Grant

by Ron Chernow

  Perhaps the most remarkable tribute to Grant came in a letter that September from leaders of the Convention of Colored Citizens of New England. It began: “Allow us to offer you a tribute of grateful hearts.” It praised his wartime service for helping to free “four millions of our race”; for making the Emancipation Proclamation a reality; for suppressing “the midnight murderous bands” who had perpetrated atrocities against southern blacks; and “for appointing men of our color Ministers Plenipotentiary, thus establishing the fact of your practical recognition of the equality of all men before the law.”96

  The 1872 presidential race provoked deep cleavages among abolitionists. When Sumner published an open letter to black voters, summoning them to abandon Grant, many erstwhile allies were speechless. “If the Devil himself were at the helm of the ship of state,” the abolitionist and women’s rights activist Lydia Maria Child responded, “my conscience would not allow me to aid in removing him to make room for the Democratic party.”97 She believed that when Liberal Republicans endorsed “state sovereignty,” it meant “when the Ku Klux renew their plans to exterminate Republicans, white and black, they shall be dealt with by Southern civil authorities—that is, by judges and jurors who are themselves members of the Ku Klux associations.”98 William Lloyd Garrison agreed that “home rule” meant “a blow aimed at the exercise of power entrusted to the President by Congress for the . . . protection of the Southern freedmen and loyalists against robbery, assassinations, and lynch-law barbarities.”99 Wendell Phillips exhorted black voters in the South: “Vote, every one of you, for Grant . . . If Greeley is elected, arm, concentrate, conceal your property, but organize for defense. You will need it soon.”100 Gerrit Smith invoked Grant’s thousands of anti-Klan indictments and warned that “the spirit of Kukluxism will not die out so long as the Democratic Party exists to sympathize with that spirit.”101 In the end, more than three-quarters of abolitionists closed ranks behind Grant.102

  By far the most important black endorsement came from Frederick Douglass, who actively campaigned for the president. He was dismayed by the betrayal of his hero, Charles Sumner, in supporting Greeley and asked him not to “give up the almost dumb millions to whom you have been mind and voice during a quarter of a century.”103 For Douglass, the black alliance with the Republican Party remained an inviolable trust. “If as a class we are slighted by the Republican party,” he noted, “we are as a class murdered by the Democratic party.”104 He swore he would rather blow his brains out than destroy the Republican Party.

  For Douglass, Grant was the general who had effected with the sword Lincoln’s emancipation policy, then extended those gains by backing the Fifteenth Amendment. “To Grant more than any other man the Negro owes his enfranchisement,” Douglass stated.105 Grant enjoyed a special niche in his pantheon, the assorted blemishes in his administration paling before his anti-Klan crusade in which “thousands have openly acknowledged the crimes charged . . . and peace had come to many places as never before. The scourging and slaughter of our people have so far ceased.”106 For readers, Douglass rattled off the unprecedented number of blacks Grant had appointed as ambassadors, customs collectors, internal revenue agents, postmasters, and clerks. Grant had also consistently welcomed him at the White House. “I have called upon him often . . . and have always found him to be easily accessible, gentlemanly, and cordial.”107

  Despite his unflagging advocacy for black rights, Grant never forgot the spirit of Appomattox and his desire for harmony between North and South. In May 1872, he signed legislation that extended amnesty and a restoration of rights to all former Confederates, except for a few hundred ex–rebel officers. He was willing to forgive any political offense as long as people were left free “to vote, speak & act” despite their “views, color or nativity.”108 He continued his relationship with the onetime Confederate partisan John Singleton Mosby, the “Gray Ghost” who had mercilessly harassed his troops in northern Virginia. After Appomattox, Grant insisted upon extending the same generous surrender terms to Mosby as to Lee. Mosby returned the favor by outlining a southern strategy for Grant that would help him carry Virginia in 1872, and the two became fast friends during Grant’s second term when Mosby turned into a frequent dinner guest at the White House.

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  IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY, it was still thought unseemly for a presidential candidate to campaign, and Grant gladly stayed on the sidelines. In justifying his decision to Roscoe Conkling, Grant noted that, in recent memory, only Stephen A. Douglas and Horatio Seymour had violated this custom and “both of them were public speakers, and both were beaten. I am no speaker and don’t want to be beaten.”109 Second terms had become a rarity, nobody having managed two full terms since Andrew Jackson. As Grant sat out the campaign, he repaired to Long Branch and journeyed periodically to Washington for cabinet meetings, often making the trip in a regular passenger train, where he smoked cigars and conversed with ordinary people.

