Where the Buck Stops

by Harry Truman

  The Act threw out the Missouri Compromise and allowed Kansas to come in as a slave state if the local voters wanted it that way, and a lot of tough characters moved in from Missouri, which was already a slave state, and saw to it that Kansas went pro-slave. This, of course, increased the bitter feelings even more between North and South, and that was, for all intents and purposes, the end of Pierce as a national figure. At the 1856 convention, he wasn’t proposed for renomination, and the nomination went to James Buchanan. Pierce went back to New Hampshire and became more and more unpopular by doing things like proposing that the man who had been the secretary of war in his cabinet, Jefferson Davis, be nominated as the Democratic candidate for president in 1860, and by opposing Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation and saying it was unconstitutional. The suggestion about Davis wasn’t quite as silly as it sounds, since Davis was probably the best-informed man in the government at the time, but it was certainly unwise and unpopular at a time when the North and South were on the brink of war. And when Jane Pierce died in 1863, Pierce turned more and more to that best friend of his back in Washington, the bottle of booze, and continued to slip so much in popularity that, when he himself died in 1868, nobody in New Hampshire was even willing to put up a statue of Franklin Pierce for half a century.

  JAMES BUCHANAN WAS one more do-nothing president. I think he was the most obvious one in his time for that sort of attitude, and the worse thing about that is that he came just before the Civil War and had a lot to do with bringing it on. In emergencies, the chief executive is the only one who can operate to meet those emergencies. Buchanan was president from 1857 to 1861, and he hesitated and backtracked and felt that his constitutional prerogative didn’t allow him to do things, and he ended up doing absolutely nothing and threw everything into Lincoln’s lap.

  He also wrote a message on the veto of the first land grants and the first land grant colleges that’s a comic masterpiece. The whole question of land grants came up because railroads were extending into the Mississippi Valley and making it easier for colonists to get into the western territories, and Congress tried to encourage colonization of these territories by selling the land for just $2 an acre and then reducing this to $1.25 an acre. But even those low amounts were just too high for poor laborers in the East and poor farmers and farm workers in the South, so the idea began to grow that the land ought to be given away free to people who were courageous enough to travel to the West and claim it. This plan was backed by a lot of people - most particularly by Andrew Johnson, who was a great friend of poor people in both farm and urban areas - and also by Horace Greeley, who also supported the idea strongly because he, too, wanted to help poor people. On the other hand, many of the manufacturers in the East opposed the plan because they didn’t want to lose a lot of their workers, and many southerners opposed it because they were afraid this would cause too rapid growth of free states, and free states would soon outnumber slave states. This put Buchanan in a terrible dilemma because he was more or less for free land grants himself but didn’t really have the guts to go against its opponents, so he simply vetoed the bill and put it off into the indefinite future. That was in 1860, and I think he suspected that he’d be out of office by the end of the year anyway.

  That wasn’t so comic in itself; the thing that was comic was that he also had to veto land grant colleges, and he justified this by explaining that the country didn’t require further education of people. In fact, the old fool went on to say, educated people were too hard to handle, and he thought there were too many educated people already. Well, this was in 1860, and he was out in 1861, and they finally passed the land grant college bill. The first land grant college is up in Michigan, and it’s a good one. The one out in Utah is the same sort. All the agricultural colleges around the country are land grant colleges, and they’re all good.

  FORTUNATELY, THE NEXT president was Abraham Lincoln, one of the greatest, and the president after Lincoln was another very good though much-maligned man, Andrew Johnson. I’ll talk about all of the good presidents in more detail later on. For now, let’s move on to the next chapter and some more of the Presidents We Could Have Done Without.

  ULYSSES SIMPSON GRANT’S period in office seems to prove the theory that we can coast along for eight years without a president. Well, of course, we’ve also recently done it with Eisenhower.

  Ulysses Simpson Grant wasn’t really his name. He was named by his parents Hiram Ulysses Grant, but he dropped the Hiram and took the name Simpson so his initials could be U. S. He later claimed that he lost the Hiram and got the Simpson when someone made some mistakes on his registration form at West Point, and that he didn’t say anything about it because he preferred initials standing for United States to his old set of initials, which caused his friends to call him Hug, but that’s a kind of doubtful story. I can see a clerk dropping someone’s first name by mistake, but not adding a name like Simpson out of the blue.

  He was born on a farm in Point Pleasant, Ohio, in 1822 and went into West Point when he was seventeen. He hadn’t had much real education before that, so his years at West Point were a kind of struggle for him, but he managed to graduate twenty-first in his class of thirty-nine, and he also said later on that his four years at the school gave him an additional and very important bonus. Fifty of the men he knew at West Point later became Civil War generals - on both sides, of course - and Grant later told friends that his knowledge of the personal strengths and weaknesses of these men helped him command and helped him win his battles.

  He fought in the Mexican War under both Zachary Taylor and Winfield Scott and rose to the rank of captain. He married a woman named Julia Dent in 1848, the sister of one of his friends at West Point, and eventually had four children, three sons and a daughter, but his pay was so small that he couldn’t afford to have his family with him when he was sent to various western posts after the war, and like Pierce, he started drinking heavily. He became an embarrassment to the Army, and he had to resign his commission in 1854.

