ULYSSES SIMPSON GRANT’S period in office seems to prove the theory that we can coast along for eight years without a president. Well, of course, we’ve also recently done it with Eisenhower.

Ulysses Simpson Grant wasn’t really his name. He was named by his parents Hiram Ulysses Grant, but he dropped the Hiram and took the name Simpson so his initials could be U. S. He later claimed that he lost the Hiram and got the Simpson when someone made some mistakes on his registration form at West Point, and that he didn’t say anything about it because he preferred initials standing for United States to his old set of initials, which caused his friends to call him Hug, but that’s a kind of doubtful story. I can see a clerk dropping someone’s first name by mistake, but not adding a name like Simpson out of the blue.

He was born on a farm in Point Pleasant, Ohio, in 1822 and went into West Point when he was seventeen. He hadn’t had much real education before that, so his years at West Point were a kind of struggle for him, but he managed to graduate twenty-first in his class of thirty-nine, and he also said later on that his four years at the school gave him an additional and very important bonus. Fifty of the men he knew at West Point later became Civil War generals - on both sides, of course - and Grant later told friends that his knowledge of the personal strengths and weaknesses of these men helped him command and helped him win his battles.

He fought in the Mexican War under both Zachary Taylor and Winfield Scott and rose to the rank of captain. He married a woman named Julia Dent in 1848, the sister of one of his friends at West Point, and eventually had four children, three sons and a daughter, but his pay was so small that he couldn’t afford to have his family with him when he was sent to various western posts after the war, and like Pierce, he started drinking heavily. He became an embarrassment to the Army, and he had to resign his commission in 1854.

There were very lean years after that. He tried farming, but he was drunk so much of the time that he lost the farm, and then he failed at selling real estate and didn’t do much better as a clerk in a store owned by a couple of his younger brothers. When the Civil War came along, he got a job at a salary of $3 a day as a clerk in the outfit in Springfield, Illinois, which was putting together Illinois’ volunteer regiments, but the governor of Illinois knew about his West Point education and his military experience and put him in charge when nobody else around seemed to be able to get the regiments to shape up. He did so well at it that he was commissioned a brigadier general, and he came out of the war as a lieutenant general, the highest rank in the Army in those days.

I’ve read some books that criticize Grant’s ability and decisions as a soldier, but I don’t agree with these writers; I think Grant did what he had to do and did it well. He was very tough when he and his men were fighting to capture Fort Henry and Fort Donelson in Tennessee, and he got one more nickname, Unconditional Surrender, when he told the general in command of Donelson that he wouldn’t accept anything less than that, but he won the battles and took 20,000 Confederate prisoners. He and his soldiers were taken by surprise when there was a big Confederate attack at Shiloh, and he was accused of being off on a bender and maybe he was, but he hung on and drove off the Confederate forces. It was Grant’s personal decision to go after Lee, instead of waiting to see what Lee might do, and keep chasing him and attacking him until Lee surrendered.

Grant also behaved the way he should have, in my view, when Lee surrendered. He came to accept Lee’s surrender with the mud still on his uniform, instead of acting like a god and a conqueror the way Douglas MacArthur sometimes did when I was vice president and president, and he ordered the horses to remain with the Confederate troops and told the southerners to keep their sidearms and go home and take care of them- selves. He was really a kindhearted and decent man, I think. It was the people around him later on who caused him all the trouble. His administration was one of the most corrupt in our history, but he didn’t even know all the crooked business was going on when he was president of the United States. It’s hard even to imagine that, but it’s true.3

Grant was one of the most popular men in the country when the Civil War ended. People in New York started a campaign to get some money into his pockets by private donations and presented him with a gift of $105,000, a lot of money in those days and not too bad right now, either. A house was built for him in Galena, Illinois, where his brothers had their store, and another house was built and given to him as a gift in Philadelphia. A new rank was created for the first time by Congress, general of the armies, and given to him. Andrew Johnson made him secretary of war, as it was called then, and a lot of people in the Republican Party began to think it would be pretty easy to get him elected as the next president.

