CHAPTER 40

Anything to Beat Grant

On the morning after the voting, Grant told Julia, “I’m afraid I’m elected.” His reticence was well founded. His dream of bringing the South along with the rest of the nation faded during his two terms. The size of the federal government ballooned, partly because of the giant administrative burden of Reconstruction. The sheer volume offered myriad opportunities for graft. It was the old spoils and patronage system, but now it was so glaring in its excesses and iniquities that it provoked howls of outrage and prompted the eventual creation of the civil service merit system. Grant left himself open to criticism by filling his cabinet and other plum appointments with friends, supporters, cronies, and family. A few proved to be competent and scrupulous, such as Hamilton Fish, his first secretary of state. Many others turned out to be either terrible crooks, the patsies of crooks, or just disasters in their jobs, like Dan Sickles.

As soon as Grant was in, Sickles began lobbying for an appointment. Grant asked Fish to find something for him. Sickles and Fish had known each other for years. Superficially, they had a few things in common. They both practiced law. They both came from old New York City families, though Fish’s was older and loftier than Sickles’s. Temperamentally, however, Fish and Sickles were opposites. When Sickles had been making a notorious name for himself, Fish had lived the quiet life of a gentlemanly lawyer and competent, unspectacular politician. He’d been appalled and disgusted by the sensational Sickles-Key murder. When Dan went off to make glorious war in 1861, Fish was president of the Union Defense Committee. Fish quietly stuck with Lincoln as the war dragged on and the Radical Republicans grew frustrated, and after the war he was deeply disturbed by their vindictiveness toward the South. He was sixty, living a comfortable patrician’s life, when Grant asked him to be his secretary of state.

Fish thought it best to give Dan a small post somewhere out of the way where he couldn’t cause much trouble. He offered him a consulship to Mexico. Dan haughtily refused the backwater post. Then Grant suggested making him minister to Spain. Grant made a number of questionable appointments in his troubled two terms, but few seem so spectacularly woodheaded. The United States and Spain were still vying over Cuba. Insurgents there had fallen into a protracted civil war with the Spanish colonial authorities. With so many Americans living and/or doing business on the island, fighting there could drag Spain and the United States into war. Mild-mannered Fish was the perfect man to deal with the supremely touchy situation. Sending Sickles to Madrid was like throwing a lit torch into an arsenal filled with gunpowder.

Fish sent Sickles to Spain with a delicately worked-out proposal by which Spain would recognize Cuba’s independence, Cuba would give up its slaves, and the United States would guarantee a large payment to the critically cash-strapped Spanish government. All sides would come out winners. The general, still not the most diplomatic of men, entangled himself in intrigues both political and personal as soon as he reached Madrid. He found Spanish politics a morass of warring factions and was soon frustrated. He consoled himself by falling back on his old profligate and licentious ways. He scandalized all Europe—and all of his enemies back home—by reputedly taking up with Isabella II, Spain’s wanton deposed queen, who was then living the high life in Paris. He simultaneously wooed a pretty woman who’d been an attendant to Isabella’s court, Caroline de Creagh, a few decades younger than he. He converted to Catholicism to marry Caroline in 1871. It would be a rocky marriage, as the fiery Caroline refused either to condone his philandering or to follow him when he eventually returned to America.

Meanwhile, James Watson Webb also caused trouble for Grant. He’d been minister to Brazil since Lincoln appointed him in 1861. Early in Grant’s first term, he was accused of extorting a small fortune from the Brazilian government. He resigned and came back to New York, where he lived out his last years, dying in 1884.

Although Grant himself was never directly implicated in any of the boondoggles, swindles, and scandals that dogged his two terms—including the Credit Mobilier scam, which reached all the way to his vice president—they did make him look the hapless buffoon. He was “pre-intellectual, archaic, and would have seemed so even to the cave-dwellers,” Henry Adams of the Boston Adamses wrote. “He should have been extinct for ages.” It was Adams who japed that “U.S.” didn’t stand for “Unconditional Surrender,” as people had said during the war, but for “Uniquely Stupid”; he added that the descent from President Washington to President Grant proved that Darwin was wrong. Most of the political cognoscenti and press agreed that Grant was “an ignorant soldier, coarse in his taste and blunt in his perceptions, fond of money and material enjoyment and of low company,” as The Nation put it.

