We could announce, quite rightly, that by furloughing soldiers in Indiana who could not vote in 1864 by absentee ballot, Lincoln corrupted the 1864 election but it's trivial.
Let me see if I have this right, the Whiskey ring should hold equal footing with putting down the 1871 insurrection by the Ku Klux Klan.
Correct?
Do people discount the 1965 Civil Rights act because Lyndon Johnson's friend and former attorney was Abe Fortas? (Isn't it wonderful how that paragon of decency, Richard Nixon, uncovered Fortas?)
There is very little doubt that Orville Babcock was a fairly shitty equivalent of the modern day Chief of Staff, and was probably corrupt, but this was the era (and error) of patronage - which Lincoln among others used judiciously - until smacked down by that all American luminary among Presidents, Chester A. Arthur, but, um, seriously? Seriously?
But let's see, does any of that outweigh active enforcement of the 14th amendment?
Smashing the Ku Klux Klan so thoroughly that it did come back until the 20th century?
Is it not clear that Jay Gould's effort to corner the Gold market collapsed entirely when Grant found out about it and flooded the market with US Gold? Corrupt?
How many convictions were obtained against members of Grant's cabinet?
Grant had a largely destroyed nation, torn by hatred, racism, violence, burned out cities, one crowd lusting for vengence, another lusting for revenge, an upended way of life, albeit rightly upended way of life that had provided vast American wealth on the backs of enslaved people, and what is that you take as important?
Not that the whole country was stitched together in a decidedly herculean task, that people who built this country with sweat and whips were finally according citizenship, although after Grant left the scene that citizenship was allowed to be eroded?
That the "corruption" was not, as you say, manufactured out of whole cloth? Was none of it "manufactured?"
It is not that Grant missed so much, but rather, given the strains of his office, the magnitude of his task and the incredible demands of his times it's that he missed so little in my opinion.
Grant was an essential President, one of the greatest ever to occupy the office of the Presidency, and all the pissing and whining in the world will not change that fact. It may be that he might have not had any scandals were he elected in lieu of Grant, but if in fact that great incorruptible force of the age, Horatio Seymour, who like many of his contemporaries refused to believe that African Americans were really human beings, had been elected to the office instead of Grant, or that magnificent splendid human being of pettifogging purity Horace Greeley in 1872, there is little doubt in my mind that the country would have disintegrated anew.
While it is true that Grant was better served (mostly) by his trusted subordinates in the Civil War who could act on his ideas and take strength from his courage (that includes the virulently racist Sherman), he was less well served by his subordinates has nothing to do with trivial details and everything to do with the measure of the task, frankly, no other single person was equipped to do after the assassination of Lincoln. No one else had the strength. No one else had the integrity and the courage.
There is a country because of Grant, not just General Grant, but President Grant as well.
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