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IN HIS YEAR-END MESSAGE to Congress in December 1869—Congressman George F. Hoar said Grant wrote it “without pause or correction, and as rapidly as his pen could fly over the paper”—the president evoked a thriving nation of nearly forty million people that, spurred on by the war, an industrial boom, and westward expansion, had blossomed into a global power, strong in manufacturing and stretching across the continent.1 To bind the eastern and western seaboards more tightly, he proposed a survey of the Isthmus of Darien as a possible site for a canal connecting the Atlantic and the Pacific—a visionary project that possessed his imagination for the rest of his life. The need for internal unity was paramount for Grant. He chided Georgia, which had ratified a new constitution, for having “unseated the colored members of the legislature.” Striking a very different tone from Andrew Johnson, he paid tribute to the impressive strides registered by former slaves: “The freedmen . . . are making rapid progress in learning, and no complaints are heard of lack of industry on their part where they receive fair remuneration for their labor.”2 With the Republican Party now straddling former abolitionists and conservative businessmen, Grant gave voice to both impulses. A hard-money man, he favored a gradual return to a dollar redeemable in gold, a moderate tariff to raise government revenue and protect business, and a modest income tax. He professed pleasure that the federal budget enjoyed a robust surplus.
Grant’s message showed marks of inexperience. Inordinately long, it delved into too many policy details and quoted verbatim from internal reports. It papered over blunders he had committed during his first year in office. Still he seemed to learn from his errors and sounded sanguine about the country’s mood. “Everything seems to be progressing well in the United States,” he informed Elihu Washburne. “Our currency is increasing in value . . . and on the whole I think a very healthy political feeling is springing up.”3
Grant was about to grapple with a grave challenge from Charles Sumner on Santo Domingo. He now had in hand the two-part treaty, negotiated by Orville Babcock, for a fifty-year lease of Samaná Bay and a gradual absorption, after a national referendum, of the Dominican republic into the United States. Grant’s cabinet was allowed to speak openly about the Samaná Bay deal, but was sworn to secrecy about Dominican annexation until the New Year. When President Báez worried about his future, Grant dispatched seven American warships to Dominican waters to assuage his concerns. In late February, Báez conducted the promised plebiscite on the American treaty and resorted to strong-arm tactics. The one-sided tally of 15,169 for annexation and only 11 against highlighted the vote’s coercive nature. It was a foolish act of bullying by Báez, since many observers agreed that the Dominican people genuinely favored an American union and would have delivered a safe majority through honest methods.
On Sunday evening January 2, 1870, Grant swallowed his presidential pride, suppressed his distrust of Sumner, and strolled across Lafayette Square to pay an impromptu call at the senator’s house. It was an extraordinary move by a president on behalf of a treaty. Grant insisted he did not go to persuade Sumner to support the treaty but only to explain why it was conducted in secrecy: he feared that if word leaked out, harmful speculation in Dominican debt might ensue. He also wanted to outline for Sumner the island’s ample resources and convey the Dominican people’s desire for American annexation. Then dining with John W. Forney, a newspaper publisher and recent secretary of the Senate, and the journalist Ben Perley Poore, Sumner was startled by Grant’s sudden appearance. When proffered a glass of sherry, Grant declined while assuring the two guests they could stay during his chat with Sumner.
After some talk about the treaty, Sumner broached a seemingly unrelated topic. He had received a letter from his friend James M. Ashley, who was being ousted by Grant as governor of the Montana Territory. He issued a plea to retain him or name him to a new position. Grant, visibly annoyed, couldn’t understand why on earth he should appoint a man he had just fired. Sumner read aloud two pages from Ashley’s letter, later admitting he had been crass, “taking too great a liberty with [Grant] in my own house, but I was irresistibly impelled by loyalty to an absent friend.”4 Slow to fathom Sumner’s ploy, Grant never dreamed of any quid pro quo between keeping Ashley and senatorial assent to the treaty. “It never occurred to me that [Sumner] tried to purchase a commission for Ashley by giving his support to the San Domingo treaty,” Grant told Hamilton Fish. “But in the light of his subsequent conduct, and the readiness of his friends to impute improper motives to you and I, it is a much fairer inference to impute such motives to him.”5 Wisconsin senator Timothy Howe corroborated Grant’s suspicion: “I have never doubted that Mr. Sumner . . . resolved to make his support of the treaty conditional upon Ashley’s restoration.” When Grant replaced Ashley with Ohio politician Benjamin F. Potts, Howe witnessed Sumner’s incandescent display of wrath: “I never saw him so excited as when Potts was confirmed in place of Ashley.”6
Grant left the talk with the decided impression that Sumner was “pleased” with the proposed treaty, having expressed a desire to see a draft.7 John Forney walked away with a similar impression that Sumner admitted he “would cheerfully support the treaty.” The intransigent Sumner would hotly contest this. He insisted the language was “fixed absolutely in my memory: ‘Mr. President,’ I said, ‘I am an Administration man, and whatever you do will always find in me the most careful and candid consideration.’”8 Secretary of the Treasury Boutwell, who dropped by Sumner’s house while Grant was there, corroborated his boss’s memory. When Sumner ended his defense of Ashley, Boutwell said, “the President rose, moved toward the door and repeated his remark that he would send the papers in the morning by Gen. Babcock. Mr. Sumner then said, after thanking the President, ‘I expect Mr. President to support the measures of your administration.’”9 When Babcock laid the treaty before Sumner a day or two later, the senator again—in Grant’s recollection—expressed unequivocal approval of it.
