The Man Who Saved the Union (87 page)

Western papers and western congressmen echoed the cry, as did Phil Sheridan, the general responsible for the security of the West. Sheridan didn’t trust Grant’s peace policy; he believed that the struggle for the West would end only with the destruction of the Indians. Sheridan was famous in the West and notorious in other parts of the country for having said that the only good Indian was a dead Indian, and he judged that the sooner the final struggle began, the better. In May 1874 he wrote Sherman from his headquarters in Chicago, “
I would like to start Colonel
Custer with a column of cavalry out, about the 15th of June, to examine the Black Hills country.… This country is entirely unknown, and a knowledge of it might be of great value in case of Indian troubles.” Sheridan understood that an expedition to the Black Hills might trigger the very troubles he warned of, but he considered this an argument in favor of sending Custer out.

Bishop
William Hare, one of the clerics charged with implementing the peace policy, took the opposite view. Hare wrote Grant from Dakota to say that the frontier was teeming with news of an expedition and with adventurers aiming to be first to gather the Black Hills gold. “
Such an expedition would, almost beyond a doubt, provoke an Indian war,” Hare told Grant. He explained that the Black Hills were sacred to the Sioux,
who would defend them to the death. “An invasion of the Black Hills means, I fear, or at least will surely result in,
War
, and war to the knife.” Interior Secretary
Columbus Delano agreed. “
A general war with the Sioux would be deplorable,” Delano wrote Grant. “It would undo the good already accomplished by our efforts for peaceable relations.”

Grant held the line as long as he could. But amid the continuing debate over the nation’s money supply, as the president defended the gold dollar against the expansionary demands of the greenbackers, refusing even to explore a promising mineral region became politically impossible. He authorized Sheridan to dispatch Custer to the Black Hills.

The expedition didn’t start a war, at least not at once, but it did confirm the gold rumors, thereby intensifying the pressure on the peace policy. “
We have had great difficulty in keeping white people from going to the Black Hills in search of gold,” Grant explained to
Red Cloud and
Spotted Tail in the spring of 1875. He had summoned the Sioux chiefs to Washington to try to get them to relinquish title to the gold region. He professed continued friendship for the
Indians and said he would not force them into anything. “I do not propose to ask you to leave the homes where you were born and raised, without your consent.” But he said he couldn’t hold back the gold seekers forever. “Every year this same difficulty will be increased unless the right of the white people to go to that country is granted by you; and it may in the end lead to hostilities between the Indians and the white people without any special fault on either side.”

Red Cloud thought Grant should try harder. “
I do not believe that the Great Father has not troops enough to keep white men away from the Black Hills,” he said. Yet the Sioux leader was realistic enough to see that the whites were probably going to get what they wanted sooner or later, and he reluctantly entered into negotiations.

Other Sioux chiefs were more adamant. As the stream of miners into the Black Hills grew to a flood,
Sitting Bull and
Crazy Horse defied the reservation regime, gathering warriors and commencing an armed resistance.

In doing so they forced Grant’s hand. He couldn’t fail to defend whites under assault from Indians, even if he thought—and though he continued to say—that the whites had put themselves in danger by going where the government had forbidden. The Democrats who were assailing him on every front would surely allege dereliction if he didn’t suppress the Sioux uprising. His generals were agitating to have it out with
the militants. “
We might just as well settle the Sioux matter now,” Sheridan wrote Sherman. “It will be better for all concerned.”

Grant accommodated his generals partway. Judging that a defeat of Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse would strengthen Red Cloud’s hand among the Sioux and facilitate a peaceful transfer of the Black Hills, the president in the spring of 1876 directed Sherman and Sheridan to send the Seventh Cavalry into the Yellowstone Valley, the stronghold of the militants.

Y
et he didn’t want Custer to lead the expedition. “
The President has just sent me instructions through the Secretary of War to send someone else than General Custer in command,” Sherman telegraphed Sheridan. Grant thought Custer a reckless prima donna whose disdain for authority had been revealed on a recent visit to Washington when he hadn’t deigned to report to his commanders. “
Please intercept him at Chicago or St. Paul and order him to halt and await further orders,” Sherman wired Sheridan on Grant’s behalf. “Meantime let the expedition from Fort Lincoln proceed without him.”

