XXIV
WEDDING AND WHISKEY
And helpless governors wake
To resume their compulsory game…
—W. H. Auden
NELLIE GRANT was one of the most appealing and most unhappy of the long line of disconcerted White House children. She was only thirteen when she moved into the Executive Mansion and into the grasp of the society that haunts it. At eighteen she was the bride at a wedding in the East Room. It was not so much that she was young when she married, but that she was handed over from one empty world to another. She was the daughter of two people so dangerously innocent that they could not fully comprehend their own vulnerability, or that of their children. Julia and Ulysses were the owners of an unusual property; Nellie was sold at a low price—it took only a dashing young man with an English name and imaginings of a splendid life to fetch her. The young girl was barely allowed to have any life at all. It was as if Henry James, who after all kept a close eye on Grant’s America, had had her in mind when he created Daisy Miller.
Nellie was an only daughter; she carried (but did not use) the name of her beautiful grandmother, Ellen Wrenshall, and she was expected to find, somewhere, that bower her mother had left behind in memory. She was seen as the president’s princess daughter, while she was, in fact, a nice teen-age girl. Her father doted on her in exactly the way a nineteenth-century father was expected to. He fluffed up her femininity, as when he wrote to her about her pony, which her younger brother rode and then harnessed to a cart for her. She was not even allowed the freedom that had once been her mother’s to get up on a horse’s back and ride.
There had been no young girl in a presidential family since the Tylers moved out of the White House a quarter of a century earlier, and Nellie Grant was good copy for reporters out to please a sentimental America. They had had her on display since 1864 when, at a sanitary-commission fair in St. Louis, she was photographed in spectacles as the old woman living in a papier-maché shoe. In 1869, an engaging Brady portrait showed her in a tartan and cloak; Queen Victoria had covered Balmoral and half of America—including Nellie—in plaid. Nellie had a bit of charm, and if she had had the fortitude that Alice Roosevelt displayed so strenuously thirty years later, she might have found the White House fun for a teen-age girl. However, she was not that strong; Nellie seems not so much to have asserted herself as to have been pushed ahead. Her mother, while fussing about the critics who did not approve of a fifteen-year-old girl’s dancing all night at a cotillion, secretly delighted in all the attention that was paid the first young lady of the land. In 1872, at sixteen, Nellie was sent to Europe with the Bories and taken up by the American minister in London, Robert C. Schenck, and his social daughters. She was presented to the queen and, to complete the storybook romance, on shipboard on the way back to America, she fell in love—with Algernon Sartoris.
The name is too good to be true, but true it was. And what’s more, Algernon was a cad and a bounder. His family, of the minor gentry, was of not very ancient lineage and limited distinction, but had an eye for acquisition. The Sartorises already owned one of the great ornaments of nineteenth-century England—Adelaide Kemble, Algernon’s mother. Adelaide Kemble is remembered today as Fanny Kemble’s sister or as the daughter of the great actor Charles Kemble, but she herself was an opera singer of impressive accomplishment. If the reviews are to be believed, she may have been the more talented of the two stunning Kemble women. She sang what must have been a very grand Norma, as well as a good number of other splendid soprano roles, and was at the top of a great career when she married and left the operatic stage.
Adelaide Kemble Sartoris (pronounced Sar-tress) was a hostess known as “one of the best leaders of talk”; at her house on Park Place, London, she entertained writers—Charles Dickens, Henry James, and Matthew Arnold—as well as singers from her world of opera. “Her dinners were perfection,” reported a fashionable friend. But when Algernon’s older brother was killed in 1873, she withdrew to the country. Mrs. Sartoris was a woman of substance, but her husband and younger son were of another cut. Though comments on both men are exceedingly guarded, the suggestions are that her husband was a philanderer and so was their son. When Nellie met Algernon, however, he seemed simply a charming young Englishman, which is to say the most desirable of suitors for an American princess. Apparently she fell in love. Perhaps he did as well. Their wedding was on May 21, 1874, and Ulysses Grant gave his daughter away. In letters to Nellie when she was a little girl and he was off at war—and again much later in his life—Grant revealed that he loved his daughter very much indeed, but whatever thoughts he or her mother had in 1874 about her happiness were smothered in talk about the clothes and presents and arrangements for the wedding. Nellie entered the East Room on the arm of her “stolid father”; her mother, who “looked sad,” followed with Jesse and Buck on either arm. Under a bell of white camelias, accompanied by his groomsman Fred Grant, in military dress, Algy stood rigidly, as if his “life depended on the exactness with which the duty is discharged.” During the ceremony, the president “looked steadfastly at the floor” and wept. After the White House wedding, Nellie went off to live in southern England with her young prince.1
Nellie’s wedding, 1874 LIBRARY OF CONGRESS
Accountants of such matters might reckon that Algernon Sartoris had done well in marrying the daughter of the president of the United States. In fact, the Grants acted as if Nellie had gotten the better of the bargain. Julia, still relishing her fantasies of White Haven, created new dreams of her daughter living in splendor and happiness with the best of people. As Mrs. Sartoris, Nellie could, it was true, call a countess cousin, but she was nevertheless miserable. The newspapers are short on details—family legend has it that Algernon drank—but in any event there was soon frank, if guarded, talk of her unhappy marriage. However, it was not too unhappy to produce four children. Nellie came home in the summer of 1875 and, while staying with her parents at Long Branch, gave birth to their first grandchild. She took Grant Greville home to England; he lived only till the next spring. Almost immediately she was again pregnant. She was visiting her parents when the Grants left the White House in March 1877, and went with them to stay at the home of Julia and Hamilton Fish; there Algernon Edward Urban was born on March 17. He was followed by Vivian May in 1879, and Rosemary Alice in 1880.2
Except for the children, Nellie’s life seems to have had little center. Very early, discreet references in the press and in letters suggested that hers was a dead marriage. In the summer of 1875 Adelbert Ames found proud grandparents when he visited Long Branch, but noticed “sorrow” when they spoke of Algernon’s unwillingness to live in America. He was unpersuaded when Julia talked to him about Nellie’s life in England: “I could see she would have me, as all the world believe and know, that she had a good, happy home there.” One of the saddest aspects of it all was that Julia and Ulysses Grant, who had made so sturdy a building of their own marriage, seemed unable to impart strength to Nellie. Henry James, after visiting the Sartorises in the country, described Adelaide’s brilliant conversation and wrote, “Meanwhile poor little Nellie Grant sits speechless on the sofa, understanding neither head nor tail of such high discourse and exciting one’s compassion for her incongruous lot in life. She is as sweet and amiable (and almost as pretty) as she is uncultivated—which is saying an immense deal. Mrs. Sartoris who appears (sick with fastidiousness as she is) to do her [Nellie] perfect justice, thinks very highly indeed of her natural aptitudes of every kind, and cannot sufficiently deplore the barbarous conduct of her mother leaving such excellent soil so perfectly untilled.”3
Nellie proved to be of small value to her husband, for Algernon Sartoris gained little stature in English society from his marriage to her. When the Grants were in England in 1877—and stayed at Windsor and Apsley House and a score of the other finest houses—the opera singer’s son and his wife were not with them. Julia and Ulysses spent only one week with their daughter and grandson and the Sartorises at their pleasant house on the south coast. Perhaps the Grants were not welcome; perhaps they were too preoccupied with their own public lives. In any case, they saw little of Nellie. She did travel with them in Italy in 1878, but then she was joining them for a holiday rather than for a real re-establishment of the family. Nellie was committed by her marriage to the Sartoris world, and she could not easily escape from it. Perhaps the most poignant footnote to her story came in the item of a society writer at the time of her father’s funeral. Nellie had been over from England to be with Grant when he was dying; now, reported the New York World, “Mrs. Sartoris is in correspondence with her family in England to have her children brought over here. If they consent…she will remain this winter with her mother, if not, she will go back about Oct. 1.” She went back. At thirty, the daughter of a president of the United States, she—with her children—was still the property of a hated husband. She went back to England, and five more years were to pass before she was permitted to come back across the Atlantic with her children and get a divorce.4
Nellie’s wedding marked the encasing of Julia and Ulysses Grant in the heavy-bordered middle-class grandeur of the American presidency. Grant never abandoned his simplicity of style, but he never again had a simple place in which to indulge it. It was all great houses, world’s fairs, testimonial dinners, and those ceaseless republican progressions—the endless trips that proclaimed that they had nowhere that was home, nowhere that they were any longer allowed to be Julia and Ulysses. Nowhere, except the White House.
