by Ron Chernow
Whoever was to blame for the Little Bighorn calamity, the national response was a ferocious outcry for Indian blood, bordering on the genocidal. E. L. Godkin of The Nation, who had embraced Grant’s Peace Policy, reflected the altered sentiment: “Our philanthropy and our hostility tend to about the same end, and this is the destruction of the Indian race.”74
By July 8, as he consulted at the White House with his military advisers, Grant rushed to shore up forces in the West while outraged Americans volunteered for service. “We must not have another massacre like Custer’s and Congress is now in Session willing to give us all we want,” Sherman advised Sheridan.75 On August 11, Grant asked Congress to expand the cavalry by 2,500 men and requested authority to call up five more regiments to deal with the emergency created by the massacre. In the wake of the disaster, Grant was less reticent in talking about the gold found in the Black Hills. That August former governor Newton Edmunds of Dakota Territory brought gold samples to the White House. “When the mines shall have been thoroughly explored,” Grant predicted, “as much gold will be found there as in California.”76 Such remarks guaranteed a stampede of prospectors to the area. At the same time, Grant recommended that people “stay away until the present troubles are over and until we have extinguished the titles of the Indians to the lands which they sold by treaty.”77 That December, the federal government took legal possession of the Black Hills.
There was something profoundly contradictory about Grant’s attitude toward the whole situation. In addressing Congress in December, he placed ultimate blame for what had happened to the Sioux on the white men: “Hostilities there have grown out of the avarice of the white man who has violated our treaty stipulation in his search for gold.”78 All along he had ardently desired to bring justice to Native Americans. This raised questions of why Grant had caved in to greedy miners. To answer this, he invoked force majeure, saying that “rumors of rich discoveries of gold” had drawn miners to the region and any effort to remove them would have led to desertion by the bulk of troops sent there.79 In other words, U.S. troops would have refused to thwart the miners, even under direct orders from the president. Thus Ulysses S. Grant, an advocate of a Peace Policy toward the Indians, found himself, willy-nilly, on the side of those raping their lands and violating a sacred treaty commitment. In the last analysis, Grant had to favor the American electorate and sacrifice the Sioux. It was a terribly ironic coda to a policy premised upon humane treatment of Native Americans. The outcome was fine as far as Phil Sheridan was concerned. “This was the country of the buffalo and the hostile Sioux only last year,” he wrote in 1877. “There are no signs of either now, but in their places we found prospectors, emigrants, and farmers.”80 Quite a different verdict was rendered by the U.S. Court of Claims in 1979. Reviewing the federal government’s dealings with the Sioux, the court said of the Black Hills episode that “a more ripe and rank case of dishonorable dealing will never, in all probability, be found in our history.”81
Lost amid recriminations over Little Bighorn was that on June 9 Grant had made amends to another oppressed group, attending the dedication of Adas Israel synagogue in Washington, home to an orthodox Jewish congregation. It was the first time an American president ever attended a synagogue consecration and yet another instance of Grant atoning for General Orders No. 11, his infamous wartime edict. A synagogue dedication was a small-time affair, yet Grant brought a distinguished retinue to the neat brick building, including his son Buck, Senator Thomas Ferry of Michigan, the Methodist minister John P. Newman, and the lawyer Simon Wolf, all of whom were seated on sofas near the podium. (Because Vice President Henry Wilson had died on November 22, 1875, Ferry, who was president pro tempore of the Senate, would succeed Grant if he did not finish his term.) The American flag was draped on both sides of the Torah ark and the narrow, gaslit room was fragrant with bouquets.
Officiating was the Philadelphia rabbi George Jacobs, clad in black robe and cap. Since the prayers were in Hebrew, Grant sat through long portions chanted in a foreign tongue. With political tact, Jacobs offered a prayer to the president of the United States along with senators and representatives. He and the scroll bearers then circled seven times around the sanctuary as prescribed by ancient ritual. Jacobs delivered a sermon in English about the patriarch Jacob, who beheld in a dream a mystical ladder upon which angels went up and down. For three straight hours, Grant sat in the modest room, his hat on in homage to Jewish custom, as humble as a penitent in sackcloth. In a mark of respect, he never spoke. Congregation elders made clear that he need not feel obliged to sit through the entire ceremony, but he made a point of staying to the end. At the close, when he made a $10 donation, the congregation extended “heartfelt thanks” for his unusual presence and generous gift.82 Grant’s attendance at the dedication crowned the special solicitude he had shown for the Jewish community throughout his presidency. As Simon Wolf wrote during Woodrow Wilson’s tenure, “President Grant did more on behalf of American citizens of Jewish faith at home and abroad than all the Presidents of the United States prior thereto or since.”83
CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE
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Redeemers
FOR THE MOST PART, Grant sat out the 1876 presidential contest, while his cabinet was far more actively engaged. Secretary of the Interior Chandler managed the campaign of Rutherford B. Hayes and chaired the Republican National Committee, while others pitched in with supporting speeches. With extreme trepidation Grant monitored a race that threatened to reverse gains made by the Republican Party and black voters across the South. In August, John Roy Lynch, the black Mississippi congressman, saw that the Democratic revival overtaking the South would make the electoral math very difficult for Hayes: “Every Southern state [the Democrats] propose to carry as they carried Mississippi last year . . . not by the power of the ballot, but by an organized system of terrorism and violence.”1
However aloof he was from campaigning, Grant remained committed to the safety of black voters. While staying at the Pennsylvania home of William W. Smith in late September, members of a “colored men’s marching club” came to serenade him.2 Grant expressed pleasure that blacks had been so faithful to the Union and reiterated his belief that voting remained the cardinal right in a democracy. As reported in the Pittsburgh Telegraph, Grant said that “it was his purpose to see that every man of every race and condition should have the privilege of voting his sentiments without violation or intimidation. When this was secured we would then, and only then, deserve to be called a free Republic.”3 Having long shied away from speeches, Grant, as a lame-duck president, seemed much more open and quicker to spout fundamental beliefs.
In the presidential race, Democrats feasted on the frequent scandals that had plagued Grant’s second term and at times seemed to run against “Grantism” rather than Hayes. Republicans cast Democrats as thinly disguised slaveholders, one prominent Republican thundering: “Every man that loved slavery better than liberty was a Democrat . . . Every man that raised blood-hounds to pursue human beings was a Democrat.”4 Though more sympathetic to white southern concerns than Grant, Hayes nonetheless advised his campaign managers to exploit fears of “rebel rule and a solid South.”5
As rebel banners were waved defiantly across the South, Grant worried that a rejuvenated Democratic Party would demand compensation for freed slaves. He especially dreaded a growing southern canard that the Civil War had been a war of northern aggression, with a moral equivalence drawn between the two sides. As he told a newspaper, he regretted Democratic claims that Confederate soldiers “fought honestly as American citizens for an honest purpose and in as good a spirit as the Northern soldiers who have been pensioned, and that they were provoked and driven into the War by the North.”6 This revisionist thesis was propagated by Lost Cause ideologues, who venerated Lee and depreciated Grant as a butcher who had only defeated his rebel counterpart by dint of superior manpower.
Grant knew that Reconstruction was imp
eriled and that the legal props were being kicked out from under it. In 1876 the Supreme Court handed down two rulings, United States v. Cruikshank and United States v. Reese, that gutted portions of the Enforcement Act of 1870 and narrowed the powers of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments. Grant did what he could to protect southern blacks and their threatened voting rights. When the House of Representatives passed a resolution to strengthen enforcement of the Fifteenth Amendment, he directed Sherman to hold forces ready “for protecting all citizens, without distinction of race, color, or political opinion, in the exercise of the right to vote as guaranteed by the Fifteenth Amendment.”7 But Reconstruction was clearly ebbing, the federal military presence in the South having waned to slightly more than three thousand officers and men.
The need for federal troops hadn’t faded, as evidenced by havoc in Hamburg, South Carolina, on July 4, 1876, the date of America’s centennial. South Carolina was one of three southern states remaining in the Republican column, Florida and Louisiana being the others, and it faced unrelenting pressure from whites to “redeem” their state for the Democrats. At Hamburg, a scuffle arose when two white farmers in a buggy protested that their path was barred by a parade of local black militia; before long, militia leaders were jailed for obstructing a public highway. White vengeance wasn’t yet sated. In the coming days, armed whites from South Carolina and nearby Georgia, including members of rifle clubs and saber companies, gathered in Hamburg to demand that local black militia relinquish their weapons. The latter took refuge in a small brick building used as an armory and a drill room, but the swelling white mob blew out its windows with musket and cannon fire. Believing their assailants would soon blow up the building, blacks leapt from the windows or climbed down an escape ladder only to be gunned down in cold blood. Five men in a row were executed and three more wounded as they attempted to flee. James Cook, the black town marshal, was shot and his skull smashed in with muskets. The Republican governor, Daniel H. Chamberlain, was a lawyer from Massachusetts, a Yale graduate who had been an officer in a black Union regiment during the war. Writing to Secretary of War Cameron, he deplored the Hamburg massacre as a “butchery of unoffending and unarmed colored men by a brutal and bloodthirsty mob of white men.”8 He thought the episode more shocking than the massacre of Custer’s men, who were at least “shot in open battle. The victims at Hamburg were murdered in cold blood after they had surrendered and were utterly defenseless.”9 The homes of nearly every black family in town were pillaged while mutilated bodies of the murdered men broiled in sunlight for days, their families too petrified to retrieve them.
On July 17, the U.S. marshal in Charleston appealed to Attorney General Taft to send federal troops to Hamburg. Without consulting the president, the conservative Taft dismissed the action as unconstitutional. On July 22, Governor Chamberlain wrote directly to Grant, portraying the Hamburg massacre as part of a systematic “campaign of violence and blood” to breed terror among black voters. The murders had bred “a feeling of triumph and political elation . . . in the minds of a considerable part of the white people and Democrats.” The governor asked Grant to exercise federal power vigilantly in the state.10 In an impassioned reply, Grant revealed the depth of his emotional commitment to black security:
The scene at Hamburg, as cruel, bloodthirsty, wanton, unprovoked, and as uncalled for as it was, is only a repetition of the course that has been pursued in other Southern States within the last few years—notably in Mississippi and Louisiana—Mississippi is governed today by officials chosen through fraud and violence, such as would scarcely be accredited to savages, much less to a civilized and christian people—How long these things are to continue, or what is to be the final remedy, the Great Ruler of the Universe only knows . . . There has never been a desire on the part of the North to humiliate the South—nothing is claimed for one State that is not freely accorded to all the others, unless it may be the right to Kill negroes and republicans without fear of punishment, and without loss of caste or reputation.11
Although Grant stopped short of dispatching federal troops, he promised, “I will give every aid for which I can find law, or constitutional power.”12
Historians have criticized Grant for not hastening troops to South Carolina, but in the new, less forgiving political climate, he was obliged to demonstrate that the state governor had done everything in his power to handle the problem alone. That Grant was profoundly disturbed by the killings is unquestionable. Transmitting to the Senate documents about the Hamburg “slaughter”—Grant’s term—he alluded to “murders & massacres” of innocent men in Louisiana as well. “All are familiar with their horrible details, the [only] wonder being that so many justify them or apologize [for] them.”13 Throttled by dwindling Republican support for Reconstruction, Grant compensated by expressing his frustration in white-hot language.
That summer, white Democrats in South Carolina united around the gubernatorial candidacy of Wade Hampton III, a former Confederate cavalry officer, who was aided by paramilitary rifle clubs known as Red Shirts. L. Cass Carpenter, an internal revenue collector in South Carolina, warned Grant in August that Hampton and his followers were plotting to regain control of the state government. When Carpenter attended Republican election meetings, he shuddered at the spectacle of “hundreds of armed, mounted white men, members of rifle and saber clubs,” who were there to “intimidate the speakers, and the assemblage gathered to hear them.”14 David T. Corbin, U.S. attorney in Greenville, investigated the Hamburg butchery and told of insuperable obstacles to prosecutions, blaming “the terror of the witnesses to testify, the constant fear of assassination if they do.” He concluded that “juries will not convict on any proof, however good.”15
The Hamburg carnage preceded far worse atrocities in October in Ellenton, South Carolina. Two black burglars allegedly entered a white woman’s home and struck her with a stick, prompting a murderous binge by hundreds of lethally armed whites from rifle clubs. They executed blacks ranging from a ninety-year-old man to a seventeen-year-old adolescent, who had his ear sliced off. Simon Coker, a black state legislator, was gunned down in an open field. At least seventeen blacks were slain within a week. So widespread was the savagery that the estimated death toll of black victims ran as high as 150. In its aftermath, black citizens of Aiken sent Grant a heartbreaking description of their plight: “We write to tell you that our people are being shot down like dogs, and no matter what democrats may say; unless you help us our folks will not dare go to the polls.”16
On October 11, Governor Chamberlain employed the requisite language for tapping federal troops, notifying Grant that “insurrection and domestic violence” in three counties near the Georgia border exceeded the state’s power to control it.17 Six days later Grant ordered rifle clubs “who ride up and down by day and night in arms, murdering some peaceable citizens and intimidating others,” to disperse and retire peaceably to their homes.18 Secretary of War Cameron dispatched troops the same day. Now approaching the finale of his second term, Grant threw aside political caution and northern ambivalence to protect black and white Republicans in the South. It was a reminder to northern Republicans that, despite the scandals in his administration, Grant had almost always been most courageous where it counted: in protecting freed people. Many northern Republicans applauded his stand, although Democrats complained that he was favoring the Hayes slate. “Today I was again impressed with the belief that when his presidential term is ended, General Grant will regain his place as one of the foremost of Americans,” James Garfield reflected.19 About a thousand federal troops had shown up in South Carolina by Election Day, not sufficient to avert all violence, but enough to provide a modicum of safety to defenseless Republicans. As one grateful white Republican reassured Grant, without federal troops “any man white or colored who would have dared to cheer Hayes . . . would have had his head taken off.”20
Mississippi remained a racial tinderbox. Blanche Ames, the outgoing governor�
�s wife, pointed out that among the “principal men” in the state capital, “there is hardly one who has not, by counsel or action, taken some part in the Negro murders.”21 In September, the U.S. marshal in Oxford, James H. Pierce, informed Attorney General Taft that a “perfect reign of terror” existed in three Mississippi counties, making Republicans afraid to vote.22 At least ten companies of federal troops, he estimated, would be required to suppress the mayhem. Hobbled by the hostile northern climate, the best Grant could do was to deploy three companies in the bloodstained counties. Aside from outright violence, White Liners terrified black voters by forcing them to reveal their employers before they voted, thus exposing them to economic reprisals. The terror tactics worked: on Election Day in November, only two Republicans dared to vote in all of Yazoo County, only one in Tallahatchie County.
In Louisiana, whites were set to purge the state and “redeem” it from Republican control. In September, Grant had received disturbing messages that electoral fraud would undermine presidential voting. The Republican senator Joseph Rodman West believed whites were reenacting the Civil War, organizing their local Democratic Party “with as much method and discipline as were the armies of the Confederacy.”23 As Louisiana Democrats took power by coercion, the resulting violence assumed horrific proportions. Rifle clubs and White Liners carried out a murderous vendetta against black Republicans on the Saturday before Election Day. As investigators later wrote:
They visited the house of Abram Williams, an old colored republican, sixty years of age. He was taken from his house, stripped, and severely whipped. They visited the house of Willis Frazier, took him also from his bed and brutally whipped him. They visited the house of a son of Abram Williams. He had taken the precaution to spend the night in the cotton-field. Not finding him at home, they whipped his wife, and committed another outrage upon her person. Merrimon Rhodes, on that night, was killed. A few days later his body, disemboweled, was found in the bayou and was buried. They visited the house of Randall Driver. They took him from his bed and from his house and brutally whipped him. They visited the house of Henry Pinkston. He was taken from his bed, from his house, and shot to death. His infant child was killed. His wife was cut in different places; she was shot and nearly slain.24
