by H. W. Brands
For a while it was. By the mid-1870s, however, the discrepancy between the number of barrels the distillers were shipping and the number they were paying tax on was so obvious as to elude only the willfully blind. In February 1875 the editor of the St. Louis Democrat, George Fishback, wrote to the secretary of the Treasury, Benjamin Bristow, that the tax evasion in Missouri had gotten out of control. “If the Secretary wants to break up the powerful ring which exists here,” Fishback said, “I can give him the name of a man who, if he receives the necessary authority and is assured of absolute secrecy about the matter, will undertake to do it.… I will guarantee success.”
Benjamin Bristow was a recent addition to Grant’s cabinet. He had served in the Justice Department as solicitor general and had entertained hopes of becoming attorney general. But after Treasury secretary William Richardson came under fire for tax farming—for providing information on tax delinquents to bounty hunters, who then shook down the deadbeats in exchange for part of the payoff—Grant had to replace him. Bristow, with a reputation for belligerent incorruptibility, seemed just the person.
He accepted George Fishback’s offer. Myron Colony, the man Fishback had referred to, was a tireless reporter who knew everyone with anything on the whiskey dodge. He compiled a huge dossier on McDonald, the distillers, and their many accomplices and delivered it to Bristow. The Treasury secretary summoned McDonald to Washington and showed him the evidence against him. McDonald confessed but apparently—testimony differed on this point—requested amnesty in exchange for a promise to collect and hand over all the unpaid taxes. To strengthen his request he warned that prosecution of himself and the distillers would gravely damage the Republican party and the president.
Bristow had no intention of letting McDonald cop a plea, and he proceeded with the investigation. At first he received the support of the president. “Let no guilty man escape,” Grant declared, although adding the curious qualifier “if it can be avoided.” But when the trail led to Orville Babcock, a Grant staffer from the war and currently a White House aide, the president’s resolve flagged. A central part of the evidence was a series of telegrams to Babcock, including one that read:
WE HAVE OFFICIAL INFORMATION THAT THE ENEMY WEAKENS.
PUSH THINGS.
SYLPH
Bristow didn’t know who “Sylph” was or what “enemy” was referred to, and neither did Attorney General Edwards Pierrepont, to whom he took the message. But they concurred that the matter required Grant’s attention.
“We brought the telegrams to the President,” Pierrepont afterward told congressional investigators. “The President called Babcock into the room before us and asked him what it meant.” Babcock answered ambiguously. “The explanation gave me no light at all,” Pierrepont said, “but it seemed to be a satisfactory explanation to the President.” Grant’s low threshold for satisfaction struck Pierrepont and Bristow as part of the problem. “The Secretary of the Treasury and I then both insisted that this was a matter so serious that if he”—Babcock—“could give an explanation which, as he said, was complete and perfect, and if he was perfectly innocent, as he said he was, he should go out there”—before the public—“and make an explanation.… We pressed it as a thing that he ought to do on the spot.” Grant reluctantly agreed. Babcock, cornered, said he would give the explanation Pierrepont and Bristow demanded. But he left without doing so, and in fact never did.19
Instead he and the other conspirators threw up a smoke screen by suggesting that “Sylph” was a prostitute with whom Grant had conducted an adulterous liaison. To pursue the matter would subject the president and especially Mrs. Grant to public humiliation. Bristow and Pierrepont ignored the ruse, and the attorney general prepared to prosecute Babcock, who thereupon requested a military trial. Grant acceded, despite Pierrepont’s express warning that a court-martial would not preclude civil prosecution. Grant packed the three-general tribunal with friends who understood that their job was to acquit Babcock and who did just that.
The case then went to the civil courts. A St. Louis grand jury indicted Babcock and McDonald, among hundreds of others. Grant let McDonald fend for himself but refused to abandon Babcock. Despite the overwhelming evidence against Babcock, the president determined to travel to St. Louis and testify to his innocence. Secretary of State Hamilton Fish and other senior members of the cabinet talked Grant out of the mission; the thought of America’s chief executive under cross-examination made them shudder—for Grant and for the office. Grant contented himself with giving testimony at the White House. Chief Justice Morrison R. Waite presided over the session and signed Grant’s deposition.
