Grant

by Ron Chernow

  When the Senate impeachment trial began on March 5, Chief Justice Salmon P. Chase officiated in his judicial robes, while Grant’s bête noire, Benjamin F. Butler, acted as a snarling chief prosecutor. Everybody recognized the historic nature of the occasion: this was the first time the House had impeached and the Senate tried a sitting president. Instead of testifying in person, Johnson followed events by a telegraph wire hooked up between the Capitol and the Willard Hotel, leaving his defense to William Evarts, who complained, “The managers conduct the trial as if it was that of a horse thief.”85

  The Senate chamber grew tense as congressmen and cabinet members crowded in behind senators while packed galleries erupted in prolonged waves of partisan applause. Grant had hoped to escape to Missouri, but felt nervous leaving the capital in such an uproar and minutely monitored proceedings from his office. Although consulted regularly by party leaders, he thought it inappropriate to appear at the trial. As odds-on favorite to be the Republican presidential nominee, his presence would appear unseemly. During the war he had learned that it was better to let power seek him rather than to pursue it; a good general waited to be summoned by his superiors. Nevertheless, he remained far from inactive during the trial. “He not only conversed with those whose action he thought he could affect, arguing in favor of the conviction of Johnson and demonstrating his guilt,” wrote Badeau, “but he visited at least one Senator at his house with this purpose.”86 Despite his reticence in public, Grant’s position was widely bruited on Capitol Hill, Charles Sumner citing Grant as “earnest for the condemnation of the [president].”87

  Despite legitimate grievances against the president, the impeachment case ultimately rested on a slender base. Evarts pointed out that the Tenure of Office Act violated the Constitution. Even if constitutional, he argued, it did not apply to Stanton, who had originally been appointed by Lincoln. He presented Andrew Johnson as a statesmanlike figure who had challenged the act in a judicious manner, dismissing Stanton and waiting for the courts to decide. The legal arguments were dwarfed by the larger political context since many voters viewed the impeachment trial as a referendum on the war and Reconstruction, abolition and civil rights. As the attorney Edwards Pierrepont wrote to Grant from New York City: “Let no man be deceived—This is the trial of an issue which determines whether true men or rebels shall rule.”88 Several weeks into the trial, Grant thought the Senate would convict Johnson, terminating his career and casting him into outer darkness. “Impeachment seems to grow in popularity,” he wrote, “and indications are that the trial will not be protracted.”89

  By May 15, Grant concluded that “impeachment is likely to fail.”90 The next day, amid extraordinary drama, the first vote was taken on whether to convict President Johnson on the eleventh impeachment article. One representative recalled legislators looking “pale and sick” from the intolerable suspense, while a senator remembered how his colleagues “leaned over their desks, many with hand to ear.”91 A conviction required a two-thirds vote of the Senate. Johnson was acquitted by a single vote when Edmund G. Ross, a junior senator from Kansas, cast the vote that rescued him. Seven Republicans voted to acquit, effectively ending the crisis. Subsequent votes merely reproduced these results. Many senators had feared a conviction would lead to legislative tyranny and presidential impotence in the future. Some thought Johnson’s misdeeds didn’t rise to the level of high crimes or misdemeanors. Others worried that Ben Wade, as president pro tempore of the Senate, would ascend to the presidency and capture the Republican nomination instead of Grant. With Johnson acquitted, everyone knew, Grant would get the party nod. Significantly, the seven Republicans who voted for acquittal all campaigned for Grant after he secured the nomination. They also extracted a critical pledge from Johnson that he would cease interfering with congressional action on Reconstruction.

