The Man Who Saved the Union (67 page)

“
I cannot,” Fish telegraphed back. “I will write by mail this afternoon and explain why.” Following lunch he continued: “Your letter reached me at a late hour this morning. I immediately sent an answer by telegraph and hope that it reached you in time for any action you may desire to take today.” Fish expressed his gratitude for the honor of being considered for the secretaryship. “Nothing would give me greater pleasure than to be
associated with your Administration, and to give the best of my humble abilities to aid in advancing the high objects which are the aim of your thoughts and your hopes and to which the country looks hopefully and confidently.” But he had to decline. “There are pressing private and family considerations which oppose a removal to or residence in Washington. My wife’s health forbids it.”

But Fish had moved too slowly. “
Not receiving your dispatch until about 1:50 p.m., I sent your appointment of Secretary of State to the Senate,” Grant replied. “I sent to the Senate to withdraw but was too late.” Grant appealed to the support Fish professed for the new administration. “Let me beg of you now, to avoid another break, to accept for the present, and should you not like the position you can withdraw after the adjournment of Congress.”

Grant’s unwillingness to let Fish decline was characteristic, reflecting his belief that the country had a legitimate call on the services of its talented men, in peace as in war. He himself had overcome his aversion to politics and let himself be drafted for president; Fish could certainly accept the lesser responsibilities of running the State Department. Grant’s insistence also reflected his own immediate needs. As he told Fish, he didn’t want another fumble like that with Stewart.

He set friends and allies to work on Fish. “
You have exceptional qualifications for the position,”
Elihu Washburne wrote him; Fish simply must answer the president’s call.
Orville Babcock, a Grant aide from the war now serving as presidential secretary, explained to Fish that the country could not possibly do without his services.

Fish found himself outflanked. “
I am ‘in for it,’ and must take the consequences,” he wrote his wife.

G
rant’s cabinet choices elicited praise from Republican newspapers. “
The Cabinet is a surprise to most people,” the
Boston
Journal
observed. “It will, however, not only stand the severest scrutiny but it makes a good impression at the outset.” The
Baltimore
American
declared: “The Cabinet as a whole is a strong one and we believe will secure the approval of the Republican party and the confidence of the country.” The
Trenton
Gazette
said, “This Cabinet will give every satisfaction not only to Republicans but to candid Democrats.” The
Springfield
Republican
thought Lincoln himself could have done little better in choosing advisers. “No halting or half-faced men are among them; no men of mere theories and crotchets;
and none of whom any section of the country need be ashamed,” Lincoln’s hometown journal declared.

Democratic papers were predictably less enthusiastic. “We hope for the best from the new Administration,” the
Troy Press
of New York opined. “We believe in its honesty, but we fear that there is a strong feeling in the mind of the President that the Government can be well conducted on a sort of strategic, military plan.” The
Baltimore
Gazette
examined the list of secretaries and grumbled: “There is not one among them who bears an established character for disinterestedness, or who is entitled to be classed among statesmen.”

John Bigelow, a well-connected New York Republican, thought the president’s choices would be measured by his expectations of the secretaries. “
The Cabinet is not strong, but it is respectable,” Bigelow wrote a friend. “Whether it lasts or goes to pieces depends upon Grant’s purpose in selecting it. If he has a policy and wanted men merely for instruments to put it into operation, it is admirably chosen. If he wants responsible ministers he has not got them.”

T
he selection of the cabinet intensified the clamor for lesser places. Each appointment Grant made disappointed a dozen aspirants who felt equally worthy. To a man who had been told by an acquaintance that he was in line for a plum post, Grant wrote: “
There was nothing in what I said to justify him coming to such a conclusion except the warmth with which I defended you against the charge of obscurity.” He let the man down gently. “The object in my writing now is to state that I have often thought of you in that connection, and that there is no one in the world who would be more agreeable to me than yourself. I had, however, come to the conclusion that it would be unjust to ask you to leave your business to take a place of so much harassment in your present health.” To his sister he was more candid. “
I scarcely get one moment alone,” he wrote Mary. “Office-seeking in this country, I regret to say, is getting to be one of the industries of the age. It gives me no peace.”

The constant pounding provoked one of Grant’s migraines; for three days he turned away all visitors. But in early April he had to resume work, for Congress was about to conclude its short session and adjourn till December. The legislature’s single noteworthy accomplishment had been a pledge to pay the
federal debt in gold, following Grant’s inaugural recommendation. Grant signed the measure and urged another matter
upon the lawmakers. “
There is one subject which concerns so deeply the welfare of the country that I deem it my duty to bring it before you,” he declared in a special message. The time had come for military reconstruction to end. Grant made no apology for the past use of force in the South. “The authority of the United States, which has been vindicated and established by its military power, must undoubtedly be asserted for the absolute protection of all its citizens in the full enjoyment of the freedom and security which is the object of a republican government.” Yet military force was a wasting asset in a democracy. “Whenever the people of a rebellious State are ready to enter in good faith upon the accomplishment of this object, in entire conformity with the constitutional authority of Congress, it is certainly desirable that all causes of irritation should be removed as promptly as possible.” Virginia had held a convention that wrote a new constitution for the state; Grant recommended that Congress authorize an election to ratify the constitution and allow for Virginia’s full return to the federal Union. Mississippi had reached a similar stage and should receive similar treatment.

Grant’s message provoked debate in Congress.
Radical Republicans wanted to condition the return of Virginia and Mississippi on the ratification by those states of the
Fifteenth Amendment. Moderates asserted that the Constitution was too important to be amended by such strong-arm tactics. A few Republicans noted softly that their constituents weren’t crazy about letting Negroes vote outside the South.

The Radicals carried the day, and the legislature passed a new reconstruction law giving Grant the authority to call elections in Virginia and Mississippi—and
Texas at the appropriate time—after those states had ratified the Fifteenth Amendment.

T
he departure of Congress left Grant relatively little to do. Nineteenth-century presidents took their lead from the legislature in lawmaking, and they delegated to customs agents, Treasury clerks and other employees of the executive branch the quotidian tasks of the federal government, chiefly collecting revenues and supervising spending. Absent war or national crisis, which mobilized the president’s authority as commander in chief, the presidency was a seasonal job.

Grant accepted the tradition and, following the lawmakers’ return to their homes, contented himself issuing a few executive orders. One that had lasting importance controlled compensation of federal workers.
Congress had mandated an eight-hour day for workers employed by the government or on its behalf, but the law lacked teeth in not preventing government agencies or private contractors from reducing pay when they reduced hours. Grant made the eight-hour mandate meaningful for workers by declaring that the shortened day must not result in diminished wages.

By early July he had accomplished all he could accomplish at the capital. “
I leave here tomorrow for Long Branch and the North, to be gone all summer,” he wrote
Adam Badeau. Long Branch was a town on the New Jersey shore that Grant would make his recurrent summer headquarters. He told Badeau he was satisfied with his first months in office. “Public affairs look to me to be progressing very favorably. The revenues of the country are being collected as they have not been before, and expenditures are looked after more carefully.… The first thing, it seems to me, is to establish the credit of the country.” If he could pay down the debt and balance the books, he would be happy. “This is policy enough for the present.”

59

A
BEL
C
ORBIN, HAVING LOST HIS WIFE, WAS LOOKING FOR ANOTHER IN
the spring of 1869. The president’s sister Virginia, never having married, was looking for a husband. Their age difference—
Corbin was sixty-one, Jennie Grant thirty-seven—provoked comment, as did the fact that he had evinced little interest in her before her brother’s election. Corbin dabbled in finance with neither great success nor abject failure; he held his place in the small army of speculators seeking the main chance but never quite finding it. Grant didn’t especially approve of the match, but he declined to spoil what looked like Jennie’s last hope of marriage.

