Why was Ulysses S Grant popular with his contemporaries, while historians often placed him near the bottom in their rankings of the presidents?
Was President Grant able to successfully guarantee black access to the ballot in the South? Why were thousands of blacks murdered during the 1876 election?
Why were the 1876 fake electors excused, while the 2020 fake electors were prosecuted, and sometimes jailed?
Why were the Union troops pulled out of the former Confederate states after the 1876 election? Did this mean the end of Reconstruction?
ULYSSES S GRANT AS UNION GENERAL AND PRESIDENT
General Grant owed his popularity with his contemporaries to leading the Union army to victory in the Civil War. Many of the responsibilities he shouldered were the same as general, then later as President. Union Civil War generals were not only responsible for fighting the war, but they were also responsible for ensuring the welfare of the emancipated slaves, feeding them, educating them, employing them, and helping them to integrate in society. Grant did this as the supreme General during the Civil War and President Johnson’s administration. So, when he supported Reconstruction efforts and put down the Ku Klux Klan as President, these efforts were a continuation of his efforts as the supreme Union general.
On July 4th, 1863, two Confederate armies were defeated at Vicksburg by General Grant, giving the Union control over the entire Mississippi River, cutting the Confederacy in two, and at Gettysburg, in the bloody battle won by General Meade. At both Vicksburg and Appomattox, Grant did not hold the surrendering Confederate troops as prisoners-of-war, but paroled them after they surrendered their weapons, allowing officers to keep their horses for spring planting.
Siege of Vicksburg: Ordinary Union Soldiers and Generals Grant and Sherman Recount the Struggle
https://seekingvirtueandwisdom.com/siege-of-vicksburg-ordinary-union-soldiers-and-generals-grant-and-sherman-recount-the-struggle/
https://youtu.be/U6KNO6IkVQs
Gettysburg: Ordinary Soldiers and Generals Pickett and Longstreet Remember the Bloody Charges
https://seekingvirtueandwisdom.com/gettysburg-ordinary-soldiers-and-generals-pickett-and-longstreet-remember-the-bloody-charges/
https://youtu.be/ibTm3l-C8VQ
Robert E Lee Surrendering to Grant at Appomattox, Ending the American Civil War
https://seekingvirtueandwisdom.com/surrender-at-appomattox-courthouse-ending-the-american-civil-war/
https://youtu.be/_Dr7qia6XkQ
General Grant’s Memoirs, Civil War Diplomacy, Post-War Events in Mexico and Santo Domingo
https://seekingvirtueandwisdom.com/general-grants-memoirs-civil-war-diplomacy-post-war-events-in-mexico-and-santo-domingo/
https://youtu.be/14xYWgYmb10
Thousands of blacks were murdered by white supremacists to keep them from voting in the elections held after the Civil War, after Emancipation, after the Civil War amendments abolishing slavery, guaranteeing due process and justice for blacks, and ensuring that all natural born citizens, including blacks, could vote.
After President Andrew Johnson’s impeachment, as his popularity sank, General Grant’s reputation rose, and he was nominated by Lincoln’s Republican Party to run for President without competition. After Congress passed strict Enforcement Acts, Grant was able to suppress the first iteration of the Ku Klux Klan, though other white supremacist terrorist organizations sprang up to take its place. Grant easily won reelection to a second term.
The South was unrepentant, few Southerners respected the civil rights of and due process under the law for the newly freed black slaves. The Northern Congressmen put the South under military rule, Union soldiers guaranteed the civil rights of the freed black slaves. Murders and crimes that could not be prosecuted in local Southern courts were tried in federal courts. But after the Panic of 1873, a deep five-year economic depression sapped the Northern patience with stationing federal troops in the Southern states to keep the peace.
We also discuss Grant’s Indian policies and Custer’s defeat at the Battle of Little Big Horn at the end of his second term.