And there in that house their private love affair flourished. When Julia suddenly needed to break into her husband’s public day, she would—as she did on May 22, 1875—take a sheet of note paper, fold it in three, into an impromptu unsealed envelope, and mark it “The President, immediate.” The note on the reverse that day read:
Dear Ulys
How many years ago to day is [it] that we were engaged: Just such a day as this too was it not?
Julia
As quickly and affectionately as it went, the query came back with its answer:
Thirty-one years ago. I was so frightened however that I do not remember whether it was warm or snowing.
Ulys5
The White House was their home and their bastion against a world in which they had never learned to be comfortable. It was one of the great ironies of the Grant story that the man who had had the honesty to tell Congress in a formal address that he was not prepared for the presidency could grasp at that office—even covet a third term—because there was nothing else he was prepared for either. The White House offered security and so did a seemingly loyal staff, but over the eight years of the presidency some of these people failed him. And one of the worst demonstrations of that failure came in the tawdry business of swindling the government out of taxes due on, of all things, whiskey.
Julia Dent Grant. From John Russell Young, Around the World with General Grant.
Strangely, it was from within the family, the cabinet, that the exposure of the whiskey frauds came. The investigation was initiated by Benjamin Helm Bristow, the upright Kentuckian who had been solicitor general, had expected to be named attorney general, and had at last, in June 1874, been brought into the cabinet as secretary of the treasury when Richardson was forced out. From within the administration, Bristow exposed the worst of the scandals of Grant’s presidency. As a result, he became both the unforgiven enemy of his chief and the hero of the anti-Grant wing of the party. Benjamin Bristow possessed that sticky double commodity, principle and ambition, and he was in the uncommon position of being able to rise to the first while advancing to the second. Ulysses Grant found the man and his cause cloying; he never fully owned up to how crooked the things were that Bristow discovered.
Distillers and distributors made an almost routine practice of bribing tax agents to ignore the mismeasurement of bottled whiskey or to supply tax stamps in excess of the amount paid for them. On Bristow’s desk when he took office was ample evidence that Treasury employees administering the tax had been involved in such practices since the Lincoln administration. Certainly it could be established that each year since 1870 from twelve to fifteen million gallons escaped the tax. The crime was known, but not the criminal, and such corruption within the Grant administration severely discredited the president. In January 1875, Vice-President Wilson told James Garfield that “Grant is now more unpopular than Andrew Johnson was in his darkest days; that Grant’s appointments had been getting worse and worse; that he is still struggling for a third term; in short that he is the millstone around the neck of our party that would sink it out of sight.” Bristow was one man whose appointment was applauded by those otherwise dismayed by Grant’s choices, and he took it to be his job to rid the president of the corruption around him. In the late fall of 1874 Bristow obtained from Congress an appropriation of $125,000 to conduct a full investigation, but it was a bold and thorough newspaper reporter who cracked the story. On February 11, 1875, George Fishback, the editor of the St. Louis Democrat, wrote Bristow, “If the Secretary wants to break up the powerful ring which exists here, I can give him the name of a man who, if he receives the necessary authority and is assured of absolute secrecy about the matter, will undertake to do it, and I will guarantee success.” That man was Myron Colony.6
An archetypal investigative reporter, Colony was nosy, shrewd, and not overly scrupulous. After he was hired by Bristow and the solicitor of the Treasury Department, Bluford Wilson, he used extraordinary ingenuity to accumulate massive evidence that a conspiracy did indeed exist and that it involved people close to Grant. General John McDonald of St. Louis had been appointed by Grant to be collector of internal revenue for the district, embracing seven states, that had its center at St. Louis. He and the president were old acquaintances, and McDonald had the endorsement of several of Julia’s family friends. Now in the spring of 1875, all of Colony and Wilson’s evidence pointed to McDonald as the central figure of the whiskey-fraud conspiracy in St. Louis.7
In April 1875, McDonald, who was aware that the investigators had his scent, was called to Bristow’s Washington office. There Bristow confronted him with massive evidence against him. McDonald broke down and confessed. But after he left the secretary’s office—conscious that an indictment loomed—he tried to move around his problem. He called on Bluford Wilson and asked for indemnity against being prosecuted, in return for a promise to collect the money owed by the delinquent distillers. According to Wilson, McDonald urged that the distilleries not be seized, as was planned, because in a full-scale prosecution “the party interests in his State and his district would be greatly damaged….” McDonald, Wilson claimed, tried to impress him with his power in the Republican party, presumably not only with those close to the head of the party, but with Grant himself. Wilson reported that if he had had the authority to do so he would have fired McDonald right then and there.8
McDonald, in his account, mentioned no conversation with Wilson, stressing instead his talk with Bristow. He claimed that the secretary, “with some anxiety…in his face,…inquired if I intended talking with the President.” McDonald said that he did indeed see Grant and urged that the evidence be burned, but that Grant recommended that it be sealed instead. There is no corroborating evidence of this alleged conversation; Wilson’s version of the next step in the story is that he and Bristow called on the president on May 7, 1875, and revealed the scope of the frauds and the need for swift prosecution. At this point Bristow and Wilson detected nothing but cooperation in Grant’s attitude toward the task of finding honest replacements for McDonald and the similarly crooked supervisor in Chicago. Wilson recalled, when later he testified before the congressional committee of inquiry, that Grant that day told him and Bristow that “McDonald had been a friend of his, and had grievously betrayed, not only that friendship, but the public.” Wilson claimed Grant was entirely sympathetic to the prosecutions at that point. When a congressman asked whether and when there was “any change in the demeanor of the President of the United States in reference to these prosecutions,” Wilson replied in the affirmative and said, “It began in August, 1875.” He then explained, “It was not until we struck Babcock in what seemed to be strong suspicious evidence of his complicity that we began to grow apart.” From that point on, “the relations of the President to the Secretary of the Treasury and myself were not as they had been.”9
Bristow, when he testified, declined to comment on Grant’s attitude toward the investigation or on any aspect of his own conversations with the president. As the president’s “constitutional adviser” he regarded all communications between the president and his cabinet members, and between various cabinet members, as “of the highest privilege,” and he repeatedly declined to answer the congressmen’s probing questions. By the time of the testimony, early in July 1876, Bristow had left the cabinet and his estrangement from Grant was well known, but the manner of his testimony sheltered Grant. Rather than leave the impression that Grant had done such improper things that he did not dare talk about them, the dignified former secretary of the treasury used a concept of executive privilege to lift “the President” above any action a man named Ulysses Grant might have taken in connection with the investigation of the whiskey frauds. (In a very different context, Marc Bloch once said caustically, “No doubt the argument runs that only by drawing a decent veil over the more glaring indiscretions of our public men can the morale of the country be kept at a high level.”)10
