As the president listened to Butterfield and to last-minute arguments from Jay Gould, nothing in his expression betrayed his thinking. Only Julia Grant heard him complain afterward that “Gould was always trying to find something out.”
On September 12, 1869, Grant was off on a visit to his wife’s family in rural Pennsylvania that would leave him unreachable for a week. He left behind a letter for George Boutwell that showed he understood the stakes in gold speculation. “The fact is,” Grant wrote, “a desperate struggle is now taking place, and each party want the government to help them out.” He was writing to put Boutwell on his guard, and Grant recommended not changing their policy.
Grant also intervened in a more personal way by dictating a letter for Julia to send to his sister. Frantic, Abel Corbin immediately showed it to Gould. Julia Grant had written that “the general says if you have any influence with your husband, tell him to have nothing to do with Jay Gould and Jim Fisk. If he does, he will be ruined, for come what may, he (your brother) will do his duty to the country and to the trusts in his keeping.”
Corbin exclaimed to Gould, “I must get out instantly. Instantly!”
If not, he could forfeit his marriage, his friendship with the president, and his reputation throughout New York society.
Corbin pleaded with Gould to turn over his $100,000 profit on the gold Gould had already bought for him. Then, disencumbered of the stock, Corbin could answer Grant by letter the next morning that he had no stake in the gold speculation.
Gould made no promises, but as he was leaving, he warned Corbin, “If the contents of Mrs. Grant’s letter is known, I am a ruined man.”
• • •
Two days later, on Friday, September 24, 1869, Fisk’s brokers began to bid up the price of gold. He and Gould now controlled 5.5 million ounces of gold worth $110 million. Gold fever swept Wall Street as the price continued to rise. Every one-dollar increase promised Gould and Fisk a windfall. As trading became crazed, the price reached $162 in greenback dollars. Gould intended to push the rate to $200.
At the Gold Room where trading was conducted, one investor tried to break the fever. James Brown from the firm Brown Brothers unloaded 250,000 orders at $160. But the allure of quick riches kept the price rising.
Anticipating the madness, Boutwell was poised to act. Before noon, he walked from the Treasury to the White House and proposed to Grant that he break the fever by dumping $3 million in Treasury gold on the market. Boutwell’s former commander-in-chief replied, “I think you had better make it five million.”
They compromised at $4 million, and Boutwell sent the order by telegram to the highly conflicted David Butterfield.
Minutes after the uncoded message was received in New York, the price of gold fell from $160 to $133. Speculators faced the loss of money they did not have, and the broker who had executed Fisk’s instructions to drive up the price now received death threats. Police were summoned to contain the rush of angry merchants and brokers pouring into the streets around the Stock Exchange.
Fisk and Gould had been identified as the ringleaders. Men seeking to confront them were turned away from their offices. Some began to shout, “Lynch! Lynch!”
The two hoped for another getaway as smooth as the one during the uproar over Erie stock. Instead, they found themselves trapped in a small office.
Fisk went to calm the mob. The minute he ventured outside, a furious investor punched him in the face. Fisk hurried back inside until the crowd finally dispersed and Black Friday came to an end.
In the tangled aftermath, Fisk simply disclaimed his debts, accusing his surrogates of running them up without his authorization. He learned that Gould, without telling him, had been selling off gold at the first sign of trouble. As a result, the two of them would net $12 million from their joint investments.
In frustration, Fisk went to the Corbins’ house to shout at them for not holding Grant to the scenario they had written for him. Gould went with him, but during the hysteria, he sat quietly and agreed, with little hope, that Corbin must go to Washington and fix what had gone awry.
• • •
At breakfast on Sunday morning, Abel Corbin described to Grant in a detached way the previous Friday’s melee on Wall Street. Grant said he had received Corbin’s letter with its assurance that he was not involved, “and you can imagine how much relieved I felt,” knowing “that you were not engaged in that disgraceful speculation.”
