Grant

by Ron Chernow

elegiacally

niggardly

Many southerners were spoiling for a fight that would harden the battles lines.

Abraham Lincoln

became the nominee less because he appealed to the most people than because he offended the fewest. Instead of trying to cultivate friends, he sought to avoid making enemies, refraining from utterances designed to soothe or antagonize the South.

On November 6, 1860, Abraham Lincoln was elected president in a vote full of troubling omens. Besides winning less than 40 percent of the popular vote, he did not win a single vote in the Deep South, where his name failed to appear on the ballot; he carried every northern state, except for New Jersey, where he managed a split with Douglas. Almost universally underrated, Lincoln was deemed a mediocrity at best, a coarse bumpkin from the backwoods.

If Grant had dithered on how best to deal with slavery, secession clarified his thinking on preserving the Union, turning him into an outright militant.

seceded states met in Montgomery, Alabama, and consecrated the new Confederate States of America, drafting Jefferson Davis as interim president.

Lincoln had fooled himself into believing that the South was bluffing and that Unionist sentiment there would prevail.

“After Capt. Grant took up the Northern side,” said Louisa Boggs, “Col. Dent swore with a big oath that if his worthless son-in-law ever came on his land he would shoot him as he would a rabbit.”

If the men regarded Grant as overly harsh at first, they soon grew to admire his fairness, competence, and aplomb. He never threw temper tantrums, never engaged in theatrics, and performed his duties in a placid, levelheaded manner. Once he took command, a remarkable change overcame Grant, mirrored in his letters. He now sounded energized, alert, and self-confident, as if shaken from a long slumber.

In his understated style, he was fearless and exacting.

William J. Hardee’s manual of tactics and reports written by George McClellan as a Crimean War observer.

Hounded from the army seven years earlier due to drinking, Grant reentered the service beneath a cloud and policed his men with unswerving zeal whenever he discovered evidence of alcohol abuse. How he dealt with drinking infractions reveals much about how he regarded his own alcohol problem.

for all that he was so strict a disciplinarian, he was never angry or vindictive.”

Crane had a chance to probe Grant’s political views. While Grant still lacked patience with extreme abolitionists, he loathed slavery with all his soul. “He believed slavery to be an anomaly in a free government like ours; that its tendency was subversive of the best interests of the master and the enslaved . . . that it resulted in denying the slave the rights of his moral nature.”

“He often remarked . . . that he believed slavery would die with this rebellion, and that it might become necessary for the government to suppress it as a stroke of military policy.”

An atypical male, Grant never hesitated to admit human fears.

He would emerge as a master of the psychology of war, intuitive about enemy weakness. Henceforth he would project himself into opponents’ minds and comprehend their fears and anxieties instead of blowing them up into all-powerful bugaboos, giving him courage when others quailed.

While in Mexico, Grant grappled for the first time with a runaway slave who appeared in camp and asked for the commanding colonel. As Chaplain Crane recalled, the man—frightened, exhausted, breathing heavily—explained that he had been treated atrociously by his master. “Kin yo help me, cunnel?” he asked Grant. “Can’t help you, sir, we are not here to look after negroes, but after rebels,” Grant rejoined. “You must take care of yourself.” Crestfallen, the man hung his head and sighed dejectedly. “Lawd, I’s afeerd massa ’ll be onto me!”39 Although Grant did not help the man, Chaplain Crane gave him bread, meat, and money and steered him to an escape route across the Mississippi. When the slave’s master and his sidekick appeared in camp two hours later and inquired about the fugitive’s whereabouts, Grant not only shielded the runaway, but demanded that the two men divulge their feelings about the rebellion. When they evaded his question, Grant detained them in camp until they agreed to take an oath of allegiance, giving their former slave more time to escape.

his main mission was to settle unfinished business from the war by preserving the Union and safeguarding the freed slaves.

Grant had signed on for “a task of peace, more difficult than the war itself.”

