Grant

by Ron Chernow

  Grant’s courtesy at Appomattox became engraved in national memory, offering hope after years of unspeakable bloodshed that peace, civility, and fraternal relations would be restored. It was a fleeting, if in many ways doomed, hope, which may be why it has had such staying power in the American imagination. Although Grant would do everything in his power to make it happen, the promised era of postwar forgiveness and tranquillity never truly came to fruition. For the South surrendering was one thing, but acceptance of postwar African American citizenship and voting rights would be quite another.

  Whatever his reservations about Lee as a general, Grant applauded his “manly course and bearing” at Appomattox. Had Lee resisted surrender and encouraged his army to wage guerrilla warfare, it would have spawned infinite trouble, Grant believed.123 Such was Lee’s unrivaled stature that his acceptance of defeat reconciled many diehard rebels to follow his example. At the same time, it was Grant who set the stage for Lee’s high-minded behavior by treating him tactfully, refusing to humiliate him, and granting him generous terms that allowed him to save face in defeat.

  Once Lee had disappeared, Grant’s officers stooped to a rapacious frenzy as they snapped up every conceivable memento of the meeting. Wilmer McLean pocketed $20 from Sheridan for the table on which Grant composed the surrender agreement; the next day, Sheridan gave it as a gift to Libbie Custer, wife of George Armstrong Custer, who, legend says, flew off with the prize on horseback. General Ord paid $40 for Lee’s table and later tried to give it as a gift to Julia Grant, who diplomatically redirected it to Mrs. Ord. In retrospect, Wilmer McLean forfeited his treasures at bargain prices, and his family claimed that Union officers ransacked the house for souvenirs without paying compensation. One journalist left a vignette of this crazed hunt for sacred relics: “Cane bottomed chairs were ruthlessly cut to pieces . . . Haircloth upholstery was cut from chairs, and sofas was [sic] also cut into strips and patches and carried away.”124 The episode presaged a postwar rapacity that would supersede the noble sentiments enunciated at Appomattox.

  Curiously absentminded, Grant forgot to notify Washington of Lee’s surrender and had to be prodded by his staff. At 4:30 p.m., he stopped by the roadside, sat down on a boulder, and wrote a message to Stanton that was singularly devoid of self-congratulation: “Gen. Lee surrendered the Army of Northern Va this afternoon on terms proposed by myself. The accompanying additional correspondence will show the conditions fully.”125 Stanton replied with fervor: “Thanks be to Almighty God for the great victory with which he has this day crowned you and the gallant army under your command.”126

  The previous day, Abraham Lincoln had left City Point for Washington. Prior to departing, he had unexpectedly requested the military band aboard the River Queen to play “Dixie.” “That tune is now Federal property,” he declared, adding it was “good to show the rebels that, with us in power, they will be free to hear it again.”127 Back in the capital, Lincoln spent the night of April 9 commiserating with William Seward, who had been badly mauled in a carriage accident. Lincoln lay beside him on the bed, delighting him with tales of Grant’s victories. “I think we are near the end at last,” he concluded.128 Later at the White House, as the president prepared for bed, Stanton materialized, waving Grant’s telegram, and Lincoln embraced him with undisguised joy. Elated by the generous Appomattox agreement, Lincoln kept saying “Good!,” “All right!,” and “Exactly the thing!” in happy appreciation.129 As Lincoln went to inform Mary, Stanton rushed to Seward’s house with the electrifying news. “Don’t try to speak,” Stanton told him. “You have made me cry for the first time in my life,” came Seward’s heartfelt response.130

