American History - Part 118 - Grant -1st Term - Scandal Ridden - Reelected
Channel: ListenAndReadAlong
Date: 2013-06-27

Welcome to THE MAKING OF A NATION -- American history in VOA Special English.
Many events took place during Grant's two administrations. But he usually was not involved directly. He had problems only because he was linked indirectly to the men who were responsible.
One of President Grant's first problems was caused by two of his friends. They tried to take control of the gold market. The men were Jay Gould and James Fisk. Both were extremely rich.
Grant's biggest national problem was the political situation in the former rebel states of the South.
After the Civil War, most southern states were governed by radical members of the Republican Party. Radicals supported citizenship rights and voting rights for blacks. In the late eighteen sixties, the radicals began to lose power. Many failed to be re-elected to state office. They were being defeated by candidates of the Democratic Party. Democrats did not want blacks to have any rights at all.
The first radical Republicans to lose power were those in Virginia. The change there was made peacefully. Not so in other southern states. In Tennessee, Georgia, and North Carolina, Democrats used threats and violence to win elections. Their campaigns often were led by members of the Ku Klux Klan.
The Klan was a secret organization of white men. Members believed white people were greater than black people. Wearing cloths over their faces, Klansmen broke up radical Republican political meetings. They threatened, beat, and killed blacks to keep them out of politics. They did the same thing to whites who tried to organize or help blacks.
Before long, Ku Klux Klan groups were formed in every southern state. By eighteen seventy-one, radical Republican congressmen were demanding a new law to destroy the Ku Klux Klan.
A committee headed by radicals was named to investigate Klan activities in the south. The committee heard reports of the Klan's brutal acts. It helped prepare a bill to control the Klan. After much debate, Congress passed the bill.
The new law gave the president power to declare military rule in the south. Democrats charged that the real purpose of the law was to keep radical Republican state governments in power.
President Grant did not wait long to use his powers under the new law. He declared military rule in a large area of South Carolina. Thousands of people there were arrested. They were tried in federal courts. Juries were made up mainly of blacks and radical whites.
This kind of justice made southerners feel even more bitterness toward the North. It also angered a number of moderate members of the Republican Party. They said the federal government should not help radical Republicans stay in power in the south.
Some of these moderate Republicans broke away from President Grant and the radicals. They called themselves Liberal Republicans and formed a new political party. They held their own presidential nominating convention for the election of eighteen seventy-two.
They nominated Horace Greeley as their candidate. Greeley published the New York Tribune newspaper.
Democrats believed their only chance to win the election was to support the new Liberal Republicans. So they, too, chose Horace Greeley as their presidential candidate. As expected, the radicals who controlled the main Republican Party nominated Grant for a second term.
The campaign between Grant and Greeley was very strange. Grant made no speeches. He spent the summer at a holiday town on the Atlantic Ocean coast. His supporters, however, were not silent. They called Greeley a fool and a traitor. They refused to treat him as a serious candidate.
Unlike Grant, Greeley did campaign hard. But he had little financial help. He also was hurt by a poorly-organized campaign.
On election day in eighteen seventy-two, Ulysses Grant won a big victory. He got the votes of thirty-one of the thirty-seven states.
Horace Greeley died three weeks after the election. The new Liberal Republican Party died with him. Ulysses Grant and the radical Republicans would govern for another four years.