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IF THERE WERE MANY small things Grant didn’t know about the presidency, he knew one big thing: his main mission was to settle unfinished business from the war by preserving the Union and safeguarding the freed slaves. As Walt Whitman noted, Grant had signed on for “a task of peace, more difficult than the war itself.”1 The first issue involved money. During the conflict, the federal government had issued reams of bonds and paper currency styled “greenbacks,” running up enormous debt. Grant and Secretary of the Treasury Boutwell were united in wanting to retire that debt. For northern veterans, redeeming the debt counted as a sacred matter, rewarding those who had invested in the war effort. The wartime Congress had promised to pay interest in gold, but a postwar movement took hold to repay money in greenbacks instead. “Every greenback,” Senator Sumner protested, “is red with the blood of fellow-citizens.”2 So it came as no surprise that the first major piece of legislation signed by Grant on March 18, 1869, committed the government to paying off bondholders in “gold or its equivalent” and redeeming paper money “at the earliest practicable period.”3 Persuaded that the restoration of American credit should be his first priority, Grant established his bona fides as a conservative, hard-money man and upheld the honor of the Union cause.
No less committed to the Radical side of the Republican agenda, he signed a bill on March 19 conferring equal rights on blacks in Washington, D.C. The fate of blacks and white Republicans in the South was a far more vexed matter that would dominate Grant’s tenure in office. Everybody agreed that readmitting former Confederate states to the Union was long overdue. Three states—Virginia, Mississippi, and Texas—had yet to resume their rightful place, and Grant saw their harmonious return as an overriding objective. As ever, he had to tread a fine line between retribution and reconciliation. On April 7, he asked Congress to authorize elections in Virginia and Mississippi to ratify new state constitutions, while insisting that those constitutions should “secure the civil and political rights of all persons within their borders,” black and white alike.4 Between January and March 1870, Virginia, Mississippi, and Texas returned to the Union as they pledged to protect black rights.
Virginia seemed the easy success story, electing a northern-born Republican governor, Gilbert C. Walker, allied with Democrats and moderate Republicans. Mississippi, by contrast, with its black majority, would turn into an overheated furnace of violently competing interests. Hope for Reconstruction rested on its provisional Maine-born governor, Adelbert A. Ames, whom Grant also named commander of the Fourth Military District, which encompassed Arkansas as well. With his thick handlebar mustache, long goatee, and high forehead, the thirty-three-year-old Ames had graduated high in his West Point class and won the Medal of Honor for his valor at the first battle of Bull Run. By war’s end he had attained the rank of brevet major general. Soon he would be married to Ben Butler’s daughter. Fired by a crusading spirit, Ames saw carpetbaggers as apostles of “northern liberty” who had “a hold on the hearts of the colored people that nothing can destroy.”5 He oversaw elections for a new Mississippi constitution that made the state eligible for readmission to the Union. “When I took command of this military district,” he recalled, “I found that the negroes who had been declared free by the United States were not free, in fact that they were living under a code that made them worse than slaves; and I found that it was necessary, as commanding officer, to protect them, and I did.”6 Delivering on his promise, Ames appointed the first black officeholders in Mississippi history. Upon entering the U.S. Senate in February 1870, he combated segregation in the U.S. Army and stood in the forefront of the campaign waged against the Ku Klux Klan. For his efforts on behalf of downtrodden blacks, Ames was to brave years of unremitting violence from the white power structure in the state.
One of Grant’s most vocal Mississippi critics was his brother-in-law Judge Lewis Dent. Conservative Republicans had nominated Dent for governor against the more liberal James Alcorn, a prominent planter, hoping Dent’s association with Grant might mislead credulous blacks into supporting him. In fact, far from being sympathetic to black suffrage, Dent believed southern whites possessed a God-given right to rule and that black voting would “inevitably lead to a black-man’s party and eventually to a war of races,” he told Grant. The upshot would be “to alienate from the planters, the ancient confidence and affection of this race.”7 Refusing to bow to nepotism this time, Grant issued a stern warning to Dent that he would resist him. “Personally, I wish you well, and would do all in my power proper to be done to secure your success; but in public matters, personal feelings will not influence me.”8 Dent lost the election.