Wilson, acknowledging Bristow’s claim of constitutional privilege for the president, did not comment on what Bristow and Grant had said to each other, but he did not feel bound to refuse to talk about what Grant had said to him. He claimed that the president had, in effect, acknowledged McDonald’s guilt and acquiesced to his prosecution. Asked by a congressman if Bristow said explicitly at the May 7 meeting that McDonald had confessed his guilt, Wilson replied, “…he did not, for the reason that it appeared at that interview that the President and the Secretary had previously been in conference touching that subject, and that the President understood that branch of the case quite as well as General Bristow did.” Except for Wilson’s recollection that Grant spoke of McDonald as a betraying friend, there is no firm evidence that Bristow and Grant, at this juncture, had mentioned McDonald’s name. Wilson claimed that Grant gave his blessing that day to relentless prosecution of anyone who was culpable.11
On May 13, 1875, the special investigators moved, and some 350 men in the government and the distilling industry were arrested, but by then, mysteriously, Grant would no longer acknowledge McDonald’s guilt. On May 22, Benjamin Bristow told Hamilton Fish that Grant had said (speaking of McDonald) that “there was one honest man upon whom they could rely, as he was an intimate acquaintance and confidential friend of Babcock’s.” In response, the exasperated Bristow had told (or reminded) the president that Babcock’s friend McDonald “was the head centre of the frauds; that he was at this time in New York with $160,000 of money fraudulently obtained, ready to take a steamer on the first indication of any effort to arrest him.”12
As for McDonald’s (and Grant’s) friend Babcock, Bristow was still at a loss as to how to make the president see that his most trusted aide not only was lying about McDonald’s innocence but was himself party to the frauds. To persuade Grant, he sent General James Harrison Wilson, Bluford Wilson’s brother and Grant’s former cavalry commander, to see him. Grant had had confidence in Harry Wilson back in the days of the war, and now Brìstow gave the general his assignment: “Wilson you’ve got to go to Grant and state to him what your brother and I know [about Horace Porter and Orville Babcock].” In recalling the conversation, James Harrison Wilson said, “Well, that was a hell of a contract for me.” When he responded to this effect at the time, Bristow and Bluford Wilson laughed and went on trying to persuade him. “Grant is about to dissolve this cabinet,” Bristow insisted. “I am to be dismissed, and your brother Bluford will go with me and the whole country will be scandalized.”13
General Wilson was reluctant, but he finally concluded that it would be in order for him to go to Grant for the sake of his brother’s career. As he told Hamlin Garland years later, he “went over to the White House” only to be told that the president could not see him; he was out for a walk with Alexander R. Shepherd, the chief Republican politician of the District of Columbia and a friend of Babcock’s. Wilson returned later in the morning and was directed to the library. He walked in and saw not only the president but “Boss Shepherd walking back and forth.” Nothing could have been more dismaying to a reformer than to see Grant and the archetype of the corrupt party politician engaged in intense private conversation. To Wilson it was now clear: “Shepherd had been to St. Louis, intervening in the investigation going on there of the Whiskey Ring and he was reporting to Grant.” General Wilson left, but returned with a note urging Grant to see him privately.14
That evening Grant and Harry Wilson had their talk—and it ended their friendship. Grant could not suffer the bearer of bad news; years later Grant said that the Wilsons “disappointed me more than any persons I ever reposed confidence in.” As Wilson recalled his conversation with Grant: “I told him…that Porter and Babcock were concerned in the Whiskey Ring and that they were making use of the White House, and imperiling his good name.” Grant was “profoundly” troubled by the accusation, and asked Wilson who his authority for the allegation was. Wilson, seeking a source Grant would trust, replied that it was Dr. Alexander Sharp, Julia’s brother-in-law, and Grant asked Wilson to send Sharp to him. It is not clear how Sharp knew of Porter’s and Babcock’s complicity, but in time, he did pay his call and corroborated Wilson’s charges. He reported that Grant was so disturbed at the attack on his two friends that he wept—and called for Wilson to come back from New York so they could talk further about the ugly business. Wilson, returning, told the president more about the case, “but he refused to believe that Porter was guilty and I don’t think he admitted to anyone that Babcock was guilty. He shielded Babcock all he could.” Wilson, a flamboyant and demonstrative man himself, but different in temperament from Grant, said of the president, “He was a deeply affectionate man, and was surrounded by mean, low hangers-on.”15
The most damaging evidence against Babcock consisted of the telegrams he had exchanged with McDonald and an ally, William Joyce, alerting them to the progress of the investigation that might catch them all. The most telling and famous of these was dated February 3, 1875, and read, “We have official information that the enemy weakens. Push things. (Signed) Sylph.” Wilson, who had had a copy of the telegram in his possession since spring, had confronted Babcock and Porter with it. In their effort to dissuade Wilson from trying to figure out the meaning of the message that bore this code signature, they retreated to the outlook of the locker room. As Porter explained it privately to Bluford Wilson:
“Sylph” was a lewd woman with whom the President of the United States had been in intimate association, and…she had bothered and annoyed the President until at one time it chanced that McDonald’s attention was called to her…in the vicinage of the President, and he said, “Why, that is Sylph.” General Babcock said, “Do you know that woman, McDonald?” And Mac. said, “Yes; I know her well.” General Babcock said…“She has been giving the President a great deal of trouble; I wish you could relieve him of her in some way.” And McDonald said, “Certainly; that is easy. I can manage her.” And he did manage her, and so important was the service which McDonald thus rendered the President that the term “Sylph” became a common matter of joke between General Babcock and McDonald, so that they were in the habit, as occasion might require, of addressing one another under that name.
Obviously the allegation that Grant had had an extramarital sexual relationship was designed to persuade Wilson to drop any further investigation of the “Sylph” matter, lest it lead embarrassingly to the presidential bed. Wilson refused to be bluffed and proceeded on the assumption that the telegram had to do with the whiskey frauds, and nothing else. In the spring of 1876, when Porter was asked about the “Sylph” telegram by inquiring congressmen, he categorically denied the sexual dimension of the story. Even if there was a private joke of some kind, the text of the telegram did not suggest anything very amusing.16
The Grants went to Long Branch for the 1875 summer season, and there awaited the birth of their first grandchild in July. During that month Edwards Pierrepont, who was now attorney general, and Hamilton Fish traveled down from New York and confronted the president with damning evidence that Babcock was guilty. (Porter’s role in the whole affair has never been made clear—no one other than Wilson seems to have thought him as centrally involved as Babcock. Porter had left the White House in 1872 and lived privately in New York. He still visited the Grants when in Washington.) Grant did not repudiate Babcock; instead he wrote instructions to Pierrepont to go forward with legal actions in the many cases, adding, “Let no guilty man escape….” As he frequently did, he then weakened his own taut prose, this time with the clause “if it can be avoided.”17
In August, Bristow confronted Babcock with the telling evidence of the order for the “Sylph” telegram to McDonald, written in what clearly was Babcock’s hand. This message, and others, cryptically suggested that the sender had deflected investigations, and generally referred to efforts to forestall arrests and thereby protect McDonald. Babcock faced Bristow down; though he admitted he had sent the “Sylph” telegram, he claimed it referred not to the whiskey investigation but rather (inexplicably) to bridge building. Grant chose to believe him; Bristow did not. Grant began to feel that Bristow and Bluford Wilson were hounding him. Somehow they had picked his closest friend in the White House as a victim, and Grant felt that he was the real target of their probing.
