by Ron Chernow
One of Grant’s most vocal Mississippi critics was his brother-in-law Judge Lewis Dent. Conservative Republicans had nominated Dent for governor against the more liberal James Alcorn, a prominent planter, hoping Dent’s association with Grant might mislead credulous blacks into supporting him. In fact, far from being sympathetic to black suffrage, Dent believed southern whites possessed a God-given right to rule and that black voting would “inevitably lead to a black-man’s party and eventually to a war of races,” he told Grant. The upshot would be “to alienate from the planters, the ancient confidence and affection of this race.”7 Refusing to bow to nepotism this time, Grant issued a stern warning to Dent that he would resist him. “Personally, I wish you well, and would do all in my power proper to be done to secure your success; but in public matters, personal feelings will not influence me.”8 Dent lost the election.
Grant also began to commit critical federal resources to ensuring black welfare. In 1867 the Bureau of Education had been created to educate freed people, but Congress had consistently slashed its budget, threatening to shut it down. Grant intervened to save it. “With millions of ex-slaves upon our hands to be educated,” he stated, “this is not the time to suppress an office for facilitating education. The Bureau shall have another trial.”9 To guarantee its success, Grant drafted John Eaton, the chaplain who had done superlative work resettling freed slaves during the war and who again enjoyed Grant’s unconditional support. Without Grant, Eaton declared, “the Bureau could hardly have become—what it has been said to be—the most influential office of education in the world.”10
On a personal level, Grant extended an olive branch to Confederate generals. In May 1869, Robert E. Lee came to the White House to discuss a railroad venture. As at Appomattox, Grant attempted to smooth over an awkward situation with a little levity and small talk. “You and I, General,” said Grant, “have had more to do with destroying railroads than building them.”11 Lee would not be drawn into this sort of pleasantry. According to Badeau, he “refused to smile, or to recognize the raillery. He went on gravely with the conversation, and no other reference was made to the past.”12 The diplomat John Lothrop Motley, who was there, detected “a shade of constraint” in Lee’s manner.13 On political matters, Lee worked hard to sound reasonable, expressed approval of the Fifteenth Amendment, and professed to see no “prodigious harm” in permitting blacks to vote. “All the Southern States should be in harmony with the National Government,” he declared.14 But before too long, Lee rose to his feet, bid Grant a frosty farewell, and departed. The two wartime titans were destined never to meet again. Lee died on October 12, 1870.
In another stunning reversal wrought by the war, General Ely Parker, the full-blooded Seneca sachem, emerged as a leading personality in the new administration. On April 13, Grant elevated him to commissioner of Indian affairs, the first Native American to hold the job and the first nonwhite person to ascend to such a lofty government post. With nearly three hundred thousand Indians in the United States and its territories, Parker’s job promised to be one of unfathomable complexity. Indian communities reeled under remorseless threats as railroad, stagecoach, and telegraph lines pushed steadily westward, crisscrossing Indian territory. As settlers traversed Indian hunting grounds, they set off deadly clashes. Gradually Indian tribes were shoved off the Great Plains, where they had hunted buffalo, and herded into drastic new patterns of resettlement.
Aided by Parker, Grant embarked on a Peace Policy with the Indians that was full of high-minded intentions. Outraged by injustices perpetrated against Native Americans, he aimed to clean up a corrupt system of licensed government traders who cheated Indians on their supplies of food, clothing, and shelter and grew indecently wealthy through a veritable sinkhole of graft called the Indian Ring. These lucrative jobs were prime sources of congressional patronage. Grant believed the best way to root out such scoundrels was to remove the whole network of shady agents from the political sphere, relocating the Bureau of Indian Affairs into the War Department. Right before his inauguration, he received a Quaker delegation and asked them to nominate Indian agents from their members. “If you can make Quakers out of the Indians, it will take the fight out of them,” Grant told them. “Let us have peace.”15 Aside from his respect for Quaker pacifism and integrity, Grant knew the society had coexisted peacefully with Indians in Pennsylvania. By the end of his first year in office, Grant had ferreted out many crooked Indian agents, replacing them with Quakers and honest army officers, eliciting howls from congressmen who had once controlled those jobs. At Grant’s behest, Congress also formed a ten-man Board of Indian Commissioners, a civilian watchdog agency staffed by dedicated, nonsalaried figures, to police wrongdoing in the Indian Bureau and reform its procedures.
