Grant and Women

Somehow I blundered early onto the rehabilitation of the reputation of Ulysses Grant, perhaps because his autobiography is the only President’s book to make it into the American literary canon.  (Maybe Obama will change that.) In recent years Grant has climbed steadily in the retrospective polls. 

Grant was enormously popular in America and around the world while he lived. After his death his reputation was thoroughly trashed by the Eastern elite in his own party—Grant had not been born rich and had not gone to Harvard—and by the Southern historians intent on glorifying a slave-whipping loser named Robert E. Lee.

In some ways Grant was the first modern general, both in tactics and in strategy, and as President he pushed through the 14th Amendment, which made people of color (and every child born here) an American citizen. He crushed the KKK. What I didn’t learn until yesterday, reading Adam Gopnik, was that Grant was the first President to hire in the government large numbers of women, Jews, black people, American Indians and Irish. That was, of course, long before women could vote.