The misunderstanding between Grant and Sumner was to be, in the words of a Sumner biographer, “the turning point in Grant’s administration and in Sumner’s career as well.”10 By now, the Santo Domingo treaty had become Grant’s pet policy, his private obsession, and Sumner’s betrayal would rankle for years. He had also been offended by Sumner’s condescending manner. Perhaps recollecting that night, Grant made this telling remark: “Sumner is the only man I was ever anything but my real self to; the only man I ever tried to conciliate by artificial means.”11
On January 10, Grant conveyed two documents to the Senate—one to lease Samaná Bay, the other to annex the Dominican republic. For Grant, annexation was a patently good thing and he was mystified why it didn’t generate more popular enthusiasm. However wrongheaded, the treaty was an ambitious undertaking upon which Grant staked his prestige, and any resistance to it aroused his fighting instincts. “When he was once engaged in battle,” Badeau noted, “he was always anxious to win.”12 But it was much harder to win a legislative than a military battle and the Senate was in no mood to compromise. Grant chafed at legislative obstacles thrown into his path. When James Russell Lowell studied his face at dinner that February, he detected “a puzzled pathos, as of a man with a problem before him of which he does not understand the terms.”13
The first sign of trouble on Capitol Hill came when Sumner procrastinated in considering the treaty. He contended that a large majority of his committee already opposed Dominican annexation and he ranted at the autocratic President Báez: “I know his history intimately. He is a usurper, whose hands have been red with innocent blood.”14 If the treaty wasn’t approved by March 29, it would expire, and on March 14 a worried Grant requested prompt action from Sumner. The next day, the Foreign Relations Committee handed him a severe blow when it voted down the Dominican treaty by a 5 to 2 margin. As the matter shifted to the full Senate, Grant doggedly took charge of the lobbying campaign. Two days later, he marched up to the Capitol—“somewhat in the style of Oliver Cromwell,” the New York World archly noted—and summoned fifteen senators who might sympathize with the treaty.15 Such presidential leadership was highly unusual at the time, leading to accusations of executive interference with the legislative branch, and Sumner grunted that his visit was “as unconstitutional in character as that warlike intervention on the island.”16
Grant had given Báez his personal pledge that he would apply his influence to carry the treaty. With military thoroughness, he drew up a list of senators opposed to or undecided about the treaty, inviting them to the White House. His lobbying skills weren’t finely honed and his laconic personality was poorly suited to such moral suasion. Senator Carl Schurz, a new member of the Foreign Relations Committee, described Grant’s gauche effort to win him over: “At first the President listened to me with evident interest, looking at me as if the objections to the treaty which I expressed were quite new to him, and made an impression on his mind. But after a while I noticed that his eyes wandered about the room, and I became doubtful whether he listened to me at all.”17
Grant’s soldierly instincts made him persevere in a lost cause instead of trimming his losses. In politics a fight-to-the-finish mentality could be unsound strategy. Grant was trapped in a controversy whose dynamics he didn’t understand, and all his frustrations as a novice president crystallized around this one issue. So fierce was his commitment to the flawed treaty that the British ambassador thought it “strange that he should be so tenacious with regard to its acceptance.”18 Instead of opposing the treaty openly, Sumner deftly moved to strangle it through dilatory tactics. He wanted his vanity stroked, but Grant, pure in his sense of rectitude, refused to appease him with patronage or cool him off with an appointment for Ashley.
On March 24, when the Senate began secret deliberations on the treaty, Sumner let loose a four-hour tirade against it. Senate opposition to annexation blended idealism with the basest form of racism. When Carl Schurz rose to eviscerate the treaty, he presented a demeaning view of Dominicans as lazy, shiftless tropical people, a theme picked up by General Joseph R. Hawley of the Hartford Courant, who complained to Sumner: “We don’t want any of those islands just yet, with their mongrel cutthroat races and foreign language and religion.”19 To annex Caribbean territory beyond the continental United States was hard for many Americans to countenance, and opponents exploited the xenophobic reaction. Before the debate ended, John Logan denounced the Dominicans as a “naked and half-savage people.”20 Opponents also lambasted the fraudulent plebiscite and venal agents promoting the scheme.
By May 14, Hamilton Fish had extracted from Dominican representatives an extension of the treaty’s expiration date. Grant received timely warnings of the rocky road ahead. In early April, Senator Lot Morrill of Maine had advised Hamilton Fish “that the President should not press the treaty—says it has no ‘earnest’ friends in the Senate—that the weight of Argument & fact is against it.”21 Although Fish passed along this advice, Grant had personalized the issue and would not budge. By mid-May, as the treaty floundered in the Senate, Fish suggested amendments to make it more palatable by presenting statehood as only one possibility. An alternative would be something like commonwealth status, a protectorate enjoying a looser affiliation with the United States than a state. Although Grant toyed briefly with this idea, his pride was wounded and his dander up and he doubled down on his bet.
On May 31, the frustrated president sent a message to the Senate asking to extend the time for its consideration. His support for annexation now flew into the realm of fantasy. On the one hand, he admitted the Dominican republic was a weak nation, with fewer than 120,000 inhabitants; on the other, he prophesied that it was “capable of supporting a population of 10,000,000 of people in luxury.” Even though he had never visited the place, Grant advertised it as paradise on earth: “It possesses the richest soil, best and most capacious harbors, most salubrious climate and the greatest abundance of [most valuable] products of the forest, mine and soil, of any of the [West India] islands.”22 The free labor market in Santo Domingo, he claimed, would sound the death knell for slavery in Puerto Rico and Cuba as escaped bondmen sought sanctuary there.
The extra Senate time spent on the treaty in June hardly added to its luster. Early in the month, Fish privately transmitted to Grant allegations from Major Raymond Perry, who spied double-dealing in Babcock’s promotion of Dominican annexation. Perry dubbed Babcock a “damned rascal” who had connived with Joseph Fabens and William Cazneau and stood to profit royally if the treaty went through.23 Grant served warning upon Babcock “that if anything dishonorable or dishonest was proved” against him, “he should answer it with his Commission.”24 Despite repeated warnings, Grant never overcame a blind spot toward Babcock, missing a shady side to his character. Babcock’s papers confirm that he was hip-deep in machinations with Fabens as they conspired to send money and arms to President Báez.25
In June, a further blot stained the treaty when Senator Orris Ferry of Connecticut condemned the treatment of Davis Hatch, a Connecticut businessman residing in Santo Domingo who had been imprisoned by President Báez. Hatch had protested to Washington that Báez was a scoundrel. A trial in Santo Domingo City ended in a death sentence for Hatch, commuted to banishment by Báez. Despite this verdict, he suffered in jail for six months. When Babcock visited the island, he did nothing to spring Hatch from jail, apparently fearing that when released, he might poison American public opinion against Báez. When Senator Ferry leveled charges against Babcock, Charles Sumner roared that the general should have his name “struck from the army, and struck from the roll of honorable men.”26 Sumner began telling fellow senators that when Grant had stopped by his house in early January, he had been under the influence of alcohol—of which there was no evidence.
