Grant as President

(1868-1876)

At 46 in 1868, Grant was the youngest man elected president up to that time (Theodore Roosevelt, elected in 1904 and John F. Kennedy elected in 1960 were younger). His re-election in 1872 was a triumph. The election of that year had the largest black participation until 1968. The Southern states would largely disenfranchise black voters in the years after 1872 until the civil rights movement of the 1960’s finally forced the states of the Old Confederacy to allow African-Americans to exercise this fundamental right of citizenship.

Grant was a strong supporter of all three of the major civil rights amendments of the Reconstruction Era: the 13^th, which prohibited slavery, the 14^th, which declared that everyone born in the United States was automatically an American citizen (except American Indians and, later, anyone of Asian descent); and the 15^th Amendment, which was passed in 1870 when Grant was president and declared that no one could be deprived of the right to vote due to race, color or previous condition of servitude. Ironically, the 15^th Amendment turned out to be of more effect in the North than in the South. Many Northern states deprived blacks of the right to vote up to this time and this practice was stopped, even though in the South, the 15^th amendment was evaded after 1877 and blacks in the former Confederate States were almost totally deprived of the franchise.

Grant also had great sympathy for the American Indians, whose lives had been completely disrupted by the onslaught of American settlers. He tried to preserve their hunting grounds in the Great Plains and appointed Ely S. Parker, who was himself of Indian descent, as Commissioner of Indian Affairs.

As I have already noted several times, Grant was very trustful of people, sometimes mistakenly. One aspect of this was his unwillingness to employ Secret Service guards. The Secret Service was established to protect the President after Lincoln’s assassination (his private guard was not at his post, which allowed John Wilke’s Booth to shoot Lincoln). But Grant did not believe he was under any threat and dismissed the Secret Service, leaving the White House basically undefended except for the guard at the front gate. Grant might have been more careful if he had known that two of the next five men elected president would be assassinated.

Grant favored civil service reform and an end to the rampant patronage system in place in Washington. Federal employment had vastly expanded during the war and the opportunities for job peddling were great. Grant’s attempts to institute a merit hiring system were defeated by Congressmen, however, who liked to be able to pass out jobs to their supporters back home. The Republicans, who dominated the Federal government, actually thought the patronage system was the only democratic way to staff the government, since the winning party actually expressed the will of the people. The idea of a professional civil service did not really take hold until the assassination of President James A. Garfield in 1883 by a disappointed office seeker.

Grant’s administration marked the transition of the Republican Party from the champion of emancipation for the slaves to the supporter of capitalism and big business. The construction of the transcontinental railroad, which was completed in May 1869 during Grant’s administration, opened up great opportunities for corruption. The Federal government gave huge grants of land to the two railroad companies that were constructing the line – the Central Pacific building east from Sacramento, California and the Union Pacific building west from Omaha. The actual construction was to be done by an outfit called the Credit Mobilier, which was really a front for the directors of the Union Pacific. They essentially paid themselves to construct the road. Huge sums of public money went into the pockets of businessmen and politicians. Grant was not responsible for this corruption, but he failed to appreciate the extent to which money and power corrupted men. He did not take the proper precautions.

Perhaps it wouldn’t have made any difference. The so-called “Gilded Age” of the 1870’s, with its stock market scandals and attempts to make money through sweetheart deals and favoritism, would have taken place regardless of who was president. We see in the 1870’s a classic case of a post-War boom that ends with a financial panic (in 1873) and then a long economic depression.

Grant’s failure to rein in the corrupt politicians and businessmen, some of whom were very close to him, should not overshadow his heroic attempts to carry out the Congressional Reconstruction program. Under President Johnson, Grant continued to serve as commander in chief of the Army. He was responsible for imposing martial law on recalcitrant states and cities in the South. He opposed Johnson’s attempts to gut the Reconstruction program and turn the South back over to the white supremacists.

When he became president, Grant sent the U.S. Army into the south to combat the white supremacist Ku Klux Klan and other racist organizations that were trying to intimidate the recently freed blacks and to prevent them from exercising their political rights. In 1870, Congress established the U.S. Department of Justice (up to this time the Attorney General had just been the president’s personal lawyer, now he became the head of a large, prosecutorial bureaucracy), which had as its primary function in the 1870’s the prosecution of civil rights cases against white racists in the South.

Grant believed the 15^th amendment’s guarantee of the right to vote would give black Americans the ability to elect their own officials and with their political rights, they would eventually achieve equality with the southern whites. He did not anticipate the degree to which the South would resist black equality and did not live to see all of the methods, including terror lynching, that would be used by Southern whites to keep blacks “in their place.”

Congress passed and Grant signed a series of Enforcement Acts in the 1870’s to combat the Klan and to give the new Republican Party in the South an opportunity to establish itself. Under military supervision, blacks registered and voted in the 1872 presidential election, which had the largest black participation of any election until 1968.

But the North was growing tired of trying to enforce civil rights on the South. Horace Greeley, the Liberal Republican’s presidential candidate in 1872, argued for letting the South go its own way and dismissed the freed slaves as lazy, worthless people who lived for the day with no thought for the future. Greeley enjoyed widespread support and was also the nominee of the Democratic Party, emerging from its wartime eclipse. He carried a number of southern and border states (the white racist vote, you might say), but lost to Grant in a landslide.

Shortly after the election, Greeley was fired as editor of the New York Tribune, his wife died and then he died, all within a month. Grant showed the kind of man he was by attending Greeley’s funeral. Grant could not hold a grudge and had many friends from both North and South.

The anti-black climate in the North came through increasingly in the 1870’s as Grant tried in vain to enforce black rights (and the law) in the South. When he sent Gen. Phil Sheridan into Louisiana to unseat the illegal state government put in place there by the so-called White Leagues, he was denounced by papers in the North for violating the civil liberties of Southern whites.

Even so, many people encouraged Grant to run for a third term as president. He declined the honor, however, since he never really liked being president, and decided to go into business instead (another mistake). The Republicans nominated Ohio Governor Rutherford B. Hayes, a Civil War hero, to run against the Democrat Samuel Tilden. The race was so close it had to be decided by a specially selected committee made up of representatives from both parties and several Supreme Court justices. One of the Supreme Court justices cast the deciding vote for Hayes, and he became president. In return, Hayes told the Southern supporters of Tilden that he would withdraw the federal troops from the South and allow them to enjoy “home rule” again. In other words, the federal effort to enforce black civil rights in the South was at an end. Before much longer, the courts, including the Supreme Court, would totally gut the meaning out of the Reconstruction Amendments and the South’s recently freed slaves would be turned over once again to the tender mercies of the white “master race.”

James M. McPherson, one of the most respected historians of the Civil War and Reconstruction, estimates that some 250,000 southern Republicans, most of them black, had been prevented from voting in the 1876 presidential election. Hayes would have won the election without making any deals with the South had the racist governments not been in control in most of the Southern states.

The bottom line is that the period after the Civil War would have been a big disappointment to Lincoln had he lived to see it. It would take another 100 years before the black people of the South would succeed – largely as a result of their own efforts – in overthrowing the racist system created by the southern states after 1877.

Grant lived on until 1885, using the last year of his life to complete his war Memoirs, which has come to be recognized as perhaps the greatest literary work in English by any military leader. It was a huge success when it was first published and brought his widow approximately 450,000 dollars in royalties. Poor Ulysses S. Grant, he tried all his life to make money and only succeeded after he died. Life can be very unkind, but, on balance, one would have to say that Grant had a noble and productive career. He had a tremendous funeral and his enormous tomb in New York City, long neglected, is once again becoming a place that tourists come to see.