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THOUGH TRANQUILLITY DESCENDED BRIEFLY on Washington after Andrew Johnson’s acquittal, he disappointed Republicans who imagined he would prove more pliant on Reconstruction. Whether issuing amnesty proclamations or appointing conservative southern commanders, he showed that he wouldn’t water down his views during his nine months left in office. Most upsetting to Grant was that Johnson turned a deaf ear to anguished pleas from blacks and white Republicans that armed terror from the Ku Klux Klan had proliferated and met no resistance from white lawmen. He transmitted to the president a letter from a Tennessee representative who described gangs of mounted men “scouring the country by night—causing dismay & terror to all—Our civil authorities are powerless.”1 In response, Johnson hid behind the shield of states’ rights and declared that, having received no direct aid requests from the Tennessee legislature, the federal government lacked all jurisdiction in the matter.
Grant did what he could to counter this brazen show of presidential indifference. He was especially concerned about terror in New Orleans. “Loyal men are being murdered in many parishes . . . revenge and murders are rampant in our state,” an informant wrote. “Can nothing be done to protect our loyal people from assassination?”2 The commander there was Grant’s old West Coast bogeyman, Robert C. Buchanan, who had refused to stanch the bleeding. “If Civil government fails to protect the Citizen,” Grant reprimanded him, “Military government should supply its place.”3 Once again, Grant did not see himself as disobeying Johnson so much as heeding the dictates of Congress, which had laid down the laws on military occupation.
Throughout the South, conventions had spawned new constitutions to protect freed people’s rights, qualifying their states for readmission to the Union. In late June, six states were folded back into the Union, resuming congressional representation. On July 9, 1868, the Fourteenth Amendment was ratified, bestowing citizenship rights upon blacks as well as women and children born in the United States of immigrants, guaranteeing them due process and equal protection of the law and prohibiting state infringement on those rights. The amendment specified that federal or state officials who had sworn to uphold the Constitution and then joined the rebellion could only be eligible for government jobs through a two-thirds vote in Congress.
Grant’s boldness in upholding Radical Reconstruction surely arose from the knowledge that he would soon be the Republican nominee for president, even though he never openly declared his candidacy. In his political life, there had always been an illusion of passivity, the sense of a massive wave lifting him to the next plateau without corresponding effort on his part, while all the time he had quietly positioned himself to ride its crest. He did not exactly want the presidential job, but neither did he exactly not want it. “I wasn’t sorry to be a candidate,” he later said, “but I was very sorry to leave the command of the army.”4 Still viewing events through the dark prism of the war, he equated the Republican Party with the Union cause and believed only he could unify it, even as he identified the Democratic Party with the white supremacist South: “I believed that if a democratic president was elected there would be little chance for those who fought for the Union.”5 If Republican leaders wondered about Grant’s true convictions—and his private actions as chief general had long confirmed his Republican credentials—the rank and file adored him, and it was hard to argue with such popularity as an aura of inevitability began to surround his candidacy.
As Republican delegates set off for their Chicago convention—it met days after Johnson’s acquittal—the prospective nominee and his wife debated their future in private. When Julia asked if he wished to be president, Grant exhibited less than gushing enthusiasm. “No,” he replied, “but I do not see that I have anything to say about it. The convention is about to assemble and, from all I hear, they will nominate me; and I suppose if I am nominated, I will be elected.”6 In part Grant’s response can be attributed to native modesty and a strict Methodist upbringing, but it also marked a transitional moment in a life hitherto devoted to military protocol and following orders. Henceforth he would need to learn the wily and aggressive arts of a politician instead of simply retreating behind the pose of a self-effacing soldier.
Right before the convention, a “Soldiers and Sailors” gathering met in Chicago and symbolically nominated Grant for president. Doubtless fulfilling a long-suppressed fantasy, Jesse Root Grant rose to address the crowd in support of his son. It astonished him, he confessed, that he “who had done nothing in particular in the great war for the country, should be called upon by the braves of the nation to speak.” “You had a boy,” shouted an audience member. “That is enough.”7 Alarmed by Jesse’s forwardness, Elihu Washburne and his circle had conspired to intercept him before he traveled to Chicago, even enlisting his son Orvil in the effort, but only brute force could have prevented the loquacious Jesse from droning on before a large, enthusiastic assembly.
The next day, with Jesse proudly in attendance, eight thousand Republicans crammed into Crosby’s Opera House for a veritable coronation of Ulysses S. Grant. To play on wartime memories, General John “Black Jack” Logan was designated to place his name in nomination. His speech was followed by a well-staged extravaganza: hats and handkerchiefs fluttered, rounds of applause rippled across the house, and a pigeon, dyed red, white, and blue, flapped through the cavernous space. As a huge ovation for his son gathered strength, Jesse Grant stood before the speaker’s platform in “mute astonishment,” said a reporter.8 Then a curtain rose to reveal huge images drawn by Thomas Nast of the Goddess of Liberty, juxtaposed with Grant. To no one’s surprise, Grant won by acclamation on the first ballot. Nobody else was even nominated. Abiding by the custom of nominees staying away from conventions, Grant remained in Washington, hard at work and seemingly in harness at army headquarters.
