Life of General Grant; his political record, etc

Chapter I. Introductory

It is no part of the design of the present work to enter upon anything like a complete biography of the official head of the Repubhc, nor indeed to make any further allusion to those remarkable events connected with his personal history, which preceded his engaging in political affairs, than may be found necessary or expedient for the proper elucidation of the subject in hand.

The story of his youth and maturer manhood, has been rescued from the common-place by a number of discreet and ingenious biographers, whose productions, based upon the same general facts and tending to a single object, have had the effect to popularize and in some measure apotheosize one whose later life has attracted such an unusual share of public attention.

But as regards the prominent leadership which fell to him in the late unhappy contest of our civil war, General Grant is his own biographer, and his chronicles are to be found in the record of battles won.

Neither detraction nor flattery can have the effect to depress or heighten the proud eminence which as a soldier ne there achieved ; for whenever and by whomsoever the story of the great rebellion shall be told. General Grant will continue to be idealized as the central figure in an assembly of heroes. And this not so much on account of his real merits as a military commander, concerning

12 INTRODUCTORY.

which there is certainly room for an honest diversity of sentiment, as by reason of the great successes achieved by the Union arms under his leadership, which alone served to lift him above the heads of all others, and give him a prominence before the country which no other man had attained.

Nor can it be said that the Government, or the people whom he served, have been at all unmindful of what was due to him for services at once so distinguished and aggrandizing.

That crowning glory of the soldier, the hearty approbation of his countrymen, has been cheerfully awarded to General Grant in unexampled measure.

Upon the termination of hostilities, he found himself with increased rank and its concomitant emoluments, the military head of the army, and in this exalted position a state of entire independence was assured to him by the magnanimous bounty of a number of our wealthy citizens. Certainly it would seem that nothing more was wanting to insure the contentment and satisfy the ambition of the most aspiring of men.

But the evil genius of General Grant, far from permitting him to rest upon his military laurels, pointed to that goal of American statesmen, the White House, and inspired him with an irresistible longing to become its occupant.

One eflect of our civil war, even at the outset, had been to disrupt and disorganize existing political parties, so that with the restoration of peace, old party lines and distinctions had become almost wholly obliterated, and the elements of new parties began to form and arrange themselves according as opinions divided upon the avowed policy of Government in dealing with questions more or less complicated and bewildering, to which the new order of things gave rise.

But every attempt to resurrect the dead issues of the pnst.and erect thereon a sentiment of opposition to the war and its results, however ingeniously contrived and ably

INTRODUCTORY. 1 3

c nducted, proved abortive. It was a subject which the m isses of the people thoroughly understood, and no system of reasoning could induce them to unite upon measures which had perished with the overthrow of African slavery— which had indeed died a violent death, and been buried from sight forever with the honors of war.

Early in 1865, one of the most lamentable events in our history — the assassination of Abraham Lincoln — took place. An occurrence so honestly regarded and so generally mourned as a national calamitj^ could not fail to fill the public mind with new causes of apprehension, and it became no easy matter for his successor to satisfy the demands of a faction which regarded his exercise of executive authority as little less than an usurpation.

It soon became evident that the country was verging upon a political crisis, springing out of the still widening breach between its chief magistrate and Congress.

All these combined causes favored the nomination of a Presidential candidate who had hitherto maintained a neutral position upon all party measures, and such an one was to be found in General Grant, who was easily prevailed upon to lay aside the sword and assume the more devious role of the politician, and it is from his first entrance upon this new and untried field that we propose to trace, with as much exactitude as the imperfect materials at our command will permit, his subsequent career.

It may not have been so highly complimentary to General Grant as might have been desired, that his selection as the rallying center of a numerous party was without reference to his personal qualifications for the discharge of even the commonest functions which pertain to the office of chief magistrate.

His intermediary ministration as Secretary of War, although in the way of his scholastical training and, for the most part, life-long pursuits, displayed none of that pre-eminent sagacity and tact which a credulously enthusiastic people had ascribed to him. Indeed, the points

14 INTRODUCTORY.

of difference which arose between himself and President Johnson, as well those of a personal as of a political nature, so far as we are able to judge from the published correspondence between them, evince a degree of ignorance on the part of General Grant of the principles of our civil government, and a recklessness in the statement ol facts, in broad and unhappy contrast with the keen comprehensiveness of his abler and better informed superior in office.

But so far from depreciating the availability of General Grant as a candidate for the Presidency, his controversy with Mr. Johnson, without regard to its merits, served only to add to his popularity, and incline the scale of his hitherto equally poised sentiments to the side of the radicals, by whom he was fairly captured and set up as a party idol, before he could complete his negotiations with the leaders of the opposition, with whom, and, in fact, with both of whom, he had long indulged in a kind of political coquetry, wherein the offer of " First come, first served," was almost openly made.

Thenceforward, during his candidacy, the studied reticence of General Grant upon all questions of public interest, was scarcely broken in upon beyond his unqualified avowal of the " one term principle," a proposition simple enough in itself, but in its application to the Chief Magistrate, an effectual guard against a train of possible evils, almost certain to flow from a selfish, not to say corrupt, use of the patronage of that great office, in planning and securing for its possessor a re-election.

A principle thus openly avowed amounts to a solemn pledge of its inculcation and practice, and the people whose suffrages have elevated to official station the one who proclaimed it, are justified now, in insisting upon its observance, not alone on account of its general expediency, but because of the demoralizing tendency of the old system as at present illustrated throughout every branch of the public service, the recipients of whose offices and incomes are dependent upon executive favor.

Chapter II

Grant's political views just before and just after the rebellion. — Declares himself an anti-Abolitionist. — He makes a tour of observation South. — His views of the condition of things there. — Questionable action of Congress. — Sound doctrine. — Grant on the fence, — The Tenure of OfHce Act. — Grant Secretary of War ad interim. — As a politician, he plays his first card. — He snubs the President, and provokes a scathing reply. — . His ignorance of public matters. — His understanding with President Johnson about resigning his position. — He fails to keep his word. — What he said February 3d contrasted with what he said January 28th. — ■ Conclusions.

If we were to be called upon to define the views held by General Grant upon those governmental questions which properly came under the head of politics, either before the breaking out of the rebellion or immediately after its close, we should be wholly at a loss what to say.

From all we have been able to gather upon this subject, it would appear that he was formerly a democrat of the Kansas-Nebraska school ; at all events, we have his word for it, that he had availed himself of his privilege as a citizen, at a general election, on but a single occasion, when he voted for James Buchanan for President, and, as he expressed no regret at the circumstance, it is presumed that the pro-slavery policy of that official met with his approval.

True it is, that, whilst residing in St. Louis, he at one time put himself forward as a candidate for city surveyor but, in so doing, we may presume that he relied more upon his professional acquirements than upon any claims of a party nature ; and, in view of the great good fortune which was held in reserve for him, it is, perhaps, a

(IS)

l6 DECLARES HIMSELF AN ANTI-ABOLITIONIST.

lucky circumstance that his endeavors were attended with no better success.

At the outbreak of the rebellion, Congress declared, by an almost unanimous vote, that the war should be conducted solely for the purpose of preserving the Union ai.d maintaining the Federal Constitution and laws, without impairing the dignity, equality and rights of the States or of individuals, and that, when these objects were accomplished, the war should cease; so that, in accepting a commission in the military service of the North^ General Grant stood committed to the prosecution of the war for the restoration of all the States under our Government, but nothing further. That he had no sympathy with that class of our fellow-citizens, who, being of African descent, were then held in bondage by the several States in rebellion, is made sufficiently evident by his repugnance to being used as an instrumenf: of emancipation, through his connection with the army, and his threat to carry his sword over to the enemy the moment it should become evident to his mind that the abolition of negro slavery was one of the ends for which the war was to be prosecuted.*

Beyond this, we look in vain for any decided expressions of opinion from him upon national topics, until, after the re-establishment of peace and order, when the freedom of the blacks — that greatest of all the results of the prolonged struggle — had become an assured fact, and nothing remained to be done but to foot up the accounts and settle the status of the rebellious States and their peoples, including the political and social relations of the freed men.

When the question of the immediate admission of the Southern negroes to a political equality with the whites, in all respects, was first agitated at the seat of Govern-

* The language of General Grant, on the occasion referred to. was, — " I am a Democrat, and when I am convinced that the war is waged to prose* cute the designs of the abolitionists, I pledge my honor, as a soldier, that I will carry my sword on the other side, and cast my lot with that people "

HIS TOUR OF OBSERVATION SOUTH. \^

ment, General Grant expressed himself, without reserve, as decidedly opposed to it. We have the evidence of ex-Senator Doolittlc that he authorized him to say to the people of Wisconsin, whither he was going, " that the contemplated reconstruction of the South, upon the base of negro suffrage, was an outrage upon all the principles of justice or statesmanship, and would eventually result in a war of races."

