XXV

WAIFS

We are told that it is a bitter moment with the Lord Mayor when he leaves the Mansion House and becomes once more Alderman Jones, of No. 75 Bucklersbury. Lord Chancellors going out of office have a great fall, though they take pensions with them for their consolation. And the President of the United States when he leaves the glory of the White House and once more becomes a simple citizen must feel the change severely.

—Anthony Trollope

ATTENDING New Year’s Day receptions in Washington was an Olympian sport. One old gentleman, Benjamin Brown French, recorded in his diary, not long before he died, a day begun in Georgetown that continued on a labyrinthine course through Washington, skirted the White House, where the crowd was so great it would have taken him an hour to get in, and ended on Capitol Hill, where he helped his wife receive 140 guests at his own house. He was not, however, too tired at the end of the day to record, caustically, the fare at thirteen of his stops. Younger, but not fitter, Congressman James A. Garfield recorded in his diary for January 2, 1876, simply that he had made “about 65 calls.” The hostesses too were competitive. Julia Grant, in the White House, was of course ahead in the game, and her enthusiasm contributed to the success that was assured by her position. “She enjoyed her presidential life,” reported one of her guests, “and good naturedly said so.…” People-watching flourished at these wonderfully wearing occasions. Clumsy wives of rustic congressmen could be made invisible, and newcomers of greater splendor appraised and perhaps nodded to. In the flow of stunning people the eye was always out for the extraordinary. At Julia Grant’s 1876 reception, few were more fascinating to the crowd than the great editor Frederick Douglass, a leonine figure, his white and wiry hair rising from his huge handsome head as he moved confidently through the White House parlors. His elegance mocked the curiosity that his presence at white America’s social events always provoked.¹

One of Julia’s friendly rivals in the matter of New Year’s Day parties was Mrs. William Worth Belknap, of whose “charming grace and manner” one guest spoke admiringly. Unfortunately, Amanda Belknap’s 1876 reception was her last. Three months later, the guest who had been so taken with her charm—Rebecca Latimer Felton—had other news of Mrs. Belknap to send to her home-town newspaper in Cartersville, Georgia. On the night of March 2, 1876, rumors about Secretary of War Belknap “ran through the city like a prairie on fire.” Mrs. Felton, being a woman as well as a highly combative politician, had to exercise her love of politics in the congressional galleries (save for the two days in 1922, when, at eighty-eight, she was to serve as the nation’s first female senator), and during the spring and summer of 1876 she looked down from the gallery and took in every detail of the impeachment proceedings of General Belknap, who for seven years had been Grant’s secretary of war.²

Mrs. Belknap, called “Puss” both by her intimates and by mocking reporters, was not in the gallery. She remained in seclusion while the impeachment order was debated, awaiting any sympathy that might come her way. The newspaper reporters who camped outside her house on the lookout for the general, rumored to have committed suicide or to be about to escape to Bermuda, one day saw her invite a police officer inside. They also caught a glimpse of Belknap, who was alive and had not fled, but looked a “perfect wreck.” Mrs. Belknap was in need of sympathy—and more. Seclusion had not been her style prior to her husband’s resignation, and Mrs. Felton had been right in regarding her as the one hostess who was in every eye, for Mrs. Belknap was gorgeous. Her marvelous figure was set off by good dresses from Worth and splendid diamonds and pearls; it could have been calculated by anyone who stopped to do so that their cost placed a strain on her husband’s salary of eight thousand dollars a year.³

Amanda Tomlinson Bower Belknap had married her sister’s widower in 1873, reigned voluptuously as his hostess until the dark days of 1876, disappeared from society, and in time, irrepressibly, regained her stride. In 1889 she was the center of a momentary scandal when she was seen at Coney Island in a red-and-white-striped bathing costume that revealed more of her fine arms and legs, excellent in silk, than was thought respectable. In October 1890 she did not quite make it to the bedside of her dying husband, the cause of whose death was variously described; one dependable source said he was a suicide.⁴

William Worth Belknap was born in Newburgh, New York, on September 22, 1829. He attended Princeton while his father served in the Mexican War. Later he studied law at Georgetown University, and he was admitted to the bar in Keokuk, Iowa, in 1851. A Douglas Democrat, he volunteered for military service in the Civil War, entered the army as a major, and was cited for “always being at the right place at the right time” in the thick of the battle of Shiloh. He rose under General Sherman’s patronage, and commanded a division in the “March to the Sea” and the Carolina campaign. After the war, he went back to Iowa, was named collector of internal revenue in the region, and again with the blessing of General Sherman was promoted, on Rawlins’s death in 1869, from obscurity to the much-controverted post of secretary of war. Both Julia and Ulysses Grant found him agreeable to have around. As secretary, he distinguished himself only by not getting at loggerheads with Sherman, his proud and difficult former commanding officer, who was now commanding general of the army. To General O. O. Howard’s dismay, Belknap was unsympathetic to the cause of the freedmen to the point of deliberately undercutting the small efforts being made on behalf of black citizens. Belknap also won the raging hatred of General George A. Custer, who, in a manner not untypical of many army officers, saw nothing incongruous in being at once ruthlessly lethal in fighting the Indians and outspokenly critical of those who swindled them.⁵

Belknap, a big man, weighed two hundred pounds and stood six feet tall; he was handsome—in a fleshy way—and genial. In cabinet meetings he was noticeably reticent, but on March 2, 1876, he went to the White House and, in tears, made a confession to Ulysses Grant.

Washington entertaining is costly. The Belknaps were not people of means, but when money was needed, money was found. The handsome Mrs. Belknap was the secretary’s third wife, and the arrangement that in good part paid for her fine clothes and fine parlor had been made by her predecessor, her sister Carrie Tomlinson, who died in 1870. It was a simple, businesslike transaction. Soon after Belknap succeeded Rawlins as secretary of war, Carrie Belknap undertook to arrange for a New York friend, Caleb P. Marsh, to have the lucrative trading post at Fort Sill, in the Oklahoma Territory. In return, he would pay her $6,000 a year. Here the first hitch arose; the present holder of the tradership, John S. Evans, had come to Washington to be sure he was not forced to give it up. But this complication was soon disposed of. Marsh and Evans made a contract, duly drawn by Marsh’s lawyer, that Evans would keep his tradership but pay Marsh $15,000—amended to $12,000—a year. Marsh would pass on to Mrs. Belknap half of these proceeds, in convenient quarterly payments.

