Grant

by Ron Chernow

  Grant had stopped off in New Jersey to spend Christmas Eve with his mother, then staying with his sister, Virginia Grant Corbin. A few days earlier, the straitlaced Hannah Grant, with her silvery hair, shucked her inhibitions and gave an interview to The Philadelphia Press, expressing considerable interest in her son’s cross-country pageant. “I was just reading about General Grant’s reception in Philadelphia,” she said. “What a time they are making over him.” She said she hadn’t seen him since his return. “I wonder what his plans are . . . he promised to come here before his departure for the South. How does he look? He must be tired . . . The General was always a good traveler. He possessed that characteristic from his boyhood.” When told that her son had refrained from discussing a third term, she professed no surprise. “The General is not in the habit of giving himself up to conjectures. When a question arises he decides it, and I do not think he has given any thought to the possibility of his being nominated again.”158

  CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

  —

  Master Spirit

  EVEN AS HE CIRCUMNAVIGATED the globe, Grant had worried about resurgent southern Democrats back home, ex-Confederates who had recaptured control of every state in the region and threatened to undo everything he had accomplished. “It looks to me that unless the North rallies by 1880 the Government will be in the hands of those who tried so hard fourteen—seventeen—years ago to destroy it,” he wrote.1 Grant regretted the rise of the solid South and deemed it his duty “to save the results of the war.”2 He also feared that unreasoning southern resistance to northern capital doomed the region to economic stagnation. Grant’s travels also made him eager to introduce consular reforms, international arbitration, closer ties between China and Japan, new trade agreements, and a more international role for the United States. Finally, he was concerned about labor unrest and the rash of railroad strikes that had roiled the Hayes administration, nearly paralyzing the economy.

  For these reasons, Grant felt a direct personal stake in the 1880 election. As he traveled, he was rejuvenated by his renewed popularity at home. He had never lost the ability to draw on lingering affection from Appomattox. As The Times of London explained, American voters were disillusioned with President Hayes for failing to deliver on civil service reform and realized that Grant, for all his errors, had hewed to “a firm and honourable policy.” This reevaluation made Grant “the most popular American, and, if the Republican nominating convention for 1880 were now to meet, would give him the nomination.3 Julia Grant perked up at the exuberant crowds who turned out for her husband—“They understand now and are sorry,” she told her children—and longed to reign again as Washington’s social doyenne.4 When the British governor in Singapore had asked about her plans to return to the White House, she had made no secret of her ardent wish for a comeback, adding that if her husband heard her say so, “he would knock my head off.”5

  Two people who watched Grant’s resurrection with enthusiasm were his old comrades Sheridan and Sherman. “He has grown wonderfully in public confidence as an able and strong man,” Sheridan wrote as Grant sailed the seas, “and it would not surprise me a bit, if he was called upon to again go to the White House.”6 More surprising had been the rediscovery of Grant’s merits by Sherman. “No man of Either Party, Seems to rise above Mediocrity, or to Command public Confidence,” Sherman wrote in October 1878. “If this Continues two years More Grant may again be President, and . . . too vigorous to remain idle he cannot well refuse.”7

  Right before Grant returned to America, Sherman posted to him a long, thoughtful letter, describing how southern leaders threatened to reverse the progress of Reconstruction and “ignore the laws made in pursuance of the new amendments to the Constitution.”8 Such inflammatory rhetoric, Sherman argued, would have made Grant an inevitable Republican candidate for 1880. But that Democratic threat had now receded and with it the need for a third Grant term. The underlying point of the letter was to notify Grant that, if Sherman’s brother John should be a candidate for president, “it would be unnatural for me to oppose or qualify his purpose.”9 When he received this letter in Tokyo, Grant was deeply moved by Sherman’s sensitivity in explaining why he might be forced to support his brother. With tears in his eyes, he told Young, “‘People may wonder . . . why I love Sherman. How could I help loving Sherman. And he has always been the same during the thirty five years I have known him. He was so at West Point.’”10

