John Thesis #6

by John Page

 

This truce was not really followed in intellectual discussions. Many upper class Southerners accused the North of being an occupying army, and they focused on their own suffering during the war.[1] Another aspect to this narrative is that the South had not truly been defeated on the battlefield.[2] They had been cheated of victory by the Union in some way. The “Lost Cause” had emerged as a historical force.

One way in which this mentality manifested itself was to make the Union Army and, by extension, the entire effort of reconstruction seems like a crime against the southern people defending their homes from foreign invaders. This narrative can be found even in more recent writings. Jacqueline Campbell, a scholar of women’s history, writes about how white women in the South reacted to Union armies fighting around their homes. She argues that the Union’s attempt to break the Southern Spirit through attrition warfare backfired. “This essay uses the destruction of the city [Columbia] as a case study to explore the concept of female honor and elite southern women’s relationship to the Confederate nation. It also tests a hypothesis that an initial wave of despondency might, in fact, be just the first step in a longer process of rededication and resistance .’”[3]

Campbell argues that the white Confederates’ views of the North grew worse as the war became bloodier. Their attitude went from viewing the North as an oppressive part of the nation to seeing the Union Army as a foreign occupier and group of barbarians. They gained a will to fight on as a result of seeing how their foes destroyed everything they owned. They didn’t see liberators but conquerors.  Campbell focuses on how the Southern civilian population felt helpless in the face of the Union Army. Campbell is trying to turn the normal narrative of the Civil War on its head. Instead of looking at how the South harmed people, she wants to look at what the North did to Southerners. She focuses on the war as a social issue and not a military one. This different focus helps shift how the war is perceived.

“Throughout this saturnalia, soldiers broke into houses, threatened the residents, destroyed their possessions, and made off with valuables, while “laughing, and saying coarse things, or talking in loud rough tones. ‘A ‘roaring stream of drunkards’ poured into Mrs. Ravenel’s home. They tore up her carpets, burst open her trunks, and took her goods. Yet although she described them as ‘plundering and raging,’ still they seemed ‘curiously civil and abstaining from personal insult.’ Many became convinced that these marauders were more interested in stealing goods than in abusing the white women with whom they came into contact. [4] ”

 

This reputation of the North stealing everything that they could would return in part during Grant’s term in office. He had many problems with officials trying to exploit their positions of power for financial gain. Many pro-southern newspapers used this stigma of greed to attack Grant and the North as a whole.

More positive writings focus on his attempts to advance civil rights and fight corruption in movement.[5] Overall, historians like Joan Waugh look at his ideals of how to achieve racial and sectional harmony and his desire to be a peace maker as well as a war winner. Other historians instead focus on how he failed to tame Congress and became swept up into scandals.

More positive historical writings focus on how the North fought a good fight in the war and its achievements in the post-bellum period. A heroic model of that time is reflected in how historians like Waugh write about him. Those who are critical of Grant, Philipp Abbott for example, instead look at all that was wrong in the “Gilded Age”. They treat Grant not as a hero, but as a sad little man who didn’t understand the “real world” of money and politics. Compared to Lincoln, Grant seems like a lesser reflection of his greatness.[6] To understand this divide in perceptions of Grant, we need to better understand the man himself and the time in which he lived.

After the war was over, a new struggle over what the war had meant and what would happened to the country next started to emerge. The struggle was over how the war was really won. Was it a triumph of the Northern Army or a trick of some kind that robbed the South of its rightful status as a nation of the world? The familiar arguments of the Lost Cause grew to haunt the Union as some individuals seemed unable to grasp the fact that the war was over. The general thread of the argument was that the former Confederacy had to keep fighting to keep their “institutions” intact as much as possible.[7] Grant mentioned how during the war, the desire to protect slavery even caused the Confederacy to lose valuable manpower as they wanted to keep African-Americans in a servile position instead of recruiting them into the South’s army.[8]

Another way of criticizing Grant was to make the claim that entire period was an aberration from the normal course of events. That Reconstruction was a huge mistake and that everything got better once the North came to its senses and stopped trying to control the South.[9] One historian who makes this claim was Woodrow Wilson.

