XXII

DEMOCRACY

…there’s gret risk they’ll blunder on,
Ef they ain’t stopped, to real Democ’cy.

—James Russell Lowell,
The Biglow Papers

WHILE GRANT’S ADMINISTRATION made peace with white men in England and lost a bid to make a peaceful sanctuary for black expatriates in the Caribbean, black Americans in the South and, of all places, at Grant’s West Point, sought to make America wholly theirs. They were trying to reconstruct the nation, and the white Americans who were their political allies were baffled by it all. In February 1870, at a dinner party in Washington given by Attorney General Rockwood Hoar, James Russell Lowell looked at Ulysses Grant’s troubled face and saw “a puzzled pathos, as of a man with a problem before him of which he does not understand the terms.” Part of Grant’s puzzlement at that time may have come from failing to appreciate how august the attorney general’s Saturday Club house guest was, but the next day Grant came to know Lowell in the way an author likes best—through his work. After another dinner party, the president heard the last of The Biglow Papers spoken by a monologist, and Hoar reported to Lowell, “Our friend Ulysses (or ‘Ulyss’ as Mrs. G. calls him sometimes) had a revelation the day after you left.” Lowell in these political essays in dialect verse (the second series of which was dedicated to Hoar) escaped from some of his own personal cautiousness, and in the one to which Grant listened, “Mr. Hosea Biglow’s Speech in March Meeting,” dated April 5, 1866, he allowed his Yankee character to give what Grant pronounced “the most perfect statement of the whole doctrine of reconstruction” that he “had ever met with.”¹

Hosea Biglow, a not-so-simple Yankee, began with a good swipe at Andrew Johnson. In his “Argymunt,” describing the content of the “speach” to follow, he said, “Gits into Johnson’s hair. No use tryin’ to git into his head.” From this point on, Hosea had at least one member of his audience with him; Grant no doubt found familiar and congenial all of the four-year-old indictment of Johnson’s and Seward’s policy of giving away the victory won in the war. But Hosea did not follow that accusation with a call for severe retribution. Instead Grant heard him say:

My frien’s, you never gethered from my mouth,

No, nut one word ag’in the South ez South,

Nor th’ ain’t a livin’ man, white, brown, nor black,

Gladder’n wut I should be to take ’em back;

But all I ask of Uncle Sam is fust

To write up on his door, “No goods on trust”;

[Cries o’ “Thet’s the ticket!”]

Give us cash down in ekle laws for all,

An’ they’ll be snug inside afore nex’ fall.

Give wut they ask, an’ we shell hev Jamaker,

Wuth minus some consid’able an acre;

Give wut they need, an’ we shell git ’fore long

A nation all one piece, rich, peacefle, strong;

Make ’em Amerikin, an’ they’ll begin

To love their country ez they loved their sin;

Let ’em stay Southun, an’ you’ve kep’ a sore

Ready to fester ez it done afore.²

In this passage, Hosea said no to vindictiveness, but yes to the South’s need to accept a cash-on-the-barrelhead deal. Lowell’s metaphor for a good nation was commercial trustworthiness, and the coin of the realm was newly minted law. As Grant sat listening to Hosea’s words, the Fifteenth Amendment—the quintessence of “ekle laws for all”—was about to be ratified. The amendment would establish the right to vote regardless “of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.” Attorney General Hoar, his abolitionist friend James Russell Lowell, and President Grant were all counting on that equal law to do a huge job; it would make Southerners “Amerikin.” It would signal the advent of national citizenship. The United States would be one nation, and laws applicable to all would save the South from being simply a black-ridden colony, as was Jamaica in the British Empire. Instead, under equal laws, black people would simply be so many more law-abiding citizens living in the South, at one with all other citizens. Surely all reasonable Southerners would recognize the sense of what Hosea Biglow had to say.

The Yankee went on to appeal further to their sensibilities:

Ef treason is a crime, ez some folks say,

How could we punish it in a milder way

Than sayin’ to ’em, “Brethren, lookee here,

We’ll jes’ divide things with ye, sheer an’ sheer,

An sence both come o’ pooty strong-backed daddies,

You take the Darkies, ez we’ve took the Paddies;

Ign’ant an’ poor we took ’em by the hand,

An’ they’re the bones an’ sinners o’ the land.”

I ain’t o’ them thet fancy there’s a loss on

Every inves’ment thet don’t start from Bos’on;

But I know this: our money’s safest trusted

In sunthin’, come wut will, thet can’t be busted,

An’ thet’s the old Amerikin idee,

To make a man a Man an’ let him be.

[Gret applause.]

In a hickory-nut shell, the argument was as follows: If we can put up with the Irish in Boston, you can put up with the Negroes in your Southland. We in New England know that we don’t have all the problems—or all the answers—but, as usual, we have a good many of the latter. Just as we trust in sound money, so we are certain of the principle that all that Americans need do “to make a man a Man [is] let him be.”³

A black man in a cabin in South Carolina might have agreed with the ladies and gentlemen sitting in the Washington parlor and nodding in approval at this reading—if only he could have been assured that he would, indeed, be “let be.” The problem was that Hoar and Lowell and Grant, by supporting the Fifteenth Amendment, were encouraging an advancement of the freedmen that many whites had no intention of permitting. The black Carolinian, for his part, already had a pretty good idea that, unenforced by the power of that America which Lowell and Grant revered, the voting amendment was not going to ensure that he would be “let be” any more than had any of the other “ekle laws” that had come out of Washington since the act creating the Freedmen’s Bureau in March 1865.

Because he was not ready to accept it himself, Lowell should have recognized why some white Southerners were not going to buy his simple solution. Like Hosea, they were aware that if Yankees did not stop passing laws designed to achieve racial justice there was “gret resk” that folks “…’ll blunder on…to real Democ’cy.” And they did not want that. Hosea, getting a second wind (and beginning to say things that Lowell—in his own person—did not dare say) blundered into irony to suggest what Reconstruction might have been:

Ef we’re to hev our ekle rights,

’t wun’t du to ’low no competition;

Th’ ole debt doo us for bein’ whites

Ain’t safe onless we stop th’ emission

O’ these noo notes, whose specie base

Is human natur’, ’thout no trace

O’ shape, nor color, nor condition.

