Grant: A Novel

by Max Byrd

  Cadwallader chuckled to himself. Thirty-six years old and full of conceit and vinegar—what Cadwallader had done was send off his first story to the Times even more critical of Grant than his incarcerated predecessor. The Union troops were in the process of maneuvering from Jackson over toward La Grange, getting in position for the cavalry clash that would ultimately be the Battle of Holly Springs. The stragglers and bummers in some of the regiments were plundering and burning every civilian building they passed, and they needed to be disciplined and punished, and Cadwallader, in the height of his newspaperman’s military wisdom, said so.

  Next day he was passing Grant’s tent on his way to breakfast when the flap shot up with a crack and there was Grant, beckoning him to come in. The General had a mass of newspapers on his table, and without uttering a word he turned through them slowly till he reached the Times. Bylines were rare back then. He pointed at the lead article and said he supposed Cadwallader was the author.

  Cadwallader was.

  The General lit a cigar with a flint-and-steel lighter and blew a puff of gray smoke. “Well,” he said quietly, “it’s factually correct, and steps are being taken to remedy the situation. And if you never write more untruthfully than this, Mr. Cadwallader, you and I won’t have any problems.”

  A great cheer came up from the Chicago street, and then what sounded like two different bands playing two different songs at the same time. Cadwallader stretched out his legs and wiggled his toes.

  The thing about Grant was that he didn’t look the part of a hero. He looked and acted exactly like what he was, a hard luck Western farmer, carrying with him the air of empty fields and dusty roads and the small-town harness shop. For the first two years of the war, in the midst of all those Eastern generals with their tailored uniforms and their polished manners, he was just somebody to ignore.

  Only, by 1863 the little Westerner with the unkempt beard and the quiet voice had somehow or other managed to have two separate Confederate armies surrender to him—at Fort Donelson, at Vicksburg—and forced another into headlong retreat at Chattanooga, and when he took command of all the Union forces in 1864, a collective sigh had seemed to go up from the nation. “The boss has finally arrived,” one private soldier in the Army of the Potomac told Cadwallader, and Cadwallader printed it in the Chicago Times for the whole world to read.

  The other thing about Grant, of course, was that he was a thousand times more complicated than he looked, and that was the mystery of him. Lincoln knew it instinctively. Lincoln knew all about the mystery of character. In the worst days after Shiloh, when that jackass Whitelaw Reid had written his famous article about Grant the bungler and the butcher, the Radical Republicans had sent a Senator over to the President’s Palace to demand that Grant be fired. And Lincoln heard him out, thought it over in silence, then shook his head: “I can’t spare this man: he fights.”

  The one and only time Cadwallader ever saw Grant lose his temper was during the Battle of the Wilderness, May 1864. “Uncle” John Sedgwick’s VI Corps had just been routed in a surprise attack and over five thousand Union casualties were already reported. Grant was sitting on a camp stool, smoking his cigar and receiving dispatches, when one of Sedgwick’s surviving officers came thundering up on his horse. As soon as he spotted Grant the officer started stuttering that the army was in a terrible crisis, Lee was about to cut them off at the Rapidan River, and if he did cut them off all communications with Washington City would be lost for good, and then they would be doomed. And Grant stood up and took the cigar out of his mouth and flung it to the ground.

  “I’m heartily tired of hearing what Lee is going to do,” he said with genuine fury. “Some of you always seem to think he’s suddenly going to turn a double somersault and land in our rear and on both our flanks at the same time. Go on back to your command and try to think what we’re going to do ourselves, instead of what Bobby Lee is going to do!” Later that week he wrote General Halleck the famous letter where he said he proposed to fight it out on this line if it took all summer.

  Rain pattered against the window and ran down the glass in silver bullets. Out on the street the parade sounded as though it was winding up in a hurry. Cadwallader pulled out his watch. Three more hours till the monumental goddam banquet. Plenty of time for a nap.

  There were two reasons the people had elected Grant President twice before.

