PRESIDENT ULYSSES S. GRANT AND THE BATTLE FOR EQUALITY
Sean Wilentz
DURING HIS TRIUMPHANT POSTPRESIDENTIAL WORLD TOUR IN 1877, Ulysses S. Grant visited Chancellor Otto von Bismarck at the Radziwill Palace in Berlin. Bismarck was enthusiastic about meeting the American soldier-statesman, and their conversation lasted several hours, with Bismarck speaking in his slow but fluent English. The two leaders searched each other out on numerous topics, including the Franco-Prussian War and, above all, the American Civil War, which Bismarck described as “so terrible” and “so very hard.”
“But it had to be done,” the former president said, agreeably enough.
“Yes, you had to save the Union just as we had to save Germany.”
This time Grant corrected his host. “Not only to save the Union, but destroy slavery.”
Bismarck replied that he supposed, all the same, that pro-Unionism “was real sentiment, the dominant sentiment.”
Yes, Grant allowed, it was early on. “But as soon as slavery fired upon the flag it was felt, we all felt, even those who did not object to slaves, that slavery must be destroyed. We felt that it was a stain to the Union that men should be bought and sold, like cattle.”
Bismarck abruptly switched the conversation back to the strictly military aspects of the war, but Grant came around again to the imperative of emancipation, especially after 1862: “There had to be an end to slavery. Then we were fighting an enemy with whom we could not make a peace. We had to destroy him. No convention, no treaty, was possible—only destruction.”
In correcting Bismarck, Grant overstated his case, possibly conflating his own opinions and reactions with those of northerners generally. From the attack on Sumter in 1861, when “slavery fired upon the flag,” until at least the fall of 1862, most northerners accepted the aim of preserving the Union without interfering with slavery where it had already existed, in accord with what they believed were the plain limitations imposed by the U.S. Constitution. President Abraham Lincoln did of course begin efforts at compensated emancipation in the border states as early as the end of 1861, and by the early summer of 1862 he had quietly but firmly decided on issuing some sort of emancipation measure. Thereafter the Emancipation Proclamation caused Lincoln enormous political trouble with moderate Republicans, as well as with Democrats, in the North. Yet Grant’s remarks are a needed reminder that antislavery opinion in various forms did run high in the North even before the war. If Lincoln and his victorious Republican Party did not support abolition, they were pledged to undertake the beginnings of slavery’s ultimate extinction by barring the institution’s expansion into the territories, a position that was sufficiently radical to cause southern states to secede as soon as Lincoln won the White House. To a greater extent than recent historians have recognized, this antislavery outlook was based, as Grant put it, on repugnance at men being “bought and sold, like cattle.” Moreover, once the shooting started, it became apparent soon enough that, as Grant recognized at the time, slavery would not survive a Union victory.
In his conversation with Bismarck, Grant also showed that he believed that the war had settled, or at least should have settled, once and for all the issue of slavery and racial subjugation in the South, as well as the Union’s preservation. Through his two terms as president Grant held firmly to that belief even when doing so caused him heavy political losses. Heroically, if not always successfully, he upheld Lincoln’s twin principles of Unionism and emancipation, and above all, he wrote, Lincoln’s “desire to see all the people of the United States enter again upon the full privileges of citizenship with equality among all.” For this steadfastness over Reconstruction and more, Grant, long an object of derision, indeed obloquy, deserves to be honored as a major American leader, one of the best presidents of his day, if not in all American history.
Grant’s reputation as a political leader has had a curious and telling history. That his presidency has ranked so low for so long says practically nothing about his public standing at the time. Grant won election in 1868 with just under 53 percent of the popular vote, a larger margin than expected, even though he narrowly lost New York and New Jersey. Four years later he crushed his opponent, Horace Greeley, in both the popular vote and the electoral college. Grant thereby became only the second president since Andrew Jackson to win reelection (Lincoln was the other), and he was the only president over the decades between Jackson and Woodrow Wilson to serve two full consecutive terms. Although his second administration was marred by allegations of scandal and by Democratic resurgence at the polls, Grant left office enormously popular, hailed as the most admired American on earth. During his world tour of 1877–79, the first time any former president had traveled so widely, crowds enthusiastically greeted him and his party on stops from London to Yokohama; large crowds also gathered to cheer his return to San Francisco and reappeared along his railroad route back east. “In stark contrast to what the literature might suggest,” the historian Joan Waugh observes, “Grant retained much of his iconic status during his presidency and regained what had been lost in his postpresidential years.” There were even serious efforts to nominate him for president on the Republican ticket once again in 1880.
During his presidency, to be sure, Grant could count on the Democratic press to condemn and mock him as at once feeble, corrupt, and imperious, attacks similar to those the Democrats had made on Lincoln. Even nastier were the rebukes of the so-called Liberal Republicans, members of Grant’s own party, including Charles Sumner and Carl Schurz, who for a combination of reasons—displeasure with Grant’s executive appointments, disgust at his friendliness with party organization pols, opposition to his resolute Reconstruction policy, all of it colored by a snobbish hauteur—came to despise the president and oppose his reelection. The most famous slurs emanated from Henry Adams, who thought that Grant was unfit to be president and who, many years later, observed acidly that “the progress of evolution from President Washington to President Grant, was alone enough to upset Darwin.” The bien-pensants of the Nation called Grant “an ignorant soldier, coarse in his taste and blunt in his perceptions, fond of money and material enjoyment and of low company.” When Grant died in 1885, the New York Tribune lauded his military career but charged that “the greatest mistake of his life was the acceptance of the presidency.”
