Every few years C-SPAN commissions historians to rank the American presidents. In 2000 Ulysses S. Grant earned a paltry designation of 33 out of the 41 presidents evaluated. The experts ranked Grant near the bottom of such categories as “Moral Authority,” “Vision/Setting an Agenda,” and “Performance Within Context of Times.” Only in the realm of “Pursued Equal Justice for All” did Grant achieve a more estimable assessment, coming in at #18, just ahead of Richard Nixon. This unremarkable positioning reflected Grant’s sour historical and popular reputation. Long ridiculed as a callous, drunk, bumbling military officer, and disparaged as an unqualified, corrupt, and incompetent chief executive, it appeared that Grant’s image would continue to deteriorate with the dawn of the new millennium.
But history is hardly inevitable. Two decades later C-SPAN placed Grant at #20 overall, in between Bill Clinton and George H. W. Bush. Even more striking, historians elevated Grant to #6 in the category of “Pursued Equal Justice for All.” What had happened?
A cottage industry of Grant rehabilitation lumbered to life in the 1990s and gained full steam through the 2000s. No longer beholden to the Lost Cause or disillusioned by the mixed success of the Civil Rights movement and the shame of Vietnam and Watergate, historians reassessed Grant within the context of his own times.
Today, during the bicentennial year of his birth, we know better the Grant who existed in fact: a committed general who preserved the Union and a principled statesman who championed emancipation and biracial civil rights. Grant embraced the foremost challenge of his era: defending the United States as a republic of liberty and equality. And to his dying day he never apologized for the signal role he had played in ensuring that a government of, by, and for the people endured for posterity. When he died in 1885 Grant left his fellow citizens with an impassioned plea to remember why they had given their full measures of devotion during the Civil War. “The cause of the great War of the Rebellion against the United States will have to be attributed to slavery,” the ailing Grant penned in his memoirs just before succumbing to throat cancer. The slaveholders’ crusade against the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, “was, I believe, one of the worst for which a people ever fought, and one for which there was the least excuse.”