XXIII

GREATNESS

He was sincere and devoted in his friendships, but when he discovered that his confidence had been misplaced, a reconciliation became impossible. With him there could be no genuine forgiveness….

—George S. Boutwell

The President…is as stubborn as ever, and seems determined to risk his all upon that one card. He seems to have a genius for suicide.

—Carl Schurz

ULYSSES GRANT had a genius for survival. To Carl Schurz he seemed bent on his own destruction in his inflexible and relentless insistence on obtaining Santo Domingo, but Schurz did not understand his adversary. Once Grant had decided to ford the stream and get Santo Domingo, he would not be turned back, and he would not forgive those who, however rationally, thwarted his will. To be sure, he did lose Santo Domingo in a vain and costly pursuit of a dubious cause. But just as he had outmaneuvered all the generals who might have stepped in front of him during the war, so would he best the politicians who had denied him Santo Domingo. He would never give up contending that annexation was desirable, and, more immediately, he would present evidence of his vindication. He would win reelection.

No Republican had dared oppose him in 1868, but by 1872 many were ready to do so. Some were men on whom he had once counted, such as Alexander T. Stewart, Jacob Dolson Cox, and Carl Schurz. As a junior senator Schurz had enlisted loyally in 1869, but he had become insubordinate in his opposition to the Ku Klux Klan Bill as well as the Santo Domingo annexation. Grant scorned the intellectuality of the men who formed the Liberal Republican movement. To him they appeared ungrateful and disloyal. In April 1871, Schurz wrote Cox that he considered “the Administration with its train of officers and officemongers” to be the “great incubus pressing upon the party,” and he predicted optimistically that “the superstition that Grant is the necessary man is rapidly giving way. The spell is broken, and we have only to push through the breach.”¹

Schurz may not have been entirely wrong about the aura of unassailability having lifted from Grant by 1871, but he could not have been more in error in his assessment of his foe. It was not a policy—monetary, diplomatic, constitutional—with which Schurz was contending, nor was it an administration conducted by Babcocks and Porters; it was Grant himself. In the lost campaign for Santo Domingo, the general and president had learned on whom he could count—and, almost more importantly, on whom he could not count—in his war of survival. He was not going to be driven from the White House by anyone, least of all the likes of Charles Sumner and Carl Schurz, to say nothing of effete creatures like Henry Adams and Edwin L. Godkin.

These two journalists were spokesmen for many well-informed people who were protesting Grant’s brand of Republicanism. Liberal Republicans wanted government not of the rich and the well born, but of the intellectually well endowed and the well bred. They favored civil-service reform, free trade, hard currency, and civility. They held in disfavor political patronage, inflationary monetary policies, and the militarism they associated with a national constabulary necessary to police a national citizenry. Theirs was a liberal conception of a limited government existing to encourage private virtue, rather than a nationalistic approach that recognized the existence of inequities in the society and sought to redress them through equal application of federal law enforced by the federal government. Except for Sumner, most of their leaders had opposed the Ku Klux Klan Bill. They also had lost most of their affection for General Grant; they had never been particularly fond of the soiled people who still liked the president very much indeed.

“The Tanner” and “the Cobbler” were the good workingman names on campaign posters in 1872. Ulysses Grant was running for re-election, with Henry Wilson of Massachusetts as the vice-presidential candidate in place of Schuyler Colfax, discredited for having accepted a very few dollars’ worth of stock from Oakes Ames in the notorious Crédit Mobilier scandal. The choice of Wilson was intended to mend part of the tear in the Republican fabric caused by Grant’s bitter fight with Wilson’s senatorial colleague from Massachusetts, Charles Sumner. An orphan apprenticed to a farmer, whose name he was given, Wilson had learned to be a shoemaker and subsequently operated a shoe factory. Entering politics in 1840, he reached the Senate in 1855, and served with distinction as chairman of the Committee on Military Affairs during the Civil War. He was an able and honest man, but despite a long life in politics he thought his only claim to lasting fame was as a scholar; he wrote a fascinating work of history that placed the blame for the Civil War on a conspiracy of great slaveholding families in the South. He repudiated these oligarchs as undemocratic in a republic that honored good hard work. But he himself did not, in fact, make very many shoes anymore. And the cobbler’s running mate had always loathed the tannery.

The Republican ticket, 1872. LIBRARY OF CONGRESS

As one biography later put it, the road had led From Tannery to the White House, and Ulysses Grant had no interest whatever in going back down that road. He was determined to keep his position at the top, and he would do so by the very simple appeal of an ordinary man to all the other ordinary men who were still stuck in the tannery or shoe factory. Justice David Davis was the candidate chosen at the National Labor convention, which hoped to win support for a workingmen’s party. The appeal was in vain; Grant’s supporters claimed him as a man of the people, and he got the votes. Grant was untroubled by Davis and had nothing but scorn for those extraordinary “better” people who were so disgusted with the corruption that had emerged in his Washington. The Charles Francis Adamses and Carl Schurzes could fulminate and call the electorate to move to higher ground all they wanted to. Grant could hold the vote of midwestern farmers even when his monetary policies meant they were acting against their own interests; he could hold the vote of the freedmen because the Democratic party was committed to denying black people equal opportunities; and he could hold the vote of the soldiers he had led into battle.²

The re-election campaign did not spring from some spontaneous urge to keep the general on his horse for another four years. He had had his cautious, careful eye on keeping his job—his self-esteem—for a second term all the time he was serving his first. The warrior stood for peace and for order. He had told Hamilton Fish to get the Alabama claims business out of the way before the second election, and his lieutenant had done so. He could also point to a semblance of order in the reconstructed South. The nation was not at war or on the brink of war. Grant was safe and dependable. He seemed oblivious to the corruption within his administration, although it was reminiscent of the activities of army suppliers which had so disgusted him during the war. He stood apart from it, and the voters made the corrupt men in Washington almost an asset to Grant. In contrast to their venality, he seemed all the purer. It bothered many loyalists that the besmirchers should bring ugliness so near their revered hero.