Many of the same generals who had defeated the Confederacy were now assigned to pacify Native Americans and often betrayed a punitive, bloody attitude, exemplified by Phil Sheridan’s infamous remark “The only good Indians I know are dead.”16 Convinced Native Americans must succumb to a stronger race of white men, Sheridan reviled them as “the enemies of our race and of our civilization,” who had to be confined on reservations or killed.17 During one Indian war in 1867, Sherman advised Sheridan, “The more [Indians] we kill this year, the less we would have to kill next year.”18 Many in Congress had few qualms about pursuing a policy of outright genocide, with one Nevada congressman calling for “extinction. And I say that with a full sense of the meaning conveyed by that word.” A Texas legislator warned that “he who resists gets crushed. That is the history of the wild Indian.”19
Cut from a different cloth, Grant had always shown sympathy for the underdog. Ever since his exposure to West Coast Indians in the 1850s, he had exhibited a touching compassion for their plight, perhaps more than any previous president. “I have lived with the Indians and I know them thoroughly,” he said. “They can be civilized and made friends of the republic.”20 He blamed white settlers for many problems wrongly attributed to Native Americans. Right after Appomattox, he remarked that “the Indians require as much protection from the whites as the white does from the Indians. My own experience has been that little trouble would have ever been had from them but for the encroachments & influence of bad whites.”21 He thought peace with the Indians could be achieved if only the latter renounced their “roving life” and agreed to “fixed places of abode” on reservations.22 Parker espoused an end to the treaty system, contending that treaties could only be made between two sovereign states, whereas Indian tribes were “wards” of the American government.23
Even as he enunciated his Peace Policy, Grant knew frightened settlers demanded tough federal protection and they constituted his ultimate political constituents. Over time, his genuine concern for Indian justice had to reckon with an incessant clamor from railroads, ranchers, and miners for more troops and frontier forts. Spurred by the 1862 Homestead Act and the transcontinental railroad, the country had made a tremendous investment in westward expansion, providing land for white settlers and masses of immigrants. Indians and federal soldiers would trade blows and engage in atrocities across a wide swath of territory. While preaching how it was “much better to support a Peace commission than a campaign against Indians,” Grant would be summoned repeatedly to send arms to western states to defend them against Indian raids.24
In the long run, Grant and Parker planned to extend citizenship to Indians through a gradual, paternalistic process of “humanization, civilization, and Christianization,” as Parker expressed it.25 “A system which looks to the extinction of a race is too abhorrent for a Nation to indulge in,” Grant told Congress in his first annual message in December 1869. As with all his presidential addresses, he composed it himself. “I see no remedy for this except in placing all the Indians on large reservations, as rapidly as it can be done, and giving them absolute protection there.”26 This hopeful, idealistic path, paved with good intentions, had been touted by well-meaning presidents from G
eorge Washington to Abraham Lincoln. Grant saw absorption and assimilation as a benign, peaceful process, not one robbing Indians of their rightful culture. Whatever its shortcomings, Grant’s approach seemed to signal a remarkable advance over the ruthless methods adopted by some earlier administrations.
Urging Native Americans to resettle on reservations and take up an agricultural economy was an ultimately quixotic idea that never gained much traction among the tribes. Most Native Americans didn’t care to be “civilized” on Grant’s terms. For them, any renunciation of their hunting traditions meant an unrelenting annihilation of their ancient culture. At the same time, the butchery of vast buffalo herds on the Great Plains by white men, many killed for commercial leather or pure sport, spelled doom for the Indian way of life. Grant favored mercy toward Indians who abided by his solution, but ended up having to deal severely with those who roamed beyond their reservations and clashed with westward settlement by whites.
