Grant

by Ron Chernow

  Bismarck commiserated with Grant upon the countless fatalities of the Civil War. “But it had to be done,” Grant replied. “Yes,” said Bismarck, “you had to save the Union just as we had to save Germany.” “Not only save the Union, but destroy slavery,” Grant added. “I suppose, however, the Union was the real sentiment, the dominant sentiment,” Bismarck inquired. “In the beginning, yes,” agreed Grant, “but as soon as slavery fired upon the flag . . . we all felt, even those who did not object to slaves, that slavery must be destroyed. We felt that it was a stain to the Union that men should be bought and sold like cattle.”71 Grant’s comments reflect the militance he had felt as president about protecting black civil rights. He now interpreted the four-year war as providential, since a shorter war might have ended up preserving slavery. They had been “fighting an enemy with whom we could not make a peace. We had to destroy him. No convention, no treaty was possible—only destruction.”72 This meeting led to several more between Grant and Bismarck, who enjoyed a surprising rapport. Bismarck assumed his place alongside Disraeli and Gambetta in Grant’s personal gallery of the leading men of Europe.

  Somewhat reluctantly Grant accepted an invitation from the crown prince to review troops outside of Berlin, but he was disturbed by the regimented militarism of Prussian society. Nagged by a bad cold on a dank, drizzly day, Grant watched as soldiers executed bayonet charges. A great modernizer in military science, he had always favored light, quick, efficient troops, unburdened by antiquated armor, and lectured his hosts to drop the bayonets: “The bayonet is heavy, and if it were removed, or if its weight in food or ammunition were added in its place, the army would be stronger. As for the bayonet as a weapon, if soldiers come near enough to use it they can do as much good with the club-end of their muskets.”73

  In July, Grant explored Denmark and Scandinavia, where he received universal cheers and admired the honest industry of the people. His brother-in-law Michael John Cramer, the U.S. chargé d’affaires in Copenhagen, was struck by how studiously Grant approached his travels, as befit a former head of state who had brushed up on each country through diplomatic reports. Grant exhibited a precise knowledge of Danish history and society and was especially taken with their public school system. When he was received by the king and queen, Cramer noted that Grant refrained from alcohol: “It was noticed that General Grant drank no wine, except a few drops of champagne when the king proposed his health.” When the minister of foreign affairs proposed a banquet in his honor, Grant declined, saying they were “tired of being ‘banqueted’” and “had come here to rest for a week.”74

  By late July, the Grants arrived in St. Petersburg, where an imperial carriage whisked them to a meeting with Czar Alexander II at his Summer Palace. The czar stood tall and erect in military uniform, but Grant detected a nervous energy about the man, who had been targeted by assassination attempts. (He would succumb to one in March 1881.) Oddly enough, the czar was mostly interested in warfare with American Indians and Grant tried to satisfy his curiosity. Meanwhile, the czarina gave Julia a tour of the Peterhof outside of St. Petersburg, laying special emphasis on the carriage and other objects employed by Peter the Great. “I could not help drawing a comparison between this great man and another great man I knew,” wrote Julia, never bashful about exalting her husband.75 When the U.S. minister, Edwin W. Stoughton, took the Grants to see the Russian man-of-war Peter the Great, it fired a seventeen-gun salute. “Madam,” said Stoughton, “they are saluting your husband.” “Oh, no, that salute is for you, Mr. Minister,” Julia objected, as ever a bit touchy about matters of status. “General Grant’s salute is twenty-one guns always.”76 With his democratic interests, Grant followed his customary practice of exploring St. Petersburg on foot, studying everyday life.

