by H. W. Brands
What he felt instead was relief. During his last months in office, amid the fight over the Hayes-Tilden election, the continuing demands by Southern Republicans for troops and the incessant assaults by Democrats, he had maintained his composure and sustained his spirits by thoughts of a foreign journey that would carry him far from the roils of American politics. He had lived longer in the White House than he had lived anywhere since childhood, and although a home base could be reassuring, it could also be confining. He remembered the freedom of the military campaign, the joy of life in tent and on horseback; and while he couldn’t reproduce his wartime existence, he could recapitulate something of its peripatetic nature. “I have no plans laid either as to where we will go or how long remain absent,” he said of his journey. “We will not return, however, until the party”—himself, Julia and Jesse—“becomes homesick, which may be in six months and may not be for two years.” The trip would be funded by a rare—for Grant—good investment: mining stocks of Nevada’s Comstock Lode, which were producing handsome dividends. And it would keep him clear of American politics, which weren’t likely to get any kinder or less complicated.
From Washington he and Julia had traveled to New York to stay with Hamilton Fish and his wife. Grant dodged questions about Hayes’s first appointments and early performance; he denied reports that he was writing a book about his life and career. “There are books enough already,” he told a reporter. “Anybody can write a book. I could myself, for that matter, perhaps. But I assure you I haven’t had the least thought about such a thing.” On departing the Fish home he thanked his host for the hospitality but mostly for the service he had provided during eight years as secretary of state. Vexing questions that might have led to war had confronted the country, he said. “Through your statesmanship more than through any individual, these questions have been peaceably settled and in a manner highly creditable to the nation and without wounding the sensibilities of other nations.” Grant appreciated no less the secretary’s personal friendship and loyalty. “Our relations have at all times been so pleasant that I shall carry the remembrance of them through life.”
Fish joined William Sherman and other notables in bidding Grant bon voyage at the Philadelphia waterfront. Grant was praised and thanked for his service in war and peace. He was visibly moved. “I feel overcome at the sentiments to which I have listened, and to which I feel altogether inadequate to respond,” he said. “I don’t think that the compliments ought all be paid to me or any one man in either of the positions which I was called upon to fill. That which I accomplished—which I was able to accomplish—I owe to the assistance of able lieutenants.… I believe some of these lieutenants could have filled my place, maybe better than I did.” From the large crowd came shouts of “No!” Grant turned to Sherman. “I believe that my friend Sherman could have taken my place as a soldier.” Cheers from the crowd for Sherman and Grant both. “And I believe, finally, that if our country ever comes into trial again, young men will spring up equal to the occasion, and if one fails, there will be another to take his place.” Tremendous cheers and much waving of handkerchiefs.
He thought the departure from America would liberate him from making speeches, which had grown easier over time yet never comfortable. But he discovered that his words were in greater demand in Europe than they had been at home. His very person was in greater demand. “What was my surprise to find nearly all shipping in port decorated to the last flag,” he wrote of his landing at Liverpool. “And from the mainmast of each ship the flag of the Union was most conspicuous. The docks were lined with as many of the population as could find standing room, and the streets to the hotel where it was understood my party would stop were packed.” Liverpool hosted a lavish lunch for the American hero; the mayors of other English cities insisted he write them into his schedule. A special train with the finest Pullman cars was placed at his disposal. It carried him first to London, where a round of receptions and dinners dizzied him and delighted Julia. They were guests of the current duke of Wellington, the heir of the Iron Duke of Waterloo. William Gladstone, the former (and future) prime minister, paid call at a soiree hosted by the American minister (and former attorney general), Edwards Pierrepont. “I doubt whether London has ever seen a private house so elaborately or so tastefully decorated,” Grant said of the minister’s residence. Grant thanked the hosts and guests and briefly asserted the necessity and virtue of Anglo-American friendship.
