The Man Who Saved the Union (94 page)

Grant avoided such talk but watched Garfield carefully. “
I hope with you that Garfield will give us an administration that will break up the solid South and not pander to the Republican soreheads and bolters,” he wrote a political ally. “He certainly will know that a thousand friends are more deserving of favors at his hands—I should say recognitions—than one ‘holier than thou art’ Republican who votes our ticket only when some objectionable person, hard for the party to carry, is nominated.”

As Garfield formed a cabinet, he solicited Grant’s advice. “
Harmony in the Republican party,” Grant responded, “and at least the support of the whole party of your administration is certainly to be desired.” He had heard that
James Blaine was being considered for secretary of state as a fence-mending measure. Grant confessed that he was torn. “I do not like
the man, have no confidence in his friendship nor in his reliability. But he is—has been—a leading member of the party and has many followers.” Then again, he had many enemies and might prove a disruptive figure in the cabinet. Garfield would have to decide for himself, Grant said. He tendered his best wishes. “There is no member of your own family more desirous of seeing your administration a success than me. The good of the whole country requires harmonious Republican government until all the results of the war are secured.”

Meanwhile Grant gave visibility to issues he feared Garfield would be tempted to ignore.
Rutherford Hayes had bought peace with the South by abandoning African Americans there; Grant strove to recommit the Republican party to their defense. He spoke conspicuously at a benefit concert for the
Colored Citizens’ Association of New York and Brooklyn. “
I sincerely hope with you that the time is not far distant when all the privileges that citizenship carries with it will be accorded you throughout the land without any opposition,” he said. Some Republicans and very many Democrats contended that blacks couldn’t be trusted to vote responsibly; Grant rejected this claim. “I have no fear that the franchise will not be exercised as carefully and judiciously by our fellow citizens of African descent as by any others. Perhaps more care will be used because it is a boon so recently given to your race and therefore prized more highly.” Many blacks were taking exemplary advantage of such opportunities as they found. “I am glad to see in my travels the progress in
education all over the country made by the colored people, even in the South, where the prejudice is the strongest. It is rare to see a colored child lose an opportunity to get a common-school education. Education is the first great step toward the capacity to exercise the new privileges accorded to you wisely and properly. I hope the field may be open to you, regardless of any prejudice which may have heretofore existed.”

84

I
N
J
ANUARY
1881 S
AMUEL
C
LEMENS SUGGESTED THAT
G
RANT WRITE
a book about his life and career. Grant responded skeptically. “
Your kind letter of the 8th came to hand in due time,” he said on the 14th. “I had delayed answering it until this time not because of any doubt as to how to answer it but because of the principal reason I have for not doing what you suggest, namely laziness. The same suggestion you make has been frequently made by others, but never entertained for a moment. In the first place I have always distrusted my ability to write anything that would satisfy myself, and the public would be much more difficult to please. In the second place I am not possessed of the kind of industry necessary to undertake such a work.” Grant noted that
Adam Badeau had been working on a book about his—Grant’s—wartime experiences.
John Russell Young, the
Herald
reporter who had followed him around the world, was compiling a book on that journey. “It would be unfair to them for me to do anything now that would in any way interfere with the sale of their work,” he told
Clemens. “Then too they have done it much better than I could if I was to try.”

But he didn’t want to disappoint Clemens completely. “If I ever settle down in a house of my own I may make notes which some one of my children may use after I am gone.” Nothing before then, however. He closed cordially: “I am very much obliged to you for your kind suggestions and for the friendship which inspires them and will always appreciate both. If you want to see me about this, or any other matter at any time, I beg that you will feel no hesitation in calling. I will always be glad to see you and hear you no matter whether your views and mine agree or not.”

