by Ron Chernow
In his laudable desire to restore goodwill between North and South and remain the grand conciliatory figure of Appomattox, Grant had submitted a remarkably naive, anodyne report. While presuming to know the thoughts of freed people, he hadn’t spent much time with them. He showed a desire to protect black civil liberties, but recapitulated the party line fed to him by white planters when he wrote that unrealistic fantasies about receiving land from their former plantations discouraged blacks from signing labor contracts. Pleased that Grant had submitted a report endorsing his conservative policies, Johnson sent it to the Senate along with the antithetical one by Carl Schurz. White southerners were predictably pleased by Grant’s report, while Radical Republicans in Congress, who had their own plans for Reconstruction, denounced it as a whitewash of presidential policies. Close readers of the report noted that Grant hadn’t relinquished his desire to protect freed slaves, and the radical Boston Daily Advertiser emphasized his statement that the federal government “shall stand as the guardian of those whom it has freed, until it sees them firmly established in the rights of citizenship.”101
Historians have been quick to pounce on the blind spots in Grant’s report. Less noticed is that he almost immediately recanted what he wrote. As early as January 12, 1866, Carl Schurz informed his wife that “Grant feels very bad about his thoughtless move and has openly expressed regret for what he has done.”102 When Schurz encountered Grant at a soldiers’ reunion in December 1868, Grant was still more regretful, admitting that on his southern tour “I traveled as the general-in-chief and people who came to see me tried to appear to the best advantage. But I have since come to the conclusion that you were right and I was wrong.”103 Here Grant echoed a famous line Abraham Lincoln had written to him, showing he was a big enough man to confess frankly to past error. In the future, he wouldn’t pull his punches about black-white relations in the South or the need for decisive military action to safeguard freed people.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
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Swing Around the Circle
WHEN THE NEW CONGRESS met in December 1865, it grew crystal-clear to Radical Republicans that Andrew Johnson’s Reconstruction policies were slanted toward the entrenched white South. Southern states sent white representatives to Washington who reflected the old Confederacy, not a newly reconstituted region, leading Radicals to take matters into their own hands. Congress set up a Joint Committee on Reconstruction, cochaired by a moderate Republican senator, William Pitt Fessenden of Maine, and Representative Thaddeus Stevens of Pennsylvania, an ardent abolitionist. Johnson saw this as an attempt by the legislative branch to wrest away prerogatives that properly belonged to the executive. Radicals advanced the argument that Confederate states, by seceding, had relinquished their former rights as sovereign states and should be treated like territories, their terms of readmission defined by Congress. Guided by this perspective, they refused to seat new southern congressmen or admit their states back into the Union. For all their excessive zeal, these militant Republicans would produce some of the most powerful legislation in American history to accord equal rights to African Americans.
Instead of the bromides Grant had doled out about southern harmony, the Joint Committee delved into violence inflicted on two particular groups. One was the so-called carpetbaggers, tens of thousands of young northerners who flocked southward to earn money and aid freed people. They built schools and churches, bought plantations, and often risked their lives to assist blacks. In southern mythology, they would be demonized as corrupt parasites, but many were motivated by idealism and paid a steep price for their courage. Southern whites who supported Reconstruction, called “scalawags,” faced similar antipathy.