The Hatch fiasco prompted a Senate investigation. The majority report cleared Babcock, but a minority report said he had turned a blind eye to Hatch’s mistreatment. Under intense questioning by Carl Schurz, it emerged that both Babcock and Grant’s old pal Rufus Ingalls had received land on Samaná Bay that would appreciate prodigiously if the treaty passed. The whole enterprise had ensnared its supporters in the machinations of an island permeated with corruption. By now in a surly, defensive mood, Grant did nothing to discipline Babcock, but cast him as the innocent victim of a witch hunt. “I never saw father so grimly angry,” son Jesse later commented.27
In frustration, Grant lashed out at cabinet members for failing to sustain him on the treaty. On June 13, when Fish saw him on unrelated business, Grant went on a rampage against his supposedly disloyal cabinet. Fish replied that only the treasury secretary opposed the treaty, but Grant was adamant that “the Secretary of the Interior is opposed to it; the Attorney-General says nothing in its favor, but sneers at it; and the Secretary of the Treasury does not open his mouth.”28 Never before had Grant demanded unswerving loyalty in the White House. And just as he spied a host of hidden enemies in his midst, he failed to see the one truly betraying him. As Fish wrote in his diary, Grant referred “warmly and affectionately to Babcock, whose innocence of the charges against him he firmly believes.”29
When Ohio governor Rutherford B. Hayes visited the White House on the sweltering evening of June 27, the two men sat out on the south portico with its fine view of an unfinished Washington Monument. Grant brooded at what he perceived as the rank injustice of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Hayes recorded Grant’s reflections: “Sumner as chairman, a man of very little practical sense, puffed-up, and unsound. Carl Schurz, an infidel and atheist; had been a rebel in his own country—as much a rebel against his government as Jeff Davis.” What riled Grant most deeply were the savage attacks on Babcock, and “he felt ‘much embittered’ against Sumner” for his unjust remarks about him. He gave Babcock a “fine character,” complaining that he was given no opportunity to defend himself against Sumner.30 Having felt unfairly accused before the war, when he was hounded from the army, Grant instinctively sided with the victims of character assassination, even when that sympathy was sorely misplaced.
Grant’s laborious efforts to enact the treaty came to naught. On June 30, the Senate split evenly on a 28 to 28 vote—a far cry from the two-thirds necessary for passage. Nineteen Republicans and nine Democrats teamed up to kill the measure in a resounding setback for Grant. Having been a successful general made it hard for him to reconcile himself to such crushing defeats. When his son Jesse asked why Santo Domingo was so important, an injured Grant replied: “Because it should belong to us. There is not one sound argument against annexation, and one day we shall need it badly.”31 He had expended too much of his political capital on the battle and badly miscalculated the strength of hostile forces arrayed against him.
In impotent rage, Grant turned against the man he had appointed at Sumner’s behest: John Lothrop Motley in London. For some time, Grant and Fish had been displeased with Motley, who had espoused Sumner’s hard line against England in the Alabama claims rather than their own more conciliatory posture. In fall 1869, Adam Badeau had resigned his post as secretary in London and returned to White House duties. To replace him, Grant planned to send Nicholas Fish, the secretary’s son, but Motley fiercely resisted the appointment. As Badeau recalled, Grant “was extremely angry; he looked upon the refusal as another piece of insubordination, a proof that Motley was determined to do as he pleased, and not as the President desired.”32 Once again a president accustomed to the automatic obedience of huge armies had to brook the vagaries of petty politics and wayward personalities.
With ambitious plans in the works for settling the Alabama claims, Grant needed a cooperative representative in London. He aimed at nothing less than annexing Canada, a much less risible prospect than taking over Santo Domingo. Clearly the expansion-minded Grant envisioned some glorious addition to the country on the scale of the Louisiana Purchase. Standing in the way was Motley and his truculent language with the British. Exceeding his instructions from Grant and Fish, Motley told Lord Clarendon that Britain’s neutrality proclamation early in the Civil War had been “the fountainhead of the disasters which had been caused to the American people . . . by the hands of Englishmen.”33
In mid-May 1870, Grant sent Badeau back to London for another tour of duty, this time as consul general. As Grant saw him off at the White House door, the talk turned to Motley. “He was persuaded that the Minister was un-American in spirit,” recalled Badeau, “and not a fitting representative of democracy.”34 Grant believed he had gotten precious little thanks from Sumner for appointing his protégé. On the eve of the Senate vote on Santo Domingo, Grant told Fish that Motley “represented Mr. Sumner more than he did the Administration, & spoke with much warmth of feeling, about Sumner.”35 Fearing repercussions from Sumner, Fish urged Grant not to fire Motley summarily. By the next day, Sumner had gotten wind of Grant’s intention to cashier Motley and was incensed.
On July 1, the day after his Santo Domingo treaty went down to humiliating defeat, Grant acted on his vengeful feelings and fired Motley. The move had been contemplated by Grant for a while, but the timing made him look extremely vindictive. Fish was afraid the public would attribute the move to pure spite, but Grant didn’t seemed fazed. When Fish pleaded with him to retain Motley for a spell, Grant replied vehemently, “That, I will not do—I will not allow Mr. Sumner to ride over me.” When Fish pointed out that Grant was lashing out at Motley, not Sumner, Grant brusquely retorted, “It is the same thing.”36 In general, Grant wasn’t one given to grudges and festering wounds, but Sumner had pushed him into a dark frame of mind, and he still had the thin skin of a novice president. He also considered Motley a faithless, rogue diplomat.
