After Lincoln

by A. J. Langguth

When they had left, her husband tried to shield her from his pain, but she saw his clothes sticking to his raw wounds “and his shoulder was almost like jelly.” Venturing out the next morning, Maria Carter found blood everywhere. The Walthall house “looked like somebody had been killing hogs there.”

  The investigator asked, “Did you know this man who drew his gun on you?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Who was he?”

  “Mr. Much.”

  “Where does he live?”

  “I reckon about three miles off. I was satisfied I knew him and Mr. Hooker.”

  “Were they considered men of standing and property in that country?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  The hearings established that Southern women were often targets for the Klan. White prostitutes in South Carolina who were rumored to have Negro clients were covered with tar and driven from their town. One black father was killed because his daughter “had caused embarrassment” to a white family by giving birth to a child by the family’s son.

  • • •

  Wanting to limit the number of federal troops, President Grant had also authorized a fleet of plainclothes detectives to gather evidence by posing as businessmen or workers looking for a job.

  As the congressional hearings moved to Washington in May, the Republicans called the detectives as witnesses. Democrats dismissed their testimony as nothing more than lies concocted to influence the 1872 presidential election.

  With the proceedings open to the public, the nation could follow the testimony in the press. Some Democratic newspapers challenged the reports of Klan terror by claiming that black witnesses were testifying in order to receive the two-dollar per diem and mileage allowance that Congress had authorized.

  Since Southern Democrats could no longer persuade Northern readers that the Klan was merely a band of high-spirited youths, they turned to other defenses. A novel published anonymously called The Masked Lady of the White House implied that any racial crimes had been committed by the Radical Republicans to discredit their opponents.

  Reporting from Spartanburg, South Carolina, the New York World claimed that “many a vagabond negro” had displayed welts from a beating “which in many cases no doubt was done years ago at the pillory for crimes.”

  The Atlanta Constitution compared the congressional investigation to the Spanish Inquisition.

  • • •

  When the investigators called their most celebrated witness on June 27, 1871, Nathan Bedford Forrest was confronted with a dilemma. He preferred to deny his involvement with the Klan entirely. If that was impossible, he wanted to take credit for curtailing its abuses once he realized that it was no longer attracting only “the best men.”

  Forrest could point to a general order issued two years earlier that directed all Klan members to destroy their masks and end their activities: “The order of the K.K.K. is in some localities being perverted from its original honorable and patriotic purposes.”

  But Forrest still received enough letters on Klan business to keep his private secretary busy, even as he devoted his efforts to building a new fortune by capitalizing on the rapid expansion of the nation’s railroads.

  The Central Pacific, built with laborers from China, and the Union Pacific, built by Irish immigrants, had expanded until a network of railways now ran through the territories of the Louisiana Purchase all the way to California. Men like Leland Stanford, Collis Huntington, and Mark Hopkins had become rich by moving passengers and freight along their transcontinental rails.

  Forrest’s goal was more modest. He bought a controlling interest in a local line that became the Selma, Marion, and Memphis Railroad. As he raised funds through subscription and solicited government favors, his Klan connection became a liability.

  When a reporter asked about expanding his line, Forrest said he intended to depend on former slaves: “Negroes are the best laborers we have ever had in the South.”

  In the months before Forrest was called to testify, four dozen Klansmen had surrounded the house of a Republican judge in Greensboro, Tennessee. When the judge appealed to Forrest for protection, Forrest kept him safe for a week, then persuaded him to leave the county.

  To Klan members, Forrest explained that, although the judge had “given bad advice to the Negroes” that kept them from returning to work on the nearby plantations, his offenses were due to his being “a drinking man” but one without “any harm to him.”

  • • •

  Nathan Forrest showed up before the congressional panel as a proud soldier and a legitimate businessman, and that was how, despite a few sharp questions, he was treated.

