The Man Who Saved the Union (74 page)

To ease the backlog Akerman accepted plea bargains from scores of the arrestees and subjected to trial only those involved in what he called “
deep criminality.” The trials took months, spilling well over into 1872. Several hundred arrestees were ultimately convicted at trial and sentenced, but because even the most egregious Klansmen couldn’t be charged under federal law with anything more serious than conspiracy to deprive individuals of their civil rights—rather than assault or murder, which remained under the exclusive jurisdiction of the states—the sentences were relatively minor. The longest prison term meted out was five years; most of the convicted served six to eighteen months. Fines ranged from ten to one hundred dollars.

Grant’s critics, noting the light sentences, charged the president with laboring mightily to produce a mouse. Some noted the defection of Schurz and the “liberal Republicans” and concluded that the Klan prosecutions were a sign of the administration’s weakness rather than its strength. Amos Akerman acknowledged the diminishing concern of Northerners for the problems of the South. “
The feeling here is very strong that the Southern Republicans must cease to look for special support,” he remarked from Washington. The Southerners would have to “stand on their own feet.” Northerners had other worries. “Such atrocities as Ku Kluxery do not hold their attention.… The Northern mind, being full of what is called progress, runs away from the past.”

But the consequences of Grant’s stroke transcended the prison time served and, for the moment at least, defied the distraction of Northern liberals. Grant’s campaign put the fear of federal power into the Klan and shattered its sense of impunity. Not for decades would the nightriders exercise such influence again.
Albion Tourgée, a judge in North Carolina (who would go on to represent
Homer Plessy in the landmark civil rights trial of the 1890s), wrote Grant explaining the effect of the president’s actions on the legal system of the South. “
At the Superior court of the county of Alamance, at which I had the honor to preside last week,” Tourgée said, “a grand jury composed of a large majority of members of the Ku Klux organization, including one chief of a camp, presented bills
of indictment of sixty-three members of the Klan for felony and eighteen for the murder of
Wyatt Outlaw, who was hung as you may recollect on a tree in the Court House Square February 26th, 1870. Many of those indicted are of the most respectable families of the county. The confessions now in my hands also reveal the perpetrators of similar crimes in other counties. I do not doubt, within a month I shall hold ample evidence as to every K.K. crime in this district. Nothing, Mr. President, but the prompt and unflinching firmness of your course in relation to this vexatious question could have rendered such a thing possible.” The change that had occurred was simply marvelous. “The Ku Klux was an impregnable fortress. Sixty-four times I have tried in vain to break into its walls and secure testimony sufficient to enable me to demand from juries indictment and conviction. The former had a few times been secured by a predominance of Republican jurors; the latter never. And so it would have remained until the end of time had not your wise and patriotic course so frightened the adherents of the Invisible Empire that they began to desert in squads. And this is the result: a
Ku Klux
grand jury
indicts for Ku Kluxing
.”

64

H
AMILTON
F
ISH’S BOREDOM WITH THE
K
U
K
LUX
K
LAN MIRRORED
his preoccupation with Britain. For the secretary of state only one issue of international affairs really mattered. The British government had sought for decades—since American independence, in fact—to stunt or contain the growing republic on the Atlantic’s western shore. Americans naturally resisted. In only one instance, in 1812, did war result, but bad feelings were chronic. During the sectional crisis the Americans seemed to be doing Britain’s enervating work for it, and Southern secession promised a permanent solution to London’s American problem. The loss of the South would weaken the Union irretrievably, making Britain perhaps the dominant power in the Western Hemisphere. Strategic prudence for Britain accordingly suggested aiding the South in its struggle against the North. Economics pointed in the same direction, as the South supplied the cotton essential to the textile trade on which Britain had built its industrial revolution.

