Prompted by a Civil War Chat viewer I listened to a podcast interview of Hillsdale College President Larry Arnn and history professor Adam Carrington in which both men praised President Ulysses Grant as a civil rights pioneer. Notwithstanding Hillsdale’s reputation for resisting the false interpretations of most academic historians, the institution has failed completely in the case of U. S. Grant. In truth, most of the evidence suggests that President Grant’s civil rights activism for Southern blacks was chiefly self-serving.
First, when the Civil War ended the infant GOP was barely ten years old. Republicans realized that it might be strangled in its cradle if the re-admittance of Southern states into the Union failed to be managed in a way to prevent Southerners from allying with Northern Democrats to regain control of the federal government. That is why the Party promoted black suffrage in the South. Since 40% of the population in the former Confederate states was black, Republicans realized they could set-up puppet regimes in the region by giving blacks the right to vote and by disfranchising former Confederates.
As a result, despite being a popular war hero Grant won only a minority of America’s white popular vote when he was first elected President in 1868 notwithstanding that three Southern states were not allowed to vote at all because they had not yet formed Republican-controlled vassal governments. Moreover, before Grant joined the Republican Party in 1868, he was critical of Southern blacks. Late in 1865, for example, he reported to President Andrew Johnson that the ex-slaves in Virginia and North Carolina were retarding economic recovery in those states by refusing to work even though the war had ended seven months earlier.
Second, Grant’s presumed motivations for suppressing the KKK are dubious. Consider the experience of Amos Akerman, his second Attorney General. Akerman was the most vigorous of Grant’s attorneys general in prosecuting the Ku Klux Klan. In order to expedite prosecutions, he expanded the powers of the then newly created federal Justice Department. About six hundred Klan members were ultimately convicted.
Yet Grant abruptly asked Akerman to resign in December 1871. Partly at the prompting of Secretary of State Hamilton Fish, Grant had misgivings about Akerman’s “obsession” with the Klan.
Perhaps more importantly, Akerman also frustrated important Northern capitalists. He was, for example, critical of the questionable terms under which railroads often qualified for federal subsidies. In June 1871 he had denied land and bond grants to the Union Pacific Railroad— a railroad which had given Crédit Mobilier lucrative contracts to build the line. Significantly, Grant’s Vice President had accepted bribes from Crédit Mobilier even though Hillsdale’s Carrington was seemingly unaware of this when he told the podcast interviewer that he did not know why Grant changed VPs in his second term reelection campaign.
Shortly before resigning Akerman confronted the previous attorney general, Ebenezer Hoar, when the latter was representing a railroad client’s land grant claims. Akerman told Hoar that the client had not completed the work required to qualify for the grants. Nearly simultaneously Interior Secretary Columbus Delano complained to President Grant that Akerman had annoyed railroad moguls Collis Huntington and Jay Gould with rulings unfavorable to their interests. Whether at the urging of Fish, Delano, or Hoar, Grant replaced Akerman with Oregon’s George Williams who later resigned under bribery accusations, as did Delano. The New York World reported in January 1872 that Williams’s appointment was essentially a triumph for the Pacific Railroads.
Third, as the Akerman episode suggests, Grant’s administration was plagued by corruption and Grant’s own self-serving conduct probably encouraged it. Contrary to the Hillsdale belief, Grant and his wife apparently believed that he deserved the office as a reward of winning the Civil War. He did not accept the nomination out of a burning desire to serve the country as Hillsdale indicates. After Appomattox, Grant was an eager recipient of valuable gifts which he would, as President, reciprocate with patronage appointments.
Between 1865 and 1869 inclusive, donors bought—or gave him enough money to buy—a total of four homes in Galena, Illinois, Philadelphia, Washington and Long Branch, New Jersey.
One of the seven donors of the 27-room Long Branch “cottage” was Tom Murphy, a notorious supplier of shoddy merchandise to the Union army during the Civil War. Grant appointed Murphy as customs collector for the Port of New York where three-fourths of America’s tariffs were paid. It was the most lucrative patronage assignment available in the federal government.
