1.5.1 Grant’s Troubled Presidency

In 1868, the Republican Party’s presidential nomination went to Ulysses S. Grant, the North’s favorite general. Hero of the Civil War and a supporter of congressional reconstruction, Grant was the obvious choice. His Democratic opponent, Horatio Seymour of New York, ran on a platform that blasted congressional reconstruction as “a flagrant usurpation of power…unconstitutional, revolutionary, and void.” The Republicans answered by “waving the bloody shirt” — that is, they reminded voters that the Democrats were “the party of rebellion.”1 During the campaign, the Ku Klux Klan erupted in a reign of terror across the South, murdering hundreds of Republicans. Fear of violence cost Grant votes, but he gained a narrow 309,000-vote margin in the popular vote and a substantial victory (214 votes to 80) in the electoral college (Map 16.2).

Grant was not as good a president as he was a general. The talents he had demonstrated on the battlefield — decisiveness, clarity, and resolution — were less obvious in the White House. He hoped to forge a policy that secured both justice for blacks and sectional reconciliation, but he took office at a time when a majority of white Northerners had grown weary of the “Southern Question” and were increasingly willing to let southern whites manage their own affairs. Moreover, Grant surrounded himself with fumbling kinfolk and old friends from his army days. He made a string of dubious appointments that led to a series of damaging scandals. Charges of corruption tainted his vice president, Schuyler Colfax, and brought down two of his cabinet officers. Though never personally implicated in any scandal, Grant was aggravatingly naive and blind to the rot that filled his administration. Republican congressman James A. Garfield declared: “His imperturbability is amazing. I am in doubt whether to call it greatness or stupidity.”

In 1872, anti-Grant Republicans bolted and launched the Liberal Party. To clean up the graft and corruption, Liberals proposed ending the spoils system, by which victorious parties rewarded loyal workers with public office, and replacing it with a nonpartisan civil service commission that would oversee competitive examinations for appointment to office (as discussed in chapter 18). Liberals also demanded that the federal government remove its troops from the South and restore “home rule” (southern white control). Democrats liked the Liberals’ southern policy and endorsed the Liberal presidential candidate, Horace Greeley, the longtime editor of the New York Tribune. The nation, however, still felt enormous affection for the man who had saved the Union and reelected Grant with 56 percent of the popular vote.

Grant’s ambitions for his administration extended beyond reconstruction, but not even foreign affairs could escape the problems of the South. Grant coveted Santo Domingo (present-day Dominican Republic) in the Caribbean and argued that the acquisition of this tropical land would permit the United States to expand its trade and would also provide a new home for the South’s blacks, who were so desperately harassed by the Klan. Aggressive foreign policy had not originated with the Grant administration. Lincoln’s and Johnson’s secretary of state, William H. Seward, had thwarted French efforts to set up a puppet empire under Maximilian in Mexico, and his purchase of Alaska (“Seward’s Ice Box”) from Russia in 1867 for only $7 million fired Grant’s imperialist ambition. But in the end, Grant could not convince Congress to approve the treaty annexing Santo Domingo. The South preoccupied Congress and undermined Grant’s initiatives.