Johnson’s leniency toward the South, his general refusal to make compromises with his Republican rivals, and the obstinacy of the old Confederates generated widespread anger in the North, resulting in a Republican triumph in the 1866 midterm elections. The public gave the Republicans veto-proof majorities in both chambers, and the Radicals used this to good effect. They took control over Reconstruction policy and essentially stripped Johnson of his appointment powers via the Tenure of Office Act of 1867. Passed over Johnson’s veto, it provided that presidential appointees subject to senatorial consent were to hold their positions until a successor had been appointed. The president could suspend such officers temporarily, but he had to seek approval from the Senate within twenty days of the suspension.14
The Tenure of Office Act represented a profound change in the way the removal power functioned. Granted, the text of the Constitution is silent on the question of removals. It declares, “the executive Power shall be vested in a President of the United States of America” and, “he shall nominate, and by and with the Advice and Consent of the Senate, shall appoint Ambassadors, other public Ministers and Consuls, Judges of the supreme Court, and all other Officers of the United States, whose Appointments are not herein otherwise provided for, and which shall be established by Law.” Nevertheless, those who were at the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia and also in the First Congress strongly supported an absolute presidential removal power.15
And there the matter stood for over seventy years, until the clash between Johnson and the Radicals. The battle over Reconstruction is an important drama in American history, and the Tenure of Office Act a key moment in that story. But it also had consequences for the body politic that extended far beyond Reconstruction. James K. Polk was the first president to worry that patronage actually undermined the position of the president, for it made him too dependent on the office-seekers who had patrons in the Congress. The Tenure of Office Act would legalize this imbalance, ensuring that Polk’s worst fears would be realized for another generation.
There were reasons to be hopeful when Ulysses S. Grant became president in 1869. As the victorious warrior in the Civil War, Grant reassured the North that he would not let the hard won victory be lost during the peace. Meanwhile, the South was encouraged by his declaration after his nomination, “Let us have peace!”16 No president except George Washington entered the White House with so much goodwill. As Adams observes,
Grant represented order. He was a great soldier, and the soldier always represented order. He might be as partisan as he pleased, but a general who had organized and commanded half 1 million or million men in the field, must know how to minister. . . . The task of bringing the government back to regular practice, and of restoring moral and mechanical order to administration, was not very difficult; it was ready to do itself, with a little encouragement.17
The earliest signs were encouraging, as Grant drew a line in the sand regarding the Tenure of Office Act, declaring that he would only fill offices that were already vacant until Congress revised the law.
Ultimately, the high hopes were dashed as Grant signed off on a compromise that preserved the essence of the original law.18 Worse, his cabinet appointments indicated that, despite his wartime acumen, he was ill-prepared for the ebb and flow of politics. His nominee for the State Department, Elihu Washburn of Illinois, was thoroughly unqualified for the job; his only real recommendation was that he had been an early sponsor of Grant during the Civil War. Worse, Grant named Alexander Stewart as secretary of the treasury; his appointment was technically illegal because he was actively engaged in trade at the time of his nomination. The Republican-dominated Senate had to put Grant through the embarrassment of disapproving the appointment.19
These were harbingers of troubles to come. As Adams laments, “Grant avowed from the start a policy of drift; and a policy of drift attaches only barnacles.”20 The trends that had been developing since Jackson’s day—spoils, graft, the frauds of professional politicians—all seemed to grow at a substantially quickened pace under Grant, so much so that by the time of his reelection in 1872, corruption was an issue in national politics. According to Republican Congresman George F. Hoar, “Selfish men and ambitious men got the ear of that simple and confiding president. They studied Grant, some of them, as the Shoemaker measures the foot of his customer.”21
Two men who made a keen study of Grant were Jay Gould and Jim Fisk. In an effort to corner the gold market, they lured Grant’s brother-in-law Abel Corbin and Assistant Treasurer Daniel Butterfield with lucrative gold offerings in the hopes that they could extract insider information. They also paraded the unsuspecting president about New York City, so their fellow traders would get the impression that they knew something nobody else did. Ultimately, their plan failed as Grant finally caught wind, but their scheme sparked the Black Friday panic of 1869 that damaged the U.S. economy for months thereafter.22
There was also the Belknap scandal. The wife of William Belknap, Grant’s secretary of war, learned that military trading posts were leased through private contractors, all going through her husband’s office. She won a bid for a trading post at Fort Still for a friend, who in turn agreed to share the profits with her. Though Belknap’s wife died, the secretary continued to enjoy this tidy little kickback, having collected some $20,000 by 1876. When the scandal broke, Grant allowed Belknap to resign rather than face rebuke from the Congress.23
There was also the Whiskey Ring, a conspiracy all through the Midwest between thousands of Treasury Department officials and whiskey distillers to avoid tax payments. At the head of the ring was General John Macdonald, collector of internal revenue in St. Louis and a wartime buddy of Grant’s. So fearful of the reaches of the scandal was Attorney General Benjamin Bristow—one of the few honest men still in government—that he barely spoke of it to anybody. When Grant learned of the crime, he demanded that the criminals be brought to justice, but he clammed up when his personal secretary, Orville Babock, another Grant associate from the war, was implicated. Grant submitted a sworn deposition on behalf of Babock, and later saw to it that Bristow was removed from his position.24
There were also the Sanborn contracts. Since Hamilton’s time at the treasury, the government gave incentive payments to people who informed about delinquent customs duties or other revenues owed to the government. This moiety system was finally eliminated, but a provision in an appropriations bill allowed the secretary of the treasury to appoint no more than three people to help the Treasury Department collect delinquent revenue. A protégé of the notoriously corrupt Representative Benjamin Butler (a Grant loyalist), John D. Sanborn, won that contract and even induced Secretary of the Treasury William Richardson to give him oversight of all railroads. Sanborn went on to collect $427,000 worth of outstanding taxes, for a moiety of over $200,000. Amazingly, the government would have collected almost all of this money anyway, so this was little more than a kickback to the crony of a well-placed House member. Even more amazing is the contrast between Bristow and Richardson. The former did his job diligently and was dismissed; the latter was, at best, lax in his duties and was eventually appointed to the Court of Claims.25
There was also the Star Route fraud. The Constitution gives Congress the power to establish and maintain a post office; however, because the government could not always maintain certain routes, they contracted private firms to service them. Thomas Brady, the second assistant postmaster general, working in conjunction with Stephen W. Dorsey, a former carpetbagger senator from Arkansas and a protégé of Grant, presented sham petitions to service these routes at cut-rate prices; later on, they offered enhanced service for an extra fee, which Congress obligingly supplied. Only a fraction of the total money appropriated went to servicing these routes; the rest was distributed among the cronies. Some of it ended up in Indiana in the closely contested presidential election of 1880, as Dorsey, then an official