by Ron Chernow
In dealing with Johnson, Grant perceived himself as embodying the Union cause and preserving Lincoln’s legacy. Less than a week after Grant became acting war secretary, Johnson decided to replace Sheridan in New Orleans with General George Thomas, who was suffering from a liver ailment. In the end, Winfield Scott Hancock replaced Thomas. For Grant, Sheridan’s removal was a barefaced attempt to eviscerate Congressional Reconstruction. Usually unflappable, he sent the president a letter glowing with passion: “I . . . urge, earnestly urge, urge in the name of a patriotic people who have sacrificed Hundreds of thousands of loyal lives, and Thousands of Millions of treasure to preserve the integrity and union of this Country that this order be not insisted on . . . [Sheridan’s] removal will only be regarded as an effort to defeat the laws of Congress. It will be interpreted by the unreconstructed element in the South, those who did all they could to break up this government by arms . . . as a triumph.”14
Clearly, in Grant’s eyes, the country was slouching toward a crisis that required him to ride to the rescue. He regarded Reconstruction as the Civil War’s final phase and believed Johnson had cast his lot with the disloyal South. Nonetheless, Johnson not only transferred Sheridan to Missouri but sent Grant an explanatory letter that insulted Sheridan, stating he had “rendered himself exceedingly obnoxious” and that his “rule has . . . been one of absolute tyranny, without reference to the principles of our government or the nature of our free institutions.”15 The letter left Grant both blue and badly disillusioned with politics. “All the romance of feeling that men in high places are above personal considerations and act only from motives of pure patriotism . . . has been destroyed,” he told Sherman.16 To mitigate the president’s order, he told his commanders not to reinstate southern politicians ousted by Sheridan and he publicized his letter to Johnson disputing Sheridan’s removal. Grant’s standing promptly soared in military circles, the Army and Navy Journal celebrating a letter whose “every word is golden.”17
With tensions running at a high pitch between the president and Congress, leading administration figures again fretted that Johnson would be arrested even before his conviction in an impeachment trial, with Benjamin Wade or another Radical Republican installed in his stead. Along with conservative cabinet members, Johnson toyed with replacing Grant with Sherman, who was more perturbed by the Radical tumult in Congress. On October 8, Secretary of the Interior Browning sounded out Sherman as to whether Grant would cooperate with a Radical congressional coup d’état against the president. Sherman reassured him that Grant “might be relied upon to prevent violence. He would not allow a mob of the ‘grand army of the Republic’ to execute the revolutionary measures of Congress.”18 Again showing solidarity with Grant, Sherman refused to entertain any appointment placing him in a superior position.
To plumb Grant’s views more deeply, Johnson took an unaccustomed step on October 12: he visited Grant at the War Department for a frank discussion. The president cut straight to the crux of the matter: What would Grant do if Congress tried to depose or arrest him before an impeachment conviction? Grant said “he should expect to obey orders,” Welles reported, “that should he (Grant) change his mind he would advise the President in season, that he might have time to make arrangements.”19 Although Johnson came away from the discussion heartened, Grant had subtly inserted political distance between himself and the president. Welles believed Grant lobbied key Radical Republicans to tamp down any talk of arresting Johnson.
In early October, Democrats won decisive victories in Pennsylvania and Ohio, throwing fear into the Republican Party, which paid a steep penalty with voters for promoting black suffrage. This enhanced Grant’s appeal as a versatile presidential candidate who might attract moderate Democratic voters while keeping die-hard Republicans in line. Blessed with this bipartisan veneer, he became the supreme prize in American politics, sought by all parties. Carl Schurz even thought his “nomination for the presidency appears to have been rendered practically certain by the October elections.”20 The New York Times editor Henry J. Raymond courted Grant with equally emphatic predictions: “Nothing in the world can prevent your nomination by the Republican party, as things are now. They dare not and cannot nominate anybody else . . . All you have to do is to stand still. Say nothing, write nothing & do nothing which shall enable any faction of any party to claim you.”21 This suited Grant, who had a clever way of placing himself in the pathway to success, then calling it fate. True to Raymond’s advice, Harper’s Weekly ran a cartoon that depicted Grant as a sphinx with a cigar clenched firmly in his mouth.
