From American Ulysses: A Life of Ulysses S. Grant:
President Grant established his daily routine. He rose at seven, read the Washington papers, and enjoyed breakfast with his family at eight thirty. Two of his four children were away—the oldest, Fred, at West Point and the second son, Buck, at Phillips Exeter Academy, preparing to enter Harvard. After breakfast, he went for a short stroll in the Washington streets, greeting locals and surprising tourists. In the aftermath of Lincoln’s assassination, armed guards had been stationed in and around the White House. Grant dismissed them all. He wanted the American people to see their president was accessible.
At ten A.M., he went to his office on the second floor. His brother-in-law Frederick Dent sat at a reception desk. Two of Grant’s former aides, Horace Porter and Orville Babcock, served as his secretaries. Dent, Porter, and Babcock wore civilian dress but impressed bodyguard William Crook as “a military council” because of the “sort of military exactness which pervaded the routine business.” Adam Badeau, writing a military history of Grant, was assigned an office. At the end of official business at three P.M., the president, usually accompanied by his son Jesse, went to his stable.
The family gathered for dinner—punctually—at five P.M. To his father’s enjoyment, young Jesse enlivened the conversation with humor. Julia’s father, Colonel Dent, still un-Reconstructed at eighty-three, growled about Republican Radicals and Negroes trying to move beyond their place.
A few close friends would visit for informal conversation, then he and Julia would retire between ten and eleven.
On Sunday evening, January 2, 1870, the president walked alone across Lafayette Park to Senator Charles Sumner’s home at the corner of H Street and Vermont Avenue.
The lame duck session of the Forty-second Congress had voted the president a 100 percent pay raise—from $25,000 to $50,000—increased salaries for Supreme Court justices, and approved hefty increases for themselves. The salary increase for the president seemed fitting because he had to pay expenses for running the White House from his personal funds.
More: read American Ulysses: A Life of Ulysses S. Grant
Adjusting for inflation, $50,000 in 1870 is close to a million today, far more than the $400K or so that current presidents make.
Fazal,
Are you sure that the salary in the book was not already adjusted for inflation?
As noted above, “The salary increase for the president seemed fitting because he had to pay expenses for running the White House from his personal funds.”
Grant had to pay the cook, buy the food, pay the maids, maybe buy heating fuel, etc., out of his $50,000 annual salary. So it would make sense for it to be comparable to $1 million today.
the number on the total benefits the president receives is something closer to 100 million
Salary aside, look at how laid back President Grant was. So much free time at hand as if he isn’t running the country. Was each state its own “country” back then?