To Rescue the Republic: Ulysses S. Grant, The Fragile Union and the Crisis of 1876
It is the last Sunday of the month, so it is time for another president, making this week's book of the week To Rescue the Republic: Ulysses S Grant, The Fragile Union and the Crisis of 1876 by Bret Baier.
Ulysses S Grant was born Hiram Ulysses Grant on April 27, 1822, in Point Pleasant, Ohio to Jesse Root Grant and Hannah Simpson Grant and he was the first born of 6 children. His father was a tanner and an abolitionist, and that abolitionist belief was instilled in Grant and caused some problems for the family down the line when Grant married Julia Dent, a southern belle from St Louis, Missouri who was born and raised in a slave owning family.
Grant spent his childhood more or less running around, helping with the family farm, and learning about horses and he was a natural and gifted horseman. He told his father early on that he did not want to be a tanner, which was his father’s business, so his father started looking around for other career paths for his son, eventually patching up a rift with his old friend, congressman Thomas Hamer. The friendship had ended over political differences, as Hamer was a Democrat and Jesse Grant was a Whig. However, Jesse Grant patched up the friendship to ask a favor of a recommendation from Hamer for his son Hiram to attend the military academy at West Point. Hamer gladly agreed and the recommendation was sent, but when Grant arrived at WestPoint, he found he had been enrolled under the name Ulysses S Grant. Grant asked to have the name changed but was told West Point could only admit the person by the name registered in his nomination. So, from that point on, he became Ulysses. The S is believed to be for his mother’s maiden name, Simpson.
Grant was well liked at West Point, but a bit of a troublemaker, gaining multiple demerits in his time there and ultimately ranked 147th in the school for good behavior. Also in his class was William Tecumseh Sherman, who was also a troublemaker, and ranked 124th overall. Grant himself, in his graduating class of 39 was ranked 21st. As Sherman would later report “A more unpromising boy never entered the Military Academy. Let this be a lesson to all of us. Looks are deceiving.”
Following West Point, Grant was assigned to the Jefferson Barracks in St Louis, MO, which he found to be lonely, while he was waiting for his permanent assignment. His West Point roommate Frederick Dent was from St Louis and invited Grant to visit with his family at their plantation. Here is where he met Julia Dent and became quickly enamored of her, eventually winning her affection and a promise to marry when he returned from fighting in the Mexican/American War.
He did quite well in Mexico, seeing combat and learning some of the administrative side of the military, and when the war was over, he rushed back to St. Louis to marry Julia, and they were married on August 22, 1848. Grants father refused to attend due to the Dents being slave owners, although he did meet Julia later and she got on quite well with Grant’s family, and Jesse and Hannah Grant were quite enamored of the four grandchildren Ulysses and Julia gave them.
Julia’s father did not initially consent to their marriage because he did not think his spoiled daughter was suited to the life of a military wife, which was partially correct. She followed Grant to his postings around the Great Lakes, but when he was assigned to positions in California and Oregon, he refused to have her accompany him, fearing for her health and safety on the cross-country trip and over the isthmus of Panama. So, he left Julia and their young children with her family in St. Louis and headed west on his own. Here is where the rumors of his alcoholism took hold, as he drank too much in the absence of his family, eventually facing a court martial for drunkenness. However, while Grant would have handily beat the charges, he would not have his record stained with an official court martial and opted instead to resign his commission, returning to St Louis and Julia in 1854.
At first, he thought to try his hand at farming and set up a farmhouse on some land that had been gifted to him by his father-in-law to farm, along with one slave. But Grant’s abolitionist roots ran deep, and he freed the slave almost as soon as he took official ownership, agreeing to pay him a wage for his services instead. Grant was not a successful farmer and eventually he made contact with his father and agreed to work at the family’s leather shop as a salesman. With that, the young Grant family packed up and moved to Galena, Illinois, where the family was living when the Civil War started. Grant quickly re-signed with the Army and was put in charge of troops. Julia’s wish was that he might achieve the rank of Major General. She was thrilled as he kept kicking literal ass and eventually became commander of all of the Union troops.
His family, as much as they were able, stayed nearby during the war, living with him during the siege at Vicksburg, and ultimately moving to DC once he was promoted to General of the Army. Here is where his long association with William T Sherman really became the saving grace of the nation. Early in the war Sherman had had a mini-breakdown and the press kept calling him crazy. Grant advised him to ignore it. When Grant started finding such success and presidential favor with Lincoln, the press suddenly got wind of his past drunkenness and started questioning his suitability to lead. Sherman returned the advice about ignoring it. And truly, it seems like the only time Grant experienced drunkenness was when he had a prolonged separation from his family. Basically, he was depressed/bored drinking. So, Sherman reminded him that clearly the stories were just bitterness from haters, and that Grant had a job to do.
