The Man Who Saved the Union

by H. W. Brands

  Grant recalled the moment vividly two decades later. “When the officer reached me I was still suffering with the sick headache,” Grant said. “But the instant I saw the contents of the note I was cured.”

  He halted, sat down and composed his reply. “I am at this writing about four miles west of Walker’s Church and will push forward to the front for the purpose of meeting you,” he wrote. “Notice sent to me on this road where you wish the interview to take place will meet me.”

  Lee’s courier conducted Grant back through the Confederate lines to where Sheridan was impatient to attack. Sheridan still suspected a ruse and registered concern that with each hour Joe Johnston was getting closer. “Is it a trick?” he demanded of no one in particular. He gestured at Lee’s army, just several hundred yards away, and snapped his open palm shut. “I’ve got ’em! I’ve got ’em like that!” Sheridan told Grant that if he would simply give the nod, he and Ord would settle the issue on the battlefield.

  But Grant had had enough of fighting, and he chose to trust Lee. He was escorted to the house of a prosperous farmer named McLean at Appomattox Court House. Lee and a single staff officer awaited him. Several of Grant’s subordinates joined their commander; all noted the contrast between the two commanding generals. “Lee was tall, large in form, fine in person, handsome in feature, grave and dignified in bearing—if anything, a little too formal,” Adam Badeau recorded. “There was a suggestion of effort in his deportment, something that showed he was determined to die gracefully, a hint of Caesar muffling himself in his mantle.” Lee’s conqueror couldn’t have been more different. “Grant as usual was simple and composed, but with none of the grand air about him,” Badeau said. “No elation was visible in his manner or appearance. His voice was as calm as ever, and his eye betrayed no emotion. He spoke and acted as plainly as if he were transacting an ordinary matter of business. No one would have suspected that he was about to receive the surrender of an army, or that one of the most terrible wars of modern times had been brought to a triumphant close by the quiet man without a sword who was conversing calmly, but rather grimly, with the elaborate gentleman in grey and gold.”

  Grant, for his own part, tried to read Lee’s emotions, without luck. “As he was a man of much dignity, with an impassible face, it was impossible to say whether he felt inwardly glad that the end had finally come, or felt sad over the result and was too manly to show it,” Grant recalled.

  As for himself, he said: “My own feelings, which had been quite jubilant on the receipt of his letter, were sad and depressed. I felt like anything rather than rejoicing at the downfall of a foe who had fought so long and valiantly.”

  The two generals spoke of the old army before the war. Grant remembered Lee better than Lee remembered him, but Lee was tactful enough not to dwell on the discrepancy. Grant would have talked on if Lee hadn’t reminded him what brought them together. Grant summoned his staff secretary, who produced paper, pen and ink. “In accordance with the substance of my letter to you of the 8th inst.,” Grant wrote, “I propose to receive the surrender of the Army of Northern Virginia on the following terms, to wit: Rolls of all the officers and men to be made in duplicate. One copy to be given to an officer designated by me, the other to be retained by such officer or officers as you may designate. The officers to give their individual paroles not to take up arms against the Government of the United States until properly exchanged and each company or regimental commander sign a like parole for the men of their commands. The arms, artillery and public property to be parked and stacked and turned over to the officer appointed by me to receive them. This will not embrace the side arms of the officers nor their private horses or baggage. This done, each officer and man will be allowed to return to their homes not to be disturbed by United States authority so long as they observe their parole and the laws in force where they may reside.”

  He handed Lee the letter. The provision permitting the officers their side arms, horses and personal property was a grace note beyond the requirements of the surrender agreement. Lee acknowledged Grant’s gesture, saying it would have a positive effect on his army. Lee asked whether soldiers other than officers—cavalrymen and artillerists principally—would be allowed to keep their horses, too. Grant, guessing that most were small farmers who would have difficulty planting a crop without their horses, said they would. Lee acknowledged this gesture as well.

