Grant

by Ron Chernow

For vice president, the Democrats picked the irascible Francis Preston Blair Jr. of Missouri, who had fought gallantly as a Union general before emerging as a biting critic of Reconstruction. Right before the convention, Blair published a letter that contested black suffrage in the South, proposing a plan to raze the entire scaffolding of Reconstruction. He wanted the new president to “declare the reconstruction acts null and void; compel the army to undo its usurpations at the South; [and] allow the white people to reorganize their own governments.”19 Once nominated, Blair freely bashed Grant, accusing him of wanting to uphold military “usurpations over the eight millions of white people at the South, fixed to the earth with his bayonets.”20 Though his brother Montgomery had represented Dred Scott before the Supreme Court, Frank Blair was an unabashed racist who vowed that as vice president he would “prevent the people of our race . . . from being driven out of the country or trodden under foot by an inferior and semi-barbarous race.”21 Walt Whitman summed up the Democratic ticket by calling it “a regular old Copperhead Democratic ticket, of the rankest kind—probably pleases the old democratic bummers around New York and Brooklyn—but everywhere else they take it like a bad dose of medicine.”22