In Our Time - President Ulysses S Grant

Episode Date: May 30, 2019

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the impact of Grant's presidency on Americans in the years after the Civil War in which he, with Lincoln, had led the Union Army to victory. His predecessor, Andrew Johnson, was prepared to let the Southern States decide for themselves which rights to allow freed slaves; Grant supported equal rights, and he used troops and Enforcement Acts to defeat the Ku klux Klan which was violently suppressing African Americans. In later years Grant was remembered mainly for the corruption scandals under his terms of office, and for his failure to support or protect Native Americans, but in more recent decades his support for reconstruction has prompted a reassessement.WithErik Mathisen Lecturer in US History at the University of KentSusan-Mary Grant Professor of American History at Newcastle UniversityandRobert Cook Professor of American History at the University of SussexProducer: Simon Tillotson

BBC Sounds, music, radio, podcasts. Thanks for downloading this episode of In Our Time. There's a reading list to go with it on our website, and you can get news about our programmes if you follow us on Twitter at BBC In Our Time. I hope you enjoyed the programmes. Hello, when Ulysses S. Grant became the Republican US President in 1869, he'd already won the American Civil War as leader of the Union Army. Now he aimed to tackle a peace.

His goal was to reconstruct a divided America. and to ensure that all former slaves would now be truly free, be equal citizens, and able to vote. Yet he faced strong and persistent resistance from Southern Democrats, who still champion white supremacy, bolstered by the Ku Klux Klan and its lynchings. He found it harder to enforce laws than fight wars, and by the end of his second term, U.S. politics had turned its attention from reconstruction to the economy, and for decades afterwards his critics had the loudest voices. With me to discuss President Ulysses S. Grant are Robert Cook, Professor of American History at the University of Sussex,

Eric Matheson, lecturer in US history at the University of Kent, and Susan Mary Grant, Professor of American History at Newcastle University. Susan Mary, what was Grant's background, starting with his early life? Well, Grant's background wasn't particularly successful. It was very erratic, you know, was up and down. He was born in Ohio, which was interesting because, of course, he was born on the banks of of the Ohio and the side from Kentucky. And that was a division between slavery and freedom in America.

So, you know, symbolically, he was born where much of his life was going to be lived out conceptually. But also he married, there was slavery in the family. He married a woman, Julia Dent, who was a slaveholder, came from a slaveholding family. So from the very beginning, Grant was aware of, the clash between slavery and non-slavery in America. But his early life was just a difficult one.

He graduated from West Point in 1843, and that was all fine. He fought in a Mexican war, which was 1846 to 48, and that was fine, not for the Mexicans, perhaps. And then he left the army in 1854, and over a multitude of things, I think. He did not cope well with other individuals who were very ambitious. From the very beginning, Grant tended to fall prey to other people's ambition.

And that was a difficulty. In what way? He wasn't very good at the politicking. He wasn't very good, I guess, at the smoke-filled rooms and sorting things out. And other men took advantage of that. And I think that is what happened in 1854. And then after that, between 54 and the outbreak of the Civil War, it was a very difficult life.

He moved to Missouri, back to his wife's father's farm. He tried to make a go of that, and it was fine for a while, but then it wasn't. But then he got into the army when the civil war started. And very soon, because it's only a short, well, short four years' war, he was commanding the Union forces, which could be called meteorotic, not to exaggerate. How did he get that far that fast? What were his qualities? Well, at first his qualities, at first the same problems happen.

He fought on the West rather than the Eastern Theatre, and the Eastern Theatre, because it was close to Washington, is where all the action was. So at first he was largely invisible. But when you started to be visible, how did he get to the top? Because I think he was successful. I mean, that was the thing. He turned around.

He had two successes early in the war where he managed to get two important forts on the Mississippi to surrender, Fort's Henry and then Fort Donaldson. So that was point number one. And then the second thing was, was it Shiloh, a very few? famous battle, which easily could have been a union defeat. I mean, literally the troops landed,

got off the train and went in the wrong direction, and managed to turn this around and turn it into a victory. So I think gradually Lincoln started to see that this was a man who was successful and also a man who actually was active. The problem that Lincoln had was his most famous general, a man called George B. McClellan, who headed the Army with the Potomac, brilliant administrator, but having made the army, he just didn't want to use it. And so Lincoln went through a series of generals and he couldn't find one that was actually successful. And Grant seemed to him to be somebody who would be successful.

So he brought him back from the West along with Sherman. And Grant proved Lincoln right. He proved to be brilliant. There was an idea that Grant is a very cruel general. Is there any evidence for that? No, he wasn't at all. I think that's just something that his enemies emphasized later. and it's also part, I think, of the myth of the lost cause

where after the Civil War, the former Confederate states, they basically make their defeat seem like the result of being outgunned, but it just wasn't true. It is true that toward the end of the war, when Grant was in charge, the Union Army was conducting a different kind of warfare. It wasn't single battles. He had this campaign called the Overland Campaign, better known as the Wilderness, which was just devastating.

