Grant : a biography by McFeely William S

Author:McFeely, William S
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Grant, Ulysses S. (Ulysses Simpson), 1822-1885, Grant, Ulysses S. (Ulysses Simpson), 1822-1885, Grant, Ulysses S, American Civil War (1861-1865), Presidents, Military campaigns, Politics and government, Presidents
Publisher: New York : Norton
Published: 1982-03-13T16:00:00+00:00

GRAN I

who put in Grant's way temptations that he knew to be dangerous." As Cox put it: "A moral monitor and guide not hesitating at big oaths and camp expletives seems a strange type of man, but no one could deny that Rawlins's heart was as true and his perception of the thing demanded by the honor and welfare of his chief was as clear as his manners and words often were rough." Rawlins was the one cabinet member who could alter the direction of a conversation until it engaged Grant's attention, who would insist that information be obtained and analyzed before the president made up his mind, and who could be counted on to know what the Dents and Babcock and Porter were saying to Grant in all those hours between cabinet meetings.-''^

Jacob Dolson Cox of Ohio, the secretary of the interior, had been born in Montreal. His family was from New York—"Cox" had originallv been "Koch," and the Dolsons too had been Dutch. He had attended Oberlin College, where he not only studied with Charles Grandison f inney but married his daughter, Helen. A lawyer, a Whig, and an early Republican, Cox became a Civil War general. He had no protracted close contact with Grant during the war, but in \^'hat contact thev had Grant was sufficient!) at ease for it to make sense early in 1868 for Sherman to propose Cox as Grant's superior during the crisis with Andrew Johnson over the position of secretary of war. Cox had by then served a term as governor of Ohio. None of Grant's cabinet appointments can have been more dismaying for the freedmen than that of Cox. Not only had he opposed Negro suffrage in postwar Ohio, but, in a message to his abolitionist alma mater, Oberlin, he had advocated forcible segregation of the races, with the black people to be placed on a reservation deep in the South. Those Republicans whom he would have thus discarded could perhaps persuade themselves that Cox's Department of the Interior had nothing to do with the racial issues of Reconstruction—the faint hope that the federal government would aid the blacks of the South to move onto homestead lands in the West was already dim to the point of extinction—but they knew that his negative voice would be heard at the cabinet table.

Cox was convinced that had Rawlins lived, Grant's administration would have remained admirable. As it was. Cox early became associated with men who became critics of the president. Grant, for his part, came to dislike Cox's moralistic tone. Along with Attorney General Hoar, Cox opposed the effort to annex Santo Domingo in 1869-70 and, further alienating Grant, sneered at advisers like Orville Babcock, calling them a "kitchen cabinet," while he pleaded for civil-service reform. Grant did, in fact, implement a merit-related personnel policy in the government, but he did not like those who, like Cox, espoused that cause in a way he took to be critical of men he had appointed and, therefore, of himself.

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