Grant

by Ron Chernow

  Grant went on to describe all of Napoleon’s campaigns . . . speaking of each battle in the most minute manner—the number of men engaged on either side; even the range of their guns and the tactics of both sides; why victory came and why defeat came, as thoroughly learned as a problem in mathematics. Then back to the battles of Frederick the Great, Leuthen, the campaigns of the Thirty Years’ War, back to the campaigns of Caesar, and always illustrating as he talked the progress and change in the art of war, and how machinery, projectiles, and improvements in arms had made what would be a great victory for Napoleon almost impossible now. It simply meant this: that Gen. Grant, with his marvelous memory, had not forgotten his West Point education. In addition to his great common sense he knew the lessons of war as completely as any General that ever lived.113

  Had Napoleon been thoroughly unselfish, Grant suggested, he would have been the greatest man in history, such was his military genius. When a young woman on board asked Grant to name the two figures he detested most in history, he shot back, “Napoleon and Robespierre.”114

  From the time he disembarked in San Francisco, Grant would be barraged with questions about his presidential ambitions, Hayes having made good on his pledge to serve only one term. During Grant’s exile, his image had waxed ever larger thanks to favorable press coverage, much of it from the pen of John Russell Young. His absence had softened memories of his presidency’s scandals and heightened appreciations of his many accomplishments. The Stalwart wing of the Republican Party meditated schemes to advance him as their presidential candidate in 1880. Grant always insisted that he had no heart for a third term, but Young spun quite a different tale. While sailing the Red Sea, Young wrote to the cartoonist Thomas Nast, “The General, Mr. Borie, and I spend most of our time looking out on the waves, and scheming for a third term!!!! You never knew such a schemer as the Gen. He sits up for hours and hours, late and schemes.”115 Yet when Young was later asked by a reporter about Grant’s political plans, he replied, “If he is nominated by an enthusiastic convention, then he will decide what is the best thing to be done. He never plans ahead. He is not a schemer.”116 It was another example of Grant’s inability to admit the extent of his own ambition.

  Those who shared the dream of a third term had thought that Grant should linger abroad and only return right before the 1880 convention. In May, Badeau had advised Sherman that once Grant landed “in America the attacks will begin. Why should he not escape them for another year?”117 Badeau and others thought that Grant’s September 1879 return to San Francisco was too soon, allowing the publicity boom that would follow his arrival to cool off by convention time. Badeau therefore believed Grant “had neither expectation nor ambition to return to power.”118 Jesse Grant thought his father lacked the fiery desire to return to the White House, but that his travels had led him to believe he could now conduct America’s foreign relations better than anyone else.

  As Grant’s ship steamed into San Francisco before a golden sunset on September 20, he received a rapturous reception as foghorns bellowed and flag-bedecked yachts swarmed around him. Julia recalled how “we saw a procession of ships which approached in pairs, separated as they neared us, passed on either side of us, closed in again after they passed, and escorted us in through the Golden Gate to San Francisco.”119 Cannon roared from Angel Island, Black Point, and Alcatraz, while thousands waved from Telegraph Hill. When Grant spotted Alcatraz, he remembered seeing it twenty-five years earlier after his hellish passage through Panama. “A year and a half ago I was thoroughly homesick,” the peripatetic Grant told reporters, “but the variation of scene and the kindness which I have met with have almost done away with that feeling.”120 To inevitable questions about his residual presidential ambitions, Grant said simply, “Well, I don’t aspire . . . My time is all my own and there is nothing to hurry me.”121

  During his trip, American readers had received vicarious pleasure that one of their own had been treated with such respect around the world, conducting himself with becoming modesty. Among Grant’s many astonishing triumphs was that he had survived an endless round of banquets and receptions without slipping back into drinking. “I was present when the old man returned from around the world,” said his friend Amos Webster, “and he told us he hadn’t tasted liquor but once during the entire trip. He had turned down his glass everywhere.”122 One wonders whether that lone lapse was the one recounted by Lord Lytton in India. Doubtless much of the credit for Grant’s abstinence goes to Julia and her strict vigilance over his sobriety. Now that he had landed in America, there would be more heavy-drinking receptions, and a person involved in one of them remembered how “Mrs. Grant had requested us not to have wine at the banquet.”123

  Adam Badeau surmised correctly that the moment Grant returned, he would be thrown into the red-hot crucible of politics. The Nation tagged him as a puppet of the Stalwarts and thought it “difficult to find words of condemnation sufficiently strong . . . for using this simple soldier as the head of The Machine.”124 “Ulysses S. Grant is a man driven mad by ambition,” the New York Sun blustered. “He now seeks to grab the government of the United States—a thing unprecedented—for a third term.”125 While in San Francisco, Grant held a midnight meeting with James M. Comly, a confidant of President Hayes’s. Grant said frankly he would prefer to see somebody else nominated as the Republican candidate for president and expressed sorrow that Hayes had restricted himself to one term. But for Comly, the startling thing was that Grant did not rule out a run. “The conversation changed my opinion entirely as to Grant’s candidacy—his willingness I mean,” he told Hayes confidentially. “I am convinced that he will not decline a nomination, if tendered with full acquiescence of leading Republicans.”126

  Grant was elated by his ecstatic reception in San Francisco, which had grown enormously since his last visit. “I cannot venture in the streets except in a carriage for the mob of good-natured and enthusiastic friends, old and young.”127 Leaving there in early October, he took a stagecoach tour of Yosemite Valley and tramped through giant sequoia groves before returning to scenes of his early army life in Oregon. In Portland, Grant addressed a veterans reunion and returned to the field where he had once planted potatoes. In Sacramento, Julia Grant had a curious encounter with a black woman who approached her gingerly, holding out her hand. “Miss Julie, I do not believe you know me. I am Henrietta, or Henny, as you used to call me at home.”128 Julia took the woman’s hands and recognized one of her father’s former slaves. “I was very glad to see Henny and told her to come to my room the next day, but I never saw her afterwards,” Julia wrote in her memoirs.129 One notes Julia’s emotional response to the unexpected reunion, but also that Henrietta failed to materialize the next day—perhaps a telling reaction from a former slave of Colonel Dent’s.

  Having survived the world tour on dividends from the Consolidated Virginia Mining Company in Nevada, the Grants spent three days in mining country there. A photo shows a gray-bearded, burly Grant in a porkpie hat and rough miner’s coat, carrying a lamp and preparing to descend into the mine. He looked more like a grizzled, weather-beaten prospector than a former president. When he bet Julia that she wouldn’t dare to descend into the mine, located seventeen hundred feet below, it roused her fighting spirit and she proved him wrong. Grant surfaced from the deep mine, red-faced and perspiring, and joked that it was a good place “to leave the newspapermen.” “Would you not leave the politicians, too?” asked John H. Kinkead, the Nevada governor. “Yes,” Grant said drily, “but there ain’t room for all that ought to be put here.”130

  As Grant moved east to Utah Territory, he presented a different public persona than before his trip, more verbal and gregarious, and in Ogden he conceded he had grown accustomed to public speaking abroad. “I think I am improving, for my knees don’t knock together like they did at first.”131 Stopping next in Nebraska, he seemed to be campaigning very hard for a man who disclaimed any interest in a third term. As
he whistle-stopped across the state, he was flabbergasted by the rapid growth of the Great Plains and discovered a new America with railroads and settlements spread across the prairies. “I am very glad to see you, but your towns in Nebraska are too thick for me to talk at every place the train stops. They are springing up here so rapidly that I scarcely know the country in passing through, although I have been out here three times before.”132 Pausing in Galesburg, Illinois, he hazarded a joke about his freshly honed oratorical skills. “I have only been in Illinois one hour, and during that time I have already made two speeches, and feel talked out.”133

  Grant’s next destination was Galena, where he and Julia occupied their furnished house for several weeks. In an interview, Grant made a surprisingly open confession when he said he could reside more cheaply in Galena than a large city. He explained that he still had two farms near St. Louis; thirty-one acres of money-losing land outside Chicago; stock in Adams Express Company, which had appreciated; and a $50,000 to $60,000 profit from Nevada mining stock, which had underwritten his travel abroad. “My income is not large enough for me to live as I would like,” he confessed, “and I will have to find something to do after a while.”134 Despite a huge reception in Galena, with its buildings decked out in bunting, Grant couldn’t see dawdling there and complained that Galena, once a prosperous town, had regressed to a sleepy little rural backwater bypassed by new railroads.

