• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 166 0

to extricate it and in which his own fortune, such as it was, would soon be consumed. Grant’s presidency was to end in a welter of scandals, none of them directly connected to Grant, but most of them the result of his engaging, but mistaken, loyalty to people who had served in the Grand Army of the Republic during the war, or fast-talking, high-living rogues, or friends, or members of his own or his official or Julia’s family. The names of the scandals alone give some clue to the kind of thing that darkened his final years in the White House—the Whisky Scandal (having to do with the sale of whiskey on a large and remunerative scale without federal tax stamps), and the Indian Trader’s Post Scandal (having to do with the sale and the partitioning of the profits of the lucrative appointments of government trading posts on Indian reservations). A pattern of grift and graft ran through the Grant administration, and though the president was one of the few major figures not to profit from it, he nevertheless seemed unable to do anything to stop it, and he was unwilling to listen to evidence against those he liked or trusted.

It did not help that nobody was happy with the chaos and disarray and sheer brutality of events in the former Confederate states. Under military government blacks began to play a role proportional to their number in state legislatures, but as the states gradually escaped from what they described as “carpetbagger” government, the black freedmen were systematically disenfranchised and prevented from voting by organized campaigns of violence, murder, and lynching, in which the nascent Ku Klux Klan played a large role. In very short order, de facto racial segregation, sharecropping, and political impotence enforced by whites became the substitute for slavery in the South.

Grant was unwilling—again very much like Ike less than a hundred years later—to use federal force to defend the rights of blacks or to challenge the Southern status quo—Grant had won the Civil War but had no interest in refighting it—and at the same time he had no wish to reward former Confederates or unreconstructed racists. He preferred to get the army out of there and leave the Southern states to their own devices, in the hope that time and political realities would produce some form of amelioration of the Southern racial situation without necessarily making blacks the equal of whites. This was, it goes without saying, apostasy to Republicans like Charles Sumner, old abolitionists who could still be stirred by the mention of John Brown, but it seemed like plain common sense to Grant and indeed to much of the country. The destruction of slavery, Grant would later tell that supreme political realist, German chancellor Bismarck, was necessary to end the rebellion and defeat the South, but like most white Americans for the next hundred years, Grant was unwilling to take the next step and accept the former slaves as equals or force the former Confederate states to do so.

(It was typical of the era that the few blacks to enter West Point as cadets, having surmounted almost impossible difficulties intended to keep them out, were persecuted and treated with contempt by the student body and the officer instructors alike. Here was an area in which even a word from Grant might have ended the campaign of discrimination, but it was not forthcoming, and it would not be until the mid–twentieth century that the experiment was tried again.)

Perhaps the brightest spot in Grant’s eight years as president was the marriage of his beloved daughter, Nellie, in the White House. Nellie, to judge from photographs, was pretty, intelligent, and good-humored—she was lucky to have inherited her looks more from her father than her mother—and the Grants were especially gratified when she fell in love with a handsome, elegant young Englishman with the almost too perfect name of Algernon Sartoris, whom she met on a transatlantic steamer. Sartoris was a nephew of the great actress Fanny Kemble, and his family was prosperous, with just enough connections to the aristocracy