General Grant Supporting Civil Rights and Reconstruction After the Civil War, and His Conflicts with Andrew Johnson
https://seekingvirtueandwisdom.com/general-grant-supporting-civil-rights-and-reconstruction-after-the-civil-war-and-his-conflicts-with-andrew-johnson/
https://youtu.be/9OJnW4hAizI
President Ulysses S Grant, First Term, Defeating the KKK, Fighting for Civil Rights
https://seekingvirtueandwisdom.com/president-ulysses-s-grant-first-term-battling-the-kkk-fighting-for-civil-rights/
https://youtu.be/-Ta7nzfdAmw
President Ulysses S Grant, Panic of 1873, White Supremacy Triumphs, and Gilded Age Corruption During his Second Term
https://seekingvirtueandwisdom.com/president-ulysses-s-grant-white-supremacy-triumphs-and-gilded-age-corruption-during-his-second-term/
https://youtu.be/vJb4VlkZrqI
President Ulysses Grant’s Indian Policy, and Custer’s Defeat at the Battle of Little Bighorn
https://wp.me/pachSU-1hN
https://seekingvirtueandwisdom.com/president-grants-indian-policy-and-custers-battle-of-little-bighorn/
Would Grant run for a third term in 1876? Despite the two-term precedent established by George Washington, the first president, and despite the political damage of the continuing financial scandals of Grant’s subordinates, his enduring popularity prompted leading senators to urge Grant to run for a third term. But in early 1875, Grant announced: “I am not, nor have I been, a candidate for a renomination.”
GRANT DITHERS WHEN CONFRONTED BY SOUTHERN VIOLENCE
Due to the changing political climate, Grant now dithered and delayed when facing Southern violence. For example, in September 1875, Republicans threw a barbeque in Clinton, Mississippi, to rally voters. Grant’s biographer Ron Chernow writes how the white supremacists reacted: “Intruders from a White Lione rifle club showed up to harass them, murdered a black citizen, then opened fire on other blacks, who quickly grabbed pistols and returned fire. The gunfight left seven or eight blacks sprawled dead in the dust, with three white men killed in retaliation.” Also, “squads of white men were bushwhacking through the countryside,” “murdering and driving unarmed and defenseless colored people from their homes.”
Governor Ames pleaded with Grant for federal aid, but Grant, sensing the changing political climate, hesitated to act, and requested that Ames “exhaust all state resources before asking for federal help.” Later Grant would regret his hesitation to halt this election-related violence in Mississippi as his greatest error made during Reconstruction.
Emboldened by federal inaction, the “White Liners decided to scare blacks from the polls and install a Democratic government through naked terror if necessary.” The local sheriff was driven off by an overwhelming armed force. “Governor Ames sat brooding and besieged in the governor’s mansion in Jackson.” “To head off threatened impeachment, he decided to resign after the election,” concluding that Reconstruction was a dead letter.
In late October, Governor Ames warned Grant that it would be “impossible to have a fair election in November” without federal troops. Threats from Democrats crushed the black election turnout. In Yazoo County, only seven Republicans voted out of a black population of over twelve thousand.
Why had Grant decided not to send federal troops to supervise the election in Mississippi? Years later, the only black Mississippi Congressman to survive in that election, John Roy Lynch, recounted a discussion he had with President Grant. He was about to order the federal troops to intervene in Mississippi when he discussed the problem with Ohio Republicans.
The Ohio Republicans were concerned that “if Grant intervened in Mississippi, Republicans would lose the elections in October, the state having already lost faith in Reconstruction. Grant decided it was more important to retain Ohio than save Mississippi. Republicans won the Ohio elections, returning Rutherford B Hayes to the governorship and setting the stage for the next president.”
Grant admitted to Lynch, “I should not have yielded. I believed at the time I was making a grave mistake. But as presented, it was duty on one side, and party obligation on the other.” “If a mistake was made, it was one of the head and not of the heart.” He predicted that the “northern retreat from Reconstruction would lead to Democrats recapturing power in the South,” “and that the results of the war of the rebellion will have been in a large measure lost.”
Chernow wonders whether the Civil War had been fought in vain. “All those hundreds of thousands dead, the millions maimed and wounded, the mourning of widows and orphans: all that suffering, all that tumult, on some level, had been for naught. Slavery had been abolished, but it had been replaced by a caste-ridden form of second-class citizenship for southern blacks, and that counted as a national shame.”[1]
REPUBLICAN NATIONAL CONVENTION
Although Grant was not actively influencing the choice of his successor, he favored Hamilton Fish, his competent Secretary of State. Chernow writes: “Party Stalwarts agreed with the administration on Reconstruction and were prepared to turn the upcoming election into another contest of loyal Republicans versus disloyal Democrats. They would inveigh against the Klan and make emotional appeals that reminded voters of Northern sacrifice and Southern betrayal during the war. Yet a segment of the Republican Party establishment now wondered aloud whether troops should be withdrawn from the South, leading many blacks to yearn for a third Grant term.”
