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RELATIONS BETWEEN GRANT and Edwin Stanton had never been noticeably warm. Partly the problem stemmed from Stanton’s dyspeptic personality and brusque treatment of Grant and partly it reflected turf disputes. After Appomattox, Grant wished to retain his supreme wartime powers and have army orders funneled through him, leaving Stanton to handle military matters requiring presidential approval. Stanton wanted the War Department to reclaim its traditional prewar powers, thus weakening Grant. At one point, Grant threatened to resign if Stanton continued to usurp what he deemed his rightful authority. Despite such conflicts, Grant retained unalloyed respect for Stanton’s wartime accomplishments, deeming him an irreproachable patriot with a fiercely “volcanic” passion for the Union.1 He sided with Stanton on Reconstruction and shared his dismay over Johnson. As he noted, Stanton “believed that Johnson was Jefferson Davis in another form, and he used his position in the Cabinet like a picket holding his position on the line.”2
Because of Stanton’s cordial relationship with congressional Republicans, his dealings with the president deteriorated during the summer of 1867. On August 1, Johnson summoned Grant for a lengthy talk—he fancied Grant had “just come off a debauch”—and expressed his intention to fire Stanton.3 Grant hesitated as he mulled over his response. Later that day, he sent the president a tough, candid letter, laying out legal and political arguments against Stanton’s ouster. Such a move, he asserted, would violate the Tenure of Office Act, expressly designed to protect the war secretary. He wondered why Johnson had not requested Stanton’s removal while the Senate was in session. Grant concluded his blunt missive with a blazing declaration: “I know I am right in this matter.”4 For Grant, there was now no turning back. He had declared his true allegiance, leaning toward the Radical Republican fraternity, and could no longer pretend he was intimately allied with administration policy.
Such was Grant’s popularity that Johnson could not dismiss Stanton without Grant’s support. Grant was still adored in the North for his wartime leadership, in the South for his clemency. Johnson searched for a legal means to fire Stanton without running afoul of the Tenure of Office Act. On August 5, he sent Stanton a one-sentence letter: “Public considerations of a high character constrain me to say, that your resignation as Secretary of War will be accepted.”5 Johnson knew that if Stanton resigned, instead of being sacked, the troublesome legislation would be a dead issue. That same day, in a tart response, Stanton lectured Johnson that “public considerations of a high character . . . constrain me not to resign the office of Secretary of War before the next meeting of Congress.”6 Radical Republicans trooped to the War Department, stiffening Stanton’s spine as he took issue with the president. They knew that he was a primary shield for their Reconstruction policies. The stage was set for a constitutional impasse between Congress and Johnson, with Grant likely caught in the middle.
On Sunday morning, August 11, Johnson told Grant unequivocally that Stanton would be suspended, not fired, to bypass the Tenure of Office Act, and he asked Grant to become the temporary secretary of war. Grant didn’t spurn the appointment, but stipulated, according to Badeau, that “on no account could he consent to hold the office after the Senate should act” on Stanton’s suspension.7 In other words, he saw himself as merely a temporary placeholder, awaiting a Senate ruling on Stanton when it reconvened. Johnson took away a quite different impression: that if the Senate overturned Stanton’s dismissal, Grant would hand the job back to him, not Stanton. Johnson assumed Stanton wouldn’t dare to override someone of Grant’s stature.
Why did Grant take a job so fraught with peril? As a soldier, he felt the need to submit to civilian direction. He also feared that if he turned down the job, Johnson might offer it to someone who shared his conservative agenda on southern policy. As Grant told Julia, “I think it most important that someone should be there who cannot be used.”8 By holding the office, he reasoned, he could protect the army from political meddling in executing Reconstruction. Even some Grant intimates questioned his wisdom in taking a post that enmeshed him in a dense web of partisan politics. “Had I been there,” Rawlins told his wife, “I might have prevailed upon the General not to accept the position.”9 He feared Johnson would manipulate Grant in his ongoing tussle with Congress. Badeau thought Johnson wanted to destroy Grant as a presidential candidate by binding him to his administration, undercutting him while pretending to advance him.
That same day, Grant drove to see Stanton and informed him of the president’s decision. Though a crushing blow for Stanton, it was not unexpected. When Grant received official notice of his appointment the next day, he sent Stanton a conciliatory message designed to draw the sting from the moment. “I cannot let the opportunity pass without expressing to you my appreciation of the zeal, patriotism, firmness and ability” with which Stanton had served as war secretary.10 In reply, Stanton admitted he had “no alternative but to submit, under protest, to the superior force of the President.”11 Branding the president’s action illegal, he was convinced Congress would restore his position when it reconvened in late November.
