When Ulysses S. Grant was elected president on November 3, 1868, one jaundice-eyed observer of the chief executive-elect was Lincoln’s Secretary of the Navy Gideon Welles. Unlike many others in Lincoln’s cabinet, Welles had stayed in the Andrew Johnson administration and embraced the now-discredited Reconstruction policies of that failed president. He was extremely critical of Grant’s support for Congress grating civil rights to African Americans and thereby interfering with the states rights” of the South.
Welles kept a journal which was published in the early 20th Century in three volumes. Volume Three, covering the Reconstruction years, can be found here.
On December 12, 1868, Welles wrote in his journal this unflattering portrait of Grant as future president:
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