  Initially Grant regretted the acquittal, but he conceded with hindsight that a conviction would have done lasting harm. With the power of the Radicals eroded by the decision, Grant became a shoo-in for the Republican nomination. Julia Grant, too, came to applaud the decision. “I could not free myself from the thought that the trial savored of persecution and that it was a dangerous precedent,” she later wrote.92 Acknowledging his bitter defeat, a discredited Stanton resigned and John Schofield, with Grant’s ready endorsement, was easily confirmed in his stead. Andrew Johnson never forgave Grant for backing his tormentors, accusing him of “standing behind the seven managers of impeachment, with Butler in the lead, urging them on to impeachment and declaring conviction and deposition indispensable to save the country . . . In this encounter he was again repulsed and driven back in . . . disgrace.”93 The next stage of Grant’s career would signify anything but disgrace.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

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  Trading Places

  THOUGH TRANQUILLITY DESCENDED BRIEFLY on Washington after Andrew Johnson’s acquittal, he disappointed Republicans who imagined he would prove more pliant on Reconstruction. Whether issuing amnesty proclamations or appointing conservative southern commanders, he showed that he wouldn’t water down his views during his nine months left in office. Most upsetting to Grant was that Johnson turned a deaf ear to anguished pleas from blacks and white Republicans that armed terror from the Ku Klux Klan had proliferated and met no resistance from white lawmen. He transmitted to the president a letter from a Tennessee representative who described gangs of mounted men “scouring the country by night—causing dismay & terror to all—Our civil authorities are powerless.”1 In response, Johnson hid behind the shield of states’ rights and declared that, having received no direct aid requests from the Tennessee legislature, the federal government lacked all jurisdiction in the matter.

  Grant did what he could to counter this brazen show of presidential indifference. He was especially concerned about terror in New Orleans. “Loyal men are being murdered in many parishes . . . revenge and murders are rampant in our state,” an informant wrote. “Can nothing be done to protect our loyal people from assassination?”2 The commander there was Grant’s old West Coast bogeyman, Robert C. Buchanan, who had refused to stanch the bleeding. “If Civil government fails to protect the Citizen,” Grant reprimanded him, “Military government should supply its place.”3 Once again, Grant did not see himself as disobeying Johnson so much as heeding the dictates of Congress, which had laid down the laws on military occupation.

  Throughout the South, conventions had spawned new constitutions to protect freed people’s rights, qualifying their states for readmission to the Union. In late June, six states were folded back into the Union, resuming congressional representation. On July 9, 1868, the Fourteenth Amendment was ratified, bestowing citizenship rights upon blacks as well as women and children born in the United States of immigrants, guaranteeing them due process and equal protection of the law and prohibiting state infringement on those rights. The amendment specified that federal or state officials who had sworn to uphold the Constitution and then joined the rebellion could only be eligible for government jobs through a two-thirds vote in Congress.

  Grant’s boldness in upholding Radical Reconstruction surely arose from the knowledge that he would soon be the Republican nominee for president, even though he never openly declared his candidacy. In his political life, there had always been an illusion of passivity, the sense of a massive wave lifting him to the next plateau without corresponding effort on his part, while all the time he had quietly positioned himself to ride its crest. He did not exactly want the presidential job, but neither did he exactly not want it. “I wasn’t sorry to be a candidate,” he later said, “but I was very sorry to leave the command of the army.”4 Still viewing events through the dark prism of the war, he equated the Republican Party with the Union cause and believed only he could unify it, even as he identified the Democratic Party with the white supremacist South: “I believed that if a democratic president was elected there would be little chance for those who fought for the Union.
”5 If Republican leaders wondered about Grant’s true convictions—and his private actions as chief general had long confirmed his Republican credentials—the rank and file adored him, and it was hard to argue with such popularity as an aura of inevitability began to surround his candidacy.

  As Republican delegates set off for their Chicago convention—it met days after Johnson’s acquittal—the prospective nominee and his wife debated their future in private. When Julia asked if he wished to be president, Grant exhibited less than gushing enthusiasm. “No,” he replied, “but I do not see that I have anything to say about it. The convention is about to assemble and, from all I hear, they will nominate me; and I suppose if I am nominated, I will be elected.”6 In part Grant’s response can be attributed to native modesty and a strict Methodist upbringing, but it also marked a transitional moment in a life hitherto devoted to military protocol and following orders. Henceforth he would need to learn the wily and aggressive arts of a politician instead of simply retreating behind the pose of a self-effacing soldier.

