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Many of Grant’s appointment problems also resulted from the absence of a true civil service as patronage lubricated the system. In the motto enunciated by New York senator William L. Marcy, “To the victor belongs the spoils.”25 As Harper’s Weekly noted on the eve of Grant’s election, “The chief business of the executive had become the distribution of patronage.”26 In an era when strangers could walk straight into the White House, Abraham Lincoln had been besieged by job seekers who cluttered the stairs and corridors day and night. One day a friend asked Lincoln whether he was depressed because the Union army had suffered a military setback. He smiled wanly and said, “No, it isn’t the army. It is the post office in Brownsville, Missouri.”27 When an officer accompanied Lincoln to the opera and noticed how tired he looked, he asked the president whether he was enjoying the opera. “Oh, no, Colonel; I have not come for the play, but for the rest. I am being hounded to death by office-seekers, who pursue me early and late, and it is simply to get two or three hours’ relief that I am here.”28 Corruption was so endemic under Andrew Johnson that the 1868 Republican platform claimed he had “perverted the public patronage into an engine of wholesale corruption.”29
Grant quickly saw he would spend disproportionate time in fights over revenue collectors, Indian agents, postmasters, marshals, and customs collectors. Within weeks of becoming president, a harried Grant was already worn down by throngs of job claimants, who stalked him everywhere. “I scarcely get one moment alone,” he told his sister Mary. “Office-seeking in this country . . . is getting to be one of the industries of the age. It gives me no peace.”30 Grant knew that, for every friend he won through an appointment, he earned a hundred enemies in rejected suitors. Under the spoils system, the president had to appease congressmen who dispensed patronage in their districts and grew powerful perpetuating this unsavory system. Gideon Welles observed that “corruption is not confined to one party. It is the disgrace and wickedness of the times.”31
Despite such pressures, Grant made extraordinary strides in naming blacks, Jews, and Native Americans to federal positions—a forgotten chapter of American history. The minor story of nepotism has overshadowed this far more important narrative. Forty years before Theodore Roosevelt incurred southern wrath by inviting Booker T. Washington to dine at the White House, Grant welcomed blacks there. On April 2, he met with the first black public official ever to visit the White House, Lieutenant Governor Oscar J. Dunn of Louisiana. On New Year’s Day, citizens always lined up to pay their respects to the president. Before crowds started to arrive on January 1, 1870, the police asked Grant whether they should honor the custom of having blacks and whites enter separately and he said yes. When informed, however, that “a number of colored people” wished to come in with whites on an equal basis, Grant “at once gave direction to admit all who wished to come,” Babcock recalled.32
George T. Downing of the National Convention of the Colored Men of America told Grant that his followers placed special emphasis on black appointments, for they “would give a death blow to objections against our holding such positions in the South, by convincing the South that it is not true that the North wishes to force a policy upon them which it is not willing to accept itself.”33 In response, Grant appointed Ebenezer D. Bassett as minister to Haiti, making him the first African American diplomat in American history. The grandson of a slave, the Yale-educated Bassett had been principal of the Philadelphia Colored High School, where he joined with Frederick Douglass in enlisting thirteen black regiments during the war. In soliciting Grant for the job, Bassett wrote that his appointment “as a representative colored man . . . would be hailed . . . by recently enfranchised colored citizens, as a marked recognition of our new condition in the Republic and an auspicious token of our great future.”34 Frederick Douglass, who had entertained hopes for the Haitian post, graciously conceded defeat. “Your appointment,” he told Bassett, “is a grand achievement for yourself and for our whole people.”35 Two years later, Grant expanded this precedent by naming James Milton Turner as minister to Liberia. Downing extolled Grant for surpassing Lincoln in naming “numbers of our race to important positions” and giving “a rebuke to vulgar prejudices against a class. In this you have gone far beyond our late lamented President.”36
Grant’s efforts transcended high-profile appointments as he named a record number of ordinary blacks to positions during his first term in office.37 During the 1872 presidential campaign, Frederick Douglass toted up black employees sprinkled throughout the federal bureaucracy, citing customs collectors, internal revenue assessors, postmasters, clerks, and messengers, and was simply staggered by their numbers: “In one Department at Washington I found 249, and many more holding important positions in its service in different parts of the country.”38 Grant integrated the executive mansion, appointing Albert Hawkins as his stable chief and coachman; he also cared for a Grant menagerie that included dogs, gamecocks, and a raucous parrot. For his personal servants, Grant picked George W. “Bill” Barnes and John Henry Whitlow. The able Barnes had been a runaway slave who showed up when Grant was in Cairo in 1861 and had turned himself into an indispensable valet.