Grant also began to commit critical federal resources to ensuring black welfare. In 1867 the Bureau of Education had been created to educate freed people, but Congress had consistently slashed its budget, threatening to shut it down. Grant intervened to save it. “With millions of ex-slaves upon our hands to be educated,” he stated, “this is not the time to suppress an office for facilitating education. The Bureau shall have another trial.”9 To guarantee its success, Grant drafted John Eaton, the chaplain who had done superlative work resettling freed slaves during the war and who again enjoyed Grant’s unconditional support. Without Grant, Eaton declared, “the Bureau could hardly have become—what it has been said to be—the most influential office of education in the world.”10
On a personal level, Grant extended an olive branch to Confederate generals. In May 1869, Robert E. Lee came to the White House to discuss a railroad venture. As at Appomattox, Grant attempted to smooth over an awkward situation with a little levity and small talk. “You and I, General,” said Grant, “have had more to do with destroying railroads than building them.”11 Lee would not be drawn into this sort of pleasantry. According to Badeau, he “refused to smile, or to recognize the raillery. He went on gravely with the conversation, and no other reference was made to the past.”12 The diplomat John Lothrop Motley, who was there, detected “a shade of constraint” in Lee’s manner.13 On political matters, Lee worked hard to sound reasonable, expressed approval of the Fifteenth Amendment, and professed to see no “prodigious harm” in permitting blacks to vote. “All the Southern States should be in harmony with the National Government,” he declared.14 But before too long, Lee rose to his feet, bid Grant a frosty farewell, and departed. The two wartime titans were destined never to meet again. Lee died on October 12, 1870.
In another stunning reversal wrought by the war, General Ely Parker, the full-blooded Seneca sachem, emerged as a leading personality in the new administration. On April 13, Grant elevated him to commissioner of Indian affairs, the first Native American to hold the job and the first nonwhite person to ascend to such a lofty government post. With nearly three hundred thousand Indians in the United States and its territories, Parker’s job promised to be one of unfathomable complexity. Indian communities reeled under remorseless threats as railroad, stagecoach, and telegraph lines pushed steadily westward, crisscrossing Indian territory. As settlers traversed Indian hunting grounds, they set off deadly clashes. Gradually Indian tribes were shoved off the Great Plains, where they had hunted buffalo, and herded into drastic new patterns of resettlement.
Aided by Parker, Grant embarked on a Peace Policy with the Indians that was full of high-minded intentions. Outraged by injustices perpetrated against Native Americans, he aimed to clean up a corrupt system of licensed government traders who cheated Indians on their supplies of food, clothing, and shelter and grew indecently wealthy through a veritable sinkhole of graft called the Indian Ring. These lucrative jobs were prime sources of congressional patronage. Grant believed the best way to root out such scoundrels was to remove the whole network of shady agents from the political sphere, relocating the Bureau of Indian Affairs into the War Department. Right before his inauguration, he received a Quaker delegation and asked them to nominate Indian agents from their members. “If you can make Quakers out of the Indians, it will take the fight out of them,” Grant told them. “Let us have peace.”15 Aside from his respect for Quaker pacifism and integrity, Grant knew the society had coexisted peacefully with Indians in Pennsylvania. By the end of his first year in office, Grant had ferreted out many crooked Indian agents, replacing them with Quakers and honest army officers, eliciting howls from congressmen who had once controlled those jobs. At Grant’s behest, Congress also formed a ten-man Board of Indian Commissioners, a civilian watchdog agency staffed by dedicated, nonsalaried figures, to police wrongdoing in the Indian Bureau and reform its procedures.
Many of the same generals who had defeated the Confederacy were now assigned to pacify Native Americans and often betrayed a punitive, bloody attitude, exemplified by Phil Sheridan’s infamous remark “The only good Indians I know are dead.”16 Convinced Native Americans must succumb to a stronger race of white men, Sheridan reviled them as “the enemies of our race and of our civilization,” who had to be confined on reservations or killed.17 During one Indian war in 1867, Sherman advised Sheridan, “The more [Indians] we kill this year, the less we would have to kill next year.”18 Many in Congress had few qualms about pursuing a policy of outright genocide, with one Nevada congressman calling for “extinction. And I say that with a full sense of the meaning conveyed by that word.” A Texas legislator warned that “he who resists gets crushed. That is the history of the wild Indian.”19
Cut from a different cloth, Grant had always shown sympathy for the underdog. Ever since his exposure to West Coast Indians in the 1850s, he had exhibited a touching compassion for their plight, perhaps more than any previous president. “I have lived with the Indians and I know them thoroughly,” he said. “They can be civilized and made friends of the republic.”20 He blamed white settlers for many problems wrongly attributed to Native Americans. Right after Appomattox, he remarked that “the Indians require as much protection from the whites as the white does from the Indians. My own experience has been that little trouble would have ever been had from them but for the encroachments & influence of bad whites.”21 He thought peace with the Indians could be achieved if only the latter renounced their “roving life” and agreed to “fixed places of abode” on reservations.22 Parker espoused an end to the treaty system, contending that treaties could only be made between two sovereign states, whereas Indian tribes were “wards” of the American government.23
Even as he enunciated his Peace Policy, Grant knew frightened settlers demanded tough federal protection and they constituted his ultimate political constituents. Over time, his genuine concern for Indian justice had to reckon with an incessant clamor from railroads, ranchers, and miners for more troops and frontier forts. Spurred by the 1862 Homestead Act and the transcontinental railroad, the country had made a tremendous investment in westward expansion, providing land for white settlers and masses of immigrants. Indians and federal soldiers would trade blows and engage in atrocities across a wide swath of territory. While preaching how it was “much better to support a Peace commission than a campaign against Indians,” Grant would be summoned repeatedly to send arms to western states to defend them against Indian raids.24
In the long run, Grant and Parker planned to extend citizenship to Indians through a gradual, paternalistic process of “humanization, civilization, and Christianization,” as Parker expressed it.25 “A system which looks to the extinction of a race is too abhorrent for a Nation to indulge in,” Grant told Congress in his first annual message in December 1869. As with all his presidential addresses, he composed it himself. “I see no remedy for this except in placing all the Indians on large reservations, as rapidly as it can be done, and giving them absolute protection there.”26 This hopeful, idealistic path, paved with good intentions, had been touted by well-meaning presidents from George Washington to Abraham Lincoln. Grant saw absorption and assimilation as a benign, peaceful process, not one robbing Indians of their rightful culture. Whatever its shortcomings, Grant’s approach seemed to signal a remarkable advance over the ruthless methods adopted by some earlier administrations.
