The Man Who Saved the Union (85 page)

Sheridan’s assertiveness split Grant’s cabinet. War Secretary
William Belknap congratulated Sheridan, saying, “
The President and all of us have full confidence and thoroughly approve your course.”
Hamilton Fish condemned Sheridan’s action and hotly resented Belknap’s implication that he endorsed it. Most other members sided with Fish, either on the principle of noninterference in state politics or from fear of the political repercussions to the Republican party.

Grant upheld Sheridan. The president wasn’t thrilled that Sheridan had given so little weight to political sensibilities, but neither was he surprised. And he certainly didn’t intend to disavow Sheridan’s actions
after the fact. He remembered how Lincoln had stood by him during moments of trial; so he would stand by Sheridan.

And he soon came to share the opprobrium aimed at Sheridan. Protest meetings were held in every section of the country; death threats poured into the White House. “
You had better mend your course toward the southern states,” a Virginian who signed himself only as “Conservative” wrote Grant. “If you do not, you will not be a living man two months from today.” From New Orleans “Deadshot” warned, “
If you cannot well back out of your now contemptible position you had better
PREPARE FOR THE NEXT WORLD
!!!” A man calling himself “
Charles Howard”—not his real name, he said—claimed personal knowledge of a shadowy Southern paramilitary organization that intended to provoke a war with the Indians on the Plains, which would require the president to withdraw the federal troops from the South. “
There will also be attempts made to assassinate you and all the leading members of the radical party. They have even now got their spies in Washington City.”

G
rant paid the threats no attention and summoned Congress to stand beside him on behalf of civil rights in Louisiana. “
To say that lawlessness, turbulence, and bloodshed have characterized the political affairs of that state since its reorganization under the reconstruction acts is only to repeat what has become well known as a part of its unhappy history,” he wrote the Senate. He summarized the fraud, violence and intimidation of the recent years and the actions he had taken to combat them. He acknowledged that the theory on which his actions rested—that the federal government could reach over the state governments to protect the rights of individual citizens—was new and to some people startling. “But it results as clearly from the
fifteenth amendment to the Constitution and the acts that have been passed to enforce that amendment as the abrogation of state laws upholding slavery results from the
thirteenth amendment.”

Referring specifically to the
Colfax massacre, Grant said he didn’t hold the people of Louisiana at large to blame for the slaughter. “But it is a lamentable fact that insuperable obstructions were thrown in the way of punishing these murderers; and the so-called conservative papers of the state not only justified the massacre, but denounced as federal tyranny and despotism the attempt of the United States officers to bring them to
justice.” Democrats elsewhere were no help. “Fierce denunciations ring through the country about office holding and election matters in Louisiana, while every one of the Colfax miscreants goes unwhipped of justice, and no way can be found in this boasted land of civilization and Christianity to punish the perpetrators of this bloody and monstrous crime.”

A similar failure had followed the
Coushatta murders. “No one has been punished, and the conservative press of the state denounced all efforts to that end and boldly justified the crime.” Again Grant was reluctant to generalize but unable not to. “To say that the murder of a negro or a white Republican is not considered a crime in Louisiana would probably be unjust to a great part of the people, but it is true that a great number of such murders have been committed and no one has been punished therefor; and manifestly, as to them, the spirit of hatred and violence is stronger than law.”

Grant again disclaimed eagerness to involve the federal government in the affairs of Louisiana or any other state. “I have always refused except where it seemed to be my imperative duty to act in such a manner under the constitution and laws of the United States,” he said. Without apologizing for Sheridan’s actions, he made plain that those actions were exceptional and would not be repeated. “I am well aware that any military interference by the officers or troops of the United States with the organization of the state legislature or any of its proceedings, or with any civil department of the government, is repugnant to our ideas of government. I can conceive of no case, not involving rebellion or insurrection, where such interference by authority of the general government ought to be permitted or can be justified.”