Yet there were arguments against a Southern tilt. The British had abolished slavery in their empire a generation earlier and ever since spearheaded efforts to curtail the international slave trade. Their motives were as mixed as motives often are; in British antislavery policy, morality married calculations of competitiveness. Slavery was inhumane; it also gave Britain’s commercial rivals an advantage if they practiced slavery while Britain didn’t. During the first year of the American war, when Lincoln fought solely for the Union, the choice between North and South was ambiguous on the slave issue, but after the president issued the
Emancipation Proclamation the British could have backed the South only at grave cost to conscience and credibility.

Other arguments added to London’s diffidence. Since the repeal of Britain’s protectionist
Corn Laws in the 1840s, the British had become big purchasers of American grain; by the 1860s they relied almost as heavily on Northern wheat as on Southern cotton. British officials, charged with managing a globe-spanning empire, had troubles around the world; to meddle in America’s fight would multiply their headaches. Finally, the South had to show an ability to win the war before Britain would risk alienating the North; to join a losing cause would be folly.

On balance the arguments for and against supporting the South were, from Britain’s perspective, nearly equal. Consequently the British took a middle stance,
recognizing Southern belligerency but not Southern independence. This passed the basic reality test: the South had created a government that was fighting for independence, but that government hadn’t come close to winning. The middle way also hedged British bets. It left open the possibility of going farther, to a recognition of independence, should Southern victories on the battlefield so warrant. And it avoided provoking the North beyond the capacity of Lincoln and his administration to endure without declaring war on London.

The balanced policy also let British merchants and manufacturers do business with both sides in the American conflict. The South, in particular, coveted access to British industry, in order to acquire the weapons without which the Confederacy would quickly have collapsed. American industry clustered in the North, which supplied its own arms needs; the South looked to Britain. British arms makers and especially ship builders were pleased to accommodate. Some sleight of hand was required, as British law forbade the construction of foreign warships; the solution was for the British yards to build commercial vessels subsequently convertible to Confederate naval use. Lincoln’s minister in London,
Charles Francis Adams, saw past the ruse and protested, but not before two ships, which the Confederates christened the
Alabama
and the
Florida
, slipped to sea and into Confederate service. The raiders sank scores of Northern merchant vessels, costing the owners and shippers millions of dollars, requiring the Union navy to engage in a lengthy pursuit and arguably extending the war months or years.

This argument was what Grant inherited, along with the anger of the owners and shippers. They pressed the American government to file claims against Britain; eventually others added their grievances. The
Alabama
claims, as the package was called, stirred Congress, where legislators orated indignantly against British perfidy. Twisting the lion’s tail
had always been good politics in America, and it was never better than during the decade after the Civil War. Charles Sumner took up the task just weeks into Grant’s presidency. An agreement on the
Alabama
claims concluded at the eleventh hour of
Andrew Johnson’s presidency required Senate approval; Sumner aimed to prevent any such approval from being given. Sumner damned Britain’s actions on the
Alabama
as deliberately malign. “
At a moment of profound peace between the United States and England there was a hostile expedition against the United States,” he said of the construction and launch of the raider. “It was in no sense a commercial transaction but an act of war.” The ship was operated by Confederate crews, but her origin was British. “Thus her depredations and burnings, making the ocean blaze, all proceeded from England.” Sumner wanted to charge Britain not simply for the cost of the ships and cargoes the
Alabama
destroyed but for the cost of the lengthened war Britain’s Confederate-friendly policy made inevitable. “Without British intervention the rebellion would have soon succumbed under the well-directed efforts of the national government. Not weeks or months, but years, were added in this way to our war, so full of costly sacrifice.” Sumner declined to place a precise dollar figure on the losses America suffered as a result of Britain’s hostile actions, but they were huge. “They stand before us mountain-high, with a base broad as the nation, and a mass stupendous as the rebellion itself.” The transfer of
Canada to the United States might begin to atone for the costs America had incurred as a result of Britain’s crimes. But beyond repayment the British must apologize for their complicity in the rebellion and in the defense of slavery. “At a great epoch of history, not less than that of the French Revolution or that of the Reformation, when civilization was fighting a last battle with slavery, England gave her name, her influence, her material resources to the wicked cause, and flung a sword into the scale with slavery.” Britain must own up and pay up. “The day of reckoning has come.”

