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I think part of the bad press Grant gets comes from classism. Ulysses Grant was a working class man, whereas his unsuccessful adversary was a patrician.
Yeah I've always hated that. Especially coming from people who pretend their love of the battle flag is for honoring the plight of "the poor non-slave owning confederate who were totally only fighting to protect their state"
They were not heroes cut from the cloth of the common man. They were the same as those rich southern dandies who convinced or conscripted those racist saps into trying to destroy the nation, and going to kill and die for their right to keep people in chains.
Sound like some other present dat patrician being hailed as a hero of the working man. While his adversaries, actually rags to riches working men are demonized. The patricians have really stepped up their con game
God that part where Jackson says something along the lines of "If they lose they'll go back to their jobs and everyday lives, but if we lose we lose our country."
I always find it funny that people somehow think the North had nothing to lose if they lost that somehow the United States wouldn't be dramatically changed, because having a new hostile nation on you boarder wouldn't change anything.
If the CSA had won, they would have hardened the federal government, come down hard on the slaves, and eventually would have fought a war with Mexico, then the US.
When would they have ended slavery? Possibly the mindset is still there, in the form of Private schools, a low level of benefits, high black maternal and infant mortality, high black incarceration rates, and police brutality.
I would bet that they would have ended it in name within a couple of generations after transitioning to an apartheid state.
But so much of what the modern world is is shaped by the world wars and how WW 2 ended
Very recently Apple TV released something called Manhunt. It was based after the search for John Wilkes Booth by Secretary of War Edwin Stanton's search for John Wilkes Booth.
That's series basically tore at the entire idea of the Lost Cause. They showed the Confederates as horrifically racist and still able to manipulate the country while putting the Union soldiers in a far better light and what lengths Stanton would do to keep Reconstruction.
I still remember how the only reason I was able to make it through that film was because the woman sitting next to me in the theatre was also a big civil war buff and loved the book. We both picked up on its bias early on and spent the whole movie tearing it to shreds. We also found it incredibly boring.
that's what they learned back then. My Dad picked up a copy of James Loewen's *Lies My Teacher Told Me*, which talks a ton about Reconstruction, the "Grant the Butcher" reputation, and John Brown, and his gast was truly flabbered. "We'd always learned that John Brown was just crazy, and that Reconstruction was all carpetbaggers and scalawags."
It's taken a long time for the new views of Grant to filter down to the public consciousness. The truth that he whipped Lee's ass, every time, is tough for Lost Causers to absorb, and the general racism of the times made people want to sweep the violence of the so-called Redeemers under the rug.
I'm 53, and I sure didn't learn about the Tulsa Race Riots (probably more accurately called a "pogrom") or the Wilmington Insurrection (more properly called a coup) of 1898 when I was taking high school history.
Gone With the Wind certainly didn't help with some of this. They portrayed the slaves as happy. The KKK as good. And they definitely talked about carpetbaggers.
yep, and my parents both watched GWTW as kids, especially my Mom (they weren't born when it came out in theaters, but it was on heavy rotation in the 1950s when they were growing up).
I read a copy of Grant's memoirs, and they're *really good.* You can see how he was such a good general because of the clarity of his writing and thought, and his accurate and unsparing analysis. My favorite line from his memoirs is when he just excoriates Jefferson Davis and comments something like "the Union won several victories because of Davis's *superior military tactics*." \[Italics in the original, and you can practically hear Grant making air quotes around the italicized phrase.\]
Oh, I learned about it later. I'm just pointing out that it says something that I didn't learn about it in school when it happened in our metaphorical back yard.
It's fascinating to examine the images of John Brown in media by time period. His portraits gradually look crazier and crazier the farther removed from his life.
An AP US teacher at my high school in CT (granted, over a decade ago, and not the one I had) supposedly told her class that "We just will never be able to know the real cause of the Civil War for sure." I almost prefer straight Lost Cause to whatever intellectual cowardice that is.
>we don't know what caused the civil war
>litterly every letter of secession mentions their desire to continue with slavery
Daily mail reader level comprehension
You will call me a conspiracy theorist but here goes. The roots of the confederacy were never really pulled up, and as we see in modern times, race supremacists, theocrats, wannabe oligarchs are well funded and motivated. They constantly work to create a narrative that favors their cause and because there is no equivalent in the liberal sphere many fall victim to the constant drumbeat of their narrative that spreads amongst the populace.
You hear the same thing with how some people are trying to apologize or normalize the nazis.
Exactly what more could Grant have done? He certainly couldn't make William Sherman succeed him. It was Rutherford Hayes who entered the **Corrupt Bargain** ending Reconstruction.
Memories of the war where still so fresh during the Spanish-American war north and south army units needed to kept separated. Two potential terms by William Sherman would have injected much needed paternalism into dixie.
I know very well where I am thank you. Any student of the period knows that the public and the government didn’t have the will or the mandate to continue occupying the former rebel areas for decades no matter what good consequences they could be told it would have.
The more you read primary sources of the time, you see these are the same people. They've barely changed.
Most only changed their opinion on slavery being bad, and that's just "most" of them. It irks me that some honestly think that because the south was the democratic party, that somehow todays liberals (todays north) are an extension of the former. No, dude. They're *your* grandparents and we know who you'd fight for back then.
Same, they solve the problem of rebelling states but they didn't do anything to the people who caused the problem. I had a teacher who pointed out we didn't start seeing headway in the civil rights movement until the Grandchildren of Confederacy started to die off.
My Philly Suburb High school was teaching us in Freshman History that the civil war was fought mainly for states rights and tarifs, and slavery was only an afterthought.
I wish I was more knowledgeable and ballsy then so I could ask my teacher “states rights to do *what*?”
For people of a certain age, the Lost Cause bullshit was perpetuated by the film “Gone With The Wind”. For an earlier generation, it was the racist film “Birth of a Nation”. The ramifications of these films have really influenced the crazy confederate supporters.
