DON’T READ THIS YET; I HAD TO PUBLISH WHAT I HAD SO FAR OR WORDPRESS PUTS UP SEVERAL INCOMPLETE AND EARLY DRAFTS I HAVE REJECTED. EXPERIENCE ANTICIPATION. OUR EYES HAVE SEEN THE GLORY.
By Sasha Alex Lessin, Ph.D. (Anthropology, UCLA)
Ulysses S. Grant failed as a businessman, struggled as a farmer, suffered accusations of drunkenness, and depended on relatives to support his family.
He lived among enslaved workers on his father-in-law’s Missouri plantation and briefly owned an enslaved man named William Jones.
Yet in 1859, when Grant desperately needed money, he signed a document freeing Jones rather than selling him.
Within six years, Grant commanded the armies that defeated the Confederate rebellion.
Within another four years, he became president of the United States.
As president, he used federal authority against white supremacist terrorism and defended the political rights of Black Americans.
His transformation illustrated one of the most consequential struggles in American history: Could a society organized around racial domination become a republic of equal citizens?
Could people conditioned to obey hierarchies of power learn to protect others’ freedom and dignity?
In terms of Anunnaki history, the dominant ideologies of the leaders of America’s North and South embody both the violent domination Anunnaki Prince Marduk promotes and the peace and racial equality espoused by Ninmah, the Great Goddess of Ancient Crete.
The American conflict gives us a documented human example of these opposing tendencies.
1822–1859: GRANT FAILED AT BUSINESS, STRUGGLED AS A FARMER, AND FREED WILLIAM JONES
Ulysses Simpson Grant was born on April 27, 1822, in Point Pleasant, Ohio. His father, Jesse Root Grant, operated businesses involving leather and tanning.
Jesse opposed slavery and believed in hard work, financial advancement, and self-reliance.
Young Ulysses preferred horses to classroom lessons. He developed exceptional riding skills but showed little enthusiasm for military life.
But his father arranged his admission to the United States Military Academy at West Point in 1839.
Grant graduated in 1843, served in the Mexican-American War, and witnessed the violence of a conflict he later condemned as an unjust war of conquest.
He fell in love with Julia Dent, whose family owned enslaved people on their Missouri plantation, White Haven.
They married in 1848.
Julia’s father, Frederick Dent, supported slavery.
Grant’s marriage therefore placed him within a slaveholding household, despite his father’s opposition to the institution.
Grant’s military career deteriorated after the Army stationed him far from Julia and their children.
He suffered loneliness and developed a reputation for drinking. He resigned from the Army in April 1854.
He returned to Missouri, attempted farming, and built a modest home he named Hardscrabble.
The farm failed to provide financial security.
Grant worked alongside enslaved laborers, including William Jones, whom he personally held in slavery for a period.
On March 29, 1859, Grant signed a legal document emancipating Jones.
Grant could have sold Jones for money.
Instead, he freed him, choosing to surrender his legal power over another human being.
This shows his embrace of the Anunnaki Great Goddess of Crete (Ninmah) and their commitment to partnership over Domination.
When we have power over another person, do we use it to secure our own comfort or to restore the other’s freedom?
1860–1863: FAILED CIVILIAN GRANT BECAME THE UNION GENERAL BEAT THE SOUTH AND FREED THE SLAVES
In 1860, Grant moved to Galena, Illinois, and worked in his family’s leather-goods business.
The following year, Southern states rebelled against the United States following Abraham Lincoln’s election.
Their leaders defended slavery, which underpinned the region’s plantation economy and racial hierarchy.
Grant returned to military service.
He organized volunteers and rapidly advanced to command larger Union formations.
In February 1862, Grant captured Fort Henry and Fort Donelson in Tennessee, helping open routes into the Confederate interior.
At Fort Donelson, he demanded surrender without negotiated conditions. Newspapers celebrated him as “Unconditional Surrender Grant.”
In April 1862, Confederate forces surprised Grant’s army near Shiloh, Tennessee.
Fighting continued for two days, leaving roughly 23,000 Union and Confederate casualties combined.
The Union army held the field, but the bloodshed shocked the country.
Critics accused Grant of recklessness and revived allegations of drunkenness.
Lincoln continued to support him.
The president recognized something many of his generals lacked: Grant accepted responsibility, attacked when opportunities appeared, and persisted when campaigns became difficult.
Yet Grant also learned that defeating the Confederacy required more than occupying territory.
Its armies drew food, labor, and supplies from an economy sustained by slavery.
As enslaved families fled plantations and approached Union encampments, Grant initially struggled with what to do.
Eventually, he established systems that employed formerly enslaved people and supported their movement toward freedom.
