by Ron Chernow
A touch of restlessness still characterized Mr. Grant, who rebelled against the hidebound etiquette that forced presidents to socialize only on their home turf. Scrapping this custom, he dined out regularly at the homes of cabinet members and old army comrades. Large numbers of friends were happy to reciprocate, stopping by the White House in the evening. After dinner Grant loved to wander across Lafayette Square and drop by Hamilton Fish’s house for casual conversation. “Few men had more powers of conversation and of narration than he when in the company of intimate friends,” Fish remarked.58
As a result of interminable dinners, the once-slender Grant developed a sleek, portly look and his beard grew flecked with gray. Though conversational with close friends, he didn’t look especially comfortable at White House social functions, trussed up in black evening coat and white tie, a onetime warrior ambushed by a sudden outbreak of peace. Shedding his levity, he nonetheless wore a downcast expression. “I observed a greater dignity of feeling,” wrote Badeau, “a conscious and intentional gravity, an absence of that familiar, almost jocular mood which once had been so frequent.”59 Grant lacked the useful glibness of many presidents and could sometimes seem like a grudging prisoner of duty. He didn’t impose himself upon people or thrust himself into conversations or demand to be the center of attention. As Badeau put it, Grant “had little small talk, and could not make conversation without a theme; but he observed closely under his mask of silence, and I always relished his criticisms of people and manners.”60
Grant has labored under the charge of being an errand boy for plutocrats, turning his back on his roots in small-town America. Without question he enjoyed fraternizing with prosperous businessmen, but he was also extraordinarily charitable toward the indigent, even though he never advertised his generosity. “He gave to all who asked him, being often unnecessarily and unwisely profuse in his donations,” said Fish. “I have not infrequently known him to give sums from five to ten times the amount of what the applicant could have reasonably or probably expected.”61 His papers show a steady solicitude for the poor, the money routed anonymously through the Metropolitan Methodist Episcopal Church in Washington, where he worshipped regularly. “Please give $10 to the blind man and $10 to the soldier’s widow,” went one note in 1869.62 In another he wrote to the Reverend John P. Newman, “Please find enclosed my check for $100, for distribution among the poor.”63
While wine flowed freely at state dinners, Grant didn’t partake and no alcohol was served when he dined in private. For New Year’s Day receptions, he ordered that coffee instead of liquor be distributed. His political enemies still delighted in branding him a drunkard, the label now being the stock-in-trade of Grant critics. Ben Butler mocked Andrew Johnson as the “drunken tailor” and Grant as the “drunken tanner.”64 When Orville Browning called on Grant one day, he found him “very much bloated, eyes red and watering, and looking very much as if he were drunk, and I think he must have been pretty full.”65 But such random accusations were now more conspicuous by their absence and occurred with nowhere near the frequency of wartime drinking charges. The precise circumstances required for Grant’s drinking binges—visits to distant cities, the absence of his wife—seldom applied during his presidency when he was constantly surrounded by people, especially Julia. Admiral Daniel Ammen summed up Grant’s presidency thus: “During all of these years I never saw General Grant in a condition that would give rise even to a suspicion that he had indulged too freely in liquor, and only on one occasion have I ever had a glass of liquor in the White House.”66 It was an extraordinary achievement that Grant, despite the almost unbearable tensions of his presidency and undoubted temptations to drink, largely conquered an alcohol problem that had beset him through much of his adult life.
An active man, Grant often felt cooped up in the White House where he worked from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. before escaping for a carriage drive. He showed his usual fondness for speedy trotters, sometimes driving so fast the timid Julia begged him to return her to the safety of the executive mansion. As Grant careened down roadways, pedestrians occasionally imagined he steered a runaway carriage. One day, riding down Pennsylvania Avenue with Sherman, Grant inquired, “Sherman, what special hobby do you intend to adopt?”67 Sherman was perplexed until Grant explained that newspapers liked to pin pet interests on people and he had chosen horses as his hobby. That way, if a reporter pressed him for information he didn’t wish to share, he could deflect the conversation to horsemanship. The anecdote suggests Grant was more artful and sophisticated in dealing with reporters than is commonly supposed.
