#general grant

✍️This is us grant.🤓

I couldn’t help but wonder what had happened to him to cause such a drastic change.🤓🤓

I don't think Buchanan was a traitor or dumb. I think he underestimated the lengths that secessionists were ready to go towards the end of his term, particularly after Lincoln's election, and he was paralyzed by either fear or resignation that he was powerless to do anything to stop secession. It doesn't excuse him, though. Buchanan didn't want to start the war by making it look like he was taking action that could trigger hostilities. But his inaction allowed the embryonic Confederacy to build up early advantages that the South never should have been able to have once the war did start.

It is crazy to me that Buchanan's Secretary of War that you referenced -- John B. Floyd -- isn't as well-known as Benedict Arnold because Floyd was arguably an even bigger traitor. All of the Confederate soldiers were traitors, but Floyd should be remembered as one of America's biggest villains. He committed Treason (with a capital 'T') while he was a still not only a member of Buchanan's Cabinet, but the civilian leader second in command authority of the U.S. military behind only the President.

Ulysses S. Grant made sure to remind everybody of Floyd's treachery several times throughout his Personal Memoirs of U.S. Grant (BOOK | KINDLE), suggesting in his section about the Battle of Fort Donelson where Floyd commanded the opposing Confederate forces, that Floyd was particularly anxious about being captured by Union troops when the Confederates were about to surrender (Floyd gave up command before the formal surrender and fled):

"General Floyd, the commanding officer, who was a man of talent enough for any civil position, was no soldier and, possibly, did not possess the elements of one. He was further unfitted for command, for the reason that his conscience must have troubled him and made him afraid. As Secretary of War he had taken a solemn oath to maintain the Constitution of the United States and to uphold the same against all its enemies. He had betrayed that trust.

it’s unfortunate that his legacy was tainted by the lost causers who aimed to change the narrative of the civil war—and ultimately won that battle. once the generation who had lived in the same period as ulysses grant died out, people began to view him as a drunk, a butcher & a corrupt politician.

and to refute those…

no, grant was not a drunk. he only drank when he was away from his wife & family, or when he wasn’t busy with something. he famously resigned from the army in the 1850s for excessively drinking, yes, but that was because he was away from his wife and family as i mentioned. yes, there were reports of him being drunk during the war, but those were possible false reports from his enemies. his chief of staff, john a. rawlins, made him pledge not to drink, and i don’t think grant is the type of person to break that pledge.

no, grant was not a butcher. sure, he threw his men at the enemy, but grant never did that for evil purposes. it’s just how war works. the north had a string of incompetent generals before grant took command. george mcclellan famously had refused to throw his men at the enemy. also, the technology at the time was new in warfare, which had made the casualties even worse. grant and a bunch of other generals had found that the new technology did not suit napoleonic warfare, which europe would unfortunately learn from the first world war. also, grant infamously regretted that assault at cold harbor for the rest of his life.

and no, grant was not a corrupt politician. grant himself was not corrupt. in fact, i would argue that grant was not suited for politics at all. he had thought politics was like running the army, which is not the case. grant’s biggest flaw was that he trusted people too much, which unfortunately made him surround himself with corrupt people who had no good intentions with grant (orville babcock, adam badeau, roscoe conkling, ferdinand ward, etc.). grant had always seen the best in people & treated them with kindness, even if they’ve done him wrong (with possibly the exception of andrew johnson). william t sherman even knew that grant was not suited for politics, sherman had hated that grant involved himself in politics (sheridan too i believe). he knew that grant would be taken advantage of, which is why he distanced himself from grant unfortunately.

in my opinion, ulysses s. grant is one of the top human beings who have been president of the united states—along with jimmy carter—and all of the people who had the balls to take advantage of him deserve to rot. <3

He taught his sons how to swim

He would ball up bits of bread and throw them with his kids at the table

One of his sons (the youngest, Buck, I think) would ask him to fight, he would say, "I'm a man of peace, and will not be hassled by someone your size" or something like that. But then would play-wrestle him.

Overall he was described as like another playmate to his children when they were young!

