Grant

by Ron Chernow

he denounced the Klan as “the most atrocious organization that the civilized part of the world has ever known.”99

For all of Sumner’s bombastic invocation of black rights, opposition to the Dominican annexation had taken on a racist tinge. Carl Schurz regretted that annexation would soon bring the absorption of Cuba, Puerto Rico, and other Caribbean islands in its wake. He described these islands as populated mainly by indolent black people and issued this challenge to treaty proponents: “Show me a single instance in any tropical country where labor when it was left free did not exhibit a strong tendency to run into shiftlessness, and where practical attempts to organize labor did not run in the direction of slavery.”17

In pursuing peace with Native Americans, Grant was trying to square the circle. It was hard to be just to the Indians and protect railroads and white settlers at the same time. As a military man, he didn’t wish to constrain the style of his commanders, but some of them dealt with Indian incursions in a bloodthirsty manner. In the end, Grant had to show the velvet glove and iron fist at once.

While Grant said memorably that he “probably had the least desire for [the office] of anyone who ever held it,” the habit of power, perhaps imperceptibly, had acquired an inescapable hold over him.

new Liberal Republican Party and espoused a general amnesty for former Confederates. He inveighed against “Negro supremacy” and referred to Reconstruction as “the horror, the nightmare, of the Southern people.”

“Liberal Republicanism is nothing but Ku-Klux-Klanism disguised,”

Radical Republican and supporter of Reconstruction.

Democrats gathered in Baltimore knowing they had to join forces with Liberal Republicans to beat Grant.

Greeley was famous for his withering slurs against Democrats, having once said that while not all Democrats were horse thieves, all horse thieves were Democrats. He had denounced them as “traitors, slave-whippers, drunkards and lecherous beasts.”84 So in nominating Greeley, the convention had to take refuge in an awkward gallows humor.

Even Democratic National Chairman August Belmont declared Greeley’s selection “one of those stupendous mistakes which it is difficult even to comprehend,” although he urged the party faithful to rally around him.

Grant had striven to protect the black community, met regularly with black leaders, and given them unprecedented White House access, making global abolitionism an explicit aim of American foreign policy. In his annual message of December 1871, he applauded emancipation efforts in Brazil, deplored ongoing bondage in Cuba and Puerto Rico, and asked Congress for legislation to forbid Americans from “holding, owning, or dealing in slaves, or being interested in slave property in foreign lands”—a practice that hadn’t ceased with emancipation at home.91

Black leaders echoed Grant’s view that the merger of Liberal Republicans and Democrats threatened their welfare. Their views were vitally important because some southern states possessed enormous black populations that, coupled with Republican votes in the North, could easily determine the electoral outcome.

Liberal Republicans were “the same men, who ten years ago, flung the lash at the slave markets of the South, they are the men who refused sitting in a street car, alongside with a colored man, and who now, when aware of your growing political importance, pretend to be your friends and claim your votes.”

The 1872 presidential race provoked deep cleavages among abolitionists. When Sumner published an open letter to black voters, summoning them to abandon Grant, many erstwhile allies were speechless. “If the Devil himself were at the helm of the ship of state,” the abolitionist and women’s rights activist Lydia Maria Child responded, “my conscience would not allow me to aid in removing him to make room for the Democratic party.”97 She believed that when Liberal Republicans endorsed “state sovereignty,” it meant “when the Ku Klux renew their plans to exterminate Republicans, white and black, they shall be dealt with by Southern civil authorities—that is, by judges and jurors who are themselves members of the Ku Klux associations.”98 William Lloyd Garrison agreed that “home rule” meant “a blow aimed at the exercise of power entrusted to the President by Congress for the . . . protection of the Southern freedmen and loyalists against robbery, assassinations, and lynch-law barbarities.”99 Wendell Phillips exhorted black voters in the South: “Vote, every one of you, for Grant . . . If Greeley is elected, arm, concentrate, conceal your property, but organize for defense. You will need it soon.”100 Gerrit Smith invoked Grant’s thousands of anti-Klan indictments and warned that “the spirit of Kukluxism will not die out so long as the Democratic Party exists to sympathize with that spirit.”101 In

Frederick Douglass,

was dismayed by the betrayal of his hero, Charles Sumner,

For Douglass, Grant was the general who had effected with the sword Lincoln’s emancipation policy, then extended those gains by backing the Fifteenth Amendment.

