One reason for the increase of debt was the selling of bonds to citizens to pay for the war efforts. It ensured that all public debts, particularly war bonds, would be paid only in gold rather than in greenbacks. The measure is significant because it was a step to help alleviate the financial struggles faced by the United States after the Civil War. The United States was already indebted before the war, and the issuing of greenbacks to keep currency circulating during the war increased the indebtedness significantly.
The country had no central bank or monetary policy at the time and was desperate to improve its position to maintain itself as a global economic leader. One effect of the bill was creating a shortage of much needed cash for farmers in the western states and territories.
On May 19, , Grant protected the wages of those working for the U. In , a law had been passed that reduced the government working day to eight hours. However, much of the law was later repealed in order to allow day wages to also be reduced. George S. Boutwell : George S. Boutwell served as secretary of the Treasury under Ulysses S. Following in line with the Republican Party national platform of , Secretary Boutwell advocated that the national debt must be reduced and the United States return to a gold specie economy.
Boutwell believed that the stabilization of the currency and the reduction of the national debt was more important than risking a depression by withdrawing greenbacks from the economy. On his own, with neither the knowledge of President Grant nor other Cabinet members, Boutwell controversially began to release gold from the Treasury and sell government bonds in order to reduce the supply of greenbacks in the economy.
As secretary, he opposed a rapid lowering of taxes and favored using surplus revenues to make a large reduction of the national debt. In , Congress, at his recommendation, passed an act providing for the funding of the national debt and authorizing the selling of certain bonds, but not authorizing an increase of the debt.
Boutwell also reorganized and reformed the U. First, he discharged unnecessary employees. Second, he started sweeping changes in the Bureau of Printing and Engraving to protect the currency from counterfeiters.
Then, he improved bookkeeping with customs houses. Finally, he revitalized tax collections to hasten the collection of revenue. These changes soon led the Treasury to have a monthly surplus. The presidency of Ulysses S. Grant was marred by a series of scandals. Reform movements were initiated by both the Democratic Party and the Liberal Republicans, a faction that split from the Republican Party to oppose political patronage and corruption in the Grant administration.
This intricate financial scheme was primarily conceived and administered by Wall Street manipulator Jay Gould and his partner James Fisk in September On September 6, , Gould bought the Tenth National Bank with the intention of using it as a buying house for gold, and Gould and Fisk began buying gold in earnest.
Boutwell and Grant finally met on September 23 and agreed to release gold from the Treasury if its price continued to rise. On the same day, Boutwell also ordered the closing of the Tenth National Bank. The gold market crashed, foiling Gould and Fisk, while ruining many investors financially. The gold panic devastated the U. Stock prices plunged, and the price of food crops such as wheat and corn dropped severely, devastating farmers. The most infamous scandal associated with the Grant administration was the Whiskey Ring of , which was exposed by Treasury Secretary Benjamin H.
Bristow and journalist Myron Colony. Whiskey distillers in the Midwest were no strangers to evading taxes, having done so since the Lincoln administration. The ringleaders had to coordinate distillers, rectifiers, gaugers, storekeepers, revenue agents, and Treasury clerks by way of recruitment and extortion.
Missouri Revenue Agent John A. Babcock, were eventually indicted in the Whiskey Ring trials. Grant unexpectedly issued an order not to give any more immunity to persons involved in the Whiskey Ring, leading to speculation that he was trying to protect Babcock.
Because Bristow needed distillers to testify with immunity in order to pursue ringleaders, the order caused friction between him and Grant. The accusation angered Grant, who fired Henderson as special prosecutor. At the trial, President Grant read a deposition stating that he had no knowledge of Babcock being involved in the ring. Broadhead went on to close out all the other cases in the Whiskey Ring.
McDonald and Joyce were convicted in the graft trials and sent to prison. According to public perception at the time, the scandals revealed that Grant reacted too readily to protect his team, to cover up misdeeds, and to get rid of whistle-blowers and reformers. His acceptance of gifts from wealthy associates showed poor judgment.
Since the mids, his presidential reputation has improved as historians emphasize his enforcement of African-American civil rights in the South and his peace policy towards American Indians. Describe how white-supremacy groups responded to social and political changes after the Civil War. After the Civil War, a number of white-supremacist groups formed as a reaction to the liberation of African-American former slaves, who were free to compete for paying jobs and opportunities in the South.