Yet Grant’s admirers greatly outnumbered his detractors, and his death brought a wave of emotional eulogizing for the fallen leader. On the very next day after Grant was laid to rest in New York City, his adopted home, talk began of replacing his temporary vault overlooking the Hudson River with a grand memorial. A dozen years later the gigantic domed edifice that is familiarly known as Grant’s Tomb was dedicated, and for the succeeding two decades, the memorial was New York’s most popular tourist site, attracting more than five hundred thousand people annually, far more than the Statue of Liberty did. Observers as astute as the Scots-born James Bryce, in his formidable and influential The American Commonwealth, published in 1888, asserted that although American presidents had not usually been the greatest men available, four of them did “belong to a front rank”: Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln, and Grant.
Grant’s standing eroded drastically after 1920 because of several currents, cultural and intellectual, that emerged from diverse quarters. First, the rising racist, pro-southern, so-called revisionist, or Lost Cause, school of American historians (pioneered at the turn of the century by William Dunning of Columbia University) portrayed Grant as a butcher during the war and a tyrant during Reconstruction, a symbol of all that was hateful about Yankee domination and the financial corruption of the postwar decades. General Robert E. Lee, the man whom Grant had defeated on the battlefield, now became widely viewed, in and out of the academy, as the great military hero of the war, lionized in the South and respected in the North as the gentleman soldier who supposedly embodied the courage and gallantry of the outnumbered Confederacy. Abraham Lincoln became the true giant of the Union cause, now regarded even by some in the South as the forgiving man who, had he lived, would have spared the country the disgrace of Reconstruction. Grant, by contrast, seemed to have possessed not an ounce of decency or forgiveness. Demonized as an inept, even venal president, Grant emerged from these accounts as the lowlife who presided over the “blackout of honest government” (as Dunning put it, crudely) during the Reconstruction years, and who personally ushered in the excess and dishonesty associated with the Gilded Age of the 1870s and 1880s.
The disillusionment among the American intelligentsia about World War I—and about all professions that waging war advanced democracy—further damaged Grant’s image during the 1920s. The leftist climate of the 1930s led to renewed attacks on his presidency as an emblem of Gilded Age corruption, in books such as Matthew Josephson’s The Robber Barons, published in 1934, and The Politicos, which appeared four years later. In the South, and not just in the South, the success of the Pulitzer Prize–winning novel Gone with the Wind and then of its spectacular film version in 1939 marked the final triumph of the Lost Cause in mass commercial culture and the culmination of a distorted popular history of the Civil War era that had begun with D. W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation a quarter century earlier. The rising historians of the 1940s and 1950s, even as they challenged both the Dunning school and the leftist simplicities of the Depression years, affirmed that Grant’s political career was disastrous. Richard Hofstadter, among the most respected new historians, could write in 1948, without fear of contradiction, that “Grant’s administrations are notorious for their corruption.”
In 1962, in his major study of the literature of the Civil War, Patriotic Gore, the influential critic Edmund Wilson revived Grant’s reputation by praising his performance in battle and (even more) lauding the taut, sinewy prose of Grant’s Personal Memoirs, completed just before his death.* But Wilson had nothing good to say about Grant’s two presidential administrations, under which, he wrote, “there flapped through the national capital a whole phantasmagoria of insolent fraud, while a swarm of predatory adventurers was let loose on the helpless South.” The civil rights and Vietnam War era brought renewed attacks on Grant, most ably in William S. McFeely’s Pulitzer Prize–winning work Grant: A Biography, as a brutal Union commander and a halfhearted defender of the ex-slaves during Reconstruction, whose unenlightened views on race led him to vacillate and finally to retreat from resisting the forces of white supremacy. Curiously, in the 1960s and 1970s, even after a wave of new scholarship had finally overturned the racist, anti-Grant interpretations of the Dunning school, Grant himself remained an object of ridicule and contempt. “Sensitive intellectuals, then and since,” the distinguished Civil War historian Charles Royster observed in 1992, “have looked at Grant’s career and marveled that he could hold his head up without shame or remorse.”
Only recently, amid the long conservative political era of Ronald Reagan, has Grant’s reputation come in for reconsideration and upgrading, by authors including Richard N. Current, Brooks D. Simpson, Jean Edward Smith, and Josiah Bunting III. Yet this Grant revival has only begun to make a dent on historians’ perceptions generally, let alone on popular impressions, and to undo the decades of vilification initiated by the Lost Cause scholars and crusaders. According to the most recent scholarly presidential rankings, Grant no longer languishes in the lowest depths, as he had since such ranking began in 1948, but he has risen no higher than the middle of the pack, on a par with Gerald Ford and Calvin Coolidge. He deserves much better.
HISTORIANS HAVE HAD difficulty pinning down Grant’s politics before his presidency, especially before the Civil War, and how they may have shaped his thoughts and actions in the White House. As a West Point graduate Grant considered himself a military officer, even after he was cashiered out of the army in 1854, and as such he purposefully avoided any fixed party allegiance. Yet on the basis of some scattered facts, chiefly about his wife, Julia, and her father, the vociferously proslavery Missouri planter, Colonel Frederick Dent, some scholars have surmised that Grant’s partisan political leanings were decidedly conservative, especially on issues connected to slavery. In fact, although he never became anything resembling an abolitionist before the war, Grant’s early life was deeply rooted in antislavery politics.
