This is the Sesquicentennial of the Grant Presidency. Jamelle Bouie, New York Times Opinion columnist, has a thoughtful article on the hopes engendered 150 years ago when U.S. Grant was sworn in as president and the disappointment eight years later.
From the article:
Grant’s inauguration felt like the beginning of a new era of reform and revitalization. For nearly four years, Americans had suffered through the tumultuous presidency of Andrew Johnson, who drove the nation to political crisis with his virulent racism, erratic behavior and leniency toward the defeated secessionists.
Grant, by contrast, backed the rights and privileges of freed black Americans. He supported the 15th Amendment to the Constitution (ratified in 1870) extending voting rights to black men and deployed federal troops against vigilante groups like the Ku Klux Klan (itself started by a former battlefield foe, Nathan Bedford Forrest).
But the laudable commitment from Grant and the Republican Congress to the political rights of the former slaves was fatally undermined by their indifference to the vast social and economic inequality of the postwar South. Unable to see past an ideology of “free labor” and “free soil,” they also couldn’t grasp how slavery and racial stigma gave black Americans a fundamentally different relationship to economic life. The result was actions that ultimately sowed seeds for new relationships of race hierarchy in the South and the nation at large…
Grant’s election both defused the ideological crisis of the Johnson era and weakened the radical movement within the Republican Party, which derived much of its influence from its conflict with the former president. Grant’s principal allies, the Columbia historian Eric Fonerwrites in “Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution,” were the “Stalwarts,” leaders whose power “rested on control of federal patronage.”
They had grown tired of — and impatient with — the “ideological mode of politics that had shaped the party at its birth,” Foner argues. For these political professionals, “the organization itself, not the issues that had once created it, commanded their highest loyalty.”
That the Stalwarts were less ideological did not make them anti-ideological. Many had cut their teeth in the antislavery crusade of the 1850s and were still committed to Reconstruction on the basis of “free labor” and “free soil,” where whites and blacks would work for wages as rational individuals responding to market incentives. “The free labor social order,” writes Foner, “ostensibly guaranteed the ambitious worker the opportunity for economic mobility, the ability to move from wage labor to independence through the acquisition of productive property.”
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