Grant

by Ron Chernow

Ames dismissed it as too little too late.

The violence on Election Day vindicated Ames’s dire scenario.

Democrats emerged triumphant in the state, boasting that they had rooted out malfeasance and bad government.

Even Hiram R. Revels, the first black U.S. senator from Mississippi, applauded the outcome as a victory over “corruption, theft, and embezzlement,” and he wasn’t the only black official who complained that Ames had surrounded himself with mercenary officials.100

Still, there was little doubt that the Democrats had won by crushing black turnout. In Yazoo County, only seven Republican votes were cast in a black population that exceeded twelve thousand. Ames saw the election as a referendum on race, pure and simple: “In one phrase—hostility to the negro as a citizen. The South cares for no other question. Everything gives way to it. They support or oppose men, advocate or denounce policies, fla...

Why had Grant retreated so shamefully from Reconstruction in the final stages of his administration?

When he asked Grant why he had refused action in Mississippi, he had replied that as soon as Ames’s plea for succor came in early September, he had prepared to issue a proclamation for action in Mississippi—something confirmed by Grant’s own papers. Before signing it, however, he conferred with Ohio Republicans who warned that if Grant intervened in Mississippi, Republicans would lose Ohio elections on October 13, the state having already lost faith in Reconstruction. Grant decided it was more important to retain Ohio than save Mississippi. Republicans won the Ohio elections, returning Rutherford B. Hayes to the governorship and setting the stage for the next president. “I should not have yielded,” Grant told Lynch. “I believed at the time I was making a grave mistake. But as presented, it was duty on one side, and party obligation on the other. Between the two I hesitated, but finally yielded to what I believed was my party obligation.

Grant’s personal tragedy was simultaneously an American tragedy. Tormented by his decision, steeped in a meditative mood, Grant reflected on the deep changes wrought in northern Republican circles. He predicted to John Roy Lynch that the northern retreat from Reconstruction would lead to Democrats recapturing power in the South as well as “future mischief of a very serious nature . . . It requires no prophet to foresee that the national government will soon be at a great disadvantage and that the results of the war of the rebellion will have been in a large measure lost

This wasn’t a minor statement: the victorious Union general of the Civil War was saying that terror tactics perpetrated by southern whites had nullified the outcome of the rebellion. All those hundreds of thousands dead, the millions maimed and wounded, the mourning of widows and orphans—all that suffering, all that tumult, on some level, had been for naught. Slavery had been abolished, but it had been replaced by a caste-ridden form of second-class citizenship for southern blacks, and that counted as a national shame.

Party Stalwarts agreed with the administration on Reconstruction and were prepared to turn the upcoming election into another contest of loyal Republicans versus disloyal Democrats.

Grant, having known Hayes well as a congressman and admired him as “an honest, sincere man, and patriot,” hurried off a telegram of hearty support.

Grant soon discovered Hayes wasn’t the friendly, compromise candidate he had envisioned. As early as March 1875, Hayes had admitted privately he was “opposed to the course of Gen. Grant on the 3d term, the Civil Service, and the appointment of unfit men on partisan or personal grounds.”40 Now, in a letter accepting the nomination, Hayes embraced civil service reform, flayed the spoils system, and promised, in advance, to spurn a second term. Grant interpreted this last pledge as a backhanded swipe at him. Despite promises to protect southern blacks, Hayes resorted to code language to suggest a repeal of Reconstruction, telling southerners he would “cherish their truest interests” and assist them in obtaining the “blessings of honest and capable local government.”

With all but three southern states now back in the Democratic Party fold, it appeared that a political backlash of monumental proportions had taken hold against Reconstruction.

Sensing an abandonment of Reconstruction, Frederick Douglass wondered what good abolition had been for the black man if “having been freed from the slaveholder’s lash, he is to be subject to the slaveholder’s shotgun?”44

On May 26, 1875, Grant met Sioux leaders at the White House and entreated them to relocate farther south where, he claimed, the climate was better, the grass richer, the buffalo more abundant.

Despite Grant’s evident concern for their welfare, he was offering them a suicide pact for their culture, urging that he wanted to see their “children attending schools” and future generations “speaking English and preparing [themselves] for the life of white men.”

more threatening to them was the decision to force Sitting Bull—a brave warrior and holy man with an almost mystical following, who had opposed the sale of the Black Hills—and his band of Sioux outside the reservation to relocate on agency land by the tight deadline of January 31, 1876. If they failed to do so, Grant would send a military

Whoever was to blame for the Little Bighorn calamity, the national response was a ferocious outcry for Indian blood, bordering on the genocidal.

