Grant

by Ron Chernow

  Reconstruction was a fine but ultimately doomed experiment in American life. The tragedy of this intractable issue was that there was finally no way for blacks to enjoy their rights without a prolonged military presence, and that became politically impossible. Could even Abraham Lincoln have appeased the white South while simultaneously protecting its black population? It seems unlikely. Grant saw a double standard at work: the country tolerated terror by whites, but not by blacks. As he wrote after leaving office: “If a negro insurrection should arise in South Carolina, Mississippi, or Louisiana, or if the negroes in either of these States . . . should intimidate the whites from going to the polls . . . there would be no division of sentiment as to the duty of the President. It does seem the rule should work both ways.”89

  Once Reconstruction collapsed, it left southern blacks for eighty years at the mercy of Jim Crow segregation, lynchings, poll taxes, literacy tests, and other tactics designed to segregate them from whites and deny them the vote. Black sharecroppers would be degraded to the level of debt-ridden serfs, bound to their former plantation owners. After 1877, the black community in the South steadily lost ground until a rigid apartheid separated the races completely, a terrible state of affairs that would not be fixed until the rise of the civil rights movement after World War II.

  Grant deserves an honored place in American history, second only to Lincoln, for what he did for the freed slaves. He got the big issues right during his presidency, even if he bungled many of the small ones. The historian Richard N. Current, who also saw Grant as the most underrated American president, wrote: “By backing Radical Reconstruction as best he could, he made a greater effort to secure the constitutional rights of blacks than did any other President between Lincoln and Lyndon B. Johnson.”90 In the words of Frederick Douglass, “That sturdy old Roman, Benjamin Butler, made the negro a contraband, Abraham Lincoln made him a freeman, and Gen. Ulysses S. Grant made him a citizen.”91 Or in the simple prose of T. Jefferson Martin of Michigan, who wrote to Grant after he left office: “As a colored Man I feel in duty bound to return you my greatful and heart felt thanks, for your firm stedfast and successful administrations of our country, both as Millitary chieftain and civil Ruler of this nation . . . My Dear friend to humanity.”92

  PART FOUR

  A Life of Reflection

  CHAPTER FORTY

  —

  The Wanderer

  UPON QUITTING THE FISH RESIDENCE in late March, Ulysses and Julia Grant conducted a sentimental tour of familiar haunts from early days, including Cincinnati, St. Louis, Chicago, and Galena. Huge crowds waylaid them everywhere. In Cincinnati, Grant was toasted as a figure second only to George Washington in American history. “I feel that I have considerable life, health and strength left,” he told one gathering, “notwithstanding the past sixteen years of labor and toil I have undergone.”1 Afterward, he rode a pair of “fine trotters” into Brown County, Ohio, scene of his boyhood, a place he hadn’t visited in decades.2 A forward-looking man, never prone to introspection, Grant was left unnerved by his brush with aging friends. As he explained, “The changes that I saw in others is so great that I felt no desire to tarry long.”3

  During his presidential years, Grant had accumulated heavy expenses while entertaining guests, saved little, and was now beset by financial worry. His salvation came from the money admirers had given him after the war, a windfall he had luckily invested in a mining venture that yielded a tidy $25,000 profit. He planned to disburse this bonanza in foreign travel for two years, or until the money ran out. All the while, Buck would manage his investments through a pair of select banking houses, J. & W. Seligman and Drexel, Morgan.

  Sixteen years earlier, Grant had been seized by a historical whirlwind that had carried him through the war and his presidency and now deposited him uneasily in the terra incognita of retirement. To fill the void that yawned open in his life, he decided to indulge a long-standing fantasy and visit Europe. A few years earlier, Jules Verne had published Around the World in Eighty Days, lending new glamour to extended foreign travel. Some historians have speculated that Grant undertook this globe-straddling tour for want of anything better to do, but Grant was a plucky traveler at heart—“the greatest traveler that ever lived,” in Adam Badeau’s view.4 A newcomer to Europe and the Grand Tour, he overlooked the small matter of securing a passport and, at the last minute, Hamilton Fish had to appeal to Secretary of State Evarts to rush passports to J. S. Morgan & Co. in London. Although Grant planned to tour as a private citizen, he would travel on U.S. warships and could scarcely pass himself off as a lowly tourist. Before long the trip would assume the dimensions of a major diplomatic event, with Evarts instructing American consuls around the world to furnish Grant with all necessary assistance.

  For a week before departing for Liverpool, Grant stayed at the Philadelphia home of George Childs. He had stopped off to see his mother in Elizabeth, New Jersey, and was outraged when his son Jesse failed to appear as well, showing disrespect for the elderly woman. “You young worthless,” he scolded Jesse, with atypical anger, “I expected to see you at your grandma’s . . . You know we sail on the 17th and if you should not be here you will be left without visible means of support.”5 In Philadelphia, Grant was feted at so many banquets that he must have been worn out from all the jubilation. At a reception at Independence Hall, 2,500 people per hour streamed past him, eager to snatch a glimpse.

  On May 17, as he boarded a cutter that carried his party to the steamship Indiana, Grant got a resounding send-off from the city. Thousands of well-wishers piled onto the wharves while scores of ships, streaming with flags and bunting, blasted their horns. Many observers thought it the greatest ovation Philadelphia had ever extended. Now that Grant was out of office, the cloud that had lowered over him lifted, and the public was reminded of the inestimable service he had performed in winning the war and reuniting the country after Appomattox. Aboard the cutter, William T. Sherman, upset by Lost Cause theorists who canonized Robert E. Lee as a military genius, delivered a speech that placed Grant securely in the pantheon of American heroes, saying, “If the name of Washington is allied with the birth of our country, that of Grant is forever identified with its preservation.”6 Momentarily, Grant and Sherman recaptured their old wartime camaraderie and Grant credited his success to “the assistance of able lieutenants . . . I believe that my friend Sherman could have taken my place as a soldier . . . and the same will apply to Sheridan.”7

  One triumph not commemorated was Grant’s remarkable victory over alcohol. “Even before his voyage around the world,” wrote Admiral Daniel Ammen, “the ordinary use of liquors, or even of the lightest wines, had been laid aside.”8 Though Grant had conquered this problem through his exceptional determination and Julia’s steadfast love, he was perturbed by the alcoholic relapses of his black manservant, Bill Barnes, who had served him since the war. Grant had fired him several times over the issue only to relent and rehire him. If his own history made him sympathetic to Barnes’s drinking troubles, it may also have made him wary. Perhaps Grant feared a long sea voyage, followed by dinners in foreign capitals, trapped with an alcoholic who flouted his pledge of sobriety. When he boarded the Indiana, he was shocked to discover Bill Barnes in his stateroom, unpacking his luggage, and he swiftly sought out the captain. “There is a colored man down in my cabin, Captain. His name is Bill Barnes . . . either you arrange for the departure of Bill Barnes, or I go, but Mrs. Grant must not know until Bill is safely ashore.”9 Barnes was promptly removed from the boat. To compensate, Grant saw to it that he was awarded a lifetime pension.

  For the trip, Grant jettisoned his official Washington retinue and brought along only Julia, the truant Jesse, an oversize maid, and a polyglot guide. That Grant still cared devoutly about public opinion was manifest in his decision to incorporate John Russell Young, a thirty-six-year-old journalist, into the small, informal party. Like many veteran politicians, Grant could no longer picture his
life apart from its constant reflection in the national press. The prospect of returning to public life was never entirely distant from his mind and, perhaps far more than he cared to admit, he had come to crave the limelight. The coverage of his foreign escapades would burnish his credentials at home during his extended stay abroad.

  A hearty Irishman with blue eyes, brown hair, and reddish side-whiskers, Young soon fell into a filial relationship with Grant. He had covered Bull Run for a Philadelphia paper and later become managing editor of Horace Greeley’s New York Tribune. Such was his journalistic renown that Walt Whitman classed him among “the higher type of newspaper man.”10 In 1870 he had endeared himself to President Grant when he founded the New York Standard “to compete directly with The Sun by those friends of your administration who resented its brutality and cowardice towards yourself,” he informed Grant.11 The paper survived only two years before Young landed a high-profile job with James Gordon Bennett’s New York Herald.

