Ulysses S. Grant

Ulysses S. Grant 	Ulysses S. Grant
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/5/5c/Ulysses_S._Grant_1870-1880.jpg/225px-Ulysses_S._Grant_1870-1880.jpg
Grant c. 1870–1880	https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/5/5c/Ulysses_S._Grant_1870-1880.jpg/225px-Ulysses_S._Grant_1870-1880.jpg
Grant c. 1870–1880
 	
18th President of the United States 	18th President of the United States
In officeMarch 4, 1869 – March 4, 1877 	In officeMarch 4, 1869 – March 4, 1877
Vice President 	
* Schuyler Colfax (1869–1873)
* Henry Wilson (1873–1875)
* None (1875–1877)
Preceded by 	Andrew Johnson
Succeeded by 	Rutherford B. Hayes
Commanding General of the U.S. Army 	Commanding General of the U.S. Army
In officeMarch 9, 1864 – March 4, 1869 	In officeMarch 9, 1864 – March 4, 1869
President 	
* Abraham Lincoln
* Andrew Johnson
Preceded by 	Henry W. Halleck
Succeeded by 	William Tecumseh Sherman
Acting United States Secretary of War 	Acting United States Secretary of War
In officeAugust 12, 1867 – January 14, 1868	In officeAugust 12, 1867 – January 14, 1868
President 	Andrew Johnson
Preceded by 	Edwin Stanton
Succeeded by 	Edwin Stanton
President of the National Rifle Association	President of the National Rifle Association
In office1883–1884 	In office1883–1884
Preceded by 	E. L. Molineux
Succeeded by 	Philip Sheridan
Personal details 	Personal details
Born 	Hiram Ulysses Grant
April 27, 1822
Point Pleasant, Ohio, U.S.
Died 	July 23, 1885 (aged 63)
Wilton, New York, U.S.
Resting place 	Grant's Tomb, New York City
Political party 	Republican
Spouse 	Julia Dent
(m. 1848)
Children 	
* Frederick
* Ulysses Jr.
* Nellie
* Jesse II
Parents 	
* Jesse Root Grant
* Hannah Simpson Grant
Education 	United States Military Academy
Occupation 	
* Military officer
* politician
Signature 	https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/e/ec/UlyssesSGrantSignature.svg/128px-UlyssesSGrantSignature.svg.png
Nicknames 	
* Sam
* Unconditional Surrender
Military service 	Military service
Branch/service 	
* United States Army 
** Union Army
Years of service 	
* 1839–1854
* 1861–1869
Rank 	
* General
Commands 	
* United States Army
* Division of the Mississippi
* Army of the Tennessee
* District of Cairo
* District of Southeast Missouri
* 21st Illinois Infantry Regiment
First tour:
* 4th Infantry Regiment (United States) Company F
Battles/wars 	See list
** Mexican–American War
*** Battle of Palo Alto
*** Battle of Resaca de la Palma
*** Battle of Monterrey
*** Battle of Molino del Rey
*** Battle of Chapultepec
** American Civil War
*** Battle of Belmont
*** Battle of Fort Henry
*** Battle of Fort Donelson
*** Battle of Shiloh
*** Siege of Corinth
*** Vicksburg campaign
**** Battle of Port Gibson
**** Battle of Jackson
**** Battle of Champion Hill
**** Siege of Vicksburg
*** Chattanooga campaign
**** Battle of Missionary Ridge
*** Overland Campaign
**** Battle of the Wilderness
**** Battle of Spotsylvania
**** Battle of North Anna
**** Battle of Totopotomoy Creek
**** Battle of Cold Harbor
*** Petersburg campaign
**** Second Battle of Petersburg
**** Second Battle of Deep Bottom
**** Battle of Chaffin's Farm
**** Battle of Darbytown and New Market Roads
**** Battle of Boydton Plank Road
**** Battle of Trent's Reach
*** Appomattox campaign
**** Third Battle of Petersburg
**** Battle of Appomattox Court House
Ulysses S. Grant (born Hiram Ulysses Grant; April 27, 1822 – July 23, 1885) was an American military officer and politician who served as the 18th president of the United States from 1869 to 1877. As commanding general, Grant led the Union Army to victory in the American Civil War in 1865 and briefly served as U.S. secretary of war. An effective civil rights executive, Grant signed a bill to create the United States Department of Justice and worked with Radical Republicans to protect African Americans during Reconstruction. Grant was born in Ohio and graduated from West Point in 1843. He served with distinction in the Mexican–American War, but resigned from the army in 1854 and returned to civilian life impoverished. In 1861, shortly after the Civil War began, Grant joined the Union Army and rose to prominence after securing Union victories in the western theater. In 1863, he led the Vicksburg campaign that gave Union forces control of the Mississippi River and dealt a major strategic blow to the Confederacy. President Abraham Lincoln promoted Grant to lieutenant general after his victory at Chattanooga. For thirteen months, Grant fought Robert E. Lee during the high-casualty Overland Campaignwhich ended with capture of Lee's army at Appomattox, where he formally surrendered to Grant. In 1866, President Andrew Johnsonpromoted Grant to General of the Army. Later, Grant broke with Johnson over Reconstruction policies. A war hero, drawn in by his sense of duty, Grant was unanimously nominated by the Republican Party and then elected president in 1868.
As president, Grant stabilized the post-war national economy, supported congressional Reconstruction and the Fifteenth Amendment, and prosecuted the Ku Klux Klan. Under Grant, the Union was completely restored. He appointed African Americans and Jewish Americans to prominent federal offices. In 1871, he created the first Civil Service Commission, advancing the civil service more than any prior president. Grant was re-elected in the 1872 presidential election, but was inundated by executive scandals during his second term. His response to the Panic of 1873 was ineffective in halting the Long Depression, which contributed to the Democrats winning the House majority in 1874. Grant's Native American policy was to assimilate Indians into Anglo-American culture. In Grant's foreign policy, the AlabamaClaims against Britain were peacefully resolved, but the Senate rejected Grant's annexation of Santo Domingo. In the disputed 1876 presidential election, Grant facilitated the approval by Congress of a peaceful compromise. Leaving office in 1877, Grant undertook a world tour, meeting prominent figures and becoming the first president to circumnavigate the world. In 1880, he was unsuccessful in obtaining the Republican nomination for a third term. In 1885, facing severe financial reversals and dying of throat cancer, Grant wrote his memoirs, covering his life through the Civil War, which were posthumously published and became a major critical and financial success. At his death, Grant was the most popular American and was memorialized as a symbol of national unity. Due to the pseudohistorical and negationist mythology of the Lost Cause of the Confederacy spread by Confederate sympathizers around the turn of the 20th century, historical assessments and rankings of Grant's presidency suffered considerably before they began recovering in the 21st century. Grant's critics take a negative view of his economic mismanagement and the corruption within his administration, while his admirers emphasize his policy towards Native Americans, vigorous enforcement of civil and voting rights for African Americans, and securing North and South as a single nation within the Union. Modern scholarship has better appreciated Grant's appointments of Cabinet reformers.
== Early life and education ==
=== Ancestry ===
Grant was of English and Ulster Scots ancestry; his immigrant ancestor Mathew Grant arrived with Puritans from England in the 1630. Grant's paternal great grandmother Suzanna Delano, of French origin, was the granddaughter of Jonathan Delano (1647–1720), 7th child of Philippe de La Noye (1602–1681). Philippe was descended from the illustrious House of Lannoy, and was one of the Fortune's passengers who landed at Plymouth in November 1621, joining the first settlers of the Mayflower. The offspring of the paternal uncle of Suzanna, Thomas Delano (born 1704), gave a few decades later another president of the United States, Franklin D. Roosevelt. His mother descended from Presbyterian immigrants from County Tyrone, Ireland (where the ancestral family home still stands in Ballygawley) to Bucks County, Pennsylvania.
=== family ===
Hiram Ulysses Grant was born in Point Pleasant, Ohio on April 27, 1822. Point Pleasant was located in the southwestern corner of Ohio near Cincinnati. His father Jesse Root Grant (1794–1873) was a self-reliant tannerand businessman, and his mother was Hannah (Simpson) Grant (1798–1883). Grant was Jesse's and Hannah's first child. Both Jessie and Hanna were natives of Pennsylvania. In the fall of 1823, the family moved to the village of Georgetown in Brown County, Ohio, where they had five more children.
At the age of five, young Grant began his formal education, starting at a subscription school and later was enrolled in two private schools. In the winter of 1836–1837, Grant was a student at Maysville Seminary, and in the autumn of 1838 he attended John Rankin's academy. Raised in a Methodist family devoid of religious pretentiousness, Grant prayed privately and was not an official member of the church. Unlike his younger siblings, Grant was never disciplined, baptized, or forced to attend church by his parents. One of his biographers suggests that Grant inherited a degree of introversion from his reserved, even "uncommonly detached" mother (she did not visit the White House during her son's presidency). At home, Grant assumed the duties which were expected of him as a young man, and they primarily included maintenance of the firewood supply; he thereby developed a noteworthy ability to work with, and control, horses which were in his charge, and he used it to provide transportation as a vocation during his youth. 
=== West Point (1839–1843) ===
At the age of 17, with the help of his father, Grant was nominated for a position at the United States Military Academy (USMA) at West Point, New Yorkby Congressman Thomas L. Hamer. Hamer mistakenly nominated him as "Ulysses S. Grant of Ohio". At West Point, he adopted this name, but only with a middle initial. Among his army colleagues at the academy, his nickname became "Sam" because the initials "U.S." also stood for "Uncle Sam". The "S", according to Grant, did not stand for anything, though Hamer had used it to abbreviate his mother's maiden name. The influence of Grant's family brought about the appointment to West Point, while Grant himself later recalled that "a military life had no charms for me". Grant, stood 5 feet 1 inches and weighed 117 lbs, when he entered West Point. Grant later said that he was lax in his studies, but he achieved excellent grades in mathematics and geology. Although Grant had a quiet nature, he did establish a few intimate friends at West Point, including Frederick Tracy Dent and Rufus Ingalls. He joined a fraternity group known as the Twelve in One, and was highly esteemed by his classmates. While not excelling scholastically, Grant studied under Romantic artist Robert Walter Weir and produced nine surviving artworks.He also established a reputation as a fearless and expert horseman, setting an equestrian high-jump record that stood almost 25 years. He graduated in 1843, ranking 21st in a class of 29. Grant later recalled that his departure from West Point was of the happiest of his times and that he had intended to resign his commission after serving the minimum term of obligated duty. Despite his excellent horsemanship, he was not assigned to the cavalry, as assignments were determined by class rank, not aptitude. Grant was instead assigned as a regimental quartermaster, managing supplies and equipment in the 4th Infantry Regiment, with the rank of brevet second lieutenant. 
== First assignment (1843–1846) ==
Grant's first assignment after graduation took him to the Jefferson Barracks near St. Louis, Missouri. After recuperating from an illness that left him thin and weak, Grant reported there in September 1843. It was the nation's largest military bastion in the West, commanded by Colonel Stephen W. Kearny. Grant was happy with his new commander, but still looked forward to the end of his military service. During this period, Grant had entertained the idea of becoming a mathematics teacher following his military service and spent much of his free time studying advanced algebra, geometry, and trigonometry. Grant spent some of his time in Missouri visiting the family of his West Point classmate, Frederick Dent, and getting to know Dent's sister, Julia; the two became secretly engaged in 1844.
== Mexican–American War (1846–1848) ==
link=https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Brevet_Second_Lieutenant_Ulysses_S._Grant_in_1843.jpg|alt=Engraving of young Grant in uniform|left|thumb|212x212px|Second lieutenant U.S. Grant in 1843
Rising tensions with Mexico saw Grant's unit shifted to Louisiana that year as a part of the Army of Observationunder Major General Zachary Taylor. President James K. Polk ordered Taylor south to force the Mexican government to bargain over disputed territory between the United States and Mexico. Grant was in charge of securing hundreds of mules in preparation for the move south. Grant purchased the mules from Mexicans and had the mules branded, but the mules resisted being broken to wear a saddle and pack. Taylor took notice of Grant when Grant jumped in the water to help his men remove oyster beds so ships could advance from Aransas Bay to Corpus Christi, saying he wished he "had more officers like Grant." On March 11, 1846, Grant's Fourth Infantry, part of the Third Brigade, left Corpus Christi, first traveling west and then veering south. Having reached the Rio Grande, both the Mexican and American armies spied on each other. On April 25, the Mexican–American War broke out when Mexican troops fired on and killed 11 American troops, commanded by Captain Seth Thornton, at Rancho de Carricitos. Defending Fort Texas on the Rio Grande, Taylor's army advanced on Palo Alto and Resaca de la Palma.
link=https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Battle_of_Monterrey.jpg|right|thumb|200x200px|Monterey street fighting during the Mexican–American War.September 1846
Grant's first battle experience came at the Battle of Palo Alto against a substantial Mexican force that intended to flank and attack the American army.Grant did not panic and readied his 1822 musket when Taylor ordered two large artillery guns that fired on the Mexican army, who retreated. The next day the American army followed the retreating Mexican army to Resaca de la Palma. Not content with his responsibilities as a quartermaster, Grant made his way to the front lines to engage in the battle, and participated in the Battle of Resaca de la Palma. Grant led his company in a charge, capturing a Mexican officer and a few of his men, his first victory. Grant later realized the ground he gained and his captives had earlier been won in the battle.
Crossing the Rio Grande, the United States army continued its advance into Mexico. Thousands of American volunteers were incorporated into the U.S. military serving alongside the regular army, including Thomas Hamer, who had nominated Grant to West Point. Starting in September, Taylor and his Army of Invasion, moved south and engaged the Mexican army at the Battle of Monterrey. During the battle, Grant demonstrated his equestrian ability, carrying a dispatch through Monterrey's sniper-lined streets on horseback while mounted in one stirrup.
President James K. Polk, who was wary of Taylor's growing popularity, divided his army, sending some troops (including Grant's unit) to form a new army under Maj. Gen. Winfield Scott. Scott's army landed at Veracruz and advanced toward Mexico City. The army met the Mexican forces at battles of Molino del Rey and Chapultepec outside Mexico City. At the latter battle, Grant dragged a howitzer into a church steeple to bombard nearby Mexican troops. Scott's army was soon into the city, and the Mexicans agreed to peace not long after. In his memoirs, Grant indicated that he had learned extensively by closely observing the decisions and actions of his commanding officers, particularly admiring Taylor's methods, and in retrospect, he identified with Taylor's style. At the time, he felt that the war was a wrongful one because he believed that territorial gains were designed to spread slavery throughout the nation; writing in 1883, Grant said "I was bitterly opposed to the measure, and to this day, I regard the war, which resulted, as one of the most unjust ever waged by a stronger nation against a weaker nation." He also opined that the later Civil War was inflicted on the nation as punishment for its aggression in Mexico.
== Marriage and family ==
On August 22, 1848, after a four-year engagement, Grant and Julia were married. He and Julia would go on to have four children: Frederick Dent Grant; Ulysses S. "Buck" Grant, Jr.; Ellen Wrenshall "Nellie" Grant; and Jesse Root Grant II.The couple corresponded during his service in Mexico; in one letter Julia shared with him a very pleasurable dream she had of him in a beard, which he was then sporting upon his return after the war.
== Extended military service (1848–1854) ==
link=https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:SanFranciscoharbor1851c_sharp.jpg|right|thumb|220x220px|San Francisco harbor during the California Gold Rush.1850–1851
Although Grant received promotions during the Mexican–American War, the peacetime army offered little for a young officer's advancement. Lieutenant Grant was assigned to several different posts over the ensuing six years. His first post-war assignments took him and Julia to Detroit and Sackets Harbor, New York, the location that made them the happiest. In the spring of 1852, he traveled in to Washington, D.C. in a failed attempt to prevail upon the Congress to rescind an order that he, in his capacity as quartermaster, reimburse the military $1000 in losses incurred on his watch, for which he bore no personal guilt. He was sent west to Fort Vancouver in the Oregon Territory in 1852, initially landing in San Francisco during the height of the California Gold Rush. Julia could not accompany him as she was eight months pregnant with their second child; further, a lieutenant's salary would not support a family on the frontier. The journey proved to be an ordeal due to transportation disruptions and an outbreak of cholera within the entourage while traveling overland through Panama. Grant made use of his organizational skills, arranging makeshift transportation and hospital facilities to take care of the sick. There were 150 4th Infantry fatalities including Grant's long-time friend John H. Gore. After Grant arrived in San Francisco he traveled to Fort Vancouver, continuing his service as quartermaster; the U.S. military was to keep the peace in the Pacific Northwest between settlers and Indians in the aftermath of the Cayuse War.
While on assignment out west and in an effort to supplement a military salary inadequate to support his family, Grant, assuming his work as quartermaster so equipped him, attempted but failed at several business ventures. The business failures in the West confirmed Jesse Grant's belief that his son had no head for business, creating frustration for both father and son. In at least one case Grant had even naively allowed himself to be swindled by a partner. These failures, along with the separation from his family, made for quite an unhappy soldier, husband and son. Rumors began to circulate that Grant was drinking in excess.
In the summer of 1853, Grant was promoted to captain, one of only fifty on active duty, and assigned to command Company F, 4th Infantry, at Fort Humboldt, on the northwest California coast. Without explanation, he shortly thereafter resigned from the army on July 31, 1854. The commanding officer at Fort Humboldt, brevet Lieutenant Colonel Robert C. Buchanan, a strict disciplinarian, had reports that Grant was intoxicated off duty while seated at the pay officer's table. Buchanan had previously warned Grant several times to stop his drinking. In lieu of a court-martial, Buchanan gave Grant an ultimatum to sign a drafted resignation letter. Grant resigned; the War Department stated on his record, "Nothing stands against his good name." Rumors, however, persisted in the regular army of Grant's intemperance. According to biographer McFeely, historians overwhelmingly agree that his intemperance at the time was a fact, though there are no eyewitness reports extant. Two of Grant's lieutenants corroborated this incident and Buchanan confirmed it to another officer in a conversation during the Civil War.Historian Jean Edward Smith says, "The story rings true. Jean Edward Smith maintains Grant's resignation was too sudden to be a calculated decision.Historian William McFeely said that Grant left the army simply because he was "profoundly depressed" and that the evidence as to how much and how often Grant drank remains elusive. Buchanan never mentioned it again until asked about it during the Civil War. The effects and extent of Grant's drinking on his military and public career are debated by historians. Lyle Dorsett said Grant was an "alcoholic" but functioned amazingly well. William Farina maintains Grant's devotion to family kept him from drinking to excess and sinking into debt.
Years later after his resignation, Grant told John Eaton, "the vice of intemperance had not a little to do with my decision to resign." Grant's father, again believing his son's only potential for success to be in the military, tried to get the Secretary of War to rescind the resignation, to no avail.
== Civilian life, poverty, and struggles (1854–1861) ==
link=https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Hardscrabble.jpg|thumb|"Hardscrabble" home Grant built in Missouri for his family.
link=https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Engraving_of_Mrs._Julia_Dent_Grant_in_1868.jpg|right|thumb|240x240px|Julia Dent Grant in 1868
At age 32, with no civilian vocation, Grant began to struggle through seven financially lean years and poverty. His father, Jesse, initially offered Grant a position in the Galena, Illinois branch of the tannery business, on condition that Julia and the children, for economic reasons, stay with her parents in Missouri, or Grant's in Kentucky. Ulysses and Julia were adamantly opposed to another separation, and declined the offer. In 1854, Grant farmed on his brother-in-law's property near St. Louis, using slaves owned by Julia's father, but it did not succeed. Two years later, Grant and family moved to a section of his father-in-law's farm; to give his family a home, built a house he called "Hardscrabble". Julia hated the rustic house, which she described as an "unattractive cabin". During this time, Grant also acquired a slave from Julia's father, a thirty-five-year-old man named William Jones. Having met with no success farming, the Grants left the farm when their fourth and final child was born in 1858. Grant freed his slave in 1859 instead of selling him, at a time when slaves commanded a high price and Grant needed money badly. For the next year, the family took a small house in St. Louis where he worked, again without success, with Julia's cousin Harry Boggs, as a bill collector. In 1860 Jesse offered him the job in his tannery in Galena, Illinois, without condition, which Ulysses accepted. The leather shop, "Grant & Perkins", sold harnesses, saddles, and other leather goods and purchased hides from farmers in the prosperous Galena area. He moved his family to Galena before that year.
Although unopposed to slavery at the time, Grant kept his political opinions private and never endorsed any candidate running for public office before the Civil War.His father-in-law was a prominent Democrat in Missouri, a factor that helped derail Grant's bid to become county engineer in 1859, while his own father was an outspoken Republican. In the 1856 election, Grant cast his first presidential vote for the Democratic candidate James Buchanan, saying he was really voting against Fremont, the Republican candidate. In 1860, he favored the Democratic presidential candidate Stephen A. Douglas over Abraham Lincoln, and Lincoln over the alternate Democratic candidate, John C. Breckinridge. Lacking the residency requirements in Illinois at the time, he could not vote. By August 1863, during the Civil War, after the fall of Vicksburg, Grant's political sympathies fully coincided with the Radical Republicans' aggressive prosecution of the war and for the abolition of slavery.
== Civil War ==
Main article: Ulysses S. Grant and the American Civil War
link=https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Ulysses_S_Grant_as_Brigadier_General,_1861.jpg|thumb|Brigadier General Grant, 1861
On April 12, 1861, the American Civil War began when Confederate troops attacked Fort Sumter in Charleston, South Carolina. The news came as a shock in Galena, and Grant shared his neighbors' concern about the war. On April 15, Lincoln called for 75,000 volunteers. The next day, Grant attended a mass meeting to assess the crisis and encourage recruitment, and a speech by his father's attorney, John Aaron Rawlins, stirred Grant's patriotism. In an April 21 letter to his father, Grant wrote out his views on the upcoming conflict: "We have a government and laws and a flag, and they must all be sustained. There are but two parties now, Traitors and Patriots."
=== Early commands ===
Further information: Kentucky in the American Civil War
On April 18, Grant chaired a second recruitment meeting, but turned down a captain's position as commander of the newly formed militia company, hoping his experience would aid him to obtain a more senior rank. His early efforts to be recommissioned were rejected by Major General George B. McClellan and Brigadier General Nathaniel Lyon. On April 29, supported by Congressman Elihu B. Washburne of Illinois, Grant was appointed military aide to Governor Richard Yatesand mustered ten regiments into the Illinois militia. On June 14, again aided by Washburne, Grant was appointed colonel and put in charge of the 21st Illinois Volunteer Infantry Regiment; he appointed John A. Rawlins as his aide-de-campand brought order and discipline to the regiment. Soon after, Grant and the 21st Regiment were transferred to Missouri to dislodge Confederate forces.
On August 5, with Washburne's aid, Grant was appointed brigadier general of volunteers. Major General John C. Frémont, Union commander of the West, passed over senior generals and appointed Grant commander of the District of Southeastern Missouri. On September 2, Grant arrived at Cairo, Illinois, assumed command by replacing Colonel Richard J. Oglesby, and set up his headquarters to plan a campaign down the Mississippi, and up the Tennessee and Cumberland rivers.
After the Confederates moved into western Kentucky, taking Columbus, with designs on southern Illinois, Grant notified Frémont and, without waiting for his reply, advanced on Paducah, Kentucky, taking it without a fight on September 6. Having understood the importance to Lincoln of Kentucky's neutrality, Grant assured its citizens, "I have come among you not as your enemy, but as your friend." On November 1, Frémont ordered Grant to "make demonstrations" against the Confederates on both sides of the Mississippi, but prohibited him from attacking.
=== Belmont (1861), Forts Henry and Donelson (1862) ===
Main articles: Battle of Belmont, Battle of Fort Henry, and Battle of Fort Donelson
link=https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Battle_of_Fort_Donelson.png|left|thumb|Battle of Fort Donelson by Kurz and Allison, 1887
On November 2, 1861, Lincoln removed Frémont from command, freeing Grant to attack Confederate soldiers encamped in Cape Girardeau, Missouri. On November 5, Grant, along with Brigadier General John A. McClernand, landed 2,500 men at Hunter's Point, and on November 7 engaged the Confederates at the Battle of Belmont. The Union army took the camp, but the reinforced Confederates under Brigadier Generals Frank Cheatham and Gideon J. Pillow forced a chaotic Union retreat. Grant had wanted to destroy Confederate strongholds at Belmont, Missouri, and Columbus, Kentucky, but was not given enough troops and was only able to disrupt their positions. Grant's troops escaped back to Cairo under fire from the fortified stronghold at Columbus. Although Grant and his army retreated, the battle gave his volunteers much-needed confidence and experience.
