Number 20: James Garfield

Year in office: 1881
Pre-service occupations: general, lawyer, educator, state senator, U.S. representative, U.S. senator
Key events during his administration: Appointments showdown, beginning of Star Route fraud investigation, his assassination

Presidential rating: no rating but popular

ESSAY

He’s a great “what if.”

Like the other president who died so shortly into his term, James Garfield forever leaves us pondering the course of the nation had he lived. Would Garfield be remembered as another Lincoln or would the name still be associated with a fat, orange cat?

As with William Henry Harrison, though, James Garfield’s meteoric rise to power and shocking death merits examination. He was a popular man, a brilliant orator, a skillful politician, a friend to many and an enemy to few.

Of course, he’s remembered primarily—or only—because of his assassination, as his time in office was short. But during the run up to his abbreviated presidency, Garfield eared his reputation as one of the brightest political stars of the era. General, congressman and would-be reformer, Garfield raced through the post-war political scene like a meteor—and burned out almost as quickly when his life ended in 1881. The “young man in a hurry” is, like all the presidents, worth examining in full.

An educated and loquacious man
James Garfield came of age in an extremely poor area of Ohio known as the Western Reserve. After a brief seafaring adventure—on the canals of the east, not the Great Lakes or the oceans—the intensely curious and highly intelligent Garfield enrolled in the Western Reserve Eclectic Institute. A simple and poor college, the Institute fired Garfield’s mind. He developed disciplined study habits, worked on speaking skills and started a daily diary that remained with him until his death.

Garfield went east for a degree, entering Williams College in northwest Massachusetts in 1854. There he came under the tutelage of one of the 19th century’s most noted educator’s Mark Hopkins. At Williams, Garfield’s speaking skills became legendary, and his salutatorian on commencement day in 1856 awed the assembled audience, including Hopkins, who was as proud of Garfield as if James were his own son.

His two years at Williams also awoke Garfield’s political interests; he joined the abolitionist movement and the Republican Party. He had also built up excellent skills in working with people whose views he didn’t necessarily support—a highly valuable skill for a politician. He returned to the Institute as a teacher, but soon entered Ohio politics and a Republican Party supporter. He finally won an office in his own right in 1859, to the Ohio senate. There, both his speaking and organizational skills made him an asset to the state.

Meanwhile, Garfield courted and wed Lucretia Rudolf, an old classmate from the Institute, in 1858. Their marriage wasn’t always an easy one, but they raised five children together. He called her “Crete.” He also read law and was admitted to the Ohio bar.

War
At first, Garfield sought compromise. In the Ohio senate, he arranged a banquet in honor of the Kentucky and Tennessee legislatures to demonstrate their common bonds. The effort was well received and highly praised. But after Fort Sumter, Garfield tossed aside compromise and fought for victory.

As a state senator, Garfield urged the raising of regiments for the Union cause. Friends insisted that his stature—his political stature—merited him a generalship, so Garfield sought a commission. He became the colonel of the 42nd Ohio Volunteers—a natural occurrence, in keeping with the spirit of the times that the man who raised the regiment usually led it.

His actions in western Kentucky during early 1862 were exaggerated by Union media eager for positive news and by Garfield himself. True, he had chased the Rebels from the area, but the case was, to put it kindly, overstated with exuberance. Still, Garfield lobbied for and gained promotion to brigadier.

He was later assigned to General Don Carlos Buell’s army during the Shiloh and Corinth campaigns, but ill health sent him home in the autumn.

During the fall of 1863, Garfield, now a U.S. representative in the 38th Congress, returned to the field with a general’s rank to serve as the chief of staff for Major General William S. Rosecrans, commander of the Army of the Cumberland. On September 19 and 20, Confederate Gen. Bragg, reinforced by James Longstreet’s veterans from Virginia, badly defeated Rosecrans at Chickamauga in northeast Georgia by driving half his army from the field—including Rosecrans and Garfield.

At a crossroads, Rosecrans and Garfield paused. One way lead to Chattanooga and safety. The other way lead back to the battlefield where the Union’s George Thomas was still fighting on Snodgrass Hill. Rosecrans went with the remainder of the army back to Chattanooga and eventual obscurity. Garfield, on the other hand, returned to the battlefield.

It may seem like an insignificant event—after all, most of the army was in retreat—but it illustrates that Garfield’s instincts were sharp—as were his political calculations. Many senior officers were later cashiered, especially Rosecrans. Who would re-elect a congressman who ran? But a congressman who ran BUT went back to fight? Different story. Garfield was promoted to major general. (Glenn Tucker gives details of this event on p. 311-313 of his Chickamauga, 1961.)

He would later leave the army for good when his term began that December and remained in Congress until he was elected to the U.S. Senate just before his nomination as a dark horse candidate in 1880.

Congressman Garfield
Once firmly ensconced in the House, Garfield joined the Radicals and embraced their hard-line course against the South. He chafed against Lincoln’s seeming moderation and would join his fellow Republicans and break with Johnson over Reconstruction. He grew disappointed in his fellow Ohioan, Salmon P. Chase, who as chief justice presided over Johnson’s impeachment. Garfield had considered Chase a political mentor but left Chase behind when he seemed to favor the defense during the trial (which wasn’t really true).

Garfield became known as a fiscal hardliner; he embraced the hard-money policies that favored the return to the gold standard. Rutkow explains that Garfield, knowing his district was politically safe (i.e., he never faced a serious challenge, and only once was his margin of victory below 60%) could make a serious, fiscally sound case for hard money without having to cater to political whims.

During his decade-and-a-half career in Congress, he also formed a rivalry/friendship with James G. Blaine of Maine, one of the key power figures of late 19th century Republican politics. Blaine had power in the House, and while he was Speaker, kept Garfield from leading the Ways & Means Committee. When the Democrats gained control of Congress, however, Garfield became the ranking opposition member—and a respected one at that.

Garfield’s career was nearly derailed through three separate scandals. “His involvement in these affairs seemed strange at the time,” writes Rutkow, “ since Garfield was decidedly puritanical in his views concerning public officials, industrialists and illicit business dealings.” (p.32) However, Garfield’s name came up in connection to the Credit Mobilier scandal. The federal government had subsidized a large portion of the Union Pacific’s construction from Nebraska to Utah. To cover up some money laundering, stock for the dummy corporation, the Credit Mobilier, was spread around Congress.

Garfield was among the congressmen who accepted stock, though by his word, he had no honest recollection about the matter. His less-than-forthcoming answers to investigators, however, hurt him politically. Soon, he had to justify his participation in the “Salary grab” of 1873, where Congress voted itself a 50% pay increase the same year the Panic hit (see entry on Grant).

Garfield was the chairman of the Appropriations Committee; so, of course public wrath came his way. He sent a letter to his constituents explaining what happened—and wasn’t entirely truthful in his explanation. Nevertheless, the safeness of his district and the distance of the next election prevented the twp scandals from hurting him too much. The final scandal was as much a scandal as a conflict of interest, where Garfield, as a lawyer, represented clients on one end and worked on legislation related to those same clients on the other. Rutkow relegates the matter to poor judgment rather than corruption.

Garfield was to play a role in the 1876 election crisis when he was appointed to the 15-member commission that was to decide the fate of the disputed electoral votes. What’s most notable about this is Garfield’s attitude: Rutkow relates that Garfield was “tired of the namby-pamby way in which many of our Republicans treat public questions.” (p.38) This speaks to Garfield’s desire to get things done boldly, not timidly, and he would carry that frustration throughout Hayes’ administration.

Hayes’ partial attempts at civil service reform, which Garfield didn’t fully support (because he didn’t like the rule that federal civil servants couldn’t participate in party politics) left the congressman despondent. Even those mild efforts met with strong opposition, and in Garfield’s opinion, that made the Hayes administration an “almost fatal blow” to the Republican Party.

Near the end of the 1870s, Garfield realized that he needed to move to the Senate and easily won the open seat in 1879.

The election of 1880
It’s true that James Garfield was a dark horse candidate. When President Hayes finally convinced his fellow Republicans that he really did mean he wasn’t going to seek a second term, party power brokers aimed to succeed Hayes with their own brand of Republicanism.

There were three main factions. The first were the Stalwarts: New York boss and Senator Roscoe Conkling lead them and backed ex-President Grant for a third term. Conkling ruled New York politics and had crossed Hayes over control of the New York Customhouse, the most lucrative port in the nation. The senator, according to some historians, wanted a third Grant term because Grant was supposedly controllable, though that seems dubious. More likely it was because Grant’s attempts at civil service reform came to naught.

The second powerful faction was the Half-Breeds, so called because they had pledged only partial support to the Grant administration and when they broke with Grant, they maintained some “see I told you so” style of credibility. They were led by Maine’s charismatic and slick James G. Blaine.

The third faction was basically the rest of the party, which bowed to neither the East Coast money interests nor the corridors of power. They were made up of the Midwestern and Western states (the South being a solid Democratic bloc). Their candidate was outgoing Treasury Secretary John Sherman.

Grant and Blaine held the strongest leads throughout much of the balloting, with Sherman barely registering. But on the 36th ballot, Blaine and Sherman supporters switched to Garfield, who won the nomination. It’s fascinating in that Garfield, already noted for his speaking skills, supposedly wasn’t actively seeking the nomination—though the did he or didn’t he question is still disputed—was by far the most popular man at the convention, even more so than Grant. When introducing Sherman’s candidacy, cries of “Garfield!” nearly drowned him out.

Conkling’s Stalwarts weren’t exactly mollified when Chester A. Arthur was selected to be the vice presidential candidate—convention politicking had gone against the Grant backers—and Garfield wasn’t exactly enamored with the choice either. It would cause some problems later.

The Democrats chose a genuine war hero—and a confirmed Democrat—as their candidate: Winfield Scott Hancock, the Army of the Potomac’s best corps commander (II Corps). Among his many laurels, Hancock had fought in almost every major battle in the east and had broken Pickett’s Charge at Gettysburg.

Garfield returned to Mentor where he conducted the first ever “front-porch campaign,” where party-members, supporters, well-wishers, bands, clubs, civic organizations by the wagon- and trainload came to hear speeches and see the candidate.

Campaign issues at first centered around 1876, but Democrats really couldn’t gain any traction, both because Hayes was not running and because their own investigations had revealed shady dealings on behalf of their own candidate (see previous entry). The campaigns instead focused on the two men. Admittedly, Hancock was the war hero while Garfield, though a general, really couldn’t compete, and Republicans knew they couldn’t touch Hancock’s service. Instead, they focused on him being the figurehead leader of a corrupt party; Democrats returned the favor.

Garfield got a tremendous boost in October when Democratic supporters attempted to damage the Republican by claiming he supported unlimited Chinese immigration. (See the last entry for more on this issue.) The letter, addressed to a “H.L. Morley” of Massachusetts, was published in a newspaper called The Truth. Chinese immigration was a heated issue in the West, and Garfield hurt himself by not answering the widely disseminated charge quickly. Finally, he provided a letter refuting the charge, and handwriting experts declared the Morley letter an obvious forgery. (Gee, this all sounds familiar, doesn’t it, Dan Rather?)

Garfield’s stature went up, the Democrats took a hit (no evidence Hancock was involved) and Garfield won in a close election. He took 214 electoral votes to Hancock’s 155, and just under 9,500 popular votes from over 9 million cast.

“Power” cabinet
With the election won, Garfield set about organizing the administration. The president-elect always must satisfy the various factions of the party that supports his election. To fail to do so for whatever reason usually invites problems, as it did for Grant and Hayes. This involves two things: the cabinet and appointments. The cabinet continues to be a major issue to this day; appointments have evolved into a different animal. The latter started becoming an issue in Grant’s term and would lead to tragic consequences in 1881.

The former produced two months of headaches for Garfield, making the end of 1880 and the beginning of 1881 a period of angst and frustration for the president-elect.

Garfield made his first selection by offering the State Department to James G. Blaine. The Secretary of State’s office during the 19th century was quite powerful: Europeans considered him akin to prime minister, while Americans considered him, and not the vice president, second only to the president. Garfield biographer Ira Rutkow explains that giving State to Blaine was a huge affront to Conkling—who did, after all, “deliver” the crucial state of New York for Garfield, hard feelings from the convention aside.

Conkling wanted a place in the Garfield administration, too—and not just the vice presidency, which few people thought much of. Conkling wanted one of his men at Treasury, the second-most powerful cabinet post. The Treasury secretary controlled monetary policy and a huge number of patronage positions. However, Garfield balked at the thought of having an Eastern moneyman once again in charge of federal monetary policy. Instead, he would eventually name William Windom of Minnesota to the post.

Oddly, Garfield gives the appearance of being under the domination of Blaine during this period, as the only firm commitment he got for a cabinet position was from Blaine by the time he got to Washington. None of Garfield’s proposed appointments seemed to meet with Blaine approval. Blaine also published, without Garfield’s knowledge, a pointed editorial that seemed to take aim at the Stalwarts, who were infuriated.

Garfield was dismayed at the fighting between the two strong personalities and their followers—and he still didn’t have a cabinet. Finally, in Washington, with his inauguration shortly to come, he made his choices. He offered War to Robert Todd Lincoln (A. Lincoln’s son), which gave prestige to the incoming administration. He wound up giving Treasury to Windom after abandoning all further attempts at compromise with Conkling proved futile when discussing the Navy secretary and postmaster general positions.

Garfield named Stalwart Thomas James to be postmaster general—but without consulting Conkling, which lead to, in Ira Rutkow’s words, an hour-long browbeating, where Conkling, witnessed by Arthur,

“...charg[ed] him with duplicity and lack of concern for the needs of the Republican Party. Arthur recalled that ‘for invective, sarcasm and impassioned eloquence, this was the speech of Conkling’s life.’ Garfield listened to the harangue in silence. He made no promises and made no apologies, but came away convinced, more than ever, that Conkling had little regard for most of his fellow Republicans.” (p.68)

There would be consequences.

The administration in action
President Garfield’s inaugural address is remarkable in that it was completely out of character. The man who had brought Hopkins to tears at his valedictorian fell flat during what was arguably the biggest speech of his life. Why? He was exhausted. The bruising cabinet nomination fight had left him little time to work on his speech; so, he didn’t finish until 3 that morning. When he took the oath later that day, he was wiped out.

Still, the new president took office amid prosperous times. The hard economic times were over and Garfield could look forward to tackling some interesting problems, such as pressing for education for blacks, especially in the South. Education was the key to black advancement, he argued in his inaugural, and he repeated that theme later that month in Louisiana. But other problems came up almost immediately—and probably made him happy that he picked the right men for cabinet positions.

First, Garfield set about strengthening the economy through Wall Street collaboration. Secretary Windom and Attorney General Wayne MacVeagh worked out an arrangement with brokers and bankers to redeem 5 percent and six percent government bonds for the new 3.5 percent bonds without unduly affecting the shareholders. Getting rid of the older bonds, which were used for Civil War public debt, became a bright mark for the administration—especially because it reduced interest on the public debt by 40 percent and saved the federal government $10 million a year.

