Grant

by Ron Chernow

“a particular aversion to egotists and braggarts,”

“Few of earth’s daughters were so lovely; none in Heaven stands nearer the throne.”

To ward off gangrene, Civil War surgeons often amputated on the spot and stacks of arms and legs had accumulated inside. These begrimed doctors, ignorant of the germ theory of infection, stood in clothes splashed with blood, pus, and filth. Many operations were performed without anesthesia, relying on whiskey instead.

Shiloh’s casualties eclipsed the total of the Revolutionary War, the War of 1812, and the Mexican War combined.

Because many of Andrew Johnson’s judicial appointees had shown little concern for black citizens, Congress had introduced nine new circuit judgeships and Grant would name some distinguished progressives to occupy them, including Hugh Lennox Bond, a Republican judge and abolitionist from Baltimore, who championed black education after the war.

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

In the nineteenth century, Congress was infinitely more powerful than in the twentieth and senators ruled as headstrong barons whose power often rivaled that of presidents.

the first major piece of legislation signed by Grant on March 18, 1869, committed the government to paying off bondholders in “gold or its equivalent” and redeeming paper money “at the earliest practicable period.”

Congress created the Department of Justice. Before then, the attorney general had functioned as the president’s legal adviser, operating from the Treasury building without the dignity of a separate department. Now he would head an active department with a substantial array of new powers. In part its creation was a practical measure to consolidate government lawyers and litigation in one department, sparing cabinet

members the expense of hiring outside attorneys and thus reducing conflicts of interest. Civil service reformers also spotted a chance to streamline the government’s legal capacity and enhance efficiency.

In March 1871, three blacks in the small town of Meridian were brought up on charges of delivering “incendiary” speeches. At the court hearing, the Republican judge and two black defendants were killed. The violence spilled over into gruesome riots in which thirty blacks were gunned down, including “all the leading colored men of the town with one or two exceptions.”

By 1872, under Grant’s leadership, the Ku Klux Klan had been smashed in the South. (Its later twentieth-century incarnation had no connection to the earlier group other than a common style and ideology.)

the Republican Party’s gradual metamorphosis from the party of abolition

to a more business-oriented one. Once the maverick party of outsiders, the Republicans had evolved into the comfortable political establishment, with all the corruption that goes with the territory.

He was a genial Irishman and lover of horse flesh

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.

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

he properly asked for a line-item veto that might have enabled him to strike out the salary grab—making him the first president in American history to request one.

NO SOUTHERN STATE presented more insurmountable problems to Grant than Louisiana, which had become a hotbed of hatred and corruption.

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.

Grant calmed them by saying there would be no disturbance. A cool hand at the helm, he prevented a frightening situation from fraying into partisan violence. As always, Grant was at his most levelheaded in a crisis.

A newcomer to Europe and the Grand Tour, he overlooked the small matter of securing a passport and, at the last minute, Hamilton Fish had to appeal to Secretary of State Evarts to rush passports

stopped by the studio of Frédéric Bartholdi and watched him sculpt the Statue of Liberty.

“My impression is that the day is not very far distant when they will make the most rapid strides toward modern civilization, and become dangerous rivals to all powers interested in the trade of the East.”