by Ron Chernow
When a joint congressional committee traveled to South Carolina to gather testimony on the Klan rebellion, many of the witnesses were threatened. They made it abundantly clear that the Klan’s word was law in many counties. As one witness from Union County testified, “The county was in effect under Ku-Klux rule; that no order issued by the Klan would be disregarded.”90 Grant received the same message from petrified citizens, such as Javan Bryant of Spartanburg County, who assured Grant that “it is a common thing for men to say in the country that they will kill anybody who reports them as Ku Klux.”91
To aid the anti-Klan effort, Akerman fielded a vast array of resources, including federal marshals and attorneys of the brand-new Justice Department. Members of the nascent Secret Service pitched in with undercover detective work. On September 12, Akerman left for South Carolina to take personal supervision of the campaign, Grant placing federal troops at his disposal. The following month, Akerman sent him a sobering report on Klan activity in South Carolina that portrayed the Klan not as bands of isolated, wild-eyed ruffians but as a comprehensive movement that spanned the entire white community. It embraced “at least two thirds of the active white men of those counties, and have the sympathy and countenance of a majority of the other third. They are connected with similar combinations in other counties and States, and no doubt are part of a grand system of criminal associations pervading most of the Southern States.”92 Bound by secret oaths, Klansmen perjured themselves to escape prosecution and terrorized witnesses and juries. Akerman estimated that the Klan had committed thousands of criminal acts during the previous year.
On October 12, the anti-Klan assault entered a new phase when Grant, at Akerman’s bidding, issued a proclamation calling upon “combinations and conspiracies” in nine South Carolina counties to disperse and retire peacefully to their homes within five days.93 Five days later, when the groups did not disarm, Grant suspended habeas corpus there. Akerman explained to Grant the legal rationale for doing so: it was impossible to prosecute Klan members if witnesses dreaded reprisals. With habeas corpus suspended, those threatening reprisals could be held in custody long enough to protect witnesses and obtain convictions. Akerman greeted Grant’s move, saying blacks can “sleep at home now.”94 By late November, he informed the cabinet that he had taken two thousand prisoners in South Carolina for violating the Ku Klux Klan Act.
Under Akerman’s inspired leadership, federal grand juries, many interracial, brought 3,384 indictments against the KKK, resulting in 1,143 convictions.95 The conviction rate was even better than it sounded. The federal court system was burdened with cases and many federal judges, appointed before Grant, didn’t sympathize with the anti-Klan crusade. Furthermore, the act that created the Department of Justice had reduced the federal legal staff by a third and curbed its ability to hire outside lawyers as needed. With witnesses offered protection, Klansmen began to name other Klansmen, stripping off the secret veil that cloaked their activities. Many Klansmen, facing arrest, fled their states. Several hundred pleaded guilty in exchange for suspended or lenient sentences. Sixty-five Klansmen wound up in the federal penitentiary in Albany, New York. The goal was not mass incarceration but restoring law and order. To his district attorneys, Akerman made plain that more than convictions were at stake: “If you cannot convict, you, at least, can expose, and ultimately such exposures will make the community ashamed of shielding the crime.”96
A southerner by choice, Akerman found it sobering to verify the depth of Klan penetration in the region, which “revealed a perversion of moral sentiment among the Southern whites which bodes ill to that part of the country for this generation.”97 On a single day in November, 250 people in one South Carolina county confessed affiliation with the group. As Akerman expressed the matter with deep feeling: “I doubt whether from the beginning of the world until now, a community, nominally civilized, has been so fully under the domination of systematic and organized depravity.”98 To another correspondent, he denounced the Klan as “the most atrocious organization that the civilized part of the world has ever known.”99
Grant pushed the anti-Klan crusade despite sturdy resistance within his own administration. At cabinet meetings, he repeatedly allowed Akerman to expatiate on Klan horrors even though some members could not have cared less. After one session, Hamilton Fish complained wearily in his diary: “Akerman introduces Ku Klux—he has it ‘on the brain’—he tells a number of stories—one of a fellow being castrated—with terribly minute & tedious details of each case—It has got to be a bore, to listen twice a week to this same thing.”100 Akerman’s speeches were hardly a bore to Grant or the terrified people victimized by Klan thuggery in the South.
