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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 9320908 | Around this time, Mark Twain belonged to a small, irregular Confederate company and later claimed for comic effect that he had been pursued by Grant's troops. As he said facetiously, "I did not know that this was the future General Grant or I would have turned and attacked him. I supposed it was just some ordinary Colonel of no particular consequence, so I let him go."35 In fact, Twain had been in the vicinity weeks earlier." | Ron Chernow | ||
| 612d22b | In other words, Julia still believed in the beneficial effects of tobacco long after her husband had likely died from it. Even grimacing with pain, Grant tracked presidential politics intently. | Ron Chernow | ||
| 194d0be | He would smile at times, but I never heard him laugh aloud," said Louisa Boggs. "He was a sad man . . . he seemed almost in despair."124 Grant seemed to be staring into an abyss. "I don't think he saw a light ahead--not a particle. I don't think he had any ambition further than to educate and take care of his family." | Ron Chernow | ||
| 61dfdba | Out of the blue, a veteran named Charles Wood, manager of a brush factory in upstate New York, sent Grant a $500 check and offered him a $1,000 interest-free loan for a year, renewable if necessary. Grant accepted this charity with everlasting relief. In his note, Wood tipped his hat to Grant by saying the payment was "for services ending about April 1865."77" | Ron Chernow | ||
| 7b8720c | the immorality of slavery became patently clear that spring. He had acquired from Colonel Dent the mulatto slave named William Jones who had worked on Dent's farm and was now thirty-five years old. It was the only time Grant ever owned a slave and Jones may have come as a gift. Then, on March 29, 1859, Grant appeared at circuit court in St. Louis to file papers that declared "I do hereby manumit, emancipate & set free said William from slav.. | Ron Chernow | ||
| ce41b08 | To deal with the legions of dead, Quartermaster General Montgomery Meigs proposed the creation of a national military cemetery, surrounding the former Lee mansion at Arlington, and Stanton approved the measure the same day. | Ron Chernow | ||
| f8ac423 | Grant later boasted, with some justice, that Hamilton Fish was the best secretary of state in fifty years. While historians have tended to mock Grant's cabinet as a bunch of mediocrities--and Borie certainly qualified as such--it was actually weighted with former congressmen, senators, governors, and judges. It had figures of real distinction (Fish), Radical Republicans (Boutwell, Creswell), men of exceptional intellect (Hoar), | Ron Chernow | ||
| 59f13b2 | FROM THE OUTBREAK OF THE WAR, Abraham Lincoln recognized the pivotal role of Kentucky, a centrally located buffer state between North and South. "I hope to have God on my side," he admonished colleagues, "but I must have Kentucky." | Ron Chernow | ||
| d9180ec | While Grant was celebrated as a victorious wartime general and the president who had peacefully settled the Alabama claims, most gratifying to him was being honored as the protector of freed people. A delegation of painters marched by, hoisting a picture that depicted the shackles of slavery being struck off beside the words "Welcome to the Liberator." | Ron Chernow | ||
| 74232cd | In February 1878, Grant braved rain, wind, and snow to become the first American president to visit Jerusalem. He met with a delegation of American Jews who distributed relief to their suffering brethren in the Holy Land and he promised to carry their message to Jewish leaders at home. As they entered religious sites, Julia was susceptible to powerful emotions, her active imagination a perfect foil for her husband's skeptical, deadpan humor.. | Ron Chernow | ||
| 025cd17 | Seven months after Grant's death, Julia received a whopping $200,000 check from Twain and $450,000 in the end--an astonishing sum for book royalties at the time. No previous book had ever sold so many copies in such a short period of time, and it rivaled that other literary sensation of the nineteenth century, Uncle Tom's Cabin. Clearly Grant had emerged victorious in his last uphill battle. | Ron Chernow | ||
| d447ab2 | He immediately had Rawlins summon stretcher bearers, but was dismayed when they removed the Union officer and overlooked the Confederate private. "Take this Confederate, too," he said. "Take them both together; the war is over between them."25 Grant seemed sickened by the carnage. "Let's get away from this dreadful place," he told an officer. "I suppose this work is part of the devil that is left in us all." | Ron Chernow | ||
| cf51f39 | a full-blooded Seneca Iroquois sachem, Ely S. Parker, who grew up on an Indian reservation in upstate New York and was a chief of the Six Nations. Trained as a civil engineer, he was a man of giant girth with jet-black hair, penetrating eyes, and exceptional strength who styled himself a "savage Jack Falstaff of 200 [pound] weight." | Ron Chernow | ||
| a810709 | The Republican marching club was known as the Galena Wide Awakes--Orvil Grant was a member--and as they tramped along, clad in dark oilcloth capes and caps, their martial air portended war. Grant rebuffed an effort, spearheaded by John Rawlins, | Ron Chernow | ||