A pair of sharp operators from Wall Street, in cahoots with one of Grant’s former generals, did their part to craft his poor image. To reduce the inflation left over from the war and put the growing economy on a sound footing, Grant’s administration began to buy back wartime greenbacks with gold. That gave Jay Gould, “the Mephistopheles of Wall Street,” and “Jubilee Jim” Fisk an idea. They were another of history’s Mutt ’n’ Jeff pairs. Gould was a small, dour ectomorph, so quiet as to seem sinister. Fisk was a fat, loud howdyboy who wore diamonds on his vest and actresses on his arm and loved nothing better than to gorge on steak and oyster pies at Delmonico’s. During the war Gould had speculated in gold and Fisk had smuggled cotton out of the South.

If Grant had been paying any attention to Wall Street he’d have known to be wary of them. With the assistance of Boss Tweed, Fisk and Gould had just hornswoggled Commodore Vanderbilt out of his Erie Railway by flooding the market with watered stock. Tweed calculated that for his efforts he earned a princely $650,000 in just three months. That was nothing compared to the $60 million Gould, as chairman, would wring from Erie’s board and common stockholders, while letting the railroad deteriorate to the point that people said it was worth your life to ride on it.

In the summer of 1869, Gould and Fisk began a concerted campaign of showering President Grant with lavish dinners, drinks, trips to the opera, and the finest cigars. Grant, who’d been poor virtually all his life, enjoyed being wooed by the high rollers. They intended to corner the gold market, buying low and driving up the price. For that they needed not only a hoodwinked Grant but the connivance of the assistant secretary of the treasury at Wall Street’s Sub-Treasury Building, who was responsible for transacting government sales in gold. That man was another disastrous Grant appointee: Dan Butterfield. Fisk and Gould bribed Butterfield with a check that equaled his annual government salary.

By September they’d driven the price of gold so high that calls came from around the country for Grant to release some of the treasury’s bullion to ease it back down. It finally dawned on Grant that he’d been had. On Friday, September 24, 1869, the government dumped $4 million worth of bullion onto the market. The price plummeted in what came to be known as the Black Friday crash. Gould and Fisk were unharmed; they’d sold while the market was still at its peak, just hours before the crash. But they’d ruined many others on Wall Street—a couple of dozen investors committed suicide—and given Grant’s reputation a serious black eye.

Butterfield resigned. He sailed on through the rest of his life a prosperous man. After he died in 1901 his widow commissioned a bronze statue by Gutzon Borglum, who also did the statue of Henry Ward Beecher that stands outside Plymouth Church, as well as Mount Rushmore. Butterfield’s heroic statue stands in the small Sakura Park in Morningside Heights; wearing his uniform, arms folded across his chest, he gazes across Riverside Drive at Grant’s Tomb, his expression inscrutable.

With Tweed and Tammany dominating New York City’s postwar municipal government, corruption ran amok. In 1866, James Parton had visited the City Council and noted the “absolute exclusion of all honest men” and the “supremacy in the Common Council of pickpockets, prize fighters, emigrant runners, pimps, and the lowest class of liquor dealers, are facts which admit of no question.” A joke made the rounds at the time that a newsboy ran into council chambers once and shouted, “Mister, your liquor store is on fire!” Every alderman jumped up and rushed out the door. On the city’s payrolls Parton found dozens of men listed as clerks or inspectors of this or that (including a dozen “manure inspectors”) who in fact were “bar-keepers, low ward politicians, nameless hangers-on of saloons, who absolutely performed no official duty whatever except to draw the salary attached to their places.” City taxes kept climbing, yet so did the city’s deficit. The Herald declared New York the worst-run city in Christendom.

