communicated to Congress
the adoption of the Fifteenth Amendment, he urged in wise and forcible
language that the new electorate could only be qualified through
education, and that to provide such education was a pressing duty of
Congress so far as its power extended, and of the people through all the
agencies it could command. But having once said this, he let the subject
drop. National education for the freedmen was left unnoticed, save by an
occasional lonely advocate like Sumner. Nor did President Grant take any
personal and positive measures to win and hold the old South to the new
order; he failed to invite and consult its representative men, he made
no journeys among the people.

In most matters of public policy, save in emergencies, Grant let matters
be shaped by the men whom he had taken into his counsel--in his official
Cabinet or the "kitchen cabinet"--and by the Republican leaders in
Congress, of whom the controlling group, especially in the Senate, were
in close touch with the White House. His affiliations were with men of
material power, men who had strongly administered civil or military
affairs, stout partisans, faithful friends and vigorous haters. His
tastes did not draw him to the idealists, the scholars, the reformers.
He was accessible to good fellowship, he was easily imposed on by men
who were seeking their own ends, and he was very slow to abandon any one
whom he had once trusted. Absolutely honest, the thieves stole all round
him. Magnanimous at heart, the bitter partisans often made him their
tool. Of the great questions of the time, the English quarrel was
brought to an admirable healing, under the management of the Secretary
of State, Hamilton Fish, in 1871, by the joint high commission, the
treaty of Washington, and the Geneva award. In the long contest for a
sound currency, the inflation policy received its death-blow by the
President's veto in 1874, and resumption was undertaken when Sherman
carried his bill through Congress in 1875. As to honesty of
administration, the president's good intentions were constantly baffled
through his misplaced and tenacious confidences. The vast expenditures
of the war, the cheating incident to its great contracts, the
speculation favored by a fluctuating currency, the huge enterprises
invited by the return of peace,--had infected private and public life
with a kind of fever; the treasury was an easy mark; and while the
people held to Grant for his persona