1863: GRANT AND BLACK UNION SOLDIERS HELPED BREAK THE CONFEDERACY AT VICKSBURG
Vicksburg, Mississippi, stood on high bluffs overlooking a crucial stretch of the Mississippi River.
Confederate guns protected the city, and Confederate armies relied on the river and surrounding transportation routes.
Lincoln understood its strategic importance.
If Union forces captured Vicksburg, they could divide the Confederacy and disrupt its ability to transport supplies and soldiers.
Grant spent months searching for a way around the city’s defenses.
He attempted canals and routes through flooded swamps. Disease, mud, and mosquitoes devastated his soldiers.
Then he devised a daring alternative.
In April 1863, Union gunboats under Rear Admiral David Dixon Porter passed Vicksburg’s powerful batteries at night. Grant marched his soldiers south along the river’s western bank, crossed to the eastern bank, and struck inland.
Rather than attack Vicksburg directly, he defeated Confederate forces in a series of battles and cut the city’s connections to supporting armies.
Grant surrounded Vicksburg and began a siege.
Civilians sheltered in caves as artillery struck the city. Food supplies dwindled. Confederate soldiers and civilians endured hunger and fear.
Meanwhile, Black soldiers entered the Union war effort in growing numbers.
At Milliken’s Bend, Louisiana, on June 7, 1863, newly recruited Black troops fought a fierce battle against Confederate attackers.
Although many lacked sufficient training, they fought courageously and helped prevent the Confederates from securing the position.
Grant recognized the significance of their service.
He informed Lincoln that Black enlistment strengthened the Union while depriving the Confederacy of labor and military resources.
On July 4, 1863, Vicksburg surrendered.
The Union’s victory at Gettysburg occurred almost at the same time.
These victories transformed the war.
The men whom slaveholders had treated as property were helping destroy the military system that defended their enslavement.
1861–1865: GIDEON WELLES’S NAVY AND GRANT’S ARMIES COORDINATED THEIR FIGHT AGAINST THE REBELS
Lincoln appointed Gideon Welles secretary of the Navy in 1861. Welles oversaw a major expansion of Union naval power.
The Navy blockaded Confederate ports, transported soldiers, supported land campaigns, and attacked Confederate positions along important rivers.
The blockade made it increasingly difficult for the Confederacy to export cotton and import weapons and other essential supplies.
In March 1862, the Union ironclad USS Monitor fought the Confederate ironclad CSS Virginia at Hampton Roads, in southeastern Virginia, where the James River meets the Chesapeake Bay, near Norfolk, Portsmouth, Newport News, and Hampton, 150 miles southeast of Washington, D.C. The Union ironclad USS Monitor, commanded by Lieutenant John Lorimer Worden, battled the Confederate ironclad CSS Virginia, commanded by Lieutenant Catesby ap Roger Jones, at Hampton Roads, Virginia, near the mouth of the James River and Chesapeake Bay.
The Virginia, built from the salvaged hull of the former USS Merrimack, had devastated Union wooden warships the previous day. But now the revolutionary Monitor, with its rotating armored gun turret, faced the Confederate vessel in a four-hour cannon duel. Neither ironclad sank the other. The Virginia withdrew toward Norfolk; the Monitor remained to protect the Union fleet and its blockade. The battle transformed naval warfare worldwide; it demonstrated that armored steam-powered warships could withstand attacks that would destroy traditional wooden vessels. Union naval operations also helped protect Washington and maintain important waterways, including the Potomac.
The Mississippi campaign demonstrated the importance of Army–Navy cooperation.
Porter’s gunboats enabled Grant to cross the Mississippi below Vicksburg, an operation that transformed the campaign.
The Union Navy and Army operated in a society divided by wealth, class, and military authority.
The federal Enrollment Act of 1863 allowed eligible drafted men to pay a $300 commutation fee to avoid that particular draft call, or to obtain substitutes under its rules.
Poorer men generally lacked these options. Irish immigrants and other working-class Americans resented the unequal burden.
In New York City, draft resistance erupted into terrible violence in July 1863, including racist attacks against Black residents.
Although the U.S. government was fighting to preserve the Union and eventually abolish slavery, it kept privileges that favored the wealthy.
PARTNERSHIP ADVOCATES PROTESTED: A cooperative society must confront economic arrangements that impose disproportionate sacrifices on people with the fewest resources.
1864–1865: GRANT TURNED SOUTH, PURSUED LEE, AND ENDED THE REBELLION
Grant’s victories at Vicksburg and Chattanooga convinced Lincoln that he had found the commander capable of coordinating the entire Union war effort.
In March 1864, Grant became lieutenant general and general-in-chief of the Union armies.