It was an odd election. Grant’s challengers were men of undoubted intellectual strength and considerable political experience. The president had firm control of the regular party, so his opponents proposed a new one—designed to appeal to a wide range of Democrats as well as disaffected Republicans—that would borrow unevenly from the spirit of Abraham Lincoln’s “malice toward none” and, forgetting the freedmen, grant amnesty to proscribed white Southerners. They planned well and came to their separate convention in Cincinnati in late April with a firm set of principles, ready to search for a leader to carry them into battle. Though their choice of Horace Greeley, a proponent of tariffs, was strange for a group so heavily committed to free trade, the crusade was politically remarkable. It even captured the Democratic party momentarily. The Democrats, not stifled during the Civil War and with no cause for excessive embarrassment over their loss in 1868, nonetheless abandoned their independence and adopted the Liberal Republican candidate as their own. Editor Greeley, though lacking the conventional exuberance of a professional politician, canvassed vigorously from the rear of a campaign train, bringing the call for reform and change to the people. In midsummer many thought the people were listening.

The Grants were on display as well, but this time they did not return to Galena; instead, come fall, they were at their post of duty, the White House. One foreign observer—Sir Edward Thornton, who was not overly acute—thought Greeley had an advantage “for he can speak & Grant cannot deliver himself of even the simplest sentence.” He could not explain why Greeley was slipping back. Silently, Grant looked superior, and after early victories in Maine and Pennsylvania there seemed to be nothing to worry about. Previously, Henry Wilson had been concerned. He made a campaign trip and reported to George Childs that he and Grant were likely to lose the election. Childs went to Grant with the dour prediction: “The general said nothing, but sent for a map of the United States. He laid the map on the table, went over it with a pencil, and said, ‘We will carry this State, that State, and that State.’…When the election came, the result was that Grant carried every State that he had said he would….” The Liberal Republicans won only where a Democrat would have: in parts of the redeemed South—states where opponents of the Radicals were back in power—and in the border states, where white-supremacist majorities disliked the pro-Negro legislation of the Republicans. Crowds of people called at the Executive Mansion to congratulate the president. Grant told Congressman James A. Garfield that the Liberal Republicans were like “the deceptive noise made in the West by prairie wolves.” He had once estimated that he was listening to a hundred only to discover all the howling came from but two animals. (Garfield noted this as the “first story” told by way of illustration he had ever heard from Grant.) According to the New York Herald, the president thanked all his callers and added that “apart from the political issues involved, he was gratified that the people had vindicated his private character, which had been assailed during the campaign.”³

The opposition view, 1872. LIBRARY OF CONGRESS

For Greeley there was no consolation. He had lost not only the election but control of his beloved Tribune. His wife, long ill, died a week before the election, and suffering both mentally and physically, Greeley himself was dead three weeks later. Grant, correctly and generously, attended the funeral. His doing so was just a simple tribute to an honorable opponent, but there could have been no better symbol of the totality of his victory than his trip to New York for the service.

With the election behind him, Grant had to get on with governing, and he needed good men to talk to about that task. Henry Wilson, his new vice-president, might have been a help in the second term, but in May 1873 he was stricken with paralysis. He continued to preside over the Senate, but after his attack he was not strong, and in November 1875 he died—in the Capitol. With no powerful new advisers finding their way into his confidence, Grant relied on Hamilton Fish more heavily than ever. When the Fishes closed their Washington house in 1872, it was widely believed that the secretary of state would be replaced, but a new house was soon found, and Fish remained. Fish was honest, and Grant trusted him, but he was a man of very narrow vision. Perhaps he should not be faulted for sticking to his own job and being more interested in foreign matters than domestic ones, but unfortunately the president did count on him for advice on domestic questions. Fish’s lack of concern for Americans with less financial security than his own led Grant away from actions that his administration should have taken to aid the freedmen and the workingclass victims of economic stress during his second term.

There was hardly anyone else in the cabinet worth talking to, and Grant felt deserted. He had found Jacob Cox more interested in rectitude than policy, but his voice had been more helpful in the cabinet than was that of his dim successor as secretary of the interior, Columbus Delano. Secretary of the Navy George Robeson contributed very little; Amos Akerman was gone, and the new attorney general, George H. Williams, was neither learned nor concerned with much of anything except his career and his exceedingly costly wife. Orville Babcock was Babcock. Rawlins’s successor, Secretary of War William Belknap, was a bluff, hypocritical, unimaginative man. Yet there were men Grant could have talked to, men who might have made a difference in the second administration if Grant had trusted them and paid attention to their advice. He himself had a spacious concept of the new nation that had been born out of the Civil War. He saw a continental colossus that spoke with one voice; it was to be a great nation-state. But Grant, its leader, had no sense of statecraft. He spent an inordinate amount of time on appointments to petty offices, in an endless attempt to balance state representation and placate party factions. Except perhaps (rather surprisingly) in international politics, there was no grand design. There was no sense that the Republican president was building a party and a government with a coherent and wide-ranging philosophy. Instead, he was capricious and fitfully personal in his appointments. Nowhere was this tendency more apparent than in his handling of the opportunity to reconstruct the Supreme Court. Andrew Johnson did not appoint a single justice; Grant named four, one of them a chief justice. Each time, there was enormous conjecture over whom he would choose, with highly interesting men mentioned as possibilities. Not all of the four he actually appointed were totally wanting in intellectual power, but in the end, he chose them with about the same discernment that went into his selection of consuls and postmasters.