Second, Garfield’s people uncovered one of the greatest scandals in American history: the “Star Route” fraud. It involved corruption in the post office, and it would take a bit of space to explain it. “Star Route” refers to special delivery routes in the southwest that were designated with a star or asterisk on the postal schedules, and that was where some of the fraud occurred. For example, one route charged the government $50,000 a year instead of the $1,000 contracted for. Biographer Rutkow explains that only someone high up in the Postal Service and elsewhere in t he government could authorize such fraud. (p.74-75)

Rumors had been circulating for years until finally a congressional investigation began. During his first week in office, Garfield ordered Postmaster General James to investigate and eliminate the abuses and corruption. He did so, and the investigation and charges would continue long after Garfield’s death.

Meanwhile, Secretary Blaine was working in Central America making the United States’ claim to any canal built in that area—a long-standing vision stretching back for several administrations.

Problems between Garfield and Arthur—and Conkling
While the Star Route fraud investigations got underway, the appointments controversy commenced once more. While Garfield was making appointments—including many black Americans to federal offices, Garfield needed to deal with the thorny problem of New York politics. The battle for civil service reform had only been postponed following Hayes’ half measures. The president actually invited Conkling in March to discuss appointments in hopes of somehow healing the rift. Garfield told the senator that while he agreed with the Stalwart’s suggestions, he needed to remember the non-Stalwart New Yorkers who had supported him in Chicago. Conkling thought they should be “exiled” to foreign service for all he cared.

Once more, Garfield seemed to be under the sway of a powerful personality when he submitted a number of Stalwart names for New York positions. An outraged Secretary Blaine tried to dissuade Garfield, but instead, the president sent another appointment: William Robertson, a Conkling enemy, as collector customs of the Port of New York.

Garfield might as well have kneed Conkling in the groin. Writes Rutkow:

“To appoint one of Conkling’s enemies to the coveted of all patronage positions was both a bold political stroke and a supreme insult to the Stalwarts. ‘This brings on the contest at once and will settle the question whether the President is registering clerk of the Senate or the Executive of the United States,’ Garfield wrote to one of his friends. ‘Shall the principal port of entry in which more than 90% of all our customs duties are collected be under the control of the administration or under the local control of a factional senator?’” (p.76-77)

The showdown brought matters to a head with his vice president. Chester Arthur (who had held the post in dispute until Hayes kicked him out) was a pure Stalwart. He and Garfield never got along—party politics had made them running mates—and the Robertson affair drove them completely apart. Arthur refused to speak to Garfield for a month, and soon started calling the president a liar—in public. Incensed, Garfield barred Arthur from the White House.

Conkling eventually lost the fight. Garfield gained in stature while Conkling, in desperation, resigned his seat in protest. The Senate confirmed Robertson anyway. “Grateful” New York voters did not return Conkling, to his surprise, to the Senate.

Garfield had struck a blow against “boss” politics and won.

A man named Guiteau
The battle over appointments created the most unfortunate consequence. Throughout most of the 19th century, the president had to spend the first several months of his term making appointments, and not just the high profile ones. There were thousands of federal posts that needed to be filled. Often, presidents of the same party kept many men on to ease the burden. Even with cabinet officials sharing the load, it was a tiresome and thankless job.

The chief executive was usually assessable to anyone, and Garfield was no exception. On his inauguration day and for weeks after, well-wishers and office-seekers flooded the White House. On of them was a would-be Stalwart named Charles Guiteau. He claimed that he had been key to Garfield’s election and therefore deserved a lucrative foreign posting. In truth, he had made crazy-man speeches on a street corner.

When his repeated visits to the White House and State Department led to no appointments—and actually caused him to be barred from both buildings—Guiteau turned against Garfield. When the president defeated Conkling, Guiteau decided that that Garfield needed to die: His death as the only way that the Stalwarts could take control and prevent the Democrats from starting another war.

Despite Abraham Lincoln’s assassination—even despite the attempted assassination of Andrew Jackson—there was still no guards for the president. Often presidents rode and walked alone or in the company of a few people. On July 2, 1881, President Garfield and Secretary Blaine walked alone into a Washington train station. They were heading to New Jersey and then other places east.

Once the duo had walked past him, Guiteau pulled out his .44 and shot Garfield twice.

The 80 days
If modern doctors had treated Garfield, he probably would have lived; the shooting would have had no more significance than the attempt on Reagan in 1981 and Guiteau would be akin to John Hinkley Jr. as a would-be assassin.

Guiteau’s first shot grazed Garfield’s right arm. His second shot hit him square in the back. Garfield went down; a policeman captured the shooter, who was screaming about being a Stalwart and that Arthur was now president. Blaine cradled the bleeding Garfield. Four cabinet members out on the platform at first thought a joke had been made: the president—shot?

Soon doctors arrived, including one of the few black American doctors. Garfield was moved to a second floor. He was weakening. Doctor Willard Bliss, a wartime gunshot expert and chief surgeon for the U.S. Armory’s hospital in Washington and current member of the DC Board of Health, soon arrived and took command. He probed for the bullet—most likely with dirty fingers—but couldn’t find it. Ten doctors in all gathered and finally agreed to let the president return to the White House.

He couldn’t have been in worse hands. Biographer Rutkow, a clinical professor of surgery who earned his doctorate of public health from Johns Hopkins, is an expert in the history of American medicine. His biography of Garfield is quite damning of the incompetent “care” that Garfield received from Bliss and the few other attending physicians.

Bliss took charge of the president and, like a mini dictator, controlled all access to Garfield and all information concerning his condition. Few visitors were permitted to see him, including family. Even the president’s personal physician was kicked out. The medical community loudly debated Bliss’ methods, but apparently the administration let him have his way. Worse, every doctor who probed into Garfield’s wound did so with unwashed fingers and non-sterilized instruments:

“From the moment that Bliss first placed his finger and instruments into Garfield’s wound, the president’s health was compromised. What had been a relatively clean bullet track was transformed into a highly contaminated one.” (Rutkow, p.110-111)

Garfield’s infected body was shaken with fever, loss of appetite and pain.

Meanwhile, the shocked nation clung to every bit of news that came from the White House, regardless of how seemingly false it was. Vice President Arthur came under immediate suspicion, and did Roscoe Conkling, considering the would-be assassin confessed his status as a “stalwart’s Stalwart.”

Months passed and finally the emaciated Garfield could take no more and demanded to be moved from the White House. A special train carried him to the New Jersey shore on Sept. 6. Bliss, seemingly delusional himself, kept telling reporters the president was recovering, but others attending him told a different story. President Garfield was clearly dying.

Finally, his painful ordeal was over on Sept. 19.

Legacy
Chester A. Arthur was sworn in the next day, though in truth, the nation had been without a chief executive since that fateful July day. The hard feelings between Garfield and Arthur—and Bliss, of course—kept Arthur from the White House throughout much of the abbreviated presidency.

The shooting and his ordeal had two lasting legacies. The first was the passage of the Pendleton Civil Service Reform in 1883, which I’ll discuss in the next entry. The second was the intense debate his treatment (or lack thereof) helped spark in a medical community undergoing a major—and positive—transition. “The controversies surrounding Garfield’s death became a dividing line between the new and the old in American medicine,” writes Rutkow, who explains that the heated discussions centered on antiseptics, trained nurses, homeopathy, etc. (Even Charles Guiteau, whose lawyer argued for insanity, claimed that he didn’t kill Garfield; the doctors did. The judge didn’t agree, and Guiteau was executed.)

The arguments would continue for some time, and Rutkow notes that Bliss’ defenders would still be defending his methods when McKinley was assassinated 20 years later.

Final Assessment

Garfield was shot six months into his term and died in September, so, like William Henry Harrison, historians never rate him, and neither will I. But the second president to be assassinated, and second to die so shortly into his term, certainly left his mark on his age.

It’s not just that his death finally began the real reform in civil service. Also, Garfield’s life was one of the bright political stars of the post-war era. The tale of the “young man in a hurry” was a true rags-to-riches story, where a poor boy rose to prominence through his wits, eloquence, quick thinking and ability to compromise.

Garfield’s abbreviated presidency had great promise. He took on—and beat—one of the most powerful political bosses in the nation. His fiscal responsibility reduced public debt. He was attentive to racial matters and kept appointing black Americans to office. He ordered a deep investigation into the U.S. Postal Service fraud. A great “what if” was cut short.

Final assessment: No rating but popular.

Resources
Ira Rutkow’s James Garfield (2006) of The American Presidents series is fascinating because Rutkow is a clinical professor of surgery—and says that Garfield shouldn’t have died. Medical incompetence killed him, not Guiteau’s bullets.

Also useful was The Presidencies of James A. Garfield and Chester A. Arthur (University of Kansas American Presidency Series) by Justus D. Doenecke (1981).

Illustrations

1 President James A. Garfield

2 Brigadier Gen. James Garfield, probably circa 1863

3 Garfield and family. His wife sits at the table; Garfield’s mother sits at far right.

4 Garfield had several pictures taken of him together with his daughter, little Mollie.

5 This Joseph Keppler cartoon published in Puck on June 16, 1880, shows Ulysses S. Grant, wearing a Civil War uniform, along with many unhappy Republican backers, handing his damaged sword "Third term imperialism" to James Garfield, who is holding paper titled "for nomination President Garfield," in front of "Fort Alliance (anti-third-term)."

6 Garfield received thousands of visitors throughout the 1880 campaign at his Mentor, Ohio, home, pictures here in the Dec. 18, 1880, Frank Leslie’s illustrated.

7 Broadside showing James A. Garfield (right) and Chester A. Arthur.

8 Garfield’s bond of friendship for the unfriendly senators shows President Garfield wrapping a “patronage” ribbon around James Blaine (front) and Roscoe Conkling, as shown in Puck on March 2, 1881.

9 The attack on the President's life--Scene in the ladies' room of the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad depot--The arrest of the assassin, from sketches by our special artist's [sic] A. Berghaus and C. Upham in Frank Leslie’s illustrated newspaper, July 16, 1881.

10 New Jersey--The removal of President Garfield, with his physicians and attendants, from the White House to the Francklyn cottage, at Elberon by the sea, September 6th, in Frank Leslie’s illustrated newspaper, Sept. 24, 1881.

11 New Jersey--President Garfield at Elberon--His first view of the ocean from his reclining-chair, Sept. 13th in Frank Leslie’s illustrated newspaper, Oct. 1, 1881.

12 Portrait of the late President James A. Garfield, painted by G.F. Gilman.

Number 19: Rutherford B. Hayes

Years in office: 1877-1881
Pre-service occupations: lawyer, governor, U.S. representative, general
Key events during his administration: end of Reconstruction (1877), “Great Railroad Strike” (1877), resumption of specie payments (1879), Nez Perce campaign (1877)

Presidential rating: Mildly successful and mixed on popularity

ESSAY

Rutherford B. Hayes seems like one of those “footnote” presidents—an also-ran. Indeed, Hayes’ ascendancy in 1876 marks the string of presidents until Teddy Roosevelt whom most people today are hard-pressed to put in the correct order, much less even name.

Rutherford “Rud” Hayes even enjoyed an ever-so-brief moment in the spotlight seven years ago during the Florida recount, because his own election to president involved disputed ballots and the Democrat candidate (Tilden) winning the popular vote while losing the electoral vote. Then he faded from memory again. In what’s becoming a usual refrain in these reports on the presidents, that’s a shame.

Historians of the Gilded Age often gloss over, speed through or grossly distort the presidents of this era, and Hayes is no exception. Hayes was a decent president; he faced one tremendous crisis in his term—the great strikes of 1877—but his actions are usually misunderstood or, worse, misreported, and his presidency is forgotten (save for the above-mentioned election). But his president shouldn’t be overlooked, because Hayes was a solid and respectable president during a time when the great passions of the previous decades had finally cooled. He stayed true to the Constitution and fought back several attempts by the Democratic-controlled Congress to usurp executive authority, and he made sure that his predecessor’s hard money policy became law, thereby greatly strengthening the nation’s economy.

“Rud” Hayes took office amid cries of fraud. Indeed, the opposition press even addressed him as “Rutherfraud” and “His Fraudulency.” Hayes took office amid a nation still struggling economically and weary from the last two decades of turmoil. Reconstruction was ending; race was fading as an issue while the nation turned its attention to labor versus capital and remaining campaigns in and settling of the West. As president, Hayes was able to steer the nation through these challenges with a quiet dignity. He wasn’t always successful in his endeavors, as we shall see, but overall, his presidency was very respectable.

Early life
Rud Hayes had one of the more interesting upbringings. At first a sickly child whose survival was questioned, Hayes developed into a rigorous young man. He loved to learn and equally loved to hear loquacious and educated men speak. He joined a prominent social club, the Cincinnati Literary Club, which included Salmon P. Chase, who would be Lincoln’s treasury secretary and later chief justice of the Supreme Court.

Not exactly a young Lochinvar, young Rud Hayes nevertheless won the hand of the lovely Lucy Ware Webb in 1852. Lucy would prove to be one of the most popular first ladies ever. Together, they had six children who lived to adulthood.

Hayes studied law, graduated from Harvard Law and eventually opened a practice in Cincinnati. Politics eventually beckoned and he entered public service in Cincinnati, but the war put a temporary stop to further ambitions on that front.

Soldier for the Union
Rutherford Hayes volunteered his services to Ohio shortly after the war began. He was made an officer in the 23rd Ohio, a regiment Hayes retained close to his heart the rest of his life. Much of his war career was spent in western (soon West) Virginia, where he was wounded four times.

Hayes loathed being assigned away from command situations, as happened when he was made a regimental judge advocate. He much preferred being in charge than being one of many.

He saw some action during the early fighting in western Virginia, but his first huge battle didn’t come until South Mountain, Maryland, on Sept. 14, 1862, where he was wounded. Made a colonel, Hayes commanded a brigade at year’s end and fought Confederate raiders, including John Hunt Morgan on the latter’s raid into Ohio in 1863. The following year, Hayes fought under George Crook at the vicious fight at Cloyd’s Mountain in West Virginia. Hayes then took part in Phil Sheridan’s subjugation of the Shenandoah Valley, fighting at Opequon Creek, Fisher’s Hill and Cedar Creek. He took three more wounds and lost four horses. Hayes finished the war a brevet major general.

During the campaigns of 1861-62, Hayes earned a reputation for fairness, mildness and the ability to get along with the most difficult officers, especially his commander. His wife, Lucy, often took a harsher and more critical view of President Lincoln and commanders in the field than did Hayes, who always counseled his wife to have patience and trust that things would work out. Lucy didn’t like how Lincoln seemed to toss aside Generals Fremont and Pope (see essay on Lincoln). She was a pure abolitionist who had convinced her husband of the cause. But Hayes, Trefousse writes, was “more farsighted than many of his contemporaries” when it came to judging situations and character (p.24), and his letters to Lucy reveal his foresight and grasp of events in anticipation of official developments. It was a trait that usually served him well as president.

Congressman and governor
In 1864, Hayes’ home district elected him to Congress. Hayes refused to leave his command to campaign for the office, saying that no officer fit for duty should leave his post to electioneer for Congress—and one who did “ought to be scalped.” He won easily and didn’t have to worry about leaving the Army because he wouldn’t have to take his seat until December 1865.

At first, Hayes felt comfortable with President Johnson. But like many moderate Republicans, Hayes reluctantly broke with the president when it became clear they were moving in two different directions. He became convinced of the rightness and justness of the Radical Republican policy in the South, and during one speech in Ohio, said there were two Reconstruction policies: Lincoln’s and Jefferson Davis’. Obviously, he placed President Johnson’s with the latter.

