Bret Baier - To Rescue the Republic: Ulysses S. Grant, the Fragile Union, and the Crisis of 1876

Special Heart

Three Days in January

Three Days in Moscow

Three Days at the Brink

TO RESCUE THE REPUBLIC . Copyright 2021 by Bret Baier. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

FIRST EDITION

Cover design by Richard L. Aquan

Cover photographs from the National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution (Ulysses S. Grant); from the Library of Congress (eagle)

Title page art by Georgios Kollidas/AdobeStock

Digital Edition OCTOBER 2021 ISBN: 978-0-06-303955-1

Version 08092021

Print ISBN: 978-0-06-303954-4

To all those who try every day to bring the country together in

tense and partisan times. Those efforts, like Grants, will hopefully

lay the groundwork for a bright future for generations to come.

The engineer adjusted the lights in my home studio as I got ready to go live. I put in my earpiece and patted some makeup on my nose and forehead. During the global Covid-19 pandemic, most anchors broadcast from studios like this, plugging in from home in order to limit personal interaction as much as possible. This day, January 6, 2021, was to mark the official certification of the electoral college vote on Capitol Hill.

President Donald Trump was wrapping up a speech on the National Mall challenging the election results and firing up the crowd. Our country has had enough; we will not take it anymore! Thats what this is all about. And to use a favorite term that all of you people really came up with. We will stop the steal, the president said as the crowd chanted in unison, Stop the steal! Stop the steal!

I explained on air that the reality was different than the presidents speech had indicated to the crowd now marching to the Capitol. There was zero chance that his vice president, Mike Pence, could overturn the results of the election during this certification process in Congress, and while several senators would rise to object to the vote in several different states, they wouldnt have the votes to change the outcome.

Then the sights and sounds outside the Capitol Building changed. Amid the chanting and waving of Trump flags, some people in the crowd started pushing the barricades on the west front of the Capitol Building. Screams from the Capitol Police of Pull them this way! and Get back rang out as the police tried to hold the lineall these images and sounds playing out on live TV. I got on the phone with lawmakers and others inside the Capitol to get a sense of what they were seeing and hearing.

On the Senate floor, Senator James Lankford of Oklahoma rose to object to the vote count in Arizona.

My challenge today is not about the good people of Arizona Then the sound of the gavel interrupted Lankford. Moments earlier, Vice President Pence had been whisked from the chamber. Presiding in the chair, Iowa senator Chuck Grassley, the Senate president pro tempore, nervously said, The Senate will stand in recess until the call of the chair! Stunned, senators started filing out of the chamber.

The crowd outside had swelled and the barricades had been breached. I waved to the camera, signaling to the control room that I had new information. Dana Perino was anchoring, and she came to me right away. Our chief political anchor, Bret Baier, I understand you have some new details?

Protesters, Dana, have made their way inside the Capitol. Youre seeing the police presence increase on the outside, but there are people inside the actual Capitol Building, just outside the Senate chamber. And both the House and Senate have now adjourned or paused this entire process because of the security concerns.

What was supposed to have been an orderly, even ceremonial, electoral college certification process had been suspended and was devolving into chaos inside the Capitol Building. I stayed in the chair commenting on the horrific images as they came in. We wouldnt get a true sense of the scope of the breach until a few hours later, when cell-phone videos and other images started to surface. January 6, 2021, was a moment that will be in the history booksa sad chapter for our country.

At the time, I happened to be putting the finishing touches on this book, about another unsettling chapter of our countrys history. To Rescue the Republic is the story of Ulysses S. Grants resolve and heroism in times of unparalleled turmoil for our nation. Grant was perhaps best known as the commanding general of the Union armies during the Civil War. But he also showed his strength as a leader on Reconstruction after the war and during his presidency. In his final days as president he rose to the challenge of preserving the Republic during the contested election of 1876, when violence threatened to once again overwhelm the nation to the point of war. As president, he led the effort to craft a resolution that would be accepted by both sides and head off a potential second civil war. It so happened that this nineteenth-century election drama was the centerpiece of my book.

Now here I was, watching the violence unfold on Capitol Hill in reaction to the 2020 election, while writing about President Grants actions after the election of 1876. Two defining moments in history brought together on January 6, 2021.

The heartbeat of our Republic is the electoral process, in which the people declare their choice of president, freely and fairly. But what happens when the fairness of an election is in doubt, when the freedom of the people is constrained, and when the divisions on the public square strangle the process? This was the case in 1876 as the growing toll of the war and Reconstruction on the South began to undermine progress in several key states. Those states issued two sets of electoral votesone for the Republican, Rutherford B. Hayes, and one for the Democrat, Samuel Tilden. Having won the war that almost destroyed the United States and cost over six hundred thousand lives, shattered the economy, and left four million freed slaves to an uncertain fate, Grant now faced the mission of healing the deep wounds in the body politic, which was in jeopardy.

I was drawn to the clear parallels between Grants time and our own, and in particular to the final drama of his presidency: at the one-hundred-year mark of our nations life, the fate of the United States was once again at stake, not on the bloody fields of war, where Grant had served so valiantly, but in the constitutional crisis of a disputed election.

In the midst of a real constitutional crisis in 2021, the story of Grant and 1876 took on new meaning. I could see across the landscape of our history that there had been those crucial times when everything we stood for was at riskwhen divisions were so deep that there were two separate realities being experienced by the citizenry. What did we do in the past to survive such a moment? And what do we do now?

Since the publication of my first presidential biography, Three Days in January: Dwight Eisenhowers Final Mission, Ive been writing about American presidents at defining moments in our nations history. These presidential lives have been fully recorded by historians, and Ive never tried to compete with their works. I like to say that I am a reporter of history, not a historian. I try to bring a fresh reporters perspective to the lives and times of US presidentsnot only to look through a soda straw into singular events that changed history but also to find a parallel in our own times. In this way, I hope Ive been able to give new meaning to what are considered familiar tales. As a reporter, Im an observer of living history who believes that presidents long dead are not relics to observe from a distance, but ever-present in the lives of Americans.