At a later period. General Grant was induced to make a tour of observation into the Southern States, with a view to ascertain the disposition of the whites towards the Government, and of the two races towards one another. He visited some of the larger towns, and gathered such facts as he was able to do from the different military stations in his route, and came home fully impressed with the peaceful and accommodating spirit which pervaded that mixed and disorganized community.*

Prostrate and helpless as the South appeared at this time, with the better class of her population greatly reduced, her substance wasted, her resources cut off and her labor-system destroyed, there was still hope, that, under the protection of a friendly government, old animosities would be forgotten in the speedy instauration of the States lately in revolt, whereby their natural resources, alwa)^s abundant, might be developed under a system more in harmony with the fraternal elements of our nationality.

But it is evident that General Grant did not then anticipate the position to be assumed by Congress towards the South, so diametrically opposed to the doctrines enunciated by that body, when they accepted the alternative of war and committed the issues which had been raised by the Southern leaders to the arbitrament of arms. Then the

* See Report of General Grant to Congress in 1866, wherein he says : " There is such universal acquiescence in the authority of the General Government throughout the portions of the Southern States visited by me that the mere presence of a military force, without regard to numbers, is sufficient to maintain order." 2 l8 SOUND DOCTRINE.

political equality of all the States had never been questioned. It was the right only to sever their connection with the Central Government which was denied. To admit such a right would be to give validity to the ordinances of secession, and concede, in a single word, all that was claimed by the South. And whilst, according to the former, and by far more rational view of the question, it must be conceded that the General Government was fully authorized in compelling the allegiance of the States in revolt, by all the powers at its command, it by no means follows that any legal justification is to be found for establishing a military government over them after their submission.

It is a sound doctrine, and one which is essential to the maintenance of the central power, that the compact of the States is indissoluble, and can never be impaired or surrendered, either by the individual States, as parts of the Integral Government, or by the Government itself; and the obligations of allegiance which this doctrine enjoins, apply with equal force to the original or Colonial States, which, for mutual advantage and protection, created the Central Government, by transferring to it certain of their independent powers, and investing it with sovereignty, and to all the other States which have been created by the General Government out of its territories, and invested with the attributes of sovereignty, without being in themselves sovereign.

If the contrary principle were to be admitted, we should be forced to concede the legal right of secession and the General Government, in effecting the restoration of the seceding States through force, instead of being in the exercise of its legitimate constitutional powers, would be chargeable with their conquest and subjugation.

So far as we are able to determine, from any acts or expressions of General Grant, xt would seem that he held lo the former opinion throughout the war ; but when a breach became inevitable between Congress and the Executive, mainly growing out of this very subject, he as-

TENURE OF OFFICE ACT. I9

sumed a neutral position, and became, in a measure, the official prop of both parties.

Another thing which seems to have escaped the observation of General Grant at this time, regarding the future of the South, was, the social and political demoralization which followed in the wake of a class of unconscionable adventurers from the Northern States, who, taking advantage of the disfranchisement of the better class of whites, succeeded in gaining the confidence and support of the colored voters, through practices and professions as abject as they were hypocritical, only to crowd their way into offices of trust, and complete the financial ruin of States over which they exercised control.

We shall have more to say upon this head hereafter.

The Tenure of Office Act was one of personal hostility to President Johnson, and had the effect to curtail the supervisory powers of the Executive over his subordinates in office, thereby increasing their independence in the ratio of diminishing their accountability to the responsible head of the government.

As to the wisdom and policy of laws which are intended to have a mere personal bearing, and serve only to tether and hamstring a public officer in the discharge of the duties which appertain to his office, nothing need be said; but when those laws are in effect a usurpation by one of the co-ordinate branches of government, of the powers which of right belong to another, the question becomes one of the gravest importance.

Not only Mr. Johnson, but every member of his Cabinet, after having formally considered the subject, regarded the provisions of the Tenure of Office Act as in violation of the constitutional powers of the Executive, although the Secretary of War subsequently intrenched himself behind them, in his endeavors to counteract the designs of the President.*

* The Senate at first refused to include members of the Cabinet within the provisions of this act, but finally consented to it after a conference with the House Committee.

20 GRANT SECRETARY OF WAR, ad hltemiU

It was this unfortunate disagreement between President Johnson and one of the ablest of his Cabinet officers, which brought General Grant to the front in the new character of Secretary of War, ad interim; an office which he accepted voluntarily, and not, as it has been alleged, by the compulsory orders of his superior.