In the first two weeks of the wilderness, the death toll of the Union Army was about 18,000, which was just terrible. But Grant hated it. He really hated it. He struggled to cope with the numbers of dead. And he struggled with the whole aftermath of battle. So he was not cruel, but his enemies, of course, called him Grant the butcher. And he was extremely successful. And a coin was struck at the end, and on one side was Abraham Lincoln. And the other side was Grant. So he was a national hero, Robert Cook. He was a national hero at the end of the war.

And that, of course, is the key reason why the Republicans decided to nominate him for president in 1868 at their Chicago Convention. The Republicans had a very strong, very potent self-image as the party that had spearheaded the successful defence of the Union and in the process liberated. In this case, we were talking about the two parts of America. We're talking about... That's the way the word is used. That's right, yes. Successful defence of the United States of America, of the American Republic. And in the process of doing that, of course,

the Republicans had also played a key role in liberating four million black slaves. Why did they pick on him? It had been four years. They'd had a president called Johnson. They didn't think a great deal of that. I mean, to be extremely brief, they thought he was being sort of too feeble and too leant listing towards the elite of the South

and he wasn't taking advantage of victors he should do. But why did they pinpoint Grant? He had no experience of politics whatsoever. We've already heard that when he tried to do a bit of politics, he'd be no good at it. So why did they pick him up as their president? Well, Grant was not a strong party man. In fact, in 1856 he had actually voted for a Democrat

in that particular election. So why did they pick him? So the Republicans picked him in 1868, in large part because they thought he was the man who was going to win the election, but also crucially because he had played an important role in siding with congressional Republicans against what the Republicans perceived to be Andrew Johnson's excessively lenient plan of reconstruction. What the Republicans feared was that the former Confederates would get into power. get back into power very, very quickly after their defeat in 1865. And the Republicans were determined to ensure that the fruits of military victory and the fragile racial promise that went along with that were secured.

How did you react initially to this invitation? Initially, Grant was not terribly enthusiastic. He certainly did not consider himself a politician. but essentially he shared the view of the majority of the Republicans that the fruits of a very costly civil war had to be secured and in terms of costs, of course, the fact that 360,000 northern soldiers had perished in the course of the conflict. That for Grant and for many Republicans was a reason why the Great Union Commander

should be the next president of the United States. What did the Republican North expect to be the dividend end of war. What did they expect to get out of having won the war, which they hadn't got out of it by the time they nominated grant for president? The Republicans were determined to ensure future southern loyalty to the union. They did not trust the defeated Confederates at this point in time. So I think that is the key dividend. And alongside that, the majority of Republicans also wanted to secure the basic civil rights of, the freed slaves. And to take up that point, Eric Matheson, Robert Ely, the great general of the South, he surrendered to Grant in the war, but he was very, very leery about conceding him the peace.

Is that right? I think in a lot of ways it was, yeah. I think that there was a very uneasy relationship between the two men coming on the back of so many battles that they had fought in the latter year and a half of the war, particularly. But there was an uneasy piece, and the arrangement that Grant had sort of come to with Lee was that Lee would go off because he was such a figurehead, because he was such an important figure, the arrangement was that he was going to go off and be as quiet in his public life as was humanly possible. Grant didn't believe that Lee was going to do this, and he suspected right up until Lee died in 1870. He suspected that Lee was sort of behind some kind of Machiavellian effort to undermine reconstruction. And certainly when he became...

Was he right? I don't think so. In Grant's time, three, at least three key amendments were brought to bear on the Constitution in order to support the African Americans. What were they? 14, 15 and 16. Can you briefly tell us? It was actually the 13th, 14th and 15th amendments. Missed out the 13th. Let's start that.

That's all right. The 13th Amendment was passed just as the war was ending. It was ratified at the end of 1865. It was an amendment that banned slavery and involuntary servitude, with the exception of those who had committed a crime and had been convicted of a crime. That would become very important in the decades it would follow. The 14th Amendment was probably the most expansive amendment. It cemented a piece of legislation that Republicans had passed earlier.

which granted civil rights to African Americans and basically put the power of the federal government behind ensuring that another race creed or previous condition of servitude was going to abridge or infringe upon any opportunities that people would have to exert the rights of citizens. It did for the first time insert the word man into the text of the Constitution, which was a body blow to the women's movement. in the United States, and it would take decades for the women's movement to recover from that. And the final amendment was the amendment that was basically being discussed as Grant becomes president. And that was really up in the air as to what Grant would do. The 15th Amendment

explicitly gave African-American men the right to vote. It was a very simple language in that amendment. And it was unclear, even at the point when Grant was giving his inaugural address, what he would do or whether he would support this amendment. In the end, he did, and he did so in a very kind of bold fashion in his inaugural address, and that ultimately got that amendment. What was the fashion? Pardon me? What did he say that was bold?

In his inaugural address, he really came out and said that it was the price that the nation had to pay, or the price that the South in particular had to pay for the war, that was the only way that the gains that the union had. had accrued during the war. It was the only way that those games could be cemented in law and cemented in the Constitution. And for that reason, I think it was a really bold step, and it was seen as a bold step at the time, too.

