Grant

by Ron Chernow

  Grant had long been caught between two willful, overbearing men—his father and his father-in-law. By a curious symmetry, Colonel Dent’s health faltered a month after Jesse Root Grant died. Long a White House fixture, granted an honored, if undeserved, place at the head of the table in the private dining room, he had made no effort to muffle his views and always spouted the Democratic Party line. For five months, he hung on in a debilitated state. On the evening of December 15, 1873, Grant, Julia, and their son Fred dined out and returned near midnight to find the Colonel resting “in a quiet slumber.” A few minutes later, he expired “without a struggle or movement of a limb or muscle,” Grant wrote.54 A funeral service was held in the Blue Room of the White House before the Colonel’s body was shipped back to St. Louis for burial. Julia, still enamored of her father, was inconsolable and unable to make the trip, so Grant and Fred accompanied the remains to St. Louis. Grant had been relieved of the heavy burden of two impossibly difficult men, but Julia never fully recovered from the blow of her father’s loss.

  Grant kept close tabs on his four children during his presidency. Fred had developed into a handsome, muscular young man, with a mustache and his father’s broad, open face. Grant never goaded him to join the military, but he believed that if his son chose an army career, he should enter West Point. Fred fared poorly at the academy, studying, like his father, under the well-known military theorist Dennis Hart Mahan, while piling up loads of demerits. Some people thought he put on airs, trading on his father’s name. The Hartford philanthropist David Clark claimed that Fred had “made himself obnoxious to the professors by advising them of what ‘his father’ desired or did not desire.”55 When Fred graduated in June 1871, he ranked thirty-seventh in a class of forty-one and stood forty-first in discipline.

  While at West Point, Fred was implicated in an ugly racial incident involving a cadet named James W. Smith, the first black cadet accepted there. A graduate of South Carolina’s Freedmen’s Bureau school, Smith had been sponsored and educated by David Clark. From the time he entered West Point in May 1870, Smith contended that he was verbally abused by white cadets and called “nothing but a damned nigger.”56 On June 30, a sadly discouraged Smith told Clark that “I have borne insult upon insult, till I am completely worn out.”57

  Smith was ready to drop out in July when Grant met with Clark in Hartford and heard about the black cadet’s daily persecution. Knowing Grant would be in town, Clark had published a letter in the local paper laying out the problem. “Such treatment of this noble Boy,” Clark wrote, “is disgraceful to the country.”58 A distraught Clark told the president that Smith might resign from West Point. Showing sympathy, Grant insisted Smith should stay and that “the battle might just as well be fought now as at any other time.”59 Grant intimated he would shield the cadet from further abuse. But Fred Grant held decidedly more retrograde views, Clark recalled, telling his father “the time had not come to send colored boys to West Point.”60 Clark countered that if it was time for black senators, it was certainly time for black cadets at West Point. Fred sulkily retorted, “Well, no damned nigger will ever graduate from West Point.”61 Despite Grant’s encouragement, Smith continued to endure blows and insults and got no satisfaction when he complained to the academy.

  In September 1870, Cadet Smith was court-martialed for attacking a cadet named Wilson—he had hit him with a coconut dipper after being mocked as a monkey—and both young men were found guilty. Smith received a light sentence, but his misery had not ended. While he was marching, a cadet named Anderson kept stepping on his toes until Smith protested, “I wish you would not tread on my toes.” To which Anderson rejoined: “Keep your damned toes out of the way.”62 According to Smith, Fred Grant was one of the white cadets who invaded the rooms of three black cadets on the night of January 3, 1871, driving them into the cold. For Smith this was “a most outrageous example of Lynch law,” but he couldn’t get the academy to punish the offenders and believed the inaction stemmed from the involvement of the president’s son.63