Carpetbagger harassment was tame compared with the outright terror inflicted on blacks. One former Louisiana slave testified that whites flogged blacks as if they were still enslaved and that more than two thousand had been killed around Shreveport in 1865 alone. Blacks enjoyed little recourse to local sheriffs, who were often Confederate veterans and seldom acted against whites charged with crimes against blacks. It grew patently obvious that southern blacks could count on protection only from federal troops. As one Mississippi observer pleaded: “Take away garrisons from this Southern Country, and the negroes will be subjected to every outrage.”1 From Georgia came warnings of a new breed of nocturnal terror unleashed against blacks. General Rufus Saxton reported a black man killed “by a band of disguised men at midnight”—a grisly scene reenacted many times in coming years.2 As southern blacks came to rely on the U.S. military for protection, Grant was thrust smack into the middle of the controversy. A man of fixed purpose, he never faltered in his deep concern for the fair treatment of freed people. On January 12, 1866, he took aim at antiblack discrimination when he issued General Orders No. 3, which protected “colored persons from prosecutions” in any southern state “charged with offenses for which white persons are not prosecuted or punished in the same manner and degree.”3
Supplied with copious and quite graphic reports by southern commanders, Grant soon realized that the hopeful tenor of his December report had been a pipe dream. After dispatching Cyrus Comstock to New Orleans to confer with Generals Edward Canby and Phil Sheridan, he received a sobering report in late January: “Saw Gen. Canby who says feeling is worse now than at close of war. He & Sheridan both say northern men could not stay south if martial law were revoked or troops withdrawn, as they could get no justice from courts . . . Canby says if troops were withdrawn, the negroes would be far worse off than before the war, being no longer property to be cared for.”4
On February 7, President Johnson met at the White House with five black leaders, including Frederick Douglass, who came to lobby for a civil rights bill. The black leaders were treated in a tasteless, abusive manner. After they shook hands with the president, their spokesman, George T. Downing, said they hoped he would support voting rights for blacks, which elicited a bizarre, rambling monologue from Johnson. He admitted to having owned slaves, but boasted of never having sold one, as if that would somehow ingratiate him with his visitors. He presented himself as a kindly master who had been “their slave instead of their being mine.” To promote civil rights, Johnson went on, would “result in the extermination of one [race] or the other.” If given the vote, “the colored man and his master, combined,” would conspire to keep poor whites “in slavery,” denying them a portion “of the rich land of the country.”5 After the bewildered delegation filed out, Johnson boasted to his secretary, “Those damned sons of bitches thought they had me in a trap.”6
Around this time, cracks appeared in the facade of unity between Grant and Johnson. In mid-February, Grant shut down the Richmond Examiner for stridently disloyal editorials, lifting the order only when the president protested. Nonetheless, Grant instructed southern commanders that the “persistent publication of articles calculated to keep up a hostility of feeling between the people of different sections of the country cannot be tolerated.”7 He disputed a resolution of the Mississippi legislature demanding that federal troops be withdrawn, saying local authorities refused to execute the law and maintain order for blacks. He also plied the president with statistics showing that whites committed far more crimes against blacks than the reverse—44 more murders and 78 more assaults.8
That February, Johnson’s relations with congressional Republicans soured further when Johnson vetoed a bill to extend the Freedmen’s Bureau. In his veto message, he cast scorn on the bureau as an “immense patronage” scheme that only cosseted indolent blacks.9 In fact, the bureau was poorly financed and chronically understaffed, never fielding more than nine hundred agents in the South. Under slavery, more than 90 percent of the adult black population had been illiterate, and the bureau had performed superlative work in helping young evangelicals and northern aid societies to teach them to read. The former slaves reacted with an unquenchable thirst for education. By early 1866, a bureau official calculated “that half a millio
n of these poor people are now studying the spelling-book, or advanced readers.”10 Outraged by the veto, Radicals retaliated with a joint resolution stating that no senator or representative from former Confederate states should be readmitted until Congress decided they were entitled to representation, thus sharpening the battle lines with Johnson.
On the night of February 22, Washington’s birthday, a large throng of Johnson’s supporters streamed to the White House to congratulate him on his veto message. The president exploited the occasion to rant against his foes in a wild-eyed, intemperate, egotistical manner, inveighing against Radical Republicans and the Joint Committee on Reconstruction. George Templeton Strong thought the president was intoxicated with “Old Bourbon” on the occasion: “He avowed himself at war with radicalism, and denounced Sumner in the Senate and Stevens of the House and [abolitionist] Wendell Phillips . . . as disunionists and traitors. He talked of Senators going about ‘with assassination in their hearts’ . . . This may result in an impeachment of the President within thirty days!”11 It would take much longer to accomplish that goal, but the rabidly partisan speech polarized the capital in a way that foreshadowed that harrowing outcome.