And it was radical at the time, Susan McMurray. I would have thought that he was going to push his through and he put his weight behind it. How far did he get with that? This period is known as the reconstruction. They're reconstructing, trying to bring an author to South together, also trying to fulfill their promises to Africa. Americans and later to the Native Americans.

So a lot of reconstructing is going on. Can you take the basic one that follow up from what's been said? Well, I think the difficulty was. I mean, the first thing is that these amendments, the 13th, 14th, 15th, they didn't happen all of a piece and at once. So the 13th Amendment, if anyone seen in the film, Lincoln,

will know that that got pushed through. Very close vote. The 14th Amendment wasn't fully ratified by Congress until 1868. So there's a long period of arguing about this in the nation and in the South specifically. And the problem was Grant faced, he faced with two problems. He faced the real ingrained racism of a lot of white Southerners and also some northerners. But he also faced a kind of disinterest from many Northern reformers.

Again, not all, but many of them. William Lloyd Garrison, for example, the most famous abolitionist, he was the editor of the Liberator, after the Civil War and after the 13th Amendment, he shut up shop. He closed down his paper. He said, well, that's that, done, done deal, and did something else with his life. And so there was that kind of taking their eye off the ball. And that was the problem, because I think one of the things Americans, and anybody really still does not understand, is quite how dreadful the violence in reconstruction was. In the early period...

Of the so-called reconstruction, of the so-called amendments being put into practice, the violence is dreadful. Yeah, the violence against it. The violence against it in the southern states was just horrific. For instance. Well, there were several massacres which took place.

I mean, again, that people know these massacres took place. We don't. Could you tell us a bit about them? We don't. Could you tell us a bit about them? But it was the levels of violence, I think, that attended these. So one can globally say, a massacre in New Orleans. And what does it actually mean? mean. And what it actually meant it was, it was just really

horrific. It was akin to a contemporary school shooting. The police actually went into a black church and massacred the congregation. And this happened more than once, three or four times in the early reconstruction period. And of course, Grant

is not president at first in the early reconstruction period. And just following on from Robert's point, one of the reasons that he comes to prominence, he's not invisible. He's doing a kind of tour of the states where he's applauded and on one occasion he has to announce he can't shake hands anymore because his hand is so swollen. And so people increasingly, I think,

not only saw him as a military hero, but because he was a military hero, they thought he is what we need to try and deal with this violence because it's so terrible out of control. And how did he then, Robert Cook? What did you do to deal with the violence? He took a number of steps. He took a number of steps. Firstly, he threw his weight, as we've heard, behind the 15th Amendment, behind ratification of the 15th Amendment. That's a very important position that... What did you do it practically?

Well, for example, he encouraged the governor of Nebraska to hold a special session in order to get the state of Nebraska to ratify as quickly as possible. He made it very clear to congressional Republicans that he supported ratification of the 15th Amendment as an essential piece in the jigsaw. really, essential to preserving, securing the fruits of northern military victory. But we've heard about massacres, and you've drawn back from the details are quite horrible about the number of lynching zone, but then the Ku Klux Kukklax clan comes on the scene here as a force, as a guerrilla force, let's say that to get.

And he took them on, didn't he? Can you tell us, he sent in soldiers to tackle them and to get rid of them? He did. The Ku Klux Klan was, was initially a fraternal organization set up by Confederate veterans in Tennessee. And it rapidly became one of many white supremacist terrorist organizations active in the southern states during the late 1860s and early 1870s. Grant acted pretty decisively against the clan in 1871 when the Republican governor in South Carolina called for assistance, Grant sent in troops,

and the clan was successfully suppressed in a number of counties in South Carolina. But it's important, I think, to recognize that the clan was just one of many white supremacist terrorist groups. There was the White League in Louisiana, for example, and crucially these groups were aligned with the Democratic Party in the South

and perhaps some of our listeners might be surprised to learn that the Democratic Party was not the progressive liberal force that it is in the United States. Today in the 19th century, the Democratic Party was the party of small government and it was also the party of white supremacism as well. So let's just develop this because the laws have said you can't do this. He sends it an army to enforce the laws. And yet there are hundreds of, I've mentioned lynchings once, I'll mention it again,

of lynching is going on. So he couldn't be everywhere. The army couldn't be anywhere. There's intimidation going on in a very wide scale. I come to him once a can you just finish that thought that I... That's a very important point. There were just a few thousand federal troops in the south

during the 1870s. Most of them were stationed in towns and cities. So life was particularly hard for African Americans, hard and dangerous for African Americans living in the southern countryside and they certainly could not be protected on a regular basis by federal troops

and Grant was always very wary of sending troops in because he understood that the Democrats, northern Democrats as well as Southern Democrats, would make hay if he did send in federal troops they would attack him for being a Caesar and a tyrant. Eric Balton, you want to develop this. Well, I think it's important to note too that in as much as African Americans wanted

desperately in many cases protection from the federal government. The whole post-Civil War period was a time of paramilitary politics. It's one of the problems I think that historians have in talking about the civil war and wars generally, we're very good at talking about how wars start. We're not so good at talking about how they end because they never end as cleanly as we would like. So how did this not end as clean as we would like? Well, inasmuch as Grant signed an armistice with Robert E. Lee to end the war in 1865.