Columbus blocked Union access to the lower Mississippi. Grant and lieutenant colonel James B. McPherson planned to bypass Columbus and move against Fort Henry on the Tennessee River. They would then march east to Fort Donelson on the Cumberland River, with the aid of gunboats, opening both rivers and allowing the Union access further south. Grant presented his plan to Henry Halleck, his new commander in the newly created Department of Missouri. Halleck rebuffed Grant, believing he needed twice the number of troops. However, after consulting McClellan, he finally agreed on the condition that the attack would be in close cooperation with the navy Flag Officer, Andrew H. Foote.  Foote's gunboats bombarded Fort Henry, leading to its surrender on February 6, 1862, before Grant's infantry even arrived.
Grant ordered an immediate assault on Fort Donelson, which dominated the Cumberland River. Unaware of the garrison's strength, Grant, McClernand, and Smith positioned their divisions around the fort. The next day McClernand and Smith independently launched probing attacks on apparent weak spots but were forced to retreat. On February 14, Foote's gunboats began bombarding the fort, only to be repulsed by its heavy guns. The next day, Pillow attacked and routed McClernand's division. Union reinforcements arrived, giving Grant a total force of over 40,000 men. Grant was with Foote four miles away when the Confederates attacked. Hearing the battle, Grant rode back and rallied his troop commanders, riding over seven miles of freezing roads and trenches, exchanging reports. When Grant blocked the Nashville Road, the Confederates retreated back into Fort Donelson. On February 16, Foote resumed his bombardment, signaling a general attack. Confederate generals John B. Floyd and Pillow fled, leaving the fort in command of Simon Bolivar Buckner, who submitted to Grant's demand for "unconditional and immediate surrender".
Grant had won the first major victory for the Union, capturing Floyd's entire army of more than 12,000. Halleck was angry that Grant had acted without his authorization and complained to McClellan, accusing Grant of "neglect and inefficiency". On March 3, Halleck sent a telegram to Washington complaining that he had no communication with Grant for a week. Three days later, Halleck claimed "word has just reached me that ... Grant has resumed his bad habits (of drinking)."Lincoln, regardless, promoted Grant to major general of volunteers and the Northern press treated Grant as a hero. Playing off his initials, they took to calling him "Unconditional Surrender Grant".
=== Shiloh (1862) and aftermath ===
Further information: Battle of Shiloh
link=https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Thure_de_Thulstrup_-_Battle_of_Shiloh.jpg|thumb|Battle of Shiloh by Thure de Thulstrup, 1888
Reinstated by Halleck at the urging of Lincoln and Secretary of War Edwin Stanton, Grant rejoined his army with orders to advance with the Army of the Tennessee into Tennessee. His main army was located at Pittsburg Landing, while 40,000 Confederate troops converged at Corinth, Mississippi. Grant wanted to attack the Confederates at Corinth, but Halleck ordered him not to attack until Major General Don Carlos Buellarrived with his division of 25,000. Grant prepared for an attack on the Confederate army of roughly equal strength. Instead of preparing defensive fortifications, they spent most of their time drilling the largely inexperienced troops while Sherman dismissed reports of nearby Confederates.
On the morning of April 6, 1862, Grant's troops were taken by surprise when the Confederates, led by Generals Albert Sidney Johnston and P. G. T. Beauregard, struck first "like an Alpine avalanche" near Shiloh church, attacking five divisions of Grant's army and forcing a confused retreat toward the Tennessee River.Johnston was killed and command fell upon Beauregard. One Union line held the Confederate attack off for several hours, giving Grant time to assemble artillery and 20,000 troops near Pittsburg Landing. The Confederates finally broke and captured a Union division, but Grant's newly assembled line held the landing, while the exhausted Confederates, lacking reinforcements, halted their advance.
Bolstered by 18,000 troops from the divisions of Major Generals Buell and Lew Wallace, Grant counterattacked at dawn the next day and regained the field, forcing the disorganized and demoralized rebels to retreat to Corinth. Halleck ordered Grant not to advance more than one day's march from Pittsburg Landing, stopping the pursuit. Although Grant had won the battle, the situation was little changed. Grant, now realizing that the South was determined to fight, would later write, "Then, indeed, I gave up all idea of saving the Union except by complete conquest." Shiloh was the costliest battle in American history to that point and the staggering 23,746 casualties stunned the nation. Briefly hailed a hero for routing the Confederates, Grant was soon mired in controversy. The Northern press castigated Grant for shockingly high casualties, and accused him of drunkenness during the battle, contrary to the accounts of those with him at the time.Discouraged, Grant considered resigning but Sherman convinced him to stay.Lincoln dismissed Grant's critics, saying "I can't spare this man; he fights."Grant's costly victory at Shiloh ended any chance for the Confederates to prevail in the Mississippi valley or regain its strategic advantage in the West.
Halleck arrived from St. Louis on April 11, took command, and assembled a combined army of about 120,000 men. On April 29, he relieved Grant of field command and replaced him with Major General George Henry Thomas. Halleck slowly marched his army to take Corinth, entrenching each night. Meanwhile, Beauregard pretended to be reinforcing, sent "deserters" to the Union Army with that story, and moved his army out during the night, to Halleck's surprise when he finally arrived at Corinth on May 30.
Halleck divided his combined army and reinstated Grant as field commander on July 11. Later that year, on September 19, Grant's army defeated Confederates at the Battle of Iuka, then successfully defended Corinth, inflicting heavy casualties. On October 25, Grant assumed command of the District of the Tennessee.In November, after Lincoln's preliminary Emancipation Proclamation, Grant ordered units under his command to incorporate former slaves into the Union Army, giving them clothes, shelter, and wages for their services.
=== Vicksburg campaign (1862–1863) ===
Further information: Vicksburg Campaign and General Order No. 11 (1862)
link=https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:VicksburgBlockade.jpg|thumb|Grant's successful gamble: Porter's gunboats night ran the Confederate gauntlet at Vicksburg on the Mississippi River.
The Union capture of Vicksburg, the last Confederate stronghold on the Mississippi River, was considered vital as it would split the Confederacy in two. Lincoln appointed McClernand for the job, rather than Grant or Sherman. Halleck, who retained power over troop displacement, ordered McClernand to Memphis, and placed him and his troops under Grant's authority.
On November 13, 1862, Grant captured Holly Springs and advanced to Corinth. His plan was to attack Vicksburg overland, while Sherman would attack Vicksburg from Chickasaw Bayou. However, Confederate cavalry raids on December 11 and 20 broke Union communications and recaptured Holly Springs, preventing Grant and Sherman from converging on Vicksburg. McClernand reached Sherman's army, assumed command, and independently of Grant led a campaign that captured Confederate Fort Hindman. After the sack of Holly Springs, Grant considered and sometimes adopted the strategy of foraging the land, rather than exposing long Union supply lines to enemy attack.
Fugitive African-American slaves poured into Grant's district, whom he sent north to Cairo to be domestic servants in Chicago. However, Lincoln ended this when Illinois political leaders complained. On his own initiative, Grant set up a pragmatic program and hired Presbyterian chaplain John Eaton to administer contraband camps. Freed slaves picked cotton that was shipped north to aid the Union war effort. Lincoln approved and Grant's program was successful.Grant also worked freed black labor on a canal to bypass Vicksburg, incorporating the laborers into the Union Army and Navy.
link=https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Battle_of_Jackson_(cropped).tif|left|thumb|The Battle of Jackson, fought on May 14, 1863, was part of the Vicksburg Campaign.
Grant's war responsibilities included combating illegal Northern cotton trade and civilian obstruction.  He had received numerous complaints about Jewish speculators in his district. The majority, however, of those involved in illegal trading were not Jewish. To help combat this, Grant required two permits, one from the Treasury and one from the Union Army, to purchase cotton. On December 17, 1862, Grant issued a controversial General Order No. 11, expelling "Jews, as a class", from his military district. After complaints, Lincoln rescinded the order on January 3, 1863. Grant finally ended the order on January 17. He later described issuing the order as one of his biggest regrets.
On January 29, 1863, Grant assumed overall command. To bypass Vicksburg's guns, Grant slowly advanced his Union army south through water-logged terrain. The plan of attacking Vicksburg from downriver was risky because, east of the river, his army would be distanced from most of its supply lines, and would have to rely on foraging. On April 16, Grant ordered Admiral David Dixon Porter's gunboats south under fire from the Vicksburg batteries to meet up with troops who had marched south down the west side of the river. Grant ordered diversionary battles, confusing Pemberton and allowing Grant's army to move east across the Mississippi. Grant's army captured Jackson. Advancing west, he defeated Pemberton's army at the Battle of Champion Hill on May 16, forcing their retreat into Vicksburg.
After Grant's men assaulted the entrenchments twice, suffering severe losses, they settled in for a siege which lasted seven weeks. During quiet periods of the campaign, Grant would drink on occasion. The personal rivalry between McClernand and Grant continued until Grant removed him from command when he contravened Grant by publishing an order without permission. Pemberton surrendered Vicksburg to Grant on July 4, 1863. Vicksburg's fall gave Union forces control of the Mississippi River and split the Confederacy. By that time, Grant's political sympathies fully coincided with the Radical Republicans' aggressive prosecution of the war and emancipation of the slaves. The success at Vicksburg was a morale boost for the Union war effort. When Stanton suggested Grant be brought east to run the Army of the Potomac, Grant demurred, writing that he knew the geography and resources of the West better and he did not want to upset the chain of command in the East.
=== Chattanooga (1863) and promotion ===
Further information: Chattanooga Campaign
link=https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Battle_of_Missionary_Ridge_McCormick_Harvesting.jpg|thumb|Union troops swarm Missionary Ridge and defeat Bragg's army.
On October 16, 1863, Lincoln promoted Grant to major general in the regular army and assigned him command of the newly formed Division of the Mississippi, which comprised the Armies of the Ohio, the Tennessee, and the Cumberland.After the Battle of Chickamauga, the Army of the Cumberland retreated into Chattanooga, where they were partially besieged. Grant arrived in Chattanooga, where plans to resupply and break the partial siege had already been set. Forces commanded by Major General Joseph Hooker, which had been sent from the Army of the Potomac, approached from the west and linked up with other units moving east from inside the city, capturing Brown's Ferry and opening a supply line to the railroad at Bridgeport.
Grant planned to have Sherman's Army of the Tennessee, assisted by the Army of the Cumberland, assault the northern end of Missionary Ridge and roll down it on the enemy's right flank. On November 23, Major General George Henry Thomassurprised the enemy in open daylight, advancing the Union lines and taking Orchard Knob, between Chattanooga and the ridge. The next day, Sherman failed to get atop Missionary Ridge, which was key to Grant's plan of battle. Hooker's forces took Lookout Mountain in unexpected success. On the 25th, Grant ordered Thomas to advance to the rifle-pits at the base of Missionary Ridge after Sherman's army failed to take Missionary Ridge from the northeast. Four divisions of the Army of the Cumberland, with the center two led by Major General Philip Sheridan and Brigadier General Thomas J. Wood, chased the Confederates out of the rifle-pits at the base and, against orders, continued the charge up the 45-degree slope and captured the Confederate entrenchments along the crest, forcing a hurried retreat. The decisive battle gave the Union control of Tennessee and opened Georgia, the Confederate heartland, to Union invasion.
On March 2, 1864, Lincoln promoted Grant to lieutenant general, giving him command of all Union Armies. Grant's new rank had previously been held only by George Washington. Grant arrived in Washington on March 8 and was formally commissioned by Lincoln the next day at a Cabinet meeting. Grant developed a good working relationship with Lincoln, who allowed Grant to devise his own strategy.
Grant established his headquarters with General George Meade's Army of the Potomac in Culpeper, Virginia, and met weekly with Lincoln and Stanton in Washington. After protest from Halleck, Grant scrapped a risky invasion of North Carolina and planned five coordinated Union offensives to prevent Confederate armies from shifting troops along interior lines. Grant and Meade would make a direct frontal attack on Robert E. Lee's Army of Northern Virginia, while Sherman—now in command of all western armies—would destroy Joseph E. Johnston's Army of Tennessee and take Atlanta. Major General Benjamin Butler would advance on Lee from the southeast, up the James River, while Major General Nathaniel Banks would capture Mobile. Major General Franz Sigel was to capture granaries and rail lines in the fertile Shenandoah Valley. Grant now commanded 533,000 battle-ready troops spread out over an eighteen-mile front. 
=== Overland Campaign (1864) ===
Main article: Overland Campaign
The Overland Campaign was a series of brutal battles fought in Virginia during May and June 1864. Sigel's and Butler's efforts failed, and Grant was left alone to fight Lee. On May 4, Grant led the army from his headquarters towards Germanna Ford. They crossed the Rapidan unopposed. On May 5, the Union army attacked Lee in the battle of the Wilderness, a three-day battle with estimated casualties of 17,666 Union and 11,125 Confederate.
Rather than retreat, Grant flanked Lee's army to the southeast and attempted to wedge his forces between Lee and Richmond at Spotsylvania Court House.Lee's army got to Spotsylvania first and a costly battle ensued, lasting thirteen days, with heavy casualties. On May 12, Grant attempted to break through Lee's Muleshoe salient guarded by Confederate artillery, resulting in one of the bloodiest assaults of the Civil War, known as the Bloody Angle. Unable to break Lee's lines, Grant again flanked the rebels to the southeast, meeting at North Anna, where a battle lasted three days.
==== Cold Harbor ====
Main article: Battle of Cold Harbor
link=https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Grant_crop_of_Cold_Harbor_photo.png|thumb|General Grant at his headquarters in Cold Harbor, Virginia, June 1864
The recent bloody Wilderness campaign had severely diminished Confederate morale;Grant believed breaking through Lee's lines at its weakest point, Cold Harbor, a vital road hub that linked to Richmond, would mean a quick end to the war. Grant already had two corps in position at Cold Harbor with Hancock's corps on the way.
Lee's lines were extended north and east of Richmond and Petersburg for approximately ten miles, but at several points there were no fortifications built yet, including Cold Harbor. On June 1 and 2 both Grant and Lee were waiting for reinforcements to arrive. Hancock's men had marched all night and arrived too exhausted for an immediate attack that morning. Grant postponed the attack until 5 p.m., and then again until 4:30 a.m. on June 3. However, Grant and Meade did not give specific orders for the attack, leaving it up to the corps commanders to coordinate. Grant had not yet learned that overnight Lee had hastily constructed entrenchments to thwart any breach attempt at Cold Harbor.Grant was anxious to make his move before the rest of Lee's army arrived. On the morning of June 3, with a force of more than 100,000 men, against Lee's 59,000, Grant attacked, not realizing that Lee's army was now well entrenched, much of it obscured by trees and bushes. Grant's army suffered 12,000–14,000 casualties, while Lee's army suffered 3,000–5,000 casualties, but Lee was less able to replace them.
The unprecedented number of casualties heightened anti-war sentiment in the North. After the battle, Grant wanted to appeal to Lee under the white flag for each side to gather up their wounded, most of them Union soldiers, but Lee insisted that a total truce be enacted and while they were deliberating all but a few of the wounded died in the field. Without giving an apology for the disastrous defeat in his official military report, Grant confided in his staff after the battle and years later wrote in his memoirs that he "regretted that the last assault at Cold Harbor was ever made."
=== Siege of Petersburg (1864–1865) ===
Further information: Siege of Petersburg and Battle of the Crater
Undetected by Lee, Grant moved his army south of the James River, freed Butler from the Bermuda Hundred, and advanced toward Petersburg, Virginia's central railroad hub, resulting in a nine-month siege. Northern resentment grew. Sheridan was assigned command of the Union Army of the Shenandoah and Grant directed him to "follow the enemy to their death" in the Shenandoah Valley.After Grant's abortive attempt to capture Petersburg, Lincoln supported Grant in his decision to continue.
Grant had to commit troops to check Confederate General Jubal Early's raids in the Shenandoah Valley, which were getting dangerously close to Washington. By late July, at Petersburg, Grant reluctantly approved a plan to blow up part of the enemy trenches from a tunnel filled with gunpowder. The massive explosion instantly killed an entire Confederate regiment. The poorly led Union troops under Major General Ambrose Burnside and Brigadier General James H. Ledlie, rather than encircling the crater, rushed into it. Recovering from the surprise, Confederates, led by Major General William Mahone, surrounded the crater and easily picked off Union troops. The Union's 3,500 casualties outnumbered the Confederates' three-to-one. The battle marked the first time that Union black troops, who endured a large proportion of the casualties, engaged in any major battle in the east. Grant admitted that the tactic had been a "stupendous failure".
link=https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:The_Peacemakers_1868.jpg|thumb|Grant (center left) next to Lincoln with General Sherman (far left) and Admiral Porter (right) – The Peacemakers by George Peter Alexander Healy, 1868
Grant would later meet with Lincoln and testify at a court of inquiry against Generals Burnside and Ledlie for their incompetence. In his memoirs, he blamed them for that disastrous Union defeat. Rather than fight Lee in a full-frontal attack as he had done at Cold Harbor, Grant continued to force Lee to extend his defenses south and west of Petersburg, better allowing him to capture essential railroad links.
Union forces soon captured Mobile Bay and Atlanta and now controlled the Shenandoah Valley, ensuring Lincoln's reelection in November. Sherman convinced Grant and Lincoln to allow his army to march on Savannah. Sherman cut a 60-mile (97 km) path of destruction unopposed, reached the Atlantic Ocean, and captured Savannah on December 22. On December 16, after much prodding by Grant, the Union Army under Thomas smashed John Bell Hood's Confederates at Nashville. These campaigns left Lee's forces at Petersburg as the only significant obstacle remaining to Union victory.
By March 1865, Lee was trapped and his strength severely weakened. He was running out of reserves to replace the high battlefield casualties and remaining Confederate troops, no longer having confidence in their commander and under the duress of trench warfare, deserted by the thousands. On March 25, in a desperate effort, Lee sacrificed his remaining troops (4,000 Confederate casualties) at Fort Stedman, a Union victory and the last Petersburg line battle.
=== Surrender of Lee and Union victory (1865) ===
Main articles: Third Battle of Petersburg, Appomattox Campaign, and Battle of Appomattox Court House
link=https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:General_Robert_E._Lee_surrenders_at_Appomattox_Court_House_1865.jpg|left|thumb|Defeated by Grant, Lee surrendered at Appomattox Court House.
On April 2, Grant ordered a general assault on Lee's forces; Lee abandoned Petersburg and Richmond, which Grant captured. A desperate Lee and part of his army attempted to link up with the remnants of Joseph E. Johnston's army. Sheridan's cavalry stopped the two armies from converging, cutting them off from their supply trains. Grant sent his aide Orville Babcock to carry his last dispatch to Lee demanding his surrender. Grant immediately rode west, bypassing Lee's army, to join Sheridan who had captured Appomattox Station, blocking Lee's escape route. On his way, Grant received a letter from Lee stating Lee would surrender his army.
On April 9, Grant and Lee met at Appomattox Court House. Although Grant felt depressed at the fall of "a foe who had fought so long and valiantly," he believed the Southern cause was "one of the worst for which a people ever fought."Grant wrote out the terms of surrender: "each officer and man will be allowed to return to his home, not to be disturbed by U.S. authority so long as they observe their paroles and the laws in force where they may reside." Lee immediately accepted Grant's terms and signed the surrender document, without any diplomatic recognition of the Confederacy. Lee asked that his former Confederate troops keep their horses, which Grant generously allowed. Grant ordered his troops to stop all celebration, saying the "war is over; the rebels are our countrymen again." Johnston's Tennessee army surrendered on April 26, 1865, Richard Taylor'sAlabama army on May 4, and Kirby Smith's Texas army on May 26, ending the war.
=== Lincoln's assassination ===
Main article: Assassination of Abraham Lincoln
On April 14, 1865, Grant attended a cabinet meeting in Washington. Lincoln invited him and his wife Julia to Ford's Theatre but they declined, because they planned to travel to their home in Burlington. In a conspiracy that also targeted top cabinet members in one last effort to topple the Union, Lincoln was shot by John Wilkes Booth at the theater and died the next morning. Many, including Grant himself, thought that Grant had been a target in the plot, and during the subsequent trial, the government tried to prove that Grant had been stalked by Booth's conspirator Michael O'Laughlen. Stanton notified Grant of the president's death and summoned him to Washington. Vice President Andrew Johnson was sworn in as president on April 15. Grant was determined to work with Johnson, and he privately expressed "every reason to hope" in the new president's ability to run the government "in its old channel". 
== Commanding generalship (1865–1869) ==
Main article: Commanding generalship of Ulysses S. Grant
link=https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Ulysses_S_Grant-Constant_Mayer.jpg|left|thumb|Constant Mayer's portrait of General Grant, 1866
At the war's end, Grant remained commander of the army, with duties that included dealing with Emperor Maximilian and French troops in Mexico, enforcement of Reconstruction in the former Confederate states, and supervision of Indian wars on the western Plains. After the Grand Review of the Armies, Lee and his generals were indicted for treason in Virginia. Johnson demanded they be put on trial, but Grant insisted that they should not be tried, citing his Appomatox amnesty. Charges against Lee were dropped. Grant secured a house for his family in Georgetown Heights in 1865 but instructed Elihu Washburne that for political purposes his legal residence remained in Galena, Illinois. On July 25, 1866, Congress promoted Grant to the newly created rank of General of the Army of the United States.
=== Tour of the South ===
Further information: Reconstruction era
President Johnson's Reconstruction policy included a speedy return of the former Confederates to Congress, reinstating white people to office in the South, and relegating black people to second-class citizenship. On November 27, 1865, Grant was sent by Johnson on a fact-finding mission to the South, to counter a pending less favorable report by Senator Carl Schurz which reported that white people in the South harbored resentment of the North, and that black people suffered from violence and fraud. Grant recommended continuation of the Freedmen's Bureau, which Johnson opposed, but advised against using black troops.
Grant believed the people of the South were not ready for self-rule and required federal government protection. Concerned that the war led to diminished respect for civil authorities, he continued using the Army to maintain order. Grant's report on the South, which he later recanted, sympathized with Johnson's Reconstruction policies. Although Grant desired former Confederates be returned to Congress, he advocated eventual black citizenship. On December 19, the day after the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment was announced in the Senate, Johnson's response used Grant's report, read aloud to the Senate, to undermine Schurz's final report and Radical opposition to Johnson's policies.
=== Break from Johnson ===
link=https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Image_from_Swingin%27_Round_the_Cirkle,_or_Andy%27s_trip_to_the_West,_together_with_a_life_of_its_hero_04.jpg|thumb|Cartoon illustration from Swingin' Round the Cirkle, or Andy's trip to the West by David Ross Locke, suggesting that Grant was a bigger draw on the multi-city tour than was Johnson 
Grant was initially optimistic about Johnson.Despite differing styles, the two got along cordially and Grant attended cabinet meetings concerning Reconstruction. By February 1866, the relationship began to break down. Johnson opposed Grant's closure of the Richmond Examiner for disloyal editorials and his enforcement of the Civil Rights Act of 1866, passed over Johnson's veto. Needing Grant's popularity, Johnson took Grant on his "Swing Around the Circle" tour, a failed attempt to gain national support for lenient policies toward the South. Grant privately called Johnson's speeches a "national disgrace" and he left the tour early. On March 2, 1867, overriding Johnson's veto, Congress passed the first of three Reconstruction Acts, using military officers to enforce the policy. Protecting Grant, Congress passed the Command of the Army Act, preventing his removal or relocation, and forcing Johnson to pass orders through Grant.
In August 1867, bypassing the Tenure of Office Act, Johnson discharged Secretary of War Edwin Stanton without Senate approval and appointed Grant ad interimSecretary of War. Stanton was the only remaining cabinet member friendly to the Radicals. Although Grant initially recommended against dismissing Stanton, he accepted the position, not wanting the Army to fall under a conservative appointee who would impede Reconstruction, and managed an uneasy partnership with Johnson.