  One was because in his simplicity and competence U. S. Grant embodied the perfect American allegory, rags-to-riches, log-cabin-to-the-President’s Palace. Every man and boy in the country could see it and identify with it and feel some pride in a free society like that, where you might fail once or twice, but Virtue would be Truly Rewarded in the end.

  And the other reason, of course, was Appomattox. If any image was going to live forever in American memory, right alongside Washington at Valley Forge and Andy Jackson at New Orleans, it was surely the perfect glorious contrast of U. S. Grant and Robert E. Lee, sitting down in Wilmer McLean’s brick house at Appomattox to end the war. Everybody in the world knew the scene. Silver-haired patrician Lee in his handsome clean uniform with his yellow sash and his jeweled sword. Laconic little U. S. Grant in his dirty boots and his mud-spattered old private’s uniform with the three stars sewn like an afterthought on the shoulder. Grant writing out the terms of surrender the way he always wrote, without hesitation or pause, then handing them modestly over to Lee, generous, noble terms, Grant’s own initiative and the first great step toward national reconciliation and forgiveness. It took a hard heart indeed to vote against Appomattox.

  Cadwallader lay down on the bed and pulled the blanket to his chin. He set his mental clock to wake him up one hour later; yawned. There was one more reason, he thought as he drifted off to sleep, why the people had twice elected Grant as President, and might yet do it again. Grant was the country’s last true connection to the martyred Abraham Lincoln. Grant was Lincoln’s friend and Lincoln’s heir. The two of them had walked side by side down the smoking streets of Richmond in 1865, the tall and the short of it, as Lincoln had joked. What Grant really represented, Cadwallader thought, was Atonement and Tribute at once.

  If Grant wanted the Republican nomination, he could probably have it, as the cub reporter said, by spontaneous combustion.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  YOUR FRIEND MARK TWAIN,” SAID WILLIAM TECUMSEH “CUMP” Sherman, and he turned his head to the left and covered his mouth, “is a piece of work!”

  Somebody whooped his name, and Sherman stood up and wagged his cigar and sat down again to a foot-stamping chorus of “Uncle Cump! Uncle Cump!” He leaned over to pour a little more coffee in Grant’s cup. “Twain told me he came up the staircase tonight, into the hall”—Sherman swept his cigar across the spectacularly resplendent banquet room that the Palmer House Hotel claimed was the largest in the world—“found all those women lined up on the stairs to watch us go in. Says, ‘Don’t you think the General ought to come out for female rights tonight? Win some votes?’ There he is now.”

  Grant saw him, three tables away, lanky on his feet, all red hair and red moustaches, glass of water raised in their direction like a gladiator giving a toast. Twain said something to the group at his table and they fell apart in raucous laughter, though you could only tell that from their pantomime, because by now there were five hundred men in the room, and what seemed like five hundred more waiters, and over the noise of the voices and laughter and glasses and silver there was still the orchestra playing every Civil War march ever written. Twain blew a kiss to Sherman, and the table went to pieces.

  “He’s coming over,” Sherman said.

  And indeed he was. Grant studied his menu. They had passed the oyster, turtle soup, and salmon courses, and the waiters were starting to fan out with the roast beef servings, and as far as he could tell, Mark Twain had yet to take a bite.

  “He’s wild as can be,” Sherman said.

  Grant smiled at the thought. He had carried The Innocents Abroad with him on hi
s round-the-world tour, and he enjoyed the idea of Mark Twain running wild anywhere. He looked at Sherman, who was now standing up again and leading the orchestra with both arms. He looked past Sherman, down the head table, where little Phil Sheridan, brand-new father of twins and the fiercest cavalryman since Genghis Khan, had scrambled onto a chair and commenced conducting Sherman. “Wild as can be,” he said, though nobody heard him.

  Twain had stopped at the first row of tables just below the head table—there were six vast rows altogether, Grant had counted them automatically, each one running the length of the room—and he was saying something to Bob Ingersoll, and Ingersoll too was laughing out loud. Grant sipped his coffee and recalled to mind Twain’s first droll words to him that afternoon, when they had all stood together outside to review the parade. Twain had reached out his hand to Grant, but turned his head sideways to Sherman and drawled, “I first met the President back in 1870. I know he remembers me. I was the one who didn’t ask him for a job.”