Occupying two positions simultaneously, Grant now spent mornings at the War Department, then strolled across the street and passed afternoons at his old army headquarters, where he was still chief general. Formal in the morning, he became more casual and unconstrained among his staff officers in the afternoon. On August 13, Grant attended his first cabinet meeting as war secretary ad interim, thrusting him squarely into the political arena. He lost no time establishing that he was a confirmed supporter of Congressional Reconstruction and would stand by his military commanders in the South. When Gideon Welles challenged him and asked if the latest Reconstruction law wasn’t “palpably unconstitutional and destructive of the government and of the Constitution itself . . . ?” Grant countered: “Who is to decide whether the law is unconstitutional?”12
The exchange went to the heart of the dispute that led to Johnson’s impeachment. However unwise the Tenure of Office Act, were not government officers obligated to heed it until the courts overturned it as unconstitutional? Grant thought so. In cabinet meetings, he showed a self-assurance that antagonized some secretaries. “This is the second meeting of the cabinet Grant has attended,” wrote Secretary of the Interior Browning, “and both have been marked by a rather ridiculous arrogance. He has been swift to deliver his crude opinions upon all subjects, and especially upon legal questions, as if they were oracles and not to be controverted.”13 Grant was no longer the bumbling clerk from Galena. Wartime experience had acquainted him with a wide array of issues and he could be quite forceful in expressing his opinions.
In dealing with Johnson, Grant perceived himself as embodying the Union cause and preserving Lincoln’s legacy. Less than a week after Grant became acting war secretary, Johnson decided to replace Sheridan in New Orleans with General George Thomas, who was suffering from a liver ailment. In the end, Winfield Scott Hancock replaced Thomas. For Grant, Sheridan’s removal was a barefaced attempt to eviscerate Congressional Reconstruction. Usually unflappable, he sent the president a letter glowing with passion: “I . . . urge, earnestly urge, urge in the name of a patriotic people who have sacrificed Hundreds of thousands of loyal lives, and Thousands of Millions of treasure to preserve the integrity and union of this Country that this order be not insisted on . . . [Sheridan’s] removal will only be regarded as an effort to defeat the laws of Congress. It will be interpreted by the unreconstructed element in the South, those who did all they could to break up this government by arms . . . as a triumph.”14
Clearly, in Grant’s eyes, the country was slouching toward a crisis that required him to ride to the rescue. He regarded Reconstruction as the Civil War’s final phase and believed Johnson had cast his lot with the disloyal South. Nonetheless, Johnson not only transferred Sheridan to Missouri but sent Grant an explanatory letter that insulted Sheridan, stating he had “rendered himself exceedingly obnoxious” and that his “rule has . . . been one of absolute tyranny, without reference to the principles of our government or the nature of our free institutions.”15 The letter left Grant both blue and badly disillusioned with politics. “All the romance of feeling that men in high places are above personal considerations and act only from motives of pure patriotism . . . has been destroyed,” he told Sherman.16 To mitigate the president’s order, he told his commanders not to reinstate southern politicians ousted by Sheridan and he publicized his letter to Johnson disputing Sheridan’s removal. Grant’s standing promptly soared in military circles, the Army and Navy Journal celebrating a letter whose “every word is golden.”17
With tensions running at a high pitch between the president and Congress, leading administration figures again fretted that Johnson would be arrested even before his conviction in an impeachment trial, with Benjamin Wade or another Radical Republican installed in his stead. Along with conservative cabinet members, Johnson toyed with replacing Grant with Sherman, who was more perturbed by the Radical tumult in Congress. On October 8, Secretary of the Interior Browning sounded out Sherman as to whether Grant would cooperate with a Radical congressional coup d’état against the president. Sherman reassured him that Grant “might be relied upon to prevent violence. He would not allow a mob of the ‘grand army of the Republic’ to execute the revolutionary measures of Congress.”18 Again showing solidarity with Grant, Sherman refused to entertain any appointment placing him in a superior position.
To plumb Grant’s views more deeply, Johnson took an unaccustomed step on October 12: he visited Grant at the War Department for a frank discussion. The president cut straight to the crux of the matter: What would Grant do if Congress tried to depose or arrest him before an impeachment conviction? Grant said “he should expect to obey orders,” Welles reported, “that should he (Grant) change his mind he would advise the President in season, that he might have time to make arrangements.”19 Although Johnson came away from the discussion heartened, Grant had subtly inserted political distance between himself and the president. Welles believed Grant lobbied key Radical Republicans to tamp down any talk of arresting Johnson.
In early October, Democrats won decisive victories in Pennsylvania and Ohio, throwing fear into the Republican Party, which paid a steep penalty with voters for promoting black suffrage. This enhanced Grant’s appeal as a versatile presidential candidate who might attract moderate Democratic voters while keeping die-hard Republicans in line. Blessed with this bipartisan veneer, he became the supreme prize in American politics, sought by all parties. Carl Schurz even thought his “nomination for the presidency appears to have been rendered practically certain by the October elections.”20 The New York Times editor Henry J. Raymond courted Grant with equally emphatic predictions: “Nothing in the world can prevent your nomination by the Republican party, as things are now. They dare not and cannot nominate anybody else . . . All you have to do is to stand still. Say nothing, write nothing & do nothing which shall enable any faction of any party to claim you.”21 This suited Grant, who had a clever way of placing himself in the pathway to success, then calling it fate. True to Raymond’s advice, Harper’s Weekly ran a cartoon that depicted Grant as a sphinx with a cigar clenched firmly in his mouth.