Grant’s father, Jesse, was a tanner who, in the 1820s, moved his business and his family from Kentucky to the river town of Point Pleasant, Ohio, because, he later wrote, he “would not live where there were slaves, and would not own them.” Jesse wrote articles for the local antislavery newspaper, The Castigator, and was a close associate of its editor, David Ammen. (Ammen also published the antislavery letters of the Reverend John Rankin of nearby Ripley, Ohio, an abolitionist hotbed, and, when collected in book form, Rankin’s writings went on to influence deeply William Lloyd Garrison’s decision to become an abolitionist.) Ammen’s son Daniel was Ulysses Grant’s best friend; the two renewed their friendship during the Civil War, and as president Grant promoted Ammen (who attended the U.S. Naval Academy) to the rank of admiral.
Jesse Grant sent Ulysses to West Point in the hope that he would train to be an engineer, but apart from his accomplished performances as an equestrian—he was the best horseman of all the cadets—young Grant excelled in art and literature. (Contrary to the later slanders against him as a coarse brute, he was an excellent amateur painter and became president of the school’s literary society.) Three years after graduation he served as a lieutenant under Generals Winfield Scott and Zachary Taylor in the war with Mexico, saw combat in several battles, and was twice brevetted for bravery. Yet even as he served his country beyond the call of duty, Grant bitterly opposed the war, and he later expressed his opposition in terms that closely resembled the arguments of the abolitionist Liberty Party. “The occupation, separation and annexation [of Mexico],” he wrote in his Memoirs, “were, from the inception of the movement to its final consummation, a conspiracy to acquire territory out of which slave states might be formed for the American Union.” Looking back, he asserted that he believed the southern impulse for secession in 1860–61 originated in this conspiracy to plunder Mexico, another view popular among the abolitionists.
After the war Grant married the socialite Julia Dent and, after unsuccessfully trying to get an assignment to Washington, D.C., was posted to remote California. There, separated from his bride, he turned to hard drinking in what became a pattern of chronic (albeit infrequent) alcohol binges. Early in 1854, under threat of being charged with dereliction of duty because of his drinking, he abruptly resigned his army commission as captain. Over the next six years, reunited with Julia and now the father of a growing family, he sank to the lower social depths, as one business venture after another, fronted by his wealthy father-in-law, failed. At his most desperate point, running a down-and-out farm in Missouri that he had facetiously called Hardscrabble, Grant had to make ends meet by selling firewood on street corners and to friends in St. Louis. His income rarely exceeded fifty dollars a month. “Great God, Grant, what are you doing?” asked one of his former fellow army officers when they bumped into each other by chance.
“I am solving the problem of poverty,” Grant said.
Although Colonel Dent had refused Grant a loan, he did provide three slaves to help work the farm in 1858. From this, and from Grant’s later ownership of a slave, some historians have concluded that his views on slavery resembled those of his father-in-law. But Grant aroused the ire of his neighbors by working side by side with Dent’s slaves in the field, as well as by paying the black day laborers who cut his firewood higher than the going rate; one of the slaves later recalled Grant as a kindly man who “always said that he wanted to give his wife’s slaves their freedom as soon as he could.”
At some point in 1858, under circumstances that remain murky, Grant came into possession of a thirty-five-year-old slave named William Jones, but in late March 1859, even though he was in penury and even though able-bodied male slaves were worth a thousand dollars and more on the auction block, Grant filed manumission papers to set Jones free. The courthouse where Grant formally freed Jones was the same building where the freedom suit case of the slave Dred Scott had been first argued in 1850; the Taney Court’s notorious final decision in Dred Scott v. Sanford had come two years to the month before Grant acted. In May 1857, Henry Taylor Blow, of the well-known antislavery Blow family, whose parents had actually owned Scott years earlier and who had provided Scott with legal counsel and other support during the years his freedom suit dragged on, had finally arranged for Scott’s formal emancipation, at the very same courthouse. It is hard to imagine that Grant missed the connections, for among his friends and steadiest firewood customers in St. Louis was the very same Henry Taylor Blow, whom Grant, as president, was to appoint ambassador to Brazil.
Five months after Grant freed Jones, John Brown led his fateful raid on Harpers Ferry, and Grant understood the personal connections immediately. Jesse Grant’s family had crumbled when he was a boy in Ohio, and he had found himself apprenticed to a tanner in the town of Hudson named Owen Brown, who took him in as a member of the family. Brown’s son, John, was six years younger than Jesse but made a lasting impression; the two also met up after Jesse had struck out on his own. “I have often heard my father speak of John Brown, particularly since the events at Harpers Ferry,” Ulysses Grant wrote in his Memoirs; the elder Grant recalled Brown “as a man of great purity of character, of high moral and physical courage, but a fanatic in whatever he advocated,” and it made sense to his son, who wrote that “[i]t was certainly the act of an insane man to attempt the invasion of the South, and the overthrow of slavery, with less than twenty men.” Both Jesse and Ulysses Grant regarded Brown as a lunatic, yet neither man expressed disapproval of Brown’s abolitionist ideals.