It shows a black family cowering, surrounded by a burning schoolhouse and a man hanged in a tree. The lost cause.
The White League was a white paramilitary group started in that worked to turn Republicans out of office and intimidate freedmen from voting and organizing politically. Its first chapter, established in Grant Parish, Louisiana, was made up of many of the same local Confederate veterans who had participated in the earlier Colfax Massacre, in April Chapters were soon founded in other areas of the state and in New Orleans.
Although sometimes linked to the secret vigilante groups of the Ku Klux Klan, as well as to the Knights of the White Camelia, the White League and other paramilitary groups of the later s displayed significant differences. They had a specific political goal: to overthrow the Reconstruction government.
They directed their activities toward intimidation and removal of Northern and black Republican candidates and officeholders. Made up of well-armed Confederate veterans, the group worked to turn Republicans out of office, disrupt their political organizations, and use force to intimidate and terrorize freedmen to keep them from the polls. Backers helped finance purchases of up-to-date arms, including Winchester rifles, Colt revolvers, and Prussian needle guns. In , White League members murdered Julia Hayden, a year-old black woman from Tennessee who was working as a schoolteacher in Hartsville, Louisiana.
The Coushatta Massacre occurred in another Red River parish: The local White League forced six Republican officeholders to resign and promise to leave the state. The League assassinated the men before they left the parish, together with between five and twenty freedmen sources differ who were witnesses.
They were Confederate veterans, experienced and well armed. The White League was effective; voting by Republicans decreased and Democrats regained control of the state legislature in The Ku Klux Klan was one among a number of secret, oath-bound organizations—including the Southern Cross, in New Orleans , and the Knights of the White Camelia , in Louisiana—using violence as a political weapon.
Historians generally see the KKK as part of the post-Civil War insurgent violence related not only to the high number of veterans in the population, but also to their effort to control the dramatically changed social situation by using extrajudicial means to restore white supremacy.
In , Mississippi Governor William L. Sharkey reported that disorder, lack of control, and lawlessness were widespread; in some states, armed bands of Confederate soldiers roamed at will.
The Klan used public violence against blacks as a method of intimidation. They burned houses and attacked and killed blacks, leaving their bodies on the roads. In an meeting in Nashville, Tennessee, Klan members gathered to try to create an hierarchical organization with local chapters reporting up the line of command to a national headquarters.
Local chapters and bands were highly independent. Forrest became involved sometime in late or early A common report is that Forrest arrived in Nashville in April while the Klan was meeting at the Maxwell House Hotel, probably at the encouragement of a state Klan leader, former Confederate general George Gordon.
The organization had grown to the point where it needed an experienced commander, and Forrest fit the bill. In Room 10 of the Maxwell, Forrest was sworn in as a member. Klan members adopted masks and robes that hid their identities and added to the drama of their rides at night, their chosen time for attacks. When they killed black political leaders, they also took heads of families, along with the leaders of churches and community groups, because these people had many roles in society.
Klan violence worked to suppress black voting, and campaign seasons were deadly. More than 2, persons were killed, wounded and otherwise injured in Louisiana within a few weeks prior to the presidential election of November The KKK killed and wounded more than black Republicans, hunting and chasing them through the woods.
Thirteen captives were taken from jail and shot; a half-buried pile of 25 bodies was found in the woods. The KKK made people vote Democratic and gave them certificates of the fact. Grant remained popular throughout the nation, despite the scandals evident during his first term in office. Grant had supported a patronage system that allowed Republicans to infiltrate and control state governments.
The Liberal Republicans thought that the Grant administration, and the president personally, were fully corrupt. More importantly, they thought that the goals of Reconstruction had been achieved. These goals were first, the destruction of slavery, and second, the destruction of Confederate nationalism. With these goals achieved, the tenets of republicanism demanded that federal military troops be removed from the South, where they were propping up allegedly corrupt Republican regimes.
Horace Greeley : Horace Greeley was soundly defeated as the candidate of the Liberal Republican Party during the election of The Liberal Republicans successfully ran B. Brown for the governorship of Missouri and won with Democrat support.