“Normal conditions of government and of economic and intellectual life were at length restored. The period of reconstruction was past; Congress had ceased to exercise extra-constitutional powers ; natural legal conditions once more prevailed. [African American]…rule under unscrupulous adventurers had been finally put an end to in the South, and the natural, inevitable ascendancy of the whites, the responsible class, established. Something like the normal balance of national parties also had been restored; votes were beginning to lose their reminiscence of the war, and to become regardful first of all of questions of peace. Economic forces, too, recovering from the past, were gathering head for the future. The nation was made to realize this when it took stock of its resources at the great Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia. At last the country was homogeneous, and had subordinated every other sentiment to that of hope.” [10]

 

This position is one that tries to explain how the nation really wanted to ignore the question of race that caused division with the nation. This argument also holds that Grant’s attempts to fix the nation through this program were doomed to fail as it went against historical tides.[11] Wilson explains how the country grew stronger as the Courts and Congress started to roll back legislation that was the main force of Reconstruction, what he calls the “Force Bills”.[12] These were the legislation that was designed to combat the Klan and other groups bent on taking away the right of African Americans by any means necessary. Wilson argued that they were not needed anymore as the period of violence had passed.[13] Without a direct threat to the country, any laws that impede a person’s civil rights were wrong and needed to be removed. The whole period of Grant’s time in office was seen as unnatural to Wilson.[14] The idea of African-Americans being able to vote was outrageous to Wilson.

Wilson’s attitudes reflect that of his time. He lived during the lowest point of race relations and his racist comments on African-Americans help show the mindset of the time. Wilson gives an explanation for the white southern resistance to the changes to the country. He gives a clear explanation of what the rationale was for keeping African-Americans out of politics was. He argues that they would vote for whoever they were told and that they were corrupting the democratic process. This was also a criticism of Grant who is seen to leading a wider corruption of politics.  Wilson’s ideal America is one that has a strong division of race and class.[15] Despite his praise of unity, it is unity of the white supremacist terms only.[16] This is when Grant’s reputation had reached its lowest point.

While many white residents of the South saw the North as the aggressor even after reconstruction, many African-Americans saw this time as a chance to gain justice and freedom that they had been promised. Grant represented that promise to many people for both racial justice and white reconciliation. The gap in how Grant was viewed after his death is best looked at by examining one town. The town of Mobile, Alabama was one community that had a strong divide in how the war was remembered. Was it a time of hope for a better life, a time where all someone had was stolen, or a bloody killing of friends and loved ones or an aberration in the normal course of events?

All such attitudes could be found in the South even this long after the war and all of the political fallout. Harriet Doss is one scholar who has looked this issue though the lenses of the people of Mobile Alabama. According to her, the town of Mobile had a complex relationship with Grant both during the war and after his death.[17]

This mix of feelings of the white residents came from both a hatred of what the Union had done to the town and gratefulness for the economic benefits of the resulting peace.  African-American residents of the town respected what Grant had tried to do for them even though he fell far short of what was hoped or promised. Doss examines the mixed emotions of the time by comparing how newspapers in the region talked Grant’s death along with how his legacy should be remembered.[18] While many ex-confederates had a sense of being American again, they were unwilling to go as far as to make any memorial to Grant.[19] Doss says that the reason this was the case was that the white residents of the town were still aware of their own view of the past and did not see how they could fully honor the man was the symbol of the North, their oppressor. [20] However, they were willing to honor nation as a whole and Grant’s contribution to restoring the Union.[21]

Doss explains how the people of Mobile understood their recent history in a way that took both narratives into account. “To a degree unlikely in previous years, Mobile Democrats, at least in print, embraced the spirit of reconciliation that Grant had championed. Like Americans across the country, the Daily Register came to consider him the savior of the Union and, moreover, recognized the symbolic value of the entire nation’s grieving together.”[22]

More recent scholarship has challenged the narrative of there being an unbridgeable divide between the North and South. This new focus is on how the roles of Robert E. Lee and Ulysses S. Grant served as a unifying force after the war.[23] One writer on this topic is William Davis. He argues that war was noble in that each side had a hero that the other side respected.[24] Lee was the skilled aristocratic general, and Grant was the humble man raised to command. They are seen as representing the nation’s past and future.[25] The struggle was for the nation’s soul, but each man was a hero in his own way. The cause may have been suspect, but the soldiers were not. He argues that this perception of the war was beneficial to the country as a whole.[26] Both sides had positive traits. Thus, healing was possible. Once the war was over, both sides could see each other as Americans and not as foes.[27] Grant, as well as Lee, needed to be the heroic being that could represent as all that was good about their causes. [28]

The heroic idea of Grant does not fully translate to his career as president.  William Hessltine, a historian from the 1930s calls Grant the president “…a hero no longer.”[29]  This reflected the perception that Grant’s role as a general does not have any bearing on his role as a president. Hessltine was writing in the 1930s when there was a strong desire to emphasize the unity of the North and South and to act in response to finical troubles that were blamed on corruption in society.

