The Man Who Saved the Union

by H. W. Brands

  “I have seen in the papers the notice of your nomination and acceptance,” William Sherman wrote Grant. “I feel a little strange, though this was a foregone conclusion. If you want the office of course I want you to have it, and now that you have accepted the nomination of course you must succeed.” But Sherman couldn’t help thinking that Grant was entering a world far removed from that in which they both had found their calling in life. “It is a sacrifice on your part, but one which I doubt not you feel forced to make.”

  “You understand my position perfectly,” Grant replied. “It is one I would not occupy for any mere personal consideration, but, from the nature of the contest since the close of active hostilities, I have been forced into it in spite of myself.” He still disdained politics, and he entered the political arena only to preserve the values he had served in the army. “I could not back down without, as it seems to me, leaving the contest for power for the next four years between mere trading politicians, the elevation of whom, no matter which party won, would lose to us, largely, the results of the costly war which we have gone through.”

  The Democrats gathered in New York City in early July. Their convention was a test of endurance; not till the twenty-second ballot did Horatio Seymour, the New York governor, emerge victorious. Seymour wasn’t an inspiring candidate; the survivors of bruising conventions often survive precisely because they inspire few strong emotions. But the convention paired him with Francis Blair of Missouri, the Union hero of the fight for St. Louis. Blair had been a Jacksonian in youth (his father was Old Hickory’s chief propagandist), yet he grew up to be a Free-Soiler and then a Republican. After foiling the Confederate plot against St. Louis, he rose to the rank of major general under William Sherman. He parted ways with the Republicans after the war and returned to his Democratic roots, condemning the Republican reconstruction policies for trampling the rights of the states, subordinating whites to blacks and fastening alien regimes on Southern society. He won the vice presidential nomination by virtue of an open letter published on the eve of the 1868 convention, in which he called for executive nullification of the Republican reconstruction acts—that is, for more of what had prompted the impeachment of Andrew Johnson. “The reconstruction policy of the Radicals will be complete before the next election,” Blair said. “The States so long excluded will have been admitted; negro suffrage established, and the carpet-baggers installed in their seats in both branches of Congress.… We cannot, therefore, undo the Radical plan of reconstruction by Congressional action.” So what were the Democrats to do? “There is but one way to restore the Government and the constitution, and that is for the President-elect to declare these acts null and void, compel the army to undo its usurpations at the South, disperse the carpet-bag State Governments, allow the white people to reorganize their own Governments and elect Senators and Representatives.” The convention must focus entirely on reconstruction. “This is the real and only question which we should allow to control us: Shall we submit to the usurpations by which the Government has been overthrown, or shall we exert ourselves for its full and complete restoration?” Blair supplied the answer: “We must restore the constitution.… We must have a President who will execute the will of the people by trampling into dust the usurpations of Congress known as the Reconstruction acts.”

  Blair’s letter was strong liquor so soon after the Johnson trial. A friendly reporter gave the vice presidential nominee an opportunity to clarify his comments, asking him if his remarks might not alarm the American people. “Alarm the people?” he bellowed in reply. “Why, they are alarmed already. The country is in revolution. The liberties of one-half of the citizens of this country have been destroyed, and those of the other half threatened.… If the madness of Congress is not checked, we will have in the South an Ireland or a Poland, and periodical insurrections will give vent to the aspirations of the people for liberty.”

  With Blair busy showing that the Democrats had learned nothing from the Johnson fiasco, Grant could have been elected without saying anything. And in fact he said very little. Presidential nominees in the nineteenth century rarely campaigned for themselves; custom dictated that they leave the stumping to others. For the publicly gregarious among the nominees, the silence was a trial; for Grant it was a pleasure, besides being tactically shrewd.

