Grant

by Ron Chernow

  Grant’s dealings with Gould, Fisk, and Corbin show that even as president, he was still the same trusting rube who had been hoodwinked by business sharpers before the war. His sin was one of naïveté, not malice or lack of scruples, his sole concern being the welfare of the country. “This is only one of a thousand instances in which the President has been duped,” James H. Wilson wrote, regretting Rawlins’s sudden absence.21 The Gold Corner set the pattern for future Grant scandals. The personal integrity of the president was never questioned, only his judgment in consorting with unsavory characters, oblivious to the impression it might create. He was a soft touch for schemers and this began to tarnish his public image. Robert Bonner, the editor of the New York Ledger, pleaded with Grant to make a public statement disclaiming “all foreknowledge of that combination, in order to relieve yourself entirely from all responsibility for the acts of others.”22 Lincoln had been a master at sending letters to newspaper editors that gave important glimpses into his thinking. Now Grant penned a letter to Bonner that said, “I had no more to do with the late gold excitement in New York City than yourself, or any other innocent party, except that I ordered the sale of gold to break the ring engaged, as I thought, in a most disreputable transaction.”23 Bonner wired back that his statement had struck the bull’s-eye. “Your letter has already done a vast deal of good.”24

  Butterfield was never charged with a crime and always maintained his innocence, but his reputation had been sullied and Grant asked for his resignation. The House Committee on Banking and Currency launched an investigation, with some members hoping to tar Grant himself, but the worst charge they could level was his lack of judgment in accepting the hospitality of Gould and Fisk. Though innocent himself, Grant had allowed himself to be carried briefly in the talons of two of Wall Street’s most rapacious financiers. “With the conventional air of assumed confidence,” wrote Henry Adams, “everyone in public assured every one else that the President himself was the savior of the situation, and in private assured each other that if the President had not been caught this time, he was sure to be trapped the next, for the ways of Wall Street were dark and double.”25

  By this point Adams had emerged as the most waspish critic of the Grant administration. He rated Grant “the greatest general the world had seen since Napoleon,” but his political behavior was another matter.26 It wasn’t surprising that a fastidious Boston Brahmin such as Adams would find Grant uncouth and boorish, a common reaction among the eastern intelligentsia. The grandson of John Quincy Adams and the son of former U.S. minister in London Charles Francis Adams Sr., Henry Adams counted William Dean Howells, Henry James, and John Hay among his glittering galaxy of friends. A thoroughgoing snob and Washington resident, he found the capital a social backwater and groaned that no “literary or scientific man, no artist, no gentleman . . . had ever lived there.”27 Adams must have sensed that Grant loathed his entire clan. In one letter, Grant wrote that “I confess to a repugnance to the appointment of an Adams,” and in another he protested that the family did “not possess one noble trait of character that I ever heard of, from old John Adams down to the last of all of them, H. B.”28

  Henry Adams’s failure to secure a niche in the Grant administration dealt a blow to his family vanity and amour propre. The chief of the spurned literati, he became a scathing critic of the spoils system under Grant and savaged his appointees with a pen dipped in vitriol. He damned Grant’s cabinet as mediocrities, especially Boutwell, although he saved kind words for Secretary of the Interior Cox and Attorney General Hoar. “My family is buried politically beyond recovery for years,” he complained. “I am becoming more and more isolated as far as allies go.”29 Adams didn’t receive from Grant the social deference to which he felt entitled and recorded this mordant impression of a White House reception in December 1869: “At last Mrs. Grant strolled in. She squints like an isosceles triangle, but is not more vulgar than some Duchesses. Her sense of dignity did not allow her to talk to me, but occasionally she condescended to throw me a constrained remark.”30

  Adams got his revenge with a series of withering aperçus about Grant that have clung like barnacles to his historical reputation. He said the initials “U. S.” stood for “uniquely stupid.”31 His most barbed comment was that Grant had single-handedly refuted Darwinian evolution: “The progress of evolution from President Washington to President Grant, was alone evidence enough to upset Darwin.”32 The comments, both hilarious and totally unfair, have been irresistible fodder for historians. Adams saw Grant as lacking a guiding sense of purpose as he piloted the ship of state, reducing governance to discrete issues devoid of an overarching design.