He was willing to forgive any political offense as long as people were left free “to vote, speak & act” despite their “views, color or nativity.”108

He being Grant. This position being a mistake in hindsight, and one that we do not afford to felons to this day.

Even if wrapped in gauzy reform rhetoric, Greeley’s speeches dwelled on the damage Grant had done in the South and the need to restore “home rule” in the former Confederacy.

Grant was the first president to confront the feminist movement as a viable political force.

Buttressed by southern blacks, he carried every state in the region except Georgia and Texas, although he lost the border states of Kentucky, Maryland, Missouri, and Tennessee. Every northern state was folded into his winning column. Republicans would now control the Senate and House with commanding majorities.

Thanks to peaceful elections, black and white Republicans had won a majority of seats in the South Carolina legislature, while the governor was a white Republican and former brigadier general from Ohio, Robert K. Scott. The spectacle of black legislators seemed intolerable to many southern white voters, who skewered the state as “a new Liberia,” while Louisa McCord, a prolific essayist, satirized the new legislature as the “crow-congress” and the “monkey show.”137

“I don’t pretend to be honest,” he said. “I only pretend to be as honest as anybody in politics.”

the powder keg of Louisiana politics exploded in April 1873. William Ward, a black Republican, and Christopher Columbus Nash, a white Democrat, vied for control of Grant Parish in the center of the state. Ward summoned his black supporters and warned them that Democrats would try to seize by force the county seat of Colfax, a lush place of swamps and bayous and a black Republican stronghold. To avert this, they threw up earthworks around the courthouse, guarding it for several weeks. This display of black power was anathema to the white community. On Easter Sunday, Nash led a mob of several hundred whites, armed with rifles and a small cannon, who opened fire on the courthouse, setting it ablaze. Even though its black defenders ran up a white flag of surrender, begging for mercy, the mob butchered dozens of them. Black families were afraid to claim the many corpses that thickly littered the ground. When Longstreet sent Colonel T. W. DeKlyne to Colfax, the latter found heaps of dead black bodies being scavenged by dogs and buzzards. “We were unable to find the body of a single white man,” he reported. Many blacks “were shot in the back at the head and neck . . . almost all had from three to a dozen wounds. Many of them had their brains literally blown out.”9 It was the worst slaughter perpetrated against blacks during Reconstruction.

There was no possibility the culprits would be prosecuted under local laws. Invoking the Enforcement Act of 1870, a federal grand jury handed down seventy-two indictments, but only three men were convicted. In 1876, in United States v. Cruikshank, the Supreme Court determined that the perpetrators could not be prosecuted under the Fourteenth Amendment because it governed only state actions, not individual ones. The Colfax murderers thus walked off scot-free, sending a powerful message to white supremacists that they could slay blacks without any penalty.

As Grant attempted to normalize federal relations with former Confederate states, he struggled with newly emergent white supremacist groups, hydra-headed offshoots of the Klan

They tiptoed around prosecution by claiming to be county militia.

Attorney General Williams advised U.S. attorneys and marshals in six southern states of Grant’s fierce determination to stem violence against black and white Republicans. This was the prelude to a state of anarchy that engulfed New Orleans on September 14.

