Committed to nothing? Anxiety mushroomed. “If Grant will throw himself away by following Johnson it will be merely the worse for him,” Horace White of the Chicago Tribune angrily warned Washburne. Was Grant a Democrat in disguise? “His reticence had led some of our friends to doubt him, and all the democrats claim him as their own,” the surveyor general of New Mexico morosely observed.
After Johnson tried to push Grant out of Washington by dispatching him to Mexico, Grant pushed back. He would protect his generals, white Unionists, and the freedmen. “Send me a list of authenticated cases of Murder, and other violence, but upon Freedmen, northern or other Union men, refugees etc.,” Grant had instructed General Howard. His intention was clear: to show Congress that the courts, as he said, in the unreconstructed South “afford no security to life or property of the classes here referred to, and to recommend that Martial Law be declared over such districts as do not afford the proper protection.”
“The General is getting more and more Radical,” one of his aides conjectured. Still, Grant seemed indifferent to politics, or he pretended he was. He slyly told John Bigelow that his main complaint against Washington was that it lacked a long half mile on which he could ride his horses fast. Perhaps he enjoyed the speculation. Forty-five years old and applauded everywhere as the man who had saved the nation, Grant had traveled far: from his hometown of Georgetown, Ohio, to West Point, where his father had sent his reluctant son, who, though a fine horseman, graduated only twenty-first in a class of thirty-nine. After the Mexican War, he’d been posted in the Pacific Northwest where, overcome by loneliness, he was said to drink. And drink. Then, after he resigned from the army, he floundered and failed; he failed to support his adored wife and four children, he aptly named his home “Hardscrabble,” and as if anticipating the famous O. Henry story, one year he sold his watch to buy Christmas presents.
The war changed that. Heading a volunteer regiment, Captain Grant was soon promoted, and the unkempt, solemn, and unprepossessing soldier with a reputation for drunkenness had captured Forts Henry and Donelson in Tennessee. He earned the sobriquet “Unconditional Surrender” Grant, and Lincoln again promoted him, this time to major-general. “I can’t spare this man,” Lincoln had reportedly said. “He fights.”
Squarely built, with a closely cropped beard, light hair, and steely eyes, Grant was a marvel of sangfroid although he was something of a loner, isolated except when he was with his beloved family or his friend General William Tecumseh Sherman. Seemingly imperturbable, according to Charles Francis Adams, Jr., Grant “might pass well enough for a dumpy and slouchy little subaltern.” But he was also called a butcher who needlessly sacrificed his men, particularly during the terrible slaughter of the Wilderness campaign in the spring of 1864—two days of fighting and 18,000 Union casualties that an unsympathetic Grant biographer called “a nightmare of humanity,” ranking it with the worst disasters in the whole history of warfare. Yet Grant seemed unflappable. And contradictory: he was a kind man said to hate the sight of blood so much he could not stand rare meat. “It is difficult to comprehend the qualities of a man who could be moved by a narrative of individual suffering,” George Boutwell recalled, “and who yet could sleep while surrounded by the horrors of the battles of the Wilderness.” Walt Whitman, who admired him, praised Grant as an “acceptor of things.” Herman Melville characterized him as man in whom “meekness and grimness meet.”
After the war, when Grant, as the nation’s hero, was wined and dined and serenaded by brass bands wherever he went, he didn’t respond with enthusiasm. And he was notoriously hard to read. He was regarded as sodden, sullen, and impassive, and it would be said that the “U. S.” in his initials stood for “Unbelievably Stupid.” He was regarded as a man of judgment, tact, and shrewdness. Henry Adams, who disliked him, recalled that even Grant’s acolytes “could never measure his character or be sure he would act. They follow a mental process in his thought. They were not sure that he did think.” In Washington when Charles Sumner’s private secretary saw the general driving his horses at full tilt on a Sunday, he said that if not for photographs—and the ever-present cigar—he’d have thought him just an ordinary-looking hooligan. Grant also possessed the sort of deadpan humor frequently mistaken for inanity. “I know of only two tunes,” he presumably said. “One is Yankee Doodle and the other isn’t.”
