Hamilton is also regarded as the founder of the U.S. Coast Guard. And on a lesser note, he started the “New York Post”.
Samuel P. Chase is on the $10,000 bill.
Hamilton died in his late 30’s. Imagine how much more he would have accomplished had he lived a long life.
Late 40s. He was either 47 or 49.
Next time they redesign the bills, they should put the headline ‘Headless Body in Topless Bar*’ on the reverse side to honor this achievement.
*Or, in olde-timey script, “Headleff Body in Topleff Bar”
Grant was actually a very good president, and one of America’s greatest sons (for much more than his Civil War service. He really completed the Lincoln Revolution. However, in this very thing was so much ahead of the people that many simply didn’t realize or udnerstand, and things tended to go back after he left office because people just weren’t ready for it. But he made a fine President and warded off far more trouble than most give him credit for.
As president, he stopped the banking fraud and cheating - the problem is that since it burst on his watch, he was blamed by historians. Historians are generally a pretty stupid lot.
He founded and innovative new direciton in AmerIndian relations: assimilation. He wanted them to become one people with the United States. Shocking, I know (that was sarcasm). It actually worked pretty well for a while, but he couldn’t control the latent racism or stop the process of corruption after he left office, though he managed to ease it while he was President.
His work in race relations and working to bring the South back into the Union as whole, peaceful, and free states worked very well. It was not until after he left office that the “Jim Crow” nonsense really began in earnest. This was the period when Longstreet, Forrest, and some other ex-Confederates came over to the Republican side and worked for racial harmony (ironically, Forrest helped found the KKK, though it was more of a drinking club at the time). Mr. Moto mentioned his work destroying the KKK, of course, which was yet another good work undone by later generations.
He avoided trouble with Spain after the Virginius incident, where some Cuban revolutionaries lied about their purpose, got the ship registered, and were smuggling armaments when they were captured and executed by Spain. Spain was right, and matter was negotiated to a comfortable end.
He has tended to get blamed for the panic of 1873 for some reason. This doesn’t make sense because it started in Vienna of all places and spread across Europe and into the United States. He used banking policy to ease the Wall Street collapse and managed to release a lot of cash without inflating the dollar. This didn’t stop the panic, but I’m honestly not sure what would have. He’s “blamed” because he acted slowly and deliberately, but again, I can’t think of anything that really could have helped: down at the bottom of it banks were just overextended, in one of the boom-bust cycles that characterize the growth of the American economy. I suppose it can be argued he should have signed the inflation bill, but this could have had huge negative long-term impact on the economy.
There were the two scandals, though it’s ironic because instead of a guilty Grant sacrifices subordinates, he was innocent and defended the guilty. Such is life. Nonentheless, while the scandals were sad, they were also pretty normal then and now.
After the Presidency, he went on a world tour which proved to be quite useful in building some personal diplomacy for America. He even helped form a peace treaty between China and Japan! Ultimately, I think a lot of historians hated Grant because of his good side. Many of the most dedicated historians of the era were Southern - sometimes Civil War veterans and deeply racist. Their very biased histories have altered public perception of history of this era and the antebellum.
Pardon a slight hijack, but assimilation was hardly “an innovative new direction”. Americans had been doing it since colonial times – Harvard started a school for Indians in its earliest years for precisely this purpose, and the colonists up and down the seacoast kept it up ever since.
Since many such assimilation programs sought to separate Indians from their culture, language, religion, and other cultural traits in the process of making the “one people with the United States”, I’d have to agree that it was shocking. No sarcasm intended.
end of hijack.
I’m going to have to read up some on Grant’s association with CM, because I’m just finishing up a book on the transcontinental railroad, and C-M’s excesses began way before Grant took office, and at least in this book Stephen Ambrose does not associate Grant with those actions.
Looking through wiki, there were some high denominations bills issued in the 1920s (since discontinued) with some weird choices: William McKinley? Grover Cleveland? Salmon Chase? Woodrow Wilson and James Madison are sort of understandable but why the former and not the likes of John Adams or Theodore Roosevelt? I guess the Secretary of the Treasury (Andrew Mellon) had a lot to do with choosing who goes on currency.
It’s no hijack. Yes, there had been some interest this way, but most people simply didn’t think of Indians as “Americans” in the political or social sense. They were other, not citizens, and so forth. Grant saw that this should not continue with the increasing territorial mash, and mostly on his own intiative started a program to bring the tribes into the United States. While this program was intende dot teach them European learning and such, it wasn’t trying to wipe out the Indian identity.