Nearly a month ago the Twitterverse tweeted with commentary on a lecture delivered at the University of Virginia by Gary Gallagher. Apparently Gary was determined to take on current understandings of the American Civil War, namely the emphasis paid to emancipation and the debate over when the Civil War ended. Gary took several authors to task concerning the first point, which received most of his attention, before turning to the second point at the 40:45 mark of the video below:
As I understand it, Gary’s argument is that present concerns shape our inquiry of the past, framing the questions and suggesting the answers we seek. There’s nothing exceptional about that observation: it’s often at the core of many a historiographical essay, the sort of discovery usually reserved for first year graduate seminars and for the occasionally perceptive undergraduate.
(Note: as an undergraduate student at UVa, I took a course under Robert D. Cross, who is honored by this lecture series. We met in his residence on The Lawn, one of the Pavilions, to discuss … the history of New England (HIUS 570). He later read my honors thesis … and I found him a gentleman as well as a scholar. But I digress.)
Although Gary doesn’t mention it explicitly, it appears to me that one of the targets of the latter part of his lecture is Greg Downs, whose After Appomattox: Military Occupation and the Ends of War (2015) has impressed many readers, including yours truly, with its careful examination of the transition from war to peace in the years between 1865 and 1871. Greg is very explicit about how events of the last fifteen years have shaped how he has viewed the period under study. Some critics would call that presentism, and, judging from what Gary had to say, he would agree. If we are to accept this argument, the notion that the Civil War continued after Appomattox has been shaped by recent headlines and our experiences in the Middle East.
It’s an attractive, even seductive explanation. One could cite Downs’s own prose in support of it. One could also point to the number of declarations made over the past decade about how we need to understand that the war did not end at Appomattox (or Bennett’s Place, or somewhere else in 1865) as a way to understand the conflict in a larger sense … a suggestion usually made as if this is a new idea for which the observer deserves much credit for being so clever and insightful.
But it’s also wrong … or at least incomplete.
I wish I could say that the idea the the Civil War did not end in 1865 first came to mind in 1989 with the completion of a certain dissertation that was published two years later, namely my own Let Us Have Peace: Ulysses S. Grant and the Politics of War and Reconstruction, 1861-1868 (1991). Originally, this manuscript was supposed to take Grant from the end of the war through the end of his presidency, echoing much of what I had done in the above-mentioned honors thesis, which was way too long for an honors thesis, as I who now supervise them know only too well. Do as I say, Barrett students, not as I did. As I commenced writing the dissertation, however, I found myself going back before 1865 to discover a great deal about Grant’s thinking about the means and ends of war, politics, and peace, so much so that I looked at Grant’s prewar thinking about politics, slavery, and the sectional conflict prior to 1861 in the dissertation’s first chapter. That was about as close to writing about antebellum antislavery politics as I got for years, even though originally that (and neither Grant nor the Civil War and Reconstruction) had been my intended field of inquiry when I came to Wisconsin in 1979.
Before long, however, I found that telling Grant’s story during the war and his tenure as general-in-chief during Reconstruction was so engaging, so absorbing, that I would have to end my work with his election as president in 1868. After all, so the expression goes, there are two types of dissertations: good ones and finished ones. Even then, I could look at Grant as a political actor, note how his attitudes and assumptions about issues changed, and how the means and ends of the war and Reconstruction changed as well. It didn’t hurt that during much of that time I was working as an assistant editor with The Papers of Andrew Johnson, located at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville, followed by three years teaching history at Wofford College, located in Spartanburg, South Carolina, a haven of KKK activity during Reconstruction.
Now I knew it was true that sometimes scholarly inquiry is shaped by present circumstances, and this was somewhat the case in the 1980s, but for a much different reason than one might suppose. Although I had written about Grant as far back as 1979, one event that refocused my attention on him was the appearance of William S. McFeely’s 1981 biography, which won the Pulitzer Prize after receiving a glowing review from McFeely’s own dissertation adviser, C. Vann Woodward. Many readers speculated that McFeely’s take on Grant was shaped largely by the collapse of the civil rights movement and the Vietnam war. That consideration did not disturb me: McFeely’s handling of evidence was another matter altogether, as I suggested in an article published in 1987 in Civil War History that served as my introduction to big time scholarship.
