Grant

by Ron Chernow

  In August 1874, Governor Kellogg wrote to Grant about terror inflicted upon Republican voters in Louisiana and said he anticipated more before the next election. He noted that Grant had held back from intervening in Arkansas and Texas with his new policy “to let the South alone,” but he predicted that federal troops would be necessary in his state so “that every republican voter should know that he will be protected if violently interfered with in the exercise of the rights conferred upon him by Congress and the Constitution.”17 Kellogg didn’t overstate the threat: that same month, White Leaguers dragged six Republican officials from their homes in Coushatta and murdered them. Grant grew livid. “No one has been punished,” he told the Senate, “and the conservative press of the State [denounced] all efforts to that end, and boldly justified the crime.”18 These bloodcurdling events convinced Grant that despite northern fatigue and hypocritical indifference, he lacked the luxury of pulling federal troops from the South. Told they were “unnecessary and irritating to the people,” he had withdrawn most of them from Louisiana, but he now revised his opinion.19 In early September, he notified Secretary of War Belknap to have troops at the ready: “The recent atrocities in the South, particularly in Louisiana, Alabama and South Carolina, show a disregard for law, civil rights and personal protection that ought not to be tolerated in any civilized government.”20 Attorney General Williams advised U.S. attorneys and marshals in six southern states of Grant’s fierce determination to stem violence against black and white Republicans.

  This was the prelude to a state of anarchy that engulfed New Orleans on September 14. D. B. Penn, the Democratic lieutenant governor under McEnery, issued a provocative call for his militia to drive from power the “usurpers,” as he billed Republican officeholders. In a veritable coup d’état, thousands of whites, many of them former Confederate soldiers instigated by the White League, barricaded the streets, overpowered black militia and the racially integrated Metropolitan Police Force led by Longstreet, and took over City Hall and the statehouse, killing more than twenty people. Afterward, they announced that Governor Kellogg had been overthrown. General Emory informed Grant that the rebellion had “embraced nearly every white man in the community.”21 The battle had witnessed an extraordinary event: James Longstreet now fired on men he had commanded during the war, his small army having killed twenty-one White Leaguers. “The streets of the city were stained with blood,” wrote Grant, who released a proclamation that said “turbulent and disorderly persons” had conspired to overthrow Louisiana’s government and he ordered them to disperse within five days.22 To back up his words, he dispatched five thousand troops and three gunboats to reinstate Governor Kellogg. Almost overnight, the federal garrison in New Orleans swelled to America’s largest. Grant’s decisive actions pacified a dangerously unstable situation: the insurgents disbanded, the Penn forces surrendered state offices, and William P. Kellogg was restored as rightful governor.

  While some northern newspapers roundly praised Grant’s handling of the uprising, many Liberal Republicans had tired of the black community and its eternal discontents. Contrary to the evidence, E. L. Godkin of The Nation portrayed southern blacks as well protected by their white governments, while in states still controlled by black Republicans, “the blacks have themselves become, in the hands of white knaves, oppressors of the worst sort.”23 Many northerners were fed up with carpetbag governments in the South and wanted the federal government to disengage from the region, even if this meant transferring it to white supremacists bent on draconian Democratic rule. One American diplomat believed northern voters were impatient “with this worn out cry of ‘Southern outrages’!!! Hard times & heavy taxes make them wish the ‘nigger,’ ‘everlasting, nigger,’ were in . . . Africa.”24 The ardent idealism that had informed the Civil War had been succeeded by a cynical, bitter revulsion.

  To Grant, it looked as if the country might be lurching toward a second Civil War. He had felt so outraged by events in Louisiana that he hadn’t bothered to consult his cabinet before issuing his proclamation. Fish and others grumbled about being excluded, but Grant’s crisp, decisive actions stopped an insurrectionary movement in its tracks. He exhibited the same spirit of command as during the war, when he had rapidly dashed off orders to his officers under fire. At one point during the Louisiana crisis, Grant had his luggage at the White House door, ready for a trip to Long Branch, when cabinet members questioned the propriety of going at such a time. He realized he needed to remain and had his trunks brought back inside.