There were those not totally self-serving who hoped he would do better. “I came over in a sleeping car with the President last night,” wrote Benjamin Helm Bristow to his law partner on December 4, 1872. He described a rich conversation with Grant, who “was on his way to Mr. Greeley’s funeral.” It was a long talk, and Bristow was happy to report that Grant’s “state of mind is just about what I think you and I would like to have it. My opinion [is] that he means to avail himself of the grand opportunity that now lies before him to make a great name for himself and to do great good for the country. Among other things that I do not care to write, I said to the President that I sincerely hope that he would recognize the original Union men in the South in his next appointment to the Supreme bench and I still more ardently hoped that when he came to look for the man, he would light on you.”⁴

Bristow’s judgment was sound. The partner to whom he wrote, John Marshall Harlan, was to be one of the greatest justices of the Supreme Court, but Grant did not place him there. Bristow’s call to Grant to rise to this height in choosing a justice masked personal disappointment. He had already held the most distinguished new post created in the Grant administration, that of solicitor general, from 1870 until November 1872. The solicitor general was the government’s lawyer in cases before the Supreme Court, and Bristow could quite naturally imagine rising to the bench himself. For a time, it looked as if he would do so. Judge Samuel Nelson, who had been on the Court since 1845, was retiring, and the remaining justices (except for Chief Justice Salmon P. Chase) went to the White House on December 2, 1872, accompanied by Bristow, to discuss Nelson’s departure. Bristow reported that they “gathered around me and expressed their individual desires that I should be appointed Judge Nelson’s successor.” Reporters who were present overheard this, and when Grant came back into the room and invited Bristow to take dinner with the family later in the day, the newspapermen put two and two together.⁵

Grant had done different arithmetic. The story went out on the wires, and Bristow even sent a telegram to his wife telling her the good news, but when next he talked with the president he learned that Judge Ward Hunt of New York had been selected, and that the president had been committed to him for some weeks. Gamely, Bristow prepared to return to private practice; he reported to Harlan that the appointment, “though not a brilliant one is entirely reputable, and will reflect no discredit on General Grant.” (Later Susan B. Anthony thought otherwise. Hunt had not valued the First Amendment highly when he upheld her conviction for picketing a Rochester polling place on election day in 1872, and in her judgment, Hunt’s attitude toward women exposed in the case was “the greatest outrage History ever witnessed.”)⁶

Hunt’s appointment, which was confirmed, brought no more greatness to the Court than had the seating of the two men Grant had earlier chosen for the bench. The appointment process had begun, with some promise, in 1869 with the selection of two men of considerable public prominence, but ultimately neither of these was seated. When the aged and ill Robert C. Grier was persuaded to resign in December 1869 and when Congress restored a ninth seat to the court, Grant had named two men with whom he had had difficult dealings—his old chief, Edwin M. Stanton, and his attorney general, Rockwood Hoar. He knew both to be skillful lawyers with impressive national reputations; he may also have felt a need to make amends to Stanton. Besides, once they were on the Court he would not have to contend with the overly energetic bustle of Stanton and the supercilious wit of Hoar.

However, the appointment of Hoar soon ran into trouble. As attorney general he had not deferred to senators from the states from which he chose federal judges, and he was resented on Capitol Hill. In addition, he was forced once again to be a whipping boy. Hoar was the victim of the animosity toward his friend Charles Sumner that some senators did not have the courage to express directly. In what was an exceedingly embarrassing rebuke to the distinguished Harvard lawyer as well as to President Grant, Hoar’s nomination was tabled in January. Stanton’s nomination had been approved quickly, but on Christmas Eve 1869, before he could take his seat, he died. Grant once more had two appointments to make.

In the meantime, the Court had handed down its decision in Hepburn v. Griswold, holding that the greenbacks issued during the war were not constitutionally valid forms of money. The two men Grant now appointed, Joseph P. Bradley of New Jersey and William Strong of Pennsylvania, had been railroad lawyers. The railroads were not anxious to pay interest on their bonds in gold-backed currency, and to no one’s surprise, the new justices joined those who had been the minority in the Hepburn case, and in two new cases, overturned the earlier decision. Greenbacks were once again acceptable legal tender, so the supply of money necessary for the development of the nation’s railroads was not diminished. Controversy has raged ever since as to whether Grant knew how the two men would decide the second Hepburn case and chose them on that account. Predicting how one’s appointees will vote in Supreme Court decisions is not an art at which presidents have been talented, and Grant probably had no guarantee from the men concerning their vote. Nevertheless, he was widely criticized for packing the Court to achieve a specific decision.

With Bradley, Strong, and now Hunt, Grant had not given the Supreme Court true distinction; his last and greatest chance to do so came when on May 7, 1873, death finally ended Chief Justice Salmon P. Chase’s voracious political appetite. Julia and Ulysses Grant rode to Chase’s funeral at the Capitol with Senator Roscoe Conkling of New York. Julia loved a funeral as well as the next person, and Chase’s in the Senate chamber was suitably grand, but her thoughts were not entirely on the dead: “When the officiating minister alluded to the mantle of the Chief Justice and invoked divine instruction as upon whose shoulder it should fall, I looked around and my choice, without hesitation, was Roscoe Conkling. He was so talented and so honorable, and I must say that woman-like I thought the flowing black robes would be becoming to Mr. Conkling.” Riding back to the White House alone with her candidate, she said, “Senator, if it were with me, I should know exactly where to place the robes of justice.” That evening she mentioned her idea to the general, and he told his wife that he had anticipated her; he was going to nominate Conkling. But the New York senator disappointed his champion and declined the offer, as did Senator Timothy Howe of Wisconsin. The Supreme Court was not the loser.⁷

Rebuffed, Grant had no other grand choice in mind. Instead, personal matters crowded in on him. Old Jesse Grant died in Covington at seventy-nine. He had been born in the same year as Justice Grier; ancient ties to the eighteenth century were breaking. We can only speculate about the sense of relief, mingled with guilt, that Grant must have felt at being at last not beholden to a father. Grant went to the funeral and then to Long Branch; meanwhile, all spring and summer and into the fall, rumors spread about whom he would name as chief justice. But if the president was dormant, some others were active indeed. The myth that justices of the Supreme Court, once raised to the high bench, have elevated themselves above place-seeking is quickly destroyed by a look at the frantic efforts of Justice Noah H. Swayne to gain promotion. He was convinced that Benjamin Bristow was the key to the post of chief justice; his scheme was that Bristow should convince Grant that he, Bristow, should be made an associate justice, to fill the post to be vacated by Swayne, who would make a splendid chief justice.⁸

