424 Chapter 15 Reconstruction and the South
to Washington for help. President
Grant’s attorney general, Edwards
Pierrepont, refused to act. “The
whole public are tired out with
these autumnal outbreaks in the
South,” he told Ames. “Preserve
the peace by the forces of your
own state.”
Nationalism was reasserting
itself. Had not Washington and
Jefferson been Virginians? Was
not Andrew Jackson Carolina-born?
Since most Northerners had little
real love or respect for African
Americans, their interest in racial
equality flagged once they felt rea-
sonably certain that blacks would
not be re-enslaved if left to their
own devices in the South.
Another, much subtler force
was also at work. The prewar
Republican party had stressed the
common interest of workers, man-
ufacturers, and farmers in a free
and mobile society, a land of equal opportunity
where all could work in harmony. Southern whites
had insisted that laborers must be disciplined if large
enterprises were to be run efficiently. By the 1870s,
as large industrial enterprises developed in the north-
ern states, the thinking of business leaders changed—
the southern argument began to make sense to them,
and they became more sympathetic to the southern
demand for more control over “their” labor force.
Accounts from Victims of the Ku Klux Klan
atwww.myhistorylab.com
Grant as President
Other matters occupied the attention of northern
voters. The expansion of industry and the rapid devel-
opment of the West, stimulated by a new wave of rail-
road building, loomed more important to many than
the fortunes of the former slaves. Beginning in 1873,
when a stock market panic struck at public confi-
dence, economic difficulties plagued the country and
provoked another debate over the tariff.
More damaging to the Republicans was the fail-
ure of Ulysses S. Grant to live up to expectations as
president. Qualities that had made Grant a fine mili-
tary leader for a democracy—his dislike of political
maneuvering and his simple belief that the popular
will could best be observed in the actions of
Congress—made him a poor chief executive. When
ReadtheDocumentCongress failed to act on his suggestion that the qual-
ity of the civil service needed improvement, he
announced meekly that if Congress did nothing, he
would assume the country did not want anything
done. Grant was honest, but his honesty was of the
naive type that made him the dupe of unscrupulous
friends and schemers.
His most serious weakness as president was his
failure to deal effectively with economic and social
problems, but the one that injured him and the
Republicans most was his inability to cope with
government corruption. The worst of the scandals—
such as the Whiskey Ring affair, which implicated
Grant’s private secretary (Orville E. Babcock) and
cost the government millions in tax revenue, and the
corruption of Secretary of War William W. Belknap
in the management of Indian affairs—did not
become public knowledge during Grant’s first term.
However, in 1872 Republican reformers, alarmed by
rumors of corruption and disappointed by Grant’s
failure to press for civil service reform, organized the
Liberal Republican party and nominated Horace
Greeley, the able but eccentric editor of the New
York Tribune, for president.
The Liberal Republicans were mostly well-
educated, socially prominent types—editors, college
presidents, economists, along with a sprinkling of busi-
nessmen and politicians. Their liberalism was of the
laissez-faire variety; they were for low tariffs and sound
money, and against what they called “class legislation,”An 1872 Grant campaign poster of “Our Three Great Presidents” at best got it about two-thirds right.