“Our philanthropy and our hostility tend to about the same end, and this is the destruction of the Indian race.”74

Ulysses S. Grant, an advocate of a Peace Policy toward the Indians, found himself, willy-nilly, on the side of those raping their lands and violating a sacred treaty commitment.

FOR THE MOST PART, Grant sat out the 1876 presidential contest, while his cabinet was far more actively engaged.

In August, John Roy Lynch, the black Mississippi congressman, saw that the Democratic revival overtaking the South would make the electoral math very difficult for Hayes: “Every Southern state [the Democrats] propose to carry as they carried Mississippi last year . . . not by the power of the ballot, but by an organized system of terrorism and violence.”1 However aloof he was from campaigning, Grant remained committed to the safety of black voters.

Though more sympathetic to white southern concerns than Grant, Hayes nonetheless advised his campaign managers to exploit fears of “rebel rule and a solid South.”

Grant worried that a rejuvenated Democratic Party would demand compensation for freed slaves. He especially dreaded a growing southern canard that the Civil War had been a war of northern aggression, with a moral equivalence drawn between the two sides.

Grant knew that Reconstruction was imperiled and that the legal props were being kicked out from under it. In 1876 the Supreme Court handed down two rulings, United States v. Cruikshank and United States v. Reese, that gutted portions of the Enforcement Act of 1870 and narrowed the powers of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments.

In the coming days, armed whites from South Carolina and nearby Georgia, including members of rifle clubs and saber companies, gathered in Hamburg to demand that local black militia relinquish their weapons. The latter took refuge in a small brick building used as an armory and a drill room, but the swelling white mob blew out its windows with musket and cannon fire. Believing their assailants would soon blow up the building, blacks leapt from the windows or climbed down an escape ladder only to be gunned down in cold blood. Five men in a row were executed and three more wounded as they attempted to flee. James Cook, the black town marshal, was shot and his skull smashed in with muskets. The Republican governor, Daniel H. Chamberlain, was a lawyer from Massachusetts, a Yale graduate who had been an officer in a black Union regiment during the war. Writing to Secretary of War Cameron, he deplored the Hamburg massacre as a “butchery of unoffending and unarmed colored men by a brutal and bloodthirsty mob of white men.”8 He thought the episode more shocking than the massacre of Custer’s men, who were at least “shot in open battle. The victims at Hamburg were murdered in cold blood after they had surrendered and were utterly defenseless.”9 The homes of nearly every black family in town were pillaged while mutilated bodies of the murdered men broiled in sunlight for days, their families too petrified to retrieve them.

“should there be any grounds of suspicion of fraudulent counting on either side it should be reported and denounced at once . . . Either party can afford to be disappointed in the result but the Country cannot afford to have the result tainted by the suspicion of illegal or false returns.”

Grant explained that the president should not tamper with state politics, but simply provide a safe, peaceful setting for states to resolve their own disputes.

Grant calmed them by saying there would be no disturbance. A cool hand at the helm, he prevented a frightening situation from fraying into partisan violence. As always, Grant was at his most levelheaded in a crisis.

Senate investigating committee later ascertained that in a single parish, more than sixty black Republicans had been butchered before the election.

Grant clarified what he meant, saying that the Fourteenth Amendment had bolstered southern power by scrapping the rule that had once counted an African American as only three-fifths of a person for electoral purposes. Despite suppressing the vote of blacks, white southerners could now count them fully for election purposes, giving the “solid South” forty extra votes in the Electoral College and disproportionate influence in American politics. “They keep those votes, but disfranchise the negroes. That is one of the gravest mistakes in the policy of reconstruction.”46

Consequential to the election outcome were the many private contacts in the capital between southern Democrats and Hayes’s northern Republican supporters. At Wormley’s Hotel on February 26, five Hayes people pledged that federal troops would be withdrawn from the South; new “redeemer” governments would be tolerated and “home rule” restored; the four southern Democrats promised, in return, fair treatment of the black community. The influence of the so-called Wormley Conference has been greatly overstated, for it merely culminated months of bargaining and confirmed what was already clear: that Hayes would bring an end to Reconstruction. It was a pyrrhic victory for Republicans, who sacrificed their idealism in exchange for perpetuating their rule.

“the real fraud has been perpetrated by those who are raising the cry of fraud.”

