After Lincoln

by A. J. Langguth

  In court, the outcome of the murders proved damaging to Pinchback’s cause. The federal government indicted ninety-eight white men under the Enforcement Acts. Nine were brought to trial; a hung jury freed eight. A second trial convicted three, including a man named William Cruikshank.

  When the Supreme Court ruled later in United States v. Cruikshank, members found unanimously that the right of the black victims at Colfax to assemble had not been guaranteed because they were neither petitioning Congress nor protesting a federal law. Assembling for any other cause was not protected.

  • • •

  The Supreme Court ruling was another blow to Grant’s attempt to keep Reconstruction alive through the executive branch. By then, he had learned not to depend on rulings from Salmon Chase, whose health had been a concern for years.

  When Chase’s daughter Kate put the Chief Justice on display to prove him still fit for his duties, Carl Schurz found Chase’s “futile effort to appear youthfully vigorous and agile” merely pathetic.

  Two strokes had left his speech halting and slurred. Chase seemed to accept his decline, although he continued to say that, as president, “I would have been useful to my country.” During Court testimony, on May 5, 1873, Chase remarked, “I feel as though I were dead, though alive.” Two days later, he was gone.

  • • •

  Grant’s attempts to fill Chase’s position frustrated a military commander proud of being decisive. Once again, he refused to announce his nomination before the Senate reconvened to ratify it. “I thought a chief justice should never be subjected to the mortification of a rejection,” Grant said.

  But his first choice, the leader of Senate Republicans, Roscoe Conkling from New York, was forty-four and afflicted with the same ambition as Salmon Chase. Preparing for a presidential campaign, Conkling turned Grant down.

  After that unexpected refusal, the president flailed about. He offered the post to Secretary of State Fish and was refused again. With the Court about to convene, the president turned to George Williams, his current attorney general, but he was thwarted by public opinion, which held that Williams had botched the Crédit Mobilier prosecution, losing the government’s case despite overwhelming evidence.

  Those false starts left Grant with Morrison Remick Waite, who was popular with the Ohio bar but largely unknown outside his state. The Nation praised Grant sardonically for “the remarkable skill with which he evaded choosing any first-rate man.”

  • • •

  By April 1874, support for Negro rights was diminishing as the country turned toward the future and the promise of riches along an expanding frontier. As he pursued policies to redeem his earlier promises, Grant was charting a course that sometimes put him at odds with his political advisers. With his 1874 veto, for example, he freed the country from its wartime reliance on greenbacks, despite warnings that he would jeopardize Republican candidates in the midterm election.

  But Grant judged hard money to be the only sound and stable monetary policy, and Congress sustained his veto.

  As he was combating inflation, however, the president was hit by scandals that were harder to explain away than Crédit Mobilier.

  In one instance, Congress had turned over a lucrative tax collector’s post to an ally of Benjamin Butler. An investigation suggested—but could not definitely prove—that the appointee had split illegal profits with Grant’s secretary of the Treasury, William Richardson, and had paid out $156,000 in bribes.

  Although Grant refused to ask for Richardson’s resignation, he left the cabinet one step ahead of a censure vote by the House. The country seemed willing to trust Grant’s integrity, but a drumroll of accusations had begun that would outlast his presidency.

  Benjamin Bristow, the forty-year-old solicitor general who served Grant well in his showdown with the Klan, was making enemies with his unrelenting prosecution of the Whiskey Ring. Bristow had seen the Treasury Department’s chief clerk convicted of corruption, along with a collector and his deputy in St. Louis. Now Bristow turned up evidence that implicated Grant’s personal secretary, Brigadier General Orville Babcock.

  Grant’s friends were convinced that the president would favor principle over personal loyalty, but they knew that any decision would be wrenching for him.

  To Bristow, Grant urged a full investigation: “Let no guilty man escape if it can be avoided.” He assured his attorney general that “if Babcock is guilty, there is no man who wants him so proven guilty as I do, for it is the greatest piece of traitorism to me that a man could possibly practice.”

  To Grant’s relief, the evidence against his closest aide was flimsy—two telegrams from Babcock that might be interpreted as referring to a matter unrelated to the Whiskey Ring. Grant pronounced himself satisfied. Then, early in December 1875, Babcock demanded that a military court be convened to clear his name.

  His gamble backfired. Instead, a federal grand jury in St. Louis indicted Babcock for conspiring to defraud the Treasury. Grant was convinced the charge was a political attempt to embarrass him, and it took strenuous protests from his cabinet members to dissuade him from traveling to Missouri to rebut the charges.

  Grant settled on drafting a disposition addressed to Chief Justice Waite that upheld Babcock’s honor. Coming from a general venerated for his truth-telling, Grant’s affidavit resolved the matter in the public mind. Babcock was acquitted. But Grant’s faith in his discretion had been shaken, and Babcock was shunted off to become inspector of lighthouses. Grant’s sons took over his secretarial duties.

  Bristow added to the president’s discomfort by trying to avoid a congressional hearing and invoking executive privilege. Grant wanted to avoid any further cloud over the White House, and he opened all relevant records and directed Bristow to testify.

  Those accusations were playing out against the background of a spoils system first introduced to Washington by Andrew Jackson. His newly victorious Democrats had boasted openly in 1828 that they intended to use government appointments to reward their party’s friends.

  It offered little consolation to Grant now that he had detected rot in the process and had worked to change it. He had seen the aftermath of the war leave hundreds of positions for his party to fill, and yet the country expected him to wring out partisan corruption. Grant called the spoils system “an abuse of long standing,” and early in his second term he had proposed rigid new criteria.

  All applications and promotions were to be awarded on the basis of examinations overseen by experts from the specific department. “A true reform,” Grant said, “will let the office seek the man,” rather than have party loyalists scratching for jobs.

  • • •

  Congress did not share the president’s vision, and the crusade lapsed. Four years later, the need for reform had become clearer than ever when Grant’s secretary of war, William Belknap, and his free-spending wife, Carrie, were accused of extorting money from a lucrative Oklahoma trading post.

  Carrie Belknap died soon after the payoffs were arranged, but quarterly payments of fifteen hundred dollars continued to pass to Belknap’s new wife, a sister-in-law of Carrie’s whom he married late in 1873. By the time the bribes were uncovered, the Belknaps had collected twenty thousand dollars.

  Barely one step ahead of his congressional critics, Belknap rushed to the White House and begged Grant to accept his resignation. Unaware of the urgency, Grant said, “Certainly, if you wish it.” Only afterward did the president learn that the House of Representatives had voted unanimously to impeach his secretary.

  His frantic resignation served its purpose, however, when Congress could not establish that it had control over a private citizen.

  To his cabinet, Grant spoke of the sorrow the scandal had caused him, given his affection for Belknap’s family. Other times, however, the president was harder to read.

  What motive had influenced him, for example, when West Point expelled the academy’s first black cadet? James W. Smith, a graduate of a South Carolina Fr
eedmen’s Bureau school, had been admitted to the class of 1870 but was harassed for three years before being dismissed on trumped-up charges. Critics suggested that Grant had refused to intervene because his son was a member of Smith’s class.

  Black leaders also deplored Grant’s inaction after the economic depression of 1874 wiped out the Freedmen’s Saving and Trust Company. The deposits of sixty-one thousand blacks were lost, including ten thousand dollars from Frederick Douglass.

  Looking for reasons to praise Grant’s second term, his defenders pointed to his endorsement of Charles Sumner’s final crusade for Negro rights. But the history of Grant’s support told a different story.

  By the time of the re-election campaign, the two men had become irreparably estranged, and yet Sumner held back from joining the Liberal Republicans. He disapproved of their strategy of currying favor with Democrats by offering a general amnesty throughout the South.

  Sumner recognized that the issue was all but moot. After Andrew Johnson pardoned white rebels in the mid-1860s, no federal law prevented them from voting once their states had been readmitted to the Union.

  The exception was a handful of prominent Confederates—a few thousand throughout the South—who were still barred by the Fourteenth Amendment from holding public office. They had to be specifically pardoned by a two-thirds vote in both houses of Congress.

  Much as he longed for Grant’s defeat, Sumner was sure that former slave owners, once returned to power, would deprive blacks of their rights. His instinct was confirmed by reports from the South that no whites were being convicted for violations of their states’ civil rights acts.

  Flouting of the law could be flagrant. In 1874, Virginia would promise to end school segregation just long enough to seat its congressional delegation. Soon afterward, the state imposed mandatory segregation in its schools.

  Given his limited influence in the Senate, Sumner chose not to challenge the amnesty bill as it passed in the House. Instead, he proposed a broad amendment to the Senate version. Sumner included federal guarantees of “equal and impartial enjoyment” of all public transportation on land or water, of inns and theaters, of schools and churches. His amendment challenged racism to the grave: Cemetery associations were forbidden to discriminate.

  Sumner had introduced variations of this—his “crowning work”—since May 1870 and had fought colleagues who tried to soften them. He was particularly infuriating to anyone who raised constitutional objections. Sumner declared that the Sermon on the Mount was a higher authority, and so was the Declaration of Independence—“earlier in time, loftier, more majestic, more sublime in character and principle.”

  Although Sumner’s amendment did not provide for enforcement, it would test the sincerity of those arguing for amnesty. Did they want true equality? Or were they conniving to let white Southerners rule over second-class blacks? Sumner was setting a trap for Grant, who favored amnesty but without Sumner’s amendment.

  The battle revived Sumner’s passion. He said, “A measure that seeks to benefit only the former rebels and neglects the colored race does not deserve success.”

  But neither Democrats nor Liberal Republicans responded to his call. And even most former Radical Republicans remained loyal to the president.

  When Democrats denied the bill the necessary two-thirds vote, Grant was the winner. He had survived the showdown without alienating either whites or blacks.

  As the election neared, a mild movement arose to nominate Sumner for the presidency. But black leaders, including Frederick Douglass, worried that Sumner’s candidacy would ensure a Democratic victory.

  Their apprehension turned out to be needless, since Sumner did not run. From his enforced retirement, Andrew Johnson spoke for much of the nation:

  “The idea of the Democracy supporting Charles Sumner is too utterly preposterous to talk about.”

  • • •

  Brooding over his options, Sumner waited until late July 1872 to endorse Horace Greeley. By then, all he had accomplished was to alienate his steadfast Republican allies. Henry Longfellow berated Sumner for believing promises from Democrats that they were prepared to protect the rights of black Southerners. And a Harper’s Weekly cartoonist, Thomas Nast, drew Sumner as Robinson Crusoe, deserting the Negro people as he sailed off with the Democrats and their new Liberal allies.

  The tensions further strained Sumner’s ailing body and troubled mind. Reluctantly, he accepted his doctor’s insistence that he must abstain from politics to avoid a complete breakdown. Friends tried to smuggle him out of the country on a ship bound for Europe, but Grant heard of his departure and predicted contentedly that Sumner would never be healthy enough to return to the Senate.

  For the second time, his enemies counted him out too soon. After ten weeks of enforced leisure, Sumner came home to learn that he would have to fight to remain within the Republican Party. Clashing with party leaders, he was even censured at one point by the Massachusetts legislature.

  Influential friends tried to get the insult revoked, but equally imposing witnesses denounced Sumner for his history of egotism and for his fulsome praise of his new allies. Julia Ward Howe singled out Greeley Republicans for their “high-handed and overbearing man-worship” of Sumner.

