by H. W. Brands
By one common interpretation, the moral fiber of American
public officials had been weakening since independence. The founders—
Washington, Jefferson, Madison and the others—were selfless demigods, immune from temptation and devoted solely to the public weal in winning independence and establishing the principles of American republicanism. The second generation—Jackson, Clay, Webster, Calhoun—were towering figures but flawed; in their battles over the meaning of democracy they sometimes permitted party and section to cloud their judgment of what the nation’s welfare required. The third generation included Lincoln, an undeniably great soul—undenied, at any rate, since his martyrdom—but also the jobbers and opportunists who battened on the country’s distress during the Civil War and after. By this interpretation the Tweed Ring, the gold conspiracy and Crédit Mobilier were a matter of moral failure: the work of bad men doing what anyone would expect of their ilk.
Persuasive evidence supported this interpretation; the persons hauled before Congress and the courts to answer for diverting public funds were hardly a distinguished cohort ethically. But another interpretation looked less to the character of the miscreants than to the context in which they operated. George Washington Plunkitt, a Tammany successor to the Tweed Ring, distinguished between “honest graft” and “dishonest graft.” The latter consisted of extortion, vice and other clear breaches of the Judeo-Christian code; such sins Plunkitt condemned. But “honest graft” was something different. It consisted chiefly of using inside information to capture profits generated by the rapid growth of the American economy. Plunkitt boasted of buying strategically placed property ahead of the announcement of new public works whose proximity caused the property to rise in value. His point was that someone would profit from the announcement; why not Plunkitt and friends? “I seen my opportunities and I took ’em,” Plunkitt explained.
Opportunities were rife in the decade after the Civil War. The industrialization of the private sector was accompanied by the expansion of the public sector, and few laws effectively governed behavior in the interstices between the two realms. The gold conspirators and Crédit Mobilier operated in this no-man’s-land, with the former betting (wrongly) on whether the public Treasury would intrude unusually into the private gold market and the latter channeling public construction funds into private pockets.
New scandals surfaced during Grant’s final eighteen months in office and fell into a similar category. The largest had been long brewing, or rather distilling: it centered on the failure of whiskey makers to pay the full tax owed on the spirits they produced. Underpayment of the whiskey tax continued a tradition of American tax dodges that dated to the eighteenth century, when resistance to rum taxes, stamp taxes and tea taxes had triggered the American Revolution and subsequently the Whiskey Rebellion of the 1790s.
The surprise of the whiskey scandal wasn’t that the underpayment occurred but that it suddenly was prosecuted. And it might not have been prosecuted if Benjamin Bristow hadn’t hoped to succeed Grant as president. Bristow’s father had been elected to Congress from Kentucky; the son served with distinction in the Union army, being severely wounded at Shiloh and returning to defend his home state against the raids of John Hunt Morgan, whom he helped capture. Kentuckians elected him to state office and Andrew Johnson appointed him a federal district attorney. His vigorous prosecutions under the new civil rights laws displeased Johnson but won him the favorable attention of Grant, who made him the first solicitor general in the new Justice Department. Bristow’s performance in that post led Grant to select him to succeed George Williams as attorney general, but the promotion fell through when Williams’s nomination to the Supreme Court stalled. Bristow got another chance at the cabinet when Treasury Secretary William Richardson was forced out after being discovered to have shared fees from a tax collector he had hired. Grant sought a clean, hard-driving man at the Treasury, and Bristow seemed just the one.
Consequently it was to Bristow that the editor of the St. Louis Democrat wrote in 1875 saying he had information about a conspiracy among whiskey distillers in the Midwest and the Treasury agents who were supposed to be collecting whiskey taxes. Bristow followed the evidence to John McDonald, the chief tax collector at St. Louis. McDonald didn’t deny wrongdoing but demanded leniency in exchange for testimony against his fellow conspirators and their sponsors in Washington. Bristow refused the request and pressed forward with the investigation.
Grant urged him on. “Let no guilty man escape if it can be avoided,” he wrote Bristow. “Be specially vigilant—or instruct those engaged in the prosecutions of fraud to be—against all who insinuate that they have high influence to protect, or to protect them. No personal consideration should stand in the way of performing a public duty.” Bristow, with Grant’s approval, gave the press a copy of the president’s instructions, and the phrase “let no man escape” became the administration’s watchword.
Living up to the watchword caused great discomfort. Bristow’s investigation eventually reached into the president’s own office, with a trail of telegrams implicating Orville Babcock, Grant’s private secretary. The telegrams were ambiguous, even mystifying, suggesting some kind of code. “Poor Ford is dead,” one to Babcock stated. “McDonald is with his body. Let the President act cautiously in his successorship.” The telegram that gained the greatest notoriety declared, “We have official information that the enemy weakens. Push things.” It was signed “Sylph.” No one knew who Sylph was, but the feminine sound of the name suggested a sexual element that lent salacious appeal to the whiskey story.