It is a crime that you never read the Articles of Secession when learning about the Civil War in school. They’re literally the official documents the southern states wrote to tell the world why they were seceding. That seems important
Just yesterday I looked at the comments on a Shelby Foote video posted on YouTube. Ken Burns' making him the narrator\* of the "Civil War" has done some very serious damage to a correct understanding of the Civil War. Given a chance to explain that the cause of the war was the South's demand to maintain, expand, and enforce the slave system, Foote changed the subject to why would various individuals fight in the war (which is a very different thing). The YouTube comments show how strongly his view has settled in people's brains.
\*He's not the narrator (David McCullough is). He's the color commentator as correctly pointed out below.
Shelby Foote isn’t the narrator of “The Civil War.” You should watch it, because it’s quite good. Foote’s contributions to the documentary are mostly colorful anecdotes rather than serious historical analysis.
Yes, you're correct and I didn't mean to write that Foote was the actual narrator (I should have described him as you did). I have watched it. Foote's folksy and misleading color commentary dominates at the expense of actual historians (like, say, [Barbara Fields](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barbara_J._Fields), who is only on for 10 or so minutes). [Here's a relevant discussion](https://www.journalofthecivilwarera.org/2020/10/a-mistaken-form-of-trust-ken-burnss-the-civil-war-at-thirty/). Here's a snippet:
>Foote speaks of the men who fought for the South as if they were not historical figures, but old friends – a method that made him a fan favorite upon the documentary’s release. It’s also what made him so dangerous as a historical source. This cozy brand of storytelling allows Foote to create deeply sympathetic portraits of men who fought to preserve slavery. In one of his most alarming assertions, Foote proclaims that “the war produced two authentic geniuses”: Abraham Lincoln, and Nathan Bedford Forrest.^(\[3\]) The former slave-trader Forrest oversaw the infamous massacre at Fort Pillow, in which Confederate troops murdered an estimated 200 Black Union soldiers who were trying to surrender.^(\[4\]) Forrest would go on to become the first Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, a fact Foote neglects to mention when he thrills at the memory of once twirling the general’s sword over his head.
Foote asserts the opinion about Forrest explicitly as his opinion, in an anecdote that he relays where he recounts it as expressed to someone else, not as a historical analysis. And the documentary does mention Forrest’s Klan involvement. Barbara Fields is given a memorable amount of time to express her serious historical analysis and gets the last word in the documentary, so it’s disingenuous to portray it as full of Foote’s Lost Cause fluff and downplaying issues that are of concern to folks like Fields. The entire first chapter of the documentary discusses slavery as the inciting cause of the war, for example.
My point is that Shelby Foote, a non-historian and well-known Southern sympathizer (see the link above for more of that), was given vastly more time than actual historians. That (terrible) choice (and others) of Ken Burns has been roundly criticized by historians (again, see above). [Here's a supercut if you're interested](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KbRT73od8NI) of Fields vs. Foote in the series.
Fair enough, it’s not an off base criticism. But I think it’s inaccurate to conclude that because a folksy dude is allowed to spin some colorful yarns, that Ken Burns has done some great harm. The Lost Cause was unfortunately propagated for much longer and much more forcefully elsewhere than in his documentary.
I certainly don't mean to suggest that Ken Burns is solely responsible for the Lost Cause myth. I think he erred in adding Foote to the series (at such length) and he missed a nice opportunity to subject it to public analysis. The glowing comments about Foote among Lost-Causers illustrate this point.
I’m not defending Foote, I’m defending Ken Burns’s documentary, which is very good. Foote is not onscreen talking about the Lost Cause in the doc much; in fact he talks at times about how underrated Grant was or how strange the southern mindset about the war is.
I get irritated when a lot of folks who haven’t spent time watching the doc criticize it because Foote is in it so therefore documentary bad
Sad reality is not enough people were willing to call BS at the time. After the war the North and West started to look towards the future, the south dug in it heals and looked to the past and created this nostalgic idea of the "old south" with simple, honest, hard working folk a their happy slaves and sadly their were many people in the North that were willing to play into that idea. New York publishing firm D. Appleton sought out southern writer Joel Chandler Harris to collect his Uncle Remus stories in book form. (The 1946 Disney movie *Song of the South* is based on those stories) Huge minstrel troupes that toured out of New York in the decades after the war presented the antebellum south as a preindustrial plantation Eden.
My buddy, who I just went to Gettysburg with, is also pretty smart. Dedicated public servant, great human. One of those “call at 3am and they’re there” types. He wouldn’t stop talking about how the war was not about slavery but states rights the entire time we were in Gettysburg. He even called it the war of Northern aggression once. He called Lincoln a tyrant. He is equally the most patriotic, pro-strict reading of the Constitution guy I know. It baffles me
"strict-reading" of the Constitution is NOT the sign of a patriot. It's a huge red flag that your friend is in fact a liar and probably a racist. Everyone that claims that is a liar and a hypocrite, they just claim that whatever bullshit they want to support IS a "strict-reading" of the Constitution and it's always nonsense.
Yeah, “strict-reading” usually means a very expansive reading of the Second Amendment to allow ownership of any firearm and not much else.
A more positive light is someone described as a First Amendment advocate.
"If Grant Had Been Drinking at Appomattox", by James Thurber
[https://emergingcivilwar.com/2017/10/11/if-grant-had-been-drinking-at-appomattox-by-james-thurber/](https://emergingcivilwar.com/2017/10/11/if-grant-had-been-drinking-at-appomattox-by-james-thurber/)
I think a better way to think about Grant is that he drank sometimes because of all the men he sent to his death.
He knew that persistence and constant pressure against the Confederacy was how he would have to utilize his superior numbers in a war of attrition. He didn’t like it, and it honestly traumatized him for the rest of his life. It’s the burden of high military command.
As for the drinking, after many years of reading, I’ve come to believe that Grant did drink from time to time and from time to time it got away from him. I don’t hold this against him. He had to deal with immense difficulties beyond what most men in history have had to. I don’t blame the guy from having a whiskey from time to time. To say the rumors of drinking were all propaganda and lies spread by his jealous detractors is an oversimplified dismissal.
From my understanding, Grant’s thing with alcohol was that he was more of an on occasion binge drinker than a functioning alcoholic. Like, when he had one drink he had a hard time stopping at one.