Government relations with Indians soured in January 1870 after the U.S. cavalry under Major Eugene M. Baker massacred 173 Piegan Blackfeet in the Montana Territory, the vast majority of them women, children, and the elderly. Many were roasted alive when their tepees were set ablaze or hacked apart with axes. Sheridan had likely contributed to the ferocity by hectoring Baker to “strike them hard!” and he blithely characterized the massacre as “well-merited punishment.”27 The episode mocked Grant’s Peace Policy and prompted a congressional backlash against the army’s handling of Indian relations. This led to banning military officers as Indian agents, a move that was partly Congress’s way of reclaiming the lucrative patronage powers lost to it.
Grant refused to regress to the seamy ways of the past. Building on his successful experience of employing Quaker agents, he expanded the idea to encompass other Protestant denominations and Roman Catholics. Religious groups would nominate people and the interior secretary selected them. When Grant’s go-between with the Jewish community, Simon Wolf, protested the exclusion of Jews, Grant said he would be glad to recognize the “Israelites,” naming Dr. Herman Bendell as superintendent of Indian affairs for the Arizona Territory.28 He was later celebrated as the first Jewish settler to plant stakes in Phoenix, Arizona. The presence of Jewish agents fit incongruously with the Christianizing mission proclaimed by Grant. Within a few years, Grant hoped his policy would “bring all the Indians on to reservations, where they will live in houses, have schoolhouses and churches, and will be pursuing peaceful and self sustaining avocations.”29 Again Grant seemed well-meaning but naive in thinking nomadic Indians would repudiate their past and suddenly mimic the ways of the white men who had forcibly dispossessed them of their tribal lands.
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ULYSSES S. GRANT had an obsessive side to his nature—a quietly obsessive side, but no less tenacious for all that. This pit-bull vigor had served him well in the military, making him the scourge of the Confederacy. Yet in politics, where a certain lightness of touch and flexibility were essential, such obstinacy could easily backfire. During his presidency, Grant came to dwell obsessively on annexing Santo Domingo—the Spanish-speaking half of the island of Hispaniola, today’s Dominican Republic—and found it hard to let the controversial issue drop.
As with many large mistakes, it stemmed from deceptively small beginnings. Early in the new administration, Colonel Joseph W. Fabens, a New England expatriate and speculator, filed a glowing report with Secretary of State Fish that idealized the rich mineral, agricultural, and timber resources of Santo Domingo. Serving as an emissary from President Buenaventura Báez, he peddled the Caribbean country to the United States as if it were a high-priced real estate parcel: “The annexation of this country to the United States should be an acquisition of great value.”30 The proposal envisaged nothing less than the final conversion of Santo Domingo into a full-fledged American state, or series of states. Fabens and his ally General William L. Cazneau were, in fact, shady operators who had booked considerable land holdings on the island and stood to pocket large profits if the United States absorbed the small country.
Fish was annoyed by Fabens’s persistence. Still, as a dutiful secretary of state, he conveyed the proposal to the cabinet in early April while withholding even tepid support. Grant showed no special partiality for the idea and seemed “a listener rather than a participant in the debate,” recalled Secretary of the Interior Cox.31 But Grant was intrigued by the magnificent harbor at Samaná Bay, which had the makings of a coaling station for naval ships. During the war, the Lincoln administration had recognized the strategic advantages of a Caribbean naval base in guarding sea lanes for boats bound for the isthmus of Panama, protecting East Coast trade with the Pacific.
No sudden whim of Grant’s, American involvement with Santo Domingo stretched back into earlier presidencies. In 1846 President Polk had dispatched David Porter to scrutinize Samaná Bay as a possible American naval depot. In 1854 President Pierce named Cazneau a special commissioner to Santo Domingo. Taking up residence there, he inveigled lucrative concessions for himself from the local government while urging the Dominican government to lease the bay to the United States.