  Grant finished the summer in Vienna, where he met with Emperor Franz Joseph I, and in Salzburg, where he met the German emperor Wilhelm I. After fifteen months abroad, Grant concluded that nobody had ever covered so many countries in that length of time. Writing from the Austrian Alps, he confessed that “I miss English speaking people. I find that I enjoy European travel just in proportion as I find Americans to associate with.”77 Many countries that Grant visited levied onerous taxes on their subjects to service massive debt and maintain standing armies, giving him a fresh appreciation of republican government in America. “The fact is we are the most progressive, freest and richest people on earth, but don’t know it or appreciate it. Foreigners see this much plainer than we do.”78

  In Madrid, James Russell Lowell, the American minister there, left priceless vignettes of the Grants as rustic innocents. When Lowell took them to the opera, Grant could scarcely endure the high-pitched screeching. “Haven’t we had enough of this?” he asked after five minutes.79 Despite the royal attention bestowed on Grant, Lowell saw that his supreme pleasure was slipping off and exploring the streets incognito: “After being here two days I think he knew Madrid better than I did . . . He is perfectly natural, naively puzzled to find himself a personage, and going through the ceremonies to which he is condemned with a dogged imperturbability.”80 He also noticed how Julia, when stuck with dinner companions who spoke no English, simply chattered away in English, sure she would be understood. Her “confidence in the language of Shakespeare & Milton as something universally applicable . . . was sublime.”81

  Hanging over Grant’s trip was the vexed question of whether he should chance a bid for a third term upon returning home. Those who favored such a course advised him to linger abroad, where his exploits were widely reported and he could dodge reporters’ questions. “Most every letter I get from the states . . . ask me to remain absent,” Grant told Badeau in March. “They have designs for me which I do not contemplate for myself.”82 The wandering Ulysses deflected questions about a third term, answering “that he knew what the Presidency was, and had had all he wanted.”83 Nonetheless, he was mightily disturbed by the mounting sway of southern Democrats in Congress and sarcastically warned that Unionists might soon need “one of Andy Johnson’s pardons to relieve us from responsibility as murderers, robbers, and illegal and unjustifiable invaders of the sacred soil of the South.”84 Grant’s concern for African Americans never faltered. That summer in Paris, he met with the black Republican senator Blanche K. Bruce of Mississippi, who informed The New York Times that if it came down to a matter of duty “I have no doubt [Grant] would accept the nomination . . . Gen. Grant would be the first choice for the Presidency of nine-tenths of the colored voters of the South.”85

  Just as Grant contemplated a return home that fall, he received an irresistible invitation from the Secretary of the Navy Richard W. Thompson to sail on the government steamer Richmond for India, China, and Japan via the Mediterranean and the Suez Canal. Thompson frankly admitted the political agenda lurking behind the offer, arguing that Grant’s presence on board the man-of-war would “so arrest public attention as to bring prominently into view, not merely the character and extent of our commerce, but the nature and value of our institutions.”86 Grant, seizing this “splendid opportunity,” prolonged his stay abroad to visit Asia.87 He calculated accurately that extending his tour would land him back in the United States in autumn 1879, just as things heated up for the 1880 presidential race. When the Richmond was temporarily delayed, the Grants set out on a commercial steamer to Asia, deciding to catch up later with the government vessel, which he would use for the trip between China and Japan.

  By February 13, the party had touched down in Bombay, where Grant soldiered on through official visits with his colonial British hosts and was struck by the absence of beggars. When traveling to Jabalpur, he hoisted himself on an elephant for a ride to a nearby marble quarry, finding himself “much pleased with the intelligence of these animals.”88 The Grants, with Fred and former navy secretary Adolph Borie in tow, visited the Taj Mahal by daylight and returned to gaze at it in moonlight. Julia, sounding like a provincial chauvinist from a Mark Twain satire, said of t
he Taj: “Everyone says it is the most beautiful building in the world, and I suppose it is. Only I think that everyone has not seen the Capitol at Washington!”89 While not uncritical of British rule in India, Grant believed they had taken a “benighted and downtrodden” country and improved its railroads, schools, farms, and factories.90 He gazed with sorrow on the workings of the caste system and the absence of female rights, reflecting his lifelong concern for the dignity of women.