  In 1879 a book by an anonymous author appeared with the provocative title The Great American Empire; or, Gen. Ulysses S. Grant, Emperor of North America. Whether or not Grant lusted for power—and he was careful to conceal any evidence of that—he could never admit it and preferred to be carried along in the political current by friends more openly interested in power. He had a way of standing back and letting things happen—a tacit form of approval. Inaction had become his preferred form of action. That Grant leaned toward a third term was evident from his unending appearances across the country and the fact that John Russell Young rushed out his book about Grant’s round-the-world tour in time for Christmas 1879. At the same time, Grant pleaded with Badeau to speed up publication of his military history of his wartime campaigns. “I think you can not get it out too soon after your return to America,” he lectured him in late November. “It will be the most authentic book published on the war, and I think the most truthful history.”11

  Buck advanced a subtler view of his father’s ambivalent mood about another presidential race: “While father was abroad, his political friends arranged that he should try again for the third term and had gone so far in their arrangements, that when he returned he felt in justice to them, that he ought to go on. The Presidency was not a thing to be sought for, neither was it a thing to be refused. He never sought position. But when it came to him, he felt it his duty to accept if he could fill the place. He was also incapable of supposing his friends to be selfish.”12

  On December 19, President Hayes conceded in his diary that Grant was the “general popular favorite” in the Republican Party, trailed by Senator James G. Blaine of Maine and Secretary of the Treasury John Sherman. Washburne concurred that the Republican vote for Grant “will be so overwhelming . . . that Blaine will get out of the road.”13 Blaine and Sherman were favored by reform-minded party members who opposed machine politics and were dubbed Half-Breeds. Grant detractors already poured scorn on the idea of a third term. E. L. Godkin of The Nation mocked Grant’s supporters as those seeking “a permanent, or nearly permanent, President” and ridiculed the notion that foreign travel had produced a new, improved version of the scandal-ridden Grant.14

  Still searching for a permanent abode, Grant spent the final days of 1879 at a friend’s home in Washington. He hoped Buck would make a speculative killing for him in an Arizona mine, enabling him to buy a suitable residence in the capital. In late December, Grant undertook an invasion of the South, this time a purely peaceful one, visiting Columbia, South Carolina, and addressing a black militia in Beaufort. The trip barely camouflaged his political agenda: to demonstrate that he could break the Democratic grasp on the region and carry some southern states, a view buttressed by endorsements from a handful of southern newspapers.

  Delighted by his friendly reception in the South, Grant and Julia boarded a steamer to St. Augustine, Florida. While in Florida, Grant associated openly with the temperance movement for the second time, meeting in Fernandina with a black lodge of the Independent Order of Good Templars. “General Grant,” a lodge spokesman said, “the black men are not unmindful of the great good you rendered in the darkest days of the race’s history, when there was but one real peril that threatened our nation’s glory, slavery.” In reply, Grant dwelled on a topic he had never dared broach so freely before: that “he thought intoxicating liquors the chief cause of poverty and crime.”15 Once again, Grant’s courage in identifying with the temperance cause suggests a mastery over his drinking problem and hence a new willingness to
acknowledge it. During his two-week Florida stay, he also gushed about the state’s economic future. “This is becoming a great resort for invalids and people who wish to avoid the rigors of a Northern Winter,” he told his daughter.16

  Grant decided to spend a goodly portion of the winter in Cuba and Mexico, taking Fred and his wife, Ida; Phil Sheridan and his wife; and Katherine Felt, the daughter of Galena friends. With John Russell Young, Grant had learned the art of taking along a chronicler who might convert a private trip to public advantage, and he now chose Byron Andrews of the Chicago Inter-Ocean as his secretary. In an oppressively hot Havana, the Grant party was handsomely entertained at the governor’s palace, then toured tobacco and sugar plantations. After arriving in Vera Cruz, Mexico, on February 18, Grant was welcomed by Matías Romero, the former treasury minister. Writing home, Grant made clear that his absence from America had a patently political objective: “We will be back in the United States about the 22d of March by which time public opinion will be sufficiently developed for me to determine my duty.”17 Those backers who argued that Grant had returned prematurely from his foreign travels now hoped his southern detour would enable them to rekindle a Grant boom when he returned in the spring.