  He headed west from Washington and joined Sherman and Sheridan on an inspection tour of the Great Plains. “The country to this place is beautiful, and this is one of the most beautiful military posts in the United States,” he wrote Julia from Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. “This will probably be the last chance I will ever have to visit the plains, and the rapid settlement is changing the character of them so rapidly that I thought I would avail myself of the opportunity to see them.” Grant’s sons Fred and Ulysses Jr., the latter called Buck, accompanied him and the other officers. “Sherman, Sheridan, Fred, Buck and myself each carry with us a Spencer carbine and hope to shoot a buffalo and elk before we return.” A mix-up with luggage left the travelers stranded at Denver for two days. “I do not regret it now, however, because I shall spend the two days in the gold mines in the mountains, which probably I would never see but for this accident,” Grant told Julia.

  He dodged requests to speak. “I fully appreciate the compliment conveyed in the resolution which you forward, and thank the City Council and citizens for it,” he told the mayor of Leavenworth, Kansas, who had delivered a formal offer to hold a reception. “But while traveling for recreation, and to inspect personally a country with which I have so much to do and have never seen, I would much prefer avoiding public demonstrations.” The mayor was miffed, having hoped to bask in Grant’s glory, but Grant’s reticence evoked approving nods among the many voters who preferred their heroes unsullied by electioneering.

  He circled back to Galena in early August. He had expected to visit only briefly. “I find it so agreeable here, however, that I have concluded to remain until about the end of September,” he wrote John Rawlins, the Galenan who was still his adjutant. The people were friendly, and in the small town he could minimize his public exposure. “Whilst I remain here I shall avoid all engagements to go any place at any stated time. The turnout of people is immense when they hear of my coming. I was invited to visit Dubuque and I agreed to go over this evening but positively refused to agree to any reception.” When he got to Dubuque he was nonetheless implored to speak. “My friends,” he responded, reading uncomfortably from a scrap of paper: “I am very glad to see you and thank you for your kindness. Dubuque being near my old residence, I have a number of friends here whom I desire to see. I have come among you for no political purpose, and do not design to make you any speech; nor do I desire that any speeches should be made on my account. I thank you all, and wish you good evening.”

  The dramatic story of that summer’s politics was the death of Thaddeus Stevens. The Radical leader succumbed after a long illness; tens of thousands of mourners, many of them African Americans, filed through the Capitol, where his body lay in state. Stevens delivered a final message by his burial in an integrated cemetery in Pennsylvania. “I have chosen this,” he explained in his epitaph, “that I might illustrate in my death the principles which I advocated through a long life: Equality of man before his Creator.”

  Stevens’s passing, coming after the Radicals’ failure to remove Johnson and after the nomination of Grant, suggested that the center of gravity in the Republican party was shifting. The battle cry of Stevens and the Radicals was equality, which demanded continued reform. Grant’s motto was peace, which implied a willingness to let things alone.

  But it also implied, for Grant and his supporters, a consolidation of what had been won in the war. “If the contest was to be determined by the mere comparison of the public services of the candidates, everyone would say that General Grant ought to be elected,” John Sherman, now a senator, told a gathering of Republicans in Ohio. “The highest services should be rewarded with the highest honors.” But more was involv
ed. “I do not place this election upon mere personal grounds,” Sherman continued, speaking for many Republicans. “The vital importance of the election of General Grant grows out of the condition of affairs in the South. This campaign is to complete a cycle of events as important for human progress as any period of history. After a long struggle in arms with rebels and another long struggle in Congress with Andrew Johnson, we are approaching a period of rest and peace.… Under the prudent management of General Grant the violent spirits of the South will have no recourse but to submit to the laws. The long struggle in the South against slavery will be settled, and the right of all men to liberty will be secured.”

  Merits and promise aside, the arithmetic of the electoral college strongly favored Grant. Three Southern states—Virginia, Mississippi and Texas—had not been readmitted to the Union under the requirements of the Reconstruction Act; their absence handicapped the Democrats. The Southern states that had been readmitted leaned Republican, not least by virtue of the enfranchisement of black voters under the convoluted terms of the recently ratified Fourteenth Amendment. Grant could lose such Democratic strongholds as Seymour’s New York State and still coast to electoral victory, even if the popular vote turned out to be close.

