Writing to Genius is an essay developed from a recent blog that I’ve posted on Medium. Two reasons: one, I didn’t feel like I’d captured enough of what I was trying to express in the original blog, and two, I’m hoping a wider audience finds her story.

Evans’ Rag

Vol 2 Issue 22

Ulysses S. Grant

This week’s blog started on a lighter note about Elizabeth Gilbert and the perils of being an Influencer—and went south with the turn of the past week.

Presently I’m reading Ulysses S. Grant’s memoirs, and it’s hard not to miss the similarities and the differences between those times and today. What’s different is Grant didn’t need a ghost writer—he wrote it himself. Finished it on his deathbed, so he never heard the praise that would be showered on his writing.

And what I find interesting about the man was his humility. Never a braggart, you get no sense that he saw himself as a great general, yet without him, Lincoln would have been waiting even longer and might never have rescued the country.

Grant had a moral compass in his execution of the war, and a clear eyed determination to prosecute it. He didn’t seem to break under the pressure, nor lose sight of the end game. They say he drank a lot, but Lincoln was quoted as saying, “I can’t spare that man. He fights.”

Contrasted to Lee, Grant was not a grand gestured person. Lee was the man of grace mounted eternally on Traveler, and Grant more the common soldier in slouch hat, muddy boots and dress. They stand as symbols of two value systems in conflict, one myopically corrupted by slavery and the other going about the business of building out a new nation.

Grant admired the daring and courage with which the Southerners fought but also wrote of the Northern determination to see it through.

Those same rebels and their sympathizers, men and women alike, held the country in chains that even today a century and a half later we struggle to remove. Not that one side in the Civil War was aligned perfectly with justice and the other side evil; elements of both have always been mixed in America. Lincoln and Grant weren’t saints, and neither man claimed sainthood, but without them, the country easily might have taken an entirely different road.

“The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” Some argue Martin Luther King saw this aphorism as intending its inevitability. I believe it was more his aspiration–hope for a better future for his nation.

Martin Luther King gave the ‘whites’ of the nation a greater gift than even his own people; he gave us all our moral compass again.