The Man Who Saved the Union

by H. W. Brands

  Sumner’s self-righteousness alienated sufficient senators that when the administration’s allies plotted his overthrow as chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, the deed was readily accomplished. Grant declared that nothing beyond concern for the public interest had inspired the change. “I never asked to have any particular person put on any of the Senate standing committees,” he said. “All that I have asked is that the chairman of the Committee on Foreign Relations be someone with whom the Secretary of State and myself might confer and advise. This I deemed due to the country in view of the very important questions which, of necessity, must come before it.”

  Coincident with Sumner’s removal was the realization in the United States that Canada had no desire to join the Union. The 1867 British North America Act gave Canadians enough self-government that transfer to the United States, never popular in Canada, came to seem there more like recolonization than liberation. Americans had balked at annexing the heavily populated regions of Mexico in 1848, being unable to rationalize the takeover of a protesting people; they balked at taking over Canada now, for the same reason. This and the deposing of Sumner made it possible for Hamilton Fish, heading Grant’s negotiating team, to leave Canada off the agenda without causing a stir.

  Extraneous issues—fishery rights with Canada in the Atlantic Northeast, boundary claims in the Pacific Northwest—delayed a final settlement of the Alabama claims until the spring of 1871. But that May the pact was signed, and in June the ratifications of the American Senate and the British parliament were exchanged, resolving decades of tension between the two great English-speaking nations and paving the way, as matters turned out, for the most important and enduring alliance in modern world history.

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  BETWEEN THE SIGNING OF THE TREATY AND ITS RATIFICATION GRANT received a message from William Sherman. The message was contained in a letter from Sherman to his brother John, who forwarded the letter to Grant with an inquiry as to whether it should be published. James Gordon Bennett of the Democratic New York Herald was pushing Sherman to accept a Democratic presidential nomination for the next year; Sherman had responded to the unsought endorsement in the most forthright language he could devise. “I have never been and never will be a candidate for President,” he wrote Bennett. “If nominated by either party I should peremptorily decline, and even if unanimously elected I should decline to serve.”

  Bennett delightedly printed Sherman’s letter, which boosted circulation, as the editor intended. And he suggested that the letter shouldn’t be taken at face value, since a man in Sherman’s position could be expected to issue such a denial. Sherman meanwhile wrote John with the same message he had sent to Bennett. “You may say for me, and publish it, too, that in no event, and under no circumstances, will I ever be a candidate for President or any other political office, and I mean every word of it,” Sherman said. John Sherman forwarded the letter to Grant.

  Before Grant could respond, one of Bennett’s reporters buttonholed the president at Long Branch, where he was vacationing. “General Sherman, Mr. President, is named as your successor. Would he take the nomination?” the reporter asked. Grant weighed his words carefully. “Sherman and I are warm friends, and I am not authorized to speak for him,” he said. “Of one thing I feel pretty certain, however, and that is that Sherman won’t stand on any platform the Democrats will make.…No, sir; Sherman can have no affiliation with such men. He is no Democrat, and never was. He probably knows very well that if the Democracy succeeded, the Southern leaders, who are still hostile to the Union of the states, and, in that view, enemies of the republic, would gain possession of the government and before long annul, so far as they could, the acts of the Republican party. That will hardly be permitted, in this century, at least.”

  After Grant read his remarks in the next day’s Herald, he decided Bennett had gotten enough mileage out of the Sherman question. He recommended that John Sherman withhold William’s letter. “Under no circumstances would I publish it,” he said. Sherman’s earlier disclaimer sufficed for his purposes, if not Bennett’s; to say more would simply keep the false boom going. Grant added, “I think his determination never to give up his present position a wise one, for his own comfort, and the public knowing it will relieve him from the suspicion of acting and speaking with reference to the effect his acts and sayings may have upon his chances for political preferment. If he should ever change his mind, however, no one has a better right than he has to aspire to anything within the gift of the American people.”

  Sherman saw Grant in Washington a few weeks later. The general had been traveling in the South, and he shared his sense of politics there as it related to the presidential election. He described the conversation to John afterward: “I told him plainly that the South would go against him en masse, though he counts on South Carolina, Louisiana, and Arkansas.… The negroes were generally quiescent and could not be relied on as voters when local questions became mixed up with political matters.” Sherman added: “I think, however, he will be renominated and reelected, unless by personally doing small things to alienate his party adherents at the North.”

  Others were hardly so confident, and still others did all in their power to undermine such confidence as existed. From its conception in the 1850s the Republican party had comprised two philosophical factions. The conscience wing of the party focused on resisting slavery and, after emancipation, extending equal rights to the freedmen. The capitalist wing bent its efforts to improving the fortunes of business enterprise. The two groups concurred on the need for activist government and through the late 1860s made effective common cause. They defeated slavery and wrote equality into the Constitution even as they fashioned a national banking system, created a flexible currency, raised tariff rates and underwrote the Pacific railroad.