On the seventh ballot, Rutherford B Hayes was nominated by a close vote. Grant had known him as a congressman and was initially satisfied with the choice. The party bosses were disappointed when Hayes promised Civil Service reform, promising not to run for a second term.
The Democrats quickly nominated Samuel Tilden, who endorsed a one-term limit for Presidents and opposed patronage and the spoils system. Predictably, he opposed Reconstruction, leading the black leader Frederick Douglass to ask what abolition had accomplished for the black man if “having been freed from the slaveholder’s lash, he is to be subject to the slaveholder’s shotgun?”[2]
PRESIDENT GRANT PROTECTS BLACKS DURING BLOODY ELECTION
Chernow notes: “However aloof he was from campaigning” in the 1876 election, “Grant remained committed to the safety of black voters.” One challenge was that the federal presence in the South had ebbed to slightly more than three thousand Union troops, facing an enemy that threatened to steal the election through violence and armed insurrection.
Many Northern voters were tiring of Reconstruction, the Supreme Court handed down several rulings watering down the Fourteenth and Fifteenth amendments and the various Enforcement Acts passed to prevent abuses by white supremacists. Grant worried that a rejuvenated rebel spirit might demand compensation for freed slaves. The Lost Cause myth was spreading that painted the Civil War as a war of Northern aggression, celebrating the military prowess of Robert E Lee while dismissing Grant as a butcher who only won the war through superior numbers and material. This Lost Cause myth influenced historians to deprecate Grant as one of the least effective presidents.
What were the issues of the two competing parties? Chernow tells us: “The Democrats feasted on the frequent scandals that had plagued Grant’s second term and” “seemed to run against ‘Grantism’ rather than Hayes. Republicans cast Democrats as thinly disguised slaveholders, one prominent Republican thundering: ‘Every man that loved slavery better than liberty was a Democrat,’ and ‘every man that raised bloodhounds to pursue human beings was a Democrat.’”
Most of the Confederate states had already been “redeemed,” returning to the Democratic Party fold, but South Carolina, Florida, and embattled Louisiana remained Republican. White Supremacist Democrats sought to redeem these last Republican strongholds in the South.
Violence erupted in Hampton, South Carolina on July 4, 1876, in Hamburg, South Carolina, sparked by a trivial complaint. Chernow recounts: “Two white farmers in a buggy protested that their path was barred by a parade of local black militia: before long, militia leaders were jailed for obstructing a public highway. White vengeance wasn’t yet sated. In the coming days, armed whites” both local and from out of town” gathered in Hamburg to demand that local black militia relinquish their weapons.
These blacks took refuge in a small brick building,” “but the swelling white mob blew out its windows with musket and cannon fire.” “Blacks leapt from the windows or climbed down an escape ladder only to be gunned down in cold blood.” “James Cook, the black town marshal, was shot and his skull smashed in with muskets.” “The homes of nearly every black family in town were pillaged while mutilated bodies of the murdered men broiled in sunlight for days, their families too petrified to retrieve them.”
Grant hesitated to send in federal troops. Under the less forgiving political climate, he felt he needed to show that the state government first did everything it could to quell the violence. Later in the summer, over a hundred blacks were murdered in Ellenton, South Carolina. Finally, in October the Republican Governor informed Grant that the state forces were unable to control the insurrections, and finally, Union troops were dispatched to keep the peace, a thousand troops were present to keep the peace on election day, not enough to prevent all violence, but enough to grant relative safety to black voters. But in Mississippi, very few blacks voted, fearing violence. Louisiana also witnessed atrocities listed by Chernow.
On election day, Tilden handily won the popular vote, but the electoral college count was split. But the 1876 Election was disputed, both parties declared victory in the unredeemed states of South Carolina, Florida, and Louisiana, as both parties appointed a party slate of electors. If Republicans won in all three states, the Republicans would win the electoral count by one vote!
The 1876 Election was used as precedent by the Republicans in 2020, when there were, once again, dual slates of electors in swing states, except that the courts ignored the precedent of the 1876 Election, as it was likely illegal in 1876 as well. There was no doubt that the mass intimidation of black voters by Democratic White Supremacists illegally threw the elections to the Democrats.
Chernow recounts: “Though scrupulously evenhanded, Grant was demonized by southern Democrats” and was “peppered with death threats.” He sent generals with federal troops to the three swing states to ensure an accurate counting of the ballots. With assistance from thousands of rifle club members, Democrats seized control of the South Carolina state legislature. Grant told the Union soldiers not to intervene, though he also declared that “if an armed mob attacked Congress, he would defend it.”
