The Man Who Saved the Union (76 page)

G
rant observed the affair with bemusement. A friend,
George Childs, and his wife were coming to Washington; Grant invited them to stay with him and Julia. He specified a particular week. “
You know our house room is so limited that we have to invite friends in rotation,” he explained. He added wryly: “I hope I have enough left, notwithstanding the defection of Mr. Greeley and Carl Schurz, to keep the little room we have filled during the winter.” The opposition press criticized Grant for staffing the executive departments with his friends after dismissing—“decapitating,” the critics luridly said—their predecessors. In a sardonic moment Grant warned one of those friends,
Russell Jones, the minister
to
Belgium, to be on guard. “
Sumner, Schurz,
Dana and all your admirers think it preposterous in me to give appointments to persons who I ever knew and particularly to those who feel any personal friendship for me,” he wrote. “If I am guided by this advice your decapitation is sure.”

But Grant could be serious, for he thought the issue a serious one. Mischief-makers sought to sow doubt between the president and the vice president, contending that
Schuyler Colfax was maneuvering to replace Grant. Colfax denied the rumors and Grant accepted the denial. He explained to the vice president how he had answered one of the rumormongers. “
I simply replied testifying my entire confidence in the earnestness you felt in declaring to the contrary, but that if you should be the choice of the
Republican party I did not know a better man to lead them, nor one that I could more earnestly work in support of. My great ambition was to save all that has been gained by so much sacrifice of blood and treasure; that I religiously believed that that could only be done through the triumph of the Republican party until their opponents get on a national, patriotic, Union platform; that the choice of the Republican party was my choice; that I held no patent right to the office, and probably had the least desire for it of anyone who ever held it or was ever prominently mentioned in connection with it.”

Grant judged that whatever weakened the Republican party enhanced the possibility of a
Democratic victory, which would be a disaster for the nation. “
My own convictions,” he told friend and business associate
Charles Ford, “are that it would have been better never to have made a sacrifice of blood and treasure to save the Union than to have the Democratic party come in power now and sacrifice by the ballot what the bayonet seemed to have accomplished.” After long eschewing party politics, Grant now saw his party as the necessary agent of national reconciliation. “
It will be a happy day for me when I am out of public life,” he told
Adam Badeau. “But I do feel a deep interest in the Republican party keeping control of affairs until the results of the war are acquiesced in by all political parties. When that is accomplished we can afford to quarrel about minor matters.” He didn’t welcome the troubles his administration and the party were encountering, but he remained optimistic, in part because he had seen much worse. “
My trials here have been considerable,” he wrote Elihu Washburne. “But, I believe, so far every tempest that has been aroused has recoiled on them who got it up.… A great many professedly staunch Republicans acted very much as if they wanted to outdo
the Democracy in breaking up the Republican party. Everything looks more favorably now, though, for the party than it did in ’63, when the war was raging.”

Several senior members of the party implored Grant to make peace with the defectors. “
We have men among us who are not for your nomination,” Senator
Henry Wilson said, reiterating the obvious. “Some I fear are ready to go into any movements to defeat you, even at the sacrifice of the Republican party. I wish something could be done to unite these men with us. In your position you can make advances to them.… You are strong now. See to it, I pray you, that all well disposed men are invited to act with you.” The president should focus on Schurz and Sumner especially, Wilson said. “I wish you could see Schurz, as he is by all odds the most influential of any of these men. I wish, too, you and Mr. Sumner would settle all your differences. This state”—
Massachusetts, home to both Wilson and Sumner—“is sure for you by about the old majority, but it would be very pleasant to have unity and peace.”