  But they began falling out not long after Grant’s election. A separation, if not a divorce, was perhaps inevitable, on grounds of temperamental incompatibility if nothing else. The conscience Republicans were idealists; former abolitionists, many of them, they accounted politics an arena where sin battled salvation—or where sin ought to battle ­salvation—and they were never happier than when holding forth on good and evil. The capitalist Republicans, by contrast, were practical men, tracing their roots to the Whig party of Henry Clay and Daniel Webster, and though most went to church on Sunday, they went to their offices, shops and factories on Monday with greater devotion.

  The falling-out likely would have commenced right after the war had Andrew Johnson not afforded the two factions an object of joint antipathy. The nomination of Grant in 1868 served as additional cement, signifying not simply appreciation for his past role in preserving the Union but hope for his future role in preserving the party. Grant sagely let both factions read what they wished into his “Let us have peace” slogan and his campaign silence on matters of policy.

  Yet he was no sooner elected than the jostling for position began. Grant’s refusal to consult with the party veterans in selecting his cabinet made both sides feel they were being jilted—as indeed they were, to some extent. Grant’s heart aligned with the conscience Republicans; he shared their commitment to the principles of democracy and equality, including civil and political rights for African Americans. But Grant’s head tilted toward the capitalist Republicans, not so much for their concern for commerce as for their practical approach to government. The conscience Republicans reminded Grant of why the Civil War had been fought, the capitalist Republicans of how the war had been won.

  Grant’s problem—among others—was that the two groups simply couldn’t get along. Conscience Republicans like Charles Sumner disdained the capitalist Republicans for putting profits above principle and made no effort to hide their disdain. Sumner’s alienation from Grant was partly personal, with their initial misunderstanding over Santo Domingo triggering a clash of stubborn temperaments, but it was mostly a protest that Grant was heeding the advice of the capitalist wing of the party. The latter made little e
ffort to draw Sumner and the conscience men back, believing that they didn’t need that self-righteous scold or his arrogant ilk so long as they had Grant on their side.

  The split in the Republicans grew more evident as the 1872 election approached, and it took surprising forms. Sumner should have endorsed Grant’s attack on the Ku Klux Klan if concern for the rights of African Americans had been his unerring lodestar, as he constantly claimed it was. But Sumner so loathed the capitalist types who had the president’s ear that he insisted on conflating the Klan issue with the remnants of the Dominican matter. “With what face can we insist upon obedience to law and respect for the African race, while we are openly engaged in lawlessness upon the coast of St. Domingo and outrage upon the African race represented by the black republic?” he demanded, referring to Haiti. “It is difficult to see how we can condemn with proper, wholehearted reprobation our own domestic Ku Klux with its fearful outrages while the President puts himself at the head of a powerful and costly Ku Klux operating abroad in defiance of international law and the Constitution of the United States.”

  Carl Schurz likewise should have upheld Grant against the reactionaries of the South, but he repeatedly condemned the president as a tyrant. “The President’s education was that of military life,” he told the Senate. “He was unused to the operations of the checks and balances of power which constitute the rule of civil government.” Schurz professed not to blame Grant for his shortcomings; he declared condescendingly: “If the habits of peremptory command on the one side and of absolute obedience on the other impressed themselves strongly on his mind, it was not his fault.” Schurz continued: “If his temper is not such as to shake off the force of life-long habits with ease, if it is not supple enough to accommodate itself to a position no longer one of undivided power and responsibility, it may be called his misfortune, but let it not, by a confidence beyond reasonable bounds, become the misfortune of the American people.” Schurz concluded: “I warn my Republican friends not to identify the cause of their party with one man.”

  Schurz thought he detected support in the resistance to Grant on Santo Domingo. “Unless I greatly mistake the signs of the times, the superstition that Grant is the necessary man is rapidly giving way,” he wrote Jacob Cox, who had resigned from the Interior Department. “The spell is broken, and we have only to push through the breach.” Schurz added, “The President, as I understand, is as stubborn as ever, and seems determined to risk his all upon that one card. He seems to have a genius for suicide.”

  Schurz announced his opposition to Grant’s reelection and his intention to establish a third party. “Grant and his faction carry at present everything before them by force majeure,” he wrote Charles Sumner. “The organization of the Republican party is almost entirely in the hands of the office-holders and ruled by selfish interest.… I doubt now whether we can prevent his nomination. The men who surround him stop at nothing.” Schurz reiterated that he wouldn’t support Grant, and he added that he couldn’t support the Democrats. “But I think—in fact I firmly believe—in case of Grant’s nomination we shall have a third movement on foot strong enough to beat both him and the Democrats. I have commenced already to organize it, and when the time comes I think it will be ready for action.”

  A positive response from New York editor Horace Greeley, former diplomat Charles Francis Adams, a variety of other Republican notables and a smattering of Republican newspapers caused Schurz to summon a public meeting of the “Liberal Republican” party for January 1872 at Jefferson City in his home state of Missouri, where a liberal wing of the state Republican party had enjoyed encouraging success in the most recent round of elections. The meeting evoked conflicting reports; the Associated Press played it as a portent of serious change in national politics, prompting the correspondent for the New York Times to deride the AP account as a “gross exaggeration of the importance of the whole affair.” The Times man, writing from St. Louis, added, “The Republicans of this city feel greatly outraged at the character of the report sent out.”