The Grants met Queen Victoria and Prince Albert at Windsor Castle. British royals had never encountered a former president—no former president had ever taken such a tour—and no one knew the protocol. Pierrepont suggested as model a previous visit by Louis Napoleon, the erstwhile emperor of France. Louis, like Grant, had been elected. The keeper of the queen’s dignity was skeptical. “Once an emperor, always an emperor,” he said. Pierrepont rejoined, “Once a president, always a president.” The protocol chief pondered, then yielded. Grant was introduced as “President Grant.”
The cheering rarely stopped. “He has been the recipient here of popular ovations like those which you witnessed at the close of the war,” Adam Badeau, now consul in London, wrote Elihu Washburne, who had survived his illness to become American minister in Paris. “In Liverpool and Manchester the demonstrations were most enthusiastic and en route to London the train was stopped again for mayors to present addresses etc. When he enters a theater the play stops, and the people rise and cheer. Here in London he takes precedence in society of ambassadors and dukes; the ministers all called on him first, and the Prince of Wales came into his box at the Oaks to make his acquaintance.”
Grant himself was struck by the magnitude and what he took to be the meaning of the enthusiasm. “My reception has been remarkable in two respects,” he wrote Hamilton Fish. “First, by invitations from all authorities connected with the government from the Queen down to the mayors and city councils of almost every city in the United Kingdom; and second, by the hearty responses of the citizens of all the cities I have visited, or at which trains upon which I have been traveling have stopped even for a few minutes. It has been very much as it was in the United States in ’65, directly after the war. I take this as indicative of a present very good feeling towards the United States.” In some cases the good feeling seemed to cloak a guilty conscience. “Many persons say to me quietly that they personally were our good friends in the day of our country’s trial, but they witness now many who were the reverse then that outdo their neighbors in respect and kindness of feeling for us now.”
At every event Grant was called upon to speak. He tried to hide behind his reputation as the American sphinx, the man of deeds rather than words. His success varied. “Yesterday and the day before I received no less than six addresses from corporations, merchant exchange, working men etc., to all of which I had to reply, without the slightest idea beforehand what I was to hear or what I should say,” he wrote his son Buck. “It being very well understood that I am no speaker makes the task much easier than it otherwise would be, but even as it is I would rather be kicked—in a friendly way—than to make these replies.”
He mixed philosophy with politics in his remarks, which were always heartfelt. “My reception has been far beyond anything that I could have expected to have been accorded to me,” he told a throng in Liverpool. “A soldier must die, and when a president’s term of office expires he is but a dead soldier. But I have received an attention and a reception that would have done honor to any living person.” Acknowledging the cooperative spirit that had informed the Treaty of Washington, he declared that Americans and Britons shared a great deal. “We are of one kindred, one blood, one language, and one civilization.” Americans were the younger people, Britons the older and more experienced, but each could learn from the other.
A league of workingmen saluted him for the victory he had won for free labor. “There is no reception that I have met which I am prouder of than this one,” he responded. “Whatever there is of greatness in the
United States, or indeed in any other country, is due to the labor performed, and to the laborer who is the author of all greatness and wealth.” He diverged from Republican party orthodoxy in embracing the free-trade principles of his hosts. “There is one subject that has been referred to here that I don’t know that I should refer to,” he told a Birmingham audience, “and that is the great advantage that would accrue to the United States if free trade could only be established.” He remarked that the British had protected their manufactures in the early stages of the industrialization process but had dropped the protection when their industries matured. The United States had come later to industrialization than Britain but had now reached the stage where if it similarly dropped protection it would emerge as “one of the greatest free trading nations on the face of the earth.” What this would mean for Anglo-American trade competition Grant didn’t say; he contented himself with a joint prediction: “When we both get to be free traders I think it is probable all other nations had better stand aside and not contend with us at all.”
