The Civil War general who later became the 18th president of the United States showed how truly complex this issue is.
Speaking this weekend in Hillsboro at the 19th century-themed Living History Event, Gen. Ulysses S. Grant refused to criticize the statue memorializing Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee. Yet the general also refused to tolerate racism during Reconstruction, when bigots tried to keep black people down after they’d been freed from slavery by President Abraham Lincoln.
No one said this was going to be easy.
“They were soldiers, not politicians,” the general told me. “(The Civil War) was created by politicians and fought by politicians. We were just the instruments of that. I do not know Mr. Lee’s politics, but I believe seriously that he was never in favor of slavery as an institution.”
(The general was portrayed by professional re-enactor Sam Grant. For our purposes here, he is Gen. Ulysses S. Grant).
The general stood in front of about 15 people at the childhood home of Franklin Pierce, his right hand tucked into his pants pockets, his left arm resting on a lectern with an unlit cigar between his index and middle fingers. He wore a bow tie, three stars on each shoulder, and a vest with gold buttons and a watch chain looping downward across the front.
The general was bearded, tanned and tired looking, as though he had indeed emerged from war recently, as though his face reflected the wear and tear so many Americans feel these days.
His eyes were serious, locked onto the audience, answering questions with an uncanny knowledge of the general’s life and place in American history.
The general never smiled, yet he offered a glimpse of humor, saying, “I talked about herding chickens a while ago. Well, try working with politicians.”
That said a lot about one of the most defining figures in our history, a man directly connected to the controversy that’s swirling everywhere these days.
In Boston, a free speech rally Saturday ended in more than 25 arrests, as people perceived to be aligned with white supremacists were driven away by thousands of counterprotesters.
In Charlottesville, Va., last weekend, Nazis and other far-right extremists marched to show their support for keeping a statue honoring Lee. Others, showing disdain for these groups, also marched, and a woman named Heather Heyer, a counterprotester, was killed when she was hit by a car driven by an alleged white nationalist.
And in Hillsboro, Gen. Grant walked a fine line between two schools of thought. History tells us that the general’s father was a fierce abolitionist, that the general pushed through legislation that helped crush the Ku Klux Klan, that he secured thousands of indictments against people covered in white sheets and hatred.
“I went to the congress and asked for the Third Reconstruction Act,” the general told me. “That basically gave me the right of Martial Law if necessary to go as far as I needed to go to crush this rebellion of these people who were destroying the lives and homes of American citizens.
“Black, white, red, it really didn’t matter to me. They were still citizens of this country and deserved all the protections the law had to offer.”
Then things got tricky. In the general’s view, Confederate officers like Lee needed to be treated with some sense of respect to better unite the country after the Civil War. And remember, in the general’s view, soldiers and officers during the Civil War were merely doing their duty.
So when President Andrew Johnson tried to lower the boom on Lee and others, the general got tough, threatening to resign his commission unless compassion was introduced.
“I called him out,” the general told me, referring to Johnson. “If he insisted on carrying out the creation of a grand jury to decide if they should be tried for treason, I had given my word, and that had infiltrated through the entire command, that what I had said was they were to be set free to go home and tend to their farms and not be harassed by the United State government unless they broke the laws in the areas with which they lived, period, end of story.”
It’s not the end of the story, of course. Not even close. More than 150 years later, statues honoring Confederate leaders, most built late in the 19th century and early in the 20th, are spread throughout the South.
Some defenders of the monuments are blatant in their bigotry, hoping for a white America, openly hostile to not just African Americans, but Jews and minorities, including gays, as well.
Others, though, maintain that these tributes should remain for other reasons, historical reasons, saying they were built based on heritage, not hate, that they represent an honorable spirit that displayed courage and sacrifice, that they have nothing to do with slavery and white supremacy.
Meanwhile, the statue of Robert E. Lee, the South’s top general, still stands in Charlottesville, where Heather Heyer was killed. He’s high on a pedestal, atop a horse, riding into an uncertain future.
When asked for an opinion on the Lee statue, the general said, “You’re going to have to take that up with the citizenry of the country and decide together. I was responsible after winning the war with winning the peace, and I promise you that winning the peace is a whole lot harder than winning a war.”