  Despite his seeming detachment from the race, Grant possessed a finely honed political sense and an excellent grasp of state-by-state politics. When Henry Wilson told Grant’s friend George Childs that his ticket with Grant would likely be defeated, Childs conveyed this forecast to Grant. “The general said nothing, but sent for a map of the United States,” recalled Childs. “He laid the map on the table, went over it with a pencil, and said, ‘We will carry this State, that State, and that State’ . . . When the election came, the result was that Grant carried every State that he said he would.”110 Hamilton Fish confirmed his uncanny predictive powers: “I never met anyone who formed, in advance, better estimates of elections that were about to take place than General Grant.”111 Buoyed by this confidence, Grant was relaxed, even a bit cocky, as the campaign progressed. “There has been no time from the Baltimore Convention to this when I have felt the least anxiety,” Grant insisted in September.112 When one politician visited him in early October, he found Grant “just as easy as tho’ he were driving horses on a smooth road with a good cigar in his mouth.”113

  Grant was a formidable incumbent if only because his foe was so lackluster. Greeley campaigned from the back of a train, delivering scores of speeches and previewing the whistle-stop style that later marked presidential campaigns. His campaign stumbled from the start and never found a secure footing. He was kept busy explaining his history of derogatory statements about Democrats. “I never said all Democrats were saloon keepers,” he protested. “What I said was that all saloon keepers were Democrats.”114 The more Greeley talked, the lower he sagged in public esteem. “Greeley’s foolish speeches must surely weaken him,” wrote Rutherford B. Hayes, “and destroy what chances he had.”115 Greeley was a ready target for ridicule. Declaring open season on his candidacy, Thomas Nast drew Greeley scaling an enormous monument, “The Whited Sepulchre,” with the slogan “This is a white man’s government” scrawled across it.116 The hapless Greeley was subjected to such a personal pounding that he afterward sighed, “I hardly knew whether I was running for President or the Penitentiary.”117

  Grant projected a different image from the sturdy, independent Grant who had captured national attention in 1868. With less of a halo around his head, he was now a power broker chummy with influential barons, ankle-deep in patronage and deal making. As political machines lined up behind him, his sophisticated campaign included a “correspondent’s association” that supplied newspapers across the country with favorable editorials. Telegrams endorsing Grant were cranked out by Capitol Hill Republicans to constituents back home. Business interests applauded Grant’s stewardship of the country, his preference for low debt, high tariffs, and sound money. The Wall Street financier Henry Clews explained why he banged the drum for Grant: “Because I believed the sacredness of contracts, the stability of wealth, the success of business enterprise, and the prosperity of the whole country depended on the election of Grant for President.”118 Reflecting Grant’s appeal to business leaders, Jay Cooke funneled more
money into Grant’s campaign coffers than anybody else. With these new magnates so influential, the Republican Party was now a house divided, and Wendell Phillips complained that oligarchs and monopolists meant the party made “the rich richer, and the poor poorer, and turns a republic into an aristocracy of capital.”119

  However beholden to business interests, Grant knew the touchstone issue for the party remained Reconstruction. Even if wrapped in gauzy reform rhetoric, Greeley’s speeches dwelled on the damage Grant had done in the South and the need to restore “home rule” in the former Confederacy. For this reason, Grant predicted, “I do not think [Greeley] will carry a single Northern State,” although he thought his opponent might pick up southern and border states.120 When it came to Reconstruction, Grant was not the tool of moguls, but the champion of oppressed blacks, leading Henry Ward Beecher to proclaim there “had never been a President more sensitive to the wants of the people.”121 Despite conspicuous blunders in his first term, notably cronyism and the misbegotten Santo Domingo treaty, Grant had chalked up significant triumphs in suppressing the Klan, reducing debt, trying to clean up Indian trading posts, experimenting with civil service reform, and settling the Alabama claims peacefully. He had appointed a prodigious number of blacks, Jews, Native Americans, and women and delivered on his promise to give the country peace and prosperity.

  Like many adversaries in Grant’s past, Greeley supporters resuscitated old drinking rumors, which haunted the president even after the reality had largely vanished. The abolitionist Anna Dickinson claimed Grant had a “greater fondness for the smoke of a cigar and the aroma of a wine glass” than for running the country.122 So many New York newspapers harped on Grant’s putative drinking that George Templeton Strong erupted in indignation: “If it be true that a beastly drunkard, without a sense of decency, can successfully conduct great campaigns, can win great battles, and can raise himself from insignificance to be a lieutenant-general and President, what is the use of all this fuss about sobriety?”123 That Grant had largely been sober for four years testifies to his remarkable willpower and his wife’s vigilance and constant presence. When a southern correspondent asked Fish about Grant’s drinking, he replied that he had been with Grant at all hours but had never seen him influenced by liquor; any insinuations to the contrary were “utterly and wantonly false.”124

  Grant was the first president to confront the feminist movement as a viable political force. The same fervor for equality that generated abolitionism had spurred on feminists, who created the National Woman Suffrage Association in 1869. While Grant showed sympathy for women’s rights, he didn’t cover himself with glory on the issue. Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and other feminist leaders had opposed the Fifteenth Amendment unless the sequel was a Sixteenth granting women the right to vote. They wanted black and women’s suffrage to advance hand in hand. In spring 1872, a New York conference composed predominantly of women, under the banner of the Equal Rights Party, nominated thirty-four-year-old Victoria Woodhull as its first female candidate for president—she was legally too young to be president—on a platform dedicated to female voting rights. Two years earlier, Woodhull, a prophetess of free love, and her sister Tennessee Claflin had opened the first female brokerage house on Wall Street, secretly aided, it was said, by Cornelius Vanderbilt. On Election Day 1872, Woodhull wound up in jail, imprisoned for sending obscene materials through the mail, her paper having broadcast salacious details of Henry Ward Beecher’s alleged philandering.

