Why is he considered a bad president, especially considering he came right after Andrew Johnson?

Why is he considered a bad president, especially considering he came right after Andrew Johnson?

Southerner butthurt would be my guess.

>Why is he considered a bad president
Corrupt as they come with policies that effectively did nothing outside of enriching his buddies. They don't call his Presidency "The Great Barbecue" for nothing.

I've always kind of seen him as painfully gullible and easily controlled by his buddies.

>believing the "it was a failure of judgment and not intent" line
Nah.

Southern Propaganda, though he was corrupt.

He was a good general but he was somewhat naïve politically. He appointed some people he trusted to positions and they took advantage of his naivety to engage in corrupt practices. When this was discovered, he got the blame and his administration acquired a reputation for corruption.

Of course, people in southern states were kind of predisposed to blame him so he couldn't really escape it. Grant put a lot of effort towards protecting former slaves from the recently-formed KKK and that didn't earn him many friends down south either. When they first appeared, Grant treated them as being a terrorist organization immediately and devoted federal resources (AKA the Army) towards trying to stomp them out as much as possible. He largely succeeded but they rebounded pretty quickly after he left office because his successors really didn't just care as much.

Keep in mind that past historians tended to be a lot more pro-southern in their views so Grant's reputation has been steadily reclaimed over time.

>TL:DR, he was a flawed but overall pretty good precedent and most of the negativity comes from southern butt-hurt

>it was only people he knew
>nevermind all of his nepotism and the fact he defended all of these people
>it was all other people doing bad things and Grant isn't complicit at all

Civil Service Commission? That got fucked over pretty badly, but he tried.

Grant's most ardent critics said the same thing. Even the butthurt Southerners' portrayal of him was more of a gullible drunk than an actively malicious grafter. Considering that Grant's memoirs were published because he got fucked over on a business deal towards the end of his life to the point where he was virtually penniless which caused him to write that he didn't know how he could trust another person, I'm inclined to believe that interpretation of him.

Really it's kind of funny that there's a lot of stuff going on in politics/the Presidential election nowadays that seem like throwbacks to the Reconstruction era and the Gilded Age in terms of graft, pay-for-play corruption, political machines and tarrifs being big issues. It's why I really wish more was written about and illuminated regarding that era beyond "blacks still had it tough in the South" and "every President between Lincoln and Teddy was useless and did nothing" dismissals. It's a 40 year period of American history that's basically ignored and I think is becoming more and more relevant to the modern day.

Take voter fraud for example. There's been articles about dead people being registered as Democrats, voting machines being hacked, all kinds of fears of a possible rigging. Yet back during that era shit like that was the norm: Benjamin Harrison won the presidency through outright voter fraud since there was nothing to stop political machines from bringing in out of district (even out of state) voters and passing them off as legit, or shipping in bags and bags full of pre-filled fraudulent ballets.

>Grant put a lot of effort towards protecting former slaves from the recently-formed KKK and that didn't earn him many friends down south either.
One of the reasons he tried annexing the Dominican Republic when the President of that country offered it to him was as a place for slaves to emigrate too while taking labor power away from the South as a way of teaching them a lesson. A nearly realized version of that "if blacks stopped working y'all would be fucked" stuff you see.

Kind of funny that it failed because of Sen. Sumner and Schurz. Sumner because he thought the whole thing was illegal and the US would try and annex Haiti too. Meanwhile Schurz was aghast at the thought of mulattos being allowed US citizenship.

You've never known anyone who's defended shitty family members or friends in the face of all evidence? Some times people have a blindspot. Grant was a very trusting individual and whether through genuine naivete or willful ignorance could not/did not want to believe that his closest friends and even family members were fucking him and the country over.

I think it's slowly becoming more recognized as an important time, it's honestly where you begin to see the America we have today as you said.

