The Man Who Saved the Union (84 page)

Congress responded slowly and without enthusiasm. In 1871 the legislature authorized the president to recommend measures to ensure that federal positions be filled on the basis of competence rather than party affiliation and personal connections. Grant appointed a civil service commission, which prescribed competitive examinations and other techniques for putting an end to the spoils system or at least reducing its scope. Grant approved the recommendations, and in the spring of 1872 the first examinations under the new system were administered.

To Grant’s mind the civil service reforms promised to be both a boon to the nation and a blessing to himself. The nation would benefit from the greater expertise and disinterestedness the new system would produce; he would benefit from not having to deal with the hordes of applicants and their noisy sponsors. Grant discovered what Lincoln and other presidents had learned: that the
patronage system alienated more people
than it satisfied. Successful applicants thought they deserved the jobs; the unsuccessful, who greatly outnumbered the successful ones, felt they had been deprived.
Grant was happy to hand the thankless task of job-filling to the commission.

Many in Congress held a different view. Senators and representatives were the usual conduits for applications for federal jobs, and the delivery of the jobs to supporters acted as binder that held the parties together. This function of the patronage explained much of the fierceness of fights over the presidency. Having a Republican in the White House permitted Republican legislators to shower jobs on their friends and constituents; the arrival of a Democrat snatched that power away.

Grant had shamed Congress into accepting the principle of civil service reform, but the legislature stubbornly refused to fund the new system. He cajoled and expostulated for money year after year, to no effect. Finally he gave the lawmakers an ultimatum. “
The rules adopted to improve the civil service of the Government have been adhered to as closely as has been practicable with the opposition with which they meet,” he said in his December 1874 annual message. “But it is impracticable to maintain them without direct and positive support of Congress.… If Congress adjourns without positive legislation on the subject of civil service reform I will regard such action as a disapproval of the system, and will abandon it.” This would be a disservice to the country and a waste of the effort invested thus far. But there was no alternative. “It is impossible to carry this system to a successful issue without general approval and assistance and positive law to support it.”

Congress remained unmoved. The lame-duck Republicans, who might have judged civil service reform a means to preserve the jobs of their protégés, were too stunned by the Democratic landslide to act coherently. The Democrats salivated at the thought of doling out thousands of positions when they reclaimed the White House in two years. The practice of reform withered; even the idea nearly expired.

G
rant’s failure on civil service reform augured ill for his seventh and eighth years in office, which threatened to be difficult enough anyway. The depression still shadowed the land, and the congressional Democrats made no secret of their intention to obstruct whatever the president proposed.

Grant might have helped himself, if only slightly, by holding open the possibility of a third term. His popularity persisted, and he could have forced the Democrats to guard their flanks against his potential presence on the ballot in 1876. The ambiguous disavowal of a third term he had made during the 1872 campaign left room for reinterpretation and hadn’t been repeated. Even if he ultimately decided not to run, by keeping his antagonists in suspense he could throw them off balance.

This was what his advisers wanted him to do; it was what political common sense dictated. But it didn’t suit him. He had silently resented the allegations of Caesarism, and he decided that the most potent refutation was a definitive disavowal of a political future. “
I never sought the office for a second, nor even for a first, nomination,” he reminded
Harry White, the president of the Pennsylvania Republican convention, in a letter intended for the press. “To the first I was called from a life position”—as general of the army—“one created by Congress expressly for me for supposed services rendered to the Republic. The position vacated I liked. It would have been most agreeable to me to have retained it.… But I was made to believe that the public good called me to make the sacrifice.” The vote of the people had corroborated this belief. His second nomination and second
election had reinforced it. Grant didn’t deny that he took personal pleasure at the result of the voting, especially the second round. “Such a fire of personal abuse and slander had been kept up for four years, notwithstanding my conscientious performance of my duties, to the best of my understanding—though I admit, in the light of subsequent events, many times subject to fair criticism—that an endorsement from the people, who alone govern republics, was a gratification that it is only human to have appreciated and enjoyed.”

But enough was enough. The tradition of stepping down after two terms was a sound one, established by the first president and observed without exception since. Grant allowed that national emergency might someday require setting the tradition aside, but until such calamity occurred, the tradition should be maintained. “I am not, nor have I been, a candidate for a renomination,” he wrote White and the country. “I would not accept a nomination if it were tendered unless it should come under such circumstances as to make it an imperative duty, circumstances not likely to arise.”

If Grant had been half as good a politician as he was a soldier, he never would have written or sent this letter. The intelligence it contained
was as valuable to Grant’s political enemies as his battle plans before Vicksburg or Richmond would have been to Pemberton or Lee. It limited his flexibility, discouraged his troops and let the Democrats know they could simply outwait him.

If he had been merely as good a politician as his wife, he would have kept his thoughts to himself. “
I followed the President into his office one Sunday afternoon, when one after another the cabinet officers arrived,” Julia wrote afterward. The gathering seemed odd, as cabinet meetings weren’t held on Sundays. She tried to draw the secretaries out, but they didn’t know the purpose of the meeting. Grant knew, of course, but he wasn’t saying. “I left the room feeling sure there was something of importance to be considered,” she recounted. “I was restless and anxious.” Half an hour later a messenger left the office and the White House. She could contain herself no longer. “I want to know what is happening,” she told her husband. “I feel sure there is something and I must know.” Grant said he would explain very soon; he just wanted to step out into the hall and light his cigar. After a few minutes he reentered the room. “What is it? Tell me!” she demanded. He said he had read the cabinet a letter he had written taking himself out of the running for 1876. She was dumbfounded. “Did all of these men approve?” she asked. Grant said he hadn’t requested their approval; he had simply read them the letter. “Why did you not read it to me?” she asked. He answered, “I know you too well. It never would have gone if I had read it.” She insisted, “Bring it and read it to me now.” He smiled and said, “It is already posted. That is why I lingered in the hall.” She wailed: “Oh, Ulys! Was that kind to me? Was it just?” He told her there was no use fretting; what was done was done. She gradually calmed herself. “But I did feel deeply injured,” she remembered.

H
aving placed himself indisputably above politics, Grant proceeded to speak from the moral high ground. He knew his time in office was running out, and he feared that the chance for justice for the freedmen wouldn’t survive him. In a message to Congress he recounted the violence and terror that had been directed against black voters and their white allies during the previous months and years; he defended his actions against the
Ku Klux Klan, the
White League and others who had violated the Constitution and federal laws; and he suggested that
such remedies could not be applied forever. “
The whole subject of executive interference with the affairs of a state is repugnant to public opinion, to the feelings of those who, from their official capacity, must be used in such interposition, and to him or those who must direct,” he said. Without the law to support it, such interference was criminal, but even with the law, it was very unpopular. “I desire, therefore, that all necessity for executive direction in local affairs may become unnecessary and obsolete.”

Grant appealed not simply to Congress but to the
American people to consider the causes and consequences of the domestic violence. “Is there not a disposition on one side to magnify wrongs and outrages, and on the other side to belittle them or justify them?” A calmer, fairer mindset couldn’t avoid improving policy toward the South. “A better state of feeling would be inculcated, and the sooner we would have that peace which would leave the states free indeed to regulate their own domestic affairs.” Grant credited the majority of Southerners with a desire for justice and the rule of law. “But do they do right in ignoring the existence of violence and bloodshed in resistance to constituted authority?” He sympathized with the frustration white Southerners had experienced since the war, as important decisions had been made for them by Washington. “But can they proclaim themselves entirely irresponsible for this condition? They can not. Violence has been rampant in some localities, and has either been justified or denied by those who could have prevented it.”

