He was the son of a prosperous Ohio tanner, who pushed him into going to West Point, where his record was fair to poor. Grant's early life forecast no great things. Was not only a great general and a great writer but a decent chief executive as well. In ''Grant,'' Jean Edward Smith, a political scientist at Marshall University and biographer of John Marshall, takes on this large and misshapen reputation, and argues that the 18th president Grant's considerable accomplishments and virtues are never quite enough to remove the stain that his time in the White House has left upon When Bill Clinton left the White House in an inky cloud of pardons, his defenders argued, and many of hisĬritics conceded, that he was not as bad as Buchanan, Harding or Grant. So is the handful of scoundrels and duds at the bottom, which always includes Ulysses S. The trinity of excellence at the top is always the same - Washington, Lincoln, Franklinĭ. He was, as president, reluctant to press too hard on his former military enemy.A solid, above-average, historically mistreated president, that's who.Ĭommon historians' stunt is the poll rating presidents. Grant, as general of the Union Army, himself offered generous terms to the vanquished foes, opposing proposals to indict the Confederacy’s leadership for treason. By the end of his second term, the North had exhausted its interest in Reconstruction, and the oppression of African Americans asserted itself once again. Had he more strongly asserted his own views on civil rights, a new South might well have emerged. And much of that, note some Reconstruction scholars, was the reluctance of Grant to fully exercise federal authority to enforce the civil rights of African Americans. “Grant oversaw a social revolution that was unprecedented,” notes scholar Joann Waugh, as, for a fleeting moment, Blacks in the South exercised political power and seemed on the cusp of transforming an entrenched racist culture. Supreme Court.) He also signed the Enforcement Acts, which protected the voting rights of Blacks in the old Confederacy, a central initiative of Reconstruction. (This legislation was later overturned by the U.S.
In 1875, Grant signed the landmark Civil Rights Act, ending separation in public accommodations and more. Department of Justice to enforce basic rights for African Americans, then under siege by Ku Klux Klan terrorism. And as president, in 1871 Grant created the U.S. Second, Grant also backed enlisting formerly enslaved people to the cause before many others did, and supported the Fifteenth Amendment, which provided suffrage for African American men. African Americans credited his leadership with the liberation of huge slices of the South as his Union Army pressed from the west. While other Union generals dithered, Grant took aggressive action against the rebellious states of the Confederacy. What’s the evidence for this? First, there was Grant’s record on the battlefield. While other Union generals dithered, Grant took aggressive action against the rebellious states of the Confederacy.Īccording to the Journal of Blacks in Higher Education, African Americans looked on Grant with favor: “Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, but it was Grant who actually freed the slaves.”