Ulysses S. Grant Frontpage

American President Frontpage

Post-Civil War America was a radically transformed nation. Industrial production had greatly increased during the war. Afterwards, businesses converted their factories for peacetime production. Later, hundreds of thousands of immigrants, many of them from Southern and Eastern Europe, entered the country to become part of the industrial labor force that suffered heavy losses in the Union ranks. The urban political machines of the Democratic Party won over these new arrivals. Even though the Republicans had successfully led the war effort, the expansion of the electorate made the Democratic Party fully competitive in state and congressional elections. The party system was evenly balanced during this period, although Republicans won the White House in every election until 1884.

African American Vote

African Americans, newly enfranchised through the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, became a political force in the North as well as the South. Grant was the first President elected in part by African American voters, and he was the first to recognize them as a significant electoral bloc. Southern states elected blacks to legislatures and to Congress. Southern state governments, ruled by coalitions of blacks and white "carpetbaggers," enacted progressive social and economic policies. Unfortunately, their efforts were limited because of the lack of financial resources. The states first needed to put their money toward rebuilding, since the South had suffered great devastation during the war.

Women's Suffrage Movement

Women were not included in the expanded electorate. Women's groups that had battled for the suffrage were outraged when they were excluded from the constitutional amendments granting suffrage to African American men. The women's movement divided, with one faction arguing that for tactical reasons it was better to support the amendments and another coming out in opposition. The split would not be healed until the twentieth century. In the 1872 election, women's rights pioneer Susan B. Anthony was arrested for attempting to vote. She hoped to appeal her subsequent conviction all the way to the Supreme Court, but authorities dropped the charges, denying her legal redress.

Technological Breakthroughs

Improvements in transportation and communications continued to tie the nation together more closely. Early in the Grant administration, the first transcontinental railroad, built by the Union Pacific and the Central Pacific companies, linked America's two coasts, thanks in large part to Chinese immigrant labor. In the 1870s, the railroads began to use refrigerator cars to bring meat from Chicago to eastern cities and later fruits and vegetables from California. Another great technological breakthrough -- the telephone -- was achieved at about the same time.

With peacetime came further western expansion. Settlers moved into the Great Plains and Rocky Mountain regions after the railroads were built. Many rail workers remained out West, gaining free homesteads from the federal government. Others settled at the junctions of the new railroad lines and created the small cities of the region. The production of grains in the wheat belt vastly expanded due to improvements in agricultural machinery.