by Ron Chernow
Despite Grant’s wish to bring probity to Indian affairs, the Indian Ring, with its legion of swindling agents, went on fleecing its clients, and Grant continued to express uncommon sympathy for the victims’ plight. “I don’t like riding over and shooting these poor savages; I want to conciliate them and make them peaceful citizens,” he told a reporter.53 When one reformer asked if he planned to modify his Indian policy, Grant replied, “I do not believe our Creator ever placed different races of men on this earth with the view of having the stronger exert all his energies in exterminating the weaker.”54
From the start, Parker had endorsed Grant’s policy of dealing with Indian tribes humanely, guiding the Indian Bureau “with a view to the maintenance of peace, and the avoidance of expensive and horrible Indian wars.”55 He believed the days of unlimited Indian freedom were over and that roving bands of Plains Indians must be sequestered on reservations. Lobbied by railroads, Congress revoked the treaty system that regarded these areas as independent states, with no more treaties signed after 1871. Along with Grant, Parker had worked to incorporate Indian tribes into the United States as partially self-governing territories, but many tribes resisted the imposition of any outside form of government.
In pursuing peace with Native Americans, Grant was trying to square the circle. It was hard to be just to the Indians and protect railroads and white settlers at the same time. As a military man, he didn’t wish to constrain the style of his commanders, but some of them dealt with Indian incursions in a bloodthirsty manner. In the end, Grant had to show the velvet glove and iron fist at once. Issuing instructions to General Schofield in 1872, for instance, Grant warned that “Indian hostilities should be avoided in the future,” giving way to “a policy to civilize and elevate” the Indians. On the other hand, “Indians who will not put themselves under the restraints required will have to be forced, even to the extent of making war upon them, to submit to measures that will insure security to the white settlers of the Territories.”56
In the last analysis, land speculators and railroad companies, in cahoots with their congressional allies, almost guaranteed that punitive policies would supersede Grant’s humane intentions. As Indian commissioner Samuel Tappan told Grant, these powerful forces “rush blindly and madly on, evidently intent upon robbing the Indian of every inch of his land, and forcing the last of his race into the grave by the cowardly and bloody hand of betrayal and massacre.”57 In meeting with Red Cloud, Red Dog, and other Oglala Sioux chieftains in Washington in May 1872, Grant evoked the burgeoning American population, the westward tidal flow of immigrants, and the demise of Indian hunting culture as unstoppable forces: “The time must come when, with the great growth of population here, the game will be gone, and your people will then have to resort to other means of support; and while there is time we would like to teach you new modes of living that will secure you in the future and be a safe means of livelihood.”58 Grant promised to send the Oglala Sioux large herds of sheep and cattle for raising stock and to build schools that would teach them English. For the Indians, however, this didn’t mean salvation so much as the wanton destruction of their traditional culture.
Grant had a complicated relationship with the American West, one that foreshadowed the competing impulses of future federal land management. He handed over millions of acres to settlers and miners and promoted the growth of railroads. At the same time, sensitive to scenic beauty, he established Yellowstone as the first national park on March 1, 1872. President Lincoln had signed a bill in 1864 that permitted California to preserve the Yosemite Valley and the giant sequoias of the Mariposa Grove, but it was Grant who initiated the modern national park system.
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AFTER A TUMULTUOUS first term in office, Grant occasionally dreamed of returning to his farm in St. Louis. “I was not anxious to be President a second term,” he confided to a reporter, “but I consented to receive the nomination simply because I thought that was the best way of discovering whether my countrymen . . . really believed all that was alleged against my administration and against myself personally.”59 While Grant said memorably that he “probably had the least desire for [the office] of anyone who ever held it,” the habit of power, perhaps imperceptibly, had acquired an inescapable hold over him.60 As Adam Badeau observed drily, “After he had been long in power he was not insensible to the sweets of possession, and was decidedly averse to relinquishing what he had enjoyed.”61 Like most presidents, he yearned for affirmation and a general vote of confidence from the electorate.