“I found that the negroes who had been declared free by the United States were not free, in fact that they were living under a code that made them worse than slaves;

Grant also began to commit critical federal resources to ensuring black welfare. In 1867 the Bureau of Education had been created to educate freed people, but Congress had consistently slashed its budget, threatening to shut it down. Grant intervened to save it.

In another stunning reversal wrought by the war, General Ely Parker, the full-blooded Seneca sachem, emerged as a leading personality in the new administration. On April 13, Grant elevated him to commissioner of Indian affairs, the first Native American to hold the job and the first nonwhite person to ascend to such a lofty government post.

Aided by Parker, Grant embarked on a Peace Policy with the Indians that was full of high-minded intentions. Outraged by injustices perpetrated against Native Americans, he aimed to clean up a corrupt system of licensed government traders who cheated Indians on their supplies of food, clothing, and shelter and grew indecently wealthy through a veritable sinkhole of graft called the Indian Ring. These lucrative jobs were prime sources of congressional patronage. Grant believed the best way to root out such scoundrels was to remove the whole network of shady agents from the political sphere, relocating the Bureau of Indian Affairs into the War Department.

He blamed white settlers for many problems wrongly attributed to Native Americans. Right after Appomattox, he remarked that “the Indians require as much protection from the whites as the white does from the Indians. My own experience has been that little trouble would have ever been had from them but for the encroachments & influence of bad whites.”

Even as he enunciated his Peace Policy, Grant knew frightened settlers demanded tough federal protection and they constituted his ultimate political constituents. Over time, his genuine concern for Indian justice had to reckon with an incessant clamor from railroads, ranchers, and miners for more troops and frontier forts.

While preaching how it was “much better to support a Peace commission than a campaign against Indians,” Grant would be summoned repeatedly to send arms to western states to defend them against Indian raids.

“A system which looks to the extinction of a race is too abhorrent for a Nation to indulge in,” Grant told Congress in his first annual message in December 1869. As with all his presidential addresses, he composed it himself. “I see no remedy for this except in placing all the Indians on large reservations, as rapidly as it can be done, and giving them absolute protection there.”26 This hopeful, idealistic path, paved with good intentions, had been touted by well-meaning presidents from George Washington to Abraham Lincoln. Grant saw absorption and assimilation as a benign, peaceful process, not one robbing Indians of their rightful culture. Whatever its shortcomings, Grant’s approach seemed to signal a remarkable advance over the ruthless methods adopted by some earlier administrations.

Grant favored mercy toward Indians who abided by his solution, but ended up having to deal severely with those who roamed beyond their reservations and clashed with westward settlement by whites.

Grant seemed well-meaning but naive in thinking nomadic Indians would repudiate their past and suddenly mimic the ways of the white men who had forcibly dispossessed them of their tribal lands.

For an assortment of reasons good and bad, the Caribbean had long been scouted as a haven for freed American slaves.

for Grant the most potent argument related to the aftermath of American slavery. Santo Domingo, he asserted, was “capable of supporting the entire colored population of the United States, should it choose to emigrate.”

“If two or three hundred thousand blacks were to emigrate to St. Domingo . . . the Southern people would learn the crime of Ku Kluxism, because they would see how necessary the black man is to their own prosperity.”

Blacks would enjoy the option of resettling outside the continental United States, yet remain citizens under the full jurisdiction of the federal government: “I took it that the colored people would go there in numbers, so as to have independent states governed by their own race. They would still be States of the Union, and under the protection of the General Government; but the citizens would be almost wholly colored.”

Although one thousand blacks had emigrated to Liberia in 1866 and 1867 under the aegis of the American Colonization Society, the idea of such emigration lost support among many blacks during Reconstruction as they gained full rights to citizenship.

The president didn’t anticipate what a hard sell Santo Domingo annexation would be, involving a tropical, Spanish-speaking, Roman Catholic nation inhabited by dark-skinned people. He committed fatal errors by pursuing this momentous policy in a closed-door, top-down style that made sense in wartime, but not in politics.

