Grant

by Ron Chernow

  Grant would have to contend with waning faith in Reconstruction among Republicans, combined with a mounting white backlash in the South. Thanks to peaceful elections, black and white Republicans had won a majority of seats in the South Carolina legislature, while the governor was a white Republican and former brigadier general from Ohio, Robert K. Scott. The spectacle of black legislators seemed intolerable to many southern white voters, who skewered the state as “a new Liberia,” while Louisa McCord, a prolific essayist, satirized the new legislature as the “crow-congress” and the “monkey show.”137 This was perhaps less surprising than growing northern agreement that many Reconstruction governments were mercenary and incompetent, an attitude that reflected an ebbing tide of Republican idealism. The bitter passions of Reconstruction had broken the bonds of affection, polarizing the nation.

  For Greeley, the election’s aftermath was calamitous. His wife had died right before the vote, he faced loss of control of his newspaper, and the shattering defeat to Grant perfected his downfall. “My house is desolate, my future dark, my heart a stone,” he wailed.138 Doleful and exhausted, Greeley died three weeks after the election on November 29, 1872, before the Electoral College had even cast its votes. In a magnanimous gesture, Grant led funeral mourners down Fifth Avenue in New York and skipped a reception for Elihu Washburne in town the same day. “I came here really to attend Mr. Greeley’s funeral,” he explained. “If I stayed here to Mr. Washburne’s reception, it might be misinterpreted.”139

  That the stain of corruption in Washington spread beyond Grant’s cabinet was confirmed right before the election when the New York Sun, exposing “The Kings of Frauds,” uncovered the electrifying Crédit Mobilier scandal, which involved the building of the transcontinental railroad. During the Johnson administration, the Union Pacific Railroad had set up a dummy construction company, Crédit Mobilier, with the same executives as the parent railroad. The directors of Crédit Mobilier awarded themselves lavish salaries, all covered by government payments that far exceeded the actual cost of constructing the railroad. As Charles Francis Adams Jr. explained: “They receive money into one hand as a corporation, and pay it out into the other as a contractor.”140 Attaching fellow legislators to the swindle, Massachusetts congressman Oakes Ames had distributed Crédit Mobilier stock to them at knockdown prices. After the story broke, Congress instituted an investigation in December 1872 that tainted House Speaker James G. Blaine, Congressman James Garfield, and Grant’s current and future vice presidents, Schuyler Colfax and Henry Wilson. President-elect Grant rose above the scandal, which predated his administration. But the involvement of Colfax and Wilson and the fact that the investigation unfolded on his watch have unfairly linked Grant’s name in the history books with a scandal in which he lacked any association.

  Schuyler Colfax extricated himself from the charges until it was shown he had deposited $1,200 in his bank at the same time Ames recorded on his books a payment for that amount. Colfax lied about the transaction, which some thought more incriminating than the transaction itself. Because they were warm personal friends and perhaps feeling guilty that Colfax had been dropped from his ticket, Grant sent him a supportive letter, showing the same misplaced confidence in wrongdoers that had marred his first term: “Allow me to say that I sympathize with you in the recent Congressional investigations; that I have watched them closely, and that I am as satisfied now as I have ever been, of your integrity, patriotism and freedom from the charges imputed as if I knew of my own knowledge [of] your innocence.”141 Grant sent this on the day of his second inauguration, authorizing Colfax to publish it. When Grant’s letter became known, Benjamin Bristow shook his head over the unfortunate impression it created: “It occurred to me that if [Grant] could have been deprived temporarily of the power to wield his pen the time he wrote the Colfax letter, it would have been better for his reputation.”142