Grant, to be sure, was hardly a committed Republican in the late 1850s, let alone an abolitionist. Whatever he may have thought about the future of slavery, he was a staunch unionist who regarded the mounting sectional crisis with dismay, and in 1856 he voted for the Democrat James Buchanan because he believed that a victory for John C. Frémont and the Republicans would incite the disunionist southern fire-eaters and tear the country to pieces. (There are also hints in the record that Grant had encountered Frémont, already a celebrity as “the Pathfinder,” in the army and distrusted him.) But when Buchanan dithered during the secession crisis, Grant turned bitterly against him and his cabinet and condemned the president as actively disloyal. Although torn, in the election of 1860, between Stephen A. Douglas and Abraham Lincoln—he remarked that he didn’t quite like the position of either party—he was not eligible to vote, having recently relocated from Missouri to his family’s town of Galena, Illinois. He later wrote, though, that finally he wanted “to see Mr. Lincoln elected.”
Days after the bombardment of Fort Sumter, Grant announced that he would rejoin the military, and thence began his legendary rise through the ranks, from a recruiter and instructor in the Illinois militia in mid-1861 to lieutenant general and general in chief of all the Union armies in March 1864. From the very start of the war he understood the conflict in terms of slavery’s future: If the southerners did not swiftly renounce secession but instead, as he expected, fought hard, Grant told associates, the existing protections granted to slavery by the North would evaporate. “In all this I can but see the doom of slavery,” he wrote to his pro-Confederate, slaveholding father-in-law.
Throughout the war Grant presented himself simply as a military commander and not as one of the Union command’s numerous political generals. “I have nothing to do with opinions,” he told the citizens of Paducah, Kentucky, in early September 1861, when his soldiers pushed out Confederate forces and captured the town. “I shall deal only with armed rebellion and its aiders and abettors.” Yet Grant could not evade politics or the larger goals and meaning of the war, quite apart from the military-political maneuvering required of any successful general. His record was not impeccable. At the end of 1862, Grant issued an order aimed at halting black-market activities in southern cotton that expelled all Jews from the military district composed of portions of Kentucky, Mississippi, and Tennessee. After a wave of protests from Jewish groups around the country hit the White House, Lincoln rescinded the order, Grant, who had Jewish friends and no history of anti-Semitism before or after the war, renounced the document and blamed its composition on a subordinate, yet the incident dogged him when he entered politics after 1865.
On the more important, overriding issues of slavery and race, Grant cooperated fully with Lincoln and the Congress over such matters as the implementation of emancipation and the recruitment of black troops for the Union army. Yet Grant’s cooperation marked far more than his political intuition or a professional obeisance to his civilian commander in chief. Of particular significance was Grant’s policy toward slaves who had escaped to his lines, the so-called contrabands. Well before Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, as Union armies began marching south, slaves ran to Union encampments by the thousands, leaving each commanding officer to invent his own policy on how to treat the fugitives. Grant, who had already been putting the contrabands to work for his army as paid teamsters, cooks, and hospital attendants, appointed a chaplain, John Eaton, to take charge of the matter in his district in November 1862. Eaton was reluctant to accept the job, but Grant, he recalled, was thoughtful as well as persuasive in his counterarguments. “Never before in those early and bewildering days,” he wrote, “had I heard the problem of the future of the Negro attacked so vigorously and with such humanity combined with practical good sense.”
Although open to abuse and not lacking in racial paternalism, Grant’s policy, worked out by Eaton—for contraband camps to supply the fugitives with food, clothing, and other basic necessities, as well as wage-work and schooling—solved the immediate humanitarian problem while extending to the ex-slaves an important measure of respect and dignity. It was the sort of policy one could have expected from the man who, before the war, worked alongside black slaves and paid his free black workers well, and although thrown together out of necessity, it became one foundation for federal policy on behalf of the freedmen after emancipation and after the war. “It was at this point, probably,” Grant later wrote about appointing Eaton, “where the first idea of a ‘Freedmen’s Bureau’ took its origin.” As president Grant tried to hasten sectional reconciliation while also defending the social and political rights of the former slaves, the chief purpose of the controversial Freedmen’s Bureau, established during the war’s final months. But to do so required cleaning up the mess left behind by the pro-southern obstructionist president Andrew Johnson.
HAVING NARROWLY ELUDED the conspiracy that murdered Abraham Lincoln, Grant, still commander of the U.S. Army, emerged as the greatest living Union hero of the Civil War, far greater than the relative unknown who succeeded Lincoln as president. Andrew Johnson understood the importance of Grant’s popularity and did his best to secure his allegiance, to the point of naming him in 1866 to the supreme position, newly created by Congress, of general of the army of the United States, the equivalent of a four-star general, the first such in American history. But after an initial period of public friendliness Grant’s and Johnson’s relations soured. Their first important disagreement came early when ironically, Johnson sought to initiate proceedings against Robert E. Lee and other generals of the defeated Confederacy for treason, contradicting the terms of the unconditional surrender that Grant had dictated at Appomattox. Grant prevailed, and thereafter, when Johnson shifted his stance, hardened his defense of white supremacy, and obstructed congressional efforts to guarantee the civil and political rights of the ex-slaves, Grant became disgusted. Johnson, he later wrote, “seemed to regard the South not only as an oppressed people, but as the people best entitled to consideration of any of our citizens…The Southerners had the most power in the executive branch, Mr. Johnson having gone to their side; and with a compact South, and such sympathy and support as they could get from the North, they felt that they would be able to control the nation at once, and already many of them acted as if they thought they were entitled to do so.”