Tweed had grown not only very fat (nearly three hundred pounds) but very wealthy. Besides the Erie he was a director or president of several banks, the New York Gas Light Company, the New York Mutual Insurance Company, the Third Avenue Railroad Company, and other institutions. He had invested large amounts in real estate and on Wall Street. He owned several homes, including a mansion in Greenwich, Connecticut, and a stable filled with his horses and carriages, and a pair of yachts. He showered his wife and daughters in jewels and swathed them in silks.

By 1870, between the numerous scandals plaguing the Grant administration and the glaringly obvious corruption locally, reform was in the air. After Henry Raymond died, at the age of only forty-nine, in June 1869, publisher George Jones, his longtime partner at the Times (and Greeley’s before that), decided it was time to attack. Jones began a concerted campaign to expose the gargantuan levels of greed and fraud that the Tweed Ring and their army of fellow travelers had perpetrated.

Tweed’s old friends the Irish Catholics compounded his troubles. New York’s Fenians had come out of the war battle-hardened and itching for a fight with the British. When small bands of them crossed into Canada and launched ludicrously ill-planned raids on Crown installations in 1866, even Tammany Hall abandoned them. One man took the Fenians’ side: Fernando Wood. He’d been languishing in political limbo since losing his seat in Congress in 1864. Now he suddenly popped up at Fenian rallies to deliver stirring speeches on the Irishman’s inalienable right to revolt against the British oppressor. Irish New York loved him for it. He agreed to make peace between Tammany and the Irish, for a price: He wanted to go back to Congress. The sachems, gritting their teeth, backed him in his bid for the predominantly Irish and German Catholic Ninth District. He won in a cakewalk. He was still in Congress when he died in 1881.

Relations between the working-class Irish Catholics and the better-off “lace curtain” Protestants in New York, which had never been good, deteriorated into deadly violence. In July 1870, the Irish Protestants’ annual Orange Day parade occasioned armed skirmishes with Catholics, and eight people died. The following year, the Tammany trio of Tweed, Mayor Hall, and Governor Hoffman failed to prevent an even larger riot in which more than sixty were killed and hundreds of others wounded.

The city united in blaming Tammany. Tweed’s empire collapsed with head-spinning speed. Ten days after the deadly rioting, the Times ran a front-page article with column after column of accounts related to the County Courthouse swindle, drawn from a ledger that, for obvious reasons, Tweed and his cronies had managed to keep secret until then. Even the most jaded New Yorkers gaped at the figures. Almost $3 million paid to a plasterer in two years. More than $350,000 to a carpenter. Another $3 million for furniture, more than half a million for carpets, $40,000 for brooms. Thermometers at $7,500 each. On and on the stupefying figures rolled. It’s been estimated that the Tweed Ring’s rake from these grotesquely padded bills was some $11 million.

At Harper’s Weekly, Thomas Nast poured all his boyhood hatred of Tammany, the Irish, and Catholics into a barrage of virulent cartoons. People started to see the Boss the way Nast did, as a pear-shaped giant with piggy little eyes and grubby little fingers, or with a bag of money in place of a head. Reaching back into his childhood, Nast popularized the image of the Tammany Tiger as a predatory beast that needed slaying. One cartoon shows a giant thumb pressing down on the city, with the caption, “Well, what are you going to do about it?”

In 1873, Tweed was convicted on multiple charges including larceny and forgery, and sentenced to twelve years. He served one before that decision was overturned, but he came out to face a multimillion-dollar civil suit. Unable to make bail, he went to the dismal Ludlow Street jail, but was allowed out periodically for home visits. During one of those he ran. He made it to Florida, and from there to Cuba, and sailed from there to Spain, working as a common seaman, operating on the mistaken notion that the country had no extradition treaty with the United States. In 1876 he was arrested by Spanish police, who, legend has it, recognized him from one of Nast’s cartoons. Back home and back in jail, sick and exhausted, he made a full and voluminous confession. He died behind bars in 1878, soon after his fifty-fifth birthday but looking far older, and was buried in Green-Wood Cemetery.

