by H. W. Brands
Fish defended Grant to Blaine. He said the president had identified the national interest accurately. “I told him that without adopting all the details of the President’s plan, I believed the principles underlying it were the only safeguards of the country.”
The Republican majority agreed to a compromise bill that redistributed and lubricated but didn’t explicitly expand the money supply. The measure afforded cover for the elections, the Republican leaders hoped, and it suited the president, who signed the bill into law.
“A wedding at the White House is a very rare occurrence in the annals of that mansion, not more than one or two having been celebrated there before the wedding of Miss Grant today,” the social correspondent for the New York Times reported on May 21, 1874. In fact there had been three White House weddings, but none in more than thirty years. And this one only partly counted, in that Grant, Julia and Nellie had decided that it would be conducted as a private affair, with guests limited to personal friends.
Reporters were allowed into the White House ahead of the wedding ceremony to satisfy the curiosity of the public. “The East Room was decorated and prepared especially for the occasion,” the Times man recounted. “A profusion of beautiful flowers and tropical plants were disposed in suitable positions. Beneath the large middle window on the eastern side of the room a low platform was raised and carpeted. The two fluted columns on either side of the window were twined with roses.”
Sources described the ceremony and reception, which the reporter reconstructed. “At 11 o’clock the guests, to the number of nearly 200, had assembled in the East Room. Mr. Sartoris was the first of the bridal party to arrive, accompanied by Lieut. Fred Grant.” While the marine band played the wedding march, the eight bridesmaids entered. “Following the bridesmaids were the President and the bride, and after them came the mother of the bride and other members of the family.” The vows were exchanged and the wedding party and guests sat down to lunch. The bride and groom departed after an hour; as they left, two young girls tossed slippers at them, in keeping with tradition. “The omen of good luck was made complete by the directness with which they were aimed, one striking the bride and the other her husband.” The president and Mrs. Grant had announced that the newlyweds would be leaving shortly for Europe and would take up residence in Britain. “Mr. Sartoris is the only son of Mr. Edward Sartoris, of England, and is heir to a considerable estate,” the Times explained to readers who hadn’t already heard.
73
TRY THOUGH HE MIGHT, GRANT COULDN’T KEEP CLEAR OF THE POLITICS of the South. Two Republicans, Elisha Baxter and Joseph Brooks, battled for the governorship of Arkansas. Brooks claimed to have won the popular vote in the most recent election, but the legislature, ruling on numerous irregularities in the balloting, awarded the office to Baxter. Both sides summoned supporters, who came armed and organized themselves into militias. A standoff paralyzed Little Rock, interspersed with bloody scrimmages. Baxter and Brooks each appealed to Grant for assistance.
Grant told the parties to work things out themselves. “I heartily approve any adjustment peaceably of the pending difficulties in Arkansas by means of the legislative assembly, the courts, or otherwise,” he wrote Baxter. “I will give all the assistance and protection I can under the Constitution and laws of the United States to such modes of adjustment. I hope that the military on both sides will now be disbanded.”
Meanwhile he had George Williams examine the merits of the competing claims. The attorney general concluded that the counting may have been crooked but that there wasn’t any remedy Washington could provide that wouldn’t create more problems than it solved. “Frauds may have been committed to the prejudice of Brooks,” Williams told Grant, “but, unhappily, there are few elections, where partisan zeal runs high, in which the victorious party with more or less of truth is not charged with acts of fraud. There must, however, be an end to controversy upon the subject. Somebody must be trusted to count votes and declare elections.” The Arkansas constitution placed that trust in the state assembly, which had decided in favor of Baxter. The president could hardly do otherwise than to encourage all Arkansans to accept the decision.
Grant did just that. He wrote to Baxter and Brooks individually, with each message tailored to its recipient but with each carrying the same core message: disband your militias and get back to ordinary politics. To the people of Arkansas the president issued a proclamation affirming the election of Baxter and commanding “all turbulent and disorderly persons to disperse and retire peaceably to their respective abodes.” Lest they not think him serious, Grant reminded the Arkansans that the federal Constitution authorized him to employ military force when necessary. They had ten days to go home.
The stern words sufficed. Brooks acquiesced to the president’s decision and sent his followers away. Baxter pondered treason charges against the Brooks camp but decided not to test his luck.
Louisiana took a lesson but not the one Grant intended. Republicans controlled the politics of Louisiana, but they were feeling lonely and threatened. This was striking, Governor William Kellogg explained to Grant from New Orleans, because the Republicans constituted a majority of the legal voters in the state. “Even our opponents now admit it,” Kellogg said. As a result the Democrats were shifting tactics. “They have abandoned the policy of fraud upon which they relied in 1872, and have returned to the policy of murder, violence, and intimidation which they pursued in 1868.” The spring of 1873 had produced a siege of Colfax, the seat of Grant Parish, where black Republicans resisted a forcible takeover by white Democrats. The whites, heavily armed with rifles and a Civil War cannon, eventually overwhelmed the blacks, massacring several dozen, including many after they had surrendered. Emboldened by the inability of the state police and the small number of federal troops in Louisiana to stop them, the insurgents in the spring of 1874 formed a “White League” dedicated to the recapture of the state by white Democrats. Governor Kellogg, watching these developments with alarm, told Grant that the president’s recent actions toward Arkansas, while perhaps justified by the situation in that state, had created a dangerous impression in Louisiana. Democrats loudly declared that Grant had become a man of words rather than of actions. He had refused to protect Republicans in Arkansas, and he would refuse to protect them in Louisiana. Kellogg contended that the Louisiana Republicans were as brave as Republicans elsewhere. “But it is necessary 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, and should feel that he is not beyond the reach of the national arm.”
