In our skeptical age, saving the Union may not not seem a worth accomplishment. But as HW Brands explains in The Man Who Saved the Union: Ulysses Grant in War and Peace, published in 2013, Grant didn’t just fight in the Civil War to save the Union as it was, with slavery intact. He fought for a nation that would live up to its promise of freedom for all.
Even during the war, he welcomed Black soldiers and grew increasingly supportive of emancipation. After the war, Grant became what Brand has called “America’s first civil rights president,” working with Congress to give freed slaves full citizenship and then fighting as commander-in-chief to fight the KKK and other unreconstructed Confederates to make sure that Black southerners could enjoy their new rights in peace and safety.
Like many biographies of Grant, Brands’s book goes through Grant’s childhood, his service in the Mexican War, his army service and failed businesses between the wars, and then the coming of the Civil War, with Grant’s major battles and campaigns, from Fort Donelson and Shiloh to Vicksburg to Chattanooga to the Wilderness, Cold Harbor, and the siege of Richmond and Petersburg, ending up at Appomattox Court House.
What makes Brands’s account stand out is his treatment of Grant’s presidency, and particular his role in protecting Black voters in the former Confederate states from intimidation and domestic terrorism. Grant ran for his first term in 1868 under the slogan “Let Us Have Peace.” But peace alone wasn’t enough for the man who had said the Union and had ordered so many men to their deaths to defeat rebels fighting to save and expand slavery. After the war, in common with so many men who wore the blue on the battlefield, Grant wanted to lock in the gains of U.S. victory by ensuring civil rights for freed slaves in the South.
When former Confederates grabbed back control of southern states and started to push freedpeople back into a state similar to slavery, Grant acted to protect the civil rights of Black southerners. First he pushed Congress to pass the Fifteenth Amendment, giving all men the right to vote regardless of race. Then, at Grant’s urging, Congress passed acts to enforce that amendment, expanding the power of the federal government in new ways.
“There is a deplorable state of affairs existing in some portions of the South, demanding the immediate attention of Congress,” Grant wrote James Blaine. Congress must pass laws to provide “means for the protection of life and property in those sections of the country where the present civil authority fails to secure that end.”
Democrats and conservative Republicans joined white southerners who howled that Grant had become a tyrant. But this didn’t stop Grant from getting Congress to do more, passing landmark civil rights legislation and the Ku Klux Klan Act, that allowed Grant to send federal troops to put suppress armed attacks by night riders in South Carolina. Military action combined with aggressive action in the courts — Grant created the Justice Department initially to bring legal action to protect Black civil rights in the South — succeeded in crushing the Klan entirely. It would not return until the twentieth century.
Black southerners and white Republicans alike in the South were grateful for Grant’s decisive action to put down what threatened to become a renewed outbreak of Civil War. Albion Tourgee, then serving as a judge in North Carolina, wrote to Grant of one indictment of Klan members in Alamance County for felony violence and murder.
Ironically, many of the grand jury were prominent members of the local Klan. But the pressure on them from the federal authorities to indict was too strong for them to twist the law. And it was all due to Grant: “Nothing, Mr. President, but the prompt and unflinching firmness of your course in relation to this vexatious question could have rendered such a thing possible. The Ku Klux was an impregnable fortress.” But no more. “A Ku Klux grand jury indicts for Ku Kluxing.”
Grant worked for reconciliation but only with justice. And for union but with liberty. Unlike many white northerners of his day, Grant would not separate those qualities and insisted, in the face of withering criticism, that the federal government guarantee that the freedom of slaves translate into equal citizenship for Black Americans. Brands does an excellent job of telling this part of Grant’s story that makes this great general and surprisingly great president so relevant for today.