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invasion during the Revolutionary War); and at all costs he didn’t want to provoke a war with Britain, then the world’s dominant superpower. In the end, by artful diplomacy, by calming down the rhetoric over Canada, and by the then-revolutionary innovation of submitting America’s claims to international arbitration in Geneva, Grant managed to achieve a settlement with the United Kingdom that left both countries more or less satisfied and would serve as a model for resolving future international disputes. As a result of this Grant developed a reputation in Europe and the rest of the world rather resembling that of Woodrow Wilson in 1918, as a great statesman who could rise above mere national political concerns—very gratifying, no doubt, but not the best way of winning elections in the United States.

What did Grant’s reputation as a president in, however (and continues to do so today whenever journalists and historians are drawing up lists of the best presidents vs. the worst ones), was the depression of 1873, which ushered in a long period of unemployment and distress, made politically more damaging by accusations that the president’s wealthy friends were making money out of it (comparisons to the economy in 2003, as this book was being written, will come naturally to mind). Even in his first term there were signs that the American economy was faltering, and it cannot be said that Grant ignored the issue, innocent as he may have been of what is now called “economics.” His chief concern was with the question of whether paper dollars (which came to be called “greenbacks” during the Civil War) should be redeemable in specie—that is, gold—partially in specie, or not in specie at all. Since this question was still perplexing Winston Churchill as chancellor of the Exchequer in Great Britain in the 1920s, and Franklin D. Roosevelt in the 1930s, it is hardly surprising that Grant was stumped by it and changed his mind frequently. Since the war had been fought, as all wars are, by printing large amounts of paper money in the expectation that victory would enable whoever was in charge of things at some later date (hopefully somebody else) to sort matters out, the aftermath, apart from a huge national debt, was an awful lot of doubtful paper money floating about, and not enough gold. Of course things were simpler, as they always are, on the losing side—Confederate paper money became worthless long before Appomattox—but in the United States it was obviously vital to peg the dollar to some acceptable value, gold being the traditional one.

It was Grant’s bad luck, given his ignorance of economics, to have to listen to both sides of a monetary discussion that doubtless bored and confused him (Churchill and Roosevelt would be just as bored and confused when their time came), and his tragedy that he was beginning to see himself as one of the “haves” rather than as one of the “have-nots.” He had already been bitten by the gold bug before, when, under the false impression that he understood fiscal policy, he fell under the sway of Jay Gould and James Fisk, Jr., two sleazy financial speculators who would have been right at home on Wall Street in the 1990s. Gould and Fisk wanted to “corner” the market in gold and tried over many dinners and in many private dining cars to persuade the president of the importance of the government’s buying gold rather than selling it. In the end, however, during the autumn of 1869, Grant changed his mind just when they thought they had him securely on the hook, setting off a gold panic that ruined many people in the financial world and causing what we would now call a “minirecession,” in addition to costing him one member of his cabinet and exposing to the world the possibility that Julia Grant herself and some of her relatives may have been involved in, and profited from, the attempts to manipulate the price of gold.

In 1873 the failure of Jay Cooke & Co., a prominent banking firm, precipitated a crash, followed by a protracted, full-blown depression, leaving the country in a mess from which Grant was unable