The Man Who Saved the Union (64 page)

Grant inherited the Indian war when he became general-in-chief, but not until the struggle with the South ended did he pay much attention to the conflict on the Plains. In the summer of 1865 he sent Sherman to command the army forces in the West from headquarters at St. Louis; he typically worked through Sherman but occasionally received communications from the front. “
I want men,” Colonel
Henry Carrington demanded from Fort Phil Kearny in the wake of the Fetterman debacle. “I must have reinforcements and the best of arms.” Carrington related the grim details of the defeat and declared that if Grant didn’t send men and weapons the country must expect more of what Fetterman and his men had suffered. “Any remissness will result in mutilation and butchery beyond precedent.”

Grant was willing to reinforce the western army, but he insisted on doing so as part of a deliberate strategy. Sherman had proposed dividing the West into separate districts for whites and Indians. The Sioux would be kept north of the Platte, west of the Missouri and east of the road to Montana. “
All Sioux found outside of these limits without a written pass from some military commander defining clearly their object should be dealt with summarily,” Sherman wrote Grant. The Arapaho, Cheyenne and other tribes would have their own districts. “This would leave for our people exclusively the use of the wide belt, east and west, between the Platte and the Arkansas, in which lie the two great railroads and over which passes the bulk of travel to the mountain territories. As long as these Indians can hunt the buffalo and antelope within the described limits”—of the white zone—“we will have the depredations of last summer and, worse yet, the exaggerations of danger raised by our own people, often for a very base purpose.”

Grant forwarded Sherman’s plan to the War Department. He endorsed the recommendations, provided that they didn’t conflict with existing treaty obligations. “
The protection of the Pacific railroad, so that not only the portion already completed shall be entirely safe, but that the portion yet to be constructed shall in no way be delayed, either by actual or apprehended danger, is indispensable,” he declared.

Grant and Sherman viewed the struggle for the Plains through their experience of the struggle for the Union. Railroads were critical; protecting the lines of communication and transport took precedence over nearly
everything else. Commerce came a distant second. Grant perceived the agents licensed by the Indian Bureau of the Department of the Interior as being much like the rogue traders of the Civil War. They put personal profit before the nation’s interest, to the point of selling the Indians the weapons they used against the federal soldiers. Grant judged this intolerable, and he bent every effort to bring the traders under control of the military. “
The Indian Bureau should be transferred to the War Department,” he told Sherman. “And Indian agencies, from among civilians, abolished.… No license should be given to traders among them.” The army would then strictly regulate what goods might be sold to the Indians. “Keeping arms and munitions from them, trade in all other articles would weaken them more rapidly than campaigns.”

Grant made the same argument more sharply and more politically to
Edwin Stanton, at that time still secretary of war. Grant knew that the current regime of Indian agents had friends in Washington who would resist the changes he espoused. But he told Stanton that the government needed to make up its mind. “
If the present practice is to be continued, I do not see that any course is left open to us but to withdraw our troops to the settlements, and call upon Congress to provide means and troops to carry on formidable hostilities against the Indians until all the Indians or all the whites upon the Great Plains and between the settlements on the Missouri and the Pacific slope are exterminated.”

He took his case to the president and the cabinet. “
War exists,” he told Johnson and the secretaries. “We cannot fight them with one branch of the government and equip and feed them with another, with any kind of justice to those who are called upon to expose their lives,” he said. He was asked whether supplies ought to be withheld from peaceable Indians. “The military must be the judge of who are peaceable Indians,” he replied.

The judgment of some military men could be harsh. The spring of 1867 brought a new round of raids by the Plains tribes upon white forts and settlements; Sherman concluded that the chances of coexistence were slim. “
This conflict of authority will exist as long as the Indians exist, for their ways are different from our ways,” he wrote Grant. “Either they or we must be masters on the Plains.” Sherman contended that right and wrong had little to do with the matter. “I have no doubt that our people have committed grievous wrong to the Indians, and I wish I could punish them. But it is impracticable.” The offenders had their political sponsors against whom a mere soldier would only break his lance. The alternatives
were plain and undeniable. “Both races cannot use this country in common.… One or the other must withdraw.”