  The campaign included the usual election-season silliness. Grant was charged with being a drunkard and with having fathered a daughter by an Indian woman in the Pacific Northwest. His supporters ignored the first charge, which was old news, and they refuted the second by pointing out that Grant had been hundreds of miles away at the time the child was conceived. He was called a “nigger lover,” which simply allowed his backers to link him to Lincoln.

  One allegation he took personally and devoted time to answering. American Jews were a small but potentially important constituency; most remembered Grant’s order expelling Jews from the military district of the Tennessee and wondered what it said about him as a man and a possible president. Jewish spokesmen inquired of the candidate; Grant replied in a letter to a supporter who had forwarded one of the inquiries, from a lawyer named Adolph Moses. He said he regretted having issued the poorly drafted order. “Give Mr. Moses assurances that I have no prejudice against sect or race but want each individual to be judged by his own merit,” he wrote. “Order No. 11 does not sustain this statement, I admit, but then I do not sustain that order. It never would have been issued if it had not been telegraphed the moment penned, without one moment’s reflection.”

  His statements allayed the concerns of at least some Jewish leaders. Simon Wolf, a prominent and well-connected Jew who shared an Ohio background with Grant, published an open letter to Jews and anyone else who happened to read the August 6 issue of the Boston Transcript: “I know General Grant and his motives, have corresponded with him on this very subject, and assert unhesitatingly that he never intended to insult any honorable Jew; that he never thought of their religion; that the order was simply directed ‘against certain evil-designing persons who respected neither law nor order, and who were endangering the morale of the army.’…Unfortunately the order was ill-worded, but that is no reason why American citizens should be betrayed from their allegiance principles and turn to a party that advocates the reverse of what is right and true.”

  Little else intruded on Grant’s time in Galena. “A person would not know there was a stirring canvass going on if it were not for the accounts we read in the papers,” he wrote Elihu Washburne in late September. He and Julia, who had joined him, liked Galena so much he extended his stay another month, into October. “I presume military affairs get on as well without me as they would with me in Washington,” he wrote John Schofield, who had succeeded Edwin Stanton as secretary of war. In October he decided to remain another two weeks. “I want to put off the evil day, day of all work, as long as possible,” he explained to Isaac Morris.

  “Let us have peace,” he had said, and most of the nation shared his desire. But in certain states the climax of the campaign brought anything but peace. The Ku Klux Klan had begun life in Tennessee as a fraternal gathering of Confederate veterans shortly after the war; following the Radical seizure of reconstruction it became a forum for grievances against the Republican governments in the South. Soon it was reprising the night patrols of the antebellum era, with a contemporary purpose: to intimidate blacks and Republicans and keep them from the polls. In 1868 the assaults of the Klan and kindred clubs were most violent in Louisiana and Georgia, where hundreds were killed and thousands terrorized. The Republicans of those two states, fearing for their lives, essentially surrendered the election to the Democrats before the balloting took place.

  Besides Louisiana and Georgia, Grant lost Seymour’s New York, neighboring New Jersey, the border states of Delaware, Maryland and Kentucky, and unpredictable Oregon. But he carried everything else, including all of New England and the Midwest and six states of the former Confederacy. He won the popular vote by 300,000 out of nearly 6 million votes cast and swamped Seymour in electors, 214 to 80.

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  GRANT’S ELECTION PLACED HIM IN A LINE OF AMERICAN GENERALS rewarded for their victories by elevation to the presidency. George Washington defeated the British in the Revolutionary War, Andrew Jackson the British and the Creek Indians in the War of 1812 and the Spanish in Florida thereafter, William Henry Harrison the British and Tecumseh in the War of 1812, Zachary Taylor the Mexicans in Grant’s first war. Each victory expanded American territory or confirmed American rule over territory previously acquired; each allowed Americans greater freedom to extend their vision of human happiness against the competing visions of those they vanquished. Few other aspirants to office could claim to have conferred such boons on their countrymen; little wonder American voters admired and rewarded their generals.