Such was Grant’s personal popularity—his wartime prestige stood quite apart from his administration’s record—that his renomination by Republicans was a foregone conclusion. Yet a growing number of disaffected party members questioned whether he could be reelected. In March 1871, the nucleus of a breakaway party met in Cincinnati, led by Jacob Cox, Grant’s disgruntled former interior secretary, and one hundred Republicans signed its declaration of principles. One ringleader was Senator Carl Schurz of Missouri, who predicted that “the superstition that Grant is the necessary man is rapidly giving way.”62 By September, Schurz clamored openly for a new Liberal Republican Party and espoused a general amnesty for former Confederates. He inveighed against “Negro supremacy” and referred to Reconstruction as “the horror, the nightmare, of the Southern people.”63
The new movement represented a curious blend of progressive and reactionary impulses, all trotted out under the rubric of reform. These dissenting Republicans recoiled at the scandals that tarnished Grant’s first term—what newspapers had now christened “Grantism”—and the advent of political bosses. They favored civil service reform, sound money, low tariffs, and states’ rights. Led by Brahmins, who felt threatened by urban machines and party bosses who cooperated with immigrants and laborers, the movement had a decidedly elitist tinge. Associating Reconstruction with political corruption and shabby government, these “reformers” espoused the withdrawal of federal troops from the South and railed against “bayonet rule.” Many identified with the white southern elite. To understand Grant’s position it is worth stressing that it was Liberal Republicans—self-righteous, good-government folks—not conservative businessmen and Stalwart Party bosses who decided that black citizens were suddenly expendable.
The new party included such presidential hopefuls as Charles Francis Adams Sr. of Massachusetts and Senator Lyman Trumbull of Illinois, who caustically observed of Grant, “The people are tired of a man who has not an idea above a horse or a cigar.”64 It boasted a smattering of abolitionists, including Theodore Tilton and Salmon P. Chase. There was also a healthy representation of those who nursed personal grievances against Grant, including Sumner, Motley, and Fenton. Then came old journalistic nemeses such as Whitelaw Reid, who penned the damning description of Shiloh, and Murat Halstead, who blasted Grant for wartime drinking. Many blue bloods still patronized Grant as a commoner with western roots who lacked their cosmopolitan touch.
On May 1, 1872, the Liberal Republican convention met in Cincinnati. In his keynote speech, Schurz asserted they would no longer “permit themselves to be driven like a flock of sheep.”65 The unruly gathering went through six ballots before choosing New York Tribune editor Horace Greeley as their presidential candidate and Missouri governor B. Gratz Brown as his running mate. Greeley’s selection was greeted with jeers and laughter. Despite the abolitionist credentials of many delegates, the convention endorsed “home rule” in the South under the old white elite, and faulted the Ku Klux Klan Act as an unwarranted federal intrusion upon state liberties. Greeley intended to make Grant’s Reconstruction policy the centerpiece of his campaign “in the confident trust that the masses of our countrymen, North and South, are eager to clasp hands across the bloody chasm which has too long divided them.”66
Grant was incensed at the apostasy of old friends. In the Cincinnati convention, he discerned mischief perpetrated by Democrats wishing to divide Republicans. When the time
came, he thought the Democratic convention would refuse to adopt Greeley as their candidate as well, forcing him out of the race. Many onlookers thought Greeley would march the new party straight off a cliff. “I don’t know whether you are aware what a conceited, ignorant, half-cracked, obstinate old creature he is,” E. L. Godkin of The Nation told Schurz. Schurz needed no reminding. He was astounded by the turn to Greeley, who opposed free trade and hard money and was lukewarm toward civil service reform. Schurz fruitlessly prodded Greeley to withdraw, saying his nomination was simply “a successful piece of political hucksterism.”67 Some people bolted the new party and returned to Grant. “That Grant is an Ass,” remarked an Ohio Liberal, “no man can deny, but better an Ass than a mischievous Idiot.”68
A couple of years earlier, Grant had judged Greeley an “honest, firm, untiring supporter of the republican party.”69 By 1872 he had settled into private contempt for him, believing he had tried to foist disreputable appointments upon him. He even thought Greeley suffered from a “mental disease” that led him to propose unsuitable characters for office.70 “Mr. Greeley is simply a disappointed man at not being estimated by others at the same value he places upon himself,” Grant wrote to Henry Wilson. “He is a genius without common sense. He attaches to himself, and reposes confidence only, in the fawning, deceitful and dishonest men of the party.”71 Grant wasn’t alone in detecting something faintly ludicrous about the new nominee. Thomas Nast made a cottage industry out of caricaturing the mercurial editor, while one newspaper taunted him as a “ridiculous political mouse.”72