The suspense in Chicago centered upon the choice of a vice presidential candidate. At the time, presidential nominees had no real say in selecting running mates. After several ballots, the convention settled upon House Speaker Schuyler Colfax of Indiana, a man so amiable he was known as “Smiler” Colfax. One delegate described him as a “good-tempered, chirping . . . real canary bird.”9 According to Gideon Welles, Lincoln had scorned Colfax as “a little intriguer—plausible,” but “not trustworthy.”10 Although Colfax had supported Edward Bates for the Republican nomination in 1860, he had then become an ardent Lincoln adherent. “Colfax is a young man, is already in position, is running a brilliant career and is sure of a bright future in any event,” wrote Lincoln, who considered naming him to his cabinet.11 After the war, Colfax became a fervent booster for Reconstruction and black voting rights.
Grant learned of his nomination when Edwin Stanton came panting up the stairs and burst into his office. “General! I have come to tell you that you have been nominated by the Republican party for President of the United States.”12 Grant was probably less astonished by the news than by Stanton’s unwonted ebullience. He reacted with his usual poker face, repressing a smile. “I did not want the Presidency, and have never quite forgiven myself for resigning the command of the army to accept it; but it could not be helped,” he reminisced. “I owed my honors and opportunities to the Republican party, and if my name could aid it I was bound to accept.”13 He feared the Democratic Party had become a haven for rebel sympathizers who refused to accept the basic tenets of Unionism, and he saw it as his duty to stand as the Republican nominee. Taking a bitter swipe at Johnson, Phil Sheridan had promised him that “the period is not distant when loyalty to the government will not be considered a crime at the White House.”14
Grant was elected on a platform very congenial to him. The Republican Party had drifted to the right on economic issues, while maintaining an unalterable commitment to black equality before the law and the right of freed people to participate in southern politics. The platform forged an amalgam of old and new, harking back to the party’s founding abolitionist principles and ahead to the conservative economics of its future. The pragmatic Grant could embody this new synthesis without fear of contradiction.
Conforming to tradition, the convention sent a delegation to Grant with official notice of his nomination. In return, he scratched out a statement that mostly dealt in standard rhetoric, concluding with four words that formed the slogan of his campaign and remained irreversibly associated with him: “Let us have peace.”15 These words, an inspired piece of phrasemaking, were gobbled up by the public and showed Grant’s sound political instincts. Translating this motto into practice, however, would prove far more daunting for it spoke to two competing themes: the need for reconciliation between North and South and the need to consolidate the war objectives. For some, the credo sounded blandly vacuous and Henry Adams wisecracked that “Let Us Have Peace” meant only “Leave Me Alone.”16
Backed by southern supporters, Andrew Johnson vainly hoped that the Democrats would nominate him at their July convention in New York. He managed to place second on the first two ballots before his candidacy faded altogether. On the twenty-second ballot, the delegates chose the colorless Horatio Seymour, a protégé of Martin Van Buren, who had been close to Boss Tweed and Tammany Hall and a notorious Copperhead as wartime governor of New York. His résumé confirmed Grant’s stereotype of the Democrats as the party of reaction. Seymour had denounced the Emancipation Proclamation as “a proposal for the butchery of women and children, for scenes . . . of arson and murder.”17 During the 1863 draft riots in New York, Seymour had praised the responsible hooligans as “my friends” in what some deemed treasonous behavior.18 His record threw into bold relief Grant’s heroic stature and ability to capitalize on Unionist sentiment.
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
As befit the political custom of the time, Grant did not actively campaign or make formal speeches. Lacking the big, overflowing personality or oratorical skills of a lifelong politician, he was lucky to have that custom in effect. Dating back to the early days of the Civil War, he had maintained a firm belief that one’s worth should be recognized instead of being crassly promoted, and he refused to allow party leaders to hatch any deals to secure his election. Back in Washington, Rawlins and other party stalwarts drafted letters and gave speeches as his surrogates, while James H. Wilson and Charles A. Dana pumped out laudatory campaign biographies.
In early June, Grant traveled to St. Louis, where he had gained possession of White Haven and an additional 280 acres from the Dent family. It was another strange, dreamlike transformation of his life from his dreary years there in the 1850s. Now he was master of the plantation he had first visited fresh out of West Point, and Colonel Dent, having suffered a crippling stroke, depended upon him and Julia. Grant planned to spend several weeks there yearly, planting strawberries and other fruits and breeding blooded horses. To banish any lingering remnants of slavery, he had his steward, William Elrod, demolish a dozen slave cabins. As president, he would closely manage the farm through Elrod.
After St. Louis, Grant moved on to Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, where he joined Sherman and Sheridan for a two-week western tour. Although they inspected forts, they participated in a new type of military campaign, this one to garner votes, with a crew of reporters tagging along to chronicle the journey. 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.”23 Like many travelers of the day, the party carried carbines to shoot buffalo, helping to hasten their demise. When they journeyed by stagecoach to Denver, they took frequent potshots through the windows at herds of antelope, killing two of them. 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
Circling back to the Midwest, he gave a brief speech to well-wishers in St. Louis before arriving at his Galena house on August 7. “After an absence of three years from your midst,” he told a gathering, “it affords me great pleasure to return here again to see you all, and, as I hope, spend an agreeable and quiet fortnight with you.”25 Wherever he went, Grant encountered swarms of people who longed to see him. Whether from genuine or fake modesty, he professed to be startled by these swelling, enthusiastic crowds. Visiting a friend in Quincy, Illinois, he was amazed by the throngs who engulfed his every step. “What was my surprise to find what seems to be not only the whole city, but the county of Adams, turned out to welcome me to your midst,” Grant told the appreciative townspeople.26
By August 18, Grant had settled into Galena for a prolonged stay, assisted by Adam Badeau and Cyrus Comstock. Galena gave Grant a convenient residence in the American heartland, where he could lie low and shun publicity. He read newspapers attentively each morning, then drove and visited old friends in the afternoon or stopped by the DeSoto House Hotel. Friends and party managers wanted him to stay in the East so he could easily be consulted. Grant isolated himself, however, leaving instructions that official business should be referred to Rawlins, who forwarded only urgent letters to him. It was the first troubling sign that Grant, in his new political incarnation, might ignore professional advice and prove unwilling to modify his traditional style to accommodate new political realities. Grant would hail the summer of 1868 as his most balmy and restful since the war began.