Despite his observation that “we’ve took the Paddies,” Hosea did not quite realize that he would have to share his America with them. By the same token, it was not long before James Russell Lowell was not only counseling Englishmen not to let all other Englishmen vote but also advising Americans that civil-service reform was more important than the enforcement of the rights of black people. And Ulysses Grant, too, after the intoxication of the evening’s poetry cleared, learned to avoid the dangerous currency of equality. Once the men who sought to enforce the Civil Rights Acts had been blocked, the president allowed himself to be persuaded by Ku Klux Klan violence and the blandishment of sound bankers of human conduct not to settle for any racial greenbacks “whose specie base / Is human natur’, ’thout no trace / O’ shape, nor color, nor condition.” But on that night in February 1870, Grant had, over brandy and cigars, heard the sound of democracy.⁴

Others heard it too at the end of the Civil War—people who thought the war had truly changed things in America. In the course of the struggle over the annexation of Santo Domingo in the spring of 1870, an eager young senator from Mississippi, caught up in that drama, revealed much of what was best and most hopeful in Reconstruction. But at the same time, he exposed exactly what it was that would spoil that great experiment in a biracial rearrangement of things in America. His name was Adelbert Ames, and he was a carpetbagger—“My carpet-bag is upstairs…,” he once said aptly, although, as it happens, with reference to his desire to visit his fiancée. “If I only had it where my eye could constantly rest on it, I would be perfectly at home.” Not yet thirty-five years old, he was lithe, attractive, boyish, and, when not concerned with matters of state (and not wrestling and pillow fighting with his brother in their bedroom in a Washington boardinghouse), he sat at his desk in the Senate chamber writing charming letters to the lovely young Blanche Butler, the daughter of General Benjamin F. Butler.⁵

Ames’s fascination with politics in the Senate chamber and with the thought of his absent fiancée got wonderfully tangled in one letter to Blanche Butler:

Last night I had rather an unpleasant dream—nothing ominous dear. It was simply this—I know you will smile. I dreamt that someone in the Senate was presenting bills for Railroads and other corporations in which your name appeared as one of the corporators! I resented in my own mind that you should be looked upon as trying to gain money in such a way so I strove to defeat the bill at least to get your name removed. I succeeded, but no sooner was the bill disposed of to my satisfaction than somebody would offer another at the head of which was your name—for your sake I kept fighting [and] winning a thousand battles to find I had them to fight over again.

Ames was courting a beautiful woman, and her father and his fortune as well; he was a senator charged with acting in the public interest, but he knew how other lawmakers, like his distant cousin Oakes Ames, looked after their railroad and other financially rewarding interests first. He was an ardent young man determined to get ahead in this world of conflicting values.⁶

Just where in this world the Mississippi senator resided was not entirely clear. He urged on Blanche that they be married in July rather than in September so that (among other reasons) they could spend a month or two with his family in Minnesota, and then several more weeks with his constituents in Mississippi, before returning to Washington in the fall. However, on another day he considered living in her town of Lowell, Massachusetts—“all I care for is to visit my parents and be long enough in Mississippi to establish a name or get the name of going there as my home.” Three weeks later he was giving Mississippi a bit more consideration: “I think I ought to give that state nearer two months than one inasmuch as this will be our first visit there after our election and that I desire to become more intimately connected with it.”⁷

Adelbert “Del” Ames was born in the prosperous Maine seacoast town of Rockland, and as the first of many tries to find a direction for his ninety-eight years of life, he obtained an appointment to West Point. He graduated in 1861; in 1865, not yet thirty, he was a brigadier general, having received a congressional Medal of Honor for gallantry at Bull Run and a battlefield promotion at Gettysburg. After the demise of the Johnsonian white-supremacy government of Mississippi, Ames, under the provisions of the Republican congressional Reconstruction legislation, was named provisional governor of the state. In March 1869 Grant made him the military commander of the Department of the Mississippi. When the state reconstituted itself, with provisions for black participation in politics, scalawag James Lusk Alcorn, a Confederate soldier and delta planter, was elected governor and Adelbert Ames was chosen senator by the black and white members of the Mississippi legislature. He was not the first man to sit in a Senate seat from Mississippi since the Civil War. That honor belonged to Hiram R. Revels, also a carpetbagger, who in February 1870 took his seat as the first black man to enter the United States Senate. Ames went to Washington and entered the Senate chamber on April 1, 1870.⁸

No one in town had more fun that spring. In the passage between the Senate and House chambers, Ames came upon a vendor selling souvenir paperweights made of globes of glass in which photographs of the great were magnified, and was delighted to see himself in one of them. He bought it and sent it to his fiancée who was in New York, shopping (at Tiffany’s) for an engagement ring. As he thought of her putting the ring over her finger, he wrote, from his Senate desk, a mock admonishment not to be “beautiful and fascinating and have a great man for a father.” Then, in full admiration, he continued: “What a grand space you’re…occupying in the world—how completely you fill my world.” Suddenly the letter ended: “I have just been interrupted by Genl Porter who brought a message from the President. We dine together.”⁹

Grant in a photographer’s studio. LIBRARY OF CONGRESS

The “we” was not Grant and Ames; instead, the senator had dinner with Horace Porter and Orville Babcock, two other young men of Washington with whom he grew friendly. They teased him about his “secret” engagement—common knowledge as far away as Europe, though not yet announced—and talked politics. The subject was the development of a Southern strategy, Reconstruction style. Ames was one of that first generation—and it was a brief generation—of post-Civil War Americans who truly thought there was in the wind a permanent evolution of the position of former slaves in the American world. The freedmen were on the move into, if not social equality, then surely some integral and prosperous part of the social and economic life of the South. Their position would be far above the one allotted them in any system of involuntary servitude or of other, less formal, dependence on a white master class. Immediately after the war, Ames—like Alcorn, the native white man, and Revels, the out-of-state black man—took this new political reality as given. Black people and white people would have to work together whether they liked it or not—and not one of these gentlemen wasted much time worrying about whether they did. They thought they could build good careers for themselves and lives for their families in this new racial context.¹⁰

Certainly Ames was determined to build a good—indeed, great—career for himself and for Blanche. One evening in the spring of 1870, while playing billiards, Ames and his future father-in-law discussed Reconstruction in general and the dismissal of Attorney General Hoar in particular and “decided exactly what should be done.” Ames and Butler (at this time a congressman) agreed that the senator would go to the White House and “have a talk with the President and tell him what the situation is.” Ames was a bit nervous about actually doing so, but his reveries were bold indeed: “Am I not getting rapidly into the political circle when at this early day I go to the Executive to point out his errors and to indicate the proper path for him to pursuer Whatever I may do Grant will know it will be in his interest and not mine that I work.” Growing still more confident, he wrote, “I am as strong as I want to be…and now if I can bring over the Southern senators to his support and be a bond of union between him and your father all for the good of the party I will have accomplished something and be in reality a power which I am not now and which I had never dreamed of.” The young man was reaching high, and the idea of driving the administration into a coherent policy with respect to the South made a great deal of sense.¹¹

Coherence, as usual, was hard to come by. In its path was the memory of the war and of the men who had died in it—as Ames and Butler had not. Many of the Union dead were buried in Southern soil. Partisans of the Union cause, mostly black, honored these dead and celebrated their own freedom by decorating the graves—to the intense consternation of adherents of the Confederate cause who were uneasy about that freedom. Ames and Butler would have liked to see Decoration Day made a national holiday. They did not succeed in 1870, but Ames enjoyed the informal celebration on May 30 in Washington—Fourth of July without noise—and took note of how important it was to the black citizens of the capital. And two days later he set out on another errand of concern to them. The senator went, for the first time, to the “White House—comfortable place—and saw the President about the colored boy appointed to the Military Academy…”¹²