To an obsessive extent, the political world speculated about the political complexion of Grant’s mind. Prodded by Senator John Thayer of Nebraska, John Forney, the editor of the Washington Daily Chronicle, printed a lengthy article on November 7 that examined Grant’s political utterances since leaving Galena, removing any doubts about his Republican leanings. The two men took an advance copy to Rawlins, who marched into Grant’s office with it. Grant sat closeted with the piece for some time before Rawlins emerged to say that “General Grant is quite pleased with your statement of his political record, and surprised that he proves to be so good a Republican.”22 If this encouraged the visitors, Rawlins also relayed the sobering message that Grant didn’t care to be president, for he worried about the monetary consequences. “He is receiving from seventeen to twenty thousand dollars a year as General . . . a life salary. To go into the Presidency at twenty-five thousand dollars a year is, perhaps, to gain more fame; but what is to become of him at the end of his Presidency? . . . Eight years from the 4th of March, 1869, he will be about fifty-six years old.”23 It was revealing that Grant, still haunted by his prewar fear of poverty, analyzed the presidency through the lens of financial security.
When the new Congress assembled in late November, the House Judiciary Committee, by a 5 to 4 vote, called for Johnson’s impeachment. Some allegations against him were relatively trivial, revolving around vetoed bills or signed pardons. More consequential was the charge of disobeying the Tenure of Office Act, but the crucial underlying issue remained Congressional Reconstruction. Representative John Churchill of New York, who cast the committee’s decisive vote, explained that he had voted against Johnson because the president intended to “prevent the reorganization of the southern states upon the plan of Congress.”24
On November 30, President Johnson read aloud to his cabinet his shrill defense against any attempted impeachment or arrest: “You no doubt are aware that certain evil disposed persons have formed a conspiracy to depose the President of the United States, and to supply his place by an individual of their own selection.” After issuing articles of impeachment, he warned, these conspirators might move to arrest him or remove him from office, and he accused them of plotting “a revolution changing the whole organic system of our Government.”25 An unrepentant Johnson served notice he would fight any impeachment effort. “I cannot deliver the great charter of a Nation’s Liberty to men who, by the very act of usurping it, would show their determination to disregard and trample it under foot.”26
When he sent a defiant annual message to Congress in early December, it polarized the situation even further. He accused Congress of burdening southern states with black voting rights even though blacks had demonstrated little capacity for government and “wherever they have been left to their own devices they have shown a constant tendency to relapse into barbarism.”27 This message claimed the dubious distinction of being the most racist such message ever penned by an American president. But the central issue was whether Johnson had committed a serious crime that met the lofty constitutional standard of “high crimes and misdemeanors” or was simply being hounded for irreconcilable political differences with Congress.
Against this impeachment backdrop, there emerged a crescendo of voices clamoring for Grant to run for president, presenting him as the nation’s potential savior. On December 5, a huge rally at the Cooper Institute in New
York, attended by business moguls Alexander T. Stewart and William B. Astor, endorsed Grant’s nomination for the high office. As his name was bandied about for president, powerful figures schemed to stop him. Rumors had raced about that Ben Butler, having never forgiven Grant for his wartime dismissal, had stooges spying on him to scrounge up a host of past indiscretions. “Butler has had detectives following the Genl. and the story is that they will at the proper time prove ‘Grant is a drunkard after fast horses women and whores,’” Orville Babcock tipped off Elihu Washburne.28
Johnson played a cunning game with Grant, praising his performance publicly to bind him to the administration, while surreptitiously driving a wedge between him and Stanton. When on December 12 he asked the Senate to approve Stanton’s suspension, he seized the opportunity to puff up Grant’s stature: “Salutary reforms have been introduced by the Secretary ad interim, & great reductions of expenses have been effected under his administration of the War Department, & the saving of millions to the Treasury.”29 Gideon Welles urged the president to go further and declare his confidence in Grant so he would be permanently “hitched” to the administration. “It would have made an issue between him and the Stanton Radicals,” he wrote in his diary.30
In many ways, Welles was typical of the conservative cabinet members who vilified Grant. A prolific diarist, he issued scathing denunciations of Grant that have long been trotted out by historians. A Connecticut lawyer, journalist, and politician, he had a white beard of biblical breadth, wore a queer wig parted down the middle, and voiced a curmudgeonly outlook. During the war Lincoln had dubbed him “Old Father Neptune.” In his diary, he offered so many diatribes against Grant that they come to sound almost pathological. He denounced Grant as “a political ignoramus,” ignorant of the workings of government, and “severely afflicted with the Presidential disease” that warped his judgment.31 He reviled him as someone of “sly cunning, if but little knowledge,” a passive, credulous tool in the hands of Radical Republicans, too stupid to exercise independent judgment.32 “The race-course has more attractions for [Grant] than the Senate or the council room,” the quotable Welles wrote. “He loves money, admires wealth, is fond of power and ready to use it remorselessly.”33 As Lincoln’s navy secretary, Welles had performed ably in blockading southern ports and building up the navy, but Grant thought him an opportunist who had defected to the Democrats to please Andrew Johnson.