In December 1867, Congress voted to keep Stanton, who was reinstated by a Senate Committee on January 10, 1868. Grant told Johnson he was going to resign the office to avoid fines and imprisonment. Johnson, who believed the law would be overturned, said he would assume Grant's legal responsibility, and reminded Grant that he had promised to delay his resignation until a suitable replacement was found. The following Monday, not willing to wait for the law to be overturned, Grant surrendered the office to Stanton, causing confusion with Johnson. With the backing of his cabinet, Johnson accused Grant of lying and "duplicity" at a stormy cabinet meeting, while a shocked and disappointed Grant felt it was Johnson who was lying. The publication of angry messages between Grant and Johnson led to a complete break between them. The controversy led to Johnson's impeachment and trial in the Senate; he was acquitted by one vote.Grant's popularity rose among the Radical Republicans and his nomination for the presidency appeared certain.
=== Election of 1868 ===
Main article: 1868 United States presidential election
link=https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Grant-Colfax.png|right|thumb|Grant–Colfax Republican ticket
At the 1868 Republican National Convention, the delegates unanimously nominated Grant for president and Speaker of the House Schuyler Colfax for vice president. Although Grant had preferred to remain in the army, he accepted the Republican nomination, believing that he was the only one who could unify the nation. The Republicans advocated "equal civil and political rights to all" and African American enfranchisement. The Democrats, having abandoned Johnson, nominated former governor Horatio Seymour of New York for president and Francis P. Blair of Missouri for vice president. The Democrats opposed suffrage for African Americans and advocated the immediate restoration of former Confederate states to the Union and amnesty from "all past political offenses".
Grant played no overt role during the campaign and was joined by Sherman and Sheridan in a tour of the West that summer. However, the Republicans adopted his words "Let us have peace" as their campaign slogan. Grant's 1862 General Order No. 11 became an issue during the presidential campaign; he sought to distance himself from the order, saying "I have no prejudice against sect or race, but want each individual to be judged by his own merit." The Democrats and their Klan supporters focused mainly on ending Reconstruction, intimidating black people and Republicans, and returning control of the South to the white Democrats and the planter class, alienating War Democrats in the North. Grant won the popular vote and an Electoral College landslide of 214 votes to Seymour's 80.Seymour received a majority of white voters, but Grant was aided by 500,000 votes cast by black people, winning him 52.7 percent of the popular vote. He lost Louisiana and Georgia, primarily due to Ku Klux Klan violence against African-American voters. At the age of 46, Grant was the youngest president yet elected.
== Personality ==
Grant was often deadpan but could also be quick and witty. He was known to be somewhat shy. very loyal and has great care for his men will being.He was an honorable man who was unable or unwilling to see dishonor in others. He disdained politics but rose to the country's highest political office. highly intelligent, superstitious, courteous. Many students have described him has been a great man for his time. 
although in the heat of the war of battle grant has shown to be very aggressive and unwavering to give up.he was also very cool on the pressure even when bullets were flying past him some people have described them that he was better focused when being pressured hardly showing any fear at all.
in terms of religious views. He is often categorized as a Methodist, likely because his wife was a Methodist or because of an incident in which a Methodist minister allegedly sprinkled water on a sleeping Grant after he had taken ill and announced the baptism to the public. During his early years, he was raised by Christian parents. Grant believes that the Christian church merely functions to keep black people in a subservient state, and that the God worshipped by his family and friends, therefore, is nothing more than a white God.His presidency he was a strong supporter of separation between church and state.
=== Views on race ===
slavery and African-Americans
In the early days of their marriage, after resigning his army commission, Grant lived with the Dents at White Haven, where Frederick assigned four enslaved people to serve Julia, though she was never registered as their legal owner. For a few months or even a year, Grant himself owned an enslaved man, William Jones. Grant did benefit from slavery during his time living with the Dents in Missouri, according to Nick Sacco, Park Ranger at Ulysses S. Grant National Historic Site in St. Louis.
It’s possible that Grant may have been uncomfortable with slavery even before the Civil War. Though he was poor at the time and could have sold William for up to $1500 ($43,000 in today’s money), Grant instead set William free on March 29, 1859. In an August 1863 letter to his patron in Congress, Illinois Representative Elihu B. Washburne, Grant wrote about his conversion to emancipation. Admitting that he had never been an abolitionist or even anti-slavery before the war, Grant acknowledged that it had become “patent to my mind early in the rebellion that the North & South could never live at peace with each other except as one nation, and that without Slavery….I would not therefore be willing to see any settlemen[t] until this question is forever settled.”
While some Union generals, including Grant’s close ally William T. Sherman, resisted orders from President Lincoln to recruit freedmen as soldiers after the final Emancipation Proclamation went into effect at the beginning of 1863, Grant actively incorporated Black troops and urged his subordinates to do the same. “Of the major Union commanders, he was the most enthusiastic advocate of enlisting blacks in the Union army,” according to historian Brooks Simpson.
When Grant assumed command of all Union armies in March 1864, he continued the established practice of denying prisoner exchanges with the Confederates. This was in protest against Confederate policy of enslaving captured Black Union troops. 
When General Benjamin Butler began negotiating a resumption of prisoner exchanges, Grant wrote Butler a letter on April 17 prioritizing “the status of colored prisoners.” He ordered Butler to demand that “no distinction whatever will be made in the exchange between white and colored prisoners,” and that “the same terms as to treatment while prisoners and conditions of release and exchange must be exacted… in the case of colored soldiers as in the case of white soldiers…Non-acquiescence by the Confederate authorities will be regarded as a refusal on their part to agree to the further exchange of prisoners.”
Grant also wanted to deter Confederate commanders from murdering Black troops after they had surrendered, as Nathan Bedford Forest did at Fort Pillow. “Grant stated that the murder of surrendering African American soldiers at Fort Pillow on April 12 motivated him to issue a formal demand that Black and White United States soldiers receive identical consideration in their treatment and exchange as prisoners by the Confederacy,” according to the National Park Service.
After the war, Grant hoped that treating old Confederates leniently would encourage them to act loyally to the United States and respect its laws, especially those abolishing slavery and granting citizenship to former slaves, with voting rights for Black men.
When white Southern leaders didn’t keep their part of the bargain, and unleashed a campaign of domestic terrorism against Black Southerners, Grant felt betrayed and knew that he had to act to guarantee civil rights or else the Union victory he had won on the battlefield would be lost.The effects of the late civil strife have been to free the slave and make him a citizen. Yet he is not possessed of the civil rights which citizenship should carry with it. This is wrong, and should be corrected.As General of the Army in the immediate aftermath of the war, and then as president during Reconstruction, Grant applied his strong hand to keep the peace by ensuring justice. That’s why he helped pass the Fifteenth Amendment giving Black men the vote along with Enforcement Acts still used today to protect civil rights, established the Department of Justice to prosecute white supremacist terrorists in the South and wound up crushing the original Ku Klux Klan.
Grant also supported civil rights legislation passed by Congress.
“The Civil Rights Act passed in 1866 was the first effort by the federal govt. to define citizenship and to offer protection to those people in cases where states failed to do so,” explains Brooks Simpson. “Had the southern states offered equal protection under law for African-Americans, the legislation would not have been necessary. The act provided the foundation for subsequent civil rights legislation and the definition for national citizenship, but proved less effective in forcing southern civil courts to dispense color-blind justice.”
As Grant’s reputation has risen in recent years, he’s often praised for his generous treatment of former Confederates and his attempts to reconcile with the white South under the slogan “Let us have peace.” 
We should remember that Grant was not willing to accept peace and reconciliation on the terms of white supremacy, but that he insisted that any peace must include fairness for Black citizens.
Jews
In recent decades, Ulysses S. Grant has been much criticized for issuing General Orders No. 11 during the Civil War, expelling all “Jews as a class” from his area of command in states along the eastern bank of the Mississippi River from Kentucky through Tennessee down to Mississippi. The Encyclopaedia Judaica writes that in Jewish memory, “Grant’s name has been linked irrevocably with anti-Jewish prejudice.”
Jonathan Sarna, professor at Brandeis University and chief historian at the National Museum of American Jewish History, thinks that Grant has gotten a bum rap. In When General Grant Expelled the Jews, Sarna writes that Grant was criticized for his order to expel Jewish people without considering his later regret of the order along with his many years of work afterwards to support Jewish interests.
Starting in the 20th century, criticism of Grant for alleged anti-semitism paralleled criticism of Grant by promoters of the Lost Cause of the Confederacy who wanted to take down Grant’s reputation because he beat their hero Robert E. Lee, helped free the enslaved and stood up for Black Southerners’ civil rights during Reconstruction.
Sarna finds that the truth is more complicated and more favorable to Grant.Grant’s record with respect to Jews now requires revision. During his administration, Jews moved from outsider to insider status in the United States, and from weakness to strength. Having abruptly expelled jews in 1862, Grant as president significantly empowered them. He insisted, over the objections of those who propounded narrower visions of America, that the country could embrace people of different races, religions, and creeds. He endeavored, as president, to further human rights at home and abroad.The trouble started when on December 17, 1862, Grant issued General Orders No. 11, which stated: “The Jews, as a class, violating every regulation of trade established by the Treasury Department, and also Department orders, are hereby expelled from the Department.”
Only the full text conveys the sense of the order:General Orders No. 11
Head Quarters 13th Army Corps,
Department of the Tennessee,
Oxford, Miss. Dec. 17, 1862.
I.. The Jews, as a class, violating every regulation of trade established by the Treasury Department, and also Department orders, are hereby expelled from the Department.
II.. Within twenty-four hours from the receipt of this order by Post Commanders, they will see that all of this class of people be furnished passes and required to leave, and any one returning after such notification will be arrested and held in confinement until an opportunity occurs of sending them out as prisoners, unless furnished with permit from Head Quarters.
III.. No permits will be given these people to visit Head Quarters for the purpose of making personal application for trade permits.
By Order of Maj. Genl. U.S. Grant
JNO. A. RAWLINS
Ass’t Adj’t Genl.Grant issued the edict in an attempt to stop smuggling cotton from the Confederacy in exchange for gold and badly needed goods to help the enemy war effort from the area under the command of Grant’s Department of the Tennessee. Some of this illegal trade was conducted by Jewish traders. Grant’s father, Jesse, an aggressive and even obnoxious businessman, was allied with two Jewish traders known as the Mack brothers. At the time, Jesse was pressing his son to issue government permits to allow the Macks to trade cotton with the South, what amounted to a special favor for a family member. In frustration and in midst of the fog of war, Grant issued an order aimed at smugglers that was too broad, affecting all Jewish people in the military district.
The order was immediately denounced by Jews and non-Jews alike. 
At least thirty Jewish families living in Paducah, Kentucky were forced to leave their homes. Newspapers denounced Grant’s order, and he was nearly censured by Congress. In response to lobbying from Jewish leaders, Abraham Lincoln rescinded the order soon after it was issued. And when he took the opportunity to comment on it, Grant later took full responsibility for the order and admitted that he regretted ever having issued it.
“I do not pretend to sustain the Order,” Grant wrote just after elected president for the first time in 1868. “The order was issued and sent without thinking of the Jews as a sect or race. I have no prejudice against sect or race, but want each individual to be judged by his own merit. Order No. 11 does not sustain this statement, I admit, but then I do not sustain that order. It never would have been issued if it had not been telegraphed the moment it was penned, and without reflection.”
Grant spent the rest of his career not only apologizing for General Orders No. 11, but also trying to make up for the ill-considered military edict by befriending Jewish Americans on the personal level and promoting Jewish interests politicly once he became president. “Having apologized for his anti-Jewish order in 1868, he became highly sensitive, even hypersensitive, to Jewish concerns,” Sarna writes.
Sarna argues that Grant’s presidency was a “golden age” for American Jews, with more appointed to federal positions than ever before, including the first Jewish governor of an American territory and the first Jewish diplomats to represent the United States abroad. Grant also, at the urging of American Jewish leaders, stood up for the human rights of Jewish minorities in Russia and Romania who were being persecuted by their governments. After Grant left office, opportunities closed for American Jews, just as they closed for African Americans. It would be decades before either group enjoyed the respect and chances for advancement they had while Grant was president.
At his death in 1885, Jewish leaders joined other Americans in paying tribute to a leader who they compared to leaders in history like Moses and to the most famous Jewish leader of the time, who died a few days after Grant, British financier and philanthropist Sir Moses Montefiore. “At Covenant Hall in Philadelphia and at an Orthodox synagogue in Wilmington, portraits of Montefiore and Grant hung side by side,” explains Sarna.
The legend of Grant as a friend of the Jewish people grew so strong that one cookbook author claimed that Grant was inspired by his book to eat his meat kosher style.
On the sabbath following Grant’s death, nationally known Rabbi EBM Browne announced to his New York congregation that “the Jews have lost a great friend in the death of Gen. Grant.”
For most Jewish leaders, Grant had more than made up for his mistake in issuing General Orders 11 by his earnest support of equality and human rights for Jewish Americans and Jews abroad.
When Grant’s tomb was completed in New York City in 1897, Jewish groups played a prominent role in honoring the ex-president. A massive “Grant Parade” of 50,000 marchers included pupils from the Hebrew Orphan asylum “with their famous band,” 75 cadets from the New York Hebrew Institute and “many lads of Jewish parentage” from the public schools.
Simon Wolf, a Washington, DC attorney appointed by Grant Recorder of Deeds for the District of Columbia, published this eulogy of Grant in several Jewish newspapers: “His tomb will stand on the banks of the Hudson but his memory and achievements will live in the hearts of all men who love liberty and admire nobility of character for all time to come.”
Native American
Ulysses S. Grant sympathized with the plight of Native Americans and believed that the original occupants of the land were worthy of study. Grant's Inauguration Address set the tone for the Grant administration Native American Peace policy. The Board of Indian Commissioners was created to make reforms in Native policy and to ensure Native tribes received federal help. Grant lobbied the United States Congress to ensure that Native peoples would receive adequate funding. The hallmark of Grant's Peace policy was the incorporation of religious groups that served on Native agencies, which were dispersed throughout the United States. 
Grant was the first President of the United States to appoint a Native American, Ely S. Parker, as the Commissioner of Indian Affairs. After the Piegan massacre, in 1870, military officers were barred from holding elected or appointed offices. During Grant's first term, American Indian Wars decreased. By the end of his second term, his Peace policy fell apart. Settlers demanded to invade Native land to get access to gold in the Black Hills. The Modoc War (1872–1873) and the Battle of the Little Bighorn (1876), were detrimental to Grant's goal of enforced Native assimilation to European American culture and society. 
Historians admire Grant's sincere efforts to improve Native relations in the United States but remain critical of the destruction of buffalo herds, which served as a tribal food supply. Native American culture was destroyed in order to engineer the Cultural assimilation of Native Americans into citizenship, and European American culture and government. Detrimental to his Peace policy was religious agency infighting in addition to Parker's resignation in 1871. Grant's intentions of peacefully "civilizing" Natives were often in conflict with the nation's westward settlement, the pursuit of gold, the Long Depression (1873-1896), financial corruption, racism, and ranchers. The driving force behind the Peace policy and Native land displacement, was the American ideal of Manifest Destiny. The primary goal of Grant's Indian policy was to have Native Americans assimilated into white culture, education, language, religion, and citizenship, that was designed to break Indian reliance on their own tribal, nomadic, hunting, and religious lifestyles. Some Grant biographers argue that Grant’s Indian policies were well-intentioned, while others argue his assimilationist policies were rooted in destroying Native American culture in the fulfilment of Manifest Destiny.
Chinese
the Naturalization Act of 1790 restricted U.S. citizenship to immigrants who were defined as “white” until 1870, when it was expanded to include immigrants of African descent. Furthermore, Atlantic seaboard states such as New York and Massachusetts used state “poor laws” to prevent some immigrants from settling within their borders before the Civil War. However, only one federal law existed to restrict immigration between 1787 and 1875. That law, which was passed in 1803 but poorly enforced, banned the "importation" of any free "negro, mulatto, or other person of color" to the United States in the wake of the Haitian Revolution. However, the federal government's relationship to immigration policy changed on March 3, 1875, when President Ulysses S. Grant signed the Page Act into law. While Grant did not comment on the Page Act upon signing it into law, he had invited such legislation to be passed during his Sixth Annual Message to Congress on December 7, 1874. Grant remarked in that speech that many Chinese people had not come to the United States voluntarily, and that Chinese women were "brought for shameful purposes, to the disgrace of the communities where [they] settled and to the great demoarlization of the young of those localities." In his Seventh Annual Message to Congress a year later, Grant expressed concerns about the “twin barbarisms” of polygamy and slavery. He first mentioned that Mormons in Utah territory were engaged in a “scandalous condition of affairs” by practicing polygamy. “That polygamy should exist in a free, enlightened, and Christian country” was an outrage that needed to be corrected with legislation protecting monogamous marriage, “innocent children [and] . . . innocent plural wives.” Continuing, he connected the fight to end polygamy with the fight to end sex trafficking then being practiced through “the importation of Chinese women, but few of whom are brought to our shores to pursue honorable or useful occupations.” Whereas Grant believed Mormon women were innocent victims in oppressive polygamous marriages, he does not seem to express the same sympathy for Chinese women victimized through the sex trade.
Grant expanded his thoughts in a conversation with Chinese general and diplomat Li Hongzhang during his two-and-a-half-year world tour. Visiting Tientsin, China, in June 1879, Grant lamented that prejudice and violence against Chinese Americans was commonplace. “There is a class of thriftless, discontented adventurers, agitators, and communists, who do not work themselves and go about sowing discontent among honest workingmen,” he claimed. “Your Excellency may rest assured that the great mass of the American people will never consent to any injustice toward China or any class.”
Continuing, Grant acknowledged that he was “ready to admit that the Chinese have been of great service to our country. I do not know what the Pacific coast would be without them. They came to our aid at the time when their aid was invaluable” in building the West’s infrastructure. Expressing skepticism about anti-immigrant workers who claimed California was “overstocked” with Chinese labor, Grant remarked that “I rather suspect that many generations must pass before so great an empire as California would have too much labor.” The biggest concern for Grant was that “the trouble about your countrymen coming to America is that they come under circumstances which make them slaves. They do not come of their own free will. They do not come to stay, bringing their wives and children. Their labor is not their own, but the property of capitalists . . . We had slavery some years since, and we only freed ourselves from slavery at the cost of a dreadful war,” Grant warned. “Having made those sacrifices to suppress slavery in one form, we do not feel like encouraging it in another.” While the end of chattel slavery seemingly created the right of all individuals to make contracts for their labor, Grant’s comments suggest that he believed some contracts were unfair, coercive, and merely another form of slavery. Ulysses and Julia Grant visited China on their world tour from April 30 through June 15, 1879, stopping to visit Hong Kong, Shanghai, Peking, and Tientsin along the way. General Grant’s comments about his experiences in China were decidedly mixed. Privately, he stated to former Secretary of the Navy Adolph E. Borie that “Tientsin is a more populous city than Shanghai and more repulsively filthy,” and wrote to longtime friend Daniel Ammen that “it is not a country nor a people calculated to invite the traveler to make a second visit.” However, he also expressed to Ammen his admiration for the industry, work ethic, and desire for education among the Chinese people. “My belief is that . . . Europe will [soon] be complaining of the too rapid advance of China.”
Grant nevertheless seems to have been genuinely moved by his experiences in Asia. He remarked that Hong Kong “is really the most beautiful place I have yet seen in the East.” When a land dispute emerged between China and Japan during the world tour, Grant agreed to work as a mediator to help find a peaceful solution. And in numerous public speeches he expressed gratitude for the warm welcome he received from the Chinese people. During one speech he announced that “my visit to China has been full of interest. I have learned a great deal of the civilization, the manners, the achievements, and the industry of China that I had never known before. My visit to China has increased my estimate of the civilization and the character of the Chinese people, and I shall leave the country with increased feelings of friendship towards them.”
== Myths about Grant ==
Most Americans know little about Ulysses S. Grant except that he helped the Union win the Civil War (somehow, against the more impressive Robert E. Lee), that he drank too much and that his presidency was plagued by corruption.
His political rivals and Confederate sympathizers have spread fake quotes myths and accusations.
Fake quotes.
If I thought this war was to abolish slavery, I would resign my commission and offer my sword to the other side. 
-- Falsely attributed to Grant by Lost Cause.
Gen. Lee, keep that sword. You have won it by your gallantry. You have not been whipped but overpowered, and I cannot receive it as a token of surrender from so brave a man.
-- Falsely attributed to Grant by Confederate newspapers after Lee's surrender
Good help is so hard to come by these days.
-- Falsely attributed to Grant as an excuse for why he allegedly owned slaves during the Civil War, a false claim made by Confederate sympathizers
I have never advocated war except as means of peace, so seek peace, but prepare for war. Because war... War never changes. War is like winter and winter is coming. 
-- Commonly attributed to Grant online, but cannot be sourced and phrasing is similar to quotes from other leaders
Ulysses S. Grant faced a special campaign to destroy his reputation that uniquely targeted only two presidents: Grant himself and Abraham Lincoln. That campaign was the Lost Cause of the Confederacy. 
As it sought to lift up the South after the Civil War, this propaganda effort aimed to denigrate the heroes of the North who had helped to end slavery and, in a particular insult to the manhood of the South, had defeated Robert E. Lee, the general who was supposed to be the South’s contribution to global military genius.
Lincoln has faired better in popular memory than Grant. Perhaps Lincoln’s early martyrdom helped preserve his later reputation. Killed only a few days after Lee’s surrender in April 1865, Lincoln never had to undertake the messy task of reuniting the defeated but still defiant South with the rest of the United States, an unprecedented challenge never before faced in American history — or anywhere else in the history of modern nations. Reconstruction was never going to be easy. Lincoln would certainly have done a better job than Andrew Johnson did. But still, if Lincoln had lived, he would have faced political, economic and cultural challenges unimaginable during the war. Those challenges brought down Johnson. Grant was the leader who had to clean up the mess and try to save the legacy of Union victory in the war.
Based on white supremacy, the Lost Cause loathed Reconstruction because it was the first time in history that America tried to achieve political equality of the races. If unreconstructed white southerners hated the abolition of slavery, they really hated the effort to protect the freedom of Black southerners. 
It was natural for southern elites who saw Reconstruction as a threat to their rule to attack the American leader most associated with Reconstruction, President Grant. From university history departments to movie theaters, agents of the Lost Cause convinced Americans in the early 20th century that Reconstruction was a dark time in American history, an oppressive military occupation of the prostrate South by vengeful Yankees who whipped up Black freedpeople and poor whites for profit or just for spite.
The truth was pretty much the opposite. Reconstruction must have been one of the most lenient treatments in history of defeated rebels who had raised their swords against their country. Instead of military tribunals, hangings for treason, land confiscations or absorption of rebellious states into loyal territories, all of which has happened in many other nations after suppression of an insurgency, the North merely asked old Confederates to take a loyalty oath and to respect the civil rights of freed Black people.
But that was too much for white southern elites used to the habit of command and convinced that God had placed them forever at the top of a pyramid of race and class. So, they fought back, refusing to accept the verdict of Appomattox. Defeated in open combat, they resorted to domestic terrorism and a war of words to reframe the story of the Civil War. 
Attacking Grant turned out to be a way of justifying the KKK, Jim Crow, lynching, and other horrors of white supremacist rule by unreconstructed former Confederates in southern states.
Using at least seven myths.
myths
formore information: debunking Grant myths
Myth 1: Grant Was a Butcher
Myth 2: Grant Was a “Drunkard”
Myth 3: Grant Was a Worse General than Lee
Myth 4: Grant Was Corrupt
Myth 5: Grant Was a Bad President
Myth 6: Grant Owned Slaves
Myth 7: Grant Was Anti-Semitic
== Abilities and Attributes ==
He attended the United States Military Academy at West Point in New York and excelled in mathematics, writing, drawing, and horsemanship. 
horsemanship
Grant known for his ability of writing courses, even at the young age.
Grant's first experience on horseback occurred at a circus that was visiting Georgetown when he was two years old. Watching the horses in the ring, Ulysses asked his parents if he could sit atop one of the ponies and ride it, to which his parents acquiesced. It was a happy event for the boy as he rode around the ring. When Grant was little more than a toddler he was often found out by his father's shop with the teams of horses, restlessly crawling and playing about their legs and swinging from their tails. On one of several such occasions a worried neighbor once noted this activity and exclaimed to his mother, Hannah, "Mrs. Grant, do you know where your boy is? He is out there swinging on the tails of Loudon's horses!" Calmly, Hannah would typically reply, "horses seem to understand Ulysses".
