The Gilded Age
Q. What is the chief end of man?
A. To get rich.
Q. In what way?
A. Dishonestly if we can; honestly if we must.
Q. Who is God, the one only and true?
A. Money is God. Gold and greenbacks and stocks.
Mark Twain used his parody of the initial questions of the Presbyterian Westminster Shorter Catechism to attack the worship of money and its attendant corrupting influence. Raised a Presbyterian, if now often poking fun of religion, Twain knew many in his audience would have known the original first Q and A.
Q. What is the chief end of man?
A. Man’s chief end is to glorify God, and to enjoy him forever.
One of Twain’s literary gifts was to take a familiar coin of the realm and infuse it with his own satirical meaning.
Two years later, Twain coined the term Gilded Age in his 1873 political novel, The Gilded Age: A Tale of To-day. In this humorous satire, he held up for ridicule unethical behavior producing ill-gotten gains in an increasingly acquisitive age. He employed the metaphor of the thin gold gilt used in the beautification of the homes of superrich industrialists and financiers to describe the cover-up of the proliferating problems of post–Civil War America. Peopled by barely disguised political leaders, The Gilded Age deftly displayed the massive wealth that soon corrupted the halls of government.
Grant had met Twain only once—at a reception in Washington in 1866—but their lives were destined to intersect in crucial ways in coming years. “The Gilded Age” would become the chief image defining a whole era of scandals. In a retelling of these years, Grant’s second term often became an example in the story. In actuality Grant remained personally untarnished, but his efficacy in stopping the spreading blight of corruption has been debated.
IN THE FOUR months between his reelection and second inauguration, the glow of Grant’s victory began to dim. In the final months of the campaign, Charles Dana’s New York Sun had begun reporting on a secretive corporation, Crédit Mobilier of America, calling it “the most damaging exhibition of official and private villainy and corruption.” The Sun charged that it had received $72 million in contracts to construct the Union Pacific Railroad—valued at $53 million.
On December 12, 1872, Congress began probing Crédit Mobilier. The investigation would uncover that the corporation allowed insiders to make enormous sums of money—in one case 348 percent—by charging the federal government inflated fees. Although this chicanery began during the Johnson administration, the charges of corruption came into the light of public scrutiny during the Grant administration.
Throughout the month of January 1873, spectators flocked to hear testimony from the congressional recipients of the scandal’s largesse. The testimony, offered in technical financial language, confused as much as it clarified.
Thomas Nast’s Crédit Mobilier cartoon portrays disgraced politicians in front of the U.S. Capitol.
The House presented the names of nine members of Congress for investigation, including Vice President Schuyler Colfax; Senators George Boutwell, Roscoe Conkling, and John Logan; and Massachusetts senator Henry Wilson, the vice president–elect. Many of these politicians were close to Grant. Some said too close.
On March 3, one day before Grant’s second inauguration, the public learned of a different kind of congressional mischief. The lame duck session of the Forty-second Congress had voted the president a 100 percent pay raise—from $25,000 to $50,000—increased salaries for Supreme Court justices, and approved hefty increases for themselves. The salary increase for the president seemed fitting because he had to pay expenses for running the White House from his personal funds. Salaries for members of Congress had not been raised for twenty years. But when the public learned Congress made raises for themselves retroactive to the beginning of the term, they voiced outrage at this clandestine greed. The press dubbed the vote “the Salary Grab Act.” When the new Forty-third Congress convened, it maintained the salary increases for the president and Supreme Court justices but repealed the raises for Congress.
ON MARCH 4, 1873, Grant presented himself for a second term; the oath was administered by the gravely ill chief justice Salmon P. Chase. No one could remember a colder day for an inauguration. A blustery wind blew from the southwest, plunging the chill factor to below zero. Flags were ripped from their standards. Bands played discordant notes or none at all.
Second inaugural addresses are often disappointing, invariably bogged down in self-congratulation—both of the candidate and of the nation—instead of offering a realistic assessment of the problems to be faced in a second term. Abraham Lincoln’s second inaugural address stands out as the exception, as did Grant’s. It did not hide from problems.
Grant used his second inaugural to reiterate what he considered the chief problems of the day: not civil service reform but freedom and fairness for all Americans. He emphasized the benefits of citizenship for freed African American slaves. “Yet he is not possessed of the civil rights which citizenship should carry with it,” he declared. “This is wrong and should be corrected.” He conceded that the president carried limited power in this domain, but Grant intended to step up to the task: “To this correction I stand committed so far as executive influence can avail.”
Nor did he back off the Indian question: “The wrong already inflicted upon him should be taken into account, and the balance placed to his credit.” He wanted his audience to take “the moral view of the question.” Grant reasoned, “Cannot the Indian be made a useful and productive member of society by proper teaching and treatment?”
Every president in every inaugural address asks himself: What time is it? Although Grant concluded his address with a call for conciliation—“My efforts in the future will be directed to the restoration of good feeling between the different sections of our common country”—the overarching tone of the address was of a leader who believed the times called for pressing forward for a more inclusive and equal society.
IN THE SUMMER of 1873, after eight years of post–Civil War business boom, signs of financial instability began to surface. But financial and political leaders were not paying attention: America had not suffered a severe financial depression since 1837.
The Gilded Age engendered a speculative spirit. The boom in railroad construction racing west from the Mississippi River became the leading edge of this exuberance. Gigantic industries in oil, iron, and steel buttressed this boom. Manufacturing prospered. Extravagance ruled. Few noticed the financial clouds appearing in the skies in 1873.
In September, everything changed—quickly. Railroad industrialists had expended huge amounts of capital up front on ventures yielding little direct returns for passenger travel in thinly populated areas out west. Banks, caught up in speculation, lent money carelessly against insufficient collateral.
Grant suddenly faced a whole set of economic problems no one had predicted. On September 17, he arrived at Ogontz, the estate outside Philadelphia owned by investment banker Jay Cooke. Grant had placed fifteen-year-old Jesse at nearby Cheltenham Academy at Cooke’s suggestion. Cooke, who had helped finance the Union war effort, had recently offered strong financial backing for Grant’s reelection, and his current pet project was building a second transcontinental railroad: the Northern Pacific. Chartered by Congress in 1864, the Northern Pacific was scheduled to connect the Great Lakes of the old Northwest with the Puget Sound of the new Northwest. The astounding cost of building miles of track across high mountains and into a massive wilderness had been radically underestimated.
Early on the morning of September 18, frantic messages dashed across Cooke’s private telegraph. After breakfast with the president, Cooke hurried to his Third Street office. He discovered his company had weighed itself down with collateral of stocks and bonds from the Northern Pacific, Lake Superior and Mississippi, Oregon Steam Navigation, and other railroads—suddenly all nearly worthless. His New York and Washington offices reported similar troubles. Cooke closed the Third Street doors at eleven A.M.; the doors in Washington shut at twelve fifteen P.M. Cooke had continued to make loans to railroads and underwrite first-mortgage bonds, but when the markets suddenly dried up, he was caught with a sudden loss of liquidity and his personal fortune was wiped out.
Panic! In the twenty-first century, economists would employ the less emotional words recession and depression, but panic more accurately described the hysteria that suddenly erupted. The collapse of economic markets threatened the destruction of the whole social fabric of society. “A financial thunderbolt,” shouted the New York Tribune. “Like a thunderclap in a clear sky,” echoed the Philadelphia Press. The news of Cooke’s collapse raced up and down Wall Street. Western Union lost ten points in ten minutes. The dramatic downfall of the leading banking house, considered too big to fail, sapped the confidence of others that soon followed suit.
It took a while for Americans to realize that the Panic of 1873 was not a distinctive phenomenon occurring in the United States alone, but that the markets of the United States were now linked to world markets. From the United Kingdom to Germany to Russia, even to faraway South Africa and Australia, costly wars, overextended credit, and unwarranted construction of railroads both preceded and accompanied the American homegrown economic turmoil.
Grant rushed to New York on September 20. The next morning, at the Fifth Avenue Hotel, he and his new secretary of the Treasury, William A. Richardson, held a series of meetings with anxious bankers, brokers, merchants, and railroad men. With financial leaders badly injured, they demanded Grant do something, but what he should and could do would became the subject of acrimonious debate.
The president had to face the crisis without his trusted secretary of the Treasury George Boutwell, who had been so crucial during the gold panic of 1869. When Henry Wilson vacated his Senate seat to become vice president, the Massachusetts legislature had elected Boutwell to succeed him. Grant, pressured to appoint a high-profile successor to Boutwell, instead selected William Richardson, Boutwell’s assistant. In appointing the little-known Richardson, Grant opted for continuity, declaring that “no departure” would be made from Boutwell’s successful financial stewardship. The press as well as many business leaders questioned Grant’s decision.