Such wit disconcerted the humorless President Johnson. Johnson had apparently asked Grant not to run for President, and though Grant said he was definitely not a candidate, he mischievously added, “but suppose the people insist on making me one, what can I do? And besides, Mrs. Grant has been recently looking at the White House, and she thinks she can run that establishment quite as well as it is run now. And you know, Mr. President, that these women will do pretty much as they please. And Mrs. Grant would decidedly object to my giving any such promise.” Johnson didn’t know if Grant was pulling his leg.
Was the General really eyeing Johnson’s job? Radical Republicans wrung their hands when he seemed noncommittal. So did Democrats. His background did not reveal much, for he had initially fought the war to preserve the Union, not to emancipate slaves, and he was known to have voted in 1856 for President James Buchanan. However, Grant was seeing more and more clearly that there could be no real reconstruction without first allowing black men to vote. Without federal troops, in places like Austin, Texas, Grant told Charles Nordhoff, a federal officer wouldn’t dare wear his uniform on the streets. “The General is getting more and more Radical,” surmised an aide.
The general wished to follow the law—the reconstruction laws, in which he happened to believe. And he readily assisted the district commanders in executing them. “Enforce your own construction of the Military Bill until ordered to do otherwise,” he had instructed General Pope in June. Then after the Third Military Reconstruction Act was passed in July, Grant promised his generals, as he had promised Sheridan, that he would shield them from executive interference. The military would oversee voter registration in the various districts and expunge civil officials, as Sheridan had done, should they need to do so. It was Johnson who was defying the laws of Congress, and in turn, the army was defying him. “The situation was approaching mutiny on one side, or else treason on the other,” said Grant’s aide Adam Badeau.
Grant had the backing of Secretary of War Edwin Stanton, who had formally stated that he would obey the Reconstruction Acts passed by Congress, and he would protect Grant and the army. For when Johnson had brought Attorney General Stanbery’s opinion on the Reconstruction Acts to the cabinet, the cabinet agreed to its provisions—all cabinet members except Edwin Stanton, who denounced Stanbery’s evisceration of the legislation. Speaking of himself in the third person, Stanton said that “he had already given the opinion that military authority was established over the rebel states, and the power rested in the commanding generals who should interpret the law for themselves, and therefore, that no instructions should be given them but to follow the Acts of Congress.” General Grant would comment that Stanton “used his position in the Cabinet like a picket holding his position on the line.”
But as far as the very conservative Gideon Welles was concerned, Stanton had shown his untrustworthy hand at last.
Together, Ulysses S. Grant and Edwin Stanton controlled the military, which Congress had empowered to curb—if not completely undercut—Johnson’s policy in the South, a policy that had been undermining white Union loyalists, allowing the murder of black men and women, and reviving state militias; it was a policy that, as they saw it, effectively restored the antebellum aristocracy.
By August, Johnson was again livid. The time had come. Congress was still in recess. He would get rid of General Philip Sheridan—and while at it, he would get rid of Edwin Stanton. Don’t do it, General Grant strongly advised: Sheridan is universally beloved, and as for Stanton, he is a cabinet member protected by the Tenure of Office Act, which was passed in o
rder to shield him. “I know I am right in this matter,” Grant said.
Treasury Secretary Hugh McCulloch also pleaded with Johnson to ignore Sheridan. Even Gideon Welles advised the President to leave General Sheridan alone. The clever Welles had learned how to influence Andrew Johnson—how to goad the President—he pretended to console, reminding Johnson that Congress had nibbled away at his power until there was nothing left: no authority, no force, no dignity. Johnson had been misled by designing men like William Seward in order to retain other even more designing men, like Edwin Stanton, whose perfidiousness—and power—was far greater than that of a perverse subordinate like Little Phil Sheridan. Leave Sheridan in place, Welles again advised; and leave Grant alone: Grant was nothing more than a simpleton who could be controlled—if only Edwin Stanton were cashiered.