  “That was ‘Marching Through Georgia,’ ” Sherman said, dropping into his seat.

  Grant nodded. He had never in his life been able to tell one tune from another.

  “And here comes Twain.”

  AT THE REPORTERS’ TABLE IN THE EXTREME BACK OF THE BANQUET hall, next to the kitchen doors, Nicholas Trist leaned forward and tried to see between two blazing chandeliers. In order to accommodate Grant’s banquet the hotel had apparently knocked away one whole wall on the left of the hall to make it even bigger, and installed what seemed like a regimental band and a small village of extra tables and potted palms. From where he sat Trist could just make out the figures of Grant and Sherman at the head table two hundred feet away and raised on a platform. Both were in uniform, like three-fourths of the other men dining, and both were just now standing up to shake hands with a redheaded man about forty, wearing a full-dress evening suit with a cutaway coat.

  “Grant’s meat.” Cadwallader jabbed his fork in the same direction. “Always burnt.” A waiter was depositing slabs of roast beef in front of the two generals. Even from this distance it was evident that Grant’s piece was burned coal black.

  “Grant don’t eat chicken,” Cadwallader added. “Claims he can’t eat anything that ever walked on two legs. Has his roast beef cooked till it’s dry. Won’t touch his meat if he sees a drop of blood.”

  Trist nodded and made a mental note. French readers would be delighted and appalled.

  Cadwallader shaded his eyes against the chandeliers. “They called Grant a ‘butcher’ in the war. Some butcher, can’t stand the sight of blood. That’s Mark Twain the writer up there with him now—he fought in the Confederate Army, but just for two months. You don’t like Grant.”

  Trist looked up in surprise.

  “Right age,” Cadwallader said. “Got that missing arm, got veteran written all over you. I look around, you—and maybe me—are the only two people here not having a fall-down hissy fit about being in the same room with our great General. So which one was it? Spotsylvania? the Wilderness? Cold Harbor?”

  “Cold Harbor.”

  “Hard to forget Cold Harbor.” Cadwallader poured himself more wine. “But Grant was a hero at Vicksburg,” he added in a judicious tone. “Saved the country at Vicksburg.”

  Which was absolutely true, Trist thought as he made his way down to the front of the hall, nobody doubted Vicksburg. What interested him more right now, what would interest any reporter, was Mark Twain standing next to U. S. Grant and chattering away like a long-lost friend. Mark Twain the writer was famous all over Europe for The Innocents Abroad, which made hilarious fun of American ignorance, and The Gilded Age, which made hilarious fun of American greed. The latest book, Tom Sawyer, apparently didn’t make fun of anything, but Trist’s French editor would still be fascinated—an ex-Confederate soldier (where had he fought? get details) and the ex-commanding general of the North: a caption bobbed inevitably to mind: Never the Twain Shall Meet.

  Just as he reached the top of the steps, a scowling muscle-bound man in a tuxedo stepped in front of him and blocked the way: a bodyguard for real. Nobody got near the General tonight, Trist was told, back on down, go to your seat.

  The clatter of dishes and voices was deafening; the orchestra began to tune up again. Trist tried to make himself heard—General Sheridan turned and glared—the bodyguard took Trist’s business card, slipped it into his pocket without looking, and stood right where he was.

  Trist waited an instant longer. He had actually met Grant earlier that day as he passed into Cameron’s suite for what was supposed to be a private conference—met, shaken hands, been dismissed in a minute and a half. Not even his campaign manager, evidently, could force the General to give an interview he didn’t want to give. Trist moved to the right in the hope of catching Grant’s eye. Directly over the head table, amid all the other flags and streamers, flapping in the smoky atmosphere like a ship’s sail, floated a big black-and-white portrait that Trist hadn’t seen from his distant table: U. S. GRANT——MAN OF DESTINY.