Chernow writes: “Rumors floated about that a secret Democratic army would stage a military raid on Washington and declare Tilden the winner. To guard against this menace, Grant and Sherman redeployed troops” “to Washington and secured the federal arsenal along with three critical bridges leading to the capitol.”
Soon after the disputed Presidential Election in 2000, the Republican Supreme Court Justice William Rehnquist penned an account of the 1876 contested election. While it was an accurate account, he omitted many of these violent acts and threats.
Congress formed an Electoral Commission to negotiate a settlement. An informal deal was reached where in return for properly crediting the disputed electors to the Republicans, President Rutherford B Hayes would withdraw federal troops from the South, ending Reconstruction, beginning the Redemption Era, leading to the eventual passage of the Jim Crow segregation laws, giving white supremacists free reign. Lynchings and Race Riots targeting blacks would go unpunished until sometime after World War II.
1876 Contested Presidential Election: Precedent for January 6th Fake Elector Scheme?
https://seekingvirtueandwisdom.com/1876-contested-presidential-election-precedent-for-january-6th-elector-scheme/
https://youtu.be/Ny0iyVYatB4
PRESIDENT GRANT BECOMES CITIZEN GRANT
In his last message to Congress, President Grant notes: “Nearly one-half of the states had revolted against the government, and of those remaining faithful to the Union, a large percentage of the population sympathized with the rebellion and made an ‘enemy in the rear’ almost as dangerous as the honorable enemy in the front.”
Chernow observes: “Grant took office when much for the South still lay under military rule; by the time he left, every Southern state had been absorbed back into the Union. For a long time after the Civil War, influenced by Southern historians, Reconstruction was viewed as a catastrophic error, a period of corrupt carpetbag politicians and illiterate black legislators, presided over by the draconian rule of US Grant.”
Chernow continues: “For more recent historians, led by Eric Foner, Reconstruction has been seen as a noble experiment in equal justice for black citizens in which they made remarkable strides in voting, holding office, owning land, creating small businesses and churches, and achieving literacy.”
These recent historians built on the efforts of WEB DuBois, the first black scholar to earn a PhD from Harvard, for his ground-breaking book, Black Reconstruction, where he countered the Lost Cause myth that Reconstruction was a low point in American history, but instead argued that American Democracy was strongest in the years following the Civil War, and that the blacks played a key role in the Union victory in that great war. White historians, mainly Charles Dunning, permitted DuBois to make presentations arguing his history, while treating him with respect, but nevertheless his narrative was ignored. But WEB DuBois’ reflections would become the dominant narrative in American Reconstruction history when they were adopted by Eric Foner and other leading scholars after the Sixties era championing Civil Rights.
WEB DuBois also wrote a best-selling account of sharecropping and other essays on black experiences after the Civil War in his Souls of Black Folk.
Refuting the Lost Cause: Black Reconstruction by WEB Du Bois
http://www.seekingvirtueandwisdom.com/refuting-the-lost-cause-black-reconstruction-by-web-dubois/
https://youtu.be/JeRCM4PAqPk
History of History of WEB Dubois’ Black Reconstruction, Challenging Lost Cause Myth and Dunning School
https://seekingvirtueandwisdom.com/history-of-history-of-web-dubois-black-reconstruction-challenging-lost-cause-myth-and-dunning-school/
https://youtu.be/CK4V3e-TPFU
WEB Du Bois: The Souls of Black Folk, Personal Essays From Reconstruction Era
http://www.seekingvirtueandwisdom.com/web-dubois-souls-of-black-folk-fighting-for-dignity/
https://youtu.be/x212gx1lNIA
WEB Du Bois, Souls of Black Folk, Essays on Alexander Crummel, Black Episcopal Priest, and Sharecropping
https://seekingvirtueandwisdom.com/web-dubois-souls-of-black-folk-essays-on-alexander-crummel-black-episcopal-priest-and-sharecropping/
https://youtu.be/J3TnQyig6Nkpeonage
Chernow lists the many accomplishments of the emancipated blacks: “About two thousand blacks served as state legislators, tax collectors, local officials, and US marshals, while fourteen serve in the House of Representatives and two in the Senate. The South witnessed a civil rights movement that briefly introduced desegregation and vouchsafed a vision of a functioning biracial democracy.”
