by H. W. Brands
Grant’s visit led to a contract between the Mexican government and the Mexican Southern company, which the Mexican congress approved in May 1881. Some of the principals in Grant’s firm wanted subsidies from the Mexican government like those the Union Pacific and Central Pacific had received from the American government, and the Mexican government appeared willing to supply them. But Grant, recalling the Crédit Mobilier scandal, rejected the subsidies. Investment monies for the railroad would be better spent, he said, if they came from private sources.
Grant’s hopes for harmony among the Republicans foundered in a fight between the James Blaine and Roscoe Conkling factions of the party. Garfield sided with Blaine, whom he made secretary of state over Grant’s objection. Conkling took offense and resigned from the Senate, hoping to be reelected with a mandate that would reveal his continuing strength. Grant backed Conkling, mostly from gratitude for the support Conkling had shown him at the 1880 convention, and his backing at times took the negative form of criticism of Garfield. At first he muttered under his breath. “I am completely disgusted with Garfield’s course,” he wrote Adam Badeau confidentially. He said he would never again support a dark-horse candidate, a man who slipped to the nomination by stealth and intrigue. Such an approach characterized Garfield’s style of leadership. “Garfield has shown that he is not possessed of the backbone of an angleworm,” Grant told Badeau.
Eventually he aired his complaints to the press. “Garfield is a man without backbone,” he told a reporter from Pittsburgh. “A man of fine ability but lacking stamina. He wants to please everybody and is afraid of the enmity of all the men around him.” Yet Grant refused to join the fray. He and the reporter were riding a train from Chicago to New York; the reporter asked if he was going to meet Conkling or otherwise engage directly in the contest with Garfield. “Oh, no,” Grant replied. “I am out of politics except as a citizen who exercises his right to vote and think as he pleases.”
Grant might subsequently have said more against Garfield had Charles Guiteau, a disappointed office seeker, not shot the president in Washington in July 1881. Grant decried the “dastardly attempt” on Garfield’s life as a “terrible crime.” The injury was not immediately fatal, and doctors predicted that the president would make a full recovery. Grant had doubts. “Of course my hopes are all for a favorable result,” he told a reporter. “After the president rallied from the shock I really believed he might recover. But later news yesterday gave me great anxiety. I have known a great many cases of men shot very much in the same way where the ball was lodged where it could not be found. The men would rally after the shock and then suddenly change for the worse, contrary to the expectations of the patient and physicians and then die in a few hours.”
Grant reflected in this interview on the crime and the criminal. “It was simply the act of a lunatic who was disappointed because he couldn’t get what he wanted. I have seen this fellow Guiteau several times. When I was at the Fifth Avenue Hotel last winter he sent his card up to my room one day as I coming from Chicago. My son”—Fred—“who was then on General Sheridan’s staff, happened to be in my room, and I asked him if he knew this Guiteau. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘He is a sort of lawyer and deadbeat in Chicago. Don’t let him come up. If you do he will bore you to death.’ ” Grant sent word that he would not see Guiteau. But Guiteau persisted, following a waiter up to Grant’s room and thrusting his way in. He said he wanted the job of minister to Austria and needed Grant’s endorsement. Grant refused and finally got him to go away. “The fellow was sharp and a ready talker, and appeared as though he had some education,” Grant observed. “But he was evidently an adventurer, a man I would not trust with anything.”
Grant thought Garfield’s doctors were doing the wrong thing treating the president in Washington at the Executive Mansion. “During the months of August and September the White House is one of the most unhealthy places in the world,” he observed in September. “He should have been taken from there long ago.” Ultimately the doctors agreed and transported the president to the seaside at Long Branch. But the effort was too late, or perhaps it was deficient in other respects, for Garfield took a sudden turn for the worse. In the evening of September 19 he died.