  From the moment he set foot in Mexico, Grant was transported by the beautiful scenery, perfect climate, and hospitable people—exactly as during the Mexican War. On February 23, he and Sheridan held a cordial meeting with President Porfirio Díaz in Mexico City and Grant again showed his talent for defining a brand-new diplomatic role for superannuated presidents. He could speak more frankly than when in office and addressed long-standing Mexican suspicions about the United States, telling Díaz frankly that “our country had dealt harshly with his in years past, and that, although I had been in the military service at the time, I had always felt that the war was unjust.”18 A true friend of Mexico, Grant foresaw the day when it would “become a rich country, a good neighbor, and the two Republics would profit by the contact.”19 Most of Mexico stood as virgin territory for railroad development and Grant agreed to aid the country in developing a rail network with American capital.

  While in Mexico City, Grant relived a pair of battles now three decades in the past. Riding in mule-drawn carriages, he and his retinue drove nine miles south of Mexico City to where Grant had fought at Churubusco in 1847. “Right here among these haciendas,” he announced, alighting from his carriage, “my command lay all day waiting for the battle of Contreras to be fought.”20 He also revisited Molino del Rey and beheld ancient walls still pockmarked with bullets and cannonballs from that conflict. The spot had never shed its youthful romance for Grant. As the intervening years fell away, he came alive in relating the story. “As [Grant] stood up in the carriage,” wrote a reporter, he talked about the fight “and his face wore an expression of eager animation such as I have never observed through its mask of immobility before.”21

  During Grant’s Mexican sojourn, Washburne reassured him he would win the nomination by acclamation at the Republican convention in Chicago, but he also sounded some alarming notes. People worried about overturning George Washington’s precedent of restricting the president to two terms. “Of course the copperheads howl over it,” Washburne wrote, “and now the opposition of our own party is howling still louder.”22 Grant was being portrayed in the press as a captive of party bosses who manipulated him for their own ends. “Many of those who desired Grant . . . do not want him as the candidate of the Camerons and Conklings, secured by manipulated caucuses and pledged delegations,” The New York Times cautioned.23 About the auspices under which he might secure the nomination, Grant showed scant concern, having long ago cast his lot with the Conklings and the Camerons, and it was too late to undo the damage.

  To Washburne, Grant insisted it was “a matter of supreme indifference” whether he was nominated or not.24 But crossing the border into Texas in late March he looked suspiciously like an energetic, barnstorming candidate, sometimes giving four or five speeches a day that plainly declared his intentions, and he exhibited an oratorical prowess that floored those who remembered the old nervous, tongue-tied Grant. At a Galveston banquet, Grant invoked his service in Texas during the Mexican War, singing the state’s praises: “I am glad to come back now on this occasion to behold a territory which is an empire in itself, and larger than some of the empires of Europe.”25 Visiting a school for African Americans, Grant promoted education for blacks and the vital importance of an educated citizenry: “I am glad to see that the colored children of Galveston have the opportunity of becoming useful citizens, and hope that you will improve it by obtaining a common school education, and that the white children will do likewise.”26 In Houston, hundreds of blacks mobbed Grant at the local hotel while one stooped, white-haired black preacher “spread out his long bony hand and pronounced his blessing upon him,” said a spectator.27

  Throughout the South, the ubiquitous Grant stopped at African American schools and churches, engendering a fervent outpouring of support from black citizens whom he had assiduously courted over the years. When he spoke to the black congregation of a Methodist church in New Orleans, the large, eager crowd spilled into the surrounding streets. “The South has been the home of the colored man,” Grant stated, “and I hope he will always be permitted to live peaceably in the South, freely.”28 Grant’s concern for the black community melded altruism with self-interest, for black Republican votes could wrest several southern states from Democratic hands. As James Longstreet told a reporter with enthusiasm, “There are Southern States which one Republican and one alone can carry and that one is General Grant—North Carolina, Louisiana, Georgia . . . Yes, it is possible for Grant to carry Georgia. Why not? Almost half the population of the State are negroes, every man of them Republicans at heart.”29

