by Ron Chernow
The pro-Grant boom that germinated in December 1863 enjoyed no support from its supposed beneficiary, who was aghast at being thrust into the political spotlight. When approached by the chairman of Ohio’s Democratic state central committee to be the presidential candidate of the War Democrats, Grant promptly squelched such scuttlebutt: “I do not know of anything I have ever done or said which would indicate that I could be a candidate for any office whatever within the gift of the people . . . Nothing likely to happen would pain me so much as to see my name used in connection with a political office.”77 Knowing it would find its way to the White House, Rawlins chimed in with a letter to Washburne that Grant was “unambitious for the honor” of the presidency.78 On a train trip that winter, Grant explained to the wife of a Union officer why he preferred his generalship over the presidency. “That is for life and my family would be provided for”—no minor consideration for a man who had suffered such economic uncertainty.79
The person who eased Lincoln’s late-night worries about Grant’s electoral plans was J. Russell Jones, a U.S. marshal in Chicago and an intimate friend of Grant’s who managed his investments. As speculation about a Grant candidacy gathered steam in January, Jones urged Grant to tamp down such talk. He thought that, with patience, Grant would be appointed lieutenant general, smoothing his way to the presidency four years later. In response, Grant spiked any discussion of his political leanings: “I am receiving a great deal of that kind of literature, but it soon finds its way into the waste basket. I already have a pretty big job on my hands, and my only ambition is to see this rebellion suppressed. Nothing could induce me to think of being a presidential candidate, particularly so long as there is a possibility of having Mr. Lincoln re-elected.”80 By disavowing any political agenda and reaffirming his loyalty to Lincoln, Grant showed his political astuteness. He already knew how to send clear but discreet political messages. Jones received this missive just as he set out for Washington to meet Lincoln, whom he found brooding about Grant’s political intentions. As they sat alone in the White House, Jones gave Grant’s letter to the president, who pored over it with infinite care, finishing with “a deep sigh of relief,” according to Jones. “Then putting both hands on my shoulders, he said: ‘My son, I can’t tell you how deeply gratified I am. You don’t know how deep the Presidential maggot can gnaw into a man’s brain.’”81 It made a remarkable statement about Grant’s meteoric ascent that Lincoln now warily appraised the former Galena store clerk as a potential competitor.
One person who obsessed about Grant’s rise to power was Sherman. Historians always laud their fraternal wartime bond, but where the affection was unalloyed on Grant’s part, Sherman developed unspoken reservations about Grant. When he returned home to Ohio that December, he saw Grant catapulted to a new plateau of celebrity. “Our army is on all lips,” he told Grant, “and were you to come to Ohio, you would hardly be allowed to eat a meal, from the intense curiosity to see you and hear you.”82 Sherman always made sarcastic comments about politicians and feared Grant would be corrupted by power. “Your reputation as a general is now far above that of any man living,” he reassured Grant, “and partisans will maneuver for your influence; but if you can escape them, as you have hitherto done, you will be more powerful for good than it is possible to measure.”83 This letter marked the start of a slow-motion schism between the two men, for Grant, unlike Sherman, had political ambitions and later allowed himself to be swept into office. Sherman also harbored some secret doubts about Grant as a general, not so much in individual battles but as a possible chieftain of the overall war effort. “Grant has qualities Halleck doesn’t,” he told his brother, Senator John Sherman, “but not such as would qualify him to command the whole army.”84
Whatever Sherman’s reservations, Elihu Washburne shared none of them and lionized his protégé. So outsize were Grant’s victories that many Washington admirers thought he merited a rank higher than a mere major general. On December 14, Washburne presented a bill in the House to resurrect the grade of lieutenant general, a rare honor conferred only on George Washington and by brevet on Winfield Scott. Grant was clearly intended as the recipient, which would jump him above Halleck to the pinnacle of military power. “I want [Grant] in a position where he can organize final victory and bring it to our armies and put an end to this rebellion,” declared Senator James Doolittle of Wisconsin.85 Grant, having done nothing to provoke this, played the bashful hero, disclaiming ambition and telling Washburne, “I have been highly honored already by the government and do not ask, or feel that I deserve, anything more in the shape of honors or promotion. A success over the enemy is what I crave above everything else.”86 Contrary to Grant’s wishes, the lieutenant general bill spurred further speculation about him as a presidential candidate. Now persuaded that Grant didn’t hanker after the presidency, Lincoln had no qualms about backing the lieutenant general bill.