To defang the Military Reconstruction Acts and restore the South to its rightful place, to readmit those unoffending Southerners into the marble halls of Congress, the disloyal Secretary of War Edwin Stanton had to go.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
The Rubicon Is Crossed
On the morning of August 5, 1868, Andrew Johnson composed the stiff formal note that he sent over to Secretary Stanton’s office. “Public considerations of a high character constrain me to say, that your resignation of Secretary of War will be accepted,” the President wrote to Stanton, who wasted no time replying. “Public considerations of a high character,” Stanton replied with bite, “constrain me not to resign the office of Secretary of War before the next meeting of Congress.” As far as Stanton was concerned, the Tenure of Office Act stipulated that Johnson could not fire him without the Senate’s approval. To do so was to break the law.
Stanton’s refusal to resign seemed to please Johnson. Johnson was banking on a public outcry about a man staying where he was not wanted—and when he’d been asked to resign by the President himself. So for the next few days, Johnson decided to leave Stanton “hanging on the sharp hooks of uncertainty,” as he gloated.
Johnson then informed Grant that he intended only to suspend Stanton, so as not to violate directly the Tenure of Office Act. He also intended to appoint Grant as secretary of war ad interim. After all, Congress was in recess, and Grant’s appointment would be only temporary, until Congress returned and approved the selection of a new war secretary, presumably Grant. So, Johnson asserted, he was acting within the legal limits of the Tenure of Office Act. Johnson also believed that Congress would applaud General Grant’s nomination, and he counted on Grant’s popularity—and his acquiescence—to smooth over possible difficulties.
Johnson also hoped to drive a wedge between Stanton and Grant, two men who, despite their different dispositions, had been working well together to execute the Military Reconstruction Acts and support the five district commanders. With Grant heading the War Department, Johnson surmised, Edwin Stanton would come to distrust the general.
Grant had warned Johnson that suspending Secretary Stanton would be impolitic to say the least, and that the people who wanted Stanton out of office were precisely the same ones who’d opposed the war—mainly, the Peace Democrats. Johnson did not quite understand. No one could say that he, Andrew Johnson, had opposed the war, he responded furiously—and again, those “public considerations of high character” were at stake.
But on a scorching Sunday, August 11, Grant accepted the appointment as interim war secretary, and with satisfaction, Johnson went to church.
The next day, Monday, August 12, 1867, Andrew Johnson, good as his word, suspended Edwin Stanton. Colonel Moore, the President’s secretary, found Stanton in his office and, embarrassed, handed Stanton the President’s latest letter. Stanton read it, folded it in half, and said he’d answer in writing.
In his reply, Stanton informed the President that Johnson had no legal right to remove him without cause—but since “the General commanding the Armies of the United States has been appointed Secretary of War ad interim,” Stanton forcefully added—and since the general had accepted the appointment—“I have no alternative but to submit, under protest, to superior force.” Weary and worn though he was, Edwin Stanton was boiling with anger.
When the President received Stanton’s note, he nodded to Colonel Moore. “The turning point has at last come,” Johnson remarked with some satisfaction. “The Rubicon is crossed.”
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“HE IS A madman,” Carl Schurz said of Andrew Johnson. Johnson assumed that, as a longtime and deft political marksman, he had fatally damaged Grant’s political future. By accepting a cabinet position—and of all cabinet posts, Secretary Stanton’s as secretary of war—Grant would appear to be in Johnson’s pocket. The Radical Republicans would abandon him.
Radical Republicans didn’t really trust General Grant anyway. When Grant’s friends claimed that he’d conferred with Stanton before he accepted the office, and that Stanton had consented, the reliably radical gadfly Wendell Phillips said he didn’t believe it for a minute. As far as Phillips was concerned, by accepting the position, Grant had stabbed Stanton in the back.
