by Ron Chernow
On September 22, Grant performed an act that spoke volumes about his secret sympathies: he quietly ordered the chief of ordnance, General Alexander Dyer, to empty surplus weapons from five southern arsenals and send most of their small arms to New York Harbor. He also spurned a request from Virginia to furnish ten thousand weapons for white militias to confront a supposedly better armed black population. In addition, he opposed rearming former Confederate states.78 Writing confidentially to Sheridan, Grant warned that few people who fought for the North exerted any influence over the pro-southern president. Johnson, he feared, would declare Congress as a body “illegal, unconstitutional and revolutionary. Commanders in Southern states will have to take great care to see, if a crisis does come, that no armed headway can be made against the Union.”79 The outside world may have wondered about Grant’s sympathies, but his private statements leave no room for conjecture about his inexorable drift toward Radical Republicanism. Welles later speculated that by fall 1866, Grant “was secretly acting in concert with the Radicals to deceive and beguile the President.”80 Grant didn’t regard it as deception so much as adhering to bedrock principles, telling Badeau he had “never felt so anxious about the country.”81
As it happened, Grant swam in a strong political tide. Johnson’s “swing around the circle” was such an indescribable fiasco that Republicans registered stunning gains in the fall elections, winning substantial majorities in both houses of Congress. The election also resoundingly endorsed the Fourteenth Amendment. These electoral gains prompted speculation about whether Johnson would seek by force to block the new Congress from meeting. Taking advantage of their election mandate, Radical Republicans planned to initiate a period of Congressional Reconstruction, helping blacks and white Republicans in the South and supplanting Presidential Reconstruction, with its heavy bias toward southern white Democrats.
Rawlins was upset by talk that Grant might be seduced by Radical Republicans and not only because he was more conservative than his boss. Like Sherman, he believed Grant was “not a politician or statesman,” but only a man who knew how to fight well. For Rawlins, Grant “was not a man of ability outside of the profession of arms, and was a man of strong passions and intense prejudices . . . [Rawlins] thought Sherman a great man—a statesman as well as a soldier—Grant was the soldier only.”82 The fraternal protectiveness Rawlins had shown toward Grant’s drinking now extended to what he deemed the equally corrupting influence of politics.
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BY FEBRUARY 1866, Napoleon III announced plans to withdraw troops from Mexico—an apparent victory for the diplomatic approach advocated by Seward versus Grant’s more robust desire to go to war. On the other hand, Grant’s decision to send a military force to the Rio Grande had helped the liberal opposition there to survive. Grant’s worries about Mexico as a haven for renegade rebels hadn’t abated, especially after Sheridan warned in February that “if the scheme is not broken up, every act of our Government which is distasteful to these people, will cause a fresh exodus to Mexico.”83 For Grant, Mexico was a hotly emotional topic. Unpersuaded that Napoleon III would budge, Grant badgered President Johnson to supply arms to liberal forces in Mexico to rid the country of the French-imposed emperor, assuring a reporter that Sheridan, with two thousand American troops, would “clean Maximilian out of Mexico in six months.”84
On October 18, at the president’s behest, Grant sent a cryptic letter to Sherman in St. Louis, asking him to come to Washington and intimating he might be named acting secretary of war. Like Rawlins, Sherman saw Washington as a cockpit of intrigue and preferred to steer clear of it. Grant couldn’t say so in a letter, but he had experienced growing friction with Johnson, who feared that in a constitutional confrontation with Congress, Grant would lean toward the legislature. Hence, Johnson wanted to ease Grant out of town, sending him on a diplomatic mission to Mexico. Grant was supposed to escort the new American minister to Mexico, Lewis D. Campbell of Ohio, and meet with Benito Juárez. Campbell had a well-known fondness for drink and some thought Johnson wished to expose Grant to temptation and tarnish his reputation. Of this unwanted assignment, Grant told the president flatly, “It is a diplomatic service for which I am not fitted either by education or taste.”85 Grant believed he would be damaged by a failed Mexican mission, while Seward would take credit for a successful one. He also believed Johnson had no right to send a military man on a patently political trip. When Sherman reached Washington, Grant told him that “he had thought the matter over, would disobey the order, and stand the consequences.” In emotional tones, he characterized the order as “a plot to get rid of him.”86
Backing Grant fully, Sherman marched off to see the president, who received him cordially and said he wished him to command the army in Grant’s absence in Mexico. “I then informed him that General Grant would not go,” Sherman recalled, “and he seemed amazed.”87 Sherman pointed out that Hancock in New Mexico or Sheridan in Texas could easily handle the job and, if neither was satisfactory, he would gladly go himself. “Certainly,” said the president, “if you will go, that will answer perfectly.”88 Sherman saw Johnson manipulating Grant as a mere pawn in a power play. “I have no doubt there is some plan to get Grant out of the way, & to get me here, but I will be a party to no such move,” Sherman informed his wife.89 He suspected the president harassed Grant “because he was looming up as a candidate for President.”90 Badeau also thought Johnson meditated replacing Grant with the more conservative Sherman, who would be more “supple” in supporting his Reconstruction policies.91
Even though the importunate Johnson hectored Grant to take the job, he remained unyielding. He then invited Grant to a cabinet meeting at which he exploded with rage when Grant declined the Mexican mission. According to Julia, the president raised his voice and struck “the table with his clenched hand with considerable force.”92 Johnson asked the attorney general whether any reason existed “why General Grant should not obey my orders? Is he in any way ineligible to this position?” Grant sprang to his feet in protest. “I am an officer of the army, and bound to obey your military orders. But this is a civil office, a purely diplomatic duty that you offer me, and I cannot be compelled to undertake it.”93 Amid shocked silence, Grant stormed from the room. Realizing that he was unmovable, Johnson reluctantly let Sherman go to Mexico instead. The president could no longer doubt Grant’s opposition. “[Grant] was as anxious to frustrate Johnson’s maneuvers as he had ever been to thwart those of Lee,” wrote Badeau.94 In the end, William Seward was correct that Maximilian’s empire rested on shaky turf and that patient diplomacy in Mexico worked better than force. In June 1867, liberal forces loyal to Benito Juárez executed Maximilian by a firing squad in a move applauded by Grant.
