![]() National Teacher Institute July 13 - 16, 2023 Learn More.USS Constitution In 4 Minutes Watch Video.African Americans During the Revolutionary War.The First American President: Setting the Precedent."You didn't need to know anything else about him except he was a drunk, a military butcher, and an incompetent, corrupt president. "Reconstruction was considered a failure for many decades because of Grant being portrayed as a military dictator, bringing troops against the helpless white south," Waugh says. Still, the negative image of Grant advanced by historian Adams - who was enraged by Grant's cabinet picks - and other would-be leaders persisted throughout the 20th century. Abraham Lincoln, one of his many admirers, addressing rumors about Grant, reportedly said, "f those accusing General Grant of getting drunk will tell me where he gets his whiskey, I will get a lot of it and send it around to some of the other Generals, who are badly in need of something of the kind." The widely held perception that he was a falling-down mess, though, is sketchy. Historians have found much to show that he had an alcohol addiction. The most dogged criticism of Grant, something that followed him through much of his life, was that he was a drunk. Babcock was acquitted, but more than 100 others were convicted. It was the only time in history that a sitting president testified voluntarily as a defense witness in a criminal trial. Babcock, was indicted in the political tempest but acquitted when - extraordinarily - Grant testified against his own federal government on Babcock's behalf. The worst was the Whiskey Ring of 1875, in which a group of distillers was accused of dodging taxes. Scandals pervaded his administration, too. His came mainly from states in the vanquished South, which balked at accepting former slaves as equals (rights granted in the 14th and 15th amendments) and bristled at Reconstruction. So even if you're not the master of policy detail, when you know that people elected you - by a landslide in 1868 and again by a somewhat smaller margin in 1872 - you have the authority that comes from being the only person in the United States to represent all of the voters of America."Īs all presidents do, Grant faced plenty of opposition. "The other thing was, he was a national hero, and that does carry a lot of weight in politics. He realized that he had these abilities that he really didn't appreciate before the Civil War," Brands says. He had gained a great deal of confidence during the Civil War. "He was better as a civilian president than he had been as a civilian insurance salesman, surveyor, farmer or whatever during the 1850s. But he took the lessons learned then, and from his bloody but victorious tour through the Civil War, and applied them when he reached the White House. Indeed, in his first attempt at a post-war career, after the Mexican War, Grant flopped. ![]() and yet every obstacle he encountered, he found a way to get through it. He had his ups and downs in life, for sure. "This is a man who we should identify with today. ![]() Grant: American Hero, American Myth," a 2009 biography. He was an essential president," says current-day historian Joan Waugh, the author of " U.S. "I would look at him as the general that saved the union and the president that managed to preserve the union. C-SPAN's panel of 91 historians now places him 22nd overall, just below John Quincy Adams (historian Henry's great-grandfather). ![]() In a completely arbitrary but well-known ranking of presidents, C-SPAN's Presidential Historians Survey, Grant's jumped 11 spots since 2000, more than any other chief executive. Only in the past few decades have historians begun to look more kindly on the reluctant politico. ![]() When he died in 1885, more than 1.5 million people attended his funeral in New York.īut his presidency, to many, was indelibly marred by political infighting, scandals, Grant's well-known drinking problem, and the overwhelming burden of bringing post-war America together through Reconstruction. As president, he served two terms and could have been reelected to more (as was allowed then). In his time, Grant was an enormously popular public figure, the leader of the Union Army, the hero who won the war for the north. ![]()
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