S
till, he had to make a living. Grant joined a group of investors who aimed to do for Mexico what the
Central Pacific and
Union Pacific Railroads had done for the United States. At a dinner at Delmonico’s in New York he called on his own experiences in Mexico and in the American West to expound to
Jay Gould,
Collis Huntington and other railroad men the opportunities Mexico afforded to them, to the United States and to Mexicans themselves. Mexico had gotten past the political turbulence of its first half century of independence and was on a promising path. “
They have thirteen years really of growth,” Grant said. “And I am perfectly satisfied that with the building of railroads and of telegraphs there need be no more apprehension for the safety of capital invested in Mexico than in our own country. The building of railroads will give employment to labor and will give rapid transit from one part of the country to another.… I look for a bright and prosperous and rapid future for Mexico, and it must result in a very large commerce with some part of the world. If we take advantage of the time, it will accrue to the benefit of the United States more than to that of any other country except Mexico, and Mexico will be necessarily more benefited than any other country.”

Grant was sufficiently persuasive that Gould immediately proposed the creation of a committee to effect Grant’s vision. Gould and Huntington were members; Grant was chairman. The
Mexican Southern Railroad Company was chartered in New York in early 1881 and Grant was named company president. He initially accepted neither salary nor ownership; if things worked out he would take compensation later. That spring he traveled to Mexico on the company’s behalf. “
I have long been of the opinion that the United States and Mexico should be the warmest of friends and enjoy the closest commercial relations,” he told a Mexico City audience. The economies of the two countries were complementary, he said, with the United States producing fruits, vegetables and grains of the temperate zone while Mexico cultivated plants of the tropics. By trading with each other, the two countries would keep their gold and silver from flowing out of the hemisphere. Grant understood that some Mexicans perceived American investment as a threat to Mexican sovereignty; where American dollars went, they said, the American flag would follow. To refute this claim Grant cited one of his failures as president.
He briefly recounted his efforts to annex Santo Domingo and explained that although the interests of the two countries recommended annexation and the
Dominican people desired it, the Senate had rejected it. There was a lesson for Mexico: “I am sure that even if it could be shown that all the people of Mexico were in favor of the annexation of a portion of their territory to the United States, it would still be rejected. We want no more land. We do want to improve what we have, and we want to see our neighbors improve and grow so strong that the designs of any other country could not endanger them.”

Grant’s visit led to a contract between the Mexican government and the Mexican Southern company, which the Mexican congress approved in May 1881. Some of the principals in Grant’s firm wanted subsidies from the Mexican government like those the Union Pacific and Central Pacific had received from the American government, and the Mexican government appeared willing to supply them. But Grant, recalling the
Crédit Mobilier scandal, rejected the subsidies. Investment monies for the railroad would be better spent, he said, if they came from private sources.

G
rant’s hopes for harmony among the Republicans foundered in a fight between the
James Blaine and
Roscoe Conkling factions of the party. Garfield sided with Blaine, whom he made secretary of state over Grant’s objection. Conkling took offense and resigned from the Senate, hoping to be reelected with a mandate that would reveal his continuing strength. Grant backed Conkling, mostly from gratitude for the support Conkling had shown him at the
1880 convention, and his backing at times took the negative form of criticism of Garfield. At first he muttered under his breath. “
I am completely disgusted with Garfield’s course,” he wrote
Adam Badeau confidentially. He said he would never again support a dark-horse candidate, a man who slipped to the nomination by stealth and intrigue. Such an approach characterized Garfield’s style of leadership. “Garfield has shown that he is not possessed of the backbone of an angleworm,” Grant told Badeau.

Eventually he aired his complaints to the press. “
Garfield is a man without backbone,” he told a reporter from Pittsburgh. “A man of fine ability but lacking stamina. He wants to please everybody and is afraid of the enmity of all the men around him.” Yet Grant refused to join the
fray. He and the reporter were riding a train from Chicago to New York; the reporter asked if he was going to meet Conkling or otherwise engage directly in the contest with Garfield. “Oh, no,” Grant replied. “I am out of politics except as a citizen who exercises his right to vote and think as he pleases.”

