Ulysses S. Grant (11 page)

For all practical purposes the Civil War was over.

Grant was forty-three years old.

M
ANY BIOGRAPHERS
of Grant have suggested that his career after Appomattox was driven mainly by a need to keep busy and for applause. Doubtless there is some truth to that—Grant, as his own mother would point out, had become a great man while he was still young, and neither he nor Julia contemplated a retreat to Galena for the rest of their lives, even though the good citizens of Galena would shortly present the Grants with a house worth sixteen thousand dollars, a tidy sum for the day, completely furnished, right down to the leather-bound sets of books in the library and the pictures on the walls. Still, one must also consider his inflexible sense of duty. The presidency was something he could not avoid.

Had Mrs. Grant not raised objections to the invitation to accompany the Lincolns to the theater—an invitation Grant had as good as accepted, and that he was then obliged to decline with considerable embarrassment—Grant might have been shot by John Wilkes Booth along with President Lincoln. Mrs. Grant made such a fuss over the prospect of another ghastly evening of being snubbed
by Mary Lincoln—who had loudly objected to Julia’s remaining seated while she, the president’s wife, stood, on a visit to City Point, and then made an even worse scene about Major General Ord’s wife’s hat—that poor Grant had to fumble around with lame excuses, the lameness of which must have been quite obvious to Lincoln, and was therefore spared being present when Lincoln was shot. Even twenty years later, when he wrote his memoirs, Grant was still concocting new and unconvincing explanations for why the Grants had been obliged to stand the Lincolns up at the last moment.

As soon as he heard the news of the assassination, Grant moved quickly to have Ford, the owner of the theater, arrested by Ord, then settled down to the more than ample work of the commanding general of the army. He would shortly be honored by becoming the first American officer since George Washington to be made a full four-star general.

It explains much about Grant if one compares him to a later general, Dwight D. Eisenhower. Like Eisenhower, Grant was perceived as “a man of the people,” like Eisenhower, his conduct of the war was universally admired, and like Eisenhower, though he was no politician, he could obviously have the presidency when he wanted it—in fact, would be sought for the presidency by both parties whether he wanted it or not. Crowds waited to see Grant trot to the office every morning in Washington, driving himself at a spanking pace, reins in his hands while smoking his trademark cigar, and politicians sought his advice—or at least his presence—at every discussion of national policy. Grant was not just popular, in the vacuum that followed the assassination of President Lincoln, he was one of
the major figures, perhaps
the
major figure, to give the administration of Andrew Johnson authority and
gravitas
—both qualities the new president conspicuously lacked himself.

Part of Grant’s authority derived from his silence. In a world in which politicians spoke for hours (the speech preceding Lincoln’s address at Gettysburg ran longer than two hours, and most of the audience thought it was too short), Grant’s reluctance to speak at all seemed like proof of his wisdom. People listened carefully to what he
did
have to say—like the utterances of the Sphinx—puzzled over his meaning, and interpreted his silences as a sign of greatness. In an age when speechmaking was a popular entertainment (the term “stemwinder” comes from a speech so long that listeners had to rewind their watch during its course), and when folksy, comic, and sometimes bawdy stories were political assets (Lincoln was the past master of these), Grant had neither a gift nor a taste for either one. Way back when he had been chosen to command a regiment of volunteers by the governor of Illinois, he had listened to other people’s full-blown rhetoric as they addressed the troops; then, when it was his turn, stood before his new men, who were no doubt expecting still more rhetoric, and said, “Go to your quarters, men.”

They had admired him for that, and his gift for brevity had encouraged and rallied troops at Fort Donelson, Shiloh, and elsewhere during the war. It mystified politicians, however, who assumed that Grant’s taciturnity was a way of hiding his opinions, although Julia could have taught them otherwise. Grant’s taciturnity was natural and unaffected. He was a good listener who liked to think things over before speaking his mind, and arrived at his conclusions by some silent, interior process known only to himself.

Grant, like Wellington after Waterloo, soon became a major “fixer” of seemingly insoluble problems, the one man who could be trusted to deal calmly, quietly, authoritatively, and above all
fairly
with matters that had everyone else in Washington stumped. He was not a party man as such, though he thought of himself as a Republican because of his admiration for Lincoln (his memoirs are nonetheless singularly lacking in emotion on the subject of Lincoln’s death), and for a time a part of his strength was that he was perceived to be
above
party loyalty and, more important, above party intrigue. He was trusted in the South as well as the North, which gave him a special position at a time when the burning question of the day was how to reintegrate the Southern states into the union, and on what terms.