  According to Clark, when Smith was again charged that month with refusing to hold his head up while marching, Secretary of War Belknap consulted Grant about the composition of the court that would pass sentence. “I have received two or three letters from my son Fred,” Grant supposedly said, “who informs me that the cadet is very objectionable there . . . Now, as this trial is to come off, Mr. Secretary, I trust that you will so make up the court as to cause his removal.”64 Smith was found guilty and ordered dismissed. Belknap forwarded the proceedings to Grant, who commuted the sentence to a one-year suspension, with Smith set back one year, forcing him to start over as a plebe. Despite this clemency, David Clark stuck to a conspiratorial view of events, writing on June 21, 1871, that “I feel that Cadet Smith has been outraged by the Secy of War and the President. Fred Grant a low miserable scamp has been the cause of much of his trouble.”65 Smith and Clark charged that Grant had condoned harsh treatment against Smith to protect his son. Smith never graduated from West Point. After suffering so much ostracism, he flunked a test given by a biased philosophy professor and was drummed out of the academy, dying two years later of tuberculosis.

  As Fred ended an unhappy tenure at West Point, Grant soured on a military future for him. “I do not want Fred to stay in the Army longer than to report for duty and serve a week or two,” he said, citing his many demerits.66 Instead of assignment to a regiment after graduation, Fred surveyed the Rocky Mountains as an assistant civil engineer, receiving a leave of absence as an army officer. Prodded by Julia, Grant, at his most henpecked, arranged for Fred to join Sherman on a European tour and he wound up attached to his staff. Grant always showed an uncritical love of his children, a yearning that went back to his lonely days on distant western outposts. Sherman felt put upon by Grant, grumbling that being forced to hire Fred was “a positive violation of law . . . Fred Grant had . . . no claim to military distinction other than being his father’s Son.”67 He remained unimpressed with Fred’s talents. “He is a good natured fellow, but cares for little.”68 Ever the loving father, Grant appraised his eldest son most charitably. “Fred is a splendid fellow,” he wrote, “and I think not the least spoiled yet.”69 Sherman described Grant’s adoration for his children as an “amiable weakness, not only pardonable, but attracting the love of all who did not suffer the consequences.”70

  Starting in May 1873, Fred joined the Chicago staff of Lieutenant General Phil Sheridan, with the rank of lieutenant colonel. The next year, he accompanied George Armstrong Custer’s expedition to the Black Hills. Custer, a martinet, had Fred arrested for drunkenness, and later on he committed himself to total abstinence. While in Chicago he met a pretty young woman named Ida Marie Honoré, daughter of a wealthy local plutocrat, and fell in love with her. She was an attractive, worldly young woman of French extraction with dark hair piled high on her head and a savvy, knowing look. The Grants were all enamored of her. “Fred’s wife is beautiful and is spoken of . . . as being quite as charming for her manners, amiability, good sense & education as she is for her beauty,” Grant reported.71 The Grants attended their society wedding at an Honoré country residence before the young couple began their matrimonial life in the White House.

  Grant expressed pride when his second son, Buck, entered Harvard, where he was a student of Henry Adams and got the lowest grade in his history class. Instead of having to upbraid Buck about bad behavior, Grant could dispense more grown-up advice. In a revealing letter, he told his son “to have the respect of all with whom you come in contact . . . To gain this never deceive nor act an artificial part. Be simply yourself . . . never resort to any means to make believe you know more than you really do.”72 It was as close to a statement of his philosophy as Grant ever came up with for his children. Buck was perhaps the most likable son, one family member finding him “a pleasing young man, a little nervous, but rather winning and gentle.”73 He excelled in German and French, spending his junior year
in a small German village before returning to Harvard. When he left college, he apprenticed at a law office in New York while studying simultaneously at Columbia Law School. “Buck, who is a spare looking young man, weighs 160 lbs. twenty pounds more than I weighed at forty years of age,” Grant told Badeau in 1874. “As my children are all leaving me it is gratifying to know that, so far, they give good promise. They are all of good habits and are very popular with their acquaintances.”74

