A few years ago I wrote about how my seventh grade history teacher, Mr. Walborn, first piqued my interest in Ulysses Grant. I guess you could say that Mr. Walborn put Grant on my radar.
For years afterward I couldn’t understand why Robert E. Lee’s star seemed to shine so much brighter than Grant’s; after all Grant was the general who won the war for the Union while Lee had turned traitor and was the loser.
As it turned out, it was all because a bunch of southern historians had grabbed their chance to rewrite history the way they wanted it to be, and for years the bogus southern “Lost Cause” narrative, which claimed that the cause of the Confederate States was morally right, heroic, and not centered on slavery, held sway. Happily, in recent years, that narrative has lost its grip, and Lee and the other traitors are now seen for what they were, and Grant’s reputation is on the rise, both as a general and as a president.
Alas, it’s not just Grant’s reputation that suffered from the bogus “Lost Cause” sham; decades of novels, films, and other works have contributed to Americans false notions of what ante-bellum life was like in the South. Works like the wildly successful novel and movie Gone With the Wind, for example. Which is one reason why I include Ty Seidule’s quote on the right hand side of my page: “With my background as a historian, I imagined what the ‘plantation’ had been before the Civil War—coffle, rape, torture. Perhaps we should stop calling these places plantations and start calling them by a more accurate name—enslaved labor farms.”
It should be remembered that Grant was wildly popular in his time. He received a majority of the popular vote during both of the elections in which he ran. As he approached the end of his life, he wrote his memoirs which became a best seller and left his family financially secure. Many, many babies were named after him, including my great-grandfather Grant Ulysses Zeller born on July 6, 1871.
The 15th Amendment to the constitution—“The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.”—was ratified in 1870 two years after Grant was elected.
The Ku Klux Klan raised its racist sheets to suppress the Black vote in the South, so Grant used his powers under the newly created Department of Justice in 1871 to destroy the Klan throughout the South, and it stayed dead for decades.
Some of the other accomplishments of Grant’s presidency include:
- Grant established the first national park—Yellowstone National Park.
- Grant appointed more than 50 Jewish people to federal office.
- Grant created the first Civil Service Commission to select employees on merit.
- Grant tried to implement a peace policy with American Indians by using the Interior Department rather than the War Department, but he was stymied in his efforts by military men such as Custer. Although his policy was considered humanitarian for its time, it was later criticized for disregarding tribal cultures, and I have to criticize it as well as his plan included trying to “christianize” the Indians. Someone needed to give him a good talking to.
Alas, his second term in office was marred by wide-spread corruption, although he was not involved himself.
As his re-election on 1872 approached, some members of the Republican Party wanted to end the Reconstruction efforts so they broke away and formed the Liberal Republican Party and held a convention in Cincinnati, Ohio. They ended up nominating the editor of the New York Tribune, Horace Greeley, to be their standard bearer. Worse, when the Democrats held their convention, they were so desperate to beat Grant, they decided to unite behind the candidate of the Liberal Republicans rather than risk splitting the vote.
This came as a shock to quite a few folks. As Paul Boller put it, Greeley was “erratic, crochety, unpredictable, and thoroughly incompetent in the art of politics. About all one could say of him as a candidate was that he was a national celebrity. With his cherubic face, big blue eyes, pilgarlic pate, steel-rimmed glasses, and shuffling gait, he looked more like a character out of a Dickens novel than a presidential hopeful, and he was an easy target for cartoonists and caricaturists.”
Perhaps I can describe it in more modern terms. It was as if a third rate “reality” show star had suddenly captured the nomination for president.
One humorist said Greeley’s nomination even astonished Dr. Livingstone when he returned from five years’ isolation in the interior of Africa after his rescue by Henry M. Stanley. Stanley, he said, was filling him in on news of world developments during his absence—the Austro-Prussian War, the execution of Maximilian in Mexico, the FrancoGerman War, the downfall of Napoleon III, and the rise of the German Empire—and finally mentioned that the Democratic party in the United States had nominated Greeley for President. “Hold on,” Livingston broke in instantly. “You have told me stupendous things, and with a confiding simplicity I was swallowing them peacefully down; but there is a limit to all things, and when you tell me that Horace Greeley is become a Democratic candidate I will be hanged if I believe it.”
— Presidential Campaigns by Paul F. Boller Jr.