D. B. Penn, the Democratic lieutenant governor under McEnery, issued a provocative call for his militia to drive from power the “usurpers,” as he billed Republican officeholders. In a veritable coup d’état, thousands of whites, many of them former Confederate soldiers instigated by the White League, barricaded the streets, overpowered black militia and the racially integrated Metropolitan Police Force led by Longstreet, and took over City Hall and the statehouse, killing more than twenty people. Afterward, they announced that Governor Kellogg had been overthrown. General Emory informed Grant that the rebellion had “embraced nearly every white man in the community.”21 The battle had witnessed an extraordinary event: James Longstreet now fired on men he had commanded during the war, his small army having killed twenty-one White Leaguers. “The streets of the city were stained with blood,” wrote Grant, who released a proclamation that said “turbulent and disorderly persons” had conspired to overthrow Louisiana’s government and he ordered them to disperse within five days.22 To back up his words, he dispatched five thousand troops and three gunboats to reinstate Governor Kellogg. Almost overnight, the federal garrison in New Orleans swelled to America’s largest. Grant’s decisive actions pacified a dangerously unstable situation: the insurgents disbanded, the Penn forces surrendered state offices, and William P. Kellogg was restored as rightful governor.

While some northern newspapers roundly praised Grant’s handling of the uprising, many Liberal Republicans had tired of the black community and its eternal discontents. Contrary to the evidence, E. L. Godkin of The Nation portrayed southern blacks as well protected by their white governments, while in states still controlled by black Republicans, “the blacks have themselves become, in the hands of white knaves, oppressors of the worst sort.”23 Many northerners were fed up with carpetbag governments in the South and wanted the federal government to disengage from the region, even if this meant transferring it to white supremacists bent on draconian Democratic rule. One American diplomat believed northern voters were impatient “with this worn out cry of ‘Southern outrages’!!! Har...

Grant sent Phil Sheridan to assume command in Louisiana in early January. It wasn’t a conciliatory choice, nor was it meant to be. So commonplace had black murders become in Louisiana that when Sheridan conducted an investigation, he came up with a gruesome tally of 2,141 blacks killed by whites since the war, with another 2,115 wounded—almost all crimes that had gone unpunished.

While at West Point, Fred was implicated in an ugly racial incident involving a cadet named James W. Smith, the first black cadet accepted there.

Smith never graduated from West Point. After suffering so much ostracism, he flunked a test given by a biased philosophy professor and was drummed out of the academy, dying two years later of tuberculosis.

Republicans might disagree on Reconstruction, but they heartily concurred on preserving the perpetual strength of the Almighty Dollar.

In this new dispensation, Grant was increasingly fair game. Democratic control of the House had far-reaching consequences for him. Armed with investigative powers, committees turned a glaring searchlight on executive departments to ferret out corruption, a tactic used to discredit the administration on Reconstruction. Half the House committee chairmanships were handed over to southerners, who attempted to block further racial progress by Grant. In the South, Democrats regained control of Alabama as the old white elite restored their antebellum primacy. White and black Republicans in the region reacted with shocked dismay.

Grant pleaded with white southerners to do justice to blacks or he would have no choice but to send in unwanted federal troops. He issued a prophetic warning of the perils facing America’s two parties: Under existing conditions the Negro votes the republican ticket because he knows his friends are of that party. Many a good citizen votes the opposite not because [he] agrees with the great principles of state which separate party, but because, generally, he is opposed to Negro rule. This is a most delusive cry. Treat the Negro as a citizen and a voter—as he is, and must remain—and soon parties will be divided, not on the color line, but on principle.46 From southern Republicans, Grant heard heartrending pleas for help, a sorrowful chorus of concern. From a black minister in Tennessee, he learned of blacks flocking to his town because so many had been murdered by night riders elsewhere. He promised Grant that “these Colored peopel will all die for you to day. they have a great love for you. So we want you to do all [you] Can for us.”47 A Houston resident complained of Democrats riding roughshod over Texas Republicans. “Send your Bayonets to Texas—and break up the assemblage of Maniacs—Ruffians—and Thieves At Austin.” The writer asserted that Democrats wouldn’t hesitate to make a constitution that placed “the colored man in a peonage worse than Slavery—But they fear the mighty Ulysses might Break up there Government.”48 Unfortunately, Grant was progressively hamstrung in copi...