Hiding in a random room in the executive mansion, sobbing inconsolably after giving his daughter, Nellie, away at her wedding to an Englishman because she was too young and was going to move away overseas where he couldn't see her! (Said husband ended up being HORRIBLE to her.)

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

April 9, 2025 (Wednesday)

Heather Cox Richardson

Apr 10, 2025

On April 9, 1865, General Robert E. Lee surrendered the Army of Northern Virginia to General Ulysses S. Grant of the United States Army at Appomattox Court House in Virginia. Lee’s surrender did not end the war—there were still two major armies in the field—but everyone knew the surrender signaled that the American Civil War was coming to a close.

Soldiers and sailors of the United States had defeated the armies and the navy of the Confederate States of America across the country and the seas, at the cost of hundreds of thousands of lives and almost $6 billion. To the northerners celebrating in the streets, it certainly looked like the South’s ideology had been thoroughly discredited.

Southern politicians had led their poorer neighbors to war to advance the idea that some people were better than others and had the right—and the duty—to rule. The Founders of the United States had made a terrible mistake when they declared, “All men are created equal,” southern leaders said. In place of that “fundamentally wrong” idea, they proposed “the great truth” that white men were a “superior race.” And within that superior race, some men were better than others.

Those leaders were the ones who should rule the majority, southern leaders explained. “We do not agree with the authors of the Declaration of Independence, that governments ‘derive their just powers from the consent of the governed,’” enslaver George Fitzhugh of Virginia wrote in 1857. “All governments must originate in force, and be continued by force.” There were 18,000 people in his county and only 1,200 could vote, he said, “But we twelve hundred…never asked and never intend to ask the consent of the sixteen thousand eight hundred whom we govern.”

But the majority of Americans recognized that if it were permitted to take hold, this ideology would destroy democracy. They fought to defeat the enslavers’ radical new definition of the United States. By the end of 1863, President Abraham Lincoln dated the birth of the nation not to the Constitution, whose protection of property underpinned southern enslavers’ insistence that enslavement was a foundational principle, but to the Declaration of Independence.

“Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure.”

The events of April 9 reassured Americans that they had, in fact, saved “the last best hope of earth”: democracy. Writing from Washington, D.C., poet Walt Whitman mused that the very heavens were rejoicing at the triumph of the U.S. military and the return to peace its victory heralded. “Nor earth nor sky ever knew spectacles of superber beauty than some of the nights lately here,” he wrote in Specimen Days. “The western star, Venus, in the earlier hours of evening, has never been so large, so clear; it seems as if it told something, as if it held rapport indulgent with humanity, with us Americans.”

So confident was General Grant in the justice of his people’s cause that he asked only that Lee and his men give their word that they would never again fight against the United States and that they turn over their military arms and artillery. The men could keep their sidearms and their horses because Grant wanted them “to be able to put in a crop to carry themselves and their families through the next winter.”

Their victory on the battlefields made northerners think they had made sure that “government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”

But their conviction that generosity would bring white southerners around to accepting the equality promised in the Declaration of Independence backfired. After Lincoln’s assassination, Andrew Johnson of Tennessee took over the presidency and worked hard to restore white supremacy without the old legal structure of enslavement, while white settlers in the West brought their hierarchical ideas with them and imposed them on Indigenous Americans, on Mexicans and Mexican Americans, and on Asians and Pacific Islanders.

With no penalty for their attempt to overthrow democracy, those who thought that white men were better than others began to insist that their cause was just and that they had lost the war only because they had been overpowered. They continued to work to make their ideology the law of the land. That idea inspired the Jim Crow and Juan Crow laws of the late-nineteenth and twentieth centuries, as well as the policies that crowded Indigenous Americans onto reservations where disease and malnutrition killed many of them and lack of opportunity pushed the rest into poverty.

In the 1930s, Nazi leaders, lawyers, and judges turned to America’s Jim Crow laws and Indian reservations for inspiration on how to create legal hierarchies that would, at the very least, wall certain populations off from white society. More Americans than we like to believe embraced facism here, too: in February 1939, more than 20,000 people showed up for a “true Americanism” rally held by Nazis at New York City’s Madison Square Garden, featuring a huge portrait of George Washington in his Continental Army uniform flanked by swastikas.