In early March, Grant applied to Johnson to have his fifteen-year-old son Fred admitted to West Point and he was promptly accepted. Grant and longtime aide Theodore Bowers shepherded Fred to the academy for his entrance exams a few days later. Bowers was a thirty-three-year-old bachelor and former newspaperman from Illinois, a handsome, bearded young man with dark, wavy hair and expressive eyes. The Grant family had delighted in his self-deprecating humor. On the way home, Grant boarded the train at Garrison Station, across the Hudson River from the academy, but Bowers, running late, tried to leap onto the train as it left the station. Unable to find a solid footing, he got trapped between the train and the platform and was dragged along, then fell to the tracks and was run over by one wheel, which mangled his face, severed his arms, and killed him on the spot. When Grant got off the train to see what had happened, the rails were streaked with blood, his friend’s body twisted beyond recognition. Those with Grant admired his stoic calm as he drafted orders to dispose of the body. Crushed by the calamity, he told Sherman, “The loss of poor Bowers is one that I feel more keenly than it is usually possible for anyone to feel for another not an immediate member of their own family.”12 It was typical of Grant to respond profoundly to death with inner grief but no outward show of emotion.
After attending Bowers’s funeral at West Point, Grant returned to a capital preoccupied with the civil rights bill introduced by Radical Republicans to nullify Black Codes in the South that prevented freedmen from owning property, making contracts, and filing lawsuits. Though silent on voting rights, the bill sought to bring the full blessings of citizenship to anyone born in the United States, including blacks, protecting them by the “full and equal benefit of all laws.”13 (Native Americans were excluded.) This landmark legislation defined citizenship rights in a new manner that made the federal government, not the states, the guarantor of basic liberties.
On March 27, Andrew Johnson vetoed the bill, denouncing it for trespassing on states’ rights. Instead of viewing it as a brave attempt to remedy historic injustice, he denigrated it for surpassing anything the federal government “has ever provided for the white race.” Perversely, he interpreted it as a case of reverse discrimination “made to operate in favor of the colored and against the white race.”14 He heaped further insults on the black community by stating that immigrants had superior claims to American citizenship because they better understood “the nature and character of our institutions.”15 The veto was a reckless move by Johnson, the original bill having passed both houses by overwhelming margins. In a then unprecedented action, Congress dealt a resounding defeat to Johnson by overriding his veto. Johnson had damaged his standing, leading even moderate Republicans to distance themselves from him. “The feud between Johnson and the ‘Radicals’ grows more and more deadly every day,” observed George Templeton Strong, “and threatens grave public mischief.”16
Grant was caught in the dispute as both sides worked hard to lay claim to his incomparable prestige. Thinking it improper for army officers to take public stands on legislation, Grant had kept a punctilious silence on the civil rights bill, but Johnson was bent on enlisting his support whether he liked it or not. When Grant threw a glittering soiree at 205 I Street, President Johnson ventured outside the White House to stand between Ulysses and Julia Grant on the receiving line, and Radical Republicans were taken aback by his presence.
