Capitol Men (22 page)

Then it was Warmoth's turn. When the legislature finished its business for the day, he told his followers not to venture too far away, and at 4:30
P.M.
he used his extant powers as governor to call an extra session. All members of the legislature were immediately notified by messenger, but the Warmoth men who had stayed nearby managed to rush into the hall and, acting as fast as the Carter faction had earlier in the day, voted to wipe clean the record of the earlier arrests and strip Carter of his job as speaker of the house, installing a Warmoth man in his stead. For good measure, the body passed an official vote of confidence in Governor Warmoth.

Carter and his faction were furious, but Warmoth had the organizational advantage and gathered enough men to regain a quorum in the senate, where he and Pinchback set out at once to defeat the opposition's scheme to deny Pinchback the office of lieutenant governor. When it became apparent that only one vote was required to tip the balance, Pinchback, as the senate's presiding officer, resolved matters by simply voting for himself. This went against informal senate tradition, but by this point no element of subterfuge seemed unusual. With Warmoth in charge, Pinchback safely elected, and Carter tumbled from his leadership of the house, the Customhouse group had no choice but to return to their seats in a Warmoth-Pinchback administration. They could only pray that an authority so corruptly installed would be short-lived.

As the election of 1872 approached, friction was also apparent in the leadership of the national Republican Party. This was a matter of special concern to black Americans, whose fate was intertwined with the party's fitness and survival though they yet had little direct influence over its management. The core of the dilemma was the man who sat in the White House and who now sought a second term. President Grant, while still admired personally as a hero of the recent war, had disappointed many Americans, even some within his own party. At fault were his persistent cronyism, his seemingly lax attention to important issues, and the corruption that seemed to waft about his office and his closest aides and cohorts.

Perhaps most significant for his black supporters, Grant that year had a bitter public falling-out with the Massachusetts senator Charles Sumner, who, with the death of Thaddeus Stevens in 1868, had become Congress's chief activist for securing equal rights for the freedmen. Sumner and Grant had always made a strange pair of Republican icons—Sumner a man of ideals and searing intellect who expressed himself, at times bombastically, with lofty allusions to classical literature and antiquity; Grant, a bland, silent fellow, seemingly incurious about the world, said to be most at ease when talking about horses in the company of his old army buddies. In the war, Grant had distinguished himself from other Union commanders by his unwavering determination to find and fight the enemy. But this firm steadfastedness often appeared less well suited to managing complex affairs of state. And while Grant personally steered clear of the charges of corruption that dogged the White House, the creeping sense of something rotten in his administration provided fodder for Democrats; among other things, it lent credence to the Democrats' persistent claims that Southern Republicans were guilty of malfeasance and incompetence.

PRESIDENT ULYSSES S. GRANT

The break with Sumner had begun in 1870, when the president became taken with the idea of annexing the Caribbean nation of Santo Domingo (now the Dominican Republic) for $1.5 million. The appeal of annexation was threefold: access to the island's mineral resources, a place to establish an American outpost that would inhibit European
meddling in the Caribbean, and control of a nearby yet isolated locale to which American blacks might be enticed to emigrate.

Sumner, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, was harshly critical of the idea, which seemed like unwarranted expansionism. He suspected that the clique that ran Santo Domingo, centered on its autocratic president, Buenaventura Baez, did not truly represent the best interests of its people, for, as Sumner learned, Baez had so little authority over his countrymen that U.S. warships had been dispatched to intimidate his opponents. It also came to Sumner's attention that some of Grant's aides had been busy in Santo Domingo, lining up lucrative real estate deals in anticipation of annexation, and that private speculators were thick in the plot to bring about the purchase. As for the idea of black migration, Sumner believed it wrong to export the nation's racial issues, however intractable they seemed, and feared that a government plan fostering the out-migration of American citizens would be a poor precedent for both the country's domestic initiatives and its foreign policy.

The rift between the two men was exacerbated not so much by Sumner's formal opposition to the plan but by the freighted language he used—comparing the annexation to the South's attempts to expand slavery into the west a generation earlier, alluding to Baez as "a political jockey ... sustained in power by the government of the United States that he may betray his country." He also made some very personal attacks on Grant, whose "kingly prerogative" toward Santo Domingo he likened to the bullying tactics of the Ku Klux Klan. "Had the President been so inspired as to bestow upon the protection of Southern unionists, white and black, one-half, nay one-quarter the time, money, zeal, will, personal attention, personal effort, personal intercession which he has bestowed upon his attempt to obtain half an island in the Caribbean sea," Sumner told the Senate in March 1871, "our Southern Ku Klux would have existed in name only, while tranquility would have reigned everywhere within our borders." After loud applause, and some hissing and booing from the galleries, Sumner continued. "Now, as I desire the suppression of the Ku Klux, and as I seek the elevation of the African race, I insist that the presidential scheme, which initiates a new form of Ku Klux on the coast of St. Domingo ... shall be arrested. I speak of that Ku Klux of which the President is the declared head, and I speak also for the African race, whom the President has trampled down." Sumner was known for insensitive and reckless words—his
friend Wendell Phillips called him "a cat without smellers"—but even his supporters feared he had overreached in comparing the president of the United States to a leader of the Ku Klux Klan.

