[A few years back I started January by highlighting some of the historic anniversaries we’d be commemorating in the year to come. It was a fun series, so I thought I’d do the same this year with some 2022 anniversaries. Leading up to a special post on predictions for 2022!]
How a vice presidential
publication helps us rethink an administration.
In that prior
historic anniversaries series, I
dedicated a post to the thorny question of how we remember Ulysses S. Grant’s
presidency, and more exactly how we acknowledge his administration’s
significant failures while still highlighting some of its genuinely impressive
and inspiring elements. Rather than repeat myself here, I’ll ask you to check
out that post and then come on back here.
Welcome back! Grant’s
first Vice President, former Indiana Congressman and Speaker of the House
Schuyler Colfax, declined to seek the office for a second time (at least in
part due to significant
conflicts between him and Grant related to those ongoing scandals), and so
Grant selected a new running mate for his 1872
reelection campaign (and thus a new Vice President once Grant defeated
Democratic nominee Horace Greeley and earned that second term): Henry
Wilson, a longtime Massachusetts Senator and leading member of the abolitionist
Radical Republicans since before the Civil War. Wilson had actively sought
the Vice Presidential nomination in 1868, and so was poised to make a real
contribution to Grant’s second term and the period’s ongoing
battles over Reconstruction, among other issues. Unfortunately he suffered
a serious stroke in May 1873, just a few months after Grant’s second
inauguration, and although he stayed in office his health declined thereafter
until he passed away after a second stroke in 1875.
While those
health issues likely led Wilson to be a less active contributor to Grant’s
second term than he would have liked, another 1872 moment both exemplifies his
impressive voice and illustrates the stakes for that administration’s ongoing
efforts. In the same year he won the Vice Presidency, Wilson published (with
the prominent Boston publisher J.R. Osgood and Company)
volumes 1 and 2 of his magisterial The
History of the Rise and Fall of the Slave Power in America, an
important early scholarly effort to trace the lead up to and events of the Civil
War (volume 3 would be published after his death, in 1877). In an era when the
propagandistic efforts to reframe the Civil War (and related histories of
slavery and race) around white
supremacist narratives were well underway, Wilson’s book offered instead an
abolitionist account of slavery’s centrality to the war, the Confederacy, and
(at least implicitly) Reconstruction’s ongoing debates and conflicts. That the
soon-to-be Vice President of the U.S. wrote and published such a book reminds
us that whatever its faults, Grant’s administration was fighting for that
abolitionist vision on a number of levels that we can and must remember (and be
inspired by) today.
Next anniversary
tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you
think?
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