There is strong evidence that Grant personally liked African-Americans and didn’t hold practically racist views for the time.[30] So any worsening of their general condition wouldn’t be intentional on his part. It was most likely that Grant wanted to preserve the legacy of Lincoln and ensure all that the Union had fought for would not be in vain and that would include protecting or expanding African-American rights.[31] Grant was a realist when it came to what people would or would not do when it came to this issue. Attitudes would not change overnight it would require a lot of work and some luck to change how society thought.

Grant explained how the North came to accept emancipation not from a moral shift but from anger at the South’s attempts to undo the sacrifices of the Civil War veteran.

Thus Mr. Johnson, fighting Congress on the one hand, and receiving the support of the South on the other, drove Congress, which was overwhelmingly republican, to the passing of first one measure and then another to restrict his power. There being a solid South on one side that was in accord with the political party in the North which had sympathized with the rebellion, it finally, in the judgment of Congress and of the majority of the legislatures of the States, became necessary to enfranchise the negro, in all his ignorance. In this work, I shall not discuss the question of how far the policy of Congress in this particular proved a wise one. It became an absolute necessity, however, because of the foolhardiness of the President and the blindness of the Southern people to their own interest. As to myself, while strongly favoring the course that would be the least humiliating to the people. [32]

 

A major part of that was destroying slavery and the racist attitudes that came with it. By removing slavery as a political issue, the nation could be helped, as the great divider of the North and South would be removed. This would hopefully reunite the two sections, as they would have nothing that was worth fighting over. [33] Based on his later actions Grant seems to more in favor of protecting the rights of all citizens but was restricted in what he could do in terms of what was acceptable to the general public. He had mentioned before of wanting to reward solders of all colors that had fought bravely for the nation, a statement that hinted at a feeling that all Americans should be treated fairly regardless of skin color.[34]

[1] Jacqueline, Campbell, G. “‘The Most Diabolical Act of All the Barbarous War’: Soldiers, Civilians, and the Burning of Columbia, February 1865.” (American Nineteenth Century History 3, no. 3: 2002). 53

[2] Davis,. XIX

[3] Cambell. 53

[4] Ibid,53

[5]Ethan Rafuse Still a Mystery? General Grant and the Historians. (The Journal of Military History Vol. 71, No. 3, 2006 ) 852

[6] Abbot. 131

[7] Waugh, 148

[8] Grant, 599

[9] Wilson, Woodrow. Division and Reunion 1829-1889. (Albert Bushnell Hart. Logs, Green and Co. New York. 1893) 273

[10] Ibid

[11] Ibid. 274

[12] Ibid

[13] Ibid. 274

[14] Ibid. 275

[15] Ibid

[16] Ibid. 260

[17] Amos Doss, Harriet E. Commerce, Nationalism, and Unionism: Mobilians’ Observances of the Death of U.S. Grant.(Alabama Review 55, no. 2 April 2002). 123

[18] Ibid

[19] Doss, 126-127

[20] Ibis, 127

[21] Ibid, 123

[22] Ibid 126

[23] Ulysses. S Grant III . “General Ulysses S. Grant: A Close-Up” (Military Affairs. Vol. 17, No. 2 Summer, 1953),  66

[24] Davis. XVII

[25] Ibid

[26] Ibid, XX

[27] Ibid, XIX

[28] Ibid

[29]William,Hessltin,. “Ulysses S. Grant Politician”.( New York. Dod, Mead and Company. 1935) VII

[30] Throughout his discussions of the Civil War he mentions how freed slaves helped his army and is outraged by a massacre of Black soldiers. Grant, 1624, 1150. When describing the Fort Pillow massacre he talks about how its garrison fought bravely and did not deserve to be killed the way they were killed.

[31] Grant, 1758

[32] Grant, 1759-1760

[33] Grant III, 68

[34] Ibid , 69