Ames may have known the issues that were of emotional concern to Grant’s black supporters, but he still had to face the problem of getting the white Southern Republicans into line if his solid South was to be constructed. In the midst of the Santo Domingo fight he wrote Blanche that, like her father, “I feel that the President must fight.” He had gone to the White House to say so, to Porter and Babcock, and did some talking in his own domain as well: “Yesterday I was talking to two Southern Senators to get them to support the President—I saw they would if a few changes could be made—today they had increased the price necessary to buy them!” They were after patronage; specifically, one of them had an office in New Orleans in mind.¹³

However, with the Santo Domingo treaty of such critical importance to the president, the patronage channels were clogged, even in the South. Grant’s own family had things blocked. Julia’s brother-in-law, James F. Casey, had control of posts the president might have used to ensure Louisiana votes, and when Ames entered the White House on June 15 he “met or saw my old enemy Judge Dent of Miss.” This was Julia’s brother Lewis, whom Grant had not supported in his white-supremacist bid for the governorship of Mississippi, but to whom he had not closed the familial door. “It is not pleasant,” the Republican senator continued, “to have to confront one you dislike as [much as] I do him. We are not acquainted but he pretends to look very grand and muttered something between his teeth. I was ready for a fight even in his own brother’s house.”¹⁴

There was, perhaps, a means other than putting a fist to Lewis Dent’s jaw to get to Grant and urge a change in his approach to the South. Ames’s immediate strategy for this was to work with his ambitious father-in-law, the “great man” who for the moment was merely the congressman from Lowell. Benjamin Butler, a rich man who had made his own money, championed the down-and-out members of society in order that, in perfectly logical political fashion, he himself might reach higher personal goals. Together the senator from Mississippi and the congressman from Massachusetts would work against another great man, Charles Sumner, to build a coalition of congressional Republicans firmly committed to Grant. The point of attack in early June 1870 was the office of attorney general, held, as noted, by a Sumner man, Rockwood Hoar.

Which of his Southern colleagues in the Senate joined Ames in his overtures to Grant for a Southern attorney general is not known. There were eleven senators (including Hiram Revels) who could be described as carpetbaggers. Ten of these had served in the Union army, four as generals and one as a chaplain. Their martial service, of course, said nothing about a concern for the welfare of their black constituents, but at least two of them had some demonstrated interest in protection of the freedmen. An additional two Southern senators, who were scalawags—native Southerners—urged on Grant the need to appoint a strong prosecutor to protect their black constituents. The line of argument was that once assured of their safety, the black and Unionist white voters could be counted on to stay in the Republican column and, in turn, Southern Republicans in Congress could give Grant their full support. They would demonstrate this commitment in their support of the annexation of Santo Domingo and then, with huge credit established in the political ledgers, draw on Grant for support of their efforts to secure a Republican grasp on the South. Ames wanted a Southern attorney general who would sustain the civil rights of black Republicans and ensure Grant’s future and his own.

During the spring of 1870, Ames and Butler reminded Grant that Attorney General Hoar was not supporting him on Santo Domingo, that he was Sumner’s man, and that, despite his closeness to Sumner, he had done little to assert aggressively the rights of black men. (Later, in Congress—in 1874—Hoar opposed a bill to enforce civil-rights laws.) Butler, with his eye on Sumner’s Senate seat, suggested to Grant (as had Hamilton Fish) that the senior senator be gotten out of town with an appointment as minister to Great Britain. (If he accepted, Butler observed, Grant could send a special envoy whenever he could not trust Sumner to carry out his wishes.) If Sumner declined the appointment, he could no longer claim that the president had ignored him. Nothing came of this particular scheme to get rid of Sumner, but Butler and Ames still had a chance to outflank Sumner with respect to his black constituents. A firm Southern advocate of black rights in the cabinet would achieve that end. The brilliant lawyer Thomas Jefferson Durant of Louisiana would fit the bill, but he had not lived in his adopted state since being driven from it by an anti-integrationist mob in 1866; however, there were other able Republican lawyers in residence in the South. Ames and Butler pressed their case.

Secretary of the Interior Jacob Dolson Cox, a proud man who took his job seriously, was immensely surprised when, on the evening of June 16, 1870, he read in the New York Times that his fellow member of the cabinet Judge Hoar had resigned. There in the paper was a very terse letter of resignation from Hoar, followed by Grant’s only slightly less terse reply of acceptance, but no details were given. Cox immediately left his Capitol Hill house and hurried to take the Pennsylvania Avenue horsecar to Hoar’s lodgings on “F” Street, to find out what had happened. On his way, the secretary was embarrassed to run into the junior senator from Massachusetts, Henry Wilson, who also had just heard the news, and wanted to know its cause. “Non-plussed how to answer, and shrinking from revealing the fact that I was more ignorant than he,” wrote Cox many years later, “I took refuge in commonplaces about the natural result of there being two Cabinet officers from one State….” “I know all that,” said Wilson, who did indeed remember that Boutwell and Hoar were both from his state, “but what do you think of the new man whose name has been sent in this afternoon?” “Worse cornered than ever,” wrote Cox, “as I could not even guess who had been nominated…I could only mumble, ‘Oh, I think you’ll find he’s all right.’” Just then the horsecar came and Cox escaped, mumbling to himself, “With how little wisdom the world is governed.”¹⁵

When Cox got to Judge Hoar’s he discovered that he was not the only member of the cabinet who had been surprised by the president. The attorney general had been in his office the day before when a very abrupt note, with no mention of cause, had come from Grant asking for his resignation. Hoar told Cox that at first he was afraid that “the President had been imposed upon by some grave charge against me” and his “impulse was to go at once and ask the reasons for the demand.” The proud Harvard man, however, could not do so—“self-respect would not permit this”—and instead took his pen and began drafting a reply. At first he played with the conventional phrases of such letters—referring to the press of family business and the like—but then he again looked at Grant’s note and decided that “since no reasons are given…for the demand, it is hardly honest to invent them in the reply.” So he wrote his terse note, carefully locked its only copy in his desk, and sent the original next door to the White House.¹⁶

That afternoon Hoar took some pardon cases to the president and found Grant not unfriendly. All fear of charges evaporated, and now Hoar felt confident enough to ask his chief what had caused the dismissal. He knew that it was linked somehow to his ties to Charles Sumner and to the fact that he, Hoar, had never given the Santo Domingo treaty the support Grant wanted from him. What he had not reckoned with was the complexity of Grant’s bid for treaty votes in the Senate. Speaking to Hoar, Grant “frankly connected his own action with the exigency in which he found himself, and the necessity, to carry out his purposes, of securing support in the Senate from Southern Republicans, who demanded that the Cabinet place should be filled from the South.”¹⁷

Now the conservative attorney general realized that Reconstruction was involved, as well as the fate of the Santo Domingo treaty. And if a powerful Reconstruction program was to emerge, Republican vanity, as Hoar phrased it, was in jeopardy. In the party spectrum on racial policy, Hoar stood in the middle, Cox was on the right, and Wilson, a supporter of Radical Reconstruction legislation, was on the left, but all had been a part of a group that had sought to hold Grant and the various factions of the Republican party to a unified position on Reconstruction. Grant’s report to Johnson in the fall of 1865, which was antithetical to the Radical program of Reconstruction, was still remembered. In contrast, these Republican leaders accepted—indeed in Wilson’s case championed—the Radical Reconstruction program designed to protect the freedmen and contain them in the South; but none of these men were willing to face the consequences of their acts and continue the federal government’s commitment to a responsibility of prosecuting terrorists actively in the federal courts.