  The youngest son, Jesse, the veteran mischief maker, was never as accomplished as his older brothers. Cursed with delicate health, he suffered from headaches and nosebleeds. Spoiled and overprotected, he received surprisingly little formal schooling, but in autumn 1873, the Grants packed him off to Cheltenham Academy near Philadelphia. When he lapsed into homesickness and complained of headaches, Grant allowed him to come home. Despite his limited education, Jesse was accepted at Cornell “without a condition,” Grant wrote, “although he has never attended school but three years, then in an infant class.”75 Julia was delighted that Jesse had gained acceptance to such a respectable university. “Do you not think that is doing pretty well?” she asked a friend. “Having been tied to my apron string all his life? (As his papa says.)”76 That Jesse was a president’s son and might have something of an undue advantage didn’t appear to cross Julia’s mind.

  When Grant was elected, his daughter, Nellie, was just thirteen, and a pretty young girl in the White House was bound to captivate the press. Woodhull & Claflin’s Weekly went so far as to publish her poetry. Short in stature, with dark eyes, a round nose, and a sweet expression, Nellie bore a striking resemblance to her father. Grant prized her as “my little sunshine” and everyone knew she ranked as his favorite. “My sister Nellie was his only daughter,” Fred wrote, “and she was much petted and loved by him.”77 One journalist saw that Nellie’s “girlish prattle was far more attractive to [Grant] than the compliments of Congressmen or the praises of politicians.”78 Charming, smart, and agreeable, a good dancer, Nellie was popular around the White House. In fall 1870, she was sent off to Miss Porter’s School in Farmington, Connecticut, but, like Jesse, she fell homesick and came home quickly.

  In 1872 the Grants suggested that Nellie accompany their Philadelphia friend Adolph Borie and his wife on a European holiday, little suspecting how the trip would profoundly alter her life. Emerging from her parents’ protective cocoon, she blossomed into a young woman as Queen Victoria received her at Buckingham Palace and she toured Paris and other capitals. “She has been all her life so much of a companion of her mother that I feared she would want to return by the first steamer leaving Liverpool after her arrival,” Grant noted with wonder. “But she writes quite the reverse of being homesick.”79 In sending Nellie abroad, her parents hoped to guard her from any amorous engagement, a strategy that had ironic consequences. On the voyage home, when the Bories fell sick and were confined to their stateroom, Nellie roamed the ship in search of adventure and found it with an Eton-educated young Englishman named Algernon Sartoris (pronounced Sar-tress). She fell in love with the handsome young man who parted his hair down the middle. He came from a family of minor gentry who owned a magnificent estate in Southampton and was wrapped in a romantic haze for Nellie. Algernon’s father was a member of Parliament and had served as British minister at a European court. His mother, a former opera singer, was a sister of the renowned actress Fanny Kemble and had counted Charles Dickens and Henry James among the fashionable guests congregating at her London salon.

  Grant was chagrined to discover that his pet of a daughter had escaped his paternal control and embarked on a shipboard romance. When Algernon Sartoris came to dine at the White House, Grant ushered him into the billiard room for a confidential chat over cigars. “I waited and hoped the President would help me, but not a word did he say,” the young man recalled. “He sat silent, looking at me. I hesitated, and fidgeted, and coughed, and thought I would sink through the floor. Finally, I exclaimed in desperation—‘Mr. President, I want to marry your daughter.’”80 Both Grants had a queasy premonition of something wrong with the dashing, bearded young Englishman. Grant griped “that he would prefer Nellie to be an old maid, but if she must marry, he thought she should choose an American husband.”81 Julia sighed every time Algernon’s name was mentioned and at last confronted her daughter: “Nellie, is it possible you are willing to leave your father and me, who have loved and cherished you all of your life, and go with this stranger for always?” Nellie replied sweetly: “Why, yes, mamma. I am sure that is just what you did when you married papa and left grandpa.”82

