Confederate "Heritage" Month 2020, April 27: Ulysses Grant's funeral and white North-South reconciliation

There's an excellent blog called Civil War Memory by Kevin Levin. Kevin is a historian and author of Searching for Black Confederates: The Civil War's Most Persistent Myth (2019). As the title suggests, he focuses a lot on the process of memory formation in the way Americans collectively remember the Civil War.

As he notes in Civil War Memory 101 (Week 6) 04/26/2020, he's currently conducting a Twitter discussion on a book by Caroline Janney, Remembering the Civil War: Reconciliation and the Limits of Reunion (2013), which also deals with the building of Civil War memory. He mentions in that post another book, U.S. Grant-American Hero, American Myth by Joan Waugh (2013).

Grant was the most important Union general in the Civil War. Lincoln was frustrated with a number of his generals, probably most notoriously George McClellan, who Lincoln and apparently most historians since have seen as overly conservative in his approach. Lincoln finally removed him from command in late 1862. Lincoln famously praised Grant for what he found an excellent qualification, "I can't spare this man – he fights."

After Andrew Johnson did all he could as President to block serious Reconstruction efforts in the South, Grant was elected President as a Republican and was pro-Reconstruction. But during the time he served as President (1869-1877), he also proved to be unwilling to use the Army to the extent necessary to defeat the Ku Klux Klan and similar white terrorist groups the conducted terror campaigns against blacks and worked to overthrow the elected, democratic Reconstruction state governments.

To me, it's counterintuitive that Grant's death in 1885 would be taken as a moment of national reconciliation, i.e., reconciliation between the white majorities in the North and South on the basis of suppressing the basic rights of black citizens, especially in the former Confederate states. In the chapter of her book called, "Pageantry of Woe: The Funeral of U.S. Grant," Waugh explains that exactly that happened:

“There is perhaps no parallel in the history of state funerals,” another observer stated, “where so many orations were delivered as at yesterday’s obsequies.” The thousands of eulogies and obituaries for Grant stressed his good Christian moral character, his role in saving and preserving the Union, and his magnanimity at Appomattox.

The praise for the last was especially loud, as eulogists likened the sentiment for sectional reconciliation engendered by Grant’s death to a final, and happy, ending to the tragic national drama begun by the Civil War. One minister captured a powerful and popular theme of Grant’s life: “By a single act Gen’l Grant put himself above the wisest of American statesmen.

That act was the terms he offered to Lee for the surrender of his Army. ... In a few, clear, simple lines [he] solved at once the problem of peace, and the possible unity and fraternity of the American people.” A speaker at a memorial service declared, “That grand funeral pageant ... owed its main impressiveness to the evidence it afforded ... [of] a restored National Union, a renewed brotherhood among the people, and a renewed sisterhood among the States.”

Richard Brookhiser mentions the key terms of that surrender in Victory incomplete: Lasting struggle after Civil War New York Post 04/08/2015:

In the parlor at Appomattox, Lee asked for the Union’s terms. Grant wrote out a generous paragraph. Officers would promise that neither they nor their men would take up arms against the United States; long guns and artillery were to be stacked, parked and surrendered.

But ex-rebels could keep their side arms and their mounts. Asking them to give up their pistols and swords, Grant wrote later, would have been “an unnecessary humiliation,” and Southern men, most of them farmers, needed their horses and mules for spring plowing.

No doubt the former Confederate soldiers were happy their could keep arms. Unfortunately for the future of democracy in the South, many of those trained soldiers went on to use their arms on behalf of anti-Reconstruction terror groups. At times during the worst crises leading up to the overthrow of the Reconstruction governments, the fact that the terrorist groups had such a large store of arms at their disposal was a critical factor.

Waugh notes that even 20 years after the war, it seems counterintuitive that Southerners as well as Northerners would celebrate Grant as a unifying figure, because the Lost Cause ideology was still intense in the South. (And hasn't died out to this day!) She describes how the death of Grant functioned in the south in particular as a way of placing the Civil War into their longer narrative(s) of American history:

Moreover, prominent speakers - leading political figures, ministers, military officers, and veterans - universally praised Grant as one of the greatest generals in the history of the world, and the general who, along with Lincoln, preserved the Union for all time. The fact that Grant was both a general and a president prompted southerners to emphasize the connection with Virginian George Washington. The Montgomery Advertiser proclaimed “His death a National Affliction” and stated: “Looking at the life and character of General Grant from the broadest national standpoint, it is true to say that no man since Washington has better illustrated the genius of American institutions or the temper of Americans as a people.” The majority of Southern eulogies made no mention of Lincoln at all - one of the notable differences between white northern and southern commemorations of Grant. While the passage of time ensured that reconciliation between the sections was under way by 1885, it was by no means fully secured. [my emphasis]

Waugh makes very clear: "Grant himself did not abandon his deepest beliefs about what the Union Cause represented. Indeed, he never backed down either in public or private on his firmly held belief that slavery was the cause of the war and that emancipation was a glorious, if unfulfilled, consequence of the conflict."