Grant

by Ron Chernow

  From July 24 through October 6, Grant embarked on a tour of the East and Midwest with Julia, the four children, and an entourage that included Babcock, Badeau, Parker, and Porter. The trip brought home how much the modest Grant had become a helpless casualty of his own fame. William Wrenshall Smith left this impression of a beleaguered Grant on the road:

  He was so famous and so celebrated that everyone wanted to stare at him and shake him to death . . . crowds gathered by the 50,000 to look at him. He seemed to shrink away from them, to be pained by the attentions paid to him, but the people loved him better for it. When the crowds would gather thick and fast, he sometimes clenched his hands together, as if pained by it all. He also liked to have his young son Jesse stand in front of him because Jesse was a little show off and seemed to deflect the people. Grant stood with his hands on his small son’s shoulders, never seeing anything, just mechanically shaking and looking on absently. It was a terrible drain on him.69

  Admitting to a poor memory for speeches, though not for faces, Grant declared that public speaking was “a terrible trial for me.”70 He considered the political custom of shaking hands “a great nuisance” that should be abolished and complained that the 1865 trip left his right arm sore.71 At a Chicago fair, Grant announced that his hands were so swollen he would shake no more hands. A woman protested loudly that it didn’t matter, since the women wanted to kiss him. “Well,” Grant joked, “none of them have offered to do it yet.”72 The women called his bluff by rushing forward in considerable numbers to give him a buss. Being the object of such female adoration was a completely novel experience for Grant.

  The most rapturous reception came in Galena, where he arrived aboard a private car provided by the railway company. When a fellow passenger noted the contrast between this luxurious conveyance and the Wilderness, Grant retorted, “Yes, it is very fine; and but for the suffering of the men I greatly prefer the wilderness.”73 Five years before Grant had arrived in Galena in a state of shame and misery. Now ten thousand people greeted him, backed by brass bands, thunderous cannon, and blizzards of bunting. A political agenda informed the town’s decision to honor Grant. Elihu Washburne and local officials had grown worried when he accepted the Philadelphia house and declared he would reside there. In Galena this was regarded as a serious breach of faith, even though Grant had resided there only one year before the war. In May, Washburne reminded Grant that he first “commanded an Illinois regiment” and “was appointed a brigadier general, a major general and a lieutenant general, all from Illinois, and I may say all, through Illinois influences.”74 This was a not-so-subtle reference to Washburne’s steadfast sponsorship. In reply, Grant promised Washburne he would vote in Galena at the next election and officially proclaim it as home.75 But Grant, having scaled national heights, wasn’t eager to crawl back into the prosaic life of a small town in western Illinois.

  Grant strode through Galena’s streets beneath flowery arches, one emblazoned with the names of his famous victories. He had once quipped that he wanted to be town mayor so he could put in a new sidewalk from his house to the station, and one arch announced in floral lettering: “General, the sidewalk is built.”76 Near the old leather goods store where he had labored, Grant was pelted with bouquets by thirty-six girls, representing the states of the Union. After Washburne delivered a speech, the Grants were ushered to a fully furnished house, a gift of local businessmen costing $16,000 and designed to tether them to the town. Beautifully situated on a prime hilltop location, it had lawns sloping away to afford fine vistas. Grant was moved by the transformation four years had wrought and one neighbor spotted “tears trickling down his cheeks” as he left the house.77 Grant told Rawlins he found the Galena reception “flattering though somewhat embarrassing” and wished the generosity had been lavished on him when he most needed it.78 Another time, upon receiving a costly overcoat, he commented, “There have been times in my life when the gift of an overcoat would have been an act of charity. No one gave it to me when I needed it. Now when I am able to pay for all I need, such gifts are continually thrust upon me.”79 The Galena house remained something of a showpiece for Grant, grand and a trifle stuffy, and it never showed the true imprint of his residence.