By that time I was fully into writing the dissertation while working full time. However, as I handed in chapter after chapter, one of my readers suggested that what the dissertation lacked was several interpretive themes that held it together from beginning to end. Yes, the manuscript showed that Grant was not quite a political ignoramus, and that his attitudes on the war, reunion, reconciliation, and race changed over time and as circumstances shifted. But, if this was to be something more than simply a Grant-centered study, one with larger implications, what could they be?
It was at that point, after a great deal of thinking and reflection, that I came upon a rather valuable insight: namely, that there was a Clausewitzian connection between means and ends as well as between war and politics that gave Grant’s own evolving understanding of the conflict a much broader meaning. Defining the ends of conflict helped one select the appropriate means to wage it; war and politics were part of a broader continuum, and, if war was politics by other means, as the corruption of Clausewitz’s writing expressed it, than Reconstruction as a political act was often war by other means, especially when it came to terrorism.
I remind you that I came to that conclusion in the late 1980s.
Nor was I alone in viewing Reconstruction this way. Back in 1981 Richard N. Current had contributed a chapter to a book of essays on Grant. Entitled “President Grant and the Continuing War,” it explored how Reconstruction defined what the Civil War achieved (and what it did not achieve) as well as Grant’s role in securing what Michael Les Benedict, quoting Richard Henry Dana, called “the fruits of victory,” all the way back in 1975 (and which I first used in 1979 in my first published article).
One can see signs of my thinking in the introduction to Let Us Have Peace, a book shaped greatly by the work and suggestions of many historians, none more so than my adviser, Richard H. Sewell, and second reader Allan G. Bogue. I say this simply to give credit where credit is due, and to remind readers of how intellectual creativity is the product of the interaction of minds and previous work upon the “author,” often rendering the first person form (as in “my work”) problematic. I spoke of “the interrelationships of warmaking and peacemaking” during the Civil War and Reconstruction, arguing that
Conquering the Confederacy was but one step of the Union effort; reintegrating the defeated South into the reunited states was of equal importance. Reconstruction began at Fort Sumter; Appomattox, although an essential step, left much unsettled. The struggle for reunion spanned both war and peace.
To Grant, I claimed, “the Civil War and Reconstruction were part of the same long struggle to preserve the Union, destroy slavery, and establish a durable peace to secure what Grant’s contemporaries called ‘the fruits of victory.'”
Nor was Grant alone in that understanding. William T. Sherman noted that “Reconstruction was a corollary of the war” in writing about Grant; Philip H. Sheridan declared that the only way to secure “peace and quiet” was to ensure that “the States which were in rebellion surrender their attempts at political power as absolutely as Lee surrendered the Military strength of the rebellion at Appomattox Court House.”
In short, my insight, founded on the insights of others, that the war in a larger sense did not end at Appomattox was shared by several key players in the event itself … no presentism there, just a rendering of what some folks thought at the time (I’d add Frederick Douglass and some other folks to this list, but that’s another essay).
All this reminds me of an observation Allan Bogue made to me in a seminar during my first year of graduate school. In an effort to counter the usual easy claims of “relevance,” he turned to me as an example of someone who was studying things that could not easily be relevant in 1980, including impeachment, disputed elections, and military occupations (he did not mention terrorism). Of course, since then we’ve had the Clinton impeachment, the election of 2000, 9/11, and wars followed by occupations in Iraq and Afghanistan. In each case I found myself recruited as an expert to place current events in past context.