His party crossed the English Channel. A tour of the European continent had the singular merit of releasing him from the obligation to speak. He and the crowds that greeted him didn’t share a language; they were content for him to nod his thanks at their coming out. Julia liked Paris more than he did. “We have now been in Paris for nearly four weeks,” he wrote Adolph Borie in November. “Mrs. Grant is quite well acquainted with the places we hear most of: Worth’s, Bon Marché, Louvre”—three fashionable clothing stores. “It is a beautiful city, but I am quite ready to leave.” Autumn rains dampened the travel but not Grant’s outlook. “The weather in Paris was most atrocious,” he declared after the party had moved on. “But I got to see most of the people. My opinion of their capacity for self-government has materially changed since seeing for myself. Before coming here I did not believe the French people capable of self-government. Now I believe them perfectly capable, and they will be satisfied with nothing less.”
They headed south and east across Italy and the Mediterranean to the Middle East. The khedive of Egypt put them up in a palace in Alexandria. Grant was appreciative but not impressed. “All the romance given to Oriental splendor in novels and guide books is dissipated by witnessing the real thing,” he wrote Buck. “Innate ugliness, slovenliness, filth and indolence witnessed here is only equaled, in my experience, by seeing the lowest class of Digger Indians found on the Pacific Coast.” Yet Egypt’s history, in contrast to its present, was most alluring. “I have seen more in Egypt to interest me than in all my other travels,” he wrote Fred from a steamer in the Nile above Thebes. The temples along the river were magnificent, built by an unusual but remarkable society. “The ancient Egyptian was a cultivated man, but governed soul and body by a ruler. Without a thorough command of all the strength, muscle and mind of the inhabitants such structures could never have been built. Without talent, learning and training the inscriptions could not have been made. And without mechanical teaching the large blocks of granite and sandstone could never have been taken from the quarries to their present resting place nor dressed as they are.”
Winter beat them to the Holy Land. “Our visit to Jerusalem was a very unpleasant one,” he wrote Adam Badeau. “The roads are bad and it rained, blew and snowed all the time. We left snow six inches deep in Jerusalem.” They reached Constantinople at a bad time for the Ottomans, who were at war with the Russians. “The Russian army was but eight miles outside and the road entirely open from the city to the Russian camp.” Grant wanted to observe the czar’s military. “But having received the hospitalities of the Turkish officials, I doubted the propriety of such a visit and therefore abstained.” The Turkish sultan showed him the royal stables; Grant admired the purebred Arabians. The sultan made him a gift of one. “These horses, I am told, have their pedigrees kept for one or two hundred years back, and are of the purest blood,” Grant wrote a friend. “It may be of some value to breeders in the United States to get some of this blood.” He arranged for his new horse to be transported to America ahead of his own return.
The Greeks were on the right track. “They seem to me to be a very energetic and advancing people,” he wrote from Athens. The Greek capital was a showplace of energy and good government. “The houses are substantial and present a fine architectural appearance; the people, high and low, are well and comfortably clad and everything indicates prosperity. I am inclined to think that if they could regain their former territory, or a good part of it, with the addition of the Greek population this would give them they would become a very respectable nation.”
But they would be working against the grain of the region. “My impression of peoples are that in the East they have a form of government and a civilization that will always repress progress and development. Syria and Asia Minor are as rich of soil as the great northwest in our own country, and are blessed with a climate far more suitable to production. The people would be industrious if they had encouragement, but they are treated as slaves, and all they produce is taken from them for the benefit of the governing classes and to maintain them in a luxurious and licentious life. Women are degraded even beneath a slave. They have no more rights than a brute. In fact, the donkey is their superior in privileges.”
Looping back west and then north, the travelers toured Italy before crossing the Alps to Germany. The New York Herald had sent John Russell Young to report on Grant’s journey; he accompanied Grant to a Berlin interview with Otto von Bismarck at the chancellor’s residence. “The General saunters in a kind of nonchalant way into the courtyard,” Young related. “The sentinels eye him for just an instant, perhaps curiously, and then quickly present arms. Somehow or other these grim soldiers recognize at once, as the salute is returned, that it comes from a man who is himself a soldier. His visit had been expected, it is true, but it was supposed that an Ex-President of the United States would have come thundering in a coach and six accompanied by outriders, and not quietly on foot. The General throws away a half-smoked cigar, then brings up his hand to his hat, acknowledging the military courtesy, and advances in the most quiet way to the door.”