  Whenever he visited Galena, Grant shied away from the leather goods store, which didn’t stop Jesse Root Grant from cashing in on his son’s presence in the most mercenary fashion. He wrote this advertising jingle for the Galena Gazette: “Since Grant has whipped the Rebel Lee / And opened trade from sea to sea / Our goods in price must soon advance / Then don’t neglect the present chance / To Call on GRANT and PERKINS. J.R.G.”80 Old family jealousies still festered and Orvil’s wife, Mary, reacted to Grant’s visit with her old tart-tongued perspective about her brother-in-law. “He was the same, maybe a little more self impressed, but Julia was much worse,” she said. “She still ran after him, bragged on him, told me, ‘Isn’t he ever more handsome with his three-star boards?’ and like nonsense. She togged herself in expensive clothes, but he still was dressed like he rolled out of bed, though Julia always said he was the handsomest soldier, always fussing and hovering over him, which he lapped up like a boy in a confectionery.”81

  Later in the trip, returning to another scene of dismal failure, Grant visited St. Louis and was feted by ten thousand people in Lafayette Park, culminating in a congratulatory speech by Missouri’s lieutenant governor. On the way back to Washington, he made a side trip to Covington to visit his parents. Hannah Grant was as hesitant to bask in her son’s fame as Jesse was eager. She had been horrified on July Fourth when she was coaxed onto a political platform outside Cincinnati amid earsplitting applause. Now she wanted to make sure her son wasn’t spoiled by idolatry. “Well, Ulysses,” she said in her no-nonsense style, standing in her apron, “you’ve become a great man, haven’t you?”82 Then she proceeded with her usual round of chores, avoiding any show of maternal warmth.

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  BACK IN WASHINGTON in early October, Grant compiled a report that charted the army’s reorganization from a war footing to peacetime conditions. He proudly informed Stanton that the Armies of the Potomac and the Tennessee had been disbanded in July without major disruptions. Grant already had a premonition that the army would occupy a central role in Reconstruction and suggested an eighty-thousand-man peacetime force to deal with “unsettled questions between the white and black races at the south.”83 He wanted the president to have authority to raise an additional twenty thousand black troops if necessary. “Colored troops can garrison the sea coast entirely,” he told General George Thomas, “and the number of interior posts may be reduced as low as you deem expedient.”84 In the end, prodded by Stanton, Grant reduced the projected army to fifty-three thousand soldiers.

  As Grant toiled under heavy burdens, Rawlins felt duty-bound to assist him. He assembled much of the material for the army report, which Grant wrote in his home library. With the war over, Rawlins had hoped to devote time to recovering his health, but Grant’s crammed schedule made that difficult. Grant remained solicitous of Rawlins’s health, urging him to spend several months recuperating at his new Galena home. “The house presented to me by the kindness of the Citizens is entirely at your service if you choose to do so,” he told Rawlins. “You will find it very comfortable and containing everything necessary for housekeeping.”85 But Rawlins found it difficult to tear himself away from Washington as the debate over the military and Reconstruction grew ever more acrimonious.

  With the army report off his desk, Grant allowed himself another interval of hoopla and hero worship in New York, arriving there by private railway car and staying for ten days. On November 20, flanked by General Joseph Hooker and magnate William B. Astor, he attended a reception in his honor at the posh Fifth Avenue Hotel that seemed to contain every luminary in the city. Suddenly Grant was the darling of the city’s plutocrats. Generals galore were there, including Winfield Scott, John C. Frémont, George Gordon Meade, Ambrose Burnside
, and Lew Wallace, as well as poets, journalists, and five senators. Three thousand people supped on oysters and champagne before watching a fireworks display outside. The Grants also hobnobbed with high society, attending a dinner party thrown by George Templeton Strong. “Mrs. Grant is the plainest of country women,” Strong wrote, “but a lady, inasmuch as she shows no trace of affectation or assumption, and frankly admits herself wholly ignorant of the social usages of New York.”86 While Grant’s aides tired of this social whirl, Grant soaked up the attention, perhaps showing the first signs of political ambition. His intimates feared this might look like grandstanding or even a blatant attempt to upstage President Johnson. “If everybody knew him as you and I do, it would be different,” wrote Washburne to Badeau, “but as they do not, they attribute to him motives that we know never entered his head.” Happy that Grant and Johnson seemed in “perfect accord,” Washburne hoped Grant would succeed him as president in the 1868 race.87

