Ulysses S. Grant: The Curse of Loyal Friends

Ulysses S. Grant left the White House without a fortune, never took a bribe, and never sold an office, yet his administration produced more documented corruption than any presidency of the nineteenth century.

This episode of Disturbing History continues our series on the dark history of presidential politics by walking straight into the Gilded Age and the Whiskey Ring, the federal liquor-tax fraud that siphoned millions of dollars out of the United States Treasury while a depression squeezed ordinary Americans, and traces how the trail of stolen tax money ran all the way to the desk of Grant's private secretary, General Orville Babcock, in the office adjoining the president's own.

We open with the central question that runs through every scandal here. What happens when the honest man in the room is the reason the corruption survives? Drawing on sixteen years of law enforcement experience, your host lays out the pattern that connects Grant to crooked bosses and clean ones alike, the boss who stakes his spotless reputation on a guilty subordinate and makes that subordinate untouchable. Grant kept score on loyalty the way other men kept score on money, a habit forged during his years of failure before the Civil War, his binge drinking and resignation from the Army, the Hardscrabble farm, the firewood sold on St. Louis street corners, and the clerk's job in his brother's Galena leather store.

Once a man was inside the wall of Grant's trust, almost nothing could throw him out, and the con men of the era learned to exploit that vulnerability like published exploit code.The episode follows that pattern through the Black Friday gold panic of September eighteen sixty-nine, where Jay Gould and Jim Fisk attempted to corner the New York gold market by buying access to Grant through his own brother-in-law Abel Corbin, and the scheme collapsed only when Grant ordered the Treasury to sell.

From there we cover Credit Mobilier, the transcontinental railroad construction-company fraud that dragged Vice President Schuyler Colfax, future president James Garfield, and roughly two dozen members of Congress into the mud, the falling-out among thieves that exposed it, and the censure of Oakes Ames that closed the books while the rest of Washington walked. We set the political stage of the Panic of eighteen seventy-three, the spoils system, and the Salary Grab before turning to the main event.

The Whiskey Ring itself gets the full treatment. We explain the seventy-cents-a-gallon liquor tax, the economics of crooked whiskey, and how supervisor John McDonald built a parallel tax system across St. Louis, Milwaukee, Chicago, Cincinnati, and Peoria, with gaugers and storekeepers and collectors all lying in the same direction, campaign money flowing into Grant's eighteen seventy-two reelection effort, and cipher telegram warnings arriving from Washington signed with the alias Sylph. We follow Treasury Secretary Benjamin Bristow and his solicitor Bluford Wilson as they ran a covert investigation against their own department, counting grain in and barrels out at the railyards to build a shadow ledger, and we cover the May tenth, eighteen seventy-five raids, the two hundred thirty indictments, and the hundred and ten convictions.

Then we watch Grant's response to the indictment of Babcock, the order banning plea deals, the firing of special prosecutor John Henderson, and the sworn deposition the sitting president gave in defense of his private secretary, the only time in American history a president has been deposed as a witness in a criminal prosecution.The back half surveys the rest of the wreckage. The Belknap affair, where Secretary of War William Belknap raced to resign ninety minutes ahead of his unanimous impeachment over the Fort Sill post-tradership kickbacks, with George Custer's complaints riding off toward the Little Bighorn under Grant's anger.

The Interior Department under Columbus Delano, the Navy Department under George Robeson, Attorney General George Williams and the carriage, the New York Custom House and Roscoe Conkling, and the battalion of Grant relatives on the federal payroll. We close with Grant's final message to Congress and its famous line about errors of judgment rather than intent, the Grant and Ward Ponzi collapse that left the general with eighty dollars in his pocket, and the dying race to finish his Personal Memoirs that restored Julia to comfort and secured his place in American letters.

We also give Reconstruction its due, the Klan prosecutions and the Fifteenth Amendment, because the man who sent his deposition to defend Babcock and the man who sent the cavalry after the Klan were operating on the same code all the way down.

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Disturbing History is a dark history podcast exploring unsolved mysteries, secret societies, historical conspiracies, lost civilizations, and the shadowy stories buried beneath the surface of the past.

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