  Right before the convention, a “Soldiers and Sailors” gathering met in Chicago and symbolically nominated Grant for president. Doubtless fulfilling a long-suppressed fantasy, Jesse Root Grant rose to address the crowd in support of his son. It astonished him, he confessed, that he “who had done nothing in particular in the great war for the country, should be called upon by the braves of the nation to speak.” “You had a boy,” shouted an audience member. “That is enough.”7 Alarmed by Jesse’s forwardness, Elihu Washburne and his circle had conspired to intercept him before he traveled to Chicago, even enlisting his son Orvil in the effort, but only brute force could have prevented the loquacious Jesse from droning on before a large, enthusiastic assembly.

  The next day, with Jesse proudly in attendance, eight thousand Republicans crammed into Crosby’s Opera House for a veritable coronation of Ulysses S. Grant. To play on wartime memories, General John “Black Jack” Logan was designated to place his name in nomination. His speech was followed by a well-staged extravaganza: hats and handkerchiefs fluttered, rounds of applause rippled across the house, and a pigeon, dyed red, white, and blue, flapped through the cavernous space. As a huge ovation for his son gathered strength, Jesse Grant stood before the speaker’s platform in “mute astonishment,” said a reporter.8 Then a curtain rose to reveal huge images drawn by Thomas Nast of the Goddess of Liberty, juxtaposed with Grant. To no one’s surprise, Grant won by acclamation on the first ballot. Nobody else was even nominated. Abiding by the custom of nominees staying away from conventions, Grant remained in Washington, hard at work and seemingly in harness at army headquarters.

  The suspense in Chicago centered upon the choice of a vice presidential candidate. At the time, presidential nominees had no real say in selecting running mates. After several ballots, the convention settled upon House Speaker Schuyler Colfax of Indiana, a man so amiable he was known as “Smiler” Colfax. One delegate described him as a “good-tempered, chirping . . . real canary bird.”9 According to Gideon Welles, Lincoln had scorned Colfax as “a little intriguer—plausible,” but “not trustworthy.”10 Although Colfax had supported Edward Bates for the Republican nomination in 1860, he had then become an ardent Lincoln adherent. “Colfax is a young man, is already in position, is running a brilliant career and is sure of a bright future in any event,” wrote Lincoln, who considered naming him to his cabinet.11 After the war, Colfax became a fervent booster for Reconstruction and black voting rights.

  Grant learned of his nomination when Edwin Stanton came panting up the stairs and burst into his office. “General! I have come to tell you that you have been nominated by the Republican party for President of the United States.”12 Grant was probably less astonished by the news than by Stanton’s unwonted ebullience. He reacted with his usual poker face, repressing a smile. “I did not want the Presidency, and have never quite forgiven myself for resigning the command of the army to accept it; but it could not be helped,” he reminisced. “I owed my honors and opportunities to the Republican party, and if my name could aid it I was bound to accept.”13 He feared the Democratic Party had become a haven for rebel sympathizers who refused to accept the basic tenets of Unionism, and he saw it as his duty to stand as the Republican nominee. Taking a bitter swipe at Johnson, Phil Sheridan had promised him that “the period is not distant when loyalty to the government will not be considered a crime at the White House.”14

  Grant was elected on a platform very congenial to him. The Republican Party had drifted to the right on economic issues, while maintaining an unalterable commitment to black equality before the law and the right of freed people to participate in southern politics. The platform forged an amalgam of old and new, harking back to the party’s founding abolitionist principles and ahead to the conservative economics of its future. The pragmatic Grant could embody this new synthesis without fear of contradiction.