Mortified at memories of General Orders No. 11, Grant compiled an outstanding record of incorporating Jews into his administration, one that far outstripped his predecessors’. The lawyer Simon Wolf estimated that Grant appointed more than fifty Jewish citizens at his request alone, including consuls, district attorneys, and deputy postmasters, with Wolf himself becoming recorder of deeds for the District of Columbia. When Grant made Edward S. Salomon governor of the Washington Territory, it was the first time an American Jew had occupied a gubernatorial post. (When Salomon proved corrupt, Grant handled his case leniently, letting him resign.) Elated at this appointment, Rabbi Isaac Mayer Wise said it showed “that President Grant has revoked General Grant’s notorious order No. 11.”39
Grant also introduced a crusading spirit in protecting Jewish rights abroad, even if it clashed with other foreign policy interests. In the past, such concerns had been criticized as interfering with the internal affairs of other nations. Now Grant set a new benchmark for fostering human rights abroad, growing out of his concern for persecuted Jews. In November 1869, reports surfaced that Russia had brutally relocated two thousand Jewish families to the interior on smuggling charges—an episode faintly reminiscent of Grant’s own wartime order. After conferring with American Jewish leaders, Grant responded in exemplary fashion. “It is too late, in this age of enlightenment,” he told them, “to persecute any one on account of race, color or religion.”40 He protested to the czar while the American ambassador in Russia formulated a state paper documenting coercion against Russian Jews. The New York World professed satisfaction at how superior this Grant was to “that General Grant who issued . . . an order suddenly exiling all the Jews from their homes within the territory occupied by his armies.”41
A still more menacing episode of anti-Semitism emerged in June 1870 with reports of “fearful massacres” against Romanian Jews, at least a thousand of whom were said to have been murdered in a pogrom. (The reports proved exaggerated.) Walking over to the State Department, Grant ordered Fish “to obtain full and reliable information in relation to this alleged massacre, and in the meantime to do all in his power to have the [neighboring] Turkish government stop such persecution.”42 In discussing this Romanian bloodletting with Simon Wolf, Grant declared that “respect for human rights” was the “first duty” of any head of state and that blacks and Jews should be elevated to a rank of “equality with the most enlightened.” Grant showed surprising passion on the subject, saying “the story of the sufferings of the Hebrews of Roumania profoundly touches every sensibility of our nature.”43
In December, Grant appointed Benjamin Franklin Peixotto, a Sephardic Jewish lawyer and journalist from San Francisco, as U.S. consul general to Romania. Grant spelled out Peixotto’s mission in a groundbreaking statement that stands as a landmark in Am
erican diplomatic annals: “Mr Peixotto has undertaken the duties of his present office more as a missionary work for the benefit of the people who are laboring under severe oppression than for any benefits to accrue to himself . . . The United States knowing no distinction of her own citizens on account of religion or nativity naturally believe in a civilization the world over which will secure the same universal liberal views.”44 For the next five years, without an official salary, Peixotto performed major work investigating conditions in Romania and the Balkans, opposing anti-Semitism, and even providing sanctuary in his own home for Jews menaced by oppression.