  Everything that happened to Grant between San Francisco and Galena was a mere warm-up for the tremendous reception that awaited him in Chicago, where he was the centerpiece of a celebration lasting several days. As one broadside put it, the town belonged to the “Man of Destiny, our own General Grant.”135 The person drafted to preside over this tribute was Grant’s old mentor, Elihu Washburne, who declined the honor, pleading a lecture he had to give in Indiana. Nobody in the political world was hoodwinked by this excuse, which was attributed to his own presidential ambitions in 1880. “He was ostensibly for Grant, but was really a candidate,” said Grant friend J. Russell Jones. “This Grant could never forgive.”136

  The Chicago festivities opened with a gigantic parade, with Grant riding in a carriage at its head, trailed by three thousand soldiers and fifteen thousand civilians. That morning a heavy rain had soaked the city and the crowd, ranging from bootblacks to businessmen, was “compelled to wade through the thickest mud which had disgraced Chicago for many a day.”137 When the rain stopped, a rainbow appeared and Grant mounted a flag-draped reviewing stand outside the Palmer House already occupied by Governor Shelby Cullom, Mayor Carter Harrison, and Mark Twain.

  An excited Twain had geared up for this encounter with Grant, telling William Dean Howells, “My sluggish soul needs a fierce upstirring.”138 During Grant’s first term, Twain had escorted Senator William Stewart of Nevada to the White House, where they found the president hunched over papers, scribbling away. When he finally raised his eyes, a flustered Twain said, “I seem to be a little embarrassed. Are you?” As Twain recalled “the General was fearfully embarrassed himself.”139 Now Mayor Harrison introduced Twain anew to Grant, who fixed the author with a wry smirk and said, in an amazing display of memory, “Mr. Clemens, I am not embarrassed—are you?”140 Some banter ensued as Twain told Grant he would withdraw to the rear of the platform. “I’ll step back, General. I don’t want to interrupt your speech.” “But I’m not going to make any,” Grant told him. “Stay where you are,” Twain insisted, “I’ll get you to make it for me.”141

  Grant’s history always provided rich food for Twain’s imagination. They were both from the Midwest, having risen from humble roots. Perhaps from some nagging guilt at having fought briefly on the Confederate side early in the war, almost crossing paths with Grant in Missouri, Twain remained obsessed with him. Playing the buffoon, he liked to present himself as the anti-Grant, the congenital coward, underscoring his fascination with the valiant Grant. In Chicago, Twain had an opportunity to see Grant in action when the latter addressed a large reunion of the Army of the Tennessee. When Grant entered, wrote Twain, “a deafening storm of welcome burst forth which continued during two or three minutes. There wasn’t a soldier on that stage who wasn’t visibly affected, except the man who was being welcomed, Grant. No change of expression crossed his face.”142

  In a paternal, almost Lincolnesque style, Grant called in two speeches for national unity and the need to avoid “all bitterness and ill-feeling, either on the part of sections or parties toward each other.”143 At the same time, he tacitly rebuked the South for its hostile treatment of carpetbaggers: “We claim for [former Confederates] the right to travel all over this broad land, to locate where they please, and the right to settle and become citizens and enjoy their political and religious convictions free from molestation or ostracism, either on account of this, or their connection with the past.”144 At one of the tributes to him, Grant sat impassively through battle hymns and panegyrics about his service to his country before a thousand men lustily belted out “Marching Through Georgia.” All the while, Twain said, Grant “never moved a hand or foot, head, or anything . . . an achievement which I should not have believed, if I had not seen it with my own eyes.”145