For most Americans, that war just carried on. It bled into the 1860s and 70s, both for white Southerners returning home, but also for African Americans. So inasmuch as the clan was a real force to be reckoned with in many parts of the South, it was still the case that were, particularly where African Americans made up a numerical majority in counties throughout the South, they practiced a kind of paramilitary politics. When they were given the right to vote, they voted on mass. They oftentimes went to the polls armed as entire communities to protect one another. So there's a kind of a back and forth, I think, between African Americans and white Southerners throughout this period

that gives you a real sense of just, as Susan Mary was saying, the violence. But it was a violence that had a lot of different facets to it. And also a lot of different groups, as has been pointed out, it wasn't just the Ku Kluxlan. There were other groups. And they weren't going to stop. It was swept across the South. and backwards and forwards. Does I understand it?

Yeah, I think the clan's membership sort of ebbed and flowed. It reached a real crescendo in the lead-up to these constitutional amendments being passed. In many ways, that's why the constitutional amendments were passed in the first place. There was a sense of the federal government needing to step in. But then the clan kind of dips. Its membership begins to dwindle. And certainly, once Grant passes these enforcement acts and basically puts the power of the federal government behind rooting out the Klan through the Justice Department principally,

which was created in 1870 to sort of act as a kind of Friedman's Bureau in a way to sort of protect African Americans in small part. Once that happened, the Klan's membership really did dwindle, and they were successful in breaking the back of that particular group. It just changed it. It did change its shape. But by the 1870s, you know, the Klan would sort of take off in other forms. But Graham was very successful. I think in that respect.

Well, Susan, Susan, Mary, how, where are the African-Americans now? These amendments have been passed. The clan and, as Roberts pointed out, other groups are doing their best to obstruct them. We've been told that indimension of troops caused the clan's membership to dip. So what's going on?

There's a little feeling of, oh, we're getting there for the African-Americans? Were they, they've been told they went to the polls and started to vote? I'm not sure there really was. I think, yes, they went to the polls and started to vote, but even if, as Eric said, they went armed, people could prevent their vote from counting in simple ways if you were in a position.

It's not secret ballot. People can see how you're voting. But in any case, if you walked into a polling station, if you walked into wherever the poll was being organized and you weren't white, they knew how you were going to vote, And in some cases, you know, the person in charge would simply reach their hand into the bowl or the box and take the ballot out and rip it up in front of them.

So it wasn't just that, you know, you burned crosses on people's lawns, which wasn't so common in that period. You didn't have to use physical violence all the time. You could just make it very clear that you weren't going to allow them to have a political voice. And I think that's one of the issues. I think one of the problems, of course, for emancipation and for African, Americans in the United States was the way that emancipation was achieved, the way that it was controlled, and the way that it continued to be controlled after the Civil War during reconstruction. So it's achieved through a conflict. It's organized, things like the American

Freedman's Inquiry Commission, which was set up in 1863, which was still in the middle of the civil war, to try and see how life would be like for African Americans after slavery had ended. That's organised by the War Department. So it all comes out of the war department. It's all about military. It's all about the point of a gun. And so they can never really achieve, I think they realize that they can never really achieve

any kind of parity of life with their white, their white neighbours. Because they're white neighbours. I mean, not all of them, but many of them are just not prepared to allow this to happen. Let's switch to the Native Americans now, if we can, Robert, with you, Robert Cook. The West was opening up, businesses driving through.

There was goal in the... Dunnigh Hills, the railroad was steaming across backers and forwards, the whole thing was beginning to take off the great American business boom, which doesn't seem to stop. How did that affect Native Americans? You're quite right. Rapid economic development after the American Civil War threatened the traditional way of life of the Plains Indians. In particular, it threatened their way of life in all kinds of ways, but particularly in terms of the extermination, the rapidestimation.

extermination of the buffalo. The material and religious culture of the plains Indians depended very heavily on the buffalo. It was official US Army policy to exterminate the buffalo as quickly as possible because that would put increased pressure on the plains Indians. Societies were divided between radicals who wanted to resist the encroachment of white settlers and pragmatists like the great Sioux chief Red Cloud, much more pragmatic, realized the consequences of continual warfare against the U.S. Army and sought some kind of compromise. But the economic expansion after the war placed Indian societies

under huge strain. I'm read that the casualties in the wars on the Great Plains had more casualties than the American Civil War. Is that true? Let's say as many, is it about... I'm not entirely sure, to be honest with you. But there was plenty.

Yeah, absolutely. It was a mass extermination. I mean, the Civil War moved west, basically, after 1865, and the Union Army was demobbed out of... Many were demobbed out of the military, but the people who were left, the soldiers who were left, were sent west. And it was very much about extermination. Grant's policies, though, were quite interesting in that when he came into office, he very much wanted to preserve a sort of a peace with Native Americans.

