How could a slaveholder develop into one of America’s most determined enforcers of rights for African Americans? The question arises when we consider two recent books on Ulysses S. Grant: John Reeves’s Soldier of Destiny and Fergus M. Bordewich’s Klan War. Reeves traces Grant’s life between 1854, when the thirty-two-year-old ex–army officer became a Missouri farmer, and 1864, when his successes on Civil War battlefields led to his appointment as the commanding general of the Union Army. Bordewich describes Grant after the Civil War, when, during his first term as president, he forcefully challenged the Ku Klux Klan, which was terrorizing Black people in the South.
Grant came from an antislavery background. His father, the Ohio businessman Jesse Root Grant, was a fervent abolitionist who knew and respected John Brown. In Reeves’s narrative, Jesse Grant becomes his son’s antislavery conscience. When in 1848 Ulysses Grant, fresh out of officer service in the Mexican-American War, married the privileged Julia Dent, he buried that conscience. Julia’s father, Frederick Dent, was a rabidly proslavery St. Louis merchant who had given her several enslaved people when she was a girl. Julia later reported that they “belonged to me up to the time of President Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation.” Like her father, she loathed abolitionism and, Reeves informs us, was “shockingly sympathetic to secessionist views” before the Civil War.
For Julia Grant, slavery was a family legacy. For her husband, it was circumstantial. When in 1854 he took up farming at White Haven, the Dent family’s 890-acre plantation southwest of St. Louis, he worked alongside his father-in-law’s enslaved laborers. By 1857 he had taken over the management of the farm, including the bondspeople.
Reeves weighs in on Grant’s complicated attitudes toward slavery. Before the Civil War he considered abolitionism a threat to social stability. He told a friend, “I was never an Abolitionist, not even what could be called anti-slavery.” In the 1856 presidential election he voted for the slavery-enabling Democrat James Buchanan, and four years later he supported Lincoln’s opponent Stephen A. Douglas, who promoted noninterference with slavery. Grant confessed, “I have no hobby of my own with regard to the negro, either to effect his freedom or continue his bondage.”