by Ron Chernow
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EVEN AS GRANT’S ENTOURAGE rolled through western states, violence against Republicans flared up again in the Deep South. The target of terror continued to be black citizens who had the temerity to exercise their voting rights. On September 4, Mississippi Republicans threw an alfresco barbecue in Clinton, west of Jackson, scheduled to rally voters in upcoming elections. Intruders from a White Line rifle club showed up to harass them, murdered a black citizen, then opened fire on other blacks, who quickly grabbed pistols and returned fire. The gunfight left seven or eight blacks sprawled dead in the dust, with three white men killed in retaliation. William H. Harney, sheriff of Hinds County, reported to Governor Adelbert Ames that the incident stemmed from squads of white men bushwhacking through the countryside, “murdering and driving the colored people from their homes . . . The colored people are unarmed and defenseless . . . I appeal to your excellency . . . to stop this slaughter of an innocent and defenseless people.”81 Local law enforcement seemed powerless to curb the cresting wave of white violence.
On September 7, Ames pleaded with Grant for federal help, noting that illegal bands of armed white men were sowing terror in several counties and boldly defying sheriffs. Grant acted decisively to stanch the violence, telling his adjutant general, “You may instruct commanding officer of troops in Mississippi that he may assist the governor in maintaining order and preserving life in case of insurrection too formidable for him to suppress.”82 Then, on vacation in Long Branch, Grant began to dither in an uncharacteristic fashion. In the altered political climate, with northern support for Reconstruction waning, he agonized over the legality of intervention and sought the opinion of his conservative attorney general, Edwards Pierrepont, who urged inaction, unfurling the banner of states’ rights. Meanwhile, Mississippi Democrats blandly assured Washington of the absence of any violence. “There are no disturbances in this State,” the Democratic Executive Committee told Pierrepont, “and no obstructions to the execution of the laws.”83
Pierrepont believed the federal government should act only if state forces failed to quell the bloodshed. On September 11, he sent Grant a soothing message that state authorities had “no difficulty in putting down the riot, and that the sending of Federal troops would do great mischief. I am satisfied that the war is over.”84 This was an extreme case of Panglossian thinking. When Pierrepont inquired of Ames if an uncontrollable insurrection existed, he confirmed that was the case. Ames knew a pivotal moment had arrived and that northern opinion had given up on protecting freed people. Sticking to his convictions, he made a forthright political stand: “I am aware of the reluctance of the people of the country to national interference in State affairs . . . Permit me to express the hope that the odium of such interference shall not attach to President Grant or the Republican Party . . . Let the odium, in all its magnitude, descend upon me. I cannot escape the conscious discharge of my duty toward a class of American citizens whose only offense consists in their color.”85
On September 13, Grant composed a long, handwritten letter to his attorney general. He had to decide whether to issue a proclamation and send troops to Mississippi. He seemed poised on a knife edge, torn between popular revulsion against Reconstruction and his fervent wish to aid threatened blacks. He admitted to being “perplexed” as to the ideal course of action. “The whole public are tired out with these annual, autumnal outbreaks in the South, and . . . the great majority are ready now to condemn any interference on the part of the government.”86 But having noted that he didn’t intercede lightly in southern affairs, he came down forthrightly for intervention. “I do not see how we are to evade the call of the governor, if made strictly within the Constitution.”87 Grant showed a painstaking concern for the constitutional propriety of such a move. At the same time, to mollify critics, he encouraged Ames to exhaust all state resources before receiving federal help. Whatever his misgivings, Grant wanted to rescue Ames and the black people of Mississippi even if it meant defying his attorney general. He was fully prepared to risk the political backlash against Reconstruction.
