ulysses s. grant

#18 FACTS:

--Enormously popular in the North after the Union's victory, Grant was elected to the presidency in 1868. Reelected in 1872, he became the first president to serve two full terms since Andrew Jackson. As President, he led Reconstruction by signing and enforcing civil rights laws and fighting Ku Klux Klan violence. He helped rebuild the Republican Party in the South, an effort that resulted in the election of African Americans to Congress and state governments for the first time.

--However, his administration was probably the most corrupt in U.S. history, and his image was tarnished by corruption scandals. By most accounts Grant himself was innocent of such things, but he chose very poorly in picking his Cabinet and federal appointments, and fostered a climate of unaccountability.

--Grant and his wife, Julia, were supposed to attend Ford theater with Lincoln on the night of his assassination, but declined since there had been a previous quarrel between Grant's wife and
Mrs. Lincoln.

There is evidence to suggest that Grant, himself, was a target in the Lincoln assassination plot by Booth. Before Lincoln was mortally wounded that night, Grant and his wife, while riding in a carriage late in the afternoon to the Union Station, were chased and stared down by a fierce looking man riding a horse, possibly Booth conspirator Michael O'Laughlen. That evening there was an alleged attempt to kill Grant by an unknown assailant, again possibly O'Laughlen, while on a train bound for Philadelphia. However, the railroad car that the Grants were in was locked and kept the intruder out.

--Ulysses Grant was the first president to have both his parents still living as he entered office.

--Grant's tomb is the largest mausoleum in North America. However, Grant is not buried there--instead, the contents of Grant's tomb are: an ancient clockwork device of unknown origin, the mummified remains of Sahure, the 2nd king of Egypt's 5th Dynasty, and a copy of Time magazine dated June 2003. How these items came to be interred within, and the whereabouts of Grant's remains, is an adventurous tale for another time...