  On July 7, 1873, the president sat down at Long Branch and composed a heartfelt letter to Algernon’s father that bespoke deep love of his daughter and country: “Much to my astonishment an attachment seems to have sprung up between the two young people; to my astonishment because I had only looked upon my daughter as a child, with a good home which I did not think of her wishing to quit for years yet.”83 His letter sounded a defiantly patriotic note. “It would be with the greatest regret that I would see Nellie quit the United States as a permanent home. It is a country of great extent of territory, of fertility, and of great future promise . . . May I ask you therefore in all candor . . . to state to me whether your son expects to become a citizen of the United States? And what has been his habits? And what are his business qualifications.”84 Grant confessed that he had to live off his presidential salary and could not provide for his daughter financially. Unable to deny her ardent wishes, he reluctantly consented to the match. The one condition was that Algernon and Nellie should wait a year before announcing their engagement, but that didn’t seem to arrest the romance.

  On May 21, 1874, 250 guests shuffled into the East Room of the White House for a wedding minutely chronicled by reporters voracious for details. A multitude of spectators circled the White House while across the street Treasury Department clerks pressed their faces to the windows to catch glimpses of arriving celebrities, including Grant’s cabinet, Supreme Court justices, and a column of generals and senators. Even Walt Whitman was susceptible to the frenzy, penning a poem that concluded: “O sweet Missouri rose! O bonny bride! Yield thy red cheeks, thy lips, today, Unto a Nation’s loving kiss.”85

  While renovating the White House, Julia had converted the East Room into a sumptuous ballroom that was now garlanded with flowers, evergreens, and potted palms. Fred Grant, immaculate in military dress, served as groomsman and entered with Algernon Sartoris. When Nellie swept in on her father’s arm, he was, wrote Jesse, “silent, tense, with tears upon his cheeks that he made no movement to brush away.”86 Grant had approved the marriage, but lacked the guile to mask his true misgivings. Julia seemed disconsolate as she trailed along with Jesse and Buck on her arms. Officiating at the wedding was the Reverend O. H. Tiffany of the Methodist church. Beneath a canopy of white blossoms shaped like a bell, Nellie, eighteen, and Algernon, twenty-two, took their vows while Grant stared moodily at the floor. Once the ceremony ended, the guests adjourned to an elaborate wedding breakfast in the State Dining Room. The young couple were showered with costly gifts, estimated to cost $60,000, that accumulated in the library, including an eighty-four-piece silver service from George W. Childs and a silver dinner service from the financier Anthony J. Drexel.

  The Gilded Age ostentation barely concealed the president’s dismay, which broke through his usually stolid exterior. Buck left a telling remembrance: “The saddest I ever saw my father was when my sister Nellie was married. It was a lavish White House ceremony and she married a foreigner. He was very downcast for a long time about it. That evening I found him sitting with mother upstairs in my mother’s dressing room and he was sobbing like a boy. I was so in awe of my father I couldn’t think of what to say, so I withdrew, deeply shaken.”87 Others claimed Grant disappeared after the wedding guests left and was discovered crying alone in Nellie’s vacant bedroom.

  Grant thought he had extracted a pledge from Algern
on to become an American citizen and reside in the United States. Then Algernon’s elder brother died and he became heir to the Sartoris estate. In a cruel twist for Grant, Nellie moved to England with her new husband. The marriage soon began to unravel thanks to Algernon’s drinking and womanizing, and one wonders whether Grant had intuited all along his son-in-law’s alcohol problem. Although the Grants tried bravely for years to pretend that Nellie was happily married as she bore a succession of children, they admitted their extreme regret that they had lost her to England.

  After meeting her, Henry James evoked a forlorn Nellie, stranded among strangers, unable to keep pace with the sophisticated repartee of her mother-in-law. After one meeting, James lamented the “poor little Nelly Grant” and her “three very handsome but rather common youngsters. She is illiterate, lovely, painted, pathetic and separated from a drunken idiot of a husband. The Sartorises don’t like her very much, but they like her more, I suppose, than they do their disreputable ‘Algie.’ Whenever I see her there is something rather touching and tragic to me in this eminently chubby vision of the daughter of a man” who was president “in a strange land, quite without friends, ignorant, helpless, vulgar, untidy, unhappy, perfectly harmless and smeared over with fifteen colours.”88