After Lincoln

by A. J. Langguth

  Wendell Phillips was shouted down at Faneuil Hall in Boston as he reminded the audience of past injustices to blacks. Even the revered abolitionist had to confront the rapid shifting in the nation’s mood.

  The New York Times observed that Phillips and his fellow crusader William Lloyd Garrison were “not exactly extinct from American politics, but they represent ideas in regard to the South which the majority of the Republican Party have outgrown.”

  As speculation grew about whether Grant would stand for re-election, corruption in Washington was becoming impossible to ignore. And yet when Congressman James Garfield of Ohio encountered the president, he was awed by Grant’s public composure:

  “His imperturbability is amazing,” Garfield wrote in his diary. “I am in doubt whether to call it greatness or stupidity.”

  • • •

  Grant’s equanimity could be explained in part by an announcement he issued on May 29, 1875, two days after the Pennsylvania Republican Party had endorsed him for a third term. Grant called his cabinet to the White House after Sunday dinner to hear his reaction to the endorsement. Once again, he had not discussed his intentions with his wife, and Hamilton Fish had to assure her that it was mere coincidence that the cabinet officers had all come to call at the same time.

  When the president entered the room, Julia Grant knew the men were about to light up their cigars and she withdrew. She waited impatiently until they left and then returned to announce to her husband, “I want to know what is happening. I feel sure there is something, and I must know.”

  Grant was not done with teasing her. “I will explain as soon as I light my cigar.” Out of her sight, he handed an envelope to a messenger at the door. Coming back to her, he reminded Julia about the speculation over his future. “Well, until now,” he said, “I have never had the opportunity to answer.”

  Grant had felt it was improper to address an issue that had not been formally raised, but now the Pennsylvania vote had given him “the opportunity of announcing that I do not wish a third term, and I have written a letter to that effect.”

  Julia asked why he had not read the letter to her.

  “Oh, I know you too well,” Grant said, chuckling. “It would never have gone if I had read it to you.” Knowing she would be disappointed with his decision, he had “lingered in the hall to light my cigar” while he gave the letter to be posted. Now his future was beyond his wife’s power to reshape it.

  Rutherford B. Hayes

  CHAPTER 19

  RUTHERFORD BIRCHARD HAYES (1876)

  FROM HIS TENTATIVE ENTRANCE TO the world, Rutherford B. Hayes was considered diffident. His father had uprooted the family from New England to seek his fortune in a rustic town on a branch of the Ohio River, and within a few years, he had become partner in a distillery and a stalwart of the Presbyterian Church. But when the noxious fevers of an 1822 epidemic struck Ohio, Hayes was carried off three months before his namesake was born.

  The infant looked destined to follow. Neighbors asked regularly whether Mrs. Hayes’s baby had survived the night.

  But Sophia Birchard Hayes had recently also lost a daughter, and she dedicated herself to sustaining this son, with his large head and enormous, watchful eyes. Her mission became more urgent when her older son went larking on a river with friends, crashed through its ice, and froze to death.

  In time, Rutherford was robust enough to go off to Kenyon College, although any form of sport was beyond him. On graduation, he returned home to study with a local lawyer. But the townspeople who found the young man unassuming missed his strong instinct for self-improvement.

  He traveled to Massachusetts to enroll in Harvard Law School and applied himself to his courses. In later years, though, classmates remembered little about him but his good nature.

  During that period, his mother’s brother had become the wealthiest businessman in the state, and Hayes seemed likely to set up a desultory law practice and spend his days reading for pleasure while he awaited his inheritance.

  Instead, he married Lucy Ware Webb, a doctor’s daughter who channeled his talents into becoming an advocate for local workingmen. While Rud Hayes still indulged his bookish interests at the Cincinnati Literary Club, he also took on and won celebrated cases that furthered his reputation. In politics, he was a Whig—opposed to slavery but no abolitionist. Yet his practice expanded to include the defense of runaway slaves, and he once found himself on a legal team with Salmon Chase.

  At home, the city council named Hayes to his first public office, as Cincinnati’s solicitor. By then, he had joined the group of political strays who called themselves Republicans. As the new decade opened in 1860, Hayes could survey his prospects contentedly.

  But the success of his presidential candidate that year upended Hayes’s comfortable life. When the new Confederacy struck at Fort Sumter, his literary society immediately organized its own military company with Hayes in its front rank. He wrote that he feared disunion less than compromise. Unencumbered by the slave states, the North “if we must go on alone, will make a glorious nation.”

  After the Union loss in Baltimore, Hayes was commissioned as an army major and resigned himself to “a just and necessary war.” As uneventful months passed with no action, it was only a routine vacancy that led to his promotion to colonel.

  And yet, army service turned out to be a revelation for this man whose early hold on life had been tenuous. Hayes had developed into a sturdy five-foot-eight-inch young man with a fledgling beard and his early moderation still intact. Assessing candidates in his new Republican alliance, Hayes valued Abraham Lincoln for the same coolness toward abolition that troubled the party’s Radical wing.

  Hayes’s first taste of battle left him, he said, no more fazed than he felt at the beginning of any major lawsuit. During a series of minor skirmishes, Hayes was nicked by a rifle ball while Lucy was at home giving birth to their second son.

  During the battle leading to Antietam, Hayes was wounded more severely. His men lost track of him in the confusion of battle, and Hayes, nearly dead, had to overcome his native reticence to shout, “Hallo, Twenty-third men! Are you going to leave your colonel here for the enemy?” At a lull in the shooting, a lieutenant carried him to safety.

  In September 1862, when the president issued his preliminary proclamation freeing Confederacy slaves, Hayes still doubted its wisdom. But he had come to trust Lincoln—and he wished that he would take a firmer hand in running the war.

  His own modest renown on the battlefield was thrusting Hayes further into politics, replacing the amiable attorney with an intense commander, who had been wounded five times and promoted to brigadier general in the last months of the conflict. Still bogged down in a military skirmish, Hayes learned that he had been elected to Congress in Ohio with a twenty-four-hundred-vote margin.

  Lincoln’s assassination shook Hayes, and he was not at all sure about this new career. He considered serving one term and then retiring to his congenial law practice in Cincinnati. As he told Lucy, one phrase often ran through his head: “Politics is a bad trade.”

  Once in Washington, however, Hayes was agreeably surprised to find the House of Representatives “more orderly and respectable” than he had expected. He reveled in his luck at being appointed to the Joint Committee on the Library, and from that unlikely watchtower, he tried to promote unity among the postwar Republicans. He soon realized, however, that Andrew Johnson had thrown in with the former rebels.

  All the same, his innate moderation made Hayes uncomfortable around Charles Sumner and Thaddeus Stevens, and he was inclined to believe the rumors of corruption within the Freedmen’s Bureau.

  Hayes left his first session to bury a young son, dead of scarlet fever, but he returned in time to vote for the Fourteenth Amendment, with its guidelines for readmitting the rebel states into the Union.

  By the time that his district’s Republican convention nominated Hayes for a second term, he confessed to finding the job “pleasant.” The
one drawback was his separation from Lucy, who stayed at home with their ailing family.

  His hopeful nature let Hayes detect encouraging signs of racial progress. “The Negro prejudice is rapidly wearing away,” he assured his uncle, although he conceded that it was still very strong among “the ignorant and unthinking generally.” When other Republicans wanted to soften the provisions of Thaddeus Stevens’s Reconstruction bill, Hayes was deeply moved by Stevens’s rebuttal and stood with him.

  But Hayes was no crusader. Instead, he had acquired a reputation as “the most patient listener in the Capitol.” Hayes said that was because he knew his own limitations. And, besides, he added, congressmen talked too much.

  When Ohio Republicans nominated Hayes as their candidate for governor, he resigned from Congress and based his campaign on voting rights for Negroes.

  “They are not aliens or strangers,” Hayes repeated in his stump speech. “They are here by the misfortune of their fathers and the crime of ours.”

  In September 1867, Lucy Hayes gave birth to a baby girl to join her surviving sons. When Ohio senator Ben Wade lost his seat in a Democratic sweep, Hayes surprisingly prevailed and took the governorship by slightly less than three thousand of the 484,603 votes cast.

  Lucy and their children moved with Hayes to Columbus, where he took pride in giving the shortest inaugural address in Ohio history. As governor, he continued to press for Negro voting rights, even as the Democratic legislature launched its failed attempt to repeal the Fourteenth Amendment.

  Ohio governors had no veto power, which insulated Hayes from many policy debates. All in all, he found the job of being governor “the pleasantest I’ve ever had—not too much hard work, plenty of time to read, good society, etc.”

  When the state’s delegation wired from Washington for guidance on the verdict in Andrew Johnson’s impeachment trial, Hayes sent back an economical one word: “Conviction.”

  Although he worried that Grant’s 1862 edict restricting Jews might cost his party votes, Hayes was otherwise enthusiastic about Grant’s presidential candidacy. He also pushed for Ben Wade as vice president, but the nomination went to Schuyler Colfax of Indiana.

  Two years later, Hayes’s margin for re-election was larger than before, helping carry Republicans in the legislature to a majority. His annual message for 1870 called for ratifying the Fifteenth Amendment.

  With Lucy’s prompting, Hayes backed a variety of social measures, including better care for the state’s orphans. He took up civil service reform and an end to electing judges by a popular vote, which he claimed encouraged corruption. Although Hayes carried the vote on the Fifteenth Amendment, his zeal for voting rights did not extend to women.

  “The proper discharge of the function of maternity,” Hayes wrote, “is inconsistent with the political duties of citizenship.” He got no argument from Lucy, despite her having relatives in the suffragette movement.

  During a trip to Washington, Hayes enjoyed an evening with Grant on the White House portico with the Washington Monument, almost completed, rising before them. The president was incensed that the Senate had opposed the Santo Domingo treaty and lashed out against Charles Sumner as “puffed-up” and Carl Schurz as “an infidel and an atheist.” Hayes listened politely.

  In September 1870, Hayes took his son, Birch, to enter his freshman year at Cornell. Lucy fretted over the temptations ahead, but Hayes’s only mild suggestion was that the boy avoid tobacco, liquor, billiards, and card playing.

  As governor, Hayes had to confront an increase in Ohio taxes over the past ten years. State taxes had risen 37 percent, and local taxes had gone up nearly 170 percent. Hayes defended the past expenditures because they had been for public works that stimulated trade. But he warned state employees that his rule would now be “pay as you go.” Hayes resolved, however, not to cripple his social programs, which included more humane treatment within the state prison system.

  Yet for Rud Hayes, there had become one towering issue—the treatment of Negroes in the American South. Now the Fourteenth and Fifteenth amendments had put the nation on the right track, and Hayes felt he could refuse a third term and retire from politics.

  Leaving office early in 1872, Hayes pronounced himself “a free man and jolly as a beggar.”

  Moving his family back to Cincinnati, Hayes went merely as an observer of the Liberal Republicans when they met there to nominate Horace Greeley to oppose Grant. The prospect of a coalition with the Democrats that could defeat the president alarmed Hayes enough for him to stand once again for Congress.

  Over the course of a grueling campaign, Ohio voters taught Hayes that they no longer responded to his impassioned plea for Negro suffrage, or for hard currency or for civil service reform. When Hayes was defeated, his relief outweighed his chagrin.

  Leaving Lucy at home, Hayes stayed in Fremont to tend his ailing uncle’s banking and real estate portfolios. He was pleased that his financial prospects allowed him to reject Grant’s offer of a job as assistant U.S. treasurer, which Hayes dismissed as “small potatoes.” He turned instead to buying up property around Toledo and rejoiced during the Crédit Mobilier scandal that he was free of politics.

  At fifty-one, Hayes might be heavier and shorter of breath, but he admired his own “elastic spirit” and his “fondness for all young people and their employments and amusements.”

  Then, amid his rounds of army reunions and public ceremonials, Hayes was hit hard, grieving at his uncle’s bedside when he died in 1873 and shaken by that year’s financial panic that swept Ohio Democrats back into power. In August 1874, he and Lucy lost their youngest son, Manning, the third of their six children not to survive.

  • • •

  As a private citizen but a popular one, Hayes launched a campaign tour for the Republicans that ended, for the first time since the war, with the national Democrats taking control of the House of Representatives.

  Hayes felt he could not refuse when his party turned to him to stop its decline. He would run again for governor. Privately, Hayes agreed that Ben Butler and his fellow Radicals had been lax about corruption in their ranks. But he traveled energetically throughout September and was returned to the governorship, along with Republican majorities in both Ohio chambers. His victory was narrow—five thousand votes out of almost six hundred thousand cast. But it made Rutherford Hayes a plausible candidate for president in 1876.

  • • •

  In New York, Governor Samuel Jones Tilden was being hailed as the Democrat who could cleanse government of the scandals of the Grant administration.

  Samuel Tilden

  Sallow, short, and balding, Tilden had not matched Hayes in outgrowing his frail constitution. With a sagging left eyelid and racked by other physical complaints, Tilden struck voters as at least a decade older than his sixty-two years. He blamed his bad digestion on powerful doses of laudanum that had been administered to him as a three-year-old.

  Tilden’s father was as devoted as Hayes’s mother to strengthening his sickly child. At his general store in New Lebanon, New York, Elan Tilden drew the boy into the political life of a town at the gateway to the Hudson Valley. From an early age, Samuel read widely. At the store he learned to listen.

  Poor health had kept Samuel at home until the age of eight. Sent off to Williams Academy in Massachusetts, he could tolerate only three months, and in 1834, he dropped out of Yale after one term because of the indigestible meals.

  By the time he transferred the following year to New York University, Tilden was already speaking publicly on behalf of Andrew Jackson and a fellow New Yorker, Martin Van Buren. As he studied law at NYU, Tilden became a spokesman for the Democrats, but the financial panic of 1837 destroyed President Van Buren’s chance for re-election.

  Despite his party’s reverses, Tilden’s hard work was propelling him forward—first as corporate counsel for New York City, then as a state assemblyman. Even when a vote went against him, Tilden was establishing himself as a man of principle. But
when he was offered backing to run for Congress, Tilden declined and returned to the law to lay the foundation for a personal fortune.

  He knew he was too demanding to take a partner. Even friends admitted that Tilden was too quick to say “I told you so.” Instead, he set up his own practice, recruiting clients from the nation’s expanding railroad companies. A highly eligible bachelor of thirty-six, Tilden joined the boards of the New-York Historical Society and the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

  Although he kept company with a number of young women who, he said, made his “heart thump,” Tilden explained to a sympathetic dowager that he had “never been accustomed to surrender to my inner life.”

  Instead, he was torn between his detestation of slavery and his allegiance to the concept of states’ rights. He resisted joining the new Republican Party, even though he admitted that Republicans were more likely to be “men of culture, wealth and force.” But theirs was “a party of self-seekers.” He would stick with the Democrats, a party whose members could be more easily shaped “by the mere force of ideas.”

  Enough New York Democrats were put off by one of Tilden’s ideas—his strenuous opposition to slavery—that he lost elections in the late 1850s for state attorney general and even for his former job as the city’s corporate counsel. Tilden responded by declaring that he was “out of politics.”

  The rise of Abraham Lincoln drew him back in. Worried that a split within Democratic ranks would elect Lincoln, Tilden spoke at Cooper Union for Stephen Douglas and followed up with a manifesto warning that a Republican victory would mean civil war. In despair, he wrote, “It is too late!”

  When he was proved right, Tilden overcame his misgivings and lined up behind President Lincoln, a man he was coming to see as warmhearted but too inexperienced to lead the nation. Tilden advised Secretary of War Edwin Stanton that their one hope rested in the Union having far greater industrial strength than the South, and three times the number of recruits to draw upon.