Urging Native Americans to resettle on reservations and take up an agricultural economy was an ultimately quixotic idea that never gained much traction among the tribes. Most Native Americans didn’t care to be “civilized” on Grant’s terms. For them, any renunciation of their hunting traditions meant an unrelenting annihilation of their ancient culture. At the same time, the butchery of vast buffalo herds on the Great Plains by white men, many killed for commercial leather or pure sport, spelled doom for the Indian way of life. Grant favored mercy toward Indians who abided by his solution, but ended up having to deal severely with those who roamed beyond their reservations and clashed with westward settlement by whites.
Government relations with Indians soured in January 1870 after the U.S. cavalry under Major Eugene M. Baker massacred 173 Piegan Blackfeet in the Montana Territory, the vast majority of them women, children, and the elderly. Many were roasted alive when their tepees were set ablaze or hacked apart with axes. Sheridan had likely contributed to the ferocity by hectoring Baker to “strike them hard!” and he blithely characterized the massacre as “well-merited punishment.”27 The episode mocked Grant’s Peace Policy and prompted a congressional backlash against the army’s handling of Indian relations. This led to banning military officers as Indian agents, a move that was partly Congress’s way of reclaiming the lucrative patronage powers lost to it.
Grant refused to regress to the seamy ways of the past. Building on his successful experience of employing Quaker agents, he expanded the idea to encompass other Protestant denominations and Roman Catholics. Religious groups would nominate people and the interior secretary selected them. When Grant’s go-between with the Jewish community, Simon Wolf, protested the exclusion of Jews, Grant said he would be glad to recognize the “Israelites,” naming Dr. Herman Bendell as superintendent of Indian affairs for the Arizona Territory.28 He was later celebrated as the first Jewish settler to plant stakes in Phoenix, Arizona. The presence of Jewish agents fit incongruously with the Christianizing mission proclaimed by Grant. Within a few years, Grant hoped his policy would “bring all the Indians on to reservations, where they will live in houses, have schoolhouses and churches, and will be pursuing peaceful and self sustaining avocations.”29 Again Grant seemed well-meaning but naive in thinking nomadic Indians would repudiate their past and suddenly mimic the ways of the white men who had forcibly dispossessed them of their tribal lands.
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ULYSSES S. GRANT had an obsessive side to his nature—a quietly obsessive side, but no less tenacious for all that. This pit-bull vigor had served him well in the military, making him the scourge of the Confederacy. Yet in politics, where a certain lightness of touch and flexibility were essential, such obstinacy could easily backfire. During his presidency, Grant came to dwell obsessively on annexing Santo Domingo—the Spanish-speaking half of the island of Hispaniola, today’s Dominican Republic—and found it hard to let the controversial issue drop.
As with many large mistakes, it stemmed from deceptively small beginnings. Early in the new administration, Colonel Joseph W. Fabens, a New England expatriate and speculator, filed a glowing report with Secretary of State Fish that idealized the rich mineral, agricultural, and timber resources of Santo Domingo. Serving as an emissary from President Buenaventura Báez, he peddled the Caribbean country to the United States as if it were a high-priced real estate parcel: “The annexation of this country to the United States should be an acquisition of great value.”30 The proposal envisaged nothing less than the final conversion of Santo Domingo into a full-fledged American state, or series of states. Fabens and his ally General William L. Cazneau were, in fact, shady operators who had booked considerable land holdings on the island and stood to pocket large profits if the United States absorbed the small country.