Gentlemen count on gentlemen, and Hoar thought “responsible” Southerners would, somehow, find a way to protect the freedmen. By 1870, however, Grant seemed to have lost the faith in the “thinking people of the South” that he had held in the fall of 1865, and was listening to carpetbaggers. The carpetbagger senators, heartily encouraged by the future father-in-law of one of them, had asked Grant for an attorney general who would vigorously prosecute those who were terrorizing their constituents. Hoar’s prejudices argued against so strong an identification with black people; what was more, he despised Butler, whom he did not consider to be a gentleman—a judgment he underscored by blocking Butler’s honorary degree from Harvard a decade later—and with quiet force he warned Grant against being “subjected to a pressure in favor of unfit men.” Grant, trimming, responded by suggesting that perhaps they both ought to keep the whole matter of the resignation confidential until he could think it over.¹⁸

Reprieved, Hoar was at work at his office in the Treasury Building on the morning of June 16 when a reporter from the New York Tribune asked to see him. Cautiously, the attorney general declined to do so, but the reporter persisted with a note: perhaps the attorney general would speak to him about the news of his resignation that he had read in the Times. Sending a surprised and troubled clerk to “give the gentleman any information you are possessed of,” Hoar stormed to the White House, walked in on Grant, and said, “Mr. President, I have come to tell you that somebody about you betrays you.” Grant, “deeply stirred” by the release of his correspondence with Hoar, got up from his desk and went into the adjacent office, where Babcock and Porter worked, determined to “severely punish the breach of confidence.” Soon he came back “mollified,” explaining to Hoar that his secretaries “could account for the leak only by supposing that some unauthorised person must have got access in the outer office” to the copy of Grant’s acceptance of the resignation. The explanation was too thin for Hoar to believe, but he could not call the president a liar and so settled for diffidence.¹⁹

Nothing was said about how Hoar’s letter was copied and came to be known to the reporter from the Times, for Grant, with bland authority, had already begun asking Hoar what he thought of Amos Akerman of Georgia. Akerman had been appointed United States district attorney for Georgia during Hoar’s regime, and the attorney general had recommended him for a federal judgeship, but Hoar found it awkward to comment on Akerman’s qualifications to be his own successor: “It would hardly be proper for me, Mr. President, to say what should be the standard of fitness for the attorney-generalship of the United States.” With this, Ebenezer Rockwood Hoar left the White House. Nominations required the great seal affixed by the secretary of state, and thus, that afternoon, Hamilton Fish learned that he was to have a new colleague in the cabinet.²⁰

Amos T. Akerman (both a’s are long in Cartersville, Georgia) was a lean and balding man with a thicket of eyebrows over penetrating eyes, a large nose, and a richly curled lower lip. Reporters saw a “face of learning and disposition to deep meditation” when the firm-minded Yankee turned Georgian arrived in the capital. A year older than Grant, Akerman was born in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, in 1821, studied at the Phillips Exeter Academy, and attended Dartmouth College, where he was president of one of its two literary and debating societies, a member of Phi Beta Kappa, and the editor of the literary magazine; his commencement address was entitled “The English Poets as Advocates of Liberty.” After graduating in 1842 he moved to the South to make a living as a schoolteacher. In Savannah, he served as a tutor to the children of Senator John Macpherson Berrien, another Northerner who had moved to Georgia, and while teaching, read law under Berrien, who had been Andrew Jackson’s attorney general. Admitted to the bar, he practiced in Elberton, Georgia, northeast of Atlanta. There is astonishingly little biographical information on Akerman, considering that he was a cabinet member; the conspiracy of historical silence that came down on Reconstructionist integrationists dealt severely with the attorney general.²¹

Akerman went with his adopted state when Georgia seceded, and served as quartermaster of a home-guard brigade that saw action when the state was invaded. He was married the day before leaving for the front. After the war he came to political prominence as a member of the Georgia constitutional convention of 1867–68, which resulted in black participation in the governing of the state; he was not a party to the resurgence of white supremacy in Georgia that resulted in the removal, in 1868, of the Negro members of the state legislature. When the right of blacks to hold office was restored, Akerman went to Washington to lobby for the readmission of Georgia. It was then that he met influential Radical Republican senators, who had assumed that the grant of political rights to the freedmen would secure their safety. However, as the participation of black citizens increased in the South, so too did the determination of white supremacists to stop them from achieving equality. When legal maneuvers failed, the white supremacists moved outside the law, and the Ku Klux Klan, founded in 1867 in Tennessee, grew strong in areas where black people were politically active. By 1869 the secret organization was using terrorist techniques to frighten voters into subservience. It soon became clear that local law-enforcement officers, within the state court systems, would not prosecute the Klansmen, and witnesses to crimes who were brave enough to report what they had seen often found that their reports were turned over to the Klan, and they themselves then became the victims of terrorist attacks. As law-abiding Southerners like Akerman sought some protection for the black Republicans, they began looking not to the state courts, but to the federal courts. For a man with young children to combat the Klan took courage, which Akerman did not lack. At first his efforts were not effective, despite his skill as a lawyer and his powerful position as United States district attorney. In this position, Akerman was charged with the duty of enforcing the federal rights of his neighbors, but neither in Georgia nor anywhere else in the South, save Kentucky, did a rigorous program of prosecuting terrorists exist in 1870.

The Civil Rights Act of 1866, designed to enforce the Thirteenth Amendment, was on the books, and shortly after the ratification of the Fifteenth Amendment, the enforcement bill of May 31, 1870, designed to end the intimidation of black voters, was passed by Congress. But none of this body of law meant that President Grant and Attorney General Hoar were insisting that United States district attorneys in the Southern districts aggressively prosecute the people terrorizing and murdering black citizens who exercised their rights. Some excellent federal judges, such as Hugh L. Bond, attempted to bring justice to the South, but neither in Akerman’s days as United States district attorney in Georgia nor during his first year as the nation’s attorney general was the prosecution of the Klan aggressive enough to be effective.

Akerman had, however, become attorney general at an auspicious time for enlarging the responsibilities of that office. Largely to eliminate the expensive practice by which cabinet departments hired lawyers for specific cases involving the government’s interest, Congress in June 1870 created the Justice Department. In the new department, the attorney general was responsible for all litigation involving the federal government; to help him carry out these added duties, a new position—solicitor general—was created. The solicitor general was to argue cases in the Supreme Court, and the attorney general supervised his work as well as that of the United States district attorneys, who argued cases before the federal circuit courts. Litigation before these courts was growing to major proportions as the pressure to protect black citizens in the South through the use of federal law and federal courts increased.

