Ecstatic Nation

by Brenda Wineapple

  Pinchback was similar to Dunn in some respects. The son of a Mississippi plantation owner and a former slave, Pinchback was born free in Georgia, then educated in Cincinnati, and as a boy he too worked on Mississippi steamboats. After enlisting with a company of black men during the war—the Louisiana Native Guards—he resigned when he was refused promotion. Pinchback was also a street brawler and a shrewd political operator. When he lost the race for state senator after the war, he complained of election fraud. Governor Warmoth investigated, the results were reversed, and Pinchback took his seat. Warmoth may have manipulated the result; Pinchback’s reputation was damaged. Yet he had attended the Republican National Convention in Chicago as a delegate, and in 1871 he became president pro tempore of the Louisiana Senate, a position that allowed him to become lieutenant governor after Dunn died.

  With Warmoth and Pinchback back in power, Louisiana seemed to symbolize corruption over honesty, backroom dealing over public probity, patronage and nepotism over civil sense and justice—and black men in high governmental positions. It was said Warmoth had his hand in the till, though it was also said that if he was corrupt, Louisiana had likely corrupted Warmoth more than he had corrupted it. Despite the honesty of such governors as Adelbert Ames of Mississippi, there were double-dealing and deception on both sides of a fractious divide. In 1870 Governor William Holden of North Carolina, who had been linked to railroad fraud, was impeached mainly for trying to defeat the Ku Klux Klan. In Florida, the conservative Republican governor, Harrison Reed, a supporter of Andrew Johnson, was roundly disliked by the Radical Republicans, whom he had ousted; by the black population, whom he believed to be inferior; by the Democrats, whom he offended; and by the Klan, which he deplored. Night after night, guns were fired near his home; and, charged with malfeasance and high crimes, he was said to be so corrupt that “he would not hesitate to sell his Country for a mess of pottage.”

  THE DISGUSTED CARL SCHURZ led the Liberal Republicans at a national convention in Cincinnati in the spring of 1872, and under his leadership and that of B. Gratz Brown, they brought together malcontent Republicans and Democrats in what Copperhead Clement Vallandigham, of all people, called a “New Departure.”

  Gratz Brown (he had shelved his first name) was in many ways the archetypical Liberal Republican, a man of diverse background whose radical views had grown less radical. Born in 1826 in Lexington, Kentucky, to a slaveholding family, he had been educated at Yale. A cousin of the Blair family, he and Frank Blair had purchased and edited the Daily Missouri Democrat after he moved to St. Louis in 1849. In 1852, at the age of twenty-six, he had served in the state legislature; in 1856 he had been shot in the knee during a duel with a proslavery Democrat and walked with a limp for the rest of his life. He hated slavery, he had opposed the Kansas-Nebraska bill, and during the war he had raised a regiment of volunteers in Missouri. Though a strong-willed, controversial figure in that obstreperous state, he was elected its Radical Republican senator in 1863. Claiming poor health, he resigned four years later.

  By that time, the stout, broad-shouldered Brown was saying that all former Confederates deserved general amnesty. Nonetheless, he advocated universal suffrage—for black men and all women, white or black. In 1870, he was elected governor of Missouri by a coalition of Republicans and Democrats hospitable to his forgiving position toward the South and his demand for civil service reforms, a reduced tariff, and an eight-hour working day. That Brown had been accused of heavy drinking—he had buttered a watermelon during one alcoholic spree and vomited all over the streets of Jefferson City—made no difference to voters, who went to the polls in such large numbers that Brown began to ogle the White House.

  Above all else, the Liberal Republicans wanted Grant out of office; as one of Grant’s biographers observed, their convention rhetoric sounded like a denunciation of King George III. After castigating Grant as corrupt, unworthy, arrogant, and torpid, they called for civil service reform, tariff reform, an end to land grants for railroads—and political amnesty for the South. Though they embraced the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments, they deplored the Ku Klux Klan Act as federal interference in the states; it offered guns instead of olive branches to those Southerners, intransigent or not, who had been deprived of office far too long. Be nice to them, it was suggested, and they would be nice to the black man. Henry Clay Warmoth of Louisiana led a delegation.

  The German-born Carl Schurz, the chair of the convention, told a friend, “I cannot become President indeed, but confidentially, it is up to me to make the next one and I can do it, too.” Schurz considered the scholarly iceberg Charles Francis Adams, Jr., the most principled, best respected, and most experienced contender for the Liberals’ presidential nomination, but Gratz Brown wanted the job. Having fallen out with Schurz over the question of welcoming Democrats to the new party, Brown suddenly withdrew his name in return for the vice presidency. He backed Horace Greeley, whom Whitelaw Reid had put forward. To the shock of the Adams supporters such as Schurz, Greeley won on the sixth ballot.

  And why not Greeley? Here was the man who, with Cornelius Vanderbilt and Gerrit Smith, had put up the bail for the ghostlike Jefferson Davis two years after his imprisonment at Fortress Monroe; here was a man who believed in a better society—during his socialist phase—and who believed in education, hard work, the dispersion of public lands (“Go west, young man”); here was a man of the present and future who after the war had then encouraged the young man to go south—just as soon as the federal government left it alone—and someone who believed in the transcontinental railroad and the virtues of civic morality as practiced by those best men, who, according to the Liberal Republicans, had been in scant supply.

  The members of the convention were said to have burst into laughter on hearing of Greeley’s nomination. It was, however, no laughing matter. E. L. Godkin, who was sympathetic to the Liberal Republicans, warned Schurz that the election of Greeley would be a national calamity. “I don’t know whether you are aware what a conceited, ignorant, half-cracked, obstinate old creature he is.” Godkin threw his support to Grant. It was bad enough to have Theodore Tilton, the biographer of Mrs. Woodhull, touting himself as a Liberal Republican, said Godkin; Greeley was the last straw. William Cullen Bryant, long esteemed as a spokesman of reform, refused to endorse Greeley. Schurz felt humiliated. Backroom dealing had undermined the very cause of reform, he said, and without compunction, he angrily told Greeley that his nomination was nothing more than “a successful piece of political hucksterism.” Worse yet, the sixty-one-year-old editor was a diehard protectionist, and most of the Liberal Republicans were free traders. For a brief moment, Schurz actually considered resigning from his own newly formed party to nominate Adams, but he knew the broadcasting of internal divisions was not a good idea, and besides he realized Adams wasn’t popular enough in the West to win an election.

  In July, at their convention, the Democrats took Greeley as their candidate too—although, as George Templeton Strong drolly noted, they took him with “a few wry faces, but with less fuss than was to have been expected; and Horace Greeley (!!!) is Democratic (!!!) candidate for the presidency.” Yet the depth of the animosity toward Grant surprised Strong. “Mere coldness and hardness of manner, ungeniality, and taciturnity,” he said, “do not justify or account for active and savage hostilities.”

  A case in point was the sixty-one-year-old Charles Sumner, whose hatred for Grant was still so intense that even he, once the stately abolitionist of sterling mettle, decided to support Greeley. Sumner had been arguing for a new civil rights bill that would outlaw segregated schools, guarantee equal access to cemeteries and churches, and prevent racial discrimination in jury selection. After Greeley’s nomination, Republicans joined forces with Democrats to pass a diluted form of Sumner’s bill—without mention of equal rights, schools, cemeteries, churches, or juries—as soon as the senator went home for a nap. “Sir, I sound the cry,” Sumner roared when he learned what had happened in his
absence. “The Rights of the colored race have been sacrificed.” Instead, the Senate had passed the General Amnesty Act of 1872, which allowed former Confederates to hold office.

  Sumner’s vote for Greeley left him to stand alone without the aid or approbation of former friends and abolitionists, many of whom, such as Gerrit Smith, labeled him a traitor. Smith charged that Sumner’s aversion to Grant was irrational—and that of the rich man of the poor. Other Republicans and Radicals thought Sumner insane or vindictive or both. William Lloyd Garrison charged him with allying himself with all those who had long been his enemies. Lydia Maria Child was angry, and Wendell Phillips was stricken by Sumner’s choice. “What could lead you,” he sorrowfully asked, “to form such an estimate of the Northern Copperhead & the Southern Secessionist & to be willing they should come into power?”

  He might not like Grant, but John Greenleaf Whittier was also upset on reading Sumner’s four-hour diatribe in the Senate against the president during which Sumner called him “first in nepotism, first in gift-taking repaid by official patronage, first in presidential pretensions, and first in quarrel with his countrymen.” When asked to comment publicly, Whittier was circumspect. “I regret his late speech,” said the Quaker poet, “as it exposes the author to the charge of personal resentment, and because it seems to me unduly severe in its tone and temper.” Yet Whittier was not the firebrand of old. “The colored man is to-day the master of his own destiny,” he declared, sounding like a Liberal Republican. “Nearly all that legislation can do for them has already been done. We can now only help them to help themselves. Industry, economy, temperance, self-culture, education for their children,—these things, indispensable to their elevation and progress, are in a great measure in their own hands.”

  Grant or Greeley: neither would send the country to the dogs, Whittier concluded. And neither of them should be running at all. He quietly voted for Grant.

  Frederick Douglass said he would rather blow his brains out than work to defeat General Grant. Though he might have appointed relatives to office and snubbed Douglass when Douglass returned from Santo Domingo (Grant had invited all the fact-finding commissioners except Douglass to dinner), Douglass said that Grant, who had crushed the Klan, was the best advocate black men and women had in the South. “The Republican party is the ship and all else is the sea,” Douglass said. For the Liberal Republicans were righteous about financial corruption while discounting the political corruption of racial politics. Take civil service reform: what was that? It would keep competent blacks out of office. “You tell us that all the honors of the nation are open to us,” said a Mississippi freedman, “yet you exclude us by ordeals that none of us can pass.” Congressman Robert Brown Elliott was unequivocal too. “We hold our rights by no perpetual or irrevocable charter,” he warned. “They are confronted by constant hazards.” In other words, vote for Grant.

  The contest between Greeley and Grant was in effect a referendum on Reconstruction. Despite the civil service reform dear to the heart of many Liberal Republicans, their choice of Greeley had tabled that question, more or less, along with issues such as tariff reform and hard money. Rather, Greeley promised not to trample on constitutional authority, which is to say not to send federal troops to the South or enforce the Ku Klux Klan Act, and in a campaign slogan that would come back to haunt him, Greeley asked his constituents to clasp hands over the bloody chasm which had too long divided the country.

  Thomas Nast took up his pen. He lampooned Carl Schurz and he belittled Charles Sumner, whom he portrayed as Robinson Crusoe abandoning his man Friday (the black population). But mostly Nast ridiculed Greeley as a dissembling, disheveled figure who clasped hands with a Klansman or reached out over the huge field of Union graves at Andersonville Prison. Greeley clasped hands with other pilloried characters such as Boss Tweed, or, dressed in a coat tattooed with Democratic and Republican promises, he stands next to P. T. Barnum; the cartoon’s caption is “Barnum’s New ‘What Is It.’ ” Greeley climbs to the top of a huge monument, “The Whited Sepulchre,” inscribed with such maxims as “This is a white man’s government,” “A negro has no rights / which a white man is / bound to respect,” “New Orleans and Memphis/massacres,” “Fort Pillow massacre, approved / by Congress of Confederate States / of America,” and “KU-KLUX.”

  During a punishing campaign, Greeley often appeared as disorganized, addled, and as touchy as Nast depicted him. And few people forgot, or were allowed to forget, that Greeley was the man who had offended Unionists, saying he thought the rebel states should go in peace. He had called “on to Richmond” before the army was ready. He had bungled the attempt, foolish in any case, to make peace with Copperheads, and he had damned Southerners as thieves and murderers, drunkards and adulterers. Southerners did not resent what Grant had done as a soldier, said one observer, as much as what Greeley had said as a politician.

  JUST BEFORE THE election, the New York Sun broke the story of the Crédit Mobilier. Established during the Johnson administration, the Crédit Mobilier was a dummy construction company created by the Union Pacific Railway, whose directors were also Union Pacific executives. Able, then, to charge whatever rates it wanted, “They receive money into one hand as a corporation, and pay it out into the other as a contractor,” said Charles Francis Adams, Jr. That is, they were contracting with themselves.

