The First Millennial President. What Millennials can learn from Ulysses…
By: Alex Garrett
Tags: Politics, Culture, BlackLivesMatter, History, Racism

There has always been more interest in Grant than other late-19th Century presidents. Grant has been Googled more often than Johnson, Hayes, Garfield, and Arthur in all 50 states for the past several years.

Screenshot:/Author. From Google Trends.

After all, the other four presidents who served from the mid-1860s until the mid-1880s were among the least memorable in our history.

In particular, Presidents Hayes (1877–81) and Arthur (1881–85) have been ranked among the most forgettable in our history — first in CNN, and again in Time.

Needless to say, interest in Grant surged when protesters tore down a statue of him in the Bay Area. But two ironies lie at the core of this direct action, carried out largely by young Black Lives Matter supporters (like me).

First, much has been made of the irony that BLM activists would topple a statue of Grant, since he was the single person most responsible for Black Americans’ upward climb from slaves to senators. Labeling Grant as a slaveholder may seem like a compelling justification for knocking down memorials that bear his likeness, but that’s a tough angle. In The Independent, Noah Berlatsky described some “less admirable aspects” of the 18th president’s “great evil”:

Grant’s wife had legal ownership of several Black people when he married her, and he himself kept a person in slavery for a year before freeing him at the start of the Civil War.

For what it’s worth, Grant owned one slave for less than a year, he freed him before the War, and Grant could have resolved severe financial hardship for his own growing family by simply selling the slave instead. Henry Brands — whose biographies of American leaders have twice been finalists for the Pulitzer Prize — wrote that Grant went to substantial lengths to avoid participating in chattel slavery (pp. 86–87):

Mary Robinson, Julia’s slave, was astonished to see a white man labor the way Grant did. “I have seen many farmers,” she remembered, “but I never saw one that worked harder than Mr. Grant.” . . . The more Grant sweated and strained, the farther he fell in the estimation of his Missouri neighbors, especially the neighbors whose opinion mattered most to Julia. The added difficulty was that Grant didn’t believe in the institution of slavery . . . . He couldn’t have freed his father-in-law’s slaves . . . . He eventually purchased a slave of his own because he couldn’t find other help. But he never got over the queasiness he felt from the ownership of another human. Her discomfort showed in his inability to get much work out of the slaves. “He was not a hand to manage Negroes,” a friend remembered. “He couldn’t force them to do anything. He was just so good and good tempered, and besides, he was not a slavery man.”

Photo by Library of Congress on Unsplash

Both Mr. Brands’ work and William McFeely’s Pulitzer-winning biography of Grant give the impression that Julia’s father all but forced the future president to profit from slave labor, and that Grant all but refused to accept the slave’s assistance. Perhaps even a tenuous connection to the cruelest institution in the history of the West justifies the toppling of Grant’s statue — to the extent that the removal achieved anything beyond a fleeting catharsis for a small number of people. But even if Grant’s status as the most successful anti-racist politician in American history doesn’t outweigh ownership of a slave, a fair appraisal of Grant’s legacy requires assessment of another anachronism.