President Ulysses S. Grant’s tomb is a rare Civil War memorial that racial protesters haven’t defaced — and historians say that shows how his legacy has eclipsed that of Robert E. Lee on his 200th birthday.
Historians and politicians from both sides of the aisle on Wednesday will commemorate the bicentennial of the Union general’s birth at his mausoleum in New York City.
Celebrations also will unfold at his former home in St. Louis, Missouri, and in Washington, where dignitaries will assemble Tuesday at the Ulysses S. Grant Memorial on the west side of the U.S. Capitol.
Statues of Lee, who led Confederate troops in the Civil War, have been toppled and removed from New Orleans to Richmond, Virginia, the erstwhile capital of the Confederacy.
Attorney Frank Scaturro, president of the Grant Monument Association and author of several books on the former president, said the 1885 tomb’s transformation from “a public toilet” during a 1990s renovation symbolizes the comeback of Grant’s legacy at Lee’s expense.
“To some degree, they have switched places, though Lee’s drop was especially precipitous,” said Mr. Scaturro, senior counsel at the conservative Judicial Crisis Network in Washington. “Grant, as a general, was long misunderstood and even vilified during the 20th century.”
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Mr. Scaturro, who as a Columbia University student fought to establish the association to fund renovations of the then-dilapidated tomb near campus, said Grant’s legacy remains complicated in the era of Black Lives Matter. He pointed out that California officials have yet to restore a bust of Grant that protesters toppled in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park in 2020.
“Recall that particularly nihilistic protesters toppled the Grant monument in Golden Gate Park, operating from a badly skewed sense of history and frankly reflexive anti-Americanism,” Mr. Scaturro said. “Grant’s tomb simply might not have been on their radar.”
While no politicians or historians defend Lee in 2022, Grant’s legacy has attracted advocates from both sides of the political fence. Former Presidents George W. Bush, Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton have all issued statements honoring his birthday this week.
Mr. Carter’s statement praised Grant’s military skill, leadership, work on behalf of African American civil rights and efforts to rebuild the South after the war.
“As a boy growing up in Georgia, I was not taught to admire Union General Ulysses S. Grant,” Mr. Carter said. “In latter years, I learned to appreciate him.”
D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser, a Democrat, has added the District of Columbia to a list of 18 states — including Colorado, Maryland and Mississippi — that had issued public proclamations honoring Grant’s birthday as of Monday afternoon.
“President Grant secured the ratification of the 15th Amendment, prohibiting racial discrimination with respect to voting rights,” Miss Bowser states in the proclamation of “Ulysses S. Grant Day.”
Sen. Roy Blunt, Missouri Republican, will join the 12th Architect of the Capitol J. Brett Blanton and Grant biographer Ronald C. White as speakers at Tuesday’s U.S. Capitol Historical Society celebration in Washington.
“In the four C-SPAN Presidential Historians Surveys in the 21st century, Grant has risen 13 places,” Mr. White said. “The question: Why has he experienced such a dramatic rise?”
Speakers at the General Grant National Memorial in New York City on Wednesday will include Army Gen. Mark Milley, chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
James Grossman, executive director of the American Historical Association, told The Washington Times on Monday that most historians have come to see the Civil War as a “war of liberation, rather than a tragic and preventable conflict in which both sides had honorable goals.”
“Grant becomes the leader of an army of liberation,” Mr. Grossman said. “He also, as president, is increasingly understood as attempting to enforce the implications of that victory, rather than oppressing a victimized region struggling to redeem its governments from the alleged excesses of Reconstruction.”
But multicultural historians have increasingly slammed Grant for owning at least one slave as a general, for presiding over the assimilation of American Indians during his 1869-1877 presidency and for corruption in his Cabinet.
“These are 19th century men and they were more progressive than average men during that period, but they’re still struggling with some very basic issues,” Edna Greene Medford, a history professor at Howard University, said at a symposium at the Grant Presidential Library last month.
Mark Tooley, author of “The Peace That Almost Was: The Forgotten Story of the 1861 Washington Peace Conference and the Final Attempt to Avert the Civil War,” said criticisms of Grant’s racial attitudes mean his public memorials may not see a 300th birthday celebration.
“The 2020 attack on Grant’s statue in San Francisco showed that self-righteous radical revisionism cannot tolerate anybody from the past,” said Mr. Tooley, president of the Institute on Religion and Democracy conservative think tank.
“We do better to understand people of the past instead of rushing to judge them to inflate our importance,” he added.
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