Despite his seeming indolence, his campaign flourished and by midsummer Senator Charles Sumner wrote, “Everything is auspicious politically. Grant will surely be elected.”27 For an increasingly fragmented Republican Party that wanted to remember the war and rally around a common hero, Grant possessed an irresistible appeal. Something of a political cipher, he enabled moderates to imagine he might weaken the Radicals, while Radicals believed he would perpetuate Reconstruction. Grant’s minions busily cultivated the top plutocrats of the day, and northern business leaders piled into the campaign, with the financier Jay Cooke and others disgorging large donations into party coffers, while Democrats aimed to exploit a populist backlash against the big-business coloring of their opponents.
Toward the end of the campaign, when Horatio Seymour delivered a handful of campaign speeches, a joke made the rounds that “Grant takes his cigar—Seymour takes the stump.”28 Democrats conducted a defamatory campaign, portraying Grant as a drunken dolt. Seymour supporters invented new lyrics to a ditty called “Captain Jinks of the Horse Marines,” with words that went: “I am Captain Grant of the Black Marines, / The stupidest man that ever was seen.” The song also featured this nasty couplet: “I smoke my weed and drink my gin, / Paying with the people’s tin.”29 Nobody was more disgusted by the drinking tales than Julia Grant. One morning in Galena, she read a newspaper story that her husband was “in a state of frenzy and is tearing up his mattress, swearing it is made of snakes.” Then she gazed up from her paper and scrutinized her sober husband “dressed in his white linen suit, calmly smoking and reading his paper and smiling at my wrathful indignation, saying, ‘I do not mind that, Mrs. Grant. If it were true, I would feel very badly, perhaps as badly as you do.’”30
Ideologically, Democrats identified Grant as a tool of Radical Republicans and their Reconstruction program. “This is a white man’s country,” ran the party’s motto, “let white men rule.” Frank Blair spewed forth incurably racist remarks, claiming Republicans in the South had promoted “a semi-barbarous race of blacks” who yearned to “subject the white women to their unbridled lust.”31 Thanks to Blair’s vile rhetoric, Democrats ran what the historian David W. Blight has branded “one of the most explicitly racist presidential campaigns in American history.”32 Grant railed at the “desperate and unscrupulous” tactics of Democrats, but Republicans didn’t shy away from invective either, spreading rumors that Horatio Seymour was insane.33
Everybody knew the Jewish issue would surface because of Grant’s notorious General Orders No. 11 during the war, when he had temporarily banned Jews as a class from his military department. A year earlier, Schuyler Colfax had argued against Grant’s nomination because of “the danger of losing at one blow the whole Jew vote, by his having banished the whole of them publicly from his lines at Paducah” during the war.34 The party feared that large concentrations of Jewish Republicans in Cincinnati, St. Louis, and Chicago might defect to the Democrats, dragging entire states down with them. During the campaign, Grant received hundreds of letters from Jewish voters, seeking reassuring explanations for his wartime order.
The publisher Joseph Medill was so upset by a possible Jewish crossover vote to the Democrats that he suggested to Elihu Washburne that Grant submit an expiatory letter to “leading and influential” Jewish leaders as a way of “smoothing the matter over.”35 Grant took personal responsibility, disavowing his wartime order as a thoughtless, misguided action that a moment’s reflection might have blocked. To Isaac Morris, who was Jewish, he insisted in September, “I have no prejudice against sect or race but want each individual to be judged by his own merit.” He admitted that General Orders No. 11 “does not sustain this statement . . . but then I do not sustain that order. It never would have been issued if it had not been telegraphed the moment penned, without one moment’s reflection.”36 This letter traveled widely in the Jewish community. Grant also sat down with David Eckstein, a Jewish leader from Cincinnati, and convinced him that he regretted his wartime action and was free of any anti-Semitic taint. He told the lawyer Simon Wolf that his wartime order was “directed simply against evil designing persons, whose religion was in no way material to the issue.”37 In the end, Jewish voters across the country forgave and endorsed Grant, who began a systematic effort to atone for his atrocious decision.