Originally from New Hampshire, Greeley had been a printer’s apprentice in Vermont before moving to New York and commencing his journalistic career. Even before Thomas Nast set pen to paper, Greeley resembled a cartoon with his round face, wire-rimmed spectacles, ghostly pallor, and faint wisps of white hair straggling across a bald pate. With a shambling walk, he was slovenly in dress and partial to white dusters. A prophet of lost causes, he had identified himself with pet theories ranging from profit sharing to vegetarianism, temperance to utopian socialism. Even ardent admirers could find Greeley’s quixotic crusades infuriating. One of the original celebrity editors in American journalism, he showed a genius for self-promotion, as when he wrote, “Go West, young man.” Though based in New York, his newspaper boasted the largest circulation in the nation, making Greeley a force to be reckoned. “Meek as he looks,” commented Harriet Beecher Stowe, “no man living is readier with a strong sharp answer.”73
Greeley had been admirably consistent in fighting slavery. But during the war he had been a volatile figure, now for war, now for peace, driving Lincoln to distraction. “He is the most vacillating man in the country, or was during the war,” said Andrew Johnson.74 Greeley now executed a startling reversal away from African Americans. From being a wholehearted abolitionist, he became an exponent of southern amnesty who opposed the Ku Klux Klan law. “Not as much violence occurs in Texas as in New York City,” he assured an Arkansas paper in 1871. “There are more desperadoes in that city than in Texas, and it is harder work to manage them.”75 He typified northern Republicans who experienced moral fatigue on race issues and expressed newfound sympathy with southern whites, assailing black legislators in South Carolina as a “mass of ignorance and barbarism.”76 He resorted to racial stereotypes about freed people, reproving them as “an easy, worthless race” who took “no thought for the morrow.”77 For this reason abolitionist Wendell Phillips declared in disgust, “Liberal Republicanism is nothing but Ku-Klux-Klanism disguised,” and William Lloyd Garrison hotly disavowed the movement.78
After Greeley was chosen as the Liberal Republican standard-bearer, Charles Sumner renewed his campaign against Grant. On May 31, 1872, he delivered a lengthy Senate speech entitled Republicanism vs. Grantism, in which Grant was puffed up into a modern Caesar. In overheated language, he called Grant’s promotion of the Santo Domingo treaty “more unconstitutional and more illegal than anything alleged against Andrew Johnson on his impeachment.”79 He said the “august trust” of the presidency had been demeaned by nepotism, “fast horses, and sea-side loiterings,” and patronage to reward friends. He stirred up old charges that Grant had accepted houses and other gifts from people who wound up in his cabinet. In conclusion, Sumner said mockingly that Grant was “first in war,” but also “first in nepotism, first in gift-taking repaid by official patronage, first in presidential pretensions, and first in quarrel with his countrymen.”80 Sumner lived another two years, but his desertion of the Republican Party and endorsement of Greeley exiled him to the political wilderness.
In the weeks before the Republican convention in Philadelphia in early June, Grant remained passive, doing nothing to further his nomination, but he didn’t need to fret about the outcome, which would amount to an elaborate coronation. Although Liberal Republicans had fled, the Philadelphia convention showed Grant with a firm grip on those remaining. Former congressman Shelby M. Cullom of Illinois placed Grant’s name in nomination. The moment he uttered it, a huge, appreciative roar reverberated through the hall. From a hidden ceiling nook descended a giant portrait of Grant, transfixing the thousands assembled and kindling a wild tumult of enthusiasm. “The recent vindictive attacks on General Grant have created a strong reaction in his favor,” wrote Rutherford B. Hayes, “which accounts for the unexpected feeling in his behalf, I mean the unlooked-for enthusiasm.”81 Unanimously nominated, Grant received the votes of every state and territory, while the party platform made no apologies for his presidency. “This glorious record of the past is the party’s best pledge for the future,” it proclaimed.82
The only suspense in Philadelphia concerned the vice presidential nominee. Schuyler Colfax had been tainted by accepting stock in the Crédit Mobilier scandal, which had tarred many politicians, and he declined reelection. Since delegates worried about the impact of Sumner’s scathing words on Massachusetts voters, they opted for Senator Henry Wilson of Massachusetts, a Radical Republican and supporter of Reconstruction. An orphan trained as a shoemaker, he ended up operating a shoe factory, acquiring the nickname of the “Natick Cobbler.” To reporters Grant sounded diplomatic about the merits of both men: “Personally I have a great affection for both Wilson and Colfax. Mr. Colfax . . . has been a firm friend, and we have always entertained the most affectionate relations toward one another.”83 Since Colfax came from Indiana, Grant thought a ticket with Wilson would provide more geographic balance.