Grant felt not only abused but also double-crossed by Sumner, for he had once had reason to believe that he and the Massachusetts senator basically agreed about Santo Domingo. Sumner lived on Lafayette Square, just across from the White House, and on January 2, 1870, Grant had taken the unusual step of paying an unannounced visit to his neighbor. Sumner, at dinner with two reporters, diplomatically invited Grant inside; the ensuing discussion, which the journalists were allowed to witness, included Grant's personal appeal for Sumner to lend his influential support on the annexation question. The president likely hoped that the part of the plan meant to benefit Southern blacks would, if explained carefully, win Sumner over, and apparently he departed that night confident of Sumner's loyalty. "Mr. President," Sumner had told him at the door, "I am an administration man, and whatever you do will always find in me the most careful and candid consideration."

When Sumner began disparaging the idea in the Senate, Grant was livid, and he repaid Sumner's rebellion by launching a successful effort to relieve Sumner of his chairmanship of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and to recall the current ambassador to Britain, John Lothrop Motley, who was the senator's close friend. Grant could not have calculated a blow to hurt Sumner more, for Sumner was immensely proud of his expertise on American foreign policy; he had traveled extensively in Europe and had dozens of important friends and contacts there.

When Grant enjoyed public favor, his ethical and diplomatic lapses were overlooked. However, when badly handled issues such as the Santo Domingo crisis emerged (the annexation plan was eventually dropped), his opponents could revive them when the moment seemed opportune. A persistent vulnerability was Grant's unashamed nepotism, for he had more than a dozen close relations on the federal payroll; and by the spring of 1872, with the election only a few months away, more questionable incidents had accrued to taint Grant's reputation.

Some said the president's troubles really began with the loss of his good friend and adviser General John A. Rawlins, a trusted military aide who later served as Grant's secretary of war. Rawlins was one of the few people whom Grant allowed to criticize him, even about his drinking. After Rawlins died of consumption in September 1869, the president's administration and policymaking seemed less sure-footed. In that very
month the administration became implicated in an attempt to corner the gold market, led by the financiers Jim Fisk and Jay Gould. On September 24, a day that came to be known as Black Friday, the price of gold was driven steeply upward as insiders bought large quantities of it; then, when a satisfactory price was reached, these amounts were suddenly sold, causing the bottom of the market to drop. The Grant administration's complicity lay in suspending the sale of gold, thus further limiting the amount available and driving up the price.

An even greater disgrace was the manipulation of the Crédit Mobilier, a construction company formed to build the roadbed for the Union Pacific railroad, which would bridge America coast to coast. For an estimated $50 million in work and material, Crédit Mobilier received $73 million from the federal coffers, a $23 million windfall for its well-connected stockholders, some of whom also sat on the board of directors of the Union Pacific. When suspicions about the arrangement arose, Oakes Ames, the Massachusetts congressman who had helped create the enterprise, distributed lucrative Crédit Mobilier shares, earning as much as 80 percent interest, to well-placed individuals in Washington, including Vice President Schuyler Colfax and the Ohio congressman James Garfield. One of the lesser beneficiaries of the scandal, Garfield was said to have received $329; this figure, scribbled in the background, became a recurring motif in derisive political cartoons about the future president.

Colfax turned out to be the big fish in the net of Crédit Mobilier. An impeachment effort was launched against him, and although it fell short, it effectively denied him a second term as Grant's number two. As far as Charles Sumner was concerned, however, it wasn't Colfax alone who should be kept from another term in office; he believed President Grant had to go as well. Grant remained popular, however, particularly with blacks, and they recoiled at the attacks made against him, for any diminution of Grant's leadership would only strengthen the Democrats' chances of seizing the nation's highest office. "I may be wrong," wrote Frederick Douglass, "but I do not at present see any good reason for degrading Grant in the eyes of the American people. Personally, he is nothing to me, but as the president, the Republican President of the country, I am conscious if it can be done to hold him in all honor."

If anyone thought Sumner would similarly acknowledge reality and fall in line behind the president, they received a rude shock on the last day of May 1872, weeks before the Republican convention, when the New Englander unloaded another barrage against Grant on the floor of the Senate. For four hours he lambasted the party's standard-bearer as
inept, corrupt, and ignorant of the workings of democratic government. Referring to a comparison that someone in the Senate had made between Grant and George Washington, the nation's first president, Sumner listed the current chief executive's distinctions: "first in nepotism, first in present-taking, and first in every species of diplomatic blundering." Accusing Grant of wasting his time on fast horses, expensive carriages, and vacationing at seaside resorts, he declared, "I protest against him as radically unfit for the presidential office!"

Republican loyalists were again deeply troubled by Sumner's antics, for earlier that month a breakaway faction, the Liberal Republicans, had convened in Cincinnati to declare their intention to deny Grant another term. Their pet cause was the overturning of the spoils system—the patronage and nepotism for which Grant was well known. But just as they decried the handing of lucrative offices to those who did not merit them, so did they speak out against the continuing "spoils" of war in the South—the restrictions on once-rebellious Southerners and the "favoritism" shown the freedmen. The movement's leaders—Senators Carl Schurz and Lyman Trumbull, the feminist orator Anna Dickinson, and the influential journalists Murat Halstead of the
Cincinnati Commercial,
Horace White of the
Chicago Tribune,
and E. L. Godkin of
The Nation
—opposed the Ku Klux Klan Bill and the ongoing interference of federal forces in the former Confederacy. In addition to their appeal for sectional reconciliation, they asked that greater attention be given to big business, western expansion, and immigration, as well as the labor strife then gripping the North, such as the demand for an eight-hour day. In short, they wanted the federal government to begin addressing the many ways in which the whole country, not only the South, had been transformed by the war.