper at the St. Louis Courthouse on March 29, 1859. This manumission paper is the lone document tying Grant to the ownership of an enslaved person.[2] There is more to Grant’s relationship with slavery, however.

For one, the manumission paper Grant signed does not indicate when he acquired Jones. He could have owned Jones for five years or five days, and in any case the length of time does not diminish the fact that Grant owned human property at some point in his life. Moreover, the few existing letters from Grant’s time in St. Louis do not indicate his feelings towards slavery one way or the other. It is impossible to determine why he acquired Jones in the first place or why he chose to free him. Further complicating matters is that after Grant freed Jones in 1859, four enslaved people informally gifted from Colonel Dent to Grant’s wife Julia—Dan, Eliza, John, and Julia—continued to live with the Grants and serve their needs until the family chose to leave St. Louis for a new life in Galena, Illinois, in early 1860.[3]

Grant’s relationship with slavery while in St. Louis took other forms. When a neighbor died in 1854, Grant served as an appraiser for the family estate. This process included the appraisal of three enslaved people (Bill, Augustus, and Amanda), two of whom were later sold at the St. Louis Courthouse. Grant also hired out enslaved laborers to assist with his farming ventures. For example, recently discovered documentation indicates that one of the enslaved men Grant hired out in 1858 was George, a 21-year-old who had been the property of Frances Sublette, wife of a wealthy St. Louis fur trader.[4] Politically, Grant had never voted in an election while a member of the U.S. Army. He recalled in his Personal Memoirs, however, that while he had been “a Whig by education and a great admirer of Mr. [Henry] Clay,” he chose to vote for Democrat James Buchanan in the 1856 presidential election. “The Republican Party was regarded in the South and the Border States not only as opposed to the extension of slavery, but as favoring the compulsory abolition of the institution . . . sensible persons appeared to believe that emancipation meant social equality,” Grant recalled. Seeing Buchanan as the most nationally appealing candidate who could prevent Southern secession, “I therefore voted for James Buchanan for President.” Although he had not lived long enough in Illinois to vote in the 1860 election, Grant also acknowledged that he would have voted for Northern Democrat Stephen Douglas had he been eligible to do so.[5]

My recent article for The Journal of the Civil War Era provides an in-depth review of Grant’s relationship with slavery while living in St. Louis and can be downloaded here.

Despite these connections to slavery, it is fair to ask whether Grant’s prewar experiences define the entirety of his character and legacy. Grant’s remarkable political evolution during the Civil War and Reconstruction must be recognized. While originally opposed to a war against slavery and fearing the further alienation of white Southerners, Grant came to understand that emancipation was necessary as a war measure by 1863. He understood that African Americans were anxious to provide aid and intelligence to the U.S. military. He welcomed their entrance into the ranks of the Union Army. During the Vicksburg campaign, Grant worked with Chaplain John Eaton to establish refugee camps and education for African Americans in the surrounding area. He also took a principled stand by ending prisoner-of-war exchanges with the Confederacy after it was discovered that Black soldiers were considered “fugitive slaves” by the Confederate government and sold back into slavery (or in some cases outright executed).[6]

During Reconstruction, Grant gradually transitioned to the Republican Party. He originally opposed Black male voting rights, believing that “a time of probation, in which the ex-slaves could prepare themselves for the privileges of citizenship” was necessary, but came to believe by 1868 that African Americans were the most loyal Unionists in the South and that military service had established a right to vote for Black men. When the 15^th Amendment banning racial discrimination at the ballot box was ratified in March 1870, Grant declared it to be “the greatest civil change[,] and constitutes the most important event that has occurred since the nation came into life.” As such, he implored his fellow white Americans to “withhold no privilege of advancement to the new citizen” and to treat Black Americans with dignity and respect. Ultimately, few white men had a larger role in promoting civil and political rights during Reconstruction than Grant. Civil rights leader Frederick Douglass later recalled that Grant had been not just a military leader, but a moral leader for the country through his advocacy for Black rights. Grant overcame “popular prejudice” and successfully adjusted himself “to new conditions, and adopt[ed] the lessons taught by the events of the hour,” argued Douglass.[7]

Seen in this light, one might view the Grant statue toppling on Juneteenth as a crucial mistake in the larger effort to promote racial justice in today’s United States. Defenders of Confederate statues now have an excuse to say “I told you so” and dismiss the larger goals of the movement to end systemic racism against Black Americans.

