appeals of some of the negroes' best friends in Congress, the Amnesty Bill failed of passage. Finally in May, 1872, a bill for general amnesty passed the House unanimously, and after Sumner's civil rights amendment had been voted down, passed the Senate with equal celerity. This bill did not go so far as the bill which Sumner killed in the Senate. It left between three hundred and five hundred former Confederates still subject to political disabilities.

Sumner, who cast one of two negatives, said he could not vote for it "while the colored race are shut out from their rights and the ban of color is recognized in this chamber. Sir, the time has not come for amnesty. You must be just to the colored race before you are generous to former rebels."

Grant signed the bill on May 22, 1872. It removed the disabilities of all except Senators and Representatives of the Thirty-sixth and Thirty-seventh Congresses, officers in the judicial, military, and naval service of the United States, heads of departments and foreign ministers of the United States. But the disabilities of men of this excepted class were removed later as occasion required, and many of them rendered their reunited country unselfish and patriotic service.

CHAPTER XXXVII

CAUSES FOR PARTY DISAFFECTION

"He has sat by and seen the country tolerably well governed," said Samuel Bowles in the "Springfield Republican" in November, 1871. Bowles was good at epigram. He was a journalist of rare attainments, of fine ideals in politics, of vivid personality, with a suggestion of the iconoclast. He never hesitated to differ with contemporaries, even his closest friends. With most of them he took issue at the very beginning of Grant's Administration, when, two days after the precedent-smashing appointments to the Cabinet were made public, he wrote to Henry L. Dawes: "I like the Cabinet - you ought to like it because it is a revolution, because it breaks up rings, and makes reform more easy and possible"; and he may have been less surprised than others because a month earlier he had written: "My opinion is that Grant's Cabinet and the way it is made up will prove a bombshell, in especial congressional and political circles."

Plainly a change had come upon the vision of the Springfield seer. The change was typical of many of his kind, and it foreshadowed happenings which, while they had but little influence on Grant's career,

have had a share in fixing the repute of his Administration quite out of keeping with their bearing on the times. Though Bowles was not a bookish man, and gained his learning almost wholly from his daily contact with the world, absorbing information here and there as bees suck honey, he had the delicate sense of values with which all writers for the press should be endowed, combined with the fine fervor befitting one who had passed through the fires of a great moral conflict and a civil war, and thus had much in common with men like Adams, Godkin, Curtis, Schurz, and Sumner, who ranked him easily in scholarship, though not in high ideals. His taste was for the "literary fellers," whom Zachariah Chandler baptized with expletives when Lowell intruded on the patronage preserves by taking office as Minister to Spain. Men of his type idealized the finer qualities in Grant which marked heroic moments in his military career. Grant's quiet simplicity and reserve appealed to them, his complete indifference to the fame which soldiers are supposed to crave.

"I am no great admirer of military heroes," wrote Motley to the Duchess of Argyle a few weeks after Appomattox, "but we needed one at this period, and we can never be too thankful that such a one was vouchsafed to us one so vast and fertile in conception, so patient in waiting, so rapid in striking, had

come, and withal so destitute of personal ambition, so modest, so averse to public notoriety. The man on whom the gaze of both hemispheres has been steadily concentrated for two years seems ever shrinking from observation. All his admiration warmly expressed is for Sherman and Sheridan. So long as we can produce such a man as Grant our Republic is safe. . . . There is something very sublime to my imagination in the fact that Grant has never yet set his foot in Richmond, and perhaps never will." A rare tribute and merited; but how strangely in contrast with the vituperative lashings by Motley's friend Sumner, six years later.

...

And this from Holmes to Motley is characteristic of exchanges between friends in the Boston group: "He is one of the simplest, stillest men I ever saw. . . . Of all the considerable personages I have seen, he appears to me to be the least capable of an emotion of vanity.... Did he enjoy the being followed as he was by the multitude? 'It was very painful.' This answer is singularly characteristic of the man. . . . I cannot get over the impression he made on me. I have got something like it from women sometimes, hardly ever from men that of entire loss of selfhood in a great aim, which made all the common influences which stir up other people as nothing to him.”

Such was the figure Grant cut in scholarly imag

inations while the halo of successful generalship was new upon him and before his garments had been soiled by contact with the slime of politics. Had he been endowed with a taste for things which men of culture fancy, or been much inclined to their companionship, he might well have retained their liking and support even though he had shattered their ideals and their fine faith in his political impeccability. They would have been more willing to charge to the requirements of the time unhappy incidents which offended them, and history would have been spared the sorry spectacle of personal quarrels and unjust attacks upon his motives and sincerity. The times were doubtless ripe for punishment, but not for such as that which men like Sumner, Godkin, Bowles, and Schurz meted out to Grant, chiefly because he lacked the social atmosphere to comprehend their point of view.

Even before he had been sworn in as President he displeased many who would have been ready with advice by quite neglecting to seek counsel or ask for help in writing his inaugural and picking out a cabinet. He was ingenuous as a child in politics, and before he was thrown against the nation's consciousness by the rush of war had hardly shown even the ordinary interest in public questions which is supposed to be the birthright of every true American.