Fish was annoyed by Fabens’s persistence. Still, as a dutiful secretary of state, he conveyed the proposal to the cabinet in early April while withholding even tepid support. Grant showed no special partiality for the idea and seemed “a listener rather than a participant in the debate,” recalled Secretary of the Interior Cox.31 But Grant was intrigued by the magnificent harbor at Samaná Bay, which had the makings of a coaling station for naval ships. During the war, the Lincoln administration had recognized the strategic advantages of a Caribbean naval base in guarding sea lanes for boats bound for the isthmus of Panama, protecting East Coast trade with the Pacific.
No sudden whim of Grant’s, American involvement with Santo Domingo stretched back into earlier presidencies. In 1846 President Polk had dispatched David Porter to scrutinize Samaná Bay as a possible American naval depot. In 1854 President Pierce named Cazneau a special commissioner to Santo Domingo. Taking up residence there, he inveigled lucrative concessions for himself from the local government while urging the Dominican government to lease the bay to the United States.
For an assortment of reasons good and bad, the Caribbean had long been scouted as a haven for freed American slaves. While some racists simply wanted to export as many blacks as possible, many abolitionists had approved “colonization” plans as long as they were voluntary and fully protected blacks. In 1858 Abraham Lincoln joined the board of managers of the Illinois Colonization Society and three years later lobbied Congress to allocate funds for territory outside the United States to relocate freed slaves. In 1862 the United States established diplomatic relations with Haiti and Liberia with an eye to their being future destinations for emancipated slaves. By the time Lincoln promulgated the Emancipation Proclamation, he foresaw a biracial America and had cooled forever on such colonization schemes.
After Spain withdrew from Santo Domingo in 1865, it became one of the few West Indian islands free of European control. With a tiny population of 150,000, it had an educated elite of Spanish ancestry along with mulattoes and Indians, many of whom welcomed an American protectorate. In 1866 Secretary of State Seward sent his son Frederick and Admiral Porter, fortified by a boatload of gold, to negotiate the purchase or extended lease of Samaná Bay. They were entertained by that man for all seasons, William L. Cazneau. The negotiations failed because of a recent revolutionary struggle. It is important to note that after the Civil War, territorial expansion and imperialism were very much in the air, William Seward having bought Alaska for $7.2 million and begun maneuvers to acquire Hawaii.
By October 1868, the Báez government arrived at a favorable view of American annexation. Fervent support sprang from Congressman Ben Butler, who had been liberally bribed by Joseph Fabens with land on Samaná Bay. In January 1869, Butler promised Fabens he would see President-elect Grant to “secure his friendly cooperation.”32 Meanwhile, President Johnson told Congress he favored annexing all of Hispaniola—Haiti and Santo Domingo combined. In the administration’s waning days, Seward worked tirelessly for annexation, so that the Santo Domingo scheme was in some respects a holdover from previous administrations.
Grant portrayed himself as a passive spectator of the scheme’s evolution. In his first year as president, he explained, “the proposition came up for the admission of Santo Domingo as a territory of the Union. It was not a question of my seeking but was a proposition from the people of Santo Domingo . . . which I entertained.”33 The project began to cast a peculiar spell over his tenacious imagination. In a handwritten memorandum entitled “Reasons why San Domingo should be annexed to the United States,” he showed just how fully he had pondered the issue.34 Noting the country’s land area of twenty thousand square miles, he praised its mineral wealth, stores of timber, tobacco, tropical fruits, and dyes and cited plentiful sugar and coffee supplies that could slash prices for American consumers. With considerable prescience, he foresaw that the “Isthmus of Darien” would someday have a canal drawing a substantial share of world commerce and a naval base at Samaná would command its gateway. Annexing Santo Domingo could also break British domination of the Caribbean, which forced American vessels “to pass through foreign waters.”35
But for Grant the most potent argument related to the aftermath of American slavery. Santo Domingo, he asserted, was “capable of supporting the entire colored population of the United States, should it choose to emigrate.”36 He emphasized that this was not a colonization or deportation scheme. He was by no means urging African Americans to emigrate to the Caribbean island, but simply acknowledging that it could function as a critical safety valve if white Americans refused to honor their rights: “The present difficulty in bringing all parts of the United States to a happy unity and love of country grows out of the prejudice to color. The prejudice is a senseless one, but it exists.”37 If a black person could resort to a Caribbean sanctuary, Grant reasoned, “his worth here would soon be discovered, and he would soon receive such recognition as to induce him to stay.”38 Or, as he subsequently wrote: “If two or three hundred thousand blacks were to emigrate to St. Domingo . . . the Southern people would learn the crime of Ku Kluxism, because they would see how necessary the black man is to their own prosperity.”39 The memorandum shows Grant in a visionary frame of mind, grappling with large issues of racial justice. Blacks would enjoy the option of resettling outside the continental United States, yet remain citizens under the full jurisdiction of the federal government: “I took it that the colored people would go there in numbers, so as to have independent states governed by their own race. They would still be States of the Union, and under the protection of the General Government; but the citizens would be almost wholly colored.”40
Although one thousand blacks had emigrated to Liberia in 1866 and 1867 under the aegis of the American Colonization Society, the idea of such emigration lost support among many blacks during Reconstruction as they gained full rights to citizenship. This progress limited, but by no means eliminated, black support for annexing Santo Domingo. Still, Grant’s policy contained a substantial element of wishful thinking. A black asylum in the Caribbean could create an incentive for whites to expel blacks from the continental United States, while Caribbean states with all-black constituencies might not fare very well in the domestic political arena.