  As the Indiana steamed into the Atlantic Ocean, Young entered into a close study of Grant, who sauntered about the deck in a cloth cap, puffing cigars. He observed how he sloughed off presidential cares and the hurly-burly of politics and, freshened by sea breezes, reverted to the genial private citizen of yore: “On the first morning at sea, General Grant said ‘that he felt better than he had for sixteen years, from the fact that he had no letters to read, and no telegraphic dispatches to attend to.’”12 Like many before him, Young learned that Grant’s storied reticence was belied by a bottomless trove of anecdotes and that while his fame was “that of a silent man those who know him at all know that in reality we have few better talkers in America.”13 He found Grant an honorable man thirsting for peace: “You might have known him for a year and never learned that he had fought a battle in his life.”14 Far from being solitary, Grant seemed to be someone yearning for late-night intimacy. “He read much, smoked rather from restlessness than love of tobacco and disliked to go to bed. To be a midnight, or two o’clock in the morning companion was the shortest road to his esteem.”15

  The trip would flower into a royal procession continually lengthened until it spanned two years and four months. Grant’s extraordinary reception by potentates, prime ministers, and moguls would testify to what a giant figure he had become in the world’s imagination, exceeded only by Lincoln. The quintessence of the American spirit, he would walk through other lands in his matter-of-fact style, a plainspoken, democratic figure. His hosts would smother him with official protocol and fawning receptions—exactly the stifling stuff one might have expected him to evade—but he would handle himself with admirable tact. He also displayed inexhaustible curiosity about the daily habits of ordinary people, seeking out obscure nooks of cities where he could watch them incognito. Julia would seem more dazzled by the glamour and glitter, devoting a full third of her memoirs to the trip, describing each stop along the way with a smattering of superlative adjectives.

  On May 28, after a crossing marked by “unusually stormy weather and rough seas,” the Grants landed in Liverpool.16 If Grant reserved any hopes that he could travel abroad as an anonymous tourist, they were instantly dispelled on the River Mersey, where people excitedly packed the docks on a sparkling day, American flags flapping from every ship. He was greeted by the mayor and Adam Badeau, now U.S. consul in London. “It had not occurred to father that anything like an official reception awaited him, save, perhaps, from our own representatives abroad,” Jesse Grant recalled. “Now we found that, in effect, we were expected to be guests of the city of Liverpool.”17 During Grant’s stay, the mayor bore him off to the Custom House, where he faced ten thousand expectant British citizens. With a start, Grant discovered he had to pioneer in freelance diplomacy and actually deliver some speeches.

  A Pullman car at his disposal took him next to Manchester, where the Liverpool bedlam was reproduced. Grant began to polish his oratorical skills, showing a real knack for extemporaneous speaking, a change first apparent during his last year or two in office. Knowing the British working class had supported abolition and the North during the Civil War, he appealed to his audience with perfect pitch. He was now an accomplished politician. “I was very well aware during the war . . . of the sentiments of the great mass of the people of Manchester towards the country to which I have the honour to belong, and of your sentiments with regard to the struggle in which it fell to my lot to take a humble part.”18 At 339 words, Grant’s speech rated as a veritable marathon for him, shattering his previous record.

  From the outset the British were mostly charmed by Grant, who showed a becoming modesty. “I cannot help feeling that it is my country that is honored through me,” he told one audience.19 A British newspaper averred that with his firm, open face and “blunt, bluff and honest” manner, “everybody at once settled in his own mind that the General would do.”20 As his trip progressed, observers draped many symbolic meanings on it, seeing him as an emblem of free labor or abolition or American democracy or peace with the Indians, and his superb handling of the Alabama claims exalted him in British esteem. “Here he will find that his eminent services to the cause of international peace are not forgotten,” The Times of London editorialized. “He will be welcomed, not only as an illustrious soldier, but as a statesman who has always been friendly to England.”21 Two weeks later, the paper affirmed that “after WASHINGTON, General GRANT is the President who will occupy the largest place in the history of the United States.”22

