by H. W. Brands
Simon Buckner arrived as Clemens was leaving. Buckner hadn’t seen Grant since the Union capture of Fort Donelson, when he had surrendered the garrison’s fifteen thousand troops to Grant. He laughed with Grant about the old days, reminding him and others present about the time in 1854 when he had loaned Grant fifty dollars. “I have my full share of admiration and esteem for Grant,” he said. “It dates back to our cadet days. He has as many merits and virtues as any man I am acquainted with, but he has one deadly defect. He is an incurable borrower, and when he wants to borrow he knows of only one limit—he wants what you’ve got. When I was poor he borrowed fifty dollars of me; when I was rich he borrowed fifteen thousand men.”
Other soldiers remembered Grant as fondly. Letters from comrades conveyed respect and admiration. “I am older than your Father and of a shorter lived race than he, therefore never dreamed of outliving him,” William Sherman wrote Fred from St. Louis. “Still, if so ordained I wish to be present when he is entombed, and to be a willing witness to the great qualities which made him the conspicuous figure of our eventful epoch. Keep these facts in your memory and act on them when the time comes, but meantime as long as there is life I have hope.” The Grand Army of the Republic made its annual encampment in Maine and sent Grant its “profound sympathy in his continued illness.” He replied with thanks and a farewell. “Tell the boys that they probably will never look into my face again nor hear my voice, but they are engraved on my heart and I love them as my children. What the good Lord has spared me for is more than I can tell, but it is perhaps to finish up my book, which I shall leave to the boys in blue.”
He bade Julia farewell also. She couldn’t talk about his death without breaking down, so he wrote her a letter. “Look after our dear children and direct them in the paths of rectitude,” he said. “It would distress me far more to think that one of them could depart from an honorable, upright and virtuous life than it would to know they were prostrated on a bed of sickness from which they were never to arise alive.” He told her to make the decision as to where he should be buried. West Point would be suitable except that she couldn’t lie beside him. Galena was a possibility. New York City, their current residence and a place where she could visit the grave, appeared the most likely. But the decision was hers. “With these few injunctions,” he concluded, “and the knowledge I have of your love and affections and of the dutiful affections of all our children, I bid you a final farewell until we meet in another, and I trust better, world.”
Through it all he kept working. “I must try to get some soft pencils. I could then write plainer and more rapidly.” He drafted the last chapter. “I have been writing up my views of some of our generals, and of the character of Lincoln and Stanton. I do not place Stanton as high as some people do. Mr. Lincoln cannot be extolled too highly.”
By the middle of July the end was in sight. “Buck has brought up the last of the first volume in print,” he wrote. “In two weeks if they work hard they can have the second volume copied ready to go to the printer. I will then feel that my work is done.” Things went faster than he thought. On July 16 he decided he had made all the additions and corrections he wanted to make. “There is nothing more I should do to it now.” He added, “Therefore I am not likely to be more ready to go than at this moment.”
He took his leave days later. His body was starving from lack of nourishment; his weight fell below one hundred pounds. He couldn’t sleep and grew ever more exhausted. For months he had slept in a chair, the better to clear his throat; now, too weak to sit, he went to bed. He drifted in and out of consciousness; Julia and the children gathered around him. In the predawn hours of July 23 he slipped into a final reverie. His limbs began to grow cold. His breathing grew fainter until, a few minutes past eight, it stopped and didn’t resume.
87
THE COUNTRY HAD BEEN BRACING FOR THE NEWS, BUT NO ONE expected the flood of emotion that followed. In cities and towns all across America, memorials and resolutions were read extolling the accomplishments of the great man. The South joined the North and the West in commemorating his virtues; New Orleans and Richmond matched New York and Chicago in celebrating the life well lived. Condolences came from most countries of Europe and several in Asia and Latin America; London’s Westminster Abbey held a special service in his honor.