The unceasing pressure for federal jobs that confronted Grant at every step mirrored a far larger phenomenon: the vast transformation of American government wrought by the war. Federal power had expanded immeasurably, testing the president’s ability to manage the change. The National Bank Acts, the Homestead Act, the Morrill Act setting up land-grant universities—such wartime measures dramatically broadened Washington’s authority. Boasting fifty-three thousand employees, the federal government ranked as the nation’s foremost employer. Before the war, it had touched citizens’ lives mostly through the postal system. Now it taxed citizens directly, conscripted them into the army, oversaw a national currency, and managed a giant national debt. As James M. McPherson has pointed out, eleven of the first twelve amendments to the Constitution constrained governmental power; starting with the Thirteenth Amendment, six of the next seven enlarged it.45 The war also centralized power, welding states closer together and forging a new sense of nationhood. As Grant told a relative, “Since the late civil war the feeling of nationality had become stronger than it had ever been before.”46 When the first transcontinental railroad, aided by land grants and government bonds, was completed two months after Grant took office, it heralded a new geographic unity in American life.
Fueled by war contracts, the northern economy had burgeoned into a mighty, productive engine that exploded with entrepreneurial energy, eclipsing the small-scale, largely agricultural antebellum economy and catapulting the country into the front ranks of world powers. As the flush of wartime idealism faded, the Grant presidency ushered in the Gilded Age, marked by a mad scramble for money and producing colossal new fortunes. During the postwar boom, industrial trusts began to dominate one industry after another, creating growing inequalities of wealth and spawning a corresponding backlash from labor unions and the general public. New technologies, especially the railroad and telegraph, made the economy continental in scope, bringing forth modern industries and flooding the country with a cornucopia of consumer goods.
The rise of big business required government assistance, providing fresh opportunities for graft to abound. With the federal government bound up in new moneymaking activities, there arose a gigantic grab for filthy lucre that affected statehouses as well and saturated the political system with corruption. Businesses bargained for tax breaks, government contracts, land grants, and other favors, undermining democratic institutions that found it hard to withstand this assault. The mounting wealth also meant the dominant Republican Party was torn between its idealistic, abolitionist past and its business-oriented future.
In dealing with these changes, Grant inevitably bore a sizable load on his shoulders. He knew the postwar economic boom was uneven, the South having surrendered half its wealth, while four million freed slaves struggled to find their niche in American society. He had to deal with the paradox that while demands upon the presidency had grown exponentially, the Congress-dominated system of the Johnson years had drastically weakened the executive branch. In the nineteenth century, Congress was infinitely more powerful than in the twentieth and senators ruled as headstrong barons whose power often rivaled that of presidents. Grant had a special political conundrum to figure out. The Radical Republicans who formed his power base were the very people who had asserted congressional power during Andrew Johnson’s impeachment. The deep-seated habit of promoting congressional prerogatives against the president would be fiendishly difficult to subdue, many senators having grown accustomed to exercising unchecked power.
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ALTHOUGH ITS POPULATION WAS SWELLING, much of the Washington over which Grant presided languished as undeveloped wasteland. “It is out at the elbows, shabby at the toes, generally dingy and neglected,” griped a lady visitor. “There are vast, dreary, uninhabited tracts, destitute of verdure and roamed over by herds of horse cars and hacks.”47 The soldiers who camped there during the war had leveled grass and bushes, leaving barren patches instead of parkland. Grant remembered the capital that year as “a most unsightly place . . . disagreeable to pass through in Summer in consequence of the dust arising from unpaved streets, and almost impassable in the winter from the Mud.”48
Perhaps more than any other president, Grant oversaw the evolution of Washington from a straggling village into a modern city with well-paved sidewalks, sewers, and water and gas mains, enabling him to claim that it became “one of the most sightly cities in the country, and can boast of being the best paved.”49 Working with the vice chairman of the board of public works, Alexander R. Shepherd, Grant adorned public parks with trees and shrubbery, straightened a third of the city’s roads, laid sidewalks where none had existed, introduced many streetlights, and signed legislation to finish the Washington Monument. With Orville Babcock heading the office charged with public buildings and grounds, Grant showed a surprisingly keen eye for government architecture and became so identified with a heavy, ornate design—the best example being the State, War, and Navy Building, now the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, adjacent to the White House—that it would be dubbed the “General Grant style” as it was replicated at post offices and courthouses across America.