“Outrages,” as the Freedmen’s Bureau termed the murders, cruel beatings, and terrifying threats of both that were intended to relegate black people in the South to a dependent position, had been going on since slavery ended. The records of the Bureau were full of documented cases of brutal mistreatment. Yet not until the December 1870 term did Congress finally move to stop the criminal activities in the South. In April 1871 the nation’s legislators established a joint committee which began a massive investigation of the activities of the Ku Klux Klan. The committee members’ thorough interrogations (recorded in thirteen volumes of testimony, along with balanced conclusions) began when Congress, anticipating their findings, passed a bill to enforce the Fourteenth Amendment. Initially, there had been difficulty getting Grant’s support of this bill. It called for the president to press for protection of the black people in the South through the courts; if compliance could not be obtained through the co-operation of the state and federal judicial systems, Grant would be empowered to use the army to enforce court decisions and to suspend the writ of habeas corpus to make prosecutions effective. Moderate Republicans like James A. Garfield and James G. Blaine balked at this, and Grant, skeptical of the usefulness of the army in enforcing racial justice, and wary of charges that he wanted to make himself a military dictator, was reluctant to support the legislation. An earlier bill, which had had Grant’s sanction but not enthusiastic support, had been defeated, and the managers of the legislation, Congressman Benjamin Butler prominent among them, concluded that they could not put through any legislation without a strong call for it by the president.

This Grant was reluctant to give. On March 23, 1871, he told George Boutwell, the only member of the cabinet besides Akerman who firmly supported the bill, that he was going to Capitol Hill to explain to those he had previously encouraged that he could not endorse legislation that might result in the use of troops for its enforcement. Dismayed, Boutwell climbed into the carriage with his chief and tried to dissuade him. At the Capitol, Boutwell’s argument was reinforced by the citation of atrocities documented in their investigation by the managers of the bill. Grant there and then agreed to issue a public endorsement; conservatives Hamilton Fish and George Robeson were able only to modify the tone slightly, and Grant’s written message of March 23, 1871, established the basis for federal jurisdiction in the cases by stating that the collection of taxes and the passage of the mail were endangered. With this somewhat tepid but indispensable call for action, Congress on April 20 passed a strong measure, called the Ku Klux Klan Act, designed to enforce the Fourteenth Amendment.²²

Armed with this legislation, Amos Akerman moved forcefully to protect his own—the people of the South, both black and white, who believed the Civil War had really changed things and who were willing to work together within a lawful society. He identified his party—the Republican party—with this cause. In the summer of 1871, Akerman wrote a fellow Southerner about the great power of the Ku Klux Klan and “the necessity of protecting the Republican citizens of the South against outrages.” He went on to say, “In my opinion we make nothing by concession to the Democracy. I am for a strict adhesion to our doctrine, as not only right in principle, but expedient in policy.” He looked forward to Grant’s renomination because he believed it would ensure the continued enforcement of antiterrorist measures—no one, he told a friend, was “better” or “stronger” than Grant—and he sought to instill confidence in the Georgian so he would dare to testify publicly before the congressional committee that was in the South investigating terrorism.²³

In August 1871, Akerman was much troubled by the threat of still more radical violence, in Louisiana. “The New Orleans trouble is serious,” he stated at the beginning of a letter to Grant on August 5, but as he explained in conversation with Babcock, the Negroes had not formally tried to obtain protection under state law, and therefore, under federal law—duly cited in his letter to the president—he could not act. In North Carolina, on the other hand, he encouraged the bringing of indictments against terrorists. Akerman reported to Benjamin Butler—whom he did not permit to bully him into an appointment of which he did not approve, or to deflect him from concentrating on the South—that from “one of the worst counties” of North Carolina a request had come that prosecution be eased “lest there be starvation, because so many of the outlaw class are hiding in the woods for fear of arrest.” Akerman doubted that there was actual starvation, and he would not accept the concept that one ceases to protect an injured party because such protection is inconvenient for the injurer. To Akerman, the complaint from North Carolina demonstrated that his United States district attorneys were indeed having an effect in the South. He acknowledged, however, that in “other states we have not yet made much impression.”²⁴

Concerned, Grant came to Washington from Long Branch in August and conferred with Senator John Scott of Pennsylvania, chairman of the joint committee that was investigating the Klan. It was clear from the discussion that if all known violators were arrested, the jails would be filled and the court calendars taxed. To permit men who had tormented blacks to go free on their own recognizance was to invite them to continue assaults on the already victimized Negroes. On the other hand, the only constitutional ground, other than invasion, for suspending habeas corpus was to declare an area to be in rebellion; for the president to do this and direct that those arrested be held in military detention centers until they could be brought to trial was to invite the charge that martial law was in effect. Grant was never happy with the image of himself as a military despot grinding the South under his heel, but the evidence of brutality presented by Scott was overwhelming. Therefore, he sent Akerman to North Carolina with instructions to encourage the judges to move the trials speedily. The attorney general was able to press prosecutions in that state, but when he moved to South Carolina, he found in the early fall that the terrorists were out of control. On October 12, 1871, a warning was given; it went unheeded, and on October 17, Grant issued a proclamation suspending habeas corpus in nine counties. Cooperating with United States marshals, army officers led detachments of soldiers out into the countryside to arrest suspects, who were then held for trial before the federal district court for violation of the act of April 20, 1871. Akerman remained in South Carolina during October, taking personal charge of this campaign against the Klan.²⁵

He could see the debilitating effect on the black citizens of the savage attacks on them, but he found it difficult to make that savagery comprehensible to his countrymen in the North. To many it was literally incomprehensible. One Northerner, trying to understand the virulence of the hatred in the South, asked Akerman if relief from the whiskey tax would dispei it. Akerman was afraid more than that would be necessary:

A portion of our southern population hate the government of the United States, because they understand it emphatically to represent northern sentiment, and hate the negro because he has ceased to be a slave and has been promoted to be a citizen and voter, and hate those of the southern whites who are looked upon as in political friendship with the north, with the United States Government and with the negro. These persons commit the violence that disturbs many parts of the south. Undoubtedly the judgement of the great body of our people condemns this behavior, but they take no active measures to suppress it.