Grant had gone to bed by the time the report reached New York. A Times reporter roused him for a statement. “You will please excuse me from a consideration of this sad news at this time,” Grant replied. “It comes with terrible force, and is unexpected. What can I say? There is nothing—absolutely nothing—to be said under circumstances such as these.” In filing his story, the reporter added, “General Grant was weeping bitterly.” Grant’s eldest son, who happened to be visiting, confirmed his father’s dismay. “Colonel Fred Grant said to the Times’s reporter that though he had seen his father under many trying circumstances he had never before known him to be so terribly affected.”
The country was affected too. Losing Lincoln to an assassin could be accounted a cost of the Civil War; losing Garfield seemed an indictment of democracy. Had politics sunk so low that the disappointed resorted to lethal force? It was a sobering thought.
One consequence of Garfield’s death was the passage of the kind of civil service reform Grant had hectored Congress about before finally giving up. The 1883 Pendleton Act established a permanent Civil Service Commission, similar in spirit and function to the commission Grant had convened, and it made possible the transfer of tens of thousands of federal patronage jobs to a nonpolitical system based on merit.
A second consequence was additional damage to the Republican party. The charitable view of Chester Arthur was that he wasn’t the worst of the spoilsmen, but no one had considered him presidential material at the time of his nomination for vice president, and the fact that he now was president changed few minds. “I can hardly say I expect much from this administration,” Grant wrote Adam Badeau. At voters’ first chance to register opinions on the new leadership in Washington, in the congressional elections of 1882, they delivered a damning verdict. The Democrats gained seventy seats in the House, giving them an overwhelming majority there. “The defeat was expected, but the magnitude of the defeat was a surprise,” Grant remarked. “It was deserved, and it is to be hoped the lesson will be appreciated.” But he wasn’t counting on it.
Fitz John Porter had graduated from West Point two years behind Grant and served alongside him in the war with Mexico. He remained in the army during the 1850s and won command of a division and then a corps of the Army of the Potomac. At the second battle of Bull Run he refused an attack order from John Pope on grounds that the recent arrival of James Longstreet’s Confederate force rendered an attack suicidal and counterproductive. Pope, embarrassed by the Union defeat in the battle, blamed Porter, who was arrested, court-martialed and convicted.
Grant had observed the proceedings from the banks of the Mississippi. By the time he took command of the army the case was forgotten, except by Porter, who spent the decade after the war struggling to have his reputation restored. Grant reviewed the matter while general-in-chief and again as president but saw no reason to reopen the case or overturn the verdict.
Yet Porter persisted, and after Grant returned from his world tour Porter sent him the evidence he had amassed in his favor. Grant examined the material and concluded that Porter indeed had been unjustly convicted. “The reading of the whole of this record has thoroughly convinced me that for these nineteen years I have been doing a gallant and efficient soldier a very great injustice in thought and sometimes in speech,” he wrote President Arthur. “I feel it incumbent upon me now to do whatever lies in my power to remove from him and from his family the stain upon his good name.” He published a detailed article on the Porter case in the North American Review. The article carried the title “An Undeserved Stigma” and included the arguments of the prosecution, which Grant proceeded to dismantle. “A literal obedience to the order of the 27th of August”—the crucial directive—“was a physical impossibility,” Grant declared. Porter
was a good soldier who had been “grossly wronged.”
Grant’s reversal won him the gratitude of Porter and the respect of many who knew the case only by reputation. “The undersigned, once soldiers under your command, desire to express their hearty and grateful thanks for your recent paper in vindication of General Fitz John Porter,” a group of Boston veterans wrote Grant. “They feel that no act, whether of valor or of policy, which has marked your great career should bring you more honor than the moral courage and the spirit of fairness and justice exhibited in this defense of a gallant Union soldier condemned on insufficient or mistaken evidence.” Though Arthur’s attorney general determined that the verdict of the Porter court-martial could not be overturned so long past the fact, the president commuted the remaining part of his sentence, his disability from holding public office.