Swayne, a Virginian who had moved to Ohio after his Quaker wife freed her slaves and whose son, Wager Swayne, headed the Freedmen’s Bureau in Alabama, had been appointed to the Court by President Lincoln in 1862. Now, in September 1873, he spent a desperate day in New York City sending Bristow telegrams and, as he changed hotels, rushing from one to another in search of answers to the telegrams in the hope that Bristow would take up his cause with the president. Swayne’s hopes were raised when he heard from Bristow, who was in Maine, that Grant had him under consideration. “Your letter,” he replied, “relieved me from all suspense and I became at once very jubilant.” In addition, Swayne wrote, another of his friends had seen Grant the previous Saturday and reported that “no one ever appeared more frank & candid than did the P. [the President] throughout the conversation.” Grant was reported to have said that if he appointed a chief justice from the bench, he would “certainly” appoint Swayne. But Swayne, to prod Bristow, mentioned his fear that the president had doubts that Bristow would accept the appointment as associate justice, and his fear that the president was concerned lest Swayne, then sixty-nine, might soon retire or die, making it necessary to repeat the distressing process of finding a chief justice. Bristow’s job was to reassure Grant on both points.⁹

Grant could quickly have ended the pressure by naming his chief justice. As long as he did not, he had to listen not only to Congressman James Garfield and other Ohio advocates of Swayne but to the Iowa partisans of Justice Samuel F. Miller and the New Jersey supporters of Justice Bradley. There were also great efforts to resurrect the cause of former Attorney General Hoar, while Julia and others had not entirely given up on the not very judicious senator from New York, Roscoe Conkling.

Hoar would not do. Grant had never liked him, and in the months following his rejection by the Senate, while he was still attorney general, he saw in Hoar a reminder of the power of Congress. He feared a repeat of the earlier humiliation, even though it appeared that changes in the membership of the Senate meant that Hoar would, this time, get through. As one keen observer put it, “If the President were very firm about it, he could carry the confirmation,” but Grant was not firm about Hoar or about any man. William M. Evarts was suggested, and the president fretted over that idea and discarded it. He had never liked the man; Evarts was much too sure of himself and had defended Andrew Johnson too well in the impeachment trial. Another obvious candidate, simply because of the office he held, was Attorney General Williams, but most of the lawyers of the day did not mention his name in their conjectures—lest someone hear it. And if the attorney general was vying for the place, he demonstrated it in odd ways; leaving the White House on Tuesday, September 30, 1873, Hamilton Fish ran into Williams, “who had forgotten that there was a cabinet meeting.”¹⁰

Later in the fall, Fish recorded that at another cabinet meeting Grant offered the appointment as chief justice to him, but that he told the president he had been twenty years away from the law and was not competent for the post. Grant replied, wrote Fish, that “he would be the judge of that, and he thought I was.” Again Fish demurred, urging a younger man, whereupon Grant—or perhaps Fish—came up with an appalling non sequitur, proposing Caleb Cushing. That seventy-three-year-old accomplished scholar and Democratic party hack, with an unimpressive record of antiabolitionism and advocacy of manifest destiny, had recently done the Grant administration a good turn as the counsel to the Alabama-claims arbitration commission in Geneva. He was put forward, in Fish’s phrase, “to bridge over the embarrassment of making a selection.” Reversing Swayne’s logic, Fish thought it desirable for Cushing to serve briefly and then resign so that Grant, at that later date, could appoint the right man. Perversely, Benjamin Butler also urged Cushing and offered Grant an odd analogy: the British counsel at the Geneva arbitration of the Alabama claims had been made lord chancellor; America should do the same for Cushing. Grant’s cabinet, except for Fish, was highly hesitant about Cushing, and used his advanced age as an excuse to push him out the door.¹¹

The man who then belatedly walked in through it was the uninspiring attorney general of the United States, George H. Williams of Oregon. Grant nominated him as chief justice, and Benjamin Bristow, who had returned to private law practice, was notified that he was to be the next attorney general. On hearing the news, Edwards Pierrepont, who himself very much wanted one post or the other and suspected that the appointment as attorney general would eventually lead Bristow to the Court, sent Bristow congratulations: “The place of Atty Genl is good while it lasts but the bench is better as it lasts for life and always for long life, except to those who pine for the Presidency.” Unfortunately, Bristow never got a chance to test Pierrepont’s hypothesis.¹²

“There is a screw loose in W[illiams]’s nomination,” wrote a Washington friend to Benjamin Bristow on December 12. “I do not know what it is—He will be either withdrawn or confirmed early next week.” This observer told Bristow that he, on the other hand, could rely on his quiet and strong reputation to carry his nomination: “You are all O. K. Do not come to Washington. Say not a word to anybody! All commend and applaud you!! I will keep you posted.” Bristow did as he was told, but unfortunately for Williams, Mrs. Williams had come to Washington, had had a great many words said about her, and had pushed—much too hard—for her husband’s elevation. “Mrs. W. is not a favorite with her own sex however much she is with ours,” noted one Justice Department official. And in assuming her position in Washington society, she had equipped herself too well. She had bought the finest carriage in Washington, far grander than the Grants’, and equipped it with a coachman and liveried footman—all paid for by the Justice Department.¹³

With the delicious allegations about Mrs. Williams delighting the early holiday gatherings in the capital, the Williams nomination came apart, but not before Ulysses Grant angrily and doggedly supported the choice that he had finally sent to the Senate. “The pressure from the White House is tremendous and it is distinctly understood that the President makes it a matter of party fealty,” wrote an assistant attorney general, C. H. Hill of Massachusetts. Grant had Conkling’s support, but he had trouble getting that of chairman of the Judiciary Committee, Senator George F. Edmunds of Vermont. Angry with the Senate—“Senators complain that the President resents all attempts at remonstrance or criticism”—Grant was also once more angry with its symbol, Charles Sumner. “I fear…that an effort will be made…to defeat Sumner [in the Senate] which is madness,” wrote C. H. Hill. “The President needs advisers badly and if he does not get them soon. Heaven only knows how this session will end.”¹⁴

In the midst of the battle, on December 15, 1873, old Colonel Dent died. Julia’s father was eighty-seven, and she recalled his death somewhat distantly: “My dear father passed away without suffering.” She also saw to it that he got the honor due him as the great man of the family: “The General and the gentlemen of our immediate household accompanied his remains to St. Louis.” Back in Washington, Grant had to try to focus again on the Williams nomination. The situation became even more blurred when John Marshall Harlan arrived at the White House with a letter from Bristow in which he declined to serve as attorney general. Associate Justice David Davis looked ahead to a seat on the court for Bristow, and advised his friend (who had just reported to Davis on research he had done to disprove charges of Lincoln’s illegitimacy) to “stay close to Grant and he will appoint you.” Refusing the lower post was, however, an odd way for Bristow to get the higher one. The nomination of Bristow along with Williams had given the appointments their only luster. Now it was gone. Grant was being repudiated. Benjamin Bristow, the man who had called the president to greatness, had decided not to take the trip with him. On December 30, Hamilton Kish called on the president and found him sitting alone in the cabinet room, dejected. Grant wanted to know if Fish had been called on by Senators Conkling and Frelinghuysen, as he had been. They had come to the White House to tell the president that Williams would not be confirmed. Williams’s use of Justice Department funds to pay for his carriage was not “illegal” in the senators’ eyes, but it was surely “indiscreet.” What was worse, during the panic of 1873, when several banks suspended payment on checks, the Williamses had drawn on departmental funds (which they later replaced) for household expenses.¹⁵

Mrs. Williams, meanwhile, pressed her husband’s case in her own fashion. She sought to keep Hamilton Fish and Roscoe Conkling from defecting from her husband’s cause by telling Julia Fish that she knew about the use of secret-service funds to secure the re-election of Senator Conkling. Grant, when he heard from Hamilton Fish of this bit of attempted blackmail, pronounced Mrs. Williams’s story “untrue.” Grant, who himself made liberal use of the secret service, had indeed heard of the matter and now stated that “the only use made of that fund was to pay…for the registration of voters in New York City.” This, the president insisted to his secretary of state, “was perfectly legitimate, and I stand ready to defend it.” Mrs. Williams’s effort had not worked. Williams fought to mend his tattered reputation, but on January 9, 1874, Grant withdrew his name. For the second time in his administration the Senate had been unwilling to accept the man he named to the high court. As in the matter of Santo Domingo, Grant had been rejected.¹⁶

“The old man got mad,” said a writer for the Nation, but he did not stop fumbling; Grant’s next scheme was to resurrect the candidacy of Caleb Cushing, who, meanwhile, had been rewarded with the ministry to Spain. Cushing would be made chief justice; Bristow—or so his partisans hoped—would again be asked to serve as attorney general; and Williams, who according to Bristow’s friend J. W. Stevenson would “prefer to walk and talk Spanish rather than remain in the Attorney General’s office,” would go to Spain, despite the fact that “Mrs. W. prefers Washington!” Stevenson, who was Kentucky’s Democratic senator, predicted that Cushing would be confirmed, “but not without a grunt from some of the Republican leaders.” The Massachusetts Republican C. H. Hill reported that the appointment of Cushing, “a septuagenarian intriguer…whose moral character is the very worst possible,” was urged by “Fish and Butler (two of his only three partizans, Sumner completing the extraordinary group).” Conkling was sent to sound out the Senate, and found that except for Sumner, only the Democrats there were happy with the choice. Commenting on the mess that the nomination had become, Hill wrote, “What a sad pity it is that our poor President has not some one to guide him. Heaven only knows where he will land the party.”¹⁷

Somehow Grant landed it on its feet but not without another tumble. Grant nominated Cushing in January, and the fur flew. David Davis wrote his friend Bristow, “I know that one of the judiciary committee told the President that if he had nominated you for Chief Justice you would have been confirmed. I wish to God he had & then the country would have been saved the disgrace of nominating a common prostitute for Chief Justice.” Rescue actually came in another way; on January 13, in the White House, Grant, Babcock, and Porter labored over a rough draft, in Grant’s hand, of a message withdrawing the nomination of Cushing. The men in the cabinet knew Cushing was the wrong man and were encouraged when the president was willing to consider three new possibilities: two obscure circuit judges—and Morrison Remick Waite.¹⁸

Waite, who had served as arbitrating counsel in Geneva with Cushing, was an honest, competent, but little-known Republican from Ohio who had been minimally active in politics but was admired by many party politicians., An able practitioner of the law, Waite was nominated as chief justice on January 18, 1874. On the twentieth, one of those disappointed wrote another: Noah Swayne informed Benjamin Bristow “that the nomination of Mr. Waite will be confirmed to day.”¹⁹

While the desultory business of choosing a chief justice wound its way through Grant’s mind, the most important event of his administration took place. This was the financial crisis of 1873, which resulted in the longest depression the United States had ever experienced. In accounts of the period, the depression of 1873–79 is often dismissed with the telling of the dramatic story of the collapse on September 18, 1873, of Jay Cooke & Company, as a result of the sanctimonious banker’s inability to sell the securities of his Northern Pacific Railway. Wall Street did indeed treat the nation to one of its inimitable emotional orgies of feverish faces and failed fortunes, but as usual the gentlemen regained their composure—and much of their money—and left the working people of the nation in severe straits. The depression is usually said to have lasted six years; according to some reckonings, which join it to the economic troubles of the nineties, it continued for the balance of the century. Between 1873 and 1876, the daily wages of city workers fell 25 percent while the cost of food dropped only 5 percent. Even that drop in food costs meant a loss of income for the farmers as well. Estimates vary on the number of unemployed—it was almost certainly in excess of a million out of a total population of forty million—and these people suffered great deprivation. This percentage of unemployment is not large by later standards, but there was no governmental welfare system, and the reduction in wage levels resulted in gravely reduced circumstances that were grim indeed for those still employed. Private relief organizations like the Overseers of the Poor in Boston reported long lines at soup kitchens and doubling up in overcrowded city tenements. Americans who were even more desperate than the slum dwellers took to the roads in search of subsistence.