His letter written, Grant departed for a veterans’ reunion in Utica, New York, leaving the matter to Pierrepont, who sent Ames a message that substituted his own conservative judgment for the president’s, while pretending he and Grant acted in unison. He struck out a line saying that Grant had agreed to an intervention proclamation. Instead he chastised the Mississippi governor for not having proven the existence of an insurrection—the legal requirement for sending troops—or taken sufficient steps to stop the violence on his own, a rebuke that left Ames feeling “disgusted” and “quite exasperated.”88 The letter concluded that “if there is such a resistance to your State authorities as you cannot, by all the means at your command, suppress, the President will swiftly aid you in crushing these lawless traitors to human rights.”89 Two days later, Pierrepont advised Grant that the federal government should back off. “No proclamation needed,” he counseled.90 Grant approved the suggestion, which he would regret as the single greatest error he made during Reconstruction. He shortly departed on his western trip, leaving Pierrepont in charge. One wonders whether, had he stayed in Washington, the Mississippi crisis might have unfolded differently.
Although Ames decided to raise a volunteer company of black and white militia, White Liners decided to scare blacks from the polls and install a Democratic government through naked terror if necessary. The black community in Vicksburg conjured up their lawless methods in a letter to the governor: “They are going around the streets at night dressed in soldiers clothes and making colored people run for their lives. They are drilling every night with the wharf boat guns. They have got 2 or 3 thousand stand of arms here in this city. They say they will either carry this election by ballot or bullet.”91 Ames surmised that Democrats and their White Line allies would temporarily lay low to forestall any proclamation from the president. “It is believed that white-liners will delay violence till one or two days before election,” he apprised Grant.92
The White Liners didn’t bother with any such pretense of civility or restraint. On October 7, John Milton Brown, the sheriff of Coahoma County, reported a “perfect state of terror” had seized his jurisdiction. “I have been driven from my county by an armed force. I am utterly powerless to enforce law or to restore order.”93 Disheartened by Grant’s refusal to rush troops to Mississippi, Ames sat brooding and besieged in the governor’s mansion in Jackson. He concluded that Reconstruction was a dead letter, white supremacists in his state having engineered a coup d’état. “Yes, a revolution has taken place—by force of arms—and a race are disfranchised—they are to be returned to a condition of serfdom—an era of second slavery,” he lamented to his wife.94 Sarcastically referring to Grant’s and Pierrepont’s words, he wrote, “The political death of the Negro will forever release the nation . . . from such ‘political outbreaks.’ You may think I exaggerate. Time will show you how accurate my statements are.”95 To head off threatened impeachment, he decided to resign after the election. His darkly prophetic letter previewed the nearly century-long Jim Crow system that would cast blacks back into a state of involuntary servitude to southern whites.
Ames worked hard to effect a truce between white Democrats and white and black Republicans in his state and even offered to strip black militia of their weaponry if Democrats respected black voting rights in the November elections. Attorney General Pierrepont dispatched to Mississippi George K. Chase, who moved into the governor’s mansion to arbitrate the bloody dispute. On October 16, Ames thanked Pierrepont for this timely assistance, saying that Chase “has succeeded in inspiring us all with confidence, and . . . by his wisdom and tact has saved the state from a catastrophe of blood”—news that drew relieved sighs from Grant and his cabinet.96 But Chase was hornswoggled by southern Democrats—White Liners had cynically suspended violence during Ames’s peace conference—and he was frank enough to admit it. On October 27, he alerted Pierrepont t
hat it would be “impossible to have a fair election on November 2nd” without the aid of U.S. troops.97
Grant and Pierrepont, having fatally wavered, had failed to quash the campaign of intimidation that left black and white Republicans cowering across Mississippi. With Chase’s blunt warning in hand, Grant and Pierrepont now belatedly sent troops to Mississippi to ensure fair elections, holding them ready for swift deployment in the event of Election Day disorder. Far from being uplifted by this news, Ames dismissed it as too little too late. “The election ceases to have any interest for us,” he told his wife. “It is lost. Gone forever. The republican candidate for the presidency next year may want this state, but he as well might want the moon for a toy.”98 The violence on Election Day vindicated Ames’s dire scenario. As he informed his wife: “The reports which come to me almost hourly are truly sickening. Violence, threats of murder, and consequent intimidation are co-extensive with the limits of the state. Republican leaders in many localities are hiding in the swamps or have sought refuge beyond the borders of their own counties. The government of the U.S. does not interfere, and will not, unless to prevent actual bloodshed.”99 Democrats emerged triumphant in the state, boasting that they had rooted out malfeasance and bad government. Even Hiram R. Revels, the first black U.S. senator from Mississippi, applauded the outcome as a victory over “corruption, theft, and embezzlement,” and he wasn’t the only black official who complained that Ames had surrounded himself with mercenary officials.100
