by H. W. Brands
Tacitly conceding that the Senate would never ratify an annexation treaty, Grant suggested an alternative path. The Senate and House should jointly create a commission to examine the Dominican question; if the commission reported favorably, the two houses could annex Santo Domingo by joint resolution, as Texas had been annexed in 1845. Grant expressed confidence that the commission would agree with him. “So convinced am I of the advantages to flow from the acquisition of San Domingo, and of the great disadvantages—I might almost say calamities—to flow from nonacquisition, that I believe the subject has only to be investigated to be approved.”
Charles Sumner was as stubborn as Grant. Sumner had obtained documents from the administration demonstrating that the U.S. Navy had sent warships to Santo Domingo to protect Báez against aggression from Haiti but also against his Dominican rivals; the commander of one of these vessels had raised the American flag over Dominican soil. Sumner condemned the orders and castigated the commander for not disobeying them. “Rather than carry out such instructions, he ought to have thrown his sword into the sea,” Sumner declared. The ensuing occupation was an “act of war … war, sir, made by the executive without the consent of Congress.” Andrew Johnson had acknowledged designs on Haiti as well as on Santo Domingo; Grant was simply less frank, Sumner said. “The president of the United States proceeds to menace the independence of Haiti.” Grant’s partner in dissimulation, Báez, was nothing but a “political jockey” with mercenary designs. “He is sustained in power by the government of the United States that he may betray his country.”
The proposed joint commission was a cloak for American aggression against Santo Domingo and Haiti, Sumner continued. “The resolution before the Senate commits Congress to a dance of blood.” He sneered at Grant’s arguments for annexation. “We are called to consider commercial, financial, material advantages, and not one word is lisped of justice or humanity.… What are these, if right and humanity are sacrificed?” Sumner had long been considered a defender in Congress of America’s blacks; he now appointed himself guardian of the African race generally. “The island of San Domingo, situated in tropical waters and occupied by another race, of another color, never can become a permanent possession of the United States. You may seize it by force of arms or by diplomacy, where a naval squadron does more than the minister, but the enforced jurisdiction cannot endure. Already by a higher statute is that island set apart to the colored race. It is theirs by right of possession, by their sweat and blood mingling with the soil, by tropical position, by its burning sun, and by unalterable laws of climate.” Annexation was horribly wrong and must be resisted. “I protest against this resolution as another stage in a drama of blood. I protest against it in the name of justice outraged by violence, in the name of humanity insulted, in the name of the weak trodden down, in the name of peace imperiled, and in the name of the African race, whose first effort at independence is rudely assailed.”
Sumner’s anti-annexation speech, which he grandly titled “Naboth’s Vineyard,” confirmed his reputation for self-righteousness even as it accomplished his purpose of stymieing Grant. The president’s allies in Congress won approval for the commission he sought, but such support for annexation as had existed outside the White House was nearly spent. The commissioners went south; on their return to Washington they reported in favor of annexation. Grant hailed the finding. “This report more than sustains all that I have heretofore said in regard to the productiveness and healthfulness of the Republic of San Domingo, of the unanimity of the people for annexation to the United States, and of their peaceable character,” he said. He took comfort in the support for annexation of no less an authority on the African race than Frederick Douglass, the former slave and abolitionist. Douglass had accompanied the commission to the West Indies and he returned convinced that annexation suited the preference and interests of the Dominicans as well as of the United States. Douglass briefed Grant on his findings and told reporters he hoped Sumner would change his mind once he had pondered the commission’s report. “If Mr. Sumner after that shall persevere in his present policy,” Douglass said, “I shall consider his opposition fractious, and regard him as the worst foe the colored race has on this continent.”
Neither the committee’s endorsement nor Douglass’s changed the minds of many lawmakers. Grant was compelled to conclude that he lacked the votes for annexation, and with belated pragmatism he let the subject drop.
62
IN JANUARY 1870 GRANT RECEIVED A LETTER FROM NEDOM ANGIER, the treasurer of the state of Georgia. Angier was a New Hampshire native who had moved to Atlanta before the war and become active in Republican politics afterward. He fell out with Governor Rufus Bullock, another Republican, over the disposition of state funds. Unable to get a hearing among Georgia Republicans, he traveled to Washington hoping to see the president. But Grant was busy and Angier impatient, so Angier sent Grant a letter. “Knowing your great desire and determination to have the laws fully executed,” he said, “and having full confidence that you will allow no infraction of the laws where it is in your power to prevent, I most respectfully ask to be allowed to make some quotations and deductions therefrom.” As Grant read Angier’s painfully detailed brief on Bullock’s flouting of state and federal law and his trampling of the rights of Georgians, he could imagine why the treasurer was having trouble with the governor—and probably with everyone else he encountered. But Grant couldn’t deny the man’s devotion to what he thought the welfare of his adopted state required. “To you we look, Most Worthy President, in the fullest confidence to curb any reckless disregard of law—to steady the restless passions and evil propensities that foment discord and mischief, and to give peace and prosperity to all portions of our beloved country.”
