How a champion of slavery became the Civil War’s most famous figure

One hundred fifty years ago, in Appomattox Court House, Virginia, Ulysses S. Grant won the Civil War.* His chief opponent, Gen. Robert E. Lee of the Confederate States, had surrendered, all but ending the rebellion that claimed hundreds of thousands of lives but freed millions more.

But this was just the beginning of Grant’s career. Three years later, after Abraham Lincoln’s assassination and the terrible tenure of Andrew Johnson, he was elected president and served two terms, leaving office as a celebrated statesman. Afterward, he would manage a bank, lose his wealth, and die from cancer, although not before penning the greatest memoir of any former president. But this isn’t the end of his story; Grant would die a second death of sorts, as opponents reduced his life to its worst qualities: His bloody tactics came to the forefront, as did his drinking and the corruption in his administration. There are few monuments to Grant, and they are mostly ignored.

How did the hero of the war become a quasi-ignominious figure, and how did the champion of Southern slavery become, if not the war’s hero, its most popular figure?

By contrast, Robert E. Lee didn’t have Grant’s long career in public life. He died in 1870, just a few years after the war. But in his short tenure as president of what’s now Washington and Lee University in Lexington, Virginia, he became a Southern saint, never defeated, and a man who surrendered his army with honor and dignity.

In death, this part of Lee would subsume the whole person. In 1890, when ex-Confederates erected a monument to Lee in the middle of Richmond, Virginia—the old Confederate capital—he would stand as an avatar for the Old South, the symbol of a romantic age.

At present, there are Lee memorials across the South: highways, parks, monuments, and state commemorations. And in popular memory, he remains a figure of admiration, an example of duty, honor, and chivalry.

To millions of Americans, 150 years after the end of the Civil War, Lee is a role model and Grant is—despite his gifted generalship and consequential presidency—an embarrassment. What happened? How did the hero of the war become a quasi-ignominious figure, and how did the champion of Southern slavery become, if not the war’s hero, its most popular figure?

The answer begins with Reconstruction. As best as possible, President Grant was a firm leader of Reconstruction America. Faced with the titanic challenge of integrating freedmen into American politics, he attacked the problem with characteristic clarity and flexibility. He proposed civil rights legislation (and would be the last president to do so until Dwight D. Eisenhower, nearly a century later) and deployed troops to hot spots across the South, to defend black Americans from white supremacist violence.* And while there were failures—at times he was too passive in the face of white violence, too paralyzed by petty politics—there were real victories too.

After Congress passed the Enforcement Acts—criminal codes that protected blacks’ 14th and 15th Amendment rights to vote, hold office, serve on juries, and receive equal protection of laws—Grant authorized federal troops to confront the Ku Klux Klan and other groups of anti-black terrorists. Declaring them “insurgents … in rebellion against the authority of the United States,” Grant and his subordinates—most notably Attorney General Amos Ackerman and the newly formed Department of Justice—broke the Klan and restored some peace to the Republican South.

In using federal power to prosecute white supremacists and support Reconstruction governments, Grant had tied his fortunes to those of freedmen and their allies. They were grateful. Grant won re-election in 1872 with the vast backing of black voters in the South, as well as former Union soldiers in the North. Appalled by his use of force in the South, his enemies dogged him as an enemy of liberty. Indeed, for as much as scandal plagued his administration, it’s also true that many cries of corruption came from angry and aggrieved Democrats, who attacked military intervention in the South as “corrupt” and “unjust.” Opponents in the North and South reviled Grant as a “tyrant” who imposed so-called “black domination” on an innocent South.

Grant wasn’t blind to his critics, and he devoted his presidency and post-presidency to defending both his record as general and the aims of the war he won. “While I would do nothing to revive unhappy memories in the South,” he once declared, “I do not like to see our soldiers apologize for the war.”

Facing him was a phalanx of Southern sympathizers and former Confederates, from ex-president Jefferson Davis to polemical writers like Edward Pollard, who would give the name “Lost Cause” to the movement to redeem and defend the former Confederacy. Born out of grief and furthered by a generation of organizations (like United Confederate Veterans and the United Daughters of the Confederacy), proponents of the Lost Cause would wage a battle for the nation’s memory of the war.

To them it was not a rebellion or a fight for slavery; it was a noble battle for constitutional ideals. As Davis put it in his two-volume memoir and defense of the Southern cause, The Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government, slavery “was in no wise the cause of the conflict, but only an incident,” and the South was fighting against “unlimited, despotic power” of the federal government and its “tremendous and sweeping usurpation” of states’ rights.

Which brings us to Lee, who—in his surrender at Appomattox—gave raw materials to the Lost Cause. “After four years of arduous service marked by unsurpassed courage and fortitude, the Army of Northern Virginia has been compelled to yield to overwhelming numbers and resources,” wrote Lee in his farewell address. “You will take with you the satisfaction that proceeds from a consciousness of duty faithfully performed; and I earnestly pray that a Merciful God will extend to you His blessings and protection.”

Not only would this order help cement Lee as a Southern icon—as historian David Blight writes in Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory, Lost Cause advocates would canonize Lee as a “blameless Christian soldier, a paragon of manly virtue and duty who soared above politics”—but it would fuel other narratives: that the nation should honor Southern bravery, that the Union’s victory was one of numerical superiority and not tactical skill (it’s in this that we see the claim that Grant was a “butcher” of men, despite all evidence to the contrary), that Reconstruction was a disaster of federal overreach, and that white supremacy was the proper order of things in the United States.

And in at least the case of Southern bravery, Lost Causers would find help from Grant, who admired Lee and the soldiers he led. “I felt like anything rather than rejoicing at the downfall of a foe who had fought so long and valiantly, and had suffered so much for a cause, though that cause was, I believe, one of the worst for which a people ever fought, and one for which there was the least excuse,” Grant wrote in an oft-quoted passage of his memoirs. “I do not question, however, the sincerity of the great mass of those who were opposed to us.”