U.S. Grant’s Failed Presidency

In U. S. Grant’s Failed Presidency, Philip Leigh examines the eighteenth President free from the hagiographic bias that has dominated books about Ulysses Grant during the past thirty years. Given his universal acclaim for having won the Civil War, no leader was better positioned to reunite the country “with malice toward none and charity for all” as the earlier martyred wartime President Abraham Lincoln intended. Unfortunately, Grant put personal and political party interests ahead of the country’s needs. Although he personally profited from eight years in the White House, his Administration was laced with corruption and his Reconstruction policies left the South impoverished and burdened with racial unrest for more than a century.