PERHAPS NO STATE EXPOSED more graphically the irremediable clash between the old South and Republican rule than Mississippi. The state legislature’s composition was shockingly alien to many Mississippi whites—55 of 115 state representatives were black, as were 9 of 37 senators. In the summer of 1874, Grant received a steady flow of warnings that white agitators, operating under the People’s Party or White Man’s Party banner, would attempt to purge the legislature by intimidating black voters and officeholders. Especially alarming was violence predicted in Vicksburg, where armed whites prowled the streets before municipal elections on August 4. On July 4, the anniversary of Grant’s Vicksburg victory, white thugs pounced on a patriotic celebration held by black Republicans and opened murderous fire on the crowd, with several killed in the subsequent melee. Peter Crosby, the first black county sheriff in Vicksburg, appealed to Lieutenant Governor Alexander K. Davis, who then pleaded with Grant to send two companies of U.S. soldiers. “Armed bodies of men are parading the streets both night and day,” he informed Grant.55

The New Orleans events presented Grant with an issue as tough and intractable as any he had faced as president. He felt outraged at the injustices white Democrats perpetrated in Louisiana and Mississippi. Yet even sympathetic northerners cringed at the image of federal soldiers barging into a state legislature and ousting elected officials.

Many saw the Louisiana violence as the opening shot of a second Civil War and a revitalized Confederacy, albeit clothed in a new form.

more than two hundred Louisiana blacks petitioned Grant about their wish to emigrate to a foreign nation:

One of the last hurrahs of Reconstruction was passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1875,

It outlawed racial segregation in public accommodations, schools, transportation, and juries. The law had many flaws in its enforcement provisions, but was revolutionary in its principles of equal treatment for all.

The Civil Rights Act of 1875 was struck down as unconstitutional by the Supreme Court in 1883. Not until 1957 would Congress dare to pass another civil rights bill, and it was only with the long-overdue Civil Rights Act of 1964 that many of the 1875 legislation’s protections for blacks became the enduring law of the land.

AS GRANT’S ENTOURAGE rolled through western states, violence against Republicans flared up again in the Deep South. The target of terror continued to be black citizens who had the temerity to exercise their voting rights. On September 4, Mississippi Republicans threw an alfresco barbecue in Clinton, west of Jackson, scheduled to rally voters in upcoming elections. Intruders from a White Line rifle club showed up to harass them, murdered a black citizen, then opened fire on other blacks, who quickly grabbed pistols and returned fire. The gunfight left seven or eight blacks sprawled dead in the dust, with three white men killed in retaliation.

On September 7, Ames pleaded with Grant for federal help, noting that illegal bands of armed white men were sowing terror in several counties and boldly defying sheriffs. Grant acted decisively to stanch the violence, telling his adjutant general, “You may instruct commanding officer of troops in Mississippi that he may assist the governor in maintaining order and preserving life in case of insurrection too formidable for him to suppress.”82 Then, on vacation in Long Branch, Grant began to dither in an uncharacteristic fashion. In the altered political climate, with northern support for Reconstruction waning, he agonized over the legality of intervention and sought the opinion of his conservative attorney general, Edwards Pierrepont, who urged inaction, unfurling the banner of states’ rights.

When Pierrepont inquired of Ames if an uncontrollable insurrection existed, he confirmed that was the case.

Grant wanted to rescue Ames and the black people of Mississippi even if it meant defying his attorney general. He was fully prepared to risk the political backlash against Reconstruction. His letter written, Grant departed for a veterans’ reunion in Utica, New York, leaving the matter to Pierrepont, who sent Ames a message that substituted his own conservative judgment for the president’s, while pretending he and Grant acted in unison.

Two days later, Pierrepont advised Grant that the federal government should back off. “No proclamation needed,” he counseled.90 Grant approved the suggestion, which he would regret as the single greatest error he made during Reconstruction. He shortly departed on his western trip, leaving Pierrepont in charge. One wonders whether, had he stayed in Washington, the Mississippi crisis might have unfolded differently.

Disheartened by Grant’s refusal to rush troops to Mississippi, Ames sat brooding and besieged in the governor’s mansion in Jackson.

Grant and Pierrepont, having fatally wavered, had failed to quash the campaign of intimidation that left black and white Republicans cowering across Mississippi.