When Corbin spoke mournfully of the many men whose fortunes had been wiped out, Grant replied, “I am not at all sorry to hear it. I have no sympathy with gold gamblers.”
Momentarily silenced, Corbin waited until later in the day to broach the subject again. He urged Grant to rescind Boutwell’s order to sell the gold. Grant’s patience was exhausted. He cut Corbin off. “The matter has been concluded,” the president said.
• • •
Grant was too optimistic. The tumult on Wall Street persisted for months, and the devastation for the nation’s farmers lasted for years before wheat, corn, and barley sold again at their prices before Black Friday.
Determined not to be pilloried with Gould as the only villains, Fisk gave the New York Herald an interview implicating the president’s family in the plot and even Grant himself.
In fact, Fisk said, Corbin had married Jennie Grant only in order to promote the gold scheme. But, he added, “Grant got scared.”
The reporter said he would need proof. When Fisk did not produce it, the reporter’s article substituted innuendo for direct accusations. In response, Abel Corbin denounced his former partner in the New York Sun: “I do not associate with such men as Fisk.”
The Sun reporter sought out Fisk, who treated Black Friday as “a little innocent fun” set off by a “crazy man” who took him seriously when he joked about buying gold at $160.
Since the Herald refused to implicate Corbin by name, Fisk fed his accusations to the Sun, professing his “astonishment” that Corbin would denigrate him in the public prints. Fisk and Gould now saw a way to rehabilitate their reputations and went on to give the Sun more than twenty interviews, finally blaming Corbin for hatching the scheme in the first place.
Their revelations spurred the New York district attorney to convene a grand jury to investigate. The public did not exonerate Gould and Fisk, but when they offered up Daniel Butterfield as a conspirator, he was forced to resign at the Treasury.
The nation’s press rallied around Ulysses Grant, deploring any accusations against him as “preposterous” or “baseless calumny.” The taint on his administration, however, would linger.
• • •
As the new congressional session opened in December 1869, Grant was taught another harsh lesson when he plunged into the complexities of foreign policy.
The issue dated to Henry Seward and his determination to secure a naval port in the Caribbean that would control the main passages from the Atlantic Ocean. When the Dominican Republic offered to allow the United States to annex its territory, Andrew Johnson had included that proposal in his last message to Congress.
But the members had been in no mood to oblige him. The House decisively defeated both annexation and extending status as protectorates to the Dominican Republic and Haiti.
On taking office, Grant found his admirals still lobbying for the treaty. Remembering the hostile reception that his troops had encountered in Mexico, Grant sent his White House secretary, Brigadier General Orville Babcock, to assess the mood among the Dominican people.
Babcock returned with a favorable report and a treaty that would let the United States either annex or buy the port of Samana Bay for $2 million.
To that point, Grant had kept his own counsel, but he realized that his preference for secrecy might offend the senators who would have to ratify the treaty.
To make amends, the president left the White House on the evening of January 2, 1870, to pay an unannounced call on Charles Sumner at his home. It was not an easy gesture for Gra
nt to make, but he hoped his show of humility in coming in person might win Sumner over.
At first, Grant’s ploy seemed to be working. Sumner was clearly surprised by the unprecedented breach of protocol, but he invited the president to join the two journalists who were dining with him. Sumner offered Grant a glass of sherry. Grant refused and launched into the reason for his visit.
After Grant had explained the treaty and was preparing to leave, one of the journalists asked Sumner whether he would support it.
Sumner’s response demonstrated why he so regularly infuriated his colleagues. “Mr. President,” he began, “I am a Republican and an administration man, and I will do all I can to make your administration a success. I will give the subject my best thought, and will do all I can rightly and consistently to aid you.”
Plainspoken Ulysses Grant left the house convinced that he could depend on Sumner’s backing for the treaty.
At that moment, the president was neglecting several warning signals: That Sumner had thwarted his nomination of Alexander Stewart at Treasury. That Sumner opposed Grant’s early attempt to repeal the Tenure of Office Act. That Sumner had expressed a marked preference for overseas expansion only to the north and his hope that one day Canada would be annexed.