By 1872, under Grant’s leadership, the Ku Klux Klan had been smashed in the South. (Its later twentieth-century incarnation had no connection to the earlier group other than a common style and ideology.) He had employed forceful, no-holds-barred actions to loosen the Klan’s grip. As southern violence subsided, southern Republicans regained confidence and cast votes with an assurance of their safety, and for southern blacks the changed mood was palpable. “Peace has come to many places as never before,” wrote Frederick Douglass. “The scourging and slaughter of our people have so far ceased.”101 It was a startling triumph for Grant, who had dared to flout what southern states considered their sacred rights to enforce the law within their borders.
Just how profoundly the atmosphere changed was revealed by a letter written by Senator Adelbert Ames, the Mississippi Republican, six months after Grant signed the Ku Klux Klan Act:
Had it not been for the Ku Klux law . . . we would not have had any showing at this election. At one time, just previous to the passage of that law, the K.K. organizations were being perfected in every county in the state. It is believed by our friends that had the law not been passed, not one of them would have been safe outside of a few of the larger cities. As it is, the K.K.’s, cowards as they are, have for a time at least suspended their operations in all but the eastern parts of the state. Recent convictions in North Carolina and the President’s action in putting a part of South Carolina under martial law has had a very subduing effect all over the South. It is perceptible here.102
For Grant’s admirers, the routing of the Klan eclipsed the lesser failures of his first term as president. “I do not know where to look for a worthier or more popular candidate than President Grant,” Akerman wrote. “The objections to his administration . . . are of the most frivolous sort. They do not go to essentials.”103 For the implacable Charles Sumner, however, Grant could do nothing right, and he scoffed “that the much-criticized Ku Klux legislation . . . would have been entirely unnecessary, if this Republican President had shown a decent energy in enforcing existing law.”104 One wonders whether Sumner thought Grant had done too little or feared that the president had upstaged him as the foremost protector of African American rights.
Despite Grant’s stunning success, a certain moral fatigue began to afflict the North, where racism remained widespread. Segments of the Republican Party pulled away from the idealism of earlier days, and nobody sensed this seismic shift more acutely than Amos Akerman. “The real difficulty is that very many of the Northern Republicans shrink from any further special legislation in regard to the South,” he wrote in December. “Even such atrocities as KuKluxery do not hold their attention as long as we should expect.”105 Democrats, meanwhile, slammed Grant’s actions as dictatorial, and one South Carolina newspaper portrayed the men arresting Klan members as “Grant’s ‘night riders.’”106
Even as he rendered superlative service in squashing the Klan, Akerman clashed with the railroads, the country’s most powerful industry. In June, he had turned down an application by the Union Pacific for a huge land subsidy and incurred the enmity of railroad barons such as Jay Gould and Collis P. Huntington. He rebuffed an attempt by one railroad company to bribe him and wouldn’t back down in his regulatory decisions. Grant came under enormou
s pressure to replace him and on December 12, he requested Akerman’s resignation. He hinted at nameless forces behind the request and expressed his “approbation of the zeal, integrity and industry” Akerman had shown in performing his duties.107 For many months, Akerman had known special interests were gunning for him and even considered resigning to spare Grant this pressure. Now he fell on his sword, thanking Grant for the kindness he had shown and conveying his “ardent wishes for the continued success of your administration.”108 Their exchanged letters show affection and mutual respect. Akerman declined Grant’s offer of a judgeship and returned to private life in Cartersville, Georgia. He remained loyal to Grant and insisted that his administration had been the best since the days of John Quincy Adams.
