by Ron Chernow
Circling back to the Midwest, he gave a brief speech to well-wishers in St. Louis before arriving at his Galena house on August 7. “After an absence of three years from your midst,” he told a gathering, “it affords me great pleasure to return here again to see you all, and, as I hope, spend an agreeable and quiet fortnight with you.”25 Wherever he went, Grant encountered swarms of people who longed to see him. Whether from genuine or fake modesty, he professed to be startled by these swelling, enthusiastic crowds. Visiting a friend in Quincy, Illinois, he was amazed by the throngs who engulfed his every step. “What was my surprise to find what seems to be not only the whole city, but the county of Adams, turned out to welcome me to your midst,” Grant told the appreciative townspeople.26
By August 18, Grant had settled into Galena for a prolonged stay, assisted by Adam Badeau and Cyrus Comstock. Galena gave Grant a convenient residence in the American heartland, where he could lie low and shun publicity. He read newspapers attentively each morning, then drove and visited old friends in the afternoon or stopped by the DeSoto House Hotel. Friends and party managers wanted him to stay in the East so he could easily be consulted. Grant isolated himself, however, leaving instructions that official business should be referred to Rawlins, who forwarded only urgent letters to him. It was the first troubling sign that Grant, in his new political incarnation, might ignore professional advice and prove unwilling to modify his traditional style to accommodate new political realities. Grant would hail the summer of 1868 as his most balmy and restful since the war began.
Despite his seeming indolence, his campaign flourished and by midsummer Senator Charles Sumner wrote, “Everything is auspicious politically. Grant will surely be elected.”27 For an increasingly fragmented Republican Party that wanted to remember the war and rally around a common hero, Grant possessed an irresistible appeal. Something of a political cipher, he enabled moderates to imagine he might weaken the Radicals, while Radicals believed he would perpetuate Reconstruction. Grant’s minions busily cultivated the top plutocrats of the day, and northern business leaders piled into the campaign, with the financier Jay Cooke and others disgorging large donations into party coffers, while Democrats aimed to exploit a populist backlash against the big-business coloring of their opponents.
Toward the end of the campaign, when Horatio Seymour delivered a handful of campaign speeches, a joke made the rounds that “Grant takes his cigar—Seymour takes the stump.”28 Democrats conducted a defamatory campaign, portraying Grant as a drunken dolt. Seymour supporters invented new lyrics to a ditty called “Captain Jinks of the Horse Marines,” with words that went: “I am Captain Grant of the Black Marines, / The stupidest man that ever was seen.” The song also featured this nasty couplet: “I smoke my weed and drink my gin, / Paying with the people’s tin.”29 Nobody was more disgusted by the drinking tales than Julia Grant. One morning in Galena, she read a newspaper story that her husband was “in a state of frenzy and is tearing up his mattress, swearing it is made of snakes.” Then she gazed up from her paper and scrutinized her sober husband “dressed in his white linen suit, calmly smoking and reading his paper and smiling at my wrathful indignation, saying, ‘I do not mind that, Mrs. Grant. If it were true, I would feel very badly, perhaps as badly as you do.’”30
Ideologically, Democrats identified Grant as a tool of Radical Republicans and their Reconstruction program. “This is a white man’s country,” ran the party’s motto, “let white men rule.” Frank Blair spewed forth incurably racist remarks, claiming Republicans in the South had promoted “a semi-barbarous race of blacks” who yearned to “subject the white women to their unbridled lust.”31 Thanks to Blair’s vile rhetoric, Democrats ran what the historian David W. Blight has branded “one of the most explicitly racist presidential campaigns in American history.”32 Grant railed at the “desperate and unscrupulous” tactics of Democrats, but Republicans didn’t shy away from invective either, spreading rumors that Horatio Seymour was insane.33
Everybody knew the Jewish issue would surface because of Grant’s notorious General Orders No. 11 during the war, when he had temporarily banned Jews as a class from his military department. A year earlier, Schuyler Colfax had argued against Grant’s nomination because of “the danger of losing at one blow the whole Jew vote, by his having banished the whole of them publicly from his lines at Paducah” during the war.34 The party feared that large concentrations of Jewish Republicans in Cincinnati, St. Louis, and Chicago might defect to the Democrats, dragging entire states down with them. During the campaign, Grant received hundreds of letters from Jewish voters, seeking reassuring explanations for his wartime order.
The publisher Joseph Medill was so upset by a possible Jewish crossover vote to the Democrats that he suggested to Elihu Washburne that Grant submit an expiatory letter to “leading and influential” Jewish leaders as a way of “smoothing the matter over.”35 Grant took personal responsibility, disavowing his wartime order as a thoughtless, misguided action that a moment’s reflection might have blocked. To Isaac Morris, who was Jewish, he insisted in September, “I have no prejudice against sect or race but want each individual to be judged by his own merit.” He admitted that General Orders No. 11 “does not sustain this statement . . . but then I do not sustain that order. It never would have been issued if it had not been telegraphed the moment penned, without one moment’s reflection.”36 This letter traveled widely in the Jewish community. Grant also sat down with David Eckstein, a Jewish leader from Cincinnati, and convinced him that he regretted his wartime action and was free of any anti-Semitic taint. He told the lawyer Simon Wolf that his wartime order was “directed simply against evil designing persons, whose religion was in no way material to the issue.”37 In the end, Jewish voters across the country forgave and endorsed Grant, who began a systematic effort to atone for his atrocious decision.