  When his entourage proceeded to London, Grant was cheered by street crowds. As befit the foremost living American, he was honored by the second Duke of Wellington with an Apsley House banquet. A wide-eyed Julia surveyed with some envy the vast residence, its magnificent halls bedecked with Napoleonic trophies. “This great house was presented to Wellington by the government for the single victory at Waterloo,” Julia mused, “along with wealth and a noble title which will descend throughout his line. As I sat there, I thought, ‘How would it have been if General Grant had been an Englishman?’”23 Grant fared somewhat better than Julia among the many luminaries they met. After William Gladstone encountered Grant at a reception, he confided that Grant “fulfills his ideal as a taciturn, self-possessed, not discourteous, substantial kind of man. Mrs. Grant [was] kind but alas ‘dowdy.’”24 Grant, reciprocating the admiration, branded Gladstone “the greatest living Englishman” and professed he had become “greatly attached” to him.25 As for Gladstone’s supreme rival, Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli, Grant found him uncommonly clever and well versed about foreign affairs. Disraeli threw a “colossal American dinner” to honor Grant, but found his guest sadly deficient and “more honorable than pleasant. I felt so overcome that I escaped as soon as possible.”26

  As he squired Grant around London, Badeau was struck by how the presidency had expanded Grant’s intellectual range. He had always exhibited a surprising capacity for self-improvement. When the Lord Mayor of London gave him the Freedom of the City at a Guildhall dinner, Grant entranced a glittering audience. “I was brought up a soldier—not to talking,” he explained. “I am not aware that I ever fought two battles on the same day in the same place, and that I should be called upon to make two speeches on the same day under the same roof is beyond my comprehension.”27 A galaxy of literary grandees, including Thomas Huxley, Matthew Arnold, Robert Browning, and Anthony Trollope, turned out to breakfast with him. Arnold frowned silently on Grant, scorning him as “ordinary-looking, dull and silent . . . A strong, resolute, business-like man, who by possession of unlimited resources in men and money . . . had been enabled to wear down and exhaust the strength of the South.”28 Arnold might have been surprised by how little Grant cared for war. When the Duke of Cambridge asked him to review troops at Aldershot, Grant replied “that the one thing I never wanted to see again was a military parade”—a recurrent theme of his trip.29

  Queen Victoria received the Grants at Windsor Castle for a private supper and overnight stay on June 26 an
d had to swallow a stiffer dose of republican pride than she had anticipated. The visit got off to a rocky start when the Grants were informed that nineteen-year-old Jesse and Adam Badeau had to dine with the royal servants. Her Highness pleaded vertigo in dealing with large groups. Jesse, growing irate, said he would rather return to town than suffer this indignity. Ever the adoring father, Grant endorsed this position: “I think that is what I would do, if I were in Jesse’s place.”30 Finally the queen backed down, sending word that “she would be happy to have Mr. Jesse dine at her table.”31

  Like her youngest son, Julia administered stern lectures on republican virtue. Before supper, two noblewomen stopped by to school her in palace etiquette. “Mrs. Grant,” one said, “I hope you will not feel fatigued. Our Queen always receives standing.” Julia replied breezily, “Oh, I am sure I will not feel the fatigue. You must remember I too have received for the last eight years and always standing.”32 Julia was at pains to remind the two women that they were dealing with American royalty.

  The cultural tension continued during the meal at the queen’s private table, deemed a signal honor for visitors. As Grenadier Guards entertained them in the courtyard, the queen cast a critical eye on her uncouth American guests. She considered Julia “civil & complimentary in her funny American way,” but griped that the upstart Jesse was “a very ill-mannered young Yankee.”33 Meanwhile, the Earl of Derby shuddered at the boorish general from America. “He is certainly the roughest specimen we have yet had from the west,” he commented. “Anyone who had seen him today would have said that his manners & intelligence were about on a par with those of a bulldog.”34 The Grants must have sensed the snobbery, for Julia turned unusually feisty. When the queen referred to her myriad duties as monarch, Julia feigned sympathy. “Yes, I can imagine them: I too have been the wife of a great ruler.”35 Privately Grant criticized the queen’s behavior for an unexpected reason. “He said her Majesty seemed too anxious to put him at his ease,” wrote Badeau, “and he implied that the anxiety was unnecessary.”36