He developed a strategy of simultaneous offensives designed to prevent Confederate commanders from shifting troops freely between threatened regions.
William Tecumseh Sherman advanced toward Atlanta. Other Union forces attacked Confederate transportation networks and military positions.
Grant personally accompanied General George G. Meade’s Army of the Potomac as it confronted Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia.
Lee had repeatedly defeated Union armies and cultivated a reputation for military brilliance.
Grant respected Lee’s abilities but rejected the idea that Lee was unbeatable.
In May 1864, their armies collided in Virginia’s Wilderness.
Dense woods made movement difficult. Smoke obscured the battlefield. Fires consumed the underbrush, and wounded men unable to escape suffered horrific deaths.
Neither side won a decisive victory.
Previous Union commanders had often withdrawn north after such battles.
Grant did something different.
He ordered his army to continue south.
The movement astonished Union soldiers. Instead of retreating, they advanced toward another confrontation.
Grant continued pressing Lee through Spotsylvania, Cold Harbor, and the long Petersburg campaign.
The losses were immense. His operations have remained controversial because of the terrible casualties they produced, particularly in frontal assaults against entrenched defenders.
But his sustained pressure, combined with other Union victories, gradually deprived Confederate armies of supplies, mobility, and reinforcements.
On April 9, 1865, Lee surrendered to Grant at Appomattox Court House, Virginia.
Grant offered terms that permitted Confederate soldiers to return home after surrendering their arms and agreeing not to resume fighting. Officers could retain their sidearms, and soldiers could keep privately owned horses.
Grant sought to end organized resistance without unnecessary humiliation.
He did not regard military victory as permission to inflict endless revenge.
The Union had defeated the rebellion. But the question of equal citizenship remained unresolved.
6. 1865–1877: JOHNSON OBSTRUCTED RECONSTRUCTION; PRESIDENT GRANT DEFENDED BLACK RIGHTS
Lincoln chose Andrew Johnson, a Southern Unionist from Tennessee, as his running mate in the 1864 presidential election.
Johnson had remained loyal to the United States when Tennessee seceded.
Lincoln and his political allies hoped the choice would attract Unionists beyond the Republican Party and demonstrate that reunion could include loyal Southerners.
Johnson became vice president on March 4, 1865.
Lincoln was assassinated in April, and Johnson became president on April 15, 1865. He served until March 4, 1869.
Johnson favored rapid restoration of former Confederate states and opposed federal efforts to establish broad political equality for Black Americans.
His policies allowed former Confederate elites to regain substantial influence.
Southern legislatures enacted Black Codes that restricted freedpeople’s rights, while racist violence threatened Black communities.
Congressional Republicans resisted Johnson’s approach.
The Civil Rights Act of 1866 and the Fourteenth Amendment, ratified in 1868, established important federal protections for citizenship and equal protection under law.
Grant’s political position increasingly aligned with those who supported stronger federal protection of freedpeople.
Elected president in 1868, Grant took office on March 4, 1869.
The Fifteenth Amendment, ratified in 1870, prohibited denying voting rights on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.
Yet white supremacist organizations, including the Ku Klux Klan, used murder, intimidation, and organized terrorism to prevent Black citizens from voting or holding public office.
Grant supported federal Enforcement Acts and authorized action against Klan violence.
His administration prosecuted conspirators and used federal power to protect elections and civil rights, particularly during the early 1870s.
Black Americans elected representatives, organized schools, established institutions, and participated in public life on an unprecedented scale.
But Reconstruction encountered fierce resistance.
Economic crises, political scandals, Northern exhaustion, and violent white supremacist campaigns weakened federal commitment.
Grant’s administration also suffered serious corruption scandals, although his own personal involvement in criminal corruption was not established.
By the end of his presidency in 1877, many of Reconstruction’s gains faced grave danger.
The Civil War had destroyed slavery as a legal institution, but it had not destroyed the determination of former slaveholding elites to retain political and economic domination.
7. 1884–1886: MARK TWAIN HELPED GRANT PROVIDE FOR JULIA AFTER HIS DEATH
After leaving the presidency, Grant traveled widely and received international honors.
But his financial security collapsed.
He became involved with the investment firm Grant & Ward. In 1884, the firm’s failure exposed fraud committed by Ferdinand Ward and left Grant financially devastated.
Soon afterward, doctors diagnosed Grant with throat cancer.
The former president confronted a terrible possibility: he might die leaving Julia and their family without adequate support.
Grant began writing his memoirs.
His friend Samuel Langhorne Clemens, better known as Mark Twain, recognized their literary and commercial value.
