by Ron Chernow
By February 5, 1876, Babcock had checked into a St. Louis hotel along with former attorney general Williams, who served as his defense counsel. Three days later, opening arguments began in his trial. Horace Porter tried to convince Grant that his testimony alone could save Babcock from the “scoundrels” bent on persecuting him.43 As the trial progressed, Grant’s worries about Babcock only deepened when prosecutors introduced evidence showing his secret communications with McDonald, one ring conspirator even claiming that John Joyce stuffed $500 into an envelope for Babcock and brazenly mailed it to him in the White House.
In a cabinet session of extraordinary drama, a distraught Grant said betrayal by Babcock was inconceivable to him. The wounded president submitted to outright paranoia. As recorded by Fish, Grant said that “the prosecution was aimed at himself, & that they were putting him on trial; that he was as confident as he lived of Babcock’s innocence.”44 If Babcock were guilty, he insisted, it would be the basest ingratitude and trickery ever known. Grant not only said he was ready to give a deposition in the case but stunned the meeting by claiming he wished to travel to St. Louis to testify at once, dragging at least two cabinet members with him. Fish protested that this would place him in the embarrassing predicament of testifying against a case prosecuted by his own administration. “The Cabinet were unanimous in the opinion that the President ought not to leave Washington during the session of Congress to be made a witness,” wrote Fish, and “ought not under any circumstances to consent to appear in Court as a witness.”45 A flustered Grant then admitted he had already promised Babcock’s lawyers he would testify. The cabinet decided he should give a deposition instead, which he did on February 12 before Chief Justice Morrison Waite—an unprecedented step for a president in a criminal proceeding.
During the five-hour deposition, Grant described how he knew Babcock “intimately” and regarded him “as a most efficient and most faithful officer.”46 He denied Babcock had tried to obstruct the Whiskey Ring investigations and would not relent one iota on his innocence. “I have always had great confidence in his integrity . . . and as yet my confidence in him is unshaken.”47 When Grant was read Babcock’s suspicious messages to McDonald, he disclaimed any knowledge of them at the time and insisted Babcock had explained them to him to his satisfaction. Grant didn’t commit perjury, but he did show a willful refusal to open himself up to the facts. At the same time, he repeatedly exhorted Pierrepont, “If Babcock is guilty, there is no man who wants him so much proven guilty as I do, for it is the greatest piece of traitorism to me that a man could possibly practice.”48 Despite his epic success in life, an atavistic side of Grant still identified with battered, beaten-down, and besieged people, and Orville Babcock now fell into that category of folks worthy of his sympathy.
Two days later Grant unburdened himself to Hamilton Fish. He thought St. Louis prosecutors were gunning for him and that Babcock was a convenient decoy as they took dead aim at him. Bristow, he believed, “had become possessed with the idea of the complicity of the President, and was using his office for the purpose of annoying him.” Bristow’s colleagues wanted to elevate him to the presidency and he “was yielding to it and allowing himself to be made a party to these proceedings.”49 So persuaded was Grant that personal attacks against him emanated from Bristow’s hostile circle that Badeau termed his mood “one of the most intense” he had ever seen.50 Persuaded that Grant would dismiss him after Babcock’s trial, Bristow pondered his resignation. He had always esteemed Grant “a good man, motivated by patriotic desire and unselfish devotion” to his country, but he believed he had fallen under the potent spell of bad advisers.51 Now the two men had arrived at an irrevocable break, one that threatened to split the Republican Party.
On February 24, Babcock’s trial closed with an acquittal and many observers believed Grant’s affidavit had helped to influence the outcome. The prosecution had suffered under the additional handicap that Babcock’s cryptic letters to St. Louis suggested guilt but offered no foolproof evidence. Just when it seemed Grant might be vindicated in his rosy view of Babcock, the gods decided to disabuse him savagely. While Babcock was returning to Washington, Grant received evidence that in 1869 he had invested in gold speculations that ended disastrously with the market crash on Black Friday, losing $40,000 in the transactions. The disclosure that Babcock had connived in tandem with Jay Gould and Jim Fisk devastated Grant. As Bluford Wilson wrote, “The President then, for the first time, comprehended . . . that if [Babcock] had betrayed him in the Black Friday transactions, he was quite capable of betraying him in connection with the whisky frauds.”52 Grant had received a sudden and terrible education in misplaced loyalty. As Buck recalled, Grant thought Babcock “could not properly come back into his family.”53 Needing someone in whom he could repose a rock-solid trust, a shaken Grant drafted Buck as his secretary to replace Babcock. The scales had fallen much too late from the president’s eyes.
