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 Ulysses Simpson Grant (born Hiram Ulysses Grant) April 27, 1822, Point Pleasant, Ohio - July 23, 1885, Mount McGregor, New York Political Party: Republican Terms: March 4, 1869 – March 4, 1877 (two terms) Vice Presidents: Schuyler Colfax (1869–1873) and Henry Wilson (1873–1875)  **Thematic Context (American Identity) ** As the now “United” States dived further into the Reconstruction era, the Americans finally settled from the stages of an underdeveloped nation into a developing world power without being cognizant of the shift. Meanwhile the fights for equality of the people began to make progress into national legislations, explicitly concerning the race and gender inequalities for the unequaled.

Women suffrage was not considered until Wyoming, at the time remained as territory, extended full voting rights to female residents age 21 or older in 1869, thus earned its official nickname “The Equality State”. Surprisingly, there was no organized suffrage movement in Wyoming. The territory legislator WIlliam Bright, supporting his wife’s belief that suffrage is a basic right of American citizenship, sponsored the bill until territorial Governor John A. Campbell signed the bill into law considering popular publicity towards the policy. The lives of the Wyoming women carried on, but the nation was startled by the radical movement within this western territory. Although the issue was challenged by Congress when Wyoming applied for statehood into the Union, the amendment stayed put and the stated received acceptance in 1890. Known by its democratic principle standing by freedom, the United States of America was not able to withhold a basic right to half of the nation’s population for long after that, as the well-known women rights activist Susan B. Anthony continued to put up a fight for women suffrage and finally pushed Congress to account the 19th Amendment into the Constitution in 1920 granting all eligible women the right to vote in the nation, a daring move to erase segregation based on genders.

Another accomplishment that complemented the nation’s status, economy-wise, was the completion of the first continental railroad. Both chartered by the Pacific Railroad Act of 1862, the Union Pacific Company and the Central Pacific Company was assigned different locations to lay railroad tracks. Under the terms of the bill, the Central Pacific Railroad Company would start building in Sacramento and continue east across the Sierra Nevada, while the Union Pacific Railroad, would build westward from the Missouri River, near the Idaho-Nebraska border, and eventually completed on May 10, 1869, where the meeting point lied on the soil of Promontory, Utah. This stitching of North America together from ocean to ocean created, perhaps, the largest integrated national market for American raw materials and manufactured goods to be exchanged between the North, South, and West. As the tracks paved the rails to the Wild West, it welded the west coast more firmly to the Union, therefore enhancing the growth of the fragment. Prosperous trade began to lure domestic and foreign investors, and America took a big leap in globalization, slowly climbing up to evolve into an international giant, the nucleus of the universal trade system through the the rigid Iron Horse. 

Emerged as an iconic hero of the victorious north from the notorious Civil War, the Republican Party nominated Grant for presidency in the election of 1869 and triumphed with the slogan “Let us have peace”. It seemed as if prominent leaders at the time were too busy grabbing powers across the nation to serve in politics, as Grant continued to serve two disastrous terms, winning the people’s vote without giving them a real choice. Along with that, major national issues developed consistently throughout his years but were majorly dealt by his radical officials, who were often crooked cronies not designated to be in federal offices in the first place. The nation, impaired by domestic exploitations and economic crash, was introduced into modernization in the most corrupted time. Though no president with such authority wished to accomplish such inclination on himself, President Ulysses Grant blundered under the demands from his citizens, hence deserves a D for his presidency.
 * Thesis **

Indeed President Ulysses Grant had been placed in a critical time of US history. Ever so loyal to the Radical Republicans, he simply followed their platforms in gaining complete social equality for blacks, “to give him a chance to develop what there is good in him” by “approach[ing] calmly, without prejudice, hate, or sectional pride”, a maneuver that essentially dominated over his presidency and later ones to come. The goal proved impossible to accomplished, especially for such aloof leader. Though the addition of the Fifteenth Amendment appeared to insinuate a new peaceful life for blacks, they still have to face segregation from the “superior” whites for another decade although on legal documents were not to be denied any legal rights. Grant also suggested alleviation to Native Americans hostility and support for assimilation for the original occupants of the land into white lifestyle. Although bills were passed and laws were made, federal actions, however, did not comply with President Grant’s pledge, just as it never had been ever since white settlers stepped foot on the hemisphere. Pioneers continued to push the natives out of their promised lands, and with the transcontinental railroads put into place, Native Americans were driven in places where the whites refused to live in. For all the effort devoted into the cause, the minorities continued to linger below the par of equal treatments during Grant’s presidency. 
 * Goals **

President Ulysses Grant, an honest man himself, was backlashed by those whom he appointed into office for the aid in his presidential election. Grant’s administration was rocked by the waves of scandals conducted by insensible opportunistics. Many of the members of his cabinet and Congressmen were involved in multiple slanders. In one incident, Grant’s first term vice president was removed from the Republican ticket for reelection in 1872 when his engagement in the Credit Mobilier scandal was exposed; House Representative James A. Garfield was also found entangled in the business, but later found himself in the president chair in 1881. President Grant is relatively found to be completely at fault for such plummet in government discredibility, for his poor character judgement led to the impairments of trust between the officials and the people that they were destined to serve.
 * Relationship with Congress **