Carrie Belknap lived to enjoy but one payment; she died of tuberculosis in December 1870, a month after her son was born. When Marsh called on her sister, then Mrs. Bower, to pay condolences, he assured her that the infant child would be the continuing beneficiary of the arrangement. Amanda agreed, saying that Carrie “gave the child to me and told me that the money coming from you I must take and keep for it.” Unluckily, the child also died, in June 1871, but payments continued to be made, to Belknap, while the aunt traveled in Europe and the genuinely bereft father performed his cabinet duties. When General Belknap married his sister-in-law on December 11, 1873, the payments from Marsh were still continuing although their amount had been reduced because deteriorated economic conditions had made the Fort Sill trading post less lucrative. At Belknap’s trial it was established that the Belknaps had benefited to the probable total of $20,000.⁶

When Carrie had entered into her agreement with Marsh, she reportedly told him, “If I prevail upon the Secretary of War to award you a post you must be careful to say nothing to him about presents, for a man once offered him $10,000 for a tradership of this kind and he told him that if he did not leave the office he would kick him down the stairs.” Perhaps that offer had been rejected because it was below the market price for trading posts, or perhaps Belknap learned to suppress such violent urges, for Marsh testified that the payments he made to the widowed secretary were pacifically received. Said Marsh, “The money was sent according to the instructions of the Secretary of War; sometimes in bank notes…I think on one or more occasions by certificate of deposit on the National Bank of America in New York. Sometimes I paid him in New York in person.”⁷

These details of the Belknaps’ finances emerged in a congressional investigation that was part of a searching scrutiny of the Grant administration conducted in 1876. As a result of the elections of 1874, the Forty-fourth Congress, which met for its first session on December 6, 1875, had a Democratic majority in the House of Representatives. The Democrats elected Michael C. Kerr of Indiana as Speaker, and promptly and with zest began vigorous investigations into the corruption in the Republican administration. They credited their election to claims that such corruption existed, and they were determined to demonstrate the reality of their claims. The task was not excessively difficult.

Before they were through, every one of Grant’s cabinet departments had been investigated, including that of the seemingly unassailable Mr. Fish. In his realm of foreign affairs, Robert C. Schenck, Grant’s second minister to Great Britain, was exceedingly ambitious socially (and, in private letters, condescending about the naiveté of Mrs. Grant and her daughter Nellie, whom he had had the pleasure of presenting to Queen Victoria in 1872). Schenck was not shy about obtaining the wherewithal to support his social life. While still in Congress and chairman of the Ways and Means Committee, he wrote his daughter, “Yesterday I got down town to meet Mr. Jay Cooke. I am gradually willowing the ground and personally putting in the seed for profitable enterprises.” His appointment as minister to Great Britain, it will be recalled, was welcomed by Cooke and many other men of business who saw in the changing of the guard new opportunities for support of their interests.⁸

Once in London, which was still the center of capital investment not only for the whole British Empire but for the United States as well, Schenck lost no time in championing American enterprises, including one in which he was personally involved. The Emma Silver Mining Company, with mines in Utah, was held to have great promise, and advertisements suggesting that Britons buy shares included the enthusiastic endorsement of Schenck. Strong criticism of Schenck resulted, and on November 27, 1871, Hamilton Fish, with Grant’s concurrence, wrote Schenck, advising him to withdraw his name from the management of the company. Schenck did so on December 6, but delayed announcing this severance of his ties with Emma Mine until January 12, 1872, to give himself and his friends time to sell their holdings before his announcement depressed the market value of shares in the company.⁹

Emma Mine failed, along with Jay Cooke’s other ventures, in the crash of 1873, but Schenck’s relationship with the company was still alive in the minds of congressmen in 1876. Abram S. Hewitt of New York headed an investigation which, while clearing Schenck of fraud, did not remove the strong suggestion that he had used his public position for private gain. And Schenck’s troubles were not merely with the Democratic congressmen; he was under threat of legal action in England. He resigned in May 1876 and came home.

Another man from Ohio who was in grave trouble was the secretary of the interior, Columbus Delano. Early in the previous year, Secretary of the Treasury Benjamin Bristow had received a letter, dated March 24, 1875, from one L. C. Stevens of Cheyenne, Wyoming. Enclosed with the letter were canceled checks, an endorsed bank draft, and other documents suggesting that John Delano, Columbus Delano’s son, was being given partnerships in surveying contracts that surveyors would not otherwise have received. Stevens’s letter also claimed that Columbus Delano had written to thank Surveyor General Silas Reed, who awarded the contracts, for favors rendered his son.¹⁰

Stevens had discovered the documents while a clerk in Reed’s office in Cheyenne, and seeking to expose his employer and John Delano, he sent them to the cabinet member best known for rectitude. Bristow, already immersed in the task of exposing Orville Babcock’s involvement in the whiskey frauds, rather enjoyed being placed in an awkward spot by “an entire stranger.” A year later he told investigating congressmen, “There were peculiar circumstances surrounding me at the time which embarrassed me very much by having the papers come into my possession.” Stevens, he claimed, insisted that he put them into Grant’s hands, and to the president’s great discomfort, Bristow did just that. Stevens knew when he wrote Bristow that the president’s brother Orvil too was the holder of a contract which brought him payment for which no cartographical service was rendered; during the 1876 investigation, a congressman asked, “Did you ever know Orvil Grant to do any surveying in that territory?” Stevens replied, “No, sir; I do not think he was ever in the territory.”¹¹

On April 29, 1875, Surveyor General Reed called on the president and “had a long talk with him about this affair….” Confronted with the documents, Reed claimed Stevens was a thief and asked Grant to give the papers to him. Grant refused, but, according to Reed, pronounced them unimportant and, as they appeared to him to belong to John Delano, proposed returning them to him. Without the papers (and therefore still vulnerable), but aware that Grant was not anxious to pursue the matter, Reed left the White House and sent a telegram firing Stevens. (He subsequently gave the job to Charles J. Reed, his nephew.) That evening Grant and Hamilton Fish discussed the accusations against Columbus Delano that were appearing in the same newspapers that had attacked the president during the 1872 presidential campaign. Whether they discussed Reed’s visit is not clear, but it is likely that Bristow had told the secretary of state about Stevens’s charges. Both cabinet members thought Delano should be asked to resign, but Grant told Fish that such a request would be “retreating under fire” and would be regarded as admission of the truth of the charges. Grant was under siege. Despite Stevens’s evidence against Delano, he sided with the attacked against the attackers.¹²

As in the investigation of Babcock and the whiskey frauds, Bristow led the attack, but when he realized that Grant was doing nothing with the evidence, he retrieved the documents from the White House and, on July 2, returned them to Stevens. He excused this action on the grounds that he had done his duty by informing Grant and was responsible for no more than that since this matter, unlike the whiskey frauds, did not involve his department. Why Grant yielded the documents is not clear except that, all along, he had wanted to wash his hands of the affair. Technically, there was no law to stop a firm under contract to survey parts of a territory from paying for the services of a cabinet officer’s son or a president’s brother (although legislation of May 18, 1796 did specify that skillful surveyors should be employed), but the evidence that John Delano was shaking down trained surveyors was strong and there was no good reason to suppose Orvil Grant was incapable of doing the same.