To an obsessive extent, the political world speculated about the political complexion of Grant’s mind. Prodded by Senator John Thayer of Nebraska, John Forney, the editor of the Washington Daily Chronicle, printed a lengthy article on November 7 that examined Grant’s political utterances since leaving Galena, removing any doubts about his Republican leanings. The two men took an advance copy to Rawlins, who marched into Grant’s office with it. Grant sat closeted with the piece for some time before Rawlins emerged to say that “General Grant is quite pleased with your statement of his political record, and surprised that he proves to be so good a Republican.”22 If this encouraged the visitors, Rawlins also relayed the sobering message that Grant didn’t care to be president, for he worried about the monetary consequences. “He is receiving from seventeen to twenty thousand dollars a year as General . . . a life salary. To go into the Presidency at twenty-five thousand dollars a year is, perhaps, to gain more fame; but what is to become of him at the end of his Presidency? . . . Eight years from the 4th of March, 1869, he will be about fifty-six years old.”23 It was revealing that Grant, still haunted by his prewar fear of poverty, analyzed the presidency through the lens of financial security.
When the new Congress assembled in late November, the House Judiciary Committee, by a 5 to 4 vote, called for Johnson’s impeachment. Some allegations against him were relatively trivial, revolving around vetoed bills or signed pardons. More consequential was the charge of disobeying the Tenure of Office Act, but the crucial underlying issue remained Congressional Reconstruction. Representative John Churchill of New York, who cast the committee’s decisive vote, explained that he had voted against Johnson because the president intended to “prevent the reorganization of the southern states upon the plan of Congress.”24
On November 30, President Johnson read aloud to his cabinet his shrill defense against any attempted impeachment or arrest: “You no doubt are aware that certain evil disposed persons have formed a conspiracy to depose the President of the United States, and to supply his place by an individual of their own selection.” After issuing articles of impeachment, he warned, these conspirators might move to arrest him or remove him from office, and he accused them of plotting “a revolution changing the whole organic system of our Government.”25 An unrepentant Johnson served notice he would fight any impeachment effort. “I cannot deliver the great charter of a Nation’s Liberty to men who, by the very act of usurping it, would show their determination to disregard and trample it under foot.”26
When he sent a defiant annual message to Congress in early December, it polarized the situation even further. He accused Congress of burdening southern states with black voting rights even though blacks had demonstrated little capacity for government and “wherever they have been left to their own devices they have shown a constant tendency to relapse into barbarism.”27 This message claimed the dubious distinction of being the most racist such message ever penned by an American president. But the central issue was whether Johnson had committed a serious crime that met the lofty constitutional standard of “high crimes and misdemeanors” or was simply being hounded for irreconcilable political differences with Congress.
Against this impeachment backdrop, there emerged a crescendo of voices clamoring for Grant to run for president, presenting him as the nation’s potential savior. On December 5, a huge rally at the Cooper Institute in New York, attended by business moguls Alexander T. Stewart and William B. Astor, endorsed Grant’s nomination for the high office. As his name was bandied about for president, powerful figures schemed to stop him. Rumors had raced about that Ben Butler, having never forgiven Grant for his wartime dismissal, had stooges spying on him to scrounge up a host of past indiscretions. “Butler has had detectives following the Genl. and the story is that they will at the proper time prove ‘Grant is a drunkard after fast horses women and whores,’” Orville Babcock tipped off Elihu Washburne.28
Johnson played a cunning game with Grant, praising his performance publicly to bind him to the administration, while surreptitiously driving a wedge between him and Stanton. When on December 12 he asked the Senate to approve Stanton’s suspension, he seized the opportunity to puff up Grant’s stature: “Salutary reforms have been introduced by the Secretary ad interim, & great reductions of expenses have been effected under his administration of the War Department, & the saving of millions to the Treasury.”29 Gideon Welles urged the president to go further and declare his confidence in Grant so he would be permanently “hitched” to the administration. “It would have made an issue between him and the Stanton Radicals,” he wrote in his diary.30
In many ways, Welles was typical of the conservative cabinet members who vilified Grant. A prolific diarist, he issued scathing denunciations of Grant that have long been trotted out by historians. A Connecticut lawyer, journalist, and politician, he had a white beard of biblical breadth, wore a queer wig parted down the middle, and voiced a curmudgeonly outlook. During the war Lincoln had dubbed him “Old Father Neptune.” In his diary, he offered so many diatribes against Grant that they come to sound almost pathological. He denounced Grant as “a political ignoramus,” ignorant of the workings of government, and “severely afflicted with the Presidential disease” that warped his judgment.31 He reviled him as someone of “sly cunning, if but little knowledge,” a passive, credulous tool in the hands of Radical Republicans, too stupid to exercise independent judgment.32 “The race-course has more attractions for [Grant] than the Senate or the council room,” the quotable Welles wrote. “He loves money, admires wealth, is fond of power and ready to use it remorselessly.”33 As Lincoln’s navy secretary, Welles had performed ably in blockading southern ports and building up the navy, but Grant thought him an opportunist who had defected to the Democrats to please Andrew Johnson.
