by Ron Chernow
The other southern warfare that winter was in Louisiana, where blacks were terrified by marauding White Leaguers. An attempt to integrate New Orleans schools resulted in a wave of violence as squadrons of white men and boys severely beat black students, hauling them forcibly from integrated schools and marching them off to black schools. “The city superintendent was attacked by a posse of half grown boys and insulted, beaten and even threatened with hanging,” Grant heard from a student.71 Dismayed by the simultaneous violence in Louisiana and Mississippi, Grant sent Phil Sheridan to Vicksburg, Jackson, and New Orleans to collect information and report back on his findings.
Sheridan’s advent coincided with one of the stormiest moments in New Orleans annals. The 1874 election had created a stalemate in the Louisiana legislature. The Conservatives—a fusion of Democrats and Liberal Republicans—had ostensibly won the legislature, but the returning board, which certified elections, tried to forge a Republican majority by vacating several seats won by Conservatives. The upshot was that when the lower house of the state legislature gathered in early January, both sides claimed to rule by a two-seat majority. Anticipating violence, eighteen hundred federal troops ringed the statehouse. At noon, with great turmoil in the chamber, the house convened, elected a Conservative as the temporary speaker, and prepared to fill five undecided seats with Conservatives. This prompted Republicans to march out in protest.
What happened next shocked the nation. Governor William Pitt Kellogg requested that General Philippe R. de Trobriand remove “all persons not returned as legal members of the house of representatives by the returning-board of the State.”72 Accompanied by twenty bayonet-wielding soldiers, Trobriand burst into the chamber, brandishing papers from Governor Kellogg. One declared the house an illegal body while another gave him authority to eject the five new members not confirmed by the returning board. The five Conservatives were escorted from the chamber amid a show of bayonets and Republican cheers. By the time the general left, Kellogg Republicans controlled the disputed house and Conservatives had withdrawn, refusing to take dictation from federal soldiers.
Sheridan was ready to hand out rough justice to white vigilantes. “I think that the terrorization now existing in Louisiana, Mississippi, and Arkansas could be entirely removed . . . by the arrest and trial of the ringleaders of the armed White League,” he informed Belknap. “It is possible that if the President would issue a proclamation declaring them banditti, no further action need be taken except that which would devolve upon me.”73 Sheridan’s remarks became public, touching off a national furor. Without consulting Grant’s cabinet, Belknap sent back a supportive telegram: “The President and all of us have full confidence and thoroughly approve your course.”74 Sheridan’s remarks and Belknap’s response would haunt the administration. Not given to legal niceties, Sheridan told a visiting Massachusetts congressman that the best way to vanquish the White League was to “suspend the what-do-you-call-it”—otherwise known as the writ of habeas corpus.75
In tampering with a legislature, the rambunctious Sheridan had crossed a line, hitherto invisible, that was now clearly marked out for irate citizens. His high-handed behavior was a publicity bonanza for southern Democrats. The spectacle of soldiers entering a statehouse left northern opinion aghast, leading to vociferous demands for Sheridan’s ouster. Major Republican newspapers in the North denounced Grant. William Cullen Bryant thought it high time for Sheridan to “tear off his epaulets and break his sword and fling the fragments into the Potomac.”76 The strident headline in the New York World distilled northern hysteria: “Tyranny! A Sovereign State Murdered!”77 The Nation joined the apoplectic chorus, damning the New Orleans action as “the most outrageous subversion of parliamentary government by military force yet attempted in this country.”78 Before long, death threats against Grant, most emanating from the South, swamped the White House.