The last straw was Johnson’s accusation, in a cabinet meeting, that Grant had betrayed him by refusing to go along with Johnson’s violation of the Radicals’ Tenure of Office Act and take over as Edwin Stanton’s permanent replacement as secretary of war, a fracas that helped soon bring about Johnson’s impeachment in late February 1868 by the House of Representatives. On May 21, 1868, five days after Johnson had escaped removal from office by a single vote in the Senate, the Republican National Convention thunderously nominated Grant as its presidential candidate. Winning the election under the slogan “Let Us Have Peace,” Grant entered the White House determined to change the nation’s course by securing national reconciliation, but on the terms of the victorious Union instead of those favored by the “compact South.” He would devote his best efforts, he said, to ensure “security of person, property, and free religious and political opinion in every part of our common country.”
The first momentous reform would be the ratification of the Fifteenth Amendment, banning disenfranchisement on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude, a measure that Grant specifically promoted in his inaugural address and thereafter supported vigorously. Congress had finished approving the amendment less than a week before Grant was sworn in, although some Radicals, including Charles Sumner, withheld their support because the amendment did not explicitly ban poll taxes and other subterfuges that might disqualify black voters. The more expansive version might have had trouble getting affirmed, but the amendment, as worded, was enough to enrage recalcitrant white southerners and turn sporadic brutal violence in the South into an eruption of terrorism that at times resembled a guerrilla insurgency. Even before the amendment was finally ratified by the states at the beginning of February 1870, masked raiders led by the Ku Klux Klan began a campaign of arson, murder, kidnapping, and intimidation, with the express purposes of scaring black voters from the polls, obliterating the Republican Party in the South, and, in time, reestablishing white supremacy as the cornerstone of southern life.
Southern Republicans, unable, except in a few isolated places, to compel local law enforcement officials to curb the Klan violence, turned to Congress and the White House for help. The degenerating situation forced a difficult choice upon national officials. On the one hand, most Americans assumed that reconciliation between North and South would mean not just a speedy return of the former Confederate states to their former status in the Union but a restoration of the constitutional order that sharply limited federal power to interfere with the police powers of the several states. President Grant, as a career military officer, was particularly sensitive about any display of executive power that might be interpreted as the actions of a would-be Caesar. To heed the pleas of the southern Republicans and use federal force against the Klan would mark a clear expansion of federal jurisdiction and inevitably raise charges from northerners as well as southerners that the government had turned its back on national accord. Yet if Washington did nothing, the Klansmen’s atrocities would go unpunished, and the freedmen and their southern white Republican allies would be abandoned to their fate. For Grant, who hailed the ratification of the Fifteenth Amendment as the completion of “the greatest civil change…since the nation came into life,” nothing less than the war’s outcome hung in the balance, as the terrorists and their wellborn political leaders attempted to reverse the outcome at Appomattox.
Congress, seizing upon the enabling clauses of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, passed the first two of three enforcement acts in mid-1870 and early 1871, making the denial of any citizen’s civil or political rights a federal offense and providing federal oversight of voter registration and elections. Grant meanwhile appointed the committed egalitarian Amos T. Akerman, a citizen of Georgia who was born and raised in New England, to replace the ineffectual Ebenezer R. Hoar as attorney general. The Department of Justice, recently created by Congress, began vigorously pursuing and prosecuting the Klan. Yet despite these initial efforts, furious violence accompanied southern elections in the autumn of 1870, indicating the need for additional federal muscle, to smash what Governor William W. Holden of North Carolina called “[a]n organized conspiracy…in existence in every County in the State,” whose “aim is to control the government.”
Five days after Congress convened on March 4, 1871, Grant requested special new legislation, a third enforcement act, aimed directly at the Klan, calling it the premier issue of the day. With Grant then repeatedly prodding, congressional leaders devised a bill that would make it a federal crime to conspire to overthrow the U.S. government or to conspire to prevent citizens from holding office, voting, or otherwise enjoying equal protection under the law. The measure, known as the Ku Klux Klan Bill, also authorized the president to use the military to enforce its provisions as well as to suspend the writ of habeas corpus in areas he declared in a state of insurrection. Nothing like it had ever been approved in peacetime, making private acts of violence answerable in federal court and vastly expanding federal power generally and executive power specifically. Democrats, North and South, not surprisingly assailed the bill as the death knell of states’ rights, but so too, in the beginnings of what was becoming the Liberal Republican schism, did many Republicans, who objected to the bill as injurious to individual liberty in the pursuit of a failing, coercive southern policy. By late spring the bill seemed doomed, as an unanticipated weakness in northern support emboldened a piebald coalition of white supremacists, strict constructionists, civil liberties advocates, disillusioned reformers, and an assortment of Grant’s disgruntled Republican political rivals.
