Joan Waugh: U.S. Grant: American Hero, American Myth

He fought to bridge a harsh partisan divide, and earned a place as America’s most beloved leader. He was no less admired outside his nation’s borders, though. For working-class Britons, he represented the triumph of free men in a true democracy, the opportunity to achieve greatness without being of royal birth. For the Emperor of Japan, it was a thrill just to meet him.

Whatever happened to the world’s most famous American?

At the time of his death, in 1885, Ulysses S. Grant held a dramatically different place in the nation’s memory of the Civil War than he does today. His two terms as president are now remembered only for what Edmund Wilson called “a whole phantasmagoria of insolent fraud”, with Grant himself the dimwit-in-chief. For many, even his military leadership has been recast as that of a drunk and a butcher, a disheveled savage in contrast to the gentlemanly Robert E. Lee. It is Lincoln who became the martyred saint and savior of the Union Cause; Grant, merely its blunt instrument.

Waugh shows how absurd that characterization would have been to Grant’s contemporaries, who ranked him with Washington and Lincoln as one of the three great heroes of American history. She traces Grant’s rapid ascension from obscure commands in the Western Theater to the head of the Union Army, earned through deft battlefield strategy and the ability to draw out the best in his trusted lieutenants; long before Lee’s elevation to nobility, north and south acclaimed Grant for his magnanimity as victor, and mourned his passing with nearly equal fervor. Waugh also reclaims Grant’s presidency from the dustbin of incompetency, identifying major achievements and progressive stands on civil rights, Indian policy, and public education.

Demonstrating how Civil War memory has been reshaped by subsequent trends like the Confederate romanticism of the “Lost Cause”, Waugh turns back the page to reveal Ulysses S. Grant as America once knew him, and makes the case for a fresh perspective of the general, statesman, and hero.

JOAN WAUGH, PhD, is a professor of history at the University of California at Los Angeles. She is also the co-editor of Wars within a War: Controversy and Conflict over the American Civil War.