When war came, Greeley lined up with the Radical Republicans and their impatience with the president. In August 1862, he published a letter to Lincoln, “Prayers of Twenty Millions,” that urged the immediate emancipation of America’s slaves.
Lincoln responded with a telegram to the Tribune, pledging himself to save the Union either “without freeing any slaves” or “by freeing all the slaves” or by “freeing some and leaving others alone.” Lincoln wrote that his personal wish was that “all men everywhere could be free.”
When Lincoln issued his emancipation order a month later, Greeley responded in print with “God Bless Abraham Lincoln.”
But Thurlow Weed, who resisted tying emancipation to the struggle to preserve the Union, warned Lincoln that his former protégé now “possesses the power to ruin our country.”
• • •
By 1864, however, it was Greeley who faced ruin, or worse. He had predicted to Secretary of War Stanton that the draft lottery would be unpopular. Military pay was too low, and rich men should not be able to pay poor men to take their place. “The burdens of society,” Greeley wrote, “must be made to fall upon property where they justly belong.”
Greeley’s foresight did not protect him from the riots that Southerners would cite later to justify the violence in New Orleans and Memphis. In Chappaqua, Molly Greeley was threatened by a drunken mob until Quaker neighbors took her in, and protesters in Manhattan damned Greeley for endorsing emancipation. Between their looting and burning down draft offices, rioters massed in front of the Tribune building. To the tune of “John Brown’s Body,” they sang impromptu choruses of “Hang Horace Greeley to a Sour Apple Tree.”
As his workers protected the Tribune office with rifles and hand grenades, Greeley went about publishing the next day’s edition.
When the rioting ended, more than a thousand lives had been lost, but Greeley exulted, “I was in no wise harmed by the mobs, though they must have hurt their throats howling at me.”
The Union army’s victory at Gettysburg calmed Northern spirits. Thanks to a Tribune reporter at the battlefield who checked his story against Lincoln’s notes, Greeley could print the text of the president’s brief address at the battle site.
As war came to an end, Greeley agreed to write a popular history of its battles. By 1867, his popular first volume had sold a remarkable 125,000 copies.
During Lincoln’s campaign for re-election, Greeley entertained the idea of dropping him to run instead John C. Frémont, with his sweeping vow to end slavery throughout the country, not only behind Confederate lines.
Greeley made a desultory gesture at convening a third-party convention but in the end did not attend it. Frémont withdrew his candidacy in September and endorsed Lincoln. Then, after Sherman took Atlanta, Greeley wrote an editorial urging a vote for Lincoln over George McClellan, after all.
• • •
During the aftermath of the assassination, Greeley had been steadfast in backing the Freedmen’s Bureau, and he endorsed both the Fourteenth and Fifteenth amendments. But his thinking about race illustrated an ambivalence common in the North. Speaking to a friend in 1870, Greeley blamed the blacks themselves for the dependence fostered by slavery. He described Negroes as an “easy, worthless race, taking no thought for the morrow” and deplored a tendency to “look to others to calculate and provide for them.”
Greeley tried to hasten the transformation to self-sufficiency by investing six thousand dollars to buy land for freed slaves in North Carolina. But because of an inept white partner, he wound up owning 150 acres of the Great Dismal Swamp.
When Greeley joined in the unpopular move to stand bail for Jefferson Davis, Andrew Johnson’s summation of Greeley was not unkind. “Angelic child,” the president called him. “All heart and no head . . . like a whale ashore.”
Greeley’s eye for talent had brought him not only journalists such as Whitelaw Reid and Charles Dana, but also a young Missouri writer he hired as a foreign correspondent. In 1867, the Tribune paid Samuel Clemens forty dollars each for reports from Paris, Jerusalem, and Cairo. Clemens collected the columns and published them as Innocents Abroad under the name Mark Twain.
With Greeley nominated by the Liberal Republicans, prominent women would be speaking out during the campaign, even though they were denied a vote of their own, but Greeley’s halting conversion to the cause of women’s rights had left Elizabeth Cady Stanton preferring to “see Beelzebub President over Greeley.”
Other women forgave his ambiguity. They saw that Greeley was clearly torn: He knew, he said, that women had “a natural right” to vote, but he remained convinced that demanding that right was “unwise or unnatural.”
That tepid backing was enough for Anna E. Dickinson to leave the Republican Party and work to defeat Grant. A graduate of DePauw University in Indiana and a popular speaker at political rallies, Miss Dickinson laced into the president, claiming that he had shown a “greater fondness for the smoke of a cigar and the aroma of a wine glass” than for carrying out his duties.
An abolitionist from her earliest years, she accepted the judgment of the Liberal Republicans that Reconstruction had succeeded and called for an end to “special legislation” for blacks. Instead, the nation should allow “the democratic process to work its magic in the South.”
• • •
During their convention in Baltimore, the Democrats responded to the overtures from Liberal Republicans by adopting their entire platform. As the campaign progressed and Grant played no part, a Philadelphia editor worried that the president was not taking the challenge seriously. He went to the White House to voice his concern in person.
Grant did not argue with him. He sent for a map, spread it out across his desk, and pointed one by one to the states his Republicans would carry.
• • •
On September 4, 1872, a headline in the New York Sun threatened to shatter Grant’s complacency. “The King of Frauds,” it proclaimed. “How the Crédit Mobilier Bought Its Way Through Congress.”
The paper charged that Union Pacific had bribed members of Congress for favors with railroad stock in its construction company, Crédit Mobilier. One of the largest corporations in the nation’s history, Union Pacific depended on the government at every level—federal land grants for right of ways as well as state and county investments in its stock.
As Union Pacific was prospering, Grant had still been at war with the Confederacy. A Massachusetts congressman named Oakes Ames had been summoned to the Lincoln White House. As Ames told the story, the president turned over to him the stewardship of Union Pacific and a sense of urgency about its completion. “If the subsidies provided are not enough to build the road,” Ames quoted Lincoln as saying, “ask double and you shall have it.”
By completing this essential railroad line, Lincoln assured Ames, he would “become the remembered man of your generation.”
Inspired, Ames and his brother Oliver bought a controlling million dollars of the line’s Crédit Mobilier stock. On December 12, 1867, the company declared its first dividend, a profit on investment of 76 percent. Oakes Ames saw a way to use the earnings to influence legislators and promote ever-greater investment. He persuaded two U.S. senators and nine representatives to buy stock.
Union Pacific continued to flourish. A golden spike driven on May 10, 1869, at Promontory, Utah, joined Union Pacific’s lines with those of the Central Pacific, and overnight the exhausting journey from New York to San Francisco with its thousand-dollar ticket became drastically shortened. Travelers could now make the same trip in a Pullman sleeping car for $150.
When the Sun published names of public officials with stock in Crédit Mobilier, their investment was seen as an obvious conflict of interest. President Grant was not on the list, but his vice president, Schuyler Colfax, appeared prominently.
Other compromised investors included two Republican representatives, Speaker of the House James G. Blaine from Maine and James A. Garfield from Ohio. As the Sun’s co
mpetitors undertook their own investigations, Oakes Ames claimed to see no scandal. He said he had simply wanted to place the Crédit Mobilier stock “where it would do the most good.”
But the firm’s business practices could not withstand the new scrutiny. It had provided swollen profits by delaying payment to its subcontractors and to its low-paid workers, in some cases refusing to pay them altogether.
To readers of the North American Review, the accusations were nothing new. Crédit Mobilier had been able to ride out the bad publicity three years earlier from a denunciation in the journal by Charles Francis Adams, but the Sun exposé jolted Congress into action.
Although hearings were already under way while the presidential voting was being held, the scandal had not yet caught the public’s imagination. Horace Greeley, who might have exploited the issue, had been singed by earlier accusations that he had been allowed to buy Northern Pacific stock at bargain rates in exchange for favorable coverage in his Tribune.