  Lee sat down and wrote a letter accepting Grant’s conditions. He signed the letter, then stood once more. He said his army was hungry. He needed help feeding the men. Grant asked how many he had. Twenty-five thousand, Lee responded. Grant told him to send his commissary and quartermaster to Appomattox Station, where they would receive all they required.

  The two men parted and returned to their armies. Grant’s men began cheering and firing their guns on learning of the surrender. He ordered them to stop. “The Confederates were now our prisoners,” he explained afterward. “We did not want to exult over their downfall.”

  The news was relayed to Washington at once. Edwin Stanton replied to Grant: “Thanks be to Almighty God for the great victory.”

  PART THREE

  AND GIVE THE PEACE

  “Descended from the gods, Ulysses, cease;

  Offend not Jove; obey, and give the peace.”

  50

  WHILE GRANT AND THE UNION ARMY WERE SUPPRESSING A REVOLUTION in American politics, Lincoln and the Republicans in Congress were making a revolution in American economics. The Republican party had always been both antislavery and pro-business, but until 1860 it lacked the power to act on either part of its agenda. Lincoln’s election and the subsequent departure of the Southern Democrats from Congress left the party in firm control of the two lawmaking branches of the federal government, and the Republicans soon began fashioning their policy preferences into statutes.

  The Constitution prevented a legislative assault on slavery, compelling Lincoln to employ his authority as commander in chief to justify the Emancipation Proclamation. But the positive reaction to the proclamation inspired the president to broader reform; he called on Congress to approve and send to the states a thirteenth, emancipating amendment to the Constitution, which the legislature duly did.

  Aiding business came more easily. Lincoln and the Republicans in Congress raised tariffs, boosting the profits of American manufacturers. They underwrote a transcontinental railroad, immediately throwing contracts to the hundreds of firms engaged in the construction of the road and prospectively knitting the country into a vast single marketplace for the purveyors of American products. They established a national currency and a national banking system, to enhance the war effort but to facilitate commerce as well. They crafted laws to shift hundreds of millions of acres of public land and hundreds of millions of dollars in other natural resources to the private sector. They spent previously unthinkable amounts of money on all manner of commodities and manufactures, for the primary purpose of defeating the rebellion but with the secondary result of accelerating the industrialization that had begun to reshape America before the war began. In dozens of other areas they made government the protector and promoter of the business interests of the country. And in providing Grant and his armies the wherewithal to defeat the Southern political revolution they ensured the extension of their economic revolution to the far corners of previously semifeudal Dixie.

  The fate of the two revolutions—the failure of the South’s political revolution, the success of the North’s economic revolution—was stunningly apparent at the war’s end. The South was devastated, its productive resources spent and shattered, its people exhausted and despondent, its legal system broken, its folkways untenable. The North was invigorated by the war, its industry surging ahead, its wealth and population growing apace, its values reigning triumphant. If characteristic Southerners were sons of planters who returned from the war to find their birthright in ruins and former slaves who, though free, had little idea how they would make a living, typical Northerne
rs were industrialists and financiers who saw handsome opportunity in every direction, workers who manned the booming mines and mills, and farmers who were rapidly transforming agriculture into an industry of its own.

  The one small cloud on the horizon of Republican dreams for more of the same was the result, ironically, of the victory so brilliantly achieved. The Republican monopoly on power wouldn’t last forever; the South, upon being effectively rejoined to the Union, would send senators and representatives to Congress once again. If the old guard in the South had its way, these legislators would be Democrats likely to obstruct and subvert the Republican agenda. The Republicans in Washington, who since April 1861 had been doing everything possible to keep the South from leaving the Union, in April 1865 suddenly found reason to delay the South’s return.