The black population loaded enormous expectations on Grant, one hopeful black editor predicting that when “Grant becomes President, a great many wrongs would be made right.”38 Blacks still couldn’t vote in many northern states, whereas they could vote in most formerly Confederate states. Blacks associated the Democratic Party with the slaveholding South, making them natural Republican adherents. “Does anybody want a revised and corrected edition of Andrew Johnson in the presidential chair for the next four years?” Frederick Douglass asked rhetorically.39 In an influential essay, he reminded readers that for decades the Democratic Party had existed “to serve the great privileged class at the South.” The marching orders for the black electorate were now clear: usher in Grant “by a vote so pronounced and overwhelming as to extinguish every ray of hope to the rebel cause.”40 One black woman in California so zealously supported Grant that she deferred all clothing purchases for several months, telling a reporter that if “Grant was not elected, she would never want anything more to wear, for she would die.”41
The campaign’s most chilling feature was the huge wave of murder and arson orchestrated by the Ku Klux Klan against black and white Republicans in the South. As state conventions drafted new constitutions that endowed blacks with the franchise, the white South acted to stamp out that voting power through brute force. Nathan Bedford Forrest boasted that the Klan had recruited forty thousand men in Tennessee alone, half a million across the South. This bloodthirsty backlash grew out of simple arithmetic: in South Carolina and Mississippi, blacks made up a majority of the electorate, while in other southern states, the substantial black populace, joined with white Republicans, appeared set to prevail during Reconstruction.
In some southern states, white employers threatened blacks with job losses if they voted Republican, and elsewhere whites resorted to naked violence to dampen Republican electoral prospects. In Opelousas, Louisiana, armed mobs of Democrats wrecked a Republican newspaper office, expelled its editor, and shot as many as two hundred blacks. So egregious was the ubiquitous terror in the state that Grant estimated that between fraud and violence, the Republican vote had been whittled down to a few thousand.42 In Camilla, Georgia, hundreds of armed whites shot indiscriminately into a black election parade, murdering or wounding many marchers. Throughout the South, black organizers were gunned down with impunity and President Johnson, having purged Grant’s best regional commanders, did nothing to halt the mayhem.
Until Election Day, Grant remained secluded in Galena, preferring to be a distant spectator of the campaign and telling Washburne that someone living in Galena would have no idea of a presidential race “if it were not for the accounts we read in the papers of great gatherings all over the country.”43 Grant withdrew into a shell from which he seldom emerged, deferring the “evil day” of returning to Washington until after the election.44 He still urged his Washington staff to withhold letters he received, knowing the majority would come from people badgering him for jobs. One noteworthy reason Grant provided for his Galena isolation was his fear that he might be assassinated before the election.45 Once elected, he thought the incentive to kill him would decline. In typical Grant fashion, he mentioned this to a friend in a matter-of-fact way without elaboration, but Badeau later revealed that Grant received several letters bearing death threats.46
Such fears aside, the one thing that marred Grant’s relative calm was press speculation about his strained relations with Sherman. For Sherman, politics had always been anathema, but he understood that Grant might think otherwise and believed that as president he would give the country “eight years of calm, quiet, firm administration.”47 A purist in his loathing for politics, Sherman refused to provide Grant with a public endorsement that might have swayed some veterans. To subdue talk of a rift in their friendship, Grant went to stay with Sherman at his farm outside St. Louis and professed to understand his reluctance to issue a statement of support. Still he was disappointed Sherman never openly aided his campaign. The problem was less personal than a clash of radically divergent worldviews—Sherman opposed Reconstruction and military occupation of the South—and the gap would only yawn wider in coming years.
The drift of the election was dramatically disclosed in mid-October when Republicans scored victories in Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Indiana, virtually ensuring Grant the presidency. For Orville Browning, Johnson’s conservative interior secretary, such a prospect guaranteed that Reconstruction, which he hated, would be preserved: “Grant will be the next President, and the Country is yet to have darker days, and heavier afflictions than have been endured in the past. The troubles in the Southern States will be aggravated and armies must be kept there to maintain the despotisms of Reconstruction.”48
On November 3, Grant marched off to the polls and voted a straight Republican ticket, omitting only the vote for president. That evening he wandered over to the home of Elihu Washburne, where a telegraph was installed near the front window to speed election results to Galena. Aside from Washburne and a couple of Republican correspondents, it was mostly townspeople who mingled excitedly in the house, Grant being the most imperturbable. “I often saw him show more interest over a game at cards than on that night when the Presidency was played for,” Badeau commented.49 Well after midnight, when Grant learned he had been elected president, he appeared on Washburne’s doorstep to address dozens of citizens who had gathered to celebrate. His speech was curt, as usual. “The responsibilities of the position I feel, but accept them without fear, if I can have the same support which has been given to me thus far.” With a placid demeanor, he promised to make an “annual pilgrimage” back to Galena, which was always afraid of losing him.50
Grant had captured the popular vote by a comfortable but not overwhelming margin, collecting 3,013,000 votes versus 2,709,000 for Seymour. Nonetheless, he won all but eight states and trounced Seymour in an electoral landslide of 214 to 80. Bolstered by black and white carpetbagger votes, all southern states, with the notable exception of Georgia and Louisiana, where Klan violence was rife, tumbled into the Republican column. White violence had also diminished Republican turnout in Tennessee, Alabama, and South Carolina. Grant probably lost the majority of white votes, but hundreds of thousands of black votes made up the difference, an outcome that would add self-interest to idealism as he and other Republicans mobilized to grant black citizens the ballot.
