by H. W. Brands
Grant’s differences with Schurz were less personal. “Schurz is an ungrateful man, a disorganizer by nature and one who can render much greater service to the party he does not belong to than the one he pretends to have attachment for. The sooner he allies himself with our enemies, openly, the better for us.” Grant gave the critical press the back of his hand. “The Springfield Republican and Cincinnati Commercial are mere guerrilla newspapers, always finding fault with their friends, and any attempt to conciliate them would merely satisfy them of their importance.” Grant proposed to do what he had always done. “I shall endeavor to perform my duty faithfully and trust to the common sense of the people to select the right man to execute their will.”
Grant likely never sent this letter (the original remained in his files), but he conveyed its gist to Wilson and others. “President says he has just had a visit from Senators Morrill of Maine and Wilson, wishing to effect a reconciliation between him and Sumner,” Hamilton Fish recorded in his diary. “He says he told them that whenever Sumner should retract and apologize for the slanders he has uttered against him in the Senate, in his own house, in street cars and other public conveyances, at dinners and other entertainments and elsewhere, as publicly, openly, and in the same manner in which he has uttered these slanders, he would listen to proposals for reconciliation. But even then he would have no confidence in him, or in the expectation that he would not again do just what he has done.”
Grant initially underestimated the stamina of the insurgency. “It looks to me as if Mr. Schurz was not making much out of his new departure,” he wrote Charles Ford. “It will be gratifying to see such disorganizers as he is defeated.” When Schurz persisted, calling a national nominating convention of the Liberal Republicans for May 1872 in Cincinnati, Grant suggested that the breakaway movement would implode with the help of the Democrats. “My prediction is that the Democratic party will attempt to hold out the idea that they will support the Cincinnati nominees in hope of permanently dividing the Republican party, that is, of committing the bolters to their ticket, and then make a straight-out nomination of their own. I believe such action will result in the withdrawal of the Cincinnati ticket just as the Fremont ticket was withdrawn in ’64. We shall see what we shall see, however.”
The Cincinnati group was a motley collection of former Free-Soilers from the North, Unionists from the South, frustrated office seekers from all over and a sprinkling of professional politicians who simply found themselves on the wrong side of the regular Republican organization. The moralistic tone of the gathering was set by Schurz, who, responding to a charge by Grant ally Oliver Morton that he was betraying the party, said of Morton: “He has never left his party. I have never betrayed my principles. That is the difference between him and me.” The conventioneers advocated civil service reform to curb the corruption they perceived as epidemic in politics, tariff reduction to diminish the power of corporations and their lobbyists, federal withdrawal from the South to conclude the Civil War once and for all, and, especially, the removal of Grant from the White House to allow his replacement by someone of greater political refinement.
Charles Francis Adams was the early frontrunner (Schurz being disqualified by his foreign birth). The son of John Quincy Adams had his father’s reformist streak, which suited the mood of the moment, and almost no record in politics, which gave his rivals little to use against him. But Grant had appointed him to the commission that was then adjudicating the Alabama claims in Geneva, and in his absence the delegates’ eyes began to wander. Schurz, who favored Adams, might have brought them back had he applied himself in a more lively fashion. “Carl Schurz was the most industrious and the least energetic man I have ever worked with,” Joseph Pulitzer, the secretary of the convention and soon the most energetic journalist in America, muttered afterward.
The convention ultimately settled on Horace Greeley. This choice was striking in that Greeley had long championed a high tariff, which most of the delegates excoriated. He did have a record as a reformer, but it was a record that roamed widely across the landscape of American politics and culture, touching socialism, vegetarianism and spiritualism, in addition to such mundane causes as abolition and temperance. He wore whiskers that would have been called a beard had they sprouted from his chin rather than his neck; observers sometimes mistook them for a mangy silver fox crawling from under his collar. Precisely how Greeley wound up as the nominee was a matter that prompted much debate. Some delegates claimed that the convention had been hijacked by the professionals, who foisted Greeley on the gathering. Others intimated that the airy reformer wasn’t so clueless after all and had sold his convictions on the tariff—which he suddenly said should come down—for the nomination.
A third explanation, which overlapped the first two, was that Greeley had engaged in backroom dealings with influential Democrats who promised to deliver their party’s seconding nomination. When the Democratic convention, in Baltimore, did indeed nominate Greeley—in the briefest convention in American history—this explanation gained plausibility.