Richardson had earned both a bachelor’s degree from Harvard University and an LLB from Harvard Law School, where his classmates called him “modest” and “persistent,” and he had compiled a steady record as a lawyer and probate judge in Massachusetts. But critics pointed back to October 1872, when in Boutwell’s absence Richardson had decided to inject $5 million of the $44 million reserve of greenbacks into the markets to help alleviate pressure. His initiative was similar to the “open market operations” undertaken routinely by the Federal Reserve today to implement monetary policy, but it was an unusual practice in that day. Detractors charged that Richardson’s initiative smacked of partisan politics aimed at putting money in the hands of voters Republicans hoped to attract in state elections in the West.
During the New York meetings, Grant exhibited a composure rooted in his own growing self-confidence. He brought informed financial convictions but also listened to competing economic interests. Without a central bank, and four decades before the creation of the Federal Reserve, Grant lacked the economic tools of later presidents. Also, enthralled with the myth that markets regulated themselves, many financial leaders were wary of any government interference.
In the days that followed, Grant was buffeted by soft- and hard-money advocates. Soft-money promoters, concerned about the problem of widespread bankruptcies and indebtedness, wanted to expand the money supply, which meant reissuing greenbacks even if it resulted in inflation. Hard-money proponents, often bankers, invoked the Civil War’s lesson on the depreciation of soft currency to justify the opposite position: pay down the debt and continue to contract the money supply. Whereas brokers pleaded to release the greenback reserves to restore some liquidity in the markets, bankers argued against flooding the markets with irredeemable money.
Grant, from the day he bought his account book as a first-year student at West Point to his service as quartermaster in the Mexican War, appreciated the value of not spending more than one’s resources. Yet as a man of the West and a farmer, he understood the plight of struggling western farmers who begged him to release greenbacks into the economy. Farmers argued that making money scarcer only drove up its worth and thus its purchasing power for agricultural communities.
When he returned to Washington, Grant was pressured by telegrams, letters, and personal visits by advocates on both sides. Secretaries Horace Porter and Orville Babcock, Interior Secretary Columbus Delano, and Secretary of War William Belknap all urged him to inflate the currency by releasing greenbacks. Secretary of State Fish, a hard-currency advocate, commended the president for standing firm. In a glowing letter to Richardson, he maintained, “I assure you that nothing the President has ever done seems, so far as I hear from persons of all classes, to give more satisfaction than the decision which he and you reached on Sunday.”
In the midst of the panic, Grant received a letter from New York businessmen Horace B. Claflin and Charles L. Anthony, seeking his views on how best to restore financial confidence. Grant responded, “The Government is desirous of doing all in its power to relieve the present unsettled condition of business affairs, which is holding back the immense resources of the country now awaiting transportation to the seaboard and a market.” He believed that “confidence on the part of the people is the first thing needed to relieve this condition of affairs.” Grant’s letter quickly became public, widely reprinted in newspapers across the nation.
Senator Boutwell, former secretary of the Treasury, wrote Grant three letters in thirteen days in October, offering approval of his actions: “In the present crisis the government stands well, and its action, especially your letter, is approved generally.” Grant’s quiet leadership and steady hand, quite different from Franklin D. Roosevelt’s public cheerleading in confronting the Great Depression sixty years later, did much to calm the troubled waters.
Grant’s actions helped stop the panic on Wall Street, although critics complained his hard-money policies protected his wealthy friends as much as the nation. But damage had been done. Abuse of sound financial management principles had struck the guilty and innocent alike. The narrative of the Panic of 1873 often focuses on the large number of banks, businesses, and railroads that failed, but the deeper story is of individual victims—factory, machine shop, and iron workers who lost their jobs, farmers who lost their farms, and many families who saw their bank savings accounts vanish. Estimates differ on the number of workers left unemployed, but it probably exceeded one million in a nation of forty million people. Even with vibrant voluntary relief organizations, the absence of government relief—present in the response to the Great Depression of the 1930s—meant untold misery and suffering spread as fall turned to the winter of 1873–1874.
JULIA HOPED THE arrival of Christmas could restore some joy in the White House. Always generous with her time at the Metropolitan Methodist Church, before each Christmas she also reached out with gifts to local hospitals, asylums, and orphanages. She and Ulysses gave not only money, but barrels of fruit and gifts of candy. Toy merchants in Washington learned to look for Mrs. Grant in the days leading up to Christmas, when she would lead a troop of young children through their stores, buying gifts for each boy and girl.
