As inspired by this thread about what effect a confederate victory at Gettysburg would have, I was wondering about the presidency of U.S. Grant.
Let’s say that instead of being the usual Gilded Age president, he was more…influential. Less cronyism and whatnot. What would people think of him today?
I feel that had he been a “better” president, he could perhaps have been elevated to the revered status of Washington…well, at least in the North.
Speaking from what the average person would know/think about, this makes sense. Grant, like Washinton, is a war hero, and appears to Joe-6 pack as the savior of the Union. Then if his presidency had more far reaching effects that appear good, he looks much like Washinton. So what do the dopers say?
For a laudatory analysis of the Grant administration, see: http://saints.css.edu/mkelsey/presid.html
Grant was actually pretty good on Indian policy, and he actually took positive steps during Reconstruction to try to keep the peace and integrate the Freedmen into Southern society. Too bad the disputed election of 1876 sold Reconstruction down the river…
So your thesis is… if Grant had been a better president, history would regard him as a better president?
Yeah, OK. Hard to argue with that.
Grant was, in fact, not a bad president. He had the misfortune of trusting his subordinates too much. Sad to say it, but he was really undone by the corruption of his friends, and he simply refused to believe it (“Who are you going to believe, Grant, me or your lying eyes?”). However, he would have been a capable and successful president otherwise, and he was used to command, an easy-going leader, and had a dash of that hard-drinking personality that has often served America so well. Even with the huge scandals, he made progress on real issues.
The primary challenge facing the Grant administration when it took office was to establish a stable biracial democracy in the former slave states. During his first term (1869-1873) the United States made considerable progress toward this objective. Federal prosecutors under Attorney General George Boutwell launched a wave of arrests and trails that weakened the Ku Klux Klan, and the Southern states held generally peaceful and fair biracial elections in 1870 and 1872. Sharecropping replaced plantation gang labor as the primary mode of agriculture in the South, the Southern states established embryonic public school systems for children of both races, and African Americans made significant progress in desegregating public accommodations in both North and South.
During Grant’s second term, however, the wheels came off. The country toppled into a recession, the Justice Department lost interest in fighting white terror in the South, and Grant proved utterly indifferent to the corruption spreading within his administration and among the remaining Republican Reconstruction regimes in the South. Democrats violently “redeemed” Alabama in 1874 and Mississippi in 1875 while the administration looked on helplessly. The problems culminated in the violent and disputed election of 1876, which led to the downfall of the remaining Republican administrations in South Carolina and Louisiana, and the long night of lynch law and Jim Crow settled upon the South.
The first generation of historians to assess Grant, writing from a white supremacist perspective, faulted him for having ever supported biracial Reconstruction. Modern historians fault him for being insufficiently supportive. But all sides can agree that his administration was corrupt and left a less than compelling economic legacy.