RECONSTRUCTION UNDER GRANT.

Before the conventions to nominate candidates for the Presidency met in 1868, I had much intercourse with General Grant, and found him ever modest and determined to steer clear of politics, or at least not permit himself to be used by partisans; and I have no doubt that he was sincere.  But the Radical Satan took him up to the high places and promised him dominion over all in view.  Perhaps none but a divine being can resist such temptation.  He accepted the nomination from the Radicals, and was elected; and though I received friendly messages from him, I did not see him until near the close of his first administration.  As ignorant of civil government as of the characters on the Moabitish stone, President Grant begun badly, and went from bad to worse.  The appointments to office that he made, the associates whom he gathered around him, were astounding.  All his own relatives, all his wife’s relatives, all the relatives of these relatives, to the remotest cousinhood, were quartered on the public treasury.  Never, since King Jamie crossed the Tweed with the hungry Scotch nation at his heels, has the like been seen; and the soul of old Newcastle, greatest of English nepotists, must have turned green with envy.  The influence of this on the public was most disastrous.  Already shortened by the war, the standard of morality, honesty, and right was buried out of sight.

For two or three years I was much in the North, and especially in New York, where I had dear friends.  The war had afforded opportunity and stimulated appetite for reckless speculation.  Vast fortunes had been acquired by new men, destitute of manners, taste, or principles.  The vulgar insolence of wealth held complete possession of public places and carried by storm the citadels of society.  Indeed, society disappeared.  As in the middle ages, to escape pollution, honorable men and refined women (and there are many such in the North) fled to sanctuary and desert, or, like early Christians in the catacombs, met secretly and in fear.  The masses sank into a condition that would disgrace Australian natives, and lost all power of discrimination.

The Vice-President of the United States accepted bribes, and perjured himself in vain to escape exposure.  President Grant wrote him a letter to assure him of his continued esteem and confidence, and this Vice-President has since lectured before “Young Men’s Christian Associations.”  Plunderings by members of the Congress excited no attention so long as they were confined to individuals or corporations.  It was only when they voted themselves money out of taxes paid by the people, that these last growled and frightened some of the statesmen into returning it.  A banker, the pet of the Government, holding the same especial relation to it that the Bank of England held to William of Orange, discovered that “a great national debt was a blessing,” and was commended and rewarded therefor.  With a palace on the shores of the Delaware, this banker owned a summer retreat on a lovely isle amid the waters of Lake Erie.  A pious man, he filled this with many divines, who blessed all his enterprises.  He contributed largely, too, to the support of an influential Christian journal to aid in disseminating truth to Jew, Gentile, and heathen.  The divines and the Christian journal were employed to persuade widows and weak men to purchase his rotten securities, as things too righteous to occasion loss.

The most eloquent preacher in the land, of a race devoted to adoration of negroes, as Hannibal to hatred of Rome, compromised the wife of a member of his congregation.  Discovered by the husband, he groveled before him in humiliation as before “his God” (his own expression).  Brought before the public, he swore that he was innocent, and denied the meaning of his own written words.  The scandal endured for months and gave an opportunity to the metropolitan journals to display their enterprise by furnishing daily and minute reports of all details to their readers.  The influence of the preacher was increased by this.  His congregation flocked to him as the Anabaptists to John of Leyden, and shopkeepers profitably advertised their wares by doubling their subscriptions to augment his salary.  Far from concealing this wound inflicted on his domestic honor, the injured husband proclaimed it from the housetops, clothed himself in it as in a robe of price, and has successfully used it to become a popular lecturer.

To represent the country at the capital of an ancient monarchy, a man was selected whom, it is no abuse of language to declare, Titus Oates after his release from the pillory would have blushed to recognize.  On the eve of his departure, as one may learn from the newspapers of the day, all that was richest and best in New York gathered around a banquet in his honor, congratulated the country to which he was accredited, and lamented the misfortune of their own that it would be deprived, even temporarily, of such virtue.  Another was sent to an empire which is assured by our oft-succeeding envoys that it is the object of our particular affection.  To the aristocracy of the realm this genial person taught the favorite game of the mighty West.  A man of broad views, feeling that diplomatic attentions were due to commons as well as to crown and nobles, he occasionally withdrew himself from the social pleasures of the “West End” to inform the stags of Capel Court of the value of American mines.  Benefactors are ever misjudged.  Aristocracy and the many-antlered have since united to defame him; but Galileo in the dungeon, Pascal by his solitary lamp, More, Sidney, and Russell on the scaffold, will console him; and in the broad bosom of his native Ohio he has found the exception to the rule that prophets are not without honor but in their own country.

The years of Methuselah and the pen of Juvenal would not suffice to exhaust the list, or depict the benighted state into which we had fallen; but it can be asserted of the popular idols of the day that unveiled, they resemble Mokanna, and can each exclaim: 

   “Here, judge if hell, with all its power to damn,
   Can add one curse to the foul thing I am!”

The examples of thousands of pure and upright people in the North were as powerless to mitigate the general corruption as song of seraphim to purify the orgies of harlots and burglars; for they were not in harmony with the brutal passions of the masses.

In Boston, July, 1872, as co-trustees of the fund left by the late Mr. Peabody for the education of the poor in the Southern States, President Grant and I met for the first time since he had accepted the nomination from the Radical party.  He was a candidate for reelection, and much worshiped; and, though cordial with me, his general manner had something of “I am the State.”  Stopping at the same inn, he passed an evening in my room, to which he came alone; and there, avoiding public affairs, we smoked and chatted about the Nueces, Rio Grande, Palo Alto, etc. things twenty-five years agone, when we were youngsters beginning life.  He was reelected in November by a large majority of electoral votes; but the people of Louisiana elected a Democratic Governor and Assembly.  When, in January following, the time of meeting of the Assembly arrived, the country, habituated as it was to violent methods, was startled by the succeeding occurrences.

The night before the Assembly was to meet, the Federal Judge in the city of New Orleans, a drunken reprobate, obtained from the commander of the United States troops a portion of his force, and stationed it in the State House.  In the morning the members elect were refused admittance, and others not elected, many not even candidates during the election, were allowed to enter.  One Packard, Marshal of the Federal Court, a bitter partisan and worthy adjunct of such a judge, had provided for an Assembly to suit himself by giving tickets to his friends, whom the soldiers passed in, excluding the elected members.  The ring-streaked, spotted, and speckled among the cattle and goats, and the brown among the sheep, were turned into the supplanters’ folds, which were filled with lowing herds and bleating flocks, while Laban had neither horn nor hoof.  There was not a solitary return produced in favor of this Packard body, nor of the Governor subsequently installed; but the Radicals asserted that their friends would have been elected had the people voted as they wished, for every negro and some whites in the State upheld their party.  By this time the charming credulity of the negroes had abated, and they answered the statement that slave-drivers were murdering their race in adjacent regions by saying that slave-drivers, at least, did not tell them lies nor steal their money.

All the whites and many of the blacks in Louisiana felt themselves cruelly wronged by the action of the Federal authorities.  Two Assemblies were in session and two Governors claiming power in New Orleans.  Excitement was intense, business arrested, and collision between the parties imminent.  As the Packard faction was supported by Federal troops, the situation looked grave, and a number of worthy people urged me to go to Washington, where my personal relations with the President might secure me access to him.  It was by no means a desirable mission, but duty seemed to require me to undertake it.