  He had enhanced his reputation the previous month by joining with twenty-one other Confederate officers in urging assistance for Washington College in Lexington, Virginia. Robert E. Lee had served as its president until his death in the fall of 1870, and Lee’s former comrades were petitioning “our friends in the United States” to give money to the renamed Washington and Lee University.

  As the final congressional report on Klan activities would note, “Our design is not to connect General Forrest” with the Klan, although, it continued, “(the reader may form his own conclusion upon the question).”

  In his testimony, Forrest admitted nothing but tried to explain for the committee the atmosphere at home that might justify Southerners protecting themselves.

  “When the war was over,” Forrest said, “our servants began to mix with the Republicans, and they broke off from the Southern people and were sulky and insolent. There was a general fear throughout the country that there would be an uprising.”

  He added that agitators from the North were adding to that fear by forming their Union Leagues, that the Negroes were holding night meetings, and that “ladies were ravished by some of those Negroes.” The Klan “was got up to protect the weak, with no political intention at all.”

  But committee members had resurrected an imprudent interview Forrest had given in August 1868 to a reporter for the Cincinnati Commercial. Forrest had denied being a Klansman but said he was “in sympathy and will cooperate with them.”

  Forrest claimed now that the reporter had caught him at a moment when he was “suffering from a sick headache” and had “misrepresented me almost entirely.” They had talked for only “three or four minutes,” Forrest insisted, perhaps only “twenty words.” He soon had to backtrack: “I should have said twenty minutes, I reckon.”

  To ward off further incrimination, Forrest took refuge in a faulty memory. As congressmen pressed for details about the Klan’s organization, Forrest responded with “I heard,” “I do not recollect,” “I do not know.”

  When all else failed, Forrest appealed to the constitutional safeguard of the Fifth Amendment: “I do not think I am compelled to answer any questions that would implicate me in anything.”

  After his appearance, a friend asked Forrest how it had gone and quoted Forrest’s reply: “I have been lying like a gentleman.”

  Horace Greeley

  CHAPTER 16

  HORACE GREELEY (1872)

  AMOS AKERMAN NEVER SAID PUBLICLY why he resigned from President Grant’s cabinet at the end of 1871. His vigorous prosecution had broken the Klan in South Carolina, but rumors in Washington suggested that Akerman deplored the sporadic nature of the prosecutions elsewhere.

  Although the Klan seemed to be a spent force throughout the South, congressional Republicans criticized Grant for not bringing the full weight of the Force laws on the Klan in Florida, Mississippi, and Alabama.

  Grant’s defenders blamed the Congress for not allocating money for an expanded judiciary system to handle the backlog of cases. But since the Klan’s terrorism no longer seemed to threaten the 1872 elections, support for the funding had diminished. Akerman’s replacement, George H. Williams, a former Oregon senator, had begun to limit federal prosecution to murder charges.

  With federal agents standing guard at the polls, black Americans were ready to vote in unpr
ecedented numbers. There was no doubt that Grant would be their choice, and Republicans hoped his popularity would carry them in state and local elections, even in South Carolina.

  Frederick Douglass, the nation’s most celebrated former slave, endorsed Grant as the reformers’ best hope. Henry Ward Beecher, whose daughter had written Uncle Tom’s Cabin, assured a Brooklyn audience that there “had never been a president more sensitive to the wants of the people.”

  Carl Schurz disagreed. Like Charles Sumner and other disaffected Republicans, Schurz found the Grant administration uninspiring and corrupt, with the president himself personally compromised by the Gold Ring. Then in 1870, Grant had appointed a fellow general, John A. McDonald, to the sprawling St. Louis federal revenue district. Allegations soon reached Washington of a Whiskey Ring—government appointees who were conspiring to defraud the Treasury of millions in tax revenue from the liquor industry.

  Since Grant was certain to be the Republican nominee, Schurz combined with three disillusioned newspaper editors in Chicago; Springfield, Illinois; and Louisville, Kentucky, to stage a rival convention in Cincinnati.

  Old-line politicians who felt pushed aside in the postwar era were drawn to this Liberal Republican Party. Lyman Trumbull was on board, along with Sumner’s Massachusetts friends indignant at the way he had been treated. The movement also attracted Eastern men of letters like James Russell Lowell and William Cullen Bryant, who had never been comfortable with Grant.

  The Liberal Republicans promised to reform the civil service, lower taxes, and end the land grants to railroads, but they would need votes from Democrats. To court them, Schurz put aside his former commitment to black suffrage and committed his party to states’ rights and “property and enterprise,” which Southerners understood to mean white property and white enterprise.

  Schurz and his allies planned to offer a presidential candidate who would provide the sharpest contrast with Grant—Charles Francis Adams, urbane son of John Quincy Adams, the nation’s sixth president.

  Before he left on a prolonged trip, Adams acknowledged his interest in the nomination, and his absence would not necessarily be a liability. Even his allies had found his father difficult to like, and Charles himself had been described as “the greatest iceberg in the northern hemisphere.”

  Schurz’s intention was upended by the arrival in Cincinnati of Whitelaw Reid, a brash newspaperman from the New York Tribune, who was determined to nominate the paper’s owner, Horace Greeley.

  Reid had challenged Ulysses Grant before. As a reporter for a Cincinnati paper at the Battle of Shiloh, Reid had filed sensational stories about Grant’s poor performance. He got most details wrong, but he set off excoriating editorials in other newspapers, including the Tribune. Greeley wrote that Grant had made no more preparation for battle “than if he had been on a Fourth of July frolic.”

  The abuse stung, but Grant had kept his head down and launched a successful counterattack the following day. Mildly, he remarked to a Tribune reporter, “Your paper is very unjust to me, but time will make it all right. I want to be judged only by my acts.”

  At the convention, Whitelaw Reid went to work after the first ballot to reduce Adams’s lead. After six ballots over five hours, Greeley was nominated, with former Missouri senator B. Gratz Brown as his running mate.

  • • •

  To build support for that moment, Greeley had been running a stealthy campaign for months. After he had received Charles Sumner’s assurance that he would not be a Liberal Republican candidate, Greeley published a magazine article to spell out his own bland political platform. He advised young men to study a trade, maintain healthy habits, renounce liquor, avoid debt, and never despair.

  Greeley was approaching sixty, but exhorting the young had always come easily. As early as 1838, when Greeley was twenty-seven himself, he had written, “If any young man is about to commence in the world, we say to him, publicly and privately, Go to the West.”

  By 1865, that advice had been distilled into “Go West, young man. Go West and grow up with the country.”

  Greeley’s own life had taken improbable turns since Thurlow Weed first picked him to edit a publication supporting William Henry Harrison. Chafing under Weed’s partisan demands, Greeley broke the bond in the spring of 1841 and went to New York to launch his Tribune.

  The paper had dozens of competitors, but Greeley was determined to lift the Tribune above the ruck of murders, scandal, and society chit-chat. One fellow publisher, Phineas Taylor Barnum, became a close friend. He described Greeley fondly as a “gangling, wispy-haired, pasty-cheeked man, high-domed and myopic, with the face of somebody’s favorite grandmother.”

  To that catalogue, Barnum might have added grit. When the four-story Tribune building was destroyed by fire in 1845, Greeley lost his supplies of paper and every manuscript. He rented an office nearby and the next morning published his paper on schedule.

  Critics and competitors took a bemused view of Greeley’s eccentric enthusiasms. He became enamored of the utopian communities promoted by William Henry Channing and the French socialist Charles Fourier. Investing in them, he lost heavily. And their collective ethic finally could not withstand Greeley’s need for untrammeled freedom.

  Greeley’s relations with women could seem conflicted. He had met Molly Cheney when they were living in a New York City boardinghouse committed to vegetarian meals with no coffee or alcohol. But their marriage was blighted by the death of an infant son. After a miscarriage five months later, Molly, who had been a lively Connecticut schoolteacher, fell into a depression from which she never fully recovered.