“To General Bristow and myself this looked like a very serious matter,” Edwards Pierrepont, the successor to George Williams as attorney general, later testified. “We brought the telegrams to the President.” Grant immediately summoned Babcock and asked what the messages meant. Babcock appeared flustered and talked around the subject for a few moments before Pierrepont and Bristow stopped him. “The Secretary of the Treasury and I then both insisted that this was a matter so serious that if he could give an explanation which, as he said, was complete and perfect, and if he was perfectly innocent, as he said he was, he should go out there and make an explanation. And we pressed it as a thing he ought to do on the spot.” Grant concurred. Babcock proceeded to draft a telegram to send to the press. “It was somewhat long and somewhat, toward the end, argumentative, and I took the pen and dashed through it,” Pierrepont recalled. “I said, ‘You don’t want to send your argument; send the fact, and go there and make your explanation.’ ”
Babcock had no explanation, at least none that exonerated him, and he was shortly indicted for tax fraud. Grant grew upset to think that one in whom he had reposed such trust might have betrayed him. He kept the cabinet secretaries after a regular meeting to discuss the case. “The President manifested a great deal of excitement,” Hamilton Fish recorded in his diary. Grant resisted believing that Babcock was guilty. “He was as confident as he lived of Babcock’s innocence,” Fish wrote. “He knew he was not guilty; that were he guilty it would be an instance of the greatest ingratitude and treachery that ever was.” Grant said he would testify on Babcock’s behalf. “The President expressed his determination to go to St. Louis, to start either this evening or tomorrow morning, and said he should like at least two members of the Cabinet to go with him.”
Pierrepont asked Grant to reconsider. The attorney general said he was the obvious one to accompany the president on such a mission and that he could rearrange his schedule to go, but he wondered about the attention Grant’s appearance would attract and the precedent it would set. For a president to weigh in on the side of the defense might be interpreted as an attempt to intimidate the jury, and in an election year interpretations mattered. Bristow concurred, as did Fish, who suggested that if the president had been subpoenaed the situation would be different. The secretary of state asked Pierrepont if a president could be subpoenaed. “He of course replied in the negative,” Fish r
ecorded, having concluded the same thing himself. According to Fish, the cabinet was unanimous in its opposition to Grant’s appearing in court.
Grant settled for giving a deposition. Pierrepont and Bristow accompanied the president; Chief Justice Morrison Waite served as notary. William Cook, counsel for the defendant, commenced the questioning. “How long have you known General Babcock, and how intimately?” Cook asked.
“I have known him since 1863, having first met him during the Vicksburg campaign that year,” Grant replied. “Since March 1864 I have known him intimately.” The president explained that Babcock had served as aide-de-camp on his military staff during and after the war and as his private secretary since his inauguration.
“As your private secretary, please state what were his general duties.”
“He received my mails, opened my letters, and referred them to the appropriate departments, submitting to me all such as required any instructions or answer from myself.”
“His relations with you were confidential?”
“Very.”
“Do you know whether, during the time General Babcock has been your private secretary, he has had frequent applications from persons throughout the country to lay their special matters before you or before the various departments?”
“That was of very frequent occurrence. Indeed it happened almost daily.”
In what manner had Babcock fulfilled his assignments?
“I have always regarded him as a most efficient and most faithful officer.”
Cook turned to the topic of the indictment. “Did General Babcock, so far as you know, ever seek in any way to influence your action in reference to any investigation of the alleged whiskey frauds in St. Louis or elsewhere?”
“He did not,” Grant replied. “I do not remember but one instance where he talked with me on the subject of these investigations, excepting since his indictment. It was then simply to say to me that he had asked Mr. Douglass”—John Douglass, the internal revenue commissioner—“why it was his department treated all their officials as though they were dishonest persons who required to be watched by spies, and why he could not make inspections similar to those which prevailed in the army, selecting for the purpose men of character who could enter the distilleries, examine the books, and make reports which could be relied upon as correct. General Babcock simply told me that he had said this to Mr. Douglass.”
Cook inquired about Babcock’s connection to John McDonald. “Was anything whatever said by him to you with reference to the investigation of alleged frauds in his”—McDonald’s—“district?”
“I have no recollection of any word or words on any matter touching his official position or business,” Grant said.
Cook asked about a particular moment when McDonald had visited Washington with reference to the whiskey investigations. “Did General Babcock at or about that time say anything to you with reference to such investigations, and to your knowledge did he in any way undertake to prevent them?”
“I have no recollection of his saying anything about that. Certainly he did not intercede with me to prevent them.”
Cook mentioned an executive order transferring various of the tax agents to other districts. The order had been explained as standard practice, but the administration’s critics contended that it was intended to frustrate the whiskey investigation. “Did General Babcock ever in any way directly or indirectly seek to influence your action in reference to that order?”
“I do not remember his ever speaking to me about or exhibiting any interest in the matter.”
Returning to the broad question, Cook asked, “Have you ever seen anything in the conduct of General Babcock or has he ever said anything to you which indicated to your mind that he was in any way interested in or connected with the whiskey ring at St. Louis or elsewhere?”
“Never.”
