President Grant.

 

 

Ulysses S. Grant was the 18th President of the United States of America. He lived from April 27, 1822 to July 23, 1885. He was a much better President than Andrew Johnson. In recent years, more people realize not only his imperfections but of his support for new Reconstruction laws that fought against oppression that black Americans faced during the late 19th century. He was a military General who helped the Union forces to defeat the Confederacy. He created the Justice Department and worked with Radical Republicans to fight to protect African Americans during Reconstruction. He was born at Point Pleasant, Ohio. His parents were Jesse Root Grant and Hannah Simpson Grant. His ancestors came from the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1630 via the Mary and John ship. Grant's great grandfather fought in the French and Indian War, and his grandfather, Noah, served in the American Revolution at Bunker hill. Noah settled in Pennsylvania and later married Rachel Kelley, the daughter of an Irish pioneer. Ulysses' father, Jesse, was a Whig Party member and a strident abolitionist. Jesse Grant moved to Point Pleasant in 1820, and he worked as a foreman in a tannery. He married Hannah on June 24, 1821. Hannah came from Presbyterian immigrants from Ballygawley in County Tyrone, Ireland. Ulysses had many brothers and sisters. He lived in Georgetown, Ohio. He started school at the age of 4. Horse riding was his gift too. Ulysses S. Grant prayed privately and never joined any denomination of a church. Ulysess S. Grant went into West Point at New York state.  He graduated from West Point too. Grant had friends in the Academy like Frederick Tracy Dent and James Longstreet. He graduated on June 30, 1843.Grant married Julia and had 4 children. Grant's father opposed Dent's family owning slaves, so he didn't attend the wedding. Grant remained in the army. When the Mexican-American war existed, Grant was a military leader in the U.S. Army. The war broke out in 1846. 

 

 

 

During that war, he was actively involved. His unit came into Louisiana as being part of the Army of Observation under Major General Zachary Taylor. The Battle of Palo Alto was the time when Grant saw combat for the first time on May 8,1846. Grant wanted combat. He led a charge at the Battle of Resaca de la Palma. He could ride a horse well. Polk, wary of Taylor's growing popularity, divided his forces, sending some troops (including Grant's unit) to form a new army under Major General Winfield Scott. Traveling by sea, Scott's army landed at Veracruz and advanced toward Mexico City. The army met the Mexican forces at the battles of Molino del Rey and Chapultepec outside Mexico City. For his bravery at Molino del Rey, Grant was brevetted first lieutenant on September 30. At San Cosmé, Grant directed his men to drag a disassembled howitzer into a church steeple, then reassembled it and bombarded nearby Mexican troops. His bravery and initiative earned him his brevet promotion to captain. On September 14, 1847, Scott's army marched into the city; Mexico ceded the vast territory, including California, to the U.S. on February 2, 1848.  Grant studied the tactics and strategies of Scott and Taylor. Grant admitted in writing that the Mexican war was morally unjust and that the territorial gains were designed to expand slavery, stating, "I was bitterly opposed to the measure ... and to this day, regard the war which resulted as one of the most unjust ever waged by a stronger against a weaker nation." He opined that the Civil War was divine punishment on the U.S. for its aggression against Mexico. During the war, Grant discovered his "moral courage" and began to consider a career in the army. 

 

 After the war, Grant worked in the Madison Barracks in upstate New York. He worked at a quartermaster job in Detroit. Grant worked everywhere from California, Panama, and to Oregon Territory. He was in civilian life in 1854 when he was 32 years old. Grant experienced poverty and even did the wrong by acquiring a slave. He felt guilt and freed the slave by manumission (in a deed) in March 1859. He worked in the real estate business with Julia's cousin Harry Boggs in St. Louis. Grant voted for Democrat James Buchanan, because he was afraid that Republican John C. Fremont would use his anti-slavery position that would lead to be southern secession. Grant considered Fremont to be a shameless self-promoter.  For the 1860 election, he could not vote because he was not yet a legal resident of Illinois, but he favored Democrat Stephen A. Douglas over the eventual winner, Abraham Lincoln, and Lincoln over the Southern Democrat, John C. Breckinridge. He was torn between his increasingly anti-slavery views and the fact that his wife remained a staunch Democrat. The American Civil War started on April 12, 1861 when Confederate troops attacked Fort Sumter in Charleston, South Carolina. Grant was shocked. On April 15, 1861, President Abraham Lincoln called for 75,000 volunteers. 