Grant was not close to his younger brother (who had been his boss in Galena) and had more than once remonstrated with him for capitalizing on their relationship; just after the war Orvil advertised his services in the notorious business of collecting bounties due servicemen for enlisting in the war, and Ulysses had urged him to stop. Like his father, Orvil was unable to resist petty enterprises, shady or otherwise. He was unembarrassed by the fact that his brother largely ignored him, and his staying power proved great; after Ulysses left the White House and Washington, Orvil remained in town, trying to ingratiate himself with any Republican with official money to spend. (During Hayes’s administration, for example, he was happy to lend his buggy to Congressman James Garfield, who was serving on the Appropriations Committee of the House.) Exasperating as Orvil was, he was part of the family, and Ulysses tried to prevent the exposure of his unethical and possibly illegal acts by retaining Columbus Delano and thereby suggesting that no such improprieties had occurred within the purview of the secretary of the interior. Unfortunately, pressure in the opposition newspapers mounted, and Grant was forced to act. On August 7, 1875, he wrote Silas Reed, “In accepting your resignation, allow me to say that I know of no reason to be dissatisfied with your administration of the office of surveyor-general.” At the same time he accepted Columbus Delano’s resignation, but still reluctant to face the publicity, he did not make it public until the fall, when Bristow himself threatened to resign unless Delano was required to leave. In October 1875, Grant’s old friend from Detroit days, Zachariah Chandler, took Delano’s place as secretary of the interior.¹³

Moving around the cabinet table, one came to George M. Robeson, who had succeeded the amiable Adolph E. Borie as secretary of the navy in 1869. Robeson had served in an almost totally unnoticeable fashion ever since. When he was appointed, he had what was regarded as a slender law practice, and his net worth was $20,000. Soon after he took office, the Philadelphia firm of A. G. Cattell & Company, grain merchants, began receiving contracts with the United States government to supply foodstuffs. The firm flourished, and so did Robeson. When allegations that he was receiving bribes from the firm were investigated in 1876, Robeson released his bankbook to the congressmen; it showed that during his years in the Navy Department, when his salary was $8,000 a year, he made deposits totaling $320,000. In addition, one of the Cattell family was said to have given a cottage in Long Branch to Robeson. A great deal of circumstantial evidence supported the widely held view that Robeson had indeed received both the money and the house from the Cattells, but when the congressional investigators, in a massive inquiry, went through the books of the firm, they found them in disorder, and there was no evidence of payments to Robeson.¹⁴

The report made by the committee in July 1876 accused the secretary of the navy of gross misconduct and claimed that a system of corruption had grown up which, “from the peculiarity of its character and the cunning of its contrivance, must hereafter be known as ‘Cattellism.’” There was talk of impeaching Robeson (which even one Democratic member of the committee thought shrilly partisan) but that action was never undertaken, perhaps because another such action already dominated congressional attention. On a bill of impeachment voted by the House of Representatives, the Senate of the United States was conducting its trial of Grant’s former secretary of war, William Worth Belknap.¹⁵

Belknap’s form of corruption, it will be recalled, had been receiving bribes from men who grew rich as the Indians became impoverished. The New York Tribune estimated that a $15,000 initial investment in a trading post brought an annual profit of $40,000—at the expense of the Indians. The newspaper, admittedly more than willing to be critical of the Grant administration, claimed that since 1874 not “a single important tradership had been secured without the payment of large sums” of money. Congressman Hiester Clymer of Pennsylvania had been seeking firm documentation of such payments, and with careful work he got it. At 11:00 A.M. on Tuesday, February 29, 1876, the House of Representatives Special Committee on Expenditures in the War Department heard Caleb Marsh’s damning testimony. That afternoon, Secretary Belknap himself was the witness. When he and his lawyer perceived the hopelessness of his position, Belknap withdrew, leaving his counsel, who made a “verbal proposition” with respect to the report the committee was determined to make to the full House the next day. The proposition was, in all likelihood, an offer to have Belknap resign in return for the abandonment of impeachment proceedings. The committee members made no response and, that evening and the next day, met privately in the rooms of one of their number to discuss Marsh’s testimony. Without question, Clymer told them to say nothing, so that nothing would dull the thrust of his request to the House to impeach Belknap. However, Lyman K. Bass, a Republican member of the committee, trying to make some hay with the administration, took the news of Belknap’s crookedness to the leading foe of corruption in the cabinet, Secretary of the Treasury Bristow.¹⁶

Bass saw Bristow early on the morning of Thursday, March 2, and the secretary immediately grasped the seriousness of the charges. The Belknaps and the Bristows attended the same Bible class, and the chore of warning Grant cannot have been a cheerful one, but Bristow knew the accusations against their friend were irrefutable. At the White House, Grant, due at Henry Ulke’s studio to sit for his portrait, was at the breakfast table when Bristow came in. The secretary told the president that there were unanswerable charges of bribery against Belknap and urged him to meet with Bass immediately, so that he would know all the particulars before the full committee called on him in the afternoon. After Bristow left, the president sent a note to Congressman Bass, asking him to call at noon. Then he finished his breakfast and prepared to leave for the artist’s studio. At the door he encountered Belknap, “nearly suffocated with excitement.” Zachariah Chandler, who accompanied Belknap, was trying to calm him, but the man broke down on seeing Grant. Weeping, he confessed, and begged his chief to accept his one-sentence letter of resignation. Grant read it, sent upstairs for someone to bring him a draft of an acceptance, studied it, but then as usual chose to write his own letter; standing at a mantelpiece at 10:20 A.M., the president wrote, “Your tender of resignation as Secretary of War, with the request to have it accepted immediately, is received and the same is hereby accepted with great regret.” Still distressed, but greatly relieved, Belknap left with Chandler. Grant again started for the door but again was interrupted, this time by Senators Lot M. Morrill and Oliver P. Morton, who talked earnestly about the “Belknap horror” for fifteen minutes. “When they left,” wrote James Garfield, to whom Grant described these events in a private conversation the next day, “he walked leisurely to Ulke’s and sat for an hour and ten minutes. He did not know the shocking details which Bass was to tell him; but he did know that his favorite minister and his wife were disgraced.” Garfield recorded that he asked Grant “if he supposed the artist saw anything unusual in his face,” and Grant replied, “I think not.” Garfield then asked if he was “himself conscious of any unusual agitation which was changing his ordinary expression.” Grant—said Garfield—“answered, ‘Oh no,’ as if surprised at my question. I told him I did not believe there was another man on the continent who could have said the same under such circumstances.” And in the privacy of his diary, Garfield added, “His imperturbability is amazing. I am in doubt whether to call it greatness or stupidity.”¹⁷

Whether this response showed greatness or stupidity, Grant’s old instinct for survival had unquestionably been at work, and his quick action was effective. At 11 A.M. the letters of resignation and acceptance were presented to the House committee; its members were furious with Grant for having anticipated them. Garfield, coming onto the floor of the House, “found great excitement.” He listened as the committee “reported the strange and pathe[t]ic story of his [Belknap’s] course, which found his accomplices in both his dead and his living wife. Rumors abounded that he had committed suicide, and for…[a]while, I almost wished they were true. A resolution for his impeachment was reported unanimously and adopted by the House without a division, though he resigned at ten 20 this morning. Since the death of Mr. Lincoln, I have never seen more sadness in the House.”¹⁸