In mid-April the House pressed for an adjournment of Congress without taking action on the bill, but the Senate insisted on a showdown vote. Grant took the unusual step of personally appearing on Capitol Hill, accompanied by his cabinet, to meet with the bill’s chief supporters from both houses, where, he had earlier intimated, he would issue a direct appeal for the bill’s passage. On the way up Pennsylvania Avenue, the president informed Treasury Secretary George Boutwell (whom he had asked to accompany him to the Capitol) that he now doubted the wisdom of delivering a message, lest it appear that he was an ex-general directly requesting military power over the government. It was a subtle and shrewd assessment of the delicate political circumstances: Grant could ill afford to make a difficult situation worse by appearing heavy-handed, and his own fortunes would crumble if the bill failed after he had done his utmost until the bitter end. But at the Capitol the Senate Republican George F. Hoar of Massachusetts reminded Grant of the scope of the Klan’s atrocities and argued that without strong executive action, the outrages would worsen. The president, Hoar suggested, faced a choice. If Grant asked Congress to grant him special powers instead of seizing them himself, it would be (as Hoar later recounted his remarks) “much less likely to be imputed to him that he was acting in the manner of a soldier and not of a statesman.” Grant immediately dropped his misgivings and wrote a strong statement on the spot, calling for legislation powerful enough to meet the emergency conditions in the South and to ensure “life, liberty, and property, and the enforcement of law, in all parts of the United States.” The bill passed the House, 93–74, and the Senate, 36–13, with the votes divided along party lines.
Less than two weeks later, after southern terrorists responded to the new law with a fresh wave of violence, Grant ordered troops stationed in the South to aid federal officials in breaking up “bands of disguised night marauders.” In October the president suspended habeas corpus in nine backcountry South Carolina counties, and with Attorney General Akerman taking personal charge of field operations, federal marshals, aided by U.S. troops, arrested hundreds and restored a testy order to the afflicted areas. Throughout the South federal grand juries returned more than three thousand indictments in 1871, and after many escaped punishment by turning informers, about six hundred of those charged were convicted. By 1872 Grant’s policies had effectively destroyed the Klan, and that year’s presidential election proceeded smoothly in the South. The national campaign’s chief issue became Grant’s Reconstruction policies, as the Liberal Republican favorite Greeley, also nominated by the Democrats, ripped into what he called the president’s imposition of “bayonet rule” and obliteration of states’ rights and self-government. Grant won in a landslide, carrying, on the strength of black votes, all but three of the eleven former Confederate states, including victories by lopsided margins in South Carolina and Mississippi. With Grant at the head of their ticket, the Republicans also picked up sixty-three seats in the House, giving them a majority of over two-thirds to go along with their majority of nearly two-thirds in the Senate.
Grant understandably regarded the results as a personal as well as political triumph and, above all, as a vindication of his southern policies. Moreover, those policies secured what, by 1872, was beginning to look like a thoroughgoing social and political revolution, one that would have been inconceivable before the Civil War and only slightly less so before 1868. Throughout the South freedmen were joining political organizations and winning election to all levels of government, including a majority of seats in the legislatures of South Carolina and Louisiana. By the time Grant won reelection, biracial Republican state governments were introducing numerous improvements and fundamental reforms, including the building of new hospitals, asylums, and penitentiaries and the introduction of public school education (albeit segregated) for black and white children. Recent historians of Reconstruction have emphasized, correctly, that much of the credit for these innovations belongs to ordinary freedmen and women and their courageous white allies, long vilified as ignorant, vengeful blacks, treacherous scalawags, and greedy carpetbaggers. But without Grant’s determination to reverse the policies of the Johnson administration, pair national reconciliation with equal civil and political rights regardless of race, push for ratification of the Fifteenth Amendment, and then intervene to halt southern white resistance, none of the advances of the late 1860s and early 1870s would have been possible.
GRANT DID NOT CONFINE his reformism to the issues stemming from Reconstruction. Appalled at the corruption and inhumane abuses that plagued the federal Indian Bureau, he called in his first inaugural address for “the proper treatment of the original occupants of this land.” He proceeded to shake up the bureau and pursue a new policy designed to gather the Indians on large reservations, where they would receive, with federal aid, food, clothing, and schooling as well as protection from violence. Although the reforms produced meager improvements and led to renewed military conflict with those tribes that refused to comply, Grant at least attempted to ensure that the Indians would be treated with respect. On another front, he responded to continuing conflicts between Protestants and Catholics over religious training in public schools with appeals to the strict separation of church and state and, in time, with a proposal for a constitutional amendment that would require every state to establish and maintain a public school system open to all children, without regard to sex, color, or religion and that would be strictly secular. Grant’s larger goals, once again, proved elusive, but his efforts helped temper the sectarian debate while encouraging fresh departures in reforming public education.
Still, Reconstruction remained of paramount importance. Yet despite the administration’s effective enforcement of the Ku Klux Klan Act and despite the mandate he received in 1872, Grant faced renewed troubles in the South that dominated, and made a misery of, his second term. Encouraged by the Liberal Republicans’ call for a “New Departure” in policy that would end the federal military presence in the South, southern Democrats moderated their rhetoric and agreed to guarantee the ex-slaves’ rights in exchange for home rule, while all along, they quietly conspired with new paramilitary organizations to intimidate and attack black voters and Republican politicians. In the North the financial Panic of 1873 and ensuing severe depression badly sapped what was left of voters’ commitment to racial justice in the South. So did the exposure, on the eve of the 1872 election, of the Crédit Mobilier scandal involving bribes to Republican officeholders in the building of the Union Pacific Railroad, events that, even though they occurred before Grant even took office, began creating in the public mind the image, eagerly promoted by a hostile, scandalmongering press, of a White House engorged by spectacularly sordid corruption. In 1874 the Democrats enjoyed an enormous political comeback and, in the midterm elections, picked up an astonishing ninety-three seats in the House of Representatives, enough to plunge the Republicans into the minority and all but doom any future efforts at crushing southern white resistance.