In 1872, Dan Sickles made a brief return trip to New York to help the state attorney general—Frank Barlow—pry the Erie Railroad away from Jay Gould. Hired as a lawyer by disgruntled shareholders, Dan orchestrated a revolt among the Erie board members, who voted to remove Gould from his chairmanship. He also contacted Barlow and asked if the attorney general would bring a lawsuit against Gould and his cronies. Barlow was preparing his case when Sickles, impetuous as ever, decided to remove Gould from office in his own inimitable way. On crutches, he marched up to the Erie’s ornate offices in the Grand Opera House at Eighth Avenue and 23rd Street at the head of a column of a few hundred cops and paid ruffians. He carried papers ordering Gould to resign his chairmanship and leave the premises forthwith.

Gould locked himself in his office. He had hired his own gang of thugs from the Irish west side, nicknamed “Gould’s guardian angels.” A Sun reporter called them “a sorry sight… dirty and unkempt,” and depicted them lounging around the Erie offices “lighting their well-stained clay pipes,” playing cards on the desks, and generally creating “an atmosphere which was somewhat akin to the foul air of a fourth class Tammany barroom.” With Gould locked in his office, the two camps faced each other in what sounds like a rather lackadaisical standoff, with the cops in the middle. The climax was anticlimactic. Eventually Gould allowed Sickles into his office, Sickles handed him the papers deposing him, and Gould quietly surrendered.

Dan Sickles returned to Spain, and more controversy. A Spanish warship captured the Virginius, a steamer that had been running arms and supplies to the Cuban insurrectionists. Her captain was Joseph Fry, a former commodore in the Confederate navy, and her crew were British and American mercenaries, plus some Cuban revolutionaries. The Spanish colonial authorities in Cuba executed Fry and fifty-two others for piracy. Some had their heads blown off at close range, their corpses trampled by horses. Reading in all the papers of the “Virginius massacre” with its “unparalleled atrocities,” Americans screamed for bloody revenge. Grant and Fish had their hands full keeping the country out of war. Having Dan Sickles as their man in Madrid didn’t help. He raged at Spanish ministers and told the Herald that war was unavoidable. When Fish and his Spanish counterparts worked around the general and negotiated a peaceful resolution, Dan was furious at being upstaged. He resigned, to everyone’s relief, and removed himself to Paris. He would not return to New York until 1879.

Much of 1872 was taken up with campaigning for the fall presidential elections, a mean and ludicrous shambles. For all the abuse he’d been taking from the wonks and cognoscenti, President Grant remained a great hero among rank-and-file Americans. The Democrats, still in the depths of their postwar demoralization, couldn’t even scratch up a candidate. Instead, they formed an alliance with a core of disaffected reformers who broke away from Grant’s Republican Party and started their own Liberal Republican Party. Their leading light was Carl Schurz, who by then was a senator for Missouri. But they couldn’t nominate Schurz for president because he was foreign-born. Another potential candidate was the Missouri governor Benjamin Brown, known as “Boozy Brown.” Even against the reputedly boozy Grant that wouldn’t fly.

Out of the gloom rode a quixotic figure on a dark horse: Horace Greeley. At sixty-one he was a living legend, still a household name, and still itching for public office. The masses still found him entertaining and lovable, though they had never elected him to public office in his life. As recently as 1869 he’d run for New York’s state comptroller and lost—to Franz Sigel, who had returned to the city at the end of the war and would live there another forty years.

Other factors rendered Greeley a less than ideal candidate. He had been railing against Democrats for decades by then, casting the Liberal Republicans’ alliance with them in an odd light. And while Greeley the abolitionist was still unloved in the South, Greeley the conciliator had upset many of his longtime fans in the North. In 1867, a Richmond circuit court judge had ruled that the government could not keep holding Jefferson Davis without a trial. He would release Davis on a $100,000 bond, provided that some of the guarantors were Northerners. Greeley had responded instantly, traveling to Richmond with a delegation of New Yorkers including Cornelius Vanderbilt. On Greeley’s securing of Davis’s release, many Northerners canceled their subscriptions to the Tribune.