To replace him, Grant named George H. Williams, a judge and former U.S. senator from Oregon, who was speedily confirmed. Williams was well qualified to be attorney general, having served as a district judge and chief justice in Oregon before establishing a lucrative law practice in Portland. Always sensitive to regional demands for representation, Grant was glad to have someone from the Pacific Coast in his cabinet and for a long time enjoyed a fine rapport with Williams, who valued the president as a “serene, self-reliant, conscientious man and officer.”109 Although Solicitor General Bristow resigned in November 1872—he felt bruised when Grant elevated Williams instead of him to replace Akerman—the war against the Klan never ground to a halt. Thanks to zealous work by U.S. attorneys in the South, Williams brought three times as many cases and chalked up four times as many convictions against Klansmen in 1872 as Akerman had attained in 1871 and did even better in 1873.110 The retreat from Klan prosecutions came later. Grant deserves immense praise for hiring Akerman, the greatest ornament of his cabinet and one of the outstanding attorneys general in American history, but he also deserves blame for letting him go much too soon. Nevertheless, the campaign against the Klan was now in full swing, had generated enormous momentum, and would only expand during the next two years.
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
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A Dance of Blood
THE SAME FLINTY DETERMINATION that informed Grant’s spectacular campaign against the Klan harmed him when dealing with the Santo Domingo treaty, an obsession he could not discard. In October 1870, he reassured President Báez that he would pursue the issue when Congress reconvened. Hamilton Fish was eager to wriggle free from the whole sordid mess, but he found it difficult to do so without offending Grant. Meanwhile, Charles Sumner still stewed over Motley’s recall and threatened to foil Grant at every turn.
In early December, when Grant sent his annual message up to Capitol Hill, it contained many fresh, forward-looking features. He wanted to rejuvenate America’s merchant marine through shipbuilding subsidies and proposed two new bureaus in the Interior Department, one for education, the other for agriculture. What was downright stale was his renewed plea to annex the Dominican nation. Far from backing down, he upped the stakes. “So convinced am I of the advantages to flow from the acquisition of San Domingo, and of the great disadvantages, I might almost say calamity, to flow from non acquisition,” he wrote in his draft message, “that I believe the subject has only to be investigated to be approved.”1 The more Grant pushed the issue, the more critics pushed back. “The President’s message is good,” observed Rutherford B. Hayes. “With the exception of San Domingo, it is approved by all fair-minded Republicans.”2
Grant requested a joint resolution of Congress that would empower him to appoint a three-man commission to investigate annexation of the island nation. Such a resolution required a simple majority vote, not the higher two-thirds bar to pass a treaty. Not surprisingly, Sumner refused to introduce such a resolution. Instead Grant turned to another member of the Foreign Affairs Committee, Senator Oliver P. Morton of Indiana, who presented the resolution on December 12. Sumner reacted with ferocity and for two weeks assailed Grant in closed-door sessions of the committee. On December 20, The New York Times reported that several senators had failed to effect a truce between Grant and Sumner: “Mr. Sumner remains as bitter as ever, and the President maintains a firm attitude, inconsistent with anything like an approach toward conciliation.”3 Far from calming down, Sumner worked himself up to his most grandiloquent indictment yet. On December 21, with an early winter storm swirling about the Capitol, he delivered a salvo against the treaty that had become a casus belli for him with Grant. It was known as the Naboth’s Vineyard speech, for he referred to Ahab, the Israeli king whose wife, Jezebel, had Naboth stoned to death to procure his vineyard. For sheer histrionics and gratuitous insults, it was one of the most vitriolic speeches in Senate annals.
