by Ron Chernow
When Democrats gathered in St. Louis in late June, they nominated for president Samuel J. Tilden, the New York governor and well-to-do lawyer, after two ballots. Having taken on Tammany Hall and the corrupt Tweed Ring, Tilden, like Hayes, laid claim to good-government credentials. Imitating Hayes, he also endorsed a one-term limit for presidents. Predictably for a Democratic candidate, he opposed Reconstruction and excoriated “the rapacity of carpetbag tyrannies.”43 With all but three southern states now back in the Democratic Party fold, it appeared that a political backlash of monumental proportions had taken hold against Reconstruction. Sensing an abandonment of Reconstruction, Frederick Douglass wondered what good abolition had been for the black man if “having been freed from the slaveholder’s lash, he is to be subject to the slaveholder’s shotgun?”44
Grant’s last year in office was supposed to be a festive season for America, marking the nation’s centennial. In 1873 he had announced that an international exhibit, the first such fair in American history, would open in Fairmount Park in Philadelphia in spring 1876. A convinced believer in American progress, Grant had caught the spirit of the age and wished to celebrate American economic gains and the advance of republican government across the globe. The exposition, he hoped, would showcase “our own and foreign skill and progress in manufactures, agriculture, art, science, and civilization.”45
On May 10, 1876, with a crowd of 186,672 on hand, Grant opened the fair, flanked by the emperor and empress of Brazil. Following the “Centennial Inauguration March,” composed by Richard Wagner, and a hymn by John Greenleaf Whittier, the president reviewed a century of development in which forests had been cleared and prairies subdued to make way for advancing settlement. He paid tribute to American industry and fine arts. Most important, he contended the United States now rivaled “older and more advanced nations in law, medicine and theology—in science, literature, philosophy, and the fine arts.”46 So softly did Grant mouth his speech that a frustrated reporter, stationed a mere twenty feet away, “could not catch a single word.” Nevertheless, when Grant pronounced the exhibition open, his words set loose a burst of pandemonium: “A flag ran up the staff on the main building, the chimes began, the cannon boomed from George’s Hill, and the orchestra and chorus pealed forth the majestic Hallelujah Chorus.”47
Grant escorted his Brazilian visitors to Machinery Hall, where they set in motion the huge Corliss engine, the showpiece of the fair. Grant was annoyed that the emperor kept pausing to chat with mechanics, while Julia nursed her own grievances against the empress, who participated in starting up the engine. “I, too, was there on the platform with the President, the Emperor and Empress. I, the wife of the President of the United States—I, the wife of General Grant—was there and was not invited to assist at this little ceremony.”48 Julia Grant’s pique and acute sense of entitlement show how accustomed she had grown to deference in the White House.
The exhibition advertised the technological prowess that had powered American progress and featured every mechanical marvel from Alexander Graham Bell’s telephone to Remington’s “Typographic Machine.” George Washington’s dentures and Ben Franklin’s hand press were on display. Visitors could also inspect the right arm and torch of the Statue of Liberty before they were whisked off to New York Harbor for assembly into the completed monument. But tributes to America’s startling ascent from frontier society to burgeoning industrial power had to contend with Indian troubles brewing on the western plains that belied this triumphant narrative.
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THE PROBLEM CENTERED on the Black Hills in present-day South Dakota, where the Oglala Sioux and other tribal bands had been guaranteed a huge reservation under the 1868 Treaty of Fort Laramie. Serving as a site for many martial and religious rituals, the Black Hills occupied a special niche in the Sioux spiritual world. Despite Grant’s pacific intentions, the leading enforcer of his Indian policy was Phil Sheridan, who considered Indian culture barbaric. Sherman’s attitude was no less punitive. “Sooner or later these Sioux have to be wiped out,” he observed, “or made to stay just where they are put.”49 In 1874, reacting to rumors of abundant gold seeded in the Black Hills, Sheridan sent George Armstrong Custer and his Seventh Cavalry to hunt it out. Custer led a column of a thousand men, armed with cannon and Gatling guns, to verify that gold existed. Predictions that the vein embedded there rivaled California’s triggered a mad scramble of miners who wished to exploit it. Although Grant took steps to intercept the sudden onslaught of money-mad settlers, pleading with them to stay away, some commanders grew lackadaisical and allowed the prospectors to encroach on sacred Sioux turf. The magnetic tug of instant riches was irresistible in a country still mired in depression.
Even as this standoff simmered, Grant traveled to Indian Territory in October, becoming the first president to do so and praising efforts by four tribes to cultivate ranching and lead a more settled life. Though wanting to enforce the Treaty of Fort Laramie and safeguard the Sioux, he recognized that the army couldn’t hold back rapacious miners. To resolve the impasse, he offered the Sioux $6 million if they ceded the Black Hills to the federal government. There lay some practical wisdom behind Grant’s offer, but one can easily imagine the chiefs’ horror at auctioning off their sacred lands.
In early 1875, Grant sent an expert geologist to the region to validate that it contained gold. If it were found in large quantities, Secretary of the Interior Delano informed Grant, his department would “protect the rights of the Indians as guaranteed to them by the treaty of 1868.” But he also intended “to use every effort possible to extinguish the Indian title to the Black Hills country, and open the same to settlement and explorations for mineral wealth at the earliest day practicable.”50 Thus, the Grant administration pursued two contradictory missions: to protect Sioux treaty rights and to pave the way for the inexorable invasion of predatory miners. In case the Sioux didn’t get the message, Sheridan prepared to establish a military post in the Black Hills, perched on the western edge of their reservation.
On May 26, 1875, Grant met Sioux leaders at the White House and entreated them to relocate farther south where, he claimed, the climate was better, the grass richer, the buffalo more abundant. He explained the extreme difficulty of interdicting white settlers, predicting the problem would only intensify and spur violent clashes. Under the Sioux treaty, the federal government had promised supplies, but, Grant warned, in the event of fighting, he would be forced to withhold them. “My interest is in seeing you protected,” he continued, “while I have the power to make treaties with you which shall protect you.” But the Sioux must “settle the question of the limits of your hunting grounds, and make preliminary arrangements to allow white persons to go into the Black Hills.”51 Federal payments for the Black Hills would take the form of government bonds, with semiannual interest applied to benefit the Sioux. Despite Grant’s evident concern for their welfare, he was offering them a suicide pact for their culture, urging that he wanted to see their “children attending schools” and future generations “speaking English and preparing [themselves] for the life of white men.”52
While Grant dealt with the nascent Sioux crisis, he received an explosive letter from Professor Othniel Marsh of Yale College, outlining pervasive corruption at the Red Cloud Agency that furnished Sioux supplies in northwest Nebraska, near the Black Hills. Marsh laid out a lurid tale of putrid pork, inferior flour, rotten tobacco, and other shoddy goods foisted upon the tribe. He stated categorically that the interior secretary and commissioner of Indian affairs worked not to correct fraud, but to suppress knowledge of it. Marsh directly challenged Grant: “You alone have the will and the power to destroy that combination of bad men, known as the Indian Ring, who are debasing this service, and thwarting the efforts of all who endeavor to bring to a full consummation your noble policy of peace.”53 Grant assured Marsh of his “earnest desire for an honest administration in every department of the Government, and willingness to ferr
et out and punish fraud wherever found.”54 That same day, he told Secretary of the Interior Delano that the agent at the Red Cloud Agency was “wholly incompetent” and “easily led without his knowledge to work the designs of bad and unscrupulous men.”55 Not standing on ceremony, Grant also directed Delano’s attention to serious accusations against him.
Perhaps stung by criticism of the ethical shortcomings of his administration, Grant convened a commission to travel to Nebraska to study the Red Cloud Agency, one that included waspish critics of Delano. Clearly Grant meant business. Remarkably, he met with Marsh—a gadfly who had publicly chastised Indian policy—three times, giving him a warm reception in contrast to his frigid treatment at Interior. Grant accepted Delano’s resignation, replacing him with the former Michigan senator Zachariah Chandler, a bluff, amiable man and a robust fund-raiser for the Republican Party. Since he had criticized civil service reform, his selection disappointed journalists seeking a purge of the scandal-ridden Interior Department.
When the commissioners arrived in Nebraska to confer with Sioux chiefs, their spokesman proceeded to tell them that Grant—“the Great Father in Washington”—had sent them to uncover wrongdoing: “If the agent or any of the contractors who have been employed by our Government to furnish you goods and supplies have cheated you, we want to find that out.”56 Red Cloud responded that he didn’t want army officers acting as Indian agents. Then he turned to the momentous issue that overshadowed corruption. Facing the Black Hills, he said, “The people from the States who have gone to the Black Hills are stealing gold, digging it out and taking it away, and I don’t see why the Great Father don’t bring them back.”57
In early November, a pastoral delegation met with Grant and expressed concern that he had renounced his Indian Peace Policy. Far from it, Grant insisted, he hoped “it would become so firmly established as to be the necessary policy of his successors.”58 After meeting with another critic, George H. Stuart, who had resigned from the Board of Indian Commissioners, Grant received a congratulatory letter from him, applauding how he had banished crooked Indian agents and installed “vastly superior” men who were “as faithful and honest as any class of men in the government Service.”59 Stuart foresaw a vindication of Grant’s Indian policy: “The policy is doing what was never before really attempted,—it is teaching the Indians civilization and Christianity,—giving them books, schools, Homes and Churches, and the result . . . will be in a few years the settlement of the Indian question, and they will be as the colored people now largely are, able to take care of themselves.”60 Such euphoria would prove woefully shortsighted.
On November 3, 1875, Grant presided over a confidential White House meeting that soon left his Peace Policy in ruins. At a parley with Sheridan, Belknap, Chandler, and Brigadier General George Crook, Grant concluded they could no longer resist the wave of miners washing over the Black Hills. While he didn’t rescind the order keeping them from the area, he indicated it should no longer be rigidly enforced since opposing the miners “only increased their desire and complicated the troubles.”61 Relaxing the order would open the floodgates of settlement and menace the Sioux. Still more threatening to them was the decision to force Sitting Bull—a brave warrior and holy man with an almost mystical following, who had opposed the sale of the Black Hills—and his band of Sioux outside the reservation to relocate on agency land by the tight deadline of January 31, 1876. If they failed to do so, Grant would send a military force to ensure their compliance. When Sitting Bull flouted this unrealistic timetable, Chandler told Belknap that the Indians in question had been turned over to his War Department. After Belknap notified Sheridan to take action, Brigadier General Alfred H. Terry formed three columns to march against Sitting Bull and his quietly charismatic ally Crazy Horse.
Part of that force was to include George Armstrong Custer, a West Point graduate who had stood out during the Civil War as an intrepid cavalry officer. Feared by his men, Custer was also admired for his flair and flamboyant audacity. He struck colorful poses in combat, his fringed buckskin suits and blond hair flowing in the breeze as he led charges. His ferocity won Phil Sheridan’s admiration, although Grant took a much more nuanced view, praising his “personal gallantry and valor” while condemning him as “not a very level-headed man.”62 Custer—vain, headstrong, narcissistic—was the very antithesis of Grant. A Democrat who had idolized George McClellan, he had often been insubordinate, intrigued against superiors, lobbied for his personal advancement, and gambled and womanized. He had also supported Andrew Johnson, opposed Grant for president, and worked against Reconstruction. So it came as no surprise that when Grant lauded Custer, he quoted Sheridan’s opinion, not his own. As he wrote in 1866, there was no cavalry officer in whom Sheridan lodged greater confidence and no officer in whose “judgment I have greater faith than in Sheridan’s.”63
Not long after the war, Grant received reports of Custer’s cruelty toward his men, one charging that Custer habitually inflicted “the most brutal & unusual punishments . . . for trifling offenses.”64 In 1867 Custer underwent a court-martial for ordering deserters to be shot and Grant seemed to consider him guilty.65 The following year, Custer and his cavalry obliterated an Indian village on the Washita River, wantonly murdering more than a hundred Southern Cheyenne, including women and children. In late March 1876, Custer testified before Representative Hiester Clymer’s committee on War Department expenditures and accused Belknap of corruption. Recklessly self-promoting, he insinuated that Grant had tampered with the Sioux reservation boundary to assist the corrupt practices of Belknap and Delano. Angered by these groundless accusations, Grant instructed Sherman and Sheridan that he didn’t want Custer to supervise one of the columns in the impending campaign against Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse.