Grant had greater reason than Sumner for resenting Britain’s wartime policy. The losses Grant’s armies endured resulted in no small part from Britain’s encouragement of the Confederacy. In private Grant’s resentment sometimes surfaced. “
If it were not for our debt,” he told the cabinet, “I wish Congress would declare war upon Great Britain, when we would take Canada and wipe out her commerce as she has done ours, and then we would start fair.… Really, I am tired of all this arrogance and assumption of Great Britain.”

But Grant differed from Sumner in keeping his resentment confidential.
He concurred in rejecting the agreement inherited from Johnson, but he did so in language far more statesmanlike than Sumner’s. “
Its provisions were wholly inadequate for the settlement of the grave wrongs that had been sustained by this government, as well as by its citizens,” he told Congress and the American people. He itemized the injuries: “the increased rates of insurance … the diminution of exports and imports … the decrease and transfer to Great Britain of our commercial marine … the prolongation of the war and the increased cost (both in treasure and in lives) of its suppression.” It was not possible to make good these injuries the way one could ordinary claims, yet the Johnson agreement attempted to do so. The agreement must be abandoned, and Grant said he had so instructed Hamilton Fish. The secretary of state was eager to start a new round of negotiations; if the British were willing, talks could begin at once. “I hope that the time may soon arrive when the two governments can approach the solution of this momentous question with an appreciation of what is due to the rights, dignity, and honor of each,” Grant said.

A
lthough the British accepted Grant’s offer to reopen negotiation of the
Alabama
claims, the talks moved slowly. Sumner stoked the fires of American passion on the subject by now insisting that Britain yield not merely Canada but all British possessions in the Western Hemisphere. The British rejected territorial transfer as absurd and unacceptable.

Amid the Anglo-American stalemate, France imprudently declared war on
Prussia. Napoleon III had designs on German territory and had long chafed at the pretensions of Prussian king Wilhelm, and when a dispute flared over the succession to the Spanish throne, Prussian chancellor
Otto von Bismarck, who was looking for an excuse to rally the other German states to Prussia’s side, magnified an interchange between Wilhelm and the French ambassador into an insult to French pride. Napoleon took the bait and the war began.

Grant hadn’t liked Napoleon during the Civil War, when the emperor had let the Confederacy float loans in Paris and exploited America’s internal conflict to send the French troops to Mexico. Grant didn’t know Bismarck, but he generally appreciated Germans, who during the war had bought Union bonds and whose German-American kinsmen had fought under the Union flag. Yet Grant kept his preferences to himself. He proclaimed American neutrality between the French and Germans
and put Americans on notice that violations of neutrality would be treated severely.

The French wanted a friendlier response. After the rest of Germany linked arms with Prussia, as Bismarck anticipated, and after Napoleon’s government collapsed upon the emperor’s capture at Sedan in September 1870, Paris sought American help in avoiding dismemberment by the Germans. The French minister in Washington requested an American statement of support for French territorial integrity. Grant declined, saying France’s troubles were none of America’s business. “
The President further expressed as a private opinion,” Hamilton Fish recorded, “that France, having without provocation entered upon the war, with a scarcely concealed intention to dispossess Prussia of a portion of her territory, could not complain, and was not entitled to sympathy, if the result of the war deprived her of a portion of her own territory.” Grant likewise declined any involvement in efforts by third parties to mediate an end to the war. Such involvement, he declared, conflicted with longstanding American policy and probably wouldn’t work anyway. But to retain his options he added an element of diplomatic ambiguity: “
Should the time come when the action of the United States can hasten the return of peace by a single hour, that action will be heartily taken.”