The young Grant was always on hand and eager for any work that involved riding a horse or driving a team of horses. At the age of five, he proved to be a skilled rider and something of a daredevil on horseback. Riding at a fast pace, he would stand on one leg while holding the reins, maintaining his balance as the horse galloped about–a feat that amazed his onlookers. At age seven, while his father was away for the day, young Grant harnessed a restless three-year-old colt, which had never been broken except to the saddle, to a sleigh, and drove the young horse about, hauling loads of brushwood throughout the day. Upon his father's return he discovered that after his son managed to bridle and harness the colt, he had amassed "a pile of brush as big as a cabin" all by himself.
When Grant was eleven he established a reputation among his peers and neighbors by riding a trick pony belonging to the circus that came to town. The pony had been trained to throw off anyone who attempted to mount him. After several other boys tried and failed the young Grant came forward and said, "I believe I can ride that pony". He mounted the restless animal, having no reins and its mane cut short, and wrapped his arms firmly around its neck. After a frantic effort to buck him off, the pony finally abated where Ulysses, rode the pony around the ring for a couple of minutes, earning himself a rounding applause from the spectators and the five-dollar prize promised to anyone who could stay with the pony.
Ulysses' father Jesse Grant held regard for horses that were pragmatic. As a tanner and leather goods merchant, horses to him were simply beasts of burden and a potential source for hides. By contrast, Ulysses viewed them as wonderful individuals, each with their own temperament. He was able to size up any horse he was working with and possessed a temperament of his own that allowed him to best employ any given horse.
Jesse began assigning various chores that required horses to Ulysses by the time he was eight years old. He soon became a proficient teamster working all day, every day, hauling wood or bark. At ten Ulysses would drive a pair of horses, by himself, from his home in Georgetown to Cincinnati, forty miles away, bringing home a load of passengers. His father did not insist on his working about the barkmill, provided there was other available work and often entrusted Ulysses with a team of horses on his own. He also allowed Ulysses to manage the horses on the farm and participate in the farming.
At age twelve, Grant's father sent him into the forest with a team of horses and a wagon to pick up a load of timber. The men at the lumber camp were supposed to load the wagon but were nowhere to be found when Ulysses arrived. Not wanting to go back empty-handed, Ulysses devised a method by hitching the logs and pulling them aboard the wagon one at a time by use of the horses. After securing the load, Ulysses hitched up the team back to the wagon and returned home, much to the amazement of his father. Biographer James McClure describes how the young Ulysses' "exhibited a remarkable self possession of mind" on an occasion when he was transporting two women in a two-horse wagon across a creek swollen from a heavy rain where he found the water level much deeper than usual. Upon crossing, he suddenly found the water to be so deep that the horses were almost swimming, while the water was up to the deck level of the wagon. The women became greatly alarmed and began to scream, but the young Grant, though in a very precarious situation, kept his calm, simply looked over his shoulder and assured the ladies by saying, "Don't speak I will take you through safe", and continued on undaunted without further incident.
When about nine years old, the young Grant had acquired such a reputation for fast riding and stunts that jockeys who had steeds suffering from what was called "a distemper", would bring their animals to Georgetown for Grant to ride them hard and fast, a technique that was known to bring the horse's body temperature up, curing the illness. Local farmers would also bring their problem horses for him to train. These challenges delighted the boy thoroughly. Pulitzer Prize winning biographer Hamlin Garland commented that Grant had a "mysterious" ability to communicate with horses, "He could train a horse to trot, rack, or pace, apparently at will". Grant, reflecting on his youthful experiences with horses, would later write in his Personal Memoirs:I began hauling all the wood used in the house and shops. I could not load it on the wagons, of course, at that time, but I could drive, and the choppers would load, and some one at the house unload. When about eleven years old, I was strong enough to hold a plough. From that age until seventeen I did all the work done with horses, such as breaking up the land, furrowing, ploughing corn and potatoes, bringing in the crops when harvested, hauling all the wood, besides tending two or three horses, a cow or two, and sawing wood for stoves, etc., while still attending school. For this I was compensated by the fact that there was never any scolding or punishing by my parents.
Military
Grant also gained a reputation for excellent horsemanship during his military career, and subsequently would sometimes receive horses as gifts from admirers. In the Mexican–American War he performed remarkable feats on horseback during battle. During the American Civil War Grant owned several horses, riding them on scouting missions, while inspecting the troops and formations, and during battle. At times he would retire one horse and use another during long campaigns. Grant was known to take exceptional care of his mounts and always kept them brushed "smooth as silk" with all the trappings in perfect order.
A war correspondent having often observed Grant's self-styled horsemanship once characterized his overall military involvement with horses: "Roads are almost useless to him, for he takes short cuts through fields and woods, and will swim his horse through almost any stream that obstructs his way. Nor does it make any difference to him whether he has daylight for his movements, for he will ride from breakfast until two o'clock in the morning, and that too without eating. The next day he will repeat the dose, until he finishes his work."
=== West Point ===
At the age of 17, Grant was nominated to attend West Point in the spring of 1839. After being accepted, he made his way across Pennsylvania to New York City and traveled up the Hudson River to West Point, arriving there and signing the register on May 29. There he soon surpassed all the cadets at the academy in horsemanship. Just as Grant was brought horses at Georgetown, cadets brought Grant their unruly horses. Grant's classmate Ingalls said Grant got along with horses, "not by punishing the animal...but by patience, and tact, and his skill in making the creature know what he wanted to have to do."
Among the horses at the academy was a dark bay horse that was so untamable that it was about to be condemned. Grant selected this beast for his horse. Every day he would devote time to it, bridling, mounting and riding it about with ease, while the entire class would watch and admire in amazement his excellent command of this horse.
Horsemanship was an important part of the curriculum at West Point. In June 1843 the cadets assembled in the riding hall during their final graduating exercises, where all members performed their riding exercises before the Superintendent, Richard Delafield, and a large assembly of spectators. The academy riding master, Henry Hershberger, approached the high-jump bar, raised it another foot (30 cm), higher than an average man's head, and then called out, "Cadet Grant", prompting a low murmur of wonderment from among the crowd. From among the cadets, all mounted on their horses, Grant sprang forward, riding a large and powerful chestnut mount. The cadets all recognized the horse as York, a horse that no one else was able to ride. Grant moved to the far end of the hall, and as he turned his mount towards the bar silence fell over the crowd. He dashed forward, gauging his pace, and with a great leap, horse and rider cleared the bar with apparent ease. Hershberg cried out, "very well done, sir", as the assembly filled the riding hall with the sound of applause. Grant had set a high-jump record at West Point that stood for twenty-five years.
Grant's personal biographer Albert D. Richardson said of Grant's horsemanship: "There was nothing he could not ride. He commanded, sat, and jumped a horse with singular ease and grace; was seen to the best advantage when mounted and at a full gallop; could perform more feats than any other member of his class, and was, altogether, one of the very best riders West Point had ever known."
Grant's classmate, the future Confederate General, James Longstreet, said of Grant that, "In horsemanship, however, he was noted as the most proficient in the Academy. In fact, rider and horse held together like the fabled centaur..." and that he was "the most daring horseman in the academy". General Rufus Ingallslater recalled that when an unruly or stubborn horse was added to the string of academy horses Grant was always called upon to subdue it. After graduation, Grant naturally requested service in the cavalry, but despite his excellent horsemanship, there was no opening available and instead was assigned to the 4th Infantry Regiment, his second choice.
=== Mexican–American War ===
During the Mexican–American War Grant expressed his amazement of the great herds of wild mustangs roaming between the Nueces and Rio Grande rivers, moving about like buffalo in a continuous mass. "The country was a rolling prairie, and from the higher ground the vision was obstructed only by the earth's curvature." Grant estimated that to corral a herd of this size, an area the size of the state of Delaware would be required.
Grant at this time was appointed Quartermaster of his regiment in August, 1846. Because of his organizational skills and ability with horses and managing teams of horses, he was put in charge of the mule teams used by the Army. Longing to participate in battle and share in its dangers, Grant found such an assignment beneath his ability and respectfully submitted a protest to this effect to his colonel, which was denied. His new assignment involved loading and packing the mules correctly and efficiently, and keeping abreast of their overall well-being. For every eight soldiers there was one pack mule where Grant would have to inspect and manage up to fifty mules, along with five mule wagon teams. To assist in this huge task and responsibility Grant would hire local Mexican mule handlers, who were more familiar with handling Mexican mules, different in their habits from those bred in America, that the Army had purchased while in Mexico.
When a volunteer was needed to carry an important dispatch for reinforcements, Grant came forward and demonstrated his equestrian ability at the Battle of Monterrey by carrying the dispatch past snipers while hanging off the side of his horse at a fast gallop, keeping the animal between him and potential fire. Before leaving the city, he stopped at a house in American hands and assured some wounded Americans that he would send for help.
=== Civil War ===
link=https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:General_Grant_and_horse,_Cincinnati,_photo.jpg|thumb|General Grant and his horse, Cincinnati
When the Civil War broke out, Grant was working at his father's leather shop in Galena, Illinois. With his home next to the shop Grant had no need for a horse, and did not own one at the time. During the war Grant owned and rode more than ten different horses, including Cincinnati, Claybank, Egypt, Fox, Jack, Jeff Davis, Kangaroo, Little Reb, Methuselah and Rodney.
Grant was appointed colonel of the Twenty-first Illinois Volunteer Infantry on June 14, 1861, at which time he purchased a horse while still in Galena. It was a strong horse, but while Grant was leading his regiment from Springfield, Illinois, to Missouri the mount proved to be unfit for military duty.
While Grant was encamped on the Illinois River for a few days, a local farmer brought in a cream-colored stallion named Jack. High-spirited and very intelligent, the horse proved to be an excellent mount for long marches, but lacked tenacity and responsiveness in battle. Grant consequently referred to him as "Old Nuisance". The horse was striking in appearance, with dark eyes and a silver mane and tail. Grant often rode this mount during the campaigns of 1862–1863, and kept him as an extra horse for ceremonial purposes. Jack was the horse that carried Grant away from Admiral Foote's riverboat the night before the attack on Fort Donelson, as well as the horse that endured difficult scouting missions in the Tennessee mud before and during the Battle of Shiloh. Grant rode Jack through the Cumberland to the Battle of Chattanooga. After Chattanooga, Grant was called away and retired the horse to his business advisor, J. R. Jones in Northern Illinois, for his personal use. During this time Grant purchased a second horse, called Fox, a powerful and spirited animal with exceptional endurance, which he also rode during the siege and battles around Fort Donelson and also at Shiloh.
On August 5, 1861, Grant was appointed Brigadier General of volunteers. Soon after he purchased a pony for his son, Frederick Grant, who was with him at the time, along with another horse for field service for himself. At the Battle of Belmont, Grant's first battle in the Civil War, his horse was killed under him and he was compelled to use his son's pony. This horse proved to be unfit for battle, so he turned it over to Captain William S. Hillyer, his aide, when he offered Grant his horse. The Union advance had scattered the Confederates away from Camp Johnston, but the Confederates soon regrouped and began to surround the Union troops. Some officers were considering surrender, but Grant was all about on his horse, reassuring and reorganizing his troops. During the final retreat, Grant narrowly escaped on his horse by leading it down a steep riverbank. Grant recalled, "my horse put its fore feet over the bank without hesitation or urging, and, with his hind feet well under him, slid down the bank and trotted aboard the boat, twelve or fifteen feet away, over a single gang-plank."
link=https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Grant%27s_horses.jpg|left|thumb|Photograph of three of Grant's horses during the Overland Campaign (Cold Harbor, Virginia), from left to right: Egypt, Cincinnati, and Jeff Davis
Cincinnati was a bay, said to have been 17.2 hands (70 inches, 178 cm) high and was a son of Lexington, considered to be the fastest thoroughbred in the United States at that time. Grant considered Cincinnati "the finest horse I have ever seen". Grant, on rare occasions, only allowed two other people to ever ride Cincinnati, one of whom was Abraham Lincoln. Of Lincoln, Grant once said, "Lincoln spent the latter days of his life with me. He came to City Point in the last month of the war and was with me all the time. He was a fine horseman and rode my horse Cincinnati every day."
In October 1862, a month before the siege of Vicksburg got underway, Grant sent his horse Jack to Illinois for a month's rest. During the Vicksburg Campaign Grant acquired another horse captured by a raiding party at a plantation in Mississippi. Grant had the opportunity to ride the animal and found it had a "delightful" gait. Grant purchased the horse from the Army and named it "Jeff Davis", a derisive nod to Confederate president Jefferson Davis. He rode it instead of Cincinnati when there was long journeys to be made, because of its surefootedness and ability to stay fresh. Shortly after the Vicksburg campaign, Grant suffered his most serious horse-related injury while visiting General Nathaniel P. Banks in New Orleans. According to Grant's account of the incident, the horse he was using, named "Charlie", was "vicious and but little used", and while he was reviewing Banks's troops, a locomotive in the street sounded its whistle, causing the horse to take flight. It stumbled and fell upon Grant's left leg, causing him to be "rendered insensible", and unconscious. He awoke in a hotel with several doctors looking over him. His leg was swollen from the knee to his thigh. Grant described the pain as "almost beyond endurance". He was bedridden for over a week, unable to even turn over by himself. He was later put upon a steamer and taken back up the Mississippi to Vicksburg where it was some time before he was able to move about on his own.
In December 1863 while still in Chattanooga, Grant was given a fine Kentucky thoroughbred as a gift by the citizens of Egypt, Illinois, who all knew Grant was in need of a new horse after retiring Jack. Grant wrote a letter of thanks to the citizens, and named his new gift horse Egypt in their honor. At seven years old, Egypt was an exceptionally handsome dark bay who measured 16 hands (64 inches, 163 cm). The horse proved invaluable in the months to come, as Grant traveled over the snow- and ice-covered Cumberland Mountains in January; Grant also used Egypt throughout the Overland Campaign in Virginia.
At the surrender at Appomattox, Grant met with Robert E. Lee at the picket lines between the armies. There the two generals sat on their horses for hours, Grant astride Cincinnati, and Lee on Traveller, and discussed the terms of surrender and the condition of the South in sight of their soldiers. Before departing, Lee requested that his officers be permitted to leave with their horses. Grant, having farmed with horses and knowing many of the Confederate officers were small farmers, allowed them to return home with their horses, swords, and their honor.
military skill
formore information: ulysses Grant, and the Civil War
Is considered to be one of the greatest American generals, in the countries history his military tactics are studied around the world.
he never lost the military campaign only small battles and contradict to propaganda from lost causes, Grant inflicted more casualties on its opponents. Out of all the generals on the union side, Abraham was impressed by Grant is he say spare this man for he fights.
Vicksburg, being his most impressive victory. Vicksburg was an important military target taken through a dogged effort marked by daring, creativity and strategic brilliance with unprecedented cooperation between the army and the navy. 
Historian Donald Miller argues that Vicksburg deserves much more attention for its impact on the war, its role in Grant’s career and its place in military history.
After more than a year of trying to capture the Confederacy’s Gibraltar on the Mississippi, a heavily fortified citadel protecting one of the wealthiest cotton trading ports in the South, Grant came up with a bold plan and executed it successfully.Lincoln had said Vicksburg was the key to winning the Civil War. He enlisted the help of Admiral David Dixon Porter to run a flotilla with troops and supplies past the guns of Vicksburg and safely land downriver at a safe site on the Mississippi side of the river. 
Then, Grant marched his army east into the interior of the state, burning the capital at Jackson, and then turning back west to attack Vicksburg from its rear. Finally, after six failed attempts over a period of seven months, Grant was at the gates of Vicksburg.
He tried twice, first on May 19 and again on May 22, to take the city by direct assault. Both attempts failed. Suffering heavy casualties with little success from these two attacks, Grant settled down to lay siege to the city. After 47 days, Grant starved out Vicksburg’s citizens and defenders alike, leading to the surrender of General John Pemberton’s Confederate army of nearly 30,000 on July 4, 1863. Taking Vicksburg opened the Mississippi River for Union shipping — “Thank God,” said Lincoln on receiving Grant’s message about Pemberton’s surrender, “The Father of Waters again goes unvexed to the sea” — while slicing the Confederacy in half. That cut off Arkansas and Texas from the eastern states of the Confederacy, reducing valuable shipments of food only a couple of months after bread riots in Richmond.
And to add insult to injury, Vicksburg was the hometown of Confederate President Jefferson Davis, whose family ran large plantations nearby. It was a humiliating loss that should have demonstrated to the world that the Confederacy was not a viable nation able to maintain the integrity of its territory.
Grant vs. Lee
Grant viewed Lee not as some kind of military god but just a mere mortal with his own weaknesses. “I never ranked Lee as high as some others of the army, that is to say, I never had as much anxiety when he was in my front as when Joe Johnston was in front,” Grant told journalist John Russell Young, perhaps underestimating Lee. (Watch my short video sharing Grant’s low opinion of Lee).
In response to an officer urging retreat at the Battle of the Wilderness, Grant lost his patience, unintentionally giving birth to one of the great quotes of the Civil War:Oh, I am heartily tired of hearing about what Lee is going to do. Some of you always seem to think he is suddenly going to turn a double somersault, and land in our rear and on both of our flanks at the same time. Go back to your command, and try to think what we are going to do ourselves, instead of what Lee is going to do.
=== The Underdog’s Home Field Advantage ===
Further, any Union superiority in stuff and men may be partly or completely cancelled out when considering that Lee was fighting on his own turf, surrounded by friendly civilians who supported him with food for soldiers, fodder for animals and other supplies available locally. 
By contrast, even when they could forage off the land, Union forces had to rely on long supply lines for ammunition and other war materiel maintained over hundreds of miles of hostile country. An invading army that has to supply itself over long distances must have 3-4 times more men and equipment than a defending army on its own turf for an equal fight. 
The benefits enjoyed by a defending army over an invading one means that Lee wasn’t fighting against “overwhelming odds” in every respect, as he claimed after surrendering to Grant at Appomattox. 
Though he suffered from fewer men and less equipment, Lee benefited from the home field advantage, just as George Washington did in the American Revolution. In wars throughout history, leveraging that advantage has allowed many a weaker insurgent to defeat a much stronger power, from the American Revolution to modern wars in Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan.
Grant made up for long distances with skill and experience in logistics. Drawing on his service in the Quartermaster Corps during the Mexican-American War, Grant used wagons, railroads and ships to keep the Union armies well supplied with what they needed to win.
=== Broad View of the War or Focus on Virginia ===
According to British military historian John Keegan, Grant wasn’t just the best general on either side of the American Civil War. For Keegan, Grant ranks among the top commanders in world history along with Alexander the Great and the Duke of Wellington.
By contrast, Keegan dismisses Lee as a tactical commander who was able to understand and fight a single battle, often successfully, but whose focus was too narrow to encompass the whole war. And Lee’s judgment was clouded by affection for his native Virginia, according to Keegan.
Civil War historian Gary Gallagher disagrees. He makes a convincing argument that Lee was in fact able to see the whole war, but that he chose to focus on the eastern theater over the West because of political reasons. And those political reasons were sound ones.
The publics of both sides, along with their leaders, were joined by foreign powers in focusing on the East and not caring much about what happened in the West. 
As Gallagher puts it, because politics often trumped battlefield results, Lee knew the war could be won or lost in the either the East or the West, but that the war could only be won in the East. 
Just take the example of two of the most famous battles of the war, Gettysburg and Vicksburg, one associated with Lee and the other with Grant. These iconic battles took place hundreds of miles from each other but culminated at the same time, in early July, 1863.
Grant’s victory at Vicksburg was a more important battle from a military standpoint than Gettysburg. But in its impact on the politics of the Civil War both at home and abroad, the three-day battle in Pennsylvania made a deeper and more lasting impact than the months-long siege in Mississippi.
== Presidency (1869–1877) ==
On March 4, 1869, Grant was sworn in as President by Chief Justice Salmon P. Chase. In his inaugural address, Grant urged the ratification of the Fifteenth Amendment; many African Americans attended his inauguration. He urged that bonds issued during the Civil War should be paid in gold, called for "proper treatment" of Native Americans and encouraged their "civilization and ultimate citizenship".
Grant's cabinet appointments sparked both criticism and approval. He appointed Elihu B. Washburne Secretary of State and John A. Rawlins Secretary of War. Washburne resigned, and Grant appointed him Minister to France. Grant then appointed former New York Senator Hamilton Fish Secretary of State. Rawlins died in office, and Grant appointed William W. BelknapSecretary of War. Grant appointed New York businessman Alexander T. Stewart Secretary of Treasury, but Stewart was found legally ineligible by a 1789 law. Grant then appointed Massachusetts Representative George S. BoutwellSecretary of Treasury. Philadelphia businessman Adolph E. Borie was appointed Secretary of Navy, but found the job stressful and resigned. Grant then appointed New Jersey's attorney general, George M. Robeson, Secretary of Navy. Former Ohio Governor Jacob D. Cox (Interior), former Maryland Senator John Creswell (Postmaster-General), and Ebenezer Rockwood Hoar (Attorney General) rounded out the cabinet.
Grant nominated Sherman to succeed him as general-in-chief and gave him control over war bureau chiefs. When Rawlins took over the War Department he complained that Sherman was given too much authority. Grant reluctantly revoked his order, upsetting Sherman and damaging their friendship. James Longstreet, a former Confederate general, was nominated for Surveyor of Customs of New Orleans; this was met with amazement, and seen as a genuine effort to unite the North and South. In March 1872, Grant signed legislation that established Yellowstone National Park, the first national park. Grant was sympathetic to women's rights, including suffrage, saying he wanted "equal rights to all citizens".
To make up for his infamous General Order No. 11, Grant appointed more than fifty Jewish people to federal office, including consuls, district attorneys, and deputy postmasters. He appointed Edward S. Salomon territorial governor of Washington, the first time an American Jewish man occupied a governor's seat. In November 1869, reports surfaced of Alexander II of Russia penalizing 2,000 Jewish families for smuggling by expelling them to the interior of the country. In response, Grant publicly supported the Jewish American B'nai B'rith petition against Alexander.In 1875, Grant proposed a constitutional amendment that limited religious indoctrination in public schools. Schools would be for all children "irrespective of sex, color, birthplace, or religions". Grant's views were incorporated into the Blaine Amendment, but it was defeated by the Senate.
In October 1871, under the Morrill Act, using federal marshals, Grant prosecuted hundreds of Utah Territory Mormon polygamists. Grant called polygamy a "crime against decency and morality". In 1874, Grant signed into law the Poland Act, which made Mormon polygamists subject to trial in District Courts and limited Mormons on juries.
Beginning in March 1873, under the Comstock Act, Grant prosecuted pornographers, in addition to abortionists. To administer the prosecutions, Grant put in charge a vigorous anti-vice activist and reformer Anthony Comstock.Comstock headed a federal commission and was empowered to destroy obscene material and hand out arrest warrants to offenders.
=== Reconstruction ===
Main article: Reconstruction era
link=https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Amos_T_Akerman_-_crop_and_minor_retouch.jpg|thumb|Amos T. Akerman, appointed Attorney General by Grant, who vigorously prosecuted the Ku Klux Klan
Grant was considered an effective civil rights president, concerned about the plight of African Americans. On March 18, 1869, Grant signed into law equal rights for black people, to serve on juries and hold office, in Washington D.C., and in 1870 he signed the Naturalization Act that gave foreign black people citizenship. During his first term, Reconstruction took precedence. Republicans controlled most Southern states, propped up by Republican-controlled Congress, northern money, and southern military occupation. Grant advocated the ratification of the Fifteenth Amendment that said states could not disenfranchise African Americans. Within a year, the three remaining states—Mississippi, Virginia, and Texas—adopted the new amendment—and were admitted to Congress. Grant put military pressure on Georgia to reinstate its black legislators and adopt the amendment. Georgia complied, and on February 24, 1871, its senators were seated in Congress, with all former Confederate states represented, the Union was completely restored under Grant. Under Grant, for the first time in history, Black-American men served in the United States Congress, all from the Southern states.