So I have to disagree with Gary Gallagher. The notion that the Civil War did not end at Appomattox is not the product of recent events. It may have gained more traction for that reason, but that’s not the same thing. Moreover, I think Gary ought to have known better. After all, who served as the in-house reader for Let Us Have Peace when it was being reviewed by the University of North Carolina Press? Gary W. Gallagher.
Crossroads 
Your ending is classic!
I have always thought that the Civil War ended in 1865 or better put, as others have, the South lost the War but won the peace.
I also loved the ending, but the entire essay is really good.
What do you think of his comments on historians emphasizing emancipation? I thought his “Union War” made some good points in refuting Chandra Manning and others, but he oddly did it in part by using the same model (sampling period accounts) that he attacks them for using.
I think he pressed his case too far and in a combative manner. It was as if he was a blogger. 🙂
I must say that I really enjoy posts such as this one which discuss historiography and the process by which a work of history relates to other scholarship and to the times in which it was written. Posts of this nature are one of the main reasons that I am a regular reader of, though infrequent commenter on, this blog. I must comment, though, when I find a post as enjoyable as this one.
Thank you.
Ditto.
I think Gallagher has it right. The importance of maintaining the Union was paramount. The Regimental History of the 13th Vermont begins with To preserve the Union and the Life of the Republic. My great grandfather and his brother both served in the 13th Vermont, and my great grand uncle went on to serve in the 17th Vermont as well through the rest of the War. Vermont then had few if any black residents. Most Americans in the 19th century never traveled more 10 miles from their home. Thus, it is reasonable to consider that they were not fighting for the abolition of slavery as Chandra Manning would have us believe. Gallagher is correct that most 19th century Americans were racists (as we define it today) Elizabeth Varon demonstrates that abolitionists were clearly a minority in the North in her “Disunion! The Coming of the American Civil War 1789-1859.” Gallagher in the Union War has noted some of the far-out claims in recent scholarship, for example that the war was the beginning of American imperialism, when in fact, the war was largely fought by volunteers who then returned home. Or, that the Grand Review discriminated against women because they could only watch the parade,Or, that USCT were purposely excluded from the Grand Review (for which no one has produced documentary evidence) Or, the importance of the Gettysburg Adress at the time. It was barely reported in the newspapers. Dr.Simpson takes Gallagher to task for “not knowing better” because he had read Dr. Simpson’s 1st book published 25 years ago. Gallagher is not saying that concept of the continuing civil war is all new. He is pointing out his belief that it has been carried too far. Gallagher makes good points about the differences between the 100th and 150th anniversaries of the war. What I think Gallagher is stating about reconstruction and the concept of the continuing Civil War is 1. We forget and fail to understand the importance of Union and 2.some advocates of the continuing Civil War are losing sight of what a cataclysmic event the War of the Rebellion from 1861 to 1865 was. The fighting in many of these battles was as bad or worse than those of WWI or WWII. There were more men killed than all our other wars combined.There were far more unknown soldiers on both sides. The Union had at least 150,000 soldiers who could not be identified after reburial efforts in late 1865 and 1866. While Grant tried to carry on Lincoln’s ideas, Andrew Johnson (as Gallagher noted) had given up a great deal of the chances of Lincoln’s ideas becoming successful. Grant, Sherman, and Sheridan were writing after the war and Sherman did not see blacks as equals. Also, Professor Gallagher mentioned at the beginning that the task of the historian is to try and interpret and understand the past without viewing the past through our morals and beliefs and imposing them on the past.
It probably helps to have read the book by James Oakes before evaluating its argument. As for the rest, I stand by my argument. One of the problems with discussing historiography is that all too often one tends to simplify (and even sometimes distort) what was said in order to set up what sometimes amounts to a strawman for a counterclaim. This seems to be the case in your characterization of Manning’s argument. I don’t think “we” fail to understand the importance of the Union: I think that to say so is to engage in exactly that sort of distortion. Moreover, one can understand what happened between 1861 and 1865 while also appreciating that what happened afterwards did much to shape what that event achieved and did not achieve. As for the last point, that’s a commonplace observation, so I wouldn’t attach anything profound to it.