Babcock and others who were guilty in the whiskey frauds sought to foster this feeling in the president in the hope that he would call off Bristow and Wilson. On September 26, 1875, Wilson wrote a letter to former Senator John B. Henderson, director of the investigation in St. Louis, introducing a new agent and stressing how important it was that they “reach the very bottom or top of the conspiracy and its ramifications.” McDonald (or an associate) gained access to the letter and interpolated “W. H.” (for “White House”) after the word “top,” to support the charge of Grant loyalists that Wilson had put spies on the president himself. Luckily for Wilson, he had his letter-press copy and could prove that the addition was a forgery. His contention was that he could not have an agent follow Babcock when he was visiting St. Louis without having it appear that he was checking on the Grant family, since Babcock was traveling with the president’s party.18
By midfall 1875, David P. Dyer, the United States district attorney in St. Louis, had sufficient evidence against Babcock to bring him before a grand jury. To persuade Grant not only of his friend’s complicity in the frauds but also of the need for him to face the jury, Secretary Bristow and Attorney General Pierrepont stayed behind after a cabinet meeting (thereby avoiding the necessity of making an appointment through Babcock) and showed him the “Sylph” telegram, together with several other telegrams from William Joyce to Babcock. The messages were so cryptic that they invited all sorts of conjectures: Did “Poor Ford is dead” mean Grant’s St. Louis friend Charles W. Ford was dead, or that some other Ford had died; or was “dead” a euphemism for “useless to the conspiracy”? Was the name indeed “Ford,” or was it—as it appeared in Bristow’s notes—“Fred,” and therefore possibly a reference to Grant’s brother-in-law or his son? Whatever the precise and correct interpretation, the telegrams, studded with names of men under surveillance, did seem to be confirming evidence that Babcock was in league with them. It appeared that before the investigation began he had been asked to ensure that Grant see to it that men friendly to the conspirators be appointed, and in the fall of 1875 he had been asked to keep associates in St. Louis informed about Bristow and Wilson’s plans for their prosecution. Having read the telegrams, Grant called in Babcock and asked, in the presence of the two cabinet members, what they meant. Coolly, Babcock spoke of some matter to which he and Grant were privy but which was unintelligible to Bristow and Pierrepont. The president seemed entirely satisfied with Babcock’s interpretation of these messages, but the cabinet officers insisted that Babcock send a telegram to his telegraphic correspondent, ordering him east to give his version of the matter.19
Babcock left the room to carry out his assignment. He was gone so long that Pierrepont, anxious about whether he had gone farther than his office next door, went to check on him. Babcock was trying to write a complex message to Joyce, in St. Louis, that would convey without actually saying it the idea that he should be on guard. Pierrepont, furious, grabbed a pen, spilled ink over Babcock’s efforts in the process of editing them, and shouted at him, “You don’t want to send your argument; send the fact, and go there and make your explanation. I do not understand it.” Life in the White House was growing less pacific.20
On December 2, 1875, when he realized that Dyer and Bristow had sufficient evidence to indict him, Babcock asked for a military court of inquiry. Reluctantly, Grant’s cabinet acquiesced, and Grant saw to it that three generals not unfavorable to Babcock were appointed to it. The judge advocate general—the prosecutor—was Asa Bird Gardner, a lawyer teaching at West Point, who had performed legal services for Babcock in a real-estate transaction and in dealings with Harris C. Fahnestock of Jay Cooke & Company. It is possible that Grant did not know of Gardner’s conflict of interest, and it is likely that he did not, at this point, know that Gardner had been involved in a Black Friday transaction; yet in structuring the trial he certainly was not stacking the deck against Babcock. He ordered Attorney General Pierrepont to direct Dyer to deliver to the court of inquiry the findings of the grand jury, which had been hearing evidence that would lead to the indictment of Babcock. Dyer’s defiant response on December 9 was to obtain from the grand jury a true bill against Babcock, which brought him to a civilian trial after his acquittal by the army panel.
Dyer was Bristow’s man, and Grant felt that his own secretary of the treasury was conspiring against him. He suspected that he was being spied on and reciprocated by enlisting the services of a slippery man named Charles S. Bell. A native of Mississippi, Bell had been (until fired) an investigator of mail frauds. He had subsequently gone to St. Louis, walked into Dyer’s astonishingly accessible office, and stolen some documents critical to the whiskey-frauds prosecution. Perhaps he was a member of the secret service (which Grant had used before), but it is more likely that he was fishing in fascinating ponds in the hope of gaining notoriety or of obtaining money from someone who sought to avoid notoriety. Then he came to Washington, where Colonel Levi P. Luckey, one of Babcock’s cronies and probably a fellow conspirator, obtained an appointment for him with Grant. Bell called at the White House at 3:00 P.M. on December 13, went into the president’s office, where the two men could talk privately, and opened his conversation with Grant with the congenial thesis “that there was an attempt on foot to injure him” through General Babcock. After a discussion of this alleged conspiracy, Grant instructed Zachariah Chandler, his current secretary of the interior, to make Bell a special pension agent in his department, with an assignment in St. Louis. There he was to find evidence that would exonerate Babcock.21
Chandler was not the only loyalist in the cabinet; on December 21, during a regular meeting, Secretary of War Belknap read a letter from Gardner, the prosecutor in Babcock’s military trial, that was highly critical of Dyer. As intended, this reading made Secretary of the Treasury Bristow uncomfortable, and, at Grant’s elbow, Secretary of State Fish stiffened. He said nothing at the moment, but later, in his diary, he wrote, “The statement was throughout that of a partisan and seemed to evince the loss of opportunity for some purpose which I do not wish to speculate upon.”22
In Washington early in January, while out for a walk, Grant encountered Elias W. Fox, editor of the St. Louis Evening Dispatch. The two men had known each other since 1861, and, of more immediate moment, Fox had served on the grand jury that indicted Babcock. Charles Bell claimed credit for the fact that the editor and the president chanced to meet. (He further claimed that Grant called on Fox “at Willard’s Hotel, room No. 124,” the Ebbitt House, and several times at Babcock’s house. The president was indeed being spied on, by his own agent.) Fox subsequently denied before the congressional committee of inquiry that he had revealed grand-jury secrets to Grant, but he did not deny that Babcock was the topic of their conversation. He left a strong impression in the hearing room that he had suggested what some of the evidence against Babcock was, with a view to aiding Grant to refute it.23
There were other ways to counterattack as well. The president was repelled by Bluford Wilson’s practice of granting immunity to guilty men who had been arrested, provided they would turn on their fellows. He knew it was likely that one of them might turn on Orville Babcock. Fred Grant had told a reporter for the friendly New York Herald that Babcock’s indictment was the result of a conspiracy between Wilson and Grant’s enemy Senator Carl Schurz, and on January 27, 1876, Grant summoned Wilson to the White House to insist that plea bargaining stop. Wilson knew that Zachariah Chandler, who was present, was alert to the political cost to the Grant wing of the party of the investigation, but it was on the ground of fairness, not of political expediency, that the president took his stand: “Major, when I said let no guilty man escape, I meant it, and not that nine men should escape, and one be convicted.” Wilson replied, “Pardon me, Mr. President, we are not in this battle counting heads.” He wanted to get to the center of the ring and contended that he could do so only by plea bargaining, letting lesser men off in order to get evidence against the heads of the conspiracy. Grant’s position sounded more honorable and unequivocal; it also meant that perhaps no one would have the incentive to point a damning finger at Babcock. In January 1876, on Grant’s orders, Attorney General Edwards Pierrepont directed that no more grants of immunity be made.24
Grant was fighting back, but the winds were strong around the White House. In the newspapers in January, in addition to stories about Babcock, there were rumors that not only Grant’s brother Orvil and his brother-in-law Lewis Dent (who had died in 1874) but also his oldest son, Fred, had been gaining money from the whiskey frauds. Grant was besieged. On February 8, 1876, he confided to his cabinet his feelings about those who were pursuing him. According to Fish, he “manifested a great deal of excitement and complained that they had taken from him his Secretaries and Clerks, his Messengers and Doorkeepers; that the prosecution was aimed at himself, and they were putting him on trial; that he was as confident as he lived of Babcock’s innocence….”25
No one else was confident. Pension-agent Bell had been busy in Missouri, doing more occasional reading in attorney Dyer’s office, but by Christmas he had become convinced that Babcock could not be cleared. He knew that Grant would not like the news, but apparently hoped that the president would nevertheless accept conclusive word on the case. He later reported how he proceeded back in Washington in February: “I took measures to inform him (meaning the President) that I believed he (Babcock) was guilty. I did it, because the President himself told me that if General Babcock was guilty he wished to know it, and he wished him punished. I took the President at his word,…I got my dismissal in three days afterward.” Chandler’s letter dismissing Bell was dated February 16, 1876.26
Grant had not wanted to know whether Babcock was guilty or innocent; he just wanted to know that he was innocent. Somehow, to lose Babcock would be to lose everything, and he was determined to go to St. Louis as a witness in Babcock’s trial to save him. For a president of the United States to take the witness chair in a criminal court to try to protect a man arrested for a crime would have been an unprecedented act. Fish, in particular, counseled as strongly as he could that Grant must not go on this errand of loyalty. Instead, on February 12, Lucien Eaton, an attorney for the prosecution, came to the White House to question the president. Babcock’s lawyer was present and was allowed to cross-examine. Also on hand were Secretary Bristow, Attorney General Pierrepont, and Morrison Remick Waite, the chief justice of the United States Supreme Court, who signed the deposition that Grant gave proclaiming Babcock’s innocence. It was read into the record at Babcock’s trial, and there can be little doubt that it achieved Babcock’s acquittal, which came on February 28, 1876.