In 1870, to enforce Reconstruction, Congress and Grant created the Justice Department that allowed the Attorney General and the new Solicitor General to prosecute the Klan. Congress and Grant passed three Enforcement Acts, designed to protect black people and Reconstruction governments. Using the Enforcement Acts, Grant crushed the Klan. By October, Grant suspended habeas corpus in part of South Carolina and sent federal troops to help marshals, who initiated prosecutions. Grant's Attorney General, Amos T. Akerman, who replaced Hoar, was zealous to destroy the Klan. Akerman and South Carolina's U.S. marshal arrested over 470 Klan members, while hundreds of Klansmen, fled the state. By 1872, the Klan's power had collapsed, and African Americans voted in record numbers in the South. Attorney General George H. Williams, Akerman's replacement, suspended prosecutions of the Klan in 1873, but prior to the election of 1874, changed course and prosecuted the Klan.
During Grant's second term, the North retreated from Reconstruction, while southern conservatives called "Redeemers" formed armed groups, the Red Shirtsand the White League, who openly used violence, intimidation, voter fraud, and racist appeals to overturn Republican rule. Northern apathy toward black people, the depressed economy and Grant's scandals made it politically difficult for the administration to maintain support for Reconstruction. Power shifted when the House was taken over by Democrats in the 1874 election. Grant ended the Brooks–Baxter War, bringing Reconstruction in Arkansas to a peaceful conclusion. He sent troops to New Orleans in the wake of the Colfax massacre and disputes over the election of Governor William Pitt Kellogg.
By 1875, Redeemer Democrats had taken control of all but three Southern states. As violence against black Southerners escalated, Grant's Attorney General Edwards Pierrepont told Republican Governor Adelbert Ames of Mississippi that the people were "tired of the autumnal outbreaks in the South", and declined to intervene directly. Grant later regretted not issuing a proclamation to help Ames, having been told Republicans in Ohio would bolt the party if he did.Grant told Congress in January 1875 he could not "see with indifference Union men or Republicans ostracized, persecuted, and murdered." Congress refused to strengthen the laws against violence but instead passed the sweeping Civil Rights Act of 1875 to guarantee black people access to public facilities. However, there was little enforcement and the Supreme Court ruled the law unconstitutional in 1883. In 1876, Grant dispatched troops to South Carolina to keep Republican Governor Daniel Henry Chamberlain in office. After Grant left office, the Compromise of 1877 meant Republicans obtained the White House for Rutherford B. Hayes in return for ending enforcement of racial equality for black people and removing federal troops from the South, marking the end of Reconstruction. 
==== Fifteenth Amendment ====
Further information: Fifteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution
Grant worked to ensure ratification of the Fifteenth Amendment approved by Congress and sent to the states during the last days of the Johnson administration. The amendment prohibited the federal and state governments from denying a citizen the right to vote based on that citizen's "race, color, or previous condition of servitude." On December 24, 1869, Grant established federal military rule in Georgia and restored black legislators who had been expelled from the state legislature. On February 3, 1870, the amendment reached the requisite number of state ratifications (then 27) and was certified as the Fifteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution. Grant hailed its ratification as "a measure of grander importance than any other one act of the kind from the foundation of our free government to the present day". By mid-1870 former Confederate states: Virginia, Texas, Mississippi, and Georgia had ratified the 15th Amendment and were readmitted to the Union.
==== Department of Justice ====
See also: United States Department of Justice
On June 22, 1870, Grant signed a bill into law passed by Congress that created the Department of Justice and to aid the Attorney General, the Office of Solicitor General. Grant appointed Amos T. Akerman as Attorney General and Benjamin H. Bristow as America's first Solicitor General. Both Akerman and Bristow used the Department of Justice to vigorously prosecute Ku Klux Klan members in the early 1870s. Grant appointed Hiram C. Whitley as director of the new Secret Service Agency in 1869, after he had successfully arrested 12 Klansmen in Georgia who had murdered a leading local Republican official. Whitley used talented detectives who infiltrated and broke up KKK units in North Carolina and Alabama. However, they could not penetrate the main hotbed of KKK activity in upstate South Carolina. Grant sent in Army troops, but Whitley's agents learned they were lying below until the troops were withdrawn. Whitley warned Akerman, who convinced Grant to declare martial law and send in US marshals backed by federal troops to arrest 500 Klansmen; hundred more fled the state, and hundreds of others surrendered in return for leniency.
In the first few years of Grant's first term in office, there were 1000 indictments against Klan members with over 550 convictions from the Department of Justice. By 1871, there were 3000 indictments and 600 convictions with most only serving brief sentences while the ringleaders were imprisoned for up to five years in the federal penitentiary in Albany, New York. The result was a dramatic decrease in violence in the South. Akerman gave credit to Grant and told a friend that no one was "better" or "stronger" than Grant when it came to prosecuting terrorists.Akerman's successor, George H. Williams, in December 1871, continued to prosecute the Klan throughout 1872 until the Spring of 1873 during Grant's second term in office. Williams' clemency and moratorium on Klan prosecutions was due in part to the fact that the Justice Department, having been inundated by Klan outrage cases, did not have the effective manpower to continue the prosecutions.
==== Naturalization Act of 1870 ====
On July 14, 1870, Grant signed into law the Naturalization Act of 1870 that allowed persons of African descent to become citizens of the United States. This revised an earlier law, the Naturalization Act of 1790 that only allowed white persons of good moral character to become U.S. citizens. The law also prosecuted persons who used fictitious names, misrepresentations, or identities of deceased individuals when applying for citizenship. 
==== Force Acts of 1870 and 1871 ====
Further information: Enforcement Act of 1870, Force Act of 1871, and Ku Klux Klan
To add enforcement to the 15th Amendment, Congress passed an act that guaranteed the protection of voting rights of African Americans; Grant signed the bill, known as the Force Act of 1870 into law on May 31, 1870. This law was designed to keep the Redeemers from attacking or threatening African Americans. This act placed severe penalties on persons who used intimidation, bribery, or physical assault to prevent citizens from voting and placed elections under Federal jurisdiction.
On January 13, 1871, Grant submitted to Congress a report on violent acts committed by the Ku Klux Klan in the South. On March 23, Grant told a reluctant Congress the situation in the South was dire and federal legislation was needed that would "secure life, liberty, and property, and the enforcement of law, in all parts of the United States." Grant stated that the U.S. mail and the collection of revenue was in jeopardy. Congress investigated the Klan's activities and eventually passed the Force Act of 1871 to allow prosecution of the Klan. This Act, also known as the "Ku Klux Klan Act" and written by Representative Benjamin Butler, was passed by Congress to specifically go after local units of the Ku Klux Klan. Although sensitive to charges of establishing a military dictatorship, Grant signed the bill into law on April 20, 1871, after being convinced by Secretary of Treasury, George Boutwell, that federal protection was warranted, having cited documented atrocities against the Freedmen. This law allowed the president to suspend habeas corpus on "armed combinations" and conspiracies by the Klan. The Act also empowered the president "to arrest and break up disguised night marauders". The actions of the Klan were defined as high crimes and acts of rebellion against the United States.
The Ku Klux Klan consisted of local secret organizations formed to violently oppose Republican rule during Reconstruction; there was no organization above the local level. Wearing white hoods to hide their identity the Klan would attack and threaten Republicans. The Klan was strong in South Carolina between 1868 and 1870; South Carolina Governor Robert K. Scott, who was mired in corruption charges, allowed the Klan to rise to power. Grant, who was fed up with their violent tactics, ordered the Ku Klux Klan to disperse from South Carolina and lay down their arms under the authority of the Enforcement Acts on October 12, 1871. There was no response, and so on October 17, 1871, Grant issued a suspension of habeas corpus in all the 9 counties in South Carolina. Grant ordered federal troops in the state who then captured the Klan, who were vigorously prosecuted by Att. Gen. Akerman and Sol. Gen. Bristow. With the Klan destroyed other white supremacist groups would emerge, including the White League and the Red Shirts.
==== Amnesty Act of 1872 ====
Main article: Amnesty Act of 1872
Texas was readmitted into the Union on March 30, 1870, Mississippi was readmitted February 23, 1870, and Virginia on January 26, 1870. Georgia became the last Confederate state to be readmitted into the Union on July 15, 1870. All members of the House of Representatives and Senate were seated from the 10 Confederate states who seceded. Technically, the United States was again a unitedcountry.
To ease tensions, Grant signed the Amnesty Act of 1872 on May 23, 1872, which gave amnesty to former Confederates. This act allowed most former Confederates, who before the war had taken an oath to uphold the Constitution of the United States, to hold elected public office. Only 500 former Confederates remained unpardonable and therefore forbidden to hold elected public office. 
==== Interactions with Jews ====
Grant publicly stated regret for his offensive wartime order expelling Jewish traders. In his army days he traded at a local store operated by the Seligman brothers, two Jewish merchants who became Grant's lifelong friends. They became wealthy bankers who donated substantially to Grant's presidential campaign. After the wartime order, however, the Jewish community was angry with Grant. While running for president, in 1868, Grant publicly apologized for the expulsion order, and once elected, he took actions intended to make amends. He appointed several Jewish leaders to office, including Simon Wolf recorder of deeds in Washington, D.C., and Edward S. Salomon Governor of the Washington Territory. Historian Jonathan Sarna argues:Eager to prove that he was above prejudice, Grant appointed more Jews to public office than had any of his predecessors and, in the name of human rights, he extended unprecedented support to persecuted Jews in Russia and Romania. Time and again, partly as a result of this enlarged vision of what it meant to be an American and partly in order to live down General Orders No. 11, Grant consciously worked to assist Jews and secure them equality. ... Through his appointments and policies, Grant rejected calls for a 'Christian nation' and embraced Jews as insiders in America, part of 'we the people.' During his administration, Jews achieved heightened status on the national scene, anti-Jewish prejudice declined, and Jews looked forward optimistically to a liberal epoch characterized by sensitivity to human rights and interreligious cooperation. 
=== Financial affairs ===
Soon after taking office, Grant took conservative steps to return the economy to pre-war monetary standards. During the War, Congress had authorized the Treasury to issue banknotes that, unlike the rest of the currency, were not backed by gold or silver. These "greenbacks" were necessary to pay the war debts, but caused inflation and forced gold-backed money out of circulation. On March 18, 1869, Grant signed the Public Credit Act of 1869, which guaranteed bondholders would be repaid in "coin or its equivalent". The act committed the government to the full return of the gold standard within ten years. This followed a policy of "hard currency, economy and gradual reduction of the national debt." Grant's own ideas about the economy were simple, and he relied on the advice of businessmen.
==== Gold corner conspiracy ====
Further information: Black Friday (1869)
link=https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Black_Friday_1869.jpg|thumb|Photograph of the blackboard in the New York City Gold Room on Black Friday, showing the collapse of the price of gold
In April 1869, railroad tycoons Jay Gould and Jim Fisk conspired to corner the gold market in New York. They controlled the Erie Railroad, and a high gold price would allow foreign agriculture buyers to purchase exported crops, shipped east over the Erie's routes.Boutwell's policy of selling gold from the Treasury biweekly, however, kept gold artificially low. Unable to corrupt Boutwell, the schemers built a relationship with Grant's brother-in-law, Abel Corbin, and gained access to Grant. Gould bribed Assistant Treasurer Daniel Butterfield to gain inside information into the Treasury.
In July, Grant reduced the sale of Treasury gold to $2,000,000 per month. Fisk told Grant his gold selling policy would destroy the nation. By September, Grant, who was naive regarding finance, was convinced a low gold price would help farmers, and the sale of gold for September was not decreased. On September 23, when the gold price reached 143+1⁄8, Boutwell rushed to the White House and talked with Grant. On September 24, known as Black Friday, Grant ordered Boutwell to sell, whereupon Boutwell wired Butterfield to sell $4,000,000 in gold. The bull market at Gould's Gold Room collapsed, the price plummeted from 160 to 133+1⁄3, a bear market panic ensued, Gould and Fisk fled, and economic damages lasted months. By January 1870, the economy resumed its post-war recovery.
=== Foreign affairs ===
Grant had limited foreign policy experience, so relied heavily on his talented Secretary of State Hamilton Fish. Grant and Fish had cordial friendship. Besides Grant, the main players in foreign affairs were Fish and the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee Charles Sumner. Sumner, who hated Grant, led the opposition to Grant's plan to annex Santo Domingo, despite fully supporting annexation of Alaska. 
Grant had an expansionist impulse to protect American interests abroad and was a strong advocate of the Monroe Doctrine. For instance, when Tomás Fríasbecame President of Bolivia in 1872, Grant stressed the importance of maintaining good relations between Bolivia and the US. He had an idealist side to his foreign policy. For instance, Grant appointed a Jewish lawyer, Benjamin F. Peixotto, U.S. Consul in Bucharest, in response to the Romanian persecution of Jews. Grant said that respect "for human rights is the first duty for those set as rulers" over the nations. Grant was a man of peace, and almost wholly devoted to domestic affairs. There were no foreign-policy disasters, and no wars to engage in. Besides Grant himself, the main players in foreign affairs were Secretary of State Hamilton Fish and the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee Charles Sumner. They had to cooperate to get a treaty ratified. When Sumner stopped Grant's plan to annex Santo Domingo, Grant had his vengeance by systematically destroying Sumner's power and ending his career. Historians have high regard for the diplomatic professionalism, independence, and good judgment of Hamilton Fish. The main issues involved Britain, Canada, Santo Domingo, Cuba, and Spain. Worldwide, it was a peaceful era, with no major wars directly affecting the United States.
link=https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Hamilton_Fish_Brady_Edited.jpg|alt=Formal photographic portrait of bearded man|right|thumb|Hamilton Fish, Secretary of State, 1869–1877
The foreign policy of the Administration was generally successful, except for the attempt to annex Santo Domingo. The annexation of Santo Domingo was Grant's effort to create a haven for blacks in the South and was a first step to end slavery in Cuba and Brazil. The dangers of a confrontation with Britain on the Alabama question were resolved peacefully, and to the monetary advantage of the United States. Issues regarding the Canadian boundary were easily settled. The achievements were the work of Secretary Hamilton Fish, who was a spokesman for caution and stability. A poll of historians has stated that Secretary Fish was one of the greatest Secretaries of States in United States history. Fish served as Secretary of State for nearly the entire two terms.
Hamilton Fish (1808 – 1893) was a wealthy New Yorker of Dutch descent who served as Governor of New York (1849 to 1850), and United States Senator (1851 to 1857). Historians emphasize his judiciousness and efforts towards reform and diplomatic moderation. Fish settled the controversial Alabama Claims with Great Britain through his development of the concept of international arbitration.Fish kept the United States out of war with Spain over Cuban independence by coolly handling the volatile Virginius Incident. In 1875, Fish initiated the processthat would ultimately lead to Hawaiian statehood, by having negotiated a reciprocal trade treaty for the island nation's sugar production. He also organized a peace conference and treaty in Washington, D.C., between South American countries and Spain. Fish worked with James Milton Turner, America's first African American consul, to settle the Liberian-Grebo war. President Grant said he trusted Fish the most for political advice.
==== Failed annexation of Santo Domingo (Dominican Republic) ====
Main article: Proposed annexation of Santo Domingo
link=https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Charles_Sumner_Brady-Handy.jpg|thumb|Charles Sumner, Republican Senator from Massachusetts and chair of the Foreign Relations Committee.
Grant gave a high priority to protecting and improving the status of Blacks in the United States and tried to annex the Caribbean country of Dominican Republic as a safety valve for them. Senator Charles Sumner was even more firmly devoted to Black interests and opposed Grant's scheme. Sumner stopped the plan and Grant retaliated by destroying Sumner's power.In 1869, Grant proposed to annex the independent Spanish-speaking black nation of the Dominican Republic, then known as Santo Domingo. Previously in 1868, President Johnson had proposed annexation, but Congress refused. In July 1869 Grant sent Orville E. Babcock and Rufus Ingalls who negotiated a draft treaty with Dominican Republic president Buenaventura Báez. To keep the island nation and Báez secure in power, Grant ordered naval ships to secure the island from invasion and internal insurrection. Báez signed an annexation treaty on November 19, 1869. Secretary Fish drew up a final draft of the proposal and offered $1.5 million to the Dominican national debt, the annexation of Santo Domingo as an American state, the United States' acquisition of the rights for Samaná Bay for 50 years with an annual $150,000 rental, and guaranteed protection from foreign intervention. On January 10, 1870, the Santo Domingo treaty was submitted to the Senate for ratification. Grant made the mistake of not building support in Congress or the country at large.
Not only did Grant believe that the island would be of strategic value to the Navy, particularly Samaná Bay, but also he sought to use it as a bargaining chip in domestic affairs. By providing a safe haven for the freedmen, he believed that the exodus of black labor would force Southern whites to realize the necessity of such a significant workforce and accept their civil rights. Grant believed the island country would increase exports and lower the trade deficit. He hoped that U.S. ownership of the island would push Spain to abolish slavery in Cuba and Puerto Rico, and perhaps Brazil as well. On March 15, 1870, the Foreign Relations Committee, headed by Sumner, recommended against treaty passage. Sumner, the leading spokesman for African American civil rights, believed that annexation would be enormously expensive and involve the U.S. in an ongoing civil war, and would threaten the independence of Haiti and the West Indies, thereby blocking black political progress. On May 31, 1870, Grant went before Congress and urged passage of the Dominican annexation treaty. Strongly opposed to ratification, Sumner successfully led the opposition in the Senate. On June 30, 1870, the Santo Domingo annexation treaty failed to pass the Senate; 28 votes in favor of the treaty and 28 votes against. Grant's own cabinet was divided over the Santo Domingo annexation attempt, and Bancroft Davis, assistant to Sec. Hamilton Fish, was secretly giving information to Sen. Sumner on state department negotiations.
link=https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Frederick_Douglass_(circa_1879).jpg|thumb|African American Commissioner Frederick Douglass appointed by Grant believed Santo Domingo annexation would benefit the United States.
Warren 1879
Grant was determined to keep the Dominican Republic treaty in the public debate, mentioning Dominican Republic annexation in his December 1870 State of the Union Address. Grant was able to get Congress in January 1871 to create a special Commission to investigate the island. Senator Sumner continued to vigorously oppose and speak out against annexation. Grant appointed Frederick Douglass, an African American civil rights activist, as one of the Commissioners who voyaged to the Dominican Republic. Returning to the United States after several months, the Commission in April 1871, issued a report that stated the Dominican people desired annexation and that the island would be beneficial to the United States. To celebrate the Commissions return, Grant invited the Commissioners to the White House, except Frederick Douglass. African American leaders were upset, and the issue of Douglass not being invited to the White House dinner was brought up during the 1872 presidential election by Horace Greeley. Douglass, however, who was personally disappointed for not being invited to the White House, remained loyal to Grant and the Republican Party. Although the Commission supported Grant's annexation attempt, there was not enough enthusiasm in Congress to vote on a second annexation treaty.
Unable constitutionally to go directly after Sen. Sumner, Grant immediately removed Sumner's close and respected friend Ambassador, John Lothrop Motley. With Grant's prodding in the Senate, Sumner was finally deposed from the Foreign Relations Committee. Grant reshaped his coalition, known as "New Radicals", working with enemies of Sumner such as Ben Butler of Massachusetts, Roscoe Conkling of New York, and Oliver P. Morton of Indiana, giving in to Fish's demands that Cuba rebels be rejected, and moving his Southern patronage from the radical blacks and carpetbaggers who were allied with Sumner to more moderate Republicans. This set the stage of the Liberal Republican revolt of 1872, when Sumner and his allies publicly denounced Grant and supported Horace Greeley and the Liberal Republicans.
A Congressional investigation in June 1870 led by Senator Carl Schurz revealed that Babcock and Ingalls both had land interests in the Bay of Samaná that would increase in value if the Santo Domingo treaty were ratified.[citation needed] U.S. Navy ships, with Grant's authorization, had been sent to protect Báez from an invasion by a Dominican rebel, Gregorio Luperón, while the treaty negotiations were taking place. The investigation had initially been called to settle a dispute between an American businessman Davis Hatch against the United States government. Báez had imprisoned Hatch without trial for his opposition to the Báez government. Hatch had claimed that the United States had failed to protect him from imprisonment. The majority Congressional report dismissed Hatch's claim and exonerated both Babcock and Ingalls. The Hatch incident, however, kept certain Senators from being enthusiastic about ratifying the treaty.
==== Cuban insurrection ====
Further information: Ten Years' War and Cuba–United States relations
The Cuban rebellion 1868–1878 against Spanish rule, called by historians the Ten Years' War, gained wide sympathy in the U.S. Juntas based in New York raised money, and smuggled men and munitions to Cuba, while energetically spreading propaganda in American newspapers. The Grant administration turned a blind eye to this violation of American neutrality. In 1869, Grant was urged by popular opinion to support rebels in Cuba with military assistance and to give them U.S. diplomatic recognition. Fish, however, wanted stability and favored the Spanish government, without publicly challenging the popular anti-Spanish American viewpoint. They reassured European governments that the U.S. did not want to annex Cuba. Grant and Fish gave lip service to Cuban independence, called for an end to slavery in Cuba, and quietly opposed American military intervention. Fish, worked diligently against popular pressure, and was able to keep Grant from officially recognizing Cuban independence because it would have endangered negotiations with Britain over the Alabama Claims.
==== Treaty of Washington ====
Further information: Treaty of Washington (1871), Alabama Claims, and Hamilton Fish
link=https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:A_still_bigger_claimant--_1872_PUNCH.jpg|left|thumb|220x220px|John Bull (Great Britain) is dwarfed by a gigantic inflated American "Alabama Claim" cartoon by Joseph Swain in Punch – or the London Charivari 22 Jan 1872.
Historians have credited the Treaty of Washington for implementing international arbitration to allow outside experts to settle disputes. Grant's able Secretary of State Hamilton Fish had orchestrated many of the events leading up to the treaty. Previously, Secretary of State William H. Seward during the Johnson administration first proposed an initial treaty concerning damages done to American merchants by three Confederate warships, CSS Florida, CSS Alabama, and CSS Shenandoah built in Britain. These damages were collectively known as the Alabama Claims. These ships had inflicted tremendous damage to U.S. shipping, as insurance rates soared, and shippers switched to British ships. Washington wanted the British to pay heavy damages, perhaps including turning over Canada. Later, the U.S. added the British blockade runners to the claims, stating that they were responsible for prolonging the war by two years by smuggling in weapons through the Union blockade to the Confederacy.
In April 1869, the U.S. Senate overwhelmingly rejected a proposed treaty that paid too little and contained no admission of British guilt for prolonging the war. Senator Charles Sumner spoke up before Congress; publicly denounced Queen Victoria; demanded a huge reparation; and opened the possibility of Canada ceded to the United States as payment. The speech angered the British government, and talks had to be put off until matters cooled down. Negotiations for a new treaty began in January 1871 when Britain sent Sir John Rose to America to meet with Fish. A joint high commission was created on February 9, 1871, in Washington, consisting of representatives from both Britain and the United States. The commission created a treaty where an international tribunal would settle the damage amounts; the British admitted regret, not fault, over the destructive actions of the Confederate war cruisers nor that charges of blockade running were included in the treaty. Grant approved and signed the treaty on May 8, 1871; the Senate ratified the Treaty of Washington on May 24, 1871.
link=https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:CSSAlabama.jpg|right|thumb|150x150px|Confederate Warship CSS AlabamaActive service (1862–1864)
The Tribunal met on neutral territory in Geneva, Switzerland. The panel of five international arbitrators included Charles Francis Adams, who was counseled by William M. Evarts, Caleb Cushing, and Morrison R. Waite. On August 25, 1872, the Tribunal awarded United States $15.5 million in gold; $1.9 million was awarded to Great Britain. Historian Amos Elwood Corning noted that the Treaty of Washington and arbitration "bequeathed to the world a priceless legacy". In addition to the $15.5 million arbitration award, the treaty resolved some disputes over borders and fishing rights. On October 21, 1872, William I, Emperor of Germany, settled a boundary dispute in favor of the United States.
==== Korean incident ====
Main article: United States expedition to Korea
link=https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:USS_Colorado,_1871.jpg|left|thumb|USS Colorado transported troops in Admiral John Rodgers' assault on the Korean forts.