The African American community mourned particularly. “In General Grant’s death the colored people of this and all other countries, and the oppressed everywhere, irrespective of complexion, have lost a preeminently true and faithful defender,” a group of black veterans resolved in New York City. Hundreds of black churches prayed for the soul of their departed champion.
People recalled and related stories about Grant. A veteran of the Richmond campaign told of entering the Confederate capital and seeing graffiti scrawled in charcoal on the wall of a church: “Ulysses S. Grant: May he be hung, drawn, and quartered.” Angry Union troops prepared to burn the church. But one of the soldiers discovered a statement riposting the first: “Hung with laurels of victory, drawn in the chariot of peace, and quartered in the White House at Washington.” The church was spared. M. D. Leggett, who had served on Grant’s military staff, remembered his leadership traits. “I heard him say once with a little impatience that he had less concern for an officer who was afraid to face the enemy than for one who hesitated in forming a judgment when he knew all the necessary facts. He said that the most cowardly officer in the command of troops was the one that was afraid of his own judgment.… His confidence in his own judgment seemed to be unbounded. Of all the men I ever met he was the most self-poised and the most self-reliant. It seemed impossible to confuse him or even to annoy him in great emergencies.” His bravery allowed him to focus on the problem at hand. “When under fire Grant never gave an indication that he was thinking of the bullets. He went where his duty took him, regardless of personal considerations. This was just as true of him in everything else. He seemed always to drop himself out of his consciousness in his devotion to the especial work before him.” Leggett acknowledged that Grant was criticized for adhering too long to friends. “It is a trait of every unselfish nature. A selfish, ambitious man will use a friend as long as he can serve his selfishness, and then will throw him aside as he would the rind of a well-squeezed lemon. A man with an honest, unselfish nature cannot be thus, but will remember the friend that stood by him when he needed friends.”
A reporter caught Phil Sheridan on a train. The cavalryman was at a loss for words. “Everything has been said about General Grant that can be said,” he declared. “I would willingly add to it if I could, for everybody knows how I regarded him. He was the greatest soldier in our history.” Oliver Howard told of a moment just after the war when fear of a renewed insurgency gripped the capital. Grant assigned a particular officer to command the troops guarding Washington. “Why, you cannot trust that officer; he is ‘coppery’!” another officer exclaimed, referring to the man’s known Southern connections. Grant looked calmly at the speaker and said, “You must trust him. If you do not have confidence, soon you can trust nobody. Trust him, sir, and he will be true.” The impugned officer performed magnificently. James Longstreet spoke succinctly from Georgia: “He was the truest as well as the bravest man that ever lived.”
For a week the papers filled their columns with the preparations for the funeral. Julia had decided on New York as his resting place. Washington put in a late bid, with advocates of the capital contending that a national hero should be buried on national ground. Samuel Clemens rejoined: “Wherever General Grant’s body lies, that is national ground.”
The final leg of his journey began with a predawn artillery salute on the slopes of Mount McGregor. A thousand people arrived for the outdoor service that sent him on his way to New York. Thousands more lined the track from Mount McGregor to Saratoga and from there to Albany. Bells in each town tolled a dirge as the funeral train, draped in furlongs of black cloth, rolled past. The casket was taken from the train at Alb
any and placed in the state capitol, where a constantly replenished line of mourners with bared and bowed heads filed slowly past. The casket was returned to the train the next day and continued south. The crowds grew thicker along the tracks as the train neared New York. It reached Grand Central Station in the late afternoon. “There was a burst of sunlight and a rainbow spanned the eastern sky,” an onlooker observed. The casket was again removed from the train and this time carried to City Hall. During nineteen hours of public showing, 125,000 people paid their respects to the Union’s savior.
The last several miles, from City Hall to Riverside Park, took half a day to traverse. A million and a half people, the largest crowd in New York’s history, clogged the procession’s route; their black attire, against the black that hung from doors and windows and lampposts, cast a fitting gloom over the city. A hundred thousand pedestrians streamed across the recently finished Brooklyn Bridge; the city’s commuter railroads, ferries and trolleys carried more passengers than ever before. The city’s hotels and restaurants broke all records for business.