Charles Sumner couldn’t bring himself to bolt the Republican party. “I have no hesitation in declaring myself a member of the Republican party, and one of the straitest of the sect,” he told his colleagues in the Senate in the wake of the Cincinnati convention, which he conspicuously avoided. “I stood by its cradle; let me not follow its hearse.” Yet he would gladly send Grant to his political grave if he could. Sumner lashed the president more harshly than he ever had before. He retraced the history of the Santo Domingo affair, in which, he said, he had been basely attacked by the president’s minions. “This Republican senator, engaged in a patriotic service, and anxious to save the colored people from outrage, was denounced on this floor as a traitor to the party.” He had realized then, he said, that the Republican party he had learned to love was being malignantly transformed. “Too plainly it was becoming the instrument of one man and his personal will, no matter how much he set at defiance the Constitution and international law, or how much he insulted the colored people.” Grant had transgressed the Constitution more egregiously than Andrew Johnson ever had, Schurz said; the appropriate analogy was Julius Caesar. “He has operated by a system of combinations, military, political, and even senatorial.… This utterly unrepublican Caesarism has mastered the Republican party and dictated the presidential will, stalking into the Senate chamber itself, while a vindictive spirit visits good Republicans who cannot submit.” But what could the country expect from a person of Grant’s background? “The successful soldier is rarely changed to the successful civilian. There seems an incompatibility between the two.… One always a soldier cannot late in life become a statesman.” Sumner recapitulated the gold conspiracy, dwelling on the role of Grant’s brother-in-law Abel Corbin. He decried Grant’s willingness to accept gifts from admirers who subsequently sought offices. “For a public man to take gifts is reprehensible; for a president to select cabinet councilors and other officers among those from whom he has taken gifts is an anomaly in republican annals.” By the sale of offices, Sumner said, Grant had become “probably the richest president since George Washington.” The Republican convention would meet shortly; Sumner demanded that the delegates choose another nominee than the incumbent. “I protest against him as radically unfit for the presidential office, being essentially military in nature, without experience in civil life, without aptitude for civil duties, and without knowledge of Republican institutions.… Not without anxiety do I wait, but with the earnest hope that the convention will bring the Republican party into ancient harmony, saving it especially from the suicidal folly of an issue on the personal pretensions of one man.”
The Republican regulars had written Sumner off as a crank, if not a lunatic. Many of Grant’s supporters thought the senator’s diatribe worked to the president’s advantage. “The atrocious speech of Mr. Sumner has been deeply felt and resented by all who served under your command,” John Pope wrote Grant from Fort Leavenworth, Kansa
s. “It is felt as a personal insult by every one of them and will secure you thousands of votes which for political reasons might have been given to another candidate.”
The regulars rallied to Grant at the Republican convention, held in Philadelphia, where they renominated him unanimously. Yet they weren’t insensitive to the complaints of their opponents, and they chose to replace Schuyler Colfax as Grant’s running mate with Henry Wilson. Delegate Edwards Pierrepont, who would become Grant’s attorney general, recounted the spirit and reasoning of the convention. “The wild enthusiasm with which your name was hailed at Philadelphia is most gratifying and is the harbinger of a November victory,” Pierrepont wrote Grant. “The nomination of Wilson is well. It gives new life by awakening new hopes.… People like change and they must have new hopes.… I am glad that Colfax was not nominated, though I like him; I am glad simply because it proves to the people that all will not run in the same old ruts. New life, new hopes this people need.… If they were in Paradise, they would demand something that looked like progress and novelty.”
Grant had no reason to dispute the judgment of the convention. “How do you like the substitution of Wilson for Colfax?” a correspondent who had followed him to Long Branch inquired. Grant replied tactfully: “The idea seems to have been to have the two candidates”—Wilson and himself—“from different sections of the country. Otherwise there is no preference between the two men”—Wilson and Colfax. “Personally I have a great affection for both Wilson and Colfax. Mr. Colfax, so far through our term, has been a firm friend, and we have always entertained the most affectionate relations toward one another.”
Greeley and Grant’s other critics, elaborating on Sumner’s charges of Caesarism, suggested that Grant sought to be president for life; Grant responded in his formal acceptance of the Republican nomination. He thanked the convention for the renewed vote of confidence and expressed hope that a second term would benefit from the lessons of the first. “Experience may guide me in avoiding mistakes inevitable with novices in all professions and all occupations,” he said. He continued: “When relieved from the responsibilities of my present trust, by the election of a successor, whether it be at the end of this term or next, I hope to leave to him as executive a country at peace within its own borders, at peace with outside nations, with a credit at home and abroad, and without embarrassing questions to threaten its future prosperity.”
This wasn’t the unequivocal no-third-term promise his opponents sought, but it quieted most concerns on that point. Grant kept out of the campaign almost as much as he had four years earlier. He allowed himself a modest rejoinder to Sumner in an interview with a correspondent from the Associated Press. As the correspondent reported: “The conversation turning on the remark of Senator Sumner to the effect that Greeley is a better friend to the black man than President Grant, the President replied that he never pretended to be, as he had repeatedly said, an original abolitionist; but he favored emancipation as a war measure. When this was secured, he thought the ballot should be conferred to make the gift complete and to place those who had been liberated in full possession of the rights of freemen.… While he had no unkind words to utter concerning Senator Sumner, he was perfectly willing to place his acts against Senator Sumner’s words.”
Another reporter caught Grant at a public reception in upstate New York, where he and Julia had taken the younger children for a holiday. He reflected on the past and future. “I was not anxious to be president a second term, but I consented to receive the nomination simply because I thought that was the best way of discovering whether my countrymen, or the majority of them, really believed all that was alleged against my administration and against myself personally,” he told the reporter. “The asperities of an election campaign will give my political opponents and my personal enemies an opportunity and an excuse to say all that can be said against me. That opportunity I do not grudge them, and I depend on the people to rebuke or to endorse me, as they see fit.” Of course, in making their decision on him, the people would render a larger verdict. “I am anxious to ascertain whether the Republican party, whose choice I again happen to be, is to have its policy sustained or not.”
