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dom and rest in the belief that all acts of yours have been and will be judicious."

The opposition newspapers in the North and the anti-Administration band in the Senate flamed out against Sheridan, against de Trobriand, especially against Grant. "If this can be done in Louisiana," cried Schurz, "and if such things be sustained by Congress, how long will it be before it can be done in Massachusetts and Ohio?... How long before a general of the Army may sit in the chair you occupy, sir, to decide contested election cases, for the purpose of manufacturing a majority in the Senate? How long before a soldier may stalk into the National House of Representatives and, pointing to the Speaker's mace, say, 'Take away that bauble!'" Indignation meetings were held in Cooper Institute and Faneuil Hall.

Charles Foster, William Walter Phelps, and Clarkson N. Potter, a congressional committee who had been in New Orleans to investigate the action of Kellogg's returning board, and who were there during the disturbances at the State House, united in a report "that the action of the returning board on the whole was arbitrary, unjust, and, in our opinion, illegal," and that this alone prevented the return of a conservative majority in the Legislature. They asserted that "the conviction has been general among

the whites since 1872 that the Kellogg Government was an usurpation." Another committee, consisting of George F. Hoar, William A. Wheeler, and William P. Frye, reported that intimidation had prevented "a full, free, and fair election" in 1874 and that General de Trobriand's interference "alone prevented a scene of bloodshed." On their recommendation the "Wheeler Compromise" was accepted, giving a conservative majority in the House; the Senate was Republican; by resolution the Legislature agreed not to disturb the Kellogg Government.

South Carolina for a moment shot a ray of light across the gloom. Daniel H. Chamberlain, a Massachusetts soldier, a lawyer, a graduate of Yale, with high ideals, Attorney-General from 1868 to 1872, with fine courage set his face against misrule. He was elected Governor in 1874, succeeding the scoundrel Moses, who in his turn had followed the disreputable Scott. He vetoed numerous plunder bills, reformed the courts, and cut loose from the rogues. "My highest ambition," he said, "has been to make the ascendancy of the Republican party in South Carolina compatible with the attainment and maintenance of as high and pure a tone in the administration of public affairs as can be exhibited in the proudest State of the South." In his two years as Governor he partially succeeded. But he was not omnipotent.

CHAPTER XLIII

THE WHISKEY RING THE BELKNAP

GRANT'S STEADFAST

CASE

LOYALTY - THE CHIEF

JUSTICESHIP

"GRANT is honest as Old Jack Taylor," Sherman wrote home from Vicksburg in reply to hints of deals with traders who swarmed the Union camps bartering their country for Mississippi cotton; and it is history that attacks on Grant all through the war originated with unscrupulous contractors whose crookedness he had exposed, forbidding them to ply their wretched traffic in his jurisdiction. Yet he was fated in the White House to be a ready target for the press by reason of disclosures affecting men in whom he placed his trust. Our Civil War, like every other war in history, had left corruption in its trail, though differing from most others in the rapidity with which men set themselves to cleaning out the thieves and the contemporaneous publicity of the disclosures. Many suspicious things which came to light while Grant was President would have occasioned little comment in other times or other countries. It is a lasting tribute to the spirit of the day that evildoers were so quickly brought to punishment, though at

the moment, the very triumph of reform cast on the period a cloud which history has not yet dispelled, for history, like politics, is ever true to form in overemphasizing superficial faults at the expense of ingrained quality.

Grant did not seek the easy fame which comes to the crusader; he had no mission to reform the ways of other men; he was so wholly human that he could never quite divorce his public functions from his private life. As President he kept about him those he liked, and while we may regret his taste in choice of some of his companions, we cannot blame the faith with which he clung to them. "Grant was the only man I ever knew," says one who was for eight years at his side, “upon whose promise you could safely go to sleep. He never failed to keep his word even in the smallest things. If once he pledged himself you could dismiss it from your mind, and travel round the world. It would be done." This trait of constancy contributed to his success, but in conjunction with his childlike trust it was a dangerous thing, which brought him bitterness of soul. Experience did not seem to profit him. He had the unsuspecting chivalry of friendship; throughout his life his sympathy went out to those he thought the victims of injustice; though they might be at fault, his instinct was to 1 General C. C. Sniffen.

shield them from attack. In the grim chase of justice his heart ran with the fox, not with the hounds.

Of all the men by whom he stood for good or bad, Babcock, his aide and secretary, brought him the greatest care, for Babcock had a genius for getting into scrapes, some doubtless innocent for all their ugliness. He was charged first with mercenary aims in San Domingo; but there was never any evidence that he was guilty there of anything but indifference to proprieties. The fact that he was then exonerated tied Grant more closely to him, as one who had been persecuted in a cause Grant had at heart.

Babcock was charged with having had a hand in paving contracts when Alexander Shepard was Governor of the District, but could be blamed apparently for nothing worse than indiscretion. Shepard was ruthless in his methods; undoubtedly his friends made money out of real estate and contracts under his régime; but nothing short of ruthlessness could have wrought such miracles as he performed almost in a night while changing Washington from a straggling, ragged town of mud and huts into a Capital with spacious avenues consistent with the splendid plans of l'Enfant three quarters of a century before. The country rang with cries against "Boss" Shepard at the time, and Congress changed the form of government, creating a commission for the District in order

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