During his two-term presidency, Grant’s noble work in the south and his decent intentions towards Native Americans were undermined by his personal naivety in high politics, and by his inability to restrain America’s imperial voracity in the west. He backed a Peace Plan, offering the Native Americans ‘civilization, Christianization and citizenship’ when what they wanted was freedom to hunt and raid. The civil war had reinvigorated the Lakota and Cheyenne in Colorado and the Dakotas, while in the south the Comanche had returned to raiding.
