Too Short for a Blog Post, Too Long for a Tweet 173

Here are a few excerpts from a book I recently read, "Grant," by Ron Chernow:

Though Grant was not an abolitionist at the war’s outset, his thinking had evolved in tandem with Lincoln’s and he now opposed slavery on practical, military, and religious grounds, taking on the president’s agenda as his own. As early as the summer of 1861, he had told an army chaplain “he believed slavery would die with this rebellion, and that it might become necessary for the government to suppress it as a stroke of military policy.” Grant’s soon-to-be brother-in-law Michael John Cramer confirmed that “as the war progressed [Grant] became gradually convinced that ‘slavery was doomed and must go.’ He had always recognized its moral evil, as also its being the cause of the war . . . hence General Grant came to look upon the war as a divine punishment for the sin of slavery.”

In a letter to Elihu Washburne, composed eight months after the Emancipation Proclamation, Grant explained that since slavery was the root cause of the war, its eradication formed the only sound basis for any settlement with the South. It had become “patent to my mind early in the rebellion that the North & South could never live at peace with each other except as one nation, and that without Slavery. As anxious as I am to see peace reestablished I would not therefore be willing to see any settlement until this question is forever settled.” In later years, Grant explained that many Union soldiers thought it “a stain to the Union that men should be bought and sold like cattle” and that an early end to the war “would have saved slavery, perhaps, and slavery meant the germs of new rebellion. There had to be an end of slavery.”

While in St. Louis, Julia consulted Dr. Charles A. Pope to see if he could possibly correct her strabismus—a serious enough problem that it caused her physical distress and interfered with travel—but he said it was too late in life to perform this operation. When she mentioned the visit afterward to her husband, he was thunderstruck as to what had made her entertain such an idea. “Why, you are getting to be such a great man and I am such a plain little wife,” Julia replied, “I thought if my eyes were as others are I might not be so very, very plain, Ulys; who knows?” Grant’s response was piercingly tender. “Did I not see you and fall in love with you with these same eyes? I like them just as they are, and now, remember, you are not to interfere with them. They are mine, and let me tell you, Mrs. Grant, you had better not make any experiments, as I might not like you half so well with any other eyes.” The anecdote, as well as many others, attests to the depth of Grant’s unconditional love for his wife, and vice versa.

The business concluded, Grant brought in his staff officers, but Lee only deigned to engage in conversation with General Seth Williams, his former adjutant when he was West Point superintendent. Apart from this exchange, Horace Porter wrote, “Lee was in no mood for pleasantries, and he did not unbend, or even relax the fixed sternness of his features.” At first Grant assigned Theodore Bowers to prepare a fair copy of the surrender agreement, while Marshall drew up an acceptance letter for Lee to sign. Because Bowers’s hand quivered nervously and he botched three or four sheets, Grant reassigned the task to his Senecan aide, Ely Parker. When introduced to the swarthy Parker, Lee blushed deeply, eyeing tensely his complexion. “What was passing in his mind no one knew,” Porter said, “but the natural surmise was that he at first mistook Parker for a negro, and was struck with astonishment to find that the commander of the Union armies had one of that race on his personal staff.” Another onlooker thought Lee momentarily offended since he believed “a mulatto had been called on to do the writing as a gratuitous affront.” Evidently Lee relaxed when he realized Parker was a Native American. “I am glad to see one real American here,” he ventured, shaking his hand. To which Parker retorted memorably: “We are all Americans.”

In honor of Lee’s surrender and the city of Mobile’s fall the previous day, the capital was to be grandly lit that evening, and the Lincolns wanted Grant to accompany Mary Lincoln in a coach to view the sights. Julia was pointedly excluded, but after the dreadful parade ground incident with Mrs. Ord, she was relieved to be spared the First Lady’s trying company. Grant and Mary Lincoln rolled through a capital bathed in the brilliant glow of lights, while rockets and fireworks augmented the effect, streaking skyward over the Potomac. On the ride, Grant received ovations everywhere. “The people were wild with enthusiasm,” wrote Horace Porter, “and wherever the General appeared he was greeted with cheers, the clapping of hands, waving of handkerchiefs, and every possible demonstration of delight.” Mary Lincoln, suspecting a possible rival to her husband in Grant, disliked the idolatry lavished on him. When crowds chanted “Grant,” she asked the driver to let her get out; only when they cheered the president did she allow the journey to resume. Grant found the experience so unsettling, he later confided, that it entered into his decision to spurn the president’s offer to escort him to Ford’s Theatre the next evening.

What pretty much guaranteed that Johnson would side with white supremacists was his benighted view of black people. No American president has ever held such openly racist views. “This is a country for white men,” he declared unashamedly, “and by God, as long as I am President, it shall be a government for white men.” In one message to Congress, he contended that “negroes have shown less capacity for government than any other race of people.” He privately referred to blacks as “ni**ers” and betrayed a morbid fascination with miscegenation. In his inverted worldview, he wanted to ensure that the “poor, quiet, unoffending, harmless” whites of the South weren’t “trodden under foot to protect ni**ers.” Not only did he think whites genetically superior to blacks but he refused to show the least respect to their most brilliant spokesmen. When Frederick Douglass came to the White House with a black delegation, Johnson turned to his secretary afterward and sneered: “He’s just like any ni**er, & would sooner cut a white man’s throat than not.” Such a president could only picture southern blacks picking cotton for low wages on their former plantations.