Grant, sitting for his portrait, thought he had found his response to the Belknap scandal. Rather than face the music, he would simply not hear it. But the next day he found he could not escape it entirely. To the earnest James Garfield—whom Grant saw as almost as eager as Bristow to weed moral gardens—he showed a face of remarkably cool unconcern, but in private with Hamilton Fish, he claimed that it had been the emotions of the moment that caused him to accept Belknap’s resignation instantly. Garfield, in his diary, saw in Grant an awesome calm; Fish, in his, recorded the emotional response of one friend to another. Both observers missed the fact that Grant’s swift action had achieved a highly rational purpose. It enabled Belknap to resign before formal charges were made. If the charges had been made first, the president would have been forced either to require Belknap to stand trial while in office or to accept a resignation that could only be regarded as an admission of guilt. In the next cabinet meeting, twenty-four hours after the strange transaction in the front hall of the White House, Grant could see that not only Bristow but also Fish was dismayed by what could be termed his obstruction of justice, but Grant told his cabinet officers that Bristow’s call at breakfast was the first he had heard of Belknap’s misdoings. The president, Fish reported, said “that he had accepted the resignation on its being tendered, and under the wrong impression, as he did not fully understand the statements of Belknap, who was very much overcome and could scarcely speak.” Grant, according to Fish, “did not know that acceptance was not a matter of course.” Belatedly, the president ordered Attorney General Pierrepont to consider whether criminal charges should be made against Belknap. Meanwhile, Congress proceeded toward an impeachment trial, despite the resignation. In the weeks before the trial Grant was short-tempered with reporters who pressed him on the matter. He could not keep the discord away totally.¹⁹

Grant truly found it hard to imagine that the activities of his comfortable close associates caused people who did not know them to condemn them. So it is possible that he had never conjectured about the source of the Belknaps’ obvious affluence and that Bristow’s alarmed report that Thursday morning was indeed the first he had heard of the secretary of war’s profit from the “sale” of traderships. It is also possible that once the exposure of unethical acts in that realm was mentioned, Grant immediately realized that the heat might reach even closer to him than the cabinet table. He knew other men who dealt in traderships: the newspapers soon revealed that Orville Babcock’s brother had obtained one, which he “rented” at a good profit; Julia’s brother John C. Dent had one, which his brother-in-law had explicitly requested for him in a letter dated September 15, 1867, to General C. C. Augur. Orvil Grant later denied “owning” three, claiming that he only held a partial interest in two trading-post stores. How the profits from these arrangements were distributed was never shown with the unmistakable clarity provided by Marsh’s testimony about the Belknaps, but Grant surely must have been wary of anything that would lead to full scrutiny of the affairs of these members of the family. If the light stayed on the Belknaps, it might be kept off the Dents and the Grants, and the president and his wife, paradoxically, would have reason to be grateful to the Belknaps. Julia, perhaps feeling guilty that her family had escaped the disgrace that had befallen Amanda Belknap’s—and because she was genuinely fond of her fun-loving friend—wrote notes to all the cabinet members and then, in tears, pleaded with them in person to call on Mrs. Belknap; she had to be allowed to appear as the wife of a respected colleague who had resigned, not of a common criminal. When Amanda Belknap was received at the White House, Julia Grant’s pardon had been bestowed.²⁰

In the twentieth century, a hasty resignation (followed by a hastily granted pardon) prevented history from repeating itself and staging an impeachment trial for the nation’s bicentennial; in July 1876, there was no such deprivation. The capital enjoyed the gaudy spectacle of the Belknap trial, and despite the heat, seats in the Senate gallery were at a premium. It was not as dramatic a show as the one eight years earlier, when a president had been on trial, but Grant’s Democratic opponents gave a powerful performance. There was much for them to work with. On August 1 the Senate voted, and Belknap was acquitted of having committed high crimes and misdemeanors. The managers of the impeachment had failed to obtain the necessary twothirds vote; twenty-three senators who thought him guilty had nevertheless voted for acquittal on the ground that the Senate did not have jurisdiction over an individual who was no longer in office. Grant’s quick acceptance of the resignation was the adroit act that saved Belknap.²¹

The sordid Belknap affair boiled down to the business of cheating the Indians. The very first efforts of the Grant administration had been directed at ending that destructive exploitation of native Americans and achieving a program for the peaceable coexistence of the two races that were competing for the western plains. The Belknap trial was evidence that the reformers had not ended the crookedness at the trading posts; the relentless moves across the plains by white America, in the face of Indian opposition, demonstrated how deeply Grant’s Peace Policy had been eroded.

In November 1872, the Modoc Indians in eastern Oregon had begun a series of attacks in an effort to secure lands they were contesting with white settlers. There was strong support in Sherman’s army for a ruthless attack on the Modoc leader, Captain Jack, and his people, but Grant insisted that peace commissioners be allowed to try to work out a nonviolent solution. Negotiations were still under way in April when, at a meeting of the two groups, the angry and suspicious Indians turned on their white counterparts and shot and killed General E. R. S. Canby and a Methodist minister, Eleazar Thomas. An agent of the Bureau of Indian Affairs, A. B. Meacham, though close to death, survived to tell his story of the killings. General Sherman, who had had little patience with Grant’s missionaries but had followed his commander’s orders, now instructed Canby’s successor, General A. C. Gillem, to make total war on the Modocs: “You will be fully justified in their utter extermination.” Sherman sent this order without consulting Grant, who never used that term, but after they discussed the murders, he told his commanders that the “President now sanctions the most severe punishment of the Moducs.” Steadfast adherents of the Peace Policy, like Alfred H. Love and Lucretia C. Mott, urged Grant to recall that the Modocs were still members of the “human family”; the government, they contended, should not overreact. But the newspapers in the West were full of bloodthirsty calls for revenge. Just a month before, in his second inaugural address, Grant had said, “Wars of extermination, engaged in by people pursuing commerce and all industrial pursuits, are expensive against the weakest people, and are demoralizing and wicked. Our superiority of strength and advantage of civilization should make us lenient toward the Indian.” But this time Grant did not stay Sherman’s hand. By October, Captain Jack and three other Modocs had been captured, tried, and hanged. Their people were driven to the alien ground of an Indian reservation and forced to stay there.²²

On the northern plains, the Northern Pacific Railway was pressing its relentless imperialistic way through the lands that the Sioux had been persuaded, with such perseverance, to agree to take as their own. As the railroad opened new areas for settlement, the incoming whites demanded that the army protect them from the displaced and angrily despairing Indians. Sherman, who expected great trouble as the railroad pushed west of the Missouri River, was given a momentary reprieve from an unlikely source; the panic of 1873 forced the Northern Pacific into bankruptcy. But the delay was only temporary, and the railroad, reorganized, soon pressed forward against the Indians again.

Civilization was threatening another Sioux area as well. Banishing Indians to the Black Hills, land no white man would want, had made sense until gold was discovered there. Sherman, who had assured Red Cloud that he would honor promises to sustain Indian boundary claims, warned would-be miners that they had no right to invade property that was not theirs. Meanwhile, the Indians made it clear that they would use force if necessary to protect their lands. And soon, in the contact areas, white settlers began the familiar practice of committing provocative acts with the expectation that Indian reprisals would force the army to move in against the Indians.²³

To counter this, Red Cloud, Spotted Tail, and Little Wound went to Washington in June 1875. Grant tried to persuade the Indians to take $25,000 in return for the rights to hunt along the Platte. Red Cloud refused, and the threat of war continued to hang over the Dakota Territory through the rest of that year and into 1876. That spring, Sitting Bull, an Indian leader independent of Red Cloud and distrustful of his negotiations, began urging the Sioux to stand up against the white men. The army, sensing a strengthening of the Indians’ position, wanted to move into action, and no army man was more eager to do so than George Armstrong Custer. This flamboyant West Point graduate, who at twenty-six had been a major general in the Civil War, had made himself persona non grata at the White House with his outspoken and detailed accusations not merely of the Belknaps but also of President Grant’s brother Orvil and of Julia’s brother John. Like Sherman, he was ruthless when he thought the Indians had broken their word, and regarded them as savages likely to do so, but he was far more contemptuous of white men who degraded themselves by cheating the Indians. When he urged Sherman to give him a command in the Dakota Territory in order to fight against the Sioux, Sherman denied his request, on orders from Grant. Furious, Custer went to Chicago to plead his case publicly and with General Sheridan. Grant, in turn, was furious with Custer, but allowed Sherman to give Custer his command.²⁴