The black population loaded enormous expectations on Grant, one hopeful black editor predicting that when “Grant becomes President, a great many wrongs would be made right.”38 Blacks still couldn’t vote in many northern states, whereas they could vote in most formerly Confederate states. Blacks associated the Democratic Party with the slaveholding South, making them natural Republican adherents. “Does anybody want a revised and corrected edition of Andrew Johnson in the presidential chair for the next four years?” Frederick Douglass asked rhetorically.39 In an influential essay, he reminded readers that for decades the Democratic Party had existed “to serve the great privileged class at the South.” The marching orders for the black electorate were now clear: usher in Grant “by a vote so pronounced and overwhelming as to extinguish every ray of hope to the rebel cause.”40 One black woman in California so zealously supported Grant that she deferred all clothing purchases for several months, telling a reporter that if “Grant was not elected, she would never want anything more to wear, for she would die.”41
The campaign’s most chilling feature was the huge wave of murder and arson orchestrated by the Ku Klux Klan against black and white Republicans in the South. As state conventions drafted new constitutions that endowed blacks with the franchise, the white South acted to stamp out that voting power through brute force. Nathan Bedford Forrest boasted that the Klan had recruited forty thousand men in Tennessee alone, half a million across the South. This bloodthirsty backlash grew out of simple arithmetic: in South Carolina and Mississippi, blacks made up a majority of the electorate, while in other southern states, the substantial black populace, joined with white Republicans, appeared set to prevail during Reconstruction.
In some southern states, white employers threatened blacks with job losses if they voted Republican, and elsewhere whites resorted to naked violence to dampen Republican electoral prospects. In Opelousas, Louisiana, armed mobs of Democrats wrecked a Republican newspaper office, expelled its editor, and shot as many as two hundred blacks. So egregious was the ubiquitous terror in the state that Grant estimated that between fraud and violence,
the Republican vote had been whittled down to a few thousand.42 In Camilla, Georgia, hundreds of armed whites shot indiscriminately into a black election parade, murdering or wounding many marchers. Throughout the South, black organizers were gunned down with impunity and President Johnson, having purged Grant’s best regional commanders, did nothing to halt the mayhem.
Until Election Day, Grant remained secluded in Galena, preferring to be a distant spectator of the campaign and telling Washburne that someone living in Galena would have no idea of a presidential race “if it were not for the accounts we read in the papers of great gatherings all over the country.”43 Grant withdrew into a shell from which he seldom emerged, deferring the “evil day” of returning to Washington until after the election.44 He still urged his Washington staff to withhold letters he received, knowing the majority would come from people badgering him for jobs. One noteworthy reason Grant provided for his Galena isolation was his fear that he might be assassinated before the election.45 Once elected, he thought the incentive to kill him would decline. In typical Grant fashion, he mentioned this to a friend in a matter-of-fact way without elaboration, but Badeau later revealed that Grant received several letters bearing death threats.46
Such fears aside, the one thing that marred Grant’s relative calm was press speculation about his strained relations with Sherman. For Sherman, politics had always been anathema, but he understood that Grant might think otherwise and believed that as president he would give the country “eight years of calm, quiet, firm administration.”47 A purist in his loathing for politics, Sherman refused to provide Grant with a public endorsement that might have swayed some veterans. To subdue talk of a rift in their friendship, Grant went to stay with Sherman at his farm outside St. Louis and professed to understand his reluctance to issue a statement of support. Still he was disappointed Sherman never openly aided his campaign. The problem was less personal than a clash of radically divergent worldviews—Sherman opposed Reconstruction and military occupation of the South—and the gap would only yawn wider in coming years.
The drift of the election was dramatically disclosed in mid-October when Republicans scored victories in Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Indiana, virtually ensuring Grant the presidency. For Orville Browning, Johnson’s conservative interior secretary, such a prospect guaranteed that Reconstruction, which he hated, would be preserved: “Grant will be the next President, and the Country is yet to have darker days, and heavier afflictions than have been endured in the past. The troubles in the Southern States will be aggravated and armies must be kept there to maintain the despotisms of Reconstruction.”48
On November 3, Grant marched off to the polls and voted a straight Republican ticket, omitting only the vote for president. That evening he wandered over to the home of Elihu Washburne, where a telegraph was installed near the front window to speed election results to Galena. Aside from Washburne and a couple of Republican correspondents, it was mostly townspeople who mingled excitedly in the house, Grant being the most imperturbable. “I often saw him show more interest over a game at cards than on that night when the Presidency was played for,” Badeau commented.49 Well after midnight, when Grant learned he had been elected president, he appeared on Washburne’s doorstep to address dozens of citizens who had gathered to celebrate. His speech was curt, as usual. “The responsibilities of the position I feel, but accept them without fear, if I can have the same support which has been given to me thus far.” With a placid demeanor, he promised to make an “annual pilgrimage” back to Galena, which was always afraid of losing him.50
Grant had captured the popular vote by a comfortable but not overwhelming margin, collecting 3,013,000 votes versus 2,709,000 for Seymour. Nonetheless, he won all but eight states and trounced Seymour in an electoral landslide of 214 to 80. Bolstered by black and white carpetbagger votes, all southern states, with the notable exception of Georgia and Louisiana, where Klan violence was rife, tumbled into the Republican column. White violence had also diminished Republican turnout in Tennessee, Alabama, and South Carolina. Grant probably lost the majority of white votes, but hundreds of thousands of black votes made up the difference, an outcome that would add self-interest to idealism as he and other Republicans mobilized to grant black citizens the ballot.
