The Man Who Saved the Union (77 page)

The regulars rallied to Grant at the Republican convention, held in Philadelphia, where they renominated him unanimously. Yet they weren’t insensitive to the complaints of their opponents, and they chose to replace
Schuyler Colfax as Grant’s running mate with Henry Wilson. Delegate
Edwards Pierrepont, who would become Grant’s attorney general, recounted the spirit and reasoning of the convention. “
The wild enthusiasm with which your name was hailed at Philadelphia is most gratifying and is the harbinger of a November victory,” Pierrepont wrote Grant. “The nomination of Wilson is well. It gives new life by awakening new hopes.… People like change and they must have new hopes.… I am glad that Colfax was not nominated, though I like him; I am glad simply because it proves to the people that all will not run in the same old ruts. New life, new hopes this people need.… If they were in Paradise, they would demand something that looked like progress and novelty.”

Grant had no reason to dispute the judgment of the convention. “
How do you like the substitution of Wilson for Colfax?” a correspondent who had followed him to Long Branch inquired. Grant replied tactfully: “The idea seems to have been to have the two candidates”—Wilson and himself—“from different sections of the country. Otherwise there is no preference between the two men”—Wilson and Colfax. “Personally
I have a great affection for both Wilson and Colfax. Mr. Colfax, so far through our term, has been a firm friend, and we have always entertained the most affectionate relations toward one another.”

Greeley and Grant’s other critics, elaborating on Sumner’s charges of
Caesarism, suggested that Grant sought to be president for life; Grant responded in his formal acceptance of the
Republican nomination.
He thanked the convention for the renewed vote of confidence and expressed hope that a second term would benefit from the lessons of the first. “
Experience may guide me in avoiding mistakes inevitable with novices in all professions and all occupations,” he said. He continued: “When relieved from the responsibilities of my present trust, by the election of a successor, whether it be at the end of this term or next, I hope to leave to him as executive a country at peace within its own borders, at peace with outside nations, with a credit at home and abroad, and without embarrassing questions to threaten its future prosperity.”

This wasn’t the unequivocal no-third-term promise his opponents sought, but it quieted most concerns on that point. Grant kept out of the campaign almost as much as he had four years earlier. He allowed himself a modest rejoinder to Sumner in an interview with a correspondent from the
Associated Press. As the correspondent reported: “
The conversation turning on the remark of Senator Sumner to the effect that Greeley is a better friend to the black man than President Grant, the President replied that he never pretended to be, as he had repeatedly said, an original abolitionist; but he favored emancipation as a war measure. When this was secured, he thought the ballot should be conferred to make the gift complete and to place those who had been liberated in full possession of the rights of freemen.… While he had no unkind words to utter concerning Senator Sumner, he was perfectly willing to place his acts against Senator Sumner’s words.”

Another reporter caught Grant at a public reception in upstate New York, where he and Julia had taken the younger children for a holiday. He reflected on the past and future. “
I was not anxious to be president a second term, but I consented to receive the nomination simply because I thought that was the best way of discovering whether my countrymen, or the majority of them, really believed all that was alleged against my administration and against myself personally,” he told the reporter. “The asperities of an election campaign will give my political opponents and my personal enemies an opportunity and an excuse to say all that can be
said against me. That opportunity I do not grudge them, and I depend on the people to rebuke or to endorse me, as they see fit.” Of course, in making their decision on him, the people would render a larger verdict. “I am anxious to ascertain whether the Republican party, whose choice I again happen to be, is to have its policy sustained or not.”