Grant’s legacy via commemoration has been challenged in the past, however. Although not a form of outright protest, the mausoleum in New York City where Ulysses and Julia Grant rest was regularly vandalized in the mid-1900s through neglect and inaction both by the city and the National Park Service. And few readers may remember that three years ago a small movement called for the destruction of Grant’s Tomb because of General Orders No. 11, which banned Jewish residents from Grant’s military lines in Kentucky, Tennessee, and Mississippi in December 1862. Although Grant later apologized for the order, the fury in 2017 was large enough that historian Jonathan Sarna wrote a passionate op-ed against the tomb’s destruction.[8]

We must also deal with the realities of Grant’s treatment of the various Indian nations who endured the pain of violated treaties, forced removal to poorly-run reservations, assimilationist policies that destroyed their traditional ways of living, and in some cases outright massacres of Indigenous populations at the hands of the U.S. Army during his presidency. The Reconstruction era was not just about the re-admittance of former Confederate states into the Union or the promotion of Black civil rights. It was also about the fulfillment of Manifest Destiny and the removal of all Indian nations as a political threat in the West. As NPS Cultural Affairs Manager Reed Robinson described in a recent interview, “Reconstruction was a process of Deconstruction for Indian Country.” The 13^th, 14^th, and 15^th Amendments, the Enforcement Acts used to shut down the KKK, and the Civil Rights Act of 1875 live in coexistence with the Camp Grant Massacre, the Modoc War, the Battle of Little Bighorn, and the Ponca Trail of Tears.[9]

Grant genuinely sought a peaceful solution. He believed that Indians had been “put upon” by whites and that fraud and corruption were widespread in the Bureau of Indian Affairs. Grant appointed his friend and Seneca Indian Ely S. Parker (Donehogawa) to head the BIA at the beginning of his presidency, established a Board of Indian Commissioners to oversee the BIA’s operations, and was praised by the chiefs of the Choctaw, Creek, Cherokee, and Chickasaw nations for his proposed policies. But Grant and the Republican Party’s vision of mass settlement, free labor farming, and a vast railroad infrastructure in the West was predicated on the belief that this land was theirs for the taking in the first place. Any Indian nations opposed to the Grant administration’s assimilation policies—including removal to reservations, a transition to farming, Christianization, and eventual “civilization” and U.S. citizenship—faced the prospect of military conflict and potential war. A recent article defending Grant may be correct in asserting that “perhaps there was a better way than Grant’s, but nobody ever found one,” but those words probably ring hollow to the Indian nations negatively affected by Grant’s policies.[10]

Seen in this light, we must remember that civil rights are not the exclusive purview of African Americans alone, but something that has meaning to everyone. Reconstruction was decidedly not a civil rights movement for the country’s indigenous population.

The transition from Confederate monuments as targets for removal to Columbus statues and now historic figures such as Washington, Lincoln, and Grant suggests that the debate is shifting. Concerns about celebrating slavery and secession in public commemorations are now being accompanied with concerns about settler colonialism, Manifest Destiny, Indian removal, and genocide. As a friend of mine recently stated, expanding the discussion to mistreatment of Indigenous populations blurs the distinction between right and wrong. “With a colonial nation, everybody’s hands are dirty to some degree. Who sets the bar? What will be the metric?” she asked. Indeed, one could make the case that someone like John Brown—as committed to social justice as anyone in the nineteenth century—nevertheless engaged in settler colonialism by fighting to make Kansas a free state. Frederick Douglass denigrated the Indian nations of the West by arguing that while Blacks achieved the “character of a civilized man,” backwards-looking Indians were not prepared for “civilization” and viewed “your cities . . . your steamboats, and your canals and railways and electric wires . . . with aversion.”[11]

Finally, a word about public monuments in general is warranted. While the seemingly indiscriminate vandalizing of monuments (which now includes the 54^th Massachusetts Memorial, abolitionist Hans Heg, and even guitar legend Stevie Ray Vaughn) raises important questions about the ways Americans choose to remember their past, it might be fair to ask whether erecting new monuments is an appropriate course moving forward. President John Quincy Adams once stated that “Democracy has no monuments. It strikes no medals; it bears the head of no man upon its coin; its very essence is iconoclastic.” Monuments, in Adams’ view, were undemocratic, coercive tools of monarchy. These troublesome icons demanded unquestioned fealty and promoted a version of history as simple hero-worship.[12] Are there better ways to utilize these public spaces in the future?