To Ulysses Grant an acquittal was an acquittal; innocence was innocence. When Orville Babcock came back to Washington, walked into the White House, and sat down at his desk as usual, Grant was undisturbed. But Hamilton Fish, when he arrived for a cabinet meeting and saw Babcock back at work, was appalled. Being a man of principle, Fish was interested in appearances. He insisted that Babcock had to go. Grant finally agreed, but only after he was forced to look again at that first debacle of his administration, Black Friday. Fish showed Grant evidence that Babcock, like Daniel Butterfield, had been speculating in gold while privy to decisions about governmental monetary policy. Butterfield had been discharged; now Fish insisted that Babcock be discharged. At last, Grant could see that even Babcock had kept things from him—had failed him. Still, the moment of separation was difficult. Finally, on March 1, Grant walked over to see Fish and told him he’d been waiting for half an hour for a letter of resignation from Babcock. Icily, Fish said there was nothing to resign, and Grant after “a moment’s pause…smiled and said, ‘that’s true, he’s only got to stay away.’” Grant’s son Buck took Babcock’s place.27
The facts surrounding Babcock’s guilt are curious. There is no getting round the evidence tying him to McDonald’s activities in St. Louis—activities for which McDonald went to jail. While there, McDonald wrote a fascinating book (with illuminating details on prison life) in which he made no bones about the fact that Babcock ought to have been there with him. And surprisingly, Babcock carefully preserved material, including the order for the “Sylph” telegram, that fully corroborates his guilt. Why did he keep such documents? Was he somehow unable to divorce even incriminating material from the other intriguing letters that showed him to have been so very close to the nation’s seat of power? Or did he keep them so that he could try using them to blackmail the president into pardoning him, should he actually be sent to jail? The cryptic messages do not appear to implicate members of the Grant family, but perhaps if he had explicated them accurately for the president, Babcock might have been able to persuade Grant that the evidence was there.
Another possibility, of course, is that Ulysses or Julia Grant too was banking the proceeds of some of the frauds and Babcock could prove it. McDonald came right out and said that the president was doing just that. However, he did not offer any concrete evidence for the allegation, though one would have thought that having made the sensational charge he would bring forward as much evidence as possible to corroborate it. Both Orvil Grant and Lewis Dent were capable of dubious dealings, and Grant may have been protecting them; if Fred Grant was involved, his father would certainly have shielded him. But what seems most likely is that Grant was troubled by Babcock’s plight not so much because he or his relatives might be implicated, but because he felt threatened by some frightening “they.”
Ulysses Grant knew that Orville Babcock was guilty and yet went so far as to perjure himself before the chief justice of the United States to keep his aide out of jail. No talk of his being duped by knaves will explain his refusal to look at the clear evidence presented by Bristow and Wilson. And that evidence was irrefutable. After hours of damning testimony, Bluford Wilson was asked by the Democratic congressman Alexander G. Cochran, “If the President of the United States was acting in good faith in this matter, how do you account for his action in reference to that ‘Sylph’ dispatch?” Babcock’s bridge building and Porter’s sexual explications were silly, as Cochran, Wilson, and even Grant must have known. Wilson could not answer the congressman without saying that Grant was a perjurer, and so he said, “Let the facts speak for themselves.” As usual, they don’t, but both the congressman and Wilson left the matter in that ambiguous place. There was no evidence that Grant received illegal money, and a thorough reading of the report of the congressional inquiry does not suggest that he did. It does, however, prove that he knew Babcock was guilty (while being unable to accept the consequences of the fact) and that he believed that upright men like Bristow and Wilson, who claimed they wanted to disassociate him from crooked men, were plotting to get him. Grant was sure that he, not Babcock, was the target. He covered for Babcock, and both Fish and Bristow knew that he did. With devious as well as open use of power he kept Babcock out of jail. His were the actions not of a duped innocent but of a man fighting back with desperate effectiveness. He had struggled for too long to allow himself to be called a fool for letting someone steal a few dollars in tax stamps.28
Orville Babcock, an odd, restless, ambitious man, was curiously affectionate. During his courtship of Annie Campbell he had been shameless in suggesting how his closeness to Ulysses and Julia Grant would bring him success, which she would share. He wrote candidly and often charmingly to his wife, and he tended his fine dahlias and shared them with neighbors like the Frederick Douglasses. A great many politicians in Washington hated him for his imperious ways as he blocked their access to Grant, but none accused him of using his position to grow rich. Annie Campbell Babcock did not ride about the city in a carriage, like Mrs. Williams; it is one of the mysteries of the Whiskey Ring that after five years of alleged activity in the frauds, Babcock had not made more money. He lived very simply. And when he had to leave the White House, his friend who was still there found him a job that would keep the family going. Orville Babcock became an inspector of lighthouses, and in 1884, while on a trip as part of his job, he drowned, at Mosquito Inlet, Florida.
The sorry business of the whiskey frauds carried down to the final year of Grant’s tenure in the White House, and it helped deflect the president’s attention during his last two years in office from matters of far greater moment. In 1875 Grant was faced with insurrection in the South. He had thought he had finished with that phenomenon a decade earlier, but he was wrong. This time, however, he was determined that he would not fight a war to subdue the rebels. The rebellion was designed to dismantle the racially integrated political structure of the South.