Midway through his second term in Congress, Hayes resigned to campaign for Ohio governor. Congress wasn’t where his ambitions lay, anyway. Even though Ohio’s governor had limited executive authority, it was a position of authority and more to Hayes’s liking. He hemmed and hawed properly then accepted the nomination—and went out to fight a difficult campaign.

Ohio was the home to Oberlin College, where white and black students studied together as equals, but the state as a whole did not want equal rights. The Republican Party ran on a plank of an equal rights amendment to Ohio’s constitution, which the Democrats strongly opposed. Republicans fared badly in the state’s ballots that fall, as the amendment was soundly defeated, a Democrat was elected to Hayes’ seat, the Democrats controlled the state house—but Hayes squeaked by and won the governor’s mansion, taking office in early 1868.

Ohio’s governor during that time didn’t have much power as he didn’t even have veto authority. Yet Hayes was popular enough to serve two non-consecutive terms. He had decided to quit political office at the end of the first term, in 1872, but as he continued to follow politics closely, he got swept in again and won a second term in 1876.

This victory in a key presidential state made him a contender to succeed Grant that year.

The disputed election—“Rutherfraud” Hayes
By 1876, the Republican Party was exhausted. The turmoil of the last 12 years had spent the party, especially Reconstruction and the “waving of the bloody shirt” over outrages in the South against blacks and Republican supporters. Grant’s handling of scandals didn’t help matters much either, nor his determination to fight for Reconstruction when the party was looking to end it. Democrats were resurgent in the South as the states were “redeemed” with white-controlled governments. Northern attentions were focused more on westward expansion, labor and economic concerns, Indian wars, and so on.

The detritus of the Civil War was fading. The party needed a fresh start. Many new faces—at least new to presidential politics—stepped forward in hopes of getting a nomination that summer. Democrats nominated Samuel Tilden of New York, a strong contender who had successfully fought the corruption of “Boss” Tweed’s Tammany Hall ring.

The Republican favorite at first was James G. Blaine of Maine—who we’ll hear from again through the next several administrations—but after coming close on several ballots, finally lost to Hayes. Why Hayes? He was considered a safer choice than Blaine, who was thought damaged by false charges of corruption involving railroad bonds. Even though cleared of the charges, enough Republicans thought a candidate with the sting of a corruption charge versus a candidate who won his stripes fighting corruption was a deal-breaker. So, Hayes was nominated. His running mate was William Wheeler, of whom Hayes confessed, “I’m sorry, but who is Wheeler?”

This was still the era when candidates didn’t stump for themselves, so Hayes remained in Cincinnati, performing his duties as governor, while the campaigns whirled on. Democrats ran on Republican corruption, while Republicans countered by saying that “Not every Democrat was a rebel, but every rebel was a Democrat.”

The election was close—so close that Hayes retired on election day believing he had lost. Tilden commanded a popular majority, and it seemed he had won the electoral vote. He started going about his business the next day until he received notice that some states were still in dispute.

The ballots in Florida, Louisiana and South Carolina were a mess. The governors of those states had certified the ballots—the governors recognized b y the federal government, that is. Florida’s Democratic governor-elect and Louisiana’s Democratic gubernatorial candidate signed their own certificates. The Tilden electors from South Carolina merely sent them to Washington with no certification, claiming their man had won. There were also bad ballots, deliberate fraud on ballots and other problems.

A major crisis was now at hand. This was far beyond the first major disputed election, that of 1824 when the race between John Quincy Adams, Andrew Jackson, Henry Clay and William Crawford was thrown to the House. With outgoing President Grant’s full support, the Congress formed the 15-member Electoral Commission to settle the matter. Members would be three Republican senators and two Democrat senators (the Republicans controlled the Senate), two Republican representatives and three Democrat representatives (the Democrats controlled the House), and five Supreme Court justices (two from each party). Most justices were Republicans, so by common accord, the most impartial justice was selected to be the fifth member.

The commission formed and met in late January, with strong counsel representing each candidate. They reviewed the dual sets of returns from the three states, and decided that they would not review ballots beyond those that were prima facie lawful (meaning they wouldn’t create any new standards for counting votes). In the end, the impartial justice sided with the seven Republican members, and awarded the disputed electoral ballots to Hayes, giving him the 185-184 victory. Only the 2000 election would be closer.

In 1878, Democrats in Congress attempted to embarrass Hayes by proving Republicans committed fraud during the election—and thereby strengthening their hand in 1880. Their Potter committee, however, backfired, when it was forced to examine actual fraud committed by Tilden’s nephew, who attempted to bribe officials in the South. Their grandstanding failed to destroy its intended target—the Republican Party—but instead strengthened Hayes’ stature and damaged Tilden too badly for him to be a contender again. * (See Resources for Treffousse’s mistaken conclusions of 1876 vs. 2000.)

The Hayes cabinet
Once inaugurated, Hayes set about asserting his independence. He didn’t care much for the game of awarding political offices to party men simply because they were “due” or because they “deserved” it. Nor did he like making appointments to satisfy wings of the party.

Like Grant (though Hayes’s biographers never make this point), Hayes appointed whom he wanted without consulting party leaders. His choices were good and strong, and some biographers have hailed his cabinet as the best post-Lincoln one for the remainder of the century. There is some truth to that sentiment, in that the men served ably and honorably, and many went on to greater success and fame.

For example, to State, that most crucial of posts, Hayes named William Evarts, who had represented the president during the election crisis. Evarts had enjoyed an interesting career up to that point: he served as Johnson’s chief counsel during the impeachment mess, then Johnson’s final attorney general; he later served as point man for Grant and Hamilton Fish’s Alabama claims arbitration. Evarts’ term at State would be solid; he would later serve in the Senate and would lead the fundraising drive for the Statue of Liberty’s pedestal in 1881.

At Treasury, Hayes selected his fellow from the Buckeye state, John Sherman. The brother of the famed general was a hard-money man like the president. Sherman would gain greater fame as the architect of the Sherman Antitrust Act in 1890.

At Interior, Hayes appointed the fiery Carl Schurz, a liberal (old sense) Republican who had been instrumental in creating the liberal Republican/Democrat alliance for 1872 to defeat Grant. Schurz had opposed placing the Indian Bureau under the War Department (an idea of Grant’s that Grant abandoned as president). When placed in charge of Interior, Schurz would attack the corruption in that department with a zeal that had long been needed. More on that later.

Meanwhile, party leaders, such as Maine’s James G. Blaine, were dismayed at Hayes’ choices, particularly because they had not been consulted—and many who wanted those choice posts were mad, as had happened with Grant.

It wasn’t a good beginning for the president, especially considering half the nation’s voters initially considered him to be a fraud—but ruffled feathers ignore the fact that he made good choices.

1877: Reconstruction swan song
Supposedly—I use that word deliberately—the resolution of the election of 1876 included a deal whereby Democrats would acquiesce to President Hayes and forget about “President” Tilden in exchange for the removal of Federal troops from the South (meaning, they would no longer protect the two remaining Republican governments in South Carolina and Louisiana, and would decamp from the state houses and return to their forts).

But that’s not quite what happened. The above paragraph is the informal “Compromise of 1877,” but President Hayes, if he actually felt beholden to it, took his time. Chief among his concerns was the seeming abandonment of blacks and Republican government in the South. What he wanted was assurances from the Democratic governors that black and non-Redeemer whites rights would be respected and upheld. Hayes got those assurances during meetings at the White House—and the troops were withdrawn—but they proved disingenuous, to put it kindly.

At first, the president believed his Southern policy was a success and a new political alignment and racial harmony was in the making. Crowds of well-wishers of blacks and whites who greeted him while on a tour of the South in later 1877 convinced him of the correctness of his policy—but also made him succumb to wishful thinking. Hayes, a good man, was being snowballed by Redeemers and white supremacists that had no intention of adhering to his policy or any of the federal laws favorable to black citizens. Hayes biographer Ari Hoogenboom explains:

“He believed that the war wounds had been healed, that white southerners had accepted the Reconstruction amendments safeguarding black lives, rights, and property, and that conservative Democrats would ignore color and sectional lines in politics and would move over to the Republican Party.

Hayes was wrong. The war wounds were not healed, white southerners had applauded the amendments because they thought it likely that they would be neither enforced nor obeyed, and conservative Democrats did not join the Republican party, which steadily shrank until its members were a mere handful of officeholders. A more cynical person than Hayes would not have expected southerners to be rapidly converted to civil and political rights for black. He failed to perceive the pervasiveness and the viciousness of racial prejudice in southern politics and society…” (Hoogenboom, p. 70)

So, the “redeemed” South meant not only the end of Reconstruction but threatened to be the end of everything gained since 1865. And the 1878 elections proved just how misplaced Hayes’ optimism was concerning his southern policy. Hayes, to his credit, took up the cause of civil rights and would fight the Democratic-controlled Congress over enforcement of the hard-won results of the Civil War. More on that later.

1877: The Great Strike
The Panic that started in 1873 stretched into Hayes’ term. Grant’s Resumption Act, which Hayes supported and effectively ended the depression, wouldn’t take effect for two more years. (More on that later.) During the summer of Hayes’ first year, massive strikes gripped first the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad in West Virginia and then many more industries nationwide.

Railroads dealt with the hard economy through cutting costs. Some lines pooled their freight hauling; some fired workers; most lines decided to reduce wages, usually by 10%. Some lines’ employees took the cut in their already low pay in stride, because they were still employed. Others, already smarting from previous wage cuts, couldn’t take it any more. In West Virginia, the trouble began.

Strikers brought rail traffic to a halt in many centers, including Chicago, East St. Louis, Decatur, Ill., and half a dozen other places. Strikers—who were soon outnumbered by general mobs—police, “vigilantes” and finally militia clashed in Baltimore, Pittsburgh and Philadelphia. The militia in Pittsburgh killed 20 and wounded 29; the strikers fought back harder and torched 39 buildings, more than 100 steam engines and more than 1,200 pieces of rolling stock. More violence erupted between mobs and police in Chicago. The violence—and the strikes—finally subsided after a month.

Hayes biographer Ari Hoogenboom notes that the great strike was the closest America ever came to a nationwide work stoppage, and it was also testament to the fact that by 1877, the United States economy had truly become national. Hoogenboom also notes that Hayes examined the situation carefully, and, mindful of how federal troops had been used in civilian situations during the past 12 years, charted a constitutionally correct course.

Hayes had dealt with strikers as Ohio’s governor, and as president he would follow exactly the same course: he said that people had the right to work and that property owners had the right to the use and possession of their property, and that he would use force if necessary to keep the peace (and nothing more). The president was most concerned with avoiding using federal soldiers to keep the railroads running, because the strikers kept their heads and allowed passenger trains, with the all-important mail, to keep running. They only blocked freight trains and battled strikebreakers, police and militia attempting to move them along. Interfering with the mail would have been a federal matter; stopping freight trains, however, was not. So, Hayes decided that the best course would be to use U.S. Marines and Army regulars to protect federal property, and, if asked properly by state governors, to keep the peace (i.e., break riots). Hayes refused to order the military to run the railroads.

The Wikipedia entry on Hayes (as of Oct. 19, 2007) claims “Hayes called in federal troops, who, for the first time in U.S. history, fired on the striking workers, killing over 70.” Rubbish! The only soldiers who fired on strikers were the various states’ National Guard units. Marines and soldiers arrived to maintain the peace and often too late to break up a fight. That’s according to both Hoogenboom and Trefousse. Historians who disparage the Gilded Age look down on Hayes as if he sided with the railroads against the strikers, but again, he did no such thing. Hayes reflected later in his diary that

“The strikes have been put down by force; but now for the real remedy. Can’t something be done by education of the strikers, by judicious control of the capitalists, by wise general policy to end or diminish the evil?” (Trefousse, p.95; emphasis in original)

It is an interesting sentiment, but his sympathy went only so far, because Hayes believed that no man, however just his cause, had a right to interfere with another man’s right to work. **

The Nez Perce campaign, the Poncas and Indian Bureau reform
One of the most dramatic incidents that occurred during Hayes’ term was the Nez Perce campaign of 1877. Chief Joseph and several chiefs fought one of the most brilliant fighting retreats in modern history, leading 800 Nez Perce through 13 battles and 1,700 miles through Oregon, Washington, Wyoming, Montana and finally Idaho, where they finally surrendered. The best brief chronicle of the events can be found in Alvin Josephy Jr.’s The Patriot Chiefs.

Hayes’ role in this campaign was negligible, but as president he sought to continue Grant’s reform of the corrupt Interior Department, including the Indian Bureau, which was one of the main sore points of contention between settlers and Indians on the plains and western reaches. Grant’s reforms hadn’t been perfect—soreness and some indecision had lead to the Nez Perce dissatisfaction and subsequent enforced reservation life—but they had been a strong step in the right direction. The reforms under Hayes and Interior Secretary Schurz were better.

With the single-mindedness that had made him a dangerous political enemy—or powerful friend—Schurz uncovered fraud, deception and corruption inside the bureau and out in the field. The new Hays/Schruz reforms included more funding for schools on reservations (Congress approved) and, for the first time, Indian police officers on reservations. The concept was expanded under President Arthur to include the appointment of Indian judges. Hoogenboom writes that by “mixing Anglo-Saxon jurisprudence with Native American practices, policemen and judges were able to keep order on reservations, and they proved effective agents of acculturation.” (p.162-163)

President Hayes earns a strong mark for his reforms, and for his handling of an unfortunate episode that happened on his watch. The land of the Poncas tribe in Nebraska was mistakenly given to some Sioux, and the Poncas were removed to the Oklahoma territory in a rather harsh journey. The new land was unacceptable, and new land was found, but many Poncas wanted to return home. The affair grew uglier—but not bloody—and eventually lead to an extraordinary personal apology from the president himself.

Hayes wrote:

“As the chief executive at the time when the wrong was consummated, I am deeply sensible that enough of the responsibility for that wrong justly attaches to me to make it my particular duty and earnest desire to do all that I can give to these injured people that measure of redress which is
required alike by justice and by humanity.” (Trefousse, p.124)

It was a bold and honorable move that satisfied the Poncas and earned him admirations from men who had formerly opposed him as a “fraud.”

Civil service reform
The president also busied himself with another kind of reform: The civil service was badly in need of a makeover. Grant’s attempts had lead to false cries of corruption from the very crusaders for reform. Hayes took up the challenge, and this occupied much of the attention of his administration.

Civil service reform was a complicated matter. Political parties expected a share of the government pie in terms of appointments to the thousands of lucrative posts, such as postmasters and ports collectors. For example, in return for supporting a successful candidate for Congress—or even president—a powerful party operative had every reasonable reason to expect some of the appointment largess to come his way for his contacts. Inevitably, this often allowed incompetent or immoral (or both) men to hold offices.

The spoils system was the most serious obstacle to getting rid of corruption in civil service, because it let members of Congress interfere with the appointments process—which was an executive function, not a legislative one. Hayes and Schurz sought to replace the spoils system with a merit system, and prevent officeholders from participating in political activities—thus removing undue political influence. It was fine in theory. But in practice? Hayes moved cautiously, which angered reformers who wanted the reform Now! and had long-since grown impatient with Republican reform efforts. But he also angered party leaders such as New York’s Roscoe Conkling, who chaffed at even mild efforts at changing the lucrative spoils system.