  As the year progressed, Grant was drawn ever more deeply into the debate on Reconstruction. In early March 1865, the federal government had assumed responsibility for aiding freed slaves through the creation of the Freedmen’s Bureau. Since it was set up as a War Department agency, drawing funds and staff from it, Grant was directly involved in its operations. The bureau’s mandate was to feed, clothe, and educate former slaves, providing them with medical supplies and legal protection and relocating them on more than 850,000 acres of land the federal government came to control during the war. It was overseen by General Oliver O. Howard, whom Grant had met outside Chattanooga and who later helped to found Howard University.

  Because southern slaves had inhabited a rural culture, the pivotal issue for their future was whether they could receive land from the federal government. With a plot of land, they had a chance for an independent life; if condemned to remain landless, they would be thrown back into servitude to the same plantation barons who had owned them. On August 16, Johnson issued an order that allowed southern whites to recapture land confiscated from them during the war—a move that made him heroic to whites while dealing a crushing blow to black hopes. It forced freedmen to abandon the forty-acre plots they had started to work, turning the men into powerless sharecroppers, bound to land owned by whites. Within weeks, a white delegation from the former Confederacy rushed to the White House to express “sincere respect” for Johnson’s desire “to sustain Southern rights in the Union.”88

  By the end of 1865, so-called Black Codes began to forge a new caste system in the South, a segregated world where freed slaves worked as indentured servants, subject to arrest if they left jobs before their annual contracts expired. It was a cruel new form of bondage, establishing the foundations of the Jim Crow system that later ruled southern race relations. In South Carolina, blacks were confined by law to their plantations, forced to work from sunup to sundown. In Florida, blacks who showed “disrespect” to their bosses or rode in public conveyances reserved for whites could be whipped and pilloried. In Mississippi, it became a criminal offense for blacks to hunt or fish, heightening their dependence upon white employers. Thus, within six months of the end of the Civil War, there arose a broadly based retreat from many of the ideals that had motivated the northern war effort, reestablishing the status quo ante and white supremacy in the old Confederacy.

  During the summer of 1865, President Johnson sent Carl Schurz, the Prussian-born journalist and Union general, to the South to report on the progress of Reconstruction. His forty-six-page report didn’t present the rosy view of a reconciled South that Johnson preferred. Instead he painted the white South as angry and defiant, still insisting that secession had been legitimate. His portrayal of freed blacks described them as languishing in wretched conditions of poverty, reinforced by Black Codes that trapped them in a new subservience. For Radical Republicans, the Schurz report crystallized their discontent with Johnson’s approach to Reconstruction, which seemed to favor whites instead of blacks. Even though Johnson blocked the document, excerpts appeared in the Boston Daily Advertiser. So strongly did the president deplore the report that he said his sole error thus far as president had been to dispatch Schurz to the South.

  To undo the damage, Johnson decided in late November to exploit Grant’s prestige and send him south on a fact-finding tour. Grant was already fielding reports from southern commanders that suggested a resurgence of violence in the region, with many white atrocities against blacks. George Meade warned that withdrawing federal troops “would very likely be followed by a war of races,” while General Peter J. Osterhaus said white militias, with telltale names such as the Jeff Davis Guards, were springing up across Mississippi.89 At first, Grant wavered as to whether he should undertake such a risky assignment and was perhaps swayed by Cyrus Comstock’s advice that “he had better go so that he might be able to speak decidedly on questions of reconstruction.”90

  As he pondered the region’s future, Grant was mildly sanguine that with slavery’s demise, a widespread social transformation would overtake the region. Had the Confederacy won the war, he thought, it would have become a pariah state in the world economy, doomed to stagnation. Slavery, he later wrote, had been a barbaric system that “degraded labor, kept it in ignorance, and enervated the governing class.”91 He hoped that poor downtrodden whites who had never owned slaves would now make common cause with northern liberals rather than the large planters who had conspired to keep them in an impoverished, dependent state.

