I just finished Ron Chernow’s Grant, a book I highly recommend.One thing the book brings home is the fact that the history of the Civil War, particularly the post-Civil War period, was written, not by the winners, but by the losers. I’ve been a history nut all my life. I remember reading every Landmark book I could get my hands on. For those who don’t remember them, Landmark issued a series of biographies of famous Americans aimed at young readers. I remember reading a biography of Nathan Bedford Forrest, and I can promise you that I came away from it completely ignorant of the fact that he headed up a terrorist organization or that he engaged in war crimes.
It was a given at that time that so called “Radical Republicans” were the post war bad guys, unfairly victimizing a traumatized South. Grant was portrayed as a weak and vacillating president surrounded by corrupt office holders. Many of his appointees were indeed corrupt, though that was hardly unusual in those days, but Chernow makes a compelling case that he strove against great odds to deliver on the promise of the 13th through 15th Amendment, trying as best as he could against a backdrop of waning political support from Republicans (the party was even then transforming itself into the party of big business) to protect the rights of the former slaves, including, above all, the right to vote, of which they were ultimately deprived by armed white terrorists (otherwise known in those days as the Democratic Party), aided and abetted by a Supreme Court that unduly restricted the protections of the recently passed Amendments and a Republican Party more intent on preserving it’s ever more tenuous hold on power than on making sure that the civil war dead had not died in vain.
The South won the battle of the history books, to the point where its narrative became widely accepted. To give just two examples: Lee was a brilliant tactician; Grant won by virtue of Northern numbers and a willingness to engage in mass murder; and the South was fighting in defense of a noble cause that had little if anything to do with slavery. By 1915, in The Birth of a Nation, usually considered the first great film made in this country, the Klan was portrayed as the good guys, protecting white womanhood from the lustful black man and delivering the South from the clutches of the greedy carpetbaggers.
When I was in college the first tentative steps were taken to wrest history back from the Southerners. I was assigned The Tragic Era, by Claude Bowers, but mainly in order to prepare us for the rebuttal. Still, even today, the view is widely held that it was the “radical Republicans”, “carpetbaggers”, etc., that were the bad guys after the Civil War. John F. Kennedy (or his ghostwriter) glorified the “courage” of the Senator who cast the deciding vote against convicting Andrew Johnson, a racist who spent almost four years trying to undo the results of the civil war by handing the Southern state governments back to the slaveholders. Grant was relegated to the ranks of the lesser presidents precisely because his true claims to greatness, as president, lay in his persistent attempts to deliver equal citizenship to the freed slaves.
I don’t know how successful the attempts by Eric Foner, Chernow and other historians will be to correct the public perception of the historical record, but one has to wonder whether we are living in a period today in which the history of our present times is being pre-written by propagandists for the worst in our nation. Not only must we contend with Fox, but mostly under the radar, local news has been handed to the propagandists at Sinclair, aided and abetted by Trump’s FCC appointee.. It’s vitally important that we don’t let the forces of reaction rewrite history yet again, or, more precisely, that we don’t let them shape the narrative while history is still happening. Unfortunately, if recent history has taught us anything, it’s that the Democratic Party is incapable of pushing any sort of narrative, even if it is totally consistent with the truth, though, as the recent episode here in Connecticut proves yet again, we’re still perfectly willing to form circular firing squads.