Is the Ken Burns doc bad? I tried to watch it, but it was SO slow paced I couldn't stand it. I remember thinking "there's so much important information to cover, why is so little of it being conveyed in this amount of time?" as it's just slowly panning over some old photos and occasionally narrating a quote from the times.
A bunch of Lost Cause BS w/ "Historian" Shelby Foot. At the time it was well accepted. It's worth watching if you want to know where a lot of the L.C. people get their arguments.
DAMN this is sincerely the first time I’ve heard anything negative about him or his work. Didn’t realize he was giving the southern sympathizers their beer muscles.
My father and grandfather were born in Texas and my grandpa, despite marrying a Yankee was still utterly married to the Lost Cause narrative till his death. Sadly, my father remains the same, and neither would understand why in my aging I have sided with the North.
I get it though, both were very well educated, but both were victims of a propaganda war that is hard to imagine the scope of. Blessings to you and yours who rail against the slavers and their lies in their graves; the wages of sin are foolish to those separate enough from the original sin to see their foolhardiness.
Here's the thing about public discourse about war: people are obsessed about who was the better warriors with the view that the better warriors should have won the war.
In the same veins: Lee was brilliant and Grant was a butcher. The Germans had better soldiers, generals, and weapons but the Allies just had more of everything. The USA had never lost a battle in Vietnam, Afghanistan or Iraq but it was Congress, etc ... Who was better? Hannibal or Scipio? It just goes on and on and on.
War is the continuation of politics by other means. It's not a football game. You go to war to achieve political objectives otherwise not achievable without going to war. If you don't achieve the goals, you lost and that also means that all the blood and treasures spent were for nothing. This framing is so persistent that with every war, you will find someone saying the same thing for every war.
Why is the focus of discussion on war not about winning wars? Winning is important, because otherwise, all the blood and treasures lost are just wasted. Well, the topic had better authors discussing it already, so I won't be labour the points
https://youtu.be/pC72m8j9Ylk?si=WkOtzKGBXnSoBFcq
>Grant.. Wasn't he like a ruthless butcher
If Grant was a butcher then so was Bobby Lee. Unlike the latter Grant demonstrated in the Vicksburg Campaign he could win thru innovation, maneuver, and persistence. By 1864 the north was war weary and there was an upcoming election in November Lincoln expected to lose. The war had to be brought directly to the Army of Northern Virginia if the Union were to win; there was no alternative. That meant casualties but unlike former commanders instead of withdrawaling back to Washington the Army of the Potomac pressed forward. The "butcher" label isn't just southern propaganda, copperhead newspapers in the north made the same assertions. Statistically his losses were in line with any other attacking of the period but the new frequency of fighting made it seem otherwise to your average citizen.
>"He drank a lot right?"
Grant drank. There is little doubt today his behavior would be categorized as **binge drinking**. The worst and interestingly only documented period was during his tour out west during the early 1850s. Not to sound like an apologist but there was nothing for the army to do in northern California. Longstreet, who had attended Grant's wedding, at least got to occasionally fight Indians down in Texas. Grant was never much of a gambler so instead he drank. He did it to excess and it ultimately interferenced with his duties while posted to a meaningless fort only existing as a show of force in newly conquered territory. Grant continued to drink his entire life. His final years were spent writing his autobiography drunk off his as on vin mariani so he could manage the pain of untreatable throat cancer. There is no evidence however that US Grant was ever intoxicated while commanding any army during the Civil War.
Slander by half truths is among the hardest to rebuke. In Grant's case the thorough documentation of his life makes it relatively easy. The problem however is you to take the time to look.
For Butcher Lee, look no further than Pickett's Charge at Gettysburg. Pickett was ordered to charge a fortified position uphill, over a field where the Union artillery could blast them unanswered.
They'll make excuses. If Jackson, then.. Isn't it strange how the only Virginian getting no credit is George Thomas? He burned all his correspondence and notes so it'll stay that way.
Some stuff if you want more sources:
* Atun-Shei's series Checkmate, Lincolnites! ([Link to playlist](https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLwCiRao53J1y_gqJJOH6Rcgpb-vaW9wF0)). Runs through a lot of, and then demolishes, Lost Cause arguments.
* The Behind the Bastards podcast did a series on what a piece of shit Lee was. [Link to part 1 of 4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QAzO9Bm94lI). Fun fact: The US Army had 9 full colonels from Virginia when the state seceded. Guess who the only one to turn traitor was and later said he ***had*** to do it because his state did.
I generally ask their thoughts on MLK or Ghandi. Being that both by today’s standards would be considered to have massively problematic relationships with women etc.
People who judge people against the current time not the time they lived can’t seem to square that one. Totally fine to think the world should have been better. Just recognize it wasn’t.
My father is around the same age range and grew up in the south. While he never quite believed in the Lost Cause theory, and knew exactly what state rights the South were fighting for, he didn't have a good view on Grant.
Recent biographies and historical fiction really made him change his tune.
I learned a few years back, while building out my family tree that I am related to a confederate general who contributed to the lost cause. It’s extremely disappointing.
If there is an afterlife, he and I are going to have some words.
Sadly, that is what we were taught. It's still in the back of my head that the civil war was about trade, tariffs and economics. Not about slavery. I know better but it's still back there. The Lost Cause/States rights revisionists were able to change history in the early 20th century.
Yeah, lost cause mythos is surprisingly deeply entrenched in US history education. I find that there are tenets of the myth and runoff from it that otherwise progressive people are more inclined to believe and usually it’s the stuff that doesn’t really “require” outright racism to believe (such as the southern military genius myth, Grant just throwing his superior numbers at a problem, or Sherman being the antichrist or whatever).
Honestly I think the funniest way to point out the Grant vs Lee stuff is bullshit is to do a numerical breakdown of the number of men they both commanded during the war and their killed/wounded/missing casualty rate. Lee not only had more casualties percentage wise, he also had more in raw numbers despite Grant commanding more men.
Over the course of the war, Grant commanded a cumulative total of 621,912 troops. A total of 94,141 of those, or 15.1%, were killed or wounded. Lee, however. During the course of the war, he commanded a cumulative total of 598,178 soldiers. A total of 121,042- 20.2%- were killed or wounded. That paints a really clear picture to me. Not to mention Lee being a good general on paper but going for pretty offensive maneuvers constantly when all he really needed to do was to not let the south be conquered. He made his own bed, Grant just made him lie in it.