Privately Grant exuded confidence. The Liberal Republicans were trying to lure the regulars away; Grant thought they would fail. Referring to a wavering Pennsylvania Republican, the president wrote Elihu Washburne: “The Greeleyites will be as liberal in their offers to him as Satan was to our Savior, and with as little ability to pay.” He still guessed that the Greeley campaign would self-destruct. “I do not often indulge in predictions,” he told Washburne, “but I have had a feeling that Greeley might not even be in the field in November.” Greeley’s supporters were growing desperate. “The opposition in this canvass seems to have no capital but slander, abuse and falsehood.” Some of the slanderers were having their malicious words turn back on themselves, as reporters discovered dark corners of their careers. “They have learned that people who live in glass houses should never throw stones.” Grant wished the lesson would rise to the top of the Liberal ranks but supposed it wouldn’t. “The saintly Trumbull and Schurz ought to see the same thing, but their hides are thick and their impudence is sublime.” In this confidential letter Grant didn’t try to conceal his satisfaction that Sumner was being ignored by all three parties. “Poor old Sumner is sick from neglect and the consciousness that he is not all of the Republican party. I very much doubt whether he will ever get to Washington again. If he is not crazy his mind is at least so affected as to disqualify him for the proper discharge of his duties as senator.”
The outlook only improved as the election neared. “There has been no time from the Baltimore convention to this when I have had the least anxiety,” Grant remarked in September. “The soreheads and thieves who have deserted the Republican party have strengthened it by their departure.” Grant forecast a big victory even if Greeley stayed in the race. “I do not think he will carry a single Northern state,” he told Washburne. “In the South I give him Tennessee and Texas, with Virginia, West Virginia, Maryland, Kentucky, Georgia, Florida, and Arkansas doubtful, with the chances in our favor in all of them except Maryland. Missouri might also be added to the doubtful states.”
Grant predicted well. Greeley carried Tennessee, Texas, Kentucky, Georgia, Maryland and Missouri; Grant carried everything else and smashed his challenger in the popular vote by 56 percent to 44 percent. Grant received 286 electoral votes to what would have been 66 for Greeley if Greeley hadn’t suddenly died three weeks after the election. His electoral votes were scattered among surviving adherents of his various causes.
66
AMID THE CAMPAIGN GRANT MET WITH SEVERAL DELEGATIONS OF Indians. Representatives of the indigenous peoples had been meeting with American presidents for decades, but in Grant they had greater hope for a sympathetic hearing than they had had in any of his predecessors. Grant remained convinced that the Indian Bureau was the principal cause of the Indian wars, but the bureau had friends on Capitol Hill and he hadn’t been able to remove it from the Interior Department. He did, however, partially circumvent the bureau by creating a new Indian commission, staffed by prominent philanthropists and others of a generous persuasion regarding the Indians. At Grant’s summons the commission met in Washington, and it denounced previous policy in the most scathing terms. “The history of the government connections with the Indians is a shameful record of broken treaties and unfulfilled promises,” the commissioners declared. “The history of the border white man’s connection with the Indians is a sickening record of murder, outrage, robbery, and wrongs committed by the former as a rule, and occasional savage outbreaks and unspeakably barbarous deeds of retaliation by the latter as the exception.… In our Indian wars, almost without exception, the first aggressions have been made by the white man.” Cynicism fueled aggression in the most pernicious way, the commissioners asserted. “In addition to the class of robbers and outlaws who find impunity in their nefarious pursuits upon the fr
ontiers, there is a large class of professedly reputable men who use every means in their power to bring on Indian wars, for the sake of the profit to be realized from the presence of troops and the expenditure of government funds in their midst. They proclaim death to the Indians at all times, in words and publications, making no distinction between the innocent and the guilty. They incite the lowest class of men to the perpetration of the darkest deeds against their victims, and, as judges and jurymen, shield them from the justice due to their crimes. Every crime committed by a white man against an Indian is concealed or palliated; every offense committed by one Indian against a white man is borne on the wings of the post or the telegraph to the remotest corner of the land, clothed with all the horrors which the reality or the imagination can throw around it.”
The commission proposed and Grant accepted a new approach to staffing the Indian agencies in the West. Because the Society of Friends, or Quakers, had historically pursued humane policies toward Indians in Pennsylvania, and because as a group they appeared more honest and diligent than the typical Indian agents, Grant’s commission gave the Quakers charge of Indian relations in about half the western agencies. In most of the rest the president replaced the Interior Department’s agents with army officers, believing, as before, that men who would have to fight the Indian wars were less likely to start them.
Grant’s “peace policy” had other facets. It followed the recommendation of William Sherman—and others—to separate the Indians from whites on the frontier, with the former being allotted reservations for their exclusive and presumably perpetual use. On these reservations the Indians would govern themselves, albeit with advice and instruction in the ways of white civilization from the Quakers and others of an educational and eleemosynary bent.