On November 3, 1875, Grant and his wartime friend Philip Sheridan sat down in Washington with Secretary of War Belknap and Secretary of the Interior Chandler to discuss the almost frantic urge of gold miners to enter the Black Hills. Sheridan was not sure the army could continue to restrain them, and Grant, as Sheridan reported it, “decided that while the orders heretofore issued forbidding the occupation of the Black Hills country, by miners, should not be rescinded, still no further resistance by the military should be made to the miners going in….” Grant, disgruntled, believed “such resistance only increased their desire and complicated the troubles.” As a result of this conference, Sheridan ordered his commander in the field, General Alfred H. Terry, to “quietly cause the troops…to assume such attitude as will meet the views of the President.” With Grant’s promise to the Indian leaders broken, the miners rushed in, but as Grant and Sheridan should have anticipated, the Sioux did not take the invasion lying down. War broke out.²⁵

Just after the Fourth of July holiday in 1876, the newspapers (which received the news before the War Department did) reported the defeat and death of Custer and his men at Little Bighorn. The military men were more restrained about the loss of their brother officer than were many of the western newspapers. Sheridan knew that Custer had badly misjudged his enemy, and reported that the defeat was “due to misapprehension and superabundance of courage, the latter being extraordinarily developed in Custer.” Politicians were more bellicose. Senator A. S. Paddock of Nebraska introduced a bill calling for a volunteer army to proceed with the extermination of the Indians. Sherman, who had used the unequivocal word “extermination” often, proved once again that in his relations with the Indians he talked a more murderous game than he chose to play. He fended off the threat of having to command another volunteer army, as, unpopularly, he had once done in Georgia. Nevertheless, the campaigns that he did sanction, while not assignments in total extermination, were vicious. General Nelson A. Miles moved against the Sioux in eastern Montana with savage effect. Farther west, General O. O. Howard, the exponent of interracial co-operation, who had allowed himself to be banished to the Far West by his old comrades Grant and Sherman to escape the accusations of improper conduct in the Freedmen’s Bureau brought to embarrass him by Secretary of War Belknap and other anti-black men in the army, now found himself forced to participate in an attack on people of still another race. In the winter of 1877 he was ordered out against Chief Joseph and the Nez Percé. When Chief Joseph was finally captured, many months after Grant left office, Howard made him promises of land not dissimilar to those he had made the freedmen—and once more he proved too weak to force his government to keep them. But even the promises indicated that Grant’s badly battered Peace Policy, not extermination, was still the government’s official policy.²⁶

If Grant was depressed by the fact that his Indian policy had come down to Little Bighorn and the pursuit of an able and honorable Indian chief by an old wartime comrade known as the Christian General, if he reflected on the fact that the destitute, frightened Indians he had once seen at army posts were no better off in Howard’s Department of the Columbia a quarter of a century later, he should have been equally disheartened about the plight of black people in the South, still threatened with the desolation he had seen them endure as refugees in Memphis during the war. As the election of 1876 drew near, black citizens—Republicans, for the most part—were being subjected to violent intimidation. It had all happened before in Louisiana and Mississippi; now South Carolina, still governed by an integrated Republican administration, was the center of white-supremacist activities. On July 8, 1876, there was a murderous attack on blacks—labeled a “riot”—in Hamburg, South Carolina. Republican Governor Daniel H. Chamberlain called on Grant to assert the authority of the “General Government” to protect the people of South Carolina and “…restore confidence to the poor people of both races….” As the fall election approached, he feared the grisly events at Hamburg would be repeated, along the pattern experienced a year earlier in Mississippi. Grant was not in town when Chamberlain’s telegram (preceding a formal letter) reached Washington, and Secretary of State Fish and Attorney General Alphonso B. Taft (who had succeeded Pierrepont in May) deemed the request not “in pursuance of the Constitution” and turned it down without even consulting the president. When Grant got to Washington and read Chamberlain’s letter of July 22, he did not override his cabinet officers but instead reiterated the claim that he was constitutionally powerless to act, even though he could see that what was happening in South Carolina in 1876 was what had happened in Mississippi in 1875. Grant’s letter of reply was a hortatory call for perseverance; what was needed, he said, was a “fair trial and punishment of all offenders without distinction of race, color, or previous condition of servitude, and,” he added flatly, “without aid from the Federal Government.” Grant then sent to the Senate all the documents relating to the Hamburg murders, including explicit details of how they had occurred and copies of Chamberlain’s letter and his reply. The Senate, in turn, published the documents but took no other action. When, later in the fall, Grant did send soldiers to guard the polling places and protect voters, it was too late. The black voters had been intimidated; the Republicans lost the election, and the abandonment by Northerners of efforts to keep black people in some semblance of parity with white people—to save Reconstruction—was all but complete.²⁷

By the summer of 1876 there was no one around the White House who gave a damn about the black people. John A. Rawlins was long dead; Amos T. Akerman had been fired five years before; they had made Grant send Orville Babcock off to look at lighthouses. Hamilton Fish had never been able to get the freedmen into his line of vision; Benjamin Bristow had, briefly and dimly, but Grant now hated him more than any other man in America. Edwards Pierrepont, the attorney general who had cared least about the need of blacks for help from the Justice Department, was gone—to London to replace Robert Schenck as minister—but Alphonso Taft cared only marginally more. (When Taft moved to the Justice Department in May 1876, he was succeeded as secretary of war by J. D. Cameron.) Julia still thought of black people as her father’s slaves; Fred had demonstrated the quality of his concern at West Point; Buck and Jesse weren’t interested; and Nellie, in England, was too far away for Grant to talk to about anything. No one in the White House—and fewer and fewer in white America—cared about the former slaves anymore. It was too late for Grant to bring about Reconstruction, even if he had had the will.

The year 1876 was troubling and frustrating for Grant. The pendulum would not hang still. He had been deprived of Babcock, and he had been showered with glamorous attention at the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia. His first grandchild—Nellie’s son, Grant—died in May; his first granddaughter—splendidly healthy—was born in June. And, amid all the contrasts, he had the private woe of facing replacement. His term would be up in a year, and he saw no signs that the pendulum would carry him up from the abandonment in which politicians, concentrating on his successor, would leave him.