All the same, he wouldn’t turn his back on the South. “To the extent that Congress has conferred power upon me to prevent it, neither
Ku Klux Klans,
White Leagues, nor any other association using arms and violence to execute their unlawful purposes can be permitted in that way to govern any part of this country; nor can I see with indifference Union men or Republicans ostracized, persecuted, and murdered on account of their opinions, as they now are in some localities.” But to continue his defense of equal rights and to have a prayer of success, he needed a show of support from the legislative branch. “I now earnestly ask that such action be taken by Congress as to leave my duties perfectly clear.”

Grant’s appeal produced results, although not exactly the kind he sought.
Charles Sumner had long advocated a
civil rights law barring racial discrimination in most aspects of public life. The concept made
little headway while he lived, but following his 1874 death the Senate had paid him homage by approving a bill incorporating his basic ideas. The House adjourned without voting on the bill, but the following year a similar bill—mandating equality in hotels and restaurants open to the public, in transportation facilities, in theaters and other public amusements and in the selection of juries—passed both chambers. The measure reached the White House about the time the two sides in Louisiana cobbled a compromise that allowed Grant to withdraw Sheridan and most of the federal troops. On March 1, 1875, the president signed the Civil Rights Act, the most ambitious affirmation of racial equality in American history until then (a distinction it would retain until the 1960s).

To affirm equality, however, was one thing; to enforce it another. The 1875 law lacked the teeth of the 1871 Ku Klux Klan Act; it required persons who believed their rights to have been violated to file suit in court, where the penalties were modest. Moreover, because the law intruded farther into the private sphere than any previous federal law touching race relations—or just about any other subject—it raised
constitutional doubts even among many who supported the principle of equality.

Grant recognized the law’s shortcomings. He understood that it might be declared unconstitutional (as indeed it was in 1883, when the Supreme Court ruled that the Fourteenth Amendment’s equal protection clause applied to actions by state governments but not by individuals). But no law was perfect, and at this late date, on this vexed subject, it was the best he could hope for.

76

A
SECOND PROMISE OF THAT SESSION OF
C
ONGRESS PROVED MORE
plausible. In January 1875 the legislature approved the
Resumption Act, which embodied Grant’s recommendation to put the federal government on track to wring the paper from America’s currency. As of January 1, 1879, the Treasury would redeem
greenbacks in
gold. The date was more distant than Grant had wished, but the certain knowledge that paper dollars would eventually be worth their face value in gold would drive them toward parity even ahead of the redemption date. The country would still not be on a gold standard, as silver coins remained lawful currency and in fact would gain prevalence in response to a second provision of the new law, one enacting Grant’s recommendation to replace small notes with silver coins.

Many economists of later generations would consider resumption to have been precisely the wrong prescription for curing the depression of the 1870s. Their arguments were anticipated during Grant’s day by populists and debtor advocates who contended that a smaller currency would drive already falling prices further down and thereby increase the burden of debtors. Grant acknowledged the price-lowering effect of resumption, but he believed the confidence-building effect to be more important. In a statement upon his signing of the bill, he praised the “
currency of a fixed known value” that resumption would produce. Grant considered the expectations of investors to be critical to recovery. When investors knew they would be paid back in dollars of value equal to those they invested, the economy would find its footing. Speaking of the measure before him, Grant explained, “By the enactment of such a law, business and industries would revive and the beginning of prosperity on a firm
basis would be reached.” He congratulated Congress and the American people on having the fortitude and courage to make the restoration of a sound currency a priority, and he gladly gave the measure his approval.

B
y one common interpretation, the moral fiber of American
public officials had been weakening since independence. The founders—
Washington, Jefferson, Madison and the others—were selfless demigods, immune from temptation and devoted solely to the public weal in winning independence and establishing the principles of American republicanism. The second generation—Jackson, Clay, Webster,
Calhoun—were towering figures but flawed; in their battles over the meaning of democracy they sometimes permitted party and section to cloud their judgment of what the nation’s welfare required. The third generation included Lincoln, an undeniably great soul—undenied, at any rate, since his martyrdom—but also the jobbers and opportunists who battened on the country’s distress during the Civil War and after. By this interpretation the Tweed Ring, the
gold conspiracy and
Crédit Mobilier were a matter of moral failure: the work of bad men doing what anyone would expect of their ilk.