In assuming the duties of his new office, General Grant took upon himself the responsibilities of a Cabinet officer, and became from thence one of the conferrees and advisers of Mr. Johnson in all that pertained to his exercise of executive powers.

He was, indeed, one of a political family, to whose consideration and judgment the graver questions of state were to be submitted. The relation between the Chief Magistrate and the several chiefs of bureaus who together form his cabinet, is necessarily one of great intimacy and confidence, wherein the formal and studied modes of communication are laid aside for the more familiar and friendly deportment of the drawing-room, and it was now and here that the anxiety of General Grant to play his first card as a politician led him to enter a formal protest to the orders of the Executive which provided for the removal of General Sheridan from the command of the 5th Military District, a measure which we venture to assert, every fair-minded citizen, at all acquainted with the extraordinary rule of that officer over the States of Louisiana and Texas, most heartily approved.

In the course of his observations upon the policy of the order making this removal, General Grant takes occasion to remark as follows : " It is unmistakably the expressed wish of the country that General Sheridan should not be removed from his present command. This is a Republic, where the will of the people is the law of the land. I beg that their voice may be heard. General Sheridan has performed his civil duties faithfully and intelligently ; his removal will only be regarded as an effort to defeat the laws of Congress."

The unsupported assumption of the first sentence

HE SNUBS THE PRESIDENT.

which we have quoted above, is only matched by the application which is made of the thread-bare aphorism which follows it. It was indeed a simple bait to be thrown out to a great party ; and yet it was seized upon with great avidity by those who conceived that a rupture with Mr. Johnson would enhance the prospects of their candidate for the succession.

There is nothing which serves in an equal degree to obscure the faults and magnify the virtues of one in the eyes of the commonalty as that species of heroism which springs from military renown, and General Grant was exceedingly fortunate at this time in being able to conceal his utter unfitness and incapacity in his new relations to the Government behind his brilliant achievements in the field of arms, which had the effect to suspend the judgment and disarm the criticism of those who would have been less tender towards almost any other individual. His resistance to the removal of General Sheridan from the command of a Department which he had converted into a tyranny as absolute as any in history, was certainly bad enough ; but to voluntarily add the stamp of his approval to the unwise and disorganizing conduct of that officer, and his reckless abuse of the extraordinary powers with which he was vested, in dealing with the civil affairs of a people over which he was improvidently placed, not to mention his studied disrespect towards the President of the United States, to whom he was directly answerable for his excesses, were more than sufficient, at any other period, to draw upon himself a merited rebuke.

Mr. Johnson, in his reply to General Grant, has shown a just appreciation of their differences. He there says : " Whilst I am cognizant of the efforts that have been made to retain General Sheridan in command of the 5th Military District, I am not aware that the question has ever been submitted to the people themselves for determination."

In regard to the course of General Sheridan, Mr. Johnson remarks : " His rule has been one of absolute

22 HE RECEIVES A SCATHING REBUKE.

tyranny, without reference to the principles ol our Government or the nature of our free institutions.

" The state of affairs which has resulted from the course he has pursued, has seriously interfered with a harmonious, satisfactory and speedy execution of the acts of Congress, and is alone sufficient to justify a change. * * * In assuming that it is the expressed wish of the people that General Sheridan should not be removed from his present command, you remark that ' this is a Republic, where the will of the people is the law of the land,' and ' beg that their voice may be heard.' This, indeed, is a Republic, based however, upon a written constitution. The Constitution is the combined and expressed will of the people, and their voice is best known when reflected in the measures which that instrument prescribes. While one of its provisions makes the President Commander-inchief of the Army and Navy, another requires that he shall take care that the law be faithfully executed."*

It would seem, from the nature of this correspondence, that Mr. Johnson found it expedient to give his week-old Secretary some rudimentary lessons in relation to the principles which underlie our Government, and at the same time to remind him that, by those fundamental rules, the President, instead of the Secretary of War, is made Commander-in-chief of the Army.

Nor can it be denied that some instruction in these regards might have been given with advantage to one who could so far mistake the spirit and just operation of our institutions as to insist upon the continued oppression of the people of a particular section of the Union, because in his judgment the people of the other sections were in favor of it, and this, by the most indulgent view, is the sum of the argument adduced by General Grant in support of the further retention of Sheridan as Commander of the 5th Military District, and which, if true, reflects as little credit upon the disposition of the populace

* See letter of General Grant to President Joiinson, dated August 17th, 1867, and the reply of Mr. Johnson thereto of August 19th.