And Grant did it, exceedingly well, with Sherman as basically his right-hand man. The two of them together devised the sweep of Grant sieging Richmond and keeping the pressure on Lee while Sherman swept in from the west, pushing Johnston’s forces ahead of him to the Atlantic. And of course, all of this worked, with Grant accepting Lee’s surrender of the Army of Northern Virginia at Appomattox on April 9, 1865, effectively ending the Civil War.
And Grant was gracious in victory, allowing the southerners to keep their horses and swords, and agreeing to feed the men who had been on starvation rations for several months. And when his own troops wanted to cheer and fire salutes to victory, he cautioned them not to, advising that graciousness in victory was the order of the day as they were all again countrymen. And he advised the same when Sherman accepted Johnston’s surrender on April 26, 1865.
By this time Lincoln had been assassinated and Johnson was president, and Grant remained as Commander of the Army, which was a good thing because Johnson wanted to try, convict, and hang, all the former confederate soldiers he could get his hands on. Grant convinced him not to based, on the amnesty he had granted when accepting the surrender, which had been agreed to by then President Lincoln. And as surrender and amnesty was ultimately accepted and granted to Johnston’s army, the south was left to rebuild. At this point, Johnson turned to forgiving everyone and destroying reconstruction efforts.
Now, in the grand tradition of politicians in the 19th century, Grant did not actually seek the presidency. But when he was nominated for the position in 1868, he accepted and won in an absolute landslide, garnishing 214 electoral votes to Horatio Seymour’s 80. And with that, he began his first term as president.
The biggest problem with Grant’s presidency is that he was too trusting, always choosing to see the best in those nearest and dearest to him. This led to several scandals throughout his term as those nearest and dearest were prone to taking advantage of him. But he oversaw ratification of the 15th amendment and tried very hard to build positive relations with the Native American tribes; however, that last one fell short as Grant fell into the oh so American trap of assuming the farmers life was the best and wanting to push the farming life on nomadic tribes. Among the scandals of his administration included Indian agents who took advantage of the tribes they were overseeing.
And reconstruction, already off to a rough start under Johnson’s administration, became an increasingly tense situation as carpetbaggers moved south and took control of several states, most notably Florida, South Carolina, and Louisiana, with governors of South Carolina and Louisiana requesting federal troops to help maintain order in their states, which Grant was loathe to do, believing that federal intervention was not his place. However, with the rise of the KKK, federal intervention became necessary, and troops were eventually installed. All of this was over Grants 8 years in the white house, as he handily won reelection in 1872, with another landslide of 286 electoral votes to Horace Greeley’s 66.
Perhaps the most puzzling of Grant’s entire presidency was the seeming enmity of US Senator Charles Sumner. Grant and Sumner shared many of the same goals, but Sumner basically refused to work with Grant on any of Grant’s plans for reconstruction, refusing to back annexation of Santo Domingo and demanding more than reasonable reparations from Great Britain for their part in building southern ships during the war. Now, to be fair, annexation of Santo Domingo was a pipe dream, as Grant’s plan was to offer all the freedman passage to Santo Domingo, basically freedom through apartheid. Which had been tried in the past with Haiti and failed abysmally. The Freedmen basically held the opinion that for better or worse, the US was home. They didn’t know anything about Haiti and later Santo Domingo, so why should they relocate? A fair point by any metric. Additionally, as Grant well knew, quite a few freedmen had fought for the Union and to maintain the Union, so why should they have to move?
Grant eventually gave up the idea of Santo Domingo, and ultimately won on the argument of reparations from Great Britain, as Sumners sum of a billion dollars and Canada was settled for the much more reasonable $15,500,000 in reparations.
But the biggest challenge of Grant’s presidency came at the very end of his tenure in office. Like the very bitter end. In 1876 he decided not to run again. There was no bar to it legally, but the precedence for only two terms had been set by George Washington, and so Grant went with tradition and announced he would not run. This left the field open for Rutherford B Hayes versus New York Democrat Samuel Tilden. And here is where South Carolina, Florida, and Louisiana, became vitally important, as all three states returned multiple electoral responses. Plus, it was unclear if one of the electors from Oregon was a valid elector as he was a member of the US Postal Service and anyone working for the federal government was barred from being an elector. It was later determined the elector had resigned his USPS position before being voted elector, however that information did not come out until after the election was settled.