On of the few effective laws passed during the Reconstruction of the South was the Ku Klux Klan Act that came into effect on April 20, 1871 as a response to the terroristic activities sweeping over the austere Southern states. This third Enforcement Act, after the previous two proved to be futile, was the product of a special direct appeal to Congress from President Grant himself. The act established penalties in the form of fines and jail time for attempts to deprive citizens of equal protection under the laws and gave the President the authority to use federal troops and suspend the writ of habeas corpus in ensuring that civil rights were upheld. The act provided immediate actions, when Grant sent additional troops in the upcoming months to the south and suspended the writ of habeas corpus in nine counties in South Carolina, but still arrived a bit too late for the intimidation had been achieved. While few convictions were made and many whites went on to disfranchise blacks’ rights, the law helped to suppress Klan activities and ensure a greater degree of fairness in the election of 1872.
 * <span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000; font-family: Arial; font-size: 13px; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Positive Action **

<span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000; font-family: Arial; font-size: 13px; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">One of the many infamous scandals during Grant’s administration was the Whiskey Ring scandal, where a group of distillers and officials defrauded the government, inflicting the taxing policies. The scandal also showed the good and the bad in the office, since it was overturned and exposed by secret investigations managed by Treasury Secretary Benjamin H. Bristow, a cautious move to avoid the fraudulents to take precaution. On May 1873, he striked and recovered $3 million in taxes, led to 238 people indicted and 110 convicted. Although the President made a grand statement “Let no guilty man escape, Grant’s personal secretary Orville A. Babcock, one of those convicted, was acquitted and liberated by the president. This unfavorable act strengthened the Republican corruption in the people’s eyes, and showcased the president’s deceiving action to not prosecute the guilty under the law.
 * <span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000; font-family: Arial; font-size: 13px; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Negative Action, **

<span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000; font-family: Arial; font-size: 13px; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">With the urgency from Grant for an amendment that <span style="background-color: transparent; color: #333333; font-family: Arial; font-size: 13px; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">would give citizens the right to vote regardless of race or previous servitude to increase Republican votes in the South from blacks and whites combined to flourish the party in the area, the Fifteenth Amendment was thus approved by Congress in 1870. This modification to the Constitution, without a doubt, was one of the most important moves by a US president to gain freedom for African Americans and other ethnic groups alike in the livelihood of the United States of America. The effect, unfortunately, was not immediate; rather a continuous aggression that spanned out to a decade of American history to get the desired equality that all American citizens reserve to this day. After the law was passed, African Americans promptly faced a new level of injustice, specifically through the Jim Crow segregation system that was later supported by Supreme Court, the judge of the country, through the ruling of the Wabash case during Cleveland’s first presidency.
 * <span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000; font-family: Arial; font-size: 13px; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Influential Decision **

<span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000; font-family: Arial; font-size: 13px; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Domestic corruptions, inside the closed-door office and outside in the fields and factories, contributed to the plunge of the nation’s overall health, and with the weary responds from the administration demonstrated President Ulysses Grant to be one of the worst president in history. The country was left in turmoil at the end of his terms of office than at the beginning, where Americans were in the midst of devastation caused by economic crash of 1873. Without the necessary knowledge and apperception of a politician, Grant left the country in disgrace with a stronger need in reform, therefore earns him a D for his presidential terms. Works Cited <span style="background-color: transparent; display: block; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: medium;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000; font-family: Arial; font-size: 13px; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Bailey, Cohen, and Kennedy. The American Pageant:Twelfth Edition. New York: Houghton Mifflin. 2002. DeGregorio, William A. The Complete Book of U.S. Presidents. New York: Gramercy Books, 2005. "The Eighteenth US President - Ulysses Grant." The Eighteenth US President - Ulysses Grant. N.p., n.d. Web. 11 Nov. 2012. < <span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: Arial; font-size: 13px; vertical-align: baseline;">[|__http://www.sheppardsoftware.com/History/presidents/Presidents_18_Grant.htm__] <span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000; font-family: Arial; font-size: 13px; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">>. "Home." Our Documents -. N.p., n.d. 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Web. 11 Nov. 2012. < <span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: Arial; font-size: 13px; vertical-align: baseline;">[|__http://millercenter.org/president/grant__] <span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000; font-family: Arial; font-size: 13px; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">>. "19th Amendment." History.com. A&E Television Networks, n.d. Web. 11 Nov. 2012. < <span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: Arial; font-size: 13px; vertical-align: baseline;">[|__http://www.history.com/topics/19th-amendment__] <span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000; font-family: Arial; font-size: 13px; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">>. "Transcontinental Railroad." History.com. A&E Television Networks, n.d. Web. 11 Nov. 2012. < <span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: Arial; font-size: 13px; vertical-align: baseline;">[|__http://www.history.com/topics/transcontinental-railroad__] <span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000; font-family: Arial; font-size: 13px; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">>. "Westlaw Insider | Blog | Today in 1869: Wyoming Extends Voting Rights to Women."Westlaw Insider | Blog | Today in 1869: Wyoming Extends Voting Rights to Women. N.p., n.d. Web. 11 Nov. 2012. < <span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: Arial; font-size: 13px; vertical-align: baseline;">[|__http://westlawinsider.com/today-in-legal-history/today-in-1869-wyoming-extends-voting-rights-to-women/__] <span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000; font-family: Arial; font-size: 13px; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">>. "Whiskey Ring." Answers.com. Answers, n.d. Web. 11 Nov. 2012. < <span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: Arial; font-size: 13px; vertical-align: baseline;">[|__http://www.answers.com/topic/whiskey-ring__] <span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000; font-family: Arial; font-size: 13px; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">>. "Women`s Suffrage." Women`s Suffrage. N.p., n.d. Web. 11 Nov. 2012. < <span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: Arial; font-size: 13px; vertical-align: baseline;">[|__http://www.u-s-history.com/pages/h1097.html__] <span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000; font-family: Arial; font-size: 13px; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">>.
 * <span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000; font-family: Arial; font-size: 13px; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Conclusion **