Eager to be part of the expedition, Custer worked to rally public opinion in his favor. Tamping down his pride, he went to the White House on May 1 to seek an interview with Grant and cooled his heels for five hours. According to one press account, Custer “sat in the waiting room unsent for until the President’s calling hour was over, although he repeatedly sent in his card.”66 When Grant at last sent out a message that he couldn’t see him, Custer stormed out in disgust. “Custer is trying to brow-beat the President,” Belknap wrote. “He may succeed.”67 Press reports intimated that Sherman had pleaded with Grant that Custer was the best man to lead the Sioux campaign, but Grant replied that Custer had tried “to besmirch his administration, and he proposed to put a stop to it.”68
Custer feared he would lose face with his regiment if he were sidelined during the Sioux campaign, and he begged Grant to spare him the “humiliation of seeing my regiment march to meet the enemy, and I not to share its dangers.”69 Phil Sheridan took his side. In the end, Grant wouldn’t overrule Sheridan and on May 8 decided to allow Custer to join the expedition, leading his regiment in Brigadier General Alfred Terry’s column. “Advise Custer to be prudent, not to take along any newspaper men who always work mischief, and to abstain from any personalities in the future,” Sherman told Terry.70
The Sioux had acquired the reputation, Sherman said, of being “the most brave and warlike Savages of this Continent.”71 By late May, Phil Sheridan confessed that his two department commanders, Generals Crook and Terry, hadn’t the foggiest idea where Sitting Bull and his Sioux warriors had fled. Sheridan took refuge in the illusion that a large body of hostile Indians couldn’t remain cohesive for long and even imagined that the approach of three columns would herd them back onto the reservation. Shattering such naive expectations on June 17, Crazy Horse led a band of warriors against the thousand-man column under General Crook, dealing them a bloody setback and driving them rearward to their base camp. As Custer drifted westward toward his doom, he knew nothing of this stunning defeat.
As the nation got ready to solemnize its centennial on July 4, reports filtered back that Custer and 263 of his men in the Seventh Cavalry had been annihilated by Lakota Si
oux and Northern Cheyenne warriors along the Little Bighorn River in southern Montana, their mutilated bodies strewn among the hills. Custer was found naked, a bullet hole in his head, a gash in his thigh, an arrow piercing his penis. Supposed to be marching toward a rendezvous with Generals Terry and John Gibbon, he had arrived too soon, failed to wait for other troops, and confronted alone an enormous Indian force favored with overpowering numbers. “I deeply deplore the loss of Custer and his men,” Sheridan wrote. “I feel it was an unnecessary sacrifice, due to misapprehension and a superabundance of courage—the latter extraordinarily developed in Custer.”72
People could scarcely fathom the shocking news and Custer soon acquired an aura of martyrdom. Some speculated that, unhinged by his feud with Grant, he had acted rashly to show his bravery. Grant refused to accept that. In a newspaper interview, he placed blame for the disaster squarely on Custer’s shoulders:
I regard Custer’s massacre as a sacrifice of troops, brought on by Custer himself, that was wholly unnecessary . . . He was not to have made the attack before effecting the junction with Terry and Gibbon. He was notified to meet them on the 26th, but instead of marching slowly, as his orders required in order to effect the junction on the 26th, he enters upon a forced march of eighty-three miles in twenty-four hours, and thus has to meet the Indians alone on the 25th . . . General Crook is the best, wiliest Indian fighter in this country. He has had vast experience in Indian fighting . . . He is as wily as Sitting Bull in this respect, that when he finds himself outnumbered and taken at a disadvantage he prudently retreats. In Custer’s case Sitting Bull had ten men to every one of Custer.73