Welles’s clash with Grant was at bottom a political one. He adored the president and his family. “No better persons have occupied the Executive Mansion,” he later wrote.34 Like Johnson, he identified with the southern white elite and lacked sympathy for the emancipated slaves. When the subject of food relief for hungry freed people emerged in the cabinet, Welles groused that “feeding the lazy and destitute negroes for a few weeks was an absurdity.”35 After discussing Reconstruction with Grant, he declared: “The Radical policy is to proscribe the intelligent, the wealthy, the moral portion of the South, and to place over them the ignorant and degraded and vicious.”36
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 convention guaranteed voting rights to “all colored male persons of the age of 21 years.”37 The Louisiana convention enacted a provision calling for equal access to public transportation “without distinction of race or color or previous condition.”38 In Charleston, seventy-six black delegates made up a majority of the state convention, many of them former slaves. Such a spectacle was anathema to many terrified whites, prompting the Charleston Mercury to jeer at this assembly as the “Congo Convention.”39 More than 80 percent of black delegates were literate, but the handful of illiterates provided endless fodder for vicious satire in the white press, creating an enduring caricature of Reconstruction as a period of misrule by inept black politicians.
Nothing alarmed white southerners more than the specter of blacks casting votes. The united power of blacks, carpetbaggers, and scalawags produced a stunning string of Republican election victories in fall 1867 across a region long solidly Democratic. Blacks embraced voting rights and registered amazingly high participation rates: a 70 percent turnout in Georgia and almost 90 percent in Virginia, casting virtually unanimous Republican votes. In Alabama, there were 89,000 black voters versus 74,000 whites, while 95,000 black voters in Georgia nearly equaled the 100,000 white voters. In a startling reversal for an area once dominated by slavery, the elections spawned black sheriffs, school board members, state legislators, and congressmen. That yesterday’s slave laborer was today’s state legislator horrified many white southerners who refused to accept this extraordinary inversion of their bygone world.
Several of Grant’s district commanders expressed deep admiration for how freed people adapted to their new status. One was General John Pope, an unabashed Republican, whose military district encompassed Georgia, Alabama, and Florida. The South might complain of “bayonet rule,” but Pope was spurred by idealism and an unflagging desire to protect black welfare. As he told Grant, “It may safely be said that the marvelous progress made in education and knowledge by these people, aided by the noble charitable contributions of Northern Societies and individuals, finds no parallel in the history of mankind . . . It becomes us therefore to guard jealously against any reaction which may and will check this most desirable progress of the colored race.”40
Pope was too sympathetic to Congressional Reconstruction for the conservative taste of Andrew Johnson. After Pope insisted that blacks be allowed to serve on juries, Johnson fired him, overriding fierce objections from Grant and sparking fresh calls for his impeachment. In a valedictory letter to Grant, Pope argued that in his district the Confederate spirit of rebellion was still abroad and “nearly as powerful as during the War . . . You can scarcely form an idea of the spirit of malice & hatred in this people—It is a misnomer to call this question in the South a political question—It is War pure & simple . . . The question is not whether Georgia & Alabama will accept or reject reconstruction—It is, shall the Union men & Freedmen, be the slaves of the old negro rebel aristocracy or not?”41
Never cavalier about military rule in the South, Grant wanted to terminate it as soon as possible, but without sacrificing black welfare. As he told one district commander, “The best way, I think, to secure a speedy termination of Military rule is to execute all the laws of Congress in the spirit in which they were conceived, firmly but without passion.”42 Grant had to deal with hysterical denunciations of Reconstruction policy from white southerners, including Colonel Dent, who predicted “all sorts of disasters to the Country,” he told Sherman. Far from viewing carpetbaggers as greedy, predatory figures, Grant pictured them going with “brain in their heads, money in their pockets, strength and energy in their limbs” to “make the South bloom like the rose.”43
Just how pessimistic Grant was about the southern mood was revealed by an unpublicized episode. Adam Badeau received a letter from his friend Edwin Booth, the illustrious Shakespearean actor and older brother of John Wilkes Booth. Unlike his brother, Edwin had been a faithful Union man and came to Badeau with a humble request from his elderly mother, who wished to have the remains of John Wilkes, now buried under the Old Arsenal Penitentiary, transferred to a family plot. To Grant, Badeau made an eloquent case to honor the family’s wishes. “But he was immutable,” wrote Badeau. “He said the time had not yet come.”44 Grant’s response shows his reaction to the frightening upsurge in Confederate sentiment prevalent in the region under his personal military supervision.
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THE DRAMA OVER Stanton’s dismissal spiraled toward its fateful climax when the Senate Committee on Military Affairs issued a report on January 10, 1868, calling for his immediate reinstatement. Soon the entire Senate launched into a blistering debate. For Radical Republicans, nothing less than the future of the Republic lay at stake. Only Stanton’s presence at the War Department “will prevent the employment . . . of this office on the side of the Rebellion,” wrote Charles Sumner, adding that Andrew Johnson was “now a full-blown rebel, except that he does not risk his neck by overt acts; but in spirit he is as bad as J.D. [Jefferson Davis].”45
The committee’s action sent Grant scurrying to study the Tenure of Office Act. He was shocked to discover that if the Senate sustained the decision to restore Stanton and Grant then refused to hand the office back to him, he faced a $10,000 fine and a five-year prison term—risks he didn’t care to run. At Sherman’s prompting, Grant made his way to the White House on Saturday, January 11, to alert Johnson to his concerns. Exactly what happened at that meeting would divide Grant and Johnson—and future historians—forever after.
Grant explained to Johnson that if the Senate stood by Stanton, Grant would have to vacate his office, citing the possible fine and prison term. He and Johnson quarreled bitterly over the meaning of the Tenure of Office Act. Grant believed bad laws trumped presidential directives and must be obeyed until judges rescinded them. “I stated that the law was binding on me, constitutional or not, until set aside by the proper tribunal,” Grant wrote.46 Dismissing the act as unconstitutional, Johnson refused to be bound by it and grew agitated over Grant’s unbending position. With a melodramatic flourish, he promised that if Grant clung to his office when Stanton tried to retake it, he would pay the fine himself and serve the jail term. When Grant demurred at this outrageous idea, Johnson pleaded with him to resign and return the office to him before Stanton regained it. Grant came away with the clear impression that he had promised to give the office back to Stanton, while Johnson came away with an equally clear impression that Grant would hold on to it until the courts ruled otherwise. Grant said he would call on Johnson on Monday with a final decision. That meeting never took place—Congress would act in the interim—and his failure to appear formed part of Johnson’s savage indictment against Grant.
Johnson thought of naming a new war secretary who stood a fair chance of Senate confirmation. Sherman suggested Governor Jacob D. Cox of Ohio, whose term would shortly expire. As a former Union general with a commendable war record, he would find favor with Grant and Republicans, while as an opponent of universal black suffrage, he might also entice moderates. According to Sherman’s recollections, Grant “urged me to push the matter all I could, saying that Governor Cox was perfectly acceptable to [him], and to the Army generally.”47 Johnson evinced scant enthusiasm for the idea.
On January 13, the full Senate ratified the judgment of the Military Affairs Committee and overwhelmingly voted for Stanton’s restoration as secretary of war. That evening, to the astonishment of official Washington, Grant attended a reception at the executive mansion. Julia had female friends staying with them who were eager to go, but when she asked her husband to escort them, he balked. “I would like to gratify you, but, really, under the circumstances, I do not think I ought to go.”48 Nevertheless, he yielded gallantly to the ladies. As they were leaving, a messenger arrived with news of the Senate vote, which Grant perused by the flickering glow of gaslight. He found himself in the excruciating bind he had feared, trapped between Stanton and Johnson. When he reached the White House, Johnson shook his hand genially and the two men chatted for several minutes; Grant later admitted his embarrassment at the show of presidential cordiality. At another dreadful Washington soiree that evening, Sherman chatted with Secretary of the Interior Browning, who wrote afterward that Sherman “spoke bitterly of Stanton’s restoration and seemed to think the President blameable, as he might, he said, have prevented it by nominating some moderate Republican for Secy of War who would have been confirmed by the Senate, and the whole subject disposed of in that way.”49
In Grant’s view, his tenure as temporary war secretary ended when he read the Senate announcement by gaslight. Early the next morning, he showed up at his War Department office, locked the door from the outside, then transferred the keys to the adjutant general. “I am to be found at my office at army headquarters,” he announced.50 Never a man to tarry, Stanton was back at work in an hour, converting his old office into a gloomy fortress, buttressed by guards. Though Grant had saved him, the graceless Stanton immediately started bossing him around. Grant resented his “discourteous mode” and the uncomfortable situation Stanton had created by his obstinacy.51 Even young Jesse Grant recollected Stanton’s boorish behavior. “Small boy that I was, I remember the rudeness of his manner.”52 Grant notified the president that he had vacated the office and no longer functioned as war secretary. Faced with this fait accompli, Johnson was furious, believing Grant should have resigned his post and allowed him to name a successor.
Bent on showing that Grant was still war secretary, Johnson demanded his presence at a cabinet meeting, one of the most rancorous in American history. After everyone was seated, Johnson canvassed the room, asking each secretary to name a subject for discussion. When he came to Grant, the latter reminded him that he was no longer a cabinet member and attended only at his request. An enraged Johnson began to grill Grant like a prosecutor, castigating him for abandoning his office, then asked point-blank: “Why did you give up the keys to Mr. Stanton and leave the Department?”53 According to Johnson loyalists, he reminded Grant of their understanding “that if you did not hold on to the office yourself, you would place it in my hands that I might select another?” “That,” said Grant, “was my intention. I thought some satisfactory arrangement would be made to dispose of the subject.” Browning quoted Grant as confessing he had agreed to hold the office until courts ruled on the Tenure of Office Act.54
Grant left a strikingly different version. As diplomatically as possible, he told the president he “might have understood me in the way he said, namely that I had promised to resign if I did not resist the reinstatement. I made no such promise.”55 He wondered aloud why Johnson had passed over the opportunity to appoint Governor Cox, which would have created a convenient exit from the impasse. He also explained that after his original talk with Johnson on the subject, he had read the Tenure of Office Act and learned of the severe penalties for violating it. Once again Johnson volunteered to pay the fine or serve the prison stretch. Feeling his integrity questioned, Grant abruptly asked to be excused from the meeting. According to Welles, he left in an “almost abject” state after enduring the president’s “cold and surprised disdain.”56 When he was gone, Johnson inveighed against his “secret intrigue in this business” and blasted him for having acted “under the direction of the chief conspirators.”57
During these critical days, Grant knew he was going to be damned by either the Radical Republicans or the president. Through studied ambiguity, he had tried to keep his options open until the last moment. In the end, he couldn’t please both sides and wound up antagonizing the president. By this point, both his political future and fundamental principles led him to line up with Radical Republicans against Johnson, who had so patently sabotaged the work of his southern commanders. Grant wasn’t being opportunistic, only true to his principles.
No longer needing to appease Grant, Johnson broadcast his anger against him to the press. The next day, an editorial in the National Intelligencer recounted the cabinet meeting and damned Grant for supposed duplicity. Upset by the leak, Grant and Sherman went to the White House to protest. Johnson claimed he hadn’t read the article and insisted that Grant had betrayed him. In Johnson’s recollection, Grant had said he would make an effort to prevail upon Stanton to resign; Grant insisted he had only said he thought Stanton would resign.
Two days later, Johnson had the Intelligencer piece read aloud to his cabinet and asked them to comment on its authenticity. While they all agreed on its accuracy, one wonders how anyone could have dissented knowing Johnson’s desired response. All four cabinet supporters of Johnson’s version of the truth were his rabid partisans. Only William Seward disputed the consensus, maintaining that Grant’s statements had been ambiguous and his admissions “rather indirect and circumstantial.”58 Grant had not lied but he may well have equivocated, which to Johnson amounted to the same thing. The president demanded that Grant obey no orders from Stanton unless issued by presidential direction, a move that Grant would rebuff. When Grant went to Stanton and discussed his possible resignation, he realized such advice was useless with the headstrong Stanton. Welles maintained that Stanton assumed “an imperious and angry look” toward Grant and spoke “loud and violently,” leaving Grant not “daring to make known the object of his mission.”59
In the firestorm of charges and countercharges, the press divided along predictably partisan lines. Pro-Johnson papers dredged up old drinking charges against Grant, asserting he was inebriated during the Stanton imbroglio. The Republican press refused to accept that Grant, a stickler for the truth, would ever stoop to dishonesty. “In a question of veracity between U.S. Grant and Andrew Johnson, between a soldier whose honor is as untarnished as the sun, and a President who has betrayed every friend, and broken every promise, the country will not hesitate,” wrote the New York Tribune.60
On January 28, Grant sent Johnson a letter on Stanton’s suspension and attempted to show he had consistently denied he would defy a Senate ruling in the matter. He reiterated that his views had changed after studying the Tenure of Office Act. Far from tugging his forelock, Grant adopted a waspish tone that accelerated the break between the two men. He “in no wise admitted the correctness” of Johnson’s recollection of events and denied he had ever made a promise to resign as war secretary.61 When the letter surfaced around town, Radical Republicans seemed jubilant as any appearance of amity between Johnson and Grant vanished. “He is a bolder man than I thought him,” Thaddeus Stevens said of Grant. “Now we will let him into the church.”62 At a stroke, Grant had virtually guaranteed he would be the Republican nominee for president.
Rawlins had returned from Galena to support Grant in the controversy. On February 3, dropping any pretense of impartiality, Grant sent Johnson an impassioned letter that essentially called him a liar, a coward, and a lawbreaker. To have resisted Stanton’s reinstatement, Grant alleged, would have meant breaking the law. “And now, Mr. President, where my honor as a soldier and integrity as a man have been so violently assailed, pardon me for saying that I can but regard this whole matter, from the beginning to the end, as an attempt to involve me in the resistance of law . . . and thus to destroy my character before the country.”63 These were shockingly bold words from Grant, who accused the president of smearing his reputation and attempting to bully him into committing a crime. According to Badeau, Rawlins told Grant that neutrality with Johnson was impossible and that the time had come for an open breach. To that end, Rawlins redrafted Grant’s February 3 letter, making its language even more scorching. Rawlins had always exercised an outsize influence on Grant, but this intervention seemed extraordinary. “I never in my intercourse with Grant saw another instance where another exercised so direct and palpable and important an influence with him,” wrote Badeau. “It made [Grant] a Republican. Rawlins knew this.”64 Rawlins again functioned as Grant’s alter ego, his conscience, his better self.
A week later, the president sent Grant a reply that matched his blunt vehemence: “First of all, you here admit that from the very beginning of what you term ‘the whole history’ of your connection with Mr. Stanton’s suspension, you intended to circumvent the President. It was to carry out that intent that you accepted the appointment.”65 Even by the lowly standards of Washington blood sport, this was bare-knuckled politics. All the while, said Senator George Williams, Grant had remained “cool and undisturbed, though his honor was at stake, and undismayed by the formidable array of power and influence against him.”66
Increasingly desperate, Johnson turned to Sherman, hoping to enlist the army on his side in a showdown with Congress. On February 12, he ordered Grant to create a new military division that would encompass Washington, with Sherman as its commander and its headquarters located in the capital. By this transparent subterfuge, Johnson hoped to neuter Grant and control the army through Sherman. Having tried to divide Grant and Stanton, he now attempted to do the same with Sherman, who again feared the arrangement would jeopardize his long-standing relationship with Grant. In distress, he told Grant that “I never felt so troubled in my life” and objected to “the false position I would occupy as between you and the President.”67 Sherman composed a deeply felt letter to Johnson, expressing discomfort at being placed in a rivalrous position with his old friend. If difficulties arose between them, he would have “no alternative but resignation.”68 In an earlier letter to the president, Sherman had noted the unfortunate changes wrought in the trusting Grant by Washington’s corrosive atmosphere. He had been with Grant through “death and slaughter . . . and yet I never saw him more troubled than since he has been in Washington, and been compelled to read himself a ‘sneak and deceiver,’ based on reports of four of the Cabinet, and apparently with your knowledge.”69 In the end, Johnson decided that he couldn’t afford to alienate the two leading war heroes and withdrew his controversial order.
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THE WORSE THINGS LOOKED FOR Andrew Johnson, the brighter was the political future for Grant. In early February, when the New York Republican Convention endorsed him for president, it gave a tremendous fillip to his potential candidacy. His actions during this pivotal time have been interpreted in two ways: that he either kept his head down and didn’t dabble in politics or, under the cloak of serving Congress, cannily angled for Radical Republican support for president. The two interpretations perhaps reflect his own ambivalence. After the war he had attained an exalted stature in North and South that transcended party labels and a political career could threaten that appeal. Still a relative newcomer to politics, he recoiled from the dishonest wrangling in Washington. “Indeed, the spectacle of Johnson dishonored, impeached, almost deposed, was not calculated to make one who stood so near at all eager to become his successor,” wrote Badeau.70 When people inquired about his presidential aspirations, Grant met them with perfect silence and a blank, stony face that mystified even the most penetrating observers.
Badeau thought the Democratic sympathies of the Dents may have held Grant back, but this seems highly unlikely since Julia, who had been brought up to daydream of a higher destiny, was always ambitious for her husband. Ideology was less important to her than power, whose trappings she now craved. When he considered a presidential run, Grant told Julia he didn’t relish being president but considered himself well situated to effect a rapprochement between North and South. “The South will accept my decision on any matters affecting its interests more amiably than that of any other man. They know I would be just and would administer the law without prejudice.”71 Julia didn’t prod him to run—she bristled at the idea she was a pushy wife—but once he made the decision, she followed him most devoutly. “I became an enthusiastic politician,” she would recall. “No delegation was too large, no serenade too long.”72
It goes without saying that Jesse Root Grant promoted his famous son with unashamedly bumptious pride. When the New York Ledger assigned a reporter to collect stories about Ulysses’s boyhood, Jesse furnished a bumper crop of three letters recounting favorite anecdotes. They soon appeared in weekly newspaper installments under the rubric “The Early Life of Gen. Grant.” Once Grant found out about his father’s latest escapade, he was predictably outraged and interceded to block publication of further letters. The newspaper’s editor assured Jesse that his letters contained no political allusions to his son and couldn’t be misconstrued as “writing him up as a Presidential candidate,” but they indeed looked like a blatant campaign ploy.73
The prospect of a Grant candidacy led to microscopic scrutiny of his personal behavior, producing fresh drinking allegations. After New York Republicans endorsed him, the New York World branded him “a commonplace man. He has no military talent . . . is hated by the army. He is generally drunk.”74 It’s hard to know whether these rumor mills simply rehashed wartime chatter. That January, a woman named Helen Griffing, who resided in Washington, told the New York editor Theodore Tilton that she had walked down F Street on a recent evening and “passed two gentlemen, one of them very intoxicated, leaning on the arm of the other. The one who was intoxicated I believe to be Gen. Grant.”75 In March, Elihu Washburne, long a clearinghouse for Grant drinking stories, heard from his friend Rufus P. Stebbins that Grant had reportedly been “seen reeling on the street.” After stating with alarm that “twenty millions of the best men women and children would weep at the bare possibility of this being true,” Stebbins suggested that Grant agree to a total abstinence pledge.76
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 H Street residence, while Stanton remained “camped in the war office,” as one editor phrased it.78
Johnson had unleashed the political equivalent of an act of war against Congress. Retaliating against the president’s violation of the Tenure of Office Act, the House introduced a resolution to impeach Andrew Johnson for high crimes and misdemeanors. Three days later, the resolution passed by an overwhelming 126 to 47 vote, with every Republican aligned against the president. Until recently, Grant had frowned upon impeachment as an extreme remedy, but Johnson’s press vendetta against him and their wounding exchange of letters had changed his mind. Badeau observed that “when the motion for impeachment was finally passed he heartily approved it.”79 Grant now harbored deep antagonism toward Johnson that burst out when he rode a streetcar with Senator John Henderson of Missouri. “I would impeach [Johnson] . . . because he is such an infernal liar,” Grant exclaimed.80 Rawlins was openly indignant against the president, while Grant, no less enraged, was more circumspect in style.
Eleven impeachment articles were filed against Johnson, all but two revolving around Stanton’s firing. Those two struck closer to the source of congressional discontent, accusing the president of refusal to implement Reconstruction laws and employing “intemperate, inflammatory and scandalous harangues” against legislators.81 As Congressman William Kelley of Pennsylvania proclaimed: “The unsheeted ghosts of the two thousand murdered negroes in Texas, cry . . . for the punishment of Andrew Johnson.”82 Radicals took a broad view of impeachment, hoping Johnson would stand trial for combating Reconstruction, sparing them the need to document violation of a particular law. Moderates championed the narrower view that a president could only be removed for committing a specific crime; hence their emphasis on the Tenure of Office Act.