But this fifth Christmas in the White House would be like no other. For Ulysses and Julia, 1873 became a year of personal losses. In June, Jesse Root Grant died at age seventy-nine. Ulysses had spent much of his early life trying to come to terms with his father, who became a constant guest in Washington. On December 15, Julia’s father, Frederick Dent, died at age eighty-six. As a young man, Ulysses had had to endure constant criticism from Julia’s Confederate father, but as a permanent resident of the White House, Dent expressed nothing but pride and praise for his son-in-law.
The giants continued to fall in Grant’s military family. George Meade died two days after Grant’s reelection. General Edward Canby was killed by the renegade Modoc Indian Captain Jack while sitting at a peace parley in California.
Losses also mounted in Grant’s political family. Horace Porter, who had served as aide-de-camp during the Civil War, resigned after Grant’s reelection to accept a position as vice president with the Pullman Palace Car Company. Porter occupied a distinctive place in Grant’s intimate circle and could not be replaced. Vice President Henry Wilson suffered a stroke in May and never fully recovered. An abolitionist, Wilson admired Grant and believed him to be “underrated,” especially approving his aggressive approach against the Ku Klux Klan.
WHEN THE FORTY-THIRD Congress convened, in December and January it focused on legislative responses to the panic. After Grant invoked financial “elasticity” in his annual message—a balance between monetary theory and pragmatic action—more than sixty bills were introduced. Most were strongly expansionist in scope, which encouraged railroad men to lobby for relief by expanding the currency. Grant favored fiscal restraint.
After months of debate, the Senate and House agreed on Bill S.617, known as the “inflation bill.” It would increase the number of greenbacks placed in circulation to $400 million. At the same time, it would advance circulation of specie-backed moneys to an equivalent amount. The Senate-sponsored bill received overwhelming approval in both houses of Congress. Everyone expected Grant to sign it.
He received the bill on April 14, 1874, and tense cabinet members arrived in his office one week later to hear his decision. Grant told them “he had given it most careful consideration with an earnest desire to give it his approval.” He shared with them that according to his typical practice, he had written out the arguments in favor of the bill. But he’d found the more he wrote his statement of approval, the more he came up with arguments opposing it. Finally, after spending many hours at his desk, he concluded he could not sign it, stating it to be “a departure from true principles of finance, national interest, national obligations to creditors, Congressional promises, party pledges (on the part of both political parties), and of personal views and promises made by me in every annual message sent to Congress and in each inaugural address.” Grant recognized the views of proponents of the bill—a majority in Congress—and stated these views in their best light, then countered them with his own financial convictions.
The cabinet sat speechless. Then all jumped in with their opinions. As Fish wrote that evening, “Delano fought” Grant’s conclusion; “[Attorney General] Williams decidedly objected”; George M. Robeson, secretary of the navy, wished “the President had reached a different conclusion”; William Belknap, secretary of war, “thought it would array the entire West in opposition.” Fish approved what he called Grant’s “volte-face” (about-face). Richardson supported the decision. Creswell commended Grant: “You are right.”
Grant had the last word: “I dare say the first result will be a storm of denunciation. But I am confident that the final judgment of the country will approve my veto.”
Congress attempted to override Grant’s veto, but the Senate could muster only 34 yeas to 30 nays. The veto was sustained.
No one was more surprised than Grant at the outpouring of support for his decision. Senator Roscoe Conkling wrote the same day to “express my admiration for your latest proof that you are as great as any duty ever set before you.” Ordinary people wrote Grant from all over the country. Zachary Eddy, pastor of the First Congregational Church of Detroit, exclaimed, “Believing that I represent the feeling of ninety-nine clergymen out of any hundred in this country, I wish to thank you for your Veto of the so called Inflation Bill.” Julie R. Seavey wrote from New York City “to add my mite to the general congratulation.” She added, “Although I am ‘only a woman’ I feel some slight interest in the affairs and honor of my country.”
Grant made his decision, opting to come down on the hard money side of the battle, but for him it was one of the most tortured decisions of his presidency. He did not want to turn his back on western farmers—he was once one of them—but believed the choice best for a troubled economy.
IN THE SPRING of 1874, Grant was happy to shift his attention from Congress to his only daughter. The press idolized Nellie Grant. She spent her teenage years in the White House to become America’s princess, with her gentle eyes and long hair down her back. Her father, a man who did not often show his sentiments in public, was openly demonstrative in his affection for his daughter.