For an assortment of reasons good and bad, the Caribbean had long been scouted as a haven for freed American slaves. While some racists simply wanted to export as many blacks as possible, many abolitionists had approved “colonization” plans as long as they were voluntary and fully protected blacks. In 1858 Abraham Lincoln joined the board of managers of the Illinois Colonization Society and three years later lobbied Congress to allocate funds for territory outside the United States to relocate freed slaves. In 1862 the United States established diplomatic relations with Haiti and Liberia with an eye to their being future destinations for emancipated slaves. By the time Lincoln promulgated the Emancipation Proclamation, he foresaw a biracial America and had cooled forever on such colonization schemes.
After Spain withdrew from Santo Domingo in 1865, it became one of the few West Indian islands free of European control. With a tiny population of 150,000, it had an educated elite of Spanish ancestry along with mulattoes and Indians, many of whom welcomed an American protectorate. In 1866 Secretary of State Seward sent his son Frederick and Admiral Porter, fortified by a boatload of gold, to negotiate the purchase or extended lease of Samaná Bay. They were entertained by that man for all seasons, William L. Cazneau. The negotiations failed because of a recent revolutionary struggle. It is important to note that after the Civil War, territorial expansion and imperialism were very much in the air, William Seward having bought Alaska for $7.2 million and begun maneuvers to acquire Hawaii.
By October 1868, the Báez government arrived at a favorable view of American annexation. Fervent support sprang from Congressman Ben Butler, who had been liberally bribed by Joseph Fabens with land on Samaná Bay. In January 1869, Butler promised Fabens he would see President-elect Grant to “secure his friendly cooperation.”32 Meanwhile, President Johnson told Congress he favored annexing all of Hispaniola—Haiti and Santo Domingo combined. In the administration’s waning days, Seward worked tirelessly for annexation, so that the Santo Domingo scheme was in some respects a holdover from previous administrations.
Grant portrayed himself as a passive spectator of the scheme’s evolution. In his first year as president, he explained, “the proposition came up for the admission of Santo Domingo as a territory of the Union. It was not a question of my seeking but was a proposition from the people of Santo Domingo . . . which I entertained.”33 The project began to cast a peculiar spell over his tenacious imagination. In a handwritten memorandum entitled “Reasons why San Domingo should be annexed to the United States,” he showed just how fully he had pondered the issue.34 Noting the country’s land area of twenty thousand square miles, he praised its mineral wealth, stores of timber, tobacco, tropical fruits, and dyes and cited plentiful sugar and coffee supplies that could slash prices for American consumers. With considerable prescience, he foresaw that the “I
sthmus of Darien” would someday have a canal drawing a substantial share of world commerce and a naval base at Samaná would command its gateway. Annexing Santo Domingo could also break British domination of the Caribbean, which forced American vessels “to pass through foreign waters.”35
But for Grant the most potent argument related to the aftermath of American slavery. Santo Domingo, he asserted, was “capable of supporting the entire colored population of the United States, should it choose to emigrate.”36 He emphasized that this was not a colonization or deportation scheme. He was by no means urging African Americans to emigrate to the Caribbean island, but simply acknowledging that it could function as a critical safety valve if white Americans refused to honor their rights: “The present difficulty in bringing all parts of the United States to a happy unity and love of country grows out of the prejudice to color. The prejudice is a senseless one, but it exists.”37 If a black person could resort to a Caribbean sanctuary, Grant reasoned, “his worth here would soon be discovered, and he would soon receive such recognition as to induce him to stay.”38 Or, as he subsequently wrote: “If two or three hundred thousand blacks were to emigrate to St. Domingo . . . the Southern people would learn the crime of Ku Kluxism, because they would see how necessary the black man is to their own prosperity.”39 The memorandum shows Grant in a visionary frame of mind, grappling with large issues of racial justice. Blacks would enjoy the option of resettling outside the continental United States, yet remain citizens under the full jurisdiction of the federal government: “I took it that the colored people would go there in numbers, so as to have independent states governed by their own race. They would still be States of the Union, and under the protection of the General Government; but the citizens would be almost wholly colored.”40