  One of the chiefs of the scheme was Oakes Ames, a shovel manufacturer and Republican congressman who sold stock in the Crédit Mobilier at a discount (or gave it away) to his congressional colleagues. The stock rose; the men got rich. They were scoring profits—and reselling their stock on the open market. Such men as Grant’s vice president, Schuyler Colfax, were tainted by the scandal, as well as such congressmen as the upstanding James Garfield and the less redoubtable James G. Blaine. They escaped prosecution, although Oakes Ames was censured and the intimations of corruption cost Schuyler Colfax his position as Grant’s vice presidential candidate in 1872.

  Despite the scandal, Grant won by a landslide on November 4. Blacks overwhelmingly voted for Grant and Henry Wilson, his running mate from Massachusetts (chosen partly as a rebuke to Sumner), in a relatively peaceful election during which Grant carried every state north of the Mason-Dixon Line. Veterans voted for him, a number of Democrats stayed home, and Grant remained popular, if pilloried. And after the election, in his remarkable second inaugural address, Grant bluntly and proudly defended himself. “I did not ask for place or position, and was entirely without influence or the acquaintance of persons of influence, but was resolved to perform my part in a struggle threatening the very existence of the nation,” he declared. “I performed a conscientious duty, without asking for promotion or command, and without a revengeful feeling toward any section or individual.”

  Stonily, he continued, “Notwithstanding this, throughout the war, and from my candidacy for my present office in 1868 to the close of the last presidential campaign, I have been the subject of abuse and slander scarcely every equaled in political history.”

  If Grant was abused, he was temporarily vindicated by his victory. For Greeley, there was no victory and no vindication, least of all from the Furies now plaguing him. His wife, Mary, to whom he’d been married for thirty-six years, had died just six days before the election. Bereft, battered, and humiliated, he could not forgive himself—for what, it was not clear. His idealism? His vacillations? His ambition? His long career as reformer, crank, brilliant editor, and man of his time? It’s difficult to know. “I have done more harm and wrong than any man who ever saw the light of day,” he moaned. “And yet I take God to witness that I have never intended to injure or harm anyone. But this is no excuse.”

  UNSUCCESSFUL IN THEIR temporary alliance and in their attempt to dislodge Grant, Liberal Republicans and Democrats were working and would continue to work to bury the past. Yet no matter how much the country seemed now to care only for material gain—or civil service reform, which, as a cause, took precedence over equal rights and so
cial reform—Grant would not let his countrymen forget his sacrifice or that of anyone else. He would not forget. But for Horace Greeley, remembering was an affliction. His health failing, the famous editor of an infamous era was also half mad, and on November 29, 1872, just a few weeks after the election, as if he could no longer tolerate himself, this far-seeing, shortsighted man fell dead.

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  WESTWARD THE COURSE OF EMPIRE

  Americans were still obsessed with place, their place, the place they wanted to call America, the territory they appropriated for the sake of manifest destiny, as John O’Sullivan memorably dubbed the country’s expansionist right to have more and more land, whether that land was bought or snatched. The country fought a war for Texas, Seward purchased Alaska, Grant eyed Santo Domingo, and Sumner set his sights on Canada.

  The filibusterer of the 1840s and 1850s had looked southward toward Cuba or Nicaragua, lands of sugarcane and slavery, while the whiff of gold lured fortune seekers to the West, soon the fabled place of Westward Ho! “The Western spirit, is, or will yet be (for no other is, or can be), the true American one,” Melville had written in 1855. The historian Francis Parkman, in his hugely popular and vivid The Oregon Trail and The Conspiracy of Pontiac, told stories about wagon trains stuffed with the pots and pans of emigrants who camped out on the bank of the Missouri River and of the doomed buffalo in the Wyoming Territory—and of Indians “hewn out of rock,” whom the white settler inevitably and without regret “will sweep from the face of the earth.” The Indian will not, alas, “learn the arts of civilization,” wrote Parkman, “and he and his forest must perish together.” Civilization marches relentlessly on.