The Death of Ulysses S. Grant and the Politics of Reconstruction Memory in the 1880s

Abstract When Ulysses S. Grant succumbed to cancer on July 23, 1885, the nation mourned the loss of one of its greatest generals and the first president to enforce the civil rights of African Americans. As scholars are increasingly recognizing, many Republicans remained committed to the protection of Black suffrage as late as 1890, but in exploring the reaction to Grant’s death, Civil War memory scholars have overlooked the importance of memories of Grant’s presidency. Through an examination of newspapers and biographies in the months after Grant’s death and the immediate years thereafter, up to 1890, this article demonstrates that Americans of all political stripes used their memories of Grant’s presidency to aid their long-term political goals of either restricting or promoting Black civil rights. Democrats and reform-minded Republicans tried to denigrate Grant’s administration for supposed corruption while still applauding his magnanimity at Appomattox. In contrast, their Republican opponents, Black and white, contested this memory by constructing a politically purposeful memory of Grant’s Reconstruction-era politics as part of their ongoing fight to enforce Black voting rights and by extension secure the fruits of Union military victory. In doing so, Americans demonstrated that they remained unreconciled and divided on both the battlefields of Civil War memory and Reconstruction.