  Julia Grant grew proud as the fame of her husband increased, but she also grew worried. She had fretted since girlhood about a subtle misalignment of her eyes, which a minor operation could have corrected. “I had never had the courage to consent,” she explained afterward. “But now that my husband had become so famous I really thought it behooved me to look as well as possible.” She discreetly consulted a physician, who informed her that she had missed her opportunity: the surgery worked on young persons only. She went to her husband and confessed her vanity and disappointment. “What in the world put such a thought in your head?” he replied. She answered, through tears: “Why, you are getting to be such a great man, and I am such a plain little wife, I thought if my eyes were as others, I might not be so very, very plain.” Years later she still remembered his response. “He drew me to him and said, ‘Did I not see you and fall in love with you with these same eyes? I like them just as they are.’ ” She remembered as well her feeling: “My knight, my Lancelot!”

  She spent the last winter of the war at City Point with him, often at his very side. Grant’s associates at first wondered at her presence. During the final weeks, when Sherman arrived from Carolina for consultation, she sat in the corner of Grant’s office writing personal letters. Grant asked Sherman half seriously whether Julia should move somewhere else. “I don’t know,” Sherman responded. “Let me see.” He turned to Julia. “Mrs. Grant, can you tell me where the Tombigbee River is?” She missed by several counties. He asked if she could locate the Chattahoochee. Again far off. Sherman turned back to Grant. “I think we may trust her,” he said.

  She got the news of Lee’s surrender from the City Point telegraph operator, who swore her to secrecy until the official word arrived. When it did she joined the celebration and urged her husband to savor his victory by returning to Richmond. “No,” he replied. “I will go at once to Washington.” She persisted, provoking his anger. “Hush, Julia,” he said. “Do not say another word on this subject. I would not distress these people. They are feeling their defeat bitterly, and you would not add to it by witnessing their despair, would you?”

  Grant went to Washington, and Julia with him. She had never been prouder of her husband. “Everyone was wild with delight,” she remembered. “We received calls of congratulations all day.… I went with Mrs. Stanton to the War Department, where we were joined by Mr. Stanton and General Grant. Mr. Stanton was in his happiest mood, showing me many stands of arms, flags, and, among other things, a stump of a large tree perforated on all sides by bullets, taken from the field of Shiloh.” A grand illumination—a fireworks display—was readied for that evening. Grant explained that Julia would ride in a carriage with the Stantons while he, at the request of the president, would ride with the Lincolns. “To this plan I protested and said I would not go at all unless he accompanied me,” she wrote. Grant reacted with surprise, then said he would ride with her first and subsequently with the Lincolns. “This was all satisfactory to me,” Julia concluded the story, “as it was the honor of being with him when he first viewed the illumination in honor of peace restored to the nation, in which he had so great a share—it was this I coveted.”

  She reveled in her husband’s glory that night. The next morning she said she wanted to go to Burlington, New Jersey, where she had placed the children in school. And she wanted him to go with her, as they had seen little of their father lately. “I wish I could,” he replied. “But I have promised Mr. Lincoln to go up this morning and with him see what can be done in reference to the reduction of the army.” She pleaded with him to change his mind. He said he would try to finish early in order to get away that evening. Just then a messenger arrived with a note for Grant from the president, who asked to postpone their interview till afternoon so he could see his son, Robert, just back from the front. Grant sighed to Julia that this would make it even more difficult for him to get out of Washington that day, but he said he would do his best. She should see to preparing their bags.

  She was doing so, hours later, when another messenger arrived. Poorly dressed, in tattered coat, trousers and hat, he asked if she was Mrs. Grant. She nodded that she was. “Mrs. Lincoln sends me, madam, with her compliments, to say she will call for you exactly at eight o’clock to go the theater,” the messenger said. Julia remembered gazing at him coolly. “I replied with some feeling (not liking either the looks of the messenger or the message, thinking the former savored of discourtesy and the latter seemed like a command), ‘You may return with my compliments to Mrs. Lincoln and say I regret that as General Grant and I intend leaving the city this afternoon, we will not, therefore, be here to accompany the President and Mrs. Lincoln to the theater.’ ” The messenger reddened. “Madam, the papers announce that General Grant will be with the President tonight at the theater.” Julia was unmoved. “You may deliver my message to Mrs. Lincoln as I have given it to you. You may go now.”