Still, there was little doubt that the Democrats had won by crushing black turnout. In Yazoo County, only seven Republican votes were cast in a black population that exceeded twelve thousand. Ames saw the election as a referendum on race, pure and simple: “In one phrase—hostility to the negro as a citizen. The South cares for no other question. Everything gives way to it. They support or oppose men, advocate or denounce policies, flatter or murder, just as such action will help them as far as possible to recover their old power over the negro.”101 He scoffed at Grant’s hollow promise to send troops as “a sham and the election a fraud.”102 The election had mocked the U.S. Constitution and guaranteed a prolonged night of terror for freed people. When a Senate committee investigated the election, it decided it had been won “by the Democrats by a preconceived plan of riots and assassinations,” in the words of Senator George Boutwell.103
Why had Grant retreated so shamefully from Reconstruction in the final stages of his administration? Again and again, he had declared southern counties in a state of insurrection and sent federal troops to protect black citizens. His actions had been courageous, exemplary. The solution to this mystery came years later from John Roy Lynch, the sole black Mississippi congressman to survive the Democratic onslaught in the state. A rousing orator, the biracial Lynch was the son of a white plantation master and an enslaved woman. Almost forty years afterward, living in Chicago, he told of a talk at the White House in November 1875. When he asked Grant why he had refused action in Mississippi, he had replied that as soon as Ames’s plea for succor came in early September, he had prepared to issue a proclamation for action in Mississippi—something confirmed by Grant’s own papers. Before signing it, however, he conferred with Ohio Republicans who warned that if Grant intervened in Mississippi, Republicans would lose Ohio elections on October 13, the state having already lost faith in Reconstruction. Grant decided it was more important to retain Ohio than save Mississippi. Republicans won the Ohio elections, returning Rutherford B. Hayes to the governorship and setting the stage for the next president. “I should not have yielded,” Grant told Lynch. “I believed at the time I was making a grave mistake. But as presented, it was duty on one side, and party obligation on the other. Between the two I hesitated, but finally yielded to what I believed was my party obligation. If a mistake was made, it was one of the head and not of the heart.”104
Grant’s personal tragedy was simultaneously an American tragedy. Tormented by his decision, steeped in a meditative mood, Grant reflected on the deep changes wrought in northern Republican circles. He predicted to John Roy Lynch that the northern retreat from Reconstruction would lead to Democrats recapturing power in the South as well as “future mischief of a very serious nature . . . It requires no prophet to foresee that the national government will soon be at a great disadvantage and that the results of the war of the rebellion will have been in a large measure lost . . . What you have just passed through in the state of Mississippi is only the beginning of what is sure to follow. I do not wish to create unnecessary alarm, nor to be looked upon as a prophet of evil, but it is impossible for me to close my eyes in the face of things that are as plain to me as the noonday sun.”105 This wasn’t a minor statement: the victorious Union general of the Civil War was saying that terror tactics perpetrated by southern whites had nullified the outcome of the rebellion. All those hundreds of thousands dead, the millions maimed and wounded, the mourning of widows and orphans—all that suffering, all that tumult, on some level, had been for naught. Slavery had been abolished, but it had been replaced by a caste-ridden form of second-class citizenship for southern blacks, and that counted as a national shame.
CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT
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Saddest of the Falls
THE LAST THING Grant needed after the Whiskey Ring scandal was more cabinet wrongdoing, but the bloodletting had not yet ceased. The tenure of Secretary of the Interior Columbus Delano had been shadowed by controversy. His department was rife with fraud, suffering from accusations of an “Indian Ring” of corrupt agents who exploited Native Americans. To worsen matters, his son was accused of blackmail and corruption in the Wyoming Territory. As charges against Delano mounted, Grant resisted pleas to sack him. “If Delano were now to resign,” he told Fish, “it would be retreating under fire and be accepted as an admission of the charges.”1 Bristow was especially upset that Grant failed to clean house and force Delano’s resignation.
