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lawsuits. Though silent on voting rights, the bill sought to bring the full blessings of citizenship to anyone born in the United States, including blacks, protecting them by the “full and equal benefit of all laws.”13 (Native Americans were excluded.)
Though he regretted his remarks were published, Grant never disavowed their authenticity.
an act to create especially for Grant the new grade of “General of the Army of the United States,” with an annual salary of $20,000. As Mark Twain said, it gave Grant “that supreme and stately and simple one-word title, ‘General,’” placing an unprecedented four stars on his shoulder straps and making him the first person since George Washington to hold the full general title.31
Johnson asked the attorney general whether any reason existed “why General Grant should not obey my orders? Is he in any way ineligible to this position?” Grant sprang to his feet in protest. “I am an officer of the army, and bound to obey your military orders. But this is a civil office, a purely diplomatic duty that you offer me, and I cannot be compelled to undertake it.”93 Amid shocked silence, Grant stormed from the room. Realizing that he was unmovable, Johnson reluctantly let Sherman go to Mexico instead.
The First Reconstruction Act represented an extraordinary effort to invest former slaves with full citizenship rights, delivering a stark rebuke to southern whites who wanted to hurl them back into a new form of bondage.
Antiblack animus in the South now assumed more sinister forms. In mid-1866, Confederate veterans in Pulaski, Tennessee, founded a club called the Ku Klux Klan, its arcane name derived from the Greek word kuklos, for band or circle.
The actions taken by Sheridan were detested by the Klan. He ordered mayors in Louisiana and Texas to draw at least half their police officers from former Union soldiers, meaning black veterans would be hired. He also presided over a budding civil rights revolution, starting with the desegregation of New Orleans streetcars. Previously blacks had been forced to ride on separate streetcars with stars stamped on their sides. When they crowded onto white streetcars in protest, transport companies appealed to Sheridan to banish these black passengers. Instead Sheridan warned that if companies
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By this point, there was no magical way to balance ambitious Reconstruction policies mandated by Congress with the obstructive arts of a hostile president.
Grant was outwardly a sphinx upon whom people could project their preferred ideology, and Radical Republicans searched for assurances that Grant stood on their side. With a select group of people he was frank about his views, but never in public.
Rawlins said it made no sense to emancipate slaves if they weren’t entitled to the law’s full protection.
It was revealing that Grant, still haunted by his prewar fear of poverty, analyzed the presidency through the lens of financial security.
Grant considered Reconstruction a noble experiment while Welles and other cabinet members condemned it as a misguided disaster that would put shiftless blacks in power. Conventions now began to meet in southern states to draw up new constitutions, which would allow them to be readmitted to the Union. At the Louisiana and South Carolina conventions, blacks made up a majority of delegates. Never before in American history had there been such racially integrated governmental meetings, and they pioneered in establishing public schools and contesting discrimination. In Alabama, a racially mixed
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After President Johnson despaired of luring Sherman to Washington, he moved swiftly to banish Stanton. On February 21, without consulting the Senate, he fired him and replaced him as secretary of war ad interim with General Lorenzo Thomas, the army adjutant general. Grant saw Stanton soon afterward and told him to hold his ground as secretary. As word spread to the Capitol, Charles Sumner fired off a telegram to Stanton with a single imperative syllable: “Stick.”77 Stanton turned his office into a veritable locked bunker, pocketing the key. Thomas notified Grant that he would operate from his
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Grant, having never set eyes on the Great Plains, wanted his son Buck to see them “whilst still occupied by the Buffalo and the Indian, both rapidly disappearing now.”
Grant rhapsodized about the beauty of the American West, only regretting the “three epidemics” that had plagued it: the pistol, the bowie knife, and whiskey.24
Dubbing the president-elect “Ulysses the Silent,” George Templeton Strong observed that “Odysseus knows how to keep his own counsel, and shuts up, close as an oyster.”
Only in hindsight did Grant fathom his own limitations upon taking office. “I entered the White House as President without any previous experience either in civil or political life,” he admitted. “I thought I could run the government of the United States, as I did the staff of my army. It was my mistake, and it led me into other mistakes.”
For navy secretary, Grant tapped a genial, well-to-do Philadelphia businessman named Adolph E. Borie, a card-playing companion who lacked credentials for the job, injecting a touch of cronyism into the administration. He had contributed to the Philadelphia house given to Grant after the war.
At forty-six, Grant was still trim and fit, the youngest man elected president until then.
“The chief business of the executive had become the distribution of patronage.”26 In an era when strangers could walk straight into the White House, Abraham Lincoln had been besieged by job seekers who cluttered the stairs and corridors day and night. One day a friend asked Lincoln whether he was depressed because the Union army had suffered a military setback. He smiled wanly and said, “No, it isn’t the army. It is the post office in Brownsville, Missouri.”
As James M. McPherson has pointed out, eleven of the first twelve amendments to the Constitution constrained governmental power; starting with the Thirteenth Amendment, six of the next seven enlarged it.
On May 19, 1869, he issued a proclamation endorsing an eight-hour day for government laborers without any diminution of pay.
It is important to note that after the Civil War, territorial expansion and imperialism were very much in the air, William Seward having bought Alaska for $7.2 million and begun maneuvers to acquire Hawaii.