As Santo Domingo emerged as a potent political issue, its supporters issued a stream of articles presenting it as a tropical paradise—“the garden of the Antilles” and the “finest part of the whole West Indies.”41 A steady drumbeat of criticism arose from those who spied a huge boondoggle being foisted on the country by unscrupulous speculators. “The signs are,” warned the New York World, “that there is a powerful combination in this country to annex the [West Indian] islands by some hook or crook, not from any considerations of public advantage, but merely as a large speculation in real estate and colonial debts.”42 There also emerged sotto voce grumbling against a Caribbean country where Spanish was spoken, many people were of mixed race, Roman Catholicism was practiced, and there was no history of American-style democracy.
In July 1869, Grant took a decisive step that moved Santo Domingo from theoretical question to practical reality. Meeting his cabinet, he “casually remarked that the navy people seemed so anxious to have the bay of Samana as a coaling station that he thought he would send Colonel [Orville] Babcock down to examine it and report upon it as an engineer,” wrote Secretary of the Interior Cox.43 Babcock, with his background as a military engineer, seemed a logical choice for the assignment. Even those opposed to the trip didn’t object vociferously and Babcock slipped away without publicity. On July 13, Grant wrote to President Báez apropos of Babcock: “I have entire confidence in his integrity and intelligence, and I commend him to your excellency accordingly.”44
Before Babcock sailed, Grant startled his cabinet by announcing that a group of New York merchants who traded with Santo Domingo had offered him free passage on one of their ships. When Fish objected to such a flagrant conflict of interest, Grant backed down and agreed that a naval vessel should carry him to the Caribbean instead. With that conversation, the cabinet began to suspect that unseen business forces were operating upon Grant and that he had established a series of back channels to Santo Domingo. Traveling there without special diplomatic authority from Fish, Babcock was only authorized to gather information, but Grant gave him orders to sound out Báez on annexation and Babcock happily complied.
When Babcock arrived in Santo Domingo in late July, his hand strengthened by an escort of American warships, he found local denizens “ignorant but not indolent.”45 When he posed the question of annexation, not everyone greeted the idea, but he thought they would reverse course once the first steps were undertaken. Babcock ended up grossly exceeding his authority, negotiating a full-dress agreement instead of merely gathering facts. On September 4, President Báez signed a treaty by which the United States would annex Santo Domingo and assume its public debt of $1.5 million or else purchase Samaná Bay outright for $2 million. It included an understanding that Grant would apply all his power to lobby the treaty in Congress in a secretive atmosphere. Santo Domingo would be admitted as a U.S. territory, then eventually as a state.
When Babcock returned to Washington, bearing this unexpected document, the news elicited a shocked reaction from Grant’s cabinet and Fish was horrified that Babcock had exceeded his directions. “What do you think!” he exclaimed to Cox privately. “Babcock is back, and has actually brought a treaty for the cession of San Domingo; yet I pledge you my word he had no more diplomatic authority than any other casual visitor to the island!”46 According to Cox, an exasperated Fish wished to bury the whole matter in “oblivion as a state secret.”47
When secretaries arrived at the next cabinet meeting, they discovered that Babcock had laid out mineral samples from the island, openly advertising its wares. Fish and Cox had expected Grant to repudiate the treaty, but he endorsed it instead. “I suppose it is not formal,” he confessed, Babcock having “had no diplomatic powers; but we can easily cure that. We can send back the treaty, and have Perry, the consular agent, sign it; and as he is an officer of the State Department it would make it all right.”48 Cabinet members sat there in thunderstruck silence. “But Mr. President,” Cox inquired, “has it been settled, then, that we want to annex San Domingo?” Cox said that Grant blushed, “smoked hard at his cigar,” and finally ended a painful pause by changing the subject. Henceforth, Grant took diplomatic matters into his own hands. He instructed Fish to draw up two treaties: one for annexation, another for taking over Samaná Bay. Fish had a racial aversion to absorbing the Dominican Republic and was, at best, a lukewarm supporter who humored Grant to gain a freer hand on other matters. By December, Grant had in hand the two treaties negotiated by Babcock.