  There were very lean years after that. He tried farming, but he was drunk so much of the time that he lost the farm, and then he failed at selling real estate and didn’t do much better as a clerk in a store owned by a couple of his younger brothers. When the Civil War came along, he got a job at a salary of $3 a day as a clerk in the outfit in Springfield, Illinois, which was putting together Illinois’ volunteer regiments, but the governor of Illinois knew about his West Point education and his military experience and put him in charge when nobody else around seemed to be able to get the regiments to shape up. He did so well at it that he was commissioned a brigadier general, and he came out of the war as a lieutenant general, the highest rank in the Army in those days.

  I’ve read some books that criticize Grant’s ability and decisions as a soldier, but I don’t agree with these writers; I think Grant did what he had to do and did it well. He was very tough when he and his men were fighting to capture Fort Henry and Fort Donelson in Tennessee, and he got one more nickname, Unconditional Surrender, when he told the general in command of Donelson that he wouldn’t accept anything less than that, but he won the battles and took 20,000 Confederate prisoners. He and his soldiers were taken by surprise when there was a big Confederate attack at Shiloh, and he was accused of being off on a bender and maybe he was, but he hung on and drove off the Confederate forces. It was Grant’s personal decision to go after Lee, instead of waiting to see what Lee might do, and keep chasing him and attacking him until Lee surrendered.

  Grant also behaved the way he should have, in my view, when Lee surrendered. He came to accept Lee’s surrender with the mud still on his uniform, instead of acting like a god and a conqueror the way Douglas MacArthur sometimes did when I was vice president and president, and he ordered the horses to remain with the Confederate troops and told the southerners to keep their sidearms and go home and take care of them- selves. He was really a kindhearted and decent man, I think. It was the people around him later on who caused hi
m all the trouble. His administration was one of the most corrupt in our history, but he didn’t even know all the crooked business was going on when he was president of the United States. It’s hard even to imagine that, but it’s true.3

  Grant was one of the most popular men in the country when the Civil War ended. People in New York started a campaign to get some money into his pockets by private donations and presented him with a gift of $105,000, a lot of money in those days and not too bad right now, either. A house was built for him in Galena, Illinois, where his brothers had their store, and another house was built and given to him as a gift in Philadelphia. A new rank was created for the first time by Congress, general of the armies, and given to him. Andrew Johnson made him secretary of war, as it was called then, and a lot of people in the Republican Party began to think it would be pretty easy to get him elected as the next president.

  He was invited to the Republican Convention, nominated unanimously on the first ballot, and campaigned against another fellow nobody remembers today, a man named Horatio Seymour who’d been governor of New York. The popular vote was surprisingly close, 3,013,421 for Grant against 2,706,829 for Seymour, but Grant received 214 electoral votes to eighty for Seymour and became our eighteenth president. (I have a feeling that a lot of people don’t really understand this business of popular votes and electoral votes, because I didn’t at one time, and I’ll explain the way it all works in one of the later chapters.)

  Grant’s period as president was one of the low points in our history. It was after the most terrible war that the country had ever suffered, and after any sort of a turmoil like that, there’s great difficulty and often a bad president. There’s bound to be, just as there was after the First World War and following a very great president, Woodrow Wilson, and it happens in nearly every instance. It’s just happened again with Eisenhower, as I can’t resist repeating, if you want to refer to a modern situation. And it certainly happened with Grant.

  I don’t think Grant knew very much about what the president’s job was except that he was commander in chief of the armed forces. That was the thing, I think, that impressed him more than anything, and he was pretty naive or ignorant about everything else.

  When the Civil War was still going on, Lincoln and Grant wanted to approach peace and the South in a manner of forgiveness: Come back and be good fellows and behave yourselves from now on. But Lincoln and Johnson were in the moderate wing of the Republican Party, and there was another part of the party known as the Radical Republicans, and one of the men in that group, Thaddeus Stevens of Pennsylvania, was the leader of the House of Representatives and felt completely different about everything. Thad Stevens and his crowd wanted to approach the thing in a manner that would cause the people who tried to break up the Union to be punished by prison and by hanging. In fact, they put Jefferson Davis, who became president of the Confederate government when the war started, in prison for a while, and they did everything they could to get a great many leaders in the South executed. They even went so far as to want to put Robert E. Lee in jail, but I’ll say this for Grant: He wouldn’t stand for it. He was president at the time, and for once he said something definite; he got up and said that if they did that, he’d quit. He did, though, prove a disappointment in just about everything else regarding the peace.

  Grant’s politics were an unknown quantity; he showed practically no interest in politics at all before he was invited to the Republican convention, and he admitted to some of his friends that he had only voted one time in his life - as a Democrat. Somehow, the word had gotten around that Grant was going to be easier toward the South than the tough series of Reconstruction Acts dictated, probably because Grant sometimes backed Johnson when he was in Johnson’s cabinet and the President was fighting with Congress, which was practically all the time, and most of Johnson’s problems were the result of the fact that he was more interested in healing the breach between the North and the South than in vengeance against southern leaders. This notion about Grant was reinforced by the fact that the most significant part of Grant’s acceptance speech was believed by many people to be one line: “Let us have peace.” Unfortunately, it didn’t turn out that way at all.

