by Ron Chernow
The next day’s parade was devoted to Sherman’s western army. Everyone knew the trouble brewing between him and Stanton and wondered whether a blowup was at hand. Once again at 9 a.m., in ideal weather, the troops began to march in dense columns from the Capitol, Sherman proudly riding at their head. Especially prominent were black pioneers, toting picks, axes, and spades, stepping lively to the music. For easterners Sherman was more legend than reality and they were thrilled that he resembled the leathery warrior they had imagined. The crowds cheered him, showering flowers on him. “When I reached the Treasury-building, and looked back, the sight was simply magnificent,” Sherman wrote. “The column was compact, and the glittering muskets looked like a solid mass of steel, moving with the regularity of a pendulum.”100 As he reached a corner brick house on Lafayette Square, his gaze rose to an upper window, where Secretary of State Seward sat swathed in bandages from his recent attack. With a flourish, Sherman waved his hat and Seward saluted in return. As Sherman and his men rode past the presidential grandstand, they saluted the assembled dignitaries with their swords.
When Sherman approached the reviewing stand, the band broke into “Marching Through Georgia” with special oomph. It was then that the long-anticipated showdown took place. After Sherman dismounted, he bounded up the steps and exchanged handshakes with Johnson and Grant and chatted courteously with cabinet members. Then he drew near his foe. Stanton extended his hand and Sherman, with an infallible flair for the dramatic, refused to grasp it. (Charles Dana claimed Stanton didn’t offer his hand but merely inclined his head.) Sherman’s snub went even further. “What a defiant and angry glance he shot at Stanton,” Julia remembered.101 Another observer claimed “Sherman’s face was scarlet and his red hair seemed to stand on end.”102 The whole contretemps lasted a few seconds before Sherman brushed past Stanton brusquely and shook the hands of other cabinet secretaries.
For Grant, this second day of marching was the more emotional, for his roots lay in the western army, which had first carried him to military glory. In comparison, the eastern army had been an adopted one. The western men, who looked more ragged and weather-beaten than the easterners, had once been dismissed as an ill-bred rabble, but they displayed an unmistakable swagger and panache that only years of victory could produce. For Grant, “their marching could not be excelled; they gave the appearance of men who had been thoroughly drilled to endure hardships . . . without the ordinary shelter of a camp.”103 Sherman likewise swelled with pride as he watched his “well organized, well commanded and disciplined” army and thought “there was no wonder that it had swept through the South like a tornado.”104
The two-day affair represented the high-water mark of Grant’s career to that point. “He was unquestionably the most aggressive fighter in the entire list of the world’s famous soldiers,” observed Porter.105 Perhaps to prolong the celebratory mood, Grant and Orville Babcock took a sunset ride on horseback down Pennsylvania Avenue. Crowds still mingled on the sidewalks and recognized and applauded Grant, who simply nodded and lifted his hat. One of those who set eyes on him was Walt Whitman, who told his mother about seeing Grant. “He is the noblest Roman of them all—none of the pictures do justice to him—about sundown I saw him again riding on a large fine horse, with his hat off in answer to the hurrahs—he rode by where I stood, & I saw him well, as he rode by on a slow canter, with nothing but a single orderly after him—He looks like a good man—(& I believe there is much in looks).”106
PART THREE
A Life of Peace
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
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Soldierly Good Faith
UNDER GRANT’S AEGIS the federal government had mustered a fearsome army, a million strong, that may well have been, as he claimed, the best trained and equipped in the world. Yet his first task as general in chief in the postwar era was to contract that army dramatically, and within six months its numbers had dwindled to 210,000 men. The brick building at Seventeenth and F Streets, from which Grant ran the army and received an unending parade of visitors, was small and unprepossessing and scarcely seemed an imposing seat of power. With its yard and tree in front, Grant’s son Jesse thought it exuded a sedate residential air: “Washington side streets were not paved in those days, and army teams were often stalled, hub-deep in the mud, before headquarters.”1 Showing the loyalty to his staff that was both his blessing and his curse, Grant kept on John Rawlins as chief of staff; Cyrus Comstock, Orville Babcock, Horace Porter, and Fred Dent as aides-de-camp; Adam Badeau and Ely Parker as military secretaries; and Theodore Bowers and Robert Lincoln as assistant adjutant generals.