In the Senate, Sumner fell back on a tactic as habitual to him as secrecy was to Grant. He held up the treaty in his committee for more than two months.
During that period, the president and Sumner had reason for more friction. The Fifteenth Amendment had been working its way through the states, but a dispute in Virginia had split the Republican ranks.
When the state held the election mandated by Congress for readmission, voters had chosen a governor hostile to the Radicals and the “unprincipled carpetbaggers” allied with them.
Grant and most members of the Senate judiciary committee held that Virginia had complied with the rules and, although the outcome at the polls had been disappointing, the state should be readmitted.
Enlisting Radical support, Sumner insisted on new requirements. Now Virginia must ratify the Fifteenth Amendment, make blacks as eligible as whites to hold office, and set up integrated public schools.
That revision of the accepted criteria alienated fifteen Republicans, whose less uncompromising spirit had labeled them New Radicals. But Sumner controlled a slightly larger bloc and overcame the challenge.
When the decision arose over Mississippi, Sumner was able to impose the Virginia terms again. The result was an irony impossible to imagine ten years earlier: Hiram Revels, a black graduate of Knox College, took his place in the Senate where Jefferson Davis had once sat.
• • •
As his committee hashed over the Santo Domingo treaty, several aspects troubled Sumner—some minor, some not. Under the law, General Babcock should have resigned from the army before going on a civilian diplomatic mission. And the dictatorship controlling the Dominican Republic was not only bankrupt but closely allied with two American generals known to be profiteers.
When Sumner marshaled his arguments against the treaty, however, he trod a delicate line on its racial implications. The United States, according to Sumner, was “an Anglo-Saxon Republic and would ever remain so by the preponderance of that race.”
While other senators might see the possibility of the Dominican Republic absorbing much of America’s former slave population, Sumner preferred that the “integrity” of the existing “colored community” on the island be preserved to “try for themselves to make the experiment of self-government.”
Sumner seemed to persuade fellow Radicals to join with the Democrats, who were determined to block any of Grant’s initiatives. The president’s anger grew when the Senate debate was allowed to lapse without a vote.
Grant was concluding, like Andrew Johnson before him, that Sumner and his old-style Radicals were the enemy. He would turn instead to the younger New Radicals, with their more tractable convictions.
But by the showdown vote, Sumner had corralled enough support to defeat Grant’s treaty with a twenty-eight–twenty-eight tie.
Stung, the president struck back by threatening to recall Sumner’s good friend, a Harvard history professor named John Lothrop Motley, from his post as ambassador to Great Britain.
When he had made the Motley appointment, Grant had agreed with Sumner that Britain should be punished for aiding the Confederacy. Sumner set the cost to the Union of that assistance at $2 billion and urged that Britain sign over Canada to the United States as a partial payment.
More recently, however, Hamilton Fish and George Boutwell had changed the president’s mind. Grant now favored a compromise on such specific grievances as the damage done by the Confederacy’s Alabama and other ships built in English shipyards.
• • •
Out for revenge, Grant could both punish Sumner and improve relations with Britain by removing the ambassador who had pressed the more extensive claims. Motley’s monocle and manners already had provoked contempt at the White House, where General Babcock was also sneering at Charles Sumner as “a poor sexless fool.”
Hamilton Fish had hoped to ease relations with the Senate by shipping off Sumner to London as Motley’s replacement. But when he called on the senator at home, he found Sumner sunk in despair: His expenses were ruinous, Sumner complained. His house was making him a pauper, and the publishing of his collected works required fifteen hundred dollars a year.
“You can’t understand my situation,” Sumner said sadly. “Your family relations are all pleasant. Why, many and many a night when I go to bed I almost wish that I may never awaken.”