  The capstone of the Grant celebration was a banquet for six hundred people at the Palmer House, a Lucullan feast of Gilded Age extravagance featuring beef and venison, wild turkey and duck, intermixed with six hours of speeches. The room was plastered with shields that had Grant’s major battles inscribed in gilded letters. “I doubt if America has ever seen anything quite equal to it,” Twain wrote. “I am well satisfied I shall not live to see its equal again.”146 At two in the morning, the author rose to offer the sixteenth and final toast. Determined to convulse the imperturbable Grant with laughter, he adopted a risky comedic strategy, proposing a toast to “The babies—as they comfort us in our sorrows, let us not forget them in our festivities.”147 Exactly how Twain would relate this to Grant was unclear. Then he contrasted the Grant who faced “the death storm at Donelson and Vicksburg” with Grant in the nursery, a powerless infant who “clawed your whiskers, and pulled your hair, and twisted your nose.”148 In a daring twist, he then imagined the fifty-seven-year-old Grant as an infant, whose main goal in the cradle was “to find some way of getting his big toe in his mouth.” Then, after a long pause for dramatic silence, he uncorked his showstopper: “And if the child is but a prophecy of the man, there are mighty few who will doubt that he succeeded.”149 Grant fell apart with laughter. “I fetched him! I broke him up utterly!” Twain exulted to his wife. “The audience saw that for once in his life he had been knocked out of his iron serenity.”150 To William Dean Howells, he added, “I shook him up like dynamite & he sat there fifteen minutes & laughed and cried like the mortalest of mortals.”151

  By the end of his Chicago stay, Grant had endured enough adulation and more than enough alcoholic temptation. Before the Palmer House banquet, Frances Willard, the head of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union, appealed to the organizers to “dispense with all intoxicating liquors at the approaching feast.”152 The plea was rebuffed and the banquet hall swam with booze. But Grant pleased temperance advocates in Harrisburg in December when they saluted his refusal “to take any stimulant at the close of the procession” in his honor and praised “the dignified example he set at the ban[q]uet on Saturday evening when he inverted his wine glasses and refused, with a few other gentleme[n] to partake of any intoxicating beverage—they endorsing the request of the W.C.T.U. of Allegheny.”153 It showed Grant’s success in dealing with his alcohol problem that he was now able to endorse temperance so publicly.

  After Chicago, Grant resumed his grand procession across the country, traveling in a private railroad car custom-made for George Pullman himself. He created a sensation in Louisville, Kentucky, where huge crowds defied rain and mud to welcome him. “The windows were crowded with ladies & children waving their handkerchiefs,” Grant wrote, “and the houses all decorated with stars & st
ripes.”154 He made time for a black delegation, expressing hope “that all the rights of citizenship may be enjoyed by them as it is guaranteed to them already by the law and constitutional amendments.”155 Pushing on, he met soldiers’ orphans in Xenia, Ohio, and business leaders in Pittsburgh and spoke before the governor’s mansion in Harrisburg.

  The most stupendous gathering came in Philadelphia, where the mayor declared a holiday in Grant’s honor. From a reviewing stand, Grant oversaw a parade that stretched for a mile with 350,000 pedestrians blanketing the sidewalks. Ten days later, returning to Philadelphia, he enjoyed time alone with President Hayes. “A most agreeable talk with General Grant for two hours alone,” Hayes told his wife. “He looks well and is in excellent spirits.”156 The most daring aspect of Grant’s stay was his address to a pacifist organization, the Universal Peace Union, founded by the aptly named Alfred H. Love. It seems remarkable that the group embraced a famous warrior, but Grant had already received its plaudits for his Peace Policy with the Indians and arbitration of the Alabama claims. In his speech, Grant peered into the future, evoking something akin to the League of Nations: “I look forward for a day when there will be a Court established, that shall be recognized by all nations, which will take into consideration all questions of difference between nations, and settle by arbitration or decision of such court, those questions, instead of keeping up large standing armies as in Europe.”157