From the very first he was uncomfortable with President Johnson, a former tailor and Democrat who talked too much, was inappropriately quarrelsome with any stranger who expressed disagreement with him, and was prone to act rashly. These failings were exacerbated by the rumor that Johnson was a drunk, which may have come about because of an unfortunate incident. Johnson had been about to address the Congress, and complained of a severe attack of diarrhea—a real problem in a day when speeches were expected to go on for hours. A well-meaning senator advised a stiff shot of brandy to steady the president’s bowels, and Johnson, who was unused to strong drink, followed his advice and as a result made a rambling, inarticulate speech, following which he had to be helped off the podium.

The rumor that the new president had been drunk when he ad
dressed the House and Senate did nothing for Johnson’s popularity—though even without that it would have been hard to follow the martyred Lincoln into the presidency—but at the nub of the problem was Johnson’s view of making peace with the South. Although he was a border state man (which was the reason he had been chosen for the vice presidency in the first place), unlike Lincoln, Johnson wanted Southerners to be punished for rebellion and treason and was determined to take a hard line. This put him at odds with Grant, who, like Lincoln, did not want to see former Confederates punished merely for their opinions, as opposed to what we would now call genuine war crimes, and was reluctant to lend his prestige to attempts on the part of the president to coerce the Southern states. Johnson’s misfortune, however, was that the radical wing of his party wanted him to go even further than he was willing to in punishing the South, so he was caught between a rock and a hard place.

One of Grant’s first tasks was to censure his old friend Sherman, who, in accepting the surrender of Joseph E. Johnston in North Carolina, had wildly and impulsively exceeded his authority with a document that allowed Confederate forces to take their arms home and deposit them in state arsenals, recognized existing state governments, and confirmed “property rights” without defining them, so that there was a possibility that the courts might hold them to include former slaves. What was going on in Sherman’s mind is hard to say—he was recklessly impulsive and prone to touches of megalomania—but Grant was obliged to write him a stiff letter and to repudiate the surrender agreement, then travel by train across the stricken South to take command of Sherman’s army and renegotiate the terms of Johnston’s surrender.

By the time Grant returned to Washington, President Johnson was already deeply enmeshed in the struggle with Congress over Reconstruction legislation that would end in his impeachment proceedings. In the summer of 1866, Johnson had taken what we would now call a whistle-stop tour of the Northern states to drum up support for his policies, and ordered Grant to accompany him as window dressing. To Grant’s embarrassment, the tour was a disaster, and even his presence in uniform was insufficient to calm audiences, as they and the president exchanged insults and threats.

By the winter of 1866, fueled by the failure of Johnson’s tour, Congress was busy drafting legislation designed to hog-tie the president hand and foot to the extreme Radical cause—military government was to be imposed on the Southern states, the president was to be enjoined from issuing any orders to the army except through the general in command, and to be forbidden from dismissing any member of his cabinet without the consent of the Senate.

Grant’s views on Reconstruction were complicated—or at any rate contradictory—but he was, above all, not an extremist. He disliked the idea of dividing the South into military districts, but would obey orders, and he was no great enthusiast for attempts “to enfranchise the Negro, in all his ignorance,” though in that too he would obey orders. Above all he did not want to get drawn into the quarrel that was fast developing between the president and the Radical members of his own cabinet, and between the president and Congress. Inexorably, however, he was drawn into the struggle, when Johnson removed Stanton as secretary of war and appointed Grant temporarily in his place. When the Senate set aside the president’s action, Grant obligingly moved out of the office of secretary
of war and let Stanton reassume it, thus inviting Johnson’s rage. Johnson thenceforth regarded Grant as having betrayed him, while Grant regarded Johnson as having insulted him.

