The Man Who Saved the Union (81 page)

He moved to tamp down the war talk. He sent a message to the Spanish government registering America’s concern. “
The summary infliction of the death penalty upon the prisoners taken from the
Virginius
will necessarily attract much attention, and will be regarded as an inhuman act, not in accordance with the spirit of the civilization of the nineteenth century,” he said. Then, having made his point, he let the Spanish know that diplomacy, not force, was his preference. He directed
Hamilton Fish to explain that if Madrid disavowed the actions of the responsible officials in Cuba, released the
Virginius
and the surviving crew and passengers and apologized to the United States by ordering a salute to the American flag, the matter could be resolved. Grant gave the Spanish two weeks to comply.

The time limit was intended to focus the Spanish mind but also to conclude the matter before
Congress returned to Washington. The last thing Grant wanted was for the legislature to take up the Cuban question again. He conspicuously prepared for war in case Spain resisted reason and justice. He sent American naval vessels to Florida and had the War Department plan an invasion of Cuba.

The theatrics worked. The Spanish government accepted his terms. Madrid quibbled only about the flag salute, pointing out that it would reserve this gesture until the questions about the ship’s registry were resolved. “
This seemed to be reasonable and just,” Grant explained to
Congress a few weeks later in a message in which he declared the case closed and the nation’s honor satisfied.

S
almon Chase had thought he would make a better president than
Abraham Lincoln, and he repeatedly threatened to resign his position as Lincoln’s Treasury secretary to show his displeasure at Lincoln’s handling of the war. Lincoln repeatedly rebuffed the threats, not wishing to give Chase the opportunity to challenge him for the
1864 nomination. But once Lincoln secured the nomination for himself, he surprised Chase by accepting his next resignation offer, and then he surprised the country by nominating Chase for chief justice. Chase didn’t abandon his presidential hopes after donning the robe, but he couldn’t resist the tide in Grant’s favor in
1868. He often found himself in the minority on his own Supreme Court, not least in the so-called
Slaughterhouse Cases of 1873, when the majority ruled that the “privileges and immunities” clause of the
Fourteenth Amendment applied only to federal civil rights and not to state civil rights. The consequence was a rapid erosion of African American rights in the South.

The decision angered Chase and doubtless raised his blood pressure, but whether it contributed to the stroke that killed him weeks later, in May 1873, was impossible to determine. “
His family and the nation have my condolence in mourning the loss of a distinguished and faithful public officer,” Grant declared on hearing the news.

The death presented Grant with the opportunity and the burden of selecting a successor. He took his time, not least since the Senate wouldn’t return to Washington till December. He could appoint an interim replacement, but the Senate could turn that person out. “
A chief justice should never be subjected to the mortification of a rejection,” Grant observed in explaining his delay. During the next several months he received much advice and not a few applications before deciding on
Roscoe Conkling of New York. “
My dear Senator,” he wrote Conkling in November: “When the chief justiceship became vacant I necessarily looked with anxiety to someone whose appointment would be recognized
as entirely fitting and acceptable to the country at large. My own preference went to you at once.” He said that he had withheld the appointment on account of not wanting to risk rejection, before adding inconsistently, “The possibility of your rejection of course was not dreamed of.”

It wasn’t dreamed of because Conkling, as a leader of the Republican majority in the Senate, would certainly be confirmed without a struggle. In those days neither presidents nor the Senate much scrutinized the judicial philosophies of nominees to the Supreme Court; as a solid Republican, Conkling suited the Republican Senate. Grant didn’t want a fight over the appointment, and Conkling was a sure bet not to provoke one.

But Conkling declined the offer. “
My transfer now from the Senate to the bench involves considerations not only beyond my own interest and wishes, but I think beyond those before you,” Conkling replied vaguely. “After much thought I am convinced that in view of the whole case, you would agree with me that another appointment should be made. I will not detain you with reasons, nor with expressions of the profound sense of obligation to you which will abide with me always, but instead I ask you to let your choice fall on another who, however else qualified, believes as man and lawyer, as I believe, in the measures you have upheld in war and in peace.”

Grant was disappointed but not so disappointed as his wife. “
When the President, Roscoe Conkling, and I drove to the Capitol to attend the funeral services of our lamented Chief Justice,
Salmon P. Chase,” Julia wrote later, “the Senate chamber was filled with the distinguished men of the country. When the officiating minister alluded to the mantle of the Chief Justice and invoked divine instruction as upon whose shoulders it should fall, I looked around and my choice, without hesitation, was Roscoe Conkling. He was so talented and so honorable, and I must say that woman-like I thought the flowing black robes would be becoming to Mr. Conkling.”

Had Grant possessed a grander vision of the presidency he might have taken the opportunity of Conkling’s declining to reconsider his opportunity to reshape the court. At the least he might have pondered the politics of an appointment more carefully, taking pains to test the waters for a nominee before putting a name forward. But Conkling’s refusal to adopt Grant’s own view of office—that when the nation called a man, he should accept or provide compelling reason why he
couldn’t—irritated him, and in his irritation he reverted to his antipolitical mode.

He nominated
George Williams, who had succeeded
Amos Akerman as attorney general. Williams was happy to receive the honor, but members of the Senate were not happy to bestow it. Grant’s critics threw hurdles in the path of the nomination. “
The Judiciary Committee is sitting listening to every idle story, every lie told by political opponents, who arrive every day to feed the fight,” Grant’s secretary
Horace Porter wrote
Benjamin Bristow, the solicitor general. “They will end by confirming him, but in the meantime they are scoring him till he will be scarcely fit for the race. He is quiet and dignified through it all, but it looks more like the political fight of ward politicians than a contest over the confirmation of a Chief Justice of the United States.… No one has touched upon the question of his ability. It is simply a slanderous rough-and-tumble political fight.”

The fight turned rougher than Porter predicted. Unable to find anything damning against Williams, the ward heelers dragged his wife into the fray. She was said to have extravagant tastes that led her to insist on a fancy carriage with elaborately attired footmen. Williams’s income as attorney general appeared too meager to support such style; he was alleged to have charged the carriage to the government. Williams denied any wrongdoing, and Grant was tempted to try to force the nomination through. But when
Hamilton Fish and others in the cabinet conveyed word from the Senate that Williams lacked the votes for confirmation, Grant reluctantly asked him to step aside. He remained as attorney general.

Grant’s third choice was
Caleb Cushing, who had been attorney general under
Franklin Pierce and more recently counsel at the Geneva tribunal that awarded the United States its diplomatic victory in the
Alabama
claims. Grant assumed that Cushing’s part in the triumph would make his confirmation straightforward and swift.

But by now Grant’s foes were primed to resist any nomination, and when they began investigating Cushing’s past they discovered a letter of recommendation he had written in March 1861 to
Jefferson Davis on behalf of a former clerk in his office. Cushing doubtless was simply trying to do the young man a favor, but the letter to the Confederate president cast doubt on Cushing’s common sense if not his loyalty to the Union. Grant had to drop him from consideration.

His fourth try was
Morrison Waite, an Ohio lawyer and charter Republican from Ohio who had served with Cushing in Geneva and who shared the glow surrounding that success. Little else distinguished his career, leading Grant to hope the bloodhounds of the Senate would wander back to their kennels, bored. They did, and Waite was confirmed.