Grant’s team of commanders in the South enforced the new Civil Rights Act. General Daniel Sickles abolished South Carolina’s Black Code, stating that “all laws shall be applicable alike to all inhabitants,” while General Alfred Terry barred Virginia’s vagrancy law as an effort to restore “slavery in all but its name.”17 A backlash arose among white southerners, producing stepped-up vigilante activity as robed, hooded figures beat and murdered blacks. White northern teachers working with the Freedmen’s Bureau faced death threats and black schools and churches were burned with impunity in North Carolina, Mississippi, and Alabama. Grant continued to present Johnson with statistics documenting racially motivated violence against blacks and added two new categories of coercion: driving off blacks “without compensation for labor” and “retaining freedmen without compensation.”18
In early May, a vicious race riot in Memphis resulted in forty-eight blacks killed, seventy injured, and five black women raped in three days. On May 12, Major General George Stoneman reported to Grant from Memphis that the unrest was touched off when white policemen arrested two “boisterous” black men and hauled them to the station house, whereupon black bystanders wounded a police officer with a pistol shot. In retaliation, police gathered a mob of white citizens, some outfitted in Confederate uniforms, and “proceeded to shoot, beat, and threaten every negro met with in that portion of the city.”19 The next day, these white vigilantes set ablaze black schools, churches, and homes, one black witness alleging that white arsonists chanted calls for a “white man’s government” as they spread mayhem.20 “Thank heaven the white race are once more rulers of Memphis,” the Memphis Avalanche editorialized with satisfaction.21
Grant empaneled a body to probe the Memphis riots. In reporting to Stanton, he showed that local authorities had tolerated a bloody vendetta by policemen and firemen against black citizens. What resulted “was a scene of murder, arson, rape & robbery in which the victims were all helpless and unresisting negroes, stamping lasting disgrace upon the civil authorities that permitted them.”22 Grant noted that the only protection afforded black citizens came from a small body of federal troops. He recommended that the riot instigators be held by the military until civil authorities in Memphis proved willing to prosecute them. Dispatching several cavalry companies, he gave them these pointed instructions: “If the Civil Authorities fail to make arrests for past violence let the troops make them and hold the parties in confinement until they, the Civil Authorities, give satisfactory evidence that justice will be done.”23 In General Orders No. 44, he generalized this policy to all southern states: “A strict and prompt enforcement of this order is required. By command of Lieutenant General Grant.”24 In the face of a recalcitrant president, Grant was rapidly emerging as the foremost protector of persecuted southern blacks.
He exhibited increasing militance in his view that only federal troops could provide safety for former slaves. On May 31, the Missouri Democrat ran an interview with Grant that he thought was off the record. His voice differed markedly from the soothing tone of his December report and was the more striking because of it. “Troops must be kept at all the principal points in the South for some time to come,” he said. “This will be necessary to repress the turbulence of a class of the South very dangerous to well-disposed persons, and also to protect the rights of the freedmen, who are looked upon with deep hatred by a large proportion of the people.”25 He
was incensed at the sudden defiance of southerners he had thought chastened. “A year ago they were willing to do anything; now they regard themselves as masters of the situation.”26 Then, most shockingly, Grant pitched into Robert E. Lee: “Lee is behaving badly. He is conducting himself very differently from what I had reason, from what he said at the time of the surrender, to suppose he would. No man at the South is capable of exercising a tenth part of the influence for good that he is, but instead of using it, he is setting an example of forced acquiescence so grudging and pernicious in its effect as to be hardly realized.”27 Though he regretted his remarks were published, Grant never disavowed their authenticity.
Grant’s belief that only federal troops could give southern blacks “a feeling of security” ran afoul of the conservative consensus hardening inside Johnson’s cabinet.28 On July 13, Attorney General Speed admitted to the president that the “most disgusting scenes of murder, arson, rape and robbery” had been practiced in Memphis against “helpless and unresisting colored citizens.” But he forswore federal responsibility, wrapping himself in the righteous rhetoric of states’ rights. He conceded that Grant’s soldiers had done a creditable job in suppressing mob violence. “Having done that,” Speed added, “they have . . . nothing to do with the redress of private grievances, or prosecutions for public wrongs.”29 This hands-off attitude was completely antithetical to the assertive use of federal power so strenuously expounded by Grant.
In June, Radical Republicans enacted the centerpiece of their legislative efforts to defend freed blacks, passing the Fourteenth Amendment, which engraved in the Constitution the principle of equal citizenship before the law regardless of race. It declared that all persons born or naturalized in the United States enjoyed both federal and state citizenship and prevented states from denying freedoms mandated by the Bill of Rights. Seeking to scotch the Black Codes, it denied states the right to deprive “any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law” and guaranteed all citizens “equal protection of the laws.”30 Andrew Johnson, who now gloried in taunting Congress, not only opposed the amendment but urged southern states to reject it, which they did. Nevertheless, the Fourteenth Amendment was ratified on July 9, 1868.