Greg Gatto 🌻

Ben Rice - New York Yankees (11) 3-run 380 feet +350

Americans love banging on about the War of Independence. They’re quieter on the War of 1812. Here’s why. In 1812, America declared war on Britain. The plan was to march into Canada and annex it. Thomas Jefferson said it would be “a mere matter of marching.” It wasn’t. The Canadians sent them packing. Two years later, the British sailed up the Potomac. American forces collapsed at Bladensburg in what’s still called “the Bladensburg Races” because of how fast they ran. President Madison had already fled to Maryland. The British walked into Washington unopposed. They sat down in the White House, ate the dinner Dolley Madison had laid out for forty guests, used the President’s silver, then set fire to the building. Then they burned the Capitol, the Treasury and the Navy Yard. A freak thunderstorm put the fires out the next day. The British left when they were ready. It’s still the only time a foreign army has captured the US capital. You can see why it doesn’t come up much.

Rob Thomson made himself available to reporters on Tuesday, which is rather rare for a manager who just lost his job. Here's why he did: “If you’re an accountable person, if you’re a leader, you’re going to stand up in front of people and answer the questions when it’s all over. And I just wanted to make sure that I did that in the right way. It’s like the last four years, I hope that people feel like, whether I did a good job or a bad job, I represented this organization properly, with class and with dignity. So this is all part of it to me.”

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He won the Civil War, broke the Klan, went bankrupt at 62, got terminal throat cancer, and wrote one of the greatest books in American literature in the final year of his life. He finished it 5 days before he died. Ulysses S. Grant was born 204 years ago today. His name wasn't even Ulysses S. Grant. He was born Hiram Ulysses Grant in Point Pleasant, Ohio on April 27, 1822. The congressman who nominated him to West Point wrote down the wrong name. Grant kept it. The "S." stands for nothing. He hated his father's tannery and loved horses. Graduated 21st of 39 at West Point. Fought in the Mexican-American War, then came home convinced it was an unjust war designed to expand slavery. He later said he believed the Civil War was divine punishment for it. He married Julia Dent in 1848, into a slave-owning Missouri family. His abolitionist father refused to attend the wedding. In 1859, broke and desperate, Grant freed the one enslaved man he'd briefly owned instead of selling him. He could have gotten a year's wages. In the Civil War he became what no other Union general was: relentless. Vicksburg (July 4, 1863) split the Confederacy in half. Lincoln then gave him every Union army. His Appomattox surrender terms: officers kept sidearms, men kept horses for spring planting, no one prosecuted. As president (1869 to 1877) he did something no president would do again until LBJ: used federal troops to crush the Ku Klux Klan. He suspended habeas corpus in 9 South Carolina counties, prosecuted Klansmen before predominantly Black juries, and broke the first Klan. His presidency was also rocked by scandal: Black Friday 1869. Crédit Mobilier. The Whiskey Ring. Belknap. Grant himself never took a dime. He was just disastrously loyal to corrupt friends. The pattern damaged his reputation for a century. After the White House, he toured the world for 2 years. Dined with Queen Victoria. Met the emperor of Japan. Then in 1884, a Wall Street partner named Ferdinand Ward ran what we'd now call a Ponzi scheme. Grant was wiped out. 62 years old. Penniless. Weeks later he was diagnosed with terminal throat cancer. Mark Twain offered to publish his memoirs. Grant wrote in agony, sometimes 50 pages a day, racing the disease to leave Julia an inheritance. He finished the manuscript July 18, 1885. He died July 23. The book made Julia $450,000, about $14M today. It's now considered one of the finest memoirs in the English language. For decades historians ranked Grant a failure. Since 2000 he's jumped 13 spots in the C-SPAN survey, the biggest rise of any president. Happy birthday, General 🇺🇸

The “reverent” Novus Ordo