Born in North Carolina during the war’s last year, Dixon drew upon real-life figures for his novel but changed some names; Thaddeus Stevens became Austin Stoneman. Otherwise, Dixon denied “taking liberty with any essential historical fact.”
Dixon gave Stoneman a heavy brown wig too small for his enormous forehead and a left leg that “ended in a mere bunch of flesh, resembling more closely an elephant’s hoof than the foot of a man.”
Dixon said that his purpose was to celebrate the way the Klan had gone forth “against overwhelming odds, daring exile, imprisonment, and a felon’s death, and saved the life of a people.” His story, Dixon concluded, “forms one of the most dramatic chapters in the history of the Aryan race.”
In Dixon’s telling, Abraham Lincoln becomes heroic for reasons his Northern admirers might not have recognized. Not only is he saintly in his forgiveness for the conquered South, Lincoln is an outspoken opponent of white men being forced to live among their former slaves.
Dixon’s Lincoln assures Stoneman that there can be no room in America for two distinct races of white and black. “We must assimilate or expel,” the president says, and his choice is to return the former slaves to Africa: “I can conceive of no greater calamity than the assimilation of the Negro into our social and political life as our equal.”
To that, Stoneman responds by “snapping his great jaws together and pursing his lips with contempt” as he says, “Words have no power to express my contempt for such twaddle!”
Dixon’s novel, appearing at a time of heightened racial tensions, sold well throughout the South. But Thaddeus Stevens, as Austin Stoneman, would reach even greater posthumous fame in 1915, when D. W. Griffith, a forty-year-old film director, bought Dixon’s novel, cast white actors in blackface as brutal and menacing Negroes, and called the result The Birth of a Nation.
Ulysses S. Grant
CHAPTER 13
ULYSSES S. GRANT (1869)
JULIA GRANT HAD BEEN RELIEVED when Andrew Johnson escaped conviction in the Senate. She sympathized with those who thought Johnson’s light punishment of the Southern states seemed to condone their rebellion, but she also felt that his trial “savored of persecution” and set “a dangerous precedent.” By that time, Mrs. Grant realized that her husband would very likely be the next president, and she did not want him hamstrung by Congress or defied by a cabinet secretary like Edwin Stanton.
Nor did she share Grant’s ambivalence about the presidency. She had gloried in being the wife of the general-in-chief, alert to any slights or snubs and able to avenge them. It had given her satisfaction to decline somewhat curtly the White House invitation to attend the theater on the night Lincoln was shot.
Now, as the Republicans departed for their nominating convention in Chicago, she asked Grant directly, “Ulys, do you want to be president?” His answer was fatalistic. “No, but I do not see that I have anything to say about it. The convention is about to assemble, and from all I hear, they will nominate me. And I suppose if I am nominated, I will be elected.”
Grant knew the job. With no feigned modesty, he thought he could handle it better than anyone else, and he was sure that Southerners would see him as a fair-minded president who enforced the law without prejudice against them.
Grant also understood that his wife, devoted but willful, required a combination of tact and firmness and might be unnerved by the full glare of a presidential campaign. William Sherman, Grant’s friend and fellow general, tried to warn her:
“Mrs. Grant, you must now be prepared to have your husband’s character thoroughly sifted.”
Julia Grant responded with fervent praise for her husband that made Sherman smile. “Oh, my dear lady,” he said, “it is not what he has done, but what they will say he has done, and they will prove, too, that Grant is a very bad man indeed. The fact is, you will be astonished to find what a bad man you have for a husband.”
• • •
Partisan abuse had been familiar to Grant as he was growing up along the Ohio River. His father, Jesse, was working as a tanner on April 27, 1822, when his first child—Hiram Ulysses Grant—was born in a one-room shack.
But Jesse Grant’s shrewd business sense—which was not to be his son’s inheritance—had led to his becoming a man of substantial property who could move his wife, Hiram, and their next five children to a two-story brick house in Georgetown, Ohio.
A loud and ornery voice at town meetings, Grant would proclaim that he had left Kentucky because he “would not live where there were slaves and would not own them.” That led to his being reviled by neighbors who depended on slave labor for their lucrative tobacco trade.
Addicted to reading, Jesse Grant consumed the local newspapers and the books that came his way. He regretted his own lack of formal education, and he was determined to avoid that fate for his children.
Since there was no public school, Grant paid for Hiram at subscription schools. Between terms, he put the boy to work on the family farm, where he enjoyed tending horses as much as he detested the tanning business.
His father intended Hiram to study at West Point, where he could receive a free education as an engineer, but his contentious views had alienated the local congressman. Rather than approach him, Jesse Grant wrote to Ohio senator Thomas Morris and got the appointment.
Young Grant had never considered defying his father, but military life held no attraction. Getting ready to leave for New York, he learned that Congress was debating whether to abolish West Point and read the papers eagerly, hoping he would be spared enrolling.
Registration day arrived, however, and a clerk at the academy entered Hiram’s name as “Ulysses S”—the “S” for Simpson, his mother’s side of the family. The new cadet adopted the error for life.