  Among whites, Grant’s southern tour inspired divergent reactions. In Mobile, former mayor Jones Withers, once a Confederate general, extolled the tour as “the grand crowning act” of an eventful life in which Grant had exhorted his countrymen to rise above “sectional animosity and party strife to his own high level of pure patriotism and true statesmanship.”30 Striking a similar note, the Memphis Appeal wrote: “We are, let us hope, upon the threshold of the new era when all trace of the bloody contest will be blotted out.”31 But many southern whites resented Grant’s presence, had not forgotten his wartime ferocity, and blamed him for Reconstruction, placing him beyond forgiveness or redemption. “Unless our people have eaten of the insane root and lost their reason, Grantism can have no foothold at the South,” the Mobile Register declared. “We have not yet become dogs to lick the hand that smites us.”32 Reprising the familiar charge of “bayonet rule,” the Louisiana Senate voted down a resolution welcoming Grant to the state.

  Grant knew the symbolic importance of a peaceful trip through a region in which he had waged bloody war and balanced appearances before black audiences with amicable speeches before white ones. At numberless banquets, he expatiated on national unity and paid tribute to southern generals, who stepped forward to thank him for his generosity at Appomattox. The reconciliation theme crested in Vicksburg, where Grant joked he was “glad to go to Vicksburg through the front door; once, you know, I was forced to come in through the back door.”33 Seventeen years after bombarding the starving city, Grant personified a spirit of renewal. “I know that nothing can again array the blue against the gray. This fact is proven by the citizens coming here to-day, white and colored together.”34 Another emotional high point came in Cairo, Illinois, where Grant recalled that when he last inhabited the town it had been “a camp of bristling bayonets.”35 He reminded listeners that on his southern swing, former Confederate officers had expressed satisfaction with the war’s outcome “and [I] in no wise felt inclined to attempt to disturb them.”36 Grant’s newfound southern popularity made it seem feasible that, as a presidential candidate, he might peel away several states from the Democratic grip. The black community nationwide lined up wholehearte
dly behind his candidacy, one black journalist calling Grant “the only man who can silence the Copperhead element in the South.”37

  Starting in Cairo, Grant’s itinerary through Illinois was largely orchestrated by Washburne, who wished to expose the undeclared candidate to as many towns as possible. Grant suffered from a lost tooth and Julia’s eye problem bothered her again, but otherwise the trip went well. The Stalwarts made no secret that Grant was their pet, their creature, their best bet for a return to power. “General Grant is in the hands of his friends,” John Logan bragged to a reporter, “and they will not withdraw him until he is beaten, no matter how many ballots are taken.”38 On April 27, when Grant celebrated his fifty-eighth birthday in Galena, townspeople trooped through his house, now a temporary oasis for a former president with no fixed address. Young claimed that he and Grant “knocked about the country together like a pair of boys on a holiday. I never saw him better or in better form.”39

  By April 1880, Adam Badeau thought opposition to Grant’s nomination had hardened because of his premature return from his world tour. He also believed Grant’s reticence about a third term and ingrained passivity damaged his chances at the forthcoming convention. According to Badeau, “Men like Conkling, Cameron, and Logan declared in intimate conferences that Grant had never said to either that he would be a candidate . . . He had done nothing whatever to promote his first nomination, and nothing directly for his second; and he determined now to follow the same course in regard to a third.”40

  Months spent on the road had strengthened Grant’s determination to return to the White House, as if acting at being president made him want to be president again. Staying at Fred’s house in Chicago in May, weeks before the convention, Grant executed an atypical volte-face: he threw off all pretense of neutrality and declared his wish to nab the nomination. Badeau was thunderstruck: “Grant manifested as much anxiety as I ever saw him display on his own account; he calculated the chances, he counted the delegates, considered how every movement would affect the result.”41 The foreign policy ideas about China, Japan, and Mexico that fermented in his brain gave him a valid reason to want to return to the presidency instead of falling back on pure egotistical desire, which had never satisfied his Methodist soul. Painfully aware of his mistakes as president, Grant fantasized about reentering the White House to correct those errors and redeem his reputation. Beyond his sudden daydreams of returning to power, Grant was goaded to run by Julia, and it was widely bruited in the press that “the General would rather offend forty million people than Madame.”42