Grant appreciated the benefits of party unity. No more than Wilson or the other senators and representatives who urged reconciliation did he welcome a rift in the party. But he thought Sumner and Schurz were too far gone, too impressed with their own importance. In any event, he thought
they
were the ones who should take the first step back. “
Whenever I have done injustice to any man,” he wrote in a letter intended for Wilson, “no matter what his position, and find it out, there is no apology I am not ready to make. I have never done aught to give offense to Mr. Sumner, Mr. Schurz, the
Springfield Republican
people, the
Cincinnati Commercial
people”—two particularly vocal opposition papers—“nor Mr. Greeley. Yet they have all attacked me without mercy.… Before there can be peace between us, rather I should say good feeling and intimacy, the explanation
must
come from them.” Grant had heard stories, apparently circulated by Sumner, that he had been drunk on the occasion of his visit to Sumner’s house. Sensitive on the old subject, he considered Sumner’s revival of it beyond the bounds of political difference. “Mr. Sumner has been unreasonable, cowardly, slanderous, unblushingly false,” Grant said. “I should require from him an acknowledgment to this effect, from his seat in the Senate, before I would consent to meet him socially. He has not the manliness ever to admit an error. I feel a greater contempt for him than for any other man in the Senate.”

Grant’s differences with Schurz were less personal. “Schurz is an ungrateful man, a disorganizer by nature and one who can render
much greater service to the party he does not belong to than the one he pretends to have attachment for. The sooner he allies himself with our enemies, openly, the better for us.” Grant gave the critical press the back of his hand. “The
Springfield Republican
and
Cincinnati Commercial
are mere guerrilla newspapers, always finding fault with their friends, and any attempt to conciliate them would merely satisfy them of their importance.” Grant proposed to do what he had always done. “I shall endeavor to perform my duty faithfully and trust to the common sense of the people to select the right man to execute their will.”

Grant likely never sent this letter (the original remained in his files), but he conveyed its gist to Wilson and others. “
President says he has just had a visit from Senators Morrill of Maine and Wilson, wishing to effect a reconciliation between him and Sumner,”
Hamilton Fish recorded in his diary. “He says he told them that whenever Sumner should retract and apologize for the slanders he has uttered against him in the Senate, in his own house, in street cars and other public conveyances, at dinners and other entertainments and elsewhere, as publicly, openly, and in the same manner in which he has uttered these slanders, he would listen to proposals for reconciliation. But even then he would have no confidence in him, or in the expectation that he would not again do just what he has done.”

G
rant initially underestimated the stamina of the insurgency. “
It looks to me as if Mr.
Schurz was not making much out of his new departure,” he wrote
Charles Ford. “It will be gratifying to see such disorganizers as he is defeated.” When Schurz persisted, calling a national nominating convention of the
Liberal Republicans for May
1872 in Cincinnati, Grant suggested that the breakaway movement would implode with the help of the
Democrats. “
My prediction is that the Democratic party will attempt to hold out the idea that they will support the Cincinnati nominees in hope of permanently dividing the Republican party, that is, of committing the bolters to their ticket, and then make a straight-out nomination of their own. I believe such action will result in the withdrawal of the Cincinnati ticket just as the Fremont ticket was withdrawn in ’64. We shall see what we shall see, however.”

The Cincinnati group was a motley collection of former Free-Soilers from the North, Unionists from the South, frustrated office seekers from all over and a sprinkling of professional politicians who simply found
themselves on the wrong side of the regular Republican organization. The moralistic tone of the gathering was set by Schurz, who, responding to a charge by Grant ally
Oliver Morton that he was betraying the party, said of Morton: “
He has never left his party. I have never betrayed my principles. That is the difference between him and me.” The conventioneers advocated civil service reform to curb the corruption they perceived as epidemic in politics, tariff reduction to diminish the power of corporations and their lobbyists, federal withdrawal from the South to conclude the Civil War once and for all, and, especially, the removal of Grant from the White House to allow his replacement by someone of greater political refinement.

Charles Francis Adams was the early frontrunner (Schurz being disqualified by his foreign birth). The son of
John Quincy Adams had his father’s reformist streak, which suited the mood of the moment, and almost no record in politics, which gave his rivals little to use against him. But Grant had appointed him to the commission that was then adjudicating the
Alabama
claims in Geneva, and in his absence the delegates’ eyes began to wander. Schurz, who favored Adams, might have brought them back had he applied himself in a more lively fashion. “
Carl Schurz was the most industrious and the least energetic man I have ever worked with,”
Joseph Pulitzer, the secretary of the convention and soon the most energetic journalist in America, muttered afterward.