Grant’s testimony helped Babcock defeat the allegations against him. Two weeks after Grant’s deposition the St. Louis jury delivered a verdict of not guilty. Babcock treated the acquittal as vindication and prepared to resume his work at the White House. Grant briefly considered letting him do so. But when a separate investigation linked Babcock to the gold conspiracy, Grant finally realized—or admitted—that Babcock may have fooled him. “The President then, for the first time, comprehended in all its significance the fact that he had been betrayed by Babcock,” Bluford Wilson of the Treasury Department, who informed Grant of the gold link, recalled. “If he (Babcock) had betrayed him in the Black Friday transactions, he was quite capable of betraying him in connection with the whiskey frauds.”
Babcock wasn’t the only betrayer. Even as Grant’s private secretary was being shown the door, his war secretary was leaving of his own volition, albeit one step ahead of impeachment. William Belknap’s second wife had decided she couldn’t live on her husband’s eight-thousand-dollar salary; discovering that Belknap controlled the concessions of trade at army posts in the West, she arranged to share in the profits of the trade. A schedule of kickbacks was negotiated, and she received regular remittances. Belknap may or may not have known about the arrangement at first, but upon her death the payments continued, to him. He took up with his deceased’s sister, a formidable beauty with a modest fortune and a determination to keep it. Upon their engagement she handed him a prenuptial agreement and asked that he sign it. “Belknap felt very much hurt at this request,” Julia Grant recalled, based on her own knowledge and on hearsay. But he was smitten, and he did as his darling wished. “For two years she enjoyed to the fullest extent possible her position, her beauty and youth, and the entire control of her little fortune,” Julia said.
Beauty, youth and fortune evoke envy, and after the Democrats gained control of the House in 1875 they launched an investigation into the Belknaps’ affairs. The kickback scheme was discovered, and the House began moving toward impeaching Belknap.
Grant, still struggling with Babcock’s betrayal, took the news of Belknap’s corruption hard. “The President spoke of Belknap’s defection saying that yesterday he had really, in the first part of the day, been unable to comprehend its magnitude and importance, the surprise was so great,” Hamilton Fish recorded. “It was really not until evening that he could realize the crime and its gravity. He spoke of his long continued acquaintance with Belknap in the army, of his having known his father as one of the finest officers in the Old Army, when he himself was a young lieutenant.”
Grant’s affection for the father and the evident distress of the son, who confessed his crimes in a tearful meeting in Grant’s office, disposed the president, without fully considering the consequences, to let Belknap resign. The resignation confused the congressional effort to remove the war secretary. The House adopted impeachment articles and the Senate trial went forward but amid constitutional doubt as to whether the Senate could remove from office someone who no longer held the office. Several senators decided it could not, and on this technicality Belknap was acquitted.
The scandals metastasized. With the 1876 elections approaching, the Democrats broadened their investigations; hardly an executive department or office escaped scrutiny. Grant’s minister to England, Robert Schenck, was found to have employed his position to promote investments in which he had a personal stake. No charges were brought, but Schenck was forced to resign. The secretary of the navy, George Robeson, seemed to be living beyond the means of his salary; when, under pressure, he released a statement of his bank account to the congressional investigators it revealed hundreds of thousands of dollars he couldn’t explain. The natural presumption was that the money had come from navy contractors. But the paper trail was so confused that the investigators did nothing beyond chastising Robeson rhetorically. The secretary of the interior, Columbus Delano, resigned under the fire of an investigation into a scheme by his son to profit illegitimately from Delano’s position. The investigation hit close to Grant when the president’s younger brother Orvil was found to have been paid for surveying services
in Wyoming Territory he failed to render. “Did you ever know Orvil Grant to do any surveying in that territory?” a congressional investigator asked the chief clerk in the Cheyenne office of the federal survey. “No, sir,” the chief clerk replied. “I do not think he was ever in the territory.”
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WILLIAM SHERMAN THOUGHT SUFFICIENTLY LITTLE OF THE POLITICAL classes that none of their corruption surprised him. He knew and liked William Belknap from the Georgia and Carolina campaigns and was consequently disposed to put responsibility for his part in the scandals elsewhere. “I feel sorry for Belknap,” he wrote his brother John. “I don’t think him naturally dishonest, but how could he live on $8000 a year in the style that you all beheld?” Sherman blamed those who set the rules for the army concessionaires. “The fault lies with Congress, which by special legislation has almost invited this very system.… I pity Belknap, and regard him as the ‘effect’ and not the ‘cause.’ ” The president played a part, Sherman allowed. “Grant is not blameless,” he told John. “He could have given an impetus in the right direction in 1869—meant to, but saw or thought he saw the danger, and made up his mind to let things run. The result was inevitable.” Yet Belknap’s demise wasn’t all to the bad, Sherman suggested. The war secretary had been impossible to work under. “He acted towards me without frankness and meanly, gradually usurping all the power which had been exercised by General Grant, leaving me almost the subject of ridicule.” Belknap’s departure, especially under a cloud, would yield an improvement. “The whirlwind that is now let loose in Washington will do good.”