Executive Times
		2005 Book Reviews
		Ulysses S. Grant by Josiah Bunting, III
		Rating: ••• (Recommended)
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	Imperturbability Readers of Josiah Bunting’s installment on Ulysses S. Grant for the American Presidents series may reconsider negative perceptions of the scandals of that administration, and come away with a new appreciation for the character, competence and composure of the 18^th United States President. Thanks to Bunting’s consistent and clear presentation of Grant in this book, criticisms are placed in context, and the legacy of Grant looks more positive. Here’s an excerpt, all of Chapter 11, “Reform, Rebuff, Reelection,” pp. 122-128: Hopeful citizens had credited the new president with an unusual array of traits of character. Among them were the effacement, or rather submersion, of self in mighty missions: service without calculation of reward or risk. Oliver Wendell Holmes believed he had seen it in Grant during the Civil War: “I cannot get over the impression he made on me . . . that of an entire loss of selfhood in a great aim, which made all the common influences which stir up other people as nothing to him.” Allied to this was Grant’s ability to judge whether others possessed the same quality; and his determination to employ such people in the important work of governance. Merit, tested and proved, would surely be the only criterion of advancement to places of responsibility. Grant might be expected, in other words, to find and hire the best men; political considerations of the crasser sort would no longer drive appointments. He had not sought offices or promotions for himself; he would not tolerate self-seeking in others. Indeed, between election and inauguration he was rumored to have ordered all applications for positions in the administration thrown into the wastebasket. By the end of the Civil War more than fifty thousand citizens were employed in the (civilian) federal bureaucracy, the largest numbers in the Departments of the Treasury and Post Office. There were sizable contingents, also, in the Departments of the Interior Navy, and War. Criteria for appointment and promotion were usually unstated, but competence and training beyond minimums were not usually prerequisites for continuing tenure. Rather, federal appointments were used to reward political supporters and contributors small and large. Further, almost all civil service employees were regularly assessed contributions for the campaigns of the parties that had appointed them. By the mid-1840s, just as Grant was leaving West Point, the incoming Democratic administration of James K. Polk thought nothing of replacing more than 13,500 of 16,000 postmasters who had been appointed by the Whig presidents William Henry Harrison and his successor, John Tyler. By such means, the national parties sustained themselves in office. Presidents, senators, congressmen made full use of patronage resources. Turnover was very high, promotion errant and almost always without examination. The idea that objective judgments as to qualifications should be demanded would have struck party leaders as unworkable at best, if not preposterous. President Lincoln had ignored what had at least been identified as a serious problem. His preoccupations were with issues far larger than this. And few American presidents have ever made appointments to senior ranks of the army on grounds more flagrantly “political” than Lincoln did, as Ulysses Grant had to learn and relearn during his tenure as commander in the West and as general in chief Andrew Johnson, in circumstances somewhat different, continued Lincoln’s practice; it was his determination to rid himself of an incompliant secretary of war Stanton, that led directly to his final downfall and the impeachment he barely survived. This spoils system particularly excited the indignation of what today might be called public intellectuals—editors, professors, journalists, pundits—most of them from New York and New England. An early champion of reform was the Rhode Islander Thomas Allen Jenckes, a member of Congress since 1862 and the first to introduce a comprehensive bill for the reform of the civil service—legislation that stipulated open competitive examinations for appointment and for promotion. A board of civil service commissioners would oversee the new program; it would develop rules and regulations; its members themselves would be guaranteed a five-year tenure and immunity from dismissal. Clearly the administration of Andrew Johnson had had a quickening effect on Jenckes’s determination to secure legislation, but his bill failed to pass. The issue remained, now taken up by men like Charles Eliot Norton, man of letters, coeditor of the North American Review, and a founder of the Nation; E. L. Godkin, editor of the Nation; and George William Curtis, an editor at Harper’s. In his delighted anticipation of a Grant regime, in which he believed the new president would take a strong lead from the start in seeking out and appointing “the best men,” Norton typified the responses of his circle: “Grant grows daily in my respect and confidence. . . . [He] is so simple, so sensible, so strong and so magnanimous.” But Norton also suggested to his friend Curtis that the latter mention to the administration that he, Norton, would be an appropriate appointee to a European mission—as minister. President Grant failed to gratify these inflated expectations; he saw patronage as Lincoln had seen it—as a political necessity whose influences need not be malign, provided honest partisans were recruited and appointed. “Honest partisanship is honest citizenship,” one of Grant’s successors would assert. Grant himself was bombarded by patronage requests, not excluding several from his own family and their friends. He made his father postmaster in Covington, Kentucky. He also discovered that the most principled and high-minded were no less importunate than the merely ambitious when it came to advancing their own claims or those of their friends. They were particularly drawn to the diplomatic service as a suitable venue for the exercise of their talents, as Charles Eliot Norton had suggested for himself Grant understood also that requiring objective assessments of talent and fitness for civil service jobs could frighten or outrage his own allies in Congress, in the Senate particularly. Nonetheless he had seen the depredations of Andrew Johnson’s abuse of the system, and so he was moved to act. In his second annual message to Congress, in December 1870, he wrote: Always favoring practical reforms, I respectfully call your attention to one abuse of long standing which I would like to see remedied by this Congress. It is a reform to the civil service of this country. . . . I would have it govern, not the tenure, but the manner of making all appointments. . . . The present system does not secure the best men, and often not even fit men, for public place. Two members of the president’s cabinet had already made a start: Jacob D. Cox, at the Department of the Interior, and George S. Boutwell, at the Treasury, both insisted on competitive exams for certain positions and a careful vetting of qualifications in new appointments. Congress remained reluctant to act—and the most reluctant were the supporters of the president himself Grant’s old friend John Logan thought of such reform as fundamentally anti-democratic. It would lead to the advancement of idealists and intellectuals rather than practical men of affairs, men who would reliably support the president in his work and the Republican party in office. Reformers were nothing but “man-milliners,” according to Grant’s senatorial champion Roscoe Conkling; yet another senator called them “effeminate . . . unable to beget or to bear; possessing neither fecundity nor virility; endowed with the contempt of men and the derision of women, and doomed to sterility.” Without enthusiasm Congress nonetheless approved an 1871 bill to create a civil service commission that would be charged with the overhaul of the system. The bill barely passed and just survived a subsequent motion that would have voided it. The commission, under George Curtis, recommended that examinations be required for all civil service positions (with a few, senior~ exceptions), that each department have its own examining board, and “that no political assessments be allowed.” Grant determined to implement these recommendations at once but needed congressional approval for them to become permanent. In a letter to a commission member he concluded with a statement of settled conviction: “The choice of Federal officers has come to be limited to those seeking office. A true reform will let the office seek the man.” But Congress would not approve legislation that would make reforms permanent, nor (three years later) would it even appropriate twenty-five thousand dollars to keep the commission afloat. Despite repeated urgings from Grant, there would be no substantial reform of the civil service until the Pendleton Act of 1883. Disappointed civil service reformers in the Northeast soon were attracted to a new movement, its earliest roots in Missouri, that would mature into a full-blown schism in the Republican party. The movement was a strange and ill-assorted coalescence of men with various grievances against the president and his principal congressional supporters. The Missourians had been provoked initially by a fervent desire to remove the penalties in the state constitution against those who had supported the South; and this grew into a later demand that the federal government remove itself from the affairs of the states entirely and that full amnesty be granted, along with the end of “bayonet rule,” by which the army was enforcing federal regulations on several states. The Missourians found common cause with the liberal reformers, who were disappointed in the Grant administration, who called for dismantling the spoils system and the corruptions. A national convention was called for May 1, 1872, in Cincinnati, at which the two groups sought common ground but found great differences of opinion instead. On the protective tariff for example, the articulate eastern contingent argued that any change would endanger business: to lower the tariff would doom financial interests in the great banking houses of the East. But this position was directly the contrary of westerners’. And while all 4,500 delegates might agree that the federal government should withdraw altogether from the South, that it should maintain the Union, and that it should resist any reopening of the “questions settled by the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments,” their disagreement on the tariff was embarrassingly finessed in a platform avowal that the liberal Republicans—as they now called themselves—”remit the discussion of the subject to the people in their congressional districts, and the decision of the Congress thereon, wholly free from Executive interference.” Passion and venom were the portion of the convention’s castigation of the president. An inattentive reader might have imagined himself listening to a denunciation of King George III: the convention’s “Address to the People of the United States” asserted that Grant had “openly used the powers and opportunities of his high office for personal ends. He has kept notoriously corrupt and unworthy men in places of power and responsibilities. . . . He has interfered with tyrannical arrogance in the public affairs of States.” Grant was depicted as lazy, with no thoughts other than of horses and cigars, the victim of a constitutional torpor that was deemed fatal in a chief executive. The convention nominated Horace Greeley as its candidate, a selection that astounded many of the delegates and almost all those outside the convention who were counted on as prospective supporters of the movement. Greeley, the most famous and brilliant journalist of the nineteenth century, founder and editor of the New York Tribune, had argued with characteristic brio in behalf of both sides of most major issues for the Civil War and its aftermath. He was known as a strong supporter of high tariffs; he was on record, many times, as having been violently critical of the Democratic party, with whom the liberal Republicans proposed to ally themselves for the election. He seemed, further, to lack gravitas. In appearance he was a character out of illustrations in Dickens’s novels: plump, with a bald red head like a pumpkin, frequently dressed in bizarre dusters, given to strange fads and nostrums—like arguing for the particular agricultural efficacy of human manure. Nonetheless, the Democrats, lacking a strong national candidate of their own, were persuaded to adopt him as their standard-bearer at their convention later that summer, in Baltimore. The issue of Grant’s reelection was never in doubt, though the vigor of the liberal Republican effort at first caused a mild anxiety among Republicans, one of whom, Grant’s Philadelphia friend George W. Childs, urged the president to campaign seriously. After flawlessly predicting the results of the coming election, using a pencil and a map, Grant told Childs that the only presidential campaigners who had been accomplished speakers (Stephen A. Douglas and Horatio Seymour) had both lost. “I am no public speaker and don’t want to be beaten.” In the end, Grant did win handily, taking 56 percent of the popular vote. He carried every northern state and several states of the old Confederacy. He had appealed, despite his inarticulateness and unwillingness to campaign, both to the “better angels” (to paraphrase Lincoln) of the voters’ nature, in recommitting Republicans to sustaining the achievements of the war~ and to the continuing gratitude and confidence of the huge numbers of veterans, their friends and relatives, who revered him as the military savior of the Union. The results of the election of 1872 demonstrate the liberal Republicans’ continuing underestimation of Ulysses Grant’s hold on the sentiment of the larger American public. In reelecting him, the people were voting for someone with whom they were comfortable, for someone they liked. His hold on their affections was not dissimilar to that of Ronald Reagan, however baffling that bond between ordinary citizen and president might have seemed to his opponents. Finally, in reelecting Ulysses Grant, they were (consciously or not) sustaining in office the man who had won the Civil War and who was—they saw this plainly—the best guarantor of the preservation of its achievements. The reputation of Grant as a drunk whose administration was wrapped in scandal is offset in Ulysses S. Grant by Bunting’s descriptions of Grant’s competence, his loyalty to friends, and his composure in the face of any obstacle or challenge. No matter what you think you know about Grant, you’re likely to learn something new from this book. Steve Hopkins, April 23, 2005
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