The national government, which had won a colossal war, proved powerless to maintain the peace. Because it could not keep its new citizens alive, it gave that task to state governments consisting of Southern whites who were not intimidated by the new status of their black neighbors and of the newly enfranchised blacks themselves. Thus Reconstruction, in its most radical phase, had to rely on a reactionary doctrine: states’ rights were invoked to protect not the slaveholder but the former slave, in order to absolve the federal government from that responsibility. At first, of course, it was an exciting business, with black men, not three years away from slavery, writing constitutions, voting, and participating in precinct politics. However, if the doctrine of states’ rights was now imposed on the South to protect its freedmen, it took only the turning of the table to utilize the same political theory to ensure their subservience. The table turners were not slow to set to the task. Conservative white domination was achieved before 1871 in Tennessee, Virginia, and North Carolina; in Georgia they pressed in too clumsy a fashion, expelling the Negro members of the legislature. This action was reversed, and methods less obviously unconstitutional, but still effective, were sought—and found.
As the counterrevolution moved ahead in state after state, there was still the lingering thought that somehow the federal government did have an obligation to sustain these state experiments in Reconstruction—to protect the black people who had been encouraged to risk partaking fully of their freedom. Grant sensed this. Just as he had known in Memphis during the war that he had to do something to keep the black refugees alive and safe from the worst of exploitation, so in Washington in 1874 he heard cries for protection against “outrages”—murders—and felt an obligation to do something. When the counterrevolutionary white-supremacist Democrats, using violent intimidation, took elections in Texas and Arkansas, Grant, ignoring the means employed, recognized the administrations that resulted. However, when Arkansas began repealing parts of the constitution by which it had come back into the Union, and when Grant was told, with graphic details, that the election had not been peaceful—that the black people had been systematically terrorized—he reversed course and asked Congress to act.
He had already taken action in Louisiana. At the urging of Julia’s brother-in-law, James F. Casey, who was the collector of customs in New Orleans and a power in Louisiana’s Republican party, he had tried in 1874 to sustain the Republicans against the terrorists (and Democrats). Even the most cynical interpretation of his support of his relatives and his party cannot dispose of the fact that Grant acted also to save the lives of citizens who were powerless to save their own. He ordered General Philip H. Sheridan to use army troops to prevent killings.
It is difficult to know how Grant could have made his point more clearly. In his message to Congress in January 1875, justifying the orders that he had given General Sheridan, he quoted verbatim the statement of facts made by the judge in United States v. Cruikshank, during the trial of white men accused of violently interrupting a political meeting of black Louisianians. According to Judge William B. Woods: “In the case…there are many facts not in controversy. I proceed to state some of them in the presence and hearing of counsel on both sides: and if I state as a conceded fact any matter that is disputed, they can correct me.” Unchallenged, the judge continued: “Most of those who were not killed were taken prisoners. Fifteen or sixteen of the blacks had lifted the boards and taken refuge under the floor of the court-house. They were all captured. About thirty-seven men were taken prisoners. The number is not definitely fixed. They were kept under guard until dark. They were led out, two by two, and shot.” The president then went on to quote the descriptions of the “pistol-shot wounds, the great majority in the head, and most of them in the back of the head.”29
Here were facts. This was what was happening to citizens of the United States. Grant had been bitterly criticized for sending Sheridan to Louisiana and permitting the general to use the army to prevent such attacks. He had taken this action not so much in the name of enforcing the Fifteenth Amendment right to vote, and the concomitant right to engage in political activity, as in the name of section 4 of article IV of the Constitution, which expressly required: “The United States shall guarantee to every State in this Union a Republican Form of Government, and shall protect each of them…on Application of the Legislature, or of the Executive (when the Legislature cannot be convened) against domestic Violence.”
There was domestic violence in Louisiana. The incident that Judge Woods had described in such calm prose was not isolated. Citizens were being killed if they exercised their right to assemble or to take part in politics. “To hold the people of Louisiana…responsible for these atrocities would not be just,” Grant said, “but it is a lamentable fact that insuperable obstructions were thrown in the way of punishing these murderers.” The president seemed to ask, What am I to do? as he pursued his thought in a sentence that he allowed, for emphasis, to stand as a separate paragraph: “I have no desire to have United States troops interfere in the domestic concerns of Louisiana or any other State.” But how else, how other than by using General Sheridan, was he going to prevent domestic violence? Grant cordially disliked William Pitt Kellogg, the Republican governor of Louisiana, but he could not refute his logic in calling on the president of the United States as the only one who could prevent the violence that was raging in the state.30
Congress, with Thaddeus Stevens dead in 1868 and no leader—black or white—strong enough to replace him, declined to make Reconstruction truly national again. The Civil Rights Act of 1875 did not speak to the emergency. It carried no new prescription for enforcement—no demand for any increase in the authority of the federal attorney general to prosecute, as Amos T. Akerman had done, those who denied the civil rights of black citizens. Akerman had been sent home to Georgia long ago; Edwards Pierrepont, who had followed George H. Williams as attorney general, was not disposed to lead a major effort to bring civil-rights offenders into court. His brother lawyers on the Supreme Court (with whom he very much hoped one day to sit) had a similar disinclination. Two years earlier, in December 1872, they had interrupted the progress of the Fourteenth Amendment on the track toward a true national citizenship. In the Slaughter-House Cases the justices had upheld the right of state legislators to decide where in a city citizens could slaughter their animals, and by inelegant extension, this decision was soon construed to mean that the states had the power to define the rights or lack of them of their citizens, including their black citizens—without those citizens having recourse to federal protection. The Fourteenth Amendment, ratified to serve only the needs of “that race and that emergency,” as Justice Miller had stated in this decision, was being directed toward a very different future. Fewer and fewer white Americans, north or south, were caring about the people of that race and their very real emergencies.
Grant was said to be “plucky and serene” that December as he prepared to send this message to Congress on January 13, 1875. Marshall Jewell, who had become postmaster general in 1874, thought him determined “to protect the colored voter in his rights to the extent of his power under the law, and if we cannot protect them we shall lose most of the fruits of this terrible war.” But neither pluck nor plain words did the job. Despite Grant’s message to Congress describing how black Americans were murdered if they tried to rise to assert themselves in meeting their emergency, Congress did not take adequate action. Nor did the president. In Mississippi, the would-be redeemers were so confident that they could bring a white-supremacist government back to their state in 1875 that they challenged General Ulysses S. Grant either to marshal all of his power to stop them or to acquiesce to the ending of an interracial political society. The president was under enormous pressure to do the latter not only from white-supremacist Southerners but from white-supremacist Northerners, some of whom were in his cabinet.31
The blacks of Mississippi had made enormous strides since the end of slavery. Only ten years after the war, people who had been chattel workers, under total domination of a master class, were moving everywhere in the body politic. Even more ominously, to some of their former masters, they were also entering new economic realms, thereby endangering the class domination of the whites. The overturned Black Code of 1865 had forbidden freedmen to own land outside of towns; their success as commercial farmers had been feared then, and it was feared still in 1875. Black men were prospering, and not only had they been represented in the Senate by Hiram R. Revels and in the House by John R. Lynch, but, more importantly, they were gaining the kind of local political positions—as sheriffs and probate officers, for example—that produce true community power. But great as were their gains, their power was still strictly limited. They still had to defer to white partners—who got most of the best jobs—to achieve their goals. Specifically, they had to rely on their carpetbagger governor, Adelbert Ames.
The young Yankee had left the Senate in 1874 and run successfully for governor. As his bride did not like Mississippi, and with their three babies stayed much of the time with her family in Lowell, Massachusetts, Ames was almost immune to destruction by social ostracism. Wives were the best target of that tactic. When the black and white legislators and other politicians gathered for parties—in hotels rather than private homes—few women attended and, thought Ames, all in attendance felt awkward. Had Mrs. Ames been present she would have had to realize that the next day the proper white women in town might well snub her. Her long stays in Massachusetts also caused him to write his excellent letters, which chronicle the defeat of one of America’s finest efforts at democracy.