Grant’s statement effectively stymied the prosecution. Despite the odor that had surrounded his administration since the gold conspiracy, not many Americans considered him personally dishonest. And those who knew him best were most convinced of his integrity. “I do not think it would have been possible for Grant to have told a lie, even if he had composed it and written it down,” Hamilton Fish said. Largely as a result, Babcock was acquitted. Grant might have kept him on the White House staff, but Fish and others convinced the president he was badly damaged goods, and he was forced to resign. (He nonetheless landed appointment as inspector of lighthouses; he drowned on the job in Florida).
Yet many others, including McDonald, were convicted. “Sylph” became to the Grant administration what “Crédit Mobilier” was to Congress; popular opinions differed chiefly over which branch of government was the more venal.20
WILLIAM BELKNAP WEIGHED IN on the side of the executive, but not by choice. Belknap was a handsome man who married three beautiful and increasingly ambitious women. The first died before General Belknap—a veteran of Shiloh and Sherman’s march to the sea—became Grant’s secretary of war in 1869. The War Department post required special skills, not least the ability to get along with Sherman, who commanded both the army and the continuing adulation of many Republicans. The latter constantly tried to push him into politics. Sherman still resisted, to the relief of Grant and the several Republicans who hoped to succeed Grant in the White House. But one never knew with Sherman when his temper might explode and he decide he could run the country better than the fools who currently made a hash of it.
Belknap combined sufficient deference and avoidance to keep Sherman calm, for which Grant was grateful. But Belknap’s second wife—the former Carrie Tomlinson—thought the president’s gratitude ought to take more substantial form. Mrs. Belknap learned that a perquisite of her husband’s office was the right to award concessions for army trading posts in the West. “She asked me one day in the course of a conversation why I did not apply for a post-tradership,” Caleb Marsh, a Belknap acquaintance, subsequently informed a congressional committee. “I asked what they were, and was told that they were, many of them, very lucrative offices or posts in the gift of the Secretary of War, and that if I wanted one she would ask the Secretary for one for me.” Marsh said he thought such favors went to people with important political connections. Carrie Belknap replied that other considerations sometimes tipped the balance. Marsh apparently caught her drift, although his memory wavered with the congressional committee. “I do not remember saying that if I had a valuable post of that kind that I would remember her, but I do remember her saying something like this: ‘If I can prevail upon the Secretary of War to award you a post you must be careful to say nothing to him about presents, for a man once offered him $10,000 for a tradership of this kind, and he told him that if he did not leave the office he would kick him down stairs.’ ” Marsh kept these words in mind a few weeks later when Carrie Belknap informed him that the trading post at Fort Sill in Oklahoma Territory was vacant and that her husband was inclined to grant it to him. In fact the post wasn’t vacant, and the current concessionaire, John S. Evans, wished to keep it. But Marsh didn’t want to operate the post himself, merely to collect the profits, and so he cut a deal with Evans whereby Evans agreed to pay him $15,000 a year, in quarterly installme
nts. This figure was later trimmed to $12,000 after the army decided to reduce the size of the garrison at Fort Sill. “When the first remittance came to me,” Marsh said, “say probably in November 1870, I sent one-half thereof to Mrs. Belknap.”21
The payments—a tidy complement to Belknap’s eight-thousand-dollar annual salary—continued after Carrie Belknap suddenly died only a month later. Marsh comforted the grieving husband and the deceased’s widowed sister, Amanda Tomlinson Bower, who took charge of the Belknaps’ infant son. Marsh suggested that the payments could furnish a trust for the boy. Amanda Bower agreed to oversee the trust. But then the child, too, died, leaving no one to accept the payments but Belknap himself—and Amanda, who married Belknap in 1873.
Compared with the whiskey scandal, which involved hundreds of people and millions of dollars, the pay-for-trade conspiracy was puny. And had the Democrats, again in charge of the House of Representatives after the 1874 elections, not possessed other reasons to investigate the Grant administration, they probably never would have come across the War Department plot. Even then they might have missed the Belknap connection if Amanda Belknap hadn’t insisted on entertaining in a fashion incommensurate with her husband’s salary. But the Democrats did discover the trading post deal, which did directly involve a cabinet secretary. Belknap couldn’t decide what to do—whether to brazen out the investigation or confess. He and Marsh agreed on a code. If Belknap telegraphed, “I hope your wife is well,” Marsh should flee the country, preventing his examination by the committee. If Belknap wired, “I hope your wife is better,” Marsh should meet with Belknap for further consultation.
The committee subpoenaed Marsh. Belknap, still not knowing whether to let Marsh talk, sent the second telegram, and Marsh came to the Belknap home. Amanda Belknap urged him to tell the committee that he and she had engaged in business over the years and that the payments were part of this business—“that all this money I had sent the Secretary was money that she had from time to time deposited with me as a kind of banker,” Marsh later explained. Belknap himself credited the committee with more sense; the members would surely see through such a tale. Half his mind wanted Marsh to take the first ship to France; the other half realized Marsh’s flight would be tantamount to a guilty plea by them both. “He was greatly excited,” Marsh recalled. “He said if I went”—to Europe—“he would be ruined.” Marsh replied that he wouldn’t perjure himself to save Belknap. “I said I would ruin him if I went before the committee.”
In the event, Marsh testified. The information he provided the committee persuaded the House to consider articles of impeachment against Belknap. Grant summoned Belknap to hear the secretary’s side of the story; Belknap broke down and tearfully confessed to the bribery scheme. He implored Grant to accept his resignation, which the president did, hoping this would end the matter.
It ended the matter, but not at once. The Democrats in the House refused to be satisfied with Belknap’s resignation and moved to impeach him. House Republicans, freed by Grant’s acceptance of Belknap’s resignation from having to defend the now-former secretary, joined in a voice vote endorsing the articles of impeachment. A desultory trial took place in the Senate, which failed to convict not because anyone doubted Belknap’s culpability but because a score of senators thought their house lacked jurisdiction over someone no longer in the executive branch. “In this country, by the Constitution, private citizens are not impeachable,” Roscoe Conkling of New York observed, explaining his acquittal vote.22
STILL THE SCANDALS didn’t cease. Grant’s minister to Britain was discovered to have employed his position to promote a mining scheme in which he had an ownership interest. The son of the secretary of the interior received favored treatment with respect to surveying contracts. And Grant’s brother Orvil got paid for a surveying job in Wyoming Territory he didn’t perform. “Did you ever know Orvil Grant to do any surveying in that territory?” the key material witness was asked. “No, sir,” he replied. “I do not think he was ever in the territory.”23
That the scandals climaxed in the summer of America’s centennial struck many as evidence of how far the republic had fallen since the founding. Some observers cited a decline in the morality of public officials. The Reverend De Witt Talmage pointed to William Tweed as a caution against the pride that goeth before a fall. “Alas! Alas!” the minister declaimed from his Manhattan pulpit while Tweed coughed himself to death in the Ludlow Street jail. “Young men, look at the contrast—in an elegant compartment of a Wagner palace car, surrounded by wine, cards, and obsequious attendants, going to his Senatorial place at Albany; then look again at the plain box … behold the low-studded room, looking out upon a mean little dingy court where, a prisoner, exhausted, forsaken, miserable, betrayed, sick, William M. Tweed lies a-dying. From how high up to how low down!”24
Others blamed the competition among the newspapers—not for the misdeeds per se but for the scandal mongering that made the current generation appear especially culpable. Was the Crédit Mobilier affair really worse than the speculation in western land and Revolutionary War bonds that had inspired much of the support for the Constitution? Did Jay Gould and Jim Fisk, those first tempters of the Grant administration, do anything Robert Morris, the financier of the Revolution, hadn’t dreamed of and gone to prison for? Tweed stole public money but didn’t kill anyone or threaten the nation’s security, unlike his Tammany Hall predecessor, Aaron Burr, who after shooting Alexander Hamilton tried to carve an empire for himself from the American Southwest.
Republicans blamed the Democrats for partisan exaggeration. Every administration had bad apples, the Republicans said. The surprise wasn’t that there were so many in the Grant administration but that there were so few—so few, in fact, that the desperate Democrats had to resort, for their pièce de résistance, to impeaching a man who had already left office.