Similar pleas about Georgia filled Grant’s letter box that season, many indicting Bullock for egregiously violating the federal Reconstruction Act and the Fourteenth Amendment. “Governor Bullock has assumed the title of Provisional Governor, which is not authorized by the act of Congress, and intends to usurp authority over the legislature and people, and expects to be supported in his illegal and tyrannical course by yourself as President and the military under your command,” Nelson Tift, a former congressman from Albany, Georgia, wrote Grant. “The people of Georgia are at your mercy and expect your protection.”
Others besides Georgians felt themselves at Grant’s mercy and hoped for his protection. Upon the seizure of control of federal reconstruction policy by the Radical Republicans, the white Democrats who had governed the South since before the war were driven from power, replaced by white and black Republicans. Some of the ousted sulked in silence, some plotted politically, some turned to violence. The Ku Klux Klan was the most visible of the groups perpetrating violence, and its victims appealed to Grant for protection. George Ashburn was a white Republican in Georgia who worked for greater rights for blacks. His activities brought him to the attention of the Klan, and in the spring of 1868 some three dozen hooded Klansmen broke into the Columbus rooming house where he was staying and shot him dead. In South Carolina a black Republican legislator named B. F. Randolph was murdered in broad daylight at a railway station in Cokesbury. In St. Helena Parish in Louisiana, Klansmen burned black churches and a schoolhouse and killed several African Americans. In the same parish Klan members dragged the coroner, a black Republican named John Kemp, from his home and shot him dead. They beat his wife and at least two of the neighbors. In Huntsville, Alabama, a Republican editor summarized the Klan violence in his vicinity: “These bands are having a great effect, in inspiring a nameless terror among negroes, poor whites, and even others. The mischief is taking place daily and nightly—nobody is found out, or arrested, or punished. The civil authority is seemingly powerless. The military does not act. And the thing goes on, and is getting worse daily.”
The organized violence of the Klan tended to grow disorganized. The disruption of Southern society by the war, combined with the return of disillusioned young men
familiar with arms but often without gainful employment, produced a general lawlessness that both contributed to the activities of the Klan and fed off it. At times it was hard to tell where political violence ended and ordinary criminality began. A visitor to Texas at the beginning of 1869 recounted events in the northeastern corner of the state. “Armed bands of banditti, thieves, cut-throats and assassins infest the country,” he said. “They prowl around houses, they call men out and shoot or hang them, they attack travelers upon the road, they seem almost everywhere present, and are ever intent upon mischief. You cannot pick up a paper without reading of murders, assassinations, and robbery.… And yet not the fourth part of the truth has been told; not one act in ten is reported. Go where you will, and you will hear of fresh murders and violence.”
Grant had to decide whether the violence was his problem or the South’s. His campaign call for peace could be interpreted in opposite ways. It might mean that he considered the sectional conflict over and the South ready to resume control of its own affairs. Or it could indicate an insistence on domestic tranquility in the South along lines specified by the newly amended Constitution, with equal rights for blacks.
Southern Republicans, governing by virtue of black votes, hoped for the latter interpretation, and from the moment Grant took office they appealed to him for protection. When their appeals were trivially political, he turned them away. A group of Georgia state legislators wired for advice on a matter of Republican politics: “Please answer quickly yes or no; should we vote for senators before repealing the black code of Georgia?” Horace Porter responded for Grant: “President has received your dispatch. He cannot advise you. Prefers that you use your own discretion.”
But often the appeals invoked fundamental principles of constitutionality and political equality. In such cases Grant took a more forward stance. Describing Georgia’s return to civil self-government, he told Congress: “She ratified her constitution, republican in form, elected a governor, members of Congress, a state legislature, and all other officers required. The governor was duly installed, and the legislature met and performed all the acts then required of them by the reconstruction acts of Congress.” For this Georgia was to be commended. Unfortunately, however, the governor and legislature had subsequently reversed course. “They unseated the colored members of the legislature and admitted to seats some members who are disqualified by the third clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution”—the clause barring former Confederates. Grant urged Congress to pass special legislation requiring Georgia to ensure equal treatment of blacks and adherence to the principles of republican government.
Congress complied. The legislature approved a law remanding Georgia to military rule until it obeyed the applicable federal laws and ratified the Fifteenth Amendment.
Georgia did as it was told. The bonus for Grant and the freedmen was the momentum the president’s action supplied to the campaign for the Fifteenth Amendment, which by February 1870 had accumulated the necessary endorsements. “The ratification of the Fifteenth Amendment is assured!” Grant wrote Elihu Washburne, allowing himself a rare exclamation mark. His enthusiasm got the better of him as he added, prematurely: “With this question out of politics, and reconstruction completed, I hope to see such good feeling in Congress as to secure rapid legislation and an early adjournment. My peace is when Congress is not in session.”