  Grant’s contribution to the nation’s destiny was arguably the most significant in the heroic line. Everything achieved by Washington, Jackson, Harrison and Taylor—not to mention the other presidents—was put at risk by Southern secession; the republican experiment would fail if the republic fell apart. Grant’s victory was a victory for the idea that people could govern themselves; the presidency, the greatest gift the American people could confer, was hardly excessive for such a champion.

  But there was a shadow across the victory and hence across the gift. The Union victory wasn’t simply or even chiefly an intellectual victory; it was a military victory. Southerners were no less certain than Northerners of the legitimacy of their interpretation of the principles of self-government; the South lost from lack not of conviction but of ammunition. Grant didn’t convince the South; he conquered the South.

  Thus it had ever been. American ideals had always traveled armed. The Loyalists of the American Revolution hadn’t been persuaded; they had been defeated (and then, in many cases, driven away). The opponents of American expansion in the nineteenth century—the British, the Spanish, the Mexicans, the Indians—had yielded not to democracy’s arguments but to democracy’s might. Southerners were simply the most recent of those compelled to yield to American—in this case Northern—force majeure.

  Americans disliked to admit that theirs was a nation built by war; they preferred to believe that the success of their country reflected the primacy of their values. To the extent that their democratic values fueled their military prowess, they weren’t wrong. And to that extent their habit of conferring the highest democratic prize on their greatest military men made perfect sense.

  It didn’t make Grant’s new job any easier, though. Saving the Union during the war had been difficult but straightforward; Grant and the army simply had to defeat Lee and the Confederates on the battlefield. Saving the Union after the war—preserving the gains of democracy and equality against the resistance of all those unconvinced Southerners—would doubtless be more complicated.

  Grant addressed Galena the day after the election. “The choice has fallen upon me,” he said. “The responsibilities of the position I feel, but I accept them without fear, if I can have the same support which ha
s been given to me thus far. I thank you and all others who have fought together in this contest.” He bade his neighbors good-bye. “I leave here tomorrow for Washington, and shall probably see but few of you again for some years to come.” He added, with equal parts tact and sincerity: “It would give me great pleasure to make an annual pilgrimage to a place where I have enjoyed myself so much as I have here during the past few months.”

  But Washington was no place for a commanding general at odds with the president. “I am not on speaking terms with your venerable Chief,” he wrote a friend in the diplomatic service who had requested Grant’s intervention with Johnson. “Therefore cannot ask him to relieve you of your present duties.” He traveled to New York to see his son Fred, who had enrolled at West Point. He was a guest at the Union League Club in Manhattan, where he was toasted enthusiastically. He responded as the antithesis of the politician. “You all know how unaccustomed I am to public speaking,” he said. The audience smiled in appreciation. “How undesirable a talent I think it is to possess, how little good it generally does.” Laughter punctuated with nods of approval. “And how desirous I am to see more of our public men follow the good example which I believe, in this particular, if in no other, I have set them.” Roars of laughter, stamping of feet. “I must, however, express my acknowledgments to the Union League of this city, as well as to the Union Leagues of other cities, for the great benefits they conferred upon the government during the rebellion through which we have passed of late years.” A thunderous standing ovation.

  He traveled in style. “The offers of the managers of the different roads from Baltimore to Chicago to furnish a palace car to the Soldiers’ Convention and return is thankfully accepted,” he telegraphed Thomas Scott, the president of the Pennsylvania Railroad. If he reflected that letting the railroads do him favors might create the appearance of a conflict of interest in one who would be charged with executing government policy toward the railroads, he dismissed the concern, knowing that members of Congress rode the rails for free, courtesy of the same railroads.