Welles’s clash with Grant was at bottom a political one. He adored the president and his family. “No better persons have occupied the Executive Mansion,” he later wrote.34 Like Johnson, he identified with the southern white elite and lacked sympathy for the emancipated slaves. When the subject of food relief for hungry freed people emerged in the cabinet, Welles groused that “feeding the lazy and destitute negroes for a few weeks was an absurdity.”35 After discussing Reconstruction with Grant, he declared: “The Radical policy is to proscribe the intelligent, the wealthy, the moral portion of the South, and to place over them the ignorant and degraded and vicious.”36
Grant considered Reconstruction a noble experiment while Welles and other cabinet members condemned it as a misguided disaster that would put shiftless blacks in power. Conventions now began to meet in southern states to draw up new constitutions, which would allow them to be readmitted to the Union. At the Louisiana and South Carolina conventions, blacks made up a majority of delegates. Never before in American history had there been such racially integrated governmental meetings, and they pioneered in establishing public schools and contesting discrimination. In Alabama, a racially mixed convention guaranteed voting rights to “all colored male persons of the age of 21 years.”37 The Louisiana convention enacted a provision calling for equal access to public transportation “without distinction of race or color or previous condition.”38 In Charleston, seventy-six black delegates made up a majority of the state convention, many of them former slaves. Such a spectacle was anathema to many terrified whites, prompting the Charleston Mercury to jeer at this assembly as the “Congo Convention.”39 More than 80 percent of black delegates were literate, but the handful of illiterates provided endless fodder for vicious satire in the white press, creating an enduring caricature of Reconstruction as a period of misrule by inept black politicians.
Nothing alarmed white southerners more than the specter of blacks casting votes. The united power of blacks, carpetbaggers, and scalawags produced a stunning string of Republican election victories in fall 1867 across a region long solidly Democratic. Blacks embraced voting rights and registered amazingly high participation rates: a 70 percent turnout in Georgia and almost 90 percent in Virginia, casting virtually unanimous Republican votes. In Alabama, there were 89,000 black voters versus 74,000 whites, while 95,000 black voters in Georgia nearly equaled the 100,000 white voters. In a startling reversal for an area once dominated by slavery, the elections spawned black sheriffs, school board members, state legislators, and congressmen. That yesterday’s slave laborer was today’s state legislator horrified many white southerners who refused to accept this extraordinary inversion of their bygone world.