In early July, Democrats gathered in Baltimore knowing they had to join forces with Liberal Republicans to beat Grant. With their visceral dislike of the president, they followed the lead of Liberal Republicans, adopting their platform verbatim and nominating Greeley for president and Brown for vice president. Greeley was famous for his withering slurs against Democrats, having once said that while not all Democrats were horse thieves, all horse thieves were Democrats. He had denounced them as “traitors, slave-whippers, drunkards and lecherous beasts.”84 So in nominating Greeley, the convention had to take refuge in an awkward gallows humor. “If the Baltimore convention puts Greeley in our hymn book,” said one delegate, “we will sing him through if it kills us.”85 Even Democratic National Chairman August Belmont declared Greeley’s selection “one of those stupendous mistakes which it is difficult even to comprehend,” although he urged the party faithful to rally around him.86 Ex-senator James R. Doolittle of Wisconsin, who chaired the convention, gave the game away when he said the true aim of the novel fusion ticket was the “overthrow of Negro supremacy”—the anti-Reconstruction agenda, however thinly masked by reform rhetoric.87 Most Republicans stood aghast at the unsavory bargain struck in Baltimore. “It does not seem possible that such an unholy and corrupt alliance could possibly succeed,” remarked Elihu Washburne.88 Still, the electoral math showed that if Greeley could siphon off a significant fraction of Republican votes, added to unanimous Democratic support, he might indeed prevail.
For Grant, the election was
about more than personal vindication. He had long warned that a Democratic victory in 1872 would overturn the result of the Civil War, degrading the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments into “dead letters.”89 So deeply did he believe this that he stated “it would have been better never to have made a sacrifice of blood and treasure to save the Union than to have the democratic party come in power now and sacrifice by the ballot what the bayonet seemed to have accomplished.”90 Grant had striven to protect the black community, met regularly with black leaders, and given them unprecedented White House access, making global abolitionism an explicit aim of American foreign policy. In his annual message of December 1871, he applauded emancipation efforts in Brazil, deplored ongoing bondage in Cuba and Puerto Rico, and asked Congress for legislation to forbid Americans from “holding, owning, or dealing in slaves, or being interested in slave property in foreign lands”—a practice that hadn’t ceased with emancipation at home.91
Black leaders echoed Grant’s view that the merger of Liberal Republicans and Democrats threatened their welfare. Their views were vitally important because some southern states possessed enormous black populations that, coupled with Republican votes in the North, could easily determine the electoral outcome. Philip A. Bell told the black readership of his San Francisco newspaper, the Elevator, that Liberal Republicans were “the same men, who ten years ago, flung the lash at the slave markets of the South, they are the men who refused sitting in a street car, alongside with a colored man, and who now, when aware of your growing political importance, pretend to be your friends and claim your votes.”92 For the black community, Grant’s unstinting allegiance to the Fifteenth Amendment made him the hands-down favorite. “Grant secured to us the privilege of exercising that franchise,” a black Mississippian told Senator Adelbert Ames.93 In April, a black convention in New Orleans voted two-to-one to support Grant. That same month, while entertaining a delegation of black church leaders, Grant told them “that no one except themselves could be more gratified than he was that four millions of persons who had been held in bondage and disposed of as chattels were now free to think for themselves and worship God as they thought proper, and that civil rights for all were fast becoming recognized throughout the land.”94 Small wonder that civil rights leader George T. Downing reaffirmed that when it came to respecting black rights, “we have not had Grant’s equal in the Presidential chair.”95