Yet for all the attempts to explain the scandals away, a feeling persisted that something was different this time. The scoundrels now operated on a scale surpassing anything imagined before the Civil War. The Tweed ring stole not thousands of dollars but millions. The whiskey ring involved hundreds of distillers and revenue agents, not the odd bootlegger and corrupt cop. The pall of Black Friday spread far beyond New York. Corporations were consolidating; criminals were, too.
Then there was the public reaction—or lack of public reaction. To many Americans, the really shocking thing about all the scandals was how little shock they generated. Voters ousted the Tweed ring, but Tammany Hall survived. The Grant administration spat out one crook after another, but the president won reelection in 1872 and voters might well have given him a third term if offered the chance.
Who could blame them? Weren’t the bosses and the operators and the peculators simply employing in the public sector the same values for which Rockefeller, Carnegie, and Morgan were being so richly rewarded in the private sector? “Tweed was the most striking illustration of a very common faith,” George Curtis wrote: “belief in the Almighty Dollar.” Rockefeller and the other capitalists often professed motives of progress and efficiency, but at the end of the quarter and the year the undisputed measure of their success was the profit they amassed. Gould had deprived more people of more money than Tweed ever did, but Gould never went to jail. Rockefeller received more in kickbacks—from railroads—in a week than William Belknap got in his whole life, yet Belknap was ruined while Rockefeller grew richer and richer.25
There was a lesson in this, but the nature of the lesson was hard to discern. Did capitalism inevitably corrupt democracy? Was honesty, whether in business or government, simply outmoded? Buyers were warned to beware in the marketplace; should keepers of the public conscience declare caveat civis and leave it at that? Or should voters just throw the rascals out and start over?
Chapter 13
THE SPIRIT OF ’76
A mid the growing and diversifying stream of immigration to America, the least noticed tributary was the one that had long been the lar
gest and still flowed strong: from Britain. British immigrants assimilated easily into American life, arriving with the language and, for the most part, the Protestant religion of the American majority. At a time when the mass of immigrants seemed increasingly foreign to many of the native born, the British were gratifyingly familiar. Once judged the agents of perfidious Albion, the British were suddenly the model of what immigrants should be and do.
From the perspective of the British immigrants themselves, the adjustment to American life was indeed generally straightforward. They found work and homes; they settled in among their new neighbors more or less where they chose. Yet certain aspects of American culture required getting used to, even after some years in the States.
John Lewis had arrived from England before the Civil War. He took up residence in New York City and landed a job in a wholesale grocery. He applauded the Union victory although he didn’t fight, and he broadly supported the principles of Republican Reconstruction although he wasn’t especially active in politics. He was more interested in American folkways, which never failed to intrigue him, and in occasional letters to a brother back in England he described what he encountered.
“I went to Philadelphia on Xmas eve and stayed three days and was pressed to stay the week out,” he explained at the beginning of 1876. “There was nothing special then but feasting—and I did feast, had to doctor myself when I came home.” One aspect of the holiday celebration, besides the feasting, did merit special notice. “That is the Christmas trees, originally from Germany and I think first introduced into England by Prince Albert, but an old custom here. Usually the trees are decorated and loaded with sweets, toys &c, which are disposed of with great eclat (what’s that, Willie?) and the matter ends.” (Willie was Lewis’s nephew.) “Not so in Philadelphia. There all the people seem to resolve themselves into children for the occasion.” Philadelphians carried the decoration of Christmas trees to excess. Everyone who could afford it—and to Lewis’s eye, nearly everyone could—devoted two whole rooms of their houses to Christmas trees and collateral decorations. “The usual arrangement in this country is to have two parlours—be it a large or small house—opening to each other by sliding doors, the front being for state occasions. As large and fine a tree as can be accommodated being procured and set up, it is covered with every conceivable shape into which coloured and gilt paper and card can be cut, and … little pictures, glass balls, chains, garlands &c, anything to make a gay and imposing display.… All the light possible is thrown upon it, often by reflectors, the lattice blinds thrown open, and it is open to inspection by passers by, which, as houses in Philadelphia are only a little above the street, is an easy matter.” There was no limit, beyond the budget and imagination of the homeowners, to the extent of the decorations. “At one place I visited, an old doctor’s, there was a very handsome river steamboat, perfect, three feet long with about fifty passengers (these last small pictures cut out) all of white, coloured and gilt card. Also a beautiful fire hose carriage.”