  When the Republican Party met in Philadelphia that June, Susan B. Anthony implored the platform committee to take a stand for women’s suffrage. She got a rhetorical nod in that direction, what she termed a “splinter” in the platform, urging “respectful consideration to the rights of women.”125 Anthony, a temperance advocate, associated Grant with drink. When a reporter asked if he was her favorite candidate, she replied, “So far, yes. Personally, I do not admire Grant, and do not care to see a ‘fast man’ at the head of the nation; but . . . principles to me are more than individual character.” When the reporter asked whether Grant was friendly to the women’s movement, she answered, “Yes, and his wife, who is said to influence him greatly, is with us heart and soul. Grant’s letter of acceptance pleases me, inasmuch as the last paragraph recommends ‘equal rights to all citizens,’ which is evidently a sop thrown to us women.”126 When Democrats met in Baltimore to nominate Greeley, an opponent of female suffrage, Anthony came out foursquare for Grant: “The mountain has brought forth its mole, and we are left to comfort ourselves with the Philadelphia splinter as best we may.”127

  Making good on her pledge, Anthony, Stanton, and other feminists held a women’s rally for Grant at the Cooper Institute in New York in early October. The newspaper coverage was typically condescending, but transmitted some sense of the excited gathering: “The hall was packed to suffocation. The lady speakers were ranged in a row, all dressed to kill . . . They have fine, large, intellectual heads and small bodies, and they seemed more fitted to be speakers on the rostrum than to fulfill the domestic duties of wives and mothers.”128

  That November, Anthony registered to vote in Rochester, New York, planning to cast her ballot for Grant for president. Women around the country were starting to issue such challenges to laws barring them. When registrars allowed Anthony to sign in, even though illegal voting was a crime, she went for Grant—the only time she ever cast a vote for president. She was arrested, tried, and found guilty. She pilloried the trial as the “greatest outrage History ever witnessed” and balked at paying the prescribed fine.129 Although she was never imprisoned, the election registrars spent five days in jail. When Anthony appealed to Grant, he pardoned the men. On the eve of his second inaugural, Julia Ward Howe, Louisa May Alcott, and other feminists petitioned Grant to embed women’s suffrage in his inaugural address. In reply, Grant stated equivocally that “he had completed his inaugural, but he looked with favor and approval on all efforts for the enlargement of woman’s sphere of work and influence.”130

  Susan B. Anthony never ceased trying to lure Grant to the feminist cause. One day she buttonholed him while he was out strolling in the capital. Grant greeted her politely and asked what he could do. “I have only one wish, Mr. President, and that is to see women vote.” “Ah, I can’t do quite as much as that for you,” Grant confessed, laughing. “I can’t put votes into the hands of you women, but it may comfort you to know that I have just appointed more than five thousand postmistresses.”131

  Grant retained an imperturbable confidence about the voting outcome right up until Election Day. The only suspense concerned whether violence might mar the results, and Solicitor General Bristow alerted southern officials to be vigilant about intimidation at the polls. Federal scrutiny paid off: blacks voted Republican in overwhelming numbers in the fairest presidential election in southern states until 1968. Nonetheless, there were unfortunate exceptions, especially in Louisiana, where local Republicans claimed that more than two thousand supporters were “killed, wounded, or otherwise injured” in the weeks leading up to the election.132 Republican ballots plummeted to half the level of previous elections. The contested race left the state with two governors and two legislatures. More than a little suspiciously, Grant didn’t register a single vote in three Georgia counties with a solid majority of black voters.

  For all the vitriol expressed in the race, Grant ended up breezing to a resounding victory. “There were no arrangements at the White House for receiving the election returns, no waiting reporters, no scurrying aides,” said his son Jesse. “Father was apparently unconcerned, and we retired at the usual hour, content to read of the result in the morning papers.”133 The morning papers yielded astounding news: Grant had overwhelmingly won the electoral vote, and had garnered the largest popular majority of the century, nearly 56 percent of the vote, the biggest percentage between Andrew Jackson and Theodore Roosevelt. It constituted an unequivocal endorsement of Grant, who had
drawn six hundred thousand more votes than four years earlier. Buttressed by southern blacks, he carried every state in the region except Georgia and Texas, although he lost the border states of Kentucky, Maryland, Missouri, and Tennessee. Every northern state was folded into his winning column. Republicans would now control the Senate and House with commanding majorities. “I was the worst beaten man that ever ran for that high office,” Greeley glumly conceded.134

  After all the hubbub, Grant was understandably gratified by the election results and felt vindicated in the course he had pursued as president. “The second nomination was almost due to me . . . because of the bitterness of political and personal opponents,” he said.135 But his first term in office hadn’t been flawless and opponents braced for worse ahead. A New York Sun headline jeered: “Greeley Defeated: Four More Years of Fraud and Corruption.”136 Second terms were notoriously difficult to negotiate and even steady Grant supporters foresaw serious pitfalls.