It's the Fourth of July!  Usually on this day we turn to the Declaration of Independence for inspiration.  We don't give Thomas Jefferson all the credit, but we do continue to believe that it is a magnificent document, and as inspiring now as it was important then.  We hope its message will continue to resonate for a very long time.   But the Fourth is about more than the events of July 4, 1776.  It is about what America has become as well as what she was 239 years ago today.  It is about the American journey and the people who shaped it.  One of those was Ulysses S. Grant.

In the Declaration of Independence, the signers made this famous claim:

There were 13 then.  In 1859, 93 years later, there were 33 states.  The 33rd was Oregon, which entered the Union on February 14, 1859.  Describing the situation after that gets complicated.  Kansas entered the Union on January 29, 1861.  That in itself was contentious.  Moreover, by that point, the departure of southern states was in full swing.  South Carolina seceded in December 1860, Mississippi, Alabama, and Georgia all left in January 1861 and so on.

These are things that most Americans have been thinking about since they learned they were Americans - and are still fighting about.  In the period following Abraham Lincoln's election, Ulysses S. Grant--originally Hiram Simpson Grant--was a long way from the general who accepted Lee's surrender in 1865 or the two-term President of the United States he became later.  But in 1860, like most of his contemporaries, north and south, he was thinking about the question of secession and whether or not states had a right to secede, to leave the Union.  Some of that thinking is captured in today's featured quote. 

We decided to share these thoughts from Grant for two reasons.  The first is because there is a richness to them that is often missing from many of our 21st Century discussions of the same issues.  Grant accepted, for example, that the founding fathers might in principle have gone along with secession, even after the adoption of the Constitution, which came into force in 1789.  He wrote:

By 1860, at least for Grant, "Secession was ... revolution."  And, thanks in no small's part to the efforts of Grant himself, the South's revolution failed.

This is one of those topics where there is no last word.  Our point is simply that Grant's views are a helpful contribution to this never-ending discussion.
The second reason we chose to talk about Ulysses S. Grant on this Fourth of July 4th has to do, not with policy arguments, but with the man himself:

 Here he is at Cold Harbor--just north of Richmond--in the late spring of 1964.  It was not a good time for Grant.  The worst of it was on June 3, with heavy Union losses.

But Grant went on.  He accepted Robert E. Lee's surrender at Appomattox the following April.   Then, keeping faith with the terms of that surrender, he kept Lincoln's successor, Andrew Johnson, from hanging Robert E. Lee, which the foolish President Johnson wanted to do.

In all of his actions - from his Civil War victories, to his treatment of freed slaves and Native Americans as President (1869 - 1877), to the heroic writing of his memoirs while he was dying of throat cancer - there was a quiet dignity, an unpretentious decency to just about everything U.S. Grand did. 

Like many of our neighbors, we put out a flag this morning.  Yes we're celebrating the Spirit of '76.  We're also celebrating that "just-doin'-my-job" strain in the American character, the strain of unpretentious decency that Grant exemplified.