by H. W. Brands
But enough was enough. The tradition of stepping down after two terms was a sound one, established by the first president and observed without exception since. Grant allowed that national emergency might someday require setting the tradition aside, but until such calamity occurred, the tradition should be maintained. “I am not, nor have I been, a candidate for a renomination,” he wrote White and the country. “I would not accept a nomination if it were tendered unless it should come under such circumstances as to make it an imperative duty, circumstances not likely to arise.”
If Grant had been half as good a politician as he was a soldier, he never would have written or sent this letter. The intelligence it contained was as valuable to Grant’s political enemies as his battle plans before Vicksburg or Richmond would have been to Pemberton or Lee. It limited his flexibility, discouraged his troops and let the Democrats know they could simply outwait him.
If he had been merely as good a politician as his wife, he would have kept his thoughts to himself. “I followed the President into his office one Sunday afternoon, when one after another the cabinet officers arrived,” Julia wrote afterward. The gathering seemed odd, as cabinet meetings weren’t held on Sundays. She tried to draw the secretaries out, but they didn’t know the purpose of the meeting. Grant knew, of course, but he wasn’t saying. “I left the room feeling sure there was something of importance to be considered,” she recounted. “I was restless and anxious.” Half an hour later a messenger left the office and the White House. She could contain herself no longer. “I want to know what is happening,” she told her husband. “I feel sure there is something and I must know.” Grant said he would explain very soon; he just wanted to step out into the hall and light his cigar. After a few minutes he reentered the room. “What is it? Tell me!” she demanded. He said he had read the cabinet a letter he had written taking himself out of the running for 1876. She was dumbfounded. “Did all of these men approve?” she asked. Grant said he hadn’t requested their approval; he had simply read them the letter. “Why did you not read it to me?” she asked. He answered, “I know you too well. It never would have gone if I had read it.” She insisted, “Bring it and read it to me now.” He smiled and said, “It is already posted. That is why I lingered in the hall.” She wailed: “Oh, Ulys! Was that kind to me? Was it just?” He told her there was no use fretting; what was done was done. She gradually calmed herself. “But I did feel deeply injured,” she remembered.
Having placed himself indisputably above politics, Grant proceeded to speak from the moral high ground. He knew his time in office was running out, and he feared that the chance for justice for the freedmen wouldn’t survive him. In a message to Congress he recounted the violence and terror that had been directed against black voters and their white allies during the previous months and years; he defended his actions against the Ku Klux Klan, the White League and others who had violated the Constitution and federal laws; and he suggested that such remedies could not be applied forever. “The whole subject of executive interference with the affairs of a state is repugnant to public opinion, to the feelings of those who, from their official capacity, must be used in such interposition, and to him or those who must direct,” he said. Without the law to support it, such interference was criminal, but even with the law, it was very unpopular. “I desire, therefore, that all necessity for executive direction in local affairs may become unnecessary and obsolete.”
Grant appealed not simply to Congress but to the American people to consider the causes and consequences of the domestic violence. “Is there not a disposition on one side to magnify wrongs and outrages, and on the other side to belittle them or justify them?” A calmer, fairer mindset couldn’t avoid improving policy toward the South. “A better state of feeling would be inculcated, and the sooner we would have that peace which would leave the states free indeed to regulate their own domestic affairs.” Grant credited the majority of Southerners with a desire for justice and the rule of law. “But do they do right in ignoring the existence of violence and bloodshed in resistance to constituted authority?” He sympathized with the frustration white Southerners had experienced since the war, as important decisions had been made for them by Washington. “But can they proclaim themselves entirely irresponsible for this condition? They can not. Violence has been rampant in some localities, and has either been justified or denied by those who could have prevented it.”
Grant knew that many people, and not in the South alone, rejected the idea that the federal government possessed continuing authority to interfere in Southern states to ensure the rights of Southern citizens. “This is a great mistake,” he said of the rejection. “While I remain executive all the laws of Congress and the provisions of the Constitution, including the recent amendments added thereto, will be enforced with rigor, but with regret that they should have added one jot or tittle to executive duties or powers.” This regret—that the president was having to do what the states should have done themselves—was what caused him to appeal again to the South’s better nature. “Let there be fairness in the discussion of Southern questions, the advocates of both or all political parties giving honest, truthful reports of occurrences, condemning the wrong and upholding the right, and soon all will be well. Under existing conditions the negro votes the Republican ticket because he knows his friends are of that party. Many a good citizen votes the opposite, not because he agrees with the great principles of state which separate parties, but because, generally, he is opposed to negro rule. This is a most delusive cry. Treat the negro as a citizen and a voter, as he is and must remain, and soon parties will be divided, not on the color line, but on principle. Then we shall have no complaint of sectional interference.”