  By an extraordinary coincidence, Adams occupied the same G Street boardinghouse as Adam Badeau, whom he recalled as a stout, red-faced, bespectacled little man. They shared a common fascination with the Grant enigma. Badeau boasted that only he and John Rawlins had truly understood the general. Adams and Badeau agreed that Grant came alive amid wartime danger, then lapsed back into inertia when the threat subsided. As Adams expressed it: “When in action he was superb and safe to follow; only when torpid he was dangerous.”33 He summarized Badeau’s similar view: “To him, Grant appeared as an intermittent energy, immensely powerful when awake, but passive and plastic in repose.”34

  For all his hero worship of Grant, Badeau harbored secret reservations that he voiced to Henry Adams, who summarized them thus:

  [Badeau] said that neither he nor the rest of the staff knew why Grant succeeded; they believed in him because of his success. For stretches of time, his mind seemed torpid. Rawlins and the others would systematically talk their ideas into it, for weeks, not directly but by discussion among themselves, in his presence. In the end, he would announce the idea as his own, without seeming conscious of the discussion; and would give the orders to carry it out with all the energy that belonged to his nature. They could never measure his character or be sure when he would act. They could never follow a mental process in his thought. They were not sure that he did think.35

  Though the portrait was overdrawn—Grant clearly thought a great deal about many matters—he did pick up ideas by a strange process of osmosis and made them fully his own. Many people said they could not follow the steps of his mental development because they were often secretive, interior, and hidden from view, the result of a powerfully intuitive process. Grant didn’t have a systematic mind, nor did he arrange his ideas inside a larger theoretical scaffolding, and he was therefore a mystery to himself and others. When Henry Adams probed people about Grant’s extraordinary success, they all seemed dumbfounded: “‘We do not know why the President is successful; we only know that he succeeds.’”36

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  WHILE HE PROVED a constant irritant to Grant, Adams was merely a gadfly who posed no enduring threat beyond his wickedly funny pen. Far more fraught was the relationship with another prickly Bostonian, Senator Charles Sumner, whose differences with Grant would fester and assume the dimensions of a pathological feud that bloodied both participants. As shown in his zeal for Andrew Johnson’s impeachment, the redoubtable Sumner could be motivated by idealism and implacable hatred at once. He was, in many ways, a kindred spirit to the curmudgeonly Adams. “The boy Henry worshipped him,” Adams wrote, “and if he ever regarded any older man as a personal friend, it was Mr. Sumner.”37

  Handsome, Harvard-educated, a cosmopolitan traveler, Sumner had long been adored by abolitionists. Right before the Civil War, his antislavery crusade led the South Carolina representative Preston Brooks to thrash him severely with a cane on the Senate floor, transforming him into a secular saint. As he droned on in endless, windy speeches, the sanctimonious Sumner was easier to admire than to love. A cold, humorless bachelor, he sashayed around Washington with his walking stick, glorying in his self-importance. As Grant’s son Jesse recalled, he “was a tall man of commanding appearance, rendered doubly conspicuous by the garments he wore . . . He always wore the most
glaring clothes I have ever seen on a civilized man: heavy plaids in vividly contrasting colors, looming above a foundation of white spats.”38 Sumner’s mandarin hauteur stood opposed to Grant’s modesty and his baroque language was a world apart from Grant’s spare eloquence.