He placed a Native American at the head of the Bureau of Indian Affairs. He made noises, which I don't think. were entirely self-serving or just for show, he made noises about very much wanting to kind of preserve a native way of life. The fact that he was at the head of a government, however, that had been at this point for a few years on the path to extermination is a bit of a gap between rhetoric and reality. Also, he himself as an expansionist, wasn't he? Hugely, yeah, very much so. I mean, his, he was very much of his moment.

very much an imperialist. For Grant in particular, it was seizing or annexing the Dominican Republic. That was really one of his great hopes for his presidency, and it was ultimately, I think, one of his great

his great sort of worries that he hadn't accomplished it, and it was a real burden on him, I think, that he hadn't accomplished it. It was a plan that had been in place for some time before he arrived in office, but he single-handedly made every attempt to annex Santa Domingo,

largely to provide African-Americans with a place to go. This was a colonization effort. But the story is tilting, because the great, let's got, the panic of 1873 in a big rush, a big collapse, almost collapse. that hurt Grant's reputation as well as hurts a lot of Americans

and Americans' confidence in America. It depends what side of the fence you're on as to whether it hurt his reputation. The post-war boom that Roberts referred to, a lot of it was speculative. A lot of the former Union generals sunk a lot of their money into the railroad. It was an incredible time of stock speculation

and the equivalent, I suppose, of hiding your money offshore. They put it into all kinds of railroad stocks. And so inevitably it was going to come to an end. And that's what it did in 1873. So species starts to fall. In fact, Grant goes to visit. He goes to visit one of the great financiers who was a friend of his, a man called Jay Cook. And in the course of the evening, Cook is receiving various telegrams,

which he just pockers, doesn't see anything. And the next morning, Grant discovers that Cook had gone bankrupt. And that caused other parts of the stock exchange to spiral the way these things do. So the long and the short of it is that in the face of this, because the panic of 1873 lasted for about five, six years, it took a long time before the economy stabilized. One of the responses from some of his colleagues in Congress was to basically print more money,

which would have been a disaster, but Brandt is really being pushed to do this. And he takes the bill home apart and he reads it very carefully and decides he's not going to do this. and so he vetoes it. So the people whose billet walls weren't very happy, but a lot of the bankers and were very pleased and wrote to thank him and said,

this has made, you know, our country will stabilize again because of your decision. So it really tied this idea of the Republicans being a party of stable money. But all through the 19th century, Americans are lurching about between the gold and the silver standard and, you know, political careers die on that hill.

But we've moved quite away from the reconstruction in the South by this point. It's part of the same larger story, but African-Americans in the South are not top of the priority list. I suppose they're not, and this is part of the problem, I think. As you get towards the end of the reconstruction period, I guess, between 1873 and 1876, so many things. I think people get frustrated, they get frustrated with the violence. I think as you would do, because it's just important. possible to do anything about. They get frustrated by the strikes and the economic collapse. And, you know, they're looking desperately for somebody who's going to resolve that.

And Grant doesn't seem to be the man at this stage in his second term of presidency. Robert Cook. Well, his second term was certainly not as successful as his first term. There are very few significant teams. But they're looking for somebody to blame and he carries the can. Sure. Northern voters are preoccupied with issues growing out of the... the panic and the subsequent depression.

So they're worried about unemployment. They're worried about depressed farming conditions in the Midwest, for example. They're also worried about corruption as well. And this is a major problem for Grant in his second term because there's a growing perception that his administration was corrupt. There are a number of high-profile, corruption cases involving his Secretary of War, Williamworth Belknap, for example, who was receiving kickbacks on a post-tradership out west.

One of his closest advisors, Orville Babcock, was involved in the Whiskey Rings conspiracy. And so there's a growing feeling that the administration itself is corrupt. And this is coupled with a mounting sense that the remaining Republican regime, left in the southern states that are basically being bolstered by federal military force, that these regimes are also corrupt. And this really gives the Democratic Party significant political leverage. The Democrats win control of the House of Representatives in 1874. Makes it impossible for Grant to secure passage of further enforcement legislation,

even though he personally, I think, would have been willing to send federal troops to certain states. on certain occasions. So Eric Matheson, to go back to the south, what's happening, when, as it were, he's looking west? Well, I think that the situation in the South, by the middle of the 1870s is becoming very tenuous. African Americans, where they were able to, particularly at the local and state level,

and particularly in places where they were a significant part of the population, they had managed to build with white Republican allies some pretty powerful state governments. But the coalitions that kind of knitted those two groups together was beginning to come apart at the seams. And the combination of that along with this violence, which begins, this vigilante violence, which begins to tick up over the middle 1870s.