Grant knew that many people, and not in the South alone, rejected the idea that the federal government possessed continuing authority to interfere in Southern states to ensure the rights of Southern citizens. “This is a great mistake,” he said of the rejection. “While I remain executive all the laws of Congress and the provisions of the
Constitution, including the recent amendments added thereto, will be enforced with rigor, but with regret that they should have added one jot or tittle to executive duties or powers.” This regret—that the president was having to do what the states should have done themselves—was what caused him to appeal again to the South’s better nature. “Let there be fairness in the discussion of Southern questions, the advocates of both or all political parties giving honest, truthful reports of occurrences, condemning the wrong and upholding the right, and soon all will be well. Under existing conditions the negro votes the Republican ticket because he knows his friends are of that party. Many a good citizen votes the opposite, not because he agrees
with the great principles of state which separate parties, but because, generally, he is opposed to negro rule. This is a most delusive cry. Treat the negro as a citizen and a voter, as he is and must remain, and soon parties will be divided, not on the color line, but on principle. Then we shall have no complaint of sectional interference.”

75

L
OUISIANA AGAIN WASN’T LISTENING
. T
HE
1874 E
LECTIONS THERE
produced a contested result in the state legislature, with the Democrats and Republicans both claiming victory and both alleging theft. New Orleans boiled over once more, prompting Grant to direct Phil Sheridan to take command of the federal forces in the city and state. The assignment outraged much of the white South; for what purpose was the president sending the despoiler of Shenandoah if not to intimidate the citizenry? Sheridan seemed to confirm the critics’ fears when the Democrats attempted a forcible seizure of the statehouse and Sheridan dispatched troops to prevent it. The federal soldiers entered the legislative chamber and physically removed the trespassers, who naturally asserted that they were not trespassers at all but the rightful occupants of the seats from which they were being evicted.

Sheridan ignored the complaints and requested greater authority. “
I think the terrorism now existing in
Louisiana,
Mississippi, and
Arkansas could be entirely removed and confidence and fair dealing established by the arrest and trial of the ringleaders of the armed
White Leagues,” he wrote to Washington. “If Congress would pass a bill declaring them banditti, they could be tried by a military commission. These banditti, who murdered men here on the 14th of last September, also more recently at Vicksburg, Miss.”—the scene of additional lethal violence—“should, in justice to law and order and the peace and prosperity of this southern part of the country, be punished.” If Congress wouldn’t act, the president should. “It is possible that if the President would issue a proclamation declaring them banditti, no further action need be taken except that which would devolve upon me.”

Sheridan’s statement evoked a louder protest from the Democratic leaders of New Orleans, who characterized his words as malicious and misinformed and his actions as illegal and despotic. “
Coming among us an almost entire stranger, General Sheridan has limited his inquiries as to the condition of affairs here to those whose interest it is not only to falsify facts but to promote that spirit of lawlessness with which we are falsely charged,” a statement from the
Cotton Exchange, a focus of Democratic influence in Louisiana, asserted. Democrats around the country echoed the cry; the Democratic state committee of
Illinois declared, “
The Administration, through the most facile of its military instruments, has dispersed the legislative assembly of a sovereign state and forced the representatives of the people from the halls of legislation at the point of the bayonet, and has given Louisiana over to her spoilers and plunderers.… This action imports terrorism of the whole South and its unholy subjugation to party ends.”

Sheridan waved aside the protesters. “
They seem to be trying to make martyrs of themselves,” he telegraphed to Washington. “It cannot be done at this late day; there have been too many bleeding negroes and ostracized white citizens for their statements to be believed by fair-minded people.” Sheridan said he would send a list he had compiled of the number of murders in Louisiana in the last few years, the perpetrators of which remained unpunished. “I think that the number will startle you; it will be up in the thousands.” He added, “The city is perfectly quiet. No trouble is apprehended.” Sheridan had received death threats; he similarly discounted them. “
I am not afraid, and will not be stopped from informing the Government that there are localities in this department where the very air has been impregnated with assassination for several years.”