With support from the University of Richmond

History News Network puts current events into historical perspective. Subscribe to our newsletter for new perspectives on the ways history continues to resonate in the present. Explore our archive of thousands of original op-eds and curated stories from around the web. Join us to learn more about the past, now.

Papers of U.S. Grant Reveal a President Who Dabbled in Real Estate

Virginia Extra, in the Wash Post (March 11, 2004):

Ulysses S. Grant, the general, is usually recalled as a tough, driven man who saved the Union on the battlefield. Grant, the president, is often remembered as an inept, disengaged and possibly corrupt politician.

The most recent seven of the 26 volumes of "The Papers of Ulysses S. Grant" may not redeem his presidential reputation, but they do show the human side of Grant as reflected in his official and personal correspondence during the White House years.

The editor of the papers, Professor John Y. Simon of Southern Illinois University at Carbondale , began assembling Grant's papers in 1962 and published the first volume in 1967. Volumes 19 through 26 cover most of the presidential years. At 70, Simon said he has the material and the energy to finish the project, with about six volumes remaining.

For his life's work in Civil War scholarship, Simon will receive a $20,000 special Lincoln Award from Gettysburg College . In the competition's 14 years, he is the first to win a Lincoln Prize for work in progress.

A first-place award of $30,000 will go to British historian Richard J. Carwardine, author of " Lincoln ," an analytical biography.

The awards are endowed by philanthropists Richard Gilder and Lewis Lehrman. Both winners are to be honored April 14 at a banquet in New York .

Among Grant's official statements to Congress, proclamations on the rights of newly freed slaves and treaties with American Indians are scattered a handful of documents regarding real estate in Washington .

He unabashedly backed out of a contract to sell his house to a District official to benefit a close war associate, Gen. William T. Sherman, instead. In the case of a house belonging to a friend who had died, Grant became personally involved in managing the property, worrying about collecting the rent and making repairs.

The Grants lived in an enormous brick house near Second and I streets NW from 1865 until they moved to the White House in early 1869 after his election as president in 1868. At that point, the house, a gift from admirers, went on the market, and District Mayor Sayles J. Bowen thought he had purchased it. His price is unknown.

However, before the settlement could take place, friends of Sherman contacted Grant, saying they would buy it for $65,000 and give it as a gift to Sherman .

At the time, Grant protested that the amount was far in excess of the house's value, but he accepted the deal, saying he would throw in the furnishings. Bowen was outraged, but power politics prevailed and the mayor lost out. Sherman, whom Grant had named commander of the Army, accepted the furnished house, commenting to a friend that the place was "splendid" and came with water, gas and stables.

In 1870, Sherman would decide that he could not afford to maintain the house and tried to unload it for $50,000. There were no takers, and he stayed.

The facts that Grant benefited from the sale of a house that had cost him nothing, and that he may have received much more than it was worth, would create enormous political problems for a sitting president today, Simon said, but at the time, that was just the way things were done.
...