Grant placed a high priority on something that should have pleased Sumner, the welfare of black citizens, to whom he offered unprecedented White House access. On December 11, 1869, he received a delegation from the mostly black National Labor Convention. While he couldn’t gratify all their wishes, especially their desire to redistribute land to black laborers in the South, he left no doubt of his extreme solicitude for their concerns. “I have done all I could to advance the best interests of the citizens of our country, without regard to color,” he told them, “and I shall endeavor to do in the future what I have done in the past.”48

Each step in black emancipation had led ineluctably to the next, and the controversial next goal was granting black males the right to vote. After the Thirteenth Amendment abolished slavery and the Fourteenth conferred citizenship rights upon blacks, the Fifteenth prevented states from denying voting rights based on race, color, or earlier condition of servitude.

Black gains can be overstated and certainly were by an alarmed white community: fewer than 20 percent of state political offices in the South were held by blacks at the height of Reconstruction.

The dread of black suffrage drove many former secessionists to new heights of indignation. Although blacks made up 13 percent of the total U.S. population, they constituted 36 percent of the South, with outright majorities in Mississippi and South Carolina. The Fifteenth Amendment meant that blacks, armed with the vote, could exercise real power and invert, in an astonishingly short period, the power structure that had long suppressed them. Many southern whites found this insupportable and argued that hapless, newly enfranchised blacks were being manipulated by scheming northern Republicans.

To circumvent the Fifteenth Amendment, white politicians in Georgia devised new methods of stripping blacks of voting rights, including poll taxes, onerous registration requirements, and similar restrictions copied in other states. With a violent backlash well under way, the party of Lincoln began to pay a price for being the vocal paladin of African Americans. As Senator Henry Wilson observed in 1869, there was not “a square mile of the United States” where Republican advocacy of black rights hadn’t resulted in the loss of white votes.

Klan violence was unquestionably the worst outbreak of domestic terrorism in American history

Many Democrats claimed that Klan atrocities were so many fairy tales dreamed up by Republicans for political expediency and denounced the Klan legislation as unconstitutional.

Fortunately for Grant, the fervor on his side was equally passionate. Frederick Douglass wisely saw that the random corruption cases that tarnished the administration’s reputation were far less consequential than the president’s unqualified support for southern blacks. Reconstruction was the essential sequel to the Civil War, completing its mission. “If we stand by President Grant and his administration,” he wrote, “it is from no spirit of hero worship or blind attachment to mere party, but because in this hour there is no middle ground. [Grant] is for stamping out this murderous ku-klux as he stamped out the rebellion.”81

On April 20, 1871, Grant returned victorious to Capitol Hill to sign the third Enforcement Act, commonly known as the Ku Klux Klan Act. He had planned a California trip that spring, but canceled it in the belief that he couldn’t sidestep this historic moment. The strong new measure laid down criminal penalties for depriving citizens of their rights under the Fourteenth Amendment, including holding office, sitting on a jury, or casting a vote. The federal government could prosecute such cases when state governments refused to act. The law also endowed Grant with extraordinary powers to suspend habeas corpus, declare martial law, and send in troops. To halt night riders, the ...

The man who implemented this bold agenda was Akerman, who thought Reconstruction best served the long-term interests of the enlightened South, properly understood. To those who protested its severity, he responded that nothing was “more idle than to attempt to conciliate by kindness that portion of the Southern people who are still malcontent. They take all kindness on the part of the Government as evidence of timidity.”84 For Akerman, the Klan’s actions “amount to war, and cannot be effectually crushed on any theory.”85 The metaphor didn’t seem excessive, for the Klan resisted by force any effort to restrain it, reflected in Nathan Bedford Forrest’s bloodthirsty injunction to his followers: “If they send the black men to hunt those confederate soldiers whom they call kuklux, then I say to you, ‘Go out and shoot the radicals.’”

Grant showed a sure grasp of both his values and methods. He knew that the Klan threatened to unravel everything he and Lincoln and Union soldiers had accomplished at great cost in blood and treasure.

Akerman made plain that more than convictions were at stake: “If you cannot convict, you, at least, can expose, and ultimately such exposures will make the community ashamed of shielding the crime.”96