Then in , the party completely split from the Republican Party and nominated New York Tribune editor Horace Greeley as candidate for the presidency. The Democrats, who at this time had no strong candidate choice of their own, reluctantly adopted Greeley as their candidate with Governor B.
Brown as his running mate. The Radical Republicans, who were content with their Reconstruction program for the South, renominated Grant, with Representative Henry Wilson as his running mate in The Republicans favored high tariffs and a continuation of Radical Reconstruction policies that supported five military districts in the Southern states.
Grant also favored amnesty for former Confederate soldiers such as the Liberal Republicans. Grant swept the Electoral College, getting votes while other minor candidates received only 63 votes. Grant won Heartbroken after a hard-fought political campaign, Greeley died a few weeks after the election and in the end, only received three electoral votes.
Out of respect for Greeley, Grant attended his funeral. Following the Civil War, political-racial tensions built up in the South, leading to a period of radical military rule.
In the South, political and racial tensions developed within the Republican Party as a response to attacks by the Democrats.
Meanwhile, freedmen were demanding a bigger share of the offices and patronage, squeezing out their carpetbagger allies.
The racial tension within the Republican Party was exacerbated because poor whites resented the job competition from freedmen. Finally, some of the more prosperous freedmen were joining the Democrats, angered by the failure of the Republicans to help them acquire land. The Grant administration had proven by its crackdown on the Ku Klux Klan that it would use as much federal power as necessary to suppress open anti-black violence.
So, by , the conservative Democratic leadership across the South decided it had to end its opposition to Reconstruction and black suffrage to survive. They decided it would be more successful to fight the Republican Party on economic grounds rather than on issues of race. Furthermore, many wealthy Southern landowners thought they could control part of the newly enfranchised black electorate to their own advantage.
Democrats began asserting that they were just as loyal to the United States as the Republicans and now supported some civil rights.
They also worked to reestablish white supremacy. The crippling national economic problems and reliance on cotton meant that the South was struggling financially. Redeemers denounced taxes higher than what they had known before the war. At that time, however, the states had few functions, and planters maintained private institutions only. Redeemers wanted to reduce state debts. As Democrats took over state legislatures, they worked to change voter-registration rules to strip most blacks and many poor whites of their ability to vote.
Blacks continued to vote in significant numbers well into the s, with many winning local offices. If Johnson was a bad president, perhaps one of the worst, was his successor any better? With just a few exceptions, Grant ranks close to the very bottom in performance. Worse perhaps, Grant has a single negative signifier attached to his presidency—corruption. Yet Grant was reelected with 56 percent of the popular vote.
When he left office, Grant went on a world tour lasting two years in which he was greeted warmly by international royalty. He received significant support for a third term in Was Grant simply a victim of the times in which the office was in eclipse, a victim of unscrupulous advisors, or a victim, as he himself admitted, of inexperience? Or, was Grant in some way an architect of his badness? Or, was Grant really not so bad after all? Unable to display preview.
Download preview PDF. Skip to main content. This service is more advanced with JavaScript available. Advertisement Hide. Like Napoleon, Grant concentrated his forces where they were most needed, was bold to the point of recklessness and was as dauntless in defeat as he was magnanimous in victory. But these strengths were balanced by a tunnel vision in which, absorbed by his own plans, he did not always see how the enemy would react.
And he was naively trusting of others, a failing that led him into bankruptcy more than once. Chernow devotes as many pages to Grant the reluctant politician as he does to the triumphant soldier. Grant has been seen as a bad president, his two terms marred by graft and corruption. While admitting these facts, Chernow prefers to present him as a generous, unifying figure, intent on healing the wounds of the Civil War, and a late convert to the cause of advancing African Americans to an equal place in society.
His memoirs, presented at last in an impressive scholarly edition by John F. Marszalek, were the fruit of a last triumphant battle. In retirement, Grant was hit by three staggering blows: a fall left him crippled; he lost his fortune in a Ponzi scheme promoted by one of his sons; and, after a lifetime smoking cigars, he was diagnosed with terminal throat cancer.
Bloody but unbowed, he set to work on his memoirs in a bid not to ensure his place in posterity, but to provide for his family after the end he knew he was facing.
It was a revelation.
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