by Ron Chernow
He rightly noted that, as a president coping with the daunting sequel to the Civil War, he had wrestled with herculean challenges: “Nearly one half [of] the states had revolted against the Govt. and of those remaining faithful to the Union a large percentage of the population sympathized with the rebellion and made an ‘enemy in the rear’ almost as dangerous as the honorable enemy in the front.”60 He had overseen the trajectory from slavery to full-fledged freedom for four million black citizens. As the first president to govern after the Fifteenth Amendment, he had guaranteed the exercise of brand-new black voting rights and opposed the spate of domestic terrorism it engendered. He had been a good steward of the nation’s finances, having slashed taxes, trimmed debt, and watched the trade balance turn from deficit to surplus. He had shown that government could make good on its pledge to repay war debt and restore American credit. Unable to let go of Santo Domingo, he pleaded one last time that by its annexation “the emancipated race of the South would have found there a congenial home,” where their civil rights might have stood unimpaired.61
At the end of the address, Grant acknowledged that his presidency would soon end, and he delivered a plaintive farewell to politics, a fickle world he had never fully mastered: “It is not probable that public affairs will ever again receive attention from me further than as a citizen of the republic, always taking a deep interest in the honor, integrity and prosperity of the whole land.”62 The address was an odd mixture of apologia and self-assertion, the New York Tribune describing it as the statement “of a man who is weary of public life and tired of political strife.”63 Grant was haunted by his diminished popularity and the loss of his heroic aura. To Congressman Abram S. Hewitt, he confided that for sixteen years he had borne the entire weight of the nation on his shoulders “without any interval of rest or any possibility of being free from great responsibility.”64 Now he was at last free to set down that awesome burden.
When Jesse Grant returned from Cornell University that Christmas, he found his father “wan and worn, and wrapped in a brooding silence that even the family could not dispel.” “We’re going, Jesse,” his father said forlornly. “That’s settled. We start as soon as possible after my successor is installed. We will take whatever money there is and we will go as far and stay as long as it lasts.”65 Only the thought of a round-the-world trip sustained his flagging mood. Whatever the cares of his presidency, Grant must have trembled at the specter of returning to private life, a world where he had stumbled so miserably.
While the presidency had contained its quota of nightmarish moments for Grant, it had been a fairy-tale existence for Julia, who now busied herself with stocking the larder and preparing the White House for the advent of the Hayes family. She was inwardly heartbroken and made no bones about the fact that she was wedded to their celebrity in the White House. One day her husband returned from Capitol Hill, exasperated by lawmakers, and exclaimed, “I wish this was over. I wish I had this Congress off my hands. I wish I was out of it altogether. After I leave this place, I never want to see it again.” Julia looked up, rather startled. “Why, Ulyss, how you talk! I never want to leave it.”66 For Julia, the White House sojourn had been not just a sacred public trust, but an enchanting social whirl. As she put it, “I wish it might have continued forever, except that it would have prevented others from enjoying the same privilege.”67
A sense of tangible relief, coupled with a mood of wintry melancholy, took hold of Grant in his last days at the White House. Right before leaving office, he dined with General Augur, who was shaken by how downcast he was: “While smoking with the President after dinner, I spoke of his return to civil life, in which I said he would be free from the annoying burdens and vexatious attacks which were embittering his official career. To my dismay the President said, with deep feeling, that he welcomed the change, because his confidence was badly shaken. He added that it was the saddest hour of his life . . . because he had come to realize that he did not know where to go, outside of his family, to find a man to be his confidential secretary, in whom he could put entire trust.”68 The exchange shows how scarred Grant had been by the betrayal of Babcock and other faithless subordinates. A lifelong naïf, Grant had been seared by Washington’s cynical politics, which left a bitter aftertaste.
On March 2, President-elect Hayes arrived at the White House, and, giving way to strong emotion, grasped Grant by both hands. Momentarily overcome, the president-elect stood there speechless. “Governor Hayes,” Grant said, “I am glad to welcome you.”69 Under the law, the inauguration was supposed to take place on March 4, but that fell on a Sunday and Grant and Hayes balked at a Sabbath ceremony. Hence, on Saturday evening March 3, Hayes was privately sworn in by Chief Justice Morrison Waite before dinner in the Red Room of the White House, an action re-created for show on Monday before a multitude of thirty thousand citizens.
On March 5, Grant escorted Hayes to the Capitol for his public swearing-in. With a portly physique and silver-streaked hair, Grant had aged dramatically in the White House and looked more like the cartoon of a Gilded Age mogul than a battle-steeled general. After months of partisan turmoil, the inauguration proceeded without incident and Garfield wrote of “relief and joy that no accident had occurred on the route for there were apprehensions of assassination.”70 Perhaps motivated by a touch of pique, a teary-eyed Julia refused to escort her husband. “She did not accompany her husband to the Capitol to see another man installed in the place which he had held,” wrote Adam Badeau, adding, “It may not be improper to say just here, that . . . Mrs. Grant was unwilling to have her husband retire; she had desired him to become a candidate for another term.”71 From later comments, we know the thoughts that buzzed through Grant’s brain. As he told one newspaperman, “Personally I was weary of office. I never wanted to get out of a place as much as I did to get out of the Presidency.”72 He felt “like a boy getting out of school.”73 After the inaugural ceremony, he and Julia hosted a large luncheon for the new president and his wife as well as departing cabinet members. In taking leave of the new First Lady, Julia remarked, “Mrs. Hayes, I hope you will be as happy here as I have been for the last eight years.”74
The luncheon over, the Hayeses ushered the Grants to the portico and bid them an emotional farewell as they stepped into a carriage that would take them to Hamilton Fish’s home for a three-week stay. For all of Grant’s avowed mistakes, Garfield was struck by what the nation owed him. “No American has carried greater fame out of the White House than this silent man who leaves it today,” he told his diary.75 As he left, Grant bore himself with a sturdy, soldierly composure, even though he stared into an indefinite future. Presidents didn’t then qualify for pensions and Grant was uncertain where or how he would earn his livelihood after his projected global journey. “I have scarcely thought of where I will make my home on my return,” he had told a friend. “I am free to go wherever it seems to be the most agreeable.”76 His itinerant army life had left him with no fixed abode, and, if he felt at home anywhere, it was in Washington. As for Galena, he had spent only a year there and almost all his old friends had died or moved. From a life excessively defined by duty, Grant was now free to abandon himself to wanderlust with all its attendant wonders and terrors.
Like many ex-presidents, Grant experienced shock when the new president didn’t automatically defer to his opinions and appointed critics of Reconstruction. He was mortified when his old foe Carl Schurz became interior secretary, while William M. Evarts ascended to secretary of state. Much to Grant’s chagrin, Hayes, an advocate of civil service reform, took issue with Roscoe Conkling and his New York patronage empire. Within a year, Hamilton Fish bemoaned to Grant that “poor Hayes, has . . . given himself up, ‘body & breeches’ to the control of the most embittered hostility, of the most disappointed of the ‘Liberals’ toward ‘Grant’ & ‘Grantism’—he is amiable, I believe, but weak as dish water.”77 Hayes always denied there was any deal, but true to his informal understa
nding with the Democrats, he removed troops from the South—or at least from the statehouses, returning them to their barracks—leaving blacks to the tender mercies of the vengeful white community. Reconstruction was now officially dead and the Democratic Party in charge across the South. “Half of what Grant gained at Appomattox,” said Wendell Phillips, “Hayes surrendered for us on the 5th of March.”78 Yet many northerners cheered the change. “The negro will disappear from the field of national politics,” The Nation pontificated with satisfaction. “Henceforth, the nation, as a nation, will have nothing more to do with him.”79 The so-called Liberal wing of the Republican Party had abandoned blacks while the Stalwart Grant had kept the faith.
Once he left office, some in the press rendered harsh judgments on his two terms. In an editorial brittle with patrician scorn, The Nation made quick work of him, calling him “coarse” and “blunt” and fond of “low company.”80 One of Grant’s most lacerating, if covert, critics was Sherman. “When [Grant] leaves the White House I fear he will sink out of sight and maybe worse,” he told a friend. “The transcendent fame he held at the close of the war, will be clouded by the acts of his Political Administration which History may stamp as corrupt and selfish.”81 Decades later, Woodrow Wilson, a southerner who detested Reconstruction, consigned President Grant to the dustbin of history: “The honest, simple-hearted soldier had not added prestige to the presidential office . . . He ought never to have been made President.”82
At moments, Grant had indeed been his own worst enemy, crossing the line that separates tenacity from obstinacy. But a class-ridden condescension accounts for some of the negative verdicts on Grant’s presidency. “It is easy to see why Grant is so often belittled,” wrote David Herbert Donald, the eminent Lincoln biographer. “He was not well educated, was not articulate in arguments, was not flashy, and had no connection with the Eastern world of intellect and power. On the other hand, he was not merely a remarkable general but . . . a skillful and successful politician. After all, he was the only President between Abraham Lincoln and Woodrow Wilson to be elected to two consecutive terms of office.”83 Donald singled out Grant as the most underrated American president.
Grant has been vilified as an incompetent president for the scandals on his watch. Attacking him on that issue became a convenient tool for Reconstruction opponents who sensationalized his failings through congressional hearings and a strident press. But corruption had flourished in American politics since the heyday of Andrew Jackson. Partly Grant’s problem arose from poorly chosen appointees, but the main cause of the corruption under his aegis was the postwar expansion of the federal government with its myriad opportunities for graft. Although Grant took the first halting steps toward civil service reform, he should have championed the movement more vigorously and freed himself from the onus of patronage. His administration’s reputation for cronyism and nepotism has obscured his exemplary record in appointing many groups hitherto excluded from American government, including African Americans, Jews, and Native Americans. It also overlooks the many outstanding figures, including Hamilton Fish, Amos Akerman, Benjamin Bristow, and John Creswell, whom he appointed.
In his final annual address, Grant affirmed that his Indian policy had largely been a success, notwithstanding the massacre at Little Bighorn. He had made a good-faith effort to eradicate corruption on reservations by appointing agents chosen by religious groups. In sharp contrast to Sherman and Sheridan, who spoke of Native Americans with cold-blooded contempt, Grant spoke of them sympathetically and frequently blamed the rapacity of white settlers for Indian misdeeds. His Peace Policy of trying to “Christianize and civilize” Native Americans, however flawed, had been pursued with honesty and must be given high marks for good intentions. Before he left office, Grant received a delegation of Choctaws, Chickasaws, Cherokees, and Creeks, who said, “On the eve of your retirement from Office, we desire to express our appreciation of the course you have pursued towards our people while President of the United States—At all times just and humane you have not failed to manifest an earnest wish for their advancement in the arts and pursuits of civilized life, a conscientious regard for their rights and the full purpose to enforce in their behalf, the obligations of the United States.”84
Unfortunately with Indian policy, as with southern policy, there was no safe middle ground for Grant to stake out. To save Native Americans, he offered them a chance to retreat to reservations and copy the folkways of the white man, abandoning their traditional hunting economy. For many Indian tribes, this was unacceptable. In the end, neither Grant nor any American president could have resisted the massive flow of westward expansion, the political power of settlers, the money lust of mining companies, and the inexorable spread of railroads. Grant probably offered the tribes the best possible deal, although it fell dreadfully short of what they deemed necessary to their survival as a people. There was a tragic gap between what President Grant could reasonably propose and what the Indians could reasonably accept.