The president didn’t anticipate what a hard sell Santo Domingo annexation would be, involving a tropical, Spanish-speaking, Roman Catholic nation inhabited by dark-skinned people. He committed fatal errors by pursuing this momentous policy in a closed-door, top-down style that made sense in wartime, but not in politics. He didn’t prepare the American electorate or mobilize public opinion or rally voters to his side. Grant hadn’t yet learned the art of appealing to the public over the heads of Washington legislators, presenting himself as steward of a broader public interest. The absence of a systematic marshaling of public opinion hurt Grant in jousting with senators who had to approve the treaty, especially Charles Sumner, august chairman of the Committee on Foreign Relations. Fearing that Haitian independence would be compromised by Dominican annexation next door, he emphatically opposed U.S. expansion there. Sumner’s pronouncements were decrees that other political figures defied at their peril. Headstrong and imperious, he resented any treaty hatched without his personal blessing, and Grant would experience the full force of his towering fury before the Santo Domingo imbroglio was finally laid to rest.
Cuba was the other locus of controversy in the Caribbean. As with American attitudes toward Santo Domingo, it was sometimes hard to differentiate between humanitarian concerns and imperialist swagger. Right before Grant became president, Cuban insurgents launched a campaign to oust their Spanish colonial overlords, provoking brutal reprisals. In Grant’s cabinet, a stentorian voice for aiding the rebels and recognizing their provisional government was the emaciated John Rawlins. As always, he approached the issue with evangelical conviction, arguing for the expulsion of all European authority from the Western Hemisphere. As Grant’s right-hand man, he commanded special respect in the cabinet and remained as outspoken as during the war. Although severely depleted by the tuberculosis that had harried him for years, Rawlins rallied during his first months as war secretary, perhaps stimulated by his new powers, and promoted his ideas in his usual animated style.
Never one to traffic in halfway measures, Rawlins wanted to champion Cuban rebels as the first step in a policy that foresaw annexation of the island. The prospect of war with Spain didn’t seem to frighten him. Before the Civil War, the impetus for Cuban annexation had come from the South, which saw a new outpost for slavery. After the war, many northerners, including prominent blacks, favored ending Spanish domination of Cuba to rid the island of slavery, casting Cuban rebels in a heroic light. Believing the rebels would prevail, Grant leaned toward Rawlins’s views and considered recognizing the insurgents as a belligerent power. They had to contend, however, with the ever-cautious Fish, who thought it foolhardy to risk war with Spain right after the Civil War. With the United States preparing for major negotiations with Great Britain on wartime claims, Fish was in no mood to engage in side battles in the Caribbean. Having already given anemic support to Grant’s Santo Domingo venture, he chose to go no further in the region. He was disturbed that filibustering expeditions against Cuba set sail from American ports with Union and Confederate veterans signed up by the Cuban revolutionary junta in New York.
However much he was exasperated by John Rawlins, who kept poaching on his territory, Fish recognized that the ailing war secretary was a good-hearted soul, motivated by pure feelings. “He is a generous, high-spirited, and right-minded (impulsive) man,” Fish wrote, “instinctively right in the direction of his impulses, even if occasionally extravagant.”49 At the same time, Fish realized that Rawlins’s bombastic rhetoric and impetuous nature could lead to reckless moves in the Caribbean that undermined his own work at State.
Despite sympathy for the Cuban rebels, Grant tread a fine line between neutrality and intervention. He was outraged in June when Spanish authorities executed two Americans in eastern Cuba, inflaming American public opinion. Still, Grant acted swiftly to end anti-Cuban raids originating on American soil, and, prodded by Fish, threatened to use military force to halt them. Grant was always willing to listen to contrary opinions. A year later, profoundly grateful to Fish, he thanked him for his restraint on Cuban intervention, saying, “You led me against my judgment at the time . . . and I now see how right it was—and I desire most sincerely to thank you.”50 It was owing to Fish’s professionalism that Grant refrained from recognizing Cuban belligerency, which might have resulted in war with Spain.
In late August 1869, when Spain perpetrated fresh atrocities in Cuba, the American press seethed with denunciations. In the New York Sun, Charles Dana declared that America was now duty-bound “to interfere in Cuba” and terminate the heinous bloodshed wrought by Spain.51 Internecine battles over Cuba in Grant’s cabinet came to a head on August 31, when Rawlins and Fish arrived for a showdown. Rawlins appeared with a deathly pallor, his eyes starting in their deep-set sockets. After visiting his pregnant wife in Connecticut, he had suffered a hemorrhage en route to Washington, then another after he arrived. Cabinet members were stunned by his cadaverous visage. Seated next to Grant, looking ravaged, he mustered enough energy for one final diatribe on behalf of Cuban insurgents. More overwrought than usual, he turned to Grant and asked forgiveness for his sustained outburst. “I have been your adjutant,” he apologized, “and I think you will excuse me for being earnest.” “Certainly,” Grant said tenderly, “and you are still my adjutant.”52
While the discussion percolated at a low boil, Grant scribbled on a sheet of paper, setting down conditions under which the United States could mediate peace between Spain and Cuba and buy Cuba in the process. As at Appomattox, Grant drafted a letter-perfect document in an attempt to bring a complex situation, fraught with danger, to a peaceful termination. When finished, he shoved the paper across the table to Fish, saying, “There is my decision.”53 The peace process would start with an immediate armistice, Cuba would compensate Spain for public property, and Spaniards on the liberated island would be free to remain or leave. Once slavery was abolished, the United States would purchase Cuba. When these terms leaked to the press in Madrid, the Spanish public reacted with explosive outrage, appalled at having to bicker with the United States over Cuba. The ferocious reaction snuffed out any hopes of a negotiated end to the conflict.
