Grant: A Novel

by Max Byrd

“Is thirty-three ballots the record?”

  “In 1801,” Cadwallader said, with the air of a man remembering a bad taste, “the House of Representatives went through thirty-six ballots for President. Finally elected Jefferson over Burr.”

  “You were there.”

  Cadwallader grinned. “I would have voted for Burr. Better copy.”

  On the thirty-fourth ballot, the governor of Wisconsin stood to announce that sixteen of its twenty votes were now to be cast for Garfield. The Hall went silent. Garfield himself instantly stood and waved his rolled-up tally sheet at the podium. “I challenge that vote! The announcement contains votes for me. No man has a right, without the consent of the person named, to vote for someone in this convention. Such consent I have not given!”

  Yet even before the last sentence the chairman was hammering his gavel, drowning out Garfield’s voice. The speaker was out of order, not recognized by the chair. Garfield sat down abruptly.

  Trist made his way across the floor toward the Ohio delegation. Garfield was sitting rigidly, hands on knees, but behind him the governor was passing a telegram from delegate to delegate. Sherman had wired new instructions from Washington—if defeat of Grant were possible, he released Ohio from himself and appealed for Garfield as a compromise. Trist knelt beside Garfield while the Hall grew noisier and noisier and the thirty-fifth ballot began.

  “Senator,” he said, “there’s been at least one vote for you on every ballot—why suddenly object?” Garfield’s reply might have been Greek or Latin, because not a word was audible over the sudden roar from Indiana, which announced through a megaphone that all twenty-seven of its votes went for him.

  At the center of the Hall, Roscoe Conkling could be seen standing, surrounded by clamoring delegates. Trist recognized a senator from Nevada, somebody from Illinois, Virginia. Anybody would guess what they were asking: Would Conkling throw New York behind Blaine just to stop Garfield? But Conkling’s cold, defiant profile made the question pointless.

  “New York casts its votes exactly as before,” Conkling informed the chairman.

  Now Garfield pushed his way to the governor. “Cast my vote for Sherman,” he said, and looked around to be sure Trist was listening. “Do not desert Sherman.” The governor shoved the telegram into Garfield’s hands and clambered up on a chair. “Ohio casts all forty-three votes,” he cried, “for James A. Garfield!”

  Even in the uproar that followed, Garfield kept an expressionless face. He motioned Trist closer. “I wish you would say this is no act of mine,” he said. “I wish you would say I’ve done everything possible for Sherman.”

  On the thirty-sixth and final ballot Garfield received 399 votes and the nomination. Grant received 306. At the reporters’ table Cadwallader leaned toward Trist. “You know the headline now?”

  “ ‘Garfield Wins.’ ”

  Cadwallader shook his head, and for an instant all that Trist could see was a strange, disconnected look on his face, weary as Don Cameron’s, impossible to read. “ ‘Grant Loses,’ ” Cadwallader said.

  EXTRACTS FROM A REPORTER’S NOTEBOOK 1883–1884

  You have asked me to write you confidentially. I will now say what I have never breathed. Grant is a drunkard. His wife has been with him for months only to use her influence in keeping him sober. He tries to let liquor alone but he cannot resist the temptation always. When he came to Memphis he left his wife at La Grange & for several days after getting here was beastly drunk, utterly incapable of doing anything. Quimby and I took him in charge, watching him day & night & keeping liquor away from him & we telegraphed to his wife and brought her on to take care of him.

  —BRIG. GEN. C. S. HAMILTON

  Feb. 11, 1863

  The soldiers observe him coming and rising to their feet gather on each side of the way to see him pass—they do not salute him, they only watch him with a certain sort of familiar reverence. His abstract air is not so great while he thus moves along as to prevent his seeing everything without apparently looking at it. A plain blue suit, without scarf, sword or trappings of any sort, save the double-starred shoulder straps … a square-cut face whose lines and contour indicate extreme endurance and determination, complete the external appearance of this small man, as one sees him passing along, turning and chewing restlessly the end of his unlighted cigar.

  NEW YORK TIMES,

  June 21, 1863

  General Grant seemed the most bashful man I ever encountered. When I came in, the room was wreathed in heavy cigar smoke and the table where he was writing was stacked high with military papers. He got up in a hurry, tried to shove half a dozen chairs at once forward for me, took his cigar out of his mouth and his hat off his head and then replaced them both without knowing that he was doing it and asked what he could do for me, ma’am.

  —MRS. MARY LIVERMORE

  nurse, Vicksburg, July 4, 1863

  Grant made what looked like a snap judgment one day on some supply orders. The quartermaster pointed out that this would cost a good deal of money and asked whether Grant was sure he was right.

  “No, I am not,” Grant replied, “but in war anything is better than indecision. We must decide. If I am wrong we shall soon find it out and can do the other thing. But not to decide wastes both time and money and may ruin everything.”

  —COLONEL JAMES F. RUSLING

  Nashville

  I met Grant in Willard’s Hotel. Obviously the man was no gentleman; he had no gait, no station, no manner. He was smoking a cigar and he had rather the look of a man who did, or once did, take a little too much to drink. He was an ordinary, scrubby looking man with a slightly seedy look as if he was out of office on half pay. Later in the week I saw Lincoln in his office and found him no better. Such a shapeless mass of writhing ugliness as slouched about the President’s chair you never saw or imagined. Grant and Lincoln get on very well.

  —RICHARD HENRY DANA, JR.

  Once he sat on the ground writing a dispatch in a fort just captured from the enemy. A shell burst immediately over him, but his hand never shook and he kept on writing. “Ulysses don’t scare worth a damn,” said a soldier nearby.

  —ADAM BADEAU

  military aide

  While he was passing a spot near the roadside where there were a number of wounded, one of them who was lying close to the roadside, seemed to attract his special attention. The man’s face was beardless; he was evidently young; his countenance was strikingly handsome. The blood was flowing from a wound in his breast, the froth about his mouth was tinged with red, and his wandering, staring eyes gave unmistakable evidence of approaching death. Just then a young staff-officer dashed by at full gallop, and as his horse’s hoofs struck a puddle in the road, a mass of black mud was splashed in the wounded man’s face. The general, whose eyes were at that moment turned upon the youth, was visibly affected. He reined in his horse, and seeing from a motion he made that he was intending to dismount to bestow some care upon the young man, I sprang from my horse, ran to the side of the soldier, wiped his face with my handkerchief, spoke to him, and examined his wound; but in a few minutes the unmistakable death-rattle was heard, and I found that he had breathed his last. I said to the general, who was watching the scene intently, “The poor fellow is dead,” remounted my horse, and the party rode on. The chief had turned round twice to look after the officer who had splashed the mud and who had passed rapidly on, as if he wished to take him to task for his carelessness. There was a painfully sad look upon the general’s face, and he did not speak for some time.

  —COLONEL HORACE PORTER

  Wilderness campaign

  Grant is certainly a very extraordinary man. He does not look it and might well pass for a dumpy and slouchy little subaltern, very fond of smoking. They say his mouth shows character. It may be, but it is so covered with beard that no one can vouch for it. He sits a horse well, but in