Thanks to the diplomatic skills of Hamilton Fish, Grant had racked up a remarkably good record in foreign affairs. During his presidency, there was no war, no military swagger, no saber rattling, and he stayed true to his motto: Let us have peace. The Treaty of Washington settling the Alabama claims prevented war with England and opened the way for a close economic partnership, with British capital powering the rise of American industry. It also established a new benchmark for employing peaceful arbitration to settle international disputes instead of the traditional resort to warfare. It is no coincidence that Grant scored his foremost triumphs as president with two issues that grew out of the Civil War—settling the Alabama claims and fighting the Klan—for he had become the embodiment of that conflict and its mission to reunite the country and achieve justice for freed slaves.
Ultimately, the appraisal of Grant’s presidency rests upon posterity’s view of Reconstruction. Grant took office when much of the South still lay under military rule; by the time he left, every southern state had been absorbed back into the Union. For a long time after the Civil War, under the influence of southern historians, Reconstruction was viewed as a catastrophic error, a period of corrupt carpetbag politicians and illiterate black legislators, presided over by the draconian rule of U. S. Grant. For more recent historians, led by Eric Foner, it has been seen as a noble experiment in equal justice for black citizens in which they made remarkable strides in voting, holding office, owning land, creating small businesses and churches, and achieving literacy. About two thousand blacks served as state legislators, tax collectors, local officials, and U.S. marshals, while fourteen served in the House of Representatives and two in the Senate. The South witnessed a civil rights movement that briefly introduced desegregation and vouchsafed a vision of a functioning biracial democracy. Since Grant was president during this period, his standing was bound to rise with this revisionist view. Even as his party and cabinet became bitterly divided over Reconstruction, he showed a deep reservoir of courage in directing the fight against the Ku Klux Klan and crushing the largest wave of domestic terrorism in American history. It was Grant who helped to weave the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments into the basic fabric of American life.
When Reconstruction was pilloried as a byword for political abuse, Grant was accused of going too far in advancing black civil rights and foisting “bayonet rule” on the South. Recent revisionist historians have sometimes swung to the other extreme, criticizing him for backtracking on Reconstruction during the last two years of his presidency, when he hesitated to send troops to police elections in Mississippi, South Carolina, and Louisiana. They condemn him for not undertaking extensive land reform in the South—a fine idea, but perhaps quixotic in a region dominated by the Klan and other terrorist groups. The true wonder is not that Grant finally retreated from robust federal intervention, but that he had the courage to persist for so long in his outspoken concern for black safety and civil rights as he faced a ferociou
s backlash from Democrats and even his own party. By the end of his second term, northern support for Reconstruction had largely disappeared. As the Indiana senator Oliver P. Morton recognized, if Reconstruction failed, it was not because of Grant, but because it had been “resisted by armed and murderous organizations, by terrorism and proscription the most wicked and cruel of the age.”85
Americans today know little about the terrorism that engulfed the South during Grant’s presidency. It has been suppressed by a strange national amnesia. The Klan’s ruthless reign is a dark, buried chapter in American history. The Civil War is far better known than its brutal aftermath. Without knowing that history, it is easy to find fault with Grant’s tough, courageous actions. For Grant, Reconstruction amounted to a tremendous missed opportunity: “There has never been a moment since Lee surrendered that I would not have gone more than halfway to meet the Southern people in a spirit of conciliation. But they have never responded to it.”86 To protect blacks, Grant had been forced to send in federal troops whose presence provoked a virulent reaction among southern whites who believed their home states had been invaded by hated Yankees a second time. Despite Grant’s best efforts at Appomattox, the breach of the Civil War never healed but became deeply embedded in American political culture.
By the end of Grant’s second term, white Democrats, through the “redeemer” movement, had reclaimed control of every southern state, winning in peacetime much of the power lost in combat. They promulgated a view of the Civil War as a righteous cause that had nothing to do with slavery but only states’ rights—to which an incredulous James Longstreet once replied, “I never heard of any other cause of the quarrel than slavery.”87 In this view, Reconstruction imposed “an oppressive peace on honorable men who had laid down their arms.”88 But the South never laid down its arms. When it came to African Americans, southern Democrats managed to re-create the status quo ante, albeit minus slavery.