In his year-end speech in December 1869, Grant reviewed the star-crossed Cuban initiative, explaining that he had not recognized the insurgents as a belligerent power because they lacked ports, courts, or a permanent seat of government. He lamented that Spain had spurned his deal and stressed that he wasn’t swapping American for European colonialism, invoking self-determination as his guiding principle: “These [Caribbean] dependencies are no longer regarded as subject to transfer from one European power to another. When the present relation of Colonies ceases they are to become independent powers, exercising the right of choice, and of self-control in the determination of their future condition.”54
John Rawlins put on a brave front as he struggled with his terrible cough and alarming medical troubles. “My health is much improved this summer,” he told a friend on August 19, whistling in the dark, “though for two weeks past I have been a little under the weather.”55 He had already soldiered on far longer than friends had thought possible. In making his militant case for Cuba, Rawlins believed “he had over-exerted himself . . . for from that excitement his disease redoubled its violence, and his frame, already exhausted, was too weak to resist,” wrote Ely Parker.56 Rawlins remained the earnest figure he had always been, motivated by deep patriotism and personal fidelity to Grant, but the strain now proved overwhelming. Right after the Cuban cabinet debate, his health collapsed altogether and death seemed imminent. “Poor Rawlins at this moment is very ill,” wrote Fish. “I fear that his disease (consumption) has the entire mastery of him, and that he has not long to labor.”57 Unable to visit the War Department, he had aides transfer urgent papers to his residence. As he lay dying, a flock of generals—Ely Parker, William T. Sherman, Oliver O. Howard, and Montgomery Meigs, among them—stood vigil by his bedside, visibly distraught. “If the love of my friends could do it,” Rawlins remarked sadly, “I would soon be a healthy man.”58
With time running out, Rawlins, thirty-eight, brooded about his young family’s future. His wife had just given birth to a stillborn baby, news carefully withheld from him. He began to dictate a will to Parker, appointing “my friend Genl Ulysses S. Grant” as guardian of his three children and his wife. It was a poignant tribute to the man who had transformed his life and by whom he had stood so ably. As he lay dying, Rawlins yearned to see Grant one more time and seemed pained by his absence. “Hasn’t the old man come yet?” he asked plaintively.59 Rawlins was so palpably upset by his absence that when he inquired, “When will he get here?” Sherman had to console him with a lie: “In about ten minutes.”60 Sherman secretly dashed off a telegram to Grant, now in Saratoga, describing Rawlins’s anxiety to see him one last time. When Grant got the telegram, the last train for the day had already left, forcing him to postpone his departure. “The most recent dispatches scarcely leave a hope that I may see [Rawlins] alive,” he told a colleague.61
Those present at Rawlins’s bedside kept promising the dying man he would see Grant one last time. Thwarted by logistical mishaps, Grant’s train didn’t arrive in Washington until 5:20 p.m. on September 6. Rawlins had expired an hour earlier, with an attendant physician intoning, “The soul of Grant’s Cabinet is gone.”62 When Grant arrived at the deathbed, he stared mournfully at his friend’s ashen face and declared he had hoped to be there earlier. The doctor mentioned that Rawlins had frequently spoken his name. Overcome with emotion, Grant could only refer to the train delays that had stalled him. His failure to be at the bedside when Rawlins died led to wounding charges of neglect. “I knew personally of [Grant’s] constant and devoted attentions to his friend,” said John Eaton, “but many people chose to believe the sensational and libellous reports.”63 Likely feeling guilty, Grant wished to maintain a vigil by the corpse during the night, but Sherman, knowing he was exhausted by the journey and shaken by the death, convinced him to go to the White House, where he wrote to Emma Rawlins of her husband’s demise: “Your beloved husband expired at twelve minutes after four o’clock this afternoon, to be mourned by a family and friends who loved him for his personal worth and services to his country, and a nation which acknowledges its debt of gratitude to him.”64
The death provoked a vast outpouring of grief, and Senator George Spencer of Alabama said, “I have never known a man more universally mourned.”65 “Poor Rawlins has gone to a happier office!” sighed Adolph Borie. “A noble fellow, truly, he was so pure zealous and earnest.”66 On the day of the funeral, the route from the War Department to the Congressional Cemetery was crowded with mourners tipping their hats or bowing in homage as the cortege rolled by. It was a remarkable tribute to a man never elected to office who had thrived in Grant’s shadow. No organization chart could evoke the influence he had wielded as Grant’s trusted counselor. A month later, James Wilson sent an appreciation of him to Orville Babcock:
The death of Rawlins is more deeply regretted by the thinking and knowing men of the country than it otherwise would have been, on account of the fact that it had come to be recognized by them, that he was the President’s best friend & most useful counsellor when engaged in renouncing rascality, which the President’s unsuspicious nature has not dreamed of being near. You and I know how necessary, the bold, uncompromising, & honest character of our dead friend, was to our living one—and how impossible it is for any stranger to exercise as good an influence over him, as one who has known him from the time of his obscurity till the day he became the foremost man of the nation. The long and short of it is that Rawlins, was his Mentor—or if I may say it, his conscience keeper.67
After Rawlins died, Sherman served briefly as acting secretary of war, encouraging Grant to name William W. Belknap, a tall, burly Iowan with curly hair and a long, square-shaped beard and a background in law and politics, as permanent secretary. Born in Newburgh, New York, and educated at Princeton and Georgetown, Belknap had fought with distinction at Shiloh and Vicksburg and joined Sherman on the march to the sea, ending the war as a brevet major general. Sherman had bristled at how Rawlins had lodged power in the War Department, reducing his own influence as chief general. He was shocked that when he complained to Grant, the latter sided with Rawlins, and their friendship never quite recovered from the difference of opinions. Even though Sherman had recommended Belknap as war secretary, he shuddered at how Belknap also circumvented him on military matters. Grant promised to arbitrate, but never did, further deepening Sherman’s disenchantment with his old comrade.
With his unrivaled candor, Rawlins had occupied a special niche in Grant’s life that nobody could re-create. Selflessly protective of Grant’s reputation, Rawlins would have warned the president against predatory, designing figures who encircled him in Washington. He would have detected wrongdoers and been a stalwart voice against corruption, elevating the ethical tone at the executive mansion. With Rawlins gone, Grant lacked that one trusted adviser upon whose judgment he could implicitly rely. Stung by criticism, Grant would retreat into silence and lick his wounds. Rawlins might have penetrated that reserve. Into the vacuum left by Rawlins moved crafty, cynical politicians for whom the credulous Grant was often no match.
In future years, Grant discharged many offices of friendship to his fallen comrade. He successfully prodded Congress to appropriate money for a bronze equestrian statue of Rawlins in the capital. He also served as guardian of the three young Rawlins children, contributed liberally to their support, paid for their boarding schools in Connecticut, and helped them obtain jobs.
John Rawlins inspired intense affection among friends, a feeling heightened by his premature death. A small cult sprang up dedicated to the proposition that Rawlins had been the unacknowledged genius of the Civil War—that it was Rawlins’s military insights that had been decisive and that Grant cheated Rawlins of his just deserts. The main acolytes for this view were James H. Wilson, the journalist Sylvanus Cadwallader, and General William S. Hillyer, who had served on Grant’s wartime staff.
Those who tended the sacred flame of Rawlins believed Grant came to resent his dependency on him, especially when people gave Rawlins credit for his own success. General John E. Smith contended that certain people “did succeed in alienating Grant from Rawlins. He, Rawlins, felt it keenly and often complained of it.”68 Wilson was “sure that Rawlins’s domination over Grant was so pronounced that when Rawlins died Grant felt relieved.”69 The Rawlins acolytes believed Grant had destroyed incriminating letters that might have cast Rawlins in a better, and Grant in a lesser, wartime light, although this allegation has never been proven.
This belief in Rawlins as the war’s neglected genius flamed into a full-blown crusade when Grant later published his Memoirs and only made brief, fleeting references to his dead comrade. Sherman thought the omission deliberate, but not for the reasons advanced by Rawlins’s admirers: “Some of Rawlins’ flatterers gave out the impression that he, Rawlins, had made Grant, and had written most of his orders and dispatches at Donelson, Shiloh and Vicksburg—Grant disliked to be patronized—and although he always was most grateful for all friendly service he hated to be considered an ‘accident.’”70
It does no disservice to the estimable John A. Rawlins to state that his importance lay in his auxiliary services to Grant. Through four years of fighting, Rawlins kept Grant’s drinking problem within manageable bounds. He was an inspired choice as chief of staff and extremely valuable as a vocal devil’s advocate, sometimes questioning Grant’s tactical moves where others feared to tread. He was also an indispensable intermediary to a man who could be taciturn and inhibited. Nevertheless, in the last analysis, Rawlins could never have substituted his judgment for Grant’s superior military acumen.