Grant

by Ron Chernow

To finance the war, the Lincoln administration had levied steep taxes on whiskey and evading those taxes had become a national pastime.

Distillers would falsify figures of the amount of liquor brewed and treasury agents would then certify those bogus returns.

Grant remained popular enough to provoke conjecture that he might hazard a run at a third term, defying the two-term custom that had ruled American politics since George Washington.

It wasn’t in his nature “to struggle for position,”

Grant remained an observant Methodist and was never reluctant to profess his faith.

the Chautauqua movement of Christian summer camps,

the need to save the nation’s classrooms from religious interference.

Mississippi Republicans threw an alfresco barbecue in Clinton, west of Jackson, scheduled to rally voters in upcoming elections.

his conservative attorney general, Edwards Pierrepont, who urged inaction, unfurling the banner of states’ rights.

Panglossian thinking.

White Liners decided to scare blacks from the polls and install a Democratic government through naked terror if necessary.

Ames sat brooding and besieged in the governor’s mansion in Jackson. He concluded that Reconstruction was a dead letter, white supremacists in his state having engineered a coup d’état.

His darkly prophetic letter previewed the nearly century-long Jim Crow system that would cast blacks back into a state of involuntary servitude to southern whites.

there was little doubt that the Democrats had won by crushing black turnout.

Slavery had been abolished, but it had been replaced by a caste-ridden form of second-class citizenship for southern blacks,

The discussion turned mainly on the question of the power of the House to impeach a person who had resigned office.

Cf trump after second term

Grant’s maladroit response to scandal reflected the lack of sophistication in a man who had been a stranger to politics before the war.

Custer—vain, headstrong, narcissistic—was the very antithesis of Grant.

Custer and his cavalry obliterated an Indian village on the Washita River, wantonly murdering more than a hundred Southern Cheyenne, including women and children.

Custer and 263 of his men in the Seventh Cavalry had been annihilated by Lakota Sioux and Northern Cheyenne warriors along the Little Bighorn River in southern Montana, their mutilated bodies strewn among the hills.

I regard Custer’s massacre as a sacrifice of troops, brought on by Custer himself, that was wholly unnecessary

Sitting Bull had ten men to every one of Custer.

growing southern canard that the Civil War had been a war of northern aggression,

Confederate soldiers “fought honestly as American citizens for an honest purpose and in as good a spirit as the Northern soldiers who have been pensioned, and that they were provoked and driven into the War by the North.”6 This revisionist thesis was propagated by Lost Cause ideologues,

Grant had almost always been most courageous where it counted: in protecting freed people.

Grant explained that the president should not tamper with state politics, but simply provide a safe, peaceful setting for states to resolve their own disputes.

It quickly became apparent that a new president could not be named because three of the contested states with warring governments—South Carolina, Florida, and Louisiana—filed one set of election certificates for Hayes and another for Tilden.

He railed against incompetent carpetbag governors in the South who “had no interests there, but had simply gone there to hold office and so soon as they should lose it, intended to come away.”

the Fourteenth Amendment had bolstered southern power by scrapping the rule that had once counted an African American as only three-fifths of a person for electoral purposes. Despite suppressing the vote of blacks, white southerners could now count them fully for election purposes, giving the “solid South” forty extra votes in the Electoral College and disproportionate influence in American politics. “They keep those votes, but disfranchise the negroes. That is one of the gravest mistakes in the policy of reconstruction.”

an act creating a bipartisan Electoral Commission, composed of five members of each house and five Supreme Court justices, to judge the validity of election returns from the contested states.

Hayes would bring an end to Reconstruction.

the special commission declared Hayes the winner in South Carolina, giving him a 185 to 184 victory in the Electoral College.

Many thought the Electoral Commission had winked at cheating committed by Republicans in the South,

“It is impossible that where so many trusts are to be allotted that the right parties should be chosen in every instance.”

“Personally I was weary of office. I never wanted to get out of a place as much as I did to get out of the Presidency.”72 He felt “like a boy getting out of school.”

Presidents didn’t then qualify for pensions and Grant was uncertain where or how he would earn his livelihood after his projected global journey.

“Half of what Grant gained at Appomattox,” said Wendell Phillips, “Hayes surrendered for us on the 5th of March.”

Woodrow Wilson, a southerner who detested Reconstruction,

had no connection with the Eastern world of intellect and power.

neither Grant nor any American president could have resisted the massive flow of westward expansion, the political power of settlers, the money lust of mining companies, and the inexorable spread of railroads.

with British capital powering the rise of American industry.

under the influence of southern historians, Reconstruction was viewed as a catastrophic error,

Example of revisionism

Since Grant was president during this period, his standing was bound to rise with this revisionist view.

Reconstruction was pilloried as a byword for political abuse,

Recent revisionist historians have sometimes swung to the other extreme, criticizing him for backtracking on Reconstruction during the last two years of his presidency, when he hesitated to send troops to police elections in Mississippi, South Carolina, and Louisiana.

if Reconstruction failed, it was not because of Grant, but because it had been “resisted by armed and murderous organizations, by terrorism and proscription the most wicked and cruel of the age.”85

Americans today know little about the terrorism that engulfed the South during Grant’s presidency. It has been suppressed by a strange national amnesia.

The Klan’s ruthless reign is a dark, buried chapter in...

“There has never been a moment since Lee surrendered that I would not have gone more than halfway to meet the Southern people in a spirit of conciliation. But they have never responded to it.”

grant was a practitioner not a pundit.

the breach of the Civil War never healed but became deeply embedded in American political culture.