Accompanied by Thomas F. Bayard, Senator from Delaware, my first step in Washington was to call on the leader of the Radicals in the Senate, Morton of Indiana, when a long conversation ensued, from which I derived no encouragement.  Senator Morton was the Couthon of his party, and this single interview prepared me for one of his dying utterances to warn the country against the insidious efforts of slave-driving rebels to regain influence in the Government.  The author of the natural history of Ireland would doubtless have welcomed one specimen, by describing which he could have filled out a chapter on snakes; and there is temptation to dwell on the character of Senator Morton as one of the few Radical leaders who kept his hands clean of plunder.  But it may be observed that one absorbing passion excludes all others from the human heart; and the small portion of his being in which disease had left vitality was set on vengeance.  Death has recently clutched him, and would not be denied; and he is bewailed throughout the land as though he had possessed the knightly tenderness of Sir Philip Sidney and the lofty patriotism of Chatham.

The President received me pleasantly, gave much time to the Louisiana difficulty, and, in order to afford himself opportunity for full information, asked me frequently to dine with his immediate family, composed of kindly, worthy people.  I also received attention and hospitality from some members of his Cabinet, who with him seemed desirous to find a remedy for the wrong.  More especially was this true of the Secretary of State, Hamilton Fish, with whom and whose refined family I had an acquaintance.  Of a distinguished Revolutionary race, possessor of a good estate, and with charming, cultivated surroundings, this gentleman seemed the Noah of the political world.  Perhaps his retention in the Cabinet was due to a belief that, under the new and milder dispensation, the presence of one righteous man might avert the doom of Gomorrah.  An exception existed in the person of the Attorney-General, a man, as eminent barristers declare, ignorant of law and self-willed and vulgar.  For some reason he had much influence with the President, who later appointed him Chief Justice of the United States; but the Senatorial gorge, indelicate as it had proved, rose at this, as the easy-shaving barber’s did at the coal-heaver, and rejected him.

Weeks elapsed, during which I felt hopeful from the earnestness manifested in my mission by the President and several of his Cabinet.  Parties were in hostile array in New Orleans, but my friends were restrained by daily reports of the situation at Washington.  Only my opinion that there was some ground for hope could be forwarded.  Conversations at dinner tables or in private interviews with the Executive and his advisers could not, then or since, be repeated; and this of necessity gave room for misconstruction, as will appear.  At length, on the day before the Congress was by law to adjourn, the President sent a message to the Senate, informing that body that, in the event the Congress failed to take action on the Louisiana matter, he should esteem it his duty to uphold the Government created by the Federal Judge.  I left Washington at once, and did not revisit it for nearly four years.

I believe that President Grant was sincere with me, and went as far as he felt it safe.  No doubt the Senatorial hyenas brought him to understand these unspoken words:  “We have supported your acts, confirmed your appointments, protected and whitewashed your friends; but there are bones which we can not give up without showing our teeth, and Louisiana is one of them.”

The failure to obtain relief for the State of my birth, and whose soil covered the remains of all most dear, was sad enough, and the attempt had involved much unpleasant work; but I had my reward.  Downfall of hope, long sustained, was bitter to the people, especially to the leaders expectant of office; and I became an object of distrust.  “Nothing succeeds like success,” and nothing fails like failure, and the world is quite right to denounce it.  The British Ministry shot an admiral for failing to relieve Minorca to encourage others, as Voltaire remarked.  Byng died silent, without plaint, which was best.  The drunken Federal Judge, author of the outrages, was universally condemned, with one exception, of which more anon.  Both branches of the Congress, controlled by Radicals, pronounced his conduct to have been illegal and unjust, and he was driven from the bench with articles of impeachment hanging over him.  Nevertheless, the Government evolved from his unjudicial consciousness was upheld by President Grant with Federal bayonets.

Two years later the people of Louisiana elected an Assembly, a majority of whose members were opposed to the fraudulent Governor, Kellogg.  The President sent United States soldiers into the halls of the Assembly to expel members at the point of the bayonet.  Lieutenant-General Sheridan, the military maid of all (such) work, came especially to superintend this business, and it was now that he expressed the desire to exterminate “banditti.”  The destruction of buildings and food in the Valley of Virginia, to the confusion of the crows, was his Salamanca; but this was his Waterloo, and great was the fame of the Lieutenant-General of the Radicals.

