No public figure has ever ascended so high in the American popular imagination during his own lifetime, only to sink so low in posterity.

In life, Ulysses S. Grant was one of the most admired Americans in US history. He was the highest ranking general since George Washington and the only president between Andrew Jackson and Woodrow Wilson to serve two consecutive full terms. Pressured from below, Grant amassed the best civil rights record of any president until Lyndon Johnson, and contemporaries ultimately ra­­­nked him alongside Washington and Abraham Lincoln as part of the “founder-martyr-savior” triumvirate. His posthumously published Personal Memoirs became one of the best-selling works of nineteenth-century American literature. Grant was given a state funeral and interred in the largest tomb on the North American continent.

In death, however, Grant became a barometer of attitudes toward Reconstruction; his stature plummeted in direct proportion to Jim Crow’s ascent. Opponents slandered his war record as that of a drunken “butcher” whose uninterrupted battlefield victories owed only to luck and overwhelming manpower. To some, Grant was a caricature of the political corruption and financial unscrupulousness of the Gilded Age. His memory, inseparable from Union triumph and black advancement during Reconstruction, became a foil to the “Lost Cause,” the cultural narrative that underpinned segregation and provided a salve for Rebel defeat, viewing slavery as benign, secession as a matter of “state’s rights,” and Confederate soldiers and leadership as superior.