The problem of how to settle the election was Grant’s idea. He started by suggesting formation of an election commission, made of five each from the House and the Senate, plus five Supreme Court justices. Eight members were Republicans; seven were Democrats. The initial polling results came in at 184 votes for Tilden, just 1 shy of the needed 185, and 165 for Hayes. As 20 electoral votes were in contention, if all were granted to Hayes, he would win, but if even just Oregon went to Tilden, Tilden would win.
Basically, as the roll call for electors was made, when one of the disputed states came up, the commission would discuss the submitted results and decide who to give the votes to. One of the commissioners, I don’t recall which one, was trying to decide how deeply they had to dig into the allegations of fraud and voter suppression. Each of the disputed southern states had US military on standby, and it is not without justification that Grant worried a misstep here might spark a second civil war, which the nation would not survive, having barely managed to survive the first one 11 years earlier.
Into this fraught historical moment stepped one Edward A Burke. Burke was a former confederate soldier, and he had a suggestion. Burke was a democratic mover and shaker who worked very much behind the scenes, and his sole interest was in ending reconstruction in the south. See, the three southern disputed states were also having disputes as to who was governor, the sitting carpetbagging republicans, or the duly elected democrats. Burke suggested that if Hayes would promise to end reconstruction and back the elections of the democratic governors, then the democrats in Congress would quit filibustering, giving Hayes the presidency. And this is ultimately what happened.
Baier hypothesizes that Tilden didn’t want the presidency as much as Hayes did, and so he didn’t fight for what was most likely rightfully his. I think, having read all I have to this point, the truth is a little simpler. And it’s a truth Baier even acknowledges in this book. Tilden was a New York democrat, not so much because he believed in the principles of the Democratic Party, but because he saw political opportunity in a party that had been ravaged post war. This political opportunity is what brought Republicans south to take over governorship of states that Republicans would have never won pre-Civil war. I think it most likely the Democrats in the south didn’t trust Tilden and didn’t believe he would actually end reconstruction. So, they took the opportunity to force a political bargain on a political opponent that would directly benefit them. And lead to a century of Jim Crow laws.
The bargain was struck just in time, and Hayes was announced victor on March 2, 1877, just two days before the required March 4 inauguration. Post-election, the Grants used their savings to go on a world tour, and Grant became a very capable public speaker, as the General who Won the War was a popular figure overseas, and the Grants dined with the crown heads of Europe. When they returned, the Grants settled into a house in New York and gave a sum to their oldest son to invest, which he did quite capably, making them millionaires. Unfortunately, Grant’s need to trust those nearest to him extended to his son Frederick, who trusted his business partner. The business partner ultimately lost the Grants everything, leaving them destitute. About this time, a monthly publication approached Grant to write a series of articles about the Civil War and several of the key battles he had fought during the conflict, at a rate of $500 per article, approximately $14,000 in today's money. Now, this might seem like a lot, but when Grants friend Mark Twain heard about this, he was outraged, believing Grant had been grossly underpaid for his contribution, and knowing it once he found out subscriptions to the magazine had skyrocketed following the release of the first article.
With that, Twain talked to Grant about publishing his memoirs and they eventually reached an agreement on who would be paid what for the publication. By the time Grant had agreed to write his book, he had been diagnosed with throat cancer and he was very worried about ensuring Julia would be taken care of once he passed. Grant did manage to finish both volumes of his memoirs before passing away on July 23, 1885, in Wilton, NY. His funeral was attended by over 1 million people, including soldiers who fought on both sides of the conflict. He was widely respected and liked as a man, possessing a wry sense of humor and humility that made him popular with the soldiers he led and fought against. And following the official publication of his book, Twain presented Julia with a check for $200,000, approximately $6,240,000 in today's money. That plus residual royalties were enough to see Julia comfortable until her own death on December 14, 1902.
This book was really good. I know there are an alarming number of people who will refuse to read it based on the author being a Fox News reporter, but he was very a-political in his writing, reporting on skullduggery that happened on both sides of the aisle during one of the nation's most difficult political turmoil. Grant is one of the presidents I know very little about, but I am going to put him near the top of my list. Like third, I think. The actual list is back home so that may change, but I think third. Because he was a man of principle. And because, despite spending 8 years in the white house, he never developed political cynicism, always seeing the best in people all the way to the bitter end.
This book was originally reviewed on October 30, 2022 on YouTube, but is now available on Rumble and PodBean.
