by Ron Chernow
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THE MIDTERM ELECTION RESULTS in autumn 1874 proved nothing short of calamitous for the Republican Party, a stunning repudiation of Grant and his inflation bill veto. Republicans relinquished their sizable majority in the House of Representatives—the first time they had surrendered control since the war—and Democrats took charge by a huge margin. This scarcely seemed the same Democratic Party trounced so handily by Grant two years earlier. It was small consolation to the Republicans that they retained a majority of Senate seats. The Democrats chalked up major triumphs in New York, New Jersey, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Missouri, and Illinois. The main reason for the electoral landslide was the economic slump, which left voters in a surly mood, and Grant’s refusal to countenance a dose of inflation to conquer it. The aura of corruption around the White House had also contributed to a sense of an administration adrift. Some observers believed that speculation about a possible third term for Grant—something he dismissed “in ridicule and contempt”—made him seem selfish, encouraging disgruntled voters to turn against him.33 The first act of the new House would be to pass a resolution that exhorted Grant to refrain from seeking a third term, which would be “unwise, unpatriotic, and fraught with peril to our free institutions.”34
Another disaffected spectator was William T. Sherman, who was far less intimate with Grant than in the palmy days of their wartime comradeship. Sherman was irate when Grant allowed Secretary Belknap to interfere with his chain of command and he moved his headquarters to St. Louis in protest. “My faith in [Grant’s] friendship is shaken,” Sherman told an editor, “and when again he wants it, it may be less than he supposes.”35 Privately Sherman was scathing about his old friend, pinning the electoral defeat on Grant: “Genl Grant and his immediate surroundings have been selfish and mean, and have alienated the Country and many of his Old Friends are not only alienated but deeply angry.” He mentioned his many sacrifices for Grant. “You have seen how he has returned it. I am not sorry that he has caught the inevitable consequence.”36 Sherman never understood that Grant had graduated from the narrow, provincial outlook of a military commander to embrace a broader leadership role. Despite Sherman’s bitterness, Ulysses and Julia Grant were the soul of hospitality when he lunched with them at the White House in November.
In the congressional elections, northern voters had sent a clarion message of retreat from black civil rights, protesting Grant’s decision to send troops into Louisiana. Racism was omnipresent in the North as well as the South. “There is a deep and a growing restlessness and jealousy of Military influence, & ascendancy,” Fish noted, “and this jealousy is being fostered . . . by the Democratic press.”37 As the northern public, beset by economic troubles, soured on Reconstruction, they latched onto a book, The Prostrate State: South Carolina Under Negro Government, which portrayed southern Reconstruction governments as populated by corrupt carpetbaggers and illiterate black legislators. The author, James Shepherd Pike, had worked for Greeley at the New York Tribune and become disillusioned with Grant. After Greeley died, his successor, Whitelaw Reid, sent Pike on a southern tour, which produced this racist diatribe. “Sambo takes naturally to stealing,” Pike told readers. “Seven years ago these men were raising corn and cotton under the whip of the overseer. Today they are raising points of order and questions of privilege.”38
In this new dispensation, Grant was increasingly fair game. Democratic control of the House had far-reaching consequences for him. Armed with investigative powers, committees turned a glaring searchlight on executive departments to ferret out corruption, a tactic used to discredit the administration on Reconstruction. Half the House committee chairmanships were handed over to southerners, who attempted to block further racial progress by Grant. In the South, Democrats regained control of Alabama as the old white elite restored their antebellum primacy. White and black Republicans in the region reacted with shocked dismay. “What sorry times have befallen us!” wrote Adelbert Ames, now Mississippi’s governor. “The old rebel spirit will not only revive, but it will make itself felt. It will roam over the land, thirsty for revenge . . . the war is not yet over.”39