Persuasive evidence supported this interpretation; the persons hauled before Congress and the courts to answer for diverting public funds were hardly a distinguished cohort ethically. But another interpretation looked less to the character of the miscreants than to the context in which they operated.
George Washington Plunkitt, a Tammany successor to the Tweed Ring, distinguished between “
honest graft” and “dishonest graft.” The latter consisted of extortion, vice and other clear breaches of the Judeo-Christian code; such sins Plunkitt condemned. But “honest graft” was something different. It consisted chiefly of using inside information to capture profits generated by the rapid growth of the American economy. Plunkitt boasted of buying strategically placed property ahead of the announcement of new public works whose proximity caused the property to rise in value. His point was that
someone
would profit from the announcement; why not Plunkitt and friends? “I seen my opportunities and I took ’em,” Plunkitt explained.

Opportunities were rife in the decade after the Civil War. The industrialization of the private sector was accompanied by the expansion of the public sector, and few laws effectively governed behavior in the interstices between the two realms. The gold conspirators and
Crédit Mobilier operated in this no-man’s-land, with the former betting (wrongly) on whether the public Treasury would intrude unusually into the private gold market and the latter channeling public construction funds into private pockets.

New scandals surfaced during Grant’s final eighteen months in office and fell into a similar category. The largest had been long brewing, or rather distilling: it centered on the failure of whiskey makers to pay the full tax owed on the spirits they produced. Underpayment of the whiskey tax continued a tradition of American tax dodges that dated to the eighteenth century, when resistance to rum taxes, stamp taxes and tea taxes had triggered the American Revolution and subsequently the
Whiskey Rebellion of the 1790s.

The surprise of the
whiskey scandal wasn’t that the underpayment occurred but that it suddenly was prosecuted. And it might not have been prosecuted if
Benjamin Bristow hadn’t hoped to succeed Grant as president. Bristow’s father had been elected to Congress from Kentucky; the son served with distinction in the Union army, being severely wounded at Shiloh and returning to defend his home state against the raids of
John Hunt Morgan, whom he helped capture. Kentuckians elected him to state office and
Andrew Johnson appointed him a federal district attorney. His vigorous prosecutions under the new civil rights laws displeased Johnson but won him the favorable attention of Grant, who made him the first solicitor general in the new Justice Department. Bristow’s performance in that post led Grant to select him to succeed
George Williams as attorney general, but the promotion fell through when Williams’s nomination to the Supreme Court stalled. Bristow got another chance at the cabinet when Treasury Secretary
William Richardson was forced out after being discovered to have shared fees from a tax collector he had hired. Grant sought a clean, hard-driving man at the Treasury, and Bristow seemed just the one.

Consequently it was to Bristow that the editor of the
St. Louis Democrat
wrote in 1875 saying he had information about a conspiracy among whiskey distillers in the Midwest and the Treasury agents who were supposed to be collecting whiskey taxes. Bristow followed the evidence to
John McDonald, the chief tax collector at St. Louis. McDonald didn’t deny wrongdoing but demanded leniency in exchange for testimony against his fellow conspirators and their sponsors in Washington. Bristow refused the request and pressed forward with the investigation.

Grant urged him on. “
Let no guilty man escape if it can be avoided,”
he wrote Bristow. “Be specially vigilant—or instruct those engaged in the prosecutions of fraud to be—against all who insinuate that they have high influence to protect, or to protect them. No personal consideration should stand in the way of performing a public duty.” Bristow, with Grant’s approval, gave the press a copy of the president’s instructions, and the phrase “let no man escape” became the administration’s watchword.