 

Grant was inspired by his father's attorney John Aaron Rawlins to fight the Confederacy. Grant went up the military ranks and fought in Missouri. On November 2, 1861, Lincoln removed Frémont from command, freeing Grant to attack Confederate soldiers encamped in Cape Girardeau, Missouri. On November 5, Grant, along with Brigadier General John A. McClernand, landed 2,500 men at Hunter's Point, and on November 7 engaged the Confederates at the Battle of Belmont. The Union army took the camp, but the reinforced Confederates under Brigadier Generals Frank Cheatham and Gideon J. Pillow forced a chaotic Union retreat. Grant had won the first major victory for the Union, capturing Floyd's entire rebel army of more than 12,000. Halleck was angry that Grant had acted without his authorization and complained to McClellan, accusing Grant of "neglect and inefficiency". On March 3, Halleck sent a telegram to Washington complaining that he had no communication with Grant for a week. Three days later, Halleck followed up with a postscript claiming "word has just reached me that ... Grant has resumed his bad habits (of drinking)." Lincoln, regardless, promoted Grant to major general of volunteers and the Northern press treated Grant as a hero. Playing off his initials, they took to calling him "Unconditional Surrender Grant." In November, after Lincoln's preliminary Emancipation Proclamation, Grant ordered units under his command to incorporate former slaves into the Union Army, giving them clothes, shelter, and wages for their services. Grant held western Tennessee with almost 40,000 men. The Union got Vicksburg later on cutting the Confederacy in two on the Mississippi river. On December 17, 1862, Grant was wrong to issue the General Order No. 11 got banned many Jewish people from his Union Army military district. Lincoln rescinded the order on January 17, 1863. General Ulyssess S. Grant continued to have more successful campaigns in defeating the Confederacy. In 1865, he finally saw Robert E. Lee, and Lee surrendered (at the Appomattox Court House). Grant allowed Lee's men to keep their horses. The war was over. By May 26, 1865, Kirby Smith's Texas army surrendered marking the end of the American Civil War. 

  

On April 14, 1865, five days after Grant's victory at Appomattox, he attended a cabinet meeting in Washington. Lincoln invited him and his wife to Ford's Theater, but they declined, for upon his wife Julia's urging, they had plans to travel to Philadelphia. In a conspiracy that also targeted top cabinet members in one last effort to topple the Union, Lincoln was fatally shot by John Wilkes Booth at the theater and died the next morning. Many, including Grant himself, thought that he had been a target in the plot, and during the subsequent trial, the government tried to prove that Grant had been stalked by Booth's conspirator Michael O'Laughlen. Andrew Johnson was President. Ulysses S. Grant was a commanding general from 1865 to 1869. He enforced Reconstruction policies in former Confederate states and supervised the Native American wars in the western Plains. Grant saved Robert E. Lee's life from being executed for treason. Grant wanted the Freedmen's Bureau to exist. Grant and Johnson broke down their political relationship over accusations of lying and corruption among both people. Grant became very popular among Radical Republicans. When the Republican Party met at the 1868 Republican National Convention in Chicago, the delegates unanimously nominated Grant for president and Speaker of the House Schuyler Colfax for vice president. Back then, many Republicans promoted equal civil and political rights to all and African American enfranchisement or voting rights. The Democrats, having abandoned Johnson, nominated former governor Horatio Seymour of New York for president and Francis P. Blair of Missouri for vice president. The Democrats wanted no suffrage for black Americans and complete restoration of former Confederate states to the Union. 

 

 

 

Grant's 1862 General Order No. 11 became an issue during the presidential campaign; he sought to distance himself from the order, saying "I have no prejudice against sect or race, but want each individual to be judged by his own merit." The Democrats and their Klan supporters focused mainly on ending Reconstruction, intimidating blacks and Republicans, and returning control of the South to the white Democrats and the planter class, alienating War Democrats in the North. An example was the murder of Republican Congressman James M. Hinds in Arkansas by a Klansman in October 1868, as Hinds campaigned for Grant. Grant won the popular vote by 300,000 votes out of 5,716,082 votes cast, receiving an Electoral College landslide of 214 votes to Seymour's 80. Seymour received a majority of white voters, but Grant was aided by 500,000 votes cast by blacks, winning him 52.7 percent of the popular vote. He lost Louisiana and Georgia, primarily due to Ku Klux Klan violence against African-American voters. At the age of 46, Grant was the youngest president yet elected, and the first president after the nation had outlawed slavery. President Ulysses S. Grant was President from 1868 to 1877. On March 4, 1869, Grant was sworn in as the eighteenth President of the United States by Chief Justice Salmon P. Chase. In his inaugural address, Grant urged the ratification of the Fifteenth Amendment, while large numbers of African Americans attended his inauguration. He also urged that bonds issued during the Civil War should be paid in gold and called for "proper treatment" of Native Americans and encouraged their "civilization and ultimate citizenship." 