A primary role of the United States Navy in the 19th century was to protect American commercial interests and open trade to Eastern markets, including Japan and China. Korea was a small independent country that excluded all foreign trade. Washington sought a treaty dealing with shipwrecked sailors after the crew of a stranded American commercial ship was executed. The long-term goal for the Grant Administration was to open Korea to Western markets in the same way Commodore Matthew Perry had opened Japan in 1854 by a Naval display of military force. On May 30, 1871, Rear Admiral John Rodgers with a fleet of five ships, part of the Asiatic Squadron, arrived at the mouth of the Salee River below Seoul. The fleet included the Colorado, one of the largest ships in the Navy with 47 guns, 47 officers, and a 571-man crew. While waiting for senior Korean officials to negotiate, Rogers sent ships out to make soundings of the Salee River for navigational purposes.
The American fleet was fired upon by a Korean fort, but there was little damage. Rogers gave the Korean government ten days to apologize or begin talks, but the Royal Court kept silent. After ten days passed, on June 10, Rogers began a series of amphibious assaults that destroyed 5 Korean forts. These military engagements were known as the Battle of Ganghwa. Several hundred Korean soldiers and three Americans were killed. Korea still refused to negotiate, and the American fleet sailed away. The Koreans refer to this 1871 U.S. military action as Shinmiyangyo. Grant defended Rogers in his third annual message to Congress in December 1871. After a change in regimes in Seoul, in 1881, the U.S. negotiated a treaty – the first treaty between Korea and a Western nation.
=== Native American policy of the Ulysses S. Grant administration ===
During his 1850s military service in the Pacific Northwest, Grant served in the Fourth Infantry stationed at Columbia Barracks, afterwards renamed Fort Vancouver (July, 1853), in the Oregon Territory. Grant told his wife Julia, who feared violence from the Native Americans, that they were a "harmless" people. Sympathetic with the plight of Native Americans, Grant believed they would remain peaceful had they not been "put upon" by whites. In this way Grant sympathized with the Native groups, which were being devastated by small pox spread by white settlers. President Grant declared in his March 4, 1869, Inaugural Address:"The proper treatment of the original occupants of this land--the Indians one deserving of careful study. I will favor any course toward them which tends to their civilization and ultimate citizenship."Grant believed that the Native practice of free roam hunting and gathering was over. During Grant's presidency the "civilization" of Indians was a controversial issue. Grant was the first President to advocate the cause of Native Americans in an Inaugural Address. Grant was well aware that Americans were generally hostile to Native peoples. 
Grant's promise to reform the nation's Native American policy surprised the nation. Three weeks into his administration, Grant met with religious leaders and philanthropists to discuss his new program. Grant said he desired to create a "humane and Christianizing policy towards the Indians." The New York Herald said that Grant planned "to make a radical change in the Indian policy of the government." Wendell Phillips, a civil rights advocate, thanked Grant for launching a new Native policy.
The Leavenworth Bulletin, hostile to Grant's Peace initiative, said: "If more men are to be scalped and their hearts boiled, we hope to God that it may be some of our Quaker Indian Agents." Unlike many of his military subordinates, Grant blamed frontier Native violence on the white settlement, and supported a Peace Commission rather than wage a "campaign against Indians." 
Soon after Grant took office, he met with tribal chiefs of the Choctaw, Creek, Cherokee, and Chickasaw nations who expressed interest to teach "wild" Natives outside their own settled districts farming skills. Grant told the Native chiefs that American settlement would lead to inevitable conflict, but that the "march to civilization" would lead to pacification.
At the core of the Peace Policy was to put the western reservations under the control of religious denominations. During his first term, the implementation of the policy involved the allotting of Indian reservations to religious organizations as exclusive religious domains. Of the 73 agencies assigned, the Methodists received fourteen; the Orthodox Friends ten; the Presbyterians nine; the Episcopalians eight; the Roman Catholics seven; the Hicksite Friends six; the Baptists five; the Dutch Reformed five; the Congregationalists three; Christians two; Unitarians two; American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions one; and Lutherans one. Infighting between competitive missionary groups over the distribution of agencies was detrimental to Grant's Peace Policy. The selection criteria were vague and some critics saw the Peace Policy as violating Native American freedom of religion. 
=== Board of Indian Commissioners 1869 ===
On April 10, 1869, Grant signed into law the Board of Indian Commissioners. There was resistance toward its passage because Congressional patronage power over appointments would be reduced. The act gave President Grant the power to create a board of Commissioners "eminent for their intelligence and philanthropy." Grant was determined to put in public service-minded men, not subject to being influenced by patronage, that had previously plagued the Indian Bureau. Grant secured $2,000,000 more in the annual appropriation to make sure that Board would be funded adequately and be successful. Grant invited Protestantreligious groups that included Methodists, Presbyterians, Episcopalians, Congregationalists, and Quakers to nominate agents to work with the Native tribes. To bypass legal concerns regarding the separation between church and state, Grant refused to ask his Attorney General Hoar for a legal opinion on the matter.
On May 27, 1869, representatives of religious denominations met with Grant and approved of his Board appointments, who were mandated by the law to inspect Indian Bureau records, to personally visit tribes, evaluate the treaty system, and to supervise Indian purchases.
On July 3, 1869, Grant authorized by executive order the Indian Board to "have full power to inspect in person or by a subcommittee, the various Indian Superintendencies, and Agencies in the Indian Country." The Grant Board was given extensive joint-power to supervise the Bureau of Indian Affairs and "civilize" Native Americans. No Natives were appointed to the committee, whose members were all white. The commission monitored purchases and began to inspect Native agencies. It attributed much of the Native wars to the encroachment of whites into Native lands. The board, however, approved of the destruction of Native culture to be replaced by European American culture. The Natives were to be instructed in Christianity, agriculture, representative government, and assimilated on reservations.
In December 1869, Grant gave his first annual message to Congress, and he mentioned findings and recommendations of the new Indian Commissioners board. Concerning Native wars, Grant said that he "did not hold, either legislation or the conduct of the whites who come most in contact with the Indian, blameless for these hostilities." Grant thought that the extinction of the Natives would be horrible. Grant said that a policy "which looks to the extinction of a race is too abhorant [sic] for a Nation to indulge in without entailing upon the wrath of all civilized Christendom." There was an edgy sense of op
=== Appointment of Parker 1869 ===
link=https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Ely_S._Parker.jpg|right|thumb|181x181px|Ely S. ParkerDonehogawa
On April 13, 1869, in a bold step, Grant appointed his aide General Ely S. Parker, Donehogawa, the first Native American Commissioner of Indian Affairs. Parker was Grant's military secretary during the Civil War. Parker, who was a full Seneca Native, received racial prejudice opposition in the Senate to his nomination. However, Grant's Attorney General Hoar said Parker was legally able to hold office. Grant believed that the Native Americans, when educated, could work within white society in modern America, and Parker served as Grant's role model. The Senate confirmed Parker by a vote of 36 to 12. During Parker's tenure Native wars dropped by 43 from 101 in 1869 to 58 in 1870. Plains Indians found it difficult to believe a literate "red man" be appointed to "Little Father" that always had gone to a white man.
The management of Native affairs was delegated by Grant to the Secretary of Interior Jacob D. Cox and Parker. Parker authorized the Indian Board Commissioners to meet with Native peoples and their agents during the summer and fall. The Bureau under Parker employed more than six hundred workers. A total of seventy agents were under the control of fifteen superintendents. 
William Welsh, a prominent merchant, and former chairman of the Board of Indian Commissioners launched a personal campaign against Commissioner of Indian Affairs Parker to remove him from office, possibly motivated by racial animus. Welsh was allowed by Congress to prosecute the Bureau in a Congressional investigation over alleged Bureau malfeasance. Although Parker was exonerated, legislation passed Congress that authorized the board to approve goods and services payments by vouchers from the Bureau. Parker refused to abide by the voucher legislation and resigned office in 1871. Parker viewed the new law made the office of Commissioner a "clerk" to the board. Grant replaced Parker with reformer Francis A. Walker. 
=== Peigan massacre 1870 ===
On January 23, 1870, the Grant administration's Peace Policy had a major setback when Major Edward M. Baker senselessly slaughtered 173 Piegan members, mostly women, and children. General Sheridan had ordered Baker to attack the Piegan warriors who raided European American settlements. In response, Baker attacked a Native village in Northern Montana on the Marias River. Gruesome details slowly emerged of the carnage: 30 Native warriors and 140 women and children were butchered outright. Philanthropist newspapers decried the violence. The New York Times said Baker's war was a "sickening slaughter," while the New York Tribune said the attack was a "national disgrace." Worse yet, the National Anti-Slavery Society blamed one of Grant's top generals, Sheridan, for starting the fight.
Additionally, public outcry increased when General Sheridan defended Baker's actions. In response, on July 15, 1870, Grant signed Congressional legislation that barred military officers from holding either elected or appointed office or suffer dismissal from the Army. In December 1870, Grant submitted to Congress the names of the new appointees, most of whom were confirmed by the Senate. 
=== Appropriations Acts 1870, 1871 ===
link=https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Red_Cloud,_Ogalalla_Sioux_Chief,_1876.png|right|thumb|155x155px|Red CloudMaȟpíya Lúta
Grant's Peace policy received a boost when Chief of the Oglala Sioux Red Cloud, Maȟpíya Lúta, and Brulé Sioux Spotted Tail, Siŋté Glešká, arrived in Washington D.C. and met Grant at the White House for a bountiful state dinner on May 7, 1870. Red Cloud, at a previous meeting with Secretary Cox and Commissioner Parker, complained that promised rations and arms for hunting had not been delivered. Afterward, Grant and Cox lobbied Congress for the promised supplies and rations. Congress responded by passing the Indian Appropriations Act, which appropriated the tribal monies, and Grant signed it into law on July 15, 1870. Two days after Spotted Tail urged the Grant administration to keep white settlers from invading Native reservation land, Grant ordered all Generals in the West to "keep intruders off by military force if necessary". In 1871, Grant signed another Indian Appropriations Act that ended the governmental policy of treating tribes as independent sovereign nations. Natives would be treated as individuals or wards of the state and Indian policies would be legislated by Congressional statutes.
=== Camp Grant massacre 1871 ===
link=https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Old_Camp_Grant_Arizona.jpg|left|thumb|170x170px|Camp Grant
In 1871, Grant's Indian peace policy, enforced and coordinated by Brig. Gen. George Stoneman in Arizona, required the Apache to be put on reservations where they would receive supplies and agriculture education. The Apache slipped out and occasionally raided white settlers. In one raid, believed to have been conducted by Apache warriors, settlers and mail runners were murdered near Tucson, Arizona. The townspeople traced this raid to Apache reservation from Camp Grant. 500 Apache lived at the Camp Grant near Dudleyville. 
Angered over the murders, the Tucson townspeople hired 92 Papago Indians, 42 Mexicans, and 6 whites to take revenge on the Apache. When the war party reached Camp Grant on April 30, they murdered 144 Apaches, mostly women, and children, in what became known as the Camp Grant Massacre. Twenty-seven captured Apache children were sold into Mexican slavery. In May, an attempt was made by a small federal military party to capture Apache leader Cochise; during the chase, they killed 13 Apache. Grant immediately removed Stoneman of his command in Arizona. 
=== Modoc War 1872 ===
Main articles: Modoc War, Battle of Lost River, and First Battle of the Stronghold
link=https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Captain_Jack.jpg|right|thumb|169x169px|Kintpuash
Two weeks after Grant was elected President for a second term his Native American peace policy was shaken. The Modoc people are a Native tribe who at that time lived by Lake Tule near the Oregon-California border. An earlier 1864 treaty removed the Modocs from their tribal lands, which were handed over to ranchers who coveted the grasslands for their favorable conditions. The Modocs were driven from Lake Tule and relocated 25 miles north and forced to live with the Klamath peoples on the Klamath Reservation. Dissatisfied with their living situation, the Modocs, led by Kintpuash(Captain Jack), rushed back to their original land.
On November 27, the U.S. Army was ordered to force the Modocs back to the Klamath Reservation. On November 28, U.S. Army Captain James Jackson, with 40 troops, reinforced by citizens, went after the Modocs. On November 29, fighting broke out between Jackson's troop-citizen army and the Modocs at the Battle of Lost River near the California-Oregon border, marking the beginning of the Modoc War. Jackson managed to drive the Modocs from their camp, but Hooker Jim and a small band of warriors escaped and killed 18 white settlers. The Modocs fled to a strong defensive position called Stronghold, located in lava beds. On January 17, 1873, the U.S. Army attacked the Modocs at Stronghold, but were repulsed by the Modocs, under the cover of fog and rock formations.
== Second term (1873–1877) ==
Grant's Peace policy unraveled during his second term in office. Under Grant's Peace policy, Wars between settlers, the federal army, and Natives had been decreasing from 101 per year in 1869 to a low of 15 per year in 1875, into Grant's second term. However, the Modoc War, the discovery of gold in the Black Hills of the Dakota Territory, and the completion of the Northern Pacific Railway, threatened to unravel Grant's Indian policy, as white settlers encroached upon native land to mine for gold. Major General Edward Canby was killed in the Modoc War. Indian wars per year jumped up to 32 in 1876 and remained at 43 in 1877. One of the highest casualty Indian battles that took place in American history was at the Battle of Little Bighorn in 1876. Indian war casualties in Montana went from 5 in 1875, to 613 in 1876 and 436 in 1877.
=== Modoc War 1873 ===
Further information: Modoc War, Second Battle of the Stronghold, Battle of Sand Butte, and Battle of Dry Lake
link=https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:General_Edward_Canby_525.jpg|right|thumb|253x253px|Major General Edward Canby was killed at a Modoc war peace conference.
Grant desired to end the Modoc War that had started in November 1872 peacefully. Grant ordered General Sherman not to attack the Indians, held up at Stronghold, but to settle matters by a commission. Sherman then sent Major General Edward Canby to quell the Native uprising. During the peace negotiations between Brig. Gen. Edward Canby and the Modoc tribal leaders, there were more Indians in the tent then had been agreed upon. Canby had been warned of duplicity among the Modocs, but he held the conference anyway. As the Indians grew more hostile, Captain Jack, said "I talk no more." and shouted "All ready." Captain Jack drew his revolver and fired directly into the head of Canby and killed him. Canby was the highest-ranking officer to be killed during the Indian Wars that took place from 1850 to 1890. Reverend Eleazar Thomas, a Methodist minister, was also killed, Alfred B. Meacham, an Indian Agent, was severely wounded.
The murders shocked the nation, and Sherman wired to have the Modocs exterminated. Grant, however, overruled Sherman and said he wanted only those involved in Canby's assassination to be punished, rather than the whole tribe. On April 15, 1873, the U.S. Army attacked the Modocs held up in Stronghold, however, the fighting was inconclusive and the Modocs escaped. On April 26, the U.S. Army stationed at Sand Butte was attacked by 22 Modocs. On May 10, the Modocs attacked the U.S. Army again at Dry Lake, but this time the battle ended in a decisive U.S. Army victory, and the Modocs finally surrendered. The Modoc warriors who murdered Canby were imprisoned and put on trial and the whole Modoc tribe was rounded up. Meacham, who survived the massacre, defended the indicted Modocs. Captain Jack was found guilty and executed, and the remaining 155 Modocs were relocated to the Quapaw Agency in the Indian Territory. This episode and the Great Sioux War undermined public confidence in Grant's peace policy, according to historian Robert M. Utley.
=== Red River War 1874–1875 ===
Main article: Red River War
link=https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Ledger-sm2.jpg|left|thumb|150x150px|Red River War
After the 1870 invention of a new method to tan buffalohides the supply of Plains Natives buffalo was decimated by commercial buffalo hunters. The buffalo slaughter was detrimental to the Native peoples, their religion, and their nomadic lifestyle. With diminished buffalo herds the Plains Natives had no means of survival and independence. In 1874, the Red River War erupted on the southern Plains when Quanah Parker, leader of the Comanche, led 700 tribal warriors and attacked the buffalo hunter supply base on the Canadian River, at Adobe Walls, Texas. The Army under General Phil Sheridan launched a military campaign, and, with few casualties on either side, forced the Indians back to their reservations by destroying their horses and winter food supplies. Grant, who agreed to the Army plan advocated by Generals William T. Sherman and Phil Sheridan, imprisoned 74 insurgents in Florida. 
=== Great Sioux War 1876–1877 ===
Main articles: Great Sioux War and Battle of Little Big Horn
link=https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Custer%27s_last_charge.jpg|right|thumb|180x180px|Custer's Last ChargeSeifert Gugler & Co. 1876
In 1874 gold had been discovered in the Black Hillsin the Dakota Territory. White speculators and settlers rushed in droves seeking riches mining gold on land reserved for the Sioux tribe by the Treaty of Fort Laramie of 1868. In 1875, to avoid conflict Grant met with Red Cloud, chief of the Sioux and offered $25,000 from the government to purchase the land. The offer was declined. On November 3, 1875, at a White House meeting, Phil Sheridan told the President that the Army was overstretched and could not defend the Sioux tribe from the settlers; Grant ordered Sheridan to round up the Sioux and put them on the reservation. Sheridan used a strategy of convergence, using Army columns to force the Sioux onto the reservation. On June 25, 1876, one of these columns, led by Colonel George A. Custer met the Sioux at the Battle of Little Big Horn and part of his command was slaughtered. Approximately 253 federal soldiers and civilians were killed compared to 40 Indians.
Custer's death and the Battle of Little Big Horn shocked the nation. Sheridan avenged Custer, pacified the northern Plains, and put the defeated Sioux on the reservation. On August 15, 1876, President Grant signed a proviso giving the Sioux nation $1,000,000 in rations, while the Sioux relinquished all rights to the Black Hills, except for a 40-mile land tract west of the 103rd meridian. On August 28, a seven-man committee, appointed by Grant, gave additional harsh stipulations for the Sioux in order to receive government assistance. Halfbreeds and "squaw men" (A white man with an Indian wife) were banished from the Sioux reservation. To receive the government rations, the Indians had to work the land. Reluctantly, on September 20, the Indian leaders, whose people were starving, agreed to the committee's demands and signed the agreement.
During the Great Sioux War, Grant came into conflict with Col. George Armstrong Custer after he testified in 1876 about corruption in the War Department under Secretary William W. Belknap (see below). Grant had Custer arrested for breach of military protocol in Chicago and barred him from leading an upcoming campaign against the Sioux. Grant finally relented and let Custer fight under Brig. Gen. Alfred Terry. Two months after Custer's death Grant castigated him in the press, saying "I regard Custer's massacre as a sacrifice of troops, brought on by Custer himself, that was wholly unnecessary – wholly unnecessary." As the nation was shocked by the death of Custer, Grant's peace policy became militaristic; Congress appropriated funds for 2,500 more troops, two more forts were constructed, the army took over the Indian agencies and Indians were barred from purchasing rifles and ammunition.
== Buffalo destruction ==
link=https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Bull_Bison.jpg|right|thumb|American buffalo or bison
Central to the Grant administration Peacepolicy was allowing the destruction of the buffalo, the Native food supply, to keep Native peoples dependent on government supplies. In 1872, around two thousand white buffalo hunters working between Kansas, and Arkansas were killing buffalo for their hides by the many thousands. The demand was for boots for European armies, or machine belts attached to steam engines. Acres of land were dedicated solely for drying the hides of the slaughtered buffalo. Native Americans protested at the "wanton destruction" of their food supply. Between 1872 in 1874, the buffalo herd south of the Platte River yielded 4.4 million kills by white hunters, and about 1 million animals killed by Indians.
Popular concern for the destruction of the buffalo mounted, and a bill in Congress was passed, HR 921, that would have made buffalo hunting illegal for whites. Taking advice from Secretary Delano, Grant chose to pocket-veto the bill, believing that the demise of the buffalo would reduce Indian wars and force tribes to stay on their respected reservations and to adopt an agricultural lifestyle rather than roaming the plains and hunting buffalo. Ranchers wanted the buffalo gone to open pasture land for their cattle herds. With the buffalo food supply lowered, Native Americans were forced to stay on reservations. 
=== Domestic affairs ===
==== Holidays law ====
On June 28, 1870, Grant approved and signed legislation that made Christmas, on December 25, a legal federal public holiday in the national capital of Washington, D.C. According to historian Ron White, Grant did this because of his passion to unify the nation. During the early 19th Century in the United States, Christmas became more of a family-centered activity. Other Holidays, included in the law within Washington, D.C., were New Year, Fourth of July, and Thanksgiving. The law affected 5,300 federal employees working in the District of Columbia, the nation's capital. The legislation was meant to adapt to similar laws in states surrounding Washington, D.C., and "in every State of the Union."
==== Utah territory polygamy ====
link=https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Brigham_Young_by_Charles_William_Carter.jpg|thumb|Brigham YoungCharles William Carter 1866–1877
In 1862, during the American Civil War President Lincoln signed into law the Morrill bill that outlawed polygamy in all U.S. Territories. Mormons who practiced polygamy in Utah, for the most part, resisted the Morrill law and the territorial governor.During the 1868 election, Grant had mentioned he would enforce the law against polygamy. Tensions began as early as 1870, when Mormons in Ogden, Utah began to arm themselves and practice military drilling. By the Fourth of July, 1871 Mormon militia in Salt Lake City, Utah were on the verge of fighting territorial troops; in the end, violence was averted.Grant, however, who believed Utah was in a state of rebellion was determined to arrest those who practiced polygamy outlawed under the Morrill Act. In October 1871 hundreds of Mormons were rounded up by U.S. marshals, put in a prison camp, arrested, and put on trial for polygamy. One convicted polygamist received a $500 fine and three years in prison under hard labor. On November 20, 1871, Mormon leader Brigham Young, in ill health, had been charged with polygamy. Young's attorney stated that Young had no intention to flee the court. Other persons during the polygamy shut down were charged with murder or intent to kill. The Morrill Act, however, proved hard to enforce since proof of marriage was required for conviction. Grant personally found polygamy morally offensive. On December 4, 1871, Grant said polygamists in Utah were "a remnant of barbarism, repugnant to civilization, to decency, and to the laws of the United States."
==== Comstock Act ====
Main article: Comstock laws
In March 1873, anti-obscenity moralists, led by Anthony Comstock, secretary of the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice, easily secured passage of the Comstock Act which made it a federal crime to mail articles "for any indecent or immoral use". Grant signed the bill after he was assured that Comstock would personally enforce it. Comstock went on to become a special agent of the Post Office appointed by Secretary James Cresswell. Comstock prosecuted pornographers, imprisoned abortionists, banned nude art, stopped the mailing of information about contraception, and tried to ban what he considered bad books.
==== Early suffrage movement ====
link=https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Belva_Ann_Lockwood_-_Brady-Handy.jpg|left|thumb|Bennette LockwoodMathew Brady 1865–1880
During Grant's presidency the early Women's suffragemovement led by Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton gained national attention. Anthony lobbied for female suffrage, equal gender pay, and protection of property for women who resided in Washington, D.C. In April 1869, Grant signed into law the protection of married women's property from their husbands' debts and the ability for women to sue in court in Washington, D.C. In March 1870 Representative Samuel M. Arnell introduced a bill, coauthored by suffragist Bennette Lockwood, that would give women federal workers equal pay for equal work. Two years later Grant signed a modified Senate version of the Arnell Bill into law. The law required that all federal female clerks would be paid the fully compensated salary; however, lower tiered female clerks were exempted. The law increased women's clerk salaries from 4% to 20% during the 1870s; however, the culture of patronage and patriarchy continued. To placate the burgeoning suffragist movement, the Republicans' platform included that women's rights should be treated with "respectful consideration", while Grant advocated equal rights for all citizens. 
=== Yellowstone and conservation ===
link=https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Yellowstone_1871b.jpg|thumb|Hayden's Map of Yellowstone, 1871
An enduring hallmark of the Grant administration was the creation of Yellowstone, the world's first national park. Organized exploration of the upper Yellowstone Riverbegan in fall 1869 when the Cook–Folsom–Peterson Expedition made a month-long journey up the Yellowstone River and into the geyser basins. In 1870, the somewhat more official Washburn–Langford–Doane Expeditionexplored the same regions of the upper Yellowstone and geyser basins, naming Old Faithful and many other park features. Official reports from Lieutenant Gustavus Cheyney Doane and Scribner's Monthly accounts by Nathaniel P. Langford brought increased public awareness to the natural wonders of the region. Influenced by Jay Cooke of the Northern Pacific Railroad and Langford's public speeches about the Yellowstone on the East Coast, geologist Ferdinand Hayden sought funding from Congress for an expedition under the auspices of the U.S. Geological Survey. In March 1871 Grant signed into law Congressional legislation appropriating $40,000 to finance the Hayden Geological Survey of 1871. Hayden was given instructions by Grant's Secretary of Interior, Columbus Delano. The expedition party was composed of 36 civilians, mostly scientists, and two military escorts. Among the survey party were an artist Thomas Moran and photographer William Henry Jackson.