There, baldly, was the problem. Grant could not have asked for a clearer analysis of Reconstruction than that offered by his attorney general. The question was what it would take to make the popular president lead the country into sustained “active measures.”²⁶

Akerman could see no point in conciliation. To E. P. Jackson, the United States district attorney in Jackson, Mississippi, who could get nowhere with the federal district judge before whom he argued his cases, Akerman wrote that he thought either impeachment or congressional action reassigning the district court were the only cures, and he expected neither. The judge, he concluded, was typical: “It is my individual opinion that nothing is more idle than to attempt to conciliate by kindness that portion of the southern people who are still malevolent. They take all kindness on the part of the Government as evidence of humility and hence are emboldened to lawlessness by it.” Akerman was not growing gentle on the job: “It is the business of a judge to terrify evil doers not to coax them.”²⁷

Akerman was willing to perform even symbolic acts to indicate where he stood. He took rooms for his new department in the handsome new headquarters of the Freedman’s Savings Bank, across the street from the Treasury, in August 1871. He applauded thrift and education among the freedmen, but he did not subscribe to the idea that emancipation had automatically cured all the deficiencies from which blacks suffered as a result of having been slaves. He defended barring Negroes from juries because they were “uneducated,” and he vigorously argued that Republican acquiescence to this position in New Jersey would not drive the black voters into the Democratic camp. In a letter marked “unofficial,” written to William E. Walker, a New Jersey Republican and a black man, he was as tough as he had been about the white Mississippi judge. Outspokenly and without condescension, he rejected Walker’s threat to take his followers into the Democratic camp: “You do not, on that matter, represent…your colored fellow citizens. I cannot believe that they are capable of such meanness.” The blunt attorney general pressed his allies hard. To a beleaguered Mississippi official he observed that “six years of leniency” had not “melted” disrespect for the law, which would “only disappear before an energetic, but at the same time, strictly just and lawful exercise of power.”²⁸

By November 1871, Akerman began to see the enormity of the problem of bringing racial justice to the South. To a friend in Brooklyn he confided, “A judge of one of the State courts, who is very kindly disposed to his Ku-Klux neighbors, writes to me a remonstrance against the action of the United States Government, and unwittingly lets out the fact that from fifteen hundred to two thousand of his neighbors have absconded.” Akerman observed that “none but the guilty would flee,” and the number of potential defendants disturbed him. He reasoned that local courts would not act and the federal courts would only be able to handle a fraction of the cases. “Really these combinations,” he concluded, “amount to war.”²⁹

Akerman was stern, but he had some sense of humor about himself. He admitted to a friend that he was “chronically garrulous on the Ku-Klux”—but he was not so tired of hearing himself on the subject as to yield in his determination to break the Klan. Having witnessed at first hand the extreme difficulty of enforcing the Ku Klux Klan Act in South Carolina, he had only praise for the courage and tenacity of Major Lewis W. Merrill of the United States Army, stationed in Yorkville, South Carolina, who was trying to do so. Merrill, described in the New York Tribune as having “the head, face, and spectacles of a German professor, and the frame of an athlete,” did, in the judgment of Allen W. Trelease, as much as any man in America to combat the Ku Klux Klan. Akerman would have agreed. He wrote a discerning and elegant evaluation of Merrill that suggests a public servant of the highest order. He told Merrill’s commanding officer that the young man was precisely the person for the job because he was “resolute, collected, bold and prudent, with a good legal head, very discriminating between truth and falsehood, very indignant at wrong, and yet master of his indignation; the safer because incredulous at the outset, and, therefore, disposed to scrutinize reports the more keenly….”³⁰

There were nowhere near enough Merrills. Akerman was dismayed that the public thought Tammany frauds in New York more interesting than the murder of black people in the South. In a speech in Brooklyn he tried to bring Northerners to a different order of priorities with a “simple narration” of the murders in South Carolina that Merrill had documented for him. He also took Merrill’s report and his own observations to Grant and urged the president to support firm prosecution of the Ku Klux Klan cases. Black people and their friends registered their approval of Akerman’s efforts with an invitation to him to serve on the visiting committee of Howard University.³¹

As late as the second week in December, there is no hint in Akerman’s correspondence that he was about to be fired. Early in November, however, he had called on his predecessor, Rockwood Hoar, in Arlington and when Hoar was “not in” to him had set down in writing, with characteristic and fatal directness, “concisely the point of objection” to Hoar’s contention that the railroad he represented had completed its road and hence was eligible for land grants from the federal government. Akerman was exceedingly stern with Hoar. (“Your road is not completed until it is finished…to a site legally fixed for a junction.”) Hoar was no doubt annoyed by the attorney general’s summary rejection of his claim. He himself may not have been in a position to extract a reversal of Akerman’s decision from President Grant, but his clients were.³²

Meanwhile Akerman continued to work to build a strong Republican party in Georgia and across the South as the only means of supporting, locally, the federal effort to enforce the laws protecting the freedmen. And he wanted through politics to achieve a very high goal—to prevent the black voters from becoming so discouraged that they would embrace racial separation. To the Reverend Henry McNeal Turner, a brilliant black minister and political leader whom Grant had named postmaster at Macon, Georgia, and who used that post to become an important figure in the state Republican party, Akerman wrote, “Those who think of organizing to vote for colored men exclusively fall into the Democratic [error?] of making politics a matter of race. A black man’s party is just as wrong as a white man’s party. The best man of the soundest politics should have your votes, without regard to his color.”³³

The man who wrote this was dismissed by President Grant a month later. Hamilton Fish, long annoyed with what he regarded as Akerman’s obsession with the Klan, counseled against stern prosecution of that organization. Instead of insisting, as Akerman did, on persevering in the protection of a national citizenry by action in the federal courts, the secretary of state preferred to let the victims pay the price; he hoped to achieve abatement of Klan violence through lenience toward the murderers. Grant knew that under the Constitution habeas corpus could be suspended only in cases of invasion and rebellion, and he did not want to conceive of the Klan’s activities as a reopening of the Civil War; he was uneasy about Akerman’s zeal. This uneasiness, coupled with pressure from Secretary of the Interior Columbus Delano in behalf of Collis P. Huntington and Jay Gould, whom Akerman had thwarted with strict rulings unfavorable to their railroads, led Grant to remove the attorney general. On December 12 and 13, 1871, Akerman and Grant exchanged brief polite notes of resignation and the acceptance thereof, and in a personal covering letter Akerman wished the president the continued success of his administration. Then the finest champion of human rights in the Grant administration went home to Cartersville, Georgia, where he practiced law privately for only eight more years. He had given up on his native North and on Northerners. In a letter free of bitterness over his resignation, he wrote his governor, Benjamin Conley (who was also being forced out of the battle), “Even such atrocities as Ku-Kluxery do not hold their attention…the Northern mind being active and full of what is called progress runs away from the past.”³⁴

Akerman’s judgment on the Grant administration, as he left it, remained positive. It was, he said, the best in forty years—since that of John Quincy Adams—for “its merits are in primary things, its faults in trivial things.” He did not elaborate on his optimism. In a more intimate and affectionate letter, he wrote Major Merrill, whose judiciousness and concern for the freedmen he so admired, “Perhaps I should violate confidence, and possibly should make mistakes if I now were to state what I suppose to be the true causes of the state of things which make that step [resignation] proper on my part.” Stoically (but inaccurately) he added, “My successor is an able and experienced man, and in administering the office will be free from some of the hostilities that have obstructed me.” Grant did not stand by Akerman, and politicians with interests different from and more powerful than the Georgian’s drove him out. Shortly before he left Washington, he indignantly denied that the cause of his going was his disagreement with the “Secretary of Interior,” as he icily referred to Columbus Delano (who had less trouble agreeing with Hoar and Huntington), but he did achieve a dignified exit. With Akerman’s departure on January 10, 1872, went any hope that the Republican party would develop as a national party of true racial equality.³⁵