The depression began with a crisis not unlike the one Grant had experienced on Black Friday four years earlier. This time, however, he had to face the absurd but highly dangerous hysteria of Wall Street without George S. Boutwell. One of the most underrated of the Radical Republicans, Boutwell had no genius for financial matters, and therein lay one of his strengths. He was not doctrinaire and not a believer in cure-alls. One cannot reasonably conjecture that all would have been well economically had he still been secretary of the treasury in the fall of 1873, but Ulysses Grant surely could have used his counsel. Boutwell had left the cabinet to take the Senate seat that Wilson vacated when he became vice-president. He was only as far away as Capitol Hill, but that can be a great distance from a president. The friendship between Grant and Boutwell held for the rest of Grant’s life, but Boutwell was not available in the cabinet to work with the president in the attempt to stabilize the economy.

On September 20, two days after Jay Cooke failed, the stock exchange had suspended trading; President Grant went to New York with his new secretary of the treasury, William A. Richardson. Richardson was a learned and able lawyer who had come from Massachusetts to be Boutwell’s assistant secretary. His promotion was recognition of genuine ability, but to Wall Street he remained an underling. The distraught but proud bankers did not go to Washington to discuss the panic; the president went to them, and in their eyes, he came with a weaker ally as secretary of the treasury than he had had on Black Friday. That earlier crisis had not brought on a depression; Grant went to New York in the hope that the nation’s good luck would hold. That evening at the Fifth Avenue Hotel, and the next day, the two men met with a series of New York bankers and other exponents of orthodox finance, such as William E. Dodge. Some conservatives insisted that the government must hold to a policy of returning to a specie-based currency, risking deflation in a reach for a secure dollar with which to conduct foreign trade. Others feared the unemployment and hardship that would result from deflation, and urged Grant not to fear the already considerable inflation in taking measures to revive the economy. They urged him to have the Treasury redeem government bonds, thus releasing into the diminished money supply of Wall Street funds that could be lent to faltering brokerage firms and other businesses. Grant agreed to the bond purchases but wavered on more extreme measures, probably because he did not understand any better in 1873 than he had in 1869 what the results of his monetary actions would be. When he got back to Washington, Hamilton Fish counseled against any inflationary measures, and Grant moved toward easy money only to the extent of permitting Richardson to reissue greenbacks amounting to $26 million that had been retired. This helped get Wall Street past its crisis but did little to affect the depression that was setting in across the nation.

At the same time that he was allowing the reissuing of currency not backed by specie—gold and silver—he sent to Congress his 1873 annual message, which seemed to claim that just the contrary was being done. He discussed the “general panic now prevailing” only after a good many international matters had been covered. Grant wondered if the panic would not prove a “blessing in disguise”; and added, “My own judgment is that however much individuals may suffer, one long step has been taken toward specie payments”; in some way, not clearly put, the crisis had moved the nation toward resumption of specie payment. He expounded on its virtues at some length, but said nothing about the effect of the economic crisis on the people of the country.²⁰

It would be anachronistic to expect Ulysses Grant to have become the spiritual cheerleader that Franklin Roosevelt made of himself in a similar period sixty years later. Still, it is curious that Grant could not stretch his imagination past the economic thinking of the reformers whom he had so roundly trounced in the election a year earlier and, instead, put himself in the position of the failed businessman and of the worker with his wages slashed. Grant and Wilson had campaigned and been elected as two workingmen, and had received the endorsement of many labor organizations. But now Grant made no effort to lead a fight for better conditions. A fight with Congress must have been tempting, since Carl Schurz and Charles Sumner were the exemplars of rectitude and enemies of all efforts to inflate the currency. Grant, however, declined the battle. Similarly, he made no effort to identify himself with the efforts of workers’ organizations which sought government actions that would restore jobs and refill pay envelopes. Indeed, one of the chief casualties of the 1873–79 depression was the union movement, which lost membership as the owners of mills, plants, and railroads put pressure on their workers in the worsening conditions of 1874 and 1875. Grant himself never succumbed to the nation’s red scare, as did Carl Schurz, in his hard-money speeches, and Thomas Nast, with his cartoons that viciously evoked images of the Paris Commune. The president did, however, revive his 1868 theme—“Let us have peace”—to suggest that he would not allow labor organizations to provoke the wrath of the employers. He had never liked using troops to keep civil order, and was spared setting the precedent established by his successor in calling out the army against organized labor. But in England in 1877, although he was given a hero’s welcome by the working people, he spoke approvingly of the suppression of the major railroad strike of 1877, the most dramatic result of the depression.

