Grant the Great

Nathan, Barbara and Lindsay make the case for Ulysses S. Grant as one of the greatest American Presidents. Particularly given my conviction that the ugly tradegy that was the dismantling of Reconstruction is, if anything, something that needs greater emphasis, I have to say I’m entirely convinced. (I would also like to note that any progressive who would rank JFK anywhere near LBJ is teh crazy.) Newman:

Grant used his new authority to crack down on Klan terrorism in nine South Carolina counties in 1871 and essentially destroyed the Klan there and then throughout the South. Hundreds of Klansmen were convicted between 1870 and 1873 of violating the voting and other civil rights of the new freedmen in the South.

The result was the election of 1872, the only election not undermined by racial terrorism until the late 1960s. In his second inaugural address, President Grant declared that racial segregation was unacceptable and called for federal legislation to assure equal rights in access to transportation and public schools. Following Grant’s lead, Congress passed the Civil Rights Act of 1875, banning segregation in public accommodations, transportation, and entertainment facilities. Majorities in both houses of Congress even voted to make school segregation illegal throughout the country, but filibusters blocked enactment of those later amendments, but it is a testament to Grant’s dogged pursuit of civil rights that so encompassing a legislative and administrative agenda of racial justice was pursued.

And Grant’s view of racial justice extended to the native american population. Instead of the mass murder that was typical of his predecessors and many of his successors, Grant sought what was known at the time as “the Quaker policy” in which he denounced past “wars of extermination” as “demoralizing and wicked.. A system which looks to the extinction of a race is too horrible for a nation to adopt without entailing upon itself the wrath of all Christendom.” While not perfect in execution, his policies stand out in a century of American genocide against the American Indian population.

The worst thing I can say about Grant is that he appointed Morrison Waite as Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. Waite not only joined the Court’s appalling gutting of the 1875 Civil Rights Act but actually wrote the opinions that effectively ended any federal protection of the voting rights of African Americans. (He also wrote the opinion that, in the course of upholding the denial of the vote to women, held that “the Constitution of the United States does not confer the right of suffrage upon any one.”) Since he wasn’t the decisive vote in any of these cases, however, that’s a minor quibble.

And although I’m sure we’ve quoted this before, I leave this Independence Day with this from Yglesias:

The South in the late nineteenth century was a region that heartily deserved to be subjected to some hostile sentiments. Nothing pissed me off more than my high school history textbook’s many disparaging references to these insidious “radical Republicans” in the late-1860s and 1870s who had all these nutty ideas like “black people should vote” and “treason should be punished.” I’ll even go whole hog and say that if Andrew Johnson had been removed from office we’d be living in a better world.