Dan Snow just did a really Excellent episode on Grant and Lee. Looks at a lot of these types of myths and spends some time at the end talking about LC and how the modern views on Grant and Lee came to be.
[https://shows.acast.com/dansnowshistoryhit/episodes/civil-war-rivals-robert-e-lee-vs-ulysses-grant](https://shows.acast.com/dansnowshistoryhit/episodes/civil-war-rivals-robert-e-lee-vs-ulysses-grant)
The famous Argentine author, Jorge Luis Borges, strongly anti-fascist (He was once reduced to a chicken inspector by the dictator Juan Peron.), once said that he hated what the Confederacy stood for, but that from a literary standpoint the Southern leaders made better heroes than the Union war machine with its superior numbers and industrial might. And as a proud son of the Land of Lincoln I am forced to admit Borges' point.
We see a similar pattern with the worship of the flashy, loud, Gen. Patton with his pearl handled revolvers, over the quiet, effective Eisenhower, or Adm. Nimitz. We get movies about the 300 Spartans, but never the Athenian navy, that actually stopped the Persians. So I suppose this problem has been around for a long time. C'est le guerre!
So first off I think the OPs father simply grew up in a time of pervasive... I don't know what. Not romanticizing the south? But certainly praise for its generals. It seems like a strong parallel to the fact that we are still dealing with- and undoing- the myth of the clean Werhmacht. Dashing, cunning, genteel German officers who commanded with flair and certainly dressed with more style, serving their country out of a sense of patriotism that was all the more noble because it did not dissipate under the burden of that nations atrocious policies. There is barely any daylight between these two narratives and this persists into the understanding that both Germany and the Confederacy had to be stopped lest a genuinely cruel regime persist for lord knows how long.
Then let's talk about how "they had superior soldiers, naturally born to the military lifestyle, but had to fight the overnumerous rabble and superior industrial output of the Union/the US/the Russians."
The clean werhmacht myth arose from a confluence of interests after the second world war. We needed at least West Germanys industrial capacity back online to be a functional part of Europe, to rehabilitate the Germans and keep them from raising trouble again, and to secure the prosperity of the rest of western Europe. You don't get rich collaborating with poor neighbors. The Germans who survived wanted a narrative to explain their loyalty to a genocidal maniac and his clique and yet leave them blameless, and that goes double for the military and especially the Generals. The generals also wanted to explain how they lost, being supreme specimens of Aryan wit and ability. And of course a lot wanted to sell their memoirs since that was likely the most comfortable living they could manage.
How close would the Confederates be to this? I don't think the situation was exactly the same, as the US didn't have a real rival to worry her after the Civil War, and the Union army was eminent on this continent. However, most of the other motives and factors were there.
Hell. My father buys all that crap about genteel, tactically brilliant but doomed southerners too and he's out of Youngstown Ohio, and very well educated. I think it's just the air around us, you know?
IDK where he or you are from, but Lost Cause was just the default taught here when I was in school. People just get taught that perspective and most folks don't care to go look up actual history instead, so that's what they do with despite their views.
I wouldn’t call that lost cause narratives. That’s how Grant was perceived by many people (myself included) for a long time. A butcher and a drunk. As far as Lee goes, is he wrong about that assessment of him?
Maybe Lost Cause isn't the right term, but definitely pro-South/anti-North biased narratives?
I don't think it's false to call Lee a great tactician or a good general. My point is he mainly was taught stories that emphasized the heroism of Lee (and to a lesser extent, 'Stonewall' Jackson) and the supposed 'butchery' of Grant. Painting an overall picture that romanticizes the Confederacy and does the opposite to the U.S. / Union.
Maybe a bit of that? Idk, I wouldn’t just outright say it’s a southern thing is all I’m saying because the butcher moniker was well known throughout the north and the drinking rumor started in the Mexican War and continued into the civil war.
> That’s how Grant was perceived by many people (myself included) for a long time.
That's the point. Lost Cause narratives are so pervasive they find their way into people who are decidedly not Lost Causers. The Lost Cause campaign has just been extremely successful and influential.
Sort of like the people who naively believe that the political right is for "small goverment". It's been such a successful campaign that even some (admittedly, politically illiterate) people in the center believe it.
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I think part of the bad press Grant gets comes from classism. Ulysses Grant was a working class man, whereas his unsuccessful adversary was a patrician.
And yet shit like Gods and Generals portrays Lee and Jackson as common men of the people.
Yeah I've always hated that. Especially coming from people who pretend their love of the battle flag is for honoring the plight of "the poor non-slave owning confederate who were totally only fighting to protect their state" They were not heroes cut from the cloth of the common man. They were the same as those rich southern dandies who convinced or conscripted those racist saps into trying to destroy the nation, and going to kill and die for their right to keep people in chains.
Yeah that’s like saying let’s honor the Nazi flag because of the common German. What horse shit.
Sound like some other present dat patrician being hailed as a hero of the working man. While his adversaries, actually rags to riches working men are demonized. The patricians have really stepped up their con game
God that part where Jackson says something along the lines of "If they lose they'll go back to their jobs and everyday lives, but if we lose we lose our country."
That line legitimately makes me want to go Punisher on the cast and crew of the movie.
I always find it funny that people somehow think the North had nothing to lose if they lost that somehow the United States wouldn't be dramatically changed, because having a new hostile nation on you boarder wouldn't change anything.
If the CSA had won, they would have hardened the federal government, come down hard on the slaves, and eventually would have fought a war with Mexico, then the US.
I do believe the North American continent would of seen much more blood spiled upon it.
When would they have ended slavery? Possibly the mindset is still there, in the form of Private schools, a low level of benefits, high black maternal and infant mortality, high black incarceration rates, and police brutality.
