Ulysses S. Grant, born Hiram Ulysses Grant, 1822-1885.  Union General, American Civil War, 1861-1865; 18th President of the United States, 1869-1877.  Superb Autograph Letter Signed, U.S.G., three pages, 5" x 8", with integral leaf, on blind-embossed personal stationery, Galena, Illinois, October 22, 1868.

This is an outstanding letter, dated 12 days before the 1868 presidential election, in which the Republican Grant addresses the Democrats' salient, emotionally-charged issue—their vitriolic condemnation, through vice presidential candidate Gen. Francis P. Blair, Jr., of Radical Reconstruction. 

Grant writes to his friend, J. Russell Jones, about the political fallout from efforts by his challenger, former New York Governor Horatio Seymour, to apologize for Blair's racist statements.  He also assesses the potential for assassination and its effect should it occur.  He writes, in full:  ”Enclosed I return you the two letters which you requested should be returned.  /  I shall not leave here for two or three days after the election in Nov.  My mind was made up to this the day after you left here.  I cannot realize that there is danger; but if it should come before election it would upset everything.  After election there would not be the same insinuation to the deed nor would the same damage accrue.  I will still go to Phila. as first proposed and from there to Washington.  /  I predict that Seymour's apologies for Blair and correction of his statements made from the stump commencing in Buffalo to-day will injure his chances for election more than all Blair has said will.  The fact is Blair represents truthfully the element in his party which will control it if elected.  Seymour evidently intends now to throw out a bait to the loyal element.  /  Yours Truly  /  U.S.G.”

Following the Civil War, Grant acceded to the Congressional Republicans' Radical Reconstruction, premised on military strength in the South, as distinguished from the more lenient policy of Presidents Abraham Lincoln and Andrew Johnson.  Seymour, a former New York governor and strong opponent of Radical Reconstruction, argued that necessary change in the South should occur only through lawful and orderly civil, not military, means. 

Blair, a Missourian who had left the Republican Party because of his opposition to Radical Reconstruction, was unabashed in his attacks.  Before the Democratic convention, seeking the presidential nomination for himself, he wrote that the “real and only issue in this contest was the overthrow of reconstruction, as the radical Republicans had forced it in the South."  In a June 30 letter, he proposed to reverse “the Radical plan of reconstruction" by having a Democratic administration “declare these acts null and void, compel the army to undo its usurpations at the South, disperse the carpet bag State Governments, allow white people to reorganize their own Governments and elect Senators and Representatives.” Subsequently, in a July 13 letter accepting the vice presidential nomination, he directly attacked Grant, under whom he had served at Vicksburg.  He wrote that the Radical “fragment of a Congress,” which he decried as “usurping authority,” had

substituted as electors in place of the men of our own race, thus illegally attained and disfranchised, a host of ignorant negroes, who are supported in idleness with the public money, and combined together to strip the white race of their birthright, through the management of Freedmen's Bureaus and the emissaries of conspirators in other States; and, to complete the oppression, the military power of the nation has been placed at their disposal, in order to make this barbarism supreme.

The military leader under whose prestige this usurping Congress has taken refuge since the condemnation of their schemes by the free people of the North in the elections of last year, and whom they have selected as their candidate to shield themselves from the result of their own wickedness and crime, has announced his acceptance of the nomination, and his willingness to maintain their usurpations over eight millions of white people at the South, fixed to the earth with his bayonets.  He exclaims:  “Let us have peace.” . . . The peace to which Grant invites us is the peace of despotism and death.

Blair subsequently embarked on a speaking tour in which he once again cast the election, and the role of Reconstruction, in starkly racial terms.  Pandering to fears of Black equality, or even superiority, in the North as well as the South, he blasted the Republicans for subjecting the South to the rule of “a semi-barbarous race of blacks" who, he said, were “worshipers of fetishes and poligamists" and wanted to “subject the white women to their unbridled lust."

Blair's diatribe cost the Democrats votes.  The New York Tribune called him a ”revolutionist,” and the New York Evening Post warned that his election would initiate ”government by assassination."  Between September 1 and October 22, the Republicans won eight of nine state elections, including those in important states such as Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Indiana.  Worried party leaders convinced Seymour, who was an accomplished orator, to break with tradition and campaign personally.  So Seymour, who did not want the presidential nomination in the first place but had it forced on him as a compromise candidate on the twenty-second ballot, entered the campaign himself.  He first spoke in Syracuse, New York, on October 21 before delivering a series of virtually identical speeches beginning in Buffalo on October 22, the day Grant wrote this letter. 

President Andrew Johnson, who detested Grant, wrote Seymour approvingly on October 22 to express his hope “that all enemies to constitutional government, whether secret or avowed, will not be spared, and that their arbitrament and unjust usurpation . . . will be signally exposed and rebuked."  In an unsubtle reference to Grant, Johnson urged that the “masses of the people should be aroused and warned against the encroachments of despotic power, now ready to enter the citadel of liberty.”

Seymour's speeches—his “apologies for Blair and correction of his statements," as Grant characterized them in this letter—did little to blunt the effect of Blair's words or diminish Grant's war-hero popularity.  Grant won the election, which was reasonably close in the popular vote but lopsided, 214-80, in the electoral vote. 

This letter does not appear in the multivolume The Papers of Ulysses S. Grant published by the Southern Illinois University Press.  The papers do, however, contain a letter that Grant wrote from Galena, Illinois, the same day to Illinois Congressman Isaac N. Morris in which Grant said that “I changed my intention of going to Washington before the Nov. election.  I do not apprehend danger, but after getting back there I shall have but little peace.  I want to put off the evil day, day of all work, as long as possible."

It is interesting that Grant talks in both this letter and the contemporaneous letter to Morris about “danger."  This letter clearly shows that he means the danger of assassination involved in traveling to Washington, D.C., for he expresses concern that his death before the election would leave the presidency to Seymour, whereas his death afterward would not.  It is more interesting yet that he writes here first of assassination before discussing Seymour's campaign. Given the sectional tension between North and South inherent in Radical Reconstruction, inflamed by Blair's speeches, Grant may well have thought, despite dismissing the possibility of danger, that he could fall victim to the same type of threat that ultimately caused President Abraham Lincoln to enter Washington secretly before his inauguration.

J. Russell Jones (1828-1905), to whom Grant wrote this letter, was a successful businessman in Galena, Illinois, where Grant moved in 1860.  Lincoln appointed him United States Marshal for Northern Illinois in 1863.  Jones was an Illinois delegate to the Republican convention that nominated Grant in 1868, and, as President, Grant appointed him to serve as United States Minister to Belgium in 1869 and as United States Collector of Customs in Chicago in 1875.

This letter comes ultimately from the estate of a lady whose grandfather, a prominent Chicago citizen, was a personal friend of Lincoln.  One of the man's daughters entered a girls' school in Brussels when Jones was the United States Minister to Belgium.  The estate contained several letters from Jones.

Grant has boldly penned this letter in black ink, and his writing is crisp and clear.  There is a bit of toning on the first page and light ink transfer on the second and third pages. Fold splits and a 1" tear at the top of the third page, affecting one word, have been professionally repaired.  There is also a notation “U. S. Grant / Oct. 22nd 68" in another hand on the back of the integral leaf.

This superb content letter is attractive overall and is in very good to fine condition. 

Unframed.