He was invited to the Republican Convention, nominated unanimously on the first ballot, and campaigned against another fellow nobody remembers today, a man named Horatio Seymour who’d been governor of New York. The popular vote was surprisingly close, 3,013,421 for Grant against 2,706,829 for Seymour, but Grant received 214 electoral votes to eighty for Seymour and became our eighteenth president. (I have a feeling that a lot of people don’t really understand this business of popular votes and electoral votes, because I didn’t at one time, and I’ll explain the way it all works in one of the later chapters.)

Grant’s period as president was one of the low points in our history. It was after the most terrible war that the country had ever suffered, and after any sort of a turmoil like that, there’s great difficulty and often a bad president. There’s bound to be, just as there was after the First World War and following a very great president, Woodrow Wilson, and it happens in nearly every instance. It’s just happened again with Eisenhower, as I can’t resist repeating, if you want to refer to a modern situation. And it certainly happened with Grant.

I don’t think Grant knew very much about what the president’s job was except that he was commander in chief of the armed forces. That was the thing, I think, that impressed him more than anything, and he was pretty naive or ignorant about everything else.

When the Civil War was still going on, Lincoln and Grant wanted to approach peace and the South in a manner of forgiveness: Come back and be good fellows and behave yourselves from now on. But Lincoln and Johnson were in the moderate wing of the Republican Party, and there was another part of the party known as the Radical Republicans, and one of the men in that group, Thaddeus Stevens of Pennsylvania, was the leader of the House of Representatives and felt completely different about everything. Thad Stevens and his crowd wanted to approach the thing in a manner that would cause the people who tried to break up the Union to be punished by prison and by hanging. In fact, they put Jefferson Davis, who became president of the Confederate government when the war started, in prison for a while, and they did everything they could to get a great many leaders in the South executed. They even went so far as to want to put Robert E. Lee in jail, but I’ll say this for Grant: He wouldn’t stand for it. He was president at the time, and for once he said something definite; he got up and said that if they did that, he’d quit. He did, though, prove a disappointment in just about everything else regarding the peace.

Grant’s politics were an unknown quantity; he showed practically no interest in politics at all before he was invited to the Republican convention, and he admitted to some of his friends that he had only voted one time in his life - as a Democrat. Somehow, the word had gotten around that Grant was going to be easier toward the South than the tough series of Reconstruction Acts dictated, probably because Grant sometimes backed Johnson when he was in Johnson’s cabinet and the President was fighting with Congress, which was practically all the time, and most of Johnson’s problems were the result of the fact that he was more interested in healing the breach between the North and the South than in vengeance against southern leaders. This notion about Grant was reinforced by the fact that the most significant part of Grant’s acceptance speech was believed by many people to be one line: “Let us have peace.” Unfortunately, it didn’t turn out that way at all.

Johnson’s plan was to welcome the South back into the Union and allow southern leaders to return to their former positions, so he announced an amnesty for most southerners and issued proclamations permitting the southern states to start setting up civil governments. He felt, as Lincoln did, that the southern states had never really left the Union and were still part of the Union. His attitude was that southerners ought to be treated as bad children and be allowed to rehabilitate themselves on the same basis as people who were Union people - that the South should be taken back as soon as they were willing to confess that they’d been wrong and taken the oath of allegiance, and go on from there, because the slaves had been freed and there wasn’t any reason to do any of the things that used to be done in a conquered country. But old Thad Stevens didn’t believe in that; that didn’t sit well with him and the other Radical Republicans. He wanted to keep the South as a conquered territory and set up territorial governments under the control of the Federal government, with southerners having no rights at all, especially no right to vote. Stevens was a bitter old man who was involved in a hatred program toward all the South, and there’s a theory that this was because he owned an iron and steel mill in Gettysburg, and it was destroyed by the Confederate soldiers when Lee was in the neighborhood, but that’s only part of the story. The biggest part of it was that the Republicans were a minority party, and Stevens and company wanted to keep the Radical Republicans in control of the Congress of the United States, and they were very much afraid that if the southerners, who were mostly Democrats, were allowed to start electing senators and representatives again, they’d turn the Radical Republicans out of office in the next few elections.