  Another congressional scandal shadowed Grant’s reelection: a 50 percent raise from $5,000 to $7,500 per annum that the Forty-Second Congress gave itself at its last session in March 1873. Congress also awarded Grant a sizable jump in salary from $25,000 to $50,000. Congress hadn’t received an increase in a generation, so that provoked no special outrage. What raised hackles was that it declared the increase retroactive to the start of the Forty-Second Congress two years earlier, producing a $5,000 windfall in back pay to every member. “Let Republicans and Democrats alike own the facts with shame,” The New York Times reprimanded legislators.143 The bonus so enraged the country that Congress rescinded the raise, although Grant’s salary hike remained in effect, the president’s salary having remained unchanged since George Washington’s time. (Grant, who was $25,000 in debt, badly needed the money.) The “salary grab” wasn’t Grant’s handiwork, but as with Crédit Mobilier, it became identified with his tenure. Because it formed part of a general appropriations bill, Grant had been unable to veto it without shutting down the government. After signing it, he properly asked for a line-item veto that might have enabled him to strike out the salary grab—making him the first president in American history to request one.144

  On the night of March 3, the eve of his second inauguration, Grant toiled until midnight, signing a last pile of bills from the outgoing Congress. The next day the capital was gripped by frigid temperatures as low as four degrees, making it the coldest inauguration day in history, worsened by biting winds that gusted up to twenty-eight miles per hour. The Grant who emerged from the White House at 10 a.m. looked grave and heavy-set compared with the wartime general, his chest more massive, his paunch thicker, his body pear-shaped, suggesting a sedentary, overfed executive. In formal wear, he always looked as if he had been imprisoned under extreme duress.

  A custom-made black carriage with three senators pulled up to the driveway and Grant clambered into the rear seat. The open carriage, exposed to fierce winds, had unusually high springs and towered over the others in the procession. Julia followed in a carriage with Vice President–elect Henry Wilson. The parade route to the Capitol featured a heavy military presence, including West Point cadets and Annapolis midshipmen who shivered without overcoats, and the cold made it impossible for marching musicians to play in tune. When Grant arrived at the Capitol’s east portico, its pillars hung with icicles, the plaza below was “black with a solid mass of people,” wrote a reporter, estimating the throng as “larger than any assemblage ever before gathered in Washington.”145 When Grant appeared on the platform, doffing his hat, a huge cheer burst from the audience as he was seated in a chair used by George Washington for his first inauguration in New York City.

  At 12:30 p.m., Salmon P. Chase, the bearded chief justice, haggard from a stroke and two months from death, delivered the oath of office to Grant. After a twenty-one-gun salute, Grant delivered his second inaugural address, braving winds so brisk that the vast majority of the audience saw the speech in pantomime. Characteristically, Grant wrote it without consulting anyone. He started with a paean to the peace and prosperity he had created along with lower taxes. Then he reaffirmed his commitment to the four million former slaves who had been made citizens. Still, the freed people were “not possessed of the civil rights which citizenship should carry with it. This is wrong and should be corrected.”146 He also praised the readmission of former Confederate states and tacitly signaled that there might be fewer federal interventions in the South in his second term.147 He sounded charitable toward Native Americans, advocating “education and civilization” in place of war: “Wars of extermination . . . are demoralizing and wicked. Our superiority of strength, and advances of civilization, should make us lenient towards the Indian.”148

  Grant previewed other second-term themes, including civil service reform and a restoration of the dollar to a fixed value in gold. He seemed to apologize for mishandling the Santo Domingo treaty, saying future acquisitions of territory should enjoy the prior support of the American public. Then, in a stupendous leap, he expressed a belief “that
our Great Maker is preparing the world, in his own good time, to become one nation, speaking one language, and when armies and Navies will be no longer required.”149 He ended on a peculiarly aggrieved note, stating that even though his life had been dedicated to public service since Fort Sumter, he had been “the subject of abuse and slander scarcely ever equaled in political history, which today I feel that I can afford to disregard in view of your verdict which I gratefully accept as my vindication.”150 It was a sour, churlish note, yet a very candid and human one. At the close, Grant climbed back into his carriage, returned to the White House, and, bundled up from the cold, watched the parade from a viewing stand.

