Flashcard saints and drunkards

Book examines Grant’s crackdown on the Klan’s violence

For a few years I thought Ulysses S. Grant was a “slovenly drunk and a bad general” because a high school history teacher told us so.

By contrast, Robert E. Lee was a principled gentlemanly military genius who, despite his personal distaste for the peculiar institution of slavery, felt compelled to resign his commission in the U.S. Army and assume leadership of the Army of Virginia because he could not countenance the overreach of the federal government — because the states had rights.

I suspect that these opinions are not too far off what a lot of Southerners — a lot of Arkansans — think today. Even today (cue presidential hopeful Nikki Haley) there are those willing to downplay or outright deny the fact that the Civil War was fought over slavery.

You will still find Lost Cause apologists who will contend, as John Wilkes Booth did in his diary, that the South was not fighting for “the continuance of slavery” but for some cause as “noble and far greater than those that urged” the Revolutionary fathers on.

Those people choose to overlook that Booth also called slavery “one of the greatest blessings (both for [slaves] and us), that God has ever bestowed upon a favored nation” and that, as some textbooks currently in use in the country echo, slaves in the U.S. were elevated and enlightened “above their race elsewhere” and benefited from their subjugation. Even today this occasionally pops up as a talking point among those anxious not to apologize for ancestors they never knew.

The truth is more nuanced than a textbook’s paragraph; one could spend years plumbing the vagaries of character of these two 19th-century icons. Much of what I know of Lee is impressive, but there is make-believe in the popular conception of him as a kind of genial saint. He was a complex and sometimes hard man and — like Grant — he failed to transcend his times.

Born into Virginia aristocracy in 1807, Lee’s father was a hero of the Revolution and the state’s governor. Lee married the daughter of George Washington’s adopted son. He took his honor seriously, and managed to graduate from West

Point without accumulating a single disciplinary demerit, an almost impossible accomplishment given the byzantine and arbitrary rules set for the conduct of cadets.

He was a great military leader, and after the Civil War broke out he chose Virginia over the Union and — until Gettysburg — simply out-maneuvered superior Union forces. His concise farewell to his troops after surrendering at Appomattox was remarkable for its graciousness and sanity as he urged his soldiers to accept the war’s outcome and return peacefully to their homes, without undertaking guerrilla actions to continue the struggle.

A WHITE SUPREMACIST

But there is also no reason to doubt he was a white supremacist, as most white people of his time were. He owned a small number of slaves in his lifetime, and while he considered himself a paternalistic master he was at times severe in his punishments, especially on recaptured runaways. Publicly, he was pretty much silent on the subject, which allows the wishful to believe what they will. But all his serious biographers quote a letter he wrote to his wife in 1856, in which he described slavery as an evil, but one more damaging to the souls of white folks than to those they enslaved.

Blacks were elevated by the “painful discipline” their servitude forced on them; their enslavement allowed them the opportunity to know the gospel of Jesus Christ. Slavery would one day end — it had ended in the rest of the “civilized” world — but its end was in God’s hands. In the meantime, the abolitionist agitators were worse than the slavers as they threatened the liberty of white Southerners by promoting sectional hatred.

In the 1860 presidential election, Lee supported Southern Democrat John C. Breckinridge, the extreme pro-slavery candidate, instead of more moderate Southerner John Bell, who carried Virginia in the election.

Bell was an anti-secessionist, pro-slavery candidate. The other candidate was Abraham Lincoln, who won largely because Bell and Breckinridge split the Southern vote, with Bell winning most of the border states and Breckinridge the Deep South.

One other irony rarely discussed in high school history classes is that while Lincoln is hailed for saving the Union, had either Breckinridge or Bell won in 1860, a civil war might have been avoided. But slavery was not — as some will suggest — being gradually phased out by the South in 1860; it was firmly entrenched. The “compensated emancipation” plan that Lincoln developed in the 1840s and tried to implement in 1862 would have kept slavery around in some form until 1895.

During the Gettysburg campaign, Lee did not order his soldiers to refrain from kidnapping free Black farmers and selling them back into slavery. In the years after the war he made it clear he opposed enfranchising former slaves. He told a Congressional committee he hoped Virginia would one day be “rid” of Blacks. And when he was urged to condemn the terrorism of the Ku Klux Klan during Reconstruction, he remained silent.

Can we agree that Lee was a complicated individual?

ROMANTICIZING LEE IN LITERATURE

A lot of what we think we know about him comes from straight-up hagiography, such as the 1898 book “The Life of General Robert E. Lee For Children, In Easy Words” written by Virginia educator Mary Williamson with the intent of teaching generations of young people about Lee’s sterling character. Williamson’s life of Lee was part of her “A Confederate Trilogy for Young Readers,” an omnibus edition that also contains a short story first published in 1867 as “General Lee and Santa Claus.”

