As had George Washington eighty years before, Robert E. Lee had been saddened by the illiteracy and intellectual poverty he found among the young soldiers under his command. Beginning in the fall of 1865, when he became president of Washington College in Lexington, Virginia, he could attempt to address that shortcoming. In the process, the general dramatically expanded the school's classical curriculum to include emphases on the sciences, commerce, and agriculture. In that way, the students would be provided with the skills to forge a New South. He also inculcated the ideals of duty and honor that had governed his own life.

Lee's greatest postwar legacy, however, was toward national reconciliation. Although he had ostensibly retired from the national spotlight, Lee became a voice of moderation and patient compliance. In his letters, a number of which were reprinted in newspapers, he urged that "all should unite in honest efforts to obliterate the effects of war and to restore the blessings of peace." Lee vowed to do "all in my power to encourage our people to set manfully to work to restore the country, to rebuild their homes and churches, to educate their children, and to remain with their states, their friends and countrymen." Thus when Congress ordered the drafting of new constitutions in the former Confederate states and disgruntled southerners contemplated a boycott of the system, Lee announced that it was "the duty of the [southern] people to accept the situation fully," and that every man should not only "prepare himself to vote" but also "prepare his friends, white and colored, to vote and to vote rightly." Lee's code of conduct demanded submission to authority. With characteristic self-discipline, he put the past behind him and moved forward. Many southerners proved willing to follow Lee's example. •

Grant's 1868 campaign slogan, "Let us have peace," defined his motivation and assured his success. As president for two terms, Grant made many advances in human rights. He won passage of the Fifteenth Amendment, which gave the freedman the vote, and the Ku Klux Klan Act, which empowered the president "to arrest and break up disguised night marauders." He pressed for the former slaves to be "possessed of the civil rights which citizenship should carry with it." Grant's attempts to provide justice to Native Americans marked a radical reversal of what had long been the government's policy: "Wars of extermination . . . are demoralizing and wicked," he told Congress. The president lobbied, not always successfully, to preserve Native American lands from encroachment by the westward advance of pioneers.

Grant pledged to "deal with nations as equitable law requires individuals to deal with each other." He avoided a war with Spain that seemed imminent when Madrid crushed a revolution in Cuba, and he averted a war with Britain over financial claims for Civil War losses caused by English-made vessels and over fishing and boundary disputes with Canada. He sought, without success, to acquire the island of Santo Domingo as a potential refuge for "the entire colored population of the United States, should it choose to emigrate."

Grant's administrations were characterized in part by corruption brought on by appointees to whom the president gave too much power and to whom he remained steadfastly loyal. Of the half-dozen scandals that troubled contemporaries and have alarmed historians, several involved the bribery of administration officials. There was never a shred of evidence that Grant himself had any part in, or profited from, these schemes. •