[April 27th will mark the 200th birthday of Ulysses S. Grant, one of the more influential but also more misunderstood 19th century Americans. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of contexts for our 18th president who was also so much more!]
Three representative
relationships across Grant’s iconic life (besides his friendship with Mark
Twain, about which I wrote on Tuesday).
1)
James
Longstreet: As that hyperlinked article indicates, certain famous details
of the friendship between Grant and Longstreet are a bit difficult to pin down
for a certainty; but there’s no doubt that the two became close during their
time at West Point, that they remained connected through Grant’s wife Julia (a
distant relation of Longstreet’s), and that they served together in the Mexican
American War, all early experiences that were no doubt formative for their friendship.
That’s one of many such examples of how U.S. and Confederate soldiers and
generals were as intimately interconnected as were the regions themselves. But
it also adds an interesting layer to Longstreet’s post-Civil War evolutions, about
which I wrote at length in this Saturday
Evening Post Considering History column
and many of which took place during Grant’s presidency.
2)
Ely
Parker: I’ve written about Ely Parker, one of my favorite 19th
century Americans, many
times before in this space. He and Grant first became friends during Parker’s
time supervising government engineering projects in Galena,
Illinois, where Ulysses and Julia lived with family for a time just before
the Civil War. During the war Parker became both adjutant and secretary to
Grant, writing much of Grant’s correspondence and (most famously) drafting the Appomattox
surrender documents. When Grant became president, he appointed Parker his Commissioner
of Indian Affairs, the first Native American to serve in the role; as the
first hyperlinked article above notes, he and Grant worked hard to extend
rights and protections to Native Americans during his brief time in the
position. Every part of that story is more complicated than these few lines
permit, but the bottom line is that Grant’s multiracial alliances and
solidarities extended not just to African Americans but very much to Native
Americans, as inspired by his longtime friendship with Ely Parker.
3)
John
McDonald: Parker was an example of how Grant brought his friends into his
administration in significant and inspiring ways; but as I discussed in Monday’s
post, the scandals that became so much of the story of the Grant presidency
were also deeply tied to his friends in far more problematic ways. That was
particularly the case with John
McDonald, a friend and fellow Civil War general whom President Grant
appointed as Revenue Collector of the Missouri District in 1869. McDonald would
become the corrupt center of the scandal known as the Whiskey
Ring, a scandal exposed and investigated by Grant’s own Secretary
of the Treasury Benjamin Bristow. That latter fact is to Grant’s credit,
and seems to reflect his genuine lack of awareness of (and frustration with)
what supposed friends such as McDonald were up to. But at the same time, those
frustrating friends fundamentally shaped narratives
of Grant’s presidency, in its own era and throughout the 150 years since, in
the process far overshadowing more inspiring friendships like those with
Longstreet and Parker.
Last
GrantStudying tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you think?
Other Grant histories or contexts you’d highlight?
No comments:
Post a Comment