Perhaps his most remarkable extracurricular activities were his solitary walks around Washington, sometimes covering five or six miles. Grant disbanded his personal guard and sauntered around town alone, hands clasped behind his back, smoking a cigar. On these rambles, he often passed Walt Whitman, then working in Washington. The poet told his mother, “I saw Grant to-day on the avenue walking by himself—(I always salute him, & he does the same to me.)”68 He often spotted Grant frequenting “a little cottage on the outskirts” of town, where he had struck up a friendship with an elderly couple. “I would see him leaning on their window sills outside: all would be talking together: they seeming to treat him without deference for place—with dignity, courtesy, appreciation.”69 Far from seeing Grant as an elitist president or toady of the rich, Whitman thought he embodied a common, democratic spirit. “Grant was the typical Western man—the plainest, the most efficient . . . the least imposed upon by appearances.”70
For Grant, the walks pierced the bubble inevitably isolating a president. On his constitutional one day, he noticed a commotion among a knot of government construction workers. When he asked what was the matter, he was told they were being forced to work ten-hour days even though Congress had recently passed legislation introducing an eight-hour day for laborers employed by the federal government. Grant summoned the responsible figure, a Mr. Benjamin, for a dressing-down and notified him “he should never again exact above eight hours labor a day from his men.”71 However frugal with government funds, Grant didn’t allow it to interfere with his sense of justice for these workmen. On May 19, 1869, he issued a proclamation endorsing an eight-hour day for government laborers without any diminution of pay.72 It was yet another example that belies the charge that Grant had turned his back on ordinary working people.
In his early days in Detroit, Grant had befriended Colonel James E. Pitman, who told the following tale of Grant on one of his walks:
He used to meet a lady every morning as she was coming out of the Treasury building. He bowed to her and she bowed to him, but never spoke. One day, he stepped before her. “See here, why don’t you stop and speak to me?” “But General,” she answered, “I supposed you wanted to be alone, and I didn’t want to intrude.” Grant smiled and said, “Don’t you suppose I would rather have people stop and talk with me than let me walk alone?” There is a hint here of Grant’s admiration for a pretty woman and also a hint of his essential loneliness. This trait he had even as a young officer in Detroit.73
As part of his health regimen, Grant escaped from the sweltering Washington summers by withdrawing to Long Branch. A miasmic breeze, he believed, blew from flats south of the White House, communicating disease to its occupants. His friend George W. Childs, the editor of the Philadelphia Public Ledger, had joined with George Pullman and other well-off friends to purchase the shingled, three-story cottage on Ocean Avenue, perched on a bluff, which effectively became the first summer White House. Grant was allowed to use the house free of charge for life and bought it in his name. Described by one reporter as a “mixture of English villa and Swiss chalet,” it was encircled by verandahs and dormer windows that provided fine ocean vistas.74 Not nearly as fancy as Newport, Long Branch exuded an informal charm and gaiety, despite its heavy contingent of bankers and industrialists. Brass bands thumped out tunes on the local hotel lawn, while scores of red, white, and blue flags rippled i
n the salt air. Grant responded to “the genial sea breeze, fine roads and beautiful surrounding villages, and pleasant and hospitable neighbors.”75 At Long Branch he felt blithe as a schoolboy and loved to flaunt feats of strength. There was a chin-up bar at the ferry house where he startled his family by performing twenty-five or thirty repetitions. Clad in a linen duster, he drove fast buggies on the beach or scooted off to neighboring towns, often logging in twenty miles before breakfast. Other times he drifted down to the ocean alone and stared pensively at the sea, smoking his cigar. Grant ran into criticism for spending too much time at his Long Branch hideaway, but he kept up an ample work schedule there and was often visited by cabinet secretaries. The beach house became for him an irreplaceable sanctuary from the pressures of office.