Through it all, Grant remained imperturbable. He had won battles precisely because he never succumbed to panic, but his congenital calm now made him seem out of touch to some colleagues. When Postmaster General Jewell dined at the White House, he didn’t find the president as gloomy as he had expected, telling Fish that Grant had “no appreciation of the results of the late election, which have been overwhelmingly adverse to the Republican party.”40 Other Republican leaders were equally alarmed, Vice President Wilson calling Grant “the millstone around the neck of our party that would sink it.”41 So despairing was Garfield that he felt “all the Gods had conspired to destroy the Republican Party,” while Bristow interpreted the elections as “a perfect Waterloo to Republicans.”42
By late November, Grant labored several hours a day over his annual message to Congress, writing it, as usual, by himself. That August, when he attended a Methodist camp meeting at Martha’s Vineyard, the mogul Russell Sage had invited him aboard an iron steamship built by his company. This encouraged Grant to revive a proposal he had floated a year earlier to connect American canals and rivers into a national network, lowering transport costs and stoking business. He also wanted to revive American shipbuilding, which had been badly damaged during the war, by paying “ample compensation” to American ships that carried mail domestically and abroad.43 Grant expanded this vision by again endorsing a canal to connect the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans and he had surveys conducted to locate the most feasible site. Quite visionary about this pathway, Grant maintained that “it would add largely to the wealth of the Pacific coast, and, perhaps, change the whole current of the trade of the world.”44
As he struggled with his annual message, all issues paled beside the baffling subject of race relations. In a bluntly eloquent appeal, he reproached white southerners for condoning vigilante violence against black citizens. He acknowledged that they fancied themselves law-abiding citizens. “But do they do right in ignoring the existence of violence and bloodshed in resistance to constituted authority?” He railed against those who denied federal responsibility to halt abuses on the state level: “The theory is even raised that there is to be no further interference on the part of the general government to protect citizens within a state where the state authorities fail to give protection. This is a great mistake. While I remain Executive all the laws of Congress, and the provisions of the Constitution . . . will be enforced with rigor.”45 In short, Grant pleaded with white southerners to do justice to blacks or he would have no choice but to send in unwanted federal troops. He issued a prophetic warning of the perils facing America’s two parties:
Under existing conditions the Negro votes the republican ticket because he knows his friends are of that party. Many a good citizen votes the opposite not because [he] agrees with the great principles of state which separate party, but because, generally, he is opposed to Negro rule. This is a most delusive cry. Treat the Negro as a citizen and a voter—as he is, and must remain—and soon parties will be divided, not on the color line, but on principle.46
From southern Republicans, Grant heard heartrending pleas for help, a sorrowful chorus of concern. From a black minister in Tennessee, he learned of blacks flocking to his town because so many had been murdered by night riders elsewhere. He promised Grant that “these Colored peopel will all die for you to day. they have a great love for you. So we want you to do all [you] Can for us.”47 A Houston resident complained of Democrats riding roughshod over Texas Republicans. “Send your Bayonets to Texas—and break up the assemblage of Maniacs—Ruffians—and Thieves At Austin.” The writer asserted that Democrats wouldn’t hesitate to make a constitution that placed “the colored man in a peonage worse than Slavery—But they fear the mighty Ulysses might Break up there Government.”48
Unfortunately, Grant was progressively hamst
rung in coping with this sudden rash of crises. The newly resurrected Democrats launched a congressional investigation into Justice Department spending that imposed steep cuts in enforcing Reconstruction. The three Enforcement Acts that had given muscle to the anti-Klan battle clashed with growing southern resistance, bolstered by northern neglect. Attorney General Williams, who had continued the crusading militance of Amos Akerman against the Klan, faced growing hostility and the press disparaged him as “Grant’s Secretary of State for Southern Affairs.”49 He began to plead for more caution in southern prosecutions, insisting the Klan had already been smashed. With major cases about Reconstruction’s constitutionality pending before the Supreme Court, Williams instructed district attorneys that “criminal prosecution under these acts ought to be suspended until it is known whether the Supreme Court will hold them constitutional or otherwise.”50 When issued in spring 1876, those court decisions would slam the door shut on Reconstruction.