When Fish informed Motley of his dismissal, he offered him “the opportunity of resigning, in case you feel inclined to do so.”37 In reply, Motley obstinately declined to resign. He pointed out that he had been unanimously approved by the Senate and had faithfully served the president for fifteen months. “I fail to perceive why I should offer my resignation.”38 On July 15, Grant sent to the Senate the name of former senator Frederick T. Frelinghuysen of New Jersey to replace Motley and he was confirmed. Motley first learned of this from the London newspapers and was shocked. He admitted he had erred in departing from administration instructions, “but he held that his offense had been condoned,” Badeau wrote. “But Grant did not often condone. The crisis finally came.”39 Frelinghuysen rejected the appointment, as did several other people, and in the end Grant turned to General Robert C. Schenck, a former Ohio congressman and minister to Brazil, who accepted the post and put Grant out of his misery. All the while, Motley refused to quit his station, becoming a pariah in London, a minister without portfolio, banished from polite society. In December, bowing to the inevitable, he finally stepped down.
Needless to say, Senator Sumner was apoplectic over Motley’s recall. “My allegation is that the removal of Mr. Motley was an act of sheer brutality & utterly indefensible,” he contended.40 He called Motley’s firing “the most atrocious crime in diplomatic history.”41 In September, Sumner protested to Fish that sacking the illustrious Motley was “the most grievous personal wrong ever done in the Depart. of State, & from the character of the victim not to be forgotten.”42 He professed shock that nobody in Grant’s cabinet had shown the decency to resign in protest. Even people who thought Grant was entitled to cashier Motley faulted how he had handled it. The New York Times editor John Bigelow, who believed Motley had been dealt with “very shabbily,” noted that it was customary to give “even a footman 30 days notice.”43
When it came to his uncompromising feud with Sumner, Grant lived up to his nickname “Unconditional Surrender” Grant. Usually reticent about criticizing people, he unleashed a volley of invective against Sumner, branding him “dogmatic, opinionated, infallible in his own estimation . . . he believed his own illusion without regard to the facts. It really amounted to a mental delusion.”44 Mocking Sumner’s vanity, he said: “Mr. Sumner could never have been bribed but in one way. That would be by flattery.”45 Once asked if he had heard Sumner converse, he replied, “No, but I have heard him lecture.”46 Told that Sumner didn’t believe in the Bible, Grant retorted, “Well, he didn’t write it.”47 Although the handwriting on the wall proclaimed in glaring letters the demise of the Santo Domingo treaty, Grant refused to concede defeat and contemplated further measures to keep it alive. He still had something to prove to Sumner, to the Senate, and to himself.
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ONE OF THE FIRST CASUALTIES of Grant’s colossal feud with Sumner was Attorney General Ebenezer Hoar, who had been rejected for the Supreme Court. Although the president found him smart, charming, and able, he was uncomfortably close to Sumner and withheld support on Santo Domingo. Grant remained on the warpath against disloyal cabinet members. As he told Hamilton Fish, “I have said to Senators & others that I mean to recognize my friends—& those who sustain my policy.”48 In promoting the treaty, Grant had come under intense pressure from white Republican leaders in the South whose black constituents revered Sumner and who had paid a price for defying him. In exchange, they demanded a southerner in the cabinet and touted the attorney general post as the best place to start.
On June 15, 1870, out of the blue, Grant scratched out a frosty note to Hoar, asking for his resignation, a letter that shook him like a thunderclap. “I sat for a while wondering what it could mean,” he wrote, “why there had been no warning, no reference to the subject.”49 He imagined someone had unjustly maligned him and was tempted to protest. Instead he sent Grant a short, diplomatic letter of resignation. That afternoon, when he saw Grant at the White House, he was mollified by his warm words and explanation for what had happened. For Hoar’s partisans, his dismissal was shocking. Secretary of the Interior Cox believed Grant decided “to sell his best friends . . . for support in the San Domingo or any other scheme in which he might set his heart.” He later questioned Grant’s “good purposes” and glimpsed “a low & unscrupulous cunning” as the “ruling motive of his public life.”50 Whatever Hoar’s injury, he departed in gentlemanly fashion, sending Grant a gracious farewell note. In private, however, he broadcast his anger and “wished the government might be destroyed.”51
On June 16, Grant tapped Amos T. Akerman of Georgia to replace him and he was approved by the Senate a week later. Although a somewhat obscure figure on the national scene, he was a brilliant choice, the first cabinet selection from the Confederate states. Honest and incorruptible, Akerman was a tall, slim man with a balding pate, eyebrows that jutted over deep-set eyes, and a pencil-thin mustache. The penetrating intensity of his gaze led one reporter to discern a “face of learning and disposition to deep meditation.”52 A native of New Hampshire and a Dartmouth graduate, Akerman had taught at a boys’ academy in North Carolina and practiced law in antebellum Georgia before serving in the Confederate quartermaster corps. After Appomattox, he switched to the Republican Party, endorsed black voting rights, and maintained that the South should renounce slavery and its extreme interpretation of states’ rights. Solidly progressive, devoted to the rule of law, he took part in Georgia’s constitutional convention of 1867–68, which overturned the old white supremacist constitution. Horrified by white vigilantism, Akerman, as federal district attorney for Georgia, showed a zealous dedication to black rights by prosecuting violators of the Civil Rights Act of 1866, costing him the support of many white southerners.
The same week that Grant appointed Akerman, Congress created the Department of Justice. Before then, the attorney general had functioned as the president’s legal adviser, operating from the Treasury building without the dignity of a separate department. Now he would head an active department with a substantial array of new powers. In part its creation was a practical measure to consolidate government lawyers and litigation in one department, sparing cabinet members the expense of hiring outside attorneys and thus reducing conflicts of interest. Civil service reformers also spotted a chance to streamline the government’s legal capacity and enhance efficiency. The new department immediately faced a pressing task to ensure compliance with the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments, which had sparked an explosion in litigation. That racial justice stood very high among Akerman’s priorities was underscored when he set up Justice Department headquarters in the new Freedman’s Savings Bank building.