Akerman was one of an exceedingly small group of white Republicans who were not embarrassed by what they had wrought in the way of such equality. Washington opened the eyes of others. In the capital city, integration was progressing with alarming success. Black Americans were taking the concept of equality seriously. They were becoming more than servants. Black people moving into the city—moving next door and attaining power in the local government—made Northern congressmen suddenly ready to listen to those who purported to know how to keep them in their place. An awkward moment in the life of Senator Adelbert Ames illustrates the problem well. In the spring of 1871 a petite young woman in a good street dress and hat came into the senator’s office and asked him to recommend her for a government job. He said that he could not do so as he did not know her. “You ought to,” she said as she left; “I was in the house long enough.” Only after she was gone did he recall that she was “the colored girl who was our chambermaid” a few months before.³⁶

All of Adelbert Ames’s efforts to protect the black citizens of his adopted Mississippi after he became governor in 1874 are diminished by this brief encounter between a young man and a young woman of Reconstruction America. For all his efforts, Ames could not see the woman as a person, through the cloud of class and race. “I felt very cheap,” he wrote his wife, “and would willingly give the letter of recommendation to regain what was lost—to avoid even the appearance of being neglectful or unduly forgetful towards one so lowly.” What Ames had lost, however, was past regaining. Amos Akerman had had his troubles with paternalism too, but he never forgot the names of the black politicians in Georgia or New Jersey with whom he argued and whom he cajoled and saluted in their mutual fight to achieve racial justice. He apparently was not afraid that he might have blundered on “to real Democ’cy.”³⁷

The United States Military Academy was perhaps the last place to look for democracy, but black people sought to find it even there. They had the idea that Reconstruction should be a national accomplishment; they saw nothing incongruous in seeking equal treatment in an army that had fought the war that ended their slavery. The man who took on this small but significant effort in reconstructing the North was James Webster Smith of South Carolina. He was the “colored boy appointed to the Military Academy” about whom Senator Adelbert Ames had called on President Ulysses Grant on June 1, 1870.

Smith had been spotted in Columbia by a northern philanthropist, David Clark, as “a remarkable scholar” of “excellent character,” and had been brought by Clark to Hartford, where he did superior work in high school before going on to Howard University. In 1870, Congressman Solomon L. Hoge of South Carolina, a former Union army officer raised in Ohio, nominated Smith for a cadetship at the military academy. Smith had been carefully picked to achieve this “first.” A black man sat in the Senate of the United States, another had argued a case before the Supreme Court; now Smith took on the risky assignment of making the black man’s way into another bastion of the establishment, the regular United States army. Martin Delany and a few other black men had served as officers of some of the 200,000 black volunteers during the Civil War, but no black officers had been trained at West Point.³⁸

In the same year that Smith was appointed, two other young black men who were appointed were refused admission on medical grounds, and a third, Michael Howard, was excluded when he failed to pass his entrance examination. Smith was too well prepared to be kept out for reasons like these. His passage, however, was anything but smooth. From home, young Smith got strong encouragement. Israel Smith, in Columbia, knowing the “rebels will devil you so much you can’t stay,” nevertheless urged James to be strong: “You must not resign on any account, for that is what the democrats want.” For James Smith, alone at West Point, this was a demanding assignment. Both officers and other cadets had been angered by his entrance into the academy, and the harassment of the young man was relentless. At first the public could only be suspicious of racism; as word of the persecution began appearing in the press, editorials suggested that the treatment of Smith—for example a pail of slops thrown over him one night as he slept—was just normal hazing, and the writers spoke in the vein of “boys will be boys.” One of those boys was Frederick Dent Grant. As the president’s son, he was in a unique position to be of great assistance to Smith and indeed to the whole process of integration of the United States Army. Unfortunately, Fred Grant—a member of the first, or senior, class in 1870–71—used his peculiar authority in precisely the opposite direction.³⁹

Smith’s opponents, determined to drive him from the academy, extricated from all members of the first class pledges that no display of support for Smith—not even the exchange of a word—would come from any of them. He was to be “silenced.” Fred Grant later denied that he had been an organizer of this conspiracy, but he never denied having joined it, and to the dismay of some of his father’s admirers, there was considerable evidence to suggest that he was an active participant in the ceaseless harassment of James Smith. The black cadet had not been at the Point for an hour before he was reminded that he was “nothing but a damn nigger”; he had to take his meals cold because he “should not touch anything on that table until the white cadets were served”; he drilled alone: “Stand off one side from the line, you d——-d black. You are too near that white man.” In June, Smith wrote to Clark that he was lonely and that “these fellows appear to be trying their utmost to run me off, and I fear they will succeed if they continue as they have begun.” The harassment was so severe that Smith lodged charges with Emory Upton, the commandant of cadets. In response Upton, knowing that no cadet would testify on Smith’s behalf, told him he “must prove the charges.” Clark, furious when he heard of Upton’s answer, made Smith testify in his own behalf by releasing one of the cadet’s letters on the subject to the press.⁴⁰

Clark also had an interview with President Grant and urged him to champion Smith as a model for the advancement of black people everywhere in the society. Clark pointed out how good Smith’s academic record was, and Grant acknowledged it, saying, “Don’t take him away; the battle may as well be fought now as any time.” However, according to Clark’s version of the conversation, Fred Grant was in the room and “in the presence of his father” said that “the time had not come to send colored boys to West Point.” Clark pointed out that if black men were in the Senate, surely they should be at the military academy, to which (reported Clark) Fred replied, “Well, no damned nigger will ever graduate from West Point.”⁴¹

If Ulysses Grant had had all the wit and wisdom in the world, it might not have been enough to bring eleven rebel states into line on Reconstruction, but one word from him could have reconstructed West Point enough for James Smith to emerge, relatively unscathed, as a second lieutenant. It was not that the academy was easy to reform. As the president knew from his own years there, the place was impregnable to thought of any kind; his word would have penetrated neither mind nor heart, but it would have struck in whatever part of the body the responsiveness to promotional possibilities resides. The president of the United States—this one a former general of the army—knew how powerful a weapon the promotions list was. With this stick President Grant could have forced the officers in charge of West Point to keep the tormentors off James Smith’s back.