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LOUISIANA AGAIN WASN’T LISTENING. THE 1874 ELECTIONS THERE produced a contested result in the state legislature, with the Democrats and Republicans both claiming victory and both alleging theft. New Orleans boiled over once more, prompting Grant to direct Phil Sheridan to take command of the federal forces in the city and state. The assignment outraged much of the white South; for what purpose was the president sending the despoiler of Shenandoah if not to intimidate the citizenry? Sheridan seemed to confirm the critics’ fears when the Democrats attempted a forcible seizure of the statehouse and Sheridan dispatched troops to prevent it. The federal soldiers entered the legislative chamber and physically removed the trespassers, who naturally asserted that they were not trespassers at all but the rightful occupants of the seats from which they were being evicted.
Sheridan ignored the complaints and requested greater authority. “I think the terrorism now existing in Louisiana, Mississippi, and Arkansas could be entirely removed and confidence and fair dealing established by the arrest and trial of the ringleaders of the armed White Leagues,” he wrote to Washington. “If Congress would pass a bill declaring them banditti, they could be tried by a military commission. These banditti, who murdered men here on the 14th of last September, also more recently at Vicksburg, Miss.”—the scene of additional lethal violence—“should, in justice to law and order and the peace and prosperity of this southern part of the country, be punished.” If Congress wouldn’t act, the president should. “It is possible that if the President would issue a proclamation declaring them banditti, no further action need be taken except that which would devolve upon me.”
Sheridan’s statement evoked a louder protest from the Democratic leaders of New Orleans, who characterized his words as malicious and misinformed and his actions as illegal and despotic. “Coming among us an almost entire stranger, General Sheridan has limited his inquiries as to the condition of affairs here to those whose interest it is not only to falsify facts but to promote that spirit of lawlessness with which we are falsely charged,” a statement from the Cotton Exchange, a focus of Democratic influence in Louisiana, asserted. Democrats around the country echoed the cry; the Democratic state committee of Illinois declared, “The Administration, through the most facile of its mi
litary instruments, has dispersed the legislative assembly of a sovereign state and forced the representatives of the people from the halls of legislation at the point of the bayonet, and has given Louisiana over to her spoilers and plunderers.… This action imports terrorism of the whole South and its unholy subjugation to party ends.”
Sheridan waved aside the protesters. “They seem to be trying to make martyrs of themselves,” he telegraphed to Washington. “It cannot be done at this late day; there have been too many bleeding negroes and ostracized white citizens for their statements to be believed by fair-minded people.” Sheridan said he would send a list he had compiled of the number of murders in Louisiana in the last few years, the perpetrators of which remained unpunished. “I think that the number will startle you; it will be up in the thousands.” He added, “The city is perfectly quiet. No trouble is apprehended.” Sheridan had received death threats; he similarly discounted them. “I am not afraid, and will not be stopped from informing the Government that there are localities in this department where the very air has been impregnated with assassination for several years.”
Sheridan’s assertiveness split Grant’s cabinet. War Secretary William Belknap congratulated Sheridan, saying, “The President and all of us have full confidence and thoroughly approve your course.” Hamilton Fish condemned Sheridan’s action and hotly resented Belknap’s implication that he endorsed it. Most other members sided with Fish, either on the principle of noninterference in state politics or from fear of the political repercussions to the Republican party.
Grant upheld Sheridan. The president wasn’t thrilled that Sheridan had given so little weight to political sensibilities, but neither was he surprised. And he certainly didn’t intend to disavow Sheridan’s actions after the fact. He remembered how Lincoln had stood by him during moments of trial; so he would stand by Sheridan.
And he soon came to share the opprobrium aimed at Sheridan. Protest meetings were held in every section of the country; death threats poured into the White House. “You had better mend your course toward the southern states,” a Virginian who signed himself only as “Conservative” wrote Grant. “If you do not, you will not be a living man two months from today.” From New Orleans “Deadshot” warned, “If you cannot well back out of your now contemptible position you had better PREPARE FOR THE NEXT WORLD!!!” A man calling himself “Charles Howard”—not his real name, he said—claimed personal knowledge of a shadowy Southern paramilitary organization that intended to provoke a war with the Indians on the Plains, which would require the president to withdraw the federal troops from the South. “There will also be attempts made to assassinate you and all the leading members of the radical party. They have even now got their spies in Washington City.”
Grant paid the threats no attention and summoned Congress to stand beside him on behalf of civil rights in Louisiana. “To say that lawlessness, turbulence, and bloodshed have characterized the political affairs of that state since its reorganization under the reconstruction acts is only to repeat what has become well known as a part of its unhappy history,” he wrote the Senate. He summarized the fraud, violence and intimidation of the recent years and the actions he had taken to combat them. He acknowledged that the theory on which his actions rested—that the federal government could reach over the state governments to protect the rights of individual citizens—was new and to some people startling. “But it results as clearly from the fifteenth amendment to the Constitution and the acts that have been passed to enforce that amendment as the abrogation of state laws upholding slavery results from the thirteenth amendment.”
