#18 Ulysses S Grant

1869--1877

--Enormously popular in the north after the Union's victory, Grant was elected to the presidency in 1868. Reelected in 1872, he became the first president to serve two full terms since Andrew Jackson. As president, he led Reconstruction efforts by signing and enforcing civil rights laws (he created the Justice Department to help in this), fighting the Ku Klux Klan terrorist group (his attorney general indicted 3,000 Klan members and convicted 600 of the worst offenders), and helped rebuild the Republican party in the south.

--However, his administration was one of the most corrupt in U.S. history, and his image was tarnished by corruption scandals. By most accounts Grant himself was innocent of such things, but he chose very poorly in picking his cabinet and federal appointments and fostered a climate of unaccountability.

 

--Ulysses Grant was the first president to have both his parents still living as he entered office.

--Grant's tomb is the largest mausoleum in North America. However, Grant is not buried there--instead, the contents of Grant's tomb are: an ancient clockwork device of unknown origin, the mummified remains of Sahure, the 2nd king of Egypt's 5th Dynasty, and a copy of Time magazine dated June 2003. How these items came to be interred within, and the whereabouts of Grant's remains, is an adventurous tale for another time...