  All the while, angina attacks and digestive woes often had Sumner out of bed twenty times a night. The doctor who had guided him back to health after the assault by Preston Brooks was now sending advice from New York, but Sumner’s Washington doctors missed the severity of his arterial stoppage. To permit him moments of rest, a local physician came by every evening at ten-thirty to administer a shot of morphine.

  Over the next months, Sumner’s condition improved enough that he could endure the fifteen-minute hearing that ended his marriage on grounds of desertion, and he could show up when the Senate opened a special session on March 4, 1873.

  At the beginning of the Senate’s regular session that December, Sumner once again introduced his comprehensive civil rights bill. At first, Republicans loyal to Grant were ready to mock Sumner for expecting Liberals and Democrats to keep the promises they had been making.

  But while his ebbing strength kept Sumner all but housebound, he received two consolations: The Massachusetts legislature did rescind its condemnation, and in the Senate Sumner’s bill was showing surprising vigor.

  Even those favorable omens took their toll. The man who handed him the legislature’s vindication recalled that after Sumner read the document, “He turned his head and wept as I never saw a man weep before.” Collecting himself, Sumner said, “I knew Massachusetts would do me justice.”

  The same newspaper that carried the story from the legislature included an item about his ex-wife: Alice Sumner was considering marriage again, news that contributed to Sumner’s angina. He required ever larger injections of morphine and described his pain as like “a toothache in my heart.”

  • • •

  One evening in mid-March 1874, Sumner said good night to his dinner guests at nine o’clock and retired to his study. At eleven, his servants heard a thud and discovered his body on the floor.

  Morphine revived him and allowed him to sleep. He murmured that he was weary but worried about the volume of his writings that he was editing. “I should not regret this,” Sumner said, “if my book were finished.”

  One obligation was even more urgent. When Rockwood Hoar arrived the next morning, Sumner awoke long enough to say, “You must take care of the civil rights bill—my bill, the civil-rights bill. Don’t let it fail.”

  He repeated that plea an hour later when Frederick Douglass came to call: “Don’t let the bill fail.”

  His doctor refused him another injection of morphine as too risky, and Sumner grew quiet. Just before 3 p.m. on March 11, his exhausted body rose up in convulsions. He vomited, gasped to breathe, and fell back dead.

  • • •

  In death, Charles Sumner achieved a harmony that had eluded him in life. When the Massachusetts legislature invi
ted a prominent Mississippi politician to deliver his official eulogy, Lucius Quintus Cincinnatus Lamar rose in the House of Representatives and praised Sumner and his “instinctive love of freedom.”

  Lamar was the white Southerner who had drafted Mississippi’s call to secede from the Union. Now newspapers across the United States printed his eloquent call for the hearts of North and South to “grow toward each other once more.”

  During the subsequent debate over Sumner’s civil rights bill, Ben Butler acted as its Senate manager. Butler extolled the gallantry of the black soldiers whom he had once commanded. He forgot the missteps in Louisiana to remember instead that he had once sworn to himself a solemn oath. He would “defend the rights of these men who have given their blood for me and my country.”

  Butler had been defeated in the last Massachusetts election, and his short time left in office made him anxious to protect the remnants of Reconstruction. He tied Sumner’s bill to other legislation that would broaden its appeal, including an expansion of the Enforcement Acts and the federal courts. He also added a subsidy for the Texas and Pacific Railroad.

  But Butler jettisoned specifics. The bill would no longer integrate Southern cemeteries. That was a minor concession. He also agreed, however, to strike out the provision most valued by Sumner, Oliver Howard, and other crusaders for equality: The civil rights bill would no longer require public schools to be integrated.

  In fact, the legislation that Butler managed to get passed was even weaker than it seemed since there was still no provision for its enforcement. Individual black plaintiffs would have to go to court to sue for their rights.

  All the same, some white Northerners joined the Southern opposition. Fearing the powers that Grant had assumed to quell the insurrection in Louisiana, they were more concerned for their own rights than for those of the blacks.