Before long congressional scrutiny turned to Orvil Grant, who had received four profitable Indian trading posts at a time when such trading licenses were virtual presses to print money. The New York Times conjectured that for two years not “a single important tradership had been secured without the payment of large sums.”2 In July 1875, press speculation suggested that Delano was privy to misdeeds involving Orvil. One newspaper presumed to know that at a heated Long Branch session between Grant and Delano, the interior secretary had “made threats of exposure concerning privileges granted Orville [sic] Grant, a brother of the President, if his [own] resignation was enforced, but gave assurances that if not molested until after the Indian frauds investigation had been concluded, he would quietly step down and out.”3
The scandal around Indian trading posts edged closer to Grant in February 1876 when the New York Herald charged Orvil with taking kickbacks from a sutler. “Let the President send for his own brother,” the paper intoned, “and question him about the money that was made in the Sioux country by starving the squaws and children.”4 Summoned by a House committee delving into War Department expenditures, Orvil testified that he had told his brother of his desire to secure Indian trading posts in 1874 and had gotten one at Fort Peck and a second at Standing Rock: “I suppose I feel grateful to my brother, and indebted to him for getting that post at Standing Rock.” The interrogator pressed him: “You consider, then, that you do have influence with the President to manage these matters to some extent?” “To some extent I have,” replied Orvil breezily, “though I am sorry to say they are of very little profit to me.”5 In fact, Grant had told Orvil about four trading posts that would soon be vacated; Orvil had applied for and received all four, installing “partners” who shared half the proceeds with him without a shred of work on Orvil’s part.
Orvil’s testimony vastly embarrassed his brother, though he admitted that the president was ignorant that he had skimmed money from these transactions. A cheerfully amoral man, Orvil betrayed not one scintilla of remorse about his misdeeds.
What nobody knew—except possibly his brother—was that Orvil was slipping into madness. Its main symptom would be a manic appetite for speculation that veered off into extravagant fantasies about cornering markets and gobbling up businesses. That Orvil was such an affable witness, seemingly unaware of the harm he caused his brother, suggests the madness had already taken root. The press had a field day with his rambling ruminations. The Nation commented that he “told his own story of his jobs as an Indian trader in a simple, artless way that would be diverting if it were not for the picture it presents of the views entertained by the Presidential family on ‘the science of politics.’”6 Nor was the president spared journalistic venom. “Under an honest and high-toned civil service,” the New York Tribune lectured, “the President would consider it his first duty . . . to see that traders at Indian posts are responsible men, and that their trade is regulated for the best interests of the Indians.”7 In fact, starting with Ely Parker and the Quakers, Grant had worked long and hard to ban corruption on the reservations.
The last cabinet secretary enveloped by scandal was Secretary of War William W. Belknap, who had shown little sympathy for Reconstruction or Grant’s Peace Policy toward the Indians. From his earliest days as war secretary, Belknap had entertained sumptuously at his Lafayette Square home with his second wife, Carrie, a beautiful Kentucky belle, who captivated guests. When Mrs. Belknap exhibited a conspicuous taste for luxury, it seemed mysterious to Washington observers how she managed it. It turned out she had helped businessman Caleb P. Marsh to obtain a trading post at Fort Sill in Indian Territory that was currently held by a John S. Evans. To keep his lucrative position, Evans agreed to make quarterly payments to Marsh and Mrs. Belknap, who split a $12,000 annual kickback. When Carrie Belknap died of tuberculosis in December 1870, her husband went on pocketing the extorted money, feigning ignorance of its source. In December 1873, he married his sister-in-law Amanda, nicknamed “Puss” and famous for her gowns and costly jewels. The war secretary still banked the illegal payments made to the previous Mrs. Belknap, albeit now at a reduced rate. In time the new Mrs. Belknap became a recipient of this satisfying flow of largesse. In all, the Belknap household received $20,000 from Evans, the equivalent of two and a half years’ salary for the war secretary, another example of Gilded Age gluttony in Washington.