President Franklin Delano Roosevelt rallied Americans to oppose fascism by emphasizing the principles that would, he said, provide “the foundations of a healthy and strong democracy: “Equality of opportunity for youth and for others. Jobs for those who can work. Security for those who need it. The ending of special privilege for the few. The preservation of civil liberties for all. The enjoyment of the fruits of scientific progress in a wider and constantly rising standard of living.” He called for “the cooperation of free countries, working together in a friendly, civilized society.”

The gulf between the ideals of democracy and the reality of life in the segregated U.S. during and after World War II galvanized Black Americans, Mexican Americans, and Asian Americans to demand equality. They successfully challenged school segregation, racial housing restrictions, state laws prohibiting interracial marriage, and anti-Chinese laws based in the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act.

As the military fought fascism in Europe, schools and churches at home emphasized that democracy depended on acceptance of racial, ethnic, and religious differences. Rallies championed diversity, and government-sponsored films warned Americans not to succumb to fascist propaganda. Posters trumpeted slogans such as “Catholics–Protestants–Jews…Working Side By Side…in War and Peace!” and reminded Americans not to “infect” their children “with racial and religious hate.” In a 1947 radio show, Superman fought a Ku Klux Klan–like gang trying to keep foreign-born players off high school sports teams, and in 1949, comic book artist Wayne Boring portrayed him on a poster urging a group of American schoolchildren to defend their classmates from “un-American” attacks on their race, religion, or ethnicity.

In the 1950s those ideas had produced a “liberal consensus,” shared by most Democrats and Republicans alike. The government should regulate business, provide for basic social welfare, and promote infrastructure: in other words, it should reflect democratic values. But when the Supreme Court’s 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision tied the federal government not just to economic equality for white Americans, but also to civil rights, opponents of the liberal consensus resurrected the same argument former Confederates had used after the Civil War to couch their ideology in economic, rather than racial, rhetoric.

Rejecting the idea of equality, they argued that the government’s effort to protect civil rights was tantamount to socialism because it took tax dollars from hardworking white men to provide benefits for undeserving Black people who wanted a handout. This idea gained momentum after Congress passed the Voting Rights Act in 1965, and gradually came to include people of color and women who demanded equality. In 1980, Ronald Reagan rode the idea that the liberal consensus was simply a way to redistribute wealth to undeserving Americans of color or women—or both, like Reagan’s “welfare queen”—into the White House.

As more than $50 trillion moved from the bottom 90% of Americans to the top 1% between 1981 and 2021, Republicans deflected attention from the hollowing out of the middle class by demonizing racial, religious, and gender minorities. By 2012 they were talking of “makers” and “takers,” and by 2016 they were feeding voters ideas and images straight out of the nation’s white supremacist past.

By 2021 the idea that some people are better than others and have a right to rule—the same ideology that had driven the Confederates—created a mob determined to end American democracy. The rioters who attacked the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election believed they were writing a new history of the United States, one that brought to life the hierarchical version of American history claimed by the Confederates before them. On that day, one of the rioters accomplished what the southern troops during the Civil War had never been able to: he carried the Confederate battle flag into the United States Capitol.

At the end of his life, General Grant recalled the events of April 9, 1865. “What General Lee's feelings were I do not know,” Grant wrote. “[M]y own feelings, which had been quite jubilant on the receipt of his letter [asking to surrender], were sad and depressed. 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.”

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

A Living Shrine

President Eisenhower declared the General Grant Tree to be a National Shrine in 1956. It was dedicated "in memory of the men and women of the Armed Forces who have served and fought and died to keep this Nation free..." It is the only example of a living shrine in the United States. During the dedication ceremony, Fleet Admiral Chester Nimitz mentioned its "equal stature with that other great shrine in Arlington Cemetery -- the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier."

Source: https://www.nps.gov/seki/learn/nature/grant.htm