![]() WATCH: Grant's Troubled Presidency Overshadowed achievements ![]() Grant’s reputation as president would pay the price for many years to come. “He entered into no consultative process, engaged in no methodical vetting of people and sent up no trial balloons to test candidates.” “He wrongly assumed that the skills that had made him successful in one sphere of life would translate intact into another,” Chernow acknowledges. Still, Grant might bear some responsibility for the people he chose and the haphazard way he went about it. The administration shared the characteristics of the times.”Ĭhernow, writing from a 21st-century perspective, makes much the same case, also pointing out that Grant “never stopped prosecutions of guilty parties and was often insistent about having them prosecuted.” “The war being over, the people had turned their attention to making money, and the corruption that was in private life had.rotted official life. “It was a time of speculation, of cupidity, and of corruption,” Garland added. The ex-general had taken office with little political experience, Hamlin Garland noted in an 1898 biography, and found himself “pitted against the keen, shrewd, practiced manipulators of public affairs.” Grant’s defenders, then and now, noted that he hadn’t personally benefitted from any of these crimes and maintained that he was an honest man surrounded by scoundrels-a line of argument that would be revived on behalf of Richard Nixon during the Watergate scandal a century later. READ MORE: The Whiskey Ring and America's First Special Prosecutor A victim of his time? Grant’s own brother Orvil, one of many relatives he put on the government payroll, was exposed in a kickback scheme that made the military overpay for provisions. The robber barons Jim Fisk and Jay Gould tricked Grant into aiding their scheme to manipulate the gold market, leading to a national financial panic known as Black Friday. His private secretary was implicated in a conspiracy to cheat the government out of tax revenue from the production of whiskey. Grant’s attorney general, secretary of war, secretary of the navy and secretary of the interior were all accused of taking bribes. Grant dressed as a trapeze performer holds up corrupt members of his administration in this 1880 political cartoon. While none rose to the notoriety of a Watergate or Teapot Dome, their sheer numbers must have been dizzying to Americans at the time. From beginning to end, his Administration produced a swirl of scandals. There’s no denying that Grant left office under a very large cloud. READ MORE: 10 Things You May Not Know About Ulysses S. So how good (or bad) president was he? Here is some of the historical evidence. Two years later, the New York Sun put it another way, calling Grant “the most corrupt President who ever sat in the chair of Washington.” Failures have been errors of judgment, not of intent.” “But I leave comparisons to history, claiming only that I have acted in every instance from a conscientious desire to do what was right, constitutional, within the law, and for the very best interests of the whole people. “Mistakes have been made, as all can see and I admit,” he wrote. Grant’s farewell message to Congress in 1876 shows he sensed that history might judge him harshly. His autobiography, published in two volumes in 1885, covers some 1,200 pages, beginning with a discussion of his ancestors and ending with his Civil War years. No one might be more surprised by this reputational revival than Grant himself. White’s American Ulysses (2016) and Ron Chernow’s Grant (2017), have made compelling cases that Grant's presidency merits reexamination, and that his contributions while in office were more substantial than he's been given credit for in previous decades. At a time when the nation was still recovering from the trauma of civil war, he worked to knit together the frayed Union, lift up formerly enslaved people and advocate a humane, if not enlightened, policy regarding Native Americans. But in more recent years, historians have taken another look at the Civil War hero. ![]() Grant suffered a reputation as one of the nation’s worst presidents, consistently ranking in the bottom 10 in polls of historians. For decades after his death in 1885, Ulysses S. ![]()
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