The New Orleans events presented Grant with an issue as tough and intractable as any he had faced as president. He felt outraged at the injustices white Democrats perpetrated in Louisiana and Mississippi. Yet even sympathetic northerners cringed at the image of federal soldiers barging into a state legislature and ousting elected officials. George Templeton Strong spoke for many when he wrote, “I have stood up for Grant through evil report and good report for ten years,” but he would not condone the Louisiana blunder.79 A couple of days later, Strong ran into General John Dix, who remarked, “It’s only the other day that they murdered a score or two of niggers at Vicksburg. Why didn’t these gentlemen get up an indignation meeting about that?”80 Other isolated voices in the North roundly applauded the hard line in Louisiana, especially Wendell Phillips, who commended Grant’s “decision & sagacity in dealing with the White League. One firm decisive hour will scatter the whole conspiracy.”81
Sensitive to public opinion, Grant worried about alienating supporters on whom he had relied to reform southern society. On January 9, he assembled his cabinet for a highly contentious debate on Louisiana. One of Grant’s saving graces was his ability to listen, and he did just that. Attorney General Williams likened the federal troops in New Orleans to a posse comitatus summoned to maintain peace under the U.S. Constitution—an interpretation Grant applauded. Fish protested that whether Democrats had committed fraud or not, Governor Kellogg had no right to interfere with the legislature. When he suggested that Grant repudiate Trobriand’s action, Grant snapped he would “‘certainly not denounce’ it nor would he censure Sheridan.”82 But Fish thought Grant’s support of Sheridan waned as the discussion progressed, and “he seemed to be somewhat impressed with doubt as to the entire correctness of what had been done.”83
The Louisiana hubbub did not subside. Two days later the Pennsylvania legislature passed a resolution condemning “so heinous an abuse of the power committed to the President.”84 At first Grant refused to bend. Events in the South struck bedrock principles that he would not compromise. As he contemplated a message to the Senate, he told Fish “he was determined under no circumstances to apologize for anything that had been done.”85 Fish pleaded that a fundamental constitutional principle was at stake that the president had to defend. Grant replied that his message would “recapitulate the events which he thought would show the necessity of what had occurred.”86
In his speech sent to the Senate on January 13, 1875, Grant spoke straight from the heart. He summoned his innermost feelings from the war and frustration over the bloody punishment inflicted on southern black and white Republicans and his message rose to unusual heights of eloquence. Instead of restricting himself to recent Louisiana history, he reconstructed earlier outrages perpetrated in the state. He recounted the six Republicans murdered in cold blood in Coushatta in August 1874—a crime that had gone unpunished. He recalled how D. B. Penn, who claimed election as lieutenant governor in 1872, issued an “inflammatory proclamation” calling upon state militia to “drive from power the usurpers,” as he termed Republican officeholders. “The White Leagues, armed and ready for the conflict, promptly responded.”87 Governor Kellogg had requested troops and Grant had issued a proclamation to restore order. By then, insurgents “had taken forcible possession of the State House, and temporarily subverted the government. Twenty or more people were killed, including a number of the police of the city.”88 Grant implied that people had forgotten the bloody prelude to the violence inspired by Democrats, which had produced the legislative standoff.
Turning to recent events in New Orleans, Grant pointed out that he hadn’t known beforehand of Trobriand’s action, but he described a military coup hatched by Conservatives, who had employed fraud and violence to engineer a majority in Louisiana’s lower house. “I am credibly informed that these violent proceedings were part of a premeditated plan to have the house organized in this way, recognize what has been called the McEnery senate, then to depose Governor Kellogg, and so revolutionize the State government.”89
In conclusion, Grant expressed his extreme d
istaste at having to interfere in the domestic affairs of Louisiana: “I have deplored the necessity which seemed to make it my duty under the Constitution and laws to direct such interference.” Nothing, he added, would afford him greater satisfaction than to sweep federal troops from the South. But he stated, in tough, unsparing, language, that “to the extent that Congress has conferred power upon me to prevent it, neither Ku-Klux-Klans, White Leagues, nor any other association using arms and violence to execute their unlawful purposes, can be permitted in that way to govern any part of this country.”90
Grant had refused to mince words about Democratic injustices in Louisiana. As Fred Grant told Sheridan, the Grant family had stood up for him “and mother carries her endorsement almost to an absurdity. Father is very strong in his feelings but more quiet.”91 That Julia Grant, erstwhile southern belle, felt so outraged by Democratic misbehavior in Louisiana says something about the militant mood in the Grant household. From official Washington, Grant received welcome encomia on his address. “You have never been more forcible or felicitous in the presentation of a great public question!” House Speaker Blaine assured him.92 John Singleton Mosby told Grant his message was “a triumphant vindication of your conduct.”93 At Faneuil Hall in Boston, a large protest meeting, addressed by Wendell Phillips, applauded Grant and Sheridan, but the national mood was swinging rapidly in the other direction. The president was running out of room to maneuver as the country backed away from further federal interference in the South. The outcry over Louisiana began to ring down the final curtain on Reconstruction. Southern whites increasingly substituted the word “Redemption”—a restoration of white rule—for the hated term “Reconstruction.”