James Longstreet wrote Grant as well. After the war he and Grant had resumed the acquaintance secession had suspended, and they exchanged notes on various battles and aspects of the war. Longstreet read Grant’s Porter article and sent a letter saying that Porter and, belatedly, Grant were right. “As you state, it was not possible for Porter to attack under the 4:30 order, the failure to do which was alleged to be his high crime,” Longstreet told Grant. Had Porter tried to attack, he would have played directly into Confederate hands. “He would have given us the opportunity that we were so earnestly seeking all of that day, and in the disjointed condition of their army”—the Union army—“on that day, the result might have been more serious than that of the next day”—when the Confederates won in a rout. Longstreet explained that in making that next-day attack, he had exceeded his own orders, reinterpreting them to suit changed circumstances, much as Porter had reinterpreted his orders. But because the Confederate side won, he was accounted self-confident rather than insubordinate. “Soon after this campaign I was promoted and assigned as Senior Lieutenant General of the Confederate Army,” Longstreet said. Such were the fortunes of war.
At 8:15 on the morning of June 29, 1882, the commuter express train of the New Jersey Central pulled out of Long Branch for its seventy-minute run to Jersey City, where the bankers, brokers and merchants aboard would transfer to the Hudson ferry to Manhattan. The business crowd regularly pressed the railroad and its crew to make better time, that they might get to their offices earlier. The train was traveling forty miles per hour as the locomotive approached a newly installed switch at the southern end of a trestle over Parker’s Creek, a tidewater arm of the Shrewsbury River. Witnesses later said that the locomotive and the first six cars of the train got safely past the switch but the final car jumped the track, lurched to the side and dragged several of the cars ahead of it into the creek.
Grant was sitting in the smoker car, third from the locomotive. About forty passengers, all men, were enjoying their cigars and the morning papers. The other cars contained some 150 passengers. Grant’s car and the others came to rest on their sides in the water of the creek, which somewhat cushioned the blow of the crash. Yet water rushed in through the shattered windows of the cars, and the passengers had to clamber out as best they could. Three didn’t make it and drowned in the brackish water. Grant received a cut on his leg but climbed through the window on what was now the skyward side of the smoking car. “He had lost his hat but still had his morning’s cigar between his teeth,” a reporter swift to the scene related. Authorities and the railroad determined that the cause of the accident was improper installation of the new switch; participants and observers agreed that, considering the velocity of the train and the number of passengers, the casualty count—seventy injured beyond the three fatalities—was thankfully light.
85
THE NATION KNEW OF GRANT’S COMMUTES AND OTHER MOVEMENTS not least because the papers regularly published articles under the headline “General Grant’s Movements.” Americans learned that President Arthur hosted Grant and Julia for a state dinner at the White House in January 1883. They read weeks later that he had testified before the Senate on behalf of a treaty reducing tariffs between the United States and Mexico. They followed him on a summer trip to the Pacific Northwest when the Northern Pacific completed the third transcontinental line—after the Union Pacific–Central Pacific and the Southern Pacific—and Grant joined a group of notables for a test of the new road. They winced during the Christmas holidays when he slipped on an icy curb in front of his house on New York’s East Sixty-sixth Street and badly bruised the leg he had injured during the war.
Though he denied interest in a return to public life—“I have washed my hands of politics,” he told an interviewer—a national poll placed him among the frontrunners for the 1884 nomination. He showed especially well among Southern Republicans, who still influenced their party’s nomination process despite having scant luck in elections. Republicans of both races in Dixie recalled how he had come to their aid when the rest of the party was willing to give them up for politically dead. “There is no man on either side who fills the public eye as Grant did in 1868, 1872, and 1880,” a poll respondent wrote from Raleigh. The chief concern of this man and others was whether their hero wanted the nomination. “If Grant was known to be a candidate, there would be but one opinion in this state,” the North Carolina man wrote of his fellow Republicans.