The stick was not used. Fred Grant had done his work well; the absence of any admonition from the White House made the persecutors of Smith sure they were safe. Despite Fred’s outburst with Clark, the president chose to ignore the patently racist core of the problem and see it as one created by the wronged party rather than by those perpetrating the wrongs. Writing at the height of the controversy to Secretary of War William Worth Belknap, who was well known for his own disinclination to assist black causes, Grant said, “I received two or three letters from my son Fred who informs me that the cadet is very objectionable there….” The publicity in the newspapers did stir other consciences, and the outcry resulted in a court of inquiry in the summer of 1870. The cadets who did the harassing, among them General Quincy Adams Gilmore’s son and Secretary Belknap’s nephew, were reprimanded but not punished, and the pressure on Smith continued. It culminated, significantly, in September, the month when the traditional ball was held at which plebes are first allowed to entertain women guests. The ball was not a minor social event in the life of West Point. Julia Grant attended, as did Senator Ames and his bride and Secretary of State Fish’s son.⁴²

That Smith might exercise his privilege and attend the ball—share a sexual pageant—with white men and women was the greatest threat he posed to the other cadets. Smith himself told of another such occasion, when his brother and sister came to visit him, stayed with “Mrs. Simpson in Highland Falls, and brought Mrs. Simpson’s two daughters to a parade.” As Smith pointed out a good tree under which to sit while watching the parade, in which, proudly, he was expecting to march, a cadet officer ordered him out of the parade and told him to stake down a tent. Meanwhile other cadets and their young lady friends, “on the qui vive to get a glimpse of ‘nigger Jim’ and the nigger wenches who are going to the hops,” pointed to the Smiths and the Simpsons and said, in voices that could clearly be heard, “See the mokes, come to attend the hops.” “Moke” was nineteenth-century slang for “ass,” and in the United States, was one of the almost endless list of synonyms for “nigger.” Smith was learning the ugly power of that word and of other derogatory terms as well. The previous fall, in the episode that brought matters to a head, Smith had been arrested for striking a fellow cadet and court-martialed for “conduct unbecoming a gentleman”; his weapon was a coconut dipper which he had wrested from a tormentor when taunted with a remark about monkeys in trees.⁴³

Smith had been subjected to a series of hearings and courts-martial conducted by officials at West Point during the summer of 1870, and now, in the fall, his defenders demanded that the War Department involve itself in his case. In October 1870, General Howard, head of the now feeble Freedmen’s Bureau but still regarded as the spokesman for Negro rights in the government, was sent to preside over still another of Smith’s trials. This was recognition of the gravity of the situation, for Howard, one of the highest-ranking generals in the army, outranked the West Point superintendent, Thomas G. Pitcher, and Commandant of Cadets Upton. Howard’s court heard full testimony, including that of Cadet Smith himself, who appeared without counsel. Patronizing white newspapers, favorably disposed to Smith, cited this acceptance of full responsibility for himself as evidence of his surprising intellectual equality. The account of the trial itself stands as a monument to his dignity and courage.⁴⁴

The transcript of the proceedings confirms that Smith was not a man anyone pushed around. “I,” testified Cadet Wilson (with whom Smith had fought over the dipper), “said to him, ‘let me go by.’ He did not move but said to me ‘God damn you.’” Wilson went on to say that Smith then hit him with the coconut shell. Howard and his colleagues on the court were not impressed by young Wilson’s claim of being severely wronged; they cleared Smith of one charge and on the other, the sin of fighting, gave him a light punishment. Many of Howard’s fellow army officers, who wanted Smith expelled, were affronted by the lenient sentence, and on November 20, 1870, the Bureau of Military Justice formally protested to Secretary Belknap that it would be better to have no sentence than one which, by making light of the crime, was an insult to the academy. Grant was said to agree with this reasoning, and posting of the decision of the Howard court was delayed. The finding, clearly a triumph for Smith, was posted only on January 5, 1871. The wait for vindication had been long, but any satisfaction in the victory was denied Smith. The harassment immediately redoubled, and before the day closed he was again arrested, this time for refusing to hold up his head when marching. It is hard to cry, unseen, and hold your head up. Again Smith was tried by a West Point court and convicted, and his case was again appealed to Secretary Belknap. While it was pending, the first-year examinations were held; despite the strain he was under, James Smith finished with a high rank in his class. If this was an embarrassment for his fellow cadets, who so forcefully suggested that he was not worthy to be among them, they betrayed no sign of it. Outside West Point, Smith’s white admirers pressed Belknap and President Grant to ensure that the conviction would be overruled. No word came from the secretary of war, however, because Belknap did not want to announce any decision that would spoil the Grant family graduation celebration. The presence of the president of the United States and his lady made commencement day 1871 on the Plain, with its magnificent late-spring view of the Hudson, particularly festive. Ulysses and Julia were the proud parents on hand for the graduation of Frederick Dent Grant, who was forty-first in a class of forty-one in discipline; thirty-seventh in academic standing.⁴⁵

Graduation over, Secretary Belknap issued his finding in the Smith case. The cadet was pardoned and permitted to return to West Point—but required to begin again as a plebe, despite his excellent academic record. Before the blurred vindication came, the old abolitionist Lewis Tappan had counseled that Smith should accept exoneration and transfer to Amherst or Williams, where Tappan would pick up the bill. In Hartford, Smith’s sponsor, David Clark, was furious with the equivocal ruling. “I feel that Cadet Smith has been outraged by the Secy of War and the President. Fred Grant a low miserable scamp has been the cause of much of his trouble,” he wrote. “If Grant is renominated for the presidency—God sparing my life & strength,” Clark continued, “I will prevent this state from giving her electorate vote for him. He is unworthy of his position. [In my] opinion Smith ought to resign and leave the rotten institution. I may publish a history of the whole affair including the conduct of Grant’s son.” Unfortunately, Clark did not write his book; he put his charges, instead, in a fiery letter to General Howard.⁴⁶

Smith did stick it out. But the graduation of the class of 1871 did not end his harassment or that of the three black cadets who entered that fall. All of them were driven from the academy. The agent of Smith’s going was neither a cabal of cruel fellow cadets nor the equally unsympathetic officers of the army, but a professor of philosophy. Professor Peter S. Michie, asserting that “neither caste nor aristocracy” existed at West Point and that the black cadets “all displayed a marked deficiency in deductive reasoning,” gave Smith his examination in private—in defiance of custom. Smith failed. A request for retesting, customarily granted, was denied. He left West Point; two years later, while teaching school, he died of tuberculosis. With unintended irony, Secretary Belknap summed up the government’s treatment of James Smith when he said that he did for the cadet “what has never been done for a white boy in like circumstances!”⁴⁷

The black cadets kept the faith. Despite Smith’s fate, they struggled to make the academy—the nation—theirs, but the academy did not yield. General Howard wrote, “No barbarian could torture a captive so as to wound him in spirit more keenly than other young fellows have done to Napier [another black cadet, who had joined Smith at West Point in the fall of 1871] simply because it is in their power.” Howard admired the courage of the black cadets, but he could not match it with effective action in their behalf. When Smith was required to repeat his first year, an enraged David Clark quite simply ordered General Howard to move into action: “I wish you to see the Sec’y of War—and the President if possible and learn what they propose to do.” But soon after Clark issued his order, Smith and Napier were being arrested to prevent black men and women from going to a party together with white men and women. And unlike the black cadets, who kept trying until, at last, Henry O. Flipper graduated in 1877, their white liberal friends were picking up their marbles and going home. When (to no avail) Clark, in July 1871 issued his marching orders to Howard, he also wrote, “The time has now come when the question must be settled by those in authority whether colored cadets have equal rights at West Point with others or not. I have been watching events one year. It is plain to me they have not. The declaration that they have is a sham—a cheat—a catch for votes—If this is true—then all I have given ($60,000 since the close of the year) and done to elevate the Colored race is foolishly squandered—and the time has come for me to stop.” David Clark stopped; all of white America stopped blundering on toward democracy.⁴⁸