In public history, practitioners regularly preach the importance of highlighting multiple historical perspectives, “sharing authority” with communities in telling diverse stories, and thinking critically about the past. Most monuments fail to achieve these lofty goals. Regardless of how one might personally view Ulysses S. Grant’s legacy, most of the monuments erected in his honor probably do a poor job of telling the full story. While it is more than fair to be concerned about the future of public monuments, discussions about who, how, and why we honor certain historical figures must continue. Local communities should be empowered to make decisions for themselves about who they choose to honor. And perhaps most importantly, these conversations must be accompanied with calls for increased funding to promote the teaching of history in public education, historical sites, and museums around the United States.

 

[1] Riviano Barros, Joe (@jrivianob). 2020. “Nearby statue of Ulysses S. Grant is also toppled. He was a slave owner too, before the Civil War. That’s three for three this night.” Twitter, June 19, 2020, 11:15PM. https://twitter.com/jrivanob/status/1274194145838428160; Marty Johnson, “Protestors Tear Down Statues of Ulysses S. Grant, National Anthem Lyricist Francis Scott Key, The Hill, June 20, 2020, accessed June 30, 2020. https://thehill.com/homenews/state-watch/503685-protesters-tear-down-statues-of-union-general-ulysses-s-grant-national

[2] The text of the manumission document can be found in John Y. Simon, ed., The Papers of Ulysses S. Grant, Volume 1: 1837-1861 (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1967), 347.

[3] On Dan, Eliza, John, and Julia, see Julia Dent Grant, The Personal Memoirs of Julia Dent Grant (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1975), 82-83.

[4] Nicholas W. Sacco, “I Never Was An Abolitionist: Ulysses S. Grant and Slavery, 1854-1863” The Journal of the Civil War Era 9, number 3 (September 2019), 410-437.

[5] Ulysses S. Grant, Personal Memoirs of U.S. Grant, Volume 1 (New York: Charles L. Webster & Co., 1885), 212-216.

[6] Brooks D. Simpson, Ulysses S. Grant: Triumph Over Adversity, 1822-1865 (New York: Houghton Mifflin Co., 2000), 162-163, 375.

[7] “Ulysses S. Grant & the 15^th Amendment,” National Park Service, April 8, 2020, accessed June 28, 2020. https://www.nps.gov/articles/ulysses-s-grant-the-15th-amendment.htm; Frederick Douglass, Life and Times of Frederick Douglass (Hartford: Park Publishing, 1881), 433-435.

[8] On Grant’s Tomb, see Joan Waugh, U.S. Grant: American Hero, American Myth (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009), 261-302; Jonathan Sarna, “Why the Rush to Tear Down Grant’s Tomb is Ignorant,” Forward, August 24, 2017, accessed June 25, 2020. https://forward.com/opinion/380997/why-the-rush-to-tear-down-grants-tomb-is-ignorant/

[9] “Ranger Chat with Reed Robinson,” National Park Service, 22:31, May 15, 2020, accessed June 30, 2020. https://www.nps.gov/media/video/view.htm?id=0A2D0554-0ABB-8E2B-2AFC516ED68734E2; see also Philip Weeks, “Farewell, My Nation”: American Indians in the United States in the Nineteenth Century (Wheeling, IL: Harlan Davidson Publishing, 1990).  

[10] See Mary Stockwell, Interrupted Odyssey: Ulysses S. Grant and the American Indians (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press), 2018; C. Joseph Genetin-Pilawa, Crooked Paths to Allotment: The Fight Over Federal Indian Policy After the Civil War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012); Stephen Kantrowitz, “’Not Quite Constitutionalized’: The Meanings of ‘Civilization’ and the Limits of Native American Citizenship” in Gregory P. Downs and Kate Masur, eds., The World the Civil War Made (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2015), 75-105; Dan McLaughlin, “In Defense of Ulysses S. Grant,” National Review, June 23, 2020, accessed June 25, 2020. https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/06/in-defense-of-ulysses-s-grant/?fbclid=IwAR16JuU1M81WdR4tleNBu83RZ45T2rbwRZ_hxQ1FLMsU4BifUt1IBJIToDI  

[11] Douglass quoted in David Blight, Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2018), 486.

[12] Adams quoted in Kirk Savage, Monument Wars: Washington, D.C., The National Mall, and the Transformation of the Memorial Landscape(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011), 1.