Volume 20 is the first in this acclaimed series to cover the months when Ulysses S. Grant held no military commission. As president, however, Grant's significance grew rather than diminished. His leadership and decisions touched directly or indirectly most people in the United States and many more around the globe. Grant spoke sincerely when he said that "I have done all I could to advance the best interests of the citizens of our country, without regard to color, and I shall endeavor to do in the future what I have done in the past." He urged adoption of the Fifteenth Amendment and rejoiced in its ratification, expressing his belief that it was "the realization of the Declaration of Independence." Grant acknowledged that government had treated Indians badly in the past. In the short run, he recommitted his administration to the experiment of employing Quakers and humanitarians as Indian advisers and agents, trusting in eventual "great success." In the long run, however, Grant thought placing Indians on large reservations and encouraging them "to take their lands in severalty" and "to set up territorial governments for their own protection" the best course. In foreign affairs, Grant became fixed on the annexation of Santo Domingo, gave this issue an inordinate degree of attention, and squandered political capital in confrontations with Congress. Senate foreign affairs committee chairman Charles Sumner emerged as the villain preventing Grant from achieving his desire, and Grant displayed his animosity toward the Massachusetts senator in private as well as in the very public removal of Sumner's friend John L. Motley as minister to England. Developments such as growing tensions among European powers, Spanish-Cuban relations, and the Alabama Claims negotiations received relatively little attention. Grant, in fact, admitted shortly after the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War, "I had no idea that such an event was even threatening."

This looks at events of 1876 - a trying year for the White House. The Seventh Cavalry was wiped out by the Sioux, and Ulysees Grant's peace process lay in tatters as a result. Scandals diverted Grant's attention from larger policy questions. A series ofprosecutions culminated in the February trial of Orville Babcock, Grant's private secretary.

From 1869 to 1877, the United States found itself deeply involved in the Caribbean as Washington sought to replace European influence and colonialism with an informal American empire. The Ulysses S. Grant administration primarily dealt with an uprising in Spanish Cuba known as the Ten Years’ War that threatened to draw in the United States. The Cuban rebels used the United States as a base of support, causing conflict between Washington and Madrid. Many Americans, including Grant, wanted to replace Spanish rule in Cuba with a U.S. protectorate, but Secretary of State Hamilton Fish opposed American colonial entanglements. President Grant looked to expand U.S. interests in the Caribbean. He looked to acquire colonies to provide naval bases to protect the trade routes to a potential American built and controlled canal in Central America. Fish preferred to expand U.S. commercial interests in the region rather than acquiring colonies. At no time was he prepared to obligate the United States to any long-term commitments. He wanted to end the war in Cuba because it hurt U.S. economic interests. He had no desire to acquire territory, but expected the Caribbean to fall into the U.S. economic sphere. Despite his personal opposition to territorial acquisition in Fish went along with Grant’s Dominican annexation project because he foresaw it as a chance to end European imperialism and to gain the president’s confidence. The Senate’s failure to approve the Dominican annexation only hardened his opposition to the creation of an American empire. He rejected Haitian offers of a naval base within that country, and he continually sought an end to the Cuban rebellion, lest it drag in the United States. Though the administration’s many peace initiatives failed, it forestalled Congressional intervention and kept the United States neutral in the conflict.

In the spring of 1871, Ulysses S. Grant wrote to an old friend that as president he was "the most persecuted individual on the Western Continent." Grant had not sought the office, and halfway through his first term he chafed under its many burdens. Grant's cherished project to annex Santo Domingo, begun early in his administration, entered a crucial period. Grant agreed to a tactical compromise: Rather than vote the controversial treaty down, Congress sent a commission to investigate the island. Grant's message submitting the report, hammered out over labored drafts, bore a defensive tone and asked Congress to postpone any decision. Closer to home, Grant sought legislation to facilitate federal intervention in the persecution of blacks by white extremists across the South. After much acrimony and stinging accusations of executive tyranny, Congress passed an Enforcement Act, hailed by Grant as "a law of extraordinary public importance." The greatest accomplishment of Grant's first term came in foreign relations. After secret negotiations, the United States and Great Britain met in a Joint High Commission to settle long-standing grievances, from boundary and fishing questions to British complicity in the depredations of the Alabama and other Confederate raiders. The resulting Treaty of Washington established an international tribunal in Geneva, Switzerland. At home, economic prosperity and consequent debt reduction meant that Grant could see "no reason why in a few short years the national taxgatherer may not disappear from the door of the citizen almost entirely." His Indian policy, influenced by Eastern Quakers and often ridiculed for its benevolence, augured well. Despite continued clashes between Indians and settlers, Grant maintained that compassion rather than force would answer the Indian problem.

This volume examines the historical connections between the United States’ Reconstruction and the country’s emergence as a geopolitical power a few decades later. It shows how the processes at work during the postbellum decade variously foreshadowed, inhibited, and conditioned the development of the United States as an overseas empire and regional hegemon. In doing so, it links the diverse topics of abolition, diplomacy, Jim Crow, humanitarianism, and imperialism. In 1935, the great African American intellectual W. E. B. Du Bois argued in his Black Reconstruction in America that these two historical moments were intimately related. In particular, Du Bois averred that the nation’s betrayal of the South’s fledgling interracial democracy in the 1870s put reactionaries in charge of a country on the verge of global power, with world-historical implications. Working with the same chronological and geographical parameters, the contributors here take up targeted case studies, tracing the biographical, ideological, and thematic linkages that stretch across the postbellum and imperial moments. With an Introduction, eleven chapters, and an Afterword, this volume offers multiple perspectives based on original primary source research. The resulting composite picture points to a host of countervailing continuities and changes. The contributors examine topics as diverse as diplomatic relations with Spain, the changing views of radical abolitionists, African American missionaries in the Caribbean, and the ambiguities of turn-of-the century political cartoons. Collectively, the volume unsettles familiar assumptions about how we should understand the late nineteenth-century United States, conventionally framed as the Gilded Age and Progressive Era. It also advances transnational approaches to understanding America’s Reconstruction and the search for the ideological currents shaping American power abroad.