But he couldn’t send Congress off without requesting legislation to give substance to the promise of political equality. Grant appreciated the momentous nature of the latest development. “The adoption of the Fifteenth Amendment to the Constitution completes the greatest civil change and constitutes the most important event that has occurred since the nation came into life,” he declared in a special message to Congress. Scarcely a decade earlier the Supreme Court had ruled that blacks were not citizens and had no rights the government and the white majority were bound to respect; now blacks were the political equals of whites. Yet he understood that paper promises often required concrete action to make them real. To this end he requested that Congress support education for the freedmen. “The framers of our Constitution firmly believed that a republican government could not endure without intelligence and education generally diffused among the people,” he said. “If these recommendations were important then, with a population of but a few millions, how much more important now, with a population of forty millions?” He left the details to Congress, but he urged the legislators “to take all the means within their constitutional powers to promote and encourage popular education throughout the country” and “to see to it that all who possess and exercise political rights shall have the opportunity to acquire the knowledge which will make their share in the government a blessing and not a danger.”
Congress wasn’t so generous. The egalitarian zeal that had inspired the educational programs of the Freedmen’s Bureau was waning; new benefits for blacks, if they cost money, were out of the question.
So Grant shifted his aim. The Fifteenth Amendment, like the Thirteenth and Fourteenth, included a clause giving Congress the authority to write enforcing legislation. At Grant’s urging the legislature wielded that authority. A first enforcement act criminalized the use of “force, bribery, threats, intimidation, or other unlawful means” to keep voters from exercising their Fifteenth Amendment rights. Violations would be investigated by federal marshals and prosecuted in federal courts. Special commissioners would be appointed in the event the caseload exceeded the capacity of existing officials. The president could summon the army, navy and militia to aid in enforcement. A second enforcement act extended the federal writ to the conduct of elections, authorizing federal officials for the first time to supervise voting in the states and guard against violations of the Fifteenth Amendment.
These measures were historic in expanding the scope of federal law, which in those days rarely reached over the states to criminalize individual behavior. But Grant wanted more. “There is a deplorable state of affairs existing in some portions of the South, demanding the immediate attention of Congress,” he wrote James Blaine, the Republican Speaker of the House. What was necessary, the president said, was legislation to provide “means for the protection of life and property in those sections of the country where the present civil authority fails to secure that end.”
Blaine wasn’t unwilling, but he wanted Grant to speak more definitively. The president seemed to have in mind something quite forceful, perhaps even revolutionary, and Blaine didn’t want to accept the responsibility. The president must argue his own case.
Grant did so. “A condition of affairs now exists in some of the states of the Union rendering life and property insecure and the carrying of the mails and the collection of the revenue dangerous,” he asserted in another special message to Congress. The comment about the mails and the revenues was legal cover for the audacious extension of federal authority Grant envisioned. “That the power to correct these evils is beyond the control of the state authorities I do not doubt,” he continued. “That the power of the Executive of the United States, acting within the limits of existing laws, is sufficient for present emergencies is not clear.” Grant insisted that Congress make it clear. “I urgently recommend such legislation as in the judgment of Congress shall effectually secure life, liberty, and property and the enforcement of law in all parts of the United States.”
Grant’s demand hit Congress like a mortar shell. The Democrats turned apoplectic at what they deemed Grant’s power grab. “I can scarcely believe that so radical a revolution has overcome the institutions of this country,” Representative Fernando Wood of New York declared as a bill embodying the president’s proposal moved toward a vote. “I can scarcely believe that within the short period of ten or twelve years political sentiment on the other side has become so radical as to countenance a serious proposition in the House of Representatives to create a military despotism on the ruins of a republic.” The bill was anti-American, anti-democratic, anti-republican, ant
i-civilized. “In no portion of our history has any such power been delegated; in no free government anywhere in the world has such power been delegated by the people,” Wood said. “Nor is there any despot for the past century who would attempt to exercise it; and even the life of the present emperor of Russia, with all his great personal authority, holding in his hands not only the church but the state, not only the sword but the purse, whose subjects are vassals, would not be safe for twenty-four hours if he attempted to exercise the power now proposed to be given to the present president of the United States.”
At the other end of the Capitol, Democratic senators waxed equally wroth. Francis Blair showed that he had lost none of the rhetorical verve that won him the vice presidential nomination in 1868. “He is invited to become dictator,” the Missouri lawmaker said of the president and the power the Republican bill would give him. “It is proposed to confer this unlimited power upon a man whose history is wholly military, except for the two years of his presidency, which has been signalized by utter disregard of law.” James Beck of Kentucky saw party cynicism behind the president’s coup. “It is to divert the minds of the people,” he said. “It is a flank movement to excite the people by the cry of murder, Ku Klux, etc.” The administration’s bill included a provision to let the president suspend habeas corpus in counties where the violence was unchecked; Beck warned: “An official might throw me into jail without cause and without warrant the moment I return”—from Washington—“stating that I had done something, he would not tell me what.” Fear of losing control of the South was driving the desperate efforts by the Republicans to remain in charge, Beck said. “If these states of the South would only continue to be Radical, if they would only agree that they would vote for General Grant again, you would never hear anything about the Ku Klux; you would never more hear of reconstruction acts.”