Two years earlier, in the spring of 1872, when sixteen-year-old Nellie traveled to the United Kingdom in the company of former navy secretary Adolph Borie and his wife, Elizabeth, the British treated her like royalty everywhere she went. She even met Queen Victoria.
Nellie, with less formal education than her brothers, has been portrayed as an “uncultivated” young woman. This harsh portrait fails to appreciate the various forms of her education—tutors as well as travel. Receiving her letters from abroad, Ulysses remarked to his father, “Nellie writes very often and [is] a very much better writer than either of the boys.”
On the way home from her tour of Britain, Nellie met a handsome young Englishman, Algernon Sartoris, the wealthy son of Edward Sartoris and Adelaide Kemble, sister of Fanny Kemble, the celebrated British actress. When Grant learned of his daughter’s shipboard romance, he wrote an anxious letter to Edward Sartoris, expressing “astonishment” at what “seems to have sprung up between the two young people.” Wearing his heart uncharacteristically on his sleeve, he admitted he “looked upon my daughter as a child, with a good home which I did not think of her wishing to quit for years yet….She is my only daughter,” he explained, “and I therefore feel a double interest in her welfare.” He then asked about the “habits, character and prospects of the one upon whom she seems to have bestowed her affections.” Grant’s “greatest regret” would be to have Nellie “quit the United States as a permanent home.” Did young Sartoris have any intention of becoming a United States citizen? After reviewing his frank letter, Grant asked Sartoris to keep it absolutely “confidential,” since it espoused “a father’s anxiety for the welfare and happiness of an only and much loved daughter.”
He then asked Nellie to wait a year to marry—to which she agreed.
Finally, on May 21, 1874, a brilliant spring day, Nellie, not quite nineteen, married Algernon Sartoris in the East Room of the White House. It was the wedding of the year. Magnolia trees stood at attention in the drive as seventy carriages passed by, bringing two hundred guests. Minister Otis Tiffany officiated at the marriage according to Methodist wedding rites. Nellie was dressed in a gown of white satin valued at $2,000 and wore a veil purchased from Brussels by her father—nothing was too good for his daughter. Fred Grant, the best man, looked handsome in his army uniform. Nellie’s eight bridesmaids bore the names of Washington royalty: Anna Barnes, Bessie Conkling, Maggie Dent, Fannie Drexel, Edith Fish, Sallie Frelinghuysen, Lillie Porter, and Jennie Sherman.
Grant, who had only reluctantly given his permission for Nellie to marry, stood during the wedding ceremony overcome with tears.
Ulysses and Julia’s only daughter, Nellie, was her father’s delight and the princess of the American press.
Grant’s oldest son, Fred, married twenty-year-old Chicago socialite Ida Marie Honoré five months later. Grant wrote Adam Badeau, “Fred’s wife is beautiful and is spoken of by all her acquaintances, male & female, young & old, as being quite as charming for her manners, amiability, good sense & education as she is for her beauty.” Ulysses and Julia loved their new daughter-in-law and invited her to live with them at the White House while Fred served with General George Custer in the Black Hills.
If Abraham Lincoln was well known for his love of Shakespeare, the New York Times pointed out that Grant “made it a point to attend a performance of all new American plays.” In the fall of 1874, Grant attended The Gilded Age, based on the popular book Mark Twain had published the previous year, and starring the actor John T. Raymond, whose career Grant had followed for many years. He traveled from Washington to the Park Theatre in New York with his friend Rufus Ingalls.
In taking their seats, Ingalls noted that the president sat as far back in the box as possible. He later reported that Grant did not want his presence to be a distraction to the onstage drama.
LATER THAT FALL, Grant accepted an invitation to participate in ceremonies dedicating a tomb for Abraham Lincoln in Springfield, Illinois. He usually rejected invitations to speak, but in this case his admiration for Lincoln overrode his reluctance. Working hard, he crafted two preliminary drafts of his speech, and although he was not known for his oratory, in the end he outdid himself.
On October 15, he read his speech from the manuscript he held in his hand. In summarizing it, a local newspaper reporter was struck by Grant’s emphasis on Lincoln’s faith in the midst of the Civil War. “His faith in an All Wise Providence directing our arms to this final result, was the faith of the Christian that his Redeemer liveth.”