In shaping the department, Congress provided for a solicitor general who would act as the government’s main attorney, arguing cases before the Supreme Court and offering counsel to U.S. attorneys and marshals. The first occupant was another outstanding choice—the bearded Benjamin Helm Bristow, a crusading U.S. attorney from Kentucky. Educated at Jefferson College in Pennsylvania, Bristow had been a “Kentucky bluejay” who bucked local sympathy for the Confederacy, helped to assemble two federal regiments in Kentucky, and fought with Grant at Fort Donelson and Shiloh before joining the state senate. He had “a bluff, frank” personality, said one reporter, who thought he conveyed “a very marked impression of personal strength.”53 After the war, he worked to assemble a moderate Republican Party in Kentucky and won plaudits as a U.S. attorney of high integrity and legal excellence, committed to black civil rights. Just before Akerman’s appointment, Bristow wrote from Kentucky to Attorney General Hoar: “It is a matter of first importance to the 225,000 Colored people of this state that the so-called ‘Civil Rights’ law of Congress should be maintained and enforced.”54
The new Justice Department would forge its identity in the battle to slay the Ku Klux Klan and such offshoots as the Knights of the White Camellia. Having disbanded Confederate armies, the North had not stopped the emergence of quasi-military organizations throughout the South. In describing the Klan’s tight grip over the region, Grant summoned his most emphatic language, saying its purpose was “by force and terror . . . to deprive colored citizens of the right to bear arms and of the right to a free ballot, to suppress schools in which colored children were taught, and to reduce the colored people to a condition closely akin to that of slavery.”55
Grant constantly received desperate pleas from southern governors for help with the Klan. In March 1870, Governor William W. Holden of North Carolina warned of a rising tide of Klan terror in his state: “Bands of these armed men ride at night through various neighborhoods, whipping and maltreating peaceable citizens, hanging some, burning churches and breaking up schools which have been established for the colored people.”56 By July, Holden feared his paltry force of six hundred soldiers would be overwhelmed by Klan marauders. Grant acted vigorously to stem the North Carolina violence, promising Holden “to send more troops to the State without delay.”57 Holden pinpointed the essence of the problem: witnesses were too terrified to testify against Klan members, and juries to convict them, enabling the secret society to flout local courts with impunity. Those who cooperated in Klan prosecutions were almost guaranteed to suffer vicious reprisals. One district attorney in Mississippi despaired when five of his main witnesses were murdered. “I cannot get witnesses as all feel it is sure death to testify before the Grand Jury,” he wrote.58
At election time, the Klan acted to intimidate black voters and elect white Democrats. It tried to undo Reconstruction and re-create the status quo ante of a submissive black workforce, lorded over by white masters. In October 1870, Governor Robert K. Scott of South Carolina told Grant his state had endured an election campaign that “for rancor and virulence . . . has never been excelled in any civilized community . . . Colored men and women have been dragged from their homes at the dead hour of night and most cruelly and brutally scourged for the sole reason that they dared to exercise their own opinions upon political subjects.”59 A shaken Scott added: “I have within a few moments witnessed in my own office a spectacle that has chilled my blood with horror.” Four citizens were “at the dead hour of night dragged from their homes and lashed on their bare backs until the flayed flesh hung dripping in shreds, and seams were gaping in their mangled bodies large enough to lay my finger in.”60
Organized in thousands of scattered groups and billing itself as the Invisible Empire, the Klan launched a new civil war by clandestine means. The menace had spread to every southern county. As Governor William H. Smith of Alabama informed Grant, “Things look here very much as they did in 1860 . . . If Alabama can be carried by intimidation & fraud so can every other state South, & the whole south will be lost to the Republican party.”61 One southern Unionist described things unequivocally: “The Ku Klux business is the worst thing that ever afflicted the South.”62 It became hard to see how the Republican Party could survive in the South without the shield of federal protection. Former abolitionists latched on to the new cause of combating the KKK. If the Civil War had to be fought over again, they favored Grant back in the starring role. “There [is] still a state of war with the South,” declared Wendell Phillips. “Let General Grant lay his hand on the leaders in the South, and you will never hear of the Ku-Klux again.”63
Grant was swamped with letters from southern blacks and white Republicans who graphically described the nightmare descending on their towns. Typical was a letter from a Mrs. S. E. Lane in South Carolina, who said she and her husband were “true & hearty Republicans . . . but Sir, we are in terror from Ku-Klux threats & outrages . . . our nearest neighbor—a prominent Republican now lies dead—murdered, by a disguised Ruffian Band, which attacked his House at midnight a few nights since—his wife also was murdered . . . & a daughter is lying dangerously ill from a shot-wound—my Husband’s life is threatened . . . we are in constant fear & terror—our nights are sleepless, we are filled with anxiety & dismay.”64 From senior politicians down to lowly sharecroppers, people sent Grant hair-raising descriptions of night riders that gave him a comprehensive grasp of the terror. However clumsy his handling of Dominican annexation, he was sure-footed when it came to protecting freed people and handling other matters arising from the war. In pursuing the Klan, he showed to advantage his persistence, simplicity, and innate stubbornness. Through the Justice Department, the federal government would emerge as the undisputed champion of civil liberties in the southern states, carving out a new role.