  Grant remained in a quandary over the fate of the sometimes disreputable Kellogg. In an extraordinary cabinet session on September 16—maybe the most dramatic in Grant’s presidency—he and his cabinet aired their grave doubts about the governor’s honesty and competence. “Kellogg’s weakness & imbecility were denounced” by Grant and others, Fish recorded, everyone agreeing that “great frauds” had been committed in the gubernatorial election on both sides.25 At the same time, everyone believed the insurgent Democratic government shouldn’t be recognized. As Marshall Jewell, the postmaster general, admitted, “Kellogg . . . is a first-class cuss, but there’s no getting rid of him.”26

  Concerns about Kellogg’s probity were dwarfed by the awareness that the Grant administration had to end the violent overthrow of a state government. “He is cool and collected,” Jewell described Grant, “and thoroughly determined, and grows a little black in the face when talking about it.”27 Attorney General Williams glimpsed a vast, insidious conspiracy in the South, poised to retake governments by force. He warned that “large quantities of arms, & military equipments [sic] have been taken into La & other Southern States—that ‘White leagues’ & ‘Rifle Companies’ have been organized throughout the South, & are regularly drilled, meeting at night, & going through various Military evolutions, such as pitched fights, bayonet exercises &c.”28 Such fears were validated after the morning cabinet session when Judge James Lyons of Virginia informed Fish that “the entire white population of the South, would consider any force, to re-instate the Kellogg Govt as an act of War, which would be resisted.”29

  After federal troops were sent to Louisiana, Grant was besieged with death threats, often addressed to Julia as well. One New Orleans resident, signing himself “a Lover of Justice,” let Julia know her husband would be “assassinated if he dont MAKE Kellogg resign . . . Men are now on their way to Washington to FULLY EXECUTE the DESIGN of putting U.S. Grant out of the way.”30 A Cincinnati correspondent told her, “If Grant reinstates Kellogg—he will suffer. Southerns, do no want to have Kellogg & niggars over them . . . Grant, may follow Kellog—if he does, he will be Shot at.”31 Grant received a raft of disturbing letters from Republicans as well. A petition signed “We the Colored people of New Orleans” claimed that the White League, in conjunction with the Democratic Party, had amassed a stockpile of up to thirty thousand guns and sworn to take control of the state “if they must kill every negro that is in the State they declares that Just as Soon as you Shall With drew the Troops from Louisanana there Will not be One republican to be found in the State.”32

  The elections that November were policed by federal troops and McEnery and the Democrats gained control of the state senate, while Kellogg retained the governorship. Once again both sides swapped vicious charges of election manipulation. It was alleged that Kellogg had blatantly reduced the number of Democratic legislators, while the black community said they had been threatened with physical harm and loss of jobs if they didn’t exactly follow the Democratic line. Merchants refused to extend credit to planters who allowed their workers to vote Republican.

  Resisting cabinet pressure to tread gingerly, Grant sent Phil Sheridan to assume command in Louisiana in early January. It wasn’t a conciliatory choice, nor was it meant to be. So commonplace had black murders become in Louisiana that when Sheridan conducted an investigation, he came up with a gruesome tally of 2,141 blacks killed by whites since the war, with another 2,115 wounded�
�almost all crimes that had gone unpunished.

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  RIGHT AFTER GRANT’S REELECTION, Supreme Court Justice Samuel Nelson decided to retire and a delegation of jurists trooped to the White House to discuss his successor. They made this courtesy call with a clear favorite in mind, Benjamin Bristow, who said they “gathered around me and expressed their individual desires that I should be appointed Judge Nelson’s successor.”33 Grant invited Bristow to dine later that day, raising expectations of his elevation to the top bench. Always bedeviled by appointments, Grant hated to be lobbied and preferred to meditate on his choices privately. “President is anxious to have the nomination made before the pressure upon him is made by the friends of the various Candidates,” Fish wrote.34 Grant had no consultative process in place with his staff or anything resembling modern-day vetting of court nominees. He came up with a surprise choice, Ward Hunt, a former Utica, New York, mayor who had served on the New York Court of Appeals and was associated with Roscoe Conkling. The Senate confirmed him without incident. The selection didn’t please feminist groups: riding the circuit in New York, Hunt had overseen the conviction of Susan B. Anthony for illegally voting for Grant in Rochester.