  One high-ranking Briton whom Grant met in India, Lord Lytton, the viceroy, left a damaging account of a drunken Grant making an utter fool of himself:

  On this occasion “our distinguished guest” the double Ex-President of the “Great Western Republic,” who got as drunk as a fiddle, showed that he could also be as profligate as a lord. He fumbled Mrs. A., kissed the shrieking Miss B.—pinched the plump Mrs. C. black and blue—and ran at Miss D. with intent to ravish her. [At last Grant was] captured by main force and carried (quatre pattes dans l’air) by six sailors . . . which relieved India of his distinguished presence. The marine officers . . . report that, when deposited in the public saloon cabin, where Mrs. G was awaiting him . . . this remarkable man satiated there and then his baffled lust on the unresisting body of his legitimate spouse, and copiously vomited during the operation.91

  Grant biographers have rightly found this story suspect. Grant had no history of groping women, much less his wife, and Lytton left Calcutta the day before the dinner in question.92 Still, one wonders whether this patently embellished story, obviously based on hearsay, may have had a kernel of truth. The description of a tipsy Grant contains disquieting echoes of the anonymous wartime letters accusing him of drunken indiscretions. This was the sole allegation of Grant’s getting drunk on his extended trip, despite numerous temptations.

  From India the Grants penetrated east to Burma and Singapore. As their ship glided across the smooth waters of the Bay of Bengal, John Russell Young began an interview with Grant about the war and his presidency, pumping him for opinions and producing a voluminous and invaluable transcript. “There are few men more willing to converse on subjects on which he is acquainted than General Grant,” Young wrote. “The charm of his talk is that it is never about anything that he does not know, and what he does know he knows well.”93

  In Thailand, the royal family feted the Grants and in Hong Kong, one hundred thousand people jammed the streets to catch sight of him. Nobody’s presence pleased him more than that of John Singleton Mosby, the Gray Ghost, and now the American consul there. “This is really the most beautiful place I have yet seen in the East,” Grant wrote. “The City is admirably built & the scenery is most picturesque.”94 To Grant’s amazement the Asian crowds that turned out to see him eclipsed in size those in Europe and the United States, their numbers inconceivable to a Westerner. When Grant went to see the viceroy of Canton, two hundred thousand people lined the route in a tumultuous reception, with Grant carried aloft in a sedan chair, curtained with green blinds, that swayed and jangled on its bamboo poles. “I regard this Canton procession, as among the most extraordinary scenes in my life,” John Russell Young wrote in his diary.95

  In late May, Grant spent a week in Shanghai, attending a torchlight parade and a ball in his honor. Repelled by the filth, squalor, and overcrowding he found in China, he also admired the industry and enterprise of the people and shrewdly sized up their economic potential. “My impression is that the day is not very far distant when they will make the most rapid strides toward modern civilization, and become dangerous rivals to all powers interested in the trade of the East.”96 Arriving in Peking on June 3, he spent the last five hours of the journey riding in a sedan chair borne by eight men. The next morning, while ascending the Great Wall, he took a comically pragmatic view of the structure: “It is hard to see any practical use these walls can serve in the present age unless they should be converted into drives.”97

  This closing phase of Grant’s journey proved important as he became the first ex-president to undertake personal diplomacy abroad. Meeting with Prince Kung, the Chinese regent and de facto head of state, he touted the benefit of railroads and warned against excessive reliance on foreign debt. Then the prince directed Grant’s attention to the fate of the Loo Choo (Ryukyu) Islands over which Japan and China had sparred for control, a conflict that had brought them to the brink of war. The Japanese had deposed the local sovereign and occupied the islands and Prince Kung wanted Grant’s aid in reversing this. At first Grant begged off as someone out of office. “But we all know how vast your influence must be,” the prince urged, “not only upon your people at home, but upon all nations who know what you have done.”98 Acknowledging that war between China and Japan would be a grave misfortune, Grant volunteered to serve as mediator between the two nations during his stop in Japan, invoking the Alabama settlement as his model. “An arbitration between nations . . . satisfies the conscience of the world, and must commend itself more and more as a means of adjusting disputes,” he declared.99

  The Grants steamed toward Japan aboard the Richmond in mid-June and at their first port of call, Nagasaki, received a twenty-one-gun salute—Julia’s gold standard—in the harbor. Emissaries of the emperor escorted them to a fifty-course meal at an ancient temple. The Grants were invited to plant banyan trees at a local park to honor their visit, and Grant minted a beautiful message that would be etched in stone nearby: “I hope that both trees may prosper, grow large, live long, and in their growth, prosperity and long life be emblematic of the future of Japan.”100 Of all the countries included on his worldwide caravan, none captivated Grant quite like Japan, which he found a model of beauty, balance, and cultivation. He loved the green hills, fertile valleys, and fine streams and found the people “the most kindly & the most cleanly in the world.”101 The Japanese, he believed, had perfected their school system, educating all classes, male and female, and producing “the superior people of the East.”102 So smitten was Grant that he wanted the United States to negotiate a commercial treaty with the country.