Wending his way back to Washington, Grant remained heedless of death threats, even though his route was widely reported. His less sanguine aides packed guns without telling him. Since Grant had not campaigned, the future course of his administration was unclear. Would he be the Grant of Appomattox or the Grant of Reconstruction? “Already the bitterness and animosity, always engendered by a Presidential campaign, are subsiding,” he wrote a week after the election, sounding like the candidate who had intoned the soothing slogan “Let us have peace.” “I hope now for national quiet and more looking after material interests.”51 But the electorate had divided along sectional and racial lines with no compromise in sight, portending a period of profound turbulence ahead. The South, so often the wartime battleground, had now become a different kind of killing field. Thomas Nast published an election cartoon entitled “Victory!” that showed Grant mounted on a white horse, waving a flag bedecked with the words “Union” and “Equal Rights,” as he thrust his sword into the throat of Horatio Seymour, who sat astride a black horse with the initials “K.K.K.” branded ominously on its flank.52
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WHEN PRESIDENT-ELECT GRANT returned to Washington on November 7, he slipped so unobtrusively into the capital, taking a public coach from the train station to his house, that reporters didn’t know he had returned until they saw him ambling near army headquarters the next day. The first thing awaiting his attention was a stack of more than six hundred letters soliciting jobs. With his old distaste for self-promotion, Grant suspected people who promoted themselves and refused to sift through this tall backlog of letters. Nor did he warm to people who tried to worm their way into his administration. When his brother-in-law Abel Corbin drafted an inaugural address for him, Grant told Badeau to lock it up unread until after his March 4 swearing-in.
Grant preserved an inscrutable silence about his cabinet appointees, declining invitations to dine with people, lest they corner him for information. In one of the more curious interregnums in American history, the tight-lipped president-elect kept the country in suspense as he mulled over his choices. At a time when the spoils system dominated American politics, Grant favored silence to ward off pressure from party bosses, hoping to make selections based purely on merit. With his pronounced streak of autonomy, he regarded any attempt to influence his cabinet choices as unwarranted meddling. “If announced in advance, efforts would be made to change my determination,” he explained, “and, therefore, I have come to the conclusion not to announce whom I am going to invite to seats in the Cabinet until I send in their names to the Senate for confirmation.”53 To guarantee secrecy, he didn’t even deign to discuss appointments with Julia. Henry Adams, debuting in his role as an acerbic gadfly of Grant’s administration, wrote that politicians were “furious at not being consulted.”54 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.”55
Grant wasn’t entirely a political neophyte. He had survived four years as general in chief in a superheated political atmosphere and had made many wartime decisions with distinctly political overtones. Yet he brought to the job no deep knowledge of statecraft and had a special need for experienced advisers. Instead he adopted the secretive, intuitive decision-making style of a general who feared his war plans might leak out. As a West Point graduate, Grant had enjoyed an insider’s knowledge of military personnel during the war, but as a Washington outsider, he needed the valuable advice of seasoned professionals about appointments. So far had the pendulum swung in Grant’s life that the insecure man of the pre–Civil War era now radiated a confidence that could verge on complacency. He wrongly assumed that the skills that had made him successful in one sphere of life would translate intact into another. He entered into no consultative process, engaged in no methodical vetting of people, and sent up no trial balloons to test candidates, making his decisions maddeningly opaque. 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.”56
Outwardly Grant remained his modest, unassuming self. After chatting with him in December, Rutherford B. Hayes wrote that Grant was “cheerful, chatty, and good-natured, and so sensible, clear-headed, and well-informed . . . he remains unspoiled by his elevation.”57 While he refrained from public statements, his private pronouncements exuded optimism. James McCosh, president of Princeton College, said after a conversation with Grant that he “spoke freely, and he expressed his determination to pay the national debt, to reduce the national expenditure, to do what was possible for the Indians, and above all was determined to have peace.”58 Such blithe generalities gave few direct hints of the likely path of his administration.
At a Chicago army reunion in December, James H. Wilson was charmed at how natural Grant remained, unspoiled by his new eminence. “He was as good and plain, and frank, as he always was,” Wilson told a friend. “I never saw so modest or so unselfish a man—and I am sure he will make one of the best presidents we have ever had.”59 Yet Grant struggled with more inward pressure than he admitted and achieved his unexampled calm at a steep psychological price. When he got up to thank his old army comrades, he confessed, “I am now suffering from one of those neuralgic headaches with which I am periodically afflicted, and which prevents me, even were I so inclined, from saying anything farther on this occasion.”60 To Julia, he was more forthcoming about his anxiety. “I have been shaken to pieces . . . and will be glad to get started home.”61 Back in Washington, a perceptive reporter detected an “expression of sadness” in Grant, who seemed “borne down with cares” as he strode about in an ordinary black suit.”62 Doubtless adding to his discomfort was an awkward distance from the lame-duck president with whom he never met. To forestall any unpleasant encounter with Johnson, Grant spent New Year’s Day 1869 in Philadelphia, avoiding the customary call at the executive mansion, and he refused to allow his children to attend a special children’s party there.
About his cabinet decisions Grant kept even Rawlins and Washburne at bay until near the inauguration. The most suspense hung over Rawlins’s fate. “All seem to take it for granted that the General is going to do something very handsome,” Rawlins told his wife, “more than he has ever done for me.”63 When Grant procrastinated in making a decision, Rawlins fell prey to nagging doubts. His medical condition had worsened and he looked haggard and sickly, debilitated by lung congestion coupled with a hacking cough. To alleviate these symptoms, he soaked in salt water and took daily horseback rides on Grant’s black pony Jeff Davis, which did little to retard the course of his tuberculosis. By October 1868, as Rawlins fell apart under the strain of work, Grant wondered whether he could cope with the exacting demands of a cabinet job. His gratitude to Rawlins was boundless, but he didn’t want to burden a gravely ill man with intolerable responsibility.64
Grant decided to assign Rawlins to the military command of the Department of Arizona, where the hot, dry climate might relieve his suffering. When Rawlins learned of this, he grew indignant and said he deserved to be secretary of war. Wilson communicated his displeasure to Grant, who replied at once, “You can tell Rawlins he shall be Secretary of War.”65 Rawlins’s appointment was extremely important, for Grant required a deputy who would protect his reputation and serve as a fearless truth-teller, saving him from personal blunders and protecting his innocent nature from designing politicians.
Grant’s elevation to the presidency opened a vacancy for general of the army with Sherman the clear front-runner. He had monitored Grant’s rise with decidedly mixed emotions, believing that “if forced to choose between the penitentiary and the White House for four years, I would say the penitentiary, thank you.”66 At the Chicago army reunion, Grant, refusing to be coy, pretty much offered him the top army job. Then, in early January, Grant informed Sherman of a startling proposition: a group of New York City businessmen, led by the retail mogul Alexander T. Stewart, had offered to buy his I Street residence for $65,000—“which I insisted was more than the property was worth,” Grant admitted—and then donate it to Sherman.67 Even though he admitted the price was excessive, Grant expressed no scruples about the windfall, which almost doubled the price he had paid. On the day of his inauguration, Grant would nominate Sherman as general of the army and Philip H. Sheridan as lieutenant general, jumping them over George Gordon Meade and a deeply offended Henry W. Halleck.
Intense speculation swirled around what would happen to Grant’s chief patron, Elihu Washburne, who had suffered medical problems and to whom Grant incontestably owed more than anyone else in Washington. In Washburne’s present medical state, Grant doubted that he could handle a taxing job and happily acceded to his desire to become minister to France. At the same time, coveting the prestige of a temporary cabinet position, Washburne advanced a bizarre proposal: he wanted to serve briefly as a cabinet secretary so he could forever claim the title. When he suggested treasury secretary, Grant proposed instead a fleeting stint as secretary of state and Washburne agreed. Even though this arrangement devalued the position of secretary of state, Grant didn’t believe he could reject Washburne’s wishful thinking out of hand. It was a well-meant, but politically maladroit, decision. Washburne would hold the post for only five days, leading one senator to wisecrack, “Who ever heard before of a man nominated [as] Secretary of State merely as a compliment?”68 This odd temporary appointment added to a general impression of Grant as a rank amateur.
Perhaps because business success had eluded Grant, he held wealthy folks in high esteem and selected Alexander T. Stewart for treasury secretary. The Irish-born department store merchant had amassed a colossal fortune in the luxury trade, had faithfully supported Grant, and had spearheaded the money collected for his Washington house. Far from seeing a political payoff involved, Grant saw only a talented businessman willing to sacrifice his economic interests for the sake of public service.
Grant’s fealty to Reconstruction appeared in his choice of an attorney general, whose portfolio would be central to protecting black rights in the South. He turned to Ebenezer Rockwood Hoar, a bespectacled Republican with a grizzled beard, who was born in Concord, Massachusetts, and attended Harvard College and Law School. A former member of the Free-Soil Party, an upright gentleman of starchy integrity, he had served on the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court where he used sarcasm to savage lesser mortals. “When on the bench,” wrote an observer, “he was said to be unhappy because he could not decide against both litigants.”69 In Boston, he belonged to the so-called Saturday Club with Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and Oliver Wendell Holmes. One group luminary, James Russell Lowell, was enamored of Hoar’s intellect: “The extraordinary quickness and acuteness, the flash of his mind (which I never saw matched but in Dr. Holmes) have dazzled and bewildered some people so that they were blind to his solid qualities.”70 Even so hearty a Grant hater as Henry Adams allowed that “in the Attorney-General’s office, Judge Hoar seemed to fill every possible ideal, both personal and political.”71 Hoar loathed the spoils system and Grant would back him in appointing high-caliber judges. Because many of Andrew Johnson’s judicial appointees had shown little concern for black citizens, Congress had introduced nine new circuit judgeships and Grant would name some distinguished progressives to occupy them, including Hugh Lennox Bond, a Republican judge and abolitionist from Baltimore, who championed black education after the war.
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. Grant portrayed Borie as “a merchant who had amassed a large fortune” and was “perfectly fitted for any place”—another example of Grant preferring to view rich businessmen through rose-colored glasses.72 A modest man, Borie tried to decline the office: “I told [Grant] that I did not consider that I knew enough about the navy and naval affairs . . . He said that was all nonsense; that I knew about ships and one thing and another.”73 Borie was in poor health, but Grant intimated he would serve as a figurehead while David Dixon Porter ably ran the department and so he consented to take the job. Borie “is now a mere clerk to Vice-Admiral Porter, not the Secretary of the Navy,” Gideon Welles jeered.74 Borie would last just four months, replaced by the attorney general of New Jersey, George M. Robeson, a roly-poly Princeton graduate with muttonchop whiskers and a sociable bent, who had been a brigadier general in the war. He would prove a capable if often slipshod administrator, shadowed by suspicions of corruption.
For interior secretary, Grant recruited Jacob Dolson Cox, a Union major general and highly literate Oberlin graduate who had rendered distinguished service at Antietam and whom Grant and Sherman had wanted to succeed Stanton as war secretary. As Ohio governor, Cox preached against black suffrage and for racial segregation, making him a conservative member of Grant’s administration. On the other hand, he enjoyed a reputation as an efficient administrator and energetic ally of civil service reform, favoring a merit system for the Department of the Interior, a notorious mare’s nest of corruption. It is important to note that corruption was rife in many departments before Grant took office. In January 1869, the journalist John Russell Young told Washburne that somebody was needed in the Interior Department “who will take the many-headed serpent of robbery and strangle it in its various shapes—Indian Rings, Patent Rings, Stationery Rings and Railroad Rings. This work will, of course, make a tremendous howl among Congress-people.”75
For postmaster general, Grant made a superb choice, selecting John A. J. Creswell of Maryland. A Dickinson College graduate, he had practiced law in Maryland and served as a representative and U.S. senator from the state. Having started out a Democrat, he joined the Radical Republican ranks and became a protégé of Henry Winter Davis, a militant on Reconstruction. There was no job richer in patronage positions than the postmaster general’s—he would employ a veritable army of sixty thousand employees—and Creswell appointed a record number of African American postal workers.76 He introduced new efficiencies into mail delivery by rail and steamship, innovated with a penny postal card, and expanded mail routes.
The frosty relations that had marked Grant’s dealings with Andrew Johnson ever since the feud over Stanton had never thawed. Hence the change of administrations represented one of the more acrimonious power transfers in American history, and the two men traded petty snubs. For two months before the inauguration, the outgoing president dithered over whether to attend. In January, he grumbled that Grant was “a dissembler, a deliberate deceiver” and swore he would not “debase” himself by going to the ceremony.77 Grant failed to extend friendly overtures and refused to share a carriage with Johnson at the inaugural parade. Johnson passed on the chance to ride in a separate carriage. Gideon Welles reminded Johnson that President-elect Andrew Jackson had never called upon John Quincy Adams, who retaliated by boycotting Jackson’s swearing-in. “The President said he was not aware of that fact,” Welles wrote. “It was a precedent for us which he was glad to learn.”78 The upshot was that Johnson stayed doggedly put in the White House until noon on March 4, distracting himself with signing bills and tying up loose ends. A few minutes after noon, he escorted his cabinet to the main entrance portico, where carriages awaited them. “I fancy I can already smell the fresh mountain air of Tennessee,” Johnson said as he departed from the White House forever.79 It was a fitting end to a sad, sometimes shabby, presidency. In future years, bent on a comeback, Johnson was defeated in contests for the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives, although the Tennessee legislature made him a U.S. senator in 1875. “Thank God for the vindication,” Johnson remarked, then died five months after being sworn in.80
In the inaugural parade, Grant and Rawlins, with the Fifth Cavalry as their escort, rode together in an open carriage despite cold, rainy weather, presenting a portrait of the unique partnership that had won the war. At the last moment, Grant relented and stopped his carriage at the White House, inviting Johnson to come along, but the lame-duck president sent back word that he was too busy to comply. The cavalcade then proceeded to Capitol Hill, passing hordes of spectators who had poured into the capital for days. Since Grant was a military hero, the parade possessed a suitably martial air, with eight divisions of marching soldiers, including several black companies. Once at the Capitol, Grant strode into the Senate chamber, where he saw Schuyler Colfax sworn in as vice president, then emerged onto the building’s eastern facade before a vast multitude of perhaps fifty thousand people gathered under gray, gusty skies. He stood calmly during a twenty-two-gun salute in his honor. At forty-six, Grant was still trim and fit, the youngest man elected president until then. Having weathered the crucible of war, he was a more worldly figure than in earlier years, his face showing curiosity, intelligence, and skepticism. Lacking the tall, upright carriage or silver mane of a prototypical politician, Grant, in black suit and yellow kid gloves, looked more like a man on a minor business errand than a statesman embarking on high office. To those who knew him well, he seemed a bit tense, perhaps awed by his removal to a wholly new realm. “That day,” wrote Badeau, “there was no geniality, no familiar jest, hardly a smile.”81
Shortly after noon, just as Andrew Johnson vacated the White House, Grant was sworn in as eighteenth president by Chief Justice Salmon Chase. For Grant, it had been an improbable journey to this moment, with many setbacks intermixed with vaulting triumphs. Jesse Root Grant sat prominently among dignitaries on the eastern portico. He had grown quite deaf and learned to compensate with a booming voice. In the course of the day, he suffered a severe fall, tumbling down a flight of stairs. “It is not probable that his injury will shorten his life,” Grant told his sister Mary, “but will probably make him lame for life.”82 Despite the leg injury, Jesse was hounded by office seekers who saw him as their most convenient conduit for reaching his son.
Despite Jesse’s wealth, he and Hannah still lived in a plain two-story brick house on an unfashionable block in Covington. Hannah didn’t accompany her tightfisted husband to the inauguration, occasioning much press speculation, especially since she never visited Washington during her son’s two terms in office. With her silver hair and kind, maternal face, she remained reticent, shy, and self-contained. “In her old age,” said a journalist, “she had calm winning manners, and a face still sweet and still young.”83 Her absence from Washington may have sent a political message since she came from a family of Jacksonian Democrats. More likely it had to do with the eternal Dent-Grant psychodrama: Hannah detested the Dent clan and didn’t care to meet them in Washington. Jesse tried to coax her into going, but she decided firmly against it when informed she would have to sit among dignitaries. “Do you think I want to set [sic] up there for 50,000 people to gaze & point at?” she told her husband. “I would rather go when there are no strangers there.”84 This attitude says much about Hannah Grant’s plainspoken, homespun ways. Rumors later ran around Covington that at the hour when her son took the oath of office, Hannah was spotted “on the rear porch of her residence, with broom in hand sweeping down the cobwebs.”85
Once the swearing-in ended, Grant fished from his coat pocket the inaugural address that he had kept a secret, releasing no advance copies. In composing it, Grant again displayed the extreme self-reliance that had marked his career. Three weeks earlier, he had given Badeau a handwritten copy, told him to stash it in a drawer, and even hid it from a frustrated Julia. Now he delivered that speech almost verbatim. Once again the secretive Grant had forgone the insights of old political hands who might have made some constructive suggestions. As he began his speech, the huge throng pressed forward to hear his soft, almost inaudible, voice. Most of the speech, a mere twelve hundred words, was businesslike and uninspired. Grant declared himself an independent, not a professional politician: “The office has come to me unsought, I commence its duties untrammeled.”86 Striking the conciliatory Appomattox note, he drew a discreet veil over the violence tearing apart the South and promised to approach remaining war issues “calmly, without prejudice, hate or sectional pride.”87 No one knew better than Grant the war’s cost and he left no doubt that, as a hard-money man, he wished to bolster American credit and pare down debt. “To protect the national honor every dollar of Government indebtedness should be paid in gold unless otherwise expressly stipulated in the contract.”88
The speech lacked soaring cadences or memorable lines, yet it touched on two explosive issues at the finale. He advised Native Americans that their days as a hunting, gathering people were numbered and that he favored “civilization, christianization and ultimate citizenship” for them.89 Then, in sharp contrast to his predecessor, Grant championed black suffrage. “It seems to me very desirable that the question should be settled now, and I entertain the hope . . . that it may be by the ratification of the fifteenth article of amendment to the Constitution.”90 All winter long, he had stood foursquare behind the amendment, telling delegates from the first national black political convention in Washington that as president he would ensure that “the colored people of the Nation may receive every protection which the law gives them.”91 By late February, the amendment, having won the needed two-thirds vote in Congress, went to the states for ratification. It suffered from decided limitations—it disappointed feminists, who hoped it would encompass women, and didn’t bar discriminatory tests to keep blacks from voting—but it qualified as a stunning triumph nonetheless. “Nothing in all history,” William Lloyd Garrison wrote, equaled “this wonderful, quiet, sudden transformation of four millions of human beings from . . . the auction-block to the ballot box.”92 Grant termed it “the most important event that has occurred, since the nation came into life.”93 George Boutwell, who had introduced the proposed amendment in the House, said Grant had thrown his immense prestige behind it and that “its ratification was due, probably, to his advice . . . Had he advised its rejection, or had he been indifferent to its fate, the amendment would have failed.”94
When Grant finished his speech, a wild cheer went up from the crowd and he bowed gratefully. He then bent over, planted a kiss on Julia’s cheek, and handed her the address. “And now, my dear,” he said facetiously, “I hope you’re satisfied.”95 Thirteen-year-old Nellie bounded over in a bright blue dress, golden tresses tumbling down her shoulders, to kiss her father. In a charming gesture, the new president left the platform holding her by one hand and Schuyler Colfax by the other. Grant’s speech was derided as flat and platitudinous. It didn’t announce a transformative presidency, nor did it articulate a sweeping vision or enlist followers in a grand social movement. Still Republicans thought it true and honest, a reflection of Grant’s pragmatic authenticity. “I think it the most remarkable document ever issued under such circumstances,” said James Wilson. “The beauty of it is, that every word of the address is Grant’s.”96 Grant would prove a far more assertive president than his modest inaugural address had suggested.
With the ceremony over, Grant climbed back into his carriage and headed to the White House. He was accompanied by a military escort and joyous black citizens, who celebrated his endorsement of the Fifteenth Amendment, trailing in his wake. By the time he reached the now-empty executive mansion, he was greeted by General John Schofield, his temporary holdover as secretary of war. A small group followed the new president to his office where they partook of drinks and cigars.
When the committee formed to arrange the inaugural ball had convened in January, the bashful Grant had startled them by saying it might be best to skip the affair altogether. Far from heeding his advice, the committee brought forth a ball of unusual opulence, held in an unfinished new wing of the Treasury Department and conducted with something less than military precision. By the time the Grants arrived at 10:30 p.m., with Julia decked out in a white satin dress, it was clear the function had degenerated into an expensive fiasco. More than a thousand guests crowded into an airless space, thick with marble construction dust, and several ladies celebrated the incoming administration by fainting on the spot. Although a blizzard hit the city, nobody had worked out a system to check coats or hats or arrange carriages for departing guests. Some people ended up spending the night in frantic searches for missing wraps, while others slogged home through the snowy mess without their overcoats. Some surely wondered whether these slipshod arrangements presaged trouble ahead for the Grant administration.