The White House—then styled the executive mansion—required such thorough renovation that Julia Grant decided they should wait two weeks to move in while new wallpaper and carpets were installed. Because no West Wing or Oval Office yet existed, Grant held his cabinet meetings and kept his office on the second floor. His most noticeable additions to the mansion were a wood-paneled billiard room, rather solemnly decorated with stained glass windows and illuminated by gaslight chandeliers, and a pool set up on the south lawn that erupted with decorative water spray. Reflecting Republican hegemony, Grant removed the Thomas Jefferson statue from the north lawn, relegating it to Statuary Hall in the Capitol.
Julia Grant expressed shock at her predecessors’ housekeeping and son Jesse recoiled at “the dingy, shabby carpets and furniture in this new home.”50 Since Grant was devoid of interest in interior decorating, Julia refurbished the White House, sprucing it up at considerable expense. She lavishly redecorated the East Room, swathing it in blue satin curtains and upholstery. Instead of Gilbert Stuart’s portrait of George Washington in the Red Room, she hung a Grant family portrait that showed her grandly surrounded by her children, her uxorious husband standing stiffly to one side, a bit upstaged. Grant managed to get an equestrian portrait of himself hung in the Green Room. Finding the ushers and messengers unkempt in appearance, Julia decided to turn them out “in dress suits and white gloves.”51 She also cleared the south lawn, which had been a haunt for public loungers, slammed shut the iron gates, and created a “beautiful lawn” for her and the children, often overseen by the president as he smoked cigars on a porch rocking chair.52 Few First Ladies—and the name wasn’t yet commonly used—have so reveled in the White House or developed such a proprietary feeling about it. “Eight happy years I spent there—so happy!” Julia would reminisce. “It still seems as much like home to me as the old farm in Missouri, White Haven.”53
By January 1, 1870, with the remodeling complete, Julia began to play hostess with a vengeance. The first and most brilliant early dinner came on January 26 when the Grants entertained Prince Arthur, third son of Queen Victoria. Both British and American flags hung in the State Dining Room as guests munched their way through a dinner of Gilded Age luxuriance,
twenty-nine courses in all. Grant had imported an army chef whose idea of fine cuisine consisted of heavy slabs of roast beef and cheese piled high atop apple pie. Julia fired him and hired an Italian steward named Valentino Melah, who still plied groaning guests with up to thirty-five dishes in an evening, with a new wine introduced at every third course; he replaced roast beef with partridge and lighter delicacies. At the center of the State Dining Room stood a horseshoe-shaped table with a large flower-draped mirror that when angled allowed Grant to screen himself from guests he especially wished to dodge.
Because of the Civil War, the White House had acquired a lugubrious atmosphere under Lincoln while the Johnson impeachment trial had further eroded social festivities in the capital. Now, with Julia’s exuberant hospitality, the mansion emerged as the center of a splendid social scene. Each Tuesday afternoon she received visitors while her husband held evening receptions every other week. Julia developed the winning idea of inviting wives of cabinet secretaries, senators, and friends to assist her in greeting visitors on the receiving line and, reversing long-standing tradition, she made sure they were incorporated into state dinners. Although faulted for extravagance, she never felt the least twinge of guilt on the subject: “I have visited many courts and, I am proud to say, I saw none that excelled in brilliancy the receptions of President Grant.”54
Julia also helped to democratize the White House. With her sociability offsetting her husband’s shyness, she drew praise for her cordiality and openness to all guests. “Of all the public receptions at the capital . . . Mrs. Grant’s weekly audiences are perhaps the most enjoyable, and certainly the most peculiarly republican gatherings,” wrote one journalist, noting “the poorest working woman” was invited to join them. The conversation was lively and often unexpectedly provocative. “Woman suffrage was the burning question of the hour; and in this Mrs. Grant showed great interest.”55 One army officer believed Julia’s strabismus handicapped her as a hostess: “Her somewhat impaired vision, with perhaps inability to recall the crowded past promptly, interfered in later years with her recognition of persons in power.”56 Still self-conscious about being cross-eyed, Julia tended to pose for photographs in profile. To deal with her correspondence, she required a private secretary to assist her. Despite this drawback, she became a popular First Lady who impressed the vast majority of visitors. As one cabinet member wrote after dining next to her, “She is intelligent, lady-like, and particularly pleased me by speaking of her husband as ‘Mr. Grant.’”57