In New Orleans, the atmosphere remained so combustible that newspapers openly advocated Sheridan’s murder and he was heckled when he appeared in his hotel dining room. “Some of the Banditti made idle threats last night that they would assassinate me because I dared to tell the truth,” he informed Belknap. “I am not afraid and will not be stopped . . . the very air has been impregnated with assassinations for some years.”94 Grant refused to hurl Sheridan to the wolves and reiterated to two congressmen his high esteem for the diminutive general: “I believe General Sheridan has no superior as a general, either living or dead, and perhaps not an equal.”95 When a congressional delegation went to Louisiana to collect evidence, Sheridan noted that more than two thousand political murders had been committed in Louisiana since 1866. The congressmen brokered a compromise whereby control of the lower house was returned to Democrats, who promised not to impeach or overthrow the Republican governor Kellogg.
Many saw the Louisiana violence as the opening shot of a second Civil War and a revitalized Confederacy, albeit clothed in a new form. Discussing the mood in New Orleans, Sheridan told Orville Babcock, “I have so often heard expressions that the new rebellion was to be fought under the stars & stripes and in the north as well as the South—that the mistake made in 1861 was to have had their own flag.”96 So darkly violent was the outlook that a former Georgia governor advised Babcock: “Confidential . . . the time has arrived when the President is in danger of assassination, and extraordinary caution should be exercised.”97 As the whole edifice of Reconstruction cracked apart, fueled by a northern backlash, those most fearful were the freed people of the South. Reflecting their anxiety, more than two hundred Louisiana blacks petitioned Grant about their wish to emigrate to a foreign nation: “We cannot get upon a mans Stemboat and make a round trip but what Some of us are whipped or Beat or Killed or Driven ashore. if we Stand up as men for the protection of our Wives and our Daughters . . . these white men . . . Says that we must die.”98
One of the last hurrahs of Reconstruction was passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1875, enacted by lame-duck Republicans. For several years, such a bill had been a will-o’-the-wisp for Charles Sumner, who hoped it would be “the capstone of my work.”99 As he lay dying in early 1874, he clasped the hands of visitors to his bedside and croaked passionately, “You must take care of the civil-rights bill . . . don’t let it fail.”100 Despite its association with Sumner, Grant endorsed the measure and signed it into law on March 1, 1875. It outlawed racial segregation in public accommodations, schools, transportation, and juries. The law had many flaws in its enforcement provisions, but was revolutionary in its principles of equal treatment for all. “This bill is a simple declaration of the equality of the citizens of the United States,” declared Harper’s Weekly.101 Democratic governors never bothered to enforce it. Nonetheless, however toothless, it struck fear into those opposed to interracial justice, as evidenced by a new wave of death threats that Grant promptly received from the Klan.102 The Civil Rights Act of 1875 was struck down as unconstitutional by the Supreme Court in 1883. Not until 1957 would Congress dare to pass another civil rights bill, and it was only with the long-overdue Civil Rights Act of 1964 that many of the 1875 legislation’s protections for blacks became the enduring law of the land.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
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Let No Guilty Man Escape
HARDLY HAD THE Louisiana furor died down than Grant found his administration descending into a scandal that would eclipse all previous scandals, which had soiled individual cabinet members but had not touched the president himself. This new one would widen, surround Grant, and threaten him directly.