On December 20, Grant relocated his headquarters to Nashville, a good spot for overseeing military operations in his jurisdiction that also enjoyed excellent telegraphic communication with Washington. During a winter respite in the fighting, Grant devoted his attention to mapping out future campaigns against Atlanta, Montgomery, and Mobile as his thoughts bent decidedly toward the eastern seaboard, the core of Confederate industrial strength. “Let us crush the head and heart of the rebellion,” he told Halleck, “and the tail can be ground to dust or allowed to die . . . All possible results that can not be gained by moving west, will accrue necessarily when our objects are gained in the east.”87
Grant’s main organizational concern was to guarantee supplies for his armies for their spring campaigns. Just how capable he was is shown in the recollections of Colonel James Rusling of the quartermaster’s department. He found Grant’s appearance unprepossessing, with an “unbuttoned coat and a battered hat” reminiscent of “a country storekeeper or a western farmer.” Then Rusling beheld Grant’s extraordinary grasp of military detail, how “every night he knew precisely where the enemy was, and what he was doing, and what we were able to do and dare.”88 He also noticed how decisively Grant acted under pressure. When brought a request for a major expenditure, Grant approved it with startling speed. Rusling asked Grant if he was sure he was correct. “No, I am not,” Grant shot back, “but in war anything is better than indecision. We must decide. If I am wrong we shall soon find it out, and can do the other thing. But not to decide wastes both time and money and may ruin everything.”89
As part of his logistical emphasis that winter, Grant sought to ensure adequate supply routes for his armies. Never content to rely on secondhand information, he toured Chattanooga, Knoxville, and Lexington, by way of the Cumberland Gap, which entailed hard riding over desolate, badly pitted roads. In general, he enjoyed rugged exercise, but the unsightly remains of war rendered it a grisly experience. “The road over Cumberland Gap . . . was strewn with debris of broken wagons and dead animals, much as I had found it on my first trip to Chattanooga . . . The road had been cut up to as great a depth as clay could be by mules and wagons, and in that condition frozen . . . the road was a very cheerless one, and very disagreeable.”90 Grant was heartened to see loyal admirers lining the route and was amused by their mistaken reaction to his entourage. “The people naturally expected to see the commanding general the oldest person in the party. I was then forty-one years of age, while my medical director was gray-haired and probably twelve or more years my senior. The crowds would generally swarm around him, and thus give me an opportunity of quietly dismounting and getting into the house.”91 Despite Grant’s self-effacing description, the ride illustrated what Sherman had recently said: Grant was now a national hero and viewed as a future president. As a colleague recalled, “Hail to the Chief, both words and air, greeted him at every stopping place.”92
The winter provided a needed reprieve for Grant, allowing him to spend time in Nashville with Julia, who had been living in Louisville because “it was not particu
larly pleasant for me at Father Grant’s house,” as she expressed it.93 During that frigid winter, Nashville provided few distractions from war. As Rawlins wrote, “If ever there was a city over which the shadow of gloom hung darkly, it is this. It is literally the City of Woe. Nineteen out of twenty of the inhabitants are in mourning for friends who have been killed in battle.”94 The kindhearted Julia, deeply moved by the plight of wounded and dying soldiers, thought of little else. “I went to visit the hospitals on several occasions and saw many sad sights,” she said. “I returned each time laden with petitions for discharges.” Then she discovered that her overworked husband, who needed a break from the unbearable grimness of war, chided her for bringing home distressing tales from sick wards: “I hear of these all day long and I sent for you to come that I might have a rest from all this sad part. I do not want you to know about these things. I want you to tell me of the children and yourself. I want and need a little rest and sunshine.”95 Sympathetic to her husband’s deep-rooted sadness about the war, so visible in wartime pictures of him, Julia stopped visiting the hospitals, and they often attended a small Methodist church together.
