by Ron Chernow
Everybody knew that the treatment of Lee, with his tremendous moral authority, would sway southern opinion during the postwar era. In early May, Halleck informed Grant that many of Lee’s officers had lined up to take amnesty oaths and that Lee himself contemplated petitioning Johnson for a pardon. “Should he do this, the whole population with few exceptions will follow his example,” Halleck insisted.32 Willing to take heat on the issue, Grant showed courage and fairness in endorsing merciful treatment for Lee. “Although it would meet with opposition in the North to allow Lee the benefit of Amnesty,” Grant told Halleck, “I think it would have the best possible effect towards restoring good feeling and peace in the South to have him come in.”33
Any chance for such a harmonious outcome was shattered in late May when federal judge John C. Underwood, a northern abolitionist, convened a grand jury in Norfolk, Virginia, for the express purpose of indicting Lee and other Confederate leaders for treason. Underwood belittled the Appomattox agreement as “a mere military arrangement” that “can have no influence upon civil rights or the status of the persons interested.”34 Following the judge’s lead, the grand jury returned indictments against Lee, Joseph Johnston, James Longstreet, and other high-ranking Confederate generals.
Lee was stunned. Having pledged his sacred honor at Appomattox, Grant was no less flabbergasted that his agreement was being retroactively nullified. Lee sent out feelers to determine whether Grant would support his clemency request and word filtered back that Grant would stand by his solemn pledge at Appomattox. On June 13, Lee wrote to Grant and asked for confirmation that officers and men of the Army of Northern Virginia had surrendered under terms protecting them “from molestation, so long as they Conformed to its conditions.”35 He enclosed a pardon application “with the earnest recommendation that, this application of Gen. R. E. Lee for amnesty and pardon may be granted him.”36 Grant saw a battle royal ahead with Johnson as to whether he had exceeded his authority at Appomattox. He jogged Stanton’s memory that “the terms granted by me met with the hearty approval of the President at the time, and of the country generally. The action of Judge Underwood in Norfolk has already had an injurious effect, and I would ask that he be ordered to quash all indictments found against paroled prisoners of war, and to desist from further prosecution of them.”37
On June 16, Grant met with Andrew Johnson at the White House and the two men engaged in a testy exchange about the fate of Lee and other Confederate generals. Johnson reiterated his vow to make “treason odious” and demanded, “When can these men be tried?” “Never,” answered Grant, “unless they violate their paroles.”38 Grant summarized the dispute:
Mr. Johnson spoke of Lee, and wanted to know why any military commander had a right to protect an arch-traitor from the laws. I was angry at this, and I spoke earnestly and plainly to the President. I said, that as General, it was none of my business what he or Congress did with General Lee or his other commanders . . . That did not come in my province. But a general commanding troops has certain responsibilities and duties and power, which are supreme. He must deal with the enemy in front of him so as to destroy him . . . His engagements are sacred so far as they lead to the destruction of the foe. I had made certain terms with Lee . . . If I had told him and his army that their liberty would be invaded, that they would be open to arrest, trial, and execution for treason, Lee would never have surrendered, and we should have lost many lives in destroying him. Now my terms of surrender were according to military law, and so long as Lee was observing his parole I would never consent to his arrest . . . I should have resigned the command of the army rather than have carried out any order directing me to arrest Lee or any of his commanders who obeyed the laws.39
Grant didn’t lightly throw down a gauntlet in this way. When he returned to the War Department, he notified his staff, “I will not stay in the army if they break the pledges that I made.”40 Johnson must have known the damage Grant’s resignation would do to his administration and Grant won the confrontation hands down. On June 20, at Johnson’s behest, Attorney General James Speed ordered the U.S. attorney in Norfolk to abandon Lee’s prosecution. On the same day, Grant informed Lee that no further actions would be taken to place him behind bars. Lee predicted that the government would procrastinate in granting his pardon, though he couldn’t have predicted that his civil liberties and right to vote would not be restored until Johnson’s broad amnesty in December 1868. His citizenship wasn’t fully restored in his lifetime and more than a hundred years passed before it was posthumously accomplished through a joint congressional resolution in 1975.