I don’t see the connection between whether Vermont had black residents (even Gallagher made this point) and whether Vermonters were interested in the destruction of slavery. Yet one might want to consult, for example, this study of the Liberty Party in Vermont (https://vermonthistory.org/journal/misc/LibertyParty.pdf) or this study of Vermont’s Republicans (http://www.amazon.com/Star-That-Set-Republican-1854-1974/dp/0739106007/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1463029866&sr=1-1&keywords=9780739106006) before you make claims about Vermont’s views on slavery.
I’d be careful about minimizing the cost of WWI from the US side. Look at the total deaths (over 100,000). Then evaluate that from the perspective that the US became actively involved in combat only in late May, 1918, lasting until November 11, 1918 – not quite 6 months. I’ll give you the “Spanish flu” if you give me the ACW casualties resulting from various diseases.
How unlikely that I would be treated to an article containing the two CW topics that I have spent the most time on: Reconstruction and Grant. My 5 month journey into the agony and ecstasy of CW study includes a Grant biography, Grant Memoirs-in-progress & at least a 100hrs of Reconstruction videos, articles, lectures, diagraming, charting, etc. Of course, none of this effort qualifies me for anything other than to say that it only heightened my appreciation for this blog article and the complicated issues addressed. As an aside, the voracious note-taker that I am, I thought it fun to look back and see what my first impression of Grant was: “A man of opinions and actions rendered from experience, rather than convention.”( My comments on Reconstruction are best not repeated.)
all very interesting.
Regarding “present concerns shape our inquiry of the past, framing the questions and suggesting the answers we seek”.
The ‘present’ quickly becomes hte ‘past’ even while the events in question are ongoing.
Gettysburg would be several orders of magnitude less regarded, marked and visited if not for Lincoln’s address.
What if Lincoln released the preliminary Emancipation Proclamation after Perryville rather than Antietam?
In these cases, Lincoln’s view of the ‘past’, however recent, suggested answers to him and framed our future questions.
Thanks, Brooks, I found your little essay an interesting read. I have a lot of trouble getting a handle on where Gallagher is coming from, to use a colloquial term. I’ve read his book, The Confederate War, as well as some articles he’s written. I always get the impression he builds up strawmen in order to tear them down. In the aforementioned book he does make a good case for a sense of Confederate nationalism, but I’m not sure the extent to which historians had denied the existent of this phenomenon in the first place. In fact, my impression is just the opposite of Gallagher’s. It seems to me that there has been less focus on what some have called the “war within the war” — the cleavages within the south that kept the region from being unified in its war efforts. In no area was this more apparent than in the mountainous areas of northern Alabama, northern Georgia, western North Carolina, eastern Tennessee, and, of course, western Virginia. So, it I think Gallagher sets up a strawman that the prevailing wisdom is that the south didn’t have a sense of nationalism and then debunks it. I believe, however, that for decades the “settled wisdom” had been of a “unified South” against a more divided North with its Copperheads and NYC race riots, etc. I may be completely wrong in my assessments here as I’m not a Civil War scholar but just a retired academic with a consuming interest in the late Rebellion.
I sense that The Confederate War was written as an answer to a book entitled Why The South Lost the Civil War (1986), by by Richard E. Beringer, William N. Still. Jr., Archer Jones, and Herman Hattaway. That book argued that white southerners lacked the will to win independence. Other people had also been writing about Confederate nationalism (including Drew Gilpin Faust), but the “lack of will” thesis got a lot of attention.
Thanks, Brooks, for putting The Confederate War into a perspective I was unaware of. I learn a lot following this blog. 🙂
Dr. Simpson, I am very interested in your opinion about whether or not Confederate monuments should be removed from (1) generic public spaces like in front of courthouses or regular public green spaces; (2) National Military Parks, like Gettysburg and Chickamauga; (3) or both. Obviously, removal of monuments is binary, so there really has to be the kind of exact answer that academics so desperately hate. I also want to ask your opinion that if you believe the answer is yes, do you also believe that monuments to “bad” wars should be removed in toto, like (assuming there are some) the ones celebrating the U.S. war against Mexico? Or the Vietnam War Wall in Washington, D.C.? (As an aside, having seen your lectures on CSPAN-3, it appears to me you don’t duck tough issues, so please, let it rip.) Thank you.