This Governor Kellogg is the Senator recently seated, of whom mention has been made, and, if a lesser quantity than zero be conceivable, with a worse title to the office than he had to that of Governor of Louisiana.  So far as known, he is a commonplace rogue; but his party has always rallied to his support, as the “Tenth Legion” to its eagles.  Indeed, it is difficult to understand the qualities or objects that enlist the devotion and compel the worship of humanity.  Travelers in the Orient tell of majestic fanes, whose mighty walls and countless columns are rich with elaborate carvings.  Hall succeeds hall, each more beautifully wrought than the other, until the innermost, the holy of holies, is reached, and there is found enshrined a shriveled ape.

The sole exception referred to in the case of the drunken Federal Judge was a lawyer of small repute, who had been Democratic in his political tendencies.  Languishing in obscurity, he saw and seized his opportunity, and rushed into print in defense of the Judge and in commendation of the President for upholding such judicial action.  It is of record that this lawyer, in the society of some men of letters, declared Dante to be the author of the Decameron; but one may be ignorant of the Italian poets and thoroughly read in French memoirs.  During the war of the Spanish succession, the Duke of Vendome, filthiest of generals, not excepting Suvaroff, commanded the French army in Italy.  To negotiate protection for their States, the Italian princes sent agents to Vendome; but the agents sent by the Duke of Parma were so insulted by the bestialities of the French commander as to go back to their master without negotiating, and no decent man would consent to return.  A starving little abbe volunteered for the service, and, possessing a special aptitude for baseness, succeeded in his mission.  Thus Alberoni, afterward Cardinal and Prime Minister of Spain, got his foot on the first rung of the ladder of fame.  The details of the story are too gross to repeat, and the Memoirs of the Duke of St. Simon must be consulted for them; but our lawyer assuredly had read them.  Many may imitate Homer, however feebly; one genius originated his epics.

Having entered on this lofty career, our Alberoni stuck to it with the tenacity of a ferret in pursuit of rabbits, and was rewarded, though not at the time nor to the extent he had reason to expect.  The mission to England was promised him by the reigning powers, when, on the very eve of securing his prize, a stick was put in the wheels of his progress, and by a brother’s hand.  Another legal personage, practicing at the same bar, that of New York, and a friend, did the deed.  “Chloe was false, Chloe was common, but constant while possessed”; but here Chloe was without the last quality.  In 1868, General Grant’s election pending, Chloe was affiliated with the Democratic party, and had been chosen one of the captains of its citadel, a sachem of Tammany.  Scenting success for Grant, with the keenness of the vulture for his prey, he attended a Radical meeting and announced his intention to give twenty thousand dollars to the Radical election fund.  This sum appears to have been the market value of a seat in the Cabinet, to which ultimately he was called.  When the English mission became vacant by the resignation of the incumbent, disgusted by British ingratitude, Chloe quitted the Cabinet to take it, and Alberoni was left wearing weeds.  Yet much allowance is due to family affection, the foundation of social organization.  Descended from a noble stock, though under a somewhat different name, Chloe from mystic sources learned that his English relatives pined for his society, and devotion to family ties tempted him to betray his friend.  Subsequently Alberoni was appointed to a more northern country, where he may find congenial society; for, in a despotism tempered only by assassination, the knees of all become pliant before power.

It is pleasant to mark the early steps of nascent ambition.  In the time of the great Napoleon every conscript carried the baton of a marshal in his knapsack; and in our happy land every rogue may be said to have an appointment to office in his pocket.  This is also pleasant.

Since the spring of 1873, when he gave himself up to the worst elements of his party, I have not seen President Grant; but his career suggests some curious reflections to one who has known him for thirty-odd years.  What the waiting-woman promised in jest, Dame Fortune has seriously bestowed on this Malvolio, and his political cross-garterings not only find favor with the Radical Olivia, but are admired by the Sir Tobys of the European world.  Indeed, Fortune has conceits as quaint as those of Haroun al-Raschid.  The beggar, from profound sleep, awoke in the Caliph’s bed.  Amazed and frightened by his surroundings, he slowly gained composure as courtier after courtier entered, bowing low, to proclaim him King of kings, Light of the World, Commander of the Faithful; and he speedily came to believe that the present had always existed, while the real past was an idle dream.  Of a nature kindly and modest, President Grant was assured by all about him that he was the delight of the Radicals, greatest captain of the age, and saviour of the nation’s life.  It was inevitable that he should begin by believing some of this, and end by believing it all.  Though he had wasted but little time on books since leaving West Point, where in his day the curriculum was limited, he had found out to the last shilling the various sums voted by Parliament to the Duke of Wellington, and spoke of them in a manner indicating his opinion that he was another example of the ingratitude of republics.  The gentle temper and sense of justice of Othello resisted the insidious wiles of Iago; but ignorance and inexperience yielded in the end to malignity and craft.  President Grant was brought not only to smother the Desdemona of his early preferences and intentions, but to feel no remorse for the deed, and take to his bosom the harridan of radicalism.  As Phalaris did those of Agrigentum opposed to his rule, he finished by hating Southerners and Democrats.

During the struggle for the Presidency in the autumn of 1876, he permitted a member of his Cabinet, the Secretary of the Interior, to become the manager of the Radicals and use all the power of his office, established for the public service, to promote the success of his party’s candidate.

Monsieur Fourtou, Minister of the Interior, removed prefects and mayors to strengthen the power of De Broglie; whereupon all the newspapers in our land published long essays to show and lament the ignorance of the French and their want of experience in republican methods.  One might suppose these articles to have been written by the “seven sleepers,” so forgetful were they of yesterday’s occurrences at home; but beams near at hand are ever blinked in our search of distant motes.  The election over, but the result in dispute, President Grant, in Philadelphia, alarmed thoughtful people by declaring that “no man could take the great office of President upon whose title thereto the faintest shadow of doubt rested,” and then, with all the power of the Government, successfully led the search for this non-existing person.  To insure fairness in the count, so that none could carp, he requested eminent statesmen to visit South Carolina, Florida, and Louisiana, the electoral votes of which were claimed by both parties; but the statesmen were, without exception, the bitterest and most unscrupulous partisans, personally interested in securing victory for their candidate, and have since received their hire.  Soldiers were quartered in the capitals of the three States to aid the equitable statesmen in reaching a correct result by applying the bayonet if the figures proved refractory.  With equity and force at work, the country might confidently expect justice; and justice was done that justice ever accorded by unscrupulous power to weakness.

But one House of the Congress was controlled by the Democrats, and these, Herod-like, were seeking to slay the child, the Nation.  To guard against this, President Grant ordered other troops to Washington and a ship of war to be anchored in the Potomac, and the child was preserved.  Again, the 4th of March, appointed by law for the installation of Presidents, fell on Sunday.  President Grant is of Scotch descent, and doubtless learned in the traditions of the land o’ cakes.  The example of Kirkpatrick at Dumfries taught him that it was wise to “mak sicker”; so the incoming man and the Chief Justice were smuggled into the White House on the sabbath day, and the oath of office was administered.  If the chair of George Washington was to be filched, it were best done under cover.  The value of the loot inspired caution.

In Paris, at a banquet, Maitre Gambetta recently toasted our ex-President “as the great commander who had sacredly obeyed and preserved his country’s laws.”  Whether this was said in irony or ignorance, had General Grant taken with him to Paris his late Secretary of the Interior, the accomplished Z. Chandler, the pair might have furnished suggestions to Marshal MacMahon and Fourtou that would have changed the dulcet strains of Maitre Gambetta into dismal howls.