But Custer was a difficult man to stop. The theatrically handsome cavalry officer riveted the attention of the country; reporters followed him west, detailing his every nod, look and act of horsemanship for readers back home. Custer’s admirers talked of him as a presidential candidate; for Grant to hold him out of battle would be interpreted as blatantly political. Grant grudgingly let him proceed, although he insisted that General
Alfred Howe Terry have formal command of the expedition.

Two months later he wished he had stood his ground. “
The recent reports touching the disaster which befell a part of the 7th Regular Cavalry led by General Custer in person are believed to be true,” Sherman wrote Grant on July 8. “For some reason as yet unexplained, General Custer, who commanded the 7th Cavalry and had been detached by his commander General Terry at the mouth of the Rosebud to make a wide detour up the Rosebud, a tributary of the Yellowstone, across to the Little Big Horn, and down it to the mouth of the Big Horn, the place agreed on for meeting, attacked en route a large Indian village with only a part of his force, having himself detached the rest with a view to intercept the expected retreat of the savages, and experienced an utter annihilation of his immediate command.”

Grant concluded that hubris had killed Custer and his men. “
I regard Custer’s massacre
as a sacrifice of troops, brought on by Custer himself, that was wholly unnecessary, wholly unnecessary,” he told a reporter. “He was not to have made the attack before effecting the junction with Terry and Gibbon. He was notified to meet them on the 26th, but instead of marching slowly, as his orders required in order to effect the junction on the 26th, he entered upon a forced march of eighty-three miles in twenty-four hours, and thus had to meet the Indians alone on the 25th.” The result was the death of 260 good men and an irreparable stain on the army.

Whatever the cause, the consequence of Custer’s defeat was another blow to Grant’s peace policy. Civil War veterans from North and South volunteered their services to crush the savages who had massacred Custer; young men who had never seen battle clamored to enlist. Grant was confident Terry had sufficient men to handle Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse, but as a political matter he concluded that he couldn’t take any chances. Congress was about to recess for the summer; before he let the lawmakers go he requested authority to reinforce Terry. They readily approved.

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A
MID THE GLOOM OF THAT SUMMER
G
RANT PONDERED HIS ESCAPE
from Washington. His pledge not to seek another term seemed now almost superfluous, as the scandals that swirled around the White House caused many
Republicans to want to distance themselves from the administration.
Benjamin Bristow turned the scandals to his own advantage by presenting himself to the party—and to the Republican convention, meeting in Cincinnati—as the sweeper of the Augean stables.
James Blaine played the role of party regular, the candidate who would defend what the Republicans had accomplished during the previous decade and a half.

Rutherford Hayes blindsided them both. The Ohio governor had fought gallantly in the Shenandoah Valley during the war, suffering multiple wounds while having several horses shot from under him. His unpretentiously pristine record as governor appealed to those convention delegates who thought Blaine
too
regular to be elected over a reformist Democrat. Hayes fended off Bristow, whittled away Blaine’s early lead and captured the nomination on the seventh ballot.

Grant praised the “
excellent ticket,” which included
William Wheeler of New York for vice president, and told a visiting group of African American leaders that it “should receive the cordial support of all races in all sections.” He continued: “I know Governor Hayes personally, and I can surrender with unfeigned pleasure my present position to him, as I believe I shall do on the 5th of March next year, with a guaranteed security for your rights and liberties under the laws of the land.”

E
lecting Hayes took more than Grant’s endorsement. The candidate carried the baggage of sixteen years of Republican rule, a dozen years of Reconstruction, half a decade of Democratic experience suppressing the Republican vote in the South, three years of depression and many months of scandals. And he wasn’t the hero of the Civil War.

Yet neither was his opponent.
Samuel Tilden owed his reputation to his diligence and success in busting the Tweed Ring of
Tammany Hall. New York voters demonstrated their appreciation by electing him governor, in which office he extended his anticorruption campaign to statewide boodling. He lacked a Civil War record and the common touch, but the Democrats guessed that the war was losing its grip on voters and that Tilden’s standoffishness, not to mention his substantial private wealth, would augment the impression that he was above any possibility of corruption.