Vernon Lane Wharton, in the excellent essay “The Revolution of 1875” (in The Negro in Mississippi, 1865–1890) records how the Democratic party systematically, and with great skill, organized the state-wide intimidation of black Republicans. In Yazoo City in September, Colonel A. T. Morgan, the Republican sheriff, was addressing an integrated rally when men broke into the meeting, killing at least one Negro and wounding several others. The assailants then moved out into the town and the surrounding country, killing black people. No force to stop them was available. Republican leaders had urged Ames not to organize a black militia company, lest it arouse anti-Negro sentiment among white people. Such reasoning was irrelevant by September; Ames wrote, “So far has this intimidation gone that I can not organize a single company of militia.” He knew he was doomed: “The old rebel armies are too much for our party and the colored men do not dare to organize even when they know their liberty is at stake.”32
The “only hope is through the U. S. enforcement laws,” Ames wrote in the same letter. Ten years after the war, Grant, who had always been exceedingly wary of using army men as civilian police, had to decide whether to support Ames and his party. Attempts in the courts to enforce the Civil Rights Acts of 1866 and 1875, and other legislation supposed to implement the three Reconstruction amendments to the Constitution, had been totally unsuccessful. Ordinary civil order would not protect black lives, as the terrifying attack in Yazoo City demonstrated.33
A few days after the attack, a woman—the only person among the victims who had a chance to leave Yazoo City to seek help, and who dared to try—came before dawn to the door of the governor’s mansion. This was Colonel Morgan’s sister-in-law. She pleaded with Ames to disperse the armed men holding Yazoo City. All he could do was issue a proclamation, knowing it would be laughed at, in the hope that it would “pave the way for national interference.”34
The next day, violence reached nearer to Jackson. A man broke into Ames’s office, exhausted after a ten-mile ride from Clinton, to tell the governor of an attack there. At a large Republican barbecue, a band of “white men fully prepared” had fired into the crowd; two women and four children were among those killed. The attackers then moved on through the town and the country killing Negroes—including “one old man nearly one hundred years old—defenseless and helpless.” Telling Ames of his escape, the messenger described carriages and carts abandoned along the Jackson road by black people whom the horsemen had caught up with and pursued into the woods. Ames pronounced the attacks cold-blooded murder by the “white liners”—those planning to vote the line on the ballot of candidates favoring white supremacy—but he did not know what to do: “I have not been able to find anyone…willing to take military appointments.” He turned the governor’s mansion into a shelter for the refugees, and went off to an upstairs corner to write his wife.35
He thought the white liners would prevail in the coming election. Such severe intimidation was bound to succeed unless he could get federal troops, which he knew would be a difficult thing to do. And, indeed, he did not yet try; he waited. Only on September 6, when reports of assaults like that at Clinton came from all over the state, did he say he might “find it necessary to call on the president” for troops “tomorrow.”36
He worried over burdening his wife with these troubles; he himself, he said, “tired of hearing of them long before the day closes.” On September 7, he issued his proclamation calling on armed bands to disperse, and, by telegram, asked Grant to send an investigating committee which could confirm the need for troops. His appeal to Grant was on the grounds that the United States Constitution required him, as governor, to protect his constituents. It had been reported to Ames that General Christopher Columbus Augur would send troops but “he requires authority from the President.” Augur, Ames had been told, thought a “militia of colored men [might] precipitate a war of races to be felt over the entire South,” for the general had been informed that “thousands in Louisiana are ready to come here to fight the Negro.”37
The members of Grant’s cabinet, enduring fierce September heat in Washington and with no Rawlins and no Akerman among them, were annoyed by these flamboyant happenings in Mississippi. Ames, not waiting for the previously requested investigation, soon asked for an immediate dispatch of troops. He tried to be confident of a positive reply while he awaited an answer. But Democrats wrote that no troops were needed, and to the delight of the cabinet, one Mississippi sheriff wired that troops were not needed in his county. Ames’s request was denied. The governor was furious, first with Grant and then, when he learned of the telegram, with the sheriff. He composed a long, angry wire of his own to Attorney General Pierrepont—but did not send it, choosing to wait out “the development of events.” When, the next day, Pierrepont wired him, asking if he had “exhausted all…powers to protect,” the governor did send his telegram, and Pierrepont took it to Grant on September 13. On the seventeenth, Pierrepont sent a telegram that was, Ames wrote, “severe” in its criticism of Ames and his associates for taking “no action to protect ourselves.” The governor replied that he had tried to raise a militia, and failed. Already “disgusted” with Pierrepont, he now was “quite exasperated.”38
On September 21, he decided to call for volunteers, black and white, for a militia company, and placed orders for muskets. Army men warned him against this move, saying that the use of federal troops was preferable, but Grant was exceedingly reluctant to send such troops. The attempt to muster a militia company failed: “I have not been able to find even one man to cooperate with me” the governor complained. He could not call the legislature into special session as there were sufficient Democrats in the Senate to prevent a quorum, so he determined to “fight it out…alone.” Ames began to take a tragic view of himself—“…of course, all the blame comes on me”—and his worried wife sought to join him in Jackson. He thought this too dangerous; his telegram to Blanche said, simply, “No.” Once again he tried to raise a militia company, this time going specifically to the blacks for recruits.39
The white liners were shrewd. Having mightily scared their enemy early in September, they decided, as Ames reported, “to remain passive till two or three days…[before] the election.” Ames, too, grew passive. He did not campaign for the Republicans seeking seats in the legislature; he waited for their defeat and anticipated his own impeachment. Augur, who was in Jackson, told Ames that he could act swiftly, but only if ordered to do so by Washington. Ames was afraid “that my Negro militia has not the courage or nerve—whatever it may be called—to act the part of soldiers.” Disheartened by the prospects of violence, he turned to reading (a good deal of English history) and gossiping with Blanche about the trial for adultery of Henry Ward Beecher—the great event of 1875, which vastly overwhelmed Mississippi’s revolution in the national press. (Ames, it might be noted, believed the preacher was guilty.)40
On October 9, Ames was enormously relieved when his company of black militia escorted a shipment of arms for forty miles without being attacked, but he guessed, correctly, that the white liners were simply biding their time until the election. The Democrats feared that an attack on the blacks would bring in federal troops. White Republicans, “intimidated by the white liners,” would not join their black brothers in the militia, and most of “the Negroes are no less intimidated. Election day may find our voters fleeing before rebel bullets rather than balloting for their rights.”41
In mid-October, Benjamin Butler went to Washington to try to persuade Grant to order troops in to sustain his son-in-law. He knew that the Republicans had feared they would lose Ohio, where election day was in October, if Grant sent troops into Mississippi (the white line ran well north of the Ohio River). But he hoped that with the election over, Grant would dispatch a force to Ames’s support. Blanche Ames, a shrewd political observer—if overly confident in her menfolk—suspected that the white liners were desperate. Their extreme abuse of Ames suggested to her that they were “frightened” that he and his black allies would win on election day.42
Ames was far less sanguine, but he was, once more, aroused. He had been told that a request for troops must be made in writing, not by telegram; a letter would take four days to arrive, then Grant would have to make a decision, and finally it might take five days for troops to move to Mississippi. It was, Ames thought, “too late.” The “terror” had done its work: “Yes, a revolution has taken place—and a race are disfranchised—they are to be returned to a country of serfdom—an era of second slavery.” And he added, “It is their fault (not mine, personally)…. They refuse to prepare for war…in time of peace.” With resigned fury, he wrote of his request to Grant and Pierrepont for help. The president did not respond, but the attorney general did, in a way that Ames knew was final. Said the governor, “The nation should have acted but it was”—and here Ames quoted Pierrepont’s telegram—” ‘tired of the[se] autumnal outbursts in the South.’” Ames concluded, in tragic exasperation, “The political death of the Negro will forever release the nation from such ‘political outbursts.’”43
Grant would have none of the war Ames wanted black Mississippians to fight. He knew that in a racial battle, white Americans would support their white brethren, across regional lines. He was doing so himself. He was willing to allow the revolution—to end black liberties and aspirations, and to accept the resultant bloodshed and the terror of intimidation—in order to prevent the greater bloodshed of a race war. He was not ready to use his authority or his troops to persuade white Mississippi that the federal government would refuse to acquiesce to the demise of black rights or to racial massacres.