Battle lines hardened in the 1870 election, which represented a worrisome setback for the Grant administration. Democrats coasted to victory in New York, Indiana, Missouri, West Virginia, and Tennessee, while the Republican majority in Congress shrank drastically. The election was noteworthy for having six black candidates elected to Congress from the Deep South, including three from South Carolina, cradle of the Confederacy. Of the six black congressmen, four were born into slavery. The election of black Republicans fed a continuing white backlash, one New York newspaper noting snidely that Congress “will soon have its full proportion of darkey members.”65 In the South, violence directed against Republicans allowed the Democrats to reclaim—or as they preferred to call it redeem—power lost in Georgia, Alabama, and Florida. “It seems that we are drifting . . . back under the leadership of the slave holders,” a black Republican moaned.66 The southern states had now been readmitted to the Union with full congressional representation, but far from adumbrating a new era of harmony, it signaled the start of a deepening era of polarization.
In Mississippi, the troubled situation was thrown into bold relief as scores of black churches and schools were burned without prosecutions. In March 1871, three blacks in the small town of Meridian were brought up on charges of delivering “incendiary” speeches. At the court hearing, the Republican judge and two black defendants were killed. The violence spilled over into gruesome riots in which thirty blacks were gunned down, including “all the leading colored men of the town with one or two exceptions.”67 During the first three months of that sanguinary year, sixty-three blacks were murdered in Mississippi and nobody served a day for these crimes.
In May 1870, Congress had passed the first Enforcement Act to protect the voting rights granted by the Fifteenth Amendment by banning the use of force or intimidation to abridge the right to vote because of race. Widespread voting irregularities in the South led Grant on February 28, 1871, to sign yet another Enforcement Act, which strengthened federal oversight of the voting process, especially in large cities. Henceforth, federal judges could appoint election officials to supervise registration and voting methods and certify the accuracy of returns, insisting upon the use of written ballots.
But all such reforms would die aborning if the root problem was not eradicated: the Ku Klux Klan. Increasingly Grant was flooded with appeals from Republican southern governors to slay the epidemic of Klan violence in their states. “This organized conspiracy is in existence in every County of the State,” Governor Holden of North Carolina warned. “It is believed that its leaders now direct the movements of the present Legislature.”68 Governor Scott of South Carolina notified Grant that two counties, Spartanburg and Union, had experienced such a “reign of terror” by Klansmen that “but few Republicans dare sleep in their houses at night.”69 Every night thousands of blacks fled into the woods for asylum. From two Carolina congressmen, Grant heard how members of a black militia had been arrested for allegedly killing a white man. The Klan invaded the jail and murdered the black captain and five of his men. Upon learning that the remaining eight black militiamen were to be transferred to another county, five hundred masked Klansmen raided the jail, overpowered the jailer, and lynched the defendants. The congressmen concluded that South Carolina’s government was “powerless to preserve law and order . . . the constituted authorities invoke the strong arm of the United States to do so.”70
In late February, Grant read aloud to his cabinet a horrifying report about the murders, whippings, and violence overtaking South Carolina. He sent troops to the state to halt the spreading disorder and swore that federal cavalry would remain even if they had to stay “during the remainder of his administration.”71 Soon Major Lewis Merrill, a man with “the head, face, and spectacles of a German professor and the frame of an athlete,” was sent to South Carolina to protect the black community as part of Attorney General Akerman’s grand strategy for demolishing the Klan.72 In a controversial move, Merrill had army officers arrest Klan members while he enlisted U.S. attorneys to try their cases and lined up federal judges to oversee their trials. These were groundbreaking decisions that for the first time enabled the federal government instead of state and local governments to punish “private criminal acts.”73
Klan violence was unquestionably the worst outbreak of domestic terrorism in American history and Grant dealt with it aggressively, using all the instruments at his disposal. To strengthen the federal arsenal, he urged Congress to widen his executive powers and insisted the new Forty-Second Congress meet on March 4, 1871, instead of waiting until that December, to do so. So strongly did Grant feel about Klan atrocities that he beseeched House Speaker James G. Blaine to focus exclusively on legislation to uproot these domestic terrorists: “If the attention of Congress can be confined to the single subject of providing means for the protection of life and property . . . I feel that we should have such legislation.”74 While conservative Republicans and Democrats squawked that Grant trespassed on states’ rights—a sacred cause in the South—he employed every weapon in his repertoire to suppress Klan violence. To accentuate just how deeply he felt, he marched up to Capitol Hill, accompanied by virtually every member of his cabinet, and lobbied for an explicitly anti-Klan bill, leaving the particulars up to legislators. He was so fixated on the Klan that Representative James A. Garfield of Ohio complained privately that Grant was “very anxious that Congress shall do nothing else, but legislate, concerning the Ku Klux.”75 The purpose of the proposed legislation was to force state compliance with the new constitutional amendment. “It seems to me, that this will virtually empower the President to abolish the State Governments,” Garfield protested. “I am in great trouble about the whole matter.”76
Refusing to backtrack, Grant plunged ahead. When Congress formed a select committee to consider Klan legislation, it encountered extraordinary resistance. Democrats construed the Ku Klux bill not as an effort to save southern blacks from wanton terror, but as a political swindle to extend Republican rule in the South. As Congressman James B. Beck of Kentucky said, “Many of you would rather see the President dictator to-day than to see the Democratic party come into power and expose the outrageous acts your party has committed.”77 Grant was dubbed “Kaiser Grant” and derided as a power-hungry, lazy, and negligent president, who wielded patronage to advance his fortunes. Senator Garrett Davis of Kentucky ridiculed him as incompetent and unfit for office while Representative John B. Hawley of Illinois labeled him “a despot; a dictator,” who would “override the liberties of this great people.”78 The press debate was no less heated, and the Chicago Times blasted Grant as “the chief of a Ku Klux Klan more powerful than that of the South.”79 One of his most scathing critics was none other than William Tecumseh Sherman. “If Ku-klux bills were kept out of Congress, and the army kept at their legitimate duties,” he told a New Orleans audience, “there are enough good and true men in all Southern States to put down all Ku-klux or other bands of marauders.”80 Many Democrats claimed that Klan atrocities were so many fairy tales dreamed up by Republicans for political expediency and denounced the Klan legislation as unconstitutional.