It grows again. It begins to grow again. And it becomes part of what becomes known in some states as the white line movement or the white league movement. connected to the Klan, definitely, connected to vigilante violence, but now they become sort of the armed wing of the Democratic Party, as Robert was saying. And they begin to sort of systematically throw people out of office. This culminates in a series of elections in 1874, 1875, which around the country were some of the most corrupt elections ever held in American history. anecdotal stories of ballot boxes being thrown from the windows of passing trains

and things being shoved into bills of lading that are sent on ships out of the country. I mean, unbelievable stories of corruption. But there was basically an attempt made on the part of whites. But they were believed. Yeah, they ought to be believed. I mean, congressional investigations after 1874 made it very clear that this was being done across the board, all in an attempt to redeem, as it became known, redeem the South. There's a sense, I think, that people are tired now of reconstruction. They want to move on with this,

move on to a rosier future for the country as a whole, and that's where you start to get a kind of a change, not only in how people are thinking about African Americans, but also how people are thinking about the war. The civil war starts to loom larger and larger, less as a conflict between two violently opposed sides and more as a conflict between two groups of people that merely disagreed. They had just a disagreement.

It becomes a brother's war again. Meanwhile, the terrorism is going on and on and on. It is. And it's bitten back into the South as strongly as it ever was in the time of official as it were, if I can use that word, slavery.

I mean, I think it is, but it's also not just in the South, and I think we have to remember that. One of the complicating factors of America's Civil War and the reconstruction that followed it is that not every slaveholding state was part of the Confederacy. So you have states like Kentucky and Missouri

that are slaveholding states that never joined a confederacy. But they become, for some reason, they become the battlegrounds really between African Americans and whites that more lynchings take place during reconstruction in Kentucky than any other time. You think of lynching in the south, you tend to think of South Carolina, Mississippi, but actually in the early years of reconstruct.

it was Kentucky. So there's a lot of struggle going on there. You're talking about hundreds of people being there. Yeah, hundreds of people. This is clearly much more of a national problem that they can't really get their teeth into because Grant could have sent more troops into South Carolina, but how would it have gone down if he'd sent troops into Kentucky?

It wouldn't have made any sense. People would have said, but these are not the states of the form of Confederacy. What are you doing? So what you're saying, Eric, is that the whites between them and said, well, let's sort of forget it and act as if this war was a war between brothers, like the brothers' wars used, and there's trouble down south,

but let them go on with it. I mean, that's a ridiculous shorthand, but is there any sense in it? Oh yeah, I mean, it becomes, one of the reasons that it becomes a brother, sorry, becomes a brother's war is, it becomes very popular in popular culture. So there's a, um, century magazine is a very, um, well-known magazine, and it starts,

it starts publishing a series of articles, battles and leaders of the civil war. And so this is the beginnings of that process where they're starting, as Eric said, to see it as they're trying to reach hands across the stone wall as the metaphorical phrase and where they're trying to see it as a war between equals. And it becomes a real point of contention. It's also worth picking your head up and realizing that in the 1870s and 80s and 90s at the end of the 19th century, this is an imperial moment around the world for a lot of white Anglo-Saxon European powers.

And the United States begins to see white Americans begin to see the idea of African Americans having power, having political powers, being something that is against the laws of nature, against the kind of laws of racial doctrine. And that gains real ascendancy as Americans are reading the international news on the one hand and seeing a race for Africa and the British. British Empire expanding its influence around the world and Americans giving African Americans meaningful political power. The arguments get knocked out from under the idea that African Americans ought to be given this power. Robert, you wanted to go. I just wanted to push back slightly against this idea of the Brothers War coming into vogue so quickly during the 1870s. The last Republican, serious Republican, attempt to enforce the 15th Amendment actually takes place in 1891. The Republicans are really shocked when they lose the 1884 election to the Democrats.

They believe that the election has been stolen by the Democrats in the South, and they push very hard for enforcement of the 15th Amendment in 1891. And that attempt is strongly supported by one of the Republicans' key. voting blocks in the north, which of course is that of union veterans who are strongly supportive of enforcement legislation as late as 18, 1990, 1. So I just want to push back a little bit against that idea of the Brothers War. As I understand it, Susan Mary, when Grant wrote his memoirs, he talked about the war but not about the peace. Yeah, it was mainly focused on the war. I mean, I think that was because that was what was going to sell.

As Eric and Robert both said by this period, Civil War memoirs are flying off the shelves and a memoir from Grant. The publishers were fighting over it. And so, yeah, it was a memoir of the conflict. I mean, that was really what his memoirs were about. But at the time his memoir came out was a best-seller, and he came to this country and 100,000 people attended the rally in Newcastle

and on and on it went. So his popularity, was firm. Yes, absolutely. I mean, he did this world too, and not everyone loved him. The French were not entirely receptive. But, you know, he went everywhere.

I mean, he went to Egypt, didn't he? He went to Turkey. He went to Calcutta. He went to Jerusalem. He was the first American former president to go to Jerusalem. He came to Britain. He opened the library in Sunderland.

So he did many, many things. And, yeah, his profile was high, and his popularity was high. And I think one of the reasons is he was, and this is going to sound a bit right perhaps, but he was a genuinely likable individual, although he was reticent and shy. I think he did come across well with people.