For a couple of days, Babcock lingered at his White House desk. Horrified to see him there, Fish pleaded with Grant to send him away. On March 1, Grant finally got rid of him, although Babcock stayed on as superintendent of public buildings in Washington. Exactly a year later, Grant handed him a humiliating assignment, shunting him to the lowly job of inspector for the fifth lighthouse district, an extraordinary comedown for a man once seated at the throne of power. To sweeten the pill somewhat, Grant wrote to Babcock and assured him of his confidence in his “integrity and great efficiency.”54 In 1884 Babcock, age forty-eight, drowned while performing his duties at Mosquito Inlet in Florida.
Even though Grant had expelled the serpent from the garden, peace didn’t return to the executive mansion. Bristow found the atmosphere “irksome and disagreeable,” thought Grant remained under Whiskey Ring influence, and decided to resign.55 According to one story, Bristow tendered Grant his letter of resignation as the president mounted his carriage for a drive; Grant pocketed the envelope in frosty silence and departed. Bristow’s letter pulled no punches. It said corrupt people had convinced Grant the prosecutions were “really aimed at you and are prompted by a mixture of base & ambitious motives . . . Utterly false as I know such statements to be . . . it is painfully apparent that they are not so regarded by you.” He faulted Grant for “withdrawal of your confidence & official support.”56 In a decidedly cool reply, Grant accepted Bristow’s resignation and hoped he would “find that peace in private life denied to anyone occupying your present official position.”57
After Bristow resigned, he was summoned by a congressional committee investigating the whiskey frauds. He declined to appear, citing executive privilege and the confidential nature of cabinet communications. Grant, showing exceptional confidence in his own integrity, urged Bristow to waive executive privilege and testify, declaring his desire “not only that you may answer all questions . . . but wish that all the members of my Cabinet . . . may also be called upon to testify in regard to the same matters.”58
Grant refused to surrender his suspicion that Bristow’s whiskey crusade was designed to position him as the Republican presidential candidate in 1876. From Fish’s diary entries, one can see that Grant’s famous composure was breaking down under pressure, and that he had become irritable, short-tempered, and impatient. On October 12, Fish recorded Grant’s astonishing private appraisal of Bristow. Fuming, he described Bristow’s nature as one of “intense selfishness and ambition and of extreme jealousy and suspicion and that from the time he entered the Cabinet he had set his eye on the Presidency with a distrust and hostility to himself (the President) and to every member of the Cabinet.”59 He later repented of this jaundiced, unfair view of Bristow.
Grant had succumbed to the curse of second-term presidents: spreading scandal. He himself was never tied to knowledge of the Whiskey Ring. In fact, his administration had brought more than 350 indictments against the whiskey culprits—an astounding feat for which Grant seldom gets credit.60 His fault was again one of superv
isory judgment rather than personal corruption. The world of politics was filled with duplicitous people and Grant was poorly equipped to spot them, remaining an easy victim for crooked men. “They studied Grant, some of them, as the shoemaker measures the foot of his customer,” wrote George Hoar.61 Many years later, David Dyer issued this verdict: “General Grant had no knowledge of the existence of the Whiskey Ring when the prosecutions began, and therefore was not in the remotest manner a party to or in any wise connected therewith. His great mistake was in trusting men who did know . . . and this after their connection with the ring was a matter of common information. Grant was an honest man and implicitly trusted those he believed to be his friends . . . At no time during the prolonged inquiry . . . was anything discovered that reflected upon General Grant’s integrity.”62 In later years, when an acquaintance inquired what had pained him most in the course of his eventful life, Grant responded readily, “To be deceived by a friend.”63
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DESPITE THE SCANDALS that had rocked his administration, Grant’s wartime heroism clung to him like an honored, if somewhat faded, old cloak and the American public retained faith in his personal integrity. But he suffered ongoing criticism from Liberal Republicans who favored civil service reform, disliked Reconstruction, and were discomfited by his disgraced cabinet members. One unsparing critic remained his steadfast wartime comrade William T. Sherman. In July 1875, the former interior secretary Orville Hickman Browning recorded this indictment by Sherman against Grant:
He thought Grant’s administration a failure—said the President was very deficient in the qualities of a statesman—that he had no comprehension of the fundamental principles of civil governments, constitutions and laws—that he had been surrounded by a weak cabinet, and had failed to restore harmony and fraternity among the different sections of the Country—that a great mistake had been made in putting all the political power of the Souther[n] states in the hands of the ignorant, and substantially disfranchising the intelligent classes, and the South was in a worse condition to-day than at the close of the war.64
Sherman’s views were colored by his close identification with the white southern establishment he had known and admired before the war.
Despite his detractors, Grant remained popular enough to provoke conjecture that he might hazard a run at a third term, defying the two-term custom that had ruled American politics since George Washington. Although Stalwart senators prodded him to run, a worn-out Grant demurred. Sixteen years of public service, he later confided, had exerted a “constant strain” upon him.65 His silence on a third term perpetuated so much speculation that Jesse pressed him to issue a statement, opting out of another term. “Do you want me to decline something that has never been offered to me,” Grant asked, smiling sadly. “If the effort is made, I shall refuse to permit my name to be brought before the next national convention. Until then it would be futile for me to speak.”66
In early 1875 Grant reconsidered this silence amid chatter in Republican circles that a third term might injure the party. When a Republican convention in Pennsylvania approved a resolution opposing a third term, Grant knew he had to issue a categorical denial. To convention president Harry White, he admitted that the “fire of personal abuse, and slander” of his first term had made him seek vindication in the 1872 election. Now “I am not, nor have I been, a candidate for a renomination.”67 Grant’s pledge made newspaper headlines across America. Writing to Edwin Cowles of the Cleveland Leader, Grant showed the same reluctance to seek power that he had manifested after Fort Sumter, when he thought it beneath his dignity to lobby for an army commission: “I left a life position of which I was very proud, to accept a first term, very much against my inclination. Twice I have been nominated to the office with great unanimity by Conventions convened to make the nomination.” It wasn’t in his nature “to struggle for position,” he said, and he would never accept a nomination tendered grudgingly by his party.68
Grant summoned his cabinet informally to show them his letter to Harry White. When Julia Grant demanded to know the reason for this impromptu gathering, Grant stalled, lit a cigar for courage, then marched into her room, explaining he had just composed a letter squelching rumors he would seek a third term. His wife, he knew, was hell-bent on remaining in the White House and he was prepared for her wrath. “Bring it and read it to me now,” she demanded. “No,” he replied, “it is already posted; that is why I lingered in the hall to light my cigar, so the letter would be beyond recall.”69 Julia would gladly have stayed for one more term and had no qualms about scrapping George Washington’s precedent. “Oh, Ulys! was that kind to me?” she protested. “Was it just to me?” “Well,” he replied, “I do not want to be here another four years. I do not think I could stand it.” Rather than feel sympathy for her husband’s plight as a profoundly overburdened president, Julia chose to feel “deeply injured.”70 She had relished being First Lady as only someone could whose social ambitions had been cruelly mocked during their early years of marriage. In the White House, she had finally attained a grandeur that satisfied her White Haven upbringing and she had radiated pleasure in the spotlight. “She enjoyed her presidential life,” observed a guest, “and good naturedly said so.”71 Julia surely wondered what life would offer without the salary and perquisites that came with the three eminent positions her husband had held since the war.