  She was still taking pleasure in her riposte when Grant, having completed his business, arrived in time for them to catch the evening train to Philadelphia. No bridge then spanned the Delaware, and they had to wait for the train ferry to transport them across. As Grant had not eaten since morning, they visited a restaurant, where he ordered oysters. His dish was being prepared when a telegraph boy hurried in with a message from Washington. The message said that President Lincoln had been shot, perhaps fatally.

  “It would be impossible for me to describe the feeling that overcame me at the news,” Grant recalled. “I knew his goodness of heart, his generosity, his yielding disposition, his desire to have everybody happy, and above all his desire to see all the people of the United States enter again upon the full privileges of citizenship with equality among all.” Grant realized that if Lincoln died Andrew Johnson would become president. He didn’t know Johnson well, but he had heard that Johnson bore a grudge against the leaders of the South. “I feared that his course towards them would be such as to repel and make them unwilling citizens, and if they became such they would remain so for a long while. I felt that reconstruction had been set back, no telling how far.”

  Grant immediately summoned a special train to return him to the capital. But learning that it wouldn’t arrive for a few hours, he took Julia on to Burlington, only an hour away. He retraced his path to Philadelphia and rode through the night to Washington. In the morning he learned, with the rest of the capital, of Lincoln’s passing. “The joy that I had witnessed among the people in the street and in public places in Washington when I left there had been turned to grief,” he recalled. “The city was in reality a city of mourning.”

  It was also a city of fear. Lincoln’s assassin, John Wilkes Booth, had organized a conspiracy that targeted Andrew Johnson and William Seward, besides Lincoln. The conspirator assigned to kill Johnson lost his nerve and didn’t attack the vice president, but Seward was assaulted in his bed and was stabbed nearly to death. Who else might be in danger was anyone’s guess in the hours and days that followed. And whether the attacks signaled a continuation of the war, by agents of the Confederate government or by diehard irregulars, was equally and frighteningly unclear.

  Grant had to assume he was on the assassins’ list. Booth had read t
he notices announcing his presence in the box with Lincoln at Ford’s Theater; the assassin must have been surprised not to find the victorious general there. Julia later convinced herself that the plotters had been watching her. She suspected, after the fact, that the unkempt messenger at her hotel room was in league with Booth, and she concluded that some men sitting near her at lunch that day were planning her husband’s murder. On the night of the shooting Charles Dana wrote Grant from the War Department warning him to be careful on the train ride back to Washington. “Permit me to suggest to you to keep a close watch on all persons who come near you in the cars or otherwise,” Dana said. “Also that an engine be sent in front of the train to guard against anything being on the track.” Grant directed the Union commander at Baltimore to send a company of soldiers to meet his train and join him for the rest of the trip to Washington. The next day Grant received an unsigned note indicating that the precautions had been well taken. As Julia recalled the note, it read: “General Grant, thank God, as I do, that you still live. It was your life that fell to my lot, and I followed you on the cars. Your car door was locked, and thus you escaped me, thank God!”

  On arrival at the capital Grant sent orders to his generals in the field to tighten security. He told Edward Ord at Richmond to arrest the mayor, city council and any paroled Confederate officers who hadn’t taken the oath of allegiance to the United States. “Extreme rigor will have to be observed whilst assassination remains the order of the day with the rebels,” Grant said. When Ord replied that Lee and his staff were in the city and that to arrest them would risk reopening the rebellion, Grant rescinded the order but still urged Ord to keep close watch for assassins and saboteurs. Meanwhile he wrote Phil Sheridan to prepare to march again. Joe Johnston hadn’t surrendered and Grant aimed to ensure that he not escape Sherman, who was short of cavalry. “I want you to get your cavalry in readiness to push south and make up this deficiency if it become necessary,” Grant told Sheridan.