The editor of the Chicago Tribune, a Grant ally, said the general should have refused the job “even at the risk of Johnson appointing Surratt secretary of war.” But Grant claimed he took Stanton’s post because, as he told his wife, “it’s most important that someone should be there who cannot be used.” Grant desired above all to sustain the army, to execute the law, and to protect the freedmen. Such men deceive themselves with their good intentions, Carl Schurz scoffed. “Grant, in my opinion, made a bad mistake in accepting the secretary-ship of war and thereby rendering easier the removal of Stanton….He has allowed himself to be imposed upon and placed in a false position. Everything depends on how he is going to get out of it.”
What had Grant been thinking, and how would he get out of it? “Make Grant speak out & take sides, or crush him back into his tent to smoke there,” Wendell Phillips pressed the managing editor of the New-York Tribune. “The time is fast approaching,” the diplomat John Lothrop Motley acknowledged, “when Ulysses must cease to do the ‘dumb, inarticulate man of genius’ business.”
That time came sooner than Grant may have anticipated. On August 17, the President acted again. He dismissed General Sheridan from his command of the Fifth Military District. He ignored Grant’s trenchant plea that Sheridan’s removal would be understood as a slap at both Congress and reconstruction laws generally. “The unreconstructed element in the South, those who did all they could to break up this government by arms,” Grant told Johnson, will regard the dismissal of General Sheridan “as a triumph.”
Johnson responded by saying Grant’s point of view was so offensive it deserved no reply, although he couldn’t keep from answering. He said Sheridan was obnoxious and tyrannical, and by getting him out of Louisiana and Texas, he was making sure the laws of the land were fully implemented—that is, he continued, he was protecting the Constitution, which upheld state sovereignty. As he explained, Sheridan’s “sole purpose seemed to be to secure negro supremacy and degrade the whites.”
Grant fired back. “I urge—earnestly urge, urge in the name of a patriotic people who have sacrificed Hundreds of thousands of loyal lives, and Thousands of Millions of treasure to preserve the integrity and union of this Country that this order be not insisted upon,” Grant wrote the President. He then took another step and, removing his sphinxlike mask, Grant released his letter to Johnson to the press.
“Every word is golden,” the Army and Navy Journal praised the general’s riposte. “These are truths that Mr. Johnson would have done well to heed.”
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SECRETARY OF WAR Edwin Stanton had been suspended. General Philip Sheridan had been removed. Next came General Daniel Sickles, commander of the Second Military District, the Carolinas.
These generals would be replaced with men willing to prevent blacks f
rom voting, running for office, serving on juries, or riding in the front of a streetcar. Johnson also wanted to fire General Oliver Otis Howard, head of the Freedmen’s Bureau, whom he detested. Mild and acquiescent, General Howard had not explicitly defied Johnson, certainly not as Stanton or Sheridan had, but the “malignant guillotine of Mr. Johnson,” as one observer noted, was being cheerfully “whetted” for Howard’s head.
Johnson calculated that he could replace General Howard with a black man and thereby placate moderate Republicans while foiling the Radicals. For Johnson assumed that many Bureau officers would quit their jobs rather than take orders from a black superior, which would be all to the good, to Johnson’s way of thinking. He floated the name of Frederick Douglass. Douglass immediately said he wouldn’t place himself “under any obligation to keep the peace with Andrew Johnson.” Radicals took heart. “The greatest black man in the nation,” the editor Theodore Tilton declared, “did not consent to become the tool of the meanest white.”
When John Mercer Langston also refused the position, Johnson offered it to black activist Robert Purvis, an early member of the American Anti-Slavery Society. Purvis consulted Wendell Phillips, who said Johnson had no real intention of appointing a black person to lead the Bureau, and even if he did, it would be just another bait-and-switch game, the same one he’d tried to play with the War Department: with an enormously popular Grant controlling the War Department, Johnson wanted to distract the public from the fact that the far less popular Stanton had been suspended.
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