ABSTRACT
Throughout his adult life, Ulysses S. Grant had been dogged by failure. Before finally achieving success as a Civil War general, he had been dismissed from the army in 1854 for heavy drinking, and then had failed as a farmer, real-estate agent, and bill collector. As president, Grant's record of failure persisted. His administration was pockmarked by scandals involving Vice President Schuyler Colfax and high-ranking cabinet officers. Although Grant was not personally implicated in any of the scandals, his political naivete was painfully obvious, as he had selected a wretched group to help him run the executive branch. Still, when the Republicans held their 1872 convention in Philadelphia, they renominated the general. Senator Henry Wilson of Massachusetts, a former cobbler, replaced Colfax, who had irritated Grant with intimations that he was interested in succeeding him. The Republicans tried to invoke some common-man imagery by advertising "the tanner and the cobbler" on their ticket, a reference to the long-ago vocations of Grant and Wilson.