Fortunately for Grant, the fervor on his side was equally passionate. Frederick Douglass wisely saw that the random corruption cases that tarnished the administration’s reputation were far less consequential than the president’s unqualified support for southern blacks. Reconstruction was the essential sequel to the Civil War, completing its mission. “If we stand by President Grant and his administration,” he wrote, “it is from no spirit of hero worship or blind attachment to mere party, but because in this hour there is no middle ground. [Grant] is for stamping out this murderous ku-klux as he stamped out the rebellion.”81
On April 20, 1871, Grant returned victorious to Capitol Hill to sign the third Enforcement Act, commonly known as the Ku Klux Klan Act. He had planned a California trip that spring, but canceled it in the belief that he couldn’t sidestep this historic moment. The strong new measure laid down criminal penalties for depriving citizens of their rights under the Fourteenth Amendment, including holding office, sitting on a jury, or casting a vote. The federal government could prosecute such cases when state governments refused to act. The law also endowed Grant with extraordinary powers to suspend habeas corpus, declare martial law, and send in troops. To halt night riders, the act made it illegal “to conspire together, or go in disguise upon the public highway . . . for the purpose . . . of depriving any person . . . of equal protection of the law.”82 However loathed in the South, the law stood as a magnificent achievement for Grant, who had initiated and rallied support for it, never wavering. To further strengthen it, he issued General Orders No. 48, allowing federal troops to arrest violators of the Ku Klux Klan Act and break up and disperse “bands of disguised marauders.”83
The man who implemented this bold agenda was Akerman, who thought Reconstruction best served the long-term interests of the enlightened South, properly understood. To those who protested its severity, he responded that nothing was “more idle than to attempt to conciliate by kindness that portion of the Southern people who are still malcontent. They take all kindness on the part of the Government as evidence of timidity.”84 For Akerman, the Klan’s actions “amount to war, and cannot be effectually crushed on any theory.”85 The metaphor didn’t seem excessive, for the Klan resisted by force any effort to restrain it, reflected in Nathan Bedford Forrest’s bloodthirsty injunction to his followers: “If they send the black men to hunt those confederate soldiers whom they call kuklux, then I say to you, ‘Go out and shoot the radicals.’”86
On May 3, Grant issued a proclamation containing a ringing defense of the Ku Klux Klan Act, calling it a “law of extraordinary public importance.”87 Never mentioning the Klan by name, he alluded to “combinations of lawless and disaffected persons.” To those who bridled at the enhanced use of federal power, denounced “bayonet rule,” and brandished the states’ rights banner, he implored them to use local laws to suppress the Klan and obviate the need for federal troops. If that didn’t happen, the inaction of local communities “imposes upon the National Government the duty of putting forth all its energies for the protection of its citizens of every race and color.”88 If states abdicated responsibility, Grant was prepared to use the full panoply of federal power in response. At the same time, he issued orders to federal troops in South Carolina and Mississippi “to arrest disguised night marauders and break up their bands.”89 In countering the Klan, Grant found himself back in familiar territory, operating as general in chief. Whenever he returned to war-related issues, Grant showed a sure grasp of both his values and methods. He knew that the Klan threatened to unravel everything he and Lincoln and Union soldiers had accomplished at great cost in blood and treasure.
When a joint congressional committee traveled to South Carolina to gather testimony on the Klan rebellion, many of the witnesses were threatened. They made it abundantly clear that the Klan’s word was law in many counties. As one witness from Union County testified, “The county was in effect under Ku-Klux rule; that no order issued by the Klan would be disregarded.”90 Grant received the same message from petrified citizens, such as Javan Bryant of Spartanburg County, who assured Grant that “it is a common thing for men to say in the country that they will kill anybody who reports them as Ku Klux.”91
To aid the anti-Klan effort, Akerman fielded a vast array of resources, including federal marshals and attorneys of the brand-new Justice Department. Members of the nascent Secret Service pitched in with undercover detective work. On September 12, Akerman left for South Carolina to take personal supervision of the campaign, Grant placing federal troops at his disposal. The following month, Akerman sent him a sobering report on Klan activity in South Carolina that portrayed the Klan not as bands of isolated, wild-eyed ruffians but as a comprehensive movement that spanned the entire white community. It embraced “at least two thirds of the active white men of those counties, and have the sympathy and countenance of a majority of the other third. They are connected with similar combinations in other counties and States, and no doubt are part of a grand system of criminal associations pervading most of the Southern States.”92 Bound by secret oaths, Klansmen perjured themselves to escape prosecution and terrorized witnesses and juries. Akerman estimated that the Klan had committed thousands of criminal acts during the previous year.
On October 12, the anti-Klan assault entered a new phase when Grant, at Akerman’s bidding, issued a proclamation calling upon “combinations and conspiracies” in nine South Carolina counties to disperse and retire peacefully to their homes within five days.93 Five days later, when the groups did not disarm, Grant suspended habeas corpus there. Akerman explained to Grant the legal rationale for doing so: it was impossible to prosecute Klan members if witnesses dreaded reprisals. With habeas corpus suspended, those threatening reprisals could be held in custody long enough to protect witnesses and obtain convictions. Akerman greeted Grant’s move, saying blacks can “sleep at home now.”94 By late November, he informed the cabinet that he had taken two thousand prisoners in South Carolina for violating the Ku Klux Klan Act.