No third term. LIBRARY OF CONGRESS

Both Julia and Ulysses Grant were so attached to the White House that people who desired a repudiation of “Grantism”—the corruption exemplified by the misdeeds of Babcock and Belknap—feared they would try for a third term. But the scandals were strong enough to preclude a sustained effort to achieve renomination for the president. Grant found it galling that Republicans felt a need to repudiate his record rather than build the next victory on it. And what was worse, Benjamin Helm Bristow was a most likely candidate to replace his chief. He had become the hero of reformers who, unlike the Liberal Republicans of 1872, sought to achieve reform within the regular Republican party. To Grant, any other Republican was preferable to Bristow, and he watched sardonically as Bristow and his former law partner John Marshall Harlan, who was managing his campaign, strained their great friendship at the Republican convention in June in Cincinnati. Bristow’s chief opponent was James G. Blaine of Maine, a far more glamorous and less honest politician than he. Blaine, with better than a hundred more convention delegates than Bristow, was short of a majority, and Bristow supporters thought they were building to a victory over Blaine when a curious accident blighted both their chances. Blaine suffered a stroke (from which he recovered well), and Bristow, hearing the news, rushed to Blaine’s house. At the door, Bristow saw Blaine on the floor with “a number of persons rubbing his limbs.” He started to enter, only to hear Mrs. Blaine say, “Mr. Bristow you have got your will; don’t come in here.” Thereafter, Blaine’s questionable health and Bristow’s appearance as one rushing to advantage over a fallen foe made neither fully attractive to the convention. Two other contenders, Senator Oliver P. Morton and Senator Roscoe Conkling (Grant’s choice) lacked the strength to win, and in the face of a stalemate, the well-crafted campaign of Governor Rutherford B. Hayes of Ohio gained force. Finally, when it appeared that only Hayes could block Blaine if Bristow faltered, Harlan—with more swiftness than some Bristow supporters thought seemly—released Bristow’s delegates to Hayes, who won the nomination. It was rumored that night that Harlan would be rewarded with an appointment to the Supreme Court, and he did indeed later receive this appointment. Bristow, who had long wanted to reach the Court himself, instead retired to private practice, and the friendship of the two men, whose careers had been too parallel for the sake of either, was never as strong again.²⁸

It was clear that whether nominated or not, Bristow would leave Grant’s cabinet, and on June 21, 1876, he was replaced by Lot M. Morrill of Maine. As he resigned, Bristow drafted a long bitter letter to Grant, complaining that he had been blocked from doing his duty; then, thinking better of it, he wrote a shorter formal letter of resignation. When he arrived at the White House with this letter, Grant was just leaving for a drive. Silently, the president took the letter, got into his carriage and drove off. At his last cabinet meeting, on June 20, Bristow stayed only long enough to exchange formal pleasantries with Grant and his colleagues. Then the reformer withdrew, leaving the Grants with the prospect of being replaced in the White House either by a Democrat who had not fought in the war or a pious nonentity of a minor Republican general.²⁹

It was after the election in November 1876, and in a mood of resignation and retrospection, that Ulysses Grant wrote his astonishing final State of the Union message, under the dateline, “Executive Mansion December 5, 1876.” He began that remarkable document with the fact that this message was his last, and then presented an apology: “It was my fortune, or misfortune, to be called to the office of Chief Executive without any previous political training. From the age of 17 I had never even witnessed the excitement attending a Presidential campaign but twice antecedent to my own candidacy, and at but one of them was I eligible as a voter.” In this formal and normally most impersonal of government documents, he took his countrymen back to his boyhood and tried to make them see why things had gone wrong. As a little boy he had witnessed political campaigns in Georgetown, he had heard his father argue politics, and it had all been real. Then that reality had been taken away; his boyhood had ended when he was seventeen, and during the campaigns of 1840, 1844, 1848, 1852, and 1864, he was somewhere with the army. In 1860 he had not lived in Galena long enough to vote. His only ballot had been that inglorious one cast in Missouri for James Buchanan in 1856. Now, in his self-pity, Grant chose to forget how intense had been his consciousness of politics in 1864, and during every day of his life since then.³⁰

Because he was cursed with this political innocence, “it is but reasonable to suppose that errors of judgement must have occurred.” He did not, however, shoulder all the responsibility: “It is not necessarily evidence of blunder on the part of the Executive because there are these differences of views. Mistakes have been made, as all can see and I admit….” He went on to place the blame only indirectly on himself; it seemed to him that the mistakes were “oftener in the selections made of the assistants appointed to aid in carrying out the various duties of administering the Government” than in his own actions.³¹

The problem in the selection of assistants, as Grant saw it, was not cronyism, but the opposite. He was troubled that “in nearly every case” the officials for whose acts he was apologizing were “selected without a personal acquaintance.” It was not Orville Babcock who was on his mind, as he sought to explain how things had gone wrong. Furthermore, he wanted it understood that he was not the first president to make errors: “History shows that no Administration from the time of Washington to the present has been free from these mistakes. But I leave comparisons to history, claiming only that I have acted in every instance from a conscientious desire to do what was right, constitutional, within the law, and for the very best interests of the whole people. Failures have been errors of judgement, not of intent.” People had failed him, and the times had been against him as well: “My civil career commenced…at a most critical and difficult time. Less than four years before, the country had emerged from a conflict such as no other nation had ever survived. Nearly one-half of the States had revolted against the government, and of those remaining faithful to the Union a large percentage of the population sympathized with the rebellion and made an ‘enemy in the rear’ almost as dangerous as the more honorable enemy in the front.” In these comments Grant was more fearful than he had ever been during the war, when the activities of the Peace Democrats were of justifiable concern to a military commander. The comments were bound—designed—to rankle the present-day Democrats, now a majority in the House of Representatives, to whom the message was addressed.³²

In his recapitulation of the events of his eight years, Grant turned first to Reconstruction, which “to speak plainly” was a matter of “whether the control of the Government should be thrown immediately into the hands of those who had so recently and persistently tried to destroy it, or whether the victors should continue to have an equal voice with them in this control.” No one could claim this was not plain speaking, and Grant spoke proudly of standing behind congressional Reconstruction measures and of his “heartily” given support for the Fifteenth Amendment. He had counted on the “late slave,” once enfranchised, to “increase” the “Union-loving and Union-supporting votes.” The freedmen too had let him down, but he had an idea why: “If free in the full sense of the word, they would not disappoint this expectation.” But he pursued this line of thought no further; after the reference to his enthusiastic support of the Fifteenth Amendment, he plunged, in mid-paragraph, into talk of debt and taxes, before moving on to another group of troubled people.³³

If black Americans were not truly “free,” neither were red Americans safe from the “avarice of the white man,” who had “violated our treaty stipulations in his search for gold.” Grant was unequivocal in his condemnation of the treaty breakers who had invaded lands that he had promised the Sioux. He then posed an obvious question: “The question might be asked why the Government has not enforced obedience to the terms of the treaty.” The answer, he quickly added, was “simple”; it lay in numbers and greed. The first people going into the Black Hills had been evicted by the troops, but then gold had been “found in paying quantity, and an effort to remove the miners would only result in the desertion of the bulk of the troops that might be sent there to remove them.”³⁴

This was about as hard-hitting and succinct a lecture on the history of the West as one could hope for, but Grant spoiled it all with his bland codicil: “All difficulty in this matter has, however, been removed—subject to the approval of Congress—by a treaty ceding the Black Hills and approaches to settlement by citizens.” If he allowed himself to think about it, Grant cannot possibly have believed that this surrender to the miners with a new treaty could be counted on to meet the continuing needs of the Sioux any more than the compromises in the South met those of the black citizens of South Carolina and Mississippi.³⁵