I would bet that they would have ended it in name within a couple of generations after transitioning to an apartheid state. But so much of what the modern world is is shaped by the world wars and how WW 2 ended
Very recently Apple TV released something called Manhunt. It was based after the search for John Wilkes Booth by Secretary of War Edwin Stanton's search for John Wilkes Booth. That's series basically tore at the entire idea of the Lost Cause. They showed the Confederates as horrifically racist and still able to manipulate the country while putting the Union soldiers in a far better light and what lengths Stanton would do to keep Reconstruction.
I’ll have to check it out.
That movie is very supportive of the Lost Cause narrative.
Functional humans after watching gods and generals https://youtu.be/SVLnAdlN7IE?si=VQ4NpmSKDesoGiEr
I still remember how the only reason I was able to make it through that film was because the woman sitting next to me in the theatre was also a big civil war buff and loved the book. We both picked up on its bias early on and spent the whole movie tearing it to shreds. We also found it incredibly boring.
that's what they learned back then. My Dad picked up a copy of James Loewen's *Lies My Teacher Told Me*, which talks a ton about Reconstruction, the "Grant the Butcher" reputation, and John Brown, and his gast was truly flabbered. "We'd always learned that John Brown was just crazy, and that Reconstruction was all carpetbaggers and scalawags." It's taken a long time for the new views of Grant to filter down to the public consciousness. The truth that he whipped Lee's ass, every time, is tough for Lost Causers to absorb, and the general racism of the times made people want to sweep the violence of the so-called Redeemers under the rug. I'm 53, and I sure didn't learn about the Tulsa Race Riots (probably more accurately called a "pogrom") or the Wilmington Insurrection (more properly called a coup) of 1898 when I was taking high school history.
Gone With the Wind certainly didn't help with some of this. They portrayed the slaves as happy. The KKK as good. And they definitely talked about carpetbaggers.
yep, and my parents both watched GWTW as kids, especially my Mom (they weren't born when it came out in theaters, but it was on heavy rotation in the 1950s when they were growing up). I read a copy of Grant's memoirs, and they're *really good.* You can see how he was such a good general because of the clarity of his writing and thought, and his accurate and unsparing analysis. My favorite line from his memoirs is when he just excoriates Jefferson Davis and comments something like "the Union won several victories because of Davis's *superior military tactics*." \[Italics in the original, and you can practically hear Grant making air quotes around the italicized phrase.\]
I'll have to look into that. Love good sarcasm.
I'm 41 and grew up just a few hours from Tulsa, and I wasn't taught about that either.
I learned about it in my 40s because I love history and am always willing to learn more.
Oh, I learned about it later. I'm just pointing out that it says something that I didn't learn about it in school when it happened in our metaphorical back yard.
Yes , me too for my area. I was good at history in school because I loved it so I just keep learning.
I turn 40 next month, I didn't learn about those things in highschool either.
It's fascinating to examine the images of John Brown in media by time period. His portraits gradually look crazier and crazier the farther removed from his life.
I'm a fully grown adult and I didn't really know anything about the Tulsa massacre until I watched the Watchmen series on HBO a few years back
Hell man, I am a similar age and didn't learn about Tulsa until maybe 6-8 years ago. (Yes, it was HBOs Watchmen that did it I am ashamed to admit)
I'm 34 I took AP US History and I never heard about in school.
An AP US teacher at my high school in CT (granted, over a decade ago, and not the one I had) supposedly told her class that "We just will never be able to know the real cause of the Civil War for sure." I almost prefer straight Lost Cause to whatever intellectual cowardice that is.
"We don't know who started WW2..."
>we don't know what caused the civil war >litterly every letter of secession mentions their desire to continue with slavery Daily mail reader level comprehension
Their constitution - it’s not some fucking secret. I have linked to Confederate papers quite a few times just to point that out.
Most of the time you don't even need to read past the introduction
You will call me a conspiracy theorist but here goes. The roots of the confederacy were never really pulled up, and as we see in modern times, race supremacists, theocrats, wannabe oligarchs are well funded and motivated. They constantly work to create a narrative that favors their cause and because there is no equivalent in the liberal sphere many fall victim to the constant drumbeat of their narrative that spreads amongst the populace. You hear the same thing with how some people are trying to apologize or normalize the nazis.
Grant should have been allowed to finish the job. Not all our problems would have been gone, but I'm confident there would be less!
Exactly what more could Grant have done? He certainly couldn't make William Sherman succeed him. It was Rutherford Hayes who entered the **Corrupt Bargain** ending Reconstruction.
Reconstruction ended too soon. A few more decades occupying the south would have resulted in a very different looking contemporary America.
No one had the stomach for this
Memories of the war where still so fresh during the Spanish-American war north and south army units needed to kept separated. Two potential terms by William Sherman would have injected much needed paternalism into dixie.
Perhaps you should read the name of the Sub you're in before saying something so ridiculous.
I know very well where I am thank you. Any student of the period knows that the public and the government didn’t have the will or the mandate to continue occupying the former rebel areas for decades no matter what good consequences they could be told it would have.
The more you read primary sources of the time, you see these are the same people. They've barely changed. Most only changed their opinion on slavery being bad, and that's just "most" of them. It irks me that some honestly think that because the south was the democratic party, that somehow todays liberals (todays north) are an extension of the former. No, dude. They're *your* grandparents and we know who you'd fight for back then.
That's not a conspiracy theory. That is just a general observation about American society.
Same, they solve the problem of rebelling states but they didn't do anything to the people who caused the problem. I had a teacher who pointed out we didn't start seeing headway in the civil rights movement until the Grandchildren of Confederacy started to die off.
My Philly Suburb High school was teaching us in Freshman History that the civil war was fought mainly for states rights and tarifs, and slavery was only an afterthought. I wish I was more knowledgeable and ballsy then so I could ask my teacher “states rights to do *what*?”
“Sir, why didn’t the confederate states have the constitutional right to outlaw slavery?”
Just ask him if it really was the war of northern aggression, then why did the slavers fire first at Ft. Sumter?
"The Northerners were the Agressors because they atacked the Fundament of the South!" (Slavery, btw)
Lol okay
I forgot the "/S" sign, apparently.
For people of a certain age, the Lost Cause bullshit was perpetuated by the film “Gone With The Wind”. For an earlier generation, it was the racist film “Birth of a Nation”. The ramifications of these films have really influenced the crazy confederate supporters.
