US Grant

Discussion in 'Coin Chat' started by Randy Abercrombie, May 26, 2020.

  1. LA_Geezer

    LA_Geezer Well-Known Member

    I watched a Grant episode last night then promptly fell asleep.
     
  2. Avatar

    Guest User Guest



    to hide this ad.
  3. LA_Geezer

    LA_Geezer Well-Known Member

    My wife's great grandfather is Gen. Sheridan.
     
  4. Chiefbullsit

    Chiefbullsit CRAZY HORSE

  5. cpm9ball

    cpm9ball CANNOT RE-MEMBER

    THUMBS UP!.png
     
  6. GoldFinger1969

    GoldFinger1969 Well-Known Member

    It repeats again tonight and is on On-Demand another night or so.
     
  7. johnmilton

    johnmilton Well-Known Member

    The Philadelphia Mint issued this small medal (31 mm) during the Civil War to celebrate the fact that the mint personnel had taken an oath of allegiance to the Union. The main motivation for issuing this piece was that any token or medal with Washington on it was a hot collectable at the time. The allegiance commemoration gave the mint an excuse to issue this piece, which sold fairly well, given at mintage of 808 pieces. The dies were made by Anthony Paquet.

    Oath of Alegiance.jpg
     
  8. Randy Abercrombie

    Randy Abercrombie Supporter! Supporter

    You made it longer than I did.
     
  9. LakeEffect

    LakeEffect Average Circulated Supporter

    I disagree. The cigars are long gone and the money spent on them long forgotten but you're still showing and talking about the coin :happy:
     
    Randy Abercrombie likes this.
  10. ewomack

    ewomack 魚の下着

    Whoa! She can really pull rank, then! :eek:
     
    Randy Abercrombie likes this.
  11. LA_Geezer

    LA_Geezer Well-Known Member

    Let me tell you, she does. ;)
     
  12. cpm9ball

    cpm9ball CANNOT RE-MEMBER

    THUMBS UP!.png
     
  13. GoldFinger1969

    GoldFinger1969 Well-Known Member

    Same thing happened to me, but I was watching HARLEY QUINN. :D
     
    Randy Abercrombie likes this.
  14. willieboyd2

    willieboyd2 First Class Poster

    Ulysses S. Grant and $50 slugs

    Here is a numismatic tidbit which did not make it into the series:

    From The Personal Memoirs of Ulysses S. Grant published by Mark Twain in 1885:

    Oregon, 1852:

    Before the advent of the American, the medium of exchange between the Indian and the white man was pelts. Afterward it was silver coin.

    If an Indian received in the sale of a horse a fifty dollar gold piece, not an infrequent occurrence, the first thing he did was to exchange it for American half dollars. These he could count.

    He would then commence his purchases, paying for each article separately, as he got it. He would not trust any one to add up the bill and pay it all at once.

    At that day fifty dollar gold pieces, not the issue of the government, were common on the Pacific coast. They were called slugs.

    :)
     
    Randy Abercrombie likes this.
  15. johnmilton

    johnmilton Well-Known Member

    This is one of two U.S. Grant tokens that were known to have been issued during the Civil War. Although Grant is known to history as the premier Union Civil War general, he did not enjoy that reputation for much of the war.

    Prior to the war, he had been drummed out of the service for excessive drinking and had failed in all of the civilian jobs he had tried. Despite successes at Forts Donelson and Henry, at a time when the war was going badly for the North, the leadership in the Union Army gave him little credit.

    Grant finally made headlines when he took the Confederate stronghold at Vicksburg, Mississippi at about the same time as the Union won the Battle of Gettysburg. It was during that period that die sinker, William Key, from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania issued this piece in 1863. It was re-issued in 1868 when Grant ran for president.

    Grant Vick.jpg

    In 1864 some Republicans were looking to replace Abraham Lincoln as the party’s presidential nominee. Some people floated Grant’s name and even went so far to have this campaign piece made. Grant made it plain that he would not be a candidate in 1864. He made that plain to Lincoln, and once “Honest Abe” was assured that Grant would not be a political rival, he appointed him to be the Lieutenant General of the Union Army.