  Grant’s next Supreme Court pick proved infinitely more complex. On May 7, 1873, Chief Justice Salmon P. Chase died after nine years of distinguished service. Five days later, Ulysses and Julia Grant rode in the funeral procession with Roscoe Conkling. Grant resolved to let the matter of a successor dangle until Congress reconvened in December, hoping to make the right choice and spare any nominee “the mortification of a rejection.”35 This seemed to represent a step forward for Grant: instead of making inscrutable snap judgments, he would throw open the process to a collaborative approach. As the time approached, the rumor mill kept churning out the name of Roscoe Conkling. It was then routine for presidents to nominate political figures instead of eminent jurists, but Liberal Republicans derided Conkling as a poor specimen of a politician. “To politics, in any good sense of the word, Mr. Conkling has not contributed a single useful or fruitful idea,” sneered Godkin in The Nation, adding that “his political claims to the chief place on the bench of the greatest tribunal in the world are as paltry as his professional ones.”36

  Despite the expected criticism, Grant was swayed by personal loyalty and offered Conkling the job on November 8, 1873. The New York senator was too wedded to Washington intrigue to retreat to the contemplative solitude of the court. Incredibly, he saw the job of chief justice as contracting his considerable power and cramping his freewheeling style. “I could not take the place,” he explained, “for I would be forever gnawing my chains.”37 On November 20, he sent Grant a short, cryptic letter, declining the offer without volunteering a reason; Conkling may have worried that with Democrats in control of New York’s legislature, his Senate seat would fall into enemy hands. Grant then offered the job to Hamilton Fish, who turned it down in a more thoughtful manner: “I insisted that I could not accept it—that it was upwards of twenty years since I had had any connection with the bar or practice . . . I felt that it would be important to put a younger man in the place.”38

  Grant next turned to Caleb Cushing, a seventy-three-year-old Massachusetts lawyer and former attorney general under President Franklin Pierce, who was heavily touted by Congressman Benjamin Butler. After years of feuding, Grant and Butler had reached a rapprochement as evidenced by Butler’s fealty to administration policy. Because Cushing’s age posed an impediment, Butler proposed that Grant appoint him as a stopgap chief justice who would resign before Grant’s term expired, thus entitling him to name a replacement. Grant canvassed his cabinet on the choice of Cushing and almost everyone balked. “I expressed a very high estimate of Cushing’s ability and fitness . . . but felt the force of the objection to Cushing’s age, and the question of the propriety of dispensing an office of that character on a conditional tenure,” Fish wrote.39

  By elimination Grant turned next to Attorney General George Williams, who bore no exalted status as a jurist and would be replaced by Benjamin Bristow. He sent their names to Capitol Hill along with his annual message. Behind the scenes, Horace Porter and Orville Babcock had schemed to secure Williams’s nomination. To many observers, Williams had done fine work against the Klan, but he lacked the superior legal mind required for the court and was overshadowed by ethical questions about his personal finances, having gotten into a bad habit of paying personal checks with government money. The reaction to him was uniformly hostile and many senators couldn’t understand why they had not been chosen instead. Editorial writers raked Williams over very hot coals. “The country should be ashamed and disgraced by the nomination of such a man,” said the Cincinnati Commercial, while Louisville’s Courier-Journal branded him “the worst appointment yet.”40

  Nevertheless, Grant, who often became obstinate when attacked, applied intense pressure on the Senate, making the Williams nomination a litmus test of party loyalty. Some Grant advisers told him that if he plunged ahead, victory would be assured. “The Judiciary Committee is sitting listening to every idle story, every lie told by political opponents, who arrive every day to feed the fight,” wrote Porter. “It is simply a Slanderous rough-and-tumble political fight.”41 At the same time, in the Senate Judiciary Committee, where a solid phalanx of opposition awaited Williams, members urged the president to yank the name. Grant, an immovable object, refused to countenance the idea, and his storied persistence once again boomeranged. “The Gen[era]l has done nothing heretofore that has hurt him so much,” Associate Justice Noah Swayne told Bristow. “Everyone now says that the third term is wholly out of the question if there Ever was a possibility of such a thing.”42 The next day, Bristow told Grant he was turning down the attorney general appointment.