Grant hadn’t campaigned for himself, and he didn’t campaign for Hayes. But he made clear that he thought Hayes far preferable to Tilden. Hayes drew notice in his acceptance statement by promising not to seek a second term if elected. Editors eager for a story portrayed this as a slap at Grant. The president assured the governor he took no offense. “
I am not aware of any feeling personal to myself,” he wrote Hayes regarding the pledge. Speaking from his own experience as a lame duck, he added, “Whether it was wise to allude to the subject in a letter of acceptance is a question about which people might differ. But in this you have largely the advantage of your competitor”—Tilden had called for a constitutional amendment barring consecutive terms yet did not disavow anything for himself. “You say distinctly what course you will take, without condemning what the people have done on seven distinct occasions: reelect the incumbent.” Grant reiterated his endorsement of Hayes as a candidate: “I hope, and fully believe, the result in November will designate you as my successor.”

G
rant’s larger contribution to the Hayes campaign was yet another effort to protect Republican voters in the South. The violence that season centered in South Carolina and Mississippi. In July Grant got a letter from South Carolina governor
Daniel Chamberlain deploring the killing at Hamburg of several black men enrolled in a local militia company. A crowd of whites had surrounded the black company and demanded that they relinquish their arms. “
It seems impossible to find a rational or adequate cause for such a demand except in the fact that the militia company
were composed of negroes or in the additional fact that they were, besides being negroes, members of the Republican party,” Chamberlain told Grant. “Those who made the demand were, on the other hand, white men and members of the Democratic party.” The governor continued: “The
effect
of this massacre is more important than the motives which caused it. Upon this point I can speak with more confidence. It is not to be doubted that the effect of this massacre has been to cause widespread terror and apprehension among the colored race and the Republicans of this state.… It has, as a matter of fact, caused a firm belief on the part of most Republicans that this affair at Hamburg is only the beginning of a series of similar race and party collisions in our state, the deliberate aim of which is believed to be the political subjugation and control of this state. They see, therefore, in this event what foreshadows a campaign of violence and blood—such a campaign as is popularly described as a campaign conducted on the ‘Mississippi plan.’ ”

From Mississippi came reports of that plan’s local application. “
The lives of white and colored Republicans are taken here with impunity,”
William Simonton wrote the president from Shannon, Mississippi. Simonton introduced himself: “I am a southron by birth, education, etc. I have lived where I now live twenty-five years, and here I expect to be buried. I was the presidential elector of the 1st congressional district in this state in 1872. I have never been a Rebel voluntarily nor involuntarily.” But he might be forced to become a de facto Democrat. “We can have a sort of peace and protection here by voting with the Democrats and accepting a moral and political serfdom. In a short time Republicans will be curiosities here, if this Democratic guerrilla warfare is permitted to go on.”

Scores of similar letters reached Grant from other parts of South Carolina and Mississippi and elsewhere in the South. The gist of their message was that without another assertion of federal power the Republican party would become operationally extinct in the South. The rights of
African Americans would expire with it.

Grant understood that any action he took would be interpreted politically. To employ the army in the South on the eve of the
election would raise howls that he was corrupting the democratic process. So he responded at first with words. “
The scene at Hamburg, as cruel, bloodthirsty, wanton, unprovoked, and uncalled for as it was, is only a repetition of the course that has been pursued in other southern states within the last few years,” he wrote Governor Chamberlain for publication. “Mississippi is governed today by officials chosen through fraud
and violence such as would scarcely be credited to savages, much less to a civilized and Christian people.” Southern Democrats charged that their states were being treated differently from the rest of the country; Grant denied the charge categorically. “Nothing is claimed for one state that is not freely accorded to all the others.” The South, in fact, was the region demanding special dispensation, he said. “The right to kill negroes and Republicans without fear of punishment and without loss of caste or reputation—this has seemed to be a privilege claimed by a few states.” Grant urged
Chamberlain to perform his duties conscientiously and other Southerners to exercise their rights. “I will give every aid for which I can find law or constitutional power. Government that cannot give protection to the life, property, and all guaranteed civil rights (in this country the greatest is an untrammeled ballot) to the citizen is, in so far, a failure, and every energy of the oppressed should be exerted (always within the law and by constitutional means) to regain lost privileges or protection. Too long denial of guaranteed rights is sure to lead to revolution, bloody revolution.”