    Grant 1864.jpg
     
    Randy Abercrombie and LakeEffect like this.
  16. Randy Abercrombie

    Randy Abercrombie Supporter! Supporter

    I had known that Grant struggled with failure as a young man. I can much relate to that. I think that is why I had always had a keen interest in him.
     
  17. Publius2

    Publius2 Well-Known Member

    The History Channel program on Grant is pretty well done IMHO. As a side note, my father's grandmother was a little girl of about 7 when Sherman's outriders came to their farm about 20 miles outside Raleigh, NC. According to what the old woman told my father when he was a little boy (about 1927), the outriders pushed the kitchen table under the trapdoor in the ceiling, went into the attic and stole all their food that had been put up for the winter, leaving them to starve.

    BTW, my father's people were not slaveholders.
     
  18. johnmilton

    johnmilton Well-Known Member

    He failed after he left the presidency too. He got involved in a Wall Street investment firm with a “Bernie Madoff” type character who ripped off Grant and all of his clients. Grant was left broke. It was about that time that he discovered he had throat cancer from smoking all of those cigars for so many years.

    Mark Twain made arrangements to sell his memoirs. During the last months of his life, Grant struggled to write them. He finished a week or so before he died. The book realized a $50,000 profit to his family, and he left them financially secure.

    Grant always seemed to be a spectacular success, during the Civil War or with his book, or a spectacular failure. He could never seem to be “happily mediocre.”
     
  19. ewomack

    ewomack 魚の下着

    A book that I recently read on Grant said that, before the Civil War, he even sold wood on the streets of St. Louis to support his family.

    Also, the final financial disaster mentioned above also involved Grant's own son. His son didn't make the bad trades, but he was involved in the firm that eventually crashed and ruined Grant.

    Many claimed that he typically put completing a mission ahead of any personal advantage that he might derive from it. An envoy Lincoln sent to investigate reports of Grant's drunkedness stated that he subsumed his self to his mission. He didn't look at how he would personally profit from a decision, he just focused on the best way to accomplish the task at hand. We could definitely use more leaders like that.

    It seems like his presidency has undergone a recent re-evaluation. Not too long ago it was considered one of the worst in US history due to its many highly publicized scandals. Now historians look at his relatively humane attitude, at least for the time, towards Native Americans (he thought they should become farmers, where some thought they should be exterminated) and he remained committed to the rights of freed blacks under Reconstruction after the Civil War. The "deal" that Hayes struck to become president in 1876 undid some of that, but Grant remained steadfast while in office. He sent troops to protect the rights of black voters in the south more than once.

    After reading that book, I was impressed. He seems like a decent guy in the end, not the "butchering scandalmonger" I so often heard about in the past.
     
  20. johnmilton

    johnmilton Well-Known Member

    Rating presidents has become political. Historians now give Grant high marks because he broke the KKK in the South. But then you ask, "What about the scandals?" The modern liberal historians answer the crooked people in the Grant adminstration are unimportant. Wrong!

    I would not say that he was a total failure, like James Buchanan, but he was below average or very low average at best, given the pluses and minuses. The trouble was, he was not a good judge of character in those he trusted. During the war, the officers who reported to him were all for the cause. They were not about to do crooked stuff. After the war was another story.

    You must remeber that the first presidential rating polls were done by Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. who was a Democrat. Schlesinger had an appointed position in the Kennedy administration. Therefore it's not surprising that his poll would rate Harding and Grant, who were Republicans, as the worst and Pierce and Buchanan, who were Democrats and really bad presidents, as "below average."
     
    Last edited: May 27, 2020
  21. Collecting Nut

    Collecting Nut Borderline Hoarder

    Uncle Grant! But only on my mothers side. Not a coin but it is Civil War. 2 bills all from the same sheet. Same serial number but different blocks. The bottom bill is an error as one number is missing from the serial number. Also the Treasurer's signature on the top bill goes onto the bottom bill. This was normal for his signature but it's also neat. IMG_2890.JPG
     
    Randy Abercrombie likes this.
Draft saved Draft deleted

Share This Page