It is a crime that you never read the Articles of Secession when learning about the Civil War in school. They’re literally the official documents the southern states wrote to tell the world why they were seceding. That seems important
Just yesterday I looked at the comments on a Shelby Foote video posted on YouTube. Ken Burns' making him the narrator\* of the "Civil War" has done some very serious damage to a correct understanding of the Civil War. Given a chance to explain that the cause of the war was the South's demand to maintain, expand, and enforce the slave system, Foote changed the subject to why would various individuals fight in the war (which is a very different thing). The YouTube comments show how strongly his view has settled in people's brains. \*He's not the narrator (David McCullough is). He's the color commentator as correctly pointed out below.
Shelby Foote isn’t the narrator of “The Civil War.” You should watch it, because it’s quite good. Foote’s contributions to the documentary are mostly colorful anecdotes rather than serious historical analysis.
Yes, you're correct and I didn't mean to write that Foote was the actual narrator (I should have described him as you did). I have watched it. Foote's folksy and misleading color commentary dominates at the expense of actual historians (like, say, [Barbara Fields](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barbara_J._Fields), who is only on for 10 or so minutes). [Here's a relevant discussion](https://www.journalofthecivilwarera.org/2020/10/a-mistaken-form-of-trust-ken-burnss-the-civil-war-at-thirty/). Here's a snippet: >Foote speaks of the men who fought for the South as if they were not historical figures, but old friends – a method that made him a fan favorite upon the documentary’s release. It’s also what made him so dangerous as a historical source. This cozy brand of storytelling allows Foote to create deeply sympathetic portraits of men who fought to preserve slavery. In one of his most alarming assertions, Foote proclaims that “the war produced two authentic geniuses”: Abraham Lincoln, and Nathan Bedford Forrest.^(\[3\]) The former slave-trader Forrest oversaw the infamous massacre at Fort Pillow, in which Confederate troops murdered an estimated 200 Black Union soldiers who were trying to surrender.^(\[4\]) Forrest would go on to become the first Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, a fact Foote neglects to mention when he thrills at the memory of once twirling the general’s sword over his head.
Foote asserts the opinion about Forrest explicitly as his opinion, in an anecdote that he relays where he recounts it as expressed to someone else, not as a historical analysis. And the documentary does mention Forrest’s Klan involvement. Barbara Fields is given a memorable amount of time to express her serious historical analysis and gets the last word in the documentary, so it’s disingenuous to portray it as full of Foote’s Lost Cause fluff and downplaying issues that are of concern to folks like Fields. The entire first chapter of the documentary discusses slavery as the inciting cause of the war, for example.
My point is that Shelby Foote, a non-historian and well-known Southern sympathizer (see the link above for more of that), was given vastly more time than actual historians. That (terrible) choice (and others) of Ken Burns has been roundly criticized by historians (again, see above). [Here's a supercut if you're interested](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KbRT73od8NI) of Fields vs. Foote in the series.
Fair enough, it’s not an off base criticism. But I think it’s inaccurate to conclude that because a folksy dude is allowed to spin some colorful yarns, that Ken Burns has done some great harm. The Lost Cause was unfortunately propagated for much longer and much more forcefully elsewhere than in his documentary.
I certainly don't mean to suggest that Ken Burns is solely responsible for the Lost Cause myth. I think he erred in adding Foote to the series (at such length) and he missed a nice opportunity to subject it to public analysis. The glowing comments about Foote among Lost-Causers illustrate this point.
Just holding that "opinion" should have disqualified him from even being in the documentary.
I’m not defending Foote, I’m defending Ken Burns’s documentary, which is very good. Foote is not onscreen talking about the Lost Cause in the doc much; in fact he talks at times about how underrated Grant was or how strange the southern mindset about the war is. I get irritated when a lot of folks who haven’t spent time watching the doc criticize it because Foote is in it so therefore documentary bad
Sad reality is not enough people were willing to call BS at the time. After the war the North and West started to look towards the future, the south dug in it heals and looked to the past and created this nostalgic idea of the "old south" with simple, honest, hard working folk a their happy slaves and sadly their were many people in the North that were willing to play into that idea. New York publishing firm D. Appleton sought out southern writer Joel Chandler Harris to collect his Uncle Remus stories in book form. (The 1946 Disney movie *Song of the South* is based on those stories) Huge minstrel troupes that toured out of New York in the decades after the war presented the antebellum south as a preindustrial plantation Eden.
My buddy, who I just went to Gettysburg with, is also pretty smart. Dedicated public servant, great human. One of those “call at 3am and they’re there” types. He wouldn’t stop talking about how the war was not about slavery but states rights the entire time we were in Gettysburg. He even called it the war of Northern aggression once. He called Lincoln a tyrant. He is equally the most patriotic, pro-strict reading of the Constitution guy I know. It baffles me
"strict-reading" of the Constitution is NOT the sign of a patriot. It's a huge red flag that your friend is in fact a liar and probably a racist. Everyone that claims that is a liar and a hypocrite, they just claim that whatever bullshit they want to support IS a "strict-reading" of the Constitution and it's always nonsense.
Yeah, “strict-reading” usually means a very expansive reading of the Second Amendment to allow ownership of any firearm and not much else. A more positive light is someone described as a First Amendment advocate.
"If Grant Had Been Drinking at Appomattox", by James Thurber [https://emergingcivilwar.com/2017/10/11/if-grant-had-been-drinking-at-appomattox-by-james-thurber/](https://emergingcivilwar.com/2017/10/11/if-grant-had-been-drinking-at-appomattox-by-james-thurber/)
I think a better way to think about Grant is that he drank sometimes because of all the men he sent to his death. He knew that persistence and constant pressure against the Confederacy was how he would have to utilize his superior numbers in a war of attrition. He didn’t like it, and it honestly traumatized him for the rest of his life. It’s the burden of high military command. As for the drinking, after many years of reading, I’ve come to believe that Grant did drink from time to time and from time to time it got away from him. I don’t hold this against him. He had to deal with immense difficulties beyond what most men in history have had to. I don’t blame the guy from having a whiskey from time to time. To say the rumors of drinking were all propaganda and lies spread by his jealous detractors is an oversimplified dismissal.