Johnson tried to get his point of view across; he even toured the country making speeches urging a sensible and gentle reconstruction program for the South. But it didn’t help; a tough series of Reconstruction Acts were passed that threw out Johnson’s civil governments and replaced them with military governments. Federal troops were sent in to patrol and control the South, and Northern carpetbaggers were encouraged to pack those bags of theirs made out of old carpets and emigrate to the South and join with blacks4 in running local southern governments. That wasn’t what Johnson had in mind for the former slaves, or what Lincoln had in mind, either; I think what Lincoln and Johnson planned was the proper education and rehabilitation of the slaves so they could become useful citizens and in time take their place in government. But that wasn’t the idea at all of Thad Stevens and the Radical Republicans; they wanted the South to be oppressed by the people who had been slaves, and that’s what brought about a lot of the bad feelings between the races. They put the blacks in charge right after their emancipation, which wasn’t fair to the blacks or to anybody else because they lacked education and experience. It was one of the worst things that was ever done for the rehabilitation of the slaves. It’s taken years and years to get the thing worked out so that people will understand that education and experience are the best things that can happen to any race or color that hasn’t had experience beforehand, and it’s only now that things are starting to straighten out between the races. (We’ve still got a distance to go, but we’re finally starting to see some real improvement with more and more black leaders in government, and I’m sure we’ll have black presidents one day.) I think Johnson understood that, and he tried to veto the tough Reconstruction Acts, but they were passed over his veto.

Well, the hope was that Grant would change things back to more temperate policies toward the South, but exactly the opposite happened. Grant certainly looked good: he was just forty-six years old when he became president, which made him the youngest president in the nation’s history up to that point, and he was very determined and very much the commanding officer in his appearance when he gave his inaugural address. But even that speech was marked with some of the poor thinking, or lack of thinking, that showed up all through his whole administration. He didn’t like a lot of the laws, Grant said, but he was going to enforce them because - if you can believe this - he felt that that was the way to get rid of them. “I know no method to secure the repeal of bad or obnoxious laws so effective as their stringent execution,” he said, which is like telling people to go out and do a lot of lynchings or murders so that the public can see that lynchings and murders are bad. And with that, Grant pushed the Reconstruction Acts harder and harder, widening the breach more and more between the North and the South. The worst thing that went on during Grant’s administration was that vicious and alleged reconstruction of the South, and that will never be forgotten as long as people write about him because he was president when the worst part of it was going on.

I think it’s even possible that, in his own muddleheaded way, Grant was for carpetbagging. He was a general, and he’d conquered the southerners and he might have thought that the conquered should pay the bill. A lot of people have had that idea since the Battle of Waterloo, when Napoleon was exiled and imprisoned. That idea has never worn off, and some people felt that same way after the Civil War. It was the same thing, if you remember, after the Mexican War, when Santa Anna was defeated - why, we made the Mexicans pay through the nose. We made them turn over a whole lot of land to us, though we did give them $15 million for it. The theory is that the victor should make the loser pay every time. In World War I and World War II, though, we didn’t follow that sort of program, though I guess there was a little of that sort of thing after World War I. There was some attempt to make the Germans pay a penalty, but Germany was never really injured by the First World War. We never got inside their borders with our armies, and the Russians then had their revolution and made their separate peace. So there wasn’t anybody to put the screws on Germany except France, and they got Alsace-Lorraine back and that’s all they wanted. Down in Africa, in the colonies, the British took over all the African colonies, and we became the managers of one of their colonies in the Pacific, and we still have it - the Marshall Islands.

The other way in which Grant showed his lack of ability as a president was when he set up his cabinet. I don’t think there were any good men in Grant’s cabinet or at least not many. I don’t know a lot about his cabinet members because I’ve never read their histories; I’ve never tried to keep up with them because I didn’t like what they did, and I never went into it very carefully. I do know, though, that the first thing Grant did was appoint two of his old buddies from Galena, Illinois. One of them died during Grant’s first year in office, which wasn’t anybody’s fault, but the other one found that job so hard that he resigned right away. Then Grant appointed a banker as secretary of the navy, and the man tried it for three months and quit because his duties in Washington were taking too much time away from his real interest, making money for himself. And then Grant made a big-time contractor his secretary of the treasury, and the fellow had to resign after just a few days because his business activities were in obvious conflict of interest with his official activities.

The result of all this, of course, was an administration so corrupt that it held the record until Warren Gamaliel Harding came to the White House and brought his poker-playing cronies along with him. Officials in the Navy Department gave contracts to manufacturers based on what they received in kickbacks and not because the manufacturers had more experience or bid lower than others. Officials in the Department of the Interior gave land to speculators on the same basis. Officials in the Indian Bureau ignored the needs of the Indians and practically sold trading posts on every street corner. Grant’s own brother-in-law got into trouble when it became known that he was giving Jay Gould, the financier, inside information so Gould could pull some Wall Street coups and cut him in, and a couple of cabinet members and five federal judges had to quit or be thrown out and possibly jailed for fraud and for accepting bribes and a lot of other things. And there was also a terrible depression during Grant’s administration.

Despite all this, Grant still managed to get himself elected for a second term. He even did better than the first time; his opponent was Horace Greeley, the editor of the New York Tribune, who was favored by both the non-Radical Republicans and by the Democrats, but Grant received 3,596,745 votes and 286 electoral votes to Greeley’s 2,843,446 votes and sixty-six electoral votes. Well, Grant was a colorful figure, except that he was only about five feet six inches tall. The black vote was crucial to his second election. He was elected by an overwhelming majority of the black vote. All the black vote went for him; I think it was something like 700,000 votes. If it had not been for that, he would not have been elected, but those votes fulfilled the objective of old Thad Stevens and the rest of his people. They wanted to keep the Radical Republicans in control of the government of the United States, and they succeeded up to 1877.

But there’s no question about the fact that if it hadn’t been for the black vote, Grant wouldn’t have been elected, and by 1877, the people began to get tired of the Radical Republicans just like they do any organization that stays in too long. Grant thought a little about running for a third term, but the Democrats had gotten control of the Congress in the middle of his second term, which I guess he considered handwriting on the wall, so he quit and even almost admitted that some of the corruption and the bad management was his own fault. “It was my fortune, or misfortune,” he said, “to be called to the office of chief executive without any previous political training. Under such circumstances, it is but reasonable to admit that errors of judgment must have occurred.” Those sentences might even be the most noticeable presidential understatement of the nineteenth century.

The two men who had a try at the office after Grant were Rutherford B. Hayes and Samuel J. Tilden. Tilden was the former governor of New York and had become famous because he was the man who broke up the Tweed Ring, and you can tell how people were beginning to feel about Grant and the Republicans by the fact that, even though Tilden wasn’t all that well-known around the country, and Hayes was a handsome fellow with red hair and blue eyes, and had been a popular general in the Civil War, it was Tilden who got a majority in both the general and electoral voting. Tilden got 4,284,265 votes to Hayes’ 4,033,295 votes, and as for the electoral margin, Tilden ended up with 203 votes and Hayes received 166. But the Republicans weren’t going to give up all that easily, even though they no longer had Grant to do their bidding, so they claimed the electoral votes in Florida, Louisiana, Oregon, and South Carolina, saying that a lot of black men had been prevented from going to the polls and that Hayes would have taken those states if the voting had been on the level. There was some question about whether or not Hayes would accept this interpretation of events since he was a rigidly moral man who prayed on his knees each morning and sang hymns each night. (He and his wife were also strict teetotalers, which I don’t admire all that much because I think a drink now and then is good for some people provided they don’t overdo it. His wife was known as Lemonade Lucy because she prohibited liquor at the White House, and Hayes’ last official act as president was to ban the sale of liquor at Army bases.) But Hayes looked the other way, and though the Democrats could have objected and demanded a recount or something, Tilden decided not to do this. Tilden was an old bachelor anyhow and never worked very hard, and when the time came for him to make a decision on the dispute, he just said, “Oh, well, there’s no use fighting for it. I don’t care anything about it, anyhow.” Then he repeated Henry Clay’s famous statement — he would rather be right than president. Incidentally, I never thought much of that statement. Why not try to be both?

Grant then had one more shot at the presidency himself. He was invited by some foreign governments to tour their countries, and he and Mrs. Grant went on a trip through Europe and Asia that lasted for three years. Everybody liked the glamour of heads of states in those days, and I think Grant visited them all; he met with Queen Victoria and Pope Pius IX and a lot of other people. There were parades and reviews, and he rode a horse and he wore the insignia of a four-star general, which was the highest rank there was in those days, and I think he enjoyed it very much.

The American press covered his trip so enthusiastically that, when the 1880 elections came along, a number of people at the Republican convention thought he’d make a good candidate again. Hayes obviously didn’t stand a chance for reelection because the depression had gotten even worse during his administration, and he’d done a number of things that were unpopular even though they might have been good for the country, including withdrawing troops from the South and trying to reform the civil service and get rid of some of the corruption. (One of the things Hayes did was fire Chester A. Arthur from his job as collector of the Port of New York, a political-plum kind of position because the collector controlled about 1,000 jobs at the Custom House and also got a very large salary from his share of fees collected. Arthur had been appointed by Grant, and Hayes wanted him out because Hayes was trying to make the civil service totally nonpolitical. But the move was unpopular because Arthur was well-liked, and of course, later became our twenty-first president.) Hayes also said he didn’t want a second term anyway, so it looked as if Hayes might be out and Grant back in again, but a deadlock developed between Grant and a man named James G. Blaine, and the nomination finally went to James A. Garfield. It was a sad turn of fate for Garfield, as you know if you remember your history, because he was shot, just four months after taking office, by a disgruntled office-seeker named Charles J. Guiteau, and died, after suffering for eighty more days, on September 19, 1881.

Grant went into business after that, taking his life savings - about $100,000 - and opening a Wall Street banking and brokerage firm with a man named Ferdinand Ward, and with one of Grant’s sons as a partner in the company. Grant’s savings would have been enough to support him in those days, but there’s always been some sort of a feeling among some professional military men that the obtaining of a lot of money is the most important thing in a man’s life. They graduate as lieutenants and go on through the military setup and they become socially conscious, and being socially conscious, they’re very anxious to have the wealth to back it up. You can’t really blame them for that; it’s the system that causes it, and their salaries are not large enough to support the condition to which they think they’re entitled. They’re not all that way, of course; there have been a great many who have no ideas in that direction, and I can name two particularly. One of them was Robert E. Lee, and the other was George C. Marshall. Marshall certainly doesn’t belong in that group, and there are dozens of others who don’t, men who were very much interested in the welfare of their country and not their own personal welfare. But Grant was one of those who wanted a lot more money than he had, even though what he had was enough, and this venture was another disaster. Grant didn’t know anything about Wall Street and how the Stock Exchange worked in that day, which was wide open and had no regulation whatever, and Ward was a crook. It wasn’t long before other people had everything that Grant had, and a lot more besides, and Ward went to jail.

Grant then went to work and wrote his memoirs. He was broke now, and he had cancer and knew he had only a short time to live, so he worked on his manuscript every minute he had the strength for it, because he wanted to earn some money to leave for his family’s support. He finished his manuscript about a month before he died, and a magazine ran his memoirs in serial form, and Mark Twain bought the book rights as a patriotic act and published the memoirs in book form. Twain later delivered $500,000 to the Grant family, which made the family okay, but Twain spent the rest of his life working to pay off the debts he acquired in financing the publication.