  Grant observed the affair with bemusement. A friend, George Childs, and his wife were coming to Washington; Grant invited them to stay with him and Julia. He specified a particular week. “You know our house room is so limited that we have to invite friends in rotation,” he explained. He added wryly: “I hope I have enough left, notwithstanding the defection of Mr. Greeley and Carl Schurz, to keep the little room we have filled during the winter.” The opposition press criticized Grant for staffing the executive departments with his friends after dismissing—“decapitating,” the critics luridly said—their predecessors. In a sardonic moment Grant warned one of those friends, Russell Jones, the minister to Belgium, to be on guard. “Sumner, Schurz, Dana and all your admirers think it preposterous in me to give appointments to persons who I ever knew and particularly to those who feel any personal friendship for me,” he wrote. “If I am guided by this advice your decapitation is sure.”

  But Grant could be serious, for he thought the issue a serious one. Mischief-makers sought to sow doubt between the president and the vice president, contending that Schuyler Colfax was maneuvering to replace Grant. Colfax denied the rumors and Grant accepted the denial. He explained to the vice president how he had answered one of the rumormongers. “I simply replied testifying my entire confidence in the earnestness you felt in declaring to the contrary, but that if you should be the choice of the Republican party I did not know a better man to lead them, nor one that I could more earnestly work in support of. My great ambition was to save all that has been gained by so much sacrifice of blood and treasure; that I religiously believed that that could only be done through the triumph of the Republican party until their opponents get on a national, patriotic, Union platform; that the choice of the Republican party was my choice; that I held no patent right to the office, and probably had the least desire for it of anyone who ever held it or was ever prominently mentioned in connection with it.”

  Grant judged that whatever weakened the Republican party enhanced the possibility of a Democratic victory, which would be a disaster for the nation. “My own convictions,” he told friend and business associate Charles Ford, “are that it would have been better never to have made a sacrifice of blood and treasure to save the Union than to have the Democratic party come in power now and sacrifice by the ballot what the bayonet seemed to have accomplished.” After long eschewing party politics, Grant now saw his party as the necessary agent of national reconciliation. “It will be a happy day for me when I am out of public life,” he told Adam Badeau. “But I do feel a deep interest in the Republican party keeping control of affairs until the results of the war are acquiesced in by all political parties. When that is accomplished we can afford to quarrel about minor matters.” He didn’t welcome the troubles his administration and the party were encountering, but he remained optimistic, in part because he had seen much worse. “My trials here have been considerable,” he wrote Elihu Washburne. “But, I believe, so far every tempest that has been aroused has recoiled on them who got it up.… A great many professedly staunch Republicans acted very much as if they wanted to outdo the Democracy in breaking up the Republican party. Everything looks more favorably now, though, for the party than it did in ’63, when the war was raging.”

  Several senior members of the party implored Grant to make peace with the defectors. “We have men among us who are not for your nomination,” Senator Henry Wilson said, reiterating the obvious. “Some I fear are ready to go into any movements to defeat you, even at the sacrifice of the Republican party. I wish something could be done to unite these men with us. In your position you can make advances to them.… You are strong now. See to it, I pray you, that all well disposed men are invited to act with you.” The president should focus on Schurz and Sumner especially, Wilson said. “I wish you could see Schurz, as he is by all odds the most influential of any of these men. I wish, too, you and Mr. Sumner would settle all your differences. This state”—Massachuset
ts, home to both Wilson and Sumner—“is sure for you by about the old majority, but it would be very pleasant to have unity and peace.”

  Grant appreciated the benefits of party unity. No more than Wilson or the other senators and representatives who urged reconciliation did he welcome a rift in the party. But he thought Sumner and Schurz were too far gone, too impressed with their own importance. In any event, he thought they were the ones who should take the first step back. “Whenever I have done injustice to any man,” he wrote in a letter intended for Wilson, “no matter what his position, and find it out, there is no apology I am not ready to make. I have never done aught to give offense to Mr. Sumner, Mr. Schurz, the Springfield Republican people, the Cincinnati Commercial people”—two particularly vocal opposition papers—“nor Mr. Greeley. Yet they have all attacked me without mercy.… Before there can be peace between us, rather I should say good feeling and intimacy, the explanation must come from them.” Grant had heard stories, apparently circulated by Sumner, that he had been drunk on the occasion of his visit to Sumner’s house. Sensitive on the old subject, he considered Sumner’s revival of it beyond the bounds of political difference. “Mr. Sumner has been unreasonable, cowardly, slanderous, unblushingly false,” Grant said. “I should require from him an acknowledgment to this effect, from his seat in the Senate, before I would consent to meet him socially. He has not the manliness ever to admit an error. I feel a greater contempt for him than for any other man in the Senate.”