I need to take a break from discussing the most important issue of our time, energy and climate change, because the subject just makes me feel sick as increasingly it is growing hopeless.
Exhausted, I think I'll discuss a subject dear to my heart, other than energy, history.
There's a lot of talk here - for good reason - about the Worst. President. Ever. In recent times, there has been a lot of talk about Presidents and their rankings by historians. Invariably when we are discussing "worst Presidents" one name is unjustly placed there, in my view.
I would like to talk about the 18th President of the United States, U.S. Grant.
Of course, Grant is mostly remembered for his military achievements, which were as spectacular as they were unexpected.
Reduced in 1860 to working as a clerk in his father's leather goods store, marked by everyone who knew him as a failure, in debt and at the edge of financial ruin, loved only by his wife and children, by 1865 General Grant was in command of hundreds of thousands of men, had conducted one of the most brilliant campaigns in military history and had established himself as the most victorious General ever to be recorded in this country or any country. He was at the end of the Civil War the highest ranking military officer in US history, equalled only by George Washington, and shortly after the war would be promoted to a rank formally greater than that which Washington had held. He had accepted the surrender of three enemy armies whole, including the Confederacy's greatest and most famous army - The Army of Northern Virginia - and decisively defeated a fourth. In the last case, he assumed command of an army after it had been surrounded, and still emerged victorious, shattering the army that had him besieged.
Advanced by both political parties as a potential candidate to run against President Lincoln, Grant demurred, offering that after the war was over, he might run for Mayor of his home town, Galena, IL and if elected, might work to install a sidewalk. Promoted by President Lincoln to command the first modern army in history, he earned the unyielding trust of the President, developing a warm and productive (and appropriately subordinate) working relationship with the greatest President the United States was ever to see.
When the war ended, a vengeful President Johnson, who had succeeded the assassinated Lincoln, attempted to rescind the generous surrender terms Grant had offered his last opponent, Robert E. Lee. Rather than execute this order, Grant threatened to resign, forcing President Johnson to back down.
Although he did not actively seek the Presidency, by 1868 a grateful nation called on Grant to run and somewhat reluctantly he accepted the nomination with the simple declaration "Let us have peace." He was overwhelmingly elected.
Grant would serve in the Presidency until 1877 and upon leaving office, would embark on a world tour in which he was feted and honored around the world. Returning to the United States he was bankrupted in an investment fraud that saw him stripped of all his wealth and rendered impoverished.
At the same time, he developed cancer of the throat as a result of a life time of cigar smoking. At this point, none other than Mark Twain came to his rescue, putting together a book deal for Grant's memoirs that Grant hoped would enable his family to survive him debt free. Writing almost continuously and in great pain as the cancer consumed him, Grant finished his military memoirs just days before he died. At the end he could only communicate in writing and famously wrote to his physician:
"The fact is that I think I am a verb instead of a personal pronoun. A verb is anything that signifies to be; to do; or to suffer. I signify all three."
The memoir he put down just as he died was to destined to become a literary classic, marked by fine, clean, evocative and sometimes wry prose and still stands as one of the greatest books ever written by a President of the United States. It is still in print and is considered an important work in any serious library related to the Civil War. It was a best seller and provided wealth for his survivors, including his beloved wife.
It is often said thought that Grant, the President was hopelessly naive and incompetent and that is era was marked by scandal and dissension. Most famously, it is said that the Grant administration was hopelessly corrupt, but, there is another view.
I would like to quote liberally from this link.
Strangely enough, I first became interested in Grant as president, and perhaps even more strangely, I singled him out from both his predecessors and successors in the White House. From my first in- depth looks at his life and career, I detected a sharp incongruence between the historical Grant and the Grant that has come to dominate history books. My understanding of this incongruence, however, has changed. Initially, I had no reason to believe that Grant's character made him a particularly transcendent figure in his time. I was impressed that he could have followed such an extraordinary military career with two terms as president during one of the most critical periods in U.S. history, and I saw that the nation had much to show for his efforts when he exited the White House in 1877. Only later did I begin to realize both how he adjusted to changing circumstances and how complex those circumstances were. Historians have not effectively explored these points...
...In both the domestic and foreign realms, President Grant could claim a wide range of achievements. In the aftermath of the most serious fiscal problems the nation had ever faced, he pursued policies that stopped inflation, raised the nations credit, and reduced taxes and the national debt by over $300 million and $435 million respectively. His veto of the Inflation Act of 1874 and subsequent drive for what became the Resumption Act of 1875 shocked many who looked to Congress to cure the nation's economic ills, and the panic of 1873 came to an abrupt end when the act went into effect in 1879. The successful arbitration of the Alabama and Virginus disputes mark not only foreign policy victories for the United States, but a significant precursor to the future course of international affairs. The establishment of the principle of the international arbitration through the Treaty of Washington, would later be embodied in the Hague Tribunal, the League of Nations, the World Court, and the United Nations...
...Also remarkable to me was Grant's "Quaker" Indian Peace Policy: on the eve of what could have become the complete genocide of the American Indian, Grant acted decisively to begin two decades of reform that for the first time promoted the welfare of Indians as individuals and broke ground for their eventual citizenship...
...The arguability of the reformers' charges against Grant extends to cases of actual corruption. The Credit Mobilier scandal, the most conspicuous of the so-called Grant scandals, was in fact only uncovered by the administration. The corrupt activity had occurred in 1867-68, before Grant even became president. Nowhere else in the American political tradition is a president held accountable for corruption dating back to a previous administration. The reformers also charged such figures as cabinet members George H. Williams and George M. Robeson with corruption, and although the record showed the baselessness of such charges, historians evidently see this minor point as negligible. No major study of the Grant presidency makes the connection between the untrustworthiness and utter damage of the reformers' accusations and Grant's adverse behavior toward such reformers as Secretary of the Treasury Benjamin Bristow, who made serious allegations concerning the president's private secretary, Orville Babcock, without sufficient evidence...
...Grant's suspension of habeas corpus in nine South Carolina counties in 1871 marked a singular display of peacetime presidential power, and in Benedict's words, " The effect was electric. Reformers lamented the sacrifice of 'real' issues, such as the tariff and civil-service reform, to the 'dead' one symbolized by the 'bloody shirt'...and the use of federal troops (in the South) as gross violations of civil liberty, but they were also forced at last to give up their open hostility to equal rights and black suffrage. Announcing a "new departure," they promised to accept the finality of the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth amendments. The new departure enabled Democrats, reform Republicans, and some Republican politicians who had lost power in their party to unite against Grant's reelection...
...historians must recognize how fundamental the inconsistency was between the reformers' revered conception of government by the best educated and the notion of black rule in the South, the latter being an essential part of Grant's program. The president's dedication to Reconstruction, which endured even after most national leaders declared it misguided, produced a civil rights record which, according to Richard N. Current, made Grant, "in a certain respect, one of the greatest presidents" with whom "only Lyndon B. Johnson can even be compared..."
Recently in a comments section in a diary about worst Presidents, I wrote:
Grant is vastly underrated as a President.
He was head and shoulders above many other Presidents, and has gotten a bad shake because of some scandals by his subordinates.
Grant had a savaged country to rebuild, a country still torn with hatred, racism, and violence. His fundemental decency was such that his nation, including many former enemies, grieved enormously when he passed, all his shortcomings known to all. It is very likely that any man who faced what Grant faced would have been diminished by the job. This is probably true of Lincoln, had Lincoln lived. Many radical Republicans were secretly satisfied when Lincoln was assassinated, because they were planning on going after his reconstruction policies.
Grant's largest flaw, both as a politician and as general, was to expect the best from his subordinates. In the Civil War he was fortunate to have had subordinates worthy of his expectations who could act on his ideas. This was less true in the White House.
Grant does not deserve comparison with Harding, Pierce, Buchanan, Nixon or Bush. He was much their superior. Come to think of it, Nixon, Buchanan and Pierce don't deserve to be compared to Bush. Bush's main accomplishment is to have set a new standard for "worst."
Grant was, simply, an example of the greatest this country could offer.
Bush is, simply, an example of the worst this country can produce.
In the current time, so ravaged by war, corruption and misrule, I think it an appropriate time to restore the
complete reputation of this great American.
I thought that this bears repeating.
Things are not always what they seem.