The turmoil of Reconstruction led finally to Johnson’s impeachment, which he narrowly survived—no thanks to Grant—but which spelled the end of his political career. In May 1868 Grant was nominated unanimously as the Republican candidate for the presidency. He went “home” to his new house in Galena and won the election without making any speeches or a campaign tour or even appearing much in public in Galena. He could be seen from time to time taking a constitutional stroll or a drive, or seated on the porch smoking a cigar, but that was as much as he would contribute to the electoral process, and as much as was needed.

He created something of a stir by refusing to ride in the same carriage as Andrew Johnson on inauguration day, but his failure to campaign and his short and notably bland inauguration speech left most people in some doubt as to what his policies would be—doubt that was shared to a significant degree by Grant himself. Almost seventy years later the outgoing president, Harry Truman, would remark of Eisenhower that he would never know what hit him when he reached his desk in the White House—as a general, when he gave an order it would be obeyed instantly, but in the White House he would give an order and nothing would happen. The same phenomenon hit Grant almost immediately. He too, like Ike, was accustomed to instant obedience, not to the political process of building up support for a policy in Congress, or appealing for support to the public, or wooing newspapermen to obtain it. He expected at the very least the backing of his own
party, without realizing that everything in politics has to be negotiated—at a price.

Grant’s presidency has come in for a good deal of criticism, and it is certainly true that it ended badly in financial and political scandals, but the fact remains that for eight years Grant exerted a calming influence on a country that had only just emerged from a bloody civil war. (Nearly 625,000 Americans had been killed in the war—compare this with 400,000 in World War II and 58,000 in Vietnam, in a country with four or five times the population it had in the mid–nineteenth century—and a large part of the country remained devastated, starving, and sunk in catastrophic defeat.) Grant not only managed to bring the South back into the Union, albeit at a price the Radicals did not want to pay, and with racial problems that would continue to plague the United States a hundred years later, but also managed to avoid foreign wars or entanglements. Grant’s sheer presence, like Ike’s eighty years later, his immense prestige, his “unflappability” (as someone would describe the supposed salient characteristic of the British prime minister from 1957 to 1963, Harold Macmillan), more or less guaranteed that the United States would be taken seriously again by the world’s great powers. Lincoln, with his death, reached, like Gandhi, an international sainthood, but Grant, like Ike, was the symbol of something else: America’s military power, the integrity of its institutions, its basic decency and good intentions, and above all its rock-solid common sense.

Nobody thought Grant would be much good at diplomacy (wrongly), or politics and policy making (which turned out to be true), but his person, his character, his rise from the leather and har
ness shop in Galena to four-star general and president, confirmed something much larger—the American dream. No other American of the nineteenth century attained such fame and worldwide admiration, not even Lincoln, whose saintly martyrdom and political cunning made him much harder to understand than the bluff, solid Grant.

Pictures of the Grants in the White House do not make it seem as if they enjoyed themselves there. Grant, in civilian clothes, looks rumpled, uncomfortable, and top-heavy, and seems to have put on a good deal of weight (as did Mrs. Grant), and in a magazine illustration of Chief Red Cloud’s visit to a White House reception, Red Cloud and his followers in their blankets and feathers look more elegant and more at ease than their hosts, the Grants. Grant has been criticized for his choice of cabinet officers, but in the nineteenth century as it is today it was considered perfectly acceptable to reward one’s friends with a cabinet post, so it is hardly surprising that Elihu Washburne, the representative who had picked Grant to command the Galena volunteers, was made secretary of state briefly, then American minister to France. Other choices ranged from the banal to the incomprehensible, also very much as they do today, but the selection of Hamilton Fish to replace Washburne as secretary of state was a fortunate one, as was that of former Ohio governor and Civil War general Jacob D. Cox for the Department of the Interior and Grant’s old aide John A. Rawlins as secretary of war. Grant was widely criticized for giving his relatives jobs, but that is an old Anglo-American political tradition, and most of the jobs were small potatoes indeed. To please Julia Grant, one supposes, her
brother became a government Indian trader in New Mexico, another brother was appointed a minor customs official in San Francisco, while a second cousin of hers became receiver of public moneys in Oregon. Her brother Frederick became Grant’s appointments secretary in the White House, while her father (already a postmaster, thanks to Andrew Jackson) moved into the White House as a kind of permanent houseguest, waylaying strangers in the halls to describe the glories of the Confederacy and the inadequacies of the Negro race. As these things go, or went, it was not nepotism on any grand scale.