Of Grant’s three sons Buck seemed to have the most promising financial future. He had taken work with a New York law firm with close ties to Wall Street. Professionally he preferred Ulysses Jr. to Buck, and his famous name attracted the attention of potential business associates, among whom Ferdinand Ward cut the most striking figure. Ward was about Buck’s age and as charming as a young man could be. Older men wished to be his father, young women to be his wife. The wishes of one of each came to pass when he married the daughter of an officer of the Marine National Bank. The union seemed a splendid match and gave Ward entrée to the highest echelons of Wall Street influence. Buck Grant had begun to handle some of his father’s finances, as well as money held in trust for other clients; Ward invited him to invest in ventures he knew to be sure winners on the basis of information not widely shared. Buck did so, the ventures paid handsomely and Ward seemed a genius. When Ward proposed that the two open a firm together, Buck considered himself very lucky. Grant & Ward leased offices at 2 Wall Street and commenced an active business. Bradstreet, the rating agency, bestowed its “gilt-edged” seal of approval on the firm; James Fish, the president of Marine Bank, extended an open line of credit.
Buck’s father was proud of the boy, concluding that while the Grant family’s talent for business might have skipped over him, it had landed squarely on Buck. Grant was pleased to become a nonmanaging partner in Grant & Ward, investing his entire liquid capital of $100,000. He refused to countenance dealing in government contracts, as that would seem to be trading on his position as former president, but he otherwise let Ward use his name in developing the business. “I am willing that Mr. Ward should derive what profit he can for the firm that the use of my name and influence may bring,” Grant wrote James Fish, who had become a partner as well.
The firm’s business boomed. The economy as a whole was rebounding from the depression of the 1870s and Grant & Ward benefited from the bounce. Its ledger books showed profits of double and triple digits, which Ward as directing partner put back into the business. His private life seemed a model of moral and ethical regularity; he had no vices and his only excess, if such it could be called, was a driving ambition to emulate the giants of Wall Street. “It is my plan to build up a great firm that shall live after Grant and Ward, its founders, have passed away,” he said.
Grant reveled in the good fortune that had finally blessed his economic endeavors. “We are much better off than ever we were before,” he wrote Nellie. “The family are enjoying as much prosperity as we ought to expect.” His balance with Grant & Ward grew larger each month; he withdrew modest amounts for living expenses but reinvested the remainder, and the compounding interest swelled his balance the more. By the spring of 1
884 he silently congratulated himself on being almost a millionaire.
The first sign that anything was amiss came on a Sunday afternoon in May. Ward paid a visit to the Grant household, where Buck and his wife were living with Grant and Julia. Ward took father and son aside and said that Marine Bank, which handled some of Grant & Ward’s accounts, was suffering short-term liquidity problems. Marine needed an emergency bridge loan.
Buck knew that Grant & Ward had more than $700,000 deposited with Marine. He asked if the bank was good for that amount. Ward said it was, but if word got out that Marine was in trouble, the spillover effect could damage Grant & Ward. Neither Buck nor Grant had any reason to doubt Ward, and when Ward inquired if Grant could raise $150,000 quickly, the general was disposed to try. Ward asked if Grant knew William Vanderbilt; Grant acknowledged that he did. Could he ask the railroad magnate for a loan? Grant supposed he could. Grant drove to Vanderbilt’s house and related the story Ward had told him. Vanderbilt said he cared nothing for Marine Bank and little more for Grant & Ward, but he respected and admired Grant and would give him the money as a personal loan.
Grant handed Vanderbilt’s check to Ward, and briefly all seemed to be well. But Marine Bank’s troubles proved to be deeper than Ward had let on, and two days later the bank was forced to close its doors. Almost immediately Grant & Ward suspended operations too, as it became known that Ward and Marine president James Fish had speculated heavily in real estate and lost. Ward disappeared and Fish refused to come out of his office. The financial community shuddered, fearing a repetition of the panic of 1873. But Jay Gould, by now the acknowledged sage of Wall Street, shrugged his shoulders and said the failed companies weren’t important enough to cause wide worry. The business of the street proceeded almost as usual.