Having prodded the Senate to ratify the Indian treaty, the president proceeded to chastise both the House and the Senate for reducing appropriations for the consular service. There would be no consul in Bolivia, Ecuador, and Colombia, he told them, and ministers were to be replaced with mere chargés d’affaires in Portugal, Denmark, Greece, Switzerland, and Paraguay. (He may have felt the projected change of representation in Denmark was a rebuke to his sister Mary and her husband, who was the minister in Copenhagen.) Now Grant asked Congress to reconsider its action. The money saved was not, he argued, “adequate consideration for the loss of influence and importance” that would result from downgrading the foreign service. Grant looked to the growth of America’s power in the world arena rather than to its diminishment.³⁶

The balance of the message dutifully informed Congress that each cabinet department was doing its job; the routine prose of these sections was a metaphor for the tedium of so much of Grant’s last eight years. But he allowed himself two exceedingly interesting digressions, two signals about matters of interest and concern that lay ahead for the American government. He called attention, in a way that suggests he had not read it, to the report of the commissioner of agriculture (not yet a cabinet secretary). This included, said Grant, a summary of findings in “chemistry, botany, entomology, etc.” which constituted a good argument for the development of more scientific agriculture. And he pointed to the practical information in the report about which crops were overproduced in the world and which were not and hence could be profitable for the nation’s farmers.³⁷

Second, he urged Congress, as a step toward the goal of scientific and profitable farming, and toward the development of the economy in general, to build permanent halls in the capital to house the fine exhibits assembled for the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia. In the hope that Congress would respond to his plea (and that of the director of the Smithsonian Institution) that such halls be swiftly built, he requested that the Philadelphia exhibits not be dismantled. It was an interesting and hopeful sign of the interest of a president in the work being done by Americans in science and the arts.³⁸

After these two looks into the future, Grant turned back to what clearly was the greatest disappointment of his years in the White House, the failure of the Senate to allow him to annex Santo Domingo. His odd tenacious affection for his and Babcock’s enterprise in the Caribbean was revealed again, with a chamber-of-commerce salute to the productive promise of the island, which would be realized once the soil was in “the hands of United States capitalists.” He seemed to be saying that he had not wanted the island simply to satisfy his whim or Orville Babcock’s ego and pocketbook:

The emancipated race of the South would have found there a congenial home, where their civil rights would not be disputed and where their labor would be so much sought after that the poorest among them could have found the means to go. Thus in cases of great oppression and cruelty, such as has been practiced upon them in many places within the last eleven years, whole communities would have sought refuge in Santo Domingo. I do not suppose the whole race would have gone, nor is it desirable that they should go. Their labor is desirable—indispensable almost—where they now are. But the possession of this territory would have left the negro “master of the situation,” by enabling him to demand his rights at home on pain of finding them elsewhere.³⁹

Despite his affection for it, Grant now did not really have his heart in his dubious Santo Domingo plan. He told Congress he was going into the matter not to reopen the annexation question, but to “vindicate any previous action in regard to it.” Vindication was what the message was about, and in ending that message, he circled back to himself: “With the present term of Congress my official life terminates. It is not probable that public affairs will ever again receive attention from me further than as a citizen of the Republic….” Grant’s choice of words was almost ominous; he had once said that getting out of the White House would be better than anything else except possibly getting out of West Point, but now he did not say that with the end of his term he would go happily into private life. What he said was “…my official life terminates.” Was he glad to go, or terrified of the void into which he was heading? The message is often regarded as an embarrassing episode in Grant’s career—a whimper from a strong man become weak and admitting his failure, a somewhat petulant request to be excused for his mistakes because he was forced against his will to take a job outside his competence. But the opposite is true. This was one of the rare moments when Grant revealed himself as he truly was, and one of those even rarer moments when a president of the United States, in an official document, dared show himself as a normal mortal struggling to make sense of his situation. If the ordinary people of the land had not been so accustomed to seeing their leaders try to lift themselves above human worries, they might have heard—and indeed some did—the sound of the human being that they had sensed to be there but that Grant, until then, had kept hidden.⁴⁰

Ulysses and Julia did not leave their house just yet. There was still one more season in which they were at the center. There was still one more New Year’s reception, and the president’s lady was not afraid to make a grand occasion grander. She alone decided how to do so. At her New Year’s Day reception in 1877, as throngs of callers came to the White House through a heavy snowfall, she presented her youngest guest—another Julia Grant, Fred and Ida’s daughter, born in the White House on June 7, 1876. And once started, this young lady was not to be stopped; nearly a century later, as Princess Cantacuzene, living in her lovely Connecticut Avenue apartment, she still received party invitations that took her back to the White House.⁴¹

Nineteen other men had lived in her grandfather’s house by the time Princess Cantacuzene died in 1975, but in the winter of 1877 it was still his. And it was not at all clear who would live in it when he left. Grant had not been in Galena or in Washington, D.C., when the returns of the election of 1876 came in. He was in Philadelphia, at the home of his friend George W. Childs, and he went to bed convinced that in the morning he would issue a congratulatory statement conceding the election to the Democrat candidate, Samuel J. Tilden. Such a statement might have altered the delicate balance of the famous maneuvers that followed; it would surely have comforted Tilden as much as it would have dismayed Hayes. Luckily for the latter, the next morning, before Grant spoke to any reporters, “an eminent Republican senator and one or two other leading Republicans walked in, and they went over the returns.”⁴²

In New York, during the night, the chairman of the Republican party, William E. Chandler, had been busy. The defeat of Rutherford B. Hayes, which had seemed a judgment on the Grant administration, was, perhaps, not a defeat after all. If the count of votes in Florida, South Carolina, and Louisiana (three states which still had Radical governments) could be challenged, Hayes might still be elected. William Chandler, moving quickly, wakened Grant’s old friend Zachariah Chandler; by dawn, they had been in touch with Republican officials in the three states and the delegation had left to call on President Grant. As Childs recalled it: “One of these leaders, notwithstanding the returns, said, ‘Hayes is elected.’…General Grant listened to them, but said nothing. After they had settled things in their own minds, he said: ‘Gentlemen, it looks to me as if Mr. Tilden is elected.’”⁴³

Despite this sardonic assessment, Grant did not issue his congratulatory statement, and he did nothing to cripple the energetic efforts of the two Chandlers and their allies to mount a challenge. He did, however, make them exceedingly nervous. Grant had no affection for Hayes, and the party leaders could glean only that his goal was a resolution of the impending crisis, which now threatened to result in civil disorder similar to that which he had experienced in 1861 and feared in the spring of 1865. Conjectures of how chaos might occur were many. If the electoral votes of the three Southern states in which the count was disputed went to Hayes, he would win; if, at the same time, an Oregon elector (who, illegally, was a government employee) was replaced by a Democratic appointee, there would be a tie. The Constitution calls for the electoral votes to be opened in the presence of both houses of Congress, but it does not say who should do the counting. If the Republican Senate majority decided the count went one way, the Democratic majority of the House of Representatives might decide it went the other. Another possibility was a Senate filibuster, begun before the count could be made, that might extend past Grant’s last day in office, leaving the United States without a president. And the disastrous interregnum between the election of 1860 and the inauguration of 1861 was not so far in the past as to make worries about disorder groundless.