Grant, beleaguered, was not always his own best champion. By nature taciturn and measured, he reacted angrily in private to personal attacks but refused even to acknowledge publicly the calumnies about him spread in the press, only deepening the newspapers’ hostility. When the White House finally did become directly implicated in scandal, most grievously in the so-called Whiskey Ring corruption, in which his personal secretary, Orville Babcock, was allegedly involved, the president could do no more than unstintingly defend Babcock, thereby giving the appearance of either complicity or astonishing credulity. Even though Grant’s own treasury secretary, the former solicitor general Benjamin Bristow (appointed to the Treasury Department in 1874) was responsible for cracking open the ring and prosecuting its participants, with Grant’s support, and even though Babcock was eventually tried on flimsy evidence and acquitted on all charges, and even though unfriendly newspapers such as the New York Tribune conceded that the scandal “had been met at the entrance of the White House and turned back,” the administration’s most acidulous critics refused to be placated. To this day Grant is widely believed to have connived in, at the very least, getting a guilty Babcock off the hook.*
Beneath the sensationalism and corruption charges, Grant’s determination to do what he could to stem the white southern reaction caused him the greatest political grief. Here as well, he incurred some deep self-inflicted wounds. The Supreme Court proved especially disastrous. Grant ended up filling four vacancies on the Court, an exceptional opportunity for any president to buttress his policies and ensure his legacy. But because of a combination of bad luck and fierce opposition in the Senate, he failed to get his first choices and wound up appointing three justices who turned against his Reconstruction policies and, in the end, helped eviscerate both the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments. Particularly unfortunate was his nomination, on the advice of his cabinet, of an obscure, mediocre Ohio lawyer, Morrison R. Waite, as chief justice in 1874, for two years later Waite wrote the majority opinion in the momentous case of United States v. Cruikshank, which killed enforcement of the Ku Klux Klan Act by declaring that the protections of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments applied to actions only by individuals and not by the states.
It was all the more galling for Grant that the Cruikshank case arose from the administration’s efforts to punish perpetrators of the bloodiest racial outrage of the entire Reconstruction era, the notorious massacre in Colfax, Louisiana, in 1873, part of a chain of events that led to Grant’s last effort to quell the white southern uprising. The affair began when Louisiana’s fractious statewide elections in 1872 brought uncertain results, with both Republicans and Democrats claiming they had won the governor’s race. A federal judge ruled in the Republicans’ favor, and Grant dispatched federal troops to enforce the decision. The state’s unyielding white population responded by forming new paramilitary groups.
Very quickly white supremacists gained control of several rural parishes, and elsewhere they mounted ferocious, coordinated attacks on blacks and Republicans. In the county seat town of Colfax, at the center of the state near the Red River, friends of the black-controlled government of surrounding Grant Parish, backed by state militiamen, dug trenches and took up arms to protect the county courthouse.* On Easter Sunday 1873 a force of some three hundred whites, led by a local white supremacist named Christopher Columbus Nash, attacked with rifles and a small cannon, and by day’s end more than one hundred blacks had been killed and the courthouse, set afire, had been destroyed. The Republican governor immediately sent in fresh forces, and several days later two companies of federal troops arrived to restore order. A total of ninety-seven men were indicted in connection with the massacre; six were tried; and three convicted. But the court appeals of those convictions led to the disabling Cruikshank ruling in 1875. The Colfax events emboldened white supremacists, including Nash, who in May 1874 formed the first chapter of a new paramilitary organization, the White League. There was much more violence to come.
The election campaign of 1874 brought renewed unrest, and in mid-September some thirty-five hundred White Leaguers in New Orleans overpowered state militiamen commanded by the former Confederate general James Longstreet, took over state offices, and installed a new Democratic government. Grant responded swiftly by issuing a proclamation demanding that the rebels disperse within five days or face federal military intervention and by ordering five thousand troops and three gunboats to New Orleans. The insurgents immediately backed down, and within three days the uprising—what the historian Jean Edward Smith calls a coup d’état—was over. But the struggle for power in Louisiana did not end there. Even after the Democrats enjoyed their national resurgence in the 1874 elections, Grant sent General Philip Sheridan to the Deep South; Sheridan, after submitting a hair-raising report to the president on conditions in Louisiana and Mississippi, obtained authority to take command of the situation and helped set in motion the forced ejection of five Louisiana Democratic legislators installed under threat of violence to occupy seats that were still contested. A congressional committee vindicated Sheridan’s actions, and at least for the moment Louisiana was quiet. Moreover, in the waning days of the Forty-third Congress the lame-duck Republican House and the Senate passed, and President Grant signed, the Civil Rights Bill of 1875, banning discrimination according to race in all public accommodations. (The last gasp of Grant’s Reconstruction policies, the act was to be declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court’s rulings in the so-called Civil Rights Cases in 1883.)
By the time he signed the civil rights legislation, Grant had sustained heavy political losses as a direct result of his determination in Louisiana. Democratic cartoonists and editorialists berated his willingness to sacrifice the prostrate state of Louisiana on the altar of radical nostrums about equality. Apart from some stalwart Radical Republicans, much of the North as well as the South had grown thoroughly tired of any commitment to civil rights for blacks. And Liberal Republicans—as ever, the president’s most spiteful, high-toned critics—especially abhorred Grant’s actions in Louisiana. Grant’s receptiveness, for example, regarding his emissary Philip Sheridan’s attempt to crack down on the White League’s leaders by having them tried by courts-martial struck Carl Schurz as “so appalling that every American citizens who loves liberty ought to stand aghast.”