AGREES TO RESIST STANTON'S RE-IN STATEMENT. 23

as upon the wisdom and fairness of General Grant in so recreantly yielding to their prejudices.*

We pass to the final act of General Grant's Secretaryship, which was terminated by his surrender of the office to Mr. Stanton, after the refusal of the Senate to concur in his removal, the causes of which, it would appear, were not satisfactory to that body. Whatever these causes may have been we shall not pause to inquire, inasmuch as they have no direct bearing upon the questions in hand.

It is certain, however, that President Johnson, who regarded the Tenure of Office Act with no favor, as having a personal, rather than a general significance, was anxious to test its constitutionality before the only tribunal empowered to pass upon that question. For this special object the President requested General Grant, as Secretary of War ad interim, to resist the re-instatement of Mr. Stanton, and thus campel him to resort to the courts for his repossession of the office, by which means the constitutionality of the act in question might be brought to a judicial determination ; or in case General Grant had any misgivings about standing in such a position, he was requested to resign the office into other hands in time to permit this plan to be carried out.

To this arrangement General Grant yielded a ready assent, and the President, secure in the belief that it would be faithfully adhered to, gave himself no further concern about the matter. It is not strange, therefore, that, after all this, the President received, with no little surprise and indignation, the subsequent notification that the War Office had been quietly given up to Mr. Stanton, without so much as a verbal protest against his re-occu-

* In issuing the order of his Department for the removal of General Sheridan, it was so framed by General Grant as to carry upon its face the evidence that it was done at the dictation of the Executive, as if to disarm in advance any censure* which might attach to himself for doing that which he could only do as a subordinate, and for which he was in no wis responsible.

24 HE FAILS TO KEEP HIS WORD.

pation of it, thus depriving him of the means of submit ting in a legal form the constit^itionality of the Tenure o Office Act to the Judicial Department of the Government; and setting at rest the graver questions to which the act gave rise.

We confess that, in assuming the foregoing statement of the case to be true, we have followed the clear and succinct narration of Mr. Johnson,* supported and affirmed by the several members of his Cabinet, who had personal knowledge of what had occurred, rather than single, unsupported, floundering and altogether improbable version of General Grant, respecting the matters under review, to be found in his published communications to the President of January 28th and February 3d, 1868, and which, for contradictory statements, shallowness of reasoning, absence of all due respect and downright impudence, stand unrivalled in the whole catalogue of State Papers ; and yet there were people enough to be found so bitter in their opposition to the policy of the administration, and so personally hostile to Mr. Johnson, as to commend the worst features of this graceless correspondence.

We have alluded to the intimate and confidential relations which of necessity exist between the' President and the members of his Cabinet, who, by the acceptance of their respective offices, consent to become the conferrees and advisers of the President upon all the more important measures of his administration.

With what a sense of shame, then, must every fair-minded citizen recall the self-condemning admissions of General Grant in his letter of February 3d, wherein the following statement occurs : " You must have known that my greatest objection to his (Mr. Stanton's) removal, was the fear that some one would be appointed in his stead, who would, by opposition to the laws relating to the restoration of the Southern States to their

* See letters of Mr. Johnson to General Grant of January 31st and Feb. ruary loth, 1868, with corroborating statements of Cabinet officers.

TWO LETTERS OF HIS COMPARED.

proper relation to the Government, embarrass the army in the performance of the duties especially imposed upon it by the laws ; and that it was to prevent such an appointment that I accepted the appointment of Secretary of War, AD INTERIM, and not for the purpose of enabling you to get rid of Mr. Stanton, or by withholding it from him in opposition to the law, or not doing so myself, surrender to one who, as the statements and assumptions in your communication plainly indicate, was sought," {Sic.)

Now let us contrast this statement with the one which is contained in the communication of General Grant to the President, of January 28th, from which we make the following quotation : " Some time after I assumed the duties of Secretary of War ad interim, the President asked my views as to the course Mr. Stanton ivould have to pursue, in case the Senate should not concur in his suspension, to obtain possession of his office. My reply was in substance, that Mr. Stanton zvould have to appeal to the courts to re-instate him, illustrating my position by citing the grounds I had taken in the case of the Baltimore Police Commissioners. In that case I did not doubt the technical right of Governor Swan, to remove the old Commissioners, and to appoint their successors as the old Commissioners refused to give up. However, I contended that no resource was left but to appeal to the courts. I had not looked particularly into the Tenure of Office Bill, but that what I had stated was a general principle."