Ever since the war, the Grant family had suffered from a vagabond existence. With the two eldest boys away at school, Long Branch provided a cherished haven where the Grants functioned as a true clan, bathing in the surf, enjoying clambakes, and entertaining visitors. Since Grant was a young president, the press delighted in the rambunctious antics of his teenage children, ranging from eighteen-year-old Fred to eleven-year-old Jesse. “I have never seen a more devoted family or a happier one,” observed the White House usher William Crook. “There never seemed to be the slightest jar.”76 As in Galena days, Grant would playfully knead his bread into little balls at meals and fire them at Nellie and Jesse, who resided in the White House. “When the missile hit, he went over and kissed the victim on the cheek,” said Crook. “He was a most loving father.”77 Grant’s oldest son, Fred, who was at West Point, showed strikingly similar interests to his father’s. He excelled at math, adored horses, and loved parade ground drills; besides the physical resemblance, he had his father’s laconic style and bullheaded drive. The second son, Buck, displayed his father’s strength and simple, straightforward manner. Nellie was pretty and sweet and pampered by her doting father. At one point, to instill more discipline in her, the Grants sent her to Miss Porter’s School in Farmington, Connecticut, where she revolted at her unwanted exile and soon returned to the mad flurry of Washington parties.
The child providing reporters with the most captivating copy was Jesse, whom his father called “a saucy little rascal” and who didn’t go to school until age nine, having had private tutors instead.78 Inheriting his father’s taste for fast horses, Jesse drove a pair of Shetland ponies in a little buggy crafted by his father. He was constantly at Grant’s side during his White House rounds: “Father was with me on walks, talks, star gazing, stamp collecting, raising pets, playing ball and other pastimes.”79 The “star gazing” referred to a telescope Jesse had mounted on the White House roof where he and his father studied the universe. Stamp collecting was another of the boy’s hobbies, and he was outraged when he sent $5 to a Boston company for foreign stamps that never arrived. Grant prevailed upon a local police officer named Kelly, assigned to the executive mansion, to see justice done. “I am a Capitol Policeman. I can arrest anybody, anywhere, at anytime for anything,” Kelly wrote on White House stationery with mock menace to the company. “I want you to send those stamps to Jesse Grant right at once.”80 Jesse shortly got a bumper crops of stamps.
It wasn’t yet the custom for First Ladies to champion causes, but Julia Grant exerted quiet influence behind the scenes. She didn’t try to butt in on policy decisions, where her knowledge was limited, but she readily detected false or treacherous figures and strove to protect her husband from the pervasive intrigue around a president. “She soothed him when cares oppressed him,” wrote Badeau, “she supported him when even he was downcast.”81 Whenever she thought he needed advice or support, she would scribble a little note and slip it into an envelope marked on top, “The President, immediate.”82 Whereas Grant accepted his presidential tenure with a certain ambivalence, the stout, buxom Julia thrived during her White House stay, referring to it as “a bright and beautiful dream” that she hoped might last forever.83
Julia made varied impressions on people. Before she became First Lady, one journalist commended her as a “sunny, sweet woman; too unassuming to be a mark for criticism,” while many others complimented her tact, warmth, and hospitality.84 Another vein of commentary chided her, however, for being bossy and autocratic, too impressed with her own prerogatives. Some remembered her berating servants; Eliza Shaw recalled her “scolding her coachman because the carriage was muddy.”85 The author Olive Logan was blunt about her shortcomings: “She was not well liked . . . she applied herself at once to finding out her privileges, and was not slow in asserting them.”86
Since he adored his wife, Grant was largely blind to these flaws, treating her like a young bride. He escorted her, arm in arm, to breakfast each morning and reenacted the same ceremony for the evening meal. Julia conjured up images of domestic bliss, leaving this vignette of the family’s quiet time together before dinner: “I was generally lying on the bed resting among my pillows before making my toilet. The General usually sat near the head of the bed, smoking his favorite cigar. Fred, feeling sure of his welcome, stretched himself across the foot. Ulysses [Buck] sat on a lounge at the foot of the bed, while Nellie and Ida [later Fred’s wife] took their comfort in great cushioned chairs.”87