The investigation would exonerate Blaine, Treasury Secretary Boutwell, and Roscoe Conkling of New York, all of whom were found to have refused Ames’s bribes. The evidence against Garfield and Schuyler Colfax was deemed inconclusive.
James W. Patterson of New Hampshire was expelled from the Senate. Oakes Ames and New York congressman James Brooks were censured; Brooks died in May 1873, and when Ames died a week later, friends claimed it was from shame.
President Grant, however blameless, was once more tainted by his associations. Yet when the votes were counted on November 5, 1872, his resulting landside confirmed every one of Grant’s state-by-state predictions. He won 55.6 percent of the popular vote, the highest number in the forty-four years since Andrew Jackson beat John Quincy Adams.
Backing from the Democrats allowed Greeley to take six Southern and border states—Georgia, Tennessee, Texas, Kentucky, Missouri, and Maryland. But the president’s popularity carried over to the Congress, with Grant Republicans winning two-thirds majorities in both Houses.
For Grant, the personal attacks had been hurtful. In a rare burst of self-pity, he lamented, “I have been the subject of abuse and slander scarcely equaled in political history.”
• • •
During the month of November, Horace Greeley lost not only the election but almost everything else he valued. Like Grant, he saw himself as a target for viciousness: “I have been assailed so bitterly that I hardly knew whether I was running for President or for the Penitentiary.”
Several days before the election, Molly Greeley died. Within weeks, Greeley lost control of the Tribune to shareholders unhappy with its declining circulation. On Thursday, November 20, feverish and unable to sleep, Greeley went to bed and waited for the end.
Nine days later, as his daughters and Whitelaw Reid kept vigil, Horace Greeley died at the age of sixty-one.
President Grant led the funeral procession in an open carriage through the streets of Manhattan to the Greenwood Cemetery in Brooklyn. Grant’s cabinet accompanied him, as did General Sherman and Chief Justice Chase.
Looking over the mourners, Henry Ward Beecher pronounced his eulogy: “The government itself stands still on his demise.”
Hiram Revels
CHAPTER 17
HIRAM REVELS (1872–1873)
AS PRESIDENT GRANT’S RE-ELECTION CAMPAIGN was ending, Pinckney Pinchback’s alliance with Governor Henry Clay Warmoth had become further frayed but not entirely over. To Pinchback’s disgust, the governor had opposed the Civil Rights Bill of 1870. More unforgivably, he blocked Pinchback’s bid for an open U.S. Senate seat a year later.
Like many white Republicans throughout the country, Warmoth was aggressively courting his state’s Democrats, which led to a reluctance to endorse Negro candidates. Following his lead, white Republicans in Louisiana sent to Washington a white Union veteran; Pinchback’s seven votes came entirely from fellow black legislators.
For the moment, Pinchback submerged his bitterness and joined with his state senate colleagues, whatever their race, in devising new schemes for pocketing public money.
Rumors about the bribes to Pinchback had become routine. In one instance, he was said to have demanded a thousand dollars to vote for legislation that would enrich the Jackson Railroad.
A more flagrant offense came to light when Pinchback was appointed as a New Orleans park commissioner. He and his four colleagues bought city land along the Metairie Ridge for sixty-five thousand dollars. Four months later, they sold half of the property for eighty thousand.
Even that transaction might have escaped notice if Pinchback’s former partner, state senator Caesar Carpetier Antoine, had not complained loudly about being cheated out of his share of the spoils.
When Louisiana’s graft could no longer go unchallenged, Congress sent a committee of five members to investigate. Pinchback did not deign to appear at their hearings. Instead, he sent a letter calling the accusations against him “unqualifiedly false” and attributing them to lobbyists for the Jackson Railroad seeking revenge because he had spurned their overtures.
Pinchback assured his senate colleagues, “I do not claim to possess all the honesty in the state. Yet I venture to say that my character would appear as the driven snow” in comparison with that of his accusers.
Unwilling to get involved, the congressmen recommended against federal intervention.