What were his greatest accomplishments? Chernow states “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.”[3]
Chernow concludes: “One of the last hurrahs of Reconstruction was the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1875, enacted by lame-duck Republicans.” “It outlawed racial segregation in public accommodations, schools, transportation, and juries.” “But Democratic governors never bothered to enforce it,” and the Supreme Court ruled that it was unconstitutional in 1883. Many of these provisions were revived by the Civil Rights Bill of 1964. [4]
The historian Eric Foner, in his history of the Reconstruction Amendments, discusses how the Confederate states were brought back into the Union, the history of the enforcement of these amendments, and the Supreme Court battles fought for nearly a century until the Sixties, when the civil rights sought by Reconstruction were finally enacted and enforced.
After Grant’s Presidency, the Republican Party became more and more the party of big business, and less and less the party safeguarding civil rights, which meant that, for many decades, blacks did not have any champions in Washington. The Progressive Republican Theodore Roosevelt initially sought civil rights reforms, but the intense blowback he received when he invited the black leader Booker T Washington to dine at the White House with his wife and children caused such intense blowback from white supremacists that he concluded that this was a reform left to later reformers.
The attorney general under Theodore Roosevelt sought unsuccessfully to end the practice of convict labor, or peonage, where Southern sheriffs arrested blacks on vagrancy, loitering, or other trumped-up charges, and then leasing the convicts out to mines, factories, and plantations as a type of slave labor. This reform had to wait until the presidency of his cousin, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, when comparisons between the American discrimination against its blacks and Nazi persecution of their Jews became politically embarrassing.
In our review of WEB DuBois during his tenure at the NAACP, we reflect on the civil rights efforts, or the lack thereof, of the Presidents from Theodore Roosevelt to Franklin Roosevelt.
Second Founding: The Reconstruction Amendments to the Constitution, by Eric Foner
http://www.seekingvirtueandwisdom.com/second-founding-the-reconstruction-amendments-to-the-constitution/
https://youtu.be/UciDV5laOLg
Was the Rough Rider President Theodore Roosevelt a Proponent of Civil Rights?
https://seekingvirtueandwisdom.com/was-the-rough-rider-president-theodore-roosevelt-a-proponent-of-civil-rights/
https://youtu.be/iA5etBYdgC0
Slavery By Another Name, Convict Labor in the Jim Crow Deep South
https://seekingvirtueandwisdom.com/slavery-by-another-name-convict-labor-in-the-jim-crow-deep-south/
https://youtu.be/2TCXcEpohaM
WEB Du Bois and the NAACP, Continuing the Fight For Civil Rights
https://seekingvirtueandwisdom.com/web-du-bois-and-the-naacp-continuing-the-fight-for-civil-rights/
https://youtu.be/MNhkq69CIfo
We also reflect on David Levering Lewis’ biography of Martin Luther King in his many civil rights struggles, such as the Montgomery Bus Boycott, Lunch Counters sit-ins and Freedom Bus Riders, which were protests for equal access to public accommodations, the brutalities faced by protesters in Birmingham,
Martin Luther King, Youth and Schooling, Lewis’ Biography Chapters, 1 and 2
https://seekingvirtueandwisdom.com/martin-luther-king-youth-and-schooling-lewis-biography-chapters-1-and-2/
https://youtu.be/_64FMZ6AlEg
Martin Luther King and Rosa Parks, Montgomery Bus Boycott, Lewis’ Biography, Chapter 3
https://seekingvirtueandwisdom.com/martin-luther-king-and-rosa-parks-montgomery-bus-boycott-lewis-biography-chapter-3/
https://youtu.be/TuiyFycWE-U
Martin Luther King, Lunch Counters, Freedom Riders, and Albany, Lewis’ Biography Chapters 4-6
https://seekingvirtueandwisdom.com/martin-luther-king-lunch-counters-freedom-riders-and-albany-lewis-biography-chapters-4-6/
https://youtu.be/_TLt2fQqL4w
Martin Luther King, Birmingham, Nonviolent Protests v Bombs and Brutality, Biography Chapter 7
https://seekingvirtueandwisdom.com/martin-luther-king-birmingham-nonviolent-protests-v-bombs-and-brutality-biography-chapter-7/
https://youtu.be/5y0v0tYMdy8
Comparing MLK’s Letter from Birmingham Jail with Hannah Arendt’s Banality of Evil in Nazi Germany
http://www.seekingvirtueandwisdom.com/comparing-martin-luther-kings-letter-from-the-birmingham-jail-with-hannah-arendts-the-banality-of-evil/
https://youtu.be/PqFAUEXbi8k
His I Have a Dream Speech at the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, bloody protests and martyrdoms in Mississippi and Selma, and his final protests in Chicago and Memphis before his assassination.