For pro-impeachment forces one complicating factor was that Johnson had no vice president, so that if he were removed, the office would fall to the president pro tempore of the Senate, Benjamin Wade of Ohio, whose Radical Republican views offended moderate Republicans and Democrats alike, one chiding him for being “the first to secure the nigger suffrage enactment.”83 As the impeachment trial approached, an apocalyptic mood seized the country, arousing fears of a violent confrontation. For weeks, Gideon Welles had warned Johnson that Congress meditated a military coup, employing Grant as its cat’s-paw. After Johnson was impeached, General Ord told Grant that someone had asked him “what I thought would be the course of Army officers if the President should . . . call on them to support him as against the Congress—and I told him that nine tenths or perhaps more of the officers would Certainly support Congress.”84
When the Senate impeachment trial began on March 5, Chief Justice Salmon P. Chase officiated in his judicial robes, while Grant’s bête noire, Benjamin F. Butler, acted as a snarling chief prosecutor. Everybody recognized the historic nature of the occasion: this was the first time the House had impeached and the Senate tried a sitting president. Instead of testifying in person, Johnson followed events by a telegraph wire hooked up between the Capitol and the Willard Hotel, leaving his defense to William Evarts, who complained, “The managers conduct the trial as if it was that of a horse thief.”85
The Senate chamber grew tense as congressmen and cabinet members crowded in behind senators while packed galleries erupted in prolonged waves of partisan applause. Grant had hoped to escape to Missouri, but felt nervous leaving the capital in such an uproar and minutely monitored proceedings from his office. Although consulted regularly by party leaders, he thought it inappropriate to appear at the trial. As odds-on favorite to be the Republican presidential nominee, his presence would appear unseemly. During the war he had learned that it was better to let power seek him rather than to pursue it; a good general waited to be summoned by his superiors. Nevertheless, he remained far from inactive during the trial. “He not only conversed with those whose action he thought he could affect, arguing in favor of the conviction of Johnson and demonstrating his guilt,” wrote Badeau, “but he visited at least one Senator at his house with this purpose.”86 Despite his reticence in public, Grant’s position was widely bruited on Capitol Hill, Charles Sumner citing Grant as “earnest for the condemnation of the [president].”87
Despite legitimate grievances against the president, the impeachment case ultimately rested on a slender base. Evarts pointed out that the Tenure of Office Act violated the Constitution. Even if constitutional, he argued, it did not apply to Stanton, who had originally been appointed by Lincoln. He presented Andrew Johnson as a statesmanlike figure who had challenged the act in a judicious manner, dismissing Stanton and waiting for the courts to decide. The legal arguments were dwarfed by the larger political context since many voters viewed the impeachment trial as a referendum on the war and Reconstruction, abolition and civil rights. As the attorney Edwards Pierrepont wrote to Grant from New York City: “Let no man be deceived—This is the trial of an issue which determines whether true men or rebels shall rule.”88 Several weeks into the trial, Grant thought the Senate would convict Johnson, terminating his career and casting him into outer darkness. “Impeachment seems to grow in popularity,” he wrote, “and indications are that the trial will not be protracted.”89
By May 15, Grant concluded that “impeachment is likely to fail.”90 The next day, amid extraordinary drama, the first vote was taken on whether to convict President Johnson on the eleventh impeachment article. One representative recalled legislators looking “pale and sick” from the intolerable suspense, while a senator remembered how his colleagues “leaned over their desks, many with hand to ear.”91 A conviction required a two-thirds vote of the Senate. Johnson was acquitted by a single vote when Edmund G. Ross, a junior senator from Kansas, cast the vote that rescued him. Seven Republicans voted to acquit, effectively ending the crisis. Subsequent votes merely reproduced these results. Many senators had feared a conviction would lead to legislative tyranny and presidential impotence in the future. Some thought Johnson’s misdeeds didn’t rise to the level of high crimes or misdemeanors. Others worried that Ben Wade, as president pro tempore of the Senate, would ascend to the presidency and capture the Republican nomination instead of Grant. With Johnson acquitted, everyone knew, Grant would get the party nod. Significantly, the seven Republicans who voted for acquittal all campaigned for Grant after he secured the nomination. They also extracted a critical pledge from Johnson that he would cease interfering with congressional action on Reconstruction.
Initially Grant regretted the acquittal, but he conceded with hindsight that a conviction would have done lasting harm. With the power of the Radicals eroded by the decision, Grant became a shoo-in for the Republican nomination. Julia Grant, too, came to applaud the decision. “I could not free myself from the thought that the trial savored of persecution and that it was a dangerous precedent,” she later wrote.92 Acknowledging his bitter defeat, a discredited Stanton resigned and John Schofield, with Grant’s ready endorsement, was easily confirmed in his stead. Andrew Johnson never forgave Grant for backing his tormentors, accusing him of “standing behind the seven managers of impeachment, with Butler in the lead, urging them on to impeachment and declaring conviction and deposition indispensable to save the country . . . In this encounter he was again repulsed and driven back in . . . disgrace.”93 The next stage of Grant’s career would signify anything but disgrace.