As news spread that Grant had saved Lee, it confirmed his special status as a forgiving, merciful northern general. As one southern editorial writer said, “Though a past uncompromising enemy of that successful Captain, we now take a special pleasure in recording this our testimony to his soldierly good faith.” The paper quoted a ringing paean from the Alabama politician Clement Clay: “Gen. GRANT is not disposed to oppress the South; on the contrary he is striving to lighten her burden.”41
With the treason indictment behind him, Lee accepted the presidency of Washington College in Lexington, Virginia, a quiet town in the shadow of the Blue Ridge Mountains, where he hoped to dodge the spotlight. But the war’s passions hadn’t subsided. William Lloyd Garrison wondered how “the vanquished leader of the rebel armies” could inculcate in his students loyalty to the Union “which he so lately attempted to destroy!”42 Lee ducked attempts to draft him into politics, calling it “extremely unpleasant” that his “name should be unnecessarily brought before the public.”43 Although he preached acceptance of the war’s verdict, he remained an unreconstructed southerner. Where he had once emphasized his original opposition to secession, he now stressed states’ rights and constitutional principles to justify the South’s action, clinging to a prejudiced view of blacks. As he told a cousin, “I have always observed that wherever you find the Negro, everything is going down around him, and wherever you find the white man, you see everything around him improving.”44 In February 1866, he testified before Congress to oppose suffrage for former slaves: “My own opinion is that, at this time, they cannot vote intelligently, and that giving them the right of suffrage would open the door to a great deal of demagoguism, and lead to embarrassments in various ways.”45
Most consequential for Grant’s historic reputation was the way southerners of the Lost Cause school would begin to idealize Lee, portraying him as a gallant, noble general who had far outshone Grant and lost the war only because his opponent was backed by limitless manpower and industrial machinery. Even in the North, praise for Lee grew so effusive that Frederick Douglass would complain in the 1870s, “We can scarcely take up a newspaper that is not filled with nauseating flatteries of the late Robert E. Lee.”46 However statesmanlike he outwardly appeared, Lee remained a southern partisan, privately lamenting “the vindictiveness and malignity of the Yankees, of which he had no conception before the war.”47 He never retreated from his retrograde views on slavery, signing a manifesto during the 1868 presidential campaign that proclaimed: “The idea that Southern people are hostile to the negroes and would oppress them . . . is entirely unfounded . . . They have grown up in our midst, and we have been accustomed from childhood to look upon them with kindness.”48 The signers proposed a restoration of the “‘kindness and humanity’ of their former social system.”49 Grant came to believe that Lee, far from accepting the war’s outcome gracefully, was secretly hostile to it and abetted southern fantasies that their defeated cause would rise anew.
While Lee’s case was the most celebrated, Grant furnished legal protection to scores of southern generals who turned to him for pardons. One by one the top brass of the Confederate army besieged him with doleful letters. Grant’s most improbable intervention came on behalf of John Singleton Mosby, the notorious “Gray Ghost,” whose raiders had bedeviled his army in northern Virginia. Mosby’s wife went to President Johnson
in distress and pleaded that her husband couldn’t earn a living as a lawyer because his freedom of movement was restricted. Grant issued a safe conduct that allowed Mosby to move about, rescuing him financially. Mosby repaid the surprising kindness by becoming a steadfast friend and ally of Grant, who later described him as “an honest, brave, conscientious man.”50
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FOR GRANT, THERE remained an unfinished piece of business from the Civil War: Mexico. In 1862, Napoleon III began to send an army of occupation to Mexico, under the pretext of collecting overdue debts, to topple the legitimate government of Benito Juárez and install a puppet regime under Ferdinand Maximilian, an Austrian archduke. Lincoln had grown alarmed for multiple reasons: the invasion had flouted the Monroe Doctrine, provided potential asylum for Confederate soldiers, and might lead France to side with the Confederacy. Refusing to recognize this forcibly imposed government, Lincoln rushed to shore up Union forces in Texas to stem any possible French incursion from Mexico.