A large part of it was literally southerner revisionism. William A. Dunning -an avowed lost cause historian- and his acolytes, waged a campaign against him, and the Union's cause at large. They did not believe in the equality of black people, considered Lincoln to be a madman, and believed emancipation to be damaging in general. They also had the gall to portray Reconstruction as "the darkest page in the saga of American History"- plainly untrue.

It is probably true that Grant was naive- and indeed, many of his ministers and the people he surrounded himself with were corrupt. But he did do good; so much so as to, at the very least, place him in the upper half of American presidents:

> Attacked reconstruction- for many of his years- to the best of his abilities.
> Prevented a recession during the Gold Standard affair
> Promoting the rights of Jews
> Attempted to push for a peace policy with the Indians; and probably would have succeeded too, if it hadn't been for Custer's idiotic last stand

His foreign policy was also pretty good; often trying for a peaceful solution, as exemplified by successful negotiations with Spain.

It is undeniable however, that his presidency should have shown a greater legacy, which can be blamed on him.

ps, everybody should read his Memoirs. The man was a brilliant writer.

>They also had the gall to portray Reconstruction as "the darkest page in the saga of American History"- plainly untrue

I'm not sure about that user. The entire civil war era, including reconstruction, is really damn dark. Probably not for the exact reasons that he describes, but if somebody says that the civil war was the worst time of all for the USA, I'd be inclined to agree.

But Dunning and his ilk wrote purely from a Southern, Confederate perspective; in open support of the Jim Crow Laws and general negro disenfranchisement. He characterised them as not being on "the same social, moral and intellectual plane as the whites", and that "restrictions in respect to bearing arms, testifying in court, and keeping labor contracts were justified by the well-established traits and habits of the negroes." So of course he would be avowedly against something that he characterised as "scalawags, carpetbaggers" etc. The guy was a little too ideologically skewed to attack it in an objective sense.

Kind of reminds me but IIRC one of Garfield's main things was advocating for the turning the blacks into an educated populace since he believed, generally, that those who were educated should be the ones to vote and that subsequently those of his generation should make it their duty to educate the children of the next.

He could've been another "nothing" Gilded Age President or he could've gone down as one of the all time greats if it wasn't for Guiteau.

I don't think there's any way to objectively defend scalawags or carpetbaggers.

I agree. After Lincoln, a lot of his successors were filled with good intentions, enlightened views etc; but would ultimately be brought down by hung senates, public disinterest and random chance- story of America really.

Be sure you don't forget those filthy yankees in general either.

Really another way that we're starting to mirror the Gilded Age.

I do think my favorite story of a figure from that era, that I've heard so far anyway, is Roscoe Conkling dying because he decided walking to work in the middle of one of the worst blizzards in New York history was a good idea.

Well, Hayes kind of had the problem of being a do nothing. He just kind of existed and his way of even winning (the deal to end Reconstruction for the Presidency) was fucking dumb although that's more on his party of course than him personally since IIRC he was pretty big on Civil Rights. Cleveland was an honest man who really wasn't cut out for anything demanding.

Arthur turned himself around, did a good job at trying to stamp out corruption and bring up the Navy and generally left office as an incredibly popular figure. The only real stain on his record is the Chinese Exclusion Act I guess. Kind of like an Antoninus Pius figure in that he was a good, steady hand who ran the country in an efficient manner and should, IMO, be seen as a damn good president because of it given how politis at the time were.

McKinley brought the country economic prosperity that it never knew and an empire. Should be remembered as another pretty good president but is overshadowed by his successor. Harrison's is just kind of a bog standard late 19th century presidency with a more aggressive foreign policy that influenced Roosevelt (especially his handling of dipolmatic tensions with Chile).

The biggest problem with the Presidents of the time is that most held office during opposition control of Congress and that by and large the parties and political machines were so large as to control everything behind the scenes and, again, being overshadowed by the larger personalities like Conkling, Blaine, Garfield when he was in the House, etc.

>The man was a brilliant writer.
So much so people thought Mark Twain ghost-wrote the book, something Twain denied. He and Twain were good friends, and Twain did give Grant advice while he was working on the memoirs.