Panic of 1873

Summary of Youth and Military Career of Ulysses S Grant
Civil War Memories

Summary of Youth, West Point, and Generalship of Ulysses S Grant, From Mexican-American War to Civil War

06/27/2025 Bruce Strom 0

Those who fought the Civil War grew up in the America of Andrew Jackson, when the giants of the second generation of American leaders fought to hold the United States together. These great orators, including Henry Clay and Daniel Webster, would later inspire Union soldiers to fight and die to preserve the Union. These were the years when the slave-owning Southern President Andrew Jackson threatened to deploy federal troops to prevent the secession of South Carolina over tariffs during the Nullification Crisis in the 1830s. […]

General Ulysses S Grant’s Victory at the Bloody Battle of Shiloh, and His Earlier Civil War Battles
Civil War Memories

General Ulysses S Grant’s Victory at the Bloody Battle of Shiloh, and His Earlier Civil War Battles

06/20/2025 Bruce Strom 0

Chernow recounts: “Before Shiloh, Grant had nursed hopes for a titanic battle that would triumphantly crush the rebellion. Now, stunned by the combative spirit of his foes, he knew there would be many more bloodbaths in a long, grinding war of attrition. This began is conversion to a theory of total warfare in which all of southern society would have to be defeated.”
Chernow continues: “For Grant, Shiloh represented a personal victory. He had rescued his army from his own errors, showing a gumption and an audacity that altered the battle’s course. He had shown coolness under fire and a willingness to take monumental gambles. The battle also instilled lasting confidence in the Army of the Tennessee, shattering anew the fighting mystique of rebel soldiers.” […]

Early Life and Career of Ulysses S Grant Through His Service in the Mexican American War
Civil War Memories

Early Life and Career of Ulysses S Grant Through His Service in the Mexican American War

06/13/2025 Bruce Strom 0

What was young Ulysses like? Chernow says that in his youth, Ulysses “seemed forgettable and colorless,” was not wayward or rambunctious or mischievous. “Like his mother, he was self-contained, as if he had trained his face to mask emotion and keep his inner life secret. Like Hannah, he was uncommonly even-tempered.” Unlike many great men of history, Ulysses in his youth had no vision of a great future and was prepared to live his life in obscurity. He was underestimated by many who met him.
Chernow describes traits that would serve him well later in life. “Never one to initiate a fight, he refused to back down when bullied. He was roused to fury if sadistic boys tormented an innocent child or a defenseless horse, and small boys embraced him as their steadfast protector.”
Ulysses was born with a love for horses. Chernow notes: “He liked to ride without a saddle or stirrups, sitting astride a blanket on the horse’s back, and he was so expert at handling horses that he began riding at age five. He became known for breaking in wild horses for local farmers.” “He tamed even the most refractory horses through a fine sensitivity to their nature rather than by his physical prowess.” […]

Redemption Era of Jim Crow, Reconstruction Ends after Contested 1876 Election
Civil War and Reconstruction

After Grant: Southern Redemption and Jim Crow, Reconstruction Ends after Contested 1876 Election

11/09/2024 Bruce Strom 1

What were his greatest accomplishments? Chernow states that “Grant showed a deep reservoir of courage in directing the fight against the Ku Klux Klan and crushing the largest wave of domestic terrorism in American history. It was Grant who helped to weave the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteen Amendments into the basic fabric of American life.”
Chernow rues: “Once Reconstruction collapsed, it left southern blacks for eighty years at the mercy of Jim Crow segregation, lynchings, poll taxes, literacy tests, and other tactics designed to segregate them from whites and deny them the vote. Black sharecroppers would be degraded to the level of debt-ridden serfs, bound to their former plantation owners. After 1877, the black community in the South steadily lost ground until a rigid apartheid separated the races completely, a terrible state of affairs that would not be fixed until the rise of the civil rights movement after World War II.” […]

President Grant's Indian Policy, and Custer's Battle of Little Bighorn
Civil War and Reconstruction

President Ulysses Grant’s Indian Policy, and Custer’s Defeat at the Battle of Little Bighorn

11/06/2024 Bruce Strom 2

Custer had a reputation for cruelty to both Indians and to his own men. Chernow notes: “In 1867, Custer was court-martialed for ordering deserters to be shot and Grant thought he was guilty. The following year, Custer and his cavalry obliterated an Indian village,” “wantonly murdering more than a hundred Southern Cheyenne, including women and children.”
Grant told Sherman and Sheridan that he did not want Custer to lead a force in the campaign against the Sioux Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse. Custer had the chutzpah to request a personal interview with Grant at the White House to appeal this decision, but Grant refused to meet with him. But with Sheridan’s intervention, Grant gave in and allowed Custer to join the expedition against the Indians. […]

President Ulysses S Grant, White Supremacy Triumphs, and Gilded Age Corruption During his Second Term
Civil War and Reconstruction

President Ulysses S Grant, White Supremacy Triumphs, and Gilded Age Corruption During his Second Term

10/27/2024 Bruce Strom 0

Why was President Grant easily reelected to second term, when there were so many problems faced in his first term? Why did the Liberal Republican Party become a third party? Was it truly liberal? Why did the Union Army fight several battles in Louisiana after the Civil War? How did […]

Civil Rights

Post-Civil War Reconstruction and Redemption History, Yale Lecture Notes

08/27/2020 Bruce Strom 10

Southerners were stubborn, Southerners were intransigent, Southerners could never accept St Paul’s declaration that “There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is neither male nor female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus.” It was anathema, unthinkable, incomprehensible that Southerners, and many Northerners, would ever regard negroes as equal to free white men, in their eyes negroes were inferior, they would always be subservient. General Sherman may have burned Atlanta and destroyed livestock, crops, and railroads in his mark to the sea; General Grant may have continually fought and flanked Robert E Lee until he was cornered and cut off from supplies at Appomattox; these two Union generals may have momentarily exhausted the ability of the Southern generals to continue the war; but the true Civil War to change racial attitudes is a war that is being fought to this very day.

The South may have lost the Civil War, but it won the peace. The history of Reconstruction is in three phases. In Presidential Reconstruction lenient terms entice the Southern states back into the Union, but the South overreaches, enacting black codes so harsh that they effectively re-enslave the free blacks to their former masters, denying blacks any rights as citizens. Radical Reconstruction is enacted when many in the North to be outraged by the attitudes of their Confederates, the Radical Republicans gain a veto-proof majority in both houses of Congress, the South is placed under military rule, and new elections are held and policies that benefit free blacks are enforced. But there is mass resistance, the Ku Klux Klan and similar white supremacy bands spring up, terrorizing the South in their night rides and burning crosses, lynchings become commonplace. The Panic of 1873 causes a deep recession, Northern public opinion tires of the endless struggle against the old Confederacy, leading to the final phase, Redemption. Federal troops are withdrawn from the South and the Southerners are free to rule as they see fit, Jim Crow laws are passed denying blacks their civil liberties and their ability to live a normal life with a decent paying job. The KKK and other night riders step up their lynchings to intimidate blacks, in some cases violently overthrowing legitimately elected local governments. […]