 

 

 

Many of his cabinet picks were praised and criticized. Washburne resigned. In March 1872, Grant signed legislation that established Yellowstone National Park, the first national park. Grant was sympathetic to women's rights; including support of female suffrage, saying he wanted "equal rights to all citizens."  He appointed Edward S. Salomon territorial governor of Washington, the first time an American Jewish man occupied a governor's seat. Grant was sympathetic to the plight of persecuted Jewish people. In November 1869, reports surfaced of the Russian Czar Alexander II punishing 2,000 Jewish families for smuggling by expelling them to the interior of the country. In response, Grant publicly supported the Jewish American B'nai B'rith petition against the Czar. In December 1869, Grant appointed a Jewish journalist as Consul to Romania, to protect Jewish people from "severe oppression." Grant wanted to limit religious indoctrination in public school, but his amendment proposal failed in Congress. In October 1871, under the Morrill Act, Grant prosecuted hundreds of Utah Mormon polygamists, including Mormon leader Brigham Young. Grant was a much more progressive President on civil rights than Presidents before him. 

 

On March 18, 1869, Grant signed into law equal rights for blacks, to serve on juries and hold office, in Washington D.C., and in 1870 he signed into law the Naturalization Act that gave foreign blacks citizenship. During his first term, Reconstruction took precedence. Republicans controlled most Southern states, propped up by Republican-controlled Congress, northern money, and southern military occupation. Grant advocated the ratification of the Fifteenth Amendment that said states could not disenfranchise African Americans. Within a year, the three remaining states—Mississippi, Virginia, and Texas—adopted the new amendment—and were admitted to Congress. Grant put military pressure on Georgia to reinstate its black legislators and adopt the new amendment. Georgia complied, and on February 24, 1871, its Senators were seated in Congress, with all the former Confederate states represented, the Union was completely restored under Grant. Under Grant, for the first time in American history, Black-American males served in the United States Congress, all from the Southern states. President Grant used the Congress and the Justice Department to prosecute the Klan for acts of violence against black people (via three Enforcement Acts). These laws crushed the Klan temporarily. Grant's Attorney General Amos T. Akerman fought the Klan. The Klan was gone for a time, and many African Americans were voted into the South. By Grant's 2nd term, the North retreated from Reconstruction. Southern conservative whites called the Redeemers formed armed groups like the Red Shirts and the White League to overturn Republican rule (via violent, intimidation, and voter fraud including racism).  Grant ended the Brooks–Baxter War, bringing Reconstruction in Arkansas to a peaceful conclusion. He sent troops to New Orleans in the wake of the Colfax massacre and disputes over the election of Governor William Pitt Kellogg. Grant recalled Sheridan and most of the federal troops from Louisiana. Grant signed the Civil Rights Act of 1875, but it was not readily enforced. The Great Compromise of 1877 ended Reconstruction forever. It caused the Democrats to break their promises and continue Jim Crow apartheid. Grant was wrong to desire Native Americans to embrace white culture via assimilation without accepting their own culture. Wars existed and Major General Oliver Otis Howard negotiated peace with Apache leader Cochise. Life is no fairly tale. The Native Americans were victims of an overt genocide campaign via the Great Sioux War, the Battle of Little Big Horn, and the Black Hills Gold Rush. Many U.S. forces intentionally killed bison to harm Native American people. Grant failed to annex the Dominican Republic as part of his Monroe Doctrine agenda. Grant won his 2nd term, because of the federal prosecution of the Klan, a strong economy, debt reduction, lower tariffs, and tax reductions. 

 

 

Financial corruption and the Panic of 1873 ended the Grant Presidency. After leaving the White House, Grant said he "was never so happy in my life". The Grants left Washington for New York, to attend the birth of their daughter Nellie's child, staying at Hamilton Fish's residence. Calling themselves "waifs", the Grants toured Cincinnati, St. Louis, Chicago, and Galena, without a clear idea of where they would live afterward. Grant toured the world. He worked with the Hayes administration. Grant mourned the assassination of Garfield. Ulyssess S. Grant wrote his memoirs before his death in 1885. He was 63 years old.  The Personal Memoirs of U. S. Grant was a critical and commercial success. Julia Grant received about $450,000 in royalties (equivalent to $13,000,000 in 2020). People mourned his passing nationwide. Grant's body was laid to rest in Riverside Park, first in a temporary tomb, and then—twelve years later, on April 17, 1897—in the General Grant National Memorial, also known as "Grant's Tomb", the largest mausoleum in North America. Ulysses S. Grant's greatest accomplishment was his promotion of laws to advance equality for black Americans. He made the error of his treatment of Native Americans and not getting a handling of financial corruption during his 2nd term. Ulysses S. Grant was a Union General who legitimate fought to end the Confederacy once and for all. His legacy will be debated for years to come, but he remains a prominent figure of world history indeed. 

  

By Timothy