Ever since Grant had fought there as a young soldier, Mexico had exerted a powerful romantic charm over his imagination. A confirmed republican, he feared the French action was “a foothold for establishing a European monarchy upon our continent . . . I, myself, regarded this as a direct act of war against the United States.”51 There was so much cross-border skulduggery between France and the rebels during the Civil War—the Confederacy regularly smuggled supplies across the Rio Grande while its soldiers used Mexico for sanctuary—that Grant classified Napoleon III as “an active part of the rebellion.”52 Convinced his position reflected the sentiments of many Union soldiers, he lobbied President Johnson and Secretary of State Seward for postwar action against Mexico. Right after Appomattox, a young staff officer recalled, Grant returned to his office one day and announced, “Now for Mexico.”53 According to Matías Romero, a Mexican minister allied with Benito Juárez who plotted with Grant to liberate his country, the lieutenant general told him that “60,000 veterans from the United States would march into Mexico as soon as they were mustered out, and this government would not oppose that action.”54
With such decided views on Mexico, Grant allowed his political judgment, which could be faulty, to supersede his military caution. During the war, he had been exemplary in bowing to civilian leadership, whereas he now tried to circumvent the secretary of state. On May 17, 1865, he dispatched Phil Sheridan with fifty thousand men to pacify Texas and parts of Louisiana still controlled by the Confederate general Edmund Kirby Smith, offering him the same surrender terms granted to Lee and Johnston. Such actions fell well within Grant’s jurisdiction as general in chief, but he had an ulterior motive in advising Sheridan to line up a strong force along the Rio Grande. He pictured Sheridan fording the Rio Grande, joining up with Juárez, and proceeding to overthrow Maximilian. Better a small war now, Grant reckoned, than a larger one later on. Like Grant, Sheridan regarded Maximilian’s downfall as the war’s final phase and subscribed wholeheartedly to the plan. It was atypical of Grant to defy the avowed wishes of the secretary of state. “With regard to this matter,” Sheridan recalled, Grant had said it would be necessary “to act with great circumspection, since the Secretary of State, Mr. Seward, was much opposed to the use of our troops along the border in any active way that would be likely to involve us in a war with European powers.”55
During the war, Grant had grown acquainted with Seward when he visited the City Point headquarters. Henry Adams thought the secretary possessed “a head like a wise macaw,” with its gray hair and thickly tufted eyebrows.56 Disfigured by a knife attack the day Lincoln was shot, Seward still bore an enormous scar on his right cheek. A short, affable man, he liked to smoke, drink, and hold court in a rasping voice, issuing oracular statements. Perhaps it was inevitable that Grant and Seward would clash: Grant was blunt and straightforward in style, while Seward prided himself on being a master of diplomatic wiles. In time, Grant came to think that Seward had sacrificed his principles to retain his influence under President Johnson.
With Mexico Grant played a dangerous game, hoping to reunite North and South under the banner of a popular foreign war. Under Sheridan’s invigorating leadership, he thought such a war would be “short, quick, decisive, and assuredly triumphant,” smashing Napoleon’s Mexican empire with one blow.57 Seward imagined he could accomplish the same goals bloodlessly through patient diplomacy. On June 30, Grant received a message from Sheridan that vindicated his most vivid fears: defeated Confederates were sacking federal arsenals and hauling artillery across the border into Mexico. “Everything on wheels artillery horses mules . . . have been run over into Mexico. Large and small bands of rebel soldiers and some citizens amounting to about two thousand have crossed the Rio Grande into Mexico.”58 This evoked the specter that renegade rebels might perpetuate the war in exile, producing the very guerrilla chaos Grant had worked so hard to avoid. A rump group of rebel soldiers formed a colony west of Vera Cruz called Carlota, which soon burgeoned into a community of five thousand people. Among southern generals flocking to sanctuary in Mexico were Jubal Early, Edmund Kirby Smith, Sterling Price, J. B. Magruder, and Joseph Shelby as well as governors of three southern states and members of the Confederate cabinet. With Maximilian’s connivance, these refugees began to advertise in southern newspapers that cheap land and labor were plentiful in Mexico.