He was determined not to stay in the army past his eight-year commitment. The only allure of West Point had been the chance it gave him to see the country’s two great cities—Philadelphia and New York—and perhaps one day to teach mathematics at a college. In a letter to a cousin, Grant showed an early concern for security: “If a man graduates here, he is safe fer life, let him go where he will.”
• • •
During his years at West Point, Grant proved to be a mediocre student but superb on horseback. His good friend James “Pete” Longstreet described him as “the most daring horseman at the Academy.”
Somewhat shy, Grant could not match the swagger of a brawny Georgian like Longstreet. He disdained the popular practice of dueling, and he was seldom moved to swear. Longstreet considered that Grant’s marked reluctance to boast was due to a “girlish modesty,” but he appreciated Grant for a “noble, generous heart, a loveable character, and sense of honor” that Longstreet found “perfect.”
At graduation in 1843, Grant ranked twenty-first in a class of thirty-nine. He was six inches taller than when he entered West Point, but a racking cough had held his weight to the same 117 pounds. Given a family history of consumption, Ulysses considered himself a likely victim one day.
• • •
Posted to the Fourth Infantry in St. Louis, the twenty-one-year-old second lieutenant met Pete Longstreet’s cousin, seventeen-year-old Julia Dent. A merchant’s daughter pampered by four indulgent brothers and a host of male slaves she called her “uncles,” Julia was plain-featured, and a childhood ailment had left her eyes with a slight squint. But she had carried herself like a belle until she became one.
Julia considered Grant dashing in his uniform and encouraged his daily visits to go horseback riding together. When Grant proposed, however, Julia had just turned eighteen and replied that being engaged would be charming, but marriage would have to wait. Then war was declared with Mexico, and Lieutenant Grant set off for duty as a quartermaster.
Serving under fire with both Zachary Taylor and Winfield Scott, Grant could compare their leadership. He preferred Taylor’s style; he said little but wrote out his plans with precision and economy. Scott, as Grant noted later, was not averse to spea
king of himself in the third person, which meant he “could praise himself without the least embarrassment.”
Grant came to believe that a great advantage to his months in Mexico had been his chance to evaluate many freshly commissioned officers from West Point, as well as the older graduates he would meet in battle again as Confederates. He had learned early that those future rebels, particularly Robert E. Lee, did not possess superhuman powers.
As for the Mexican war itself, Grant considered it “one of the most unjust ever waged by a stronger nation against a weaker nation” and chided himself for not having “the moral courage to resign” his commission. America, he concluded, had been motivated solely by a desire for territory, and he blamed the war for contributing to the aggressive style among Southern politicians that would sweep them toward secession.
• • •
By the time General Antonio López de Santa Anna was defeated, the men of Grant’s regiment had suffered heavy losses during their sixteen months of battle, and they entered Mexico City in a somber mood. Brevetted twice for bravery, Grant had won his first promotion by replacing a first lieutenant picked off by a Mexican sniper.
As he waited to be sent home, Grant became curious about Mexico’s national sport and bought a fifty-cent ticket for a bullfight. He was sickened by what he saw. He could not understand, he said, “how human beings could enjoy the suffering of beasts, and often of men.”
On his return to the United States, Grant at last could marry Julia Dent, with Pete Longstreet as his best man. As the bride observed, “I had had four years to prepare for this event.” The newlyweds went off to settle in Sackets Harbor, New York, near a battlefield from the War of 1812.
In the peacetime army, Grant was promoted to captain. He was popular with his men. And yet he was increasingly bored by military routine. Assigned next to Detroit and then—without his wife and their two children—to Humboldt Bay in California, the young father foresaw a bleak and lonely future.
To make extra money, Grant invested in a range of schemes—shipping a hundred tons of ice to San Francisco, raising hogs, running a boardinghouse. But foul weather thwarted some of his plans, and an absconding partner scuttled another. Given his tendency to lend money freely, Grant began to run up debts and to escape from his worries in alcohol.
According to a story circulating at his post, when Grant did not show up for duty one day, he was given the choice of a court-martial or resigning his commission.
• • •
A civilian again, Grant retreated to a farm near St. Louis that Julia had inherited. With no money for livestock, he supported their family by chopping wood and carting it to the city. Julia’s father declined to lend him money but offered to put his slaves to work on Grant’s property. Grant worked side by side with them and also hired free black laborers at better than the going wage.
When Julia’s father gave him a slave outright, Grant set him free. Another slave remembered that Grant “always said that he wanted to give his wife’s slaves their freedom as soon as he could.”
• • •
In the spring of 1858, Grant managed at last to plant a full crop—potatoes, corn, wheat. On July 1, a killing freeze destroyed most of it.
At that low point, hearty Pete Longstreet passed through town. After an awkward reunion, they played a few nostalgic hands of brag, their favorite card game.
As Longstreet was leaving, Grant insisted on pressing a five-dollar gold piece into his hand. He had remembered that he had borrowed the money fifteen years before.
Attempting to refuse, Longstreet protested tactlessly that Grant clearly needed the money more than he did.
“You must take it,” Grant said. “I cannot live with anything in my possession which is not mine.”