Several of Grant’s district commanders expressed deep admiration for how freed people adapted to their new status. One was General John Pope, an unabashed Republican, whose military district encompassed Georgia, Alabama, and Florida. The South might complain of “bayonet rule,” but Pope was spurred by idealism and an unflagging desire to protect black welfare. As he told Grant, “It may safely be said that the marvelous progress made in education and knowledge by these people, aided by the noble charitable contributions of Northern Societies and individuals, finds no parallel in the history of mankind . . . It becomes us therefore to guard jealously against any reaction which may and will check this most desirable progress of the colored race.”40
Pope was too sympathetic to Congressional Reconstruction for the conservative taste of Andrew Johnson. After Pope insisted that blacks be allowed to serve on juries, Johnson fired him, overriding fierce objections from Grant and sparking fresh calls for his impeachment. In a valedictory letter to Grant, Pope argued that in his district the Confederate spirit of rebellion was still abroad and “nearly as powerful as during the War . . . You can scarcely form an idea of the spirit of malice & hatred in this people—It is a misnomer to call this question in the South a political question—It is War pure & simple . . . The question is not whether Georgia & Alabama will accept or reject reconstruction—It is, shall the Union men & Freedmen, be the slaves of the old negro rebel aristocracy or not?”41
Never cavalier about military rule in the South, Grant wanted to terminate it as soon as possible, but without sacrificing black welfare. As he told one district commander, “The best way, I think, to secure a speedy termination of Military rule is to execute all the laws of Congress in the spirit in which they were conceived, firmly but without passion.”42 Grant had to deal with hysterical denunciations of Reconstruction policy from white southerners, including Colonel Dent, who predicted “all sorts of disasters to the Country,” he told Sherman. Far from viewing carpetbaggers as greedy, predatory figures, Grant pictured them going with “brain in their heads, money in their pockets, strength and energy in their limbs” to “make the South bloom like the rose.”43
Just how pessimistic Grant was about the southern mood was revealed by an unpublicized episode. Adam Badeau received a letter from his friend Edwin Booth, the illustrious Shakespearean actor and older brother of John Wilkes Booth. Unlike his brother, Edwin had been a faithful Union man and came to Badeau with a humble request from his elderly mother, who wished to have the remains of John Wilkes, now buried under the Old Arsenal Penitentiary, transferred to a family plot. To Grant, Badeau made an eloquent case to honor the family’s wishes. “But he was immutable,” wrote Badeau. “He said the time had not yet come.”44 Grant’s response shows his reaction to the frightening upsurge in Confederate sentiment prevalent in the region under his personal military supervision.
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THE DRAMA OVER Stanton’s dismissal spiraled toward its fateful climax when the Senate Committee on Military Affairs issued a report on January 10, 1868, calling for his immediate reinstatement. Soon the entire Senate launched into a blistering debate. For Radical Republicans, nothing less than the future of the Republic lay at stake. Only Stanton’s presence at the War Department “will prevent the employment . . . of this office on the side of the Rebellion,” wrote Charles Sumner, adding that Andrew Johnson was “now a full-blown rebel, except that he does not risk his neck by overt acts; but in spirit he is as bad as J.D. [Jefferson Davis].”45
The committee’s action sent Grant scurrying to study the Tenure of Office Act. He was shocked to discover that if the Senate sustained the decision to restore Stanton and Grant then refused to hand the office back to him, he faced a $10,000 fine and a five-year prison term—risks he didn’t care to run. At Sherman’s prompting, Grant made his way to the White House on Saturday, January 11, to alert Johnson to his concerns. Exactly what happened at that meeting would divide Grant and Johnson—and future historians—forever after.
Grant explained to Johnson that if the Senate stood by Stanton, Grant would have to vacate his office, citing the possible fine and prison term. He and Johnson quarreled bitterly over the meaning of the Tenure of Office Act. Grant believed bad laws trumped presidential directives and must be obeyed until judges rescinded them. “I stated that the law was binding on me, constitutional or not, until set aside by the proper tribunal,” Grant wrote.46 Dismissing the act as unconstitutional, Johnson refused to be bound by it and grew agitated over Grant’s unbending position. With a melodramatic flourish, he promised that if Grant clung to his office when Stanton tried to retake it, he would pay the fine himself and serve the jail term. When Grant demurred at this outrageous idea, Johnson pleaded with him to resign and return the office to him before Stanton regained it. Grant came away with the clear impression that he had promised to give the office back to Stanton, while Johnson came away with an equally clear impression that Grant would hold on to it until the courts ruled otherwise. Grant said he would call on Johnson on Monday with a final decision. That meeting never took place—Congress would act in the interim—and his failure to appear formed part of Johnson’s savage indictment against Grant.