by Philip Dray
Was Oscar Dunn poisoned? His overall condition and specific symptoms—vomiting, muscle spasms, shrunken features and whitened face, weak pulse, coma—correspond with classic accounts of arsenic poisoning. Because the symptoms arsenic causes resemble those of natural illness, and because, colorless and flavorless, it can be mixed undetectably with food, this poison was known as a handy means of retribution or a shortcut to an inheritance. Not for nothing was it sometimes called "succession powder." Certain arsenic compounds were used in the nineteenth century to treat syphilis, which might explain Dunn's family's demand for secrecy, although there's no evidence he suffered from the disease. It's also possible that Dunn was poisoned accidentally. The Cherry Pectoral he was taking contained a small amount of arsenic to calm the nerves. Then, too, in an era before refrigeration and government standards for shipping and storing food, tainted provisions were not unheard of; the very week of Dunn's death, the New Orleans Times ran an article titled "Beware of Herrings" about reports that containers of arsenic-laden fish had shown up on grocery shelves.
Of course, the theory that had "set tongues upon swivels" on the streets of New Orleans was that Dunn had been murdered for political reasons. Warmoth, in desperate political straits and under threat of impeachment, was a primary suspect. Another was Pinchback; having already replaced Dunn as Warmoth's leading black ally, he stood to succeed Dunn as lieutenant governor and even ascend to the office of governor if Warmoth was impeached. In a bizarre turn, another man in line for the governor's seat, House Speaker George Carter, complained the day after Dunn's death that he too was feeling sick, "in a way that he had never before experienced," with abdominal cramps and nausea; he confided to his physician that he feared he had been "dosed" and "foully dealt with." So certain was he that he was about to die, Carter at one point called for a close friend to help him settle his private affairs. He survived his fever and delirium, however, and soon repudiated the rumor that he and Dunn had been the target of a murderous conspiracy.
"Who delivered the fatal cup?" the Louisiana historian A. E. Perkins would ask, several years later. "It ill becomes an historian, or any other chronicler, to dignify rumor with notice. But when rumor swells to established fact, or rests upon evidence all but conclusive, then one may without hesitancy take full notice of it." The Louisianian, a newspaper in which Pinchback was an owner and partner, dismissed the rumors as a "hallucination" and a "chimerical notion," and scolded those "classes of people, whose minds suspicion is always haunting, and whose ... lack of knowledge induce them to attribute every disaster ... to some secondhand agency." But the idea that something mysterious had attended Dunn's sudden passing would linger for many years. Several informants assured Perkins, whose research took place in the 1930s when many contemporaries of Dunn's remained alive, that the murder by poison had been "an open secret," that the conspirators were known, and that all had been hushed up.
Whether Dunn was poisoned, or his natural, if untimely, removal simply agitated local suspicion, what mattered was that a man who may have had a stabilizing effect on Reconstruction in Louisiana had been cut down in his prime.
While it seems unlikely that Dunn would have been added to Grant's presidential ticket in 1872, and even a politician of Dunn's caliber would have been hard-pressed to survive the local crusade for whites' home rule in the mid-1870s, it is intriguing to consider what impact Dunn might have had. Such questions surely occupied the mourners—numbering more than fifty thousand—who gathered for his funeral, the largest such event held for an African American in the nineteenth century. They lined the curb along a dozen blocks of Canal Street and joined the mile-long procession, which slowly trailed the caisson that conveyed Dunn to his final resting place in St. Louis Cemetery.
Pinchback was cautious in his response to Dunn's sudden death. He did not, like many others, rush to the lieutenant governor's home to sit in the parlor and console the widow, although he was in prominent attendance at the funeral. He discreetly mentioned his regard for Dunn in a speech in the state senate, where, alluding to his own keen interest in civil rights, he observed that Dunn's life, and his ascent to the office of lieutenant governor, "manifested to us the truthfulness of the sublime principle established by the fathers of our country that all men are born free and equal."
Warmoth, meanwhile, was preoccupied with his own troubles. Although no official inquiry investigated whether Warmoth had anything to do with Dunn's death, it was hardly forgotten that the last objective to which the lamented lieutenant governor had devoted himself was Warmoth's impeachment. Dunn's disappearance had, for the moment, left the Customhouse men disoriented, but Warmoth recognized the need to act. Fearful of allowing Carter, the house speaker, who was popular with the Customhouse faction, to remain in line for the governorship, he moved quickly to put the loyal Pinchback in Dunn's seat. His adversaries would be far less inclined to seek impeachment if it meant making Pinchback the governor. At the same time Warmoth had to assuage his white constituency. "Pinchback ... was a restless, ambitious man and had more than once arrayed himself against me and my policies," Warmoth later recalled. "He was a freelance and dangerous, and had to be reckoned with at all times. He was very distasteful to my conservative friends, and many of them openly condemned me for his election until they became aware of the situation and realized the political necessity for the action we had taken."
After attaining Pinchback's consent, Warmoth shrewdly convened the state senate, not the full legislature, for he knew the house was capable of starting impeachment proceedings against him. On December 6, the senate elected Pinchback as temporary presiding officer, an indication that he was their choice for lieutenant governor. Soon after the New Year, however, a resurgent Customhouse faction attacked Pinchback's elevation as illegal (Warmoth was rumored to have secured Pinchback's victory by paying $15,000 for the vote of a Customhouse-aligned senator) and again made known their aim to impeach Warmoth at the first opportunity.
The governor had executed several clever maneuvers, but the Customhouse clique responded in kind. To approve Pinchback as lieutenant governor, a senate quorum was needed. In order to make such approval impossible, eleven Republican senators and three Democrats were by nightfall sneaked aboard the federal revenue cutter Wilderness, which James Casey then ordered to sail offshore and keep the legislators out of sight. Marshal Packard met the vessel by launch every few days to resupply it with food, drink, and cigars, and the ship kept its human cargo secret for a full week. When Warmoth and Pinchback learned of the ruse, they complained directly to President Grant that an official U.S. vessel was being used for questionable political purposes, and Grant ordered the boat back to New Orleans. Officials who met it at the dock, however, discovered no Louisiana state senators aboard, for they had disembarked in Mississippi.
In addition to inserting Pinchback into the line of secession ahead of Speaker Carter, Warmoth sought to undermine Carter by making a show of strength against the Customhouse faction when the full legislature finally convened at the Mechanics Institute. Warmoth called up special police deputies to watch over the meetings; the opposition had federal troops brought in. Cordons of armed men jostled as they surrounded the building. At noon on January 4, 1872, federal marshals entered and arrested Warmoth and Pinchback, Police Chief Algernon'S. Badger, and eighteen representatives and four senators. The arrests stemmed from alleged violations of the Ku Klux Klan Act of 1871, involving interference with the Customhouse faction's civil rights, and were dubious in any case since each side was using similar tactics to undermine the other. The apprehended men immediately made bail, but by the time they returned to the institute, Carter had expelled additional senators loyal to Warmoth and put Customhouse men in their place.
Then it was Warmoth's turn. When the legislature finished its business for the day, he told his followers not to venture too far away, and at 4:30 P.M. he used his extant powers as governor to call an extra session. All members of the legislature were immediately notified by
messenger, but the Warmoth men who had stayed nearby managed to rush into the hall and, acting as fast as the Carter faction had earlier in the day, voted to wipe clean the record of the earlier arrests and strip Carter of his job as speaker of the house, installing a Warmoth man in his stead. For good measure, the body passed an official vote of confidence in Governor Warmoth.
Carter and his faction were furious, but Warmoth had the organizational advantage and gathered enough men to regain a quorum in the senate, where he and Pinchback set out at once to defeat the opposition's scheme to deny Pinchback the office of lieutenant governor. When it became apparent that only one vote was required to tip the balance, Pinchback, as the senate's presiding officer, resolved matters by simply voting for himself. This went against informal senate tradition, but by this point no element of subterfuge seemed unusual. With Warmoth in charge, Pinchback safely elected, and Carter tumbled from his leadership of the house, the Customhouse group had no choice but to return to their seats in a Warmoth-Pinchback administration. They could only pray that an authority so corruptly installed would be short-lived.
As the election of 1872 approached, friction was also apparent in the leadership of the national Republican Party. This was a matter of special concern to black Americans, whose fate was intertwined with the party's fitness and survival though they yet had little direct influence over its management. The core of the dilemma was the man who sat in the White House and who now sought a second term. President Grant, while still admired personally as a hero of the recent war, had disappointed many Americans, even some within his own party. At fault were his persistent cronyism, his seemingly lax attention to important issues, and the corruption that seemed to waft about his office and his closest aides and cohorts.
Perhaps most significant for his black supporters, Grant that year had a bitter public falling-out with the Massachusetts senator Charles Sumner, who, with the death of Thaddeus Stevens in 1868, had become Congress's chief activist for securing equal rights for the freedmen. Sumner and Grant had always made a strange pair of Republican icons—Sumner a man of ideals and searing intellect who expressed himself, at times bombastically, with lofty allusions to classical literature and antiquity; Grant, a bland, silent fellow, seemingly incurious about the world, said to be most at ease when talking about horses in the company of his old army buddies. In the war, Grant had distinguished himself from other Union commanders by his unwavering determination to find and fight the enemy. But this firm steadfastedness often appeared less well suited to managing complex affairs of state. And while Grant personally steered clear of the charges of corruption that dogged the White House, the creeping sense of something rotten in his administration provided fodder for Democrats; among other things, it lent credence to the Democrats' persistent claims that Southern Republicans were guilty of malfeasance and incompetence.
PRESIDENT ULYSSES S. GRANT
The break with Sumner had begun in 1870, when the president became taken with the idea of annexing the Caribbean nation of Santo Domingo (now the Dominican Republic) for $1.5 million. The appeal of annexation was threefold: access to the island's mineral resources, a place to establish an American outpost that would inhibit European meddling in the Caribbean, and control of a nearby yet isolated locale to which American blacks might be enticed to emigrate.
Sumner, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, was harshly critical of the idea, which seemed like unwarranted expansionism. He suspected that the clique that ran Santo Domingo, centered on its autocratic president, Buenaventura Baez, did not truly represent the best interests of its people, for, as Sumner learned, Baez had so little authority over his countrymen that U.S. warships had been dispatched to intimidate his opponents. It also came to Sumner's attention that some of Grant's aides had been busy in Santo Domingo, lining up lucrative real estate deals in anticipation of annexation, and that private speculators were thick in the plot to bring about the purchase. As for the idea of black migration, Sumner believed it wrong to export the nation's racial issues, however intractable they seemed, and feared that a government plan fostering the out-migration of American citizens would be a poor precedent for both the country's domestic initiatives and its foreign policy.
The rift between the two men was exacerbated not so much by Sumner's formal opposition to the plan but by the freighted language he used—comparing the annexation to the South's attempts to expand slavery into the west a generation earlier, alluding to Baez as "a political jockey ... sustained in power by the government of the United States that he may betray his country." He also made some very personal attacks on Grant, whose "kingly prerogative" toward Santo Domingo he likened to the bullying tactics of the Ku Klux Klan. "Had the President been so inspired as to bestow upon the protection of Southern unionists, white and black, one-half, nay one-quarter the time, money, zeal, will, personal attention, personal effort, personal intercession which he has bestowed upon his attempt to obtain half an island in the Caribbean sea," Sumner told the Senate in March 1871, "our Southern Ku Klux would have existed in name only, while tranquility would have reigned everywhere within our borders." After loud applause, and some hissing and booing from the galleries, Sumner continued. "Now, as I desire the suppression of the Ku Klux, and as I seek the elevation of the African race, I insist that the presidential scheme, which initiates a new form of Ku Klux on the coast of St. Domingo ... shall be arrested. I speak of that Ku Klux of which the President is the declared head, and I speak also for the African race, whom the President has trampled down." Sumner was known for insensitive and reckless words—his friend Wendell Phillips called him "a cat without smellers"—but even his supporters feared he had overreached in comparing the president of the United States to a leader of the Ku Klux Klan.
Grant felt not only abused but also double-crossed by Sumner, for he had once had reason to believe that he and the Massachusetts senator basically agreed about Santo Domingo. Sumner lived on Lafayette Square, just across from the White House, and on January 2, 1870, Grant had taken the unusual step of paying an unannounced visit to his neighbor. Sumner, at dinner with two reporters, diplomatically invited Grant inside; the ensuing discussion, which the journalists were allowed to witness, included Grant's personal appeal for Sumner to lend his influential support on the annexation question. The president likely hoped that the part of the plan meant to benefit Southern blacks would, if explained carefully, win Sumner over, and apparently he departed that night confident of Sumner's loyalty. "Mr. President," Sumner had told him at the door, "I am an administration man, and whatever you do will always find in me the most careful and candid consideration."
When Sumner began disparaging the idea in the Senate, Grant was livid, and he repaid Sumner's rebellion by launching a successful effort to relieve Sumner of his chairmanship of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and to recall the current ambassador to Britain, John Lothrop Motley, who was the senator's close friend. Grant could not have calculated a blow to hurt Sumner more, for Sumner was immensely proud of his expertise on American foreign policy; he had traveled extensively in Europe and had dozens of important friends and contacts there.
When Grant enjoyed public favor, his ethical and diplomatic lapses were overlooked. However, when badly handled issues such as the Santo Domingo crisis emerged (the annexation plan was eventually dropped), his opponents could revive them when the moment seemed opportune. A persistent vulnerability was Grant's unashamed nepotism, for he had more than a dozen close relations on the federal payroll; and by the spring of 1872, with the election only a few months away, more questionable incidents had accrued to taint Grant's reputation.
Some said the president's troubles really began with the loss of his good friend and adviser General John A. Rawlins, a trusted military aide who later served as Grant's secretary of war. Rawlins was one of the few people whom Grant allowed to criticize him, even about his drinking. After Rawlins died of consumption in September 1869, the president's administration and po
licymaking seemed less sure-footed. In that very month the administration became implicated in an attempt to corner the gold market, led by the financiers Jim Fisk and Jay Gould. On September 24, a day that came to be known as Black Friday, the price of gold was driven steeply upward as insiders bought large quantities of it; then, when a satisfactory price was reached, these amounts were suddenly sold, causing the bottom of the market to drop. The Grant administration's complicity lay in suspending the sale of gold, thus further limiting the amount available and driving up the price.
An even greater disgrace was the manipulation of the Crédit Mobilier, a construction company formed to build the roadbed for the Union Pacific railroad, which would bridge America coast to coast. For an estimated $50 million in work and material, Crédit Mobilier received $73 million from the federal coffers, a $23 million windfall for its well-connected stockholders, some of whom also sat on the board of directors of the Union Pacific. When suspicions about the arrangement arose, Oakes Ames, the Massachusetts congressman who had helped create the enterprise, distributed lucrative Crédit Mobilier shares, earning as much as 80 percent interest, to well-placed individuals in Washington, including Vice President Schuyler Colfax and the Ohio congressman James Garfield. One of the lesser beneficiaries of the scandal, Garfield was said to have received $329; this figure, scribbled in the background, became a recurring motif in derisive political cartoons about the future president.
Colfax turned out to be the big fish in the net of Crédit Mobilier. An impeachment effort was launched against him, and although it fell short, it effectively denied him a second term as Grant's number two. As far as Charles Sumner was concerned, however, it wasn't Colfax alone who should be kept from another term in office; he believed President Grant had to go as well. Grant remained popular, however, particularly with blacks, and they recoiled at the attacks made against him, for any diminution of Grant's leadership would only strengthen the Democrats' chances of seizing the nation's highest office. "I may be wrong," wrote Frederick Douglass, "but I do not at present see any good reason for degrading Grant in the eyes of the American people. Personally, he is nothing to me, but as the president, the Republican President of the country, I am conscious if it can be done to hold him in all honor."