Grant

Ulysses S. Grant’s life and career spanned three key eras in 19th century US history: The American Civil War, Reconstruction, and the Gilded Age. The first of these, the Civil War, had causes rooted in the United States’ history with slavery. Basically, the United States had become divided between “slave states,” where slavery was still accepted, and free states, where slavery had been outlawed. The number of “slave states” overlapped with the Southern United States. In the South, the economy was still rural and agrarian, depending on labor-intensive crops like cotton and tobacco. Also, politics were dominated by the wealthy owners of large, slave-dependent plantations. As for the North, the economy was city-based, commercial, and industrializing. While slavery was increasingly banned by nations around the Americas, northerners increasingly advocated for outlawing slavery across the United States; not only for moral reasons, but also because slavery was seen as a serious drain on the nation’s economy and a reason why the South was failing to industrialize. Tensions escalated once the United States won the Mexican-American War, annexing territories stretching from Texas to California and raising questions of whether any future states will allow slavery or not. Legislative attempts were made to reach a balance, such as the Missouri Compromise and the Kansas-Nebraska Act. These efforts did not stop violence from breaking out, with enslavers and anti-slavery settlers fighting in Kansas and western Missouri in a series of armed battles and massacres called Bleeding Kansas. This only presaged the Civil War, which broke out with Southern rebels attacking Fort Sumter in South Carolina after the election of the firmly anti-slavery President Lincoln.

Both the political trends leading up to the Civil War and the politics of Reconstruction that followed were heavily influenced by United States’ political parties. Following the collapse of the Whig Party in 1856, the two major parties were the Republicans and Democrats. However, it is important to remember that, while these are technically the same political parties that exist today, they had very different platforms back then. The Democrats identified with farmers, supported the preservation of slavery, and believed states should trump the federal government. The Democrats became the dominant party in the South. Meanwhile, the North belonged to the Republicans. Their platform favored the interests of middle-class business owners and corporations, the free market (which they saw as harmed by slavery), and using the federal government to industrialize the country and achieve westward expansion. After the Civil War and during the Reconstruction era, it was the Democrats who tended to oppose African American civil rights. However, the Republicans were more divided on that issue. One faction of the Republicans, the Liberal Republicans, supported the autonomy of Southern states even at the expense of African American civil rights and safety from racist violence. Another faction, the Radical Republicans, pushed for civil rights for African Americans.

Finally, Grant’s presidency also took place with the backdrop of the Gilded Age. Both Democrats and Republicans agreed in laissez-faire economics, meaning that there should be little government regulation of business and market activities. As a result, the growth of the United States federal government and military with the Civil War and westward expansion also encouraged a boom of corporations that profited from the government’s needs and activities, especially banks, steel manufacturers, and railroad companies. The Gilded Age saw the economy become richer and more complex. However, it also brought with it more instability and more income inequality.