With the ceremony over, Grant climbed back into his carriage and headed to the White House. He was accompanied by a military escort and joyous black citizens, who celebrated his endorsement of the Fifteenth Amendment, trailing in his wake. By the time he reached the now-empty executive mansion, he was greeted by General John Schofield, his temporary holdover as secretary of war. A small group followed the new president to his office where they partook of drinks and cigars.
When the committee formed to arrange the inaugural ball had convened in January, the bashful Grant had startled them by saying it might be best to skip the affair altogether. Far from heeding his advice, the committee brought forth a ball of unusual opulence, held in an unfinished new wing of the Treasury Department and conducted with something less than military precision. By the time the Grants arrived at 10:30 p.m., with Julia decked out in a white satin dress, it was clear the function had degenerated into an expensive fiasco. More than a thousand guests crowded into an airless space, thick with marble construction dust, and several ladies celebrated the incoming administration by fainting on the spot. Although a blizzard hit the city, nobody had worked out a system to check coats or hats or arrange carriages for departing guests. Some people ended up spending the night in frantic searches for missing wraps, while others slogged home through the snowy mess without their overcoats. Some surely wondered whether these slipshod arrangements presaged trouble ahead for the Grant administration.
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
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Spoils of War
ON HIS FIRST FULL DAY IN OFFICE, March 5, Grant, with brisk, military efficiency, produced his first list of cabinet appointees—Washburne, Stewart, Borie, Creswell, Hoar, and Cox—and John Rawlins materialized on the Senate floor to present it. Grant, it turned out, had overlooked an antiquated statute, introduced by Alexander Hamilton in forging the Treasury Department in 1789, that no treasury secretary could be directly or indirectly involved in trade or commerce. A flustered Grant discovered this provision only after Alexander T. Stewart was unanimously confirmed by the Senate. Stewart offered to place his profits in a trust while in office, with the proceeds donated to charity, but that didn’t solve the predicament. Grant pursued a failed effort to have Congress pass a resolution exempting Stewart from the law. In the end, he withdrew the nomination, the whole debacle reflecting his inexperience and refusal to seek counsel before selecting cabinet secretaries.
Instead of Stewart, Grant proposed Congressman George Boutwell of Massachusetts, the first commissioner of Internal Revenue during the war. Heavily touted by Radicals, the former Massachusetts governor had been an early backer of the Republican Party and a stout supporter of Reconstruction. A fire-breathing house manager in the Andrew Johnson impeachment, he had excoriated the president as an “apostate and a traitor.”1 As a confirmed abolitionist, he had been instrumental in passing both the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments. Boutwell was not an endearing personality—one colleague found him “cold, calculating, and without confidences”—but he reflected Grant’s emphasis on defending the rights of newly freed blacks.2 Within days Grant sent to Capitol Hill the names of a second batch of appointees, including Boutwell and Rawlins, and they were duly rubber-stamped. Elihu Washburne, having served as secretary of state for all of five days, was now confirmed as minister to France, with Hamilton Fish chosen to run the State Department on a permanent basis. With his long face, wide mouth, wavy hair, and scraggly side-whiskers, Fish was Grant’s most inspired choice. The squire of a Hudson River estate where Grant had stayed, the sixty-year-old Fish was a former New York governor and senator, a cultivated patrician fluent in four languages. With his Whig background, impeccable judgment, and long experience, he described himself as an old fogey with traditional notions of honesty. In a cabinet plagued by high turnover, he would labor for eight years, lending gravity to American foreign policy and riding out many controversies. He functioned on such confidential terms with Grant that he almost ranked as his prime minister. Steeped in statecraft, he would master reams of information, keep a voluminous diary, and tutor Grant in the mysterious ways of diplomacy. For Grant, Fish was a godsend, compensating for his own glaring inexperience in foreign affairs. Grant later boasted, with some justice, that Hamilton Fish was the best secretary of state in fifty years.
