Grant was careful to describe his visit to China as that of a mere tourist, but the Qing government couldn’t resist the opportunity to enlist the former US president to help mediate a growing dispute with Japan The Meiji Government of Japan had begun to test the willingness of the Qing court to defend their control over Taiwan and the Ryukyu Islands, and the Qing government wanted Grant to help avoid a costly war with Japan. Grant was careful to describe his visit to China as that of a mere tourist, but the Qing government couldn’t resist the opportunity to enlist the former US president to help mediate a growing dispute with Japan over - surprise, surprise - the status of the islands known as the Ryukyu in Japan and the Liuqiu in Chinese. Suggestions that Grant would try for a third term in the 1880 presidential election dogged him throughout his voyage, and Republican supporters back home actively encouraged Grant to remain abroad to let the negative press fade and be replaced by a new persona: global statesman. Grant was also the first US president to visit China.Īlthough no longer in office, Grant toured China in 1879, one of the last legs of a round-the-world tour taken in part to escape the bruising politics and scandal that characterized his second term as US president.

Grant’s was a life lived in many acts: Soldier. Clocking in at over 1,000 pages, Chernow’s latest is good winter holiday beach reading, if for no other reason than the hardcover edition weighs enough to stun a flesh-crazed tiger shark. Grant, the much-anticipated followup to Chernow’s Hamilton bio, which became the improbable source material for a hit musical. I just finished Ron Chernow’s doorstopper biography of Ulysses S.

President grant autobiography