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News / Opinion / Columns

Donnelly: Vancouver’s Grant excelled during racial struggle

By Ann Donnelly

Published: June 7, 2020, 6:01am

Vancouver’s Ulysses S. Grant. He belongs to us. Yes, he joined with Lincoln to save the nation, became the most admired general of his time, was twice elected president, and later was feted around the world, but to his fans here — myself included — it is his brief time in Vancouver that brings him close to us.

Vancouver’s Grant Street and Grant House honor someone who has recently been re-evaluated as a soldier, president and man. His exemplary actions to correct racial injustice as general and president speak to the firm, measured leadership called for today.

Premiering on May 25, History Channel’s U.S. Grant, produced by Leonardo DiCaprio, delighted history buffs and set viewership records. Co-produced by Ron Chernow, author of the 2017 bestseller “Grant,” the series flew through the 18th president’s eventful life. Chernow provided comments and a panel of professors and other experts, some young and African American, created an admiring portrait of Grant and the choices he made in turbulent times.

There were no shots of Grant in Vancouver, but we can fill in the blanks. As a youth, Grant wanted to be a math teacher, but his father sent him to West Point. Though the best horseman in his class, the cavalry passed on him, and he was assigned to be quartermaster. As such, arriving at Fort Vancouver with his regiment in 1852, he likely had reason to visit the post headquarters (now Grant House) often. In a letter to his wife, he professed his wish to make Vancouver their home but foretold correctly that life would take them elsewhere.

Life placed Grant in the middle of our nation’s struggle against slavery, and he did as much in the effort as any man in history. DiCaprio shows Grant freeing his family’s slave, then joining the new abolitionist Republican Party and throwing his support behind Lincoln.

Lincoln’s nomination and election in 1860 ignited the long-simmering Civil War. Grant rose to become Lincoln’s general-in-chief through a combination of imagination, preparation and determination, taking every opportunity to free slaves caught up in the battles and incorporate them into the war effort.

Grant’s ability to design an overarching military strategy was essential to our nation’s survival, ending slavery. As president, advised and supported by abolitionist Frederick Douglass, he appointed thousands of Republican African Americans and other abolitionists to federal offices throughout the South and encouraged the first elected black congressmen and senators.

The actions for which he should be remembered — his righteous war against the Ku Klux Klan, including sending federal troops — have faded in our nation’s memory. Grant’s declining reputation has focused instead on the corruption of the Gilded Age, and his disastrous lack of business acumen.

After Grant’s death in 1885, the “Lost Cause” movement took hold, in which Southern historians portrayed the South’s aims in the Civil War as noble but doomed defense of hearth and home. Hundreds of statues of Confederate generals were erected, primarily between 1900 and 1920. In 1936, Douglas Freeman’s prize-winning biography of Robert E. Lee featured on its cover the general’s most famous photograph, impeccable and aristocratic.

The 1939 film Gone with the Wind, with its unforgettable score, was influential in portraying the South as plucky, kindly custodians of their slaves, and the North (by extension, Grant) as victorious by brute force.

Biographer Chernow and filmmaker DiCaprio have restored Grant to his deserved standing. When we climb the steps of Grant House next, let’s pause to recall a young soldier who wanted to settle here but instead went into history and made us proud.

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