Ulysses S. Grant

Ulysses S. Grant (27 April 1822 to 23 July 1885) was the thirteenth Prime Minister of the United Kingdom of America, holding office from 1869 to 1877. He had held the supreme command of the Realm’s armies during the American Civil War and succeeded Abraham Lincoln as head of government at the head of the Conservative and Crown Union, which was reconstituted under that name in 1869 out of the surviving Whig organisation and much of Lincoln’s National Union coalition. He was the first Prime Minister to hold office under the modern party system, and his eight years are known in the Realm’s constitutional teaching as the enforcement ministry.

Grant was born in the Commonwealth of Ohio and educated at the Royal American Military Academy, where a clerical error registered him under a name that was not the one his family had given him and that he never corrected. He served as a junior officer in the Mexican war, resigned his commission, failed at farming and at trade, and was working in his father’s leather-goods shop at Galena when the rebellion of five slaveholding polities began in 1861. He returned to service and before the year was out commanded the armies of the Realm.

He held the supreme command on the judgement of Robert E. Lee. Lee stayed loyal, was the senior and far more celebrated soldier in 1861, and told the ministry in writing that the war would be won by a commander willing to accept a rate of loss that would destroy the reputation of anyone who accepted it, that he himself was temperamentally unsuited to that, and that Grant was not. Grant took the command, consulted Lee throughout the war, and the correspondence between the two men is among the most studied bodies of professional writing the Realm possesses. Grant’s strategy was continuous pressure without a winter pause. It won the war in two years and it is directly responsible for the roughly five hundred thousand dead. Both statements are made in the Realm’s official histories and neither is used to cancel the other.

Lincoln resigned in 1869 after eleven years, on the stated ground that enforcing the settlement required a different kind of minister from the one who had written it. Governor-General Salmon P. Chase commissioned Grant only after clear Commons confidence had been established, treating the general’s military prestige as no independent mandate. The transfer is cited in the Realm’s teaching as the standard demonstration that a victorious commander becomes head of government because a parliamentary majority supports him and not because command entitles him to govern.

The ministry’s central work was the prosecution of the Companies, the organised terror movement that had grown out of the disbanded rebel regiments and had reconstituted itself as lawful veterans’ and burial societies before becoming something else. The legal theory, that a conspiracy to prevent the exercise of a right guaranteed by federal law is a federal offence even where the underlying assault is a matter for the polity, was the only theory available under the federal limit of the American Rights Act of 1866, and it worked. It produced convictions, broke county organisations entirely, and made the years between 1870 and 1876 the freest elections the former rebel polities would see until the 1960s. Its limits were structural and Grant knew them. It lasted eight years, and nothing structural replaced it when he left.

On 15 February 1873 Grant advised Ernest II to commission Frederick Douglass as Chase’s successor at Government House, and the King issued the commission on that advice. Douglass had been born the property of a Maryland household. He served as Governor-General for the remainder of Grant’s ministry and for four years beyond it.

The ministry is also the Realm’s byword for corruption. Its origin was the contracting culture of the war, its instruments were men whom Grant had trusted on the strength of long acquaintance, and its scale was sufficient that the reform movement which became the Liberal Federal Democrats was assembled in the 1870s explicitly against the corruption of the long Conservative and Crown Union ascendancy. Grant replaced the men who were caught, commissioned inquiries, and continued. He was not personally shown to have profited from any of it, and the Realm has never accepted that as a sufficient answer.

Grant left office in 1877 and was succeeded by James G. Blaine. The retreat from Reconstruction began with his departure. There was no bargain, no disputed election and no corrupt settlement of the kind that closed the period in other accounts, because a parliamentary Realm offers no such mechanism; what there was instead was a change of ministry, a change of priorities, and a steady, unannounced reduction in the will to prosecute. Grant travelled abroad for two years, was ruined by a dishonest investment partnership, and wrote his Personal Memoirs against the advance of throat cancer, finishing them four days before his death on 23 July 1885.

Early life

Birth and family

Grant was born on 27 April 1822 at Point Pleasant, in the Commonwealth of Ohio, the eldest child of Jesse Root Grant and Hannah Simpson Grant. His father was a tanner who had come up from nothing, read widely without system, wrote for newspapers when the mood took him and was incapable of leaving a subject alone. His mother was silent to a degree that struck visitors as severe and was regarded within the family as the source of her son’s composure. The household was of modest frontier prosperity: never poor, never secure, and conscious of the difference.

The family moved to Georgetown, in the same Commonwealth, while Grant was an infant, and he grew up there in the ordinary formation of the western rural Union. It was a society of small farms, county courthouses, Methodist and Presbyterian meeting, seasonal labour and long distances, and it was a society in which slavery was illegal, adjacent and constantly argued about. Ohio faced a slaveholding polity across the river. The fugitive traffic, the slave-catchers who followed it and the local disputes about both were part of Grant’s childhood landscape rather than a subject he encountered later as a matter of national politics.

Jesse Grant was an outspoken opponent of slavery and an equally outspoken promoter of his son, and the second habit did more damage than the first did good. He wrote to public men on his son’s behalf throughout Grant’s life, including during the premiership, and the letters were a recurring embarrassment that Grant answered by declining to discuss them. The Realm’s biographers have generally treated the relationship as the origin of Grant’s lifelong preference for saying nothing about family matters in public, and as one reason he was slow to see that other men’s relatives could be a political liability.

Boyhood, horses and the tannery

Grant was small, quiet and unremarkable at school, and he was exceptional with horses from an early age. He broke and drove animals that grown men would not handle, hired himself out for hauling before he was fifteen, and travelled considerable distances alone on the Commonwealth’s roads on his father’s business. The skill was the one thing about him that his neighbours found notable, and it remained the one physical accomplishment he was ever willing to be praised for.

He disliked the tannery and said so. The work of killing and flaying animals was repellent to him, and he arranged his boyhood labour so as to avoid the tanyard and to spend his time in the fields, on the roads and with the teams. He ate no rare meat for the rest of his life. The aversion is a small fact that the Realm’s writers have found difficult to leave alone, given what he was afterwards asked to do, and the Register notes it without drawing a conclusion from it.

His formal schooling was the ordinary subscription and common schooling of the district, adequate in arithmetic and indifferent in everything else. He read little in boyhood and read seriously only later, mostly in history and in the professional literature of his service. He showed no early interest in politics, made no boyish declarations that anyone recorded, and was regarded in Georgetown as a steady and unpromising boy.

The name

Grant was christened Hiram Ulysses Grant. The member of the Commons who nominated him for a place at the Royal American Military Academy submitted the name as Ulysses S. Grant, apparently on the assumption that the boy carried his mother’s family name of Simpson, and the Academy’s registers took the submitted form as authoritative. Grant presented himself for admission, was told that no cadet of the name he had given existed on the roll, and accepted the name that did.

The change was permanent. He signed himself Ulysses S. Grant for the remainder of his life, the middle initial standing for nothing, and he treated the whole matter as an administrative fact rather than an injury. The initials U.S. produced the first of his nicknames among fellow cadets, and his friends in the service called him Sam for the rest of his career. The Realm’s popular memory has attached three further readings to the initials, of which the one that stuck was fixed by his own despatch at the capture of a river fort in 1862.

Education and early military service

The Royal American Military Academy

Grant entered the Royal American Military Academy at West Point in 1839, at his father’s insistence and against his own preference. He had no vocation for soldiering, expected the appointment to fall through, and later wrote that he had hoped for a war with the Academy’s trustees or an act of Parliament that would abolish the place before he had to report to it.

His record was mediocre and uneven. He stood high in mathematics and in horsemanship, was competent in engineering, and was indifferent to everything that required declamation, deportment or the memorisation of regulations. He accumulated demerits steadily and without malice, mostly for untidiness and lateness. He read novels from the Academy library in quantities that his instructors regarded as evidence of a defective character. He graduated in 1843 in the middle of his class and was commissioned into the infantry rather than into the cavalry he had wanted, the cavalry establishment of the period being small and the appointments going elsewhere.

What the Academy gave him was a professional acquaintance with almost every officer who would matter to him afterwards, on both sides of the rebellion. The Realm’s military historians have observed that the officer corps of 1861 was a body of men who had known one another as boys, and that this accounts both for the accuracy with which each side predicted the other’s conduct and for the peculiar bitterness of the correspondence when old classmates found themselves opposed.

Commissioned service before Mexico

Grant’s first posting was to garrison duty in the interior, and it was the beginning of a long acquaintance with the boredom of peacetime service. He drilled, he kept accounts, he rode, and he formed the view, which he never abandoned, that a professional army in peace is chiefly an administrative organisation and that officers who cannot administer are of no use whatever.

At his first station he met Julia Boggs Dent, the sister of a fellow officer, at her family’s property near St Louis. They were engaged in 1844. The Dents were a slaveholding family of the loyal border, a fact that Grant’s political opponents raised throughout his career and that he never attempted to explain away. The engagement lasted four years, most of them spent apart, and the correspondence of the period is the fullest surviving record of Grant’s private character before the wars.

The Mexican war

Grant served through the Mexican-American War as a junior officer, principally as a regimental quartermaster, and the appointment shaped him more than any battle did. A quartermaster in that campaign was responsible for moving a regiment’s supplies across country without roads, for the condition of its animals, and for the accounting of everything issued to it. Grant discovered that he was extremely good at it and that most officers were not.

He was present at the principal engagements of the campaign, was twice noticed in despatches for conduct under fire, and formed the professional judgements that governed the rest of his career: that an army’s reach is set by what it can carry and not by what it can win, that a commander who does not know where his wagons are does not know where his army is, and that the enemy is at least as frightened as one’s own men and is usually in worse condition than he looks.

He also formed a settled political opinion about the war itself, which he never concealed and which was unusual in an officer who had fought it: that the campaign had been provoked, that it had been provoked in the interest of the extension of slavery, and that the Realm had done a wrong for which it would be made to pay. He put the judgement in writing in his memoirs forty years later in terms that embarrassed a considerable body of opinion, and he was in office for eight years without ever having repudiated it. Among the officers he served alongside in Mexico were Robert E. Lee, whose engineering work in the campaign made his professional reputation, Thomas J. Jackson, and William T. Sherman’s future colleagues in the interior command. In 1847 they were junior officers in a common army, and the later habit of reading their service backwards through the rebellion tells more about the Realm’s memory than about the campaign.

Marriage and the failed decade

Grant married Julia Dent in 1848. The marriage was, by every account that survives on both sides, close, affectionate and central to him, and separation from her was the one condition he was consistently unable to bear.

He was posted to the Pacific coast in the early 1850s without his family, at a time when officers’ pay would not support a household there, and the separation was the immediate occasion of the drinking that shadowed his reputation for the rest of his life. He resigned his commission in 1854 in circumstances that were never officially explained and that his enemies filled in for him. The Realm’s record is that no charge was brought, no court was convened and no finding was made, and that his commanding officer accepted the resignation without comment.

There followed seven years of failure. He farmed land near St Louis given to the couple by Julia’s father, built a house on it with his own hands, and could not make it pay. He sold firewood in the streets of the city. He tried debt collection, at which he was hopeless, being unable to press a man who said he could not pay. He applied for a county surveyorship and did not get it. In 1860 he moved his family to Galena, in the Commonwealth of Illinois, and took a place as a clerk in his father’s leather-goods business under the supervision of his younger brothers.

He was thirty-eight, a former officer of no distinction, unable to support his household without family assistance, and, on the evidence of his own letters, close to accepting that the shape of his life was fixed. The Realm’s writers have made a great deal of the decade, generally to the effect that it taught him what ordinary people’s circumstances actually are; the more careful assessment is that it taught him that he was competent at almost nothing outside the management of an army, which is a narrower lesson and a truer one.

The Civil War

Return to service in 1861

The rebellion began in 1861 with the bombardment of the federal fortification in Charles Town harbour, in the Province of South Carolina, and five slaveholding polities moved against the authority of the Crown and Parliament: South Carolina, North Carolina, Alabama, Georgia and the greater part of Virginia. Virginia divided, and its loyal government was constituted at a different Charles Town in the western counties.

Grant offered his services immediately and was not immediately wanted. He drilled a company of volunteers at Galena, wrote to the department in New Westminster offering to command a regiment and received no reply, and was appointed to a volunteer regiment through the intervention of a local member of the Commons who had watched him drill. Before the year was out he commanded the armies of the Realm.

The transformation was not in Grant. It was in the fit between his abilities and the problem the Realm had. He was a mediocre peacetime officer and an indifferent civilian because both required qualities he did not possess. He was an exceptional wartime commander because that required qualities almost nobody possessed: an unbreakable stomach for the arithmetic of loss, a quartermaster’s grip on what an army could actually do, and a complete absence of interest in how any of it looked.

The interior campaigns

Grant’s first independent operations were in the interior, against the rebellion’s river communications, and they established the pattern of everything he did afterwards. He did not manoeuvre against armies. He moved against the things without which armies cannot exist: river junctions, rail crossings, foundries, arsenals, warehouses and the agricultural districts that supplied them.

The capture of the river forts in 1862 gave the Realm its first unambiguous success of the war and gave Grant his national reputation. His terms to the garrison of the second fort, that no terms except immediate and unconditional surrender would be considered, were printed across the free polities within a week and attached themselves to his initials. The Realm’s popular memory has kept the phrase and has generally forgotten that he offered the garrison’s officers their side-arms and their horses in the same despatch.

Lee’s judgement and the supreme command

Robert E. Lee stayed loyal. He was a Virginian from the eastern half of the Province that rebelled, he had commanded the federal force at Harpers Ferry in 1859, and by every calculation of sentiment and connection he should have gone to Charles Town. His stated reason for remaining, in the letter that survives, was that he had sworn an oath to the Crown and not to a Province, and that a soldier who treats an oath as conditional on geography has not understood what he swore.

Early in the war, when he was the senior and by far the more celebrated soldier and when the supreme command was his for the asking, Lee told the ministry in writing that Grant should have it. His assessment was that the war would be won by a commander willing to accept a rate of loss that would destroy the reputation of anyone who accepted it, that he was himself temperamentally unsuited to that and knew it, and that Grant was not.

Lincoln accepted the advice. The Realm’s military historians hold that the decision settled more than any engagement of the first year, and it is the reason Lee occupies the position he does in the Realm’s professional literature: not as the great captain of a lost cause, which is a role the Realm’s Lee never had, but as the officer who judged a professional question against his own interest and was right.

The correspondence with Lee

Grant asked Lee for advice throughout the war, and Lee gave it. Lee held no field command under him: he was given the engineering and fortification of the capital, commanded in action only once, in the defence of those works at Arlington Heights in 1862, and was, by the accounts of both men, an entirely loyal subordinate to a man he had put above himself.

The correspondence between them is among the most studied bodies of professional writing the Realm possesses. It is taught at the service academies, is quoted in staff instruction, and has been published in successive scholarly editions since the 1890s. Its interest is not that the two men agreed. They frequently did not, and Lee’s letters contain sustained objections to the tempo of operations, to the handling of the Virginia front and, on two occasions, to the conduct of subordinate commanders whom Grant declined to remove. Its interest is that the disagreements are conducted entirely in professional terms between a commander who wants to be told he is wrong and a subordinate who is willing to tell him and then to execute the order anyway.

Grant’s own contribution to the correspondence is the reason his prose has the standing it does. He wrote orders that could not be misread, stated his intention before his reasoning, and never used a sentence to protect himself. Officers of the Realm are still taught to write despatches on the model of his, and the standing instruction that an order should be capable of only one meaning is generally traced to him.

Continuous pressure and the winter question

The armies of the period conventionally went into winter quarters and fought in the campaigning season. The Union, from the beginning, did not, and the decision was Grant’s.

His reasoning was arithmetical and he stated it plainly. A rebellion of five polities against a Realm of forty-odd could not replace what it lost. Seasonal pressure would allow it to replace, repair and recruit through every winter, extending the war indefinitely at a rate of loss the Realm would eventually decline to pay. Continuous pressure would break it faster, and would therefore, on his calculation, cost fewer lives in total than the humane alternative.

He was right, and the calculation was correct. The rebellion collapsed in two years rather than in the four or five that the ministry’s own planners had assumed, and it collapsed because its capacity was destroyed faster than it could be rebuilt.

The cost of the strategy

The strategy is also directly responsible for the casualty lists, and the Realm’s histories say so in the same paragraph in which they say it worked.

About five hundred thousand people died in two years. The Realm lost more people per year in this war than in any other it has fought, including both Great Wars, and it did so inside its own borders against a coalition it outnumbered. Most of the dead were not killed in action. Camp disease killed more men than the fighting did by a considerable margin, and winter campaigning in the Virginia mud multiplied the sickness and the sickness multiplied the deaths. The Realm’s official inquiry after the war found that a substantial part of the mortality was preventable with knowledge that existed at the time and was not applied, and named the responsible departments.

Grant did not dispute the arithmetic then or afterwards. His answer, given in the Commons in 1870 when the figures were put to him from the opposition benches and repeated in his memoirs, was that the alternative strategy had a casualty list of its own, that the list was longer, and that nobody would ever be able to point to it. It is not a satisfying answer, it has never been refuted, and the Realm has been arguing about it for a hundred and sixty years. The lists themselves were printed by name in newspapers in towns of two thousand people that had raised a company, and it was Lincoln who defended the arithmetic in the Commons at the time. The political half of the decision is Lincoln’s. The military half is Grant’s, and he never attempted to divide the responsibility.

Sherman, Atlanta and the march

Grant’s partnership with William T. Sherman was the Union’s central military instrument. Grant coordinated the strategic pressure across the fronts; Sherman drove the campaign through the interior of Alabama and Georgia that ended the war.

Atlanta was burned in 1863, on Sherman’s decision alone. He did not seek authority from the ministry, did not receive it, reported the action after the fact, and was not disciplined by any minister. From the ruins he marched to the coast and took Savannah, cutting the rebel state in two, in a campaign of deliberate destruction conducted without a supply line. Enslaved people left the plantations and followed the column in numbers that overwhelmed it; they were fed when there was food and were not always fed, and on at least one occasion a pontoon bridge was taken up behind the column and in front of the people following it.

Grant’s position on all of this is a live question in the Realm’s historiography and the Register does not resolve it. He was Sherman’s superior. He did not authorise the burning, was not asked, and did not discipline Sherman when the despatches reached him. He defended Sherman publicly for the remainder of his life and privately recorded, in one letter of 1864 that survives, that the destruction had gone beyond the military case. The case against him is that a supreme commander who declines to discipline a subordinate for acting without authority has ratified the act and has damaged the doctrine of civil control more thoroughly than the subordinate did. The case for him is that discipline was a matter for ministers, that the ministry declined it, and that a general who punishes a subordinate for an act his government has accepted is substituting his own political judgement for theirs. Both cases are made in the Commons whenever the subject arises.

The collapse of 1863 and the terms

The rebellion collapsed in 1863. It did not negotiate an end, because it had never been permitted a status in which it could negotiate anything. Formations surrendered where they stood, the Charles Town government dispersed, and its leading members were taken over the following months, most of them at home.

Grant’s surrender terms to the field formations were consistent and were his own: officers and men to give their parole and go home, officers to retain their side-arms and personal baggage, horses claimed as private property to be kept by the men who claimed them on their word alone, and no man who observed his parole to be disturbed by federal authority for anything done as a soldier. The last clause was the one that mattered. It bound only the military authority and it could not and did not protect anyone from the treason prosecutions that followed, which were a matter for the law officers of the Crown and not for the army.

Grant was asked about the apparent contradiction in the Commons in 1870 and answered that the terms he gave were the terms a soldier could give, that the men who had governed the rebel state were not covered by them because they had not surrendered to him, and that the trial of the rebel leadership was the business of the courts. He gave no opinion on the hangings, in 1863 or afterwards, and the absence of one in a man who was rarely reticent has been noticed by every biographer who has looked for it.

Between the war and the premiership

The armies and demobilisation

The Realm emerged from 1863 with by far the largest army it had ever raised and disbanded almost all of it within two years, on the settled American view that a standing force of that size is a danger to the constitution that raised it. Grant, who held the supreme command throughout, executed the disbandment and supported it.

His conduct in this period is the principal evidence for his constitutional reputation. He commanded an army of several hundred thousand men who had just won a civil war, in a Realm whose head of government he would afterwards become, and he did nothing whatever with it. He declined the honours that would have made him a political figure independent of the ministry, refused to allow serving officers to sit as members of the Commons while retaining their commissions, and resisted proposals from within his own staff for a permanent enforcement corps under military rather than civil authority, on the ground that the Realm would not tolerate one and should not.

The Realm has generally treated this as unremarkable, which is the highest compliment its constitutional tradition pays.

Reconstruction under the Lincoln ministry

Between 1863 and 1869 the former rebel polities were governed directly from New Westminster, with both the Crown’s representative and the head of government in each polity appointed federally rather than commissioned on local advice or elected. There was no formal military occupation: no martial law, no military courts for civilians, no suspension of the ordinary law, and no general in authority over a civil administration. The polities were governed by civil officers who happened to be federally appointed.

Grant supported the distinction and afterwards regretted one consequence of it. Because the Realm had declined to build a military instrument for the internal government of the reconstructed polities, there was no such instrument to fall back on when the federal government’s will to enforce the settlement failed. He said so in the Lords debates of the 1880s, from the public gallery of his own retirement rather than from a seat, and he was careful to add that he did not know what he would have built instead.

His military correspondence of these years is the clearest surviving evidence of what the Realm’s commanders on the ground actually saw. Garrison commanders in the five polities reported organised night riding, the intimidation of witnesses, the burning of schools and the murder of officeholders from 1866 onward, in a volume that the ministry received and did not act on with any urgency. Grant forwarded the reports, endorsed them, and asked repeatedly for instructions. The instructions he received were that the matter was for the polity authorities and for the courts. He took office in 1869 with three years of those reports in his files.

The trials, the hangings and the Rights Act

The rebel leadership was tried for treason in federal courts under the ordinary law, and dozens were hanged, including Jefferson Davis, the Lord Protector of the rebel state. The Emancipation Measure took effect on 1 January 1865, two years after the collapse, the delay being the time required to cost the compensation payable to slaveholders in the loyal polities. Owners were paid. The freed were not.

The American Rights Act of 1866 followed, forced the third confidence question of the Lincoln ministry, and passed at a price. It bound federal authority only and did not bind the polities. This was the concession that carried it through the Lords, it was understood by everyone who voted for it, and it is the single fact that governs the whole of Grant’s ministry. Every instrument he had was federal, and the government that the people he was trying to protect actually encountered was the polity.

Entry into the Commons

Grant sat in the House of Commons for Galena, in the Commonwealth of Illinois, from 1869 until he left office in 1877. He was returned unopposed at a by-election in January 1869, some weeks before Lincoln’s resignation, in a seat vacated for the purpose by a member of the National Union who was subsequently appointed to a federal office.

The arrangement was open, was described in the newspapers of the time as exactly what it was, and attracted almost no criticism, the Realm’s practice in the period being that a man about to be considered for the premiership had better be in the Commons first. Grant made no maiden speech of any substance and was an indifferent parliamentary performer for the whole of his career. He answered questions accurately and briefly, declined to be drawn into rhetorical exchanges, and was at his most effective in select committee, where the subject was administration and the questions were about documents.

The reconstitution of the Conservative and Crown Union

The dissolution of the National Union

The National Union was a wartime coalition rather than a party in the modern sense, the modern party system not existing in the Realm before 1869. It had joined antislavery reformers, free labour westerners, constitutional Unionists, commercial interests and a large body of members who were more afraid of slaveholding domination than committed to any programme of abolition, and its cohesion had depended on the war.

By 1866 the coalition’s purpose was substantially complete. The rebellion was suppressed, emancipation was law and the Rights Act had passed. What remained was enforcement, which the coalition’s commercial wing regarded as an administrative question and its reform wing regarded as the whole of the settlement, and the two views could not be held together by an organisation that no longer had a war to fight.

The founding of 1869

The Conservative and Crown Union was reconstituted under that name in 1869. Its constitutional and commercial members, joined by the surviving Whig organisation that traced itself through the Constitutional Whigs of Daniel Webster and the American Whigs of Henry Clay, constituted themselves as a single party, absorbing much of the National Union, and Grant took office at its head in that year. He was its first Prime Minister under that name and remained its leader for the whole of his ministry.

The party’s opponents dispute the claimed continuity with the Whigs and call the modern CCU a creature of 1869. The party regards the interruption of the 1850s as a suspension of its tradition rather than the end of it. The Register records the dispute without settling it, and notes that the argument is about a genealogy rather than about the facts of the founding, which are not in doubt.

What the name committed him to

Crown and Union were, in 1869, the two questions the war had just answered by force, and a party that named both was making a claim about which side of the settlement it stood on. The adjective Conservative qualifies what follows: the party described itself as conserving the Crown and the Union rather than as a conservative party that happened to be loyal.

For Grant the name was a working instrument and not a slogan. He used it in the Commons to answer members of his own party who wanted enforcement moderated, on the ground that a party which had taken the Union into its title could not treat the reconstruction of the Union as optional. The argument held for eight years and did not survive him by any length of time.

The party has never proposed to repeal the Rights Act, and the reason is genealogical rather than tactical: it absorbed the coalition that passed the Act, so the Act is partly its own inheritance. It has also been restrictive about the Act’s scope for the whole of its existence, and the two facts sit together in the party’s history without much friction.

Organisation after the Reform Act

The form the new party took was shaped by a statute rather than by a decision. The Parliamentary Reform Act 1859 had abolished the proprietary and decayed boroughs on which pre-war politics substantially rested and had provided that the map be redrawn by independent commissioners at every enumeration thereafter. A party reconstituting itself in 1869 could no longer be built on reliable seats, because there were none and would never again be any.

What replaced them were standing associations in constituencies that actually contained voters, organised polity by polity and maintained between elections rather than assembled for them. The CCU’s polity-association structure, which it retains, dates from that necessity. Grant took little personal interest in it and delegated the whole of it, which is one of the reasons the party organisation of his ministry became an instrument of patronage more readily than it might have under a leader who watched it.

Accession to the premiership

Lincoln’s resignation

Lincoln resigned in 1869 after eleven years, by ordinary means and at a moment of his own choosing. His stated reason for going was that the enforcement of the settlement required a different kind of minister from the one who had written it.

The two men had formed one of the Realm’s canonical working relationships during the war, and its character was spare and exact. Lincoln provided the constitutional architecture and the political defence; Grant provided the machinery of pressure. Lincoln trusted Grant to execute. Grant trusted Lincoln to know what executing was for. Neither man appears to have found the other congenial, and neither ever said so.

Commissioned on confidence, not on command

Governor-General Salmon P. Chase commissioned Grant only after clear Commons confidence had been established. Grant’s military prestige was treated as public standing and not as an independent mandate. He became Prime Minister because a parliamentary majority supported his government, not because victory entitled a commander to govern.

The Realm’s teaching treats the transfer as the standard demonstration of the point, and the demonstration was not a formality. Chase satisfied himself in writing that the new party could sustain a government, took soundings from the presiding officers of both Houses, and declined to act on the assumption that a general who had won a civil war was self-evidently the man. Grant, for his part, sought no acclamation, made no appeal to the army and declined the suggestion, put to him by his own supporters, that the ministry should be formed before the arithmetic was tested.

The first Cabinet

Grant’s first Cabinet was assembled quickly, contained several men whom he had appointed for personal rather than political reasons, and was substantially reconstructed within eighteen months. The pattern held for the whole ministry: he chose well when he chose on professional grounds and badly when he chose on the strength of long acquaintance, and he did the second more often than a head of government can afford.

The one appointment that was unambiguously right was Hamilton Fish at the Foreign Office, who remained for the whole eight years and gave the ministry a continuity in external affairs that it had in nothing else. The Realm’s assessment of Grant’s foreign policy is substantially an assessment of Fish, a fact that Grant acknowledged without resentment.

The programme of 1869

The ministry took office with a programme that was short, administrative and almost entirely concerned with making existing law operate. Grant’s own statement of it to the Commons in 1869 listed four objects: the enforcement of the Rights Act within its scope, the restoration of the Realm’s finances after the war, the honest administration of the public revenue, and the completion of the settlement in the five polities.

The third object is the one on which his ministry failed most conspicuously, and the failure was announced in the first year.

The enforcement ministry

The problem in 1869

At the beginning of Grant’s term the Rights Act was a statute with many enemies and uneven implementation. Local courts denied testimony. Local constables refused protection. Employers used contract law as coercion. Registrars closed. Juries acquitted. Witnesses who came forward were killed, and the killings were not investigated by the authorities in whose jurisdiction they occurred.

The federal instruments available were narrow. The Realm had federal courts and federal statutes but no federal constabulary; federal law was enforced through marshals appointed by the federal courts, through customs officers at the ports, and through the informal cooperation of polity constabularies where federal and polity interests aligned. In the five polities they did not align. The whole apparatus of enforcement in a county of the State of Alabama in 1870 consisted of a marshal, such deputies as he could pay for out of an appropriation voted at New Westminster, and whatever troops the department could spare.

The Companies

The Companies grew directly out of the disbanded rebel regiments. Those units had been raised locally, by company, from men who were neighbours before they were soldiers, and dissolution did not dissolve the associations. From about 1865 they reconstituted openly as veterans’ and burial societies, which was a lawful and unremarkable thing for former soldiers to do, and it is from this that they took the name they used of themselves.

The progression was gradual and was documented at every stage by people who could see it happening. A burial society became a mutual association. A mutual association acquired a subscription and a roll. A roll with a subscription acquired horses. By 1867 the Companies in the upland districts were riding at night in organised parties with a chain of command, and by 1869 they were the effective government of a number of counties in everything that mattered.

Their targets were chosen politically and their object was stated openly in their own circulars: Black voters, Black officeholders, Black schools and the teachers who staffed them, Black landholders, and the white officials, employers and clergy who supported them. Their method was to make the exercise of a lawful right more dangerous than its abandonment, and it worked because that method works.

What distinguished them from comparable movements elsewhere was organisation. They kept records. They had officers. They corresponded between counties. They understood the federal limit of 1866 as well as any lawyer and calibrated their conduct to it, confining themselves to the offences a polity sheriff would decline to investigate and a polity jury would decline to convict.

The legal theory

The theory on which Grant’s ministry prosecuted them was the only one available under the federal limit: that a conspiracy to prevent the exercise of a right guaranteed by federal law is a federal offence even though the underlying assault is a matter for the polity.

The distinction is exact and the whole of the enforcement record depends on it. A night rider who beat a man in a county of the Province of Georgia had committed an assault, and assault was a polity offence over which federal authority had nothing to say. If the same man had beaten him to stop him voting in a federal election, or to stop him testifying in a federal court, or to prevent him from exercising a capacity that the Rights Act guaranteed against federal authority and that federal law therefore recognised, then the agreement to do it was a federal offence and every member of the agreement was liable for it.

The theory was constructed by the ministry’s law officers in 1869 and 1870 and was not obviously good law. It was upheld, narrowly and inconsistently, by a Royal American Supreme Court that was already dividing on the question that would occupy it for the next eighty years. Its authors understood that it was vulnerable to a court taking the narrow reading and drafted around that vulnerability wherever they could.

The statutes of 1870 and 1871

Parliament gave the ministry three instruments in two sessions.

The Department of Justice Act 1870 consolidated the Crown’s law officers into a single department under the Attorney-General, created the office of Solicitor-General to conduct the Realm’s litigation, and brought the federal prosecutors and the marshals’ service under one ministerial head answerable to the Commons. Before the Act the Realm’s legal business had been distributed across departments that retained their own counsel and their own opinions. Its practical effect was that the enforcement campaign had a department behind it and an estimate of its own.

The Conspiracies Against Rights Act 1870 enacted the ministry’s theory in statute, making it an offence to combine to prevent, hinder or punish the exercise of any right or capacity conferred or recognised by federal law, and providing for trial in the federal courts.

The Protection of Electors Act 1871 extended the same principle to federal elections specifically, provided for federal supervisors at polls in constituencies where the returning officer certified a risk, and authorised the deployment of troops in aid of the civil power at a poll on the written requisition of a federal judge. Grant insisted on the judicial requisition against advice from his own department. His reason, given in Cabinet and recorded, was that a Realm which allows a minister to put soldiers at a polling place on his own authority has made an instrument that will be used against the Commons within a generation.

The marshals

The instrument that actually did the work was the marshals’ service, and it was small.

Grant’s ministry increased the appropriation for it in every year of its existence and increased the number of deputies about fourfold, which sounds substantial and produced a service of a few hundred men to police five polities. Deputies were paid by fee rather than by salary for most of the period, which was a standing invitation to corruption and produced it. They were locally recruited, which meant that in the worst counties they were recruited from a population that either sympathised with the Companies or was frightened of them. A number were killed. A larger number resigned.

The ministry’s answer was to send deputies from outside the polity, which worked and which supplied the opposition with its most effective line of attack: that the Realm was policing its own polities with strangers. The charge was accurate. Grant’s response, on the several occasions when it was put to him, was that a local officer who will not serve a warrant is not a local officer but an absence of one.

Prosecution in practice

The prosecutions were laborious. Establishing a federal right at the heart of every case required proof of what the victim had been doing or intending to do, which frequently meant proving that a dead man had intended to vote. Witnesses had to be found, protected, brought to a federal court that might be a hundred miles away, and returned home afterwards to the county the defendants came from. The ministry’s own reports acknowledge that it could not protect returning witnesses and did not pretend otherwise.

The trials nevertheless produced convictions in numbers. Whole county organisations were broken by the prosecution of their officers, because the Companies’ great administrative strength, their records, rolls and correspondence, was also their great evidential weakness once a marshal reached a strongbox. Several hundred men were convicted across the five polities between 1870 and 1875, a considerably larger number were indicted and pleaded, and a very much larger number ceased riding.

The ministry also made a decision that has been criticised ever since. Faced with more indictments than the federal courts could try, the law officers prosecuted the officers and dropped or compounded the cases against the rank and file. The policy was defensible on grounds of capacity and it meant that the great majority of men who had committed the violence were never tried for it. Grant defended the decision in the Commons on the ground that the Realm was suppressing an organisation and not conducting a census of guilt.

What it achieved

It worked while it lasted. Convictions were obtained, the night riding fell away sharply in the early 1870s, and elections in the former rebel polities in that decade were freer than they would be again for eighty years.

Black men voted and held office in the five polities throughout the period, sat in the reconstructed polity assemblies in numbers, and a small number sat in the Commons at New Westminster. The schools stayed open. The churches, burial societies, mutual associations, benefit clubs, building societies and newspapers that Black communities had founded after 1865 went on being founded, and the institutions built in these years are the reason the retreat did not destroy everything.

The Realm’s assessment of the period is that the enforcement ministry bought six years, that six years was long enough for a generation of institutions to be established that outlasted everything that followed, and that this was not what the ministry was trying to do.

The structural limits

The limits were structural and Grant knew them.

The theory depended on establishing a federal right at the heart of every prosecution, which was laborious and vulnerable to a court taking the narrow reading. The marshals’ service was small and could not be made large without a general federal constabulary that Parliament would not create and that the Realm’s constitutional instincts were against. Troops could protect a poll but could not protect a farm, and the offences that destroyed a community were committed at farms, at night, in numbers, across a county. And the whole apparatus depended on a ministry willing to spend political capital in the former rebel polities for the benefit of people whose votes were being suppressed, which is to say on a ministry willing to spend and receive nothing back.

Grant set all four out in a memorandum to his own Cabinet in 1874 that was published in the 1920s and is now the most quoted document of his ministry. Its conclusion was that the enforcement machinery was a temporary expedient resting on the will of a particular government, that no succeeding government would be obliged to maintain it, and that the Realm needed either to extend the Rights Act to the polities or to accept that the settlement would be undone. Parliament did neither for eighty-eight years.

Exhaustion, 1876

By 1876 the ministry was carrying the campaign against a Commons that had lost interest in it and a party that had begun to regard it as an electoral liability in the industrial polities, where the argument had shifted to the currency, the depression and the accumulated scandals.

Requisitions for troops were met more slowly. Estimates for the marshals’ service passed with reductions. The law officers were instructed to concentrate on the strongest cases, which was prudent administration and which the ministry’s own field officers reported as the beginning of the end. Grant’s last year in office saw fewer prosecutions than any year since 1869, and the reduction was not announced, was not debated and was not the subject of any decision that a historian can point to.

The whole enforcement effort lasted eight years, and nothing structural replaced it when he left.

Rights, the Charter and the courts

The Fourth Amendment to the Charter, 1873

The most durable legal achievement of the ministry was the Fourth Amendment to the Charter of Union, carried in 1873, which entrenched the emancipation of 1865 beyond the reach of an ordinary majority and guaranteed equal protection against the Union.

The amendment required a double majority and cleared it because Reconstruction held the window open and the electorates that would later have refused were not the electorates that voted. Lincoln, by then 1st Duke of Springfield, carried it through the Lords. Governor-General Frederick Douglass granted assent in the name of the Crown in right of America in his first year in office, so that a man born the property of a Maryland household completed the constitutional act that ended the possibility of ownership in law.

Its guarantee, like the Act of 1866, ran against the common government and not against the polities, which retained their own arrangements for another eighty-nine years. The entrenchment survived and the enforcement did not, and the Realm’s constitutional writers have generally treated the contrast as the clearest available demonstration of the difference between a rule that requires nobody to do anything and a rule that requires somebody to act.

The federal limit and the argument Grant did not win

Grant argued for the extension of the Rights Act to the polities twice, in 1871 and again in 1874, and was defeated both times without a division being necessary.

The objection was not, in the main, a defence of the Companies. It was a defence of the polities, and it was made by members of his own party as readily as by the opposition: that the Charter guaranteed the internal government of the polities, that the price paid in the Lords in 1866 was a matter of record, and that a Parliament which reversed that price four years later would be treating a constitutional bargain as a temporary convenience. A substantial body of members who voted for every enforcement statute Grant brought forward would not vote for extension, and the distinction they drew was that federal prosecution of a conspiracy against a federal right was federal business while the conduct of a county registrar was not.

Grant never accepted the distinction and never found an answer to it. His 1874 memorandum concedes that he could not see how the Realm was to reach the county courthouse without a statute Parliament would not pass, and that he did not know how to obtain one.

The Supreme Court

The Royal American Supreme Court heard the enforcement cases as they came up and split on them, and the split lasted for decades.

One line of authority read the Act’s federal limit as a boundary the Court had no business moving, and applied the same reasoning to the conspiracy statutes: that a federal offence had to rest on a federal right, that the right had to be identified with precision, and that a court which allowed a prosecution to proceed on a general appeal to citizenship was extending federal criminal jurisdiction by construction. The other held that the Act’s non-derogable core was a statement about persons rather than a federal courtesy, that a right which evaporates at a polity boundary is not a right, and that the Charter’s own guarantees ran everywhere.

Neither line ever wholly prevailed. The practical effect on Grant’s ministry was that the availability of a prosecution depended on which circuit panel heard the appeal, that convictions obtained in one circuit were reversed on facts that had sustained convictions in another, and that the law officers spent a great deal of the ministry’s time and credit on cases they lost for reasons that had nothing to do with the evidence.

Schools, the bureau and the land

The Realm had built two things for the freed under Lincoln’s ministry, and Grant’s inherited both.

The first was schools: a national programme of common schooling in the former rebel polities, funded federally, staffed heavily by Black teachers within a decade, which produced a rise in literacy among the fastest ever recorded anywhere. Grant’s ministry maintained the appropriation, defended it in every estimate, and treated the burning of schoolhouses as one of the clearest available heads of federal prosecution. The schools are the most durable achievement of the whole period and they survived the retreat.

The second was a bureau, a federal office charged with the relief, employment, contracts, land claims, family reunification and legal representation of the formerly enslaved. It was competent in parts, corrupt in parts and chronically underfunded throughout. Grant’s ministry reduced its functions progressively across the 1870s and it was wound down at the point when it was needed most. The reduction was defended at the time as the transfer of its legal work to the new Department of Justice, which was partly true and which did not replace what was lost.

The land question had been raised, partly acted on and reversed under Lincoln, and Grant did not reopen it. Land that had come into federal hands by confiscation, abandonment and tax sale, and had been settled by formerly enslaved families under military and bureau arrangements, was restored to pardoned owners whose legal claims were strong once the pardons were granted. Nothing corresponding to a general land settlement was proposed by his ministry. What followed instead was tenancy, and then the crop-lien and share arrangements that shaped the rural economy of the five polities for eighty years.

The Realm’s left has been consistent for a century in the judgement that this is the largest omission of the enforcement ministry: that a government which understood that rights require enforcement did not draw the conclusion that they also require an economic base, and that the freedmen it protected at the poll it left dependent at the gin house.

Elections and government formation

The Parliament he inherited

Grant took office in the middle of a Parliament elected under Lincoln, with a coalition majority that had been assembled for a war and had begun to dissolve into the party system that replaced it. The Commons of 1869 contained a body of former National Union members who now sat as Conservative and Crown Union, a body who did not, an unorganised reform interest, and the members returned from the reconstructed polities, whose right to sit was itself the subject of periodic motions.

The arithmetic was adequate and unstable. Grant’s first eighteen months were spent as much on holding the new party together as on the programme, and the reconstruction of the Cabinet in 1870 and 1871 was substantially an exercise in that.

The general election of 1870

Grant sought a dissolution in 1870 in order to obtain a mandate of his own, and the Conservative and Crown Union was returned with a working majority. It was the first general election fought under the modern party names and the first fought on the redrawn map that the commissioners had produced under the Reform Act.

The campaign was conducted on the enforcement question in the five polities and on the war debt, the tariff and the currency everywhere else, and the two campaigns had almost nothing to do with one another. Grant campaigned very little in person, being poor at it and knowing it, and the party’s organisation carried the contest.

The result gave the ministry the authority to bring forward the statutes of 1870 and 1871 and gave the enforcement campaign the parliamentary base it needed. It also produced a majority that contained a large commercial interest with no attachment to the enforcement programme, which is a debt the ministry paid across the following six years.

The general election of 1875

The second general election of the ministry returned Grant with a reduced majority. The contest was fought against the background of the panic of 1873, the depression that followed it, and the revenue and contracting scandals, and the ministry’s enforcement record was scarcely mentioned outside the polities where it was operating.

The reform interest fought its first organised campaign at this election, without a national party and with candidates who stood against sitting members of Grant’s own party on the corruption question. It did not win many seats. It established that the issue would carry votes, and the organisation assembled for the campaign became the nucleus of the Liberal Federal Democrats within a few years.

The Commons and the Lords

Grant was a poor House of Commons man and a competent manager of it, which is an unusual combination and is explained by his willingness to delegate the parts he was bad at.

He answered questions himself, briefly and accurately, and refused the period’s convention that a Prime Minister should reply to an attack with a speech. He did not intervene in debates on subjects he had not mastered. He was effective in select committee and used committees deliberately as an instrument, referring contested administrative questions to them and accepting their findings, including several that were damaging to his own ministers.

The Lords were a standing obstacle throughout. The upper House had exacted the federal limit in 1866, had no appetite for revisiting it, and amended or delayed a number of the ministry’s measures on polity-autonomy grounds. Grant’s practice was to accept amendments that did not destroy a bill’s operation and to force the question only where they did, and he never once threatened the upper House with the consequences of obstruction. Whether this was constitutional propriety or a failure of nerve is one of the standing questions about him.

Corruption and administration

The wartime origin

Grant’s ministry is the Realm’s byword for corruption, and the record supports the reputation.

Its origin was the contracting culture of the war. The Realm had spent more on the rebellion than on anything in its history, had spent it fast, and had let contracts through a system of recommendation that assumed the honesty of the men recommended. Select committees examined procurement throughout the war and published findings the Lincoln ministry found inconvenient; the ministry accepted the findings and changed very little. A great deal of the corruption prosecuted under Grant’s ministry originated in contracts let under Lincoln’s, and the men who had learned the practice during the war carried it into the peace and into the new party’s organisation.

This is an explanation and it is not an excuse, and the Realm’s histories are careful to keep the two apart. The wartime culture explains where the practice came from. It does not explain why a government with eight years and a large majority did not root it out.

The gold corner of 1869

The ministry’s first scandal arrived in its first year. A group of speculators, including a relative of Grant’s household by marriage, attempted to corner the market in gold on the strength of the impression that they had access to the administration’s intentions and could predict or influence whether public gold would be sold.

Grant broke the corner by ordering the sale of public gold, which collapsed the price and ruined a great many people who had nothing to do with the scheme, including a number who had been drawn into it on the same impression of access. He was embarrassed and was not implicated. The scheme’s promoters had traded on a proximity that Grant had allowed to exist, and the Realm’s judgement has consistently been that the fault was in permitting the proximity rather than in the response, which was prompt and correct.

The railway finance

The construction finance of the transcontinental railway produced the ministry’s most damaging parliamentary scandal, in 1872 and 1873, when it became known that shares in a construction company holding the contracts had been distributed to members of the Commons on terms that no member would have obtained in the market.

The inquiry that followed was conducted by a select committee, reported in public, and named members of both front benches. It produced censures, a small number of resignations, and no prosecutions, the law officers advising that the conduct disclosed was disgraceful and not criminal on the state of the statute. The correspondence that would afterwards shadow Blaine’s own ministry belongs to the rail finance of these years.

Grant’s part in it was not personal. His fault was that his ministry had let the contracts, had resisted the inquiry at the outset on the ground that it was a parliamentary attack rather than an investigation, and had then been obliged to accept findings it had tried to prevent from being made.

The revenue ring

The revenue service scandal of 1875 was the most serious of them, because it was internal to the government and because it reached Grant’s own office.

An organised conspiracy among revenue officers, distillers and political agents had for several years diverted a large part of the excise on spirits in the western cities, sharing the proceeds among officials and party organisations. It was uncovered and prosecuted by Benjamin H. Bristow, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, who conducted the investigation with a thoroughness that a substantial part of the ministry regarded as disloyal.

The prosecutions reached hundreds of officials and secured convictions. They also reached Grant’s own private secretary, Orville E. Babcock, who was indicted and acquitted, and Grant made a written deposition in his defence, which was extraordinary conduct for a head of government and was condemned as such at the time. Bristow resigned in 1876, his position within the ministry having become impossible, and the resignation of the minister who had exposed the fraud did the government more damage than the fraud had.

Grant’s recorded instruction, that no guilty man should escape, was published and was widely quoted against him when the conduct of his household appeared to contradict it.

The war office contracts

In 1876 it emerged that the Secretary of State for War, William W. Belknap, had for years received payments arising from the sale of appointments to trading posts at frontier military stations, the posts being lucrative monopolies and the appointments being in the minister’s gift.

Belknap resigned before the Commons could act. The House proceeded against him notwithstanding the resignation, on the constitutional ground that a minister cannot escape parliamentary accountability by ceasing to be one, and the proceeding failed on a division in which a substantial number of members voted against on that jurisdictional point rather than on the merits. He was prosecuted afterwards and was not convicted.

The affair damaged Grant more than any of the others, because the department concerned was the one he had commanded, because the traffic had been running for years in a service he was assumed to know, and because his first reaction was to accept the resignation with an expression of regret before the facts were established.

Grant’s own conduct

No inquiry, at the time or since, has produced evidence that Grant profited personally from any of it. He left office with substantially the property he had entered with and was destitute within eight years through a fraud practised on him.

The Realm has never accepted that this settles the question. The standing assessment, made by his critics in the 1870s and by the historiography ever since, is that a head of government is responsible for the administration he heads; that Grant’s characteristic error, treating an accusation against a friend as an attack on the government and reading the evidence afterwards if at all, is precisely the error that allows an administration to be looted; and that he made the same error repeatedly over eight years without learning from it.

His defenders answer that he dismissed the men who were proved dishonest, appointed the inquiries that proved them dishonest, and did not obstruct a single prosecution except in the case of his own secretary. The Register records both positions. It does not treat the enforcement record as an answer to the corruption, and neither did the reform movement, which admired the first and was founded against the second.

The civil service commission

Grant’s ministry made the Realm’s first serious attempt at a merit civil service. A commission was appointed in 1871 to draw up rules for competitive examination and for appointment on qualification rather than on recommendation, and it drafted them.

The rules were applied to a part of the federal establishment, were resisted by the party organisations of both sides with an energy that neither had shown on any other administrative question, and lapsed within three years when Parliament declined to vote the commission’s expenses. Grant asked for the money twice, in terms that his critics found insufficiently vigorous, and did not make the question one of confidence.

The episode is the strongest single item in the case against his administration and the strongest single item in the case for his intentions, and the Realm’s writers have used it for both purposes for a hundred and fifty years.

The founding of the Liberal Federal Democrats

The reform movement that became the Liberal Federal Democrats was assembled in the 1870s out of liberal lawyers, newspaper editors, chambers of commerce, university men, municipal reform societies and a body of the professional classes with no established political home. Its target was the corruption of the long Conservative and Crown Union ascendancy, and it said so in those terms.

Its founding diagnosis was that the corruption was not a moral failing of individuals but a defect of machinery, and that the remedy was structural: offices filled on merit, contracts let fairly, elections counted properly, courts open, public bodies obliged to give reasons. The word Federal in the party’s name records the diagnosis, referring to the federal machinery rather than to any centralising ambition.

The party’s first ministry was Samuel J. Tilden’s in 1883, and the civil service reforms it began outlasted it. That the reform party of the Realm was founded against the ministry that carried the rights settlement furthest is one of the more uncomfortable facts of the period, and both parties’ historians have noticed it. The LFD’s answer has always been that an administration which cannot keep its own accounts cannot be trusted with anyone’s rights, and that the retreat proved the point rather than refuting it.

Finance and the economy

The war debt and the income tax

The war had been paid for by borrowing, by taxation and by printing, and Grant inherited the consequences of all three. The federal debt was the largest single fact in the Realm’s finances and would remain so for a generation.

The Realm’s first general income tax had been introduced as a war measure and was repealed after the war, which left the revenue resting on customs and excise, which is to say on the tariff and on spirits and tobacco. The ministry’s fiscal policy was accordingly a policy of debt reduction out of a revenue it could not easily increase, and Grant pursued it steadily and unimaginatively, running surpluses, retiring bonds and refusing every proposal for expenditure that was not already committed. The American pound recovered its standing internationally during his ministry, and the recovery is generally credited to this policy.

One lasting consequence of the war’s domestic borrowing was that a broad section of the American public held the Realm’s debt directly and had a personal interest in its being honoured. Grant’s fiscal conservatism was therefore popular in a way that fiscal conservatism usually is not, and it constrained him in ways he did not always recognise: the enforcement estimates competed for money against debt retirement, and debt retirement had a constituency.

The currency question

The ministry’s most divisive domestic issue after enforcement was the currency. The Realm had issued paper against its own credit rather than against specie during the war, the paper had not been withdrawn, and the question of whether and when it should be redeemed in coin divided the polities on lines that had nothing to do with the war.

The commercial and creditor interest of the eastern polities wanted redemption and wanted it soon. The agricultural and debtor interest of the west and the frontier wanted the paper maintained or expanded, on the ground that contraction meant falling prices, and falling prices meant that a debt contracted in one currency was repaid in a harder one.

Grant’s position was for redemption and he did not conceal it. In 1874 he refused assent to a measure passed by both Houses to expand the paper issue, advising the Governor-General against it and offering his resignation if the advice were not taken, which is the single most aggressive constitutional act of his ministry and the one his admirers most often forget. The measure fell.

The panic of 1873

A banking failure in New Westminster in the autumn of 1873, arising from railway finance, produced the worst commercial crisis the Realm had suffered. Banks suspended, the exchange closed for the first time in its history, railway construction stopped, and the depression that followed lasted the rest of the ministry.

The Realm had no central bank; the Royal American Reserve was not founded until 1913, after a later panic. The instruments available to a ministry in 1873 were the release of public balances into the money market, the purchase of its own bonds, and exhortation, and Grant used all three to no great effect. Unemployment in the industrial polities was severe, wage reductions produced the Realm’s first large-scale industrial disputes, and the ministry met the disputes with an even hand that satisfied nobody.

The political consequence was that from 1873 the Realm’s public argument was about money and work, and the enforcement campaign was conducted in a country that had stopped paying attention to it. Grant’s own later assessment, in the memoirs, was that the panic cost the settlement more than any single act of its enemies.

Specie resumption, 1875

The Specie Resumption Act 1875 provided for the redemption of the Realm’s paper in coin from a fixed date at the end of the decade, and was the ministry’s principal financial measure.

It passed narrowly, against the opposition of the western members of Grant’s own party, and it was resented for a generation. Its defenders held that a currency the Realm could not redeem was a promise the Realm had not kept, and that resumption restored the standing of the American pound. Its opponents held that a deliberate contraction in the middle of a depression transferred wealth from debtors to creditors by statute and that the ministry had known it would.

The Realm has never settled the argument, and the currency question dominated its politics for the next twenty years.

Indian policy and the western frontier

The peace policy

Grant’s ministry adopted, in 1869, a declared peace policy towards the Indigenous nations of the western territories: that the Realm would deal with the nations by treaty and by civil agency rather than by campaign, that the agencies would be staffed on the nomination of religious bodies rather than by political patronage, and that a standing board of unpaid commissioners would supervise the expenditure and report to Parliament.

The policy was Grant’s own, and he defended it until his ministry’s bill of 1871 gave up its treaty half. Its declared object was the reduction of frontier warfare and the elimination of the fraud that had made the agencies notorious, and its unexamined assumption, stated openly in the ministry’s own papers, was that the nations would be settled on reserved lands, converted, schooled in English and absorbed. The policy was humane in intention by the standards of its administrators and assimilationist in design without qualification.

The board, the agencies and Ely Parker

The first Commissioner of Indian Affairs of the ministry was Ely S. Parker, a Seneca sachem and engineer who had served on Grant’s staff throughout the war and had drafted the surrender terms for the field formations in 1863. His appointment placed the administration of the Realm’s relations with the Indigenous nations in the hands of a member of one of them.

Parker reorganised the agencies, cancelled contracts, and was accordingly accused of fraud by the contractors and their parliamentary friends. He was investigated and was cleared of every charge. In 1871 the ministry brought in a bill to end treaty-making with the nations, and Parker, whose position the investigation had already made difficult, resigned over it. The bill passed the Commons and the Lords threw it out. Grant accepted the resignation and afterwards described it as one of the failures of his ministry.

The board of commissioners lasted longer and achieved less. It had no executive authority, its reports were published and were not acted on, and its members resigned in bodies at intervals when the department declined to follow their findings. The agencies remained a source of fraud for the whole of the ministry and long after it.

The wars of the 1870s

The peace policy did not stop the wars, and the ministry prosecuted them. Campaigns were fought in the north-west, in the southern plains and, from 1876, in the northern plains against the Lakota and Cheyenne nations, and the Realm’s forces destroyed villages, killed non-combatants and drove populations onto reserved lands in winter.

The immediate cause of the northern war was the entry of prospectors into country guaranteed by treaty, which the ministry failed to prevent, and then a departmental order requiring the nations to come onto the agencies by a date in midwinter, which was not capable of being complied with and which the ministry’s own officers reported as not capable of being complied with. A federal column was destroyed at a river crossing in the summer of 1876, and the Realm’s response was a campaign of a severity that ended organised resistance on the northern plains within a year.

The Register states the sequence plainly because the responsible body is the subject of this article. The treaty was the Realm’s. The failure to exclude the prospectors was the ministry’s. The impossible order was the ministry’s. The campaign was the ministry’s, and it was conducted while the same ministry was prosecuting a conspiracy statute in the southern polities on the principle that a right guaranteed by federal law must be made real. The Realm’s historians have not found a way to hold the two records together and have mostly stopped trying.

The schools

The ministry funded the beginnings of the boarding-school system, in which Indigenous children were removed from their families and educated in institutions that forbade their languages. The suppression of Indigenous languages through these schools was policy and not accident, and the Realm’s modern account of the period says so.

Grant’s ministry did not invent the system and did not foresee what it became. It funded it, defended it in estimate, and described it in its own reports as the humane alternative to the campaign. That description was made in good faith by the men who made it and it was wrong.

The Realm’s assessment

The modern assessment of the peace policy is that it was a genuine attempt to replace extermination with administration, that it reduced neither the extent of dispossession nor the violence with which it was carried out, and that its assimilationist machinery did lasting damage of a kind its authors did not intend and would not have understood as damage.

Grant’s personal record is mixed in a way that his admirers find difficult. He appointed Parker and stated repeatedly in public that the frontier wars were caused by the conduct of settlers and traders rather than by the nations. He also brought in the bill of 1871 to end treaty-making, which cost him Parker and which only the Lords stopped, authorised the campaigns, accepted the departmental orders that provoked them, and left office with the treaty system substantially discredited and the reserved-land system entrenched.

Labour, immigration and the polities

Chinese immigration

The ministry faced organised pressure, principally from the Pacific polities, for the exclusion of Chinese immigrants, and it resisted the pressure without defeating it.

Grant’s position was that the Realm’s treaty obligations to the Empire of China governed the question, that a Realm which had just written equal civil personhood into its statute book could not enact a racial exclusion four years later without making the statute ridiculous, and that the disorder in the Pacific polities was a matter for the ordinary law. Governor-General Douglass pressed the same argument in private audience in stronger terms, holding that rights which depended on European ancestry reproduced exactly the logic the postwar settlement had rejected.

The ministry did not carry the argument beyond its own term. Exclusion measures were introduced in the Commons repeatedly during the 1870s, were resisted by the ministry, and passed in the decade after it left office. The violence against Chinese communities in the Pacific polities during Grant’s ministry was suppressed by polity authorities where they chose to suppress it and was not otherwise reached, the federal limit applying to this as to everything else.

Immigrant labour and the industrial polities

The depression after 1873 produced wage reductions, strikes and the Realm’s first large industrial disputes, concentrated in the rail and mining districts and heavily involving immigrant labour from Ireland and the German states.

The ministry’s response was to treat public order as a polity matter, to make troops available in aid of the civil power on requisition, and to decline every proposal for federal regulation of hours or wages on the ground that it had no power to make one. The position was legally correct and politically inert, and it left the field to the polities, which used it variously.

Grant expressed sympathy for the men out of work more often than any Prime Minister of the century and did nothing whatever about it, which is a fair summary of the ministry’s whole social policy.

The former rebel polities

Readmission to ordinary self-government proceeded through Grant’s ministry polity by polity, as appointed officers were replaced by commissioned and elected ones. There was no treaty to complete, since nothing had left, and no single statute of conditions; what there was instead was a set of consistent requirements applied unevenly.

The conditions were acceptance of the Emancipation Measure as unalterable, repudiation of the rebel debt, an assembly elected on the post-1866 franchise, and the exclusion from office of men convicted in the treason trials. They were satisfied on paper long before they were satisfied in fact, and in several polities they were satisfied on paper by men who had spent the war at Charles Town and had not been indicted.

Grant’s ministry granted readmission in most of the five and knew that the certifications it accepted were partly fictions. Its defence, recorded in Cabinet, was that the alternative was direct rule without a term, that direct rule without a term was itself a constitutional injury, and that a polity restored to its own government could still be reached by federal prosecution. The first two propositions were true. The third depended entirely on the ministry that came next.

Foreign policy

The doctrine of the ministry

The ministry’s foreign policy was conducted by Hamilton Fish throughout and was consistent: the settlement of disputes by arbitration and treaty wherever a tribunal could be constituted, no acquisition of territory containing populations the Realm was not prepared to admit as citizens, no recognition of belligerency in any foreign civil conflict, and the avoidance of European entanglement.

Grant’s own instincts were less cautious than his Foreign Secretary’s, and the record of the ministry is substantially the record of Fish restraining him. This was acknowledged at the time and Grant did not resent it. He kept Fish for eight years, which is the longest continuous tenure of the office in the century, and defended him against his own supporters on more than one occasion.

Spain, Cuba and the Ten Years’ War

The most dangerous question of the ministry was Cuba. The rising of October 1868 had begun the Ten Years’ War against Spanish rule, an insurgent Republic in Arms had adopted a constitution in 1869, and there was strong pressure in the Commons and in the press for the Realm to recognise the insurgents as belligerents.

Grant was sympathetic to recognition and Fish was against it. The Foreign Office view, which prevailed, was that a Realm which had just spent two years insisting that no foreign power might recognise the belligerency of a rebellion within its own borders could not recognise one within Spain’s without destroying the principle it had fought for. Spain had also prepared an intervention on the rebel side during the Realm’s own war, and the Realm’s relations with Madrid were accordingly poor, which made the argument for restraint harder to make and more necessary.

The crisis came in 1873, when a Spanish warship seized a vessel carrying arms and men to the insurgents and executed a number of those aboard, among them subjects of the Crown. Public feeling was extreme and the Realm came nearer to war than at any point between 1863 and 1898. The matter was settled by negotiation: an indemnity, the return of the vessel, and a Spanish disavowal of the officer responsible. The Realm’s naval establishment was found during the crisis to be in no condition to fight Spain, which had consequences.

Cuba obtained no foreign liberator. The war ended in 1878, after Grant had left office, without independence.

The Caribbean annexation proposal

Grant proposed the annexation of a Caribbean republic in 1870 and was defeated on it, and it is the clearest single failure of his political judgement.

His stated reasons were strategic and, in part, connected with the rights settlement: a naval station in the Caribbean, and, more particularly, a polity of the Realm in which formerly enslaved people from the southern polities might settle and hold land under a government that would protect them. The second reason was sincere and was put to Douglass, who visited the territory on a commission of inquiry and reported in favour of the proposal.

It was defeated in Parliament and defeated heavily. The objections were made from several directions at once: that the Realm had no business acquiring territory whose inhabitants had not asked to be acquired, that the negotiations had been conducted through personal agents of the Prime Minister rather than through the Foreign Office, that the promoters of the scheme stood to profit from it, and that the proposal amounted to an admission that the rights settlement could not be made to work at home. Grant pressed it beyond the point at which it was recoverable, made a personal quarrel of it with members of his own party, and lost.

The episode cost him a body of support in the Commons that he needed later and never regained.

New Albion and the northern boundary

The Crown of New Albion had entered the personal union through Confederation in 1867, two years before Grant took office, so that the Realm’s northern neighbour was a sovereign federation sharing the same monarch, with its own Parliament, its own responsible government and its own courts.

The relationship required a machinery that did not exist, since the two governments could not conduct their business through the Crown they shared. Grant’s ministry and the government at Ottawa settled a series of questions by direct negotiation and by arbitration: the north-western boundary through the island channels, the north Atlantic fisheries, navigation on the shared waters, and the reciprocal treatment of vessels. The arbitrations were referred to European heads of state and were accepted by both governments without complaint.

The ministry’s practice in these negotiations, that a shared Crown creates no shared government and that two realms of the same King deal with one another as separate states, became the standing doctrine of the Realm and is now applied without argument across the whole family of Crown realms.

Europe and the German war

The Realm was neutral in the war between France and the German states in 1870 and in the settlement that produced the German Empire in January 1871, and the neutrality raised a constitutional question that the ministry answered carefully.

The Kingdom of Hanover, which had survived the settlement of 1866 unannexed, entered the new Empire as a constituent monarchy with its Crown, government and archives intact. Its King was Ernest II, who was also King of Great Britain and Ireland, King of the United Kingdom of America and King of New Albion. The Realm’s sovereign therefore became, in a wholly separate capacity, a federal prince within a European empire, in the middle of Grant’s ministry and without any American minister having been consulted.

The ministry’s position, stated in the Commons and never since departed from, was that nothing whatever followed from it for the Realm: that the Crown in right of America is a distinct thing from the Crown in right of Hanover, that the King acts in each capacity on the advice of the ministers of that realm alone, and that the American Parliament’s business was unaffected by the German constitutional arrangements of a person who happened also to be its King. Grant recognised the Empire in the ordinary course on Fish’s advice and made no comment on the family question. The Realm has treated the episode since as the clearest early demonstration of the divisibility of the shared Crown.

The navy

The Realm had spent the war being politely assisted by the Royal Navy and had emerged determined not to need the assistance again, and Grant’s ministry did less about it than it intended.

The naval estimates competed against debt retirement and lost. The condition of the establishment was exposed in the Cuban crisis of 1873, when the Realm discovered that it could not have fought Spain at sea with the ships it had in commission, and the discovery produced a programme of construction that was voted, reduced and voted again across the remaining years of the ministry. The Realm’s blue-water navy dates from the humiliation of 1861 in its doctrine and from the 1880s in its hulls, and Grant’s ministry falls in the gap between the two, having agreed with the argument and declined to pay for it.

The Crown and the Governors-General

Ernest II

Ernest II reigned throughout Grant’s ministry and until 1878. He was blind, resident in Great Britain, and had established during the rebellion a practice of complete abstention from American political questions that he did not vary afterwards.

His part in the ministry was formal and consistent: he commissioned the head of government once Commons confidence was clear, on the resident Governor-General’s confirmation, and he did not attempt to influence the choice. He commissioned Grant in 1869, commissioned Douglass as Governor-General on Grant’s advice in 1873, and commissioned Blaine in 1877. Grant’s correspondence with him is thin, formal and entirely correct, and there is no evidence that the two men ever discussed policy.

Salmon P. Chase, 1869 to 1873

Governor-General Salmon P. Chase served through the first four years of the ministry. He had been Lincoln’s Chancellor of the Exchequer, had financed the war, and had granted assent to the Rights Act in 1866.

Chase and Grant were unlike men who recognised complementary strengths. Their weekly audiences were shorter, plainer and more operationally bounded than Chase’s philosophical exchanges with Lincoln had been. Chase tested whether proposed Crown instruments had statutory warrant and traced the chain of responsibility through which action would be reviewed; Grant supplied direct ministerial advice and was more interested in whether a statute gave his officers what they needed to protect a courthouse, a witness or a school. They maintained no operational channel to commanders.

Chase regarded the enforcement ministry as the necessary practical continuation of Lincoln’s settlement even when its administration proved imperfect. He answered the scandals by requiring honest advice and regular constitutional process rather than by using Crown authority to punish ordinary ministerial failure, which is the distinction the office rests on and which he was careful to state whenever the temptation arose.

The recommendation of Frederick Douglass

By 1872 Chase’s strokes and declining mobility had made retirement necessary, and he and Grant arranged an orderly end to the conventional eight-year tenure without any declaration of incapacity.

Grant recommended Frederick Douglass as Chase’s successor. His stated reasons were that Douglass possessed abolitionist authority, international stature and extensive experience of constitutional argument, and that those qualifications could give the settlement moral and constitutional legitimacy at a moment when the will to enforce it was visibly weakening. The appointment also answered the retreat and strengthened the public meaning of equal citizenship, and Grant was explicit in Cabinet that the symbolism was secondary to fitness for the office: Douglass was not to be commissioned to represent a race or to reward a constituency.

The recommendation followed the ordinary constitutional route. Grant advised Ernest II in the King’s American capacity. Ernest issued the commission without personal or British governing instructions.

15 February 1873

On 15 February 1873 Chase’s retirement took effect before Douglass was sworn. The sequence left no vacancy, no acting Governor-General and no Council of State, and Chase completed a meticulous personal handover that treated his successor’s authority as fully ordinary in law and historic in meaning.

The Chief Justice of the Royal American Supreme Court administered the oath at Government House. Its wording had been settled by Order-in-Council on Grant’s advice under existing appointment law, and because Douglass was the first new Governor-General installed after the enactment of the Rights Act, it became the first vice-regal oath to name the statute expressly, binding the holder to the Crown in right of America, the Charter, the Rights Act and impartial service to every person according to law. Douglass took the oath in the newly established Governor-General’s Full Dress, an optional navy, gold and white civilian uniform carrying no sword, military insignia, rank badges or eagle motif, and appeared immediately afterwards before both Houses of Parliament.

The installation produced national celebration and organised racist hostility in the same week. Grant attended the swearing-in and said nothing for the record that survives. He and Chase both insisted that Douglass’s authority was fully ordinary in law, and the insistence was itself the point they were making.

Working with Douglass

Grant and Douglass formed a disciplined working partnership. Both preferred direct speech and distrusted decorative evasion, and their weekly audiences were morally candid and evidence-heavy. Douglass brought reports from petitioners, provincial tours, churches, schools and legal advocates; Grant supplied ministerial advice and the administrative account of enforcement.

The constitutional difficulty was how a Governor-General could support lawful rights enforcement without allowing scandal or parliamentary weakness to turn Government House into a substitute opposition. Douglass refused two convenient conclusions: that scandal invalidated Reconstruction, and that the justice of Reconstruction excused dishonest administration. He demanded complete advice when scandal touched the ministry and left confidence, investigation and punishment to Parliament and the courts.

Grant, for his part, accepted a Governor-General who warned forcefully without claiming an operational or competing political mandate. He was not always comfortable with it. The record of the audiences of 1875 and 1876, when the revenue prosecutions were running and the enforcement estimates were being cut, shows Douglass pressing harder than at any other point and Grant answering with the administrative account and very little else.

The limits both men observed

Neither man used the relationship to do what the constitution did not permit. Douglass granted assent on advice throughout, including to measures he privately regarded as damaging, warned in private and explained the national obligation in general public addresses without attacking the ministry or organising resistance. Grant did not use the vice-regal office as a shield for the ministry, did not ask Douglass to lend Crown authority to a contested political position, and did not attempt to have him replaced when the warnings became sharp.

The Realm’s constitutional writers regard the four years of the Grant and Douglass partnership as one of the clearest available demonstrations of what the office is for, precisely because both men had every reason to stretch it and neither did.

Cabinet and administration

Method

Grant ran his Cabinet as he had run an army. He required written submissions, expected departments to state the question, the authority, the cost and the objections, and announced a decision rather than allowing a discussion to conclude itself. Once a decision was announced he expected it to be executed and treated further argument as insubordination.

The method worked in the departments that had a clear statutory task and failed in the departments that required political judgement, because it produced decisions faster than the ministry could assess whether they were right. It also concentrated an unusual amount of business in the Prime Minister’s own office, which is one reason the corruption of his private secretary was so damaging.

Principal ministers

Fish at the Foreign Office was the fixed point of the ministry. The law officers changed frequently and the changes mattered: Amos T. Akerman, the Attorney-General who built the enforcement campaign and prosecuted the Companies with more energy than any officer before or since, was pushed out of the ministry in 1871 under pressure from railway interests whose litigation he had declined to settle on the terms they wanted. The Realm’s historians regard his removal as the single clearest instance of the corruption of the ministry directly damaging its enforcement work, and Grant’s acquiescence in it as the hardest item in his personal record.

Benjamin H. Bristow at the Exchequer prosecuted the revenue ring and resigned in 1876. William W. Belknap at the War Office resigned in 1876 over the trading-post payments. Ely S. Parker at the Indian Office resigned in 1871, after being cleared of charges brought by contractors, over the ministry’s bill to end treaty-making.

The pattern is visible and was noticed at the time: the ministers who did their work rigorously left under pressure, and the ministers who did not left under investigation.

Patronage

The federal establishment was filled by recommendation, and the recommendations came through the new party’s polity associations, which Grant had delegated entirely and did not supervise.

He appointed a considerable number of men on the strength of wartime service or personal acquaintance, including relatives of his wife’s family, and defended the appointments on the ground that he knew the men. Several were competent. Several were not. His assumption that long acquaintance supported trust made him slow to recognise a conflict of interest and slower to accept that one had been established, and the assumption is the mechanism by which most of the ministry’s scandals reached it.

Soldiers in civil office

A substantial number of Grant’s appointments went to officers who had served under him, in the federal departments and in the appointed offices of the reconstructed polities.

The practice was defended on the ground that the officers were competent administrators, visibly temporary, and the least resented of the available appointees in the polities themselves. It was attacked on the ground that a Realm whose constitutional doctrine holds that no soldier possesses a political discretion had put a great many soldiers into positions that consisted of nothing else.

Grant’s own answer was that the men he appointed had resigned or retired their commissions, that they held their offices on the same terms as any other civil officer, and that he had refused throughout the war to allow serving officers to sit in the Commons. The answer is technically complete and it did not settle the argument, which recurs in the Realm’s constitutional literature whenever a general enters politics.

Departure and the retreat

The decision to go

Grant resigned in 1877 after eight years, at a time of his own choosing and without any parliamentary defeat requiring it. He was fifty-four.

The reasons he gave were that eight years was as long as any minister should hold the office, a proposition the Realm’s practice had by then substantially accepted, and that the government needed a leader who could carry the party into the next general election, which he did not believe he could. There was no crisis, no confidence question and no royal intervention. The ministry’s parliamentary position had weakened, the depression was in its fourth year, and the accumulated scandals had made the ministry’s continuation an argument for the reform interest.

Governor-General Douglass commissioned James G. Blaine once clear Commons confidence had been established. Grant’s support and his military reputation supplied no alternative mandate, and Douglass’s doubts about the direction of Reconstruction did not authorise him to obstruct a parliamentary transfer.

No bargain and no disputed election

There was no corrupt bargain and no disputed election. A parliamentary Realm offers no mechanism by which the outcome of a contest for the headship of government can be traded for a change of policy in the polities, because there is no such contest: a ministry is formed when a member of the Commons can command a majority and it ends when he cannot.

The Register records this plainly because the point is frequently misunderstood. The end of the enforcement period in the Realm has no founding transaction, no negotiated settlement and no document. What there was instead was a change of ministry, a change of priorities, and a steady, unannounced reduction in the will to prosecute.

The retreat

Blaine, and after him Samuel J. Tilden and Grover Cleveland, did not repeal the settlement. They administered it less.

Prosecutions were brought in smaller numbers and then in very small numbers. Marshals were not reinforced. Troops were not sent. The bureau was closed. Appointed officers in the polities were replaced by elected ones on a timetable that responded to local pressure rather than to local conditions. None of this required a decision that anybody had to defend, and none of it was announced.

The mechanism by which the polities then dismantled the settlement required no defiance of federal law at all. A polity could not repeal the Rights Act and did not try. What a polity could do was legislate its own franchise, appoint its own registrars, run its own polls, constitute its own juries, define its own vagrancy and labour offences, staff its own sheriffs’ offices and decline to prosecute private violence, and none of that touched federal authority. Reconstruction ended in 1889 and nothing announced it.

What was not replaced

Nothing structural replaced the enforcement ministry. There was no federal constabulary, no standing prosecutorial capacity dedicated to the settlement, no statutory duty on any successor to maintain the campaign, and no extension of the Rights Act to the polities. The whole apparatus had rested on the will of a particular government, exactly as Grant’s 1874 memorandum said it did.

The Act was extended to the polities in 1962, eighty-eight years after Grant put the proposition to his own Cabinet and could not get it through Parliament. The Realm’s modern constitutional practice is built on the conclusion that a right which stops at a jurisdictional boundary is not a right but a courtesy, and Grant’s ministry is the standing evidence of what the intervening period cost.

Political positions

Rights and federal power

Grant held that a law which is not enforced is not a law but an aspiration in statutory language, and that the whole value of the Rights Act lay in whether a person could reach a courthouse and be heard in it. He argued for the extension of the Act to the polities, did not obtain it, and did not pretend that the federal machinery was an adequate substitute.

He was not an abolitionist by formation and did not claim to be. He had married into a slaveholding family of the loyal border, had held a settled view about the Mexican war and the extension of slavery from 1848, and had arrived at his rights politics through the administration of a war and its consequences rather than through the moral argument that produced Lincoln and Douglass. His critics on the reform side have used this to argue that his commitment was institutional rather than moral. His defenders answer that an institutional commitment is the one that produces prosecutions.

The constitution and the army

Grant’s constitutional positions were consistent and, on the record, held against his own interest. He held that a commander derives no political authority from victory, that a large standing army is a danger to the constitution that raised it, that soldiers in civil office hold no military discretion, and that troops at a poll require a judicial requisition and not a ministerial one.

He was less clear on the question of a general who acts without authority, and the failure to press Sherman’s case is the exception that his critics use against the whole of the rest.

Finance

He was a hard-money man, a debt reducer and a fiscal conservative, and these positions cost him support in the west and among the debtor interest for the whole of his ministry. He did not regard economic distress as a matter for federal remedy and did not propose one during four years of depression, holding that the Realm’s business was to restore the currency and pay its debts and that recovery would follow.

Party and office

Grant treated the Conservative and Crown Union as an instrument for carrying the settlement rather than as a body with claims of its own, delegated its organisation entirely, and was slow to see what the organisation was becoming. He accepted the convention of a limited tenure, left at a time of his own choosing, and declined every suggestion that he should return to public office afterwards.

Personal life

Julia and the family

Grant married Julia Dent in 1848 and the marriage lasted until his death. It was the central relationship of his life, and the correspondence between them, published in the twentieth century, is the principal source for his private character.

They had four children. The household was informal by the standards of the period and of the office, and Grant’s domestic manner, quiet, indulgent and physically affectionate, surprised visitors who had come expecting the man of the despatches. Julia was a political asset without holding any position and a political liability through her family, whose members appeared repeatedly in the ministry’s difficulties and whom Grant would not exclude.

Manner and habits

Grant was small, quiet, badly dressed and almost impossible to read. He spoke little in company, disliked ceremony, and had no gift whatever for public speaking. He smoked constantly, which killed him. He rode extremely well and did it for pleasure until the last years of his life.

The drinking is a real fact and a heavily contested one. He drank episodically rather than habitually, was affected by very little, and the episodes were associated throughout his life with isolation and inactivity rather than with pressure. His staff during the war managed the question and left records that they had managed it. His political enemies made the maximum use of it, his admirers denied it entirely, and neither account is accurate. The Realm’s biographers now treat it as a condition he lived with and largely controlled, which is a duller conclusion than either side wanted.

Belief and manner of speech

Grant was raised among Methodists, attended church without conspicuous devotion, and declined throughout his life to make any public statement about his religious belief. He disliked profanity, would not permit it in his presence, and did not object to it in others’ accounts of him.

His prose is the most admired thing about him and it was entirely unaffected. He wrote as he spoke, in short declarative sentences with the intention stated first, and the Realm’s literary judgement of the memoirs has been consistently higher than its political judgement of the ministry.

Later life

The world tour

Grant left office in 1877 and travelled for more than two years, through Europe, the Mediterranean, Egypt, India, China and Japan. He was received everywhere as a head of government of the Realm and by several courts as a soldier of standing, and the tour is the origin of a substantial body of correspondence about the condition of the countries he passed through.

He met the German Chancellor, was received by the Emperor of China’s ministers, and mediated informally in a boundary dispute between China and Japan at the request of both. He returned in 1879 with an international reputation considerably higher than his domestic one.

The attempt at a return

A body of opinion within the Conservative and Crown Union attempted to bring Grant back to the leadership at the end of the 1870s and again in the early 1880s, on the ground that he was the only figure who could hold the party together.

He declined, consistently and without apparent regret, and the Realm has generally accepted the refusals at face value. The party’s reform wing had by then largely departed to the new Liberal Federal Democrats, and Grant’s own view, recorded in correspondence, was that a former Prime Minister who returns after eight years out of office returns to a different Parliament and is of no use in it.

Financial ruin

In the early 1880s Grant put substantially everything he had into an investment partnership in which one of his sons was engaged. The partnership was a fraud. It failed in 1884, and Grant was left destitute at sixty-two, with debts he had guaranteed personally and no income.

He surrendered his property, including his war trophies and the presents of the world tour, to meet the obligations. The Realm’s public response was a mixture of sympathy and satisfaction that the biographers have found instructive: a man who had presided over the most corrupt administration in the Realm’s history had been comprehensively swindled, and a considerable body of opinion regarded this as a species of justice while a larger body was ashamed of the first.

The Personal Memoirs

Grant was diagnosed with throat cancer in 1884 and began writing to provide for his family. Samuel Clemens, writing as Mark Twain, published the Personal Memoirs through his own firm on terms that were extraordinarily generous and that Clemens defended as ordinary commercial judgement.

The book is a work of military history written with uncommon directness, covering his early life, the Mexican war and the rebellion, and stopping before the premiership. It contains almost nothing about the ministry, which Grant declined to write about on the ground that the men concerned were still living and the judgements were not his to make. It is regarded in the Realm as among the finest military memoirs in the language, and the earnings kept his family in comfort for the rest of their lives.

Illness and death

He wrote the final pages in extreme pain, latterly unable to speak and communicating in written notes, and finished four days before his death on 23 July 1885. He was sixty-three.

Lincoln, who had lived until 1881, did not survive to read them. Grant completed them alone, in the knowledge that the enforcement ministry’s long-term verdict was still being written and that the retreat he had predicted was well advanced.

Funeral and memory

The funeral was the largest public ceremonial the Realm had held. Its service was held in the choir of Columbia Cathedral, the first state funeral in the building, while the nave was still open to the sky. The procession that followed it across the river included formations of the wartime army, delegations from the freed communities of the five polities, and, at the family’s request and in a decision that was argued about for a generation, a body of former rebel soldiers.

Robert E. Lee had died before him. In 1864 Lee and Mary had sold the slope and the woods of their estate across the river to the Crown for the burial of the capital’s dead, and they gave the house and the rest of it to the Realm by a deed of gift that took effect on his death in 1870, for use as a national military cemetery; it is now the Robert E. Lee National Cemetery, and in speech simply the National Cemetery. Grant is buried there, on the slope in sight of the terrace where Lee lies, and Julia was buried beside him. His stone names him Prime Minister, the first exception to the rule that the cemetery’s stones carry no office, made at the government’s request over the administration’s objection; the only other Prime Minister buried there, John F. Kennedy, has the same exception. The two men had sat on that terrace most Sundays of Lee’s last five years, and Grant kept Lee’s last letter on his desk for as long as he was in office.

Public image

In office

Grant’s public image during the ministry was that of a silent, honest, badly served soldier presiding over a government that was being robbed. The image was substantially accurate and it was politically useless to him, because it invited the conclusion that the Realm required a different sort of man.

He was popular in the freed communities of the five polities to a degree no other Prime Minister of the century approached, and remained so for the rest of his life. He was detested in the white south, where the Companies’ own literature made him the central figure of a persecution. He was respected and not liked in the commercial polities, where the currency policy was approved and the administration was not.

The Lost Cause and Grant

The Lost Cause account of the war, developed in the former rebel polities from the 1870s onward, required a version of Grant, and it produced one: the butcher who won by arithmetic, who spent men because he had them, and whose victory was therefore a matter of resources rather than of generalship.

The account is not supported by the professional literature and has been extremely durable. Its persistence is assisted by the fact that half of it is true. Grant did win by accepting a rate of loss that no other commander would accept, said so, and never claimed otherwise. The Lost Cause version takes an accurate fact about the strategy and attaches to it a judgement about the man that the record does not sustain, and the Realm’s military historians have spent a century separating the two with limited public effect.

Memorials

Grant is commemorated by his grave at the National Cemetery, at the service academies and in the naming of a number of public works of the period. He is not among the figures the Realm has placed at the centre of its national ceremonial, and the omission is generally attributed to the corruption rather than to anything else.

The freed communities’ own commemoration of him is older and more continuous than the Realm’s. A number of churches, schools, benefit societies and streets founded between 1870 and 1890 in the five polities carry his name, and the naming was in most cases done while the enforcement was still running and its future was not known.

Historical reputation

The first account

The first account of Grant, which held from the 1870s to about 1900, was the reform account: an honest soldier out of his depth in politics, presiding over a corrupt administration, whose military reputation had carried him into an office he was not equipped for.

It was written substantially by the people who had founded the Liberal Federal Democrats against him and it was not dishonest. Its defect was that it treated the enforcement campaign as an incidental part of the ministry rather than as its central work, largely because by 1900 the campaign had been comprehensively undone and the reform movement’s own successors had not maintained it either.

The long depreciation

Between about 1900 and the 1950s Grant’s reputation reached its lowest point, and the reason was the historiography of the war and of Reconstruction rather than anything about the ministry.

The dominant academic account of the period in those decades treated Reconstruction as a mistake, direct rule as a vindictive imposition, and federal enforcement as an interference with the natural recovery of the polities. On that account the enforcement ministry was not merely ineffective but wrong, and Grant’s corruption was the natural companion of a misconceived project. The account was taught in the Realm’s universities for two generations and was written substantially by men who were sympathetic to the Lost Cause.

The revision

The reassessment began in the 1950s, ran alongside the campaign that produced the extension of the Rights Act in 1962, and is now the dominant account.

It holds that the enforcement campaign was the most serious attempt any government of the Realm made to give the rights settlement practical effect before the 1960s, that it worked while it was maintained, that its failure was structural rather than a failure of will, and that the eighty-eight years between Grant’s proposal to extend the Act and its extension are the measure of what was lost when it stopped. It also holds that the corruption was exactly as bad as the reform account said, and it declines to trade one against the other.

The unresolved argument

What the Realm has not settled is what the corruption means.

One case holds that an administration is judged by what it does, that Grant’s did the most important work of the century and did it against the grain of his own party and his own Parliament, and that a government’s accounts are a lesser question than whether a person in a county of the State of Alabama could vote and be heard in court. The other holds that the enforcement rested entirely on public willingness to sustain it, that the corruption destroyed that willingness faster than the enemies of the settlement could have destroyed it themselves, and that a ministry which spends the credit its cause depends on has damaged the cause whatever its intentions.

Both cases are made. The Register does not decide between them, and the argument has not closed.

His premiership is studied in the Realm’s secondary schools under the heading of the enforcement ministry. His admirers consider the label a compliment. His critics consider it an admission that the rights settlement required force to sustain and was therefore not durable on its own terms. Both sides are partly right, which is why the argument has never ended.

Chronology

Electoral history

Offices and succession

He succeeded Abraham Lincoln as Prime Minister, was the first leader of the Conservative and Crown Union under that name, and was succeeded as Prime Minister by James G. Blaine.

Trivia

See also

• Abraham Lincoln, 12th Prime Minister; Lincoln’s ministry is the constitutional source that Grant’s ministry enforces
• Frederick Douglass, 12th Governor-General; commissioned on Grant’s advice in 1873 and his constitutional partner to 1877
• Salmon P. Chase, 11th Governor-General; commissioned Grant on clear Commons confidence in 1869
• James G. Blaine, 14th Prime Minister; succeeded Grant in 1877, and the retreat begins with the change of ministry
• William H. Seward, 11th Prime Minister; Seward’s ministry precedes the crisis that Lincoln and then Grant resolve
• Ernest II, Monarch throughout Grant’s ministry
• The American Civil War, the 1861 to 1863 rebellion that Grant’s military career defines and his premiership inherits
• The American Rights Act, the 1866 settlement whose federal limit governs everything the enforcement ministry could and could not do
• Conservative and Crown Union, reconstituted under that name in 1869 with Grant as its first Prime Minister
• Liberal Federal Democrats, founded in the 1870s against the corruption of the long CCU ascendancy
• Prime Minister of the United Kingdom of America, the office and its succession

Categories

People · Prime Ministers · Conservative and Crown Union · The Civil War Era · Reconstruction · Nineteenth Century