As the election approached, the white liners worked out their strategy. A committee asked Ames to disarm the militia, promising a peaceful election in return. Reluctantly, he agreed, and sent two companies of the militia home. The sheriff of Yazoo County had already refused to go back to Yazoo City as the head of a militia company because he feared “assassination.” State Senator Charles Caldwell disbanded his militia company and bravely returned to Clinton, where his enemies waited until after the election to murder him. Other black militiamen, however, declined to be dismissed and turn their guns in to the army. The white liners then claimed Ames had broken his promise to disband the black forces, thus legitimizing, from their point of view, any violence that might occur. Ames thereupon revoked the commissions of the militiamen. The brave black men who would not bow to the white liners now gave up on their white Yankee governor. Dreading that “somebody will think I have ‘sold out,’” Ames rationalized in time-honored fashion: “By and by they will thank me for it.” As he lapsed into this not very accurate sense of the future, Ames worried that his letters might be tampered with: “…I am making important history and everybody knows it….”44
Out-of-state campaigners were busy in Mississippi. One of the most effective was the popular Confederate general John B. Gordon, who came from Georgia; another effective speaker was L. Q. C. Lamar, who taught and practiced law in Mississippi. They were shrewd; in their powerful speeches to the white liners they never explicitly called for violence, but when they were through, aroused men and women among their listeners did. The two gentlemen were also effective outside Mississippi. They and entrepreneurs like them were fast persuading their counterparts in the North that their particular Southern way with the Negroes should prevail, since otherwise there would be either violence or a lot of pushy black people in the country. A spendid example of the latter, in their eyes, was the black Louisiana Republican P. B. S. Pinchback, who also campaigned in Mississippi—for the other side. Ames attended a supper given for Pinchback when he came to Jackson, but made only a lackluster speech in honor of the visitor. Ames had given up. He played croquet and expected a peaceful but fruitless election, which for himself would be a humiliating failure.
The white liners were so sure of victory they had not felt the need to attack the black militia, and they seemed certain that nothing would cause the federal government to send in the troops that would restore the confidence of the integrationist voters. In truth, Pierrepont was exceedingly eager to see that Ames did not break the calm and sent George K. Chase, a former Maine man then living in New York, to see Ames in Jackson. Chase arrived in mid-October, got on well with Ames, stayed with him in the mansion, took two days’ holiday in New Orleans with him, and confided to the governor that Attorney General Pierrepont, who, as a member of Grant’s Republican administration, should have been sympathetic to his party in Mississippi, had instead been explicitly critical of Ames and the Mississippi Republicans. Ames was feeling abandoned in his adopted state and his attention began to turn elsewhere. Chase, a “good liver” who enjoyed croquet, talked enticingly of the high life of New York and urged Ames to abandon Mississippi and politics and go into business.45
Chase also, at Pierrepont’s direction, met with the leaders of the Mississippi Democratic party, the white liners, to hold them to their peace pledge, and at the eleventh hour, Grant and the attorney general responded to Ames’s request, saying that troops could be sent in if the pledge was broken. Ames, for his part, thought their response too late. “Our side is so thoroughly demoralized that I doubt if they can be rallied,” he wrote. And he gave some thought also to the long-term outcome. “The republican candidate for presidency next year may want this state,” he mused, “but he as well might want the moon for a toy.”46
November 1, election eve, found some Republican leaders either lying low or away from home. The intimidation had had impressive results, and the white liners were confident. Ames had orders ready to give to army troops—but could issue them only if actual bloodshed had taken place. The troops were stationed only in three towns, and Ames was sure that in any election-day violence, those towns would be carefully spared, though others all over the state might erupt. But there was no violence. When the election returns came in, with their story of a complete Republican rout, Ames quietly went out to the lawn for another game of croquet.
Grant received a dressing down from Benjamin Butler for failing to support the party—and Butler’s son-in-law—in Mississippi. The president replied that he had sent troops and Ames had no cause for complaint. Ames countered—but only in a letter to his wife—that Grant’s handling of the troops had been useless, except to the white liners. Blanche Butler Ames had urged everyone she knew in Washington to press the president to support the black and white Republicans in Mississippi, but Grant had not, done so. “Grant’s professed order that troops should be at my disposal…was,” Ames lamented, “a sham and the election a fraud.” He added, “The democracy has been denouncing me for years—the republicans say I have ‘sold them out.’ Grant will probably say ‘it was Ames’ fault. I gave him…troops….’” Ames had established his “character,” even among his enemies; now his own party had destroyed it. His jeremiad went on: “While Grant may this day try to shield himself…and Pierrepont repeat what he knows to be false and the newspapers hound [me,] I am convinced that I am a better man than any of the whole crowd.”47
What if one looks beyond the men involved to the law they had made? During Reconstruction, Republicans built a formidable constitutional machine designed to protect, equally, the rights of a national citizenry. The three postwar amendments to the Constitution, the civil-rights legislation of 1866, 1870, 1871, and 1875, and the creation of the Justice Department were monumental achievements. Grant contributed to all that was accomplished during his administration, most notably by his trip to Capitol Hill to win passage of the Ku Klux Klan Act of April 20, 1871, and by his great message to Congress on January 13, 1875. But what was the value of the machine if it could not be made to move in behalf of the citizens? When skillful racists organized opposition to blacks, Grant did not find a way to make the laws effective. He could have sent scores of government lawyers south as United States district attorneys under the direction of the Justice Department, as Amos T. Akerman had done in 1871. He could have established a vastly strengthened constabulary of United States marshals; instead, as in Louisiana, he did nothing until he was forced to send troops because local violence had reached crisis proportions. Time and time again, Grant was described as angered at cabinet meetings by a report of some cruel murder in the South; time and again, by the next meeting, the arguments of Fish and Pierrepont and his own lassitude had dissuaded him from any action. Understandably and honorably, President Grant, remembering that he had been a general, was reluctant to see armies once again marching across the South; less commendably, he could devise no sustained federal program of law enforcement. He asked Congress to act and was frustrated when it did little to implement its own legislation and referred the responsibility back to him. It has been contended that the racism existent in the post-Emancipation period was so strong he could not have done more. Some think he did enough; conservative historians, looking at the splendid constitutional structure and accompanying federal action, pronounce that Reconstruction was not a failure. One wonders what would have been the judgment of the black people at that political picnic in Clinton, Mississippi, in September 1875.
The picnickers’ man was soon gone; the once hopeful governor of an uneasily integrated state of Mississippi left the South. Ames resigned, knowing impeachment was the alternative. The gallant optimist of post-Civil War America left politics. He lived to be old and rich and cultivated, but a villa on Lake Como and golf with John D. Rockefeller, half a century after the revolution of 1875, never quite compensated for the loss of a glorious chance, which he had shared with Ulysses Grant, to make history in Yazoo City and Clinton.