The situation grew more perilous in March 1875 when Postmaster General Jewell asked Grant if he could speak to him plainly about a troubling matter. “I always wish the Cabinet to feel entirely free to make confidential communications to me,” Grant replied.51 Jewell then told of whispers that the Judiciary Committee, probing the Justice Department, had generated facts about Attorney General Williams that could tarnish the administration. Williams’s Supreme Court nomination had foundered in part because of his wife Kate’s extravagant spending. Now it was alleged that after the Justice Department brought suit for evasion of customs duties against the New York merchant house of Pratt & Boyd, a “certain lady” had extorted $30,000 from them in exchange for a promise to drop the suit. When Grant conferred with Fish on April 12, he preferred to view Williams as an innocent dupe, showing the sympathy for human frailty that was his tragic undoing. As Fish wrote, Grant “had a high respect for Williams but feared that he had been entrapped, or that transactions had passed through his hands without his notice, for which he could not fail to be held officially responsible, of a very disreputable nature.”52 Nonetheless, frightened by a potential probe into the attorney general’s office, Grant suggested that Williams depart at once. In accepting his resignation, Grant gave no hint of the scandalous backdrop: “My sincere friendship accompanies you in the new field of life you have chosen and best wishes for your success. Very respectfully yours U. S. GRANT.”53
In choosing a successor, Grant searched for someone of unimpeachable honesty to forestall further snooping by House Democrats. He picked Edwards Pierrepont, a popular New York lawyer, who had gained reformist credentials combating corruption in Tammany Hall. To avoid unpleasant surprises, Grant made sure to canvass his cabinet, all of whom warmly approved the choice. In adding Pierrepont, Bristow, and Jewell to his cabinet, Grant temporarily silenced detractors who had portrayed his administration as riddled with corruption. Harper’s Weekly said that by recruiting these three men of “the highest character,” Grant had shown his commitment to “good government and honest administration.”54
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PERHAPS NO STATE EXPOSED more graphically the irremediable clash between the old South and Republican rule than Mississippi. The state legislature’s composition was shockingly alien to many Mississippi whites—55 of 115 state representatives were black, as were 9 of 37 senators. In the summer of 1874, Grant received a steady flow of warnings that white agitators, operating under the People’s Party or White Man’s Party banner, would attempt to purge the legislature by intimidating black voters and officeholders. Especially alarming was violence predicted in Vicksburg, where armed whites prowled the streets before municipal elections on August 4. On July 4, the anniversary of Grant’s Vicksburg victory, white thugs pounced on a patriotic celebration held by black Republicans and opened murderous fire on the crowd, with several killed in the subsequent melee. Peter Crosby, the first black county sheriff in Vicksburg, appealed to Lieutenant Governor Alexander K. Davis, who then pleaded with Grant to send two companies of U.S. soldiers. “Armed bodies of men are parading the streets both night and day,” he informed Grant.55
Governor Ames grew desperately worried. Knowing only federal troops could safeguard black voters, he described for Grant the openly military character of the white Democrat threat, organized into infantry, cavalry, and artillery units. Departing from the assertive actions of his first term, Grant hesitated and refused to send in federal soldiers. “I have tried to get troops, but the President refuses,” Ames told his wife. “It is thought he wants the support of the Southern Democrats for a third term. Most true it is that they are generally for him in this state. And they in Vicksburg who are rioting, who are ready for murder and frauds, laud him to the skies.”56
The August election passed without violence. “The election just closed was the most peaceable and orderly ever held here” came the reassuring message to Grant from a Mississippi senator.57 But the eerie quiet merely proved that white intimidation had succeeded, with blacks terrorized into staying home; white supremacists expelled Republicans from local offices without firing a shot. “Had there been a doubt as to the issue,” Ames concluded, “a bloody riot would have resulted.”58 It was a turning point in Reconstruction, much as Vicksburg’s fall had been during the war. White Democrats had demonstrated that without the protection of federal troops, they could resurrect the prewar power structure. The Vicksburg vote showed the fundamental weakness of a political revolution that had relied heavily on force applied by outsiders in Washington—something that couldn’t be maintained indefinitely. The lesson was well learned by armed White League and White Line militia in Mississippi, Louisiana, Arkansas, Alabama, and South Carolina, who mobilized to retake control of their states.