Privately Grant exuded confidence. The Liberal Republicans were trying to lure the regulars away; Grant thought they would fail. Referring to a wavering Pennsylvania Republican, the president wrote
Elihu Washburne: “
The Greeleyites will be as liberal in their offers to him as Satan was to our Savior, and with as little ability to pay.” He still guessed that the Greeley campaign would self-destruct. “I do not often indulge in predictions,” he told Washburne, “but I have had a feeling that Greeley might not even be in the field in November.” Greeley’s supporters were growing desperate. “The opposition in this canvass seems to have no capital but slander, abuse and falsehood.” Some of the slanderers were having their malicious words turn back on themselves, as reporters discovered dark corners of their careers. “They have learned that people who live in glass houses should never throw stones.” Grant wished the lesson would rise to the top of the Liberal ranks but supposed it wouldn’t. “The saintly Trumbull and Schurz ought to see the same thing, but their hides are thick and their impudence is sublime.” In this confidential letter Grant didn’t try to conceal his satisfaction that Sumner was being ignored by all three parties. “Poor old Sumner is sick from neglect and the consciousness that he is not all of the Republican party. I very much doubt whether he will ever get to Washington again. If he is not crazy his mind is at least so affected as to disqualify him for the proper discharge of his duties as senator.”

The outlook only improved as the election neared. “
There has been no time from the Baltimore convention to this when I have had the least anxiety,” Grant remarked in September. “The soreheads and thieves who have deserted the Republican party have strengthened it by their departure.” Grant forecast a big victory even if Greeley stayed in the race. “
I do not think he will carry a single Northern state,” he told Washburne. “In the South I give him
Tennessee and
Texas, with
Virginia,
West Virginia,
Maryland,
Kentucky,
Georgia,
Florida, and
Arkansas doubtful, with the chances in our favor in all of them except Maryland.
Missouri might also be added to the doubtful states.”

Grant predicted well. Greeley carried Tennessee, Texas, Kentucky,
Georgia, Maryland and Missouri; Grant carried everything else and smashed his challenger in the popular vote by 56 percent to 44 percent. Grant received 286 electoral votes to what would have been 66 for Greeley if Greeley hadn’t suddenly died three weeks after the election. His electoral votes were scattered among surviving adherents of his various causes.

66

A
MID THE CAMPAIGN
G
RANT MET WITH SEVERAL DELEGATIONS OF
Indians. Representatives of the indigenous peoples had been meeting with American presidents for decades, but in Grant they had greater hope for a sympathetic hearing than they had had in any of his predecessors. Grant remained convinced that the Indian Bureau was the principal cause of the Indian wars, but the bureau had friends on Capitol Hill and he hadn’t been able to remove it from the Interior Department. He did, however, partially circumvent the bureau by creating a new Indian commission, staffed by prominent philanthropists and others of a generous persuasion regarding the Indians. At Grant’s summons the commission met in Washington, and it denounced previous policy in the most scathing terms. “
The history of the government connections with the Indians is a shameful record of broken treaties and unfulfilled promises,” the commissioners declared. “The history of the border white man’s connection with the Indians is a sickening record of murder, outrage, robbery, and wrongs committed by the former as a rule, and occasional savage outbreaks and unspeakably barbarous deeds of retaliation by the latter as the exception.… In our Indian wars, almost without exception, the first aggressions have been made by the white man.” Cynicism fueled aggression in the most pernicious way, the commissioners asserted. “In addition to the class of robbers and outlaws who find impunity in their nefarious pursuits upon the frontiers, there is a large class of professedly reputable men who use every means in their power to bring on Indian wars, for the sake of the profit to be realized from the presence of troops and the expenditure of government funds in their midst. They proclaim death to the Indians at all
times, in words and publications, making no distinction between the innocent and the guilty. They incite the lowest class of men to the perpetration of the darkest deeds against their victims, and, as judges and jurymen, shield them from the justice due to their crimes. Every crime committed by a white man against an Indian is concealed or palliated; every offense committed by one Indian against a white man is borne on the wings of the post or the telegraph to the remotest corner of the land, clothed with all the horrors which the reality or the imagination can throw around it.”