Tens of thousands of people marched in the procession. Dozens of active-duty regiments from several states—infantry, cavalry, artillery—tramped, clopped and rumbled along the streets. Grizzled veterans of the Grand Army showed equal fervor if less energy. Winfield Scott Hancock, on a glistening charger, led the procession; Virginia’s Fitzhugh Lee represented the Confederacy. President Grover Cleveland was accompanied by former presidents Rutherford Hayes and Chester Arthur. Cabinet secretaries, Supreme Court justices, senators and representatives likewise paid the federal government’s respects. Mayor William Grace conveyed the regards of the city of New York, while police commissioner Fitz John Porter, fully rehabilitated after Grant’s exoneration of him, oversaw security. Dozens of foreign diplomats bespoke the respect in which the hero was held in their home countries.
Twenty-four black horses pulled the catafalque to the tomb site. As it reached the ridge crest and came in sight of the Hudson, more than a hundred feet below, the guns of several warships in the river boomed a salute. The pallbearers, including William Sheridan, Phil Sherman, Admiral David Porter and Confederate generals Joseph Johnston and Simon Buckner, guided the casket to the cedar box into which it was lowered, pending the construction of the permanent tomb. The drums of the U.S. Marine band rolled while the undertaker screwed on the lid. A wreath of oak leaves was placed on top. Several moments of silence ensued. Then the people of New York were permitted in. They moved quietly through the site for several hours until, at six o’clock, the police closed the doors, with instructions to the thousands still in line that they could return the next day.
They returned the next day and for days and weeks following. Only gradually did their number diminish, till Grant’s resting place became a tourist site the locals mostly left alone. But a dozen years after the funeral the city and country turned out again in force. By 1897 Grant’s legacy was coming into view. His stature as a military hero had never been higher. A few white Southerners still dreamed that secession could have succeeded and slavery been preserved, but most had let the Lost Cause go. Those who nursed a grudge against the bluecoats reserved their special animus for Sherman, who outlived Grant by a half decade without evincing second thoughts about the march to the sea. Students of the military arts rehearsed and analyzed Grant’s campaigns and observed that for all the honor paid Lee for brilliance and daring, it was Grant who had the harder task in their epic struggle. Grant fought in enemy territory against an army that typically stood behind developed defenses; Grant had to win while Lee had merely to avoid losing. Attackers almost always suffer greater casualties than defenders, but Grant’s casualties, as a portion of his army, were lower than Lee’s. His mistakes were few and never decisive. And in the reckoning that overrode all others, he came out on top: he won the war.
Grant’s presidency was evoking mixed reactions. In the years since he had left office, influential groups on both sides of the Mason-Dixon Line had consciously sought reconciliation, which had been Grant’s goal too. But where Grant’s approach to reconciliation was premised on the egalitarian ideals of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, these new reconciliationists—white Southern Democrats and Northern capitalist-minded Republicans—preferred the path of amnesia. The Southern Democrats forgot that secession was about slavery, they recast the Civil War as a difference over states’ rights, and they recalled Reconstruction as a carnival of corruption from which they had at length redeemed the South. The Northern capitalist Republicans lost touch with the antislavery roots of their party, they pushed aside Lincoln in favor of J. P. Morgan and company, and if they didn’t actively embrace the Southern redefinition of the war and its aftermath, they didn’t bother to dispute it. They transmuted the Fourteenth Amendment from a charter of citizenship rights into a guarantor of corporate rights; the Fifteenth Amendment they and their Southern allies-in-amnesia ignored.
To both groups Grant’s presidency posed a problem, for it stood against their revision of recent history. They responded by attacking his presidency and him as president. They emphasized the scandals, neglecting Grant’s role in defeating the Black Friday gold corner and in bringing the whiskey culprits to justice, and conflating the transgressions that occurred under his authority with such extraneous bilkings as Crédit Mobilier and the Tweed Ring. They reiterated the tales of Grant’s drinking without demonstrating a single instance where alcohol impaired his performance of duty. They threw his efforts to enforce the Constitution, especially as it pertained to civil rights in the South, back in his face as evidence of a militaristic mindset.