Under Akerman’s inspired leadership, federal grand juries, many interracial, brought 3,384 indictments against the KKK, resulting in 1,143 convictions.95 The conviction rate was even better than it sounded. The federal court system was burdened with cases and many federal judges, appointed before Grant, didn’t sympathize with the anti-Klan crusade. Furthermore, the act that created the Department of Justice had reduced the federal legal staff by a third and curbed its ability to hire outside lawyers as needed. With witnesses offered protection, Klansmen began to name other Klansmen, stripping off the secret veil that cloaked their activities. Many Klansmen, facing arrest, fled their states. Several hundred pleaded guilty in exchange for suspended or lenient sentences. Sixty-five Klansmen wound up in the federal penitentiary in Albany, New York. The goal was not mass incarceration but restoring law and order. To his district attorneys, Akerman made plain that more than convictions were at stake: “If you cannot convict, you, at least, can expose, and ultimately such exposures will make the community ashamed of shielding the crime.”96
A southerner by choice, Akerman found it sobering to verify the depth of Klan penetration in the region, which “revealed a perversion of moral sentiment among the Southern whites which bodes ill to that part of the country for this generation.”97 On a single day in November, 250 people in one South Carolina county confessed affiliation with the group. As Akerman expressed the matter with deep feeling: “I doubt whether from the beginning of the world until now, a community, nominally civilized, has been so fully under the domination of systematic and organized depravity.”98 To another correspondent, he denounced the Klan as “the most atrocious organization that the civilized part of the world has ever known.”99
Grant pushed the anti-Klan crusade despite sturdy resistance within his own administration. At cabinet meetings, he repeatedly allowed Akerman to expatiate on Klan horrors even though some members could not have cared less. After one session, Hamilton Fish complained wearily in his diary: “Akerman introduces Ku Klux—he has it ‘on the brain’—he tells a number of stories—one of a fellow being castrated—with terribly minute & tedious details of each case—It has got to be a bore, to listen twice a week to this same thing.”100 Akerman’s speeches were hardly a bore to Grant or the terrified people victimized by Klan thuggery in the South.
By 1872, under Grant’s leadership, the Ku Klux Klan had been smashed in the South. (Its later twentieth-century incarnation had no connection to the earlier group other than a common style and ideology.) He had employed forceful, no-holds-barred actions to loosen the Klan’s grip. As southern violence subsided, southern Republicans regained confidence and cast votes with an assurance of their safety, and for southern blacks the changed mood was palpable. “Peace has come to many places as never before,” wrote Frederick Douglass. “The scourging and slaughter of our people have so far ceased.”101 It was a startling triumph for Grant, who had dared to flout what southern states considered their sacred rights to enforce the law within their borders.
Just how profoundly the atmosphere changed was revealed by a letter written by Senator Adelbert Ames, the Mississippi Republican, six months after Grant signed the Ku Klux Klan Act:
Had it not been for the Ku Klux law . . . we would not have had any showing at this election. At one time, just previous to the passage of that law, the K.K. organizations were being perfected in every county in the state. It is believed by our friends that had the law not been passed, not one of them would have been safe outside of a few of the larger cities. As it is, the K.K.’s, cowards as they are, have for a time at least suspended their operations in all but the eastern parts of the state. Recent convictions in North Carolina and the President’s action in putting a part of South Carolina under martial law has had a very subduing effect all over the South. It is perceptible here.102
For Grant’s admirers, the routing of the Klan eclipsed the lesser failures of his first term as president. “I do not know where to look for a worthier or more popular candidate than President Grant,” Akerman wrote. “The objections to his administration . . . are of the most frivolous sort. They do not go to essentials.”103 For the implacable Charles Sumner, however, Grant could do nothing right, and he scoffed “that the much-criticized Ku Klux legislation . . . would have been entirely unnecessary, if this Republican President had shown a decent energy in enforcing existing law.”104 One wonders whether Sumner thought Grant had done too little or feared that the president had upstaged him as the foremost protector of African American rights.
Despite Grant’s stunning success, a certain moral fatigue began to afflict the North, where racism remained widespread. Segments of the Republican Party pulled away from the idealism of earlier days, and nobody sensed this seismic shift more acutely than Amos Akerman. “The real difficulty is that very many of the Northern Republicans shrink from any further special legislation in regard to the South,” he wrote in December. “Even such atrocities as KuKluxery do not hold their attention as long as we should expect.”105 Democrats, meanwhile, slammed Grant’s actions as dictatorial, and one South Carolina newspaper portrayed the men arresting Klan members as “Grant’s ‘night riders.’”106
Even as he rendered superlative service in squashing the Klan, Akerman clashed with the railroads, the country’s most powerful industry. In June, he had turned down an application by the Union Pacific for a huge land subsidy and incurred the enmity of railroad barons such as Jay Gould and Collis P. Huntington. He rebuffed an attempt by one railroad company to bribe him and wouldn’t back down in his regulatory decisions. Grant came under enormous pressure to replace him and on December 12, he requested Akerman’s resignation. He hinted at nameless forces behind the request and expressed his “approbation of the zeal, integrity and industry” Akerman had shown in performing his duties.107 For many months, Akerman had known special interests were gunning for him and even considered resigning to spare Grant this pressure. Now he fell on his sword, thanking Grant for the kindness he had shown and conveying his “ardent wishes for the continued success of your administration.”108 Their exchanged letters show affection and mutual respect. Akerman declined Grant’s offer of a judgeship and returned to private life in Cartersville, Georgia. He remained loyal to Grant and insisted that his administration had been the best since the days of John Quincy Adams.
To replace him, Grant named George H. Williams, a judge and former U.S. senator from Oregon, who was speedily confirmed. Williams was well qualified to be attorney general, having served as a district judge and chief justice in Oregon before establishing a lucrative law practice in Portland. Always sensitive to regional demands for representation, Grant was glad to have someone from the Pacific Coast in his cabinet and for a long time enjoyed a fine rapport with Williams, who valued the president as a “serene, self-reliant, conscientious man and officer.”109 Although Solicitor General Bristow resigned in November 1872—he felt bruised when Grant elevated Williams instead of him to replace Akerman—the war against the Klan never ground to a halt. Thanks to zealous work by U.S. attorneys in the South, Williams brought three times as many cases and chalked up four times as many convictions against Klansmen in 1872 as Akerman had attained in 1871 and did even better in 1873.110 The retreat from Klan prosecutions came later. Grant deserves immense praise for hiring Akerman, the greatest ornament of his cabinet and one of the outstanding attorneys general in American history, but he also deserves blame for letting him go much too soon. Nevertheless, the campaign against the Klan was now in full swing, had generated enormous momentum, and would only expand during the next two years.