In Nashville, Grant pursued the incorporation of black soldiers into his army. In his year-end address to Congress, Lincoln boasted that one hundred thousand former slaves now participated in military service, about half bearing arms, and he credited them with a goodly share of Union victories. Around the same time, when Grant recommended the appointment of Brigadier General Augustus L. Chetlain to command black troops, Lincoln seconded this choice. Chetlain’s job was to recruit and organize “colored troops in Tennessee and West Kentucky.”96 In discussing the assignment with Grant, Chetlain found him a wholehearted convert to Lincoln’s policy: “He then said that it was the policy of the government, which he fully endorsed, to place a large force of colored troops in the service at once; that the experiment of using colored men in the South in the army so far had proved satisfactory. After a pause, he added: ‘I believe the colored man will make a good soldier.’”97 That winter, Grant also expanded the use of black troops to guard plantations on the west side of the Mississippi River.
Grant had allowed his eldest son, Fred, to join him during the Vicksburg Campaign. During the siege, Fred had contracted typhoid fever that only worsened in subsequent months. In late January, Grant sped off to St. Louis, where Fred’s condition had grown perilous. He was so pessimistic that he did not expect to find his son still alive. The military situation in eastern Tennessee unavoidably detained him—Longstreet had resumed menacing activities in that end of the state—but by the time Grant saw Fred, he was on the mend, if still looking skeletal. Once given proper medications, Fred recovered at such a rapid pace that he returned to Nashville with his parents.
While in St. Louis, Julia consulted Dr. Charles A. Pope to see if he could possibly correct her strabismus—a serious enough problem that it caused her physical distress and interfered with travel—but he said it was too late in life to perform this operation. When she mentioned the visit afterward to her husband, he was thunderstruck as to what had made her entertain such an idea. “Why, you are getting to be such a great man and I am such a plain little wife,” Julia replied, “I thought if my eyes were as others are I might not be so very, very plain, Ulys; who knows?” Grant’s response was piercingly tender. “Did I not see you and fall in love with you with these same eyes? I like them just as they are, and now, remember, you are not to interfere with them. They are mine, and let me tell you, Mrs. Grant, you had better not make any experiments, as I might not like you half so well with any other eyes.”98 The anecdote, as well as many others, attests to the depth of Grant’s unconditional love for his wife, and vice versa.
Ulysses and Julia Grant received proof in St. Louis that they had been transformed into significant public figures. One night they attended the theater to see a drama called Richelieu and sat far enough back in their box that the audience didn’t realize until intermission that Grant was there. At that point they took up a chant, “Grant! Grant! Get up!” He finally got up and made an awkward bow, but the crowd wouldn’t stop cheering until he brought his seat to the front edge of the box, making him visible to the entire house.
Two nights later, Grant was feted at the new Lindell Hotel, where Colonel Dent joined the admiring throng. The colonel, now a white-haired old man, listened as nine major and brigadier generals and numerous orators extolled his son-in-law’s victories. Grant warmly greeted old friends and responded modestly to their sustained applause, a typically inscrutable expression on his face. Incapable of making a speech when a toast was given—“Gentlemen,” he replied, “it will be impossible for me to do more than thank you”—he stood and lit a cigar to the crowd’s delight.99 Waiters kept placing wineglasses at Grant’s side from which he would not partake. “I dare not touch it,” he told General John M. Schofield. “Sometimes I can drink freely without any unpleasant effect; at others I could not take even a single glass of wine.” Schofield, impressed, thought, “A strong man indeed, who could thus know and govern his own weakness!”100 Afterward, a huge crowd gathered outside Grant’s hotel as celebratory bonfires burned and rockets streaked skyward. Grant appeared on the balcony to acknowledge the great fuss made over him. It must have been hard for his St. Louis friends to believe that this man, who had left town destitute a few years earlier, now rode such a wave of national adulation.