Grant wasn’t prepared to agree. When the
Johnson administration refused to rein in the traders and Congress declined to increase appropriations for western defense, Grant called for a retreat from the most exposed western positions, the forts in the valley of the Powder River. “
It will be well to prepare at once for the abandonment of the posts Phil Kearny, Reno, and Fetterman, and to make all the capital with the Indians that can be made out of the change,” he wrote Sherman. He told Sherman to prepare the evacuation at once, lest matters on the ground force the army’s hand. “I fear that, by delay, the Indians may commence hostilities and make it impossible for us to give them up.” To Stanton, Grant again spoke more politically. He identified the forts he wished to evacuate and explained that the ground they occupied was more important to the Indians than to the whites. “
These posts are kept up at great expense and without any benefit,” he said. Prudence called for their abandonment.

Even as he urged retreat, Grant added his voice to those calling for negotiations with the Indians. He tapped Sherman to head a peace commission. Sherman had to be talked into the job, having traveled to Fort Laramie the previous autumn to meet with leaders of the Sioux, only for
Red Cloud to boycott the talks. The chief sent a message that there was nothing to negotiate until the whites left the Powder River. “
I did not first commence the spilling of blood,” he said. “If the Great Father kept the white men out of my country, peace would last forever. But if they disturb me, there will be no peace.… I mean to keep this land.”

Grant told Sherman to try again. “
Your peace commission may accomplish a great deal of good, beside that of collecting the Indians on reservations, by attracting the attention of Indians during the season practicable for making war, and also of our white people, who never seem to be satisfied without hostilities with them.” Talking was preferable to fighting. “It is much better to support a peace commission than a campaign against Indians.”

Sherman consented, only to be frustrated again. Once more Red Cloud stayed away. He sent another message: “
We are on the mountains looking down on the soldiers and the forts. When we see the soldiers moving away and the forts abandoned, then I will come down and talk.”

Sherman left muttering at the stubbornness of the Sioux. But Red Cloud got what he wanted. In the summer of 1868, after Congress
accepted Grant’s calls for retrenchment, the army pulled out of the Powder River forts. Red Cloud led his warriors down from the mountains and into the forts, which he burned to the ground. He proceeded to Fort Laramie and signed a treaty Sherman had prepared. “
The Government of the United States desires peace, and its honor is hereby pledged to keep it,” the treaty said. “The Indians desire peace, and they now pledge their honor to maintain it.”

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T
HOUGH THE IMPEACHMENT EFFORT FAILED TO REMOVE
J
OHNSON
from office, it confirmed congressional control of reconstruction. The president bowed to the inevitable and began to enforce the laws he had lately condemned, and the Radicals pushed ahead with the writing of Republican-friendly constitutions for the Southern states. Their haste to do justice to the former slaves was inspired by their historical sense that injustice had festered far too long in America and their political sense that if Republican-controlled Southern states could be readmitted in time for the 1868 presidential election, the electoral votes of those states would guarantee a Republican victory.

The most controversial question at the Republican convention was how severely to criticize
Andrew Johnson—a question that proved not very controversial at all. “
We profoundly deplore the untimely and tragic death of
Abraham Lincoln,” the platform declared, “and regret the accession of Andrew Johnson to the Presidency, who has acted treacherously to the people who elected him and the cause he was pledged to support; has usurped high legislative and judicial functions; has refused to execute the laws”—and so on, through a condemnation that culminated in a correct but misleading verdict: “and has been justly impeached for high crimes and misdemeanors, and properly pronounced guilty thereof by the vote of thirty-five senators.”

The easy part was nominating Grant. He hadn’t campaigned at all, and no one in particular had campaigned on his behalf. The delegates simply assumed that the hero of the war would make an irresistible candidate. “
It would hardly seem that the Convention had met for the purpose of nominating a candidate for President, so little is that office mentioned
in the canvass going on,” a reporter who reached Chicago with the delegates said on Monday, May 18. “
Grant’s name occurs to no one save as a positively fixed result, and the only occasion when it will be prominently in the mouths of his friends is when he is nominated by acclamation, which will be done by Thursday certainly, if not sooner.” The reporter added disappointedly: “This detracts in a great measure from the excitement and interest usually attending the nomination.”