In December 1874, after twelve months of hard times, Grant began his annual message to Congress with a discussion of the “prostration in business and industries,” and there was no more talk of a “blessing in disguise.” “It seems to me,” the president stated, “that nothing is clearer than that the greater part of the burden of existing prostration, for the want of a sound financial system, falls upon the working man, who must after all produce the wealth, and the salaried man, who superintends and conducts business.” But relief was to come only from putting the currency on a gold and silver standard—from resuming specie payments. Congress had not been so limited in its conception of possible cures, and the long debate that had taken place the previous spring in both houses gives the lie to the idea that in the late nineteenth century the federal government was not regarded as having a legitimate role in the economic life of the citizenry.²¹

The result of all the talk and bill drafting had been a relatively underrated piece of legislation that was completely in keeping with the more comprehensive radical program that the Populists would espouse in the nineties. Known pejoratively, but not inaccurately, as the “Inflation Bill,” it called not for the redemption of greenbacks and the restoration of a currency based on specie, as advocated by both the Johnson and Grant administrations, but for the reverse. Additional greenback and specie-based currency would be issued together. The amount would be a mere $64 million, but both proponents and opponents saw in the bill the start of the practice of determining the supply of currency by the fluctuating needs of the economy. The bill, which had the backing of western congressmen, ambitious eastern businessmen who had not yet made their money, a growing number of farmers, and most of the nation’s factory workers, reached Grant’s desk early in April 1874.

Historians and economists who presumably understand money castigate presidents who do not. They should not be astonished by the presidents’ failure; the problem lies in the language. The mechanism of the economy can be learned—if this goes up, that goes down—but it all becomes something other than a machine when ethical words like “value” and “trustworthy” or emotionally weighted terms like “soft” and “hard” are introduced. A man like Ulysses Grant, who knew what it was to have a business fail, to lack money to pay bills, to be out of work, could not evaluate the machines built for him by contending economists and others who claimed to know. The “more money” machine seemed to work when it was demonstrated, but the “less money” machine looked just as good when its mechanic turned it on. The problem, which Grant could never fully articulate but which is evident in his grapplings with the subject in his state papers, is that he could not connect metaphor to reality. What would it mean to the bill collector in St. Louis if President Grant told Secretary of the Treasury Richardson to sell government bonds, or to buy them; to “create” more money, or to do the opposite (presumably to “destroy” money)?

He could see that times were bad, that businesses were failing, that people had lost their jobs or—more characteristic of the depression of the seventies—were working for reduced wages. The president was under intense pressure during 1874 to come to the rescue of conflicting Ulysses Grants. One was the out-of-a-job, lonely, restless Ulysses Grant who wanted a new start. The other was the man hanging on desperately to a job, trying to keep a family secure, holding fast to an image of responsibility, who did not dare budge lest it all be lost.

To go the way of the first Ulysses Grant was to go with the inflationists, who wanted to combat the depression by creating more money that people could spend, as individual consumers or as speculative investors. The advocates of this course were the working people and speculative entrepreneurs like James Fisk, Jr. The Grant who applauded the growth and expansion of the nation was comfortable with the idea of creating more money.

But the other Ulysses Grant was drawn to the opposite view. The conservatives urged him to hold tight. They warned that the newly created dollars would not be honored by those in the East and England who already had their money. They appealed to morality and decorum. The advocates of creating more money, a policy which had as its base great expectations rather than accomplished achievement, were rude men like Benjamin Butler and vulgar men like James Fisk. Dirty farmers and dangerous workers, as clean and orderly people thought of them, wanted more money too. If President Grant joined with the farmers and workers, would there truly be an America of equality and opportunity—would his pursuit of happiness get him to his goal? Or would he simply go west and go wild, becoming the drunken tramp he had so nearly become? Irwin Unger, in one of the finest passages of The Greenback Era, describes Grant’s chilly reception of William Gray, a Boston banker, who came to Washington at the end of March to urge a veto of the “Inflation Bill.” The president had been insulted by critical things said about his management of financial affairs, and he refused to be lectured to by the Bostonian. The next day, a group of sound-money men from New York arrived at the White House and were dismayed to find that Grant had buttressed himself with Senators Logan, Carpenter, and Thomas W. Ferry—all easy-money men. While the New Yorkers were stating their case, Benjamin Butler “shouldered his way into the room and took the President off to a corner, leaving the New Yorkers cooling their heels.” Unger regards Grant as having been “deliberately insulting” to the bankers because they were “repeating the inconvenient…promptings of his own conscience.”²²

The sound-money advocates did not expect a veto, but a veto came. As Hamilton Fish recalled the discussion in the cabinet, Grant “earnestly desire[d] to give his approval,” but Fish led him from one machine to the other and got his chief to see that the arguments for the bill were “fallacious and untenable” and, instead, Grant and his cabinet wrote a veto message. “In the end,” concludes Unger, “the conservatives had gotten through to the President. His truculent behavior toward the merchants probably betrayed a painfully tender conscience rather than a firm commitment to soft money.” Or, to disagree and put it another way, Grant wanted to tell the good sound patriarchs to go to hell, but in the end did not dare. He was suffering not from a “tender conscience” but from a sense of rage at having to do the respectable safe thing in order to hold on to what he and Julia had won—the deference of the “better” people. He did not trust himself—or his fellow countrymen—not to become dispossessed if he defied the possessors. “Ultimately, even the obtuse and insensitive old soldier,” says Unger, “could not deny the impelling conservative image of soft money as the ‘sum of all iniquity’; specie as ‘philosophy, morality and religion.’”²³

Individual Republicans argued vehemently for years longer about the merits of a monetary policy that would help men who had failed in business or struggled as farmers or wage earners as against those of a policy that brought still greater profit to the successful, but Grant’s veto made the stand of the Republican party official. From this date it was the party not of the working class but of those who were or aspired to be the capitalists. The latter were overjoyed. Grant’s “heroic” espousal of hard money raised him “100 per cent” in George Templeton Strong’s estimation. He and other orthodox men of finance moved to capitalize on the wisdom of one they had called “Ulysses the unwise” by achieving a return to specie-backed money in the wake of the veto. Seeing Secretary of the Treasury William Richardson, like his predecessor, George Boutwell, as a friend of the expansionists, Boston reformers moved to get rid of him. The club they used was that one that was all too available in the Grant administration—corruption. John D. Sanborn, an ally of another easy-money man, Benjamin Butler, had obtained a contract to inform on persons who were delinquent in paying taxes; in return for the information, Sanborn would obtain a percentage of the money collected. This practice had been ended by legislation in 1872, but Congressman Butler had managed to attach to the bill a rider making an exception for Sanborn and two other informers. William Richardson, then assistant secretary of the treasury, had signed a contract with Sanborn, and therefore came to be regarded as sanctioning this unsavory method of doing business. Sanborn simply went to the Boston office of internal revenue, and using Richardson’s authorization as leverage, obtained an already compiled list of tax delinquents, whom he then ordered to pay up, claiming for himself 50 percent of what they owed. Sanborn subsequently admitted to the congressional investigators that he was paid $213,500 for collecting taxes that would have been paid even if he had done nothing.²⁴