Given the two candidates—a “man of no ideas,” as someone put it, versus a “man of too many”—the campaign was predictable. It reduced itself to what the New York Sun called “a shower of mud.” Republican derision of Greeley—who at one time or another had favored vegetarianism, abolitionism, brown bread, free-thinking, socialism, and spiritualism—was biting and cruel. In Harper’s Weekly, cartoonist Thomas Nast (who created the elephant as the Republican gonfalon) had a field day with “Honest Old Horace.” Picturing the Tribune editor as a hopelessly near-sighted and pumpkin-headed clown, he did a savage takeoff on Greeley’s pamphlet, “What I Know About Farming,” in a series of cartoons labeled, “What I Know About Stooping To Conquer,” “What I Know About Honesty” (shaking hands with Tammany Boss Tweed), “What I Know About Bailing Out” (a reference to the bail Greeley had helped provide for Jefferson Davis in 1867), “What I Know About Eating My Own Words,” “What I Know About Bolting,” and “What I Know About Running for the Presidency.” In a savage ridicule of Greeley’s appeal in his acceptance letter for North and South to “clasp their hands across the bloody chasm,” Nast showed Greeley shaking hands with a rebel who had just shot a Union soldier, stretching out his hand to John Wilkes Booth across Lincoln’s grave, and turning a defenseless black over to a member of the Ku Klux Klan who has just lynched a black man and knifed a black mother and her child. “I have been assailed so bitterly,” wailed Greeley at the end of the campaign, “that I hardly knew whether I was running for the Presidency or the penitentiary.”
…
Grant of course received his share of the campaign abuse. All the old charges of 1868 were revived and he was attacked as a crook, drunkard, ignoramus, dictator, swindler, and “utterly depraved horse jockey.” But with Greeley in the running, he was unbeatable. With the support of Northern businessmen and bankers, Republican regulars, Union veterans, and blacks (and with the help of Democratic abstainers), Grant won an easy victory in November. He carried 31 states (all but six), took 286 of the 349 electoral votes, and won a popular majority of 763,000 votes over Greeley (3,597,132 to 2,834,125).
— Presidential Campaigns by Paul F. Boller Jr.
Ulysses Grant was an early supporter of women’s suffrage.
Susan B. Anthony, celebrated suffragette, attended all three conventions—Liberal Republican, Republican, and Democratic—but only the Republicans agreed to include a reference to their “obligations to the loyal women of America” in their platform. It was the first woman’s plank in a national platform, and although only a “splinter,” Anthony decided to support Grant for President and go out on the stump for the Republican ticket—and for woman suffrage. She also decided to vote, along with several other women, on election day. The Fourteenth Amendment, she told inspectors when registering to vote, guaranteed equal rights for all citizens and that included women and their right to vote.
On November 5 Anthony voted in Rochester, New York. On November 18 she was arrested. She insisted on handcuffs, but the embarrassed marshal declined; she also refused to pay bail, but her lawyer (without consulting her) chivalrously went on her bond. The case of United States vs. Susan B. Anthony might have been a landmark had it reached the United States Supreme Court, as Anthony and her lawyers wished. Instead, her trial in a Circuit Court in June 1873 was a farce. Associate Supreme Court Justice Ward Hunt refused to let Anthony testify, permitted testimony she had given after her arrest to be admitted into the record, delivered an opinion he had written before the trial, directed the jury to deliver a verdict of guilty, and refused to let the jury be polled.
“Has the prisoner anything to say why sentence shall not be pronounced?” he asked after refusing a motion for a new trial. The prisoner did; she lectured him at length, despite repeated orders to sit down, on his violation of her rights. The judge then fined her $100 and the costs of the prosecution. “May it please your honor,” said Anthony firmly, “I will never pay a dollar of your unjust penalty.”
She never did. The government was glad to drop the case.
— Presidential Campaigns by Paul F. Boller Jr.
As you have no doubt noticed, I’m a big admirer of Ulysses Grant, and I haven’t even mentioned his efforts as a general during the Civil War, where he was brilliant in his tactics but once the battle was won, his ingrained humanity took over.
But I’m only supposed to evaluate his presidency.
Much as I’d love to give him two thumbs up, I have to restrain myself and only award him one.
In the end he was much too trusting of some of his friends and while he wasn’t looking they undermined some of his policies and corrupted his second term. Had he exercised a bit more oversight, he might well have been a truly great president, because he had the popular will behind him.