Longstreet saw that continuing to refuse would only mortify Grant further. He pocketed the coin, and they shook hands. When they met again, it would be to try to kill each other.
• • •
The harsh demands of scratching out a living culminated in Grant’s collapse from fever and ague. He gave up farming and entered the real estate business with one of his wife’s cousins.
Julia Grant understood her husband’s weakness for alcohol. He sometimes went for months entirely sober, then got drunk on less liquor than most men. A few drinks might set off a binge. With Julia at his side, Grant could usually control the impulse, but rumors about his excesses would persist throughout his life.
As a distraction, Grant turned to politics. Since the Whig Party of his boyhood had disappeared, Grant became a Know Nothing for one week before its secrecy and hostility to foreigners caused him to drop out. As for the antislavery movement, even in the North and West Grant had met few out-and-out abolitionists.
In 1856, Grant voted for the first time in his life. Worried that a Republican victory would mean secession by the South, he cast his ballot for James Buchanan and the Democrats. He reasoned that if they won, the South would have no excuse to rebel and Southern extremists would calm down during the four years before the next presidential election. They were sure to “think before they took the awful leap which they had so vehemently threatened.”
“But,” Grant concluded, “I was mistaken.”
In May 1860, Ulysses Grant, now the father of four, moved his family to Galena, Illinois, to work in his family’s leather goods store for six hundred dollars a year. The younger men on staff showed more respect for his age and experience than Grant felt himself. He was unhappy as a billing clerk and more miserable waiting on customers from behind the counter.
Doomed to live out his days in his father’s shadow, Grant had substituted cheap cigars for the drinking that had threatened to destroy him. Indulging in that small pleasure, he watched as a once-promising future went up in smoke.
• • •
Then rescue came. Within a year, the Confederate governor of South Carolina ordered an attack against the Union camp at Fort Sumter. The town of Galena responded with a town meeting and nominated its one West Point graduate to round up volunteers for the war that was sure to come.
Before the month was out, Grant had borrowed money to buy a spirited horse and was leading volunteers to the station for the train to Springfield. The recruits were togged out in new uniforms. Grant wore his shabby civilian clothes and carried his own carpetbag.
• • •
In August, Grant got a promotion before his first battle. President Lincoln recognized his prior service by commissioning him as a brigadier general of volunteers, made retroactive to May 17, 1861.
For the next three years, Grant suffered the randomness of war. A horse was shot from under him in Missouri when he led an unauthorized raid during the Battle of Belmont in November 1861. The rebels saw the outcome as a Confederate victory, but Grant’s men felt they had performed well, and they respected their commander’s physical courage.
Three months later, Grant won a national reputation during a major Union victory at Fort Donelson, Tennessee, by sending an ultimatum to the beleaguered enemy: “No terms except immediate and unconditional surrender can be accepted.” A popular joke turned his initials into “Unconditional Surrender” Grant.
Three of the ranking Confederate generals at the fort agreed to surrender, but Nathan Forrest challenged their decision. He had not come out to fight in order to surrender, Forrest said, and after dark he led five hundred of his men to safety.
Grant knew that he had been lucky in his opposition. From observing Gideon Pillow in Mexico, Grant considered him especially inept. When he learned that Pillow, now a Confederate general, had also slipped away on a small boat, Grant said he was happy to see him go. Pillow would be more useful to the North by fighting for the rebels than he would have been as a prisoner of war.
• • •
The following year, Grant learned that he was less surefooted politically than on the battlefield.
By December 1862, he had become frustrated by persistent smuggling and speculation in cotto
n supplies within his command. He understood that President Lincoln wanted to revive trade in captured areas as a way to win back Southern loyalty. But as a result, merchants were swearing allegiance to the Union, then using their profits to keep the Confederate army from collapse.
Drawing on random examples and hearsay, Grant issued a blunt decree:
“The Jews, as a class violating every regulation of trade established by the Treasury Department and also department orders, are hereby expelled from the department within twenty-four hours from the receipt of this order.”
Grant’s General Order No. 11 covered the territory from Cairo, Illinois, south to northern Mississippi and from the Mississippi River to the Tennessee River. Grant warned that any Jews returning to the area would be arrested and jailed, then expelled as prisoners.
Grant did not want to listen to appeals. He forbade the issuing of permits to “these people” to visit headquarters for personal applications.
To underscore his determination, Grant had wired to a subordinate: “Refuse all permits to come south of Jackson for the present. The Israelites especially should be kept out.”
In protesting their banishment, Jews got assistance from an unexpected quarter. Hours after Grant issued his decree, Nathan Forrest swept down on Grant’s rear supply area north of Jackson, Tennessee, cutting telegraph lines and tearing up fifty miles of Mobile & Ohio railroad track.
The attack surprised Grant, and during Forrest’s raid his men outfought the far larger Union forces and left behind twenty-five hundred casualties.
By the time Grant’s telegram could reach Paducah, Kentucky, one of the Jews marked for expulsion had already ridden to Washington, secured an interview with the president, and informed him of Grant’s decree. At once, Lincoln directed General Henry Halleck to rescind it.
After Lincoln Page 25