U.S. Grant & the Whiskey Ring

Justin Wingerter

HIST 444 Paper #2

4/6/2010

“I always knew when I was in trouble that Grant was thinking about me and would get me out. And he did,” General William Tecumseh Sherman proudly boasted. General Greenville Dodge meanwhile once described Ulysses S. Grant’s devotion and loyalty to the United States as being bound by “hooks of steel.”[1] It was that loyalty and sense of devotion that pulled Grant, much like Washington before him, reluctantly into war and finally, into the Oval Office. “I have been forced into it in spite of myself,” he bemoaned to Sherman, and yet his immortal position as Savior pushed him onward in hopes of defeating the “mere trading politicians” that threatened to lose the peace.[2] Unfortunately, the undying loyalty that led Grant into joining the Union Army in 1861, preserving the union, and meanwhile earning the praise of his fellow generals ultimately tainted his presidency with numerous scandals.

On the morning of Saturday, February 12, 1876 President Grant found himself in a most precarious position: standing in the Executive Mansion with a hand on the Bible, promising to tell the truth to Chief Justice Morrison R. Waite.[3] On that day the President became the only sitting commander-in-chief to voluntarily testify for the defense in a criminal trial as he authored and signed a disposition in defense of his private secretary and fellow commander at Vicksburg and Appomattox, Orville E. Babcock.[4] Charged with “conspiracy to defraud the Treasury of the United States,” the story of Babcock’s compliance in the Whiskey Ring and Grant’s ignorance of it continue to plague the legacy of the Hero of Appomattox.[5]

In the decade following the end of the Civil War, federal excise taxes on liquor were increased dramatically in an attempt to pay off the debt garnered during the war.[6] In an attempt to avoid these new expenses, many of the nation’s whiskey distillers bribed agents at the Treasury Department and received tax...