A Republic No More. Jay Cost

more so than their northern counterparts. These carpetbagger and scalawag Republicans were shunned from mainstream southern society, making public jobs their only opportunities for gainful employment, and making civil servants even more avaricious.²⁷ Moreover, rings of businessmen and officeholders who conspired to bilk the government regularly captured Republican-led governments in the South. For instance, a ring headed by Milton Littlefield, a former union general, and businessman George Swepson, an advisor to the governor of North Carolina, distributed about $200,000 in bribes to Tar Heel State legislators to obtain millions of dollars for new railroad lines. But instead of spending the money to do what they promised, they used it to buy stock in other railroads, speculate in state bonds, further their political connections, and even take a lavish tour of Europe. In the end, of course, the railroad was never built.²⁸

      The corrupted South was also the site for the greatest electoral fraud in the country in 1876. While Democrat Samuel Tilden won a comfortable majority in the nationwide presidential vote (thanks to suppression of the black vote in the South by Democrats), the vote in three southern states—South Carolina, Florida, and Louisiana—was close enough for Republicans to contest. The GOP probably won South Carolina, and Florida was genuinely too close to call, but Republican-run voting boards in Louisiana wiped out a six thousand–vote advantage for Tilden and ended up reporting a Rutherford Hayes victory of several thousand votes.²⁹

      Grant was not directly implicated in any of these scandals, but there is a pattern of presidential diffidence that is undeniable and damning. Too loyal to his friends, too sympathetic to old wartime buddies, too much in awe of men of wealth, too lax in the day-to-day business of governance, Grant was not so much guilty of sins of commission, but sins of omission. His overawing public stature would have given him political cover to reshape and reform the body politic, but Grant refused to do it. The result was that the sorts of frauds that had periodically marred the body politic from the Founding until the Civil War all seemed to happen at once, and in a much more dreadful way. If Lincoln’s tenure represented the potential good that a natural aristocrat could do with the tools of corruption, Grant’s demonstrated what happens if a man of immense natural talents instead chose not to do anything.

      Grant’s laxity in the executive branch had a profound effect on the body politic. In 1872, it sparked a division within the Republican ranks, as a faction of Liberal Republicans separated from the rest of the party to back the candidacy of publisher Horace Greeley, who also received the endorsement of the Democrats. While this challenge went nowhere—Grant slightly improved on his margin of 1868, despite the suppression of pro-Grant African Americans in the South—it presaged a split that would develop within the Republican Party. In time, a large number of Republicans would reject Grantism. These “Half-Breeds,” as they would be known, would clash with Grant’s Stalwart faction in the nomination battles of 1876, 1880, and 1884. Meanwhile, the corruption issue contributed to the Democratic rebound of 1874, when the party regained control of the House of Representatives for the first time since 1858. For the next twenty years, the Democrats would control at least one branch of Congress or the presidency for every cycle except for a brief Republican resurgence in 1888.

      Grant’s Stalwart faction did not merely represent a diehard clique of supporters, although they most certainly were that. At the 1880 convention, for instance, there was an effort to renominate Grant for an unprecedented third term. The effort lost steam as the anti-Grant forces coalesced around James Garfield of Ohio. Even so, 306 delegates—“the Immortal 306” as they were known—backed Grant on every ballot, an unusual twist, as historically a successful dark horse like Garfield usually enjoys a stampede in his direction at the end. The Stalwarts, embodied by the Immortal 306, were also the political beneficiaries of Grant’s patronage policies. A look at the final roll call in the 1880 nomination is illustrative. Nearly 40 percent of these delegates came from the eleven states of the former Confederacy; the Republican Party in these states benefited enormously from Grant’s military Reconstruction and his distribution of patronage. Roughly the same number came from just three states: Illinois, New York, and Pennsylvania. Not coincidentally, all three developed robust statewide machines, akin to Van Buren’s Albany Regency, thanks to Grant’s patronage policies.³⁰

      Actually, to say that Grant had a patronage policy is somewhat of a misnomer. Whereas other presidents had used patronage to manage their coalitions in pursuit of reelection or favored policies, Grant essentially ceded control of patronage to the dominant personalities of the Senate. The Tenure of Office Act bound the president to listen to the Senate, but as Johnson (and, for that matter, Grant’s successors) demonstrated, the president could at least put up a robust fight for the sake of the appointment power. But not Grant. After his initial skirmish over the Tenure of Office Act, he backed down and effectively handed over much of the patronage power to a new class of senatorial satraps. The Senate, in turn, was transformed from the world’s greatest deliberative body—as it was when Henry Clay, John C. Calhoun, and Daniel Webster debated the great issues of their day—into the meeting place of state party bosses.³¹

      Adams best captures the unmatched power of the Senate bosses in The Education of Henry Adams:

      [O]ne day when Adams was pleading with a Cabinet officer for patience and tact in dealing with Representatives, the Secretary impatiently broke out: “You can’t use tact with a Congressman! A Congressman is a hog! You must take a stick and hit him on the snout!” . . . He had to ask: “If a Congressman is a hog, what is a Senator?” This innocent question, put in a candid spirit, petrified any executive officer that ever sat a week in his office. Even Adams admitted that Senators passed belief. . . . Great leaders, like Sumner and Conkling, could not be burlesqued; they were more grotesque than ridicule could make them. . . . They did permanent and terrible mischief. . . . The most troublesome task of a reform President was that of bringing the Senate back to decency.³²

      Grant was not such a reform President, as Adams well knew. Little wonder that the machines these senators controlled stayed with Grant until the final ballot in 1880.

      Who were these bosses? There was Oliver Morton of Indiana, an initial organizer of the Republican Party. A paralytic who had to be carried into the Senate chamber, he nevertheless was a shrewd political operative who used patronage, contracts, and licenses—all the tools of mid-nineteenth–century corruption—to build a machine in what was at the time the most uncertain of northern swing states. According to one local newspaper, “Morton ran the party . . . as a school master ran his school. He cared little whether his orders were liked or not, so long as they were obeyed. He controlled the politicians as a showman controlled his puppets.”³³

      There was Zachariah Chandler of Michigan, of whom one early twentieth-century historian writes: