The Man Who Saved the Union (86 page)

Living up to the watchword caused great discomfort. Bristow’s investigation eventually reached into the president’s own office, with a trail of telegrams implicating Orville Babcock, Grant’s private secretary. The telegrams were ambiguous, even mystifying, suggesting some kind of code. “
Poor Ford is dead,” one to Babcock stated. “McDonald is with his body. Let the President act cautiously in his successorship.” The telegram that gained the greatest notoriety declared, “We have official information that the enemy weakens. Push things.” It was signed “Sylph.” No one knew who Sylph was, but the feminine sound of the name suggested a sexual element that lent salacious appeal to the
whiskey story.

“
To General Bristow and myself this looked like a very serious matter,”
Edwards Pierrepont, the successor to George Williams as attorney general, later testified. “We brought the telegrams to the President.” Grant immediately summoned Babcock and asked what the messages meant. Babcock appeared flustered and talked around the subject for a few moments before Pierrepont and Bristow stopped him. “The Secretary of the Treasury and I then both insisted that this was a matter so serious that if he could give an explanation which, as he said, was complete and perfect, and if he was perfectly innocent, as he said he was, he should go out there and make an explanation. And we pressed it as a thing he ought to do on the spot.” Grant concurred. Babcock proceeded to draft a telegram to send to the press. “It was somewhat long and somewhat, toward the end, argumentative, and I took the pen and dashed through it,” Pierrepont recalled. “I said, ‘You don’t want to send your argument; send the fact, and go there and make your explanation.’ ”

Babcock had no explanation, at least none that exonerated him, and he was shortly indicted for tax fraud. Grant grew upset to think that one in whom he had reposed such trust might have betrayed him. He kept the cabinet secretaries after a regular meeting to discuss the case. “
The President manifested a great deal of excitement,”
Hamilton Fish recorded in his diary. Grant resisted believing that Babcock was guilty. “He was as confident as he lived of Babcock’s innocence,” Fish wrote. “He knew he
was not guilty; that were he guilty it would be an instance of the greatest ingratitude and treachery that ever was.” Grant said he would testify on Babcock’s behalf. “The President expressed his determination to go to St. Louis, to start either this evening or tomorrow morning, and said he should like at least two members of the Cabinet to go with him.”

Pierrepont asked Grant to reconsider. The attorney general said he was the obvious one to accompany the president on such a mission and that he could rearrange his schedule to go, but he wondered about the attention Grant’s appearance would attract and the precedent it would set. For a president to weigh in on the side of the defense might be interpreted as an attempt to intimidate the jury, and in an election year interpretations mattered. Bristow concurred, as did Fish, who suggested that if the president had been subpoenaed the situation would be different. The secretary of state asked Pierrepont if a president
could
be subpoenaed. “He of course replied in the negative,” Fish recorded, having concluded the same thing himself. According to Fish, the cabinet was unanimous in its opposition to Grant’s appearing in court.

Grant settled for giving a deposition. Pierrepont and Bristow accompanied the president; Chief Justice
Morrison Waite served as notary.
William Cook, counsel for the defendant, commenced the questioning. “
How long have you known General Babcock, and how intimately?” Cook asked.

“I have known him since 1863, having first met him during the Vicksburg campaign that year,” Grant replied. “Since March 1864 I have known him intimately.” The president explained that Babcock had served as aide-de-camp on his military staff during and after the war and as his private secretary since his inauguration.

“As your private secretary, please state what were his general duties.”

“He received my mails, opened my letters, and referred them to the appropriate departments, submitting to me all such as required any instructions or answer from myself.”

“His relations with you were confidential?”

“Very.”

“Do you know whether, during the time General Babcock has been your private secretary, he has had frequent applications from persons throughout the country to lay their special matters before you or before the various departments?”

“That was of very frequent occurrence. Indeed it happened almost daily.”

In what manner had Babcock fulfilled his assignments?

“I have always regarded him as a most efficient and most faithful officer.”

Cook turned to the topic of the indictment. “Did General Babcock, so far as you know, ever seek in any way to influence your action in reference to any investigation of the alleged whiskey frauds in St. Louis or elsewhere?”

“He did not,” Grant replied. “I do not remember but one instance where he talked with me on the subject of these investigations, excepting since his indictment. It was then simply to say to me that he had asked Mr.
Douglass”—John Douglass, the internal revenue commissioner—“why it was his department treated all their officials as though they were dishonest persons who required to be watched by spies, and why he could not make inspections similar to those which prevailed in the army, selecting for the purpose men of character who could enter the distilleries, examine the books, and make reports which could be relied upon as correct. General Babcock simply told me that he had said this to Mr. Douglass.”

Cook inquired about Babcock’s connection to
John McDonald. “Was anything whatever said by him to you with reference to the investigation of alleged frauds in his”—McDonald’s—“district?”

“I have no recollection of any word or words on any matter touching his official position or business,” Grant said.

Cook asked about a particular moment when McDonald had visited Washington with reference to the whiskey investigations. “Did General Babcock at or about that time say anything to you with reference to such investigations, and to your knowledge did he in any way undertake to prevent them?”

“I have no recollection of his saying anything about that. Certainly he did not intercede with me to prevent them.”

Cook mentioned an executive order transferring various of the tax agents to other districts. The order had been explained as standard practice, but the administration’s critics contended that it was intended to frustrate the whiskey investigation. “Did General Babcock ever in any way directly or indirectly seek to influence your action in reference to that order?”

“I do not remember his ever speaking to me about or exhibiting any interest in the matter.”

Returning to the broad question, Cook asked, “Have you ever seen anything in the conduct of General Babcock or has he ever said anything
to you which indicated to your mind that he was in any way interested in or connected with the whiskey ring at St. Louis or elsewhere?”

“Never.”

Grant’s testimony helped Babcock defeat the allegations against him. Two weeks after Grant’s deposition the St. Louis jury delivered a verdict of not guilty. Babcock treated the acquittal as vindication and prepared to resume his work at the White House. Grant briefly considered letting him do so. But when a separate investigation linked Babcock to the
gold conspiracy, Grant finally realized—or admitted—that Babcock may have fooled him. “
The President then, for the first time, comprehended in all its significance the fact that he had been betrayed by Babcock,”
Bluford Wilson of the Treasury Department, who informed Grant of the gold link, recalled. “If he (Babcock) had betrayed him in the Black Friday transactions, he was quite capable of betraying him in connection with the whiskey frauds.”

B
abcock wasn’t the only betrayer. Even as Grant’s private secretary was being shown the door, his war secretary was leaving of his own volition, albeit one step ahead of impeachment. William Belknap’s second wife had decided she couldn’t live on her husband’s eight-thousand-dollar salary; discovering that Belknap controlled the concessions of trade at army posts in the West, she arranged to share in the profits of the trade. A schedule of
kickbacks was negotiated, and she received regular remittances. Belknap may or may not have known about the arrangement at first, but upon her death the payments continued, to him. He took up with his deceased’s sister, a formidable beauty with a modest fortune and a determination to keep it. Upon their engagement she handed him a prenuptial agreement and asked that he sign it. “
Belknap felt very much hurt at this request,” Julia Grant recalled, based on her own knowledge and on hearsay. But he was smitten, and he did as his darling wished. “For two years she enjoyed to the fullest extent possible her position, her beauty and youth, and the entire control of her little fortune,” Julia said.

Beauty, youth and fortune evoke envy, and after the
Democrats gained control of the House in 1875 they launched an investigation into the Belknaps’ affairs. The kickback scheme was discovered, and the House began moving toward impeaching Belknap.

Grant, still struggling with Babcock’s betrayal, took the news of Belknap’s corruption hard. “
The President spoke of Belknap’s defection
saying that yesterday he had really, in the first part of the day, been unable to comprehend its magnitude and importance, the surprise was so great,”
Hamilton Fish recorded. “It was really not until evening that he could realize the crime and its gravity. He spoke of his long continued acquaintance with Belknap in the army, of his having known his father as one of the finest officers in the Old Army, when he himself was a young lieutenant.”