  Grant had admired Sumner’s statesmanship and ardent abolitionism. Sumner, for his part, had high praise for Grant as a soldier, but reluctantly endorsed him for president and only belatedly threw his weight behind him during the 1868 race. Dismissing Grant as an intellectual lightweight, he fancied he would function as Grant’s tutor on foreign policy and expected to be named secretary of state as a reward for his support. His hopes were dashed when his friend Fish beat him out for the post, and he bristled further as Grant toed an independent line in foreign policy. With a sense of senatorial privilege, Sumner expected to dominate American foreign policy and suggested appointments. “Mr. Sumner . . . who is the idol of the reformers, was among the first senators to ask offices for his friends,” Grant noted. “He expected offices as a right.”39 Chairing the Foreign Relations Committee, he also expected his views to prevail. Sumner typified a Senate that had grown arrogant and imperious, demanding patronage as the price of its cooperation with the president. The press and reformers expected Grant to tame the headstrong Senate, a clash that would come to a head in his conflict with Sumner.

  Although Sumner failed to become secretary of state, he scored a major victory in April 1869 when Grant named, at his recommendation, the historian John Lothrop Motley as minister to England. A graduate of Harvard, Motley had studied in Germany, served in the diplomatic corps in St. Petersburg, and written a magisterial history of the Dutch republic. Learned but irascible, a habitué of aristocratic drawing rooms, he had acted as American minister to the Austrian Empire until he started to find fault with Johnson administration policy and surrendered his post.

  When Motley returned to the United States, he delivered stirring campaign speeches for Grant, whom he had idolized during the war. Before the inauguration, he cultivated Grant’s company, even reading manuscript chapters of Badeau’s military history of Grant’s wartime service. He impressed Grant as “a gentleman, a scholar and a man of ability, fully capable of representing his government in any capacity.”40 Still, Grant had private reservations, complaining that Motley “parts his hair in the middle and carries a single eye glass.”41 “In truth,” wrote Henry Adams, “Grant disliked Motley at sight, because they had nothing in common.”42 Although he chafed at Sumner’s pressure, Grant succumbed to his lobbying and appointed Motley, making Adam Badeau his assistant secretary of legation in London. Sumner prided himself on Motley’s appointment, but it was to embroil Grant in protracted controversy with the self-aggrandizing senator.

  The flashpoint in their fractured relationship revolved around the CSS Alabama claims, which dated from the war. This incendiary issue dredged up potent emotions. Constructed in a British shipyard, the Alabama had been the most lethal Confederate blockade runner preying on Union ships, seizing or demolishing dozens before being destroyed by the USS Kearsarge off Cherbourg in June 1864. As Grant reminded people, the depredations of the Alabama and other Confederate raiders outfitted in England had wreaked havoc with Union shipping, driven up insurance costs, prolonged the war, and forced desperate American exporters to resort to foreign ships. In these ways, the indirect costs of the Alabama raids added up to stupendous sums, dealing a blow to America’s merchant marine and forcing it to cede shipping supremacy to Great Britain. British dependence upon southern cotton for its textile mills had engendered a pro-southern bias in certain circles, and the Alabama’s activities seemed to belie British claims to wartime neutrality. Grant had been incensed by this betrayal, complaining that the British government had supplied torpedoes, fuses, and guns to the Confederacy, all crafted in its arsenals.

  In the waning days of the Johnson administration, William Seward had pursued an indemnity from England, asking for all of Canada as recompense for crippled Union shipping. In the end, he settled for much less compensation incorporated into the Johnson-Clarendon Convention, which he submitted to the Senate as Grant was about to assume power. The agreement outraged the American electorate, which found it too timid in its demands upon the British. Grant believed that Seward had usurped his prerogatives as an incoming president by trying to arbitrate the Alabama claims at the close of the Johnson regime.

  The Johnson-Clarendon Convention still lay before the Senate when Grant became president and Sumner delivered its coup de grâce. On the Senate floor, he issued a flaming denunciation of the treaty, contending the Civil War had been “doubled in duration” by Britain’s treacherous support for the Confederacy.43 Not simply wanting compensation for destroyed American vessels, he added a still more explosive demand: that Britain pay a staggering $2 billion in indirect damages for extending the war and undermining America’s merchant marine. He wanted Canada thrown in as a lagniappe and inflamed the situation further by calling for a British admission of guilt and an apology; Grant and Fish would have settled for an expression of regret. Sumner’s words stirred up fellow senators, arousing such bellicose passions that the Senate defeated the Johnson-Clarendon Convention by a huge margin. With his speech, Sumner staked his claim to leadership in foreign policy under Grant.

  The British were shocked by Sumner’s intemperate language. Lord Clarendon, Britain’s foreign secretary, denounced him for the “most extravagant hostility to England,” while The Times of London called him a demagogue.44 The Grant administration was taken unawares by Sumner’s screed. While sharing his indignation and seeking substantial reparations, Grant and Fish saw a chance for a negotiated solution with William Gladstone’s new liberal government and a rapprochement with England. Should this not occur, they feared war with England and an erosion in credit extended by British banks to American industry. Fish also hoped to push for Canadian independence, expecting the United States then to annex the country peacefully. Grant, although bitter over England’s wartime duplicity, was a true-blue anglophile at heart. “England and the United States are natural allies, and should be the best of friends,” he declared in his Memoirs. “They speak one language, and are related by blood and other ties. We together . . . are better qualified than any other people to establish commerce between all the nationalities of the world.”45

  That Sumner intended to oversee Alabama negotiations was underscored when Motley, before sailing to England, drew up a fifteen-thousand-word memorandum that would govern his diplomacy on the issue. It exuded the same venom as Sumner’s speech, decrying British policy as “a sin against humanity, a disgrace to civilization.”46 It was undoubtedly influenced, if not partly drafted, by the senator himself. Fish found the document belligerent, suppressed it, and drew up more circumspect instructions. Sumner then confronted Fish and tried to induce him to accept the paper. Fish could be tough in a low-key way and refused to submit to Sumner’s bullying. When Sumner threatened that he would urge Motley to resign, Fish refused to be blackmailed. For Grant it came as a harsh initiation into the trouble an insolent senator could cause. By early June, the London Times reported that a “social breach” had opened between Grant and Sumner.47

  Grant placed a high priority on something that should have pleased Sumner, the welfare of black citizens, to whom he offered unprecedented White House access. On December 11, 1869, he received a delegation from the mostly black National Labor Convention. While he couldn’t gratify all their wishes, especially their desire to redistribute land to black laborers in the South, he left no doubt of his extreme solicitude for their concerns. “I have done all I could to advance the best interests of the citizens of our country, without regard to color,” he told them, “and I shall endeavor to do in the future what I have done in the past.”48

  Grant designated November 30 as the date for Mississippi and Texas to vote on new state constitutions that would guarantee black rights and readmit them to the Union. When Mississip
pi’s new, heavily Republican, legislature gathered in January, it signaled a radical shift in southern politics in its selection of two new senators. One was Adelbert Ames and the other Hiram Revels, a minister who became the first black person to serve in the U.S. Senate. In a powerful piece of symbolism, Revels occupied the Senate seat once held by Jefferson Davis. Former slaves looked on with wonder as they gained a new place in state legislatures and in Washington. For many southern whites, however, the idea that their erstwhile slaves could now hold office and even gain the upper hand in their political lives was intolerable. It reinforced their growing conviction that secession had been, as The Nation phrased it, “not wicked, but holy and glorious.”49

  Each step in black emancipation had led ineluctably to the next, and the controversial next goal was granting black males the right to vote. After the Thirteenth Amendment abolished slavery and the Fourteenth conferred citizenship rights upon blacks, the Fifteenth prevented states from denying voting rights based on race, color, or earlier condition of servitude. For Grant this last amendment embodied the logical culmination of everything he had fought for during the war. In Badeau’s words, he thought that “in order to secure the Union which he desired and which the Northern people had fought for, a voting population at the South friendly to the Union was indispensable.”50 He watched ratification of the Fifteenth Amendment with the keenest sympathy. “You will see by the papers that the ratification of the Fifteenth Amendment is assured!” he exulted to Elihu Washburne in late January 1870. “With this question out of politics, and reconstruction completed, I hope to see such good feeling in Congress as to secure rapid legislation and an early adjournment.”51