Grant’s main focus was on the opposition Lincoln faced: “Amidst obloquy, personal abuse and hate undisguised, and which was given vent to without restraint through the press, upon the stump and in private circles he remained the same staunch unyielding servant of the people.” He praised his friend: “To know him personally was to love and respect him for his great qualities of heart and head, and for his patience and patriotism.” In the end, “I never heard him utter a complaint nor cast a censure for bad conduct or bad faith. It was his nature to find excuses for his adversaries. In his death the Nation lost its greatest hero. In his death the South lost its most just friend.”
In one of his most famous cartoons, in 1874 a sympathetic Thomas Nast depicts all the problems and issues borne by Grant with the caption “A Burden He Has to Shoulder.”
ELSEWHERE, THE FALL of 1874 did not prove kind to Grant. Editorial cartoonist Thomas Nast, although Grant’s defender, nevertheless portrayed “A Burden He Has to Shoulder.”
The president occupied a no-man’s-land in political battles that surrounded congressional elections. Although he began his second term intent on a more conciliatory approach to the South, he was criticized for interfering in southern states. With Republicans afflicted by factionalism and often corruption, Grant watched the Republican hopes for a strong party presence in the South disappear. Accused of being both carpetbaggers and scalawags, of favoring the rights of African Americans over whites, Republicans were beaten, often literally, by resurgent neo-Confederate Democratic parties in southern states.
For Grant and the Republicans, the bitter fruit of this Democratic resurgence was harvested in the 1874 congressional elections. In the House, comprising 293 seats, a seismic shift took place. The Republican majority of 114 seats in 1872—198 to 88—became in 1874 a Democratic majority of 60 seats—169 to 109. In the Senate, Republicans lost 7 seats but retained their majority. Democrats won control of the House of Representatives for the first time since before the Civil War.
Several factors loomed behind this change. Voters often respond to hard economic times by blaming the party in power. Also, throughout the South, various white leagues, different versions of the older Ku Klux Klan, once again employed voter suppression to help Democrats win House seats. Democrats ended up winning two-thirds of the region’s seats.
GRANT’S ANGER BURST forth as he prepared for his next opportunity to speak to Congress and the American people—his sixth annual message to Congress on December 7. In a departure from his usual practice, he read to his cabinet a draft of his message: he took on “critics who assume to direct affairs without responsibility, and, I am sorry to say, in many instances without conscience.” While Fish characterized Grant’s remarks as “very strong and very just,” the cautious secretary of state also voiced his concern. He believed Grant’s words “were wholly beneath the dignity of his official position or of an official document.” Grant’s words testified to his true feelings.
Although Grant ended up deleting the most inflammatory words, he retained his candor. Pointing to the recently completed elections, he minced no words in describing violence and intimidation intended “to deprive citizens of the freedom of the ballot because of their political opinions.” He cited example after example: “In some places colored laborers were compelled to vote according to the wishes of their employers, under threat of discharge if they acted otherwise.”
Grant anticipated his critics’ responses; he knew they would continue to charge him with federal interference. “Complaints are made of this interference by Federal authority; but if said amendment [Fifteenth Amendment] and act [Enforcement Act] do not provide for such interference under the circumstances as stated above, then they are without meaning, force, or effect, and the whole scheme of colored enfranchisement is worse than mockery and little better than a crime.”
What did Grant propose as the solution? “Treat the negro as a citizen and a voter, as he is and must remain, and soon parties will be divided, not on the color line, but on principle. Then we shall have no complaint of sectional interference.”
It was well-known that portions of presidents’ annual messages to Congress were often written by a cabinet secretary whose portfolio includes a particular subject or issue. No one wrote these determined words but Grant. Halfway through his second term, he had found his own voice. That voice became much more animated when he spoke about unfair obstacles set in the path of former slaves in their march to full freedom. Making full use of the regular reporting he’d received from generals in the field, his speeches about racial injustice pulsate with examples that had clearly touched him deeply.
BY THE END of 1874, some politicians and newspapermen were talking of Grant running for a third term, something never before attempted in American politics. But with the Panic of 1873 still running its course, with a Democratic majority in the House of Representatives, with Republican hopes for success in the South dimming rapidly, and with rumors of more scandals threatening those close to Grant, he faced many uncertainties as he looked toward his two final years as president.
This Thomas Nast cartoon depicts a barrel of corruption whose rings name the many scandals taking place during the Grant administration. The man in the cartoon is Grant’s disgraced secretary of war, William Belknap.