Grant heard from Louisiana’s Democrats as well. “We assure your excellency most positively that Gov. Kellogg is in error,” S. J. Ward, the president of the board of trade of Shreveport, telegraphed. Describing a riot in Caddo Parish in which he said blacks took the principal part, Ward asserted, “The action of the negroes was prompted by their white leaders with a view of bringing about such a condition of affairs as would induce your excellency to send troops to the state, which troops it was hoped and believed by the wily instigators of the trouble would overawe and intimidate the white people and prevent them from prosecuting the present political contest against the radical party.” That party—the Republicans—was wholly corrupt, Ward said, and deserving of defeat rather than outside support. “We assure your excellency that the white people of Louisiana, owning upwards of three hundred and fifty millions of property and largely interested in commerce and agriculture, desire only to elect and establish a government of competent and honest officials under which all legitimate interests of all persons irrespective of race, color, or previous condition of servitude will be protected.”
The unrest intensified as the 1874 election approached. On the last day of August Governor Kellogg reported a seizure by the White League of several elected officials at Coushatta in Red River Parish, who were then transported in the direction of Shreveport. “En route they
were all shot in cold blood,” Kellogg said. Several blacks with the misfortune of witnessing the crime were killed as well. The incident was characteristic of the situation in northwestern Louisiana, Kellogg said. “Predatory bands of armed men are scouring several of the Republican parishes in that portion of the state, driving out Republicans and intimidating colored men. Registration commenced today, and an openly avowed policy of exterminating Republicans.”
The insurrection moved to New Orleans, where a small army of White Leaguers challenged city police and state militia. On September 14 the United States marshal in New Orleans reported a battle in which fifteen police were killed and thirty wounded. “The purpose of the riot is the overthrow of the state government,” the marshal declared. The few federal troops in the area were having no effect on the violence. “The military force is inadequate to protect the public property and keep the peace besides.” That same day Kellogg made a formal plea for federal assistance. “Under Article 4, section 4, of the Constitution of the United States, I have the honor to inform you that this state is now subject to domestic violence of a character that the state forces under existing circumstances are unable to suppress,” he wired Grant. “I respectfully make requisition upon you to take measures to put down the domestic violence and insurrection now prevailing.”
Grant decided that Louisiana looked less like the Arkansas of the previous spring than like the South Carolina of three years earlier. He prepared to take strong action. “Turbulent and disorderly persons have combined together with force and arms to overthrow the state government of Louisiana and to resist the laws and constituted authorities,” he proclaimed. Citing his responsibility to preserve the states against domestic violence and to ensure enforcement of the laws, he gave “said turbulent and disorderly persons” five days to disperse and return to their homes. After that they would face federal troops. To emphasize his resolve he ordered infantry units from outside Louisiana to converge on the state and dispatched three warships from the Gulf of Mexico to New Orleans.
The brandishing of force sufficed. The insurgents dispersed, and Kellogg and the other officials regained control of the state, at least long enough to conduct the 1874 elections.
The Republicans expected to suffer losses in that autumn’s countrywide balloting. The party had controlled the national government for fourteen years, and voters typically tire of incumbents long before then. Grant remained popular among Americans generally, but he wasn’t on the ballot and, anyway, midterm elections usually hinge on perceptions of Congress rather than of the president. The depression, deeper than ever that autumn, seemingly sealed the Republicans’ dismal fate.
Yet the tsunami that swept Republicans away caught the party by surprise. Many simply had grown so accustomed to office that they couldn’t imagine America without them in charge. James Blaine was less prone to self-delusion than most of his colleagues, but even he failed to detect the signs of the approaching catastrophe. Blaine’s home state always voted early to spare voters the rigors of Maine Novembers; Blaine reported to Grant in September: “The result of our election today is in all respects satisfactory. We have carried every Congressional district; have a majority I think in every county in the state.”
But Maine proved the rare bright spot. When the rest of the country voted, the Republicans were trounced. They lost ninety-six seats in the House, where their swaggering majority became a quivering minority. The shift was less dramatic in the Senate, as such shifts typically are, with but a third of the seats in play in any election. But there too the Republicans suffered badly, with their majority sharply diminished and the survivors deeply sobered.
The outcome meant little to Grant personally. He had always shunned the role of politician, and though he had learned to play the political game on matters touching the essence of republicanism—ratification of the Fifteenth Amendment, suppression of the Ku Klux Klan—he still considered Congress hostile territory. Responding in the autumn of 1873 to a dinner invitation from Simon Cameron, the former secretary of war and then a senator from Pennsylvania, Grant had written: “Not before the meeting of Congress. After that unhappy event I would be willing to run away any Saturday from my natural enemy.” The landslide winner of the 1872 presidential election had little difficulty convincing himself that the congressional Republicans’ losses in 1874 were their losses, not his.
74
GRANT RARELY ABANDONED MISSIONS HE CONSIDERED ESSENTIAL, but that autumn he sounded retreat on a matter he been pushing forward for years. From the first weeks of his first term, when the clamor for office had induced one of his migraines, he had cajoled Congress to reform the federal civil service. “There is no duty which so much embarrasses the executive and heads of departments as that of appointments, nor is there any such arduous and thankless labor imposed on senators and representatives as that of finding places for constituents,” he declared. “The present system does not secure the best men, and often not even fit men, for public place. The elevation and purification of the civil service of the government will be hailed with approval by the whole people of the United States.”
Congress responded slowly and without enthusiasm. In 1871 the legislature authorized the president to recommend measures to ensure that federal positions be filled on the basis of competence rather than party affiliation and personal connections. Grant appointed a civil service commission, which prescribed competitive examinations and other techniques for putting an end to the spoils system or at least reducing its scope. Grant approved the recommendations, and in the spring of 1872 the first examinations under the new system were administered.
To Grant’s mind the civil service reforms promised to be both a boon to the nation and a blessing to himself. The nation would benefit from the greater expertise and disinterestedness the new system would produce; he would benefit from not having to deal with the hordes of applicants and their noisy sponsors. Grant discovered what Lincoln and other presidents had learned: that the patronage system alienated more people than it satisfied. Successful applicants thought they deserved the jobs; the unsuccessful, who greatly outnumbered the successful ones, felt they had been deprived. Grant was happy to hand the thankless task of job-filling to the commission.
Many in Congress held a different view. Senators and representatives were the usual conduits for applications for federal jobs, and the delivery of the jobs to supporters acted as binder that held the parties together. This function of the patronage explained much of the fierceness of fights over the presidency. Having a Republican in the White House permitted Republican legislators to shower jobs on their friends and constituents; the arrival of a Democrat snatched that power away.
Grant had shamed Congress into accepting the principle of civil service reform, but the legislature stubbornly refused to fund the new system. He cajoled and expostulated for money year after year, to no effect. Finally he gave the lawmakers an ultimatum. “The rules adopted to improve the civil service of the Government have been adhered to as closely as has been practicable with the opposition with which they meet,” he said in his December 1874 annual message. “But it is impracticable to maintain them without direct and positive support of Congress.… If Congress adjourns without positive legislation on the subject of civil service reform I will regard such action as a disapproval of the system, and will abandon it.” This would be a disservice to the country and a waste of the effort invested thus far. But there was no alternative. “It is impossible to carry this system to a successful issue without general approval and assistance and positive law to support it.”
Congress remained unmoved. The lame-duck Republicans, who might have judged civil service reform a means to preserve the jobs of their protégés, were too stunned by the Democratic landslide to act coherently. The Democrats salivated at the thought of doling out thousands of positions when they reclaimed the White House in two years. The practice of reform withered; even the idea nearly expired.
Grant’s failure on civil serv
ice reform augured ill for his seventh and eighth years in office, which threatened to be difficult enough anyway. The depression still shadowed the land, and the congressional Democrats made no secret of their intention to obstruct whatever the president proposed.
Grant might have helped himself, if only slightly, by holding open the possibility of a third term. His popularity persisted, and he could have forced the Democrats to guard their flanks against his potential presence on the ballot in 1876. The ambiguous disavowal of a third term he had made during the 1872 campaign left room for reinterpretation and hadn’t been repeated. Even if he ultimately decided not to run, by keeping his antagonists in suspense he could throw them off balance.
This was what his advisers wanted him to do; it was what political common sense dictated. But it didn’t suit him. He had silently resented the allegations of Caesarism, and he decided that the most potent refutation was a definitive disavowal of a political future. “I never sought the office for a second, nor even for a first, nomination,” he reminded Harry White, the president of the Pennsylvania Republican convention, in a letter intended for the press. “To the first I was called from a life position”—as general of the army—“one created by Congress expressly for me for supposed services rendered to the Republic. The position vacated I liked. It would have been most agreeable to me to have retained it.… But I was made to believe that the public good called me to make the sacrifice.” The vote of the people had corroborated this belief. His second nomination and second election had reinforced it. Grant didn’t deny that he took personal pleasure at the result of the voting, especially the second round. “Such a fire of personal abuse and slander had been kept up for four years, notwithstanding my conscientious performance of my duties, to the best of my understanding—though I admit, in the light of subsequent events, many times subject to fair criticism—that an endorsement from the people, who alone govern republics, was a gratification that it is only human to have appreciated and enjoyed.”