“The resolution before the Senate commits Congress to a dance of blood,” Sumner thundered. “It is a new step in a measure of violence.”4 He noted that Grant didn’t need congressional authorization to send agents to foreign countries but had done so “to commit Congress to the policy of annexation.”5 He took deadly aim at Báez, saying American warships in Dominican waters sustained his government: “You call him ‘president,’ they call him there ‘dictator.’”6 At this point, Senator Morton objected that Sumner had raised a frivolous point, since all groups in Santo Domingo favored annexation, not just the president. In response, Sumner unleashed his full cannonade of rhetoric: “Frivolous! Is it frivolous when I see the flag of my country prostituted to an act of wrong? Is it frivolous when I see the mighty power of this Republic degraded to an act of oppression?”7 Sumner went on melodramatically about America bullying Haiti, claiming Grant wanted to annex the entire island, not merely the Dominican side. Stooping to a new low, he identified Grant with three former presidents who had appeased the South—Pierce, Buchanan, and Johnson—and sought “the oppression of a weak and humble people.” In closing, Sumner made a bizarre racial argument that the island of Hispaniola had been consecrated “to the colored race. It is theirs by right of possession; by their sweat and blood mingling with the soil; by tropical position; by its burning sun, and by unalterable laws of climate.”8
Many senators were appalled by Sumner’s ugly attack, which Zachariah Chandler of Michigan termed a “brutal assault.”9 To rebut his charges, Senator Roscoe Conkling of New York rose to defend Grant and pointed out that the three-man commission was merely one of inquiry to confirm or deny the charges directed against annexation. He countered Sumner’s indignation with his own. “Why, sir,” he protested, “if the charges made by the Senator today against the President be true, it would be necessary to convict him of being a fool in order to acquit him of being a knave.” At first Conkling seemed to mock the notion that Grant wanted to eject Sumner from the Foreign Relations Committee, then he endorsed it by saying it should no longer be chaired “by a Senator who has launched against the Administration an assault more bitter than has proceeded from any Democratic member of this body.”10 Morton backed up Conkling, protesting that Grant had been treated with “a bitterness of persecution and a torrent of calumny” not seen “since the days of Thomas Jefferson.”11
In a rowdy debate, opposing senators roared through the night and it was around dawn when they wearily approved Morton’s resolution for an inquiry commission. Vice President Colfax went to the White House to congratulate Grant, who received a parade of jubilant lawmakers. In the following days, Sumner told Fish and Boutwell that he had always been courteous to Grant. Afterward, at the White House, the two men analyzed Sumner’s manic behavior. Though an old friend of his, Fish said the Massachusetts senator was “crazy” and “a monomaniac upon all matters relating to his own importance and his relations toward the president.” For Boutwell, Sumner had fired charges against Grant “so outrageous and violent” that he dared not repeat them.12 He recalled Sumner’s charge that Grant was drunk when he stopped by his house for the famous dinner chat. As proof, Sumner had cited the fact that Grant addressed him as chairman of the Judiciary Committee. “He was no more drunk, or excited,” recalled Boutwell, “than he was when we le
ft him upstairs five minutes since—no more than Sumner himself.”13 Sumner now took to calling Grant “a colossus of ignorance” and defamed Fish as “a gentleman in aspect with the heart of a lackey.”14 He said he would have no further dealings with the secretary of state, a rupture that threatened the very workings of government.
Among those who believed Sumner trafficked in unfair invective was Frederick Douglass, who wrote to the senator and berated him for lumping Grant’s name “with the infamous names of Pierce, Buchanan and Johnson. These names in the minds of all loyal and liberty loving men stand under the heaviest reproach—and I candidly think you did wrong to place Grant in that infamous category even by implication.”15 Only a group of neutral commissioners, Douglass argued, could engage in dispassionate analysis of the Santo Domingo question and report honestly to the American people.
In defending Grant, Fish insisted that the president had maintained cordial relations with senators who opposed the Santo Domingo treaty. He paid a remarkable tribute to Grant, stating that “no man living is more tolerant of honest and manly differences of opinion, is more single or sincere in his desire for the public welfare, is more disinterested or regardless of what concerns himself, is more frank and confiding in his own dealings, is more sensitive to a betrayal of confidence, or would look with more scorn and contempt upon one who uses the words and the assurances of friendship to cover a secret and determined purpose of hostility.”16 In short, Fish thought Sumner had gone way beyond legitimate disagreement and behaved in a false, duplicitous manner.
On January 9, the resolution for an inquiry commission passed the House and was approved by the Senate three days later. For all of Sumner’s bombastic invocation of black rights, opposition to the Dominican annexation had taken on a racist tinge. Carl Schurz regretted that annexation would soon bring the absorption of Cuba, Puerto Rico, and other Caribbean islands in its wake. He described these islands as populated mainly by indolent black people and issued this challenge to treaty proponents: “Show me a single instance in any tropical country where labor when it was left free did not exhibit a strong tendency to run into shiftlessness, and where practical attempts to organize labor did not run in the direction of slavery.”17