The president’s cautious approach brought much criticism—and a showdown over the New York Customhouse (which collected 70 percent of U.S. customs revenue), run by Conkling patron Chester A. Arthur. Hayes tried to remove Arthur and another man from the Boston customs house and replace them with his own appointments (made in consultation with, ironically, spoilsmen), but Congress defeated them in late 1877.

Hoogenboom illuminates this early Hayes defeat by describing the politicians as “disappointed” and the reformers as “peeved” and the administration’s reform credibility as “eroded.” (p.134-135) Hayes was a little inconsistent, because he did use patronage to his effect when it served him—particularly in the South.

Reformers would remain peeved throughout Hayes’ term and unhappy with what they considered the administration’s retreat and inconsistencies. Even though he did make decent steps, Hayes wouldn’t be able to complete reforming the civil service an passed it to his successor Garfield, who unwillingly became the symbol of reform by his death. (It’s also funny that Hayes aimed to kick Arthur out of office, connected as he was with the corrupt New York machine (though not corrupt himself), only to sit in the same seat as Hayes a few years later—and winning praise as a great civil service reformer.)

Hayes versus Congress
As stated earlier, President Hayes fought hard against a Congress determined to undo the progress made on civil rights since the Civil War. If Lincoln started the second American revolution and Grant won and sustained that victory, Hayes is one of the many unsung presidents who helped sustain it.

Hayes was a weakened president by the end of 1877 through the combination of his cabinet appointments, civil service reform and the end of Reconstruction. Democrats in Congress realized that if they were to take complete control in the South and regain the White House in 1880, federal oversight of Congressional elections needed to be eliminated. Thanks to the 1878 elections, in 1879, Hayes faced a Democratic-controlled Congress. But as that Congress was about to learn, it wasn’t veto-proof, and “his Fraudulency” was no pushover. Rud Hayes was a mild man, but when his dander was up, he was as rigid as steel.

First, the outgoing 45th Congress failed to appropriate money for the federal government when it adjourned in March (the Republican-controlled Senate had refused to go along with the Democrat scheme to prevent enforcement of the 13th, 14th and 15th amendments, so no funding was approved). President Hayes called the incoming congress into immediate session to get the appropriate funding.

The now-Democrat-controlled House and Senate tried four times to pass bills aimed at removing any type of federal say in the South. Each time, Hayes vetoed the bills. First they tried prohibiting military protection at federal elections, which Hayes declared unconstitutional because it denied the federal government the right to enforce its laws. Then they passed another appropriations bill with riders repealing parts of the Enforcement Acts pertaining to supervisors and marshals for elections. Hayes countered by saying that the aim was nothing more than to destroy federal control over congressional elections.

Then Congress attempted to deny compensation for federal officials at election time, and then denial of payment for marshals employed to protect polls.

Each time, Hayes vetoed the bill with a stern lecture on passing bills with unconstitutional (or unrelated) matters attached to them. With each veto, Hayes’ stature rose and the Democrats’ fell—and Hayes recovered much ground with his own party. Finally, in the summer, they gave him a bill he could sign, but sent a separate one that he once again vetoed. By this time, the Democrats were in total disarray, and well on their way to defeat in 1880.

Sound economics
Hayes was a hard-money man and had been long before he came to Washington. The nation had been off the gold standard since the Civil War, and the nation’s economy ran on government-backed gold coins, the greenbacks that the federal government began issuing during the war, and notes issued by national banks. Hayes’ predecessor had defeated an attempt to greatly expand paper currency, and supported a return to the gold standard (resumption of specie payments, meaning the greenbacks were redeemed with, or backed by, gold at face value). The Resumption Act was scheduled to take effect on Jan. 1, 1879.

President Hayes supported Grant’s sound economic policy and made it his own. Hoognboom explains that Hayes opposed inflation through the expansion of greenbacks in circulation and/or the substitution of a silver standard for the gold standard, and Hayes had attributed his 1875 gubernatorial victory to his hard money support (p. 93). Democrats, backers of a silver standard and some Republicans, however, attempted to undo the Resumption Act. The arguments were the same now as against Grant: expanding the money supply would relieve the economic hardships of the Panic.

Hayes, like Grant, strongly disagreed. Treasury Secretary Sherman (who had authored the Resumption Act in the Senate) built a gold reserve to prepare for 1879. The president, meanwhile, vetoed a veto-proof watered-down government silver purchase bill on the grounds that it didn’t reflect realistic commercial value. In other words, he didn’t object to silver coinage, just that it shouldn’t be put on the same level as gold-backed money. (Hoogenboom p.95 and Trefousse, p.101) ***

Hayes lost the battle over silver coinage, but won out over the inflation supporters when the year following resumption proved a spectacular success. In his subsequent speeches, Hayes usually took credit for the improved economy, and he does deserve a lot of credit by refusing to let Congress gut the Resumption Act. Hoogenboom writes:

“Above all, Hayes was determined that the nation remain on the gold standard, and he fought to eliminate any threat to it. Congress, viewing the currency, not as a question of faith and moral, but as one of politics and economics, was content to ignore that issue, especially since business was booming. But Hayes believed that his hard-money policies sustained that boom, and the continued circulation of greenback and silver dollars made him uneasy. For him, it was an eternal verity of both economic and moral law that gold was the proper base for a nation’s economic currency.” (p.100)

As we shall see in upcoming presidential profiles, the battle over greenbacks vs. silver vs. gold was just beginning.

China and Mexico
President Hayes is not known for foreign policy, but two events merit mention.

The pre-war Nativist Party—later the American Party—was the first formal anti-immigration expression in American history. That party, which faded rather quickly, opposed Irish and Catholic and other “undesirable” immigrants from Europe.

In the West, the number of Chinese immigrants had been increasing—lured, as they were first by gold and then by the American dream just like their European counterparts. A Nativist streak had infected the West, particularly in California. The great strike touched the west coast and many Chinese (called Coolies) were murdered in racist attacks. Competition for jobs and cheap labor was usually the main cause.

Californians lead Congress in passing a law in 1879 specifically restricting immigration from China. President Hayes was under immense political pressure to sign the measure, but he decided it would be a bad move for America. The act would violate the Burlingame Treaty with China and could endanger American merchants and missionaries in the empire. So Hayes sent his veto to Congress, which was sustained, and the president received praise from outside of the West for upholding the ideals of the nation’s founding.

Hayes didn’t veto the bill for idealistic reasons, because he did agree with the Californians’ sentiments to some extent. He didn’t consider the Chinese as immigrants because they were mostly men, not families, and he actually worried about a propensity of aggression among whites against “lesser” (e.g., weaker) peoples. He believed limiting immigration from China would be better for both America and China.

Meanwhile, President Hayes and Secretary Evarts attempted to deal with Mexican bandits raiding across the border and hitting American ranchers. Mexico’s government—or lack thereof—had been unstable for at least half a century. When Hayes took office, Porfirio Diaz also assumed power in Mexico and would consolidate the country until his overthrow in 1911. Diaz would prove to be a strong leader, but of course in 1877 Hayes had no way of knowing this and assumed that Diaz was yet another in the long string of weak rulers unable to control the borders.

Hayes issued orders to General Ord letting U.S. troops pursue Mexican bandits across the border, a move that led to ridiculous charges by political opponents that the president and Secretary Evarts sought to take over northern Mexico.

The troops stayed. And by 1880, Diaz had gained control of his side of the border, and Hayes rescinded the cross-border pursuit orders. Subsequently, exports to Mexico increased.

Succession
Rud Hayes had brought a great dignity and calm to the White House—some said “restored it” after the Grant years, and it is true that there was absolutely no scandal connected with the Hayes administration, absent the 1876 election. Lucy Hayes was a bright and spirited host who eschewed liquor in the presidential mansion (it’s disputed whether she was called “Lemonade Lucy” during or after the White House years). The Hayes presidency was a bright spot, and if Hayes had wanted another term, he could have easily had it.

But he didn’t. He had pledged during his campaign to serve only one year—had even proposed a Constitutional amendment limiting the president to one six-year term (as was in the Confederate Constitution)—and was tired of the ardor of presidential life. Four years was enough.

Republicans gathered in Chicago to choose Hayes’ successor. U.S. Grant had been convinced to give a try for a third term and he seemed to be the favorite at first. But rivals James G. Blaine and John Sherman threw support behind dark horse candidate Rep. James Garfield. Grant and his fervent supporters backed down, and Hayes’ fellow Ohioan won the nomination. Garfield, with Chester A. Arthur in tow, went on to defeat Gen. Winfield Scott Hancock in a close election.

Post-presidency
Rutherford Hayes retired to his beloved Spiegel Grove estate in Ohio, where he continued to be involved in veterans’ affairs—as president, he had pressed for real veteran benefits—and other philanthropic activities. He had already been appointed to the Board of Trustees for Ohio State University, which he served until his death in January 1893.

Final Assessment

Negative historical interpretations of the Gilded Age make it easy to overlook this honest and capable moderate president’s term. Like Grant, Hayes is another president bedeviled by self-anointed intellectuals such as Henry Adams, who sneered at Hayes as a “third-rate nonentity.”

Hayes’ use of executive power was careful and measured. Contrary to popular history, he did not send federal soldiers to break the 1877 strikes on behalf of railroads, but rather to keep the peace. He vetoed appropriations bills that were unconstitutional or included riders that were inappropriate and unconstitutional, and ultimately were designed to damage or undo lawful federal authority. His one major constitutional proposal, limiting the president to one six-year-term, anticipated the post-FDR 22nd amendment (one which I oppose as long as there’s not a proportionate one for Congress and the Court).

Hayes’ attempts to reform the civil service continued the actions begun by Grant, but much of the political establishment of both parties wasn’t too interested; reformers chaffed at his careful measures. Only his successor’s murder would bring the needed change.

His treatment of Indians was even better than Grant’s. Andrew Johnson had foreseen the need for change in direction; Grant had started the change that moved U.S. policy away from merely shoving Indians out of the way, and went so far as to treat many tribal leaders just short of heads of state. Hayes took it even further through Schurz’s fumigation of the Indian Bureau and Interior Department.

His foreign policy, while a minor aspect of his presidency, was measured and punctuated by his farsighted rejection of the anti-Chinese immigration act. His dealings with Mexico were also just.

It’s also interesting to note that Hayes traveled—a lot. During his four years in the White House, Hayes visited more places of the country than most of the other previous presidents combined. He was also the first sitting president to visit the west coast.

It’s fair to label Rutherford Hayes a somewhat successful president, because he accomplished much of what he set out to do. Hayes’ only policy that can be labeled a failure was his Southern policy; while well intentioned, the president labored under an unpleasant illusion that things were getting better in the South when the opposite was true. The systematic crushing of black freedom in the South—it was systematic and done under the auspices of state authority—didn’t escape Hayes’ notice, but he believed Grant’s solution of federal force to prop up Republican governments was not a solution. Instead, he appealed to Southerners’ better nature and pleaded with them to follow the law. But without threat of reprisal—whatever forms that could have taken—the pleading was useless. In this area, Hayes failed.

Final assessment: Somewhat successful and popular.

Resources

Hayes’ presidency is easily overlooked, but fortunately we have some excellent resources. For this study I used The Presidency of Rutherford B. Hayes by Ari Hoogenboom (1988), of the University of Kansas’ American Presidency series, and Rutherford B. Hayes by Hans L. Trefousse (2002), of Arthur Schlesinger Jr.’s The American Presidents series.

A decent one-volume treatment of Hayes’ life is Hoogenboom’s 1995 Rutherford B. Hayes: Warrior and President. (Trefousse wryly notes that his fellow biographer placed Hayes’ soldiering before his government service, which indicates which was better.)

A scathing attack on Hayes and his successors concerning Southern policies is found in The Betrayal of the Negro, from Rutherford B. Hayes to Woodrow Wilson by Rayford Whittingham Logan and Eric Foner (1954, reprinted in 1997).

* – I find some of Trefousse’s conclusions about Hayes somewhat unconvincing, especially concerning his depiction of the “restoration” of the good name of the White House following the Grant years. If Grant was so bad for the Republican Party and Hayes was so great, why was there a strong movement afoot to give Grant a third term in 1880—to succeed Hayes? My point is, Trefousse, while elevating the deserving Hayes, overly denigrates Grant.

It is true that Hayes ran a scandal-free administration and Grant’s people, well, they had some problems (see last entry). But Grant was every bit as popular as Hayes, even more so. Trefousse has more than a bit of modern-day historian’s bias against Grant, especially because many things that Grant did or initiated—especially the specie repayment bill—Trefousse gives Hayes full credit for.

Another big problem with Trefousse’s book: he stretches the comparisons between the 1876 and 2000 elections way too far. In the introduction, he states, “As in 2000, the controversy was in part because of a dispute about African-American votes…” Oh, hogwash! Yes, it was true in 1876, as racist Democrats fought to deny blacks the right to vote. But it did not happen in 2000; even the liberal-dominated Civil Rights Commission was forced to admit by its more conservative-leaning members that the charges of “black voter suppression” in Florida 2000 were flat-out bogus. The fictitious charges were trumped by liberals and black “leaders,” so-called, who just could not accept that their guy had lost the electoral vote fair and square.

There was no black voter intimidation in Florida 2000—and liberals conveniently ignore the fact that in the counties most in dispute (e.g., the only counties Al Gore sought a recount in) were run by Democrats, not Republicans. Trefousse was also writing in 2001 (the book was published in 2002) so he paints a happy picture of Democrats rallying to President Bush unlike the Democrats in Hayes’ era. It’s hard to read Trefousse’s words without laughing mirthlessly, because Democrats did not “rally to Bush” in 2001, and their behavior since the Florida recount has gotten steadily worse.

(And please: anyone who wants to argue the Bush was “selected-not-elected” crap had best go elsewhere. Every major media organization did their own recounts by every possible method and all came to the same conclusion: Bush won fair and square. All the U.S. Supreme Court did was put an end to the endless--and unconstitutional--recounting. It didn’t install Bush as president.)

** -- I agree with Hayes on this sentiment. I appreciate what unions have done for this country in the past, but it makes me mad today when union people tell me I can’t—not shouldn’t, but can’t—do business with someone because they don’t hire union. A pox on that. I’ll do business and shop where I please.

*** -- It’s amazing but not surprising that Trefousse and Hoogenboom manage to give only a passing hard money credit to President Grant, without whom Hayes would not have had a good, solid policy to champion! In addition, I realize that there are certain people on the far right conservative spectrum—such as Ron Paul—who advocate that we must only be on the gold standard and that anything else is unconstitutional, echoing in a way an argument of Rutherford Hayes. However, having the U.S. economy based on the gold standard in 1879 is one thing; doing the same in 2007, with an economy several times over the size of 1879’s, is almost too fantastic to contemplate.

Illustrations

1 A chromolithograph of President R. Hayes created by G.F. Gilman.

2 Rutherford and Lucy Hayes on their wedding day, Dec. 30, 1852.

3 Hayes as a general late in the Civil War.

4 This cover sheet for a song composed for the 1876 campaign highlights Hayes’ support for hard currency: The wagon’s large front wheel is inscribed “Hard Money Wheeler Gold Basis,” a rather clumsy way of mentioning both Hayes’ vice presidential candidate and Hayes support for the resumption of specie act. (Most campaign songs were wretched and eminently forgettable.)