71

G
RANT’S FRONTAL ASSAULT ON THE
K
U
K
LUX KLAN IN
S
OUTH
C
AROLINA
raised hopes among Republicans elsewhere in the South that he would come to their aid against their political rivals.
Edmund J. Davis was a Texas Unionist who had fled his home state after secession and raised a cavalry regiment of Texans for the Union army. He ran for Texas governor as a Republican in
1869 and was elected to a four-year term. But his testy nature soon antagonized even many of his fellow Republicans, and when he tried for reelection in December
1873 he lost very badly to Democrat
Richard Coke. Thereupon Davis, citing “
great wrongs and frauds perpetrated by our opponents who controlled the registry and the ballot boxes in much the most of the counties,” complained to Grant that the result had been rigged. The
Texas supreme court stirred the dispute by invalidating recent elections to the state legislature, which had authority over the gubernatorial election. “
This may cause here a conflict of authority,” Davis told Grant. Violence hadn’t occurred, he said, but it wasn’t out of the question. “A display of U.S. troops will be most likely to keep the peace till the trouble is settled. I therefore request that assistance.”

At the time of his intervention in South Carolina, Grant had realized that such a blunt instrument could be used only rarely. The Constitution allowed the federal government to suppress
insurrections in the states, but insurrections were rare. Mundane violence was something for the states to deal with themselves, and the Texas case didn’t rise even to that level. The Constitution did
not
authorize the federal government to act as registrar or election judge in the states, and though the recent enforcement acts asserted such authority in cases where civil rights
were being systematically violated, they didn’t extend to instances where Republicans had simply grown unpopular and were voted out of office. Grant had shrugged off the charges of tyranny and military despotism in using the army in South Carolina, knowing that South Carolina was singular. He couldn’t have shrugged off the charges had he made a habit of intervention.

He told Davis to accept the judgment of Texas voters. “
The act of the legislature of Texas providing for the recent election having received your approval,” he wrote the governor, “and both political parties having made nominations and having conducted a political campaign under its provisions, would it not be prudent as well as right to yield to the verdict of the people as expressed by their ballots?”

He took a similar stance when a faction of Republicans in South Carolina sent a delegation to Washington with an appeal for help. The irresponsible elements of the electorate were wreaking havoc on the state, they asserted. The administration must act to restore order. “
Gentlemen,” Grant replied, according to a news account soon published, “after listening to what has been said, I do not see that there is anything that can be done, either by the executive or by the legislative branch of the national government, to better the condition of things which you have described. South Carolina has now a complete existence as a sovereign state, and must make her own laws.” If those laws were bad laws, South Carolina was fully capable of changing them. Grant thought it ironic that his visitors had come from a convention where at least one speaker had railed against the administration in Washington in the most vitriolic terms. “I have never seen a speech equal to it in malignity, vileness, falsity, and slander,” he told his visitors. He inquired whether any among them had refuted the slander. They said they had chosen to treat the speech with “
silent contempt.” Grant puffed on his cigar, eyed them skeptically and sent them away.

W
hether to intervene in the economy was a harder question. As the depression intensified, debtors pleaded with Washington for relief. Falling prices made their debt burden heavier; they embraced any policies that promised to lift prices and ease their burden. The experience of the war seemed to show that printing money raised prices, and so they petitioned Congress to crank up the presses again. “
The importance of doing something in regard to the
currency is becoming more apparent
every day,”
Oliver Morton wrote Grant in late March 1874. “The stagnation of business is increasing.” The Indiana Republican contended that a widespread belief that there wasn’t sufficient money in the economy to sustain a recovery was the culprit. “This conviction stands in the way of enterprise everywhere, especially in the West.” Morton recounted the arguments against expanding the currency, in order to dismiss them. He knew that the president and much of the country distrusted anything that could be construed as
inflation. What was being proposed was no such thing, Morton said. “An increase of the currency which simply keeps pace with the increase of population and wealth is no inflation. The currency is the instrument with which the business of the country is carried on, and the volume of it should be increased with the volume of business. To me it seems absurd that the volume of currency can be fixed at a particular point unless you can also fix the volume of business.” The president had advocated a return to specie payments—in effect, to the
gold standard. Morton shared this desire, but he suggested that the surest way back to gold was not necessarily the straightest way. “The first step, in my opinion, to the return to specie payments is the restoration of good times and the creation of a surplus revenue.” Expanding the currency would accomplish both.