Grant’s affection for the father and the evident distress of the son, who confessed his crimes in a tearful meeting in Grant’s office, disposed the president, without fully considering the consequences, to let Belknap resign. The resignation confused the congressional effort to remove the war secretary. The House adopted impeachment articles and the Senate trial went forward but amid constitutional doubt as to whether the Senate could remove from office someone who no longer held the office. Several senators decided it could not, and on this technicality Belknap was acquitted.

T
he scandals metastasized. With the 1876
elections approaching, the Democrats broadened their investigations; hardly an executive department or office escaped scrutiny. Grant’s minister to England, Robert Schenck, was found to have employed his position to promote investments in which he had a personal stake. No charges were brought, but Schenck was forced to resign. The secretary of the navy,
George Robeson, seemed to be living beyond the means of his salary; when, under pressure, he released a statement of his bank account to the congressional investigators it revealed hundreds of thousands of dollars he couldn’t explain. The natural presumption was that the money had come from navy contractors. But the paper trail was so confused that the investigators did nothing beyond chastising Robeson rhetorically. The secretary of the interior,
Columbus Delano, resigned under the fire of an investigation into a scheme by his son to profit illegitimately from Delano’s position. The investigation hit close to Grant when the president’s younger brother Orvil was found to have been paid for surveying services in
Wyoming Territory he failed to render. “
Did you ever know
Orvil Grant to do any surveying in that territory?” a congressional investigator asked the chief clerk in the Cheyenne office of the federal survey. “No, sir,” the chief clerk replied. “I do not think he was ever
in
the territory.”

77

W
ILLIAM
S
HERMAN THOUGHT SUFFICIENTLY LITTLE OF THE POLITICAL
classes that none of their corruption surprised him. He knew and liked William Belknap from the Georgia and Carolina campaigns and was consequently disposed to put responsibility for his part in the scandals elsewhere. “
I feel sorry for Belknap,” he wrote his brother John. “I don’t think him naturally dishonest, but how could he live on $8000 a year in the style that you all beheld?” Sherman blamed those who set the rules for the army concessionaires. “The fault lies with Congress, which by special legislation has almost invited this very system.… I pity Belknap, and regard him as the ‘effect’ and not the ‘cause.’ ” The president played a part, Sherman allowed. “Grant is not blameless,” he told John. “He could have given an impetus in the right direction in 1869—meant to, but saw or thought he saw the danger, and made up his mind to let things
run
. The result was inevitable.” Yet Belknap’s demise wasn’t all to the bad, Sherman suggested. The war secretary had been impossible to work under. “He acted towards me without frankness and meanly, gradually usurping all the power which had been exercised by General Grant, leaving me almost the subject of ridicule.” Belknap’s departure, especially under a cloud, would yield an improvement. “The whirlwind that is now let loose in Washington will do good.”

The whirlwind did blow some power back toward Sherman and away from the civilians of the War Department, but it did little to strengthen the military in the West, the area of Sherman’s greatest professional concern. Grant’s Indian policy had always required a delicate balancing. The president had to convince
Red Cloud and the other Indian leaders that the government in Washington had their welfare at heart despite recurrent
unwillingness in Congress to fund the Indian agencies adequately, and he had to convince Congress that the Indians were fundamentally peaceful despite outbreaks of violence by the bands unreconciled to life on reservations. The western settlers were a wild card in his considerations. They could readily provoke attacks, and when they did they could count on a sympathetic hearing among a substantial portion of the American public.

The settlers constantly tried to seize land the president sought to reserve for the Indians. During the early 1870s rumors circulated of gold in the Dakota Black Hills, the heart of the Sioux reservation. Grant received letters and petitions from westerners demanding that the region be opened to settlement. A group of Nebraskans wrote that the Black Hills held the key to the future of the West and perhaps the nation as a whole. “
Being thoroughly of the opinion that the opening of the same to occupancy by all who may desire is but simple justice and would promote the general welfare of the country,” the Nebraskans said, “we would therefore humbly pray your Excellency to inaugurate such steps as will at the earliest possible moment render the said Black Hills occupiable by the white people with safety.”