Grant was peppered with conflicting reports from white Democrats and black Republicans in Mississippi, who seemed to reside on different planets. One white complained to Grant about “ignorant brutal” black voters; griped that “the scum of the North” had “flooded this country in pursuit of offices & plunder”; and, referring to Grant himself, observed, “We have a Dictator who claims to be President under the constitution.”59 Yet black citizens told Grant they felt utterly powerless. A black sergeant who had fought with Grant at Vicksburg said of the black community in Mississippi: “We are all most Povity stricken to death . . . We are dependin on you for help.” The Democrats, he said, wanted “to starve the dam negros out that vote the Radical ticket.”60
On December 5, a bloodless coup occurred in Vicksburg when armed members of the Taxpayers’ League (the White League in some accounts) seized the Warren County courthouse, forced the black sheriff, Peter Crosby, to flee, then chased out the board of supervisors. As a column of black militia approached Vicksburg, the mayor declared martial law and appointed a former Confederate officer, Colonel Horace Miller, to enforce it. Black and white militia confronted each other at a bridge south of town; as blacks began to retreat, armed whites fired and killed several blacks. Whites then went on a homicidal spree, pulling blacks from their homes and killing them. Some violence occurred on the very spot where Pemberton had surrendered to Grant. “They were shot down like dogs,” wrote Blanche Ames, the governor’s wife, “and those that fell wounded were murdered.”61 A congressional investigatory committee concurred: “It was no battle; it was a simple massacre.”62 The death toll approached that of a small battle: at least twenty-one blacks dead and two wounded. As one observer recalled, “Others were killed and eaten by buzzards . . . The birds had got all the meat off their bodies, and the only way you could recognize them was by their clothes.”63 In the days ahead, armed white men initiated a campaign of killing in the nearby countryside that took up to three hundred black lives.
On December 17, Governor Ames summoned the state legislature to an emotional special session. He now faced an armed uprising that he described as an “insurrection in the fullest sense.”64 Without the military means to curb this “reign of terror,” he feared the insurgents would impose a new order “
founded entirely upon the degradation and serfdom of a class.”65 Both houses of the legislature endorsed a resolution calling upon Grant to hasten federal troops to Vicksburg. There was no way Grant could back down before a military putsch on American soil, and he now showed flashes of his gritty old panache. First he acted to protect the Mississippi legislature, telling the federal commander in Jackson that if “threatened with violence from unauthorized persons they must be protected in the proper discharge of their duties.”66 On December 21, he issued a proclamation that repeated charges made by Ames and Mississippi legislators and ordered the “disorderly and turbulent persons to disperse and retire peaceably within five days.”67 Grant now followed the well-polished script of his first term.
When Ames requested federal troops on January 4, Grant promptly ordered his commanders to “comply with the request of Govr Ames as far as practicable.”68 His decisive response contrasted starkly with congressional wavering. “I fear that Congress will not give the President power to put down the White Leaguers of the South,” Jesse Ames told his son Adelbert. “If not, there can be nothing but a reign of terror in the South until the nation is involved in a Civil War from one end of the land to the other of which the last war is a mere trifle compared to it.”69 When a congressional committee reported in February on the Mississippi bloodshed, it concluded that the nation had arrived at a crossroads and “must either restrain by force these violent demonstrations by the bold, fierce spirits of the whites” or tell newly enfranchised black citizens, “we have made you men and citizens . . . now work out your own salvation as others have done.”70 It had become flagrantly obvious that no common ground existed between the white and black communities in the South, no middle position that allowed for compromise. Any federal action would either inflame the white community or victimize the black. There was simply no neat solution as a violent gulf yawned open between Democrats and Republicans.
