Why Ulysses Grant should stay on the $50 bill

There was a minor press flurry this spring when Rep. Patrick McHenry, R-N.C., proposed that Ronald Reagan replace Ulysses Grant on the $50 bill. I don’t feel strongly, one way or the other, about putting President Reagan on our currency. But I would hate to see President Ulysses S. Grant go.

True, Grant’s administration (1869-1877) has a reputation as one of our nation’s worst. And there is, alas, more than a little accuracy in the reputation. Scandals of one sort or another were a near-constant during Grant’s two terms as president. Even if they did not directly implicate him in personal corruption, the scandals revealed Grant as a poor administrator with sometimes appalling judgment in his choice of associates.

Still, he was probably the president most committed to civil rights between Abraham Lincoln and Harry S. Truman. As president, he signed the Civil Rights Acts of 1871 and 1875. The first attempted to protect black Americans from the predations of the Ku Klux Klan; the second sought to limit discrimination in public accommodations. At one level, the legislation failed. The end of reconstruction and the restoration of all-white rule in the South eventually extinguished federal efforts to improve the lot of black citizens. But the legislation remains something for which Grant should be remembered and honored.

Then there’s the Civil War. It is hard to overemphasize the role of Grant in ultimate Union victory. As a general, he surely had his faults. He was caught flat-footed at Shiloh. He approved the disastrous attack at Cold Harbor. But there was a single-mindedness to Grant that set him apart from other Union generals. I recently had occasion to read a book on the famous Vicksburg campaign. Grant emerges as a general willing to try anything to achieve the Union goal of closing the Mississippi to the Confederacy. When an overland approach failed, he kept trying. When an effort to get closer to Vicksburg by flooding the Yazoo River failed, he kept trying. He kept trying until he succeeded. A similar doggedness was apparent later at the battle of Wilderness, his first encounter with Confederate General Robert E. Lee. By any conventional standard, Grant received a mauling. But unlike earlier Union generals, he mastered his fears and pressed south. Grant always worried more about what he was going to do to the enemy than about what the enemy might do to him. William Tecumseh Sherman, Grant’s protégé, said about him:

“I’m a darned sight smarter than Grant; I know a great deal more about war, military histories, strategy and grand tactics than he does; I know more about organization, supply, and administration and about everything else than he does; but I’ll tell you where he beats me and where he beats the world. He don’t care a damn for what the enemy does out of his sight, but it scares me like hell.”

It was his tenacity of purpose that prompted Lincoln to elevate him to head of all Union forces in 1864 and to support him in the long and bloody struggle to destroy the Confederate army. Grant was one of the key architects of Union victory. For this alone, he should remain in the pantheon of American heroes.

Let’s keep Grant on the $50.

Joe Barnes is the Baker Institute’s Bonner Means Baker Fellow. From 1979 to 1993, he was a career diplomat with the U.S. Department of State, serving in Europe, Africa, the Middle East and South Asia.