| f3eaaf5 | Dismissed as a philistine, a boor, a drunk, and an incompetent, Grant has been subjected to pernicious stereotypes that grossly impede our understanding of the man. As a contemporary newspaper sniffed, Grant was "an ignorant soldier, coarse in his taste and blunt in his perceptions, fond of money and material enjoyment and of low company."14 In fact, Grant was a sensitive, complex, and misunderstood man with a shrewd mind, a wry wit, a rich.. | Ron Chernow | ||
| eaf5ed3 | He saw that while he had much to lose by refraining from the duel, he had precious little to gain by facing it: "I shall hazard much and can possibly gain nothing by the issue of the interview." 72 Why then did he fight? To maintain his sense of honor and capacity for leadership, he argued, he had to bow to the public's belief in dueling: "The ability to be in future useful, whether in resisting mischief or effecting good, in those crises o.. | Ron Chernow | ||
| 0e6484c | Having been battered by the world in his earlier years, he had come to rely on family and friends and never forgot that lesson. When he offered an appointment to a former St. Louis friend, the man felt obliged to point out that he was a Democrat. Grant waved away this concern. "Just before the Civil War," he said, "when I was standing on a street corner in St. Louis by a wagon loaded with wood, you approached and said: 'Captain, haven't you.. | Ron Chernow | ||
| 955b490 | At 8:08 a.m. on July 23, 1885, Grant died so gently that nobody was quite certain at first that his spirit had stolen away. His death reflected words he had once written to a bereaved widow during the Mexican War, saying that her husband had "died as a soldier dies, without fear and without a murmur."142 Grant's corpse weighed ninety pounds and lay under an oval picture of Abraham Lincoln. It was hard to believe this wizened form represente.. | Ron Chernow | ||
| 9d68bac | The extraordinary outpouring of bipartisan concern blotted out the scandals of Grant's presidency and restored him to his rightful niche in the American pantheon. Hundreds of sympathetic messages piled up at the Grant residence, including telegrams from Jefferson Davis and the sons of Robert E. Lee and Albert Sidney Johnston. | Ron Chernow | ||
| 851e84c | Predictably, northern military units predominated, but the presence of Confederate soldiers touched onlookers. "It was quite a sight to see the Stonewall Brigade [march] up Fifth Avenue with their drums marked Staunton, Va.," one said. "They wore the grey, with a black and brass helmet. There were several companies of Virginia and Southern troops."148 Contingents of black veterans were liberally represented among the sixty thousand soldiers.. | Ron Chernow | ||
| 4fba8eb | Summing up Grant's career, Frederick Douglass wrote: "In him the Negro found a protector, the Indian a friend, a vanquished foe a brother, an imperiled nation a savior."153 Church" | Ron Chernow | ||
| 8c41f0c | What pretty much guaranteed that Johnson would side with white supremacists was his benighted view of black people. No American president has ever held such openly racist views. "This is a country for white men," he declared unashamedly, "and by God, as long as I am President, it shall be a government for white men." | Ron Chernow | ||
| b931bbc | lose. The chief quartermaster on the West Coast, Robert Allen, an old friend of Grant's, learned he was holed up in a cheap miner's hotel called "What Cheer House." He found Grant in a spartan garret room furnished with a cot, a pine table, and a chair. "Why, Grant, what are you doing here?" Allen asked. "Nothing," Grant replied. "I've resigned from the army. I'm out of money, and I have no means of getting home." | Ron Chernow | ||
| e569cac | old Abe is through with his next four years, we will put him [i.e., Grant] | Ron Chernow | ||
| c3a7669 | Grant deserves an honored place in American history, second only to Lincoln for what he did for the freed slaves. He got the big issues right during his presidency even if he bungled many of the small ones. The historian Richard N. Currant who also saw Grant as the most underrated American president wrote "by backing radical reconstruction as best he could he made a greater effort to secure the constitutional rights of blacks than did any o.. | Ron Chernow | ||
| e2793de | Sensing an abandonment of Reconstruction, Frederick Douglass wondered what good abolition had been for the black man if "having been freed from the slaveholder's lash, he is to be subject to the slaveholder's shotgun?" | Ron Chernow | ||
| 99158dc | When Grant made Edward S. Salomon governor of the Washington Territory, it was the first time an American Jew had occupied a gubernatorial post. (When Salomon proved corrupt, Grant handled his case leniently, letting him resign.) Elated at this appointment, Rabbi Isaac Mayer Wise said it showed "that President Grant has revoked General Grant's notorious order No. 11." | Ron Chernow | ||
| 0409fe2 | Few First Ladies--and the name wasn't yet commonly used--have so reveled in the White House or developed such a proprietary feeling about it. "Eight happy years I spent there--so happy!" Julia would reminisce. "It still seems as much like home to me as the old farm in Missouri, White Haven." | Ron Chernow | ||