Wending his way back to Washington, Grant remained heedless of death threats, even though his route was widely reported. His less sanguine aides packed guns without telling him. Since Grant had not campaigned, the future course of his administration was unclear. Would he be the Grant of Appomattox or the Grant of Reconstruction? “Already the bitterness and animosity, always engendered by a Presidential campaign, are subsiding,” he wrote a week after the election, sounding like the candidate who had intoned the soothing slogan “Let us have peace.” “I hope now for national quiet and more looking after material interests.”51 But the electorate had divided along sectional and racial lines with no compromise in sight, portending a period of profound turbulence ahead. The South, so often the wartime battleground, had now become a different kind of killing field. Thomas Nast published an election cartoon entitled “Victory!” that showed Grant mounted on a white horse, waving a flag bedecked with the words “Union” and “Equal Rights,” as he thrust his sword into the throat of Horatio Seymour, who sat astride a black horse with the initials “K.K.K.” branded ominously on its flank.52
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WHEN PRESIDENT-ELECT GRANT returned to Washington on November 7, he slipped so unobtrusively into the capital, taking a public coach from the train station to his house, that reporters didn’t know he had returned until they saw him ambling near army headquarters the next day. The first thing awaiting his attention was a stack of more than six hundred letters soliciting jobs. With his old distaste for self-promotion, Grant suspected people who promoted themselves and refused to sift through this tall backlog of letters. Nor did he warm to people who tried to worm their way into his administration. When his brother-in-law Abel Corbin drafted an inaugural address for him, Grant told Badeau to lock it up unread until after his March 4 swearing-in.
Grant preserved an inscrutable silence about his cabinet appointees, declining invitations to dine with people, lest they corner him for information. In one of the more curious interregnums in American history, the tight-lipped president-elect kept the country in suspense as he mulled over his choices. At a time when the spoils system dominated American politics, Grant favored silence to ward off pressure from party bosses, hoping to make selections based purely on merit. With his pronounced streak of autonomy, he regarded any attempt to influence his cabinet choices as unwarranted meddling. “If announced in advance, efforts would be made to change my determination,” he explained, “and, therefore, I have come to the conclusion not to announce whom I am going to invite to seats in the Cabinet until I send in their names to the Senate for confirmation.”53 To guarantee secrecy, he didn’t even deign to discuss appointments with Julia. Henry Adams, debuting in his role as an acerbic gadfly of Grant’s administration, wrote that politicians were “furious at not being consulted.”54 Dubbing the president-elect “Ulysses the Silent,” George Templeton Strong observed that “Odysseus knows how to keep his own counsel, and shuts up, close as an oyster.”55
Grant wasn’t entirely a political neophyte. He had survived four years as general in chief in a superheated political atmosphere and had made many wartime decisions with distinctly political overtones. Yet he brought to the job no deep knowledge of statecraft and had a special need for experienced advisers. Instead he adopted the secretive, intuitive decision-making style of a general who feared his war plans might leak out. As a West Point graduate, Grant had enjoyed an insider’s knowledge of military personnel during the war, but as a Washington outsider, he needed the valuable advice of seasoned professionals about appointments. So far had the pendulum swung in Grant’s life that the insecure man of the pre–Civil War era now radiated a confidence that could verge on complacency. He wrongly as
sumed that the skills that had made him successful in one sphere of life would translate intact into another. He entered into no consultative process, engaged in no methodical vetting of people, and sent up no trial balloons to test candidates, making his decisions maddeningly opaque. Only in hindsight did Grant fathom his own limitations upon taking office. “I entered the White House as President without any previous experience either in civil or political life,” he admitted. “I thought I could run the government of the United States, as I did the staff of my army. It was my mistake, and it led me into other mistakes.”56
Outwardly Grant remained his modest, unassuming self. After chatting with him in December, Rutherford B. Hayes wrote that Grant was “cheerful, chatty, and good-natured, and so sensible, clear-headed, and well-informed . . . he remains unspoiled by his elevation.”57 While he refrained from public statements, his private pronouncements exuded optimism. James McCosh, president of Princeton College, said after a conversation with Grant that he “spoke freely, and he expressed his determination to pay the national debt, to reduce the national expenditure, to do what was possible for the Indians, and above all was determined to have peace.”58 Such blithe generalities gave few direct hints of the likely path of his administration.