Here are my answers:
[1] That decision belongs to the community where the statue is located. So, if it’s a monument on state grounds, it’s up to the state. If it’s on city grounds/county grounds, then it’s up to the city/county. Let’s take an example. I happen to like the Lee and Jackson monuments in Charlottesville. I liked them when I was a student there. I also like the Lee/Jackson monument in Baltimore. But if the people there want to remove them, I see no reason why my preference should outweigh theirs.
[2] No.
[3] See [1] and [2].
As I have not answered “yes,” the remainder of your inquiry can be set aside.
Brooks,
Two questions. First, was the link to your essay supposed to be to a downloadable copy? I found myself at a paywall, and unless I missed something, Project Muse does not seem to have an equivalent to the limited free individual membership available from JSTOR.
I was able to grab a copy by firing up an alumni portal that my university provides, but others may not have (or know about) such resource. (I keep meaning to post a public service message about ways to enjoy the riches of JSTOR and similar academic treasuries, but haven’t gotten around it.)
Second, in a comment you mentioned a book by James Oakes, although I didn’t see a mention of a title. (Haven’t listened to the talk yet, perhaps it’s there.)
No, the article’s not a downloadable copy.
James Oakes’s book is entitled Freedom National: The Destruction of Slavery in the United States, 1861-1865. I also recommend his much shorter book, The Scorpion’s Sting: Antislavery and the Coming of the Civil War.
I think the Civil War ended in 1865.
Another war, if you want to call it that, started in 1865.
I think the argument that Congress continued fighting the war, thus justifying having a military officer overseeing Reconstruction districts, until various states were “redeemed” is persuasive. Yes, the war between organized armies ended in 1865. The confederacy as an entity ended in 1865. In that sense, the war ended in 1865; however, that’s not the only way to look at it. The Supreme Court ruled that legally the war didn’t end until Andrew Johnson’s 1866 proclamation declaring it ended in the final state of Texas. A struggle continued afterward, during Reconstruction, in the form of a violent insurgency that included terrorism. If we consider the underlying issue of the Civil War, from the confederate point of view, to be the status of African-Americans in the South, then one can be forgiven for making the case that the war continued well past 1865, though it continued by other means. This history stuff gets very complicated very quickly.
Sorry I am late with this comment.
This discussion seems to me to be a lot of semantic navel gazing. War is the conflict of arms between opposing forces. Once one of those forces surrenders, and in this case the country supporting those forces goes out of existence, the war is over. The ongoing political, social, and economic effects of that war remain to be resolved, but the war is over. To say otherwise redefines the meaning of war.
Please do not get the idea that I believe that the post-war political, social, and economic issues are not worth studying. They are. Emphatically so. Indeed, in the long run, the post-war wrangling may be more important than the war itself.
So war requires the existence of nation-states on both sides?
To quote myself: War is the conflict of arms between opposing forces.
In this case (the U.S. civil war), that was a nation-state and a proclaimed nation-state. I am not of the opinion that the conflict must always be between nation states. But it is between two entities: two nation states; two groups of nation-states, a nation-state and a guerrilla movement; two guerilla movements. whatever. But the key thing is conflict of arms.
Then what do you term white supremacist terrorist groups who engage in a conflict of arms that must be countered by a traditional military force?
Your definition lends itself to the claim that Reconstruction was a continuing war.
This is why I think it unwise to term this discussion one of semantic navel gazing, because one may fall victim to one’s own criticism.
You ask: Then what do you term white supremacist terrorist groups who engage in a conflict of arms that must be countered by a traditional military force?