Referring specifically to the Colfax massacre, Grant said he didn’t hold the people of Louisiana at large to blame for the slaughter. “But it is a lamentable fact that insuperable obstructions were thrown in the way of punishing these murderers; and the so-called conservative papers of the state not only justified the massacre, but denounced as federal tyranny and despotism the attempt of the United States officers to bring them to justice.” Democrats elsewhere were no help. “Fierce denunciations ring through the country about office holding and election matters in Louisiana, while every one of the Colfax miscreants goes unwhipped of justice, and no way can be found in this boasted land of civilization and Christianity to punish the perpetrators of this bloody and monstrous crime.”
A similar failure had followed the Coushatta murders. “No one has been punished, and the conservative press of the state denounced all efforts to that end and boldly justified the crime.” Again Grant was reluctant to generalize but unable not to. “To say that the murder of a negro or a white Republican is not considered a crime in Louisiana would probably be unjust to a great part of the people, but it is true that a great number of such murders have been committed and no one has been punished therefor; and manifestly, as to them, the spirit of hatred and violence is stronger than law.”
Grant again disclaimed eagerness to involve the federal government in the affairs of Louisiana or any other state. “I have always refused except where it seemed to be my imperative duty to act in such a manner under the constitution and laws of the United States,” he said. Without apologizing for Sheridan’s actions, he made plain that those actions were exceptional and would not be repeated. “I am well aware that any military interference by the officers or troops of the United States with the organization of the state legislature or any of its proceedings, or with any civil department of the government, is repugnant to our ideas of government. I can conceive of no case, not involving rebellion or insurrection, where such interference by authority of the general government ought to be permitted or can be justified.”
All the same, he wouldn’t turn his back on the South. “To the extent that Congress has conferred power upon me to prevent it, neither Ku Klux Klans, White Leagues, nor any other association using arms and violence to execute their unlawful purposes can be permitted in that way to govern any part of this country; nor can I see with indifference Union men or Republicans ostracized, persecuted, and murdered on account of their opinions, as they now are in some localities.” But to continue his defense of equal rights and to have a prayer of success, he needed a show of support from the legislative branch. “I now earnestly ask that such action be taken by Congress as to leave my duties perfectly clear.”
Grant’s appeal produced results, although not exactly the kind he sought. Charles Sumner had long advocated a civil rights law barring racial discrimination in most aspects of public life. The concept made little headway while he lived, but following his 1874 death the Senate had paid him homage by approving a bill incorporating his basic ideas. The House adjourned without voting on the bill, but the following year a similar bill—mandating equality in hotels and restaurants open to the public, in transportation facilities, in theaters and other public amusements and in the selection of juries—passed both chambers. The measure reached the White House about the time the two sides in Louisiana cobbled a compromise that allowed Grant to withdraw Sheridan and most of the federal troops. On March 1, 1875, the president signed the Civil Rights Act, the most ambitious affirmation of racial equality in American history until then (a distinction it would retain until the 1960s).
To affirm equality, however, was one thing; to enforce it another. The 1875 law lacked the teeth of the 1871 Ku Klux Klan Act; it required persons who believed their rights to have been violated to file suit in court, where the penalties were modest. Moreover, because the law intruded farther into the private sphere than any previous federal law touching race relations—or just about any other subject—it raised constitutional doubts even among many who supported the principle of equality.
Grant recognized the law’s shortcomings. He understood that it might be declared unconstitutional (as indeed it was in 1883, when the Supreme Court ruled that the Fourteenth Amendment’s equal protection clause applied to actions by state governments but not by individuals). But no law was perfect, and at this late date, on this vexed subject, it was the bes
t he could hope for.
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A SECOND PROMISE OF THAT SESSION OF CONGRESS PROVED MORE plausible. In January 1875 the legislature approved the Resumption Act, which embodied Grant’s recommendation to put the federal government on track to wring the paper from America’s currency. As of January 1, 1879, the Treasury would redeem greenbacks in gold. The date was more distant than Grant had wished, but the certain knowledge that paper dollars would eventually be worth their face value in gold would drive them toward parity even ahead of the redemption date. The country would still not be on a gold standard, as silver coins remained lawful currency and in fact would gain prevalence in response to a second provision of the new law, one enacting Grant’s recommendation to replace small notes with silver coins.
Many economists of later generations would consider resumption to have been precisely the wrong prescription for curing the depression of the 1870s. Their arguments were anticipated during Grant’s day by populists and debtor advocates who contended that a smaller currency would drive already falling prices further down and thereby increase the burden of debtors. Grant acknowledged the price-lowering effect of resumption, but he believed the confidence-building effect to be more important. In a statement upon his signing of the bill, he praised the “currency of a fixed known value” that resumption would produce. Grant considered the expectations of investors to be critical to recovery. When investors knew they would be paid back in dollars of value equal to those they invested, the economy would find its footing. Speaking of the measure before him, Grant explained, “By the enactment of such a law, business and industries would revive and the beginning of prosperity on a firm basis would be reached.” He congratulated Congress and the American people on having the fortitude and courage to make the restoration of a sound currency a priority, and he gladly gave the measure his approval.