  On November 27, Grant headed south along with Comstock, Babcock, and Badeau. The two-week trip was terribly brief and superficial, taking them through Virginia, the Carolinas, Georgia, and Tennessee, before returning to Washington on December 11. The ruinous state of southern railroads made the journey slow and oppressive. Eager to rush back to Washington for the opening of Congress, Grant felt himself a prisoner to an overly tight schedule. In many towns his time was consumed by ceremonial visits from mayors, aldermen, and merchants as well as ex-rebel governors and former Confederate cabinet members. While he reviewed a black regiment on the Sea Islands of Georgia, he spent most of his fleeting trip huddled with white leaders. In Raleigh, North Carolina, he met with committees from both houses of the legislature and sent this bland synopsis to Julia: “There seems to be the best of feeling existing . . . by both original Secessionists and Unionists, to act in such a way as to secure admittance back and to please the general Government.”92 Everywhere Grant was lavishly complimented by white southerners who honored his charity at Appomattox. Badeau summed up the fawning treatment: “The man who had done most to subdue the South was universally recognized as its protector and savior from further suffering.”93 Unfortunately, such reverence made it impossible for Grant to deliver the astringent, cold-eyed critique the situation required.

  Cyrus Comstock kept a diary of the trip that provides glimpses of the South that tally with Carl Schurz’s assessment, not Grant’s. In Charleston, he spoke to Oliver O. Howard’s brother, who told him that “the feeling between whites & negroes is bad, the negroes having no trust in the whites & the latter fearing a rising.”94 He noted that many southern ladies made angry faces at Yankee officers. En route to Augusta, when they were all squeezed into an ambulance car, they passed a former rebel soldier who called out, “Well if there ain’t a whole coach full of full blooded Yankees.”95 At the close of the trip, Comstock came up with a blunt assessment: “There is much bitter feeling still at the south . . . the government will have to exercise some control over the south for a year to come to secure the best treatment of the negro.”96

  On December 18, the Thirteenth Amendment, which banned slavery, went into effect. Until then slavery had remained legal in most southern states, making the amendment more than merely symbolic. It presented a pivotal moment in attitudes toward Reconstruction. William Lloyd Garrison closed up shop at The Liberator, believing the work of emancipation done. With the amendment and the creation of state governments in the South, Seward imagined Recon
struction would soon be completed. For Radical Republicans, however, the hard work had only just begun. “Liberty has been won,” contended Senator Charles Sumner. “The battle for Equality is still pending.” Unless freed blacks received the vote, warned Frederick Douglass, “we should have slavery back again, in spirit if not in form.”97

  On the same day the amendment was ratified, Grant filed his report on his southern trip with Andrew Johnson, presenting his findings in unconvincingly Panglossian terms. “I am satisfied that the mass of thinking men of the South accept the present situation of affairs in good faith. The questions which have heretofore divided the sentiment of the people of the two sections, Slavery and States Rights . . . they regard as having been settled forever.”98 To assure the safety of blacks and whites, Grant suggested the maintenance of small garrisons in the South. In a controversial passage, he recommended that only white troops should be stationed in the southern interior, appeasing white fears that black soldiers might “instigate” their southern brethren: “The presence of Black troops, lately slaves, demoralizes labor both by their advice and furnishing in their camps a resort for the Freedmen for long distances around. White troops generally excited no opposition.”99 Grant opposed land redistribution, which had excited so much hope among freedmen, saying “the late slave seems to be imbued with the idea that the property of his late master should by right belong to him.”100 Such thinking could incite dangerous collisions, he was persuaded, and he blamed agents of the Freedmen’s Bureau for fomenting such incendiary ideas. On the other hand, he urged the bureau’s continuance to safeguard black rights.