• • •
Rifts within the Republican ranks were forcing Pinchback to forgive Warmoth, at least long enough to combat a rival faction led by Oscar James Dunn, the black housepainter who had defeated Pinchback for lieutenant governor.
Animosity ran so high between the camps by August 1871 that the courthouse had been ringed by deputy marshals; two of them were armed with the new, rapid-fire Gatling guns.
Warmoth chose to move his convention to nearby Turner Hall, where delegates elected Pinchback as their presiding officer. Accepting the position required him to acknowledge his personal differences with the governor but claim he had always supported his administration.
With that, Warmoth sent Pinchback to Washington to resolve a patronage dispute with President Grant. The issue was sensitive because the man Warmoth wanted fired was Grant’s brother-in-law, James F. Casey. But en route, Pinchback saw no need for diplomacy.
Casey “hadn’t a handful of brains,” he told a reporter from the Cincinnati Commercial, “and no will of his own.”
They met at Grant’s summer cottage in New Jersey, and the president heard out the charges against Casey. But when he said nothing and took no action, Lieutenant Governor Dunn seemed to have emerged as the dominant black voice in Louisiana politics.
Then, as Pinchback was evaluating his future, Oscar Dunn contracted pneumonia and died.
Now it was Warmoth who had to forget that he had once called Pinchback “restless, ambitious,” even dangerous. He overrode protests from his new white Democratic allies and nominated Pinckney Pinchback as Louisiana’s lieutenant governor.
In the state senate, C. C. Antoine, by now entirely estranged from Pinchback, voted against him. So did—given the etiquette of the day—Pinchback himself. With the result headed toward a tie, a Customs House worker named J. B. Lewis put his vote on the market.
The Republicans promised Lewis fifteen thousand dollars cash to cast the deciding ballot. They also extorted his pledge to vote with the Warmoth faction through the end of the legislative session, when he would receive his payoff.
Learning of the deal, Pinchback protested that the bribe had been too high until he saw a note from the opposition offering Lewis five thousand dollars. The Republicans said they had no choice but to improve on Lewis’s inflated price.
When the vote was called, Pinchback was confirmed, eighteen to sixteen.
• • •
His term was troubled from the start. To prevent a quorum, opposition senators hid aboard a U.S. revenue cutter supplied by James Casey and sailed down the Mississippi. As tension rose, Warmoth secretly deputized 250 new polic
emen to stop the House from acting without the Senate’s being in session.
The governor’s enemies struck back by invoking the 1871 Enforcement Act, intended to protect against the Klan. Now Warmoth and Pinchback were accused under the act of depriving a class of citizens of their rights; they were arrested and released on bail.
When the legislative session finally opened, Pinchback was challenged again as presiding officer. This time, he ignored tradition, voted for himself, and took his seat.
For all its drama, the session accomplished little. Pinchback did use his position, however, to place his nine-year-old son, Pinckney Napoleon, in an all-white school. Pinchback anticipated the hostility the child would face. But he was determined that his son get the education he had been deprived of.
From his earliest speeches in Alabama, Pinchback had reminded black audiences of the effects of that deprivation:
“Take any race, keep them in the most miserable condition possible, enslave them for two hundred and forty-odd years as the colored race has been, and compare them with the colored race. I do not think that you will find much difference.”
His speech concluded with a plea to give the former slaves “as many years in freedom and opportunity as they have been in slavery, and if they do not compare favorably with any other race on earth, then I say let them be branded an inferior race.”
Until then, if he ever failed to speak out for black equality “may my right hand forget its cunning and my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth.”
In March 1872, Pinckney Pinchback became the first black governor in the history of the United States, but there was an asterisk next to his achievement: He was only acting governor, because Henry Warmoth had gone to New York to endorse Horace Greeley and the Liberal Republicans.
Across the South, other black candidates were also reaching high rank, but were often denied their victories. When John W. Menard had been elected to the U.S. Congress from Louisiana four years earlier, white congressmen blocked his being seated. Menard made history all the same. Permitted fifteen minutes to argue his case, Menard became the first black man to speak on the House floor.
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