The convention ultimately settled on Horace
Greeley. This choice was striking in that Greeley had long championed a high tariff, which most of the delegates excoriated. He did have a record as a reformer, but it was a record that roamed widely across the landscape of American politics and culture, touching socialism, vegetarianism and spiritualism, in addition to such mundane causes as abolition and temperance. He wore whiskers that would have been called a beard had they sprouted from his chin rather than his neck; observers sometimes mistook them for a mangy silver fox crawling from under his collar. Precisely how Greeley wound up as the nominee was a matter that prompted much debate. Some delegates claimed that the convention had been hijacked by the professionals, who foisted Greeley on the gathering. Others intimated that the airy reformer wasn’t so clueless after all and had sold his convictions on the tariff—which he suddenly said should come down—for the nomination.

A third explanation, which overlapped the first two, was that Greeley had engaged in backroom dealings with influential
Democrats who
promised to deliver their party’s seconding nomination. When the Democratic convention, in Baltimore, did indeed nominate Greeley—in the briefest convention in American history—this explanation gained plausibility.

C
harles
Sumner couldn’t bring himself to bolt the
Republican party. “
I have no hesitation in declaring myself a member of the Republican party, and one of the straitest of the sect,” he told his colleagues in the Senate in the wake of the Cincinnati convention, which he conspicuously avoided. “I stood by its cradle; let me not follow its hearse.” Yet he would gladly send Grant to his political grave if he could. Sumner lashed the president more harshly than he ever had before. He retraced the history of the Santo Domingo affair, in which, he said, he had been basely attacked by the president’s minions. “This Republican senator, engaged in a patriotic service, and anxious to save the colored people from outrage, was denounced on this floor as a traitor to the party.” He had realized then, he said, that the Republican party he had learned to love was being malignantly transformed. “Too plainly it was becoming the instrument of
one man and his personal will
, no matter how much he set at defiance the Constitution and international law, or how much he insulted the colored people.” Grant had transgressed the Constitution more egregiously than
Andrew Johnson ever had, Schurz said; the appropriate analogy was Julius Caesar. “He has operated by a system of combinations, military, political, and even senatorial.… This utterly unrepublican
Caesarism has mastered the Republican party and dictated the presidential will, stalking into the Senate chamber itself, while a vindictive spirit visits good Republicans who cannot submit.” But what could the country expect from a person of Grant’s background? “The successful soldier is rarely changed to the successful civilian. There seems an incompatibility between the two.… One always a soldier cannot late in life become a statesman.” Sumner recapitulated the gold conspiracy, dwelling on the role of Grant’s brother-in-law
Abel Corbin. He decried Grant’s willingness to accept gifts from admirers who subsequently sought offices. “For a public man to take gifts is reprehensible; for a president to select cabinet councilors and other officers among those from whom he has taken gifts is an anomaly in republican annals.” By the sale of offices, Sumner said, Grant had become “probably the richest president since George Washington.” The Republican convention would meet shortly;
Sumner demanded that the delegates choose another nominee than the incumbent. “I protest against him as radically unfit for the presidential office, being essentially military in nature, without experience in civil life, without aptitude for civil duties, and without knowledge of Republican institutions.… Not without anxiety do I wait, but with the earnest hope that the convention will bring the
Republican party into ancient harmony, saving it especially from the suicidal folly of an issue on the personal pretensions of one man.”

T
he Republican regulars had written Sumner off as a crank, if not a lunatic. Many of
Grant’s supporters thought the senator’s diatribe worked to the president’s advantage. “
The atrocious speech of Mr. Sumner has been deeply felt and resented by all who served under your command,”
John Pope wrote Grant from Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. “It is felt as a personal insult by every one of them and will secure you thousands of votes which for political reasons might have been given to another candidate.”