Corbin supposed that marrying Jennie would make him more popular. At least he would be mentioned in the papers as a member of the president’s family. He probably didn’t realize that his fame—or notoriety—would evolve so quickly. “
Mr. Corbin is a very shrewd old gentleman,”
Jay Gould told a congressional committee just months later. Gould was one of the most powerful men on Wall Street: a principal in the
Erie Railroad, which he and partner
James Fisk had wrested from transport titan
Cornelius Vanderbilt in a series of raids dubbed the “Erie War,” and a speculator whose slightest gestures caused the markets to gyrate. “I used to meet him occasionally,” Gould said of Corbin. “He owned some real estate in Jersey City, where I was building a horse-railroad through some of our own lands and also through his.”

At one of these meetings Corbin diverted the discussion from real estate. “He asked me how he could make some money,” Gould recalled. “I told him if we were certain we were going to have a big harvest, and if the government would facilitate it, I could see how it could be done.” Gould’s
plan depended on the fluctuating price of gold relative to greenbacks, the Civil War currency in which domestic prices were denominated. A rising price for gold meant a falling price for the greenbacks, in turn implying more-competitive prices internationally for American farm goods, which would flow from the nation’s heartland to the Atlantic coast and generate traffic for Gould’s Erie Railroad. The chain of events would be good for Gould and the Erie and for the farmers, railroad workers, dockhands and many others involved in the export trade. Gould explained this to Corbin; he meanwhile suggested that profits might be garnered in the gold market itself, as part of the broader business.

“He saw at a glance the whole case, and said that he thought it was the true platform to stand on,” Gould recounted of Corbin. “Whatever the government could do legitimately and fairly to facilitate the exportation of breadstuffs, and produce good prices for the products of the West, they ought to do.” Corbin offered to help. “He was anxious that I should see the president and communicate to him my view of the subject.” He said that Gould, as a railroad man, was just the person to make the argument. “He was anxious that I should see the president and talk with him, and he made an appointment for me to do so. I went to Mr. Corbin’s and was introduced to the president.”

Gould caught Grant as the president was heading for Boston to attend a peace jubilee. Gould offered transport on one of the Erie’s steamboats, and Grant accepted. “He was our guest,” Gould told the congressional committee, referring to the boat trip, which he and Jim Fisk joined. “We had supper about nine or ten o’clock going over. At this supper the question came up about the state of the country, the crops, prospects ahead, etc. The president was a listener; the other gentlemen were discussing.” The central question was the government’s role in determining the price of gold. The Treasury held sufficient gold to drive the price down should
Grant and George Boutwell, the Treasury secretary, decide to sell. “Some were in favor of Boutwell’s selling gold, and some were opposed to it. After they had all interchanged their views, someone asked the president what his views were.”

A hush fell over the room. This was the million-dollar question on which Gould’s whole scheme depended. The president spoke slowly, between puffs on his cigar. “He remarked that he thought there was a certain amount of factiousness about the prosperity of the country, and that the bubble might as well be tapped in one way as another,” Gould told the committee.

Grant turned to Gould and asked what he thought of the subject. The financier made his strongest case. “I remarked that I thought if that policy”—bursting the bubble—“was carried out, it would produce great distress, and almost lead to civil war. It would produce strikes among the workmen; and the workshops, to a great extent, would have to be closed.” The president could avert this outcome by doing nothing or by pitching in. “I took the ground that the government ought to let gold alone, and let it find its commercial level—that, as a matter of fact, it”—the government—“ought to facilitate an upward movement of gold.”

Grant offered no encouragement. Gould judged the evening a failure. “We supposed from that conversation that the president was a contractionist,” he told the committee.

Gould persisted. When Grant traveled to Newport in August to visit friends, Gould sent Jim Fisk after him. “
I took a letter of introduction from Mr. Gould, in which it was written that there were three hundred sail of vessels then on the Mediterranean from the Black Sea, with grain to supply the Liverpool market,” Fisk told the congressional committee. “Gold was then about 34”—134 greenback dollars bought 100 gold dollars. “If it continued at that price we had very little chance of carrying forward the crop during the fall. I know that we felt very nervous about it. I talked with General Grant on the subject and endeavored, as far as I could, to convince him that his policy was one that would only bring destruction upon us all.” Grant listened; again he gave no encouragement.