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JOHNSON DID EVERYTHING in his power to dissuade southern states from accepting the Fourteenth Amendment. Unlike the president, Grant believed they should adopt it before readmission to the Union and grew progressively more alarmed that black and white Republicans were being murdered with abandon in southern states. On January 18, 1867, he wrote a confidential letter to Oliver O. Howard that showed what a flaming militant he had become in protecting freedmen and how closely he now identified with Radical Republicans. Grant asked Howard to compile a list of “authenticated cases of Murder” committed against freed people and white Republicans in the South during the previous six months. “My object in this is to make a report showing that the Courts in the states excluded from Congress afford no security to life or property . . . and to recommend that Martial Law be declared over such districts as do not afford the proper protection.”95 On February 8, Grant handed Howard’s findings to Stanton. In a cabinet discussion a week later, Howard’s evidence was gruffly dismissed by Welles as mere “rumors of negro murders,” unworthy of serious consideration.96 This would become a standard Democratic defense in future years. Johnson and Welles worked to bury the explosive document. If it went to Congress, Welles feared, certain �
��mischievous persons” would say that “here was information of which Grant complained, but of which the President took no notice.”97
All the while a movement to impeach the president gathered strength in Republican circles. Since people imagined Johnson might be suspended from his official duties before being convicted, the conflict portended a crisis of the first magnitude. By now Johnson had surrendered any lingering solicitude for poor southern whites in favor of the old slaveholding elite, making the former slaves the villains of his administration. When the journalist Charles Nordhoff met him at the White House, he described the president as sure that “the people of the South . . . were to be trodden under foot to ‘protect niggers.’”98 Grant believed that Johnson strove to form a coalition of northern Peace Democrats and former Confederates to nullify the war’s outcome. So plausible did it seem that the conflict between Johnson and Congress would end in violence that Congressman John Logan of Illinois wrote discreetly to Colonel N. P. Chipman in the War Department, warning him to “quietly and secretly organize all our boys that can assemble at a given signal . . . ready to protect the Congress of the U.S.”99 For many in Washington, the great mystery was how Grant would act in such a crisis. President Johnson didn’t know the answer, wrote Gideon Welles, and “I doubt if Grant himself knows. The Radicals, who distrust him, are nevertheless courting him assiduously.”100
The Radicals succeeded in attracting him to their camp, for only they could offer continuity with the deeply held values that had informed his wartime service. Alarmed by the punishment being inflicted on former slaves and Union men in the South, Grant recommended to Stanton on January 29, 1867, that Texas be placed under martial law. Such a measure, he thought, would be a warning to other southern states “and if necessary could be extended to others.”101 A few weeks later, The New York Times printed a candid interview in which Grant chided southern states for their recalcitrance. If they “had accepted the [Fourteenth] Amendment instead of rejecting it so hastily, they would have been admitted by Congress in December, but now I think they will have to take the Amendment, and manhood suffrage besides.”102 In many parts of Texas, Grant asserted, a Union man wasn’t safe outside the umbrella of federal military protection. When asked whether a Union man could travel safely in the South, he replied frankly that if he got into “angry political discussions, there would be danger in some places no doubt. In that case shooting would probably be passed off as justifiable homicide, if the murderer was arrested at all.”103
On March 2, 1867, the Radical Republicans, having scored stunning gains in the fall elections, engineered a backlash against Andrew Johnson that crystallized with passage of what became known as the First Reconstruction Act. In shaping the bill, Congress consulted closely with Grant. The legislation carved up ten Confederate states (Tennessee, having ratified the Fourteenth Amendment, was exempt) into five military districts. Appointed by the president, the general commanding each district would exercise enormous power, overseeing conventions to draft new constitutions before their states were readmitted to the Union. States were required to ratify the Fourteenth Amendment and grant voting rights to black men. Betraying his ingrained racial prejudice, Johnson vetoed the act. “The negroes have not asked for the privilege of voting,” he stated, and “the vast majority of them have no idea what it means.”104 Grant scorned this message as “ridiculous” and large House and Senate majorities quickly overrode the veto.105 Johnson deferred to Grant’s wishes in picking the first five military district commanders—John Schofield, Dan Sickles, George Thomas, Edward Ord, and Phil Sheridan—although Gideon Welles griped that in choosing these men Grant had been “swayed by Radical influence.”106
The First Reconstruction Act represented an extraordinary effort to invest former slaves with full citizenship rights, delivering a stark rebuke to southern whites who wanted to hurl them back into a new form of bondage. “What a bitter dose for their arrogant aristocracy of only seven years ago!” George Templeton Strong gloated. “Was there ever a more tremendous and searching social revolution?”107 For many southern whites it seemed that, having endured wartime defeat, they now had to submit to a second military humiliation. Summarizing this view decades later, H. L. Mencken claimed the South was subjected “to the supervision and veto of the rest of the country—and . . . enjoyed scarcely more liberty, in the political sense, than so many convicts in the penitentiary.”108 Yet for southern blacks and white Republicans the First Reconstruction Act promised sorely needed protection against the indiscriminate white terror directed at them with alarming frequency.
Privately Grant endorsed the legislation as “a fitting end to all our controversy.”109 Southern intolerance, as revealed by the Memphis and New Orleans race riots, had led him to revise his lenient attitude at Appomattox in favor of more drastic measures to protect freed people. “General [Grant] getting more & more radical,” Comstock noted in his diary.110 With military oversight of the South and district commanders reporting directly to him, Grant now wielded unprecedented power over the region—probably more domestic power than any other general in chief in American history. In enforcing the new legislation, he increasingly took his cues from Congress and bypassed an intransigent president. Still a relative novice in Washington politics, Grant managed at first to maintain decent relations with both Johnson and Congress, Welles speculating that he would “not be surprised if Grant, in whom [Johnson] still has [great] confidence, and possibly Stanton, are the only persons whom he consults.”111 Grant performed a nimble balancing act that would be tested as strains between the president and Congress grew unmanageable.
On the day the Reconstruction bill passed, Congress also enacted the Tenure of Office Act, a future flashpoint in its relations with the president. From the earliest days of the Republic, presidents had been obligated to seek the advice and consent of the Senate in appointing cabinet members, while retaining full power to remove them. Radical Republicans feared Johnson would seek to eviscerate Reconstruction by ousting Stanton, and the new bill, specifically designed to protect him, required Senate approval before firing cabinet members. With some justice, Johnson saw the law as impinging squarely on his constitutional prerogatives. After objections from congressional moderates, the bill was modified to apply only to cabinet members appointed by sitting presidents, exempting those appointed by previous presidents. Since Stanton had been named by Lincoln, the tantalizing question hung fire: Was he covered by the act? As president, Grant would acknowledge the law’s absurdity and work to repeal it. When it became the law of the land in 1867, however, he felt legally bound to obey it.
Congress imposed other punitive restraints on the president. A rider to a military appropriation bill prevented him from issuing orders directly to the army, lest he tamper with Radical Reconstruction and pressure southern commanders. All such orders had to be routed through Grant, lodging extra power in his hands. The rider further stipulated that Grant could be cashiered only with Senate consent. Taken together, these rules chipped away at Johnson’s power and converted Grant and Stanton into protected wards of Congress, presaging a constitutional showdown between Johnson and Radical Republicans that would hinge on the political sympathies of the two men.
Of the five military commanders in the South, none supported Congressional Reconstruction more militantly than Sheridan, who was in charge of Louisiana and Texas and especially bewailed conditions in Louisiana: “Government is denounced; the Freedmen are shot and Union men are persecuted if they have the temerity to express their opinion.”112 Within a week of his appointment, Sheridan showed how briskly he would enforce the First Reconstruction Act by removing from office the Louisiana attorney general, the New Orleans mayor, and a federal district judge in the city—all of whom had condoned recent racial violence. He believed they had egged on the rioters, then prosecuted victims instead of perpetrators. Two days later, Grant applauded Sheridan’s action: “I have just seen your order . . . It is just the thing, and m
eets the universal approbation of the loyal people at least.”113 When Sheridan contemplated removing the Texas and Louisiana governors, Grant cautioned him against doing so, saying its constitutionality was questionable.
Never cavalier about constitutional issues, Grant believed the First Reconstruction Act provided military governments “for the rebel states until they were fully restored in all their relations to the general government.”114 Until then, military commanders should regard “present state governments as provisional,” tolerating them “just so far as they could be used in carrying out the will of Congress.”115 On March 23, the Second Reconstruction Act expanded the powers of district commanders over southern election procedures and allowed them to register voters, a move that enraged Andrew Johnson, who blocked further removal of southern officials by the military in early April. Although Grant sent this order to Sheridan, he secretly dissented from it, informing Sheridan “there is a decided hostility to the whole Congressional plan for reconstruction, at the ‘White House,’ and a disposition to remove you from the command you now have. Both the Secretary of War and myself will oppose any such move, as will the mass of the people.”116 Far from seeing himself as high-handed or dictatorial, Grant pictured himself as a soldier loyally carrying out congressional directives.
