in high command. There is less in common than is often supposed between the buoyant energy that led Grant to Shiloh and the grim plodding determination that led him to Vicksburg and to Appomattox. Shiloh revealed to Grant the intensity of the struggle, and after that battle, appreciating to the full the material and moral factors with which he had to deal, he gradually trained his military character on those lines which alone could conduce to ultimate success. Singleness of purpose, and relentless vigour in the execution of the purpose, were the qualities necessary to the conduct of the vast enterprise of subduing the Confederacy. Grant possessed or acquired both to such a degree that he proved fully equal to the emergency. If in technical finesse he was surpassed by many of his predecessors and his subordinates, he had the most important qualities of a great captain, courage that rose higher with each obstacle, and the clear judgment to distinguish the essential from the minor issues in war.—(C. F. A.)]
After the assassination of President Lincoln a disposition was shown by his successor, Andrew Johnson, to deal severely with the Confederate leaders, and it was understood that indictments for treason were to be brought against General Lee and others. Grant, however, insisted that the United States government was bound by the terms accorded to Lee and his army at Appomattox. He went so far as to threaten to resign his commission if the president disregarded his protest. This energetic action on Grant’s part saved the United States from a foul stain upon its escutcheon. In July 1866 the grade of general was created, for the first time since the organization of the government, and Grant was promoted to that position. In the following year he became involved in the deadly quarrel between President Johnson and Congress. To tie the president’s hands Congress had passed the Tenure of Office Act, forbidding the president to remove any cabinet officer without the consent of the Senate; but in August 1867 President Johnson suspended Secretary Stanton and appointed Grant secretary of war ad interim until the pleasure of the Senate should be ascertained. Grant accepted the appointment under protest, and held it until the following January, when the Senate refused to confirm the president’s action, and Secretary Stanton resumed his office. President Johnson was much disgusted at the readiness with which Grant turned over the office to Stanton, and a bitter controversy ensued between Johnson and Grant. Hitherto Grant had taken little part in politics. The only vote which he had ever cast for a presidential candidate was in 1856 for Presidency, 1868. James Buchanan; and leading Democrats, so late as the beginning of 1868, hoped to make him their candidate in the election of that year; but the effect of the controversy with President Johnson was to bring Grant forward as the candidate of the Republican party. At the convention in Chicago on the 20th of May 1868 he was unanimously nominated on the first ballot. The Democratic party nominated the one available Democrat who had the smallest chance of beating him—Horatio Seymour, lately governor of New York, an excellent statesman, but at that time hopeless as a candidate because of his attitude during the war. The result of the contest was at no time in doubt; Grant received 214 electoral votes and Seymour 80.
The most important domestic event of Grant’s first term as president was the adoption of the fifteenth amendment to the Constitution on the 30th of March 1870, providing that suffrage throughout the United States should not be restricted on account of race, colour or previous condition of servitude. The most important event in foreign policy was the treaty with Great Britain of the 8th of May 1871, commonly known as the Treaty of Washington, whereby several controversies between the United States and Great Britain, including the bitter questions as to damage inflicted upon the United States by the “Alabama” and other Confederate cruisers built and equipped in England, were referred to arbitration. In 1869 the government of Santo Domingo (or the Dominican Republic) expressed a wish for annexation by the United States, and such a step was favoured by Grant, but a treaty negotiated with this end in view failed to obtain the requisite two-thirds vote in the Senate. In May 1872 something was done towards alleviating the odious Reconstruction laws for dragooning the South, which had been passed by Congress in spite of the vetoes of President Johnson. The Amnesty Bill restored civil rights to all persons in the South, save from 300 to 500 who had held high positions under the Confederacy. As early as 1870 President Grant recommended measures of civil service reform, and succeeded in obtaining an act authorizing him to appoint a Civil Service commission. A commission was created, but owing to the hostility of the politicians in Congress it accomplished little. During the fifty years since Crawford’s Tenure of Office Act was passed in 1820, the country had been growing more and more familiar with the spectacle of corruption in high places. The evil rose to alarming proportions during Grant’s presidency, partly because of the immense extension of the civil service, partly because of the growing tendency to alliance between spoilsmen and the persons benefited by protective tariffs, and partly because the public attention was still so much absorbed in Southern affairs that little energy was left for curbing rascality in the North. The scandals, indeed, were rife in Washington, and affected persons in close relations with the president. Grant was ill-fitted for coping with the difficulties of such a situation. Along with high intellectual powers in certain directions, he had a simplicity of nature charming in itself, but often calculated to render him the easy prey of sharpers. He found it almost impossible to believe that anything could be wrong in persons to whom he had given his friendship, and on several occasions such friends proved themselves unworthy of him. The feeling was widely prevalent in the spring of 1872 that the interests of pure government in the United States demanded that President Grant should not be elected to a second term. This feeling led a number of high-minded gentlemen to form themselves into an organization under the name of Liberal Republicans. They held a convention at Cincinnati in May with the intention of nominating for the presidency Charles Francis Adams, who had ably represented the United States at the court of St James’s during the Civil War. The convention, was, however, captured by politicians who converted the whole affair into a farce by nominating Horace Greeley, editor of the New York Tribune, who represented almost anything rather than the object for which the convention had been called together. The Democrats had despaired of electing a candidate of their own, and hoped to achieve success by adopting the Cincinnati nominee, should he prove to be an eligible person. The event showed that while their defeat in 1868 had taught them despondency, it had not taught them wisdom; it was still in their power to make a gallant fight by nominating a person for whom Republican reformers could vote. But with almost incredible fatuity, they adopted Greeley as their candidate. As a natural result Grant was re-elected by an overwhelming majority.
The most important event of his second term was his veto of the Inflation Bill in 1874 followed by the passage of the Resumption Act in the following year. The country was still labouring under the curse of an inconvertible paper currency originating with the Legal Tender Act Second presidency. of 1862. There was a considerable party in favour of debasing the currency indefinitely by inflation, and a bill with that object was passed by Congress in April 1874. It was promptly vetoed by President Grant, and two months later he wrote a very sensible letter to Senator J. P. Jones of Nevada advocating a speedy return to specie payments. The passage of the Resumption Act in January 1875 was largely due to his consistent advocacy, and for these measures he deserves as high credit as for his victories in the field. In spite of these great services, popular dissatisfaction with the Republican party rapidly increased during the years 1874–1876. The causes were twofold: firstly, there was great dissatisfaction with the troubles in the Southern states, owing to the harsh Reconstruction laws and the robberies committed by the carpet-bag governments which those laws kept in power; secondly, the scandals at