And they liked him in a way that some politicians were not and are not likable. Grant was likable. His reputation plunged, but now seems to be, and his tomb was neglected, and nobody looked after it, and he was the neglected, forgotten,

let's not think about him much president. But he seems to be, his reputation seems to him and making a comeback. Yeah, I think as a result of the sort of lost cause, the notion of Grant is this butcher and this man who

loved a particularly destructive war. It fit into a larger story that Americans were telling themselves about the Civil War. It really wasn't until the middle of the 20th century, I think that people started to think about Grant in some different ways, particularly Grant the general.

and a lot of that had to do with people reading his memoirs a bit more seriously. I mean, for me at any rate, they are astonishing. His memoirs are probably one of the best examples of American memoir in American history, I think. Well, thank you very much. Thank you, Eric Matherson, Robert Cook and Susan Mary Grant. Next week, Sir Thomas Brown, the 17th century doctor and essayist,

Virginia Woolf wrote, few people are the writings of Sir Thomas Brown, but those who do are the salt of the earth. Thank you very much. And the In Our Time podcast gets some extra time now with a few minutes of bonus material from Melvin and his guests. Okay, well, what did we miss out? I can't know you to ask.

How did Ku Klux found the words come into? I couldn't find. It's supposed to be from Circle. I mean, people, there's arguments about it, but it's meant to be from the Greek for Circle, Ku Klis. That's one of the, most likely, at least, coming out of left field suggestion I've heard. I think it was used by a lot of fraternal

organisations even before the Civil War. Yeah, yeah. They like to use the Greek to... Yes, they did. Well, Americans like to use the whole idea. They still do, especially in the South, especially, yes. Yes, it was very much that kind of Greek revival. We didn't bring up the story of how Mark Twain got involved with publishing. Publishing, yeah.

The memoirs, that might be something to bring up. Well, the way you go. What's the story? So there's an important story, fascinating story behind the writing of Grant's memoirs. In 1884, Grant, when broke, he had invested unwisely in a New York brokerage company that was co-owned by one of his sons, Ulysses. And as a result, Grant knew that he had to do something in order to secure his family's future. and Mark Twain, the celebrated author, he was currently at work on Huckleberry Finn, had just set up his own publishing company,

and Twain offered Grant a lucrative contract to publish his memoirs. And as a consequence of that, the Grant family came into a lot of money after Grant's death in July 1885. Hundreds of thousands of dollars were accrued as a consequence. The profits were great. The memoirs were published in two volumes, and while Grant was actually undertaking the writing of the memoirs, he was diagnosed with throat cancer, so he actually wrote the final stages of the memoirs

while he was dying, and he just managed to complete the memoirs shortly before his death in July, 1885. There's a very famous photograph of Grant sitting in the verand of his house and totally ensued in a scarf, because of course he had a massive tumour just writing. It's really sad. It was a hugely courageous

and impressive effort, I think, on his part. Yes, it was. But he loved his wife so very much. I mean, Julia, Julia Dent as well as Julia Grant. I think to the very end, they behaved like a young married couple. I'm sure their friends loved that. But that's really how they were as a couple.

And he was so worried about her, I think. But he was a fantastic writer. which I think came as a real shock to a lot of people. You know, where did he get it from? You don't describe them as a background as a big reader, do you? No, no, I don't know where it came from. Maybe you don't have to read to be a good writer. That could be a right.

It's entirely possible. Possibly. Yeah, but he was astonishing at it. And people have since gone back and read correspondence that he had written during the war itself, and they found him to be a really good, terse, very to the point, not flowery, very different from William Tecumpsa Sherman,

who also wrote memoirs before, Grant did, which were huge and voluminous and put Sherman at the center of the Shakespearean drama. And Grant's was very different. But I think that's why it still kind of reads so well, is that it was very kind of crisp and to the point. We didn't talk about General Order 11. Can you explain to people what that was? Do you want to? Well, this is one of the great mistakes of Grant's life, really.

in 1862, he issued General Order 11, which really expressed his frustration with the extent of cotton trading within union lines. And he felt that merchants were getting in the way of his military campaigning. So in this order, he excluded Jews from union lines because he believed that Jews as a class were heavily involved in cotton trading. Were they? No more so than the non-Jews, I think. It was certainly an expression of anti-Semitism. I think grassroots anti-Semitism was rife in the United States during this period. But I think in Grant's defence, he did come to regret the order. He realised it was a big mistake for all kinds of reasons. The issue came up.

What reasons did he put forward? Well, the issue comes up in the 1868 election campaign because Jewish Americans, who are becoming not insignificant group within American society. They're not overly excited when Grant is nominated in 1868. So he makes amends. He makes a public retraction of the order. He states very publicly that he does not sustain. in that order. And he also makes one or two significant appointments of Jewish Americans as well

when he enters the White House. So I think he did come to realize that he was wrong to issue that that order. The Native Americans is a sad story. It just gets sadder and sidled, isn't it? The Great Battles of the Plains. I did read in somebody's notes. I know you took me up on it, so in that case I didn't press it. That as many people have been killed in the Great Plains War as had been killed the American Civil War. You don't find it. And who wrote that? I think because on the Great Plains they're massacring entire tribal groups, Native nations, women and children.

Not to see they didn't do that in the Civil War, but not quite as much. I mean, civil war death rates used to be sort of stuck at 600,000, and then recently some people counted forward into the census and upped it by 100,000, but many when Native Americans died. I think it's interesting, though, because Grant, again, Grant was really ahead of his time as a long word.

did genuinely try to make life better of Native Americans. It was just very, very difficult because the world was moving on and what white settlers wanted on the planes was different from what Native Americans wanted. But Eli Parker, for example, was one of his lieutenant generals, was it? I mean, he was a Seneca

and he in fact drafted the terms of Lee's surrender. And then after the war, Grant made him the Commissioner for Indian Affairs. The trouble was that some of Grant's former colleagues, generals like Phil Sheridan and Sherman, they were just utterly racist. I mean, Phil Sheridan is the one that the anecdote says, basically said,

only good Indians are dead Indian. I mean, it really was shocking what went on there. And I think Grant found that hard because these are men he's fought with, and now they're opposing his views. Grant certainly empathised with Native Americans, and their plight, he believed that the settlers were to blame, white settlers were to blame, really, for the violence.

We wanted to do to try to stop. Well, I think that's the key question, really. I think his view was that the only way to prevent them from being exterminated or from vanishing. Many Americans at the time simply thought that they would vanish as progress swept across the West. Grant's view was that they could only be saved if they learned the ways of white people. So the only way to do that he believed was to place them on reservations

and make sure that their hunting ways, that their communal society was broken up, that they learned how to undertake commercial farming, that they were taught Christianity. So one could make an argument for saying, well, he wasn't an exterminationist, but he still believed that the only way to save the Indians was actually to destroy their traditional culture.

He did see that a lot of the problems was corruption among white officials. And so he did. He tried to, he replaced a lot of the officials, Indian agents, who supposedly lived on these newly constructed reservations. And the idea was that money would go to them and they would give the money to the native peoples to do things like build a church, build a school yard, whatever. And he realized a lot of that money was not getting to the people

it was intended for. So he replaced them all with, first of all, Quakers, and then he just tries to replace them with, you know, religiously inclined individuals who are less keen to do that. But of course, the irony is the year when Grant, the end of reconstruction in 1876, 77, it's the year of, you know, America's centennial, 1876, and it's the year of Little Bickhorn, isn't it?

Yes, when miners enter the, the Black Hills on the Great Sioux Reservation after the discovery of gold. The Black Hills of Dakota. Ultimately, Grant decides that he can't use federal troops to prevent the miners encroaching onto the reservation. So there are tremendous constraints, I think, on Grant and what he can actually do to protect Native Americans during this period.

And it was kind of an unstoppable force. The force of not just kind of this idea of civilization, but also the fact that the railroads were gobbling up enormous tracts of land. And that was the real power in the Republican Party by the time you get to Grant's administration. And that comes out of the Civil War, of course. And once the railroads are there, there's no, as it were high, just the rail. Absolutely.

And that's where a lot of the corruption comes from, too. You know, the Republican National Chairman was in the pay of four different railroads. Yeah, a lot of them were. Well, the time he was in the 1860s and 70s, I mean, they controlled so much. They had so much patronage power that the idea of protecting Native Americans was just, I mean, it was a trifle. There was nothing to be done to stand in the way of these enormous railroad barons sort of getting their way. Did one of you use the word genocide? Well, genocide is used sometimes in relation to what happens, Native Americans.

Obviously, every time the word genocide is used, it's contested. but I think it's probably accurate because it was consistent on the part of white people and it was determined and it was deliberate. They expected the land. I mean, this is part of the problem that during the Civil War, they'd passed legislation at the Homestead Act,

Pacific Railroad Act, specifically to help people move west. And of course, when the war ended, they had these expectations that were going to be able to. This is the eternal American story. Go west, go west, go west. And, you know, they find some natives in the way more natives perhaps and the original settlers had found in Jamestown even

and it's just a bad bad ending for the natives but this goes on all the way through I mean it does settlement act it goes all the way through into the 20th century trying to control and the clue-cloth trying to finish on that to come back to that that goes very much on into the 20th century doesn't it there's a revival it's a different kind of organisation they reach their peak in the 1920s yeah but it's not just anti-African-American but it's anti-catholic it's anti-catholic

anti-Jewish anti-Wilish, anti-women with short skirts, it's anti-everything. They've expanded their remit. But those, I mean, it's in 1920s you have these photographs of the clan marches down Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington. And they are quite terrifying. I mean, Europeans perhaps have to keep in perspective

that this is not Nuremberg, but these rallies are nevertheless designed to be intimidating. Because the original clan didn't have the white hoods. They had masks, which were very scary but they didn't have this kind of costume of the white they've become famous for.

Birth of a Nation did that, yes, the film, Birth of a Nation. Well, thank you all very much. The producers trying to get in. Do you want to do a coffee? I love a coffee, please. Coffee, please. I'd like a coffee thing as well.

What did the S stand for, by the way? It was a mistake. It was a bureaucratic error. The first name was Hiram. In our time with Melvin Bragg is produced by Simon Tillotson. This is Planet Puffin. There's a fair chance you will get bitten at some point.

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