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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;ewomack, post: 4532158, member: 15588&quot;]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.</p><p><br /></p><p>Also, the final financial disaster mentioned above also involved Grant&#039;s own son. His son didn&#039;t make the bad trades, but he was involved in the firm that eventually crashed and ruined Grant.</p><p><br /></p><p>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&#039;s drunkedness stated that he subsumed his self to his mission. He didn&#039;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.</p><p><br /></p><p>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 &quot;deal&quot; 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.</p><p><br /></p><p>After reading that book, I was impressed. He seems like a decent guy in the end, not the &quot;butchering scandalmonger&quot; I so often heard about in the past.[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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