Williamson’s book was not the worst offender; in the 1930s Douglas Southall Freeman, a historian who edited the Richmond News Leader for decades, wrote a four-volume Pulitzer Prize-winning biography that came to be considered the definitive account of Lee’s life. This, despite the fact that Freeman actually warned readers not to look for any signs of ambiguity or complexity in his subject. Excepting perhaps Jesus Christ, Lee was the most perfect man who ever lived.

While Freeman’s biography received universal praise at the time, it gave scant attention to Lee’s relationship with slavery. (It’s also worth noting that Freeman held certain dubious views. He promoted the eugenics movement and was a staunch segregationist who bitterly opposed interracial marriage. He once said the “greatest inheritance” was “clean blood, right-thinking ancestry.”)

. . .

Probably because Lee died in 1870, he’s almost entirely absent from Fergus M. Bordewich’s “Klan War: Ulysses S. Grant and the Battle to Save Reconstruction” (Knopf, $35), a compelling and revelatory examination of Grant’s crackdown on Klan violence in the South during his presidency.

While the prevailing notion is that the Klan grew gradually stronger in the years after the war, Bordewich writes that by the end of Grant’s first term, “the president could credibly claim he had broken the back of the Ku Klux Klan.”

But this apparent victory was short-lived; even as Grant began his second term in 1873, the political will to fight white supremacist terror groups was flagging.

ANOTHER COMPLEX FIGURE

Grant is a figure no less complex than Lee; never a abolitionist, he was vaguely anti-slavery but, after marrying into a family of Missouri planters, managed to himself own a slave named William Jones in the late 1850s. (In 1859, Grant went to the St. Louis Courthouse and wrote a manumission paper legally freeing Jones from slavery.) Grant once offered that he had no strong opinion one way or another on the subject of slavery.

Immediately after the end of the war, when he was still commander of the armed forces, Grant issued a reassuring report to President Andrew Johnson, who was anxious to proclaim the South largely rehabilitated. Grant’s “whitewash” (Bordewich’s term) was in contrast to a report written by former Union Gen. Carl Schurz, who found white Southerners unrepentant and delusional. Johnson suppressed Schurz’s report and embraced Grant’s.

While Grant might not have had strong thoughts on racial politics, he did have a thing about insurrection and murder, and despite Lee’s admonitions against guerilla warfare, after the Civil War ended, racial violence erupted all over the South as white supremacists attempted to push back against emancipated Blacks and their allies.

So after he became president, Grant set the federal government against the Klan, a kind of continuation of the Civil War. (Schurz eventually became an apologist for holdout Southerners. People are strange.)

One of the incidents Bordewich mentions is the alleged lynching of 24 prosperous Blacks who had built a community near Pine Bluff in 1866. While this incident has been cited by many historians, the actual evidence for it — which Bordewich details in the book — consists solely of a letter sent by a white Republican to anti-slavery U.S. Rep. Thaddeus Stevens of Pennsylvania.

The man reported that the morning after after he saw the night sky lit up by flames, he investigated and found the bodies of Black men and women hanging from the trees. “Sir, there must be something done or else I think the Rebels are going to rise again.”

While the Pine Bluff lynchings may be apocryphal, there were violent incidents all over the South. (In the Encyclopedia of Arkansas’ entry on the alleged lynchings, historian Nancy Snell Griffith quotes a January 1866 report where Edward W. Gannt, a resident of Hempstead County who was “once a bitter rebel, but who long since repented and has shown works meet for repentance,” predicted “there is no hope for the freedmen of Arkansas … They will be starved, murdered, or forced into a condition more horrible than the worst stages of slavery. Our people’s wrath over defeat would be poured upon the heads of the helpless ones once their slaves.”)

Immediately after the end of the war, when he was still commander of the armed forces, Grant issued a reassuring report to President Andrew Johnson, who was anxious to proclaim the South largely rehabilitated.

TERRORISM BY KLAN

“Racist foolery became floggings and beatings, and then lynchings and shootings, often of savage cruelty, accompanied by systematic torture, burnings, castrations and sexual humiliation,” Bordewich writes. While the Klansmen — often community leaders and politically connected citizens — attributed the violence to outliers and a few hotheads, the Grant administration determined there was a pattern of orchestrated, strategic terrorism aimed at exerting “political control.”

The saddest thing about “Klan War” is that it suggests the government could have broken the Klan and that the racial history of the past 150 years might be very different (though the book also demonstrates the sullen persistence of white supremacy). Are we where we are today because of a missed opportunity in the 19th century? Or is there some hate-bearing gene that infects our kind? Are we, as Bordewich suggests, always just a scratch away from “barbarism”?

And can we ever reconcile the contradictions within ourselves, much less through figures we can only know through books and scholarship? Can we ever accept that those iconic statues were people first, subject to folly and breathtaking hypocrisy even as they demonstrated remarkable courage and capability? Must we always reduce them to flashcard saints and drunkards?

And how will we ever teach a history in full so long as partisans of all stripes insist on enforcing their own brands of political correctness?