  Conforming to tradition, the convention sent a delegation to Grant with official notice of his nomination. In return, he scratched out a statement that mostly dealt in standard rhetoric, concluding with four words that formed the slogan of his campaign and remained irreversibly associated with him: “Let us have peace.”15 These words, an inspired piece of phrasemaking, were gobbled up by the public and showed Grant’s sound political instincts. Translating this motto into practice, however, would prove far more daunting for it spoke to two competing themes: the need for reconciliation between North and South and the need to consolidate the war objectives. For some, the credo sounded blandly vacuous and Henry Adams wisecracked that “Let Us Have Peace” meant only “Leave Me Alone.”16

  Backed by southern supporters, Andrew Johnson vainly hoped that the Democrats would nominate him at their July convention in New York. He managed to place second on the first two ballots before his candidacy faded altogether. On the twenty-second ballot, the delegates chose the colorless Horatio Seymour, a protégé of Martin Van Buren, who had been close to Boss Tweed and Tammany Hall and a notorious Copperhead as wartime governor of New York. His résumé confirmed Grant’s stereotype of the Democrats as the party of reaction. Seymour had denounced the Emancipation Proclamation as “a proposal for the butchery of women and children, for scenes . . . of arson and murder.”17 During the 1863 draft riots in New York, Seymour had praised the responsible hooligans as “my friends” in what some deemed treasonous behavior.18 His record threw into bold relief Grant’s heroic stature and ability to capitalize on Unionist sentiment.

  For vice president, the Democrats picked the irascible Francis Preston Blair Jr. of Missouri, who had fought gallantly as a Union general before emerging as a biting critic of Reconstruction. Right before the convention, Blair published a letter that contested black suffrage in the South, proposing a plan to raze the entire scaffolding of Reconstruction. He wanted the new president to “declare the reconstruction acts null and void; compel the army to undo its usurpations at the South; [and] allow the white people to reorganize their own governments.”19 Once nominated, Blair freely bashed Grant, accusing him of wanting to uphold military “usurpations over the eight millions of white people at the South, fixed to the earth with his bayonets.”20 Though his brother Montgomery had represented Dred Scott before the Supreme Court, Frank Blair was an unabashed racist who vowed that as vice president he would “prevent the people of our race . . . from being driven out of the country or trodden under foot by an inferior and semi-barbarous race.”21 Walt Whitman summed up the Democratic ticket by calling it “a regular old Copperhead Democratic ticket, of the rankest kind—probably pleases the old democratic bummers around New York and Brooklyn—but everywhere else they take it like a bad dose of medicine.”22

  As befit the political custom of the time, Grant did not actively campaign or make formal speeches. Lacking the big, overflowing personality or oratorical skills of a lifelong politician, he was lucky to have that custom in effect. Dating back to the early days of the Civil War, he had
maintained a firm belief that one’s worth should be recognized instead of being crassly promoted, and he refused to allow party leaders to hatch any deals to secure his election. Back in Washington, Rawlins and other party stalwarts drafted letters and gave speeches as his surrogates, while James H. Wilson and Charles A. Dana pumped out laudatory campaign biographies.

  In early June, Grant traveled to St. Louis, where he had gained possession of White Haven and an additional 280 acres from the Dent family. It was another strange, dreamlike transformation of his life from his dreary years there in the 1850s. Now he was master of the plantation he had first visited fresh out of West Point, and Colonel Dent, having suffered a crippling stroke, depended upon him and Julia. Grant planned to spend several weeks there yearly, planting strawberries and other fruits and breeding blooded horses. To banish any lingering remnants of slavery, he had his steward, William Elrod, demolish a dozen slave cabins. As president, he would closely manage the farm through Elrod.

  After St. Louis, Grant moved on to Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, where he joined Sherman and Sheridan for a two-week western tour. Although they inspected forts, they participated in a new type of military campaign, this one to garner votes, with a crew of reporters tagging along to chronicle the journey. Grant, having never set eyes on the Great Plains, wanted his son Buck to see them “whilst still occupied by the Buffalo and the Indian, both rapidly disappearing now.”23 Like many travelers of the day, the party carried carbines to shoot buffalo, helping to hasten their demise. When they journeyed by stagecoach to Denver, they took frequent potshots through the windows at herds of antelope, killing two of them. Grant rhapsodized about the beauty of the American West, only regretting the “three epidemics” that had plagued it: the pistol, the bowie knife, and whiskey.24