From a convention that was a frenzy of bickering and balloting—the Times dismissed it as “the Bolters’ Convention,” and characterized Liberal Republicans as “soreheads”—Greeley emerged victorious, with Boozy Brown his running mate. One party member who decided to return to the mainstream fold remarked, “That Grant is an ass, no one can deny, but better an ass than a mischievous idiot.” William Lloyd Garrison declared Greeley “smitten with imbecility,” while Thurlow Weed thought that no one “outside a lunatic asylum” could take him seriously.

The Democrats gloomily nominated Greeley at their convention several weeks later. Greeley removed himself from the editorship of the Tribune and launched into campaigning with his usual windmill-tilting zeal, traveling as far as Texas in his old white coat, giving as many as two hundred speeches in a single month. He called for reconciliation between North and South, black and white, urging all Americans to bury the hatchet and clasp hands “over the bloody chasm of the war.” It became a campaign slogan and image, along with the glummer “Anything to Beat Grant.” Boozy Brown went on the stump as well, and lived up to his name. At one picnic he was reportedly seen spreading butter on a slice of watermelon, thinking it was a slice of bread. In a speech to graduating students at Yale, barely able to stand, he told them to vote for Greeley because he had “the largest head in America.”

Grant the bungler versus Greeley the loony was a rich feast for the press, who delighted in lambasting and lampooning both candidates. At Frank Leslie’s Illustrated, Matt Morgan, recently brought over from London specifically to go up against Nast, depicted Grant as King Grant, a drunken despot lolling in dissipation, surrounded by sycophants and turning aside the needy commoner. But Morgan’s work looked timid compared to Nast’s. Nast’s weekly barrage of anti-Greeley cartoons—once three in a single issue—was relentlessly vicious and mocking. For accepting the Democratic nomination, Nast drew Greeley as an organ grinder’s monkey dancing to Tammany’s tune, or showed him whitewashing the Tiger, or shaking hands with Tweed and a long line of classic Tammany thugs and brutes. For Greeley’s appeasing attitude toward the South he showed him conspiring with the Ku Klux Klan and shaking hands with John Wilkes Booth over Lincoln’s grave. In one illustration Greeley is on his knees praying to Satan.

In the midst of all this, Greeley’s wife, Mary, died on October 30. She had been sickly with consumption for years, during which they’d drifted apart as he scurried about pursuing his various causes. He left the campaign trail to sit by her bedside for her last few days and nights. The day she died, Harper’s hit the stands with a Nast illustration of Greeley himself on a stretcher, dead or dying, being carried off to Chappaqua. Nast was roundly criticized for the ghastly though unintentional timing.

Greeley, and his campaign, collapsed in the final days before the voting. “I have been assailed so bitterly that I hardly know whether I was running for President or the penitentiary,” he moaned. Grant was reelected on November 5, with 286 electoral votes to Greeley’s 66. Greeley’s desolation was complete. Exhausted, shattered by two great losses within days of each other, he tumbled into his last bout of brain fever, a complete mental and physical breakdown, and died, babbling incoherently, on Friday, November 29, just as the electoral college was confirming Grant’s win. Thousands passed through City Hall for the viewing; Grant attended the funeral and was in the cortege of some 125 carriages that followed the hearse out to Green-Wood, where Greeley’s old nemesis Henry Raymond was also laid.

The Sunday after Greeley died, Henry Ward Beecher mentioned him only briefly in his sermon, and then only to characterize him as “a man of noble ambition, if not always the most wise.” Asked to speak at the funeral a few days later, he characteristically rose to the occasion and offered a more glowing assessment.

Beecher’s own character was just then coming under intense scrutiny. Plymouth insiders had harbored suspicions since the 1850s that their preacher was having affairs with some of the adoring females in his congregation, including Henry Bowen’s wife. Now it came out that he’d dallied with Theodore Tilton’s wife as well. Tilton sued Beecher for alienation of affection. The trial, held in the Brooklyn City Courthouse from January into July 1875, was the epicenter of the media circus of the century. It would end in a hung jury, the reverend’s reputation dinged but not fatally damaged. After he died in 1887 the public chose to remember him as the great orator and abolitionist, not the philanderer.