DURING HIS EIGHT YEARS IN OFFICE, Grant had been bedeviled not so much by his policies, where his record was often excellent, but by personalities, where his record left much to be desired.

as a president coping with the daunting sequel to the Civil War, he had wrestled with herculean challenges: “Nearly one half [of] the states had revolted against the Govt. and of those remaining faithful to the Union a large percentage of the population sympathized with the rebellion and made an ‘enemy in the rear’ almost as dangerous as the honorable enemy in the front.”

As the first president to govern after the Fifteenth Amendment, he had guaranteed the exercise of brand-new black voting rights and opposed the spate of domestic terrorism it engendered. He had been a good steward of the nation’s finances, having slashed taxes, trimmed debt, and watched the trade balance turn from deficit to surplus. He had shown that government could make good on its pledge to repay war debt and restore American credit. Unable to let go of Santo Domingo, he pleaded one last time that by its annexation “the emancipated race of the South would have found there a congenial home,” where their civil rights might have stood unimpaired.61

Decades later, Woodrow Wilson, a southerner who detested Reconstruction, consigned President Grant to the dustbin of history: “The honest, simple-hearted soldier had not added prestige to the presidential office . . . He ought never to have been made President.”82

David Herbert Donald, the eminent Lincoln biographer.

singled out Grant as the most underrated American president.

Although Grant took the first halting steps toward civil service reform, he should have championed the movement more vigorously and freed himself from the onus of patronage. His administration’s reputation for cronyism and nepotism has obscured his exemplary record in appointing many groups hitherto excluded from American government, including African Americans, Jews, and Native Americans. It also overlooks the many outstanding figures, including Hamilton Fish, Amos Akerman, Benjamin Bristow, and John Creswell, whom he appointed.

Unfortunately with Indian policy, as with southern policy, there was no safe middle ground for Grant to stake out.

neither Grant nor any American president could have resisted the massive flow of westward expansion, the political power of settlers, the money lust of mining companies, and the inexorable spread of railroads.

Ultimately, the appraisal of Grant’s presidency rests upon posterity’s view of Reconstruction. Grant took office when much of the South still lay under military rule; by the time he left, every southern state had been absorbed back into the Union. For a long time after the Civil War, under the influence of southern historians, Reconstruction was viewed as a catastrophic error, a period of corrupt carpetbag politicians and illiterate black legislators, presided over by the draconian rule of U. S. Grant. For more recent historians, led by Eric Foner, it has been seen as a noble experiment in equal justice for black citizens in which they made remarkable strides in voting, holding office, owning land, creating small businesses and churches, and achieving literacy. About two thousand blacks served as state legislators, tax collectors, local officials, and U.S. marshals, while fourteen served in the House of Representatives and two in the Senate. The South witnessed a civil rights movement that briefly introduced desegregation and vouchsafed a vision of a functioning biracial democracy. Since Grant was president during this period, his standing was bound to rise with this revisionist view. Even as his party and cabinet became bitterly divided over Reconstruction, he showed a deep reservoir of courage in directing the fight against the Ku Klux Klan and crushing the largest wave of domestic terrorism in American history. It was Grant who helped to weave the Thirteenth, Fourteenth...

Americans today know little about the terrorism that engulfed the South during Grant’s presidency.

By the end of Grant’s second term, white Democrats, through the “redeemer” movement, had reclaimed control of every southern state, winning in peacetime much of the power lost in combat. They promulgated a view of the Civil War as a righteous cause that had nothing to do with slavery but only states’ rights—to

When it came to African Americans, southern Democrats managed to re-create the status quo ante, albeit minus slavery.

Reconstruction was a fine but ultimately doomed experiment in American life. The tragedy of this intractable issue was that there was finally no way for blacks to enjoy their rights without a prolonged military presence, and that became politically impossible.

the country tolerated terror by whites, but not by blacks.

Once Reconstruction collapsed, it left southern blacks for eighty years at the mercy of Jim Crow segregation, lynchings, poll taxes, literacy tests, and other tactics designed to segregate them from whites and deny them the vote. Black sharecroppers would be degraded to the level of debt-ridden serfs, bound to their former plantation owners. After 1877, the black community in the South steadily lost ground until a rigid apartheid separated the races completely, a terrible state of affairs that would not be fixed until the rise of the civil rights movement after World War II.

In the words of Frederick Douglass, “That sturdy old Roman, Benjamin Butler, made the negro a contraband, Abraham Lincoln made him a freeman, and Gen. Ulysses S. Grant made him a citizen.”