While historians have tended to mock Grant’s cabinet as a bunch of mediocrities—and Borie certainly qualified as such—it was actually weighted with former congressmen, senators, governors, and judges. It had figures of real distinction (Fish), Radical Republicans (Boutwell, Creswell), men of exceptional intellect (Hoar), and advocates of civil service reform (Cox). Rutherford B. Hayes was enraptured by Grant’s freedom from party hacks: “His Cabinet looks like a revolution . . . It is an attempt to put fitness and qualification before what is called ‘claims’ and ‘political services.’ If anybody could overthrow the spoils doctrine and practice, Grant is the man.”3 The trouble lay less with the caliber of choices than an absence of any ideological cohesion. Grant didn’t want his cabinet ruled by a monolithic party line, which was praiseworthy, but this sometimes resulted in a fragmentation of views that would bedevil his administration.
In this heyday of the spoils system, Grant had thrown down a gauntlet to party leaders. In response, they patronized him as a dunderhead and lashed out at his choices. Senator John Sherman said Grant’s “attempt to form a cabinet without consultation with anyone, and with very little knowledge, except social intercourse with the persons appointed” cast doubt on his presidency.4 After seeing Grant, Ben Butler growled that “he is stupidly dull and ignorant and no more comprehends his duty or his power under the Constitution than that dog,” indicating a small dog nearby.5 Charles Sumner, the all-powerful chairman of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, took special umbrage at not being consulted about the secretary of state, perhaps because he coveted the plum assignment himself. Unfortunately, Grant’s reforming spirit backfired, since he had to make amends to spurned politicians on Capitol Hill and only ended up more beholden to them.
Grant exhibited another serious defect in managing appointments. In the fast-moving world of warfare, it was a virtue to act decisively and make snap judgments based on intuition. In the White House, by contrast, he was too quick to hire people, then too quick to fire them. If this style served Grant well in the fog of war, where improvisation was vital, it led to some rough clashes and bruised feelings in the political sphere. Instead of seeming simple and direct, he could come across as brusque and even insensitive. Where he should have deliberated and calculated, he sometimes rushed into headlong action, as if storming an enemy fort.
Critics have faulted Grant for applying a rigid military model to his cabinet secretaries, treating them as so many staff officers. Ebenezer Hoar later complained that Grant had “the most crude and imperfect notions” of the proper relationship with his cabinet, leading to his interfering “with the duties which the law imposes upon a Cabinet officer.”6 But this was far from a universal impression among his cabinet. Boutwell believed that Grant gave him ample leeway, as he had given his wartime commanders. Fish disputed that Grant was a naive, bumbling president, saying he was “the most scrupulously truthful man he had ever known” and had earnestly educated himself in every great question laid before him.7
For his White House entourage, Grant imported pretty much the same coterie of staff officers who had served him during the war and its aftermath. As with his cabinet, he favored personal secretaries with whom he felt comfortable, including Frederick Dent, Adam Badeau, Orville Babcock, Cyrus Comstock, and Horace Porter, as well as Robert Douglas, son of the late senator Stephen Douglas. In these appointments Grant demonstrated commendable loyalty for past services. As Ely Parker phrased it, “After the war was over, Grant showed his love for his military family by doing kindness[es] for them whenever he could. When he became President he sought them out, and without solicitation on their part, provided for many of th
em.”8
Yet it was sometimes difficult to distinguish personal loyalty from cronyism. Many observers were disturbed by all the uniformed men striding the White House corridors. In a broad-brush indictment, Charles Sumner disapproved of the way the White House “assumed the character of military head-quarters. To the dishonor of the civil service and in total disregard of precedent, the President surrounded himself with officers of the army, and substituted military forms for those of civil life.”9 Among the administration’s clandestine critics was William T. Sherman, who saw an unprepared Grant gravitating into a political sphere where he operated as a dangerous amateur.