Hayden's published reports, magazine articles, along with paintings by Moran and photographs by Jackson convinced Congress to preserve the natural wonders of the upper Yellowstone. On December 18, 1871, a bill was introduced simultaneously in the Senate, by Senator S.C. Pomeroy of Kansas, and in the House of Representatives, by Congressman William H. Clagett of the Montana Territory, for the establishment of a park at the headwaters of the Yellowstone River. Hayden's influence on Congress is readily apparent when examining the detailed information contained in the report of the House Committee on Public Lands: "The bill now before Congress has for its objective the withdrawal from settlement, occupancy, or sale, under the laws of the United States a tract of land fifty-five by sixty-five miles, about the sources of the Yellowstone and Missouri Rivers, and dedicates and sets apart as a great national park or pleasure-ground for the benefit and enjoyment of the people." When the bill was presented to Congress, the bill's chief supporters, ably prepared by Langford, Hayden and Jay Cooke, convinced their colleagues that the region's real value was as a park area, to be preserved in its natural state. The bill was approved by a comfortable margin in the Senate on January 30, 1872, and by the House on February 27.
On March 1, 1872, Grant played his role, in signing the "Act of Dedication" into law. It established the Yellowstone region as the nation's first national park, made possible by three years of exploration by Cook-Folsom-Peterson (1869), Washburn-Langford-Doane (1870), and Hayden (1871). The 1872 Yellowstone Act prohibited fish and game, including buffalo, from "wanton destruction" within the confines of the park. However, Congress did not appropriate funds or legislation for the enforcement against poaching; as a result, Secretary Delano could not hire people to aid tourists or protect Yellowstone from encroachment. By the 1880s buffalo herds dwindled to only a few hundred, a majority found mostly in Yellowstone National Park. As the Indian wars ended, Congress appropriated money and enforcement legislation in 1894, signed into law by President Grover Cleveland, that protected and preserved buffalo and other wildlife in Yellowstone. Grant also signed legislation that protected northern fur seals on Alaska's Pribilof Islands. This was the first law in U.S. history that specifically protected wildlife on federally owned land.
==== Civil service commission ====
The reform of the spoils system of political patronage entered the national agenda under the Grant presidency and would take on the fervor of a religious revival.The distribution of federal jobs by Congressional legislators was considered vital for their reelection to Congress. Grant required that all applicants to federal jobs apply directly to the Department heads, rather than the president. Two of Grant's appointments, Secretary of Interior Jacob D. Cox and Secretary of Treasury George S. Boutwell put in place examinations in their respected departments advocated by reformers. Grant and all reformers agreed that the prevailing system of appointments was unsound, for it maximized party advantage and minimized efficiency and the nonpartisan interest of good government. Historian John Simon says his efforts at civil service reform were honest, but that they were met with criticism from all sides and were a failure.
Grant was the first president to recommend a professional civil service. He pushed the initial legislation through Congress and appointed the members for the first United States Civil Service Commission. The temporary Commission recommended administering competitive exams and issuing regulations on the hiring and promotion of government employees. Grant ordered their recommendations in effect in 1872; having lasted for two years until December 1874. At the New York Custom House, a port that took in hundreds of millions of dollars a year in revenue, applicants for an entry position now had to pass a written civil service examination. Chester A. Arthur who was appointed by Grant as New York Custom Collector stated that the examinations excluded and deterred unfit persons from getting employment positions. However, Congress, in no mood to reform itself, denied any long-term reform by refusing to enact the necessary legislation to make the changes permanent. Historians have traditionally been divided whether patronage, meaning appointments made without a merit system, should be labeled corruption.
The movement for Civil Service reform reflected two distinct objectives: to eliminate the corruption and inefficiencies in a non-professional bureaucracy and to check the power of President Johnson. Although many reformers after the Election of 1868 looked to Grant to ram Civil Service legislation through Congress, he refused, saying:Civil Service Reform rests entirely with Congress. If members will give up claiming patronage, that will be a step gained. But there is an immense amount of human nature in the members of Congress, and it is human nature to seek power and use it to help friends. You cannot call it corruption – it is a condition of our representative form of Government.Grant used patronage to build his party and help his friends. He protected those whom he thought were the victims of injustice or attacks by his enemies, even if they were guilty. Grant believed in loyalty to his friends, as one writer called it the "Chivalry of Friendship".
==== New York Custom House Ring ====
link=https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:That_salary_grab-%22You_took_it%22_LCCN93500053.tif|thumb|"Salary Grab" caption: "That salary grab – 'You took it'" Frank Leslie's Illustrated NewspaperDecember 27, 1873
Prior to the presidential election of 1872 two congressional and one Treasury Department investigations took place over corruption at the New York Custom House under Grant collector appointments Moses H. Grinnell and Thomas Murphy. Private warehouses were taking imported goods from the docks and charging shippers storage fees. Grant's friend, George K. Leet, was allegedly involved with exorbitant pricing for storing goods and splitting the profits.[citation needed] Grant's third collector appointment, Chester A. Arthur, implemented Secretary of Treasury George S. Boutwell's reform to keep the goods protected on the docks rather than private storage.
==== Star Route Postal Ring ====
Main article: Star route scandal
In the early 1870s during the Grant Administration, lucrative postal route contracts were given to local contractors on the Pacific Coast and Southern regions of the United States. These were known as Star Routes because an asterisk was given on official Post Office documents. These remote routes were hundreds of miles long and went to the most rural parts of the United States by horse and buggy. In obtaining these highly prized postal contracts, an intricate ring of bribery and straw bidding was set up in the Postal Contract office; the ring consisted of contractors, postal clerks, and various intermediary brokers. Straw bidding was at its highest practice while John Creswell, Grant's 1869 appointment, was Postmaster-General. An 1872 federal investigation into the matter exonerated Creswell, but he was censured by the minority House report. A $40,000 bribe to the 42nd Congress by one postal contractor had tainted the results of the investigation. In 1876, another congressional investigation under a Democratic House shut down the postal ring for a few years.
==== The Salary Grab ====
On March 3, 1873, Grant signed a law that authorized the president's salary to be increased from $25,000 a year to $50,000 a year and Congressmen's salaries to be increased by $2,500. Representatives also received a retroactive pay bonus for the previous two years of service. This was done in secret and attached to a general appropriations bill. Reforming newspapers quickly exposed the law and the bonus was repealed in January 1874. Grant missed an opportunity to veto the bill and to make a strong statement for good government.
=== Election of 1872 ===
Main article: 1872 United States presidential election
link=https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Ulysses_Grant_Henry_Wilson_campaign_poster_1872.jpg|thumb|Grant-Wilson Campaign Poster 1872
As his first term entered its final year, Grant remained popular throughout the nation despite the accusations of corruption that were swirling around his administration. When Republicans gathered for their 1872 national convention he was unanimously nominated for a second term. Henry Wilson was selected as his running mate over scandal-tainted Vice President Schuyler Colfax. The party platform advocated high tariffs and a continuation of Radical Reconstruction policies that supported five military districts in the Southern states.
During Grant's first term a significant number of Republicans had become completely disillusioned with the party. Weary of the scandals and opposed to several of Grant's policies, split from the party to form the Liberal Republican Party. At the party's only national convention, held in May 1872 New York Tribune editor Horace Greeley was nominated for president, and Benjamin Gratz Brown was nominated for vice president. They advocated civil service reform, a low tariff, and granting amnesty to former Confederate soldiers. They also wanted to end reconstruction and restore local self-government in the South.
link=https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:ElectoralCollege1872.svg|left|thumb|Electoral Vote Results 1872
The Democrats, who at this time had no strong candidate choice of their own, saw an opportunity to consolidate the anti-Grant vote and jumped on the Greeley bandwagon, reluctantly adopting Greeley and Brown as their nominees. It is the only time in American history when a major party endorsed the candidate of a third party.
While Grant, like incumbent presidents before him, did not campaign, an efficient party organization composed of thousands of patronage appointees, did so on his behalf. Frederick Douglass supported Grant and reminded black voters that Grant had destroyed the violent Ku Klux Klan. Greeley embarked on a five-state campaign tour in late September, during which he delivered nearly 200 speeches. His campaign was plagued by misstatements and embarrassing moments.
However, because of political infighting between Liberal Republicans and Democrats, and due to several campaign blunders, the physically ailing Greeley was no match for Grant, who won in a landslide. Grant won 286 of the 352 Electoral College votes and received 55.8 percent of the popular vote nationwide. The President's reelection victory also brought an overwhelming Republican majority into both houses of Congress. Heartbroken after a hard-fought political campaign, Greeley died a few weeks after the election. Out of respect for Greeley, Grant attended his funeral.
The second inauguration of Ulysses Grant's presidency was held on Tuesday, March 4, 1873, commencing the second four-year term of his presidency. Subsequently, the inaugural ball ended early when the food froze. Departing from the White House, a parade escorted Grant down the newly paved Pennsylvania Avenue, which was all decorated with banners and flags, on to the swearing-in ceremony in front of the Capitol building. Chief Justice Salmon P. Chaseadministered the presidential oath of office. This was one of the coldest inaugurations in U.S. history, with the temperature at only 6 degrees at sunrise. After the swearing-in ceremony the inaugural parade commenced down Pennsylvania. The Evening Star observed. "The private stands and windows along the entire route were crowded to excess." The parade consisted of a variety of military units along with marching bands, and civic organizations. The military units, in their fancy regalia, were the most noticeable. Altogether there were approximately 12,000 marchers who participated, including several units of African American soldiers. At the inaugural ball there were some 6,000 people in attendance. Great care was taken to ensure that Grant's inaugural ball would be in spacious quarters and would feature an elegant assortment of appetizers, food, and champagne. A large temporary wooden building was constructed at Judiciary Square to accommodate the event. Grant arrived around 11:30pm and the dancing began.
It was the only term of Henry Wilson as vice president. Wilson died 2 years, 263 days into this term, and the office remained vacant for the balance of it.
=== Reconstruction ===
Further information: Reconstruction era of the United States
Grant was vigorous in his enforcement of the 14th and 15th amendments and prosecuted thousands of persons who violated African American civil rights; he used military force to put down political insurrections in Louisiana, Mississippi, and South Carolina. He proactively used military and Justice Departmentenforcement of civil rights laws and the protection of African Americans more than any other 19th-century president. He used his full powers to weaken the Ku Klux Klan, reducing violence and intimidation in the South. He appointed James Milton Turner as the first African American minister to a foreign nation. Grant's relationship with Charles Sumner, the leader in promoting civil rights, was shattered by the Senator's opposition to Grant's plan to acquire Santo Domingo by treaty. Grant retaliated, firing men Sumner had recommended and having allies strip Sumner of his chairmanship of the Foreign Relations Committee. Sumner joined the Liberal Republican movement in 1872 to fight Grant's reelection.
Conservative resistance to Republican state governments grew after the 1872 elections. With the destruction of the Klan in 1872, new secret paramilitary organizations arose in the Deep South. In Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Louisiana, the Red Shirts and White League operated openly and were better organized than the Ku Klux Klan. Their goals were to oust the Republicans, return Conservative whites to power, and use whatever illegal methods needed to achieve them. Being loyal to his veterans, Grant remained determined that African Americans would receive protection.
==== Colfax Massacre ====
Main article: Colfax Massacre
After the November 4, 1872, election, Louisiana was a split state. In a controversial election, two candidates were claiming victory as governor. Violence was used to intimidate black Republicans. The fusionist party of Liberal Republicans and Democrats claimed John McEnery as the victor, while the Republicans claimed U.S. Senator William P. Kellogg. Two months later each candidate was sworn in as governor on January 13, 1873. A federal judge ruled that Kellogg was the rightful winner of the election and ordered him and the Republican-based majority to be seated. The White League supported McEnery and prepared to use military force to remove Kellogg from office. Grant ordered troops to enforce the court order and protect Kellogg. On March 4, Federal troops under a flag of truce and Kellogg's state militia defeated McEnery's fusionist party's insurrection.
link=https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:The_Union_as_It_Was.jpg|thumb|Louisiana White League units in 1874 to terrorized black Republicans
A dispute arose over who would be installed as judge and sheriff at the Colfax courthouse in Grant Parish. Kellogg's two appointees had seized control of the Court House on March 25 with aid and protection of black state militia troops. Then on April 13, White League forces attacked the courthouse and massacred 50 black militiamen who had been captured. A total of 105 blacks were killed trying to defend the Colfax courthouse for Governor Kellogg. On April 21, Grant sent in the U.S. 19th Infantry Regiment to restore order. On May 22, Grant issued a new proclamation to restore order in Louisiana. On May 31, McEnery finally told his followers to obey "peremptory orders" of the President. The orders brought a brief peace to New Orleans and most of Louisiana, except, ironically, Grant Parish.
==== Brooks-Baxter war in Arkansas ====
Main article: Brooks–Baxter War
In the fall of 1872, the Republican party split in Arkansas and ran two candidates for governor, Elisha Baxter and Joseph Brooks. Massive fraud characterized the election, but Baxter was declared the winner and took office. Brooks never gave up; finally, in 1874, a local judge ruled Brooks was entitled to the office and swore him in. Both sides mobilized militia units, and rioting and fighting bloodied the streets. Speculation swirled as to who President Grant would side with – either Baxter or Brooks. Grant delayed, requesting a joint session of the Arkansas government to figure out peacefully who would be the Governor, but Baxter refused to participate. On May 15, 1874, Grant issued a Proclamation that Baxter was the legitimate Governor of Arkansas, and hostilities ceased. In the fall of 1874 the people of Arkansas voted out Baxter, and Republicans and the Redeemers came to power.
A few months later in early 1875, Grant announced that Brooks had been legitimately elected back in 1872. Grant did not send in troops, and Brooks never regained office. Instead, Grant appointed him to the high-paying patronage job of US postmaster in Little Rock. Grant's legalistic approach did resolve the conflict peacefully, but it left the Republican Party in Arkansas in total disarray, and further discredited Grant's reputation.
==== Vicksburg riots ====
In August 1874, the Vicksburg city government elected White reform party candidates consisting of Republicans and Democrats. They promised to lower city spending and taxes. Despite such intentions, the reform movement turned racist when the new White city officials went after the county government, which had a majority of African Americans. The White League threatened the life of and expelled Crosby, the black Warren County Sheriff and tax collector. Crosby sought help from Republican Governor Adelbert Ames to regain his position as sheriff. Governor Ames told him to take other African Americans and use force to retain his lawful position. At that time Vicksburg had a population of 12,443, more than half of whom were African American.
On December 7, 1874, Crosby and an African American militia approached Vicksburg. He had said that the Whites were, "ruffians, barbarians, and political banditti". A series of confrontations occurred against white paramilitary forces that resulted in the deaths of 29 African Americans and 2 Whites. The White militia retained control of the County Court House and jail.
On December 21, Grant issued a Presidential Proclamation for the people in Vicksburg to stop fighting. General Philip Sheridan, based in Louisiana for this regional territory, dispatched federal troops, who reinstated Crosby as sheriff and restored the peace. When questioned about the matter, Governor Ames denied that he had told Crosby to use African American militia. On June 7, 1875, Crosby was shot to death by a white deputy while drinking in a bar. The origins of the shooting remained a mystery.
link=https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:JamesLongstreet.jpg|thumb|Former Confederate General James A. Longstreet and African American militia attempted to stop a white supremacist revolt at New Orleans in September 1874.
==== Louisiana revolt and coups ====
On September 14, 1874, the White League and Democratic militia took control of the state house at New Orleans, and the Republican Governor William P. Kellogg was forced to flee. Former Confederate General James A. Longstreet, with 3,000 African American militia and 400 Metropolitan police, made a counterattack on the 8,000 White League troops. Consisting of former Confederate soldiers, the experienced White League troops routed Longstreet's army. On September 17, Grant sent in Federal troops, and they restored the government back to Kellogg. During the following controversial election in November, passions rose high, and violence mixed with fraud were rampant; the state of affairs in New Orleans was becoming out of control. The results were that 53 Republicans and 53 Democrats were elected with 5 remaining seats to be decided by the legislature.
Grant had been careful to watch the elections and secretly sent Phil Sheridan in to keep law and order in the state. Sheridan had arrived in New Orleans a few days before the January 4, 1875, legislature opening meeting. At the convention the Democrats again with military force took control of the state building out of Republican hands. Initially, the Democrats were protected by federal troops under Colonel Régis de Trobriand, and the escaped Republicans were removed from the hallways of the state building. However, Governor Kellogg then requested that Trobriand reseat the Republicans. Trobriand returned to the Statehouse and used bayonets to force the Democrats out of the building. The Republicans then organized their own house with their own speakers all being protected by the Federal Army. Sheridan, who had annexed the Department of the Gulf to his command at 9:00 p.m., claimed that the federal troops were being neutral since they had also protected the Democrats earlier.
==== Civil Rights Act of 1875 ====
Further information: Civil Rights Act of 1875
Throughout his presidency, Grant was continually concerned with the civil rights of all Americans, "irrespective of nationality, color, or religion." Grant had no role in writing the Civil Rights Act of 1875 but he did sign it a few days before the Republicans lost control of Congress. The new law was designed to allow everyone access to public eating establishments, hotels, and places of entertainment. This was done particularly to protect African Americans who were discriminated across United States. The bill was also passed in honor of Senator Charles Sumner who had previously attempted to pass a civil rights bill in 1872. In his sixth message to Congress, he summed up his own views, "While I remain Executive all the laws of Congress and the provisions of the Constitution ... will be enforced with rigor ... Treat the Negro as a citizen and a voter, as he is and must remain ... Then we shall have no complaint of sectional interference." In the pursued equal justice for allcategory from the 2009 C-SPAN presidential rating survey Grant scored a 9 getting into the top ten. The Civil Rights Act of 1875 proved a very little value to Blacks. The Justice Department and the federal judges generally refused to enforce it, and the Supreme Court declared it unconstitutional in 1883. Historian William Gillette calls it "an insignificant victory."
==== South Carolina 1876 ====
Further information: 1876 South Carolina gubernatorial election
link=https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Wade_Hampton_III_-_Brady-Handy.jpg|thumb|Former Confederate officer Wade Hampton IIIwas supported by the terrorist group Red Shirtsin the 1876 Governor's election in South Carolina.
During the election year of 1876, South Carolina was in a state of rebellion against Republican governor Daniel H. Chamberlain. Conservatives were determined to win the election for ex-Confederate Wade Hampton through violence and intimidation. The Republicans went on to nominate Chamberlain for a second term. Hampton supporters, donning red shirts, disrupted Republican meetings with gun shootings and yelling. Tensions became violent on July 8, 1876, when five African Americans were murdered at Hamburg. The rifle clubs, wearing their Red Shirts, were better armed than the blacks. South Carolina was ruled more by "mobocracy and bloodshed" than by Chamberlain's government.
Black militia fought back in Charleston on September 6, 1876, in what was known as the "King Street riot". The white militia assumed defensive positions out of concern over possible intervention from federal troops. Then, on September 19, the Red Shirts took offensive action by openly killing between 30 and 50 African Americans outside Ellenton. During the massacre, state representative Simon Coker was killed. On October 7, Governor Chamberlain declared martial law and told all the "rifle club" members to put down their weapons. In the meantime, Wade Hampton never ceased to remind Chamberlain that he did not rule South Carolina. Out of desperation, Chamberlain wrote to Grant and asked for federal intervention. The "Cainhoy riot" took place on October 15 when Republicans held a rally at "Brick Church" outside Cainhoy. Blacks and whites both opened fire; six whites and one black were killed. Grant, upset over the Ellenton and Cainhoy riots, finally declared a Presidential Proclamation on October 17, 1876, and ordered all persons, within 3 days, to cease their lawless activities and disperse to their homes. A total of 1,144 federal infantrymen were sent into South Carolina, and the violence stopped; election day was quiet. Both Hampton and Chamberlain claimed victory, and for a while both acted as governor; Hampton took the office in 1877 after President Rutherford B. Hayes withdrew federal troops and after Chamberlain left the state.
==== Panic of 1873 ====
Main article: Panic of 1873
link=https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:The_Great_Financial_Panic_of_1873_-_Closing_the_door_of_the_Stock_Exchange_on_its_members,_Saturday,_Sept._20th_LCCN99614016.tif|right|thumb|The NYSE closed on September 20, 1873
Between 1868 and 1873, the American economy was robust, primarily caused by railroad building, manufacturing expansion, and thriving agriculture production. Financial debt, however, particularly in railroad investment, spread throughout both the private and federal sectors. The market began to break in July 1873 when the Brooklyn Trust Company went broke and closed. Secretary Richardson sold gold to pay for $14 million in federal bonds. Two months later, the Panic of 1873, collapsed the national economy. On September 17, the stock market crashed, followed by the New York Warehouse & Security Company, September 18, and the Jay Cooke & Company, September 19, both going bankrupt. On September 19, Grant ordered Secretary Richardson, Boutwell's replacement, to purchase $10 million in bonds. Richardson complied using greenbacks to expand the money supply. On September 20, the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) closed for ten days. Traveling to New York, Grant met with Richardson to consult with bankers, who gave Grant conflicting financial advice.
Returning to Washington, Grant and Richardson sent millions of greenbacks from the treasury to New York to purchase bonds, stopping the purchases on September 24. By the beginning of January 1874, Richardson had issued a total of $26 million greenbacks from the Treasury reserve, into the economy, relieving Wall Street, but not stopping the national Long Depression, that would last 5 years. Thousands of businesses, depressed daily wages by 25% for three years, and brought the unemployment rate up to 14%.
==== Inflation bill vetoed and compromise ====
link=https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Grant_Inflation_Bill_Veto.jpg|thumb|Political cartoon by Thomas Nast: Grant congratulated for vetoing the "inflation bill" on April 22, 1874
Grant and Richardson's mildly inflationary response to the Panic of 1873, encouraged Congress to pursue a more aggressive policy. The legality of releasing greenbacks was presumed to have been illegal. On April 14, 1874, Congress passed the Inflation Bill that set the greenback maximum at $400,000 retroactively legalizing the $26 million reserve greenbacks earlier released by the Treasury. The bill released an additional $18 million in greenbacks up to the original $400,000,000 amount. Going further, the bill authorized an additional $46 million in banknotes and raised their maximum to $400 million. Eastern bankers vigorously lobbied Grant to veto the bill because of their reliance on bonds and foreign investors who did business in gold. Most of Grant's cabinet favored the bill in order to secure a Republican election. Grant's conservative Secretary of State Hamilton Fishthreatened to resign if Grant signed the bill. On April 22, 1874, after evaluating his own reasons for wanting to sign the bill, Grant unexpectedly vetoed the bill against the popular election strategy of the Republican Party because he believed it would destroy the nation's credit.
Congress passed a compromise bill, that Grant signed on June 20, 1874. The act legalized the $26 million released by Richardson and set the maximum of greenbacks at $382 million. Up to $55 million in national banknotes would be redistributed from states with an excess to those states that had minimal amounts. The act did little to relieve the national economy
==== Resumption of Specie Act ====
On January 14, 1875, Grant signed the Resumption of Specie Act, and he could not have been happier; he wrote a note to Congress congratulating members on the passage of the act. The legislation was drafted by Ohio Republican Senator John Sherman. This act provided that paper money in circulation would be exchanged for gold specie and silver coins and would be effective January 1, 1879. The act also implemented that gradual steps would be taken to reduce the number of greenbacks in circulation. At that time there were "paper coin" currency worth less than $1.00, and these would be exchanged for silver coins. Its effect was to stabilize the currency and make the consumers money as "good as gold". In an age without a Federal Reserve system to control inflation, this act stabilized the economy. Grant considered it the hallmark of his administration.
=== Foreign affairs ===
Further information: Hamilton Fish
Foreign affairs were managed peacefully during Grant's second term in office. Historians credit Secretary of State Hamilton Fish with a highly effective foreign policy. Ronald Cedric White says of Grant, "everyone agreed he chose well when he appointed Hamilton Fish secretary of state."
==== Virginus incident ====
Main article: Virginius Affair
link=https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Castelar_by_Josep_Nin_i_Tud%C3%B3.jpg|thumb|Emilio CastelarSpanish Republic president (1873–1874)
On October 31, 1873, a steamer Virginius, flying the American flag carrying war materials and men to aid the Cuban insurrection (in violation of American and Spanish law) was intercepted and taken to Cuba. After a hasty trial, the local Spanish officials executed 53 would-be insurgents, eight of whom were United States citizens; orders from Madrid to delay the executions arrived too late. War scares erupted in both the U.S. and Spain, heightened by the bellicose dispatches from the American minister in Madrid, retired general Daniel Sickles. Secretary of State Fish kept a cool demeanor in the crisis, and through investigation discovered there was a question over whether the Virginius ship had the right to bear the United States flag. The Spanish Republic's president Emilio Castelar expressed profound regret for the tragedy and was willing to make reparations through arbitration. Fish negotiated reparations with the Spanish minister Senor Polo de Barnabé. With Grant's approval, Spain was to surrender Virginius, pay an indemnity to the surviving families of the Americans executed, and salute the American flag; the episode ended quietly.
Grant also played a pivotal role in the affair. Grant sent American warships off of Florida and discussed Cuban invasion plans with General Sherman and the War Department. The bluff worked and the Spanish government accepted Grant's negotiated peace terms. Grant messaged Congress the incident was closed and national honor was restored. However, the salute of the American flag by the Spanish Navy was a stickler. When the Spanish returned the Virginus the Spanish Navy did not salute the American flag disputing that the Virginius was not an American-owned ship. The next day Grant's Attorney General George H. Williamsruled that the Virginus U.S. ownership was fraudulent, but the Spanish had no right to capture the ship.
==== Hawaiian free trade treaty ====
In December 1874, Grant held a state dinner at the White House for the King of Hawaii, David Kalakaua, who was seeking the importation of Hawaiian sugar duty-free to the United States. Grant and Fish were able to produce a successful free trade treaty in 1875 with the Kingdom of Hawaii, incorporating the Pacific islands' sugar industry into the United States' economy sphere.
==== Liberian-Grebo war ====
The U.S. settled the war between Liberia and the native Grebo people in 1876 by dispatching the USS Alaska to Liberia. James Milton Turner, the first African American ambassador from the United States, requested that a warship be sent to protect American property in Liberia, a former American colony. After Alaskaarrived, Turner negotiated the incorporation of Grebo people into Liberian society and the ousting of foreign traders from Liberia.
==== Mexican border raids ====
At the close of Grant's second term in office, Fish had to contend with Indian raids on the Mexican border, due to a lack of law enforcement over the U.S.–Mexican border. The problem would escalate during the Hayes administration, under Fish's successor William Evarts.
==== Religion and schools ====
Main article: Blaine Amendment
Grant believed strongly in the separation of church and state and championed complete secularization in public schools. In a September 1875 speech, Grant advocated "security of free thought, free speech, and free press, pure morals, unfettered religious sentiments, and of equal rights and privileges to all men, irrespective of nationality, color, or religion." In regard to public education, Grant endorsed that every child should receive "the opportunity of a good common school education, unmixed with sectarian, pagan, or atheist tenets. Leave the matter of religion to the family altar, the church, and the private schools... Keep the church and the state forever separate."
In a speech in 1875 to a veteran's meeting, Grant called for a Constitutional amendment that would mandate free public schools and prohibit the use of public money for sectarian schools. He was echoing nativist sentiments that were strong in his Republican Party. Tyler Anbinder says, "Grant was not an obsessive nativist. He expressed his resentment of immigrants and animus toward Catholicism only rarely. But these sentiments reveal themselves frequently enough in his writings and major actions as general....In the 1850s he joined a Know Nothing lodge and irrationally blamed immigrants for setbacks in his career."
Grant laid out his agenda for "good common school education". He attacked government support for "sectarian schools" run by religious organizations and called for the defense of public education "unmixed with sectarian, pagan or atheistical dogmas." Grant declared that "Church and State" should be "forever separate." Religion, he said, should be left to families, churches, and private schools devoid of public funds.
After Grant's speech Republican Congressman James G. Blaine (1830–1893) proposed the amendment to the federal Constitution. Blaine, who actively sought Catholic votes when he ran for president in 1884, believed that possibility of hurtful agitation on the school question should be ended. In 1875, the proposed amendment passed by a vote of 180 to 7 in the House of Representatives, but failed by four votes to achieve the necessary two-thirds vote in the Senate. Nothing like it ever became federal legislation. However, many states did adopt similar amendments to their state constitution.
The proposed Blaine Amendment text was:No State shall make any law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; and no money raised by taxation in any State for the support of public schools, or derived from any public fund therefor, nor any public lands devoted thereto, shall ever be under the control of any religious sect; nor shall any money so raised or lands so devoted be divided between religious sects or denominations.
==== Polygamy and Chinese prostitution ====
In October 1875, Grant traveled to Utah and was surprised that the Mormons treated him kindly. He told Utah territorial governor, George W. Emery, that he had been deceived concerning the Mormons. However, on December 7, 1875, after his return to Washington, Grant wrote to Congress in his seventh annual State of the Union address that as "an institution polygamy should be banished from the land…" Grant believed that polygamy negatively affected children and women. Grant advocated that a second law, stronger than the Morrill Act, be passed to "punish so flagrant a crime against decency and morality."
Grant also denounced the immigration of Chinese women into the United States for the purposes of prostitution, saying that it was "no less an evil" than polygamy.
Scandals and frauds continued to be exposed during Grant's second term in office, although Grant's appointments of reformers to his cabinet temporarily helped his presidential reputation, cleaned up federal departments, and defeated the notorious Whiskey Ring. Grant, however, often remained loyal to cabinet members or appointees involved in corruption or mismanagement, refusing to believe in their guilt. The Democrats along with the Liberal Republicans had gained control of the House of Representatives and held many Committee meetings to stop political graft. The Emma Silver mine was a minor embarrassment associated with American Ambassador to Britain, Robert C. Schenck, using his name to promote a worked out silver mine. The Crédit Mobilier scandal's origins were during the presidential Administrations of Abraham Lincoln and Andrew Johnson; however, political congressional infighting during the Grant Administration exposed the scandal.
==== Sanborn contracts ====
Further information: Sanborn incident
In June 1874, Treasury Secretary William A. Richardson gave private contracts to one John D. Sanborn who in turn collected illegally withheld taxes for fees at inflated commissions. The profits from the commissions were allegedly split with Richardson and Senator Benjamin Butler, while Sanborn claimed these payments were "expenses". Senator Butler had written a loophole in the law that allowed Sanborn to collect the commissions, but Sanborn would not reveal whom he split the profits with.
==== Pratt & Boyd ====
In April 1875, it was discovered that Attorney General George H. Williams allegedly received a bribe through a $30,000 gift to his wife from a Merchant house company, Pratt & Boyd, to drop the case for fraudulent customhouse entries. Williams was forced to resign by Grant in 1875.
==== Delano's Department of Interior ====
By 1875, the Department of the Interior under Secretary of Interior Columbus Delano was in serious disrepair with corruption and fraud. Profiteering prevailed in the Bureau of Indian Affairs, controlled by corrupt clerks and bogus agents. This proved to be the most serious detriment to Grant's Indian peace policy. Many agents that worked for the department made unscrupulous fortunes and retired with more money than their pay would allow at the expense and exploitation of Native Americans. Delano had allowed "Indian Attorneys" who were paid by Native American tribes $8.00 a day plus food and travel expenses for sham representation in Washington. Delano exempted his department from Grant's civil service reform implementation in federal offices. Delano told Grant the Interior Department was too large to implement civil service reform.
Delano's son, John Delano, and Ulysses S. Grant's own brother, Orvil Grant, were discovered to have been awarded lucrative corrupt cartographical contracts by Surveyor General Silas Reed. Neither John Delano nor Orvil Grant performed any work or were qualified to hold such surveying positions. Massive fraud was also found in the Patent Office with corrupt clerks who embezzled from the government payroll. Under increasing pressure by the press and Indian reformers, Delano resigned from office on October 15, 1875. Grant then appointed Zachariah Chandler as Secretary of the Interior who replaced Delano. Chandler vigorously uncovered and cleaned up the fraud in the department by firing all the clerks and banned the phony "Indian Attorneys" access to Washington. Grant's "Quaker" or church appointments partially made up the lack of food staples and housing from the government. Chandler cleaned up the Patent Office by firing all the corrupt clerks.
==== Whiskey Ring prosecuted ====
Further information: Whiskey Ring
Grant's second term anti-corruption team
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/e/e1/Benjamin_Helm_Bristow_Brady_-_Handy_U.S._Secretary_of_Treasury.jpg/150px-Benjamin_Helm_Bristow_Brady_-_Handy_U.S._Secretary_of_Treasury.jpg
Benjamin Bristow
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/4/4e/Edwards_Pierrepont_Brady-Handy.tif/lossless-page1-147px-Edwards_Pierrepont_Brady-Handy.tif.png
Edwards Pierrepont
Grant's presidency is often criticized for scandals, though Grant also appointed many reformers. In May 1875, Secretary of Treasury Benjamin H. Bristow discovered that millions of dollars of taxes were being funneled into an illegal ring from whiskey manufacturers. Prosecutions ensued, and many were put in prison. Grant's private Secretary Orville E. Babcock was indicted and later acquitted in trial. Grant's new Attorney General Edwards Pierrepont and Bristow formed an anti-corruption team to weed out criminal activity during Grant's second term. The Whiskey Ring was organized throughout the United States, and by 1875 it was a fully operating criminal association. The investigation and closure of the Whiskey Ring resulted in 230 indictments, 110 convictions, and $3,000,000 in tax revenues that were returned to the Treasury Department. Bristow and Pierrpont brought evidence to Grant of Babcock's involvement. Grant asked Babcock with Bristow and Pierrepont in attendance at the White House about the evidence. Babcock gave Grant an explanation that the evidence did not concern the Ring, and Grant quietly accepted Babcock's words at face value. During the prosecution of the Whiskey Ring leaders, Grant testified on behalf of his friend Babcock. As a result, Babcock was acquitted. However, the deposition by Grant was a great embarrassment to his reputation. The Babcock trial turned into an impeachment trial against the President by Grant's political opponents.
==== Trading post ring ====
Main article: Trader post scandal
In March 1876 it was discovered under House investigations that Secretary of War William W. Belknap was taking extortion money in exchange for allowing an Indian trading post agent to remain in position at Fort Sill. Belknap was allowed to resign by Grant and as a result, was acquitted in a Senate impeachment trial. Profits were made at the expense of Native Americans who were supposed to receive food and clothing from the government. In late April 1876, Grant lashed out at Lieut. Col. George A. Custer, after Custer had testified at a Congressional committee one month before against Grant's brother Orville and Sec. Belknap.[citation needed] There had been rumors Custer had talked with the press concerning the Indian post profiteering.[citation needed] Custer personally went to the White House to clear matters up with the President. However, Grant refused to see him three times. When Custer left Washington on May 3 to return to Fort Lincoln, he had been removed from overall command by Grant and denied any participation of the Sioux Campaign; having been replaced by Brig. Gen. Alfred Terry. However, at Terry's insistence, Grant relented and allowed Custer to participate in the campaign against the Sioux on the condition he did not take any pressmen.
==== Cattellism ====
In March 1876, Secretary of Navy George M. Robeson was charged by a Democratic-controlled House investigation committee with giving lucrative contracts to Alexander Cattell & Company, a grain supplier, in return for real estate, loans, and payment of debts. The House investigating committee also discovered that Secretary Robeson had allegedly embezzled $15 million in naval construction appropriations. Since there were no financial paper trails or enough evidence for impeachment and conviction, the House Investigation committee admonished Robeson and claimed he had set up a corrupt contracting system known as "Cattellism".
==== Safe burglary conspiracy ====
In September 1876, Orville E. Babcock, Superintendent of Public Works and Buildings, was indicted in a safe burglary conspiracy case and trial. In April, corrupt building contractors in Washington, D.C. were on trial for graft when a safe robbery occurred. Bogus secret service agents broke into a safe and attempted to frame Columbus Alexander, who had exposed the corrupt contracting ring. Babcock was named as part of the conspiracy, but later acquitted in the trial against the burglars. Evidence suggests that Backcock was involved with the swindles by the corrupt Washington Contractors Ring and he wanted revenge on Columbus Alexander, an avid reformer and critic of the Grant Administration. There was also evidence that safe burglary jury had been tampered with.
=== Election of 1876 ===
In the presidential election of 1876, the Republicans nominated the fiscally conservative Rutherford B. Hayes and the Democrats nominated reformer Samuel Tilden. Results were split. Tilden received 51% of the popular vote; Hayes 48%; many black Republicans were not allowed to vote, however. Twenty key electoral votes remained undecided and in dispute. Both Republicans and Democrats claimed victory and the threat of a second civil war was eminent. Grant was watchful; encouraged Congress to settle the election by commission; and determined to keep a peaceful transfer of power. On January 29, 1877, Grant signed the Electoral Commission Act that gave a 15-member bipartisan commission power to determine electoral votes. The commission gave Hayes 185 electoral votes; Tilden received 184. Grant's personal honesty, firmness, and even-handedness reassured the nation, and a second civil war was averted.
== Post-presidency (1877–1885) ==
After leaving the White House, Grant said he "was never so happy in my life". The Grants left Washington for New York, to attend the birth of their daughter Nellie's child. Calling themselves "waifs", the Grants toured Cincinnati, St. Louis, Chicago, and Galena, without a clear idea of where they would live.
=== World tour and diplomacy ===
Main article: World tour of Ulysses S. Grant
link=https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:World_tour_of_Ulysses_S_Grant,_1879,_map.jpg|thumb|Map of Grant's world tour by J. S. Kemp, 1879
Using $25,000 (equivalent to $715,000 in 2023) from liquidating an investment in a Nevada-based mining company, the Grants set out on a world tour for approximately two and a half years. On May 16, Grant and his wife left for England aboard the SS Indiana. During the tour, the Grants made stops in Europe, Africa, India, the Middle East and the Far East, meeting with notable dignitaries such as Queen Victoria, Tsar Alexander II, Pope Leo XIII, Otto von Bismarck, Li Hongzhang, and Emperor Meiji.
As a courtesy to Grant by the Hayes administration, his touring party received federal transportation on three U.S. Navy ships: a five-month tour of the Mediterranean on the USS Vandalia, travel from Hong Kong to China on the USS Ashuelot, and from China to Japan on the USS Richmond. The Hayes administration encouraged Grant to assume a public unofficial diplomatic role and strengthen American interests abroad during the tour. Homesick, the Grants left Japan on the SS City of Tokio and landed in San Francisco on September 20, 1879, greeted by cheering crowds. Grant's tour demonstrated to Europe and Asia that the United States was an emerging world power.
=== Third term attempt ===
Main article: 1880 Republican National Convention
link=https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Ulysses_S._Grant_Trapeze_Cartoon_Keppler_Puck_1880.tif|alt=Grant, shown in a cartoon as an acrobat hanging from rings, holding up multiple politician/acrobats|thumb|Cartoonist Joseph Keppler lampooned Grant and his associates. Puck, 1880
Stalwarts, led by Grant's old political ally, Roscoe Conkling, saw Grant's renewed popularity as an opportunity, and sought to nominate him for the presidency in 1880. Opponents called it a violation of the unofficial two-term rule in use since George Washington. Grant said nothing publicly but wanted the job and encouraged his men. Washburne urged him to run; Grant demurred. Even so, Conkling and John A. Logan began to organize delegates in Grant's favor. When the convention convened in Chicago in June, there were more delegates pledged to Grant than to any other candidate, but he was still short of a majority vote.
At the convention, Conkling nominated Grant with an eloquent speech, the most famous line being: "When asked which state he hails from, our sole reply shall be, he hails from Appomattox and its famous apple tree." With 378 votes needed for the nomination, the first ballot had Grant at 304, Blaine at 284, Sherman at 93, and the rest to minor candidates. After thirty-six ballots, Blaine's delegates combined with those of other candidates to nominate a compromise candidate: James A. Garfield. A procedural motion made the vote unanimous for Garfield. Grant gave speeches for Garfield but declined to criticize the Democratic nominee, Winfield Scott Hancock, a general who had served under him. Garfield won the election. Grant gave Garfield his public support and pushed him to include Stalwarts in his administration. On July 2, 1881, Garfield was shot by an assassin and died on September 19. On learning of Garfield's death from a reporter, Grant wept.
=== Business failures ===
In the 19th century, there were no federal presidential pensions, and the Grants' personal income was $6,000 a year. Grant's world tour had been costly, and he had depleted most of his savings. Wealthy friends bought him a house on Manhattan's Upper East Side, and to make an income, Grant, Jay Gould, and former Mexican Finance Secretary Matías Romero chartered the Mexican Southern Railroad, with plans to build a railroad from Oaxaca to Mexico City. Grant urged President Chester A. Arthur to negotiate a free trade treaty with Mexico. Arthur and the Mexican government agreed, but the United States Senate rejected the treaty in 1883. The railroad was similarly unsuccessful, falling into bankruptcy the following year.
At the same time, Grant's son Buck had opened a Wall Street brokerage house with Ferdinand Ward. A conniving man who swindled numerous wealthy men, Ward was at the time regarded as a rising star on Wall Street. The firm, Grant & Ward, was initially successful. In 1883, Grant joined the firm and invested $100,000 (~$2.78 million in 2023) of his own money. Ward paid investors abnormally high interest by pledging the company's securities on multiple loans in a process called rehypothecation (now regarded as a Ponzi scheme). Ward, in collusion with banker James D. Fish and kept secret from bank examiners, retrieved the firm's securities from the company's bank vault. When the trades went bad, multiple loans came due, all backed by the same collateral.
Historians agree that the elder Grant was likely unaware of Ward's intentions, but it is unclear how much Buck Grant knew. In May 1884, enough investments went bad to convince Ward that the firm would soon be bankrupt. Ward, who assumed Grant was "a child in business matters", told him of the impending failure, but assured Grant that this was a temporary shortfall. Grant approached businessman William Henry Vanderbilt, who gave him a personal loan of $150,000. Grant invested the money in the firm, but it was not enough to save it. The fall of Grant & Ward set off the Panic of 1884.
Vanderbilt offered to forgive Grant's debt entirely, but Grant refused.Impoverished but compelled by personal honor, he repaid what he could with his Civil War mementos and the sale or transfer of all other assets. Vanderbilt took title to Grant's home, although he allowed the Grants to continue to reside there, and pledged to donate the souvenirs to the federal government and insisted the debt had been paid in full. Grant was distraught over Ward's deception and asked privately how he could ever "trust any human being again." In March 1885, he testified against both Ward and Fish. After the collapse of Grant & Ward, there was an outpouring of sympathy for Grant. 
=== Memoirs, military pension, illness and death ===
Main article: Personal Memoirs of U. S. Grant
link=https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:US_Grant_in_1885.jpg|alt=Grant sitting in a porch chair wrapped in blankets|thumb|Grant working on his memoirs, less than a month before his death
Grant attended a service for Civil War veterans in Ocean Grove, New Jersey, on August 4, 1884, receiving a standing ovation from the ten thousand attendees; it would be his last public appearance. In the summer of 1884, Grant complained of a sore throat but put off seeing a doctor until late October, when he learned it was cancer, possibly caused by his frequent cigar smoking. Grant chose not to reveal the seriousness of his condition to his wife, who soon found out from Grant's doctor. In March 1885, The New York Times announced that Grant was dying of cancer, causing nationwide public concern. Knowing of Grant and Julia's financial difficulties, Congress restored him to the rank of General of the Army with full retirement pay—Grant's assumption of the presidency had required that he resign his commission and forfeit his (and his widow's) pension.
Grant was nearly penniless and worried about leaving his wife money to live on. He approached The Century Magazine and wrote a number of articles on his Civil War campaigns for $500 (equivalent to $17,000 in 2023) each. The articles were well received by critics, and the editor, Robert Underwood Johnson, suggested that Grant write a memoir, as Sherman and others had done. The magazine offered him a book contract with a 10% royalty. However, Grant's friend Mark Twain, one of the few who understood Grant's precarious financial condition, offered him an unheard-of 70% royalty. To provide for his family, Grant worked intensely on his memoirs in New York City. His former staff member Adam Badeau assisted with the research, while his son Frederick located documents and did much of the fact-checking. Because of the summer heat and humidity, his doctors recommended that he move upstate to a cottage at the top of Mount McGregor, offered by a family friend.
On July 18, 1885, Grant finished his memoir, which includes the events of his life to the end of the Civil War. The Personal Memoirs of U. S. Grant was a critical and commercial success. Julia Grant eventually received about $450,000 in royalties (equivalent to $15,300,000 in 2023). The memoir has been highly regarded by the public, military historians, and literary critics. Grant portrayed himself as an honorable Western hero, whose strength lies in his honesty. He candidly depicted his battles against both the Confederates and internal army foes.
link=https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Grant_Funeral_Train3.jpg|alt=Drawing of a steam engine and train approaching station with an honor guard at attention|left|thumb|Grant's funeral train at West Point
Grant died at 8:08 a.m. in the Mount McGregor cottage on July 23, 1885.
Sheridan, then Commanding General of the Army, ordered a day-long tribute to Grant on all military posts, and President Grover Clevelandordered a thirty-day nationwide period of mourning. After private services, the honor guard placed Grant's body on a funeral train, which traveled to West Point and New York City. A quarter of a million people viewed it in the two days before the funeral. Tens of thousands of men, many of them veterans from the Grand Army of the Republic (GAR), marched with Grant's casket drawn by two dozen black stallions to Riverside Park in Morningside Heights, Manhattan. His pallbearers included Union generals Sherman and Sheridan, Confederate generals Simon Bolivar Buckner and Joseph E. Johnston, Admiral David Dixon Porter, and Senator John A. Logan, the head of the GAR.Following the casket in the seven-mile-long (11 km) procession were President Cleveland, two former living presidents Hayes and Arthur, all of the president's cabinet, and justices of the Supreme Court.
Attendance at the New York funeral topped 1.5 million. Ceremonies were held in other major cities around the country, while Grant was eulogized in the press.Grant's body was laid to rest in Riverside Park, first in a temporary tomb, and then on April 17, 1897, in the General Grant National Memorial, known as "Grant's Tomb", the largest mausoleum in North America.
== Historical reputation ==
Grant was hailed across the North as the General who "saved the Union" and overall his military reputation has held up well. Achieving great national fame for his victories at Vicksburg and the surrender at Appomattox, Grant was the most successful general, Union or Confederate, in the American Civil War.He was criticized by the South for using excessive force, and his drinking was often exaggerated by the press and stereotyped by rivals and critics. Historians also debate how effective Grant was at halting corruption. The scandals during his administration stigmatized his political reputation.
During the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Grant's reputation was damaged by the "Lost Cause" movement and the Dunning School. Views of Grant reached new lows as he was seen as an unsuccessful president and an unskilled, if lucky, general. In the 1950s, some historians reassessed Grant's military career, shifting the analysis of Grant as the victor by brute force to that of skillful modern strategist and commander. Historian William S. McFeely's biography, Grant(1981), won the Pulitzer Prize, and brought renewed scholarly interest in Grant. McFeely believed Grant was an "ordinary American" trying to "make his mark" during the 19th century. In the 21st century, Grant's reputation improved markedly among historians after the publication of Grant (2001), by historian Jean Edward Smith. Opinions of Grant's presidency demonstrate a better appreciation of Grant's personal integrity, Reconstruction efforts, and peace policy towards Indians, even when they fell short. H. W. Brands' The Man Who Saved the Union (2012), Ronald C. White's American Ulysses (2016), and Ron Chernow's Grant (2017) continued the elevation of Grant's reputation. White said that Grant "demonstrated a distinctive sense of humility, moral courage, and determination", and as president he "stood up for African Americans, especially fighting against voter suppression perpetrated by the Ku Klux Klan". White believed that Grant was "an exceptional person and leader". Historian Robert Farley writes that the "Cult of Lee" and the Dunning School's resentment of Grant for his defeat of Lee and his strong enforcement of Reconstruction resulted in Grant's shoddy treatment by historians.
In a 2021 C-SPAN survey ranking presidents from worst to best, Grant was ranked 20 out of 44 presidents, up from his previous ranking of 33 in 2017. This was due to the rehabilitation of his image and legacy in recent years, with Grant now receiving "more credit for Reconstruction and his diplomacy than condemnation for his alleged corruption."