  From this angle the man of destiny looked small, tired, bored. The bodyguard took a warning step toward him. Trist moved farther to his right. In a cleared space in front of the guests of honor Brobdingnagian bakers had placed a white frosted cake molded in the shape of the Confederate fortress at Vicksburg—with little cannons, little flags, little sugar soldiers. Mark Twain was just coming down another set of steps, between the cake and a bristling display of regimental shields and flags. When Trist reached him he squinted down at his card with undisguised impatience.

  “I write for two French journals,” Trist told him, bending forward to drown out “Tramp, Tramp, Tramp”—pouring out the flattery like syrup—“my readers would love to hear how a famous writer knows General Grant so well.”

  Twain had small, dark, untrustworthy eyes, and up close a shock of carrot-red hair that was already going gray in patches. He shook his head, looked the other way to greet somebody, and told Trist no press interviews this evening, not even any whiskey—he held up his glass of water—not till after his speech. He studied Trist’s sleeve.

  “Veteran?” He had a slow, soft Missouri drawl.

  “Yes.”

  “Well, come on up and see me tomorrow,” he said, pocketing the card, “after breakfast, suite forty-five, down the hall from Grant.”

  AT TEN O’CLOCK PRECISELY (PALMER HOUSE TIME) CUMP Sherman rose to his feet, put his hands on his hips, and bellowed at crowd-stopping volume:

  “Can you hear me in the middle of the hall?”

  “No!”

  “Then you’ll have to read about it in the papers!”

  There was a printed program of speakers now before each plate—the evening’s star attraction was the long-winded atheist Robert Ingersoll, listed as ninth in order, certain, Trist thought with a sinking heart, to speak for an hour all by himself. Mark Twain, the single Southerner on the program, was listed last.

  Sherman rapped on the table. The orchestra whinnied to a halt. The chandeliers and lights began to dim. Trist turned in his chair and saw that along the back of the room women were now filing in and standing in attentive, respectful knots next to the wall. When he turned forward again everything was deep in shadows, except for one great unwavering light focused on the head table, the first speaker opening his notes, and seated beside him, Grant.

  By the third interminable oration in praise of the General, Trist could hardly sit still. He pushed away from the table and carried a bottle of brandy to the back of the hall, peering in the shadows as he went for a glimpse of Mrs. Cameron. Out training her hounds, sharpening her arrows. She was actually the widower Cameron’s second wife, that much he knew, younger than Cameron by twenty years. Around other men in the hotel she was mildly flirtatious, sensationally attractive; flirtatious, intelligent, unhappy—his last adjective surprised him so much that he put down the brandy bottle and walked a few more feet along the wall. Mark Twain emerged from the darkest alcove, next to the kitchen
. “Look at Grant,” he whispered, pointing, “cast-iron.” And down at the head table Grant’s face was indeed in its famous “silent” state, which Trist had only seen in photographs: utterly blank. The orator, whoever he was, wheeled at exactly that instant and stretched out his arms dramatically toward the General, and Grant merely stared straight ahead, motionless as the room rose and cheered. “Bulletproof,” Twain groaned, and went away.

  At midnight there was a ten-minute intermission. In the lavatory corridor Cadwallader swayed on his feet, drunk, Trist realized, drunk and exhausted. “I like your new personal writer,” he informed Don Cameron, who was shoving his big red-faced way back into the hall, and he gripped Trist’s shoulder and gave the Senator a sweaty grin. “Veteran, well-spoken—you treat him right, you hear?”

  Cameron was a bad politician, a child could see that, Trist thought, as brusque and rude as money and drink could make him; but he was also chairman of Grant’s campaign committee. Even he knew enough to nod back at the little reporter and pry his mouth into a smile.

  “Power of the pen,” Cadwallader told Trist with a smirk. They reclaimed their seats in the banquet hall where the eighth speaker of the night had just gotten to his legs. “Grant needs every kind word in the press that Cameron can buy or borrow.” He sat back heavily, slopped brandy into a water glass. “Book about Grant,” he said, and leaned over confidentially. Applause and laughter were coming from scattered parts of the hall. “My book.” Cadwallader closed his eyes, nodded. “Not for publication.” Leaned back. “Show you sometime.”