Grant might subsequently have said more against Garfield had
Charles Guiteau, a disappointed office seeker, not shot the president in Washington in July 1881. Grant decried the “
dastardly attempt” on Garfield’s life as a “terrible crime.” The injury was not immediately fatal, and doctors predicted that the president would make a full recovery. Grant had doubts. “
Of course my hopes are all for a favorable result,” he told a reporter. “After the president rallied from the shock I really believed he might recover. But later news yesterday gave me great anxiety. I have known a great many cases of men shot very much in the same way where the ball was lodged where it could not be found. The men would rally after the shock and then suddenly change for the worse, contrary to the expectations of the patient and physicians and then die in a few hours.”

Grant reflected in this interview on the crime and the criminal. “It was simply the act of a lunatic who was disappointed because he couldn’t get what he wanted. I have seen this fellow Guiteau several times. When I was at the Fifth Avenue Hotel last winter he sent his card up to my room one day as I coming from Chicago. My son”—Fred—“who was then on General Sheridan’s staff, happened to be in my room, and I asked him if he knew this Guiteau. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘He is a sort of lawyer and deadbeat in Chicago. Don’t let him come up. If you do he will bore you to death.’ ” Grant sent word that he would not see Guiteau. But Guiteau persisted, following a waiter up to Grant’s room and thrusting his way in. He said he wanted the job of minister to
Austria and needed Grant’s endorsement. Grant refused and finally got him to go away. “The fellow was sharp and a ready talker, and appeared as though he had some education,” Grant observed. “But he was evidently an adventurer, a man I would not trust with anything.”

Grant thought Garfield’s doctors were doing the wrong thing treating the president in Washington at the Executive Mansion. “
During the months of August and September the White House is one of the most unhealthy places in the world,” he observed in September. “He should have been taken from there long ago.” Ultimately the doctors agreed and transported the president to the seaside at Long Branch. But the effort
was too late, or perhaps it was deficient in other respects, for Garfield took a sudden turn for the worse. In the evening of September 19 he died.

Grant had gone to bed by the time the report reached New York. A
Times
reporter roused him for a statement. “
You will please excuse me from a consideration of this sad news at this time,” Grant replied. “It comes with terrible force, and is unexpected. What can I say? There is nothing—absolutely nothing—to be said under circumstances such as these.” In filing his story, the reporter added, “General Grant was weeping bitterly.” Grant’s eldest son, who happened to be visiting, confirmed his father’s dismay. “Colonel Fred Grant said to the
Times
’s reporter that though he had seen his father under many trying circumstances he had never before known him to be so terribly affected.”

The country was affected too. Losing Lincoln to an assassin could be accounted a cost of the Civil War; losing Garfield seemed an indictment of democracy. Had politics sunk so low that the disappointed resorted to lethal force? It was a sobering thought.

One consequence of Garfield’s death was the passage of the kind of
civil service reform Grant had hectored Congress about before finally giving up. The 1883 Pendleton Act established a permanent
Civil Service Commission, similar in spirit and function to the commission Grant had convened, and it made possible the transfer of tens of thousands of federal patronage jobs to a nonpolitical system based on merit.

A second consequence was additional damage to the Republican party. The charitable view of
Chester Arthur was that he wasn’t the worst of the spoilsmen, but no one had considered him presidential material at the time of his nomination for vice president, and the fact that he now
was
president changed few minds. “
I can hardly say I expect much from this administration,” Grant wrote
Adam Badeau. At voters’ first chance to register opinions on the new leadership in Washington, in the congressional elections
of 1882, they delivered a damning verdict. The Democrats gained seventy seats in the House, giving them an overwhelming majority there. “
The defeat was expected, but the magnitude of the defeat was a surprise,” Grant remarked. “It was deserved, and it is to be hoped the lesson will be appreciated.” But he wasn’t counting on it.