Grant remained an observant Methodist and was never reluctant to profess his faith. In August 1875, he assisted John Heyl Vincent, his former Galena pastor, at the Chautauqua movement of Christian summer camps, addressing a crowd of thirty thousand. He also attended a revival meeting officiated by Dwight Moody, a leading evangelist. During the 1876 centennial, when asked to supply a statement for Sunday school children, he wrote: “Hold fast to the Bible as the sheet-anchor of your liberties; write its precepts in your hearts, and PRACTISE THEM IN YOUR LIVES. To the influence of this book we are indebted for all the progress made in true civilization.”72 Yet Grant never exploited religion for partisan gain or pandered to the political agenda of any religious group. At a time when some Protestants wanted to Christianize the country and some Catholics lobbied for state funding for parochial schools, he produced a landmark statement reaffirming the separation of church and state.
The occasion was a trip in September 1875 to Des Moines, Iowa, where he held an afternoon meeting at Moore’s Opera House, greeting 2,500 children who had been cautioned that the visiting president “was a man of deeds not words.”73 The taciturn Grant lived up to his billing, spoke briefly, and spent the rest of the afternoon touring the city with Judge C. C. Cole. As they viewed various schools, they discussed the tremendous strides the nation had made in free public education. The sight of the schoolchildren had stirred some latent impulse in Grant yearning for expression. That evening he was scheduled to address an Army of the Tennessee reunion and asked Cole if they might return to his house early so he could jot down some thoughts for his dinner speech. In only forty minutes, scribbling in pencil, Grant drafted a speech “on the backs of envelopes and the stray scraps of paper at hand in his room.”74 It was a historic plea for public education and the need to save the nation’s classrooms from religious interference.
Grant started out by emphasizing the importance in a republic of a knowledgeable citizenry: “The free school is the promoter of that intelligence which is to preserve us as a free nation.” With an unaccustomed rhetorical flourish, he affirmed that in the near future “the dividing line will not be Mason & Dixons but between patriotism, & intelligence on the one side & superstition, ambition & ignorance on the other.”75 He wound up with an eloquent appeal for separating church and state: “Encourage free schools and resolve that not one dollar of money appropriated to their support no matter how raised, shall be appropriated to the support of any sectarian school . . . Leave the matter of religion to the family circle, the church & the private school support[ed] entirely by private contribution. Keep the c
hurch and state forever separate.”76
Some observers construed the speech as a transparent attack on the Catholic Church and one Catholic periodical said Grant sought to “ostracize” Catholics “socially and disfranchise them politically.”77 Thomas Nast drew a cartoon that showed Grant smoking a cigar as he coolly stepped on the foot of a prelate crossing the church-state divide. Many Catholics supported the speech, however, which proved so popular in Iowa that it revived Republican Party fortunes there. Traveling elsewhere in Iowa, Grant proselytized for a wider agenda to promote public education. When asked about state support for higher education, he endorsed it as long as free, universal education was provided for younger children, elementary schools being the system’s cornerstone. Doubtless with Reconstruction in mind, Grant advanced a broader vision of free education as the most effective means to assimilate immigrant masses and heal lingering wartime wounds. Students should be taught that “while loving the home State, they should love the country more. Hard sectional feelings should give way to brotherly love for the whole American family.”78
In his annual message to Congress that December, Grant embroidered this theme of the need for mass public education to resist “tyranny and oppression . . . whether directed by the demagogue or by priestcraft.”79 Educating the citizenry, he asserted, was the optimal way to protect democratic institutions. Making a dramatic leap, he advocated a constitutional amendment that would require each state “to establish and forever maintain free public schools adequate to the education of all the children . . . irrespective of sex, color, birthplace, or religions; forbidding the teaching in said schools of religious, atheistic, or pagan tenets; and prohibiting the granting of any school-funds, or school-taxes . . . in aid . . . of any religious sect or denomination.”80 Grant worded his message to remove any suspicion that he spoke for a particular religious denomination. Also buried in his statement was a courageous, farsighted plea for free, universal education for black children. The laconic Grant’s crusade for public education was a unique event in his presidency, the result of a riveting speech that had forced an issue on the national consciousness through powerful oratory.