| 6c28a11 | At forty-six, Grant was still trim and fit, the youngest man elected president until then. Having weathered the crucible of war, he was a more worldly figure than in earlier years, his face showing curiosity, intelligence, and skepticism. Lacking the tall, upright carriage or silver mane of a prototypical politician, Grant, in black suit and yellow kid gloves, looked more like a man on a minor business errand than a statesman embarking on h.. | Ron Chernow | ||
| c862c38 | Around this time he performed a ceremony that he had contemplated for some time. He asked Fred to compose a letter requesting a future president of the United States to appoint his grandson Ulysses (Fred's son) as a West Point cadet. Grant summoned family members and doctors as witnesses before he affixed his signature to the document. It was such a solemn gesture for him that as he folded the paper, a hush gripped the room. In 1898 Preside.. | Ron Chernow | ||
| 58a4a0f | Daring in design, cautious in execution--it was a formula he made his own throughout his career. | Ron Chernow | ||
| ae55be2 | The underlying point of the letter was to notify Grant that, if Sherman's brother John should be a candidate for president, "it would be unnatural for me to oppose or qualify his purpose."9 When he received this letter in Tokyo, Grant was deeply moved by Sherman's sensitivity in explaining why he might be forced to support his brother. With tears in his eyes, he told Young, "'People may wonder . . . why I love Sherman. How could I help lovi.. | Ron Chernow | ||
| 4a469df | When he sent a defiant annual message to Congress in early December, it polarized the situation even further. He accused Congress of burdening southern states with black voting rights even though blacks had demonstrated little capacity for government and "wherever they have been left to their own devices they have shown a constant tendency to relapse into barbarism."27 This message claimed the dubious distinction of being the most racist su.. | Ron Chernow | ||
| 2bdb229 | With a soil and climate scarcely equaled in the world," he protested, Mexico "has more poor and starving subjects who are willing and able to work than any country in the world. The rich keep down the poor with a hardness of heart that is incredible." | Ron Chernow | ||
| 00bf19a | George Washington noted the hypocrisy of the many slaveholding antifederalists: "It is a little strange that the men of large property in the South should be more afraid that the Constitution will produce an aristocracy or a monarchy than the genuine, democratical people of the East." -- | Ron Chernow | ||
| c229310 | For anyone studying Hamilton's pay book, it would come as no surprise that he would someday emerge as a first-rate constitutional scholar, an unsurpassed treasury secretary, and the protagonist of the first great sex scandal in American political history. | Ron Chernow | ||
| 401d8e6 | By no means confined to the south, slavery was well entrenched in much of the north. By 1784, Vermont, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, and Connecticut had outlawed slavery or passed laws for its gradual extinction--at the very least, New England's soil did not lend itself to large plantations--but New York and New Jersey retained significant slave populations. New York City, in particular, was identified with slave.. | Ron Chernow | ||
| 735d42b | The stress placed upon the Adams-Hamilton feud pointed up a deeper problem in the Federalist party, one that may explain its ultimate failure to survive: the elitist nature of its politics. James McHenry complained to Oliver Wolcott, Jr., of their adherents, "They write private letters to each other, but do nothing to give a proper direction to the public mind."50 The Federalists issued appeals to the electorate but did not try to mobilize .. | Ron Chernow | ||
| 7a69acf | An episode at Congress Hall in January 1798 symbolized the acrimonious mood. Representative Matthew Lyon of Vermont, a die-hard Republican, began to mock the aristocratic sympathies of Roger Griswold, a Federalist from Connecticut. When Griswold then taunted Lyon for alleged cowardice during the Revolution, Lyon spat right in his face. Griswold got a hickory cane and proceeded to thrash Lyon, who retaliated by taking up fire tongs and attac.. | Ron Chernow | ||
| abf2e3a | He also saw human nature as insatiably curious and reserved his highest praise for minds that created "schemes or systems of truth."11" | Ron Chernow | ||
| 2345b09 | In "the general course of things, the popular views and even prejudices will direct the action of the rulers." | Ron Chernow | ||
| 2706f9e | The rancor ushered in a golden age of literary assassination in American politics. No | Ron Chernow | ||
| e981809 | Unlike Jefferson, Hamilton never saw the creation of America as a magical leap across a chasm to an entirely new landscape, and he always thought the New World had much to learn from the Old. Probably | Ron Chernow | ||
| 473ed49 | After the French and Indian War, the British vacillated about whether to swap all of Canada for the island of Guadeloupe; in the event the French toasted their own diplomatic cunning in retaining the sugar island. | Ron Chernow |