Martin Luther King, I Have a Dream Speech, March on Washington DC, Biography Chapter 8
https://seekingvirtueandwisdom.com/martin-luther-king-i-have-a-dream-speech-march-on-washington-dc-biography-chapter-8/
https://youtu.be/IJ64y3nQA4Q
Martin Luther King, Bloody Struggles in Mississippi and Selma, Lewis’ Biography Chapters 8-9
https://seekingvirtueandwisdom.com/martin-luther-king-bloody-struggles-in-mississippi-and-selma-lewis-biography-chapters-8-9/
https://youtu.be/eMA_7vLYcdM
Martin Luther King & LBJ: Great Society, Vietnam, Chicago & Memphis, Lewis Biography Chapters 10-12
https://seekingvirtueandwisdom.com/martin-luther-king-lbj-great-society-and-vietnam-northern-civil-rights-biography-chapters-10-12/
https://youtu.be/IeKssG8mrlk
Although John F Kennedy raised awareness of the need for civil rights, when he was assassinated, the first Civil Rights Act was stuck in Congress. Martin Luther King partnered with President Lyndon Johnson to pass the revolutionary Great Society Civil Rights legislation, finally granting blacks due process and voting rights. These efforts would have been thwarted if the NAACP attorneys Thurgood Marshall and Charles Houston had not challenged the Jim Crow segregation laws in the Courts, leading up to the Supreme Court Brown decision.
Presidency of Lyndon Baines Johnson, Civil Rights, Great Society, and Vietnam War
https://seekingvirtueandwisdom.com/presidency-of-lyndon-baines-johnson-civil-rights-great-society-and-vietnam-war/
https://youtu.be/lydW8mfpJGQ
John F Kennedy, Cuba, Russia, and Civil Rights, Book Review of An Unfinished Love Story
https://seekingvirtueandwisdom.com/john-f-kennedy-cuba-russia-and-civil-rights-review-of-an-unfinished-love-story/
https://youtu.be/krkJki2vQ2o
Lyndon Johnson, Enacting the Great Society and Vietnam, Review of an Unfinished Love Story
https://seekingvirtueandwisdom.com/lyndon-johnson-enacting-the-great-society-and-vietnam-review-of-an-unfinished-love-story/
https://youtu.be/MgVEipHdvfM
NAACP Attorneys Thurgood Marshall and Charles Houston Challenge Jim Crow in the Courts
https://seekingvirtueandwisdom.com/naacp-attorneys-thurgood-marshall-and-charles-houston-challenge-jim-crow-in-the-courts/
https://youtu.be/fBSNQXDziDU
DISCUSSING THE SOURCES
We discussed best-selling Ron Chernow’s biography, Grant, in our reflections on his conflicts with President Johnson and his role as Union general in Reconstruction during Johnson’s presidency. We summarized and skipped over many of his accounts of the election-related violence in the swing states of Florida, South Carolina, and Louisiana in particular, and also how his wife Julia was reluctant to leave her job as hostess of the White House.
Since we had previously recorded a video specifically on the contested Election of 1876, where the white supremacist Democrats had opposing slates of fake electors, we likewise summarized and skipped over some of the electoral violence in that election where thousands of black voters lost their lives. We realized that the author of the history of that election, Supreme Court William Rehnquist, chose not to report on much of this murderous violence.
Ron Chernow is a guest on many YouTube videos promoting his biography on GRANT, so check them out. Sometime in the future, we are planning a summary reflection, covering his youth and his role in the Mexican War that was one spark among many that eventually ignited the Civil War. We may reflect on his Memoirs discussing the Battle of Shiloh, as it teaches us the value of perseverance and level-headedness. The Confederates thought they were winning the battle when they surprised and pushed back the Union forces on the second day, but Grant, rather than becoming discouraged, instead focused on the Confederate forces’ tactical weakness, successfully counter attacking the next day, driving the rebels back, winning a resounding victory.
[1] Ron Chernow, Grant, Chapter 37, Let No Guilty Man Escape, pp. 809-818.
[2] Ron Chernow, Grant, Chapter 38, Saddest of the Falls, pp. 827-828.
[3] Ron Chernow, Grant, Chapter 39, Redeemers, pp. 838-858.
[4] Ron Chernow, Grant, Chapter 36, The Bravest Battle, p. 795.
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