For the last two years of his presidency, surrounded by an indifferent cabinet, a hostile Congress, and an avenging Supreme Court, Grant was virtually the only leading figure inside the federal government who was still concerned about protecting equal rights in the South. Where Grant could work out a modus vivendi with politically astute southern Republicans, as with South Carolina’s governor Daniel Chamberlain, he was able to stave off for a time the violent white supremacist insurgency. But in states where idealism outstripped realism and where compromising internecine politics came into play, as in Mississippi, with its ineffectual governor, Adelbert Ames, the son-in-law of Grant’s nemesis Benjamin Butler of Massachusetts, local equivalents of the White Leaguers, working hand in glove with Democratic politicians, gave no quarter. By the end of Grant’s second term all but three southern states had been (in the term favored by the white supremacists) “redeemed” from so-called Black Republican rule. Grant’s successor, Rutherford B. Hayes, in accord with the deals that settled the disputed presidential election of 1876, turned the South over to the Democrats and white insurgents, ending Reconstruction and commencing the long regression of race relations that was to culminate in black disenfranchisement at century’s end.
Grant, embittered by his failures in the South, remarked upon them during his postpresidential world tour and said that only an extension of military rule could have “enabled the Southern people to pull themselves together and repair material losses.” It would have been better, he explained, to have postponed black suffrage, readmission of the Confederate states, and the rest of Reconstruction for ten years and held the South in a territorial condition, in order to prepare the way for momentous reforms and thereby to permit the citizens of the South to put aside what Grant called “the madness of their leaders” who had come to power in the 1870s. Still, Grant recognized that suffrage, once given, could not be revoked, “and all that remains now is to make good that gift by protecting those that received it.” About the only merciful thing about Grant’s excruciating death from throat cancer in 1885 was that it spared him from having to witness how badly the federal government failed the freedmen and their children in the 1880s and after and allowed the cornerstone of Grant’s southern program, black suffrage, to be revoked for generations to come.
RECONSTRUCTION WAS NOT, to be sure, the only controversial aspect of Grant’s presidency, yet his record in other areas, although mixed, is better than the generally bleak appraisals of his political leadership suggest. In foreign policy, Grant’s stubborn efforts to annex Santo Domingo, an action in which that country’s government had expressed interest, must count as a failure, but so, too, the settlement, by international arbitration of the so-called Alabama claims cases, arising from attacks by British-built warships on northern vessels during the Civil War, must be counted as a great success, for Grant as well as for his secretary of state, Hamilton Fish. Although the Panic of 1873 and the severe economic depression that followed were not caused by Grant’s actions, they inevitably tarnish his presidency’s reputation, yet sufficient credit is rarely given to Grant for his swift actions, three years earlier, to upset the efforts by his sometime associates Jim Fisk and Jay Gould to corner the gold market.
Still, if Reconstruction was not the only issue facing the country during Grant’s presidency, it was certainly the gravest, and his standing as a president depends chiefly on evaluations of how he handled it. In a perverse way, it is possible to judge Grant’s Reconstruction as both a dismal defeat and a stunning victory, for even though while in office, Grant polarized Republicans against Democrats, northerners against southerners, and whites against blacks, he left the presidency with political, social, and economic relations between North and South restored as at no time since 1861. The price for that success, however, was the subjugation of the freedman and the reversal of Grant’s egalitarian hopes.
There is an argument to be made in Grant’s defense that between 1868 and 1876 blacks and their political allies laid some of the foundations for later advances, not least with the signing of the Civil Rights Act of 1875. Yet once the reaction against Reconstruction took hold, everywhere from the violently “redeemed” towns and countries of Dixie to the genteel chambers of the U.S. Supreme Court, a full century was to pass before the nation returned to where Grant had helped lead it. For the entire history of American democracy, but especially for the intervening generations of black Americans, it was a cruel sort of success.
How much blame must Grant bear? Certainly, he could not prevent the resurgence of white supremacy in the South and the obliteration of the postwar experiment in biracial southern democracy, any more than he could keep public opinion in the North (never solid on the matter of freedmen’s rights) dedicated to the cause. But given all that he was up against, not simply from southern white terrorists but from high-minded factional opponents and schismatics from his own political party, it is all the more remarkable that Grant sustained his commitment to the freedmen for as long and as hard as he did. Given the limitations imposed on executive power by the U.S. Constitution, it is more remarkable still that he acted as boldly as he did.
In retrospect, it may appear as if any attempt, only a few years after Appomattox, to foster amity between North and South while at the same time upholding the civil and political rights of the ex-slaves was doomed from the start. But this was not Grant’s failure; it was the failure of most of the citizenry of an entire nation, a failure that he did his utmost to avert. Finally, Grant left behind the most admirable and politically courageous record on race relations of any president from Abraham Lincoln to Lyndon B. Johnson. For that leadership, he sustained broad approval among the American people—but he earned the enmity of southern racists and northern “liberal” reformers of his own time and then earned, from generations of later historians, a lasting reputation for incompetence and worse. It is long past time that the reconstruction of our understanding of Reconstruction came to include President Ulysses S. Grant.