  Then, on the misty evening of April 11, with buildings brightly lit throughout the capital, Washingtonians took to the streets to celebrate. On the north portico of the White House, Lincoln appeared at his favorite window and “men fairly yelled with delight,” reported Noah Brooks, and “tossed up their hats and screamed like mad.” Hundreds of enthusiastic citizens gathered to sing to Lincoln and applaud Lee’s surrender. Lincoln again requested “Dixie” and proposed “three cheers for General Grant and the officers and men under him.”131 Standing in a candlelit glow, Lincoln, in his last public speech, touched on the fraught issue of “reconstruction” in the seceded states—a word that connoted sweeping changes ahead for the southern social order. The Union army, he noted, would likely linger in the South for an extended period to deal with “disorganized and discordant elements,” a prospect that would define Grant’s career for many years.132 At a time when only six northern states granted blacks the right to vote, Lincoln expressed partial support for black suffrage: “I would myself prefer that [the vote] were now conferred on the very intelligent, and on those who serve our cause as soldiers.”133 These words buzzed angrily in the brain of one spectator, John Wilkes Booth, who supposedly snarled: “That means nigger citizenship. Now, by God, I’ll put him through. That is the last speech he will ever make.”134

  Julia Grant long remembered the moment at City Point when a breathless telegraph operator handed her news of Lee’s surrender. The James River was packed with passenger boats, and the atmosphere grew festive as the information reached them. These boats drew alongside Julia’s steamer, and people “came aboard to congratulate me and to tell me that General Grant would certainly be the next President.” Later on, Julia stoutly supported her husband’s presidential ambitions, but at this moment she derived no joy from the possibility, preferring to savor his new renown as chief “of this great and victorious army.”135

  Around the campfire on April 9, Grant expressed cautious optimism that the remaining Confederate commanders would soon lay down their arms. While his staff officers thought he might want to see the army he had defeated, he refused to lord it over them and planned to head to Washington. It was a measure of his humility that, instead of seeking to exploit his army’s strength, he wished to demobilize it and end weapons purchases as soon as possible. Having defeated the Army of Northern Virginia, he felt a solicitude for its well-being, and years later admitted to a young Virginian that Lee’s army came to hold a place in his heart second only to the paternal care he harbored for his own men. “Curious sort of feeling, isn’t it?” he remarked with wonderment.136

  On the rainy morning of April 10, Grant rode out to meet Lee a second time, bringing a bugler and staff officer waving a white flag. On a small hillside beside the road, he and Lee held a parley alone on horseback while their staff officers, in “a most beautiful semi-circle,” said Parker, kept a respectful distance.137 The two men behaved with impeccable courtesy, each lifting his hat to the other. They spoke frankly. Lee claimed the war had reduced him to poverty. Grant’s main concern was that Lee should exert his moral authority to bring the war to a speedy conclusion, inducing other commanders to relinquish their weapons. Lee endorsed the need to pacify the country and bring the South back into the Union fold. At heart, he asserted, he had always been a Union man and blamed extremist politicians for bringing on the war. He contended that southerners stood resigned to the end of slavery.

  Despite these encouraging generalities, Lee balked at specifics. As Grant recollected: “General Lee said that his campaign in Virginia was the last organized resistance which the South was capable of making—that I might have to march a good deal and encounter isolated commands here and there; but there was no longer an army which could make a stand. I told Lee that this fact only made his responsibility greater, and any further war would be a crime.”138 While conceding that the war had ended, Lee insisted he couldn’t undertake helpful measures without consulting Jefferson Davis, now a fugitive from justice. Grant regretted Lee’s inability to break free from his benighted leader: “I saw that the Confederacy had gone beyond the reach of President Davis, and that there was nothing that could be done except what Lee could do to benefit the Southern people.”139 When Grant urged Lee to go and speak directly with President Lincoln, Lee again invoked the n
eed to confer with Davis, missing a historic opportunity.

  After thirty minutes of discussion, Grant and Lee reenacted the courtly ceremony of lifting their hats to each other and Lee rode off to bid farewell to his army. A couple of days later, after surrendering their arms and folding their colors, the Army of Northern Virginia dispersed in a peaceful manner that demonstrated the wisdom of Grant’s clemency. Led by Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain, the soldiers in blue lifted rifles to their shoulders in a respectful gesture that touched southern hearts. Grant allowed the defeated men to ride home free of charge on government transportation and military railroads.

  After parting with Lee, Grant relaxed on the McLean porch before proceeding to City Point, the first stop on his journey to Washington. He traveled slowly east on a special train that was repeatedly detained by derailed cars and other somber vestiges of war. He didn’t reach City Point until the next morning, when he sprinted up to Julia’s stateroom and breakfasted with her aboard the steamer. Someone inquired whether Grant planned to visit Richmond and Julia urged him to do so, but he showed, as always, exquisite sensitivity to the psychology of a defeated people. “Hush, Julia,” he responded. “Do not say another word on this subject. I would not distress these people. They are feeling their defeat bitterly, and you would not add to it by witnessing their despair, would you?”140 It was the observation of a man who had known terrible shame in his own life and understood the extreme need for self-respect at moments of failure.

  Grant had grown immeasurably during the war and now possessed a broader understanding of people and politics than his earlier provincial life had ever allowed. One adjutant disagreed: “All through the war I never noticed him change at all, except to become a little sadder . . . He felt a terrible responsibility and he expressed it in his face, in every feature.”141 It was remarkable that Grant had borne so much responsibility for four years despite his alcohol problem and amid unbearable stress. The credit must go first to Grant, who managed to keep his demons at bay enough to win the war, but also to Rawlins. Grant’s Galena physician, Dr. Edward D. Kittoe, noted that Grant had been surrounded by constant temptation and praised his “repeated efforts to overcome the desire for strong drink while he was in the army, and . . . his final victory through his own persistency and the encouragement and advice so freely given him by Rawlins.”142 In the war’s final days, the country acknowledged an immense debt to Rawlins by making him a brigadier general in the regular army, then a major general by brevet, honors recommended by Grant, who called him “an officer who has won more deserved reputation in this war than any other who has acted throughout purely as a Staff Officer.”143

  A certified failure in civilian life, Grant had entered the war with everything to gain and nothing to lose. The erstwhile leather goods clerk from Galena now had more than one million men under his command. A new American military power had come into being that could compete with almost any European army. Grant had been the mainspring of the Union effort, imposing order and giving cohesion to far-flung armies. In summarizing his salient qualities, The New York Times foresaw that in future generations “if a great soldier is indomitable in purpose and exhaustless in courage, endurance, and equanimity; if he is free from vanity and pettiness, if he is unpretentious, truthful, frank, constant, generous to friends, magnanimous to foes, and patriotic to the core, of him it will be said, ‘He is like Grant.’”144

  The Civil War had been a contest of incomparable ferocity, dwarfing anything in American history. It claimed 750,000 lives, more than the combined total losses in all other wars between the Revolutionary War and the Vietnam War.145 The historian James M. McPherson has calculated that, as a portion of the total population, the Civil War killed seven times as many American soldiers as World War II.146 While the North lost more men in absolute terms, death took a far graver toll in the South, where the population was smaller, with young and old alike indiscriminately conscripted; by the end, more than one-fifth of the southern white male population had perished. Grant was sobered by the horrifying roster of casualties, saying future generations would look back at the Civil War “with almost incredulity that such events could have occurred in a Christian country and in a civilized age.”147

  For the rest of his life, Grant had to deal with the charge that he had merely been the lucky beneficiary of superiority in men and resources. He grew touchy on the subject because it addressed the larger question of whether he had crudely consigned young men to their death, winning by overwhelming force. The plain fact was that six Union commanders before him had failed, with the same men and matériel, whereas Grant had succeeded. It vexed him that the North denigrated its generals, while southern generals were idealized. As he remarked bitterly, “The Southern generals were [seen as] models of chivalry and valor—our generals were venal, incompetent, coarse . . . Everything that our opponents did was perfect. Lee was a demigod, Jackson was a demigod, while our generals were brutal butchers.”148

  Over the years, Grant adduced many reasons why the South had the advantage in the war, starting with its political unity versus constant northern divisions. “We had to send troops to suppress riots in New York; we had enemies in our midst. In every Northern State there was a strong party against the war; always rejoicing over disaster, always voting to paralyze our forces; ready for any concession or surrender.”149 The South, by contrast, could mobilize fully, recruiting all able-bodied men. Four million slaves had worked the farms, supported the economy, and freed the white population for military service—at least before they flocked in large numbers to Union lines. And the Confederacy almost always fought on home turf, with all the obvious advantages that entailed for Lee.

  What Lee thought of Grant as a general is somewhat contradictory. As already mentioned, he later said George McClellan was the foremost Union general. But the Reverend George W. Pepper, a chaplain in Sherman’s army, said Lee named Grant as the premier Union general: “Both as a gentleman and as an organizer of victorious war, General Grant has excelled all your most noted soldiers.”150 Another story, printed years later, said Lee was distressed when somebody argued that Grant had merely profited from fortunate circumstances. “Sir,” Lee upbraided him, “your opinion is a very poor compliment to me. We all thought Richmond, protected as it was by our splendid fortifications and defended by our army of veterans, could not be taken. Yet Grant turned his face to our capital, and never turned it away until we had surrendered. Now, I have carefully searched the military records of both ancient and modern history, and have never found Grant’s superior as a general.”151 The authenticity of this quote has been questioned.152 What has never been doubted is Lee’s gratitude to Grant for his behavior at Appomattox, which he commended as “without a parallel in the history of the civilized world.”153

  Grant betrayed only qualified admiration for Lee: “Lee was of a slow, conservative nature, without imagination or humor, always the same, with grave dignity. I never could see in his achievements what justifies his reputation. The illusion that nothing but heavy odds beat him will not stand the ultimate light of history.”154 Strangely enough, Grant derided Lee as a desk-bound general even though Lee was almost invariably engaged in the field. It seemed to bother Grant that Lee was reserved and aloof while he himself had “always kept open house at head-quarters, so far as the army was concerned.”155 Perhaps the person who best explained Grant’s strategic superiority was Sherman, who stated that while Lee attacked the front porch, Grant would attack the kitchen and bedroom. In his earthy way, Sherman expressed the view that Grant engaged in total warfare that eroded enemy supply lines and infrastructure, while Lee remained tightly focused on the battle at hand, without a long-term strategy for winning the war.

  For all the endless horrors of that war, Grant believed the country was stronger for having endured it: “We are better off now than we would have been without it and have made more rapid progress than we otherwise should have made.”156 The country had become
more cosmopolitan, its citizens more worldly, its economy more productive, its military more potent. Most important, Union forces had struck a major blow for freedom and equality. Like Lincoln, Grant deemed the war “a punishment for national sins that had to come sooner or later in some shape, and probably in blood.”157 Four million slaves had been emancipated and would shortly receive the right to vote, send their children to public schools, and enjoy the benefits of citizenship—progress that would be savagely resisted. For Grant, the war had validated the basic soundness of American institutions. Before, he noted, “monarchical Europe generally believed that our republic was a rope of sand that would part the moment the slightest strain was brought upon it. Now it has shown itself capable of dealing with one of the greatest wars that was ever made, and our people have proven themselves to be the most formidable in war of any nationality.” He added the important caveat that the war had been “a fearful lesson, and should teach us the necessity of avoiding wars in the future.”158

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

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  A Singular, Indescribable Vessel

  WHEN ULYSSES AND JULIA GRANT docked in Washington on the sunny morning of April 13, 1865, they found a capital bedecked with patriotic imagery. Julia remembered how “all the bells rang out merry greetings, and the city was literally swathed in flags and bunting.”1 The pair went straight to the Willard Hotel, where Grant had been snubbed by a patronizing desk clerk a year earlier. As word leaked out that the Grants were guests, huge crowds milled in the surrounding streets, avid to snatch a glimpse of their war hero. Grant hadn’t come to town to glory in adulation, but to dismantle the army and reduce national expenses. The police had to clear a path for Grant to visit the War Department, where he advised Stanton to cease recruiting activities and the purchase of new weaponry. Such was the spellbinding power of Appomattox that even the dour Stanton no longer appeared quite so grumpy. “Mr. Stanton was in his happiest mood,” Julia wrote, “showing me many stands of arms, flags, and, among other things, a stump of a large tree perforated on all sides by bullets, taken from the field of Shiloh.”2