  In late December, Fish found Grant alone in the cabinet room in a highly agitated state. He had belatedly grown disenchanted with Williams, telling Fish he didn’t think Williams “had done anything corrupt or illegal but that there had been indiscreet things done. That Mrs. Williams had given orders for the purchase of an expensive carriage and liveries for two servants and that the expenses for these had been paid out of the Contingent fund of the Department of Justice; as were also the wages of the two men who were employed as private servants. He manifested much regret at having learned this.”43 For Grant, this was a now-familiar tale of his trusting, innocent nature betrayed.

  With the Senate prepared to reject Williams, Grant reluctantly withdrew his name. In another instance of errant judgment, he allowed Williams to retain his attorney general post, despite the damaging information that had come to light. In such embarrassing situations, Grant could be hurt and angry and submit to an impulsive side of his nature. Without consulting anyone, he reverted to his earlier pick and sent Caleb Cushing’s name to the Senate. However charming and erudite he was, Cushing met instant opposition. One senator unearthed a friendly, if innocuous, letter he had written to Jefferson Davis three weeks before Fort Sumter, recommending a friend as a Confederate clerk, and this lessened his chances for confirmation. Feeling bruised, Grant withdrew Cushing’s name as well.

  Unable to afford another gaffe, Grant consulted the Senate leadership and came up with the name of Morrison R. Waite of Toledo, Ohio, who was, if not a brilliant lawyer, at least a proficient one, having recently chaired the Ohio constitutional convention. Assistant Attorney General C. H. Hill lauded him as “a prompt, energetic business man.”44 Appeased senators approved Waite’s name within forty-eight hours, bringing general relief throughout the country. The Nation spoke for many when it wrote that Grant had “with remarkable skill, avoided choosing any first rate man . . . But considering what he might have done, we ought to be thankful.”45 The New York Tribune damned Waite with faint praise, describing him as “an honest man and a fair lawyer, and that is as much as can reasonably be expected from Grant.”46 Harper’s Weekly penned a fitting epitaph for Grant’s conspicuous mishandling of the chief justice
ship: “In both the cases of Mr. Williams and Mr. Cushing the nomination was made not only without consultation, but without proper knowledge or inquiry, and it is evident therefore, without a due sense of the great character and importance of the office.”47

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  THROUGHOUT HIS PRESIDENCY, Grant remained a doting father, husband, and son. As his health worsened in late 1872, Jesse Root Grant voiced an urgent wish to see his famous son. “My father is very old and infirm,” Grant told a friend, “and has conceived the idea that unless he sees me this Winter he will never see me again.”48 Julia wasn’t overjoyed about the trip. “I think it will be rather a doleful visit,” she confided to a correspondent. “But still he has to go I suppose.”49 However frayed their relationship, Jesse Root Grant still loomed large in his son’s mind. In late May, he went into a terminal decline and died on June 29, 1873, just as Ulysses was en route to Covington.

  After the funeral, Grant consoled himself with the thought that his father had been resigned to his death, having “reached a ripe old age without pain or sickness,” he wrote. “He had been so long gradually failing that my mother and sister . . . had discounted his death in advance.”50 Perhaps because of complex, unresolved feelings toward his father, Grant took his death very hard. “I went up . . . to see him and tell him I had been with his father,” said Eliza Shaw. “The General could not speak a word he was so affected.”51 Grant’s grief was understandable since Jesse, for all his many flaws, had never surrendered implicit belief in his son. “When his faculties waned,” a family friend assured Grant, “his joy in your fame and his almost childish faith in you, were the unguarded gate through which interested persons imposed upon him. I am glad he never had occasion to think you had failed him.”52 After Jesse’s death, Hannah Grant decided to live in New York with her daughter Virginia and son-in-law Abel Corbin. Grant’s mother still hadn’t visited the White House and seemed distant from her son, perhaps feeling slighted by him or still uncomfortable with Julia and the unreconstructed Dents. In 1880, she informed a relative that “U.S. Grant,” as she coolly referred to him, had paid her a short visit, then she added tartly that “he Seldom Writes to any of us.”53