During the war, Grant had been a superb talent scout, winnowing out unqualified officers and advancing enterprising ones. Nevertheless, he had proven credulous with some personalities who didn’t deserve his trust, and as president he again showed little inkling of the opportunism that could afflict his staff as they faced the lure of peacetime riches and power. One such opportunist—although it took Grant many years to see it—was Adam Badeau. The onetime theater critic had an agile pen and was given his own White House room to compose an elaborate, three-volume Military History of Ulysses S. Grant, meant to enshrine his boss in the history books and contest Lost Cause southern analysts who glorified Lee at his expense. In time, Grant elevated Badeau to several diplomatic posts abroad, even as an underlying resentment festered inside the younger man. As early as March 1869, one White House staffer noted that Badeau had “violently” offended Grant “by his pushing and presumption”—the start of a rift that would silently widen in future years.10
In the end, the most troubling aide was Orville E. Babcock, who enjoyed the most intimate access to Grant. A popular, congenial thirty-three-year-old with a Vandyke beard, he was born in Vermont, graduated from West Point, and was a skilled engineer. For Grant, he had been a genuine war hero, fighting with gallantry at the Wilderness and Petersburg. Much like a chief of staff, Babcock occupied a second-floor White House office that enjoyed direct admittance to Grant’s private study, so that, in General Sherman’s words, he became “a kind of intermediator between the people and the President.”11 Grant trusted him so much that Babcock opened mail addressed to him and often sent replies himself. Babcock’s influence rivaled that of cabinet secretaries and only Rawlins enjoyed more confidential relations with the president. Unfortunately, where Rawlins qualified as a man of fiery principles, Babcock came to personify the looser morals of the Gilded Age.
Though sometimes hoodwinked by close acquaintances, on other occasions Grant managed to combine personal favors with first-rate appointments. He made an excellent choice by tapping his old pal and ex–Confederate general James Longstreet as surveyor of customs for New Orleans. The rich patronage position seemed well merited, for Longstreet was that rare southern general who had preached cooperation with Reconstruction and been traduced as a scalawag for his outspoken courage. “Our new president has done many acts for which his country will hold him in grateful remembrance,” wrote Horace Greeley, “but he never did a wiser or nobler act than his nomination yesterday of General James Longstreet.”12 Grant personally shepherded the nomination through the Senate. “The Senators have as many favors to ask of me as I have of them,” he told Longstreet, “and I will see that you are confirmed.”13
The Grants and Dents showed no scruples about badgering Grant for jobs and he found it hard to avoid the perils of nepotism. Such favoritism was commonplace in the freewheeling atmosphere of nineteenth-century America. During the Civil War, the New York World had rapped Lincoln on the knuckles for having “appointed his whole family to government posts.”14 With an eye on the main chance, Jesse Root Grant had his son renew his appointment as postmaster of Covington. The pushy Jesse also lobbied for patronage jobs for friends, sought a fancy new post office in Covington, and bragged about his Washington connections. Not content to control Covington, he set himself up as a power broker in Ravenna, Ohio, where he favored for postmaster Eliza F. Evans, a soldier’s widow and the daughter of an old friend, over an aspirant preferred by Congressman James A. Garfield. When Grant backed Mrs. Evans, Garfield didn’t challenge him, but he disliked a meddling interloper such as Jesse Grant. In sketching this brawl, the New York World said archly that in future civil service exams, the Grant administration should list just two questions: “Were you a contributor to either of Grant’s three houses, in Philadelphia, Washington, or Galena?” and “Are you a member of the Dent family or otherwise connected by blood or marriage with General Grant?”15
Grant was kept busy supplying jobs for Michael John Cramer, the Swiss-born Methodist clergyman who married his youngest sister, Mary. During the war, Grant had wangled him a job as a hospital chaplain, followed by another at an army barracks in Covington after the war. As if such generosity were not enough, Grant conferred upon his brother-in-law the honor of being resident minister and chargé d’affaires in Denmark, where he would reside for eleven years.