Grant’s dealings with Gould, Fisk, and Corbin show that even as president, he was still the same trusting rube who had been hoodwinked by business sharpers before the war.
When Mississippi’s new, heavily Republican, legislature gathered in January, it signaled a radical shift in southern politics in its selection of two new senators. One was Adelbert Ames and the other Hiram Revels, a minister who became the first black person to serve in the U.S. Senate. In a powerful piece of symbolism, Revels occupied the Senate seat once held by Jefferson Davis.
In late February, Báez conducted the promised plebiscite on the American treaty and resorted to strong-arm tactics. The one-sided tally of 15,169 for annexation and only 11 against highlighted the vote’s coercive nature.
Told that Sumner didn’t believe in the Bible, Grant retorted, “Well, he didn’t write it.”
Whatever Hoar’s injury, he departed in gentlemanly fashion, sending Grant a gracious farewell note. In private, however, he broadcast his anger and “wished the government might be destroyed.”51
The same week that Grant appointed Akerman, Congress created the Department of Justice. Before then, the attorney general had functioned as the president’s legal adviser, operating from the Treasury building without the dignity of a separate department.
In Mississippi, the troubled situation was thrown into bold relief as scores of black churches and schools were burned without prosecutions. In March 1871, three blacks in the small town of Meridian were brought up on charges of delivering “incendiary” speeches. At the court hearing, the Republican judge and two black defendants were killed. The violence spilled over into gruesome riots in which thirty blacks were gunned down, including “all the leading colored men of the town with one or two exceptions.”67 During the first three months of that sanguinary year, sixty-three blacks were murdered
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In a controversial move, Merrill had army officers arrest Klan members while he enlisted U.S. attorneys to try their cases and lined up federal judges to oversee their trials. These were groundbreaking decisions that for the first time enabled the federal government instead of state and local governments to punish “private criminal acts.”
To those who bridled at the enhanced use of federal power, denounced “bayonet rule,” and brandished the states’ rights banner, he implored them to use local laws to suppress the Klan and obviate the need for federal troops. If that didn’t happen, the inaction of local communities “imposes upon the National Government the duty of putting forth all its energies for the protection of its citizens of every race and color.”
By 1872, under Grant’s leadership, the Ku Klux Klan had been smashed in the South. (Its later twentieth-century incarnation had no connection to the earlier group other than a common style and ideology.)
Grant lacked the normal human quota of cynicism and had paid for it.
Fish persuaded Grant that it was futile to pursue Canadian annexation.
The Joint High Commission recommended the creation of a five-man arbitration tribunal, based in Geneva, with members chosen by a cluster of world dignitaries: President Grant, Queen Victoria, the king of Italy, the president of the Swiss Confederation, and the emperor of Brazil.
In September, the Geneva tribunal handed down a judgment that Great Britain was culpable in allowing the Alabama and other raiders to be built in British shipyards and owed the United States $15.5 million.
As the United States emerged as the world’s foremost industrial power, Great Britain served as the premier banker to American railways and factories, powering the country’s economic growth at a time when American finance could not have managed the feat alone.
The mystery of Grant’s presidency is how this upright man tolerated some of the arrant rascals collected around him. Again and again he was stunned by scandals because he could not imagine subordinates guilty of such sleazy behavior.
After personal betrayals suffered over the Santo Domingo treaty, he decided to reward loyalty above ideology and came to view reformers as two-faced troublemakers while party bosses, however corrupt, at least stuck to their word.
in the heyday of senatorial power. Senators were still elected by state legislatures controlled by party machines and business interests.
He was a genial Irishman and lover of horse flesh whom Grant had befriended
Garfield denounced Stalwarts supporting Grant as “super-serviceable lackeys that sneeze whenever their master takes snuff.”
He handed over millions of acres to settlers and miners and promoted the growth of railroads. At the same time, sensitive to scenic beauty, he established Yellowstone as the first national park on March 1, 1872. President Lincoln had signed a bill in 1864 that permitted California to preserve the Yosemite Valley and the giant sequoias of the Mariposa Grove, but it was Grant who initiated the modern national park system.
Schuyler Colfax had been tainted by accepting stock in the Crédit Mobilier scandal, which had tarred many politicians, and he declined reelection.
With these new magnates so influential, the Republican Party was now a house divided, and Wendell Phillips complained that oligarchs and monopolists meant the party made “the rich richer, and the poor poorer, and turns a republic into an aristocracy of capital.”119
Despite conspicuous blunders in his first term, notably cronyism and the misbegotten Santo Domingo treaty, Grant had chalked up significant triumphs in suppressing the Klan, reducing debt, trying to clean up Indian trading posts, experimenting with civil service reform, and settling the Alabama claims peacefully. He had appointed a prodigious number of blacks, Jews, Native Americans, and women and delivered on his promise to give the country peace and prosperity.
Then, in a stupendous leap, he expressed a belief “that our Great Maker is preparing the world, in his own good time, to become one nation, speaking one language, and when armies and Navies will be no longer required.”
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.
Williams had done fine work against the Klan, but he lacked the superior legal mind required for the court and was overshadowed by ethical questions about his personal finances, having gotten into a bad habit of paying personal checks with government money.