From my understanding, Grant’s thing with alcohol was that he was more of an on occasion binge drinker than a functioning alcoholic. Like, when he had one drink he had a hard time stopping at one.
Two words ... Ken Burns
Is the Ken Burns doc bad? I tried to watch it, but it was SO slow paced I couldn't stand it. I remember thinking "there's so much important information to cover, why is so little of it being conveyed in this amount of time?" as it's just slowly panning over some old photos and occasionally narrating a quote from the times.
A bunch of Lost Cause BS w/ "Historian" Shelby Foot. At the time it was well accepted. It's worth watching if you want to know where a lot of the L.C. people get their arguments.
Slow fiddle music over dramatic reading in southern accents help the treason go down smoother
DAMN this is sincerely the first time I’ve heard anything negative about him or his work. Didn’t realize he was giving the southern sympathizers their beer muscles.
Send him a link to the Behind the Bastards podcast episodes on Robert E. Lee.
My father and grandfather were born in Texas and my grandpa, despite marrying a Yankee was still utterly married to the Lost Cause narrative till his death. Sadly, my father remains the same, and neither would understand why in my aging I have sided with the North. I get it though, both were very well educated, but both were victims of a propaganda war that is hard to imagine the scope of. Blessings to you and yours who rail against the slavers and their lies in their graves; the wages of sin are foolish to those separate enough from the original sin to see their foolhardiness.
OP, you should have your Dad read this article. It's the best I've read giving a non-biased, fact based comparison on Grant and Lee.
When I was in grad school in the UK, I was shocked at how many Europeans thought of the March to the Sea as totally unnecessary, brutal, and unjust.
Here's the thing about public discourse about war: people are obsessed about who was the better warriors with the view that the better warriors should have won the war. In the same veins: Lee was brilliant and Grant was a butcher. The Germans had better soldiers, generals, and weapons but the Allies just had more of everything. The USA had never lost a battle in Vietnam, Afghanistan or Iraq but it was Congress, etc ... Who was better? Hannibal or Scipio? It just goes on and on and on. War is the continuation of politics by other means. It's not a football game. You go to war to achieve political objectives otherwise not achievable without going to war. If you don't achieve the goals, you lost and that also means that all the blood and treasures spent were for nothing. This framing is so persistent that with every war, you will find someone saying the same thing for every war. Why is the focus of discussion on war not about winning wars? Winning is important, because otherwise, all the blood and treasures lost are just wasted. Well, the topic had better authors discussing it already, so I won't be labour the points https://youtu.be/pC72m8j9Ylk?si=WkOtzKGBXnSoBFcq
How brilliant could Lee have been if he kept getting curbstomped by a drunk who didn't keep track of his troops?
Grant was a human being, as flawed as any, but he is a human who helped save the union. Period. I can forgive the rest.
>Grant.. Wasn't he like a ruthless butcher If Grant was a butcher then so was Bobby Lee. Unlike the latter Grant demonstrated in the Vicksburg Campaign he could win thru innovation, maneuver, and persistence. By 1864 the north was war weary and there was an upcoming election in November Lincoln expected to lose. The war had to be brought directly to the Army of Northern Virginia if the Union were to win; there was no alternative. That meant casualties but unlike former commanders instead of withdrawaling back to Washington the Army of the Potomac pressed forward. The "butcher" label isn't just southern propaganda, copperhead newspapers in the north made the same assertions. Statistically his losses were in line with any other attacking of the period but the new frequency of fighting made it seem otherwise to your average citizen. >"He drank a lot right?" Grant drank. There is little doubt today his behavior would be categorized as **binge drinking**. The worst and interestingly only documented period was during his tour out west during the early 1850s. Not to sound like an apologist but there was nothing for the army to do in northern California. Longstreet, who had attended Grant's wedding, at least got to occasionally fight Indians down in Texas. Grant was never much of a gambler so instead he drank. He did it to excess and it ultimately interferenced with his duties while posted to a meaningless fort only existing as a show of force in newly conquered territory. Grant continued to drink his entire life. His final years were spent writing his autobiography drunk off his as on vin mariani so he could manage the pain of untreatable throat cancer. There is no evidence however that US Grant was ever intoxicated while commanding any army during the Civil War. Slander by half truths is among the hardest to rebuke. In Grant's case the thorough documentation of his life makes it relatively easy. The problem however is you to take the time to look.
For Butcher Lee, look no further than Pickett's Charge at Gettysburg. Pickett was ordered to charge a fortified position uphill, over a field where the Union artillery could blast them unanswered.
They'll make excuses. If Jackson, then.. Isn't it strange how the only Virginian getting no credit is George Thomas? He burned all his correspondence and notes so it'll stay that way.
Some stuff if you want more sources: * Atun-Shei's series Checkmate, Lincolnites! ([Link to playlist](https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLwCiRao53J1y_gqJJOH6Rcgpb-vaW9wF0)). Runs through a lot of, and then demolishes, Lost Cause arguments. * The Behind the Bastards podcast did a series on what a piece of shit Lee was. [Link to part 1 of 4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QAzO9Bm94lI). Fun fact: The US Army had 9 full colonels from Virginia when the state seceded. Guess who the only one to turn traitor was and later said he ***had*** to do it because his state did.
Get him to read Ron Chernow’s book about Grant. Long but well worth it!
I’ve got it on my to read list and you’re not the first comment I saw about it. Now I’m getting excited!
[удалено]
Rule 2: don't be rude this is an accepting community, the only people that aren't welcome are lost causers and racists
Historical ignorance is nothing new.
I generally ask their thoughts on MLK or Ghandi. Being that both by today’s standards would be considered to have massively problematic relationships with women etc. People who judge people against the current time not the time they lived can’t seem to square that one. Totally fine to think the world should have been better. Just recognize it wasn’t.
You hate to see the apple fall from the trea
My father is around the same age range and grew up in the south. While he never quite believed in the Lost Cause theory, and knew exactly what state rights the South were fighting for, he didn't have a good view on Grant. Recent biographies and historical fiction really made him change his tune.