In many ways, the most lavish beneficiary of such largesse was the man least entitled to it, Colonel Dent, who had been invited by Grant to live in the White House. “The General was always so, so lovely to my dear father, and papa was so proud of him,” Julia wrote in her sometimes unreal, flowery style.16 Now in his early eighties, the Colonel had never modified his Confederate views and remained a rabid Democrat. Before becoming president, Grant had paid off such sizable debts accumulated by his father-in-law that it mired him in financial obligations. For visitors to the executive mansion in the Grant years, Colonel Dent was ubiquitous, whether sunning himself on the porch or occupying his favorite spot near Grant’s office and lecturing waiting politicians. At Blue Room receptions, he sprawled in an easy chair behind the president and First Lady, as if he were the grand old man of the administration. Despite a surface charm, the Colonel was still dogmatic about politics and said his son-in-law was “really a stanch Democrat; but he doesn’t know it.”17
As in past years, the self-absorbed Jesse Root Grant and equally self-absorbed Colonel Dent continued to find each other insufferable and Grant took refuge in his old strategy of passive detachment. With Colonel Dent monopolizing the White House, Jesse stayed at an inexpensive hotel when he visited Washington. The two men took turns insulting each other, pretending the other was a doddering old fool. “You should take better care of that old gentleman, Julia,” Dent would say of Jesse Grant. “He is feeble and deaf as a post, and yet you permit him to wander all over Washington alone. It is not safe; he should never be allowed out without an attendant.”18 To insult Jesse, Colonel Dent would pop out of his armchair whenever Jesse entered the room. “Accept my chair, Mr. Grant,” he would say with elaborate courtesy, as if humoring a senile old man. Stiffly indignant, Jesse would reply in a stage whisper to a grandson, “I hope I shall not live to become as old and infirm as your Grandfather Dent.”19
Relations between the Dents and Grants, at a low ebb for twenty-five years, regressed even further. Cyrus Comstock reported that Julia was “aggrieved by that old good for nothing J R Grant, abusing her firmly to some correspondent.”20 Grant’s childhood friend Eliza Shaw reflected the rancor of the Grant family when she observed that “Old Man Dent was a man without tact or respect for anybody. He was a fat old man, drank a good deal.” She confirmed that Hannah Grant thought the Dents had captured the White House and boycotted Washington to avoid meeting them. “Julia Grant was not on good terms with the General’s mother. The General’s mother was never in Washington because of this. She never came to see her son at the capital.”21
As the Dent family guzzled freely at the patronage trough, the president more or less willingly catered to their thirst. One of Julia’s brothers-in-law was made a bank examiner in Missouri, another a District of Columbia marshal, a third the collector of the Port of New Orleans. Her brothers also lined up for posts, with one made a customs appraiser in San Francisco, a second an Indian trader in New Mexico, and brother Fred one of Grant’s
secretaries. “A dozen members of the family billeted upon the country!” Senator Sumner snorted in disgust.22
The subject of Grant and nepotism remains a puzzle. The practice hurt his standing and detracted from his better cabinet appointments. As Carl Schurz protested, Grant showed “a disposition to give offices to all his relatives and to a great number of old personal friends; and in these instances to consult the members of Congress very little. That makes bad blood here and there.”23 As Grant had shown during the war, he was personally incorruptible and never desired promotions that stemmed from wire-pulling. To keep the selection process pure, he had even refrained from consulting politicians about his cabinet choices. Yet he also had an unremitting sense of fidelity to family, even when they scarcely deserved it, and seemed unable to perceive how unfair such partiality might appear to most Americans. Having been battered by the world in his earlier years, he had come to rely on family and friends and never forgot that lesson. When he offered an appointment to a former St. Louis friend, the man felt obliged to point out that he was a Democrat. Grant waved away this concern. “Just before the Civil War,” he said, “when I was standing on a street corner in St. Louis by a wagon loaded with wood, you approached and said: ‘Captain, haven’t you been able to sell your wood?’ I answered: ‘No.’ Then you said: ‘I’ll buy it; and whenever you haul a load of wood to the city and can’t sell it, just take it around to my residence . . . and I’ll pay you for it.’ I haven’t forgotten it.”24