  Following a grand fireworks display, the elaborate inaugural ball that evening was a dismal affair that did not bode well for Grant’s second term. A cavernous wooden building, lit with gas chandeliers, had been especially constructed for the occasion, with an enormous eagle, streaming the national colors from its claws, suspended from the ceiling. To camouflage the rough wood structure, the walls were draped with so much white muslin it was nicknamed “the Muslin Palace.” Hundreds of canaries were imported to warble their greetings to three thousand guests. In a courageous move, Grant invited black guests, leading some members of the Washington beau monde to boycott the event in protest at this racial mixing.151

  The whole ostentatious affair was undone by a simple design flaw: the big barnlike room lacked heat. As guests arrived, they were shocked by the frosty temperature and attempted to dance in their fur wraps, hats, and overcoats to keep warm. Champagne, food, and ice cream froze in the arctic air. By the time Ulysses, Julia, and Nellie Grant arrived at 11:30 p.m., canaries had started to keel over and die in droves on their perches, the first martyrs to Grant’s second term. The presidential family decided not to tarry long and the dwindling crowd, seeing their chance to escape the deep freeze, had piled out of the hall by the stroke of midnight.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

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  A Butchery of Citizens

  NO SOUTHERN STATE presented more insurmountable problems to Grant than Louisiana, which had become a hotbed of hatred and corruption. Henry Clay Warmoth served as the Republican carpetbag governor of the state during Grant’s first term as president. “I don’t pretend to be honest,” he said. “I only pretend to be as honest as anybody in politics.” For those who didn’t grasp the point, Warmoth added, “Why, damn it, everybody is demoralized down here. Corruption is the fashion.”1 He ended up being impeached. Exasperated by Louisiana’s political squalor, Grant confessed that “if he knew capable, honest men in Louisiana, who would accept office, he would appoint them, whether Republicans or Democrats.”2

  In November 1872, there arose a slashing race for governor between Senator William Pitt Kellogg, the Republican candidate backed by Grant, and Democrat John McEnery. Kellogg was allied with Grant’s brother-in-law James F. Casey, collector of customs in New Orleans. Although Kellogg emerged victorious, his foes refused to concede the election, which had been marked by illegalities on both sides. For months, both Kellogg and McEnery claimed to be governor, holding competing inaugural celebrations and assuming similar trappings of office. For Grant, who had hoped to intercede less in southern states during his second term, the standoff presented a baffling dilemma. He decided that General William H. Emory, his New Orleans commander, should refrain from taking sides and only act “to maintain order should there be a disturbance.”3 At the same time, he thought the McEnery government should desist from enacting legislation until the courts had decided which governor was legitimate. Despite election “frauds and forgeries,” Grant professed he was “extremely anxious to avoid any appearance of undue interference in State affairs.”4 His statement is noteworthy for, despite southern charges of “bayonet rule,” Grant never lightly or capriciously intervened in the South, doing so only when he discovered a sound constitutional basis for action. As an adroit politician, he was very aware of the growing northern reluctance to get embroiled in these chronic southern disputes.

  A couple of days later, he informed his cabinet that in late March or early April he planned to tour the southern states, culminating in unruly New Orleans. This signified a new stage in his presidency. He had been in the South as a general on military business, but never as president; it spoke volumes that he dared not set foot in the South for fear of violence against him or perhaps because he had been deterred by the legal complications of states being restored to the Union. In late February, Grant canceled the proposed trip when a Nashville friend advised him “there are evil disposed persons who may be inclined to do harm to him & to his party,” noted Fish, who said Grant received other alarming letters.5 Julia Grant was resolutely against her husband hazarding the trip and Grant soon told people, not quite truthfully, that “urgent public business” necessitated that he postpone it indefinitely.6

  The Louisiana situation deteriorated with resurgent Klan activity. On January 21, Joseph T. Hatch, a businessman, informed Grant that he was being persecuted for having voted for Grant, Kellogg, and the Republican ticket. One night up to twenty men in disguise had ringed his warehouse, emptied more than one hundred shots into it, then threatened that unless his business “was moved, that in a Short time they would apply the Torch.”7 In spite of Grant’s reluctance to meddle in Louisiana, the wholesale breakdown of law and order made it imperative. In early March, Governor Kellogg described how McEnery supporters had seized a police station and said he would need to send in state militia under General James Longstreet to recapture it. Grant reacted swiftly: “Instruct Military to prevent any violent interference with the state Government of La.”8

  After a federal judge ruled in favor of the Kellogg slate, the powder keg of Louisiana politics exploded in April 1873. William Ward, a black Republican, and Christopher Columbus Nash, a white Democrat, vied for control of Grant Parish in the center of the state. Ward summoned his black supporters and warned them that Democrats would try to seize by force the county seat of Colfax, a lush place of swamps and bayous and a black Republican stronghold. To avert this, they threw up earthworks around the courthouse, guarding it for several weeks. This display of black power was anathema to the white community. On Easter Sunday, Nash led a mob of several hundred whites, armed with rifles and a small cannon, who opened fire on the courthouse, setting it ablaze. Even though its black defenders ran up a white flag of surrender, begging for mercy, the mob butchered dozens of them. Black families were afraid to claim the many corpses that thickly littered the ground. When Longstreet sent Colonel T. W. DeKlyne to Colfax, the latter found heaps of dead black bodies being scavenged by dogs and buzzards. “We were unable to find the body of a single white man,” he reported. Many blacks “were shot in the back at the head and neck . . . almost all had from three to a dozen wounds. Many of them had their brains literally blown out.”9 It was the worst slaughter perpetrated against blacks during Reconstruction.

  Staggered by this cold-blooded massacre, Grant told the Senate “a butchery of citizens was committed at Colfax, which in bloodthirstiness and barbarity is hardly surpassed by any acts of savage warfare.”10 A week later, Captain Jacob H. Smith of the U.S. Army arrived in Colfax with a hundred soldiers, arrested eight white perpetrators of the carnage, and counted seventy-three black victims; other estimates ran as high as three hundred. There was no possibility the culprits would be prosecuted under local laws. Invoking the Enforcement Act of 1870, a federal grand jury handed down seventy-two indictments, but only three men were convicted. In 1876, in United States v. Cruikshank, the Supreme Court determined that the perpetrators could not be prosecuted under the Fourteenth Amendment because it governed only state actions, not individual ones. The Colfax murderers thus walked off scot-free, sending a powerful message to white supremacists that they could slay blacks without any penalty.

  In commenting on the Colfax brutality, Grant was enraged that the same southern Democrats who accused him of unwarranted federal intrusion di
d nothing to repudiate such unalloyed sadism. Only federal power, he believed, could protect freed people from abuses brazenly ignored by states. As he told the Senate, “insuperable obstructions were thrown in the way of punishing these murderers, and the so-called conservative papers of the State not only justified the massacre, but denounced as federal tyranny and despotism the attempt of the United States officers to bring them to justice. Fierce denunciations ring through the country about office-holding and election matters in Louisiana, while every one of the Colfax miscreants goes unwhipped of justice, and no way can be found in this boasted land of civilization and Christianity to punish the perpetrators of this bloody and monstrous crime.”11 Grant seldom spoke with such full-throated passion.

  In early May, Grant received a dispatch from Kellogg that two or three Louisiana parishes were “in a state of insurrection against the state authorities.”12 Grant answered this appeal for troops with the carefully worded formula he invoked to justify southern intervention: “Now therefore, I, Ulysses S. Grant, President of the United States, do hereby make proclamation, and command said turbulent and disorderly persons to disperse and retire peaceably to their respective abodes within twenty days from this date.”13 Should they refuse to do so, Grant would send in federal troops. Perhaps as a reminder of who had won the war, he published a proclamation on May 21, shutting government offices for the day so that employees could honor Union graves on Decoration Day.

  As Grant attempted to normalize federal relations with former Confederate states, he struggled with newly emergent white supremacist groups, hydra-headed offshoots of the Klan with names such as the White League, “rifle clubs,” Red Shirts, and Knights of the White Camellia. They tiptoed around prosecution by claiming to be county militia. Unlike the Klan, which was a secret paramilitary group, the White League that formed in Opelousas, Louisiana, in 1874 operated with overtly political aims that included evicting the Republican Party from power. The league didn’t refrain from undisguised violence—one historian described it as “the military arm of the Democratic Party”—and preached imminent race war, but it also engaged in economic pressure and terrorism against blacks who dared to vote.14 Its credo could be seen in the preamble of the state Democratic platform, which began, “We the white people of Louisiana . . .”15 Harper’s Weekly wasn’t far from the mark when it termed the White League “an unmasked Ku Klux.”16