The commission proposed and Grant accepted a new approach to staffing the Indian agencies in the West. Because the Society of Friends, or Quakers, had historically pursued humane policies toward Indians in Pennsylvania, and because as a group they appeared more honest and diligent than the typical Indian agents, Grant’s commission gave the Quakers charge of Indian relations in about half the western agencies. In most of the rest the president replaced the Interior Department’s agents with army officers, believing, as before, that men who would have to fight the Indian wars were less likely to start them.

Grant’s “peace policy” had other facets. It followed the recommendation of William Sherman—and others—to separate the Indians from whites on the frontier, with the former being allotted reservations for their exclusive and presumably perpetual use. On these reservations the Indians would govern themselves, albeit with advice and instruction in the ways of white civilization from the
Quakers and others of an educational and eleemosynary bent.

The peace policy bore fruit. Violence on the Indian frontier diminished, and leading men of the Sioux and other Plains tribes accepted the reservations apportioned to their peoples. Such leaders were the ones who visited Grant in 1872. “
I come without an invitation,” the Sioux chief
Red Cloud told Grant accurately (through an interpreter). “I have come of my own will.” Red Cloud had been impressed by the good faith of Grant’s new agents, and he was willing to give the reservation allotted to his people a try. He explained that he had traveled to Washington to seek a better location for the Indian agency—the headquarters of the Indian agent—assigned to the Sioux reservation. “I have decided a place for my agency,” Red Cloud told Grant. “I want it on the White River, and all the people that are with me want it there. We have found a good creek, and this man”—he nodded to
Jared Daniels, the Indian agent who had accompanied him—“went with me to select that place, and we came
down to let you know of it. That is the only place that is suitable for our agency. I don’t want any other.”

Grant wanted to give Red Cloud what he asked. The Sioux chief exemplified what the peace policy was trying to accomplish: a reconciliation between the Indians and modern ways of life. The old habits—of roaming, hunting and raiding widely and at will—were doomed, Grant believed, and Indians who insisted on clinging to the old habits were likely doomed too. Grant reiterated this point even as he explained that he couldn’t give Red Cloud the location he wanted. “The place you mention is within the limits of
Nebraska,” Grant said. “And if you were to go there it would, probably, not be a great many years before the white people would be encroaching upon you, and then there would have to be another change.” Grant nonetheless invited Red Cloud to speak with the secretary of the interior and the commissioner of Indian affairs. “What they say I will agree to.” He added that he welcomed Red Cloud’s visit and was happy that a large number of Indian braves were accompanying the chief on his tour of the East. “They will find that the whites are in number as the blades of grass upon the hill side, and their number increases every day. They come from other countries in greater numbers, every year, than the whole number of Indians in America.” Red Cloud and his men should share this knowledge with those of their people who still thought war a solution to their problems.

Grant sketched the only future he thought provided a chance for the Indians’ survival. “We want to do for you and your people all we can to advance and help them, and to enable them to become self-supporting,” he told Red Cloud. “The time must come when, with the great growth of population here, the game will be gone, and your people will then have to resort to other means of support. While there is time we would like to teach you new modes of living that will secure you in the future and be a safe means of livelihood. I want to see the Indians get upon land where they can look forward to permanent homes for themselves and their children.” Grant raised the possibility of a voluntary relocation to a gentler region. “If at any time you feel like moving to what is known as Cherokee country”—
Oklahoma—“which is a large territory with an admirable climate, where you would never suffer from the cold and where you could have lands set apart to remain exclusively your own, we would set apart a large tract of land that would belong to you and your children. We would at first build houses for your chiefs and principal men, and send men among your people to instruct them so they could have houses
for shelter. We would send you large herds of cattle and sheep to live upon, and to enable you to raise stock.” Grant offered to supply instruction in the modern ways. “We would send, if you so desire, Indians who have been accustomed to live with white men, who would instruct you in growing and raising stock until you know how to do so yourselves. We would establish schools, so that your children would learn to read and to write, and to speak the English language, the same as white people, and in this way you and your people would be prepared, before the game is gone, to live comfortably and securely.”