I call that violent political action. It’s not war.
I do not agree that my definition lends itself to considering Reconstruction a continuing war. You may interpret it that way if you’d like, but since it is my definition, I’ll just say it does not.
Exactly. Your definition. That’s my point. When you offered, “War is the conflict of arms between opposing forces,” you opened the door to semantic navel gazing. It would all depend on how one defines “opposing forces.” Students of Fourth Generation Warfare understand that differently than you do. For a critic of 4GW, see http://www.strategicstudiesinstitute.army.mil/pdffiles/pub632.pdf
I am not a war theorist. I try to take a common-sense approach to what is and is not war. Perhaps my viewpoint is along the lines of Justice Potter Stewart and pornography: I know it when I see it. If you want to define what was happening during Reconstruction as a war, that is fine, but it is not part of what is commonly thought of as the Civil War.
I’ll be reading that paper on 4GW with interest. Thanks for bringing it to my attention.
This post came up as related to your recent posting of 2 Scholars on Grant. After viewing Gary Gallagher’s talk again and reading your comment on it, I think you misunderstood what he was saying. He was noting that the Lost Cause narrative and the overemphasis of emancipation as the major motivation of the Union have gone through cycles of acceptance and rejection. Also, he is not saying that the idea that the War of the Rebellion did not end in 1865 has only come out in recent scholarship. He does state that the fighting that resulted in 750,000 to 800,000 deaths from 1861 to 1865 did end in 1865. Subsequent Southern terrorism, however wrong, pales in comparison. Your comment seems more about tooting your own horn. Of course, if Mr. Gallagher had told UNC Press that your book was not worth publishing your career might have been much less successful.
Apparently, Mr. Colton, you wanted to reply a second time to the same post, because you want to defend Professor Gallagher. You are entitled to your own interpretation of what he said, although you offered a different one last time. Try to be consistent. Your opinion appears to be in the minority, and might be shaped by your own prejudices.
As UNC Press (and not Gary) sought the book manuscript, as did other presses, I don’t think things would have been much different … plus he would have had to take issue with the other reader, some guy named McPherson. Gary offered exactly two minor (indeed, trivial) comments. So are you implying that he judges the work of others on anything other than its merits? That’s an unpleasant thing to suggest. Maybe you think he should do so, but that’s between you two. Maybe you’re projecting and suggesting how you handle such matters.
Scholars disagree all the time. Readers of Gary’s The Union War were surprised that he went after certain scholars, and he has offered the same comment about Greg’s book elsewhere. Have you read it? Let’s just say I’m not alone in taking exception to Gary’s perspective.
Next time you want to take a shot at me, try harder. Until then, I guess you know all about tooting horns. You just blew a sour note, that’s all.
And try it on another post. You’ve had two chances here. Neither was very impressive.
One ought to have sufficient common sense to avoid reaching conclusions about the hypothetical fate of a scholar’s career because one peer reviewer found (for any of a possible array of reasons, some good and some bad) that one manuscript was not worthy of being published. The notion that the scholar should refrain from disagreeing with, or criticizing, that peer reviewer because the opposite happened is facially ridiculous.
Mr. Colton’s a troll, and not a very good one. He can go elsewhere to be cranky.
He’s failed to contest successfully the key contentions of the post: (1) the notion of the continuing war precedes recent events; (2) it even preceded my book, which offered the notion of Appomattox as transition point; (3) Gary was well aware of scholarship that complicated his claims. Thus Colton’s childish ranting had to go in a different direction. It can now appear in a different place. Not only is it ineffective as a defense of Gallagher, it actually implies that Gallagher would assess scholarship on grounds other than its merits. I see that as an insult to Gary.
I may be breaking the rules by posting on this this thread again, but my, oh, my how differently I view this post now that I am a seasoned reader of many books/articles Civil War. It seems that once again, all that was old is new again. I see this with the re-invention of US Grant by the recent biographers, and the kerfuffle that it is stirring. However, those in the know, know that our good Professor & Frank Scaturro were pioneering this nearly 20 years ago. As one rather astute commentator put it: rather than being the originator of the movement, the new authors are the result of the movement.