5 Chief Justice Morrison R. Waite administes the oath of office to Rutherford B. Hayes on a flag-draped inaugural stand on the east portico of the U.S. Capitol in March 1877.

6 An unflattering cartoon by J.A. Wales features “The ‘Strong’ government 1869-1877,” with a woman as “the Solid South” carrying Ulysses S. Grant in a carpet bag marked “carpet bag and bayonet rule;” and “The ‘Weak’ government 1877-1881,” with Rutherford B. Hayes plowing under the carpet bag and bayonets with a plow marked “Let ‘em alone policy.”

7 Various scenes of “The Great Railroad Strike” in July 1877, as shown in Frank Leslie's Illustrated, Aug. 11, 1877.

8 “District of Columbia – our Indian allies – interview of a delegation of Indian chiefs with President Hayes, in the East Room of the White House.” Frank Leslie’s Illustrated, Oct. 13, 1877.

9 An Oct. 19, 1881, Puck cartoon by Frederick Burr Opper shows President Hayes kicking Chester A. Arthur out of the New York Customs House.

10 President-elect James Garfield looks at a baby in basket tagged “civil service reform, compliments of R.B. Hayes.” The outgoing president, dressed as a woman, leaves with bag labeled “R.B. Hayes – savings, Fremont, Ohio.” This cartoon, drawn by Frederick Burr Opper, appeared in the Jan. 19, 1881, issue of Puck.

11 President Hayes (Brady-Handy Collection, LOC)

12 Rutherford Hayes flanked by two of his sons.

13 The president in retirement at his beloved Spiegel Grove estate. (Rutherford B. Hayes Presidential Center

)

Number 18: Ulysses S. Grant

Years in office: 1869-1877
Pre-service occupations: officer (1842-1854), farmer, clerk, salesman, general (1861-1865), general in chief (1864-1869)
Key events during his administration: Reconstruction (ended 1877), “Black Friday” (1869), Treaty of Washington (1871), battle of Little Big Horn (1876), formation of the Justice Department (1870), 15th Amendment added to the Constitution (1870), veto of the inflation bill (1874) and signing of the Specie Resumption act (1875), Colorado added to the Union (1876), Centennial Exposition (1876), Office of Surgeon General created (1871), establishment of first national park at Yellowstone (1872)

Presidential rating: Somewhat successful and popular

ESSAY

Amuse yourself with a little quiz: ask family, friends or even random people what they think of when they hear the name President Ulysses S. Grant. Most likely—if they give you an opinion—you’ll hear some variation of “incompetent, drunk and corrupt.”

Such is the power of the historian and the political enemy to rewrite history.

President Ulysses S. Grant was not incompetent, was not drunk in office, and his administration was not corrupt. My proof? The actual historical record. During his time he was revered in the same breath as Washington and Lincoln, but historians, scholars and political enemies succeeded in trashing what was truly one of the better presidencies. His political enemies, including the hypocritical “reformers,” the self-anointed intellectual elite (like Henry Adams), racist Reconstruction historians (such as the Dunning school) and highly judgmental and arrogant modernist historians (such as William McFeely) together succeeded in creating a portrait of President Grant that is a flat-out fabrication.

Some of these historians and intellectuals were biased against Grant because they opposed him personally. Some neglected to use Grant’s actual papers! Some built upon the previous erroneous works of others and compounded the errors. Some were actually bored with their subject! But mainly they trashed him because of Grant’s enforcement of Reconstruction and a real failure to understand Reconstruction both in the context of the Gilded Age and Grant’s strong belief in Reconstruction. For example, the Dunning school of thought from the 1910s and 1920s tore Grant’s presidency to shreds in part because they—like the so-called “reformers” and of course the Democrats before them—despised Reconstruction and blacks and therefore Grant. But latter-day historians, like William Gillette in his Retreat from Reconstruction, 1868-1879, (1982) attempt to paint Grant as an obstacle to Reconstruction, and it is his inattentiveness and lack of a coherent policy that caused Reconstruction to fail! It’s an odd thesis, particularly because Grant was that rarest of presidents: a politically courageous man who did the right thing even in the face of mounting hostility from all sides, especially the racist Democrats, as well as many in his own party who were more concerned about the dawning new age than the detritus of the Civil War.

The violence done to the history, character and presidency of Ulysses S. Grant is stunning and amazing. It’s as if they have a standard for excellence in some areas and a “Grant standard” for the 18th president. Many liberal scholars trash Grant because they want to trash anyone in power connected with the Gilded Age—which, of course, leaves them writing incoherently about one of the greatest champions of human rights in that era.

I want to be clear: Grant would never be ranked as a great or near-great president. But he definitely deserves a place among the above-average presidents, perhaps even at the upper end. Even the late Stephen Ambrose and dean of Civil War historians James McPherson say that Grant’s presidency deserves a much more positive evaluation. So does Lincoln’s most celebrated modern biographer, David Herbert Donald. (Ambrose’s comments are found in his final book, To America.)

Grant definitely had faults, chief among them being his nativity with people and his military style, which often ill-served him as president.

But he succeeded in ways that have not been truly appreciated until the last decade or so. These areas are: Reconstruction and the pursuit of black rights; international relations, including arbitration with England through his superb secretary of state, and avoiding war with Spain over Cuba; preventing the genocide of the Plains Indians; amazing fiscal responsibility; and maintaining the peace in 1876.

I won’t forget the scandals, but they just aren’t what they appeared to be. If you think Grant’s administration was nothing more than eight long years of incompetence and corruption, you are in for one heck of a surprise.

I am a partisan for Ulysses S. Grant, and it will probably show in this report. I make no apologies for my defense of Grant, because the way professional men of letters and self-anointed elite have treated this man just plain stinks. They should hang their heads in shame.

Important note: A little drink
The charge persists to this day that Grant was a drunk—a persistent slosh. He wasn’t! He was an alcoholic who 1) knew he had a problem and 2) got it under control. Drinking cost him his first Army career in 1854. When he rejoined the Army in 1861, he brought with him a friend from Galena, Ill., named John Rawlins, whose primary job was to keep him “on the wagon” (e.g., sober). There were a couple of times he fell off the wagon, but it was never during a battle. (He was NOT drunk at Shiloh.) Almost every single report about him being drunk during the war, or after, is false and usually malicious in nature, spread by jealous rivals for command or political enemies. Any contemporary or modern caricature you see of Grant as a drunkard is a vicious slander and ignorant lie.

Even innocent modern characterizations of Grant as a drunk are just wrong, coming as they do from badly sourced biographies. For example, Shelby Foote, whose writings I greatly admire and whose Southern drawl greatly elevated Ken Burns' The Civil War documentary, said during that documentary that Grant "went on a true bender during the Vicksburg campaign." However, the veracity of that claim and similar wartime drunkenness is highly dubious (see Smith for more).

In Hans L. Trefousse's 1989 biography on Andrew Johnson he claims Grant had to be sobered up during Johnson's "swing around the circle," repeating claims of Grant's enemies, but modern Grant biographers dispute this and similar claims.

A failure?
Grant’s civilian life is usually portrayed as failure with a big capital “F.” Even many admirers say that Grant failed at everything except the army. Hogwash!

Grant always kept food on the table, a roof over his family’s heads and clothes on their backs. Does that sound like a failure? Sure, he went from farming to collecting debts to working in his father’s tannery and even sold firewood on the streets, but the point is he didn’t give up. He always made sure his family was provided for. Even at the end of his life, after a swindler of a business partner snookered him out of a ton of money, Grant refused to settle for charity and instead wrote his incredible Memoirs, the profits of which kept his family comfortable long after his death.

The man never gave up and always found a way to provide. That’s not a failure in my book.

First Army career
Grant’s first Army career began at West Point. Suffice it to say Grant wasn’t all that thrilled about some aspects of the academy, but he proved superior at horsemanship—better than any of his classmates, in fact. Although Grant would never serve in a cavalry unit, his prowess with and knowledge of horses would follow him the rest of his life. Normally a shy man around strangers (which lead some people to foolishly think Grant was dull-minded), Grant could talk your ears off concerning the subject of horses.

He graduated in the middle of his class and at his first posting met the woman he would eventually marry: Julia Dent, daughter of a Missouri slave owner. Grant was assigned to Zachary Taylor’s Army of Observation in Texas. As he wrote years later, he thought the Mexican War wrong, but went anyway because it was his duty to do so.

Grant liked Taylor immensely and copied his leadership style: loose and informal, but pointed. Grant would even copy Taylor’s style of dress during the Civil War: like Taylor, Grant eschewed pompous uniforms and wore simple trousers and a private’s blouse. There’s another reason why Grant gladly abandoned formal Army wear: as a freshly minted first lieutenant, young boys apparently made fun of him with the familiar childhood ditty, “Solder, soldier, will you work? No, indeed, I’ll sell my shirt!”

Lieutenant Grant earned citations for bravery under fire during the Mexican War, especially for bring supplies to his men. He ended the war as a brevet Captain (a field promotion) and settled into peacetime army routines. It was not easy for him. The long, boring postings away from his wife, especially to the Pacific coast, led him to drink, which finally ruined his career in 1854.

Rather than be court-martialed, Grant resigned. He tried his hand at the afore-mentioned professions, living for a time at a farm he called “Hardscrabble” (you can see his home on the Grant’s Farm park owned by Anheuser-Busch, near another home where he and Julia lived for a while, called White Haven).

At times he was penniless, and he couldn’t make a go at anything—but he always kept his family fed. When the war began, he was working in his father’s tannery in Galena, Ill.

Call to arms
Grant’s generalship has received far more attention than his presidency, of course, and his reputation has found favors and disfavor over the last 150 years. Currently, he is enjoying a favorable re-evaluation. I’m not qualified to judge whether he was the best of the war, or if Sherman, Lee, Jackson or some other general was, beyond making general observations. I’ll leave that for the military historians. See the Resources section below for in-depth examinations.

He got a second start in the army in 1861 when the Illinois governor placed him in charge of a regiment. As a West Point graduate, he soon gathered a few other regiments under his command, was promoted to brigadier and never looked back. After fighting a sharp battle at Belmont, Missouri, in November of ‘61, he won the critical battles of Forts Henry and Donnellson in Tennessee the following February, which triggered the collapse of the entire Confederate defenses in the West (and opened the northeastern reaches of that state to the Union for the rest of the war).

In April, Grant fought and won the terrible bloody battle at Shiloh. The butcher’s bill and (false) charges of drunkenness derailed his career for a while, but the battle changed his outlook. Before the fight, he thought the war would end with a few more good pushes; after Shiloh Grant became convinced the war could only be won by conquest of the South. During and after the Shiloh campaign, Grant forged his lifelong friendship with William T. Sherman, who explained their friendship in two different ways: “Grant stood by me when I was crazy, and I stood by him when he was drunk.” (Both charges against the men were false.) And: “I’m a damn sight far smarter than Grant. I know a great deal more about war, military histories, strategy and grand tactics than he does; I know more about organization, supply, and administration and about everything else than he does; but I'll tell you where he beats me and where he beats the world. He don't care a damn for what the enemy does out of his sight, but it scares me like hell."

Grant explained that last statement in a roundabout way in his Memoirs. Early in the war, Grant was tasked with capturing a rebel camp in Missouri. Though greatly afraid, he marched on the camp only to find it deserted. He determined that the rebel leader had been just as afraid of Grant as Grant was of him. He never forgot that lesson.

Armchair general that I am, I think Sherman is wrong, though. Sherman was the better tactician, but Grant was the better strategist. Anyway, Grant got back on track later in the year when he made plans to destroy the army defending Vicksburg, Miss. It was a long and tortuous road that had many setbacks—and some legitimate criticism. But in one of the masterpieces of modern warfare, Grant out-maneuvered the Vicksburg defenses and captured the defending army after a siege, on July 4, 1863. He then defeated the major Confederate western army (The Army of Tennessee) at Chattanooga that November. By then, President Lincoln knew Grant was the man he needed to win the war.

Lincoln brought Grant east to command all Union armies in early 1864. Grant reassured Lincoln like no other general had, largely because Grant told Lincoln that regardless of what happened from then on, it wouldn’t be from lack of support from the government. In other words, Grant was literally the first Union general to actually assume responsibility for what he was about to do, and told Lincoln ahead of time that he had no intention of blaming the president for anything. Lincoln must have loved hearing that.

Grant has long been attacked (starting during the war itself) as a butcher who sacrificed lives needlessly, and as an untalented general who used blunt force to have his way. Such criticism seems overwrought and done to elevate Lee while denigrating Grant. And certain facts cannot ever be denied. Grant won decisively because he had a plan and stuck to it, found and promoted competent and loyal lieutenants such as Sherman and Sheridan, and had a willingness to abandon failed approaches, such as he did when he quit the direct, bloody confrontation with Lee. Grant knew how to whip Lee and the Confederacy and did it. It is argued that Lee was the better general because of his string of brilliant victories, whereas Grant faced poorly led and ill-equipped western armies. Yet practically nothing Lee did advanced his cause decisively. And Lee also faced an often poorly led army, whose weaknesses he took advantage of to deadly effect. Grant’s efforts, however, continually brought the Union closer to victory, at Forts Henry and Donnellson, Shiloh, Vicksburg and Chattanooga. Grant never retraced his steps, and wherever he was in charge, the Union cause didn’t either. Grant’s casualties were also proportionately less than Lee’s. Lee himself refused to hear any criticism of Grant, for when his lieutenants complained that Grant foolishly wasted lives, Lee silenced them by saying he believed Grant had admirably conducted his affairs. (This is not to say Lee wasn’t a great general; he was – but he did, in fact, lose, whereas Grant won.) Lee always sought the decisive battle, but Grant came to understand that the way to beat the South was through a war of exhaustion. (Meaning, he could win the war regardless of whether he won the set battles.)

Grant was also the only the only general to eliminate three entire armies from the field: at Donnellson, Vicksburg and Appomattox.

Finally, one more thing about Grant as general: The keys to Grant’s amazing successes are many. His enemies—and they were legion—credited his successes to mere chance and luck: a foolish drunkard who happened to be at the right places at the right times. But it was Grant’s character, his fortitude, his rejection of any possibility of defeat and his ability to see the “big picture” that gave him success. Grant, of course, had some vanity—what general doesn’t – but his vanity honestly took second place to winning the war. Chief among Grant’s qualities was his ability to generate loyalty in chief lieutenants and his men—and he did this through smart delegation of duties, a decided lack of military pomp and the always-constant drive to press on. And Grant was always in the thick of things, whether placing demoralized or reinforcements into line at Shiloh, or personally moving men and material through the swamps to begin his great flank march on Vicksburg, or disengaging from the Wilderness and putting his men back on the road south. Robert E. Lee’s post-war supporters may have heaped all of the glory from the war on his shoulders, but it was Grant who won it. Not by flash and expensive offensives, but by following this maxim, which he told to his wife Julia shortly after Donnellson: “The art of war is simple enough. Find out where your enemy is. Get at him as soon as you can. Strike him as hard as you can, and keep moving on.”

The peacemakers
There was, of course, so much left out of that summary of Grant’s military career, but you have a general idea, and the story of the Civil War is familiar enough. (See Resources below for more.)

But just before it ended—and just before Lincoln’s life ended—Lincoln met with Grant, Sherman and Rear Adm. David Porter on a steamer at City Point, Va., Grant’s headquarters. This March 1865 meeting is so critical to understanding Grant’s presidency that is it amazing that historians have overlooked it for so long.

During this meeting, Lincoln talked about what he expected to happen next, after Confederate armies finally surrendered and their men paroled. Lincoln had a desire to “let ‘em up easy” and get the Confederate states back into the Union quickly, but fairly. He wanted the newly freed slaves to play an important role as well.

The meeting left a profound impression on Grant and Sherman, as played out in the quite generous terms each dictated to his foe at the Appomattox and Durham Station surrenders, respectively. But Lincoln’s desire for a reunited nation left an even deeper impression on Grant, in that he would spend his entire time in office enacting, in effect, what Lincoln’s second term would have been. Of course, there may be some serious disagreement here, as some Lincoln scholars would argue that we don’t quite know what Lincoln’s second term would have entailed for the South because Lincoln himself wasn’t so sure. However, Ulysses S. Grant was sure, and his understanding of what Lincoln wanted for the South was that the “verdict” of Appomattox must never be overturned.

To Grant, according to his understanding of Lincoln’s wishes, the peace was immutable: the Confederate states would come back to the Union fold, slavery was dead and the newly freed slaves would become citizens. As president, Grant would work to secure that vision—to his eventual despair.

It is a huge mistake, though, to separate the story of Ulysses S. Grant into everything leading up to Appomattox and everything after, because to do so fails to take into account Grant’s increasingly strong desire—his mission, if you will—to preserve the fruits of that victory. He fought hard for that victory and he was not about to see it thrown away. But during the Johnson years, Grant came to believe that those fruits were in danger of being lost.

Playing politics
For the next four years, Grant continued serving as general in chief. He was undoubtedly the most celebrated and honored man in the country. He was still primarily a military man, but events would force him to become politically involved. Before the war, he had been a Democrat, but he identified now with the Republican Party primarily because of Lincoln and the war.

Grant never got along with President Johnson. Early in his term, Johnson (and the Radicals) wanted to punish high-level Confederates, including Robert E. Lee, both by refusing them clemency and putting them on trial. Trying Lee for treason (something Lee was not afraid of) offended Grant because of the terms he had given at Appomattox. Grant was mad—and he had a reputation for never losing his cool. He all but shouted at Johnson “If I had told him and his army that their liberty would be invaded, that they would be open to arrest, trial and execution for treason, Lee would have never surrendered, and we would have lost many lives in destroying him.” As long as Lee and his officers never violated their parole as laid out at the surrender, Grant would never consent to their arrest. He would resign his command first. (Smith, p.418)

Grant had Johnson, and the president knew it. Grant was far too popular for Johnson to have him as an enemy. But probably from that moment on, Johnson knew he needed to either control Grant or neutralize him. He tried, but his own mistakes couldn’t override Grant’s character and popularity.

Relations between commander in chief and general in chief got worse. Grant abandoned the president’s entourage during Johnson’s disastrous 1866 “swing around the circle” when it became clear Johnson was just using Grant to make it appear he supported Johnson’s policies. And Grant was angered by Johnson’s vindictive words against the Radicals.

Strangely, though, things were getting so bad between Johnson and Congress during the fall of 1866 that Grant actually began to fear that Johnson would initiate a coup. It seems fantastic now—almost feverish—but it seemed logical to Grant. After all, Johnson was talking about a Congress that was operating “illegally” and “unconstitutionally.” His suspicions were fueled by Johnson’s desire to send Grant to lead a diplomatic mission to the newly restored Mexican government (a show of force by 50,000 of Grant’s troops just after the war had convinced France’s puppet government under Maximillian to quit Mexico). Grant adamantly refused to go, because it was a job for diplomats, not soldiers, and the president could not order him to do it. (He was right.) The coup of course never materialized.

Johnson and Grant fought even further when Congress initiated Military, or Radical, Reconstruction by dividing the ex-Confederacy into five military districts. Johnson, reluctantly, appointed five generals named by Grant to lead these districts (see the report on Johnson for the battle between the president and Congress over Military Reconstruction). Grant named his protégé, Phillip H. Sheridan, to command the district based in New Orleans, but Sheridan’s blunt style led to outcries that bent the ear of the president. He (probably gleefully) removed Sheridan over Grant’s protest.

The final showdown between Grant and Johnson came when Johnson tried to use the general in the events that led to impeachment. By now (1868) Grant was the assumed Republican candidate, and Johnson, still holding on to the dreams of party building, sought to damage Grant. Grant actually handled matters badly; among other missteps, he didn’t meet with Johnson when he said he would—and Johnson immediately pounced on Grant to “expose” him as a liar. Nobody really believed him, though.

Republicans had begun to look at Grant as their possible candidate for the White House because Grant was tremendously popular. In today’s language, Grant was a superstar. And the Radical Republicans thought Grant would be just want they needed: an easily pliable, very popular war hero in the White House who would let them enact their program of vengeance against the South. Republicans were again doing with Grant what the Whigs—some of them even the same men—had done with Zachary Taylor 18 years earlier.

Reluctantly, and against the advice of Sherman, who abhorred politics (despite his brother John, the senator) Grant accepted the nomination. He quelled party infighting with “Let us have peace,” a statement which became his campaign slogan. He easily won the election, squashing the Democrats’ Horatio Seymour in a commanding victory. However, it was closer than the Republicans thought it would be, given Grant’s popularity, but the Republicans had suffered because of impeachment (sound familiar?) and other issues.

Why did Grant run for president? It’s simple, really. Grant didn’t want the job, but leaving the nation and the war’s legacy in the hands of the likes of Johnson, hard-core and racist ex-rebels and others threatened to wreck what had already been gained. During the second half of the Johnson years, though, Grant moved from a man of pure military thinking to one of political thinking, as well. This movement is illustrated by his involvement in the Military Reconstruction bill:

“When the Reconstruction bill went into conference committee to reconcile the House and Senate versions, Grant worked closely with Sherman’s brother, sponsor of the bill in the Senate, to fashion a measure that would provide for black suffrage and at the same time indicate to the Southern states how military occupation could be ended [Big Mo note: adoption of the 14th Amendment]. Grant’s role was widely reported…

… What was most surprising was Grant’s endorsement of black suffrage. Throughout 1865 and 1866 he had been skeptical of enfranchising the freedmen, at least immediately. But continued resistance on the part of white Southerners to granting legal equality to African-Americans, combined with the increasing violence in the South, convinced him that black suffrage was essential. Only by weaving the freedmen into the political fabric of the nation could past injustices be corrected and the current wave of violence be brought under control.” (Smith, p.433)

So, as both Grant and the Radicals were about to find out, things wouldn’t go as planned. Grant, for all his personal and supposed political nativity, proved to be a much different president than they expected. And the Radicals would not get to mercilessly crush the South like they wanted to.

Political naïves
If Grant had one personality flaw that hurt him in his presidency—and throughout his life—it was his naivety with people. Quite often, Grant would trust someone unquestionably unless and until that person proved himself to be a snake. On such occasion, that person was never trusted again, with rare exception. In the Army, Grant’s instincts and judge of character served him quite well. But in the world of politics, where chameleons ruled and Grant’s instincts on character were less sharp, Grant was initially like a babe in the woods and got caught by some skunks.

Immediately the Republicans sought to control him, mainly through his cabinet appointments and the usual flurry of offices; but like his hero, Zachary Taylor, Grant would prove to be his own man and appointed whom he would. And like Taylor’s, not all of his appointments were good. For example, he made his old Galena friend, John Rawlins, the secretary of war, which naturally angered party members who expected the office to go to someone else. But Rawlins was deathly ill and died later in 1869.

His longtime political patron, Elihu B. Washburne, served as his secretary of state for a mere 12 days before heading to France as ambassador for the next eight years. It was supposed to be temporary to let Washburne have the title added to his portfolio, but it did not—nor should it—reflect well on Grant.

These early appointments cause Grant political embarrassment and exposed a level of political incompetence in certain people’s minds that Grant was never able to shake. It wasn’t an auspicious beginning.

But most appointments were quite good. Grant’s most spectacular cabinet officer was former New York governor and senator Hamilton Fish as secretary of state (replacing the short-lived term of Washburne). Grant consulted absolutely nobody over the appointment—not even Fish himself! Fish received notice in the mail, and he accepted; reluctant at first, he soon warmed to the job. It’s a good thing, too, because Fish became one of the most celebrated secretaries of state in the nation’s history, on even par with George Marshall. He served throughout the administration. More on him later.

His selections for treasury and attorney general were also excellent. It was a mixed cabinet at first, but historians who seem to dismiss the Grant cabinet as nothing more than a pack of corrupt toadies (with the exception of Fish) don’t know what they’re talking about.

Party leaders were certainly upset over the lack of consultation over cabinet choices, but in Grant’s defense, they should have thought of that before making a general their standard-bearer. A man who is used to giving orders and delegating responsibilities isn’t going to suddenly overnight develop a gift for politics, or see the need for stroking delicate egos in Congress. He’s going to simply get the job done.

But the appointments flap was just the beginning of Grant’s troubles with strong personalities in Congress, particularly the old abolitionist stalwart, Charles Sumner. Grant and Sumner should have been allies, and Grant thought that they would be. But Sumner “betrayed” Grant in a way that (I think) justified Grant’s subsequent treatment of the Massachusetts senator. Sumner believed that he would run foreign policy through his proxies in State and took it as a personal affront that Grant assumed that he and his secretary of state would do so. Worse, the night before the Senate was to vote on Grant’s plan to annex Santo Domingo, Grant had invited Sumner over to talk, and Sumner had assured Grant on his support—in typical politician-speak. In other words, he promised to the politically-naïve without really promising that he would support the treaty. The next day, when Sumner spoke against the treaty, Grant was aghast, and accused (correctly) Sumner of duplicity. Thanks in large part to Sumner’s opposition, the treaty failed—and Grant never forgave Sumner.

Grant was also not a strong speaker. With the written word, he was brilliant. It was said of Grant that his orders in battle were always clear and precise. No one failed to understand what he wanted. His messages to Congress were equally clear and brilliantly written. (If you read his Memoirs, you’ll understand why the great Mark Twain was so enthusiastic about them, and Twain knew a thing or two about the written word.) But when he was speaking, he wasn’t great or too memorable. Fortunately, he came to know his limitation, and kept it to a minimum.

What follows are the major things that happened in Grant’s presidency. Rather than list events chronologically, I’ve described them thematically for easier understanding of just why there is more to Grant’s presidency than you know.

Reconstruction
The period in the South of 1863-1877 generally falls under the term of Reconstruction. It was not a happy period, but it saw, for a time, the elevation of black Americans to equal footing with whites. For the first time, black Americans were elected to local, state and federal governments. But the bitter fighting between Johnson and Congress soured the nation and the South on Reconstruction, so by the time President Grant took command of the situation, he had three primary goals in mind: with Congress in control of Reconstruction (with Grant’s assistance back when the law was passed), Grant was to enforce the law while protecting freedmen and Unionists from predatory violence of white supremacists, being fair to ex-rebels who sought re-union, and reuniting the Southern states to the Union. The formal condition of reunion was supposedly presaged on acceptance of the 14th amendment. Technically, Reconstruction could be said to have ended in 1871, when the last of the Southern delegates was finally seated in Congress. But President Grant still needed to enforce the law in the South.

In short, here’s how Grant handled Reconstruction:

Ulysses S. Grant was the original civil rights president. Not Lincoln, you say? The great Emancipator destroyed slavery and restored the Union to his great credit and the undying thanks of the nation. Grant, however, carried Lincoln’s vision even further, and was the greatest champion of black civil rights until Lyndon Johnson.

During Grant’s administration, he pressed for civil rights long after the country as a whole had tired of “waving the bloody shirt” in support of the freedmen. The general-turned-president spent his eight years in office making sure the “verdict” of Appomattox was not overturned. Grant and his cabinet formed the Justice Department specifically to enforce federal authority in the South and preserve the rights of the freedmen. Two of Grant’s attorneys general, Amos T. Ackerman and then George H. Williams, oversaw Grant’s presidential Reconstruction policies through the five Enforcement Acts and the Ku-Klux Klan Act. Through their actions—driven by Grant—they smashed the Klan and thereby rendered it impotent for 50 years. Thanks to Grant’s forceful actions, violence in the South against freedmen dropped, and it was only when the threat of reprisal was removed following Grant’s presidency that violence escalated again. The 14th and 15th amendments became law based on his full and unswerving support. He suspended habeas corpus and sent federal troops into Southern states to enforce suffrage for blacks, believing that the freedmen should enjoy the same political rights as anyone else. The 1872 elections, which Grant won in a landslide, were the fairest in the South until the 1960s.

He tried to annex Santo Domingo (modern-day Dominican Republic) not, as has been long thought, in a bungled attempt to add territory to the US. Rather, Grant sought to make the black-dominated island into three or four US states on the theory that if they were successful, then they would serve as models for successful, peaceful state governments dominated by blacks. The annexation effort of course failed, and whether it was noble or wrongheaded is beside the point: it was an example of novel thinking from someone often dismissed as a dullard.

Grant was the first president to fight for equal rights for blacks based on the simple belief that they deserved it no less than anyone else. He used the full weight of the federal government as much as he could during peacetime—and more than any other president in peacetime, ever (even Jefferson and the disastrous embargo of 1807-08)—to protect America’s most vulnerable people. But his fight was a doomed fight. (The best analogy I can think of is Atticus Finch defending the prejudged Tom Robinson in To Kill a Mockingbird.) Because racism was so ingrained in America at that time, what Grant sought to do was simply not possible—at least, not then. There are some historians like Gillette who believe that had Grant been a really slick politician, Reconstruction would have worked. But that, too, is hogwash, because even slick politicians can’t change deep-rooted attitudes and beliefs with mere political skills.

As the Republican-led Reconstruction governments fell and states were “redeemed” by Democrat (white supremacist) governments, the public eventually soured on reconstructing the South. The best analogy is to the war in Iraq: when Americans hear nothing but bad news, and are unclear of when the thing is finally over, they lose patience. Historian Josiah Bunting III, writing in 2004, explains:

“It is often a liability of democracy that its citizens cannot for a long time sustain support for policies and actions that, however noble their goals, do not demonstrate measurable progress. Moral stamina, as historians call it, is a perishable commodity in the American polity. Abraham Lincoln might urge that the nation take increased devotion to the cause for which the Union dead had given the last full measure of devotion, but citizens of neither 1863 nor 1875 could agree among themselves as to the real nature of that cause, and what labors were necessary, and right, to secure its final achievement. As the years wore on and the war edged further into the past, many northern citizens had had enough and were ready to move on. For them, this was the meaning of Grant’s famous injunction “Let us have peace.” (Bunting, p.109)

But despite Grant’s valiant losing battle, some people did notice and were grateful—and looked forward to a better day when there were more Grants in the country than white supremacists and Klansmen and Redeemers:

“To [Grant] more than any other man the negro owes his enfranchisement and the Indian a humane policy. In the matter of the protection of the freedman from violence his moral courage surpassed that of his party; hence his place as its head was given to timid men, and the country was allowed to drift, instead of stemming the current with stalwart arms.”

So wrote the great Frederick Douglass, who was absolutely right in his assessment of Grant and of the nation. Because when lesser men succeeded Grant as president, and Reconstruction was abandoned, black Americans essentially had to start over. Yet most historians have dismissed Grant’s efforts, and labeled him as a racist, a butcher and a dullard too stupid to be president.

Superb international relations
With Grant’s full support, Secretary of State Fish enacted methods of international arbitration that are still used and served as the foundational basis for the League of Nations and later the United Nations.

Have you ever heard of that?

During the war, England had manufactured several ships for the Confederacy that were easily converted to commerce raiders. The CSS Alabama (sunk by the USS Kersage of Le Harve in 1864) became the focal point of the dispute between America and England. The Senate had rejected a Johnson administration agreement with England. Fish, on the other hand, and with Grant’s full approval, brilliantly made peace with England over the Civil War claims, and also ended all outstanding border disputes and fishing rights disputes between American and England/Canada, thereby strengthening and deepening the ties between our two nations.

The Washington Treaty of 1871 remains a masterpiece of diplomacy, and was hailed in Washington. Alas, Grant gets no credit, but Fish would not have acted without his chief’s approval. However, it would be fair (well, almost) to say that our true friendship with England began during Grant’s presidency, because after these claims, we really had no more arguments with England. Grant also avoided war with Spain over Cuba—twice—despite enormous public and congressional pressure. He knew that the desire to add Havana to the Union was motivated by nothing more than greed. He offered to purchase Cuba, but did nothing more. Congress and certain segments of the public wanted America to intervene on the side of rebels in Cuba against Spanish rule, but Grant saw absolutely no reason for it. He offered America’s services as arbitrator, but no more.

Thirty years later the United States would fight the highly dubious Spanish-American War—and Grant probably would have disapproved, just as he disapproved of the Mexican War.

Preventing genocide
Elsewhere on the domestic front, Grant made a true effort to make peace with the Plains Indian tribes, thereby in all likelihood saving them from extermination. That’s a bold statement, I know.

And President Andrew Johnson had, to his credit, initiated a peace policy of his own. But Grant’s was much more substantive and carried some actual weight behind it—and Johnson’s fighting with Congress made his a non-starter, despite the truth behind his commission’s reports.

Western states supported Grant in 1868 on the mistaken belief that he—the man who destroyed the Confederacy—would eradicate the “Indian problem” once and for all. They were wrong. In the army in the 1850s Grant wrote to his wife Julia that he knew the Indians were getting shafted left and right, and when he became president, Grant reversed U.S. policy and promoted comprehensive reform designed to bring peace.

Of course, “Custer’s Last Stand” occurred during the final year of his administration, mainly because of the vainglorious Custer but also Sheridan’s aggression and Grant’s mistaken trust in Sheridan. I don’t discount the culpability of the Sioux and etc. who were on the warpath, but this was an avoidable disaster, and Grant took his eye off the ball.

But Grant’s policy usually was to punish those who did wrong while making fair and just peace with those who wanted peace. In fact, it’s very similar to Taylor’s approach to Indians and Mexicans, and George W. Bush’s approach to Islamic terror. What made the difference in Grant’s approach was that Grant believed in treating Indians as individuals instead of just tribes. In other words, seeing them as people, not problems. When the famed Red Cloud and other Plains chiefs visited Washington in 1870, Grant treated them just shy of visiting heads of state. Not for nothing did the Plains Indians refer specifically to Grant as “great white father.” He pressed for citizenship for Indians—a remarkably progressive stance for the 1870s and something no president had ever before done—and sought to treat them fairly by replacing corrupt Indian agents with (presumably) un-corruptible Quakers. The corrupt agents were one of the biggest causes of troubles on the Plains. He also created a blue-ribbon panel for Indian affairs to bypass the congressional logjam on Indian appropriations, and placed his longtime friend Ely Parker—himself a Seneca chief—in charge of Indian affairs. Alas, the panel folded before he left office.

Finally, Grant utterly refused to abandon his peace policy just to win votes in the west. Grant swept the west in 1872 except for Texas, which had to do more with Reconstruction than the peace policy.

Although Grant wasn’t entirely successful on this front, he sincerely believed that Indians deserved justice no less than anyone else.

Managing the nation’s money better than his own
Grant was bad with money—his own, that is. And it often got him into trouble. One of the primary reasons why he wrote his amazing Memoirs was because he hoped to provide for his family after he died (which he did).

But with the nation’s money, Grant and his chosen treasury secretaries proved up to the task. Grant prevented the greedy cornering of the gold market in 1869 by Jay Gould and Jim Fisk in a brilliant counter-stroke that flooded the market with government gold (instead of the small amount regularly scheduled to be sold).

At first, Grant was taken in by Jay Gould and Jim Fisk—his trusting nature got the better of him. But contrary to what history says, the actual paper record proves that Grant ultimately was not fooled by what Gould and Fisk planned and warned his treasury secretary a full two weeks in advance of what they were scheming and to prepare accordingly. Thus, Grant prevented a bad situation from becoming a serious crisis. While the episode does not reflect well on Grant—“laggard and uncertain” is how Josiah Bunting describes Grant’s handling—it is true that once he got wind of the scheme, he acted.

During his second term, the Panic of 1873 slammed the nation. The collapse of the Jay Cooke banking firm in Philadelphia precipitated the Panic, which was exacerbated by the collapse of many railroads. Unemployment ran as high as 14 percent by 1876. The president is criticized in modern times for not doing more to alleviate the crisis, but Grant did what he could with the tools he had. (Remember, this is still the time before the activist presidency, and before the time when the executive branch was looked to as the cure-all of the nation).

So what did Grant do? Contrary to “history,” Grant did not “do nothing,” nor was he confused and directionless. Grant single-handedly prevented the amazingly harmful inflation bill of 1874 from becoming law. Designed by a Congress and Wall Street desperate to do something to combat the Panic, the bill would have creamed the already-struggling economy while benefiting only a few through the release of millions of government “greenbacks” (paper currency). Immediately following that victory, Grant supported the Resumption of specie payment Act of 1875, thereby restoring US credit and avoided turning a financial crisis into a financial disaster. The Panic literally ended abruptly when the act became effective in 1879.

Years later, Grant explained that he took his time witing out the reasons to approve the bill. Republican party leaders were warning that a veto would destroy the party, especially in the west; so was his cabinet, except Fish, so the pressure on Grant was great. He wrote out elegant reasons for approving the bill, arguing that it it wouldn't mean inflation, that it wouldn't affect the country's credit, that it would help, not hurt:

"When I finished my wonderful message, I read it over and said to myself, 'What is the good of all of this? You do not believe it. You know it is not true.' Throwing it aside I resolved to do what I believed to be right, veto the bill! I could not stand my own arguments." (Smith, p. 581)

The importance of that victory cannot be understated. Smith calls the veto "a seminal event in American history" (p. 581) because the nation moved away from Civil War soft money and a massive and necessary step toward the reurn of specie payments (money backed by gold). A triumphant Grant told Congress in December 1874 that unbacked paper currency had served its purpose in the war, but in order to restore economic stability, hard currency was needed, not hundreds of millions of more greenbacks that would lead to a more inflated dollar unable to compete with foreign currencies.

Sure, Congress' and Wall Street's inflation bill would have provided temporary relief across the country -- and Grant was fully aware of this. He knew full well what it was like to be poor and living from one meal to the next. But as the chief executive, he had to look at the bigger picture.

And he was right. It was a major victory and was actually hailed in the financial community , many newspapers and even by Republicans starting to take a dim view of the General in the White House, such as future president James Garfield.

To summarize Grant's economic policy, Frank Scaturro writes:

"Grant pursued an economic policy that was singularly successful in the aftermath of the most serious fiscal problems the nation had ever faced. Under his administration, policies were pursued that reduced inflation, bolstered economic recovery from the mild depression of 1867-69, promoted economy in federal expenditures, and substantially raised the nation’s credit. Both taxes and the national debt were reduced during Grant’s presidency by approximately $300 million and $435 million, respectively; one-fifth of the national debt had been eliminated, and during Grant’s first year in office, [Treasury Secretary] Boutwell had successfully established a policy that (if it had been desirable to continue rather than reducing taxation) would have paid off the entire national debt in less than a quarter century. Annual interest rates were reduced by approximately $30 million under Grant’s policies, and the balance of trade was changed from over $130 million against the United States to over $120 million in the nation’s favor.” (Scaturro, p.49-50)

In sum, Grant successfully pursued what today would be considered fiscally conservative policies.

Other events
Three other incidences that occurred during the Grant era merit mention. In addition to establishing the Department of Justice in 1871 under the attorney general, Grant added the office of the solicitor general. (The office of the surgeon general also began during Grant’s term, though it came about through an act of Congress.)

Grant also signed into law in 1870 the creation of the Weather Bureau, which would later become the National Weather Service.

Finally, Grant and Congress authorized the creation of the first national park in America. Based on reports from (and tireless efforts of) F.V. Hayden, more than 2,200,000 acres became Yellowstone National Park (Wyoming) in March 1872.

The “scandals” and corruption
Yes, there were scandals. And undoubtedly, “scandal” is the word most people continue to associate with Grant. But unlike some of Grant’s successors (including a certain turkey from Arkansas), Grant was not the epicenter of scandal. And many of the “scandals” actually occurred during Johnson’s unfortunate term and only came to light during Grant’s terms (as has happened to George W. Bush: the crimes of Enron actually took place during Clinton’s administration, but since they were exposed during Bush’s time, Bush gets blamed). Other scandals merely occurred during Grant’s terms but had nothing to do with him or his administration, such as Boss Tweed and Tammany Hall.

As for the worst of the “scandals”, it was Grant’s administration that helped expose them! Those were the Credit Mobilier scandal, which occurred before Grant became president, and the Whiskey scandal, which included some low-ranking members of his administration and would eventually bring accusations—proven unfounded—against his primary secretary, Babcock. Grant made sure that no one guilty would go unpunished—even longtime friends.

But when it became clear to Grant that his attorney general, Bristow, was aiming to destroy Grant’s aide and friend Babcock in a bald attempt to win the graces of the reformers and get elected president, Grant sheltered Babcock. Grant’s defense of Babcock, done in an unprecedented five-hour closed session, ended the matter and satisfied (at the time) many of his harshest critics. But these days his defense of Babcock has been taken as evidence of corruption by protecting a crony—but really it was shielding someone from an unjust witch-hunt. At the same time, the nature of some of the “scandals” are willfully misunderstood, as they involved the spoils system, which all presidents to that point had used without protest. Grant was the first president to press for the creation of a civil service to eliminate the spoils system. The so-called reformers, who supposedly longed for civil service reform, accused Grant of corruption primarily because Grant did not appoint them to posts! Grant abandoned the attempt late in his second term in the face of an unwilling Congress; it took the murder of President Garfield—himself a “reformer”—for civil service to be truly reformed under President Chester A. Arthur.

Alas, some of the corruption of Grant's people was real, but -- and this is really no excuse -- it was no different than existed throughout the era. Grant's second-term appointees were much weaker than his first. His men at Treasury, War, Justice and Interior at the beginning of the second term were all bad choices, and it is here that the charge of corruption has the most force. Their actions were either illegal, later declared illegal or merely grossly indiscreet. Fortunately most did not survive the term, but their damage was done.

Grant's loyalty to such men "went beyond prudence," Smith writes (p.554), and Grant hurt himself badly by holding on to men who were no good, both in their offices and in their abuses of thier offices. So, could Grant have handled the “scandals” better? Absolutely.

Worse for his reputation, Grant did not loudly and repeatedly condemn corruption and scandal when it was discovered. However, that wasn’t how he operated. When someone betrayed his trust or royally screwed up, President Grant privately offered that man a chance to make things right by resigning. In other words, he didn’t go for the political theater. Contemporary and modern critics use this as evidence of corruption by way of protecting cronies. To Grant, it was merely a way of one man offering another man a way to save face.

So, yes, he could have handled matters differently (i.e., better). But then he would not have been Ulysses S. Grant.

In the end, equating Grant with “scandal” and "corruption" almost to the singular exclusion of all else is, quite plainly, idiotic. There were far worse scandals in other administrations, but no one attaches that word to them as easily as they do to Grant. Not even Warren G. Harding. I’m not trying to set up an “everyone does it” excuse,” but rather argue that Grant does not and never has deserved to have this label attached to him. The scandal and corruption label has been way overblown and falsely—even maliciously—applied.

Maintaining the peace: the disputed election of 1876
By 1876, Grant had lost much of the support of the Republican Party, as the north was looking to move beyond Reconstruction. He was still popular personally, but a third term did not seem likely. Republicans decided on former general and rising star Ohio Governor Rutherford Hayes as their standard-bearer.

For eight years Grant had shepherded the nation through an intensely complex era that immediately followed on the heels of a decade of tremendous upheaval. His era would end with his calm and non-partisan handling of the election crisis of 1876, where Democrat Tilden won the popular vote but the electoral college vote was in dispute. Grant’s handling of the crisis was different than Bill Clinton’s in 2000. Clinton was a non-entity during his crisis, which is understandable considering his chosen successor was one of the candidates, and Clinton inserting himself into the Florida recount probably would have made that explosive situation worse. In 1876, Grant made sure order prevailed and the transition was peaceful, and inserted himself into the crisis in order to solve it because, to use a modern term, he didn’t have a dog in the fight.

Grant already knew that, one way or another, Reconstruction was finished. He naturally preferred a Republican victory, but he wanted a fair outcome. Grant recommended a commission to Congress to settle the election, which Congress did, certifying the results shortly before Hayes was inaugurated. He even quietly ordered troops assembled in Washington in case there was trouble. True, it’s easy to overplay Grant’s role in this dispute, but to his credit, he made sure there was a peaceful transition.

Around the world—and a third try
When he left office, Grant was still as much of a hero as he was in 1865. The political class didn’t think so, nor did the self-anointed intellectuals and “reformers.” But Grant didn’t care. Grant and Julia packed and left on a celebrated, two-year, worldwide tour. They visited England, Prussia, Italy, Egypt, Russia, Burma and Japan. Everywhere he went, he was regarded as a conquering hero, and addressed as “general.”

In Berlin, he stunned Chancellor Bismarck by simply walking to the imperial palace on his own, rather than arriving with a full—and pompous—entourage. In the Holy Land, he talked for hours about his favorite subject, horses, with a powerful sultan. In Japan, he was actually asked to settle a border dispute between Japan and China, and did so, “ruling” in favor of Japan. In Venice, Italy, he cracked that the city would be nice except for all the flooded streets. Unkind bashers have used this remark as evidence of his supposed dullness.

A reporter accompanied the Grants and later published his writings. The book is particularly valuable because Grant gave many impressions to the reporter that he didn't relate in his Memoirs, especially of his presidency and various Confederate generals. For example, Grant didn’t fear Robert E. Lee, but was always wary of Joseph E. Johnston, whom he thought was the better general. And he expounded on various political leaders and defended the actions he took as president, such as the critical veto of the inflation bill.

The Grants returned home to a hero’s welcome in 1879, when Grant was talked into making another try at the presidency. Unfortunately, Grant was interested and actively pursued getting his old job back. He came within a stone’s throw at the 1880 convention, but enough of the party decided that two terms of Grant was enough, and nominated James Garfield instead on the 36th ballot.

Ruin, cancer and final victory
Grant went into business one final time in New York City as a broker, but his partner proved to be a skunk and bankrupted the company—leaving Grant broke once more. Worse, all of the cigars Grant had smoked since the fall of Fort Donnellson in 1862 had given him inoperable throat cancer. (Grant had not smoked cigars before then, but after the spectacular victory, he received so many cigars as presents he decided to just start smoking them.)

Grant, now virtually penniless again, needed a way to support his family. Century magazine had approached him about writing an article about the Battle of Shiloh as part of the magazine’s new series, Battles and Leaders of the Civil War. (This is a great series written entirely by the participants. Any public library worth its salt should have a copy of the four-volume series.) Grant wrote a dry account, which was not at all what the editors wanted. They asked him to try again. So, he did, and he soon found himself writing not just about Shiloh, but his whole life.

By then Grant had made friends with the humorist Mark Twain, and Twain, hearing of Grant’s problems, worked out a deal where Grant would write his life’s story and Twain would see it published. Grant and his family would get 75% of the profits and Twain would get the rest.

Moving to Mount MacGregor in upstate New York in 1885, Grant worked diligently on the Memoirs while the cancer sapped his life. He finally finished five days before he died on July 23.

The Memoirs sold incredibly well and brought in $450,000 for Julia, which more than made her comfortable. Twain declared them the best military memoirs since Caesar’s, and at least on this one point, most Grant critics agree.

Final Assessment

Few other presidents faced as deep and profoundly diverse crises upon entering office as Grant. (The others were Lincoln, Andrew Johnson and Franklin D. Roosevelt.) That fact needs to be appreciated, as Scaturro writes:

“More important than the observation that certain [new and unprecedented] issues began to face the country when Grant was president was how he handled them: whether the issue was economic policy, foreign affairs, or civil rights, Grant established a record on the questions he encountered with a decisiveness that towers above the record of other presidents. His stand on monetary policy effected a party realignment and set the stage for future debate, and his successors through the nineteenth century never achieved their own economic goals as clearly as Grant did through the Resumption Act. …Grant’s own record on civil rights stands alone in his era, a fact that is largely intertwined with Reconstruction’s repudiation, and even the repudiation could not endue after the government passed measures nine decades later to recover the legal framework of civil rights that had been either created or otherwise realized under Grant.

…The notion that Grant was a president without policies stands in stark contrast to a record that indicates strong leadership (even if that leadership was sometimes manifested in “hidden hands”-style interaction with congressmen). Grant’s period, which occurred during a period of unprecedented growth, which began in the face of so many unanswered political questions, and which ended having answered virtually every question facing it, established the foundations of modern America largely in the same way Washington’s presidency shaped the earlier establishment.” (Scaturro, P.117-118)

Grant was the only president between Lincoln and McKinley to win re-election to back-to-back terms. He won re-election in a landslide, counting among his supporters the western states, most every single black man and progressives. He crushed the liberal-Republican/Democrat alliance arrayed to defeat him—as effectively as he crushed Rebel armies in Tennessee and Virginia. (Biographer Jean Edward Smith plays up this theme often.)

So why does President Grant have such a lousy reputation? It’s because the history of his presidency was written by and large by his political and personal enemies. Grant became a victim of “the Lost Cause,” wherein the Confederates were the natural inheritors of the Revolutionary mantle and were overwhelmed by Lincoln’s “illegal war.” Grant’s contemporary enemies proved far more prolific with their condemnations than his supporters were with their praises. Grant’s 1872 victory, vigorous enforcement of Reconstruction and lack of appointments to hypocritical “reformers” soured Grant before the intellectual class—including historians. White supremacists, redeemers and Lost Cause-sympathizing historians naturally trashed Grant’s presidency. William Dunning and his students became the leading authorities on Reconstruction and the Gilded Age from the early 1900s through the 1940s. They elevated Andrew Johnson and viciously attacked the Radicals, Grant and Reconstruction, and by extension, blacks. They viewed Reconstruction with utter contempt, and therefore Grant himself. This view is the predominant view that continues to this day. (To see this in action, read The Tragic Era by Dunning student Claude Bowers. Then read W.E.B. DuBois’ Black Reconstruction in America, written as a response to the Dunning school. Then read Eric Foner’s definitive 1987 Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, although Foner does not give Grant his due.)

Later New Deal Democrats and liberals, who despised anyone in power during the Gilded Age, took an equally dim view of Grant and played up the so-called “scandals.” And latter-day bored, unthinking, uncritical or Lost Cause-sympathizing historians have accepted their biased verdict without question. (McFeely admitted he was bored with the monetary aspects of Grant’s presidency.)

You still see this gross bias and character assassination at work today, in biographies of other presidents (the most recent Rutherford Hayes biography repeats the tired “corruption” theme) and even on the White House’s official history page. The Wikipedia entry on Grant is terrible and full of Grant bashing. I don’t blame Wikipedia—I blame what the author of that post used as source material, including Hesseltine and McFeely. You can even see it in works on other presidents of that era, who cite how much the public was “tired” of the “scandals” of the Grant era.

However, the last decade’s worth of research on Ulysses S. Grant’s presidency has revealed that Grant’s good sense displayed on battlefield after battlefield did not desert him in the White House. As a president, Grant has long since deserved much better treatment than he’s gotten from historians and elites.

In sum: Grant saved the Union three times. First by winning the war, second by winning the peace at Appomattox, and third by preserving the peace as president. He is under-appreciated, underestimated, misunderstood and undeserving of his presidency’s lousy reputation. If there were such a creature as historical justice, Grant would be immortalized on Mount Rushmore.

Presidential rating: somewhat successful and popular. Had Reconstruction actually succeeded, then it would be possible to call Grant our greatest president behind Washington and Lincoln.

Resources
Grant’s reputation has enjoyed a renaissance during the past decade. The best recent resources are:

Josiah Bunting III, Ulysses S. Grant (2004), is one of the absolute best of the short biographies in the late Arthur Schlesinger Jr’s The American Presidents Series. Jean Edward Smith’s Grant (2002) is the best one-volume synthesis of Grant’s entire life ever written. He doesn’t introduce anything new on Grant’s war career, but his exposition on Grant’s presidency is fresh and refreshing. Frank Scaturro’s President Grant Reconsidered (1998) is a necessary book for anyone interested in understanding the violence done to Grant’s character and presidency over the past century.

Geoffrey Perret’s Ulysses S. Grant: Soldier and Patriot (1998) is not a biography I recommend, because the presentation is much weaker than the later works (and I am just not a fan of Perret’s work). He’s too much of a cheerleader and too easily explains away Grant’s flaws and mistakes.

And lest you think I’m too much of a cheerleader for Grant, read a current negative assessment, Michael Korda’s Ulysses S. Grant: The Unlikely Hero (2004). Korda agrees with Bunting on Grant’s military career but does not buy the new thinking on Grant’s presidency.

William McFeely’s Grant: A Biography (1982) is definitely not my favorite Grant biographjy, despite its Pulitzer Prize. While well written, McFeely's work boottle up Grant as a racist and a butcher and a failed incompetent president, a judgemnent I obviously and strongly disagree with.

For Grant’s military career, you can still find no better treatment than the trilogy begun by Lloyd Lewis in Captain Sam Grant and completed by Bruce Catton in his superb Grant Moves South and Grant Takes Command. However, Brooks Simpson’s Ulysses S. Grant: Tragedy and Triumph, 1822-1865 is also an excellent and recent one-volume (of a planned two-volume study) treatment. His earlier study, Ulysses S Grant and the Politics of Reconstruction, which takes Grant up to 1868, is also valuable and portends good things for the second volume of his biography.

(While Grant’s military prowess has enjoyed a renaissance of late, Lee’s has taken a severe hit. Edward H. Bonekemper III wrote A Victor, Not a Butcher: Ulysses S. Grant’s Overlooked Military Genius (2004), a companion to his earlier book, How Robert E. Lee Lost the Civil War. Both are highly charged and debatable, but seem to be typical of the emerging thought on both generals. Lee’s stock as a general has been slowly falling since the publication in the early 1990s of Alan T. Nolan’s highly critical Robert E. Lee Considered, written from the premise that Lee had never before been considered—at least honestly. However, such arguments over who was the better general never seemed to matter to the actual generals in question.)

And of course, you should read Grant’s own Memoirs of U.S. Grant. (Note: one of the many scurrilous attacks against Grant is that Twain actually wrote them, but Twain never claimed this and I doubt he ever would. Besides, all you have to do is compare the clarity of Grant’s wartime orders with the clarity of the Memoirs AND his written presidential messages, and you can easily dismiss this ridiculous charge.)

It is a crying shame that military history is considered such a revolting subject on today’s wimpified university campuses; few military historians find tenure anymore. However, military history is the most popular historical subject among lay people—who seem to know better than the sneering self-anointed intellectuals who look down on men like Grant.

Illustrations

All illustrations are in the public domain and taken from the Library of Congress Photographs and Prints Division unless otherwise noted.

1. This is my favorite photograph of Grant as president. It shows his strength—and a little weight gain now that he was no longer living off of Army rations.

2. Lt. Sam Grant as he appeared before the Mexican War. This drawing appears as the frontpiece for the 1885 illustrated edition of Grant’s Memoirs.

3. A chromolithograph of Ulysses S. Grant surrounded by nine (sometimes fanciful) scenes of his entire military service. Clockwise from bottom left: West Point graduation in 1843, artillery crew in the Tower of Chapultepec outside Mexico City in 1847; drilling volunteers in 1861; Fort Donelson in February 1862; battle of Shiloh, April 1862; Siege of Vicksburg 1863; battle of Chattanooga, November 1863; appointment by Lincoln as commander in Chief, 1864, and Lee’s surrender, April 1865. Apparently this was published by L. Prang & Co. of Boston in 1885 on the occasion of Grant’s death. (This image replaces the detail from The Glorious Fourth, a painting by Mort Kunstler, which showed Grant entering Vicksburg, Miss., on July 4, 1863. Kunstler is one of my favorite artists, but I realized I could have been violating copyrights by reproducing even a detail of the image on my site. See it here.)

4. Edwin Forbes sketched Grant (on horse, center) as he orders the Army of the Potomac to disengage from the bloody battle of the Wilderness and continue marching south. It was the first time after a defeat that that army had pressed forward, and it marked a momentous shift in the war. Combat artists were an integral component of reporting the Civil War, and Forbes, Alfred Waud and Winslow Homer were the best.

5. Grant at Cold Harbor. This is a haunting photograph, because it was taken after 40 days of continuous fighting between the Army of the Potomac and Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia. Grant lost 50,000 men while Lee lost around 30,000. You can see the strain on Grant’s face. (The Ulysses S. Grant Information Center).

6. Alexander Gardner photographed Grant c.1865.

7. Lieutenant General Ulysses S. Grant was photographed by F. Gutekunst of Philadelphia.

8. General Ulysses S. Grant, Secretary of the Navy Gideon Welles and President Andrew Johnson pose together on Aug. 31, 1866, in Auburn, New York, at the home of former Governor Enos Throop during Johnson’s disastrous “swing around the circle.” This photograph was donated to the Ulysses S. Grant Association by Doris C. Baker, great-great-great-niece of Governor Throop, and is believed to have never been previously published anywhere before appearing on that organization's web site. (Ulysses S. Grant Association)

9. Grant’s secretary of state, Hamilton Fish, was surprised when the president offered him the job. Yet he served faithfully and brilliantly throughout the entire administration. He’s rated one of the best ever.

10. Alfred Waud drew this scene of a three different black men—an artisan, a businessman and a soldier—casting votes for the first time. Published in Harper's Weekly on Nov. 16, 1867. Grant would spend his entire presidency fighting to keep such scenes from disappearing in the South.

11. President Grant signs the Ku-Klux Force Bill with Secretary Robeson and Gen. Porter at the Capitol on April 20, 1971, as shown in Frank Leslie’s Illustrated, May 13, 1871.

12. The Fifteenth Amendment. Celebrated May 19th, 1870, from an original design by James C. Beard. This was one of several large commemorative prints marking the enactment of the Fifteenth Amendment guaranteeing the right to vote regardless of race and showing the grand May 19 celebratory parade in Baltimore. Noteworthy in this print are some of the vignettes around the edges: President Ulysses S. Grant and Vice President Schuyler S. Colfax occupy the upper corners. In the top center are Martin Robinson Delany, author, pre-war agitator and the first black major in the U.S. Army; famed abolitionist Frederick Douglass; and Mississippi senator Hiram Rhoades Revels. At the sides are (left, top to bottom) a young black man reading the Emancipation Proclamation, three black men with Masonic sashes and banners (“We Unite in the Bonds of Fellowship with the Whole Human Race”), an open Bible (“Our Charter of Rights”), and a bust portrait of Lincoln. In the lower left corner is a classroom scene in a black school, labeled “Education Will Prove the Equality of the Races.” In the lower right corner a black pastor preaches to his congregation, with the motto “The Holy Ordinances of Religion Are Free” below. To the right of the central scene are (top to bottom): two free blacks who “till our own fields;” a black officer commanding his troops (“We Will Protect Our Country as It Defends Our Rights”); a bust portrait of John Brown; and a black man reading to his family (“Freedom Unites the Family Circle”). The bottom row shows three more scenes (left to right): a black wedding ceremony (“Liberty Protects the Marriage Alter”); a black man voting (“The Ballot Box Is Open To Us”); and Senator Revels in the House of Representatives (“Our Representative Sits in the National Legislature”).

13. Frederick Douglass was an outspoken supporter of President Grant. (Although he was actually nominated to be Virginia Woodhull’s running mate 1872 on the Equal Rights ticket, Douglass never campaigned or acknowledged the honor.)

14. President Grant greets Red Cloud, Spotted Tail and Swift Bear during a visit of the Indian delegation with Commissioner of Indian Affairs, Ely S. Parker (not the other man in the picture), in 1870, as drawn for the June 18, 1870, Harper’s Weekly by C.S. Reinhart.

15. This medallion, created in the early 1870s, is titled Defender, Martyr, Father - U.S. Grant, A. Lincoln, G. Washington. Despite the negative—and untrue—views of intellectuals and historians, Grant remained close to the hearts of his countrymen for at least a generation.

16. Julia Dent Grant, taken sometime in the 1870s. Grant adored his wife, and she brought much class and dignity to the White House.

17. The penalty of being an American statesman of the first magnitude, a c.1913 cartoon addressed to Theodore Roosevelt, illustrates that at least 35 years after he left office, Grant was often still ranked with the greats. (Certain restrictions may apply to this picture: Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, [reproduction number, e.g., LC-USZ62-90145])

18. Grant’s tomb overlooking the Hudson River in upper New York City is often the butt of the joke “Who’s buried in Grant’s tomb?” Grant and Julia Grant are, of course. The tomb was recently restored. It forever faces south and is emblazoned with Grant’s misunderstood 1868 campaign slogan, “Let us have peace.” (Grant Monument Association.)