This Ain’t our First Rodeo
There are times I revert back to the history teacher I used to be!!!!
It was a tumultuous time. The United States, after years of struggle, finally made huge advances in the rights of minorities. When it seemed like that struggle was finally won, the President of the United States seemed to undo all of the victories. That President, whose legitimacy in office was questioned, was in a death struggle with the Congress for the power to govern the country. In the middle was the military; the Generals who were the only figures that the nation could trust.
It sounds like Trump, the Congressional Committees, and Mattis-Kelly-McMasters. It sounds like the kind of struggle we are fighting, a struggle seeming to threaten the very core of our Republic. It sounds like the loss of rights for minorities, women, immigrants, the LGBTQ. It sounds like today.
It was 1866. That violent struggle was America’s Civil War, where one out of thirty Americans was killed. The minorities were not only the freed slaves, but also native Americans and women. After all of the bloodletting culminating with the murder of Abraham Lincoln, the war was finally over, the nation re-united. The “Freedmen” looked to become full citizens, and the 13th and 14th Amendments to the Constitution seemed to guarantee that outcome.
Andrew Johnson was the Vice President who replaced Lincoln. In school we were taught that Johnson was a failure; showed up to his inauguration drunk, and was suitably impeached by the Congress. In reality, Johnson was a self-made man, who took minimal education and turned in into a successful political career. He courageously was the only US Senator from a Confederate state to remain with the Union, he became the military governor of recaptured Tennessee, and he joined the “unity” ticket with Lincoln in the election of 1864.
With Congress in recess, Johnson was the sole power in the months after the end of the Civil War. His view, like Lincoln’s, was that the rebellious states should return as soon as possible. But as a Southerner he believed that the freed slaves represented a danger that needed to be controlled. As the former Confederate states began to enact the infamous “black codes” to keep Freedmen “in their place, ” Johnson encouraged their return to the nation.
Standing in the way was another figure maligned by history. Ulysses S. Grant was the commanding general of the US Army, then in occupation of the rebellious states. Grant, described by our school history as a drunk who was willing to “waste” his men in battle, was actually neither. As he rose in rank during the war, he also matured in attitude. He recognized the value of the Freedmen through their valor on the battlefield. He understood the world altering results of the Civil War, and he was unwilling to allow those gains to be lost. He saw himself as the protector of the sacrifice.
But Grant also understood the American tradition of civilian control of the military. He tread a thin line as the General in Chief, ordering his occupying generals to protect the Freedmen, while staying within the orders of his Commander in Chief.
To the nation, Grant was a hero behind only Washington and Lincoln. As the Johnson Administration slowly dissolved, surviving removal from office by a single vote in the Senate, Grant became the obvious choice for President. Here was the General, who would try to stand up for the Freedmen and the Native Americans as well as the poor “dirt farmer,” where Grant himself began.
And he did, or at least he tried. As President, Grant used the power of the Federal government to put down the powerful Ku Klux Klan and he reorganized the reservation system with the goal of bringing the tribes into the mainstream culture. And while his Administration ultimately became bogged down in financial scandal, Grant remained clear of the stain.
This story does not really have a happy ending. When Grant left office, the Hayes/Tilden deal was struck, ending reconstruction and beginning the “Jim Crow Era” of segregation. The “Gilded Age” of America of the late 1800’s was the age of industrialism and “robber barons,” when millions of dollars were made by the Carnegie’s and Mellon’s and Morgan’s; and the working class struggled in our newly crowded cities. It would be another sixty years before workers rights were recognized, and eighty years before the civil rights that Grant hoped for would start to become real.
But America survived. As the Constitution set forth, we continued to become “more perfect.” In our present: with a President who has no understanding of compassion, where we face crisis throughout the world with a gaping hole in place of strong leadership, where we are faced with the ugly twins of racism and nationalism; we need to understand that we have been in crisis before. We have been through the crucible of disaster, and we have emerged stronger. This ain’t our first rodeo.