To finance the war, the Lincoln administration had levied steep taxes on whiskey and evading those taxes had become a national pastime. Whiskey barons had emerged as major forces in American politics, channeling vast amounts of money to the Democratic Party under Andrew Johnson. “The revenues of the Country are in the hands of the enemy,” Grant was told during the 1868 campaign, “and the whiskey ring alone can raise from now until the close of the canvas a million a day should they need so much for political purposes.”1 In 1868 Congress created internal revenue supervisors to clean up fraud arising from the whiskey tax. Nevertheless, the Treasury Department remained an asylum for corrupt agents, who siphoned off money from distillers eager to avoid taxes. The methods of the Whiskey Ring were fairly straightforward. Distillers would falsify figures of the amount of liquor brewed and treasury agents would then certify those bogus returns. The upshot was that in major brewing centers taxpayers were cheated of millions of dollars in government revenues.
The system was perfected in St. Louis, where Grant maintained the White Haven farm and where he and Julia thought they might retire. As he explained, he kept close watch on his irregular farm income because it was “largely what I must depend on for a support when retired from public duties.”2 In October 1874, Grant attended a St. Louis agricultural fair, and his sentimental homecoming again underscored the indescribable changes in his life since 1860, when he had left the town impoverished. Horace Porter rode over to Hardscrabble with Grant and recorded this fascinating vignette:
When visiting St. Louis with him . . . he made a characteristic remark showing how little his thoughts dwelt upon those events of his life which made such a deep impression upon others. Upon his arrival a horse and buggy were ordered, and a drive taken to his farm, about eight miles distant. He stopped on the high ground overlooking the city, and stood for a time by the side of the little log house which he had built partly with his own hands in the days of his poverty and early struggles. Upon being asked whether the events of the past fifteen years of his life did not seem to him like a tale of the Arabian Nights, especially in coming from the White House to visit the little farm-house of early days, he replied, “Well I never thought about it in that light.”3
Grant’s host in St. Louis was his old friend General John McDonald, a former steamboat operator slated to play a notorious part in the upcoming whiskey scandal. Grant had appointed him supervisor for internal revenue for Arkansas and Missouri, with headquarters in St. Louis, but instead of rooting out crooks, McDonald became the kingpin of the local whiskey cabal. For every seventy-cent tax dodged on a gallon of whiskey, thirty-five
cents went to the distiller and an equal amount to the ring. These colossal sums propped up Republican politicians in Missouri, shady activity unknown to Grant.
Never known for subtlety, McDonald entertained Grant lavishly during his stay, allowing him to use for free an entire floor at a local hotel. While there, Grant entered two of his horses in a competition at the local fair. Shaded by a pagoda in the center of the arena, Grant smoked his cigar and studied the horses. As a connoisseur, he knew the Kentucky Thoroughbreds on display far outshone his own horses and he was resigned to losing. He didn’t reckon on McDonald’s role as judge; the latter approached Grant’s colt and gaudily draped a blue ribbon around its neck. Far from being pleased, Grant was disgusted at the unfairness, a friend recalling that Grant “flushed, took his cigar out of his mouth, threw it on the ground and said in a low voice: ‘That is an outrage.’ He turned and walked away.”4 McDonald also strove to ingratiate himself with Grant by giving him a pair of fast horses, equipped with wagon, harness, and gold breastplates engraved with his name. The Whiskey Ring made sure Grant’s aide Orville Babcock enjoyed an unforgettable interlude with the blonde Louise Hawkins, nicknamed “Sylph.” Waxing poetic about her beauty, Babcock said, “She was, indeed, a sylph and siren, whose presence was like the flavor of the poppy mingled with the perfumes of Araby.”5