CHAPTER THIRTY
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We Are All Americans
IF THERE WERE MANY small things Grant didn’t know about the presidency, he knew one big thing: his main mission was to settle unfinished business from the war by preserving the Union and safeguarding the freed slaves. As Walt Whitman noted, Grant had signed on for “a task of peace, more difficult than the war itself.”1 The first issue involved money. During the conflict, the federal government had issued reams of bonds and paper currency styled “greenbacks,” running up enormous debt. Grant and Secretary of the Treasury Boutwell were united in wanting to retire that debt. For northern veterans, redeeming the debt counted as a sacred matter, rewarding those who had invested in the war effort. The wartime Congress had promised to pay interest in gold, but a postwar movement took hold to repay money in greenbacks instead. “Every greenback,” Senator Sumner protested, “is red with the blood of fellow-citizens.”2 So it came as no surprise that the first major piece of legislation signed by Grant on March 18, 1869, committed the government to paying off bondholders in “gold or its equivalent” and redeeming paper money “at the earliest practicable period.”3 Persuaded that the restoration of American credit should be his first priority, Grant established his bona fides as a conservative, hard-money man and upheld the honor of the Union cause.
No less committed to the Radical side of the Republican agenda, he signed a bill on March 19 conferring equal rights on blacks in Washington, D.C. The fate of blacks and white Republicans in the South was a far more vexed matter that would dominate Grant’s tenure in office. Everybody agreed that readmitting former Confederate states to the Union was long overdue. Three states—Virginia, Mississippi, and Texas—had yet to resume their rightful place, and Grant saw their harmonious return as an overriding objective. As ever, he had to tread a fine line between retribution and reconciliation. On April 7, he asked Congress to authorize elections in Virginia and Mississippi to ratify new state constitutions, while insisting that those constitutions should “secure the civil and political rights of all persons within their borders,” black and white alike.4 Between January and March 1870, Virginia, Mississippi, and Texas returned to the Union as they pledged to protect black rights.
Virginia seemed the easy success story, electing a northern-born Republican governor, Gilbert C. Walker, allied with Democrats and moderate Republicans. Mississippi, by contrast, with its black majority, would turn into an overheated furnace of violently competing interests. Hope for Reconstruction rested on its provisional Maine-born governor, Adelbert A. Ames, whom Grant also named commander of the Fourth Military District, which encompassed Arkansas as well. With his thick handlebar mustache, long goatee, and high forehead, the thirty-th
ree-year-old Ames had graduated high in his West Point class and won the Medal of Honor for his valor at the first battle of Bull Run. By war’s end he had attained the rank of brevet major general. Soon he would be married to Ben Butler’s daughter. Fired by a crusading spirit, Ames saw carpetbaggers as apostles of “northern liberty” who had “a hold on the hearts of the colored people that nothing can destroy.”5 He oversaw elections for a new Mississippi constitution that made the state eligible for readmission to the Union. “When I took command of this military district,” he recalled, “I found that the negroes who had been declared free by the United States were not free, in fact that they were living under a code that made them worse than slaves; and I found that it was necessary, as commanding officer, to protect them, and I did.”6 Delivering on his promise, Ames appointed the first black officeholders in Mississippi history. Upon entering the U.S. Senate in February 1870, he combated segregation in the U.S. Army and stood in the forefront of the campaign waged against the Ku Klux Klan. For his efforts on behalf of downtrodden blacks, Ames was to brave years of unremitting violence from the white power structure in the state.