The Papers Of Ulysses S Grant July 1 1868 October 31 1869

This volume carries Ulysses S. Grant through a brief period of welcome calm to the storms of the White House. Seemingly resigned to becoming president, Grant detached himself from military routine in Washington, D.C., during the summer of 1868 to tour the Great Plains. He then settled in Galena to escape the clamor of the presidential campaign. Grant reveled in his respite from official duties, writing to his father, "I have enjoyed my summers vacation very much and look forward with dread to my return to Washington." Grant's residence in Galena shielded him from public scrutiny. "Whilst I remain here I shall avoid all engagements to go any place at any stated time. The turn out of people is immense when they hear of my coming." Grant remained in or near his prewar hometown until the election forced him back to Washington. Grant publicly said that he accepted presidential responsibilities "without fear" but privately lacked eagerness for the office. Even before his electoral victory, he wrote disapprovingly of "the Army of office seekers" and "begging letters" from potential appointees. Never enamored with the "pulling and hauling" so much a part of politics, Grant tried to minimize importunities by withholding names of his cabinet selections until after his inauguration and keeping his policy pronouncements spare and noncontroversial. His earnest desire as president was simply to inspire every citizen to work for "a happy Union."

From 1869 to 1877, the United States found itself deeply involved in the Caribbean as Washington sought to replace European influence and colonialism with an informal American empire. The Ulysses S. Grant administration primarily dealt with an uprising in Spanish Cuba known as the Ten Years’ War that threatened to draw in the United States. The Cuban rebels used the United States as a base of support, causing conflict between Washington and Madrid. Many Americans, including Grant, wanted to replace Spanish rule in Cuba with a U.S. protectorate, but Secretary of State Hamilton Fish opposed American colonial entanglements. President Grant looked to expand U.S. interests in the Caribbean. He looked to acquire colonies to provide naval bases to protect the trade routes to a potential American built and controlled canal in Central America. Fish preferred to expand U.S. commercial interests in the region rather than acquiring colonies. At no time was he prepared to obligate the United States to any long-term commitments. He wanted to end the war in Cuba because it hurt U.S. economic interests. He had no desire to acquire territory, but expected the Caribbean to fall into the U.S. economic sphere. Despite his personal opposition to territorial acquisition in Fish went along with Grant’s Dominican annexation project because he foresaw it as a chance to end European imperialism and to gain the president’s confidence. The Senate’s failure to approve the Dominican annexation only hardened his opposition to the creation of an American empire. He rejected Haitian offers of a naval base within that country, and he continually sought an end to the Cuban rebellion, lest it drag in the United States. Though the administration’s many peace initiatives failed, it forestalled Congressional intervention and kept the United States neutral in the conflict.

In the spring of 1865, after the end of the Civil War and the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, two men bestrode the national government as giants: Andrew Johnson and Ulysses S. Grant. How these two men viewed what a post-war America should look like would determine policy and politics for generations to come, impacting the lives of millions of people, North and South, black and white. While both Johnson and Grant initially shared similar views regarding the necessity of bringing the South back into the Union fold as expeditiously as possible, their differences, particularly regarding the fate of millions of recently-freed African Americans, would soon reveal an unbridgeable chasm. Add to the mix that Johnson, having served at every level of government in a career spanning four decades, very much liked being President and wanted to be elected in his own right in 1868, at the same time that a massive move was underway to make Grant the next president during that same election, and conflict and resentment between the two men became inevitable. In fact, competition between Johnson and Grant would soon evolved into a battle of personal destruction, one lasting well beyond their White House years and representing one of the most all-consuming and obsessive struggles between two presidents in U.S. history.

From abject poverty to undisputed political boss of Pennsylvania, Lincoln’s secretary of war, senator, chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and a founder of the Republican Party, Simon Cameron (1799–1889) was one of the nineteenth century’s most prominent political figures. In his wake, however, he left a series of questionable political and business dealings and, at the age of eighty, even a sex scandal. Far more than a biography of Cameron, Amiable Scoundrel is also a portrait of an era that allowed—indeed, encouraged—a man such as Cameron to seize political control. The political changes of the early nineteenth century enabled him not only to improve his status but also to exert real political authority. The changes caused by the Civil War, in turn, allowed Cameron to consolidate his political authority into a successful, well-oiled political machine. A key figure in designing and implementing the Union’s military strategy during the Civil War’s crucial first year, Cameron played an essential role in pushing Abraham Lincoln to permit the enlistment of African Americans into the U.S. Army, a stance that eventually led to his forced resignation. Yet his legacy has languished, nearly forgotten save for the fact that his name has become shorthand for corruption, even though no evidence has ever been presented to prove that Cameron was corrupt. Amiable Scoundrel puts Cameron’s actions into a larger historical context by demonstrating that many politicians of the time, including Abraham Lincoln, used similar tactics to win elections and advance their careers. This study is the fascinating story of Cameron’s life and an illuminating portrait of his times. Purchase the audio edition.

This volume examines the historical connections between the United States’ Reconstruction and the country’s emergence as a geopolitical power a few decades later. It shows how the processes at work during the postbellum decade variously foreshadowed, inhibited, and conditioned the development of the United States as an overseas empire and regional hegemon. In doing so, it links the diverse topics of abolition, diplomacy, Jim Crow, humanitarianism, and imperialism. In 1935, the great African American intellectual W. E. B. Du Bois argued in his Black Reconstruction in America that these two historical moments were intimately related. In particular, Du Bois averred that the nation’s betrayal of the South’s fledgling interracial democracy in the 1870s put reactionaries in charge of a country on the verge of global power, with world-historical implications. Working with the same chronological and geographical parameters, the contributors here take up targeted case studies, tracing the biographical, ideological, and thematic linkages that stretch across the postbellum and imperial moments. With an Introduction, eleven chapters, and an Afterword, this volume offers multiple perspectives based on original primary source research. The resulting composite picture points to a host of countervailing continuities and changes. The contributors examine topics as diverse as diplomatic relations with Spain, the changing views of radical abolitionists, African American missionaries in the Caribbean, and the ambiguities of turn-of-the century political cartoons. Collectively, the volume unsettles familiar assumptions about how we should understand the late nineteenth-century United States, conventionally framed as the Gilded Age and Progressive Era. It also advances transnational approaches to understanding America’s Reconstruction and the search for the ideological currents shaping American power abroad.