Thanks, Shosanna, for mentioning my good friend, Frank Scaturro. He doesn’t get nearly as much credit as he deserves.
For some reason my iPhone wants to post under my other alias. I’ve usually used OhioGuy on this blog before. Real name is Carl Jón Denbow.
Frank played a key (I’d say the key) role in helping to restore Grant’s Tomb.
Credit where credit is due: Professor Simpson recommended the book, and now I quote from it all of the time. It has been a life saver against those rants that people launch into, regarding the Grant presidency. I travel a lot (30,000 miles this year) and the Scaturro book has been with me for about 1/3 of those miles — constantly referencing it! Carl, lease give my highest regards to Frank Scaturro, as his book has definitely boosted my “game”.
Wasn’t I the one who recommended that book? My wife thinks I use it like a religious track. I bought about 45 copies of it and gave a copy to every member of our Civil War Round Table. I’ve also given copies to a number of other people, including my youngest daughter’s father-in-law, who is African American.
1. After Appomattox the war changed significantly. The blockade ended and cotton, grown or stored could be sold openly. The white supremacists no longer had to maintain forces at a distance. They could board at home and forage was no longer a problem. The white supremacists stopped fighting with the strongest enemy and directed the violence at the weakest groups the African-Americans and the non-native Republicans. Whether this was a war or not, it wasn’t peace.
2. The references to Carl Von Clausewitz in Prof. Simpson’s Let Us Have Peace are interesting.
The concepts were creeping into the discussion, but why is concealed. Probably McClellan, Halleck and Franz Lieber are part of it. But as Lincoln refers to the unpredictable element of “friction” the language of Clausewitz is making itself felt.
3. The realization that a Civil War caused in part by political disagreements about slavery had to resolve those issues was very rapid, especially in the west. Whether they were aware of Clausewitz or not, they were proving him correct.
Thanks for the excellent blog.
What did Grant mean by “the results of the war” which he thought were so endangered that he was compelled to give up his generalship and become a candidate for the Presidency?
Did that include protection of the national debt, and the fledgling national banking system?
Did that include finishing the transcontinental railroad with no close scrutiny of the over payments collected by both the CPRR and the UPRR?
His reputation and the legitimacy of the United States cause were probably key considerations, but did he ever write about that? What came out in his speeches?
Other factors may have been protection of the Juarez government in Mexico, and continual pressure on Napoleon III, in France.
But it seems part of the results were that politicians and soldiers, of both high and low rank, who had given time and treasure, and risk their lives for the United States were going to have their political and economic opportunities protected, at least for four years. Within that coalition the African-Americans seem to have been included.
No one seems to be looking at this blog site any longer, so maybe the answer will have to wait for the often predicted book on the Grant presidency.
It’s very clear what Grant meant by the results of the war. He talked about that concept a good deal, and the quotes I’m aware of that reference this thought are all focused primarily on slavery, its destruction and the rights of the freedmen.
It does not appear that the surrender at Appomattox could be the end of the war. The Confederacy had many of the appearances of a national government, but it was not a real government. The Confederate Government never surrendered but even if it had surrendered, it had no control over the diverse insurgent groups that arose.
Some Confederate officers used the surrenders to get out of the war, and survive. But the Appomattox surrender, and those that followed, were more like a cease fire. The term plea bargain might apply to the situation. Some participants in the conspiracy quit and turned state’s evidence, while others struggled on in resistance.
Appomattox was more like an cease fire.
The situation was more like a negotiated armistice at the time the Hayes/Tilden election was settled. By then the Democratic Party could negotiate on behalf of the insurgents.
Peace does not arrive until the inauguration of Grover Cleveland. At that time, the dreaded, but inevitable transfer of executive authority took place. The war was renewed.