No other candidate challenged Grant; if one had, there might have been a riot, or perhaps a mutiny. A gathering of Union veterans took place in Chicago simultaneous with the Republican convention; the soldiers swapped battle tales and convinced themselves that none other than their old commander must now become the country’s commander in chief. They passed a unanimous resolution to this effect and marched to the Republican convention to help the delegates there reach the same conclusion. At times it was hard to distinguish between the two groups. The temporary chairman of the Republican convention was Union general
Carl Schurz, who introduced the permanent chairman, General
Joseph Hawley. General
John Logan placed Grant’s name in nomination. Scores more of the delegates had been lesser Union officers. The convention hardly required the prompting from the veterans; it unanimously approved Grant’s nomination on the first ballot.

Grant received word at Washington. Though he hadn’t sought the nomination, he could read the newspapers and the political tea leaves as well as anyone and wasn’t surprised. “
The proceedings of the convention were marked with wisdom, moderation and patriotism, and, I believe, express the feelings of the great mass of those who sustained the country through its recent trials,” he wrote by way of reply, complimenting the delegates and himself in a single sentence. He distanced himself from Johnson, saying, “If elected to the office of President of the United States it will be my endeavor to administer all the laws, in good faith.” He avoided specifics. “In times like the present it is impossible, or at least eminently improper, to lay down a policy to be adhered to, right or wrong, through an administration of four years. New political issues, not foreseen, are constantly arising; the views of the public on old ones are constantly changing, and a purely administrative officer should always be free to execute the will of the people.” He embraced tradition and essential values. “Peace, and universal prosperity, its sequence, with economy of administration, will lighten the burden of taxation, while it constantly reduces the national debt.” He closed with four words that summarized
the mood of the country and made the general election almost pro forma: “Let us have peace.”

“I
have seen in the papers the notice of your nomination and acceptance,” William Sherman wrote Grant. “I feel a little strange, though this was a foregone conclusion. If you want the office of course I want you to have it, and now that you have accepted the nomination of course you must succeed.” But Sherman couldn’t help thinking that Grant was entering a world far removed from that in which they both had found their calling in life. “It is a sacrifice on your part, but one which I doubt not you feel forced to make.”

“
You understand my position perfectly,” Grant replied. “It is one I would not occupy for any mere personal consideration, but, from the nature of the contest since the close of active hostilities, I have been forced into it in spite of myself.” He still disdained politics, and he entered the political arena only to preserve the values he had served in the army. “I could not back down without, as it seems to me, leaving the contest for power for the next four years between mere trading politicians, the elevation of whom, no matter which party won, would lose to us, largely, the results of the costly war which we have gone through.”

T
he Democrats gathered in New York City in early July. Their convention was a test of endurance; not till the twenty-second ballot did
Horatio Seymour, the New York governor, emerge victorious. Seymour wasn’t an inspiring candidate; the survivors of bruising conventions often survive precisely because they inspire few strong emotions. But the convention paired him with
Francis Blair of Missouri, the Union hero of the fight for St. Louis. Blair had been a Jacksonian in youth (his father was Old Hickory’s chief propagandist), yet he grew up to be a Free-Soiler and then a Republican. After foiling the Confederate plot against St. Louis, he rose to the rank of major general under William Sherman. He parted ways with the Republicans after the war and returned to his Democratic roots, condemning the Republican reconstruction policies for trampling the rights of the states, subordinating whites to blacks and fastening alien regimes on Southern society. He won the vice presidential nomination by virtue of an open letter published on the eve of the
1868 convention, in which he called for executive nullification of the Republican reconstruction
acts—that is, for more of what had prompted the
impeachment of Andrew
Johnson. “
The reconstruction policy of the Radicals will be complete before the next election,” Blair said. “The States so long excluded will have been admitted; negro suffrage established, and the carpet-baggers installed in their seats in both branches of Congress.… We cannot, therefore, undo the Radical plan of reconstruction by Congressional action.” So what were the Democrats to do? “There is but one way to restore the Government and the constitution, and that is for the President-elect to declare these acts null and void, compel the army to undo its usurpations at the South, disperse the carpet-bag State Governments, allow the white people to reorganize their own Governments and elect Senators and Representatives.” The convention must focus entirely on reconstruction. “This is the real and only question which we should allow to control us: Shall we submit to the usurpations by which the Government has been overthrown, or shall we exert ourselves for its full and complete restoration?” Blair supplied the answer: “We must restore the constitution.… We must have a President who will execute the will of the people by trampling into dust the usurpations of Congress known as the Reconstruction acts.”