Yet if Grant’s presidential reputation fared poorly with the elites, it resonated positively with those for whom he had fought. Southern blacks and the Northerners who revered Lincoln honored Grant for striving to uphold the vision of the Great Emancipator. They couldn’t know that nearly a century would pass before the country had another president who took civil rights as seriously as Grant did. American Indians recalled Grant as the president whose peace policy offered a distinct alternative to the aggressive exploitation favored by his predecessors and most of his contemporaries. The Indians, like the African Americans, could not claim lasting success for Grant’s endeavors on their behalf; his struggle for minority rights against majority hostility or indifference was a battle he couldn’t win. But he waged a good and honorable fight.
One thing all Americans could agree on was Grant’s central role in saving the Union. As commanding general in the Civil War he had defeated secession and destroyed slavery, secession’s cause. As president during Reconstruction he had guided the South back into the Union. By the end of his public life the Union was more secure than at any previous time in the history of the nation. And no one had done more to produce that result than he.
It was Grant’s role as unifier that those who gathered in New York in April 1897 came to celebrate. Many present had purchased his book, which sold hundreds of thousands of copies and let Samuel Clemens pay Julia Grant $400,000 while keeping a nice profit for himself. The book impressed critics, who then and later accounted it a historical landmark and a literary gem. Grant’s clarity in depicting his campaigns enabled his Northern admirers to relive their side’s stirring victories; at the same time, his generous tone and the respect he displayed for his Confederate foes allowed Southerners to read it with equal benefit, if perhaps less enthusiasm.
By the time Grant’s tomb was completed, he had become a symbol of national unity around whom Northerners and Southerners both could rally. Veterans of the war took the lead in the procession to his monument that blustery spring day. They were men who had fought beside Grant in the Union armies of the Tennessee and Potomac; they were men who had served with Lee in the Confederate Army of Northern Virginia. Their general officers were nearly all gone, although John Gordon, scarred from battle and crippled by age and recent accident, rode in a carriage. The Union veterans of the Virginia campaign lined up to shake this former en
emy’s hand, with several nonetheless remarking that in their prime they would have shot him. He cheerfully returned the sentiment, and all shared in the comradeship of battles survived. A sturdy Confederate sallied into the Union ranks in worn but mended grays; he boasted that he was proud of his service on behalf of his cause but had come to honor a valiant soldier and a great man. He was met with backslaps and hurrahs. A company of Confederates reproduced the rebel yell; a Union band struck up “Dixie.”
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The author would like to thank the many people who made this book possible. The librarians and archivists at the University of Texas at Austin, the Library of Congress and the other institutions where I conducted research provided indispensable assistance. Bill Thomas, Kristine Puopolo and Stephanie Bowen at Doubleday were insightful and professional from start to finish. Roslyn Schloss did her usual brilliant job of copyediting. My colleagues and students at the University of Texas allowed me to test my thinking on them. Gregory Curtis, Stephen Harrigan and Lawrence Wright offered weekly literary consultation.
SOURCES
The principal sources for the present work are the letters, orders, memoranda, presidential messages and other writings of Ulysses S. Grant. The most comprehensive collection of these materials is The Papers of Ulysses S. Grant, carefully and revealingly edited by John Y. Simon and published in thirty-one volumes by Southern Illinois University Press between 1967 and 2009. The great majority of entries are from Grant’s own hand, but numerous incoming letters and other supporting material are included in the extensive notes. Many of these incoming letters have not been available to previous biographers, and they afford new insight into Grant’s presidency, in particular his campaign against the Ku Klux Klan. In the source references below, letters and other documents written by Grant and taken from this collection are cited by date alone. Collateral materials from this collection (which often appear out of chronological order) are cited in the form Papers of Grant, volume, page.