what happens in 72 is quite literally a fight between charles sumner and grant. charles sumner wants control of the republican party and he thinks he should, he is educated and all of those things. he thinks grant is a backwards bumpkin and read thinks he is, i don't know, elected. [laughter] dr. cox-richardson: and he cuts sumner out of a lot of things. when he does that sumner declares war on him. you have to integrate the south back into the union and they have admitted most if not all of these states and the omnibus bill to prove that the republicans are not trying to control everything forever. one of these states in terrible trouble in 1870 is missouri because missouri is a union state but it is decimated by the war, a guerrilla war there. missouri is under the drake constitution which permits no civic identity for anyone who has ever sympathized with the confederacy which means anyone who is democrats cannot be a lawyer, teacher, minister. once all of the southern states are back in the union, the people in missouri, the democrats who cannot vote, are piss

even a champion of african-american rights, charles sumner exhibited a kind of racism in his opposition sumner said the tropics were ideally suited for blacks. the united states ought not to interfere. let them run their own affairs in their own natural habitat. really quite a racist argument to make. not in the sense of overt racism that he hated blacks, but the , perception of the differences in the races. it was defeated in the senate. grant eventually stopped pushing annexation, but he never gave up the idea. he never admitted it was the wrong thing. even in his memoirs where he talked almost exclusively about his military career, he did say, one of the few things he mentioned about his presidency was the project presented domingo and he thought it was the right thing to do. again, this question of helping southern blacks by acquiring santo domingo. there were achievements in other areas. in the economy, taxation. tariff taxes were lower. the income tax was abolished. the national debt was lowered by 17%. the resumption act was passed, which scheduled a date by which the united stat

when charles sumner's most ardent supporters was a commissioner. they did the kind of thorough examination revealed -- orville babcock did not on his first trip. what you had between babcock's trip and the commissions report was all of this political brouhaha over scented amigo for some of the reasons -- santo domingo for some of the reasons i was talking about. i think grant realized it would not go through. as i was indicating, he thought the united states had made a big mistake. he had done everything he could. what he did in may of 1871 when he sent the commission report to congress, he said, here it is. it is up to you if you want to do something about it. it is up to the american people if they want this. i have done everything i can on behalf of a project i think is good for the country. but circumstances he did not have to name names at that point, circumstances have decided otherwise. as i said, he gave up on pushing it after that. although in his last annual message to congress in december of 1876, he brought it up one more time saying we

one is charles sumner who was very disappointed he was not appointed secretary of state. he became a very severe critic of grant until he died in 1874. he was always criticizing grants for things that he thought were not being handled properly. another critic was henry adams. he was turned off by the johnson administration and even before grants became president -- he was ready for bear even before ulysses s. grant put his hand on the bible to become president. throughout his term, henry adams wrote quite critical articles about him. if you know about henry adams, grant comes off badly there as well. these men thought that he was a liar, a rogue, he was stupid, he was conniving. very nasty portrait of grant in the website -- in the past. some newspapers, particularly democratic newspapers, gave him a very hard time. once democrats got control of the house of representatives they severely criticized grant's performance. but these critics' coments and notions -- comments and notions about grant became embedded in the literature about it. when historians look back, they tend

charles sumner, who was flogged the abolitionist who was flogged on the house of the senate was also a big anti-monopoly organizer. so we've sort of forgotten this incredible part of our history that's, i think powerful because it connects this economic power and political power in a serious way. but we've forgotten it on purpose. we've forgottennen it because chicago school has been so well funded to tell us we can think of each of these things separately. >> i got to tell a margaret thatcher joke at the london school, and it was highly inappropriate. i think that problem is largely solved by the internet though. i think when we got together in our own separate communities, we have people talking about gender issues, we have people talking about class, and we have people talking about race. and what you find is as those conversations start to overlap where we see each other -- i'm a class activist, okay great -- i see folks working on, a friend of mine, dante, runs million hoodies which was an organization set up after trayvon. we say the same things on twitter and don't even realiz