At a June 16 cabinet meeting, Grant made a vigorous case for a confrontational approach with Maximilian, arguing that Confederate refugees would join the latter’s imperial army and precipitate hostilities with the U.S. government. He predicted a long, bloody war, fueled by thousands of former Confederate soldiers, and proposed that the federal government issue a solemn protest against the Mexican monarchy. Seward, in an eloquent rebuttal, said this tough approach would “wound French pride and produce a war with France.” In his estimation, Maximilian’s reign “was rapidly perishing, and, if let alone, Maximilian would leave in less than six months, perhaps in sixty days, whereas, if we interfered, it would prolong his stay and the Empire also.”59 After this debate, Gideon Welles issued his private verdict that “Seward acts from intelligence, Grant from impulse.”60 Cynical and curmudgeonly, Welles spied in Grant’s concern for Mexico a concealed taste for power, writing that he “naturally perhaps, desires to retain a large military force in service.”61 The war had certainly made Grant far more accustomed to exercising power, but he had been active in disbanding troops ever since Appomattox.
The Mexican question roiled Johnson’s cabinet and grew only more heated when the president read aloud on July 14 a truculent letter from Sheridan that was endorsed by Grant. Sheridan bragged that his army was in “magnificent trim” and hoped shortly to “have the pleasure of crossing the Rio Grande with them with our faces turned towards the city of Mexico.”62 Secretary of the Treasury Hugh McCulloch warned that a Mexican war might bankrupt the U.S. government. For his part, Seward was astounded by Sheridan’s bellicose message. “Said if we got in war and drove out the French, we could not get out ourselves,” Welles recorded.63 Meanwhile, Grant advocated deeper involvement in Mexico by sending a general there to act as a liaison with liberal forces and sell them arms from federal surplus stock. When General John Schofield was chosen as the intermediary, Seward adroitly steered him to Paris instead, telling him “to get your legs under Napoleon’s mahogany and tell him to get out of Mexico.”64 Grant’s hawkish stand on Mexico helped Seward’s dovish diplomatic efforts since the latter could present himself to the French as a peaceful alternative to Grant’s belligerence.
Even though Seward made clear that the United States would rely on diplomacy to settle differences with Mexico, Grant clung to a more muscular policy. On August 10, The New York Times carried an interview in which Grant warned that “the French would have to leave Mexico peaceably, if they chose, but forcibly if they refused.”65 Grant denied making any such explicit threat, but he was clearly applying pressure on the administration instead of passively serving as its c
hief soldier. In early September, he renewed his obsessive campaign against Mexico, telling Johnson that the United States should serve notice on the French to withdraw their troops. Sheridan found it difficult to restrain his men from crossing the Rio Grande. All the while, imperial French troops continued to extend their control over Mexico.
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OUTSIDE OF WASHINGTON, Grant remained a celebrity, smothered with adulation everywhere. It was impossible to restrain admirers who surged around him at every turn. On June 8, he attended commencement exercises at West Point and was embraced by Winfield Scott, gray eminence of the army, who lived in a hotel on the academy grounds. “Thank God you have passed through so much peril unharmed,” Scott exclaimed upon seeing Grant. “Welcome to my bachelor home!”66 Such camaraderie must have seemed dreamlike to Grant, who had first glimpsed the majestic Scott as a West Point plebe. Now the two men strolled arm in arm, as comfortable as well-worn pals. Still tremendously tall, Scott was white-haired, corpulent, and wrinkled and sat with Julia on a verandah while Grant surveyed marching cadets. Having recently published his memoirs, he gave Grant a copy with a warm inscription that must have bowled him over: “From the oldest to the greatest General of the Army of the United States.”67 Before long, Fred Grant would enter the academy and Grant noted proudly he was “full three inches taller than I was when I entered West Point and better prepared.”68