KansasFreestater
1st Lieutenant
- Joined
- Mar 14, 2014
Ulysses Grant wrote his first inaugural address entirely on his own. (And you can see his handwritten manuscript here.) Grant was inaugurated on March 4, 1869, winning election after a campaign whose motto was "Let Us Have Peace." The speech is not long, and is well worth reading, but I will give a few excerpts.
First, Grant laid out his concept of how a good executive should govern, the ideal for which he would strive:
On all leading questions agitating the public mind I will always express my views to Congress and urge them according to my judgment, and when I think it advisable will exercise the constitutional privilege of interposing a veto to defeat measures which I oppose; but all laws will be faithfully executed, whether they meet my approval or not.
Although the War of the Rebellion had ended four years earlier, the years under Andrew Johnson had been so rancorous that some parts of the speech sound as if they could have been delivered in 1865; in many ways, the war was still very fresh.
The country having just emerged from a great rebellion, many questions will come before it for settlement in the next four years which preceding Administrations have never had to deal with. In meeting these it is desirable that they should be approached calmly, without prejudice, hate, or sectional pride, remembering that the greatest good to the greatest number is the object to be attained.
Grant devoted the largest part of his speech to the national debt. In his personal life, Grant had a horror of debt, and this attitude he carried to the national level as well. According to his staffer Horace Porter (quoted in William C. Davis's Crucible of Command), after Lee's surrender at Appomattox, Grant made plans to immediately go to Washington to halt the "useless outlay of money" required by his army. Now, as President, retiring the war debt was uppermost in his mind.
A great debt has been contracted in securing to us and our posterity the Union. The payment of this, principal and interest, as well as the return to a specie basis as soon as it can be accomplished without material detriment to the debtor class or to the country at large, must be provided for. To protect the national honor, every dollar of Government indebtedness should be paid in gold, unless otherwise expressly stipulated in the contract. Let it be understood that no repudiator of one farthing of our public debt will be trusted in public place, and it will go far toward strengthening a credit which ought to be the best in the world, and will ultimately enable us to replace the debt with bonds bearing less interest than we now pay. To this should be added a faithful collection of the revenue, a strict accountability to the Treasury for every dollar collected, and the greatest practicable retrenchment in expenditure in every department of Government.
The most notable part of the speech, for me, is near the end, as if saving the best for last: his emphatic endorsement of the Fifteenth Amendment, which would guarantee African-American civil rights. There it is, on the very day he takes office, a clear shot across the bow. And he would be faithful to that commitment: As President Lincoln had worked to get the Thirteenth Amendment passed, President Grant worked very hard to get the Fifteenth Amendment passed. It was ratified in 1870.
As general in command of all the Union armies, Grant had overseen horrific losses of life and treasure. Was it worth it? Only if the victories the war had secured were protected and preserved. Sadly, before Grant's second term ended, his fellow citizens -- and even many of his fellow party members -- would tire of the work of Reconstruction. But on that March day in 1869, when Grant took the oath of office, he was resolved to do his utter best to carry forth the legacy of his beloved leader, Abraham Lincoln, whom Grant described as "incontestably the greatest man I ever knew."
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