He Should Belong to the Ages: El Presidente Grant
Ulysses S. Grant was General of the United States Army during the American Civil War and President of the United States from 1873 to 1881.
Born in Ohio in 1822, he began attending West Point in 1839 and subsequently served in the United States Army during the Mexican-American War. Largely apolitical and obscure during the 1850's, during the American Civil War he became one of the most well-regarded generals in the U.S. Army, scoring a considerable number of victories in the Western theatre that captured control of the critical Mississippi River for the Union. Though some criticized him as a butcher for his aggressive tactics, he attracted the admiration of President Lincoln, who in the late stages of the war made him the commanding general in the Virginia front, where he successfully defeated Robert E. Lee's army and accepted his surrender at the Appomattox Court House, ending the American Civil War. After the war, he remained the highest-ranking officer in the U.S. Army and was one of the most important enforcers of Reconstruction during President Lincoln's second term and and President Wade's sole term. While tipped as a potential compromise nominee at the 1868 Republican National Convention, alongside President Lincoln, should it have deadlocked between the Radical Ohio Senator Benjamin Wade and the moderate Secretary of State William Seward, the Radical Republicans successfully took control of the convention and nominated Wade. Grant thus continued his army duties in the South.
In 1872, as President Wade was widely unpopular, many Republicans believed the only chance for victory lay in denying him renomination. Grant quickly gained traction as the likeliest candidate to defeat Wade, as the only person in the party capable of appealing to both moderates and radicals in the party. At the convention, Grant's backers succeeded in gaining him the nomination, thus pitting him against National Union nominee John T. Hoffman, a New York City mayor turned governor who had emerged as the early favorite in the presidential contest. However, Grant's personal popularity did much to overcome the increasing unpopularity of President Wade's Radical Reconstruction programs, while a scandal concerning the Tammany Hall organization brought Hoffman's once-sterling reputation into question while defusing questions about Republican corruption in the Credit Mobilier scandal. In the November election, Grant scored a clear victory over Hoffman.
Grant, as president, scaled back some of the most radical proposals of President Wade, but on the whole his handling of Reconstruction was more similar to Wade's Radical Reconstruction than Lincoln's Moderate Reconstruction. On the economy, he was beset by many questions on the currency, business interests, and how to respond to the 1870's depression; he also had to deal with the issue of corruption, as many of his associates would be caught in flagrant acts of corruption, though the president himself was never implicated. As 1876 approached, with a weak economy and Reconstruction still unpopular, his reelection seemed to be doubtful, but far from doomed. However, his position would be dramatically worsened by a split in his party; Vice-President Charles Francis Adams, a moderate Republican who had been nominated to appeal to that faction of the party, took great issue with his Reconstruction policies and, alongside a number of other Republicans, bolted from the party, creating the Liberal Republican Party. On the other side, former President Wade took issue with Grant's conservative economics, and attempted to return to the presidency on the Labor Reform Party line. Thomas F. Bayard, a Delaware senator who was the National Union nominee, seemed a likely victor. Bayard's chances would be doomed, however, by the revelation of the Dover Speech, an 1861 piece of oratory in which he seemingly called for Delaware's secession. This badly damaged Bayard in the North, and Adams surged as the primary anti-Reconstruction candidate. However, this was not enough; Bayard took enough of the vote that President Grant won reelection anyway with less than 40% of the vote, while Wade managed to carry Ohio but was irrelevant elsewhere.
Grant's second term was similar to his first. While he had wanted to scale back Reconstruction further, including the retreat of all troops from the South, his 1876 reelection margin was not great, and his observance of events in the border states, as well as Arkansas and Texas, the two former Confederate states where he did remove troops, led him to believe that the Republicans could not win in the South without troops in place to ensure the voting rights of freedmen and prevent scalawags from being intimidated; combined with the fact that without southern electoral votes he would not have won a majority in the Electoral College, President Grant maintained troops in the other nine former Confederate states and maintained vigorous enforcement of Reconstruction decrees in all the South largely due to political expedience.
In 1880, though quite tired of the job, he decided to run for a third term; as a shaky coalition of Liberals and National Unionists had captured control of the U.S. House and been woven together into an alliance by James A. Garfield, the incumbent Republican speaker who had turned to the Liberals as the only real advocates of civil service reform and secured a fourth term as speaker, President Grant was doubtful of his party's ability to win a sixth consecutive election without him at the helm. Garfield became the candidate of a Liberal-National Union fusion coalition with Samuel J. Tilden, a favorite of both the Liberals and National Unionists, as his running mate; though the skepticism of some National Unionists of Garfield due to his partisan history kept Garfield from running away with the contest, it was nonetheless close. As the vote was counted, Garfield took a close but clear lead in the popular vote, but the electoral vote remained contentious. The contest was marred by two occurrences; first, the candidacy of Greenback candidate James B. Weaver, who performed strongly in the states of Illinois and Michigan and was accused of acting as a spoiler for Grant who tipped those two states to Garfield; and secondly, a very close, decisive contest in New York. Garfield narrowly took the state, thus defeating Grant's bid for a third term; this was the first time in twenty years a non-Republican was elected president, and Garfield would be a significant president in his own right. Grant, for his part, retired from politics entirely, and died in 1885; he was posthumously promoted to General of the Armies, the highest rank in the U.S. Army, by the U.S. Congress in 1985 for the centenary of his death, one of only three individuals to be given the honor.