  While his wife retreated to her bed, Greeley submerged himself in work. Following another miscarriage, Molly seemed to be going blind. Greeley tried without success to find a cure at Brook Farm, the community outside Boston run by a cousin of Ralph Waldo Emerson.

  When they returned to New York, it was to live in a barren house with no furniture, rugs, or curtains. Greeley complained to friends that waiting on his wife’s every need had become hard for him. Then Molly delivered a son they called “Pickie,” and the family moved to a wooden farmhouse on the East River. To live with them, Greeley invited his new book review editor, Margaret Fuller.

  An intrepid young member of Emerson’s Transcendental Club, Miss Fuller published three articles a week in the Tribune during the next two years. Greeley took pains to assure the world that his protégée was his wife’s friend, not his. But their guest was finding Molly Greeley increasingly demanding and Pickie a neglected and willful child.

  Traveling to Europe to be Greeley’s foreign correspondent, Margaret Fuller took as her lover a young Italian aristocrat. As they were returning to America, the couple and their infant son were drowned during a storm off the coast of Fire Island.

  When Pickie died of cholera at the age of seven, his father worried that Molly would not survive another loss. As for himself, Greeley wrote that he now understood at thirty-eight “that the summer of my life was over” and “that my future course must be along the downhill of life.”

  Work remained his reliable salvation. Greeley opposed the war with Mexico. He alienated abolitionists by holding aloof from their increasingly urgent debates, arguing that the low wages paid in the North to both white and black workers were the equivalent of the actual slavery of the South.

  Rather than spout more “angry vituperation against slaveholders,” Greeley wrote, abolitionists should improve the black schools and churches and the living conditions in the North.

  • • •

  In 1848, Greeley got his one exposure to political office in Washington when a New York congressman was removed for election fraud and the Whig Party bosses turned to him as a three-month interim appointment.

  During that time, Greeley delighted in becoming the House scourge. He assailed fellow congressmen in his newspaper for missing votes and for padding their expense accounts. He exposed their wrongdoing by contrasting the shortest routes to each dist
rict with the mileage that representatives were claiming for reimbursement.

  Among Greeley’s examples was freshman congressman Abraham Lincoln, accused of pocketing $630 by overcharging for the 780 miles from Springfield.

  The one result of Greeley’s crusade was to outrage his colleagues. They retaliated with scant support for his land-reform measure, which would have allowed homesteaders to buy forty acres at $1.25 an acre. He had no better luck in trying to redraw the boundary between New Mexico and Texas.

  Despite Greeley’s criticism of Lincoln, the two men became friendly. They disagreed, however, about a bill to end the slave trade in the District of Columbia; Lincoln voted against the bill.

  • • •

  Out of Congress once more, Greeley promoted the cause of the political revolutions raging across Europe. And in London, he was dazzled by the Crystal Palace, a vast structure of steel and glass dedicated to human achievement.

  Eager to duplicate the spectacle on Sixth Avenue in New York, Greeley formed a corporation and appointed his friend P. T. Barnum as director of an exhibition between Fortieth and Forty-second Streets. Well satisfied with the result, Greeley promoted his homegrown palace as a “beauty and a wonder,” a celebration of American ingenuity. Both he and Barnum lost their investments.

  By the time the debate erupted over slavery in Kansas, Greeley had become committed to abolition and sent his paper to the forefront of the battle. He remained personally cautious, however, instructing his editor, Charles Dana, to avoid anything that was “impelled by hatred of the South” or a desire to humiliate the region.

  Greeley had joined with other editors in establishing the Associated Press to share the cost of gathering news, but his weekly edition of the Tribune now blanketed the nation and dominated the conversation in literate households throughout the American West. Readers gladly overlooked Greeley’s crotchets to embrace what one Lincoln secretary called “The Gospel according to St. Horace.”

  • • •