Even more recently, impeachment proceedings against a president had been instituted, and Grant did not like the strident calls for such action against him for using troops to guard the polls in South Carolina in November 1876. He did not want to take any step that could result in his being called a dictator, and he was no more sanguine about having the Republicans in the Senate make a decision to accept the returns of the Republican electors in the disputed states. Such a resolution would, he feared, be “stigmatized as a fraud.” Even Tilden would be better than such a victory, and he asked his friend Childs if there was not some other way out of the impasse.⁴⁴

Meanwhile, eager politicians were courting Grant, hoping to ensure that whatever procedure was adopted, the result would be a Republican president. Early in January 1877, Hayes’s supporters were afraid Grant would follow the lead of his friend Roscoe Conkling. Conkling, powerful in the Senate, piqued that he had not been the nominee, and genuinely troubled by Hayes’s lack of concern for the stalwart black and white Republicans who were desperately fighting to stay alive in Southern politics, was believed to favor a compromise that would yield the presidency to Tilden. If Grant agreed, the struggle would probably be lost. Therefore, Hayes sent one of his closest friends, James M. Comly, to call on the president. Comly’s approach to Grant was skillful; it only involved sacrificing one reformer. As Comly reported to Hayes, once Grant was assured that “there was not one chance in a million that you would appoint Bristow to a Cabinet position in view of the fact that he had made himself so personally obnoxious to the President…,” all was well. Grant responded with “strong emotion” to this assurance and “drew the friendly cigars from his pocket,” a gesture which Comly took as highly propitious.⁴⁵

When a Tilden rally was scheduled for Ford’s Theater, Grant engaged in some alarmist rhetoric, declaring the District of Columbia was as safe as a “garrisoned fortress, and any demonstrations or warlike concentration of men threatening the peace of the city or endangering the security of public property or treasure of the Government would be summarily dealt with, should the public safety demand, by a declaration of marshal law.” Privately, he was on a quieter course. He invited several Republican senators and his friend Childs to the White House to hear arguments in favor of an independent electoral commission to decide the issue. The dinner party was not a success; as Grant said to Childs, “You see the feeling here. I find them almost universally opposed to anything like an Electoral Commission.”⁴⁶

Childs’s response was to work all the harder to achieve this elite solution to the dilemma, and he persuaded Grant to do something he had not done before—use Democrats as the agents to carry out a policy. He arranged for Grant to meet with Samuel J. Randall, Speaker of the House of Representatives, and General Robert Patterson, an eighty-five-year-old Pennsylvanian who had been a friend of Andrew Jackson’s. Grant had fought with him at Cerro Gordo, and since the Mexican War he had been an investor in the Pennsylvania Railroad and the owner of extensive sugar properties in Louisiana. Patterson represented well the commercial values underlying the compromise that eventually emerged. Childs told Grant that Patterson had “a great deal of influence with the Democrats, and particularly the Southern Democrats.” Knowing he could find support in the opposition party, Grant next turned to his fellow Republicans. He called in Roscoe Conkling, who told him that he was not alone in opposing an electoral commission; Senator Oliver P. Morton, powerful among Republicans, disliked the idea as well. Despite the opposition of these loyal supporters, Grant replied, “I wish it done.”⁴⁷

How much weight the president’s command carried is hard to measure. As a lame-duck president, with little remaining patronage, he obviously had severely limited means of exerting direct pressure. Even so, and despite the scandals of his administration, General Grant was still a powerful force. The commission idea carried with it an aura of fairness, and it won overwhelming support in Congress. In the Senate, twenty-six Democrats voted for it, and one against, while only twenty-one Republicans supported the commission. Sixteen Republican senators defied Grant. In the House, the Democratic majority ensured a victory, but twice as many Republicans went against the president’s advice as were willing to accede to it.⁴⁸

After the vote was taken, strong advocates of a Republican victory at any price hoped that Grant would reverse himself and veto the bill. It was true that Grant’s attention to the matter of the electoral commission was not total; as Childs recalled it: “After the bill had passed and was waiting for signature, General Grant went to a State fair in Maryland the day it should have been signed, and there was much perturbation about it.” Frantic telegrams were sent, but Childs, feeling confident that he knew where the president stood, reassured the backers of the commission that Grant would sign the bill. And he did so, though not without a sense that he was probably handing the White House over to a Democrat. Later that spring, when no such horror had occurred, Grant told Childs “with rare candor” that “from the beginning” he had thought the Louisiana votes would go to Tilden. But the electoral commission found for Hayes; Congress accepted the decision, and Hayes arrived in Washington on Friday, March 2. The carriages of the Hayes party rushed to the White House, and ushers announced the president-elect. Hayes, “grasping President Grant’s hand in both of his, and looking in the President’s eyes, seemed for a moment too overcome for expression.” Grant, a good deal less overcome, said simply, “Governor Hayes, I am glad to welcome you….” The next day he and Buck returned Hayes’s call, and then Grant went to Capitol Hill to sign bills. That evening Julia gave her last White House reception—for two thousand people. At midnight Hayes was sworn in, privately (because Grant’s term ended on a Sunday). The public inaugural went forward on Monday, March 5, 1877.⁴⁹

Leaving the White House was torture for Julia. Once the new president moved in, and she had had to go, she and Ulysses traveled west for “dinners, receptions, and serenades…many and charming” in Cincinnati, St. Louis, Galena, and Chicago, and then in Harrisburg, and finally back in Washington, where in a hotel “our parlors were thronged all day long. And at night, it was like the President’s levees.” She was trying to continue the wonderful eight years she had spent as first lady. (Ulysses got away from all of this briefly when he and Daniel Ammen, leaving Julia in Cincinnati, took a carriage up muddy roads for a sentimental journey back to Georgetown.)⁵⁰

Julia’s final day in the White House had been made to last as long as possible. Nervous people in the Hayes party began to wonder if she would ever go. She declined an invitation to attend the inaugural, on Capitol Hill, and rejected her husband’s suggestion that they leave quietly before the Hayeses reached the White House after the ceremony. Instead, as if it were her house still, she welcomed President Hayes and gave a fine luncheon. The guests were relieved to be back from the Capitol and inside the White House: one of them, Congressman Garfield, spoke of the “indications of relief and joy that no accident had occurred on the route for there were apprehensions of assassination.” Julia’s luncheon was a success, and when it was over, the Grants said good-by to the servants and stepped into their four-in-hand. The Hayeses, and all of the party, came out under the portico to say good-by. As they drove off, Garfield silently made his assessment: “No American has carried greater fame out of the White House than this silent man who leaves it today.” Near him, “Mrs. Secretary Robeson stood crying…saying this is my place to stand on the steps and see my King go.”⁵¹

The Grants and Nellie stayed with Julia and Hamilton Fish until Nellie’s baby was born, on March 17. A week later they set out for Ohio. They were escorted to the train by Zachariah Chandler, who thanked Julia for the “propriety and dignity” with which she had “presided over the Executive Mansion during these eight years past.” She and Ulysses waved to the party on the platform as the train pulled out of the station, and then Julia went to her compartment and wept. The general heard her crying and went in, asking what the trouble was. “Oh, Ulys,” she answered, “I feel like a waif.” “Is that all?” he replied. “I thought something had happened. You must not forget that I too am a waif.”⁵²