Clemens arranged for publication through his own publishing firm, Charles L. Webster & Company, under terms more favorable to Grant’s family than those offered by another publisher.
Grant worked through severe pain to complete his account of his military life.
He finished shortly before his death on July 23, 1885.
The two-volume Personal Memoirs of U. S. Grant became an extraordinary publishing success.
In 1886, Julia Grant received an initial royalty payment of approximately $200,000, a substantial fortune at the time.
Grant had been unable to preserve his family’s wealth through business.
He ultimately secured their financial future through his writing.
The memoirs also gave later generations an account of his military decisions in his own words.
Clemens helped preserve that account while ensuring that its author received meaningful financial compensation.
This final chapter of Grant’s life illustrates a different kind of partnership: one man recognized another’s talent and helped him turn it into security for his family.
8. GRANT’S LEGACY: AMERICA DEFEATED SLAVERY, BUT THE STRUGGLE FOR EQUAL CITIZENSHIP CONTINUES
The Civil War killed hundreds of thousands of Americans and devastated much of the South.
Its outcome abolished slavery through the Thirteenth Amendment, ratified in December 1865.
The Fourteenth Amendment established national birthright citizenship for people born or naturalized in the United States and subject to its jurisdiction, and it guaranteed equal protection under the law.
The Fifteenth Amendment sought to protect voting rights against racial exclusion.
These constitutional changes transformed the legal foundations of the republic.
But their enforcement required continuing struggle.
Former slaveholders and white supremacist organizations resisted Black political participation through violence, discriminatory laws, and economic coercion.
Generations of Black Americans fought back through education, organizing, litigation, journalism, political campaigns, and protest.
Their struggle helped produce the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
Grant’s life belongs in our Birthright Citizenship series because it connects the military defeat of slavery to the struggle to make constitutional citizenship meaningful.
His story also reveals the limitations of heroic leadership.
No single president, general, or reformer could create an equal society alone.
Freedom depended on the actions of enslaved people who escaped, Black soldiers who fought, abolitionists who organized, lawmakers who defended civil rights, and ordinary citizens who refused to accept racial domination.
A PARTNERSHIP–DOMINATION DIALOGUE
DOMINATION: “Society needs strong rulers. Some people must command, and others must obey. Those who control property and political power should decide who belongs.”
PARTNERSHIP: “A person’s humanity does not depend on another person’s permission. Citizenship must protect people against arbitrary power.”
DOMINATION: “Grant used armies, artillery, sieges, and overwhelming force. Doesn’t that prove domination wins?”
PARTNERSHIP: “Force can defend an unjust system, but it can also be used to stop those who maintain one through violence. The moral question is what the force protects and what happens after the fighting ends.”
DOMINATION: “Then why did racial oppression continue after Appomattox?”
PARTNERSHIP: “Because defeating an army does not automatically defeat the beliefs, institutions, and economic interests that sustained it. Citizenship requires laws, enforcement, education, and people willing to defend one another’s rights.”
DOMINATION: “Can people conditioned by domination really change?”
PARTNERSHIP: “Grant’s life suggests they can change, although imperfectly. The greater test is whether society creates institutions that protect freedom even when powerful individuals refuse to cooperate.”
DOCUMENTARY AND HISTORICAL REFERENCES
The principal documentary basis for this article is the caption material you supplied from Grant (HISTORY, 2020), with its episodes Unlikely Hero, Lincoln’s General, and Freedom’s Champion, together with the PBS American Experience documentary Ulysses S. Grant (2002).
The article paraphrases the documentaries rather than reproducing their narration or dramatized dialogue. The historical interpretations concerning Anunnaki domination and partnership are the author’s framework, not claims made by the documentary producers.
Further historical primary sources include Grant’s 1859 manumission of William Jones, his Personal Memoirs, the Reconstruction Amendments, and federal Enforcement Acts.
KEYWORDS
Ulysses S. Grant, Birthright Citizenship, William Jones, Julia Dent Grant, Abraham Lincoln, Andrew Johnson, Gideon Welles, Robert E. Lee, Battle of Vicksburg, Battle of the Wilderness, Appomattox, Black Union soldiers, Emancipation Proclamation, Reconstruction, Fourteenth Amendment, Fifteenth Amendment, Ku Klux Klan, Mark Twain, Samuel Clemens, Civil War, Anunnaki, Marduk, Ninmah, Domination versus Partnership
HASHTAGS
#UlyssesSGrant #BirthrightCitizenship #CivilWar #AbrahamLincoln #WilliamJones #BlackHistory #Reconstruction #FourteenthAmendment #FifteenthAmendment #CivilRights #MarkTwain #PartnershipNotDomination #Anunnaki #SashaAlexLessinPhD