On February 7, President Johnson met at the White House with five black leaders, including Frederick Douglass, who came to lobby for a civil rights bill. The black leaders were treated in a tasteless, abusive manner. After they shook hands with the president, their spokesman, George T. Downing, said they hoped he would support voting rights for blacks, which elicited a bizarre, rambling monologue from Johnson. He admitted to having owned slaves, but boasted of never having sold one, as if that would somehow ingratiate him with his visitors. He presented himself as a kindly master who had been “their slave instead of their being mine.” To promote civil rights, Johnson went on, would “result in the extermination of one [race] or the other.” If given the vote, “the colored man and his master, combined,” would conspire to keep poor whites “in slavery,” denying them a portion “of the rich land of the country.” After the bewildered delegation filed out, Johnson boasted to his secretary, “Those damned sons of bitches thought they had me in a trap.”

That evening, to commemorate the landmark amendment, thousands marched down Pennsylvania Avenue in a torchlight procession. When they gathered outside the White House, Grant came out to address them and stressed the extraordinary importance he attached to the amendment, lauding it as a seminal act and saying there had been “no event since the close of the war in which I have felt so deep an interest . . . It looked to me as the realization of the Declaration of Independence.” Grant’s brother-in-law Michael John Cramer later explained that Grant had initially worried about bestowing voting rights upon black citizens, some of them still illiterate. Ku Klux Klan terror wiped away that hesitation, for as the Klan “endeavored to suppress the political rights of the freedmen of the South by the use of unscrupulous means, etc., he, the head of the army, became convinced . . . that the ballot was the only real means the freedmen had for defending their lives, property, and rights.” This fateful moment presented Grant with a domestic challenge as daunting as that faced by any American president, for it inspired hope among blacks and smoldering resentment among many whites. Before long, southern blacks held office as lieutenant governors, militia officers, state legislators, and secretaries of state, not to mention coroners, constables, judges, and county magistrates; six hundred served as southern legislators during Reconstruction. Black gains can be overstated and certainly were by an alarmed white community: fewer than 20 percent of state political offices in the South were held by blacks at the height of Reconstruction. Still, these represented spectacular gains for people so recently chained in bondage. 

The dread of black suffrage drove many former secessionists to new heights of indignation. Although blacks made up 13 percent of the total U.S. population, they constituted 36 percent of the South, with outright majorities in Mississippi and South Carolina. The Fifteenth Amendment meant that blacks, armed with the vote, could exercise real power and invert, in an astonishingly short period, the power structure that had long suppressed them. Many southern whites found this insupportable and argued that hapless, newly enfranchised blacks were being manipulated by scheming northern Republicans. Woodrow Wilson would express this stereotypical view: “Unscrupulous adventurers appeared, to act as the leaders of the inexperienced blacks in taking possession, first of the conventions, and afterwards of the state governments . . . [Negroes] submitted to the unrestrained authority of small and masterful groups of white men whom the instincts of plunder had drawn from the North.” Not surprisingly, the Fifteenth Amendment incited a violent backlash among whites whose nerves were already frayed by having lost the war and their valuable holdings of human property. 

Hardly had the ink dried on the new amendment than southern demagogues began to pander to the anxieties it aroused. In West Virginia, an overwhelmingly white state, Democratic politicians sounded the battle cry of electing a “white man’s government” to gain control of the governorship and state legislature. “The spirit of the late rebellion is in the ascendant,” one Republican politician admitted. “Hostility to negro suffrage was the prime element of our defeat.” To circumvent the Fifteenth Amendment, white politicians in Georgia devised new methods of stripping blacks of voting rights, including poll taxes, onerous registration requirements, and similar restrictions copied in other states. With a violent backlash well under way, the party of Lincoln began to pay a price for being the vocal paladin of African Americans. As Senator Henry Wilson observed in 1869, there was not “a square mile of the United States” where Republican advocacy of black rights hadn’t resulted in the loss of white votes.

Behind the Fifteenth Amendment’s idealism lay the stark reality that a “solid South” of white voters would vote en masse for the Democratic Party, forcing the Republicans to create a countervailing political force. Under Article I, Section 2, of the Constitution, slaveholding states had been entitled to count three of every five slaves as part of their electorate in computing their share of congressional delegates. Now former slaves would count as full citizens, swelling the electoral tally for southern states. This was fine as long as freed people exercised their full voting rights. Instead, over time, the white South would receive extra delegates in Congress and electoral votes in presidential races while stifling black voting power. “It was unjust to the North,” Grant subsequently lamented. “In giving the South negro suffrage, we have given the old slave-holders forty votes in the electoral college. They keep those votes, but disfranchise the negroes. That is one of the gravest mistakes in the policy of reconstruction.”

By 1872, under Grant’s leadership, the Ku Klux Klan had been smashed in the South. (Its later twentieth-century incarnation had no connection to the earlier group other than a common style and ideology.) He had employed forceful, no-holds-barred actions to loosen the Klan’s grip. As southern violence subsided, southern Republicans regained confidence and cast votes with an assurance of their safety, and for southern blacks the changed mood was palpable. “Peace has come to many places as never before,” wrote Frederick Douglass. “The scourging and slaughter of our people have so far ceased.” It was a startling triumph for Grant, who had dared to flout what southern states considered their sacred rights to enforce the law within their borders.