Grant

by Ron Chernow

His citizenship wasn’t fully restored in his lifetime and more than a hundred years passed before it was posthumously accomplished through a joint congressional resolution in 1975.

Before long, Fred Grant would enter the academy and Grant noted proudly he was “full three inches taller than I was when I entered West Point and better prepared.”

Johnson was bent on enlisting his support whether he liked it or not. When Grant threw a glittering soiree at 205 I Street, President Johnson ventured outside the White House to stand between Ulysses and Julia Grant on the receiving line, and Radical Republicans were taken aback by his presence.

Then, most shockingly, Grant pitched into Robert E. Lee: “Lee is behaving badly. He is conducting himself very differently from what I had reason, from what he said at the time of the surrender, to suppose he would. No man at the South is capable of exercising a tenth part of the influence for good that he is, but instead of using it, he is setting an example of forced acquiescence so grudging and pernicious in its effect as to be hardly realized.”

Nevertheless, the Fourteenth Amendment was ratified on July 9, 1868.

Johnson recommended and Congress passed on July 25 an act to create especially for Grant the new grade of “General of the Army of the United States,” with an annual salary of $20,000. As Mark Twain said, it gave Grant “that supreme and stately and simple one-word title, ‘General,’” placing an unprecedented four stars on his shoulder straps and making him the first person since George Washington to hold the full general title.

When the group went for a drive in Central Park, Grant took the reins of his carriage and challenged another driver to a race, winning easily.

In mid-1866, Confederate veterans in Pulaski, Tennessee, founded a club called the Ku Klux Klan, its

Klansmen donned outlandish hoods to terrorize their former slaves into believing they represented the ghosts of dead Confederate soldiers.

and a pigeon, dyed red, white, and blue, flapped through

the cavernous space.

Grant took personal responsibility, disavowing his wartime order as a thoughtless, misguided action that a moment’s reflection might have blocked.

WHEN PRESIDENT-ELECT GRANT returned to Washington on November 7, he slipped so unobtrusively into the capital, taking a public coach from the train station to his house, that reporters didn’t know he had returned until they saw him ambling near army headquarters the next day.

At forty-six, Grant

was still trim and fit, the youngest man elected president until then.

Then, in sharp contrast to his predecessor, Grant championed black suffrage. “It seems to me very desirable that the question should be settled now, and I entertain the hope . . . that it may be by the ratification of the fifteenth article of amendment to the Constitution.”

“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.”

He made an excellent choice by tapping his old pal and ex–Confederate general James Longstreet as surveyor of customs for New Orleans. The rich patronage position seemed well merited, for Longstreet was that rare southern general who had preached cooperation with Reconstruction and been traduced as a scalawag for his outspoken courage.

To insult Jesse, Colonel Dent would pop out of his armchair whenever Jesse entered the room. “Accept my chair, Mr. Grant,” he would say with elaborate courtesy, as if humoring a senile old man.

Despite such pressures, Grant made extraordinary strides in naming blacks, Jews, and Native Americans to federal positions—a forgotten chapter of American history. The minor story of nepotism has overshadowed this far more important narrative. Forty years before Theodore Roosevelt incurred southern wrath by inviting Booker T. Washington to dine at the White House, Grant welcomed blacks there.

On April 2, he met with the first black

public official ever to visit the White House, Lieutenant Governor Oscar...

Grant appointed Ebenezer D. Bassett as minister to Haiti, making him the first African American diplomat in American history.

Mortified at memories of General Orders No. 11, Grant compiled an outstanding record of incorporating Jews into his administration, one that far outstripped his predecessors’.

Elated at this appointment, Rabbi Isaac Mayer Wise said it showed “that President Grant has revoked General Grant’s notorious order No.

Grant had imported an army chef whose idea of fine cuisine consisted of heavy slabs of roast beef and cheese piled high atop apple pie.

On these rambles, he often passed Walt Whitman, then working in Washington. The poet told his mother, “I saw Grant to-day on the avenue walking by himself—(I always salute him, & he does the same to me.)”

On May 19, 1869, he issued a proclamation endorsing an eight-hour day for government laborers without any diminution of pay.

There was a chin-up bar at the ferry house where he startled his family by performing twenty-five or thirty repetitions.

No less committed to the Radical side of the Republican agenda, he signed a bill on March 19 conferring equal rights on blacks in Washington, D.C.

In May 1869, Robert E. Lee came to the White House to discuss a railroad venture. As at Appomattox, Grant attempted to smooth over an awkward situation with a little levity and small talk. “You and I, General,” said Grant, “have had more to do with destroying railroads than building them.”11 Lee would not be drawn into this sort of pleasantry.

Dr. Herman Bendell as superintendent of Indian affairs for the Arizona Territory.28 He was later celebrated as the first Jewish settler to plant stakes in Phoenix, Arizona.

after the Civil War, territorial expansion and imperialism were very much in the air, William Seward having bought Alaska for $7.2 million

“You led me against my judgment at the time . . . and I now see how right it was—and I desire most sincerely to thank you.”

Adams got his revenge with a series of withering aperçus about Grant that have clung like barnacles to his historical reputation. He said the initials “U. S.” stood for “uniquely stupid.”

two new senators. One was Adelbert Ames and the other Hiram Revels, a minister who became the first black person to serve in the U.S. Senate. In a powerful piece of symbolism, Revels occupied the Senate seat once held by Jefferson Davis.

After 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.

Told that Sumner didn’t believe in the Bible, Grant retorted, “Well, he didn’t write it.”

The same week that Grant appointed Akerman, Congress created the Department of Justice.

At the same time, sensitive to scenic beauty, he established Yellowstone as the first national park on March 1, 1872.

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.

Because it formed part of a general appropriations bill, Grant had been unable to veto it without shutting down the government. After signing it, 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.

In a courageous move, Grant invited black guests, leading some members of the Washington beau monde to boycott the event in protest at this racial mixing.151

By the time Ulysses, Julia, and Nellie Grant arrived at 11:30 p.m., canaries had started to keel over and die in droves on their perches, the first martyrs to Grant’s second term.

In Yazoo County, only seven Republican votes were cast in a black population that exceeded twelve thousand.

Grant decided it was more important to retain Ohio than save Mississippi. Republicans won the Ohio elections, returning Rutherford B. Hayes to the governorship and setting the stage for the next president.

Grant gave the job to Yale-educated Alphonso Taft of Cincinnati, an influential judge and father of William Howard, the future president.

Grant traveled to Indian Territory in