One person who followed Grant’s growing fame with apprehension was John Rawlins, who behaved like a nervous mother fretting over a potentially wayward son. When traveling on a train with Grant in Kentucky, two St. Louis society ladies tried to push a bottle of wine on Grant, which he refused. Grant’s physician, Dr. Kittoe, described Rawlins’s outraged reaction: “Rawlins watched his chief with fear and trembling lest he should yield to the temptation, and gave vent to his indignation at the course pursued by the St. Louis females in terms more profanely forcible than elegant and in so loud a tone that the two objects of his wrath plainly heard what he said and bore evidence of their mortification by their looks.”101 The ever-watchful Rawlins feared Grant had given way to drink at the festive St. Louis dinner and was relieved when he returned unharmed to Nashville. “I feared everything was not as it should be with him, but his appearance has agreeably disappointed me, and for once I have done him injustice in my thoughts,” he wrote.102
One reason Rawlins thought so despondently about Grant may have been his depressed view of his own medical condition. He was beginning to suspect that his long-standing cough might mean that, like his first wife before him, he was infected with tuberculosis. He would shortly leave on an extended western trip to try to recapture his health. In the meantime, he consumed opiates to deal with the pain, complaining to his new wife that “the quantity of opium has affected my whole system inasmuch as to produce a sensation of numbness and drowsiness.”103 When shown a photo of himself, he was taken aback to see himself looking “sad and death-like,” yet he admitted to Emma that the image was accurate and that in every photo there was “that same sad and sorrowful expression.”104
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
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Idol of the Hour
AS HIS FATE WAS debated in Washington that February, Grant continued to direct his department’s operations from Nashville, where he lodged comfortably with a family that “consists only of an elderly gentleman & his wife, son-in-law and his wife besides a young school Miss,” Grant told Julia. “I usually take a ride for an hour in the evening on horseback or in the buggy. This you know always keeps me feeling well.”1 He would not enjoy this tranquil interval for long.
Grant felt ambivalent toward the congressional bill that would elevate him to lieutenant general and likely install him as chief of the northern war effort. Conflicted about his own ambition, he nonetheless had a way of making himself available for promotion. Although he did nothing to advance the bill in Congress, neither did he do anything to stop it. He feared that becoming lieu
tenant general would snatch him from the battlefield and chain him to a desk, weakening his contribution to the war effort. He made clear that he would accept no post that tethered him to Washington or prevented him from leading armies in combat. Finding political machinations distasteful, Grant dreaded becoming a bureaucratic captive, mixed up in legislative intrigue. He also worried that as lieutenant general, he would suddenly outrank and supersede Halleck. Even though Halleck had been two-faced toward him, Grant still treated him with great respect and balked at leapfrogging over him in the military hierarchy. The one feature Grant wholeheartedly embraced was that promotion would boost his salary to $8,640 per year. On some level, he still feared a reversion to financial failure after the war.
It came as no surprise that Grant’s main cheerleader on the House floor was Elihu Washburne, who informed colleagues that Grant had “captured more prisoners and taken more guns than any general in modern times.”2 He cited Grant’s modesty, lack of pretension, and devotion to the Union. There was some grumbling in Washington about Washburne’s patent self-interest in promoting a man with whom he was so closely identified. Even his brother Cadwallader warned him he could be a bore and monomaniac on the subject of Grant: “Touching Ulysses S. Grant I think you have crowded him about as hard as he will bear and anything more looks fulsome. He’s a good man, and we all know it, and we don’t want to be told many times what we know already.”3 In the Senate, James Doolittle led the charge for Grant, enumerating how he had won seventeen battles and taken one hundred thousand prisoners and five hundred artillery pieces. Another persuasive argument for tapping Grant as lieutenant general was that it would topple Halleck, who was loathed by the more radical Republicans in Congress.
Some legislators didn’t want a specific name attached to the lieutenant general bill, fearing it would encroach on presidential prerogatives, setting a harmful precedent. While the version that passed the House contained Grant’s name, the Senate excised it. Opposition to the bill centered on the idea that such a lofty rank should be conferred only after the Union won the war. As Congressman Thaddeus Stevens colorfully put it, “Saints are not canonized until after death.”4 Everyone knew the sacred nature of the lieutenant general title, indelibly associated with George Washington. Congressman James Garfield worried that if the new lieutenant general failed in his assignment, he might have to be deposed a few months later and noted that Lincoln already had full authority to name a new general in chief. Washburne pressed the argument that Grant, with a free hand, could wind up the war more quickly. “I want this now,” the congressman insisted. “Grant must fight out this war, and he will never leave the field!”5