Only gradually did Grant adapt to the murky ways of Washington—“I have a horror of living in Washington,” he warned Julia, “and never intend to do it”—but residence there proved inseparable from high command.2 He fantasized about living in Philadelphia and commuting to the capital weekly, a dream nearly realized in January 1865 when a group of Philadelphia dignitaries gave him, gratis, a fully furnished house on Chestnut Street “in gratitude for eminent services.”3 These rich citizens spared no expense, outfitting the opulent quarters with an excellent piano, velvet carpets, and lace curtains. However hard it might be to picture the hard-bitten Grant stomping about in this prissy place, he envisioned it as his new home. To her horror, Julia discovered that the new abode came with a complete wine cellar, well stocked with costly wines, brandies, and whiskies, and she quietly consulted Rawlins about how to get rid of such temptation. “Send for some responsible broker . . . have him dispose of the entire stock at once; and put the money in your pocket,” Rawlins advised her, and Julia acted swiftly before her husband was waylaid into fresh temptation.4
Upon occupying the house in May, Grant discovered he had woefully underestimated the time he had to spend in Washington. Predictably he became a prisoner of his heavy workload and Julia, after four years apart from her husband, hated being stranded in another city. In Washington Grant stayed at the Willard Hotel, where he was so hounded by job supplicants that Julia perceived he needed “a home where these petitioners could not penetrate.”5 Also, the upkeep of the tony Philadelphia home was so expensive Grant feared he would be saddled with debt for a decade. Consequently, the Grants rented out the Philadelphia house in November and relocated to Georgetown, decorating their new home with furniture from Philadelphia. The residence at 205 I Street NW was an ample, four-story place with two acres and a fine Potomac view. Hung with banners, swords, bugles, and other wartime trophies, the house contained engravings of Washington, Sherman, and Sheridan, along with a bust of Lincoln.
If the Philadelphia house posed a financial burden for Grant, it never presented an ethical one. Showered with gifts by adoring businessmen, he didn’t question such generosity, accepting it as standard recompense for war heroes. Julia reacted to these gifts as so much manna dropped by a bountiful heaven: “a home, a lovely home, given to my dear, brave husband by a number of strange gentlemen of Philadelphia!”6 In fairness to Grant, one should note that the Duke of Wellington had received a dukedom and a vast fortune from a devoted nation, while Sherman pocketed money and a St. Louis home. But presents from private donors could easily shade over into subtle sources of corruption, especially since Grant’s name was now being bandied about as a future president.
The Georgetown home came from a coterie of well-heeled New York admirers, led by Major General Daniel Butterfield, who transferred $105,000 to Grant in February 1866. Since the money far exceeded the $34,000 mortgage, these rich gentlemen furnished Grant with $55,000 in government bonds and the remainder in cash. No judicial rules yet governed such gifts. One donor was Abel Rathbone Corbin, the former editor of a Missouri newspaper, who later married Grant’s sister Jennie. As we shall see, Corbin wasn’t bashful about trading on his connection with Grant. Grant took this largesse without any apparent misgivings. Once again, what looked like patriotic munificence from one standpoint might look like buying future influence from ano
ther.
In Washington, people were struck by how lightly Grant wore his postwar fame. When John Eaton brought two British clergymen to meet him, they expected a profusion of ribbons and medals, but found him dressed instead in a “plain business suit” with a battered old army hat “lying on the table before him.”7 Showing a democratic style, Grant grabbed a streetcar to work each morning and in fair weather pounded the pavement at a rapid clip, smoking and tipping his hat to pedestrians as he whizzed by. The cigar still served as his trademark, though he scaled back consumption from twenty per day during the war to ten, feeling virtuous in his self-restraint. An active, curious pedestrian, he was often caught window-shopping by an amused Sherman. “Hello, Grant,” Sherman would interrupt him, “what are you doing?” Grant would give an embarrassed little laugh. “Taking a little exercise, as usual, and looking around,” he declared.8 The one thing about Washington that seemed to cramp Grant’s style was the absence of long straightaways for racing fast horses.
Julia Grant came alive in the heady atmosphere of Washington politics and was fondly received by the new First Lady, the sickly and reclusive Eliza McCardle Johnson. “Mrs. Johnson was a retiring, kind, gentle old lady,” Julia wrote, “too much of an invalid to do the honors of the house . . . but she always came into the drawing room after the long state dinners to take coffee and receive the greetings of her husband’s guests.”9 After the Grants bought the I Street house, Julia emerged as an ambitious social hostess, with a clear case of Potomac fever. Her receptions were packed with powerful visitors, leading Cyrus Comstock to growl at one gathering about “a horrid jam in which it took about an hour to get from stairway to parlor.”10 At loose ends as a host, Grant seemed misplaced in these fancy gatherings. He “was a quiet, undemonstrative man,” noted a visitor, “whose immobile face rarely relaxed into a smile, and who displayed slight interest in social affairs.”11 If a trifle unsophisticated, Julia was well-meaning and eager to please. “Mrs. Grant is an unpretending, affectionate, motherly person who makes a good impression on everybody,” wrote Rutherford B. Hayes. “Her naivete is genuine and very funny at times.”12
Grant’s postwar fame didn’t spare him the bane of his father-in-law’s glaring presence. After he and Julia settled into their Georgetown home, Colonel Dent had no qualms about moving in with them, forcing the victorious Union general to tolerate under his roof a cranky, unrepentant rebel who pontificated about the North violating southern rights. “Occasionally I get into a discussion against my will with Mr. Dent,” wrote Comstock, who resided with the Grants. “He was a rebel sympathizer during the war & now is always abusing the Yankees & crying ‘unconstitutional.’ It makes me furious once in a while.”13
Many Colonel Dents remained scattered throughout the South, unreconciled to the war’s outcome. As the charitable victor at Appomattox, Grant stood as the foremost symbol of a merciful attitude toward the defeated states. At the same time, as the leading Union general, fully committed to the war’s agenda of preserving the Union and ending slavery, Grant was no less associated with protecting the four million freed people. How to reconcile these two often incompatible impulses as they clashed in postwar America would define the rest of Grant’s life and would prove, in many ways, as baffling a problem as winning the war. Nearly two weeks after Appomattox, Grant had written to Julia, “I find my duties, anxieties, and the necessity for having all my wits about me, increasing instead of diminishing. I have a Herculean task to perform.”14
Lincoln had left behind only vague hints about how to pursue Reconstruction. He had bequeathed no immutable master plan, leading to educated guesswork about what he might have done. “Grant only knew the general magnanimity of the President’s views and his disposition toward clemency,” wrote Badeau.15 In Andrew Johnson, Grant had to deal with a new president who would swing from excessive hostility toward the South to excessive leniency, alienating him at both ends of the spectrum.
Grant’s relationship with Johnson started out amicably despite their differing styles. Grant was circumspect and reserved whereas Johnson blurted out oaths and tirades, heedless of the consequences. Grant disclaimed interest in politics or the presidency. “If I supposed that President Johnson believed that I desired to be President, I would be so ashamed that I could not look him in the face,” he confided.16 With Grant a bona fide war hero, Johnson cultivated the relationship, naming Jesse Root Grant postmaster of Covington, Kentucky. In the view of one lawmaker, Johnson “seemed not exactly to stand in awe of [Grant] but anxious to conciliate rather than resolved to command.”17 From the outset, Grant held decidedly ambivalent feelings toward the hotheaded Johnson, finding him “revengeful, passionate, and opinionated.”18
Complicating their relationship was head-scratching about whether Grant was a Democrat or a Republican. Many Democrats sensed an allied spirit and possible presidential nominee for their party. Later, when their relations soured, Johnson insisted that Grant had started out a stalwart supporter of his policies who was then seduced by Radical Republicans catering to his dawning presidential ambition. “He meant well for the first two years, and much that I did that was denounced was through his advice,” said Johnson. “He was the strongest man of all in the support of my policy for a long while.”19 Johnson overstated his case, conveniently forgetting many points of disagreement. Grant saw himself as a soldier, not a politician, narrowly defining his duties as general in chief. He was allowed to attend cabinet meetings about Reconstruction but piped up only when addressed about specific military issues. Still suffused with the Appomattox spirit, he lobbied Stanton to release Confederate prisoners and argued that former rebel soldiers who qualified as loyal citizens should be eligible for the regular army.
With Congress out of session until December, Andrew Johnson spurned calls for a special session to deal with Reconstruction. Grant thought it a profound error to make such momentous decisions by presidential fiat. At first Johnson appeared tailor-made to appeal to poor southern whites and juggle the conflicting interests of North and South. In Grant’s view, he was “one of the ablest of the poor white class” and started out his presidency as if he “wished to revenge himself upon Southern men of better social standing than himself.”20 With a broad streak of class rage, Johnson seemed to breathe fire against patrician southern planters. Radical Republicans in Congress even thought the president a kindred soul who might support black equality and suffrage. “It was supposed,” Sherman recalled, “that President Johnson would err, if at all, in imposing too harsh terms upon these [southern] states.”21
Fresh from Appomattox, Grant was initially dismayed by the way Johnson lashed out at ex-rebels. “They surely would not make good citizens,” he later wrote, “if they felt that they had a yoke around their necks.”22 Before long, however, he grasped the hidden psyche of Andrew Johnson and saw lurking behind his grievances against southern planters a burning wish to emulate them. Instead of punishing his social betters, he would pose as their champion to win them over. As Grant put it, “As soon as the slave-holders put their thumb upon him . . . he became their slave.”23 A Democrat with a devout faith in limited government and states’ rights, Johnson wasn’t ready to extend federal power to protect blacks. Before long, Grant wrote, Johnson came “to regard the South not only as an oppressed people, but as the people best entitled to consideration of any of our citizens.”24 The new president planned to win a second term through an alliance of southern white Democrats and moderate northern Republicans.
What pretty much guaranteed that Johnson would side with white supremacists was his benighted view of black people. No American president has ever held such openly racist views. “This is a country for white men,” he declared unashamedly, “and by God, as long as I am President, it shall be a government for white men.”25 In one message to Congress, he contended that “negroes have shown less capacity for government than any other race of people.”26 He privately referred to blacks as “niggers” and betray
ed a morbid fascination with miscegenation. In his inverted worldview, he wanted to ensure that the “poor, quiet, unoffending, harmless” whites of the South weren’t “trodden under foot to protect niggers.”27 Not only did he think whites genetically superior to blacks but he refused to show the least respect to their most brilliant spokesmen. When Frederick Douglass came to the White House with a black delegation, Johnson turned to his secretary afterward and sneered: “He’s just like any nigger, & would sooner cut a white man’s throat than not.”28 Such a president could only picture southern blacks picking cotton for low wages on their former plantations.
In May, Johnson unveiled his Reconstruction program with a pair of proclamations. One promised to restore full citizenship to most southerners who agreed to take an oath of allegiance. The second outlined steps by which rebel states would be readmitted to the Union. The president would name provisional governors who would call elections to assemble conventions that would bring forth new state constitutions. These elections, of course, would be limited to white male voters. Whatever hopes Radical Republicans cherished about Johnson were rudely thwarted as he began granting wholesale pardons to white southerners. The conservative men he chose as southern governors showed he didn’t intend to “reconstruct” the South at all or upset its traditional power structure. With presidential acquiescence, the old slave owners would reclaim their firm hold on power.
Grant and Johnson clashed sharply over a possible treason prosecution for Robert E. Lee. Johnson’s amnesty proclamation excluded Confederate military leaders, who were required to apply directly to the president for pardons. Grant knew he would never have extracted the Appomattox agreement if it hadn’t exempted Confederate officers from future punishment, but many northerners still bristled at coddling Lee. As Ralph Waldo Emerson protested, “General Grant’s terms certainly look a little too easy, as foreclosing any action hereafter to convict Lee of treason.”29 A vociferous campaign in the northern press advocated trying Lee on treason charges, with Ben Butler assuring the president that Grant “had no authority to grant amnesty” at Appomattox.30 The issue was a highly charged one. Memories of the war were fresh, the wounds were still raw, and many dead bodies lay unburied around Appomattox Court House and Sayler’s Creek. Johnson insisted that as commander in chief he could override anything done by Grant at Appomattox. Grant objected that the rebels had surrendered on these terms, Lincoln had honored them, and there would have been “endless guerrilla warfare” without this leniency.31