Bismarck met him at the head of a marble hall. He extended his hand. “Glad to welcome General Grant to Germany,” he said in slow but precise English. Grant answered that he had looked forward to this meeting. Bismarck expressed surprise that Grant seemed so young, but comparing ages they discovered that only eleven years separated them. “That shows the value of a military life,” Bismarck said. “You have the frame of a young man, while I feel like an old one.”
They took seats in the library of the chancellor’s palace. Bismarck inquired about General Sheridan, whom he had encountered when Sheridan traveled to Europe to observe the Franco-Prussian War. “Sheridan seemed to be a man of great ability,” Bismarck observed. Grant nodded. “Yes,” he said, “I regard Sheridan as not only one of the great soldiers of our war, but one of the great soldiers of the world—as a man who is fit for the highest commands. No better general ever lived than Sheridan.”
Bismarck apologized for the absence of Emperor Wilhelm, who was nursing wounds from an attempted assassination just weeks earlier. Grant conveyed his good wishes for the emperor’s recovery. Wilhelm thanked him and said, “It is so strange, so strange and so sad. Here is an old man, one of the kindest old gentlemen in the world, and yet they must try and shoot him!…I should have supposed that the Emperor could have walked alone all over the empire without harm, and yet they must try and shoot him.”
Grant agreed that it was a terrible turn of events. The same thing had happened to Lincoln, he said. A man of the kindest and gentlest nature had been killed by a vengeful assassin.
Bismarck said the emperor had spoken of taking Grant to see the Prussian army; his wounds prevented his doing so. The crown prince would stand in. Grant accepted the invitation but with a modest smile said that his military days were over. And he hoped his country’s military days were over, too.
“Yo
u are so happily placed in America that you need fear no wars,” Bismarck replied. “What always seemed so sad to me about your last great war was that you were fighting your own people. That is always so terrible in wars, so very hard.”
“But it had to be done,” Grant said.
“Yes, you had to save the Union just as we had to save Germany.”
“Not only save the Union but destroy slavery.”
“I suppose, however, the Union was the real sentiment, the dominant sentiment.”
“In the beginning, yes. But as soon as slavery fired upon the flag it was felt, 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.”
“I suppose if you had had a large army at the beginning of the war it would have ended in a much shorter time.”
“We might have had no war at all. But we cannot tell. Our war had many strange features; there were many things which seemed odd enough at the time but which now seem providential. If we had had a large regular army, as it was then constituted, it might have gone with the South. In fact, the Southern feeling in the army among high officers was so strong that when the war broke out the army dissolved. We had no army; then we had to organize one. A great commander like Sherman or Sheridan even then might have organized and put down the rebellion in six months or a year, or at the farthest two years. But that would have saved slavery, perhaps, and slavery meant the germs of a new rebellion. There had to be an end to slavery.”
“It was a long war, and a great work well done. I suppose it means a long peace.”
“I believe so.”
Grant had left America in part to give Hayes the opportunity to establish his own presidency. “I propose to stay away till after the exciting scenes that will surround the test of Mr. Hayes’s policy, for the reason that if I were at home I would be charged with having a hand in every kind of political maneuvering,” he told William Copeland, a colleague of John Young’s at the New York Herald. But he couldn’t avoid all comment on American affairs, even from a distance. The death of John Motley, a protégé of Charles Sumner’s, revived talk of the dispute between Grant and Sumner, with certain of Sumner’s surviving friends suggesting that Grant’s removal of Motley from the post of minister to Britain somehow contributed to his death these several years later. Copeland invited Grant to defend himself. He did so, saying more about Sumner than he had said while in office or perhaps than he now intended. The Herald of course printed Grant’s remarks, prompting the Sumnerites in America to recount their champion’s side of the old story in greater detail than ever. The transatlantic rehashing did little credit to Grant, Sumner or anyone else, but it did sell papers, which had been the Herald’s point all along.