  Johnson’s plan was to welcome the South back into the Union and allow southern leaders to return to their former positions, so he announced an amnesty for most southerners and issued proclamations permitting the southern states to start setting up civil governments. He felt, as Lincoln did, that the southern states had never really left the Union and were still part of the Union. His attitude was that southerners ought to be treated as bad children and be allowed to rehabilitate themselves on the same basis as people who were Union people - that the South should be taken back as soon as they were willing to confess that they’d been wrong and taken the oath of allegiance, and go on from there, because the slaves had been freed and there wasn’t any reason to do any of the things that used to be done in a conquered country. But old Thad Stevens didn’t believe in that; that didn’t sit well with him and the other Radical Republicans. He wanted to keep the South as a conquered territory and set up territorial governments under the control of the Federal government, with southerners having no rights at all, especially no right to vote. Stevens was a bitter old man who was involved in a hatred program toward all the South, and there’s a theory that this was because he owned an iron and steel mill in Gettysburg, and it was destroyed by the Confederate soldiers when Lee was in the neighborhood, but that’s only part of the story. The biggest part of it was that the Republicans were a minority party, and Stevens and company wanted to keep the Radical Republicans in control of the Congress of the United States, and they were very much afraid that if the southerners, who were mostly Democrats, were allowed to start electing senators and representatives again, they’d turn the Radical Republicans out of office in the next few elections.

  Johnson tried to get his point of view across; he even toured the country making speeches urging a sensible and gentle reconstruction program for the South. But it didn’t help; a tough series of Reconstruction Acts were passed that threw out Johnson’s civil governments and replaced them with military governments. Federal troops were sent in to patrol and control the South, and Northern carpetbaggers were encouraged to pack those bags of theirs made out of old carpets and emigrate to the South and join with blacks4 in running local southern governments. That wasn’t what Johnson had in mind for the former slaves, or what Lincoln had in mind, either; I think what Lincoln and Johnson planned was the proper education and rehabilitation of the slaves so they could become useful citizens and in time take their place in government. But that wasn’t the idea at all of Thad Stevens and the Radical Republicans; they wanted the South to be oppressed by the people who had been slaves, and that’s what brought about a lot of the bad feelings between the races. They put the blacks in charge right after their emancipation, which wasn’t fair to the blacks or to anybody else because they lacked education and experience. It was one of the worst things that was ever done for the rehabilitation of the slaves. It’s taken years and years to get the thing worked out so that people will understand that education and experience are the best things that can happen to any race or color that hasn’t had experience beforehand, and it’s only now that things are starting to straighten out between the races. (We’ve still got a distance to go, but we’re finally starting to see some real improvement with more and more black leaders in government, and I’m sure we’ll have black presidents one day.) I think Johnson understood that, and he tried to veto the tough Reconstruction Acts, but they were passed over his veto.

  Well, the hope was that Grant would change things back to more temperate policies toward the South, but exactly the opposite happened. Grant certainly looked good: he was just forty-six years old when he became president, which made him the youngest president in the nation’s history up to that point, and he was very determined and very much the commanding officer in his appearance when he gave his inaugural a
ddress. But even that speech was marked with some of the poor thinking, or lack of thinking, that showed up all through his whole administration. He didn’t like a lot of the laws, Grant said, but he was going to enforce them because - if you can believe this - he felt that that was the way to get rid of them. “I know no method to secure the repeal of bad or obnoxious laws so effective as their stringent execution,” he said, which is like telling people to go out and do a lot of lynchings or murders so that the public can see that lynchings and murders are bad. And with that, Grant pushed the Reconstruction Acts harder and harder, widening the breach more and more between the North and the South. The worst thing that went on during Grant’s administration was that vicious and alleged reconstruction of the South, and that will never be forgotten as long as people write about him because he was president when the worst part of it was going on.

  I think it’s even possible that, in his own muddleheaded way, Grant was for carpetbagging. He was a general, and he’d conquered the southerners and he might have thought that the conquered should pay the bill. A lot of people have had that idea since the Battle of Waterloo, when Napoleon was exiled and imprisoned. That idea has never worn off, and some people felt that same way after the Civil War. It was the same thing, if you remember, after the Mexican War, when Santa Anna was defeated - why, we made the Mexicans pay through the nose. We made them turn over a whole lot of land to us, though we did give them $15 million for it. The theory is that the victor should make the loser pay every time. In World War I and World War II, though, we didn’t follow that sort of program, though I guess there was a little of that sort of thing after World War I. There was some attempt to make the Germans pay a penalty, but Germany was never really injured by the First World War. We never got inside their borders with our armies, and the Russians then had their revolution and made their separate peace. So there wasn’t anybody to put the screws on Germany except France, and they got Alsace-Lorraine back and that’s all they wanted. Down in Africa, in the colonies, the British took over all the African colonies, and we became the managers of one of their colonies in the Pacific, and we still have it - the Marshall Islands.