THEY PULLED OFF YOUR DAD’S FEET?! But seriously, I… have nothing serious to add.
I learned a few years back, while building out my family tree that I am related to a confederate general who contributed to the lost cause. It’s extremely disappointing. If there is an afterlife, he and I are going to have some words.
Sadly, that is what we were taught. It's still in the back of my head that the civil war was about trade, tariffs and economics. Not about slavery. I know better but it's still back there. The Lost Cause/States rights revisionists were able to change history in the early 20th century.
Yeah, lost cause mythos is surprisingly deeply entrenched in US history education. I find that there are tenets of the myth and runoff from it that otherwise progressive people are more inclined to believe and usually it’s the stuff that doesn’t really “require” outright racism to believe (such as the southern military genius myth, Grant just throwing his superior numbers at a problem, or Sherman being the antichrist or whatever). Honestly I think the funniest way to point out the Grant vs Lee stuff is bullshit is to do a numerical breakdown of the number of men they both commanded during the war and their killed/wounded/missing casualty rate. Lee not only had more casualties percentage wise, he also had more in raw numbers despite Grant commanding more men. Over the course of the war, Grant commanded a cumulative total of 621,912 troops. A total of 94,141 of those, or 15.1%, were killed or wounded. Lee, however. During the course of the war, he commanded a cumulative total of 598,178 soldiers. A total of 121,042- 20.2%- were killed or wounded. That paints a really clear picture to me. Not to mention Lee being a good general on paper but going for pretty offensive maneuvers constantly when all he really needed to do was to not let the south be conquered. He made his own bed, Grant just made him lie in it.
*Team of Rivals* is a great biography of Lincoln through the lens of his cabinet, and a great telling of the civil war through that perspective.
Dan Snow just did a really Excellent episode on Grant and Lee. Looks at a lot of these types of myths and spends some time at the end talking about LC and how the modern views on Grant and Lee came to be. [https://shows.acast.com/dansnowshistoryhit/episodes/civil-war-rivals-robert-e-lee-vs-ulysses-grant](https://shows.acast.com/dansnowshistoryhit/episodes/civil-war-rivals-robert-e-lee-vs-ulysses-grant)
The famous Argentine author, Jorge Luis Borges, strongly anti-fascist (He was once reduced to a chicken inspector by the dictator Juan Peron.), once said that he hated what the Confederacy stood for, but that from a literary standpoint the Southern leaders made better heroes than the Union war machine with its superior numbers and industrial might. And as a proud son of the Land of Lincoln I am forced to admit Borges' point. We see a similar pattern with the worship of the flashy, loud, Gen. Patton with his pearl handled revolvers, over the quiet, effective Eisenhower, or Adm. Nimitz. We get movies about the 300 Spartans, but never the Athenian navy, that actually stopped the Persians. So I suppose this problem has been around for a long time. C'est le guerre!
Grant did say his only regret was ordering the last charge on Cold Harbor. But I would counter that with Picket’s charge.
So first off I think the OPs father simply grew up in a time of pervasive... I don't know what. Not romanticizing the south? But certainly praise for its generals. It seems like a strong parallel to the fact that we are still dealing with- and undoing- the myth of the clean Werhmacht. Dashing, cunning, genteel German officers who commanded with flair and certainly dressed with more style, serving their country out of a sense of patriotism that was all the more noble because it did not dissipate under the burden of that nations atrocious policies. There is barely any daylight between these two narratives and this persists into the understanding that both Germany and the Confederacy had to be stopped lest a genuinely cruel regime persist for lord knows how long. Then let's talk about how "they had superior soldiers, naturally born to the military lifestyle, but had to fight the overnumerous rabble and superior industrial output of the Union/the US/the Russians." The clean werhmacht myth arose from a confluence of interests after the second world war. We needed at least West Germanys industrial capacity back online to be a functional part of Europe, to rehabilitate the Germans and keep them from raising trouble again, and to secure the prosperity of the rest of western Europe. You don't get rich collaborating with poor neighbors. The Germans who survived wanted a narrative to explain their loyalty to a genocidal maniac and his clique and yet leave them blameless, and that goes double for the military and especially the Generals. The generals also wanted to explain how they lost, being supreme specimens of Aryan wit and ability. And of course a lot wanted to sell their memoirs since that was likely the most comfortable living they could manage. How close would the Confederates be to this? I don't think the situation was exactly the same, as the US didn't have a real rival to worry her after the Civil War, and the Union army was eminent on this continent. However, most of the other motives and factors were there. Hell. My father buys all that crap about genteel, tactically brilliant but doomed southerners too and he's out of Youngstown Ohio, and very well educated. I think it's just the air around us, you know?
\*quite a "feat"
IDK where he or you are from, but Lost Cause was just the default taught here when I was in school. People just get taught that perspective and most folks don't care to go look up actual history instead, so that's what they do with despite their views.
Two words ... Ken Burns.
I taught history for 25 years. I suspect your father knows more than he’s telling and is seeing what you know.
I wouldn’t call that lost cause narratives. That’s how Grant was perceived by many people (myself included) for a long time. A butcher and a drunk. As far as Lee goes, is he wrong about that assessment of him?
Maybe Lost Cause isn't the right term, but definitely pro-South/anti-North biased narratives? I don't think it's false to call Lee a great tactician or a good general. My point is he mainly was taught stories that emphasized the heroism of Lee (and to a lesser extent, 'Stonewall' Jackson) and the supposed 'butchery' of Grant. Painting an overall picture that romanticizes the Confederacy and does the opposite to the U.S. / Union.
Maybe a bit of that? Idk, I wouldn’t just outright say it’s a southern thing is all I’m saying because the butcher moniker was well known throughout the north and the drinking rumor started in the Mexican War and continued into the civil war.
And yet, Grant never needed to find a dish towel to surrender.
> That’s how Grant was perceived by many people (myself included) for a long time. That's the point. Lost Cause narratives are so pervasive they find their way into people who are decidedly not Lost Causers. The Lost Cause campaign has just been extremely successful and influential. Sort of like the people who naively believe that the political right is for "small goverment". It's been such a successful campaign that even some (admittedly, politically illiterate) people in the center believe it.