The investigation, which continued from February to May, was highly publicized and deeply damaging to the Grant administration. On June 2, 1874, to the delight of the reformers, who had no problem connecting softness on money with flaccidity in the conduct of official business, Secretary of the Treasury Richardson was shunted aside into a judgeship, and the department passed into the impeccably clean hands of Benjamin Bristow, a sound-money man. Grant had been warned that if he did not appoint a reformer, the corruption issue could result in Democratic victories in 1874 and 1876. Reluctantly, he agreed to give Bristow the post.

Faced with a Democratic victory in November and the opposition’s organization of the House that would come in March 1875, the hard-money Republicans pressed for a bill to resume specie payments. This time the administration did give leadership. As noted, Grant’s 1874 message to Congress called for resumption, and Bristow lobbied strongly for the bill. What passed was a moderate compromise measure, but its result, due in large measure to Bristow’s active contractionist policies, was an acceptance of the international gold standard. In 1875 the Democrats did organize the House, but without a majority in the Senate they were unable to stop the hard-money policy. The greenback movement, which seemed to have such promise for working-class America in 1874, had been successfully contained by the reforming conservatives by 1875.

During the depression years Grant turned to the task of shoring up his own economic future. Beginning before the crash, and continuing serenely through the troubled fall of 1873 and on into 1874, he tried once again to forget his troubled Grant past and make himself a country gentleman, in the not very convincing mold of the Dents. He and Julia still owned the farm in St. Louis, and after her father’s death her holdings increased. The farm had been neglected, but earlier that year Grant had begun to give it attention with the ardor of an absent squire eager to return. He discharged one manager and hired another, Nathaniel Carlin. In a forceful way, he told Carlin that he would personally give him instructions and that reports should come directly to him; should matters arise that Grant could not oversee himself, Carlin could look to the man who handled his business affairs in St. Louis, Judge John F. Long. In addition, Carlin’s former employer, Charles W. Ford, an old friend of the president’s, would look in from time to time. Grant’s instructions in October were specific; Carlin was to “sell all the calves you can at good prices”—he wanted to be out of cattle entirely by spring—and take in as many horses to board “as you can attend.”²⁵

The president had big plans and wanted no tenants—they had been nothing but a bother in the past. Turning to farming, he told Carlin in November that he favored top dressing when it came to spreading the manure, and he hoped the fields could all be gotten into grass as soon as possible. Carlin was to straighten the road that had been dislocated when the railroad line was put across the land, down at the creek, and he was to restore some damaged fences. Grant then moved to the subject of his horses, which had been mistreated by the former manager.²⁶

The president was surprised “that Young Hamiltonian is still alive now with the care—or lack of care—that he has gone through with.” The horse was from the finest line of trotters in the land. Grant gave instructions that all of his horses on the farm should either be trained to be driven or bred to produce fillies which could be driven. Trotters were the horses Grant most enjoyed, and they would bring a profit when sold to other enthusiasts. He explained Young Hamiltonian’s line to Carlin. The horse was “sired by Iron Duke, now owned and always owned in Orange Co. N. Y.” (Goshen was a great trotting town.) His “dam was a very fast and stylish mare—Addie—that I got in 1865. She was full sister of one of the best stallions in Massachusetts.” On and on the horseman went, with full recall of the qualities of the several horses he thought should be mated. No affairs of men and nations commanded so thoroughly the attention of President Grant.²⁷

In the summer of 1874, Grant asked Judge Long to ship east one of his favorite horses, Butcher Boy, “if he is not too decrepit from old age.” Then he added, “If I get him here I will keep him as long as he and I live.” There is a nice sense of continuance in this—the tie of man to horse that might have added small, but rich, value to Grant’s life. It stumbled away from him. Butcher Boy was moved, not east for the president to enjoy, but rather to Chicago, where J. Russell Jones, late of Galena, could impress his new and affluent friends by driving out behind General Grant’s horse.²⁸

Things did not work out for Butcher Boy—or for Grant; the farm was not going as smoothly as he wished. In November 1874, on time borrowed from the writing of his message to Congress, Grant wrote Judge Long that it must not be considered a criticism of Carlin that there were bills to be paid which could not be met from receipts. He was sending a thousand dollars to pay the taxes. In December, in a letter to Carlin, he praised his manager for his good work with the horses but had to say no to a request for equipment: “I have already paid out this year some $12,000 on the farm and have not got the means to go further.” Grant had made a major investment in his estate and hoped he could go out in the spring “to put the place on a good footing.”²⁹

That footing was never gained. The Grants, with the Bories and Orville Babcock, visited the farm during a western trip in April 1875, but their time in St. Louis was short and largely consumed by the social comings and goings of a president; Grant’s attention had strayed from the idea of a country seat. That fall, Carlin received formal notification from Judge Long that all of Grant’s personal property on the farm—which meant the horses—was to be sold, and the farm was to be rented. The dream of a fine country holding with splendid horses was dead. Once they left the Executive Mansion, Ulysses and Julia would not go back to where they had ridden together, courted, and built the only house they were ever to build. The attempt between 1873 and 1875 to create a secure domestic economy for themselves and their children was no more a success than were Grant’s confused efforts to establish greatness in the government with a distinguished appointment to the Supreme Court or to restore the prosperity of the nation.³⁰