Grant

by Ron Chernow

Johnson hid behind the shield of states’ rights

four words that formed the slogan of his campaign and remained irreversibly associated with him: “Let us have peace.”

Boss Tweed and Tammany Hall

As befit the political custom of the time, Grant did not actively campaign or make formal speeches.

He wrongly assumed that the skills that had made him successful in one sphere of life would translate intact into another.

Grant’s black pony Jeff Davis,

the so-called Saturday Club with Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and Oliver Wendell Holmes.

At the last moment, Grant relented and stopped his carriage at the White House, inviting Johnson to come along, but the lame-duck president sent back word that he was too busy to comply.

At forty-six, Grant was still trim and fit, the youngest man elected president until then.

“Nothing in all history,” William Lloyd Garrison wrote, equaled “this wonderful, quiet, sudden transformation of four millions of human beings from . . . the auction-block to the ballot box.”

Where he should have deliberated and calculated, he sometimes rushed into headlong action, as if storming an enemy fort.

Grant took refuge in his old strategy of passive detachment.

Stoic

The White House—then styled the executive mansion—required

no West Wing or Oval Office yet existed,

Grant, despite the almost unbearable tensions of his presidency and undoubted temptations to drink, largely conquered an alcohol problem that had beset him through much of his adult life.

GRANT had an obsessive side to his nature—a

“The people had desired money” before Gould, Mark Twain observed, “but he taught them to fall down and worship it.”

Grant’s dealings with Gould, Fisk, and Corbin show that even as president, he was still the same trusting rube who had been hoodwinked by business sharpers before the war.

He was a soft touch for schemers and this began to tarnish his public image.

It wasn’t surprising that a fastidious Boston Brahmin such as Adams would find Grant uncouth and boorish, a common reaction among the eastern intelligentsia.

aperçus

Adams and Badeau agreed that Grant came alive amid wartime danger, then lapsed back into inertia when the threat subsided.

Grant didn’t have a systematic mind, nor did he arrange his ideas inside a larger theoretical scaffolding, and he was therefore a mystery to himself and others.

the Thirteenth Amendment abolished slavery and the Fourteenth conferred citizenship rights upon blacks, the Fifteenth prevented states from denying voting rights based on race, color, or earlier condition of servitude.

To circumvent the Fifteenth Amendment, white politicians in Georgia devised new methods of stripping blacks of voting rights, including poll taxes, onerous registration requirements, and similar restrictions copied in other states.

Jim Crow?

over time, the white South would receive extra delegates in Congress and electoral votes in presidential races while stifling black voting power. “It was unjust to the North,” Grant subsequently lamented. “In giving the South negro suffrage, we have given the old slave-holders forty votes in the electoral college. They keep those votes, but disfranchise the negroes. That is one of the gravest mistakes in the policy of reconstruction.”58

Congressmen simply balked at surrendering their most potent source of power—patronage.

political activity shouldn’t factor into hiring government workers.

No longer would government workers be required to fork over payments to political parties to retain their jobs.

Grant has suffered from a double standard in the eyes of historians. When Lincoln employed patronage for political ends, which he did extensively, they have praised him as a master politician; when Grant catered to the same spoilsmen, they have denigrated him as a corrupt opportunist.

Their ascent reflected the Republican Party’s gradual metamorphosis from the party of abolition to a more business-oriented one.

he established Yellowstone as the first national park on March 1, 1872. President Lincoln had signed a bill in 1864 that permitted California to preserve the Yosemite Valley and the giant sequoias of the Mariposa Grove, but it was Grant who initiated the modern national park system.

Even ardent admirers could find Greeley’s quixotic crusades infuriating. One of the original celebrity editors in American journalism, he showed a genius for self-promotion, as when he wrote, “Go West, young man.”

He had long warned that a Democratic victory in 1872 would overturn the result of the Civil War, degrading the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments into “dead letters.”

Greeley campaigned from the back of a train, delivering scores of speeches and previewing the whistle-stop style that later marked presidential campaigns.

The more Greeley talked, the lower he sagged in public esteem.

Grant was the first president to confront the feminist movement as a viable political force.

When registrars allowed Anthony to sign in, even though illegal voting was a crime, she went for Grant—the

blacks voted Republican in overwhelming numbers in the fairest presidential election in southern states until 1968.

More than a little suspiciously, Grant didn’t register a single vote in three Georgia counties with a solid majority of black voters.

“I was the worst beaten man that ever ran for that high office,” Greeley glumly conceded.

the fact that the investigation unfolded on his watch have unfairly linked Grant’s name in the history books with a scandal in which he lacked any association.

in a stupendous leap, he expressed a belief “that our Great Maker is preparing the world, in his own good time, to become one nation, speaking one language, and when armies and Navies will be no longer required.”

Southern whites increasingly substituted the word “Redemption”—a restoration of white rule—for the hated term “Reconstruction.”

“I believe General Sheridan has no superior as a general, either living or dead, and perhaps not an equal.”

Many saw the Louisiana violence as the opening shot of a second Civil War and a revitalized Confederacy,

the whole edifice of Reconstruction cracked apart, fueled by a northern backlash,

One of the last hurrahs of Reconstruction was passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1875,

outlawed racial segregation in public accommodations, schools, transportation, and juries.

The Civil Rights Act of 1875 was struck down as unconstitutional by the Supreme Court in 1883. Not until 1957 would Congress dare to pass another civil rights bill, and it was only with the long-overdue Civil Rights Act of 1964 that many of the 1875 legislation’s protections for blacks became the enduring law of the land.