DID YOU KNOW?
Grant entered the White House on March 4, 1869, politically inexperienced at age 46, the youngest man elected president. The Grants had four children. Their daughter, Nellie, became a national darling, and when she was married in the White House in 1874, the public was entranced by the details of the wedding. The executive mansion was also the home for both the president’s father and his father-in-law.
After leaving office, Ulysses and Julia Grant set forth on a round-the-world trip in May 1877. Grant’s reputation as the man who had saved the American Union having preceded him, he was greeted everywhere as a conquering hero in Great Britain, Germany, Japan etc. In 1879 Grant found that a faction of the Republican Party was eager to nominate him for a third term. Although he did nothing to encourage support, he
President Grant and Vice President Colfax
Grants Burial Tomb
Now, Grant easily won reelection in 1872, defeating Horace Greeley, by nearly 800,000 votes in the popular election and capturing 286 of 366 electoral votes. Grant supported both amnesty for Confederate leaders and civil rights for the formerly enslaved. He worked for ratification of the Fifteenth Amendment and went to Capitol Hill to win passage of the Ku Klux Klan Act of 1871, although he was largely ineffective in enforcing the civil rights laws and other tenets of Reconstruction.
charges brought an open break between the two men and strengthened Grant’s ties to the Republican Party, which led to his nomination for president in 1868. The last line of his letter of acceptance, “Let us have peace,” became the Republican campaign slogan. Grant’s Democratic opponent was Horatio Seymour, former governor of New York. The race was a close one, and Grant’s narrow margin of victory in the popular vote (300,000 ballots) may have been attributable to newly enfranchised Black voters. The vote of the electoral college was more one-sided, with Grant garnering 214 votes, compared with 80 for Seymour.