But Sumner would not agree to displace Motley, “who is my friend.” In fact, when word of his friend’s removal reached him, Sumner wanted the world to know that Motley, “an ultra-American,” was being punished only for Sumner’s vote against the Santo Domingo treaty. In the Senate, he asked the clerk to read the relevant dates: the rejection of annexation—June 30. The president’s demand for Motley’s resignation—July 1.
For Sumner, the treatment of Motley was “the most atrocious crime” in diplomatic history. In that fevered state, he set off on a speaking tour almost as disastrous as Andrew Johnson’s Squaring the Circle. Financially, the seven thousand dollars he earned were a godsend, but his thirty-eight lectures, almost one a day throughout the Midwest, were not always well received.
At the University of Michigan, Sumner spoke for two and a half hours. When he finally said, “In conclusion,” the hall erupted with such enthusiasm that Sumner felt obliged to decline his fee.
To a reporter along his route, Sumner termed Grant “simple-minded” and, although honest himself, a man lured into a corrupt deal in Santo Domingo by Babcock and other young military aides.
Returning to Washington, Sumner could do no better than to claim that the report was “a mixture of truth, of falsehood, and of exaggeration, producing in the main the effect of falsehood.”
But in the new session of Congress, the New Radicals attempted to strip Sumner of his chairmanship of the Foreign Relations Committee.
By now, Sumner was imagining parallels between the debate over the treaty and the raucous battle over Kansas that had nearly cost him his life. On the Senate floor, he gave a rousing speech that he later published as “Naboth’s Vineyard,” an allusion to King Ahab’s greed for the grapes of a poor neighbor.
Hitting back, the New Radicals, too young to remember the battles of yesteryear, called into question Sumner’s loyalty, judgment, even his sanity.
Sumner decided that Hamilton Fish’s behavior had been so outrageous that he must cut the secretary of state dead and refused to speak to him on anything but official business. Given Fish’s position, Sumner’s vow of silence became intolerable. And when Sumner again insisted on the British withdrawing from Canada as the price for settling the war claims, the stress on him proved too much for a man turned sixty.
On February 15, 1871, Sumner was awakened by a crushing pain in his chest and left a
rm, but he forced himself to report to the Senate, where a doctor ordered two weeks of absolute rest.
Sumner’s disability gave opponents their opening. When the Forty-second Congress convened on March 4, Charles Sumner was dropped from the Senate’s Foreign Relations Committee.
He retreated to his house to read the hundreds of letters that came praising him and indignant over his ouster. At the White House, visitors found President Grant relieved and happy, as convinced as his predecessor that it been necessary “to teach these men that they cannot assail an administration with impunity.”
When two congressmen tried to effect a reconciliation, Grant proved more unyielding than he had been at Appomattox. He told them “that whenever Sumner should retract and apologize for the slanders he had uttered against me, in the Senate, in his own house, in streetcars and other public conveyances, at dinners and other public entertainments and elsewhere, as publicly, openly and in the same manner in which he has uttered these slanders, I will listen to proposals for a reconciliation.”
From Sumner’s letters to friends, Grant would not be getting an apology soon. He was describing the president as “without moral sense, without ideas, without knowledge.” And for good measure, “the lowest President, whether intellectually or morally, we have ever had.”
CHAPTER 15
KU KLUX KLAN (1870–1872)
DESPITE WHAT ULYSSES GRANT HAD once thought about political bias within the Freedmen’s Bureau, Oliver Howard believed he had kept his agency free from partisanship. After the Reconstruction Act of 1867 granted the vote to freedmen, Howard ordered his staff to avoid overt politicking.
By the end of that year, Howard had sounded hopeful. He reported that the freedmen now had “all the rights of citizenship,” but he asked that his bureau be continued in order to guide former slaves through their first election. Howard ruled that his agents could instruct the freedmen on their rights but could not recommend a particular party.
That claim of neutrality did not persuade the South’s disgruntled whites. Howard’s field offices reported that those former Confederates who were already bitter over being banned from voting were convinced that the bureau was indoctrinating blacks with Republican propaganda.
After Lincoln Page 28