President Garfield: A Brief, Consequential Term

No chapter of the American story has caused historians more embarrassment than the Gilded Age, that national adolescence bracketed by soldier-turned-politician Ulysses S. Grant and politician-turned-soldier Theodore Roosevelt. Surrendering the moral high ground attained through battlefield heroics, a victorious North abandoned its commitment to four million liberated slaves and gave itself over to the lucrative distractions of fortune hunting.