Leonardo DiCaprio’s Big Middle Finger to the Confederacy
Grant, a History Channel miniseries airing over three nights beginning on Memorial Day (May 25), is an overt—and timely—reclamation project. His reputation having faded over the past century because, as many here assert, the South’s “Lost Cause” rewriting of Civil War history invariably downplayed his accomplishments, Ulysses S. Grant is restored by this informative and entertaining TV documentary to the prototypical modern American hero. Based on Ron Chernow’s critically acclaimed 2017 biography of the same name, it’s a stirring tribute to an individual who embodied America’s finest ideals: hard work, determination, courage, resolve, and belief in democracy and equality for all, no matter the color of their skin.
Executive produced by Leonardo DiCaprio, and featuring participation from numerous historians, writers and servicemen, including Chernow, Ta-Nehisi Coates and David Petraeus, Grant is a non-fiction tale about the intertwined self-definition of a man and a nation. Born on April 27, 1822, Grant grew up the working-class son of an Ohio tanner and merchant, and found his first calling as an accomplished horseman. Disinterested in taking over the family business, and having garnered the nickname “Useless Grant” as a kid, he was sent—without being asked—to West Point, where a typo bestowed him with the middle initial “S” (rather than “H,” for Hiram), thereby resulting in the more patriotic “US Grant” moniker. The reconfiguration of Grant’s name would continue once he joined President Abraham Lincoln’s Civil War army, his initials eventually coming to stand for “Unconditional Surrender” Grant due to his habit of securing definitive victory over his adversaries.
In the aftermath of his Civil War service (and his beloved President Lincoln’s assassination), Grant was elected America’s 18th commander-in-chief, and while in office, he became renowned for spearheading Reconstruction, creating the Justice Department, and using that arm of the government to battle and prosecute the Ku Klux Klan. Though slandered throughout his life as a drunk, a butcher and a corrupt would-be dictator (the last slur courtesy of an administration dogged by scandal), Grant makes the convincing case that he was, first and foremost, a noble patriot. A staunch defender of the Union, he was convinced of the necessity for emancipation for African-American slaves, and of the evil of the Confederacy, whose members he often referred to as “rebels” and “traitors” to the grand democratic experiment of the United States.
In this regard, Grant is an active attempt to rehabilitate the historical record, positing Confederate adversary Robert E. Lee as a symbol of the intolerant, aristocratic, treasonous old guard, and Grant as an emblem of a more open, just, unified modern America. Grant’s disgust for the Confederacy and the rancidness it stood for is on full display throughout this series, which pointedly contends that—good ol’ boy revisionism be damned—it was slavery, not simply the more euphemistic “states’ rights,” which drove the South to secede and take up arms against the Union. At the same time, Grant’s compassion and levelheadedness also remains front and center, epitomized by the lenient terms of surrender he ultimately offered to the defeated Lee, which helped him secure support throughout the South in the years following the end of the war.
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