  The Japanese reciprocated his affection. After his arrival in Tokyo on July 3, a high-level reception committee paid homage to Grant’s accomplishments: “How you crushed a rebellion, and afterwards ruled a nation in peace and righteousness, is known over the whole world.”103 The emperor wanted to receive his illustrious visitor on the Fourth of July, and Grant’s carriage, flanked by cavalry, had to penetrate an enormous crush of people and ride under floral arches before reaching the emperor’s summer palace. The young, slim emperor then did something unprecedented: he strode up to Grant and shook his hand in profound respect, after which Ulysses and Julia Grant exchanged bows with assorted princes. The emperor later said nobody during his reign had impressed him more than “the unassuming bourgeois Civil War hero and president.”104

  At a subsequent meeting with the emperor, Grant decried colonial exploitation of Asian countries, making an exception for British rule in India. “But since I left India I have seen things that made my blood boil, in the way the European powers attempt to degrade the Asiatic nations.”105 Grant made good on his pledge to mediate the dispute over the Loo Choo Islands, showing a deft, diplomatic touch. He succeeded in getting negotiations started between the two sides, and the Chinese acceded to Japanese control of the islands. Grant became the first American president to accomplish such a solo feat, and the Chinese and Japanese were deeply grateful, even though talks later foundered. Grant contrasted his selfless diplomacy with the self-interested approach of European powers who “have no interests in Asia . . . that do not involve the humiliation and subjugation of the Asiatic people.”106 It formed a fitting finale to a trip in which Grant defined a new role for ex-presidents abroad, showing how they could use their prestige to settle intractable foreign conflicts and promote peaceful arbitration.

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  ON SEPTEMBER 3, 1879, Grant and his party departed from Japan aboard the City of Tokio, bound for San Francisco. After two years a
nd four months roaming the seas like a modern Ulysses, Grant was outwardly the same unadorned man with the placid exterior, but inwardly much transformed. He had shed the last vestiges of his provincial boyhood and seemed a far more cosmopolitan figure, his head stocked with exotic stores of information. He had become an accomplished speaker and diplomat, able to throw off witticisms with an effortless touch and offer cogent commentary on many cultures. The New York Times speculated that the trip had endowed him with “greater power to discern the true character of men.”107 Yet despite his manifold triumphs, Grant turned homeward with some trepidation, even a creeping sense of dread, unsure how he would make a living or where he would live. “I have no home, but must establish one after I get back,” he told Elihu Washburne. “I do not know where.”108

  When he grew bored with playing cards on the boat, Julia inquired if he had ever read Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables. “No,” he said. “I started to read it on the James River but was interrupted so frequently that I read only a few pages.”109 He began reading it so voraciously that he disappeared for days, only popping up for meals. “He read it very slowly,” said Young, “almost like a man who is studying rather than reading.”110 Then at eleven o’clock one night, Young was pacing the deck when Grant appeared, fresh from reading, and he asked him about Hugo’s presentation of the battle of Waterloo. “It is a very fine account,” Grant answered.111 Then he astounded Young with his fine-grained knowledge of the weapons, troops, and tactics employed by Napoleon and Wellington. Despite his contempt for Napoleon, Grant concluded that “it was the finest planned battle of Napoleon, the best conceived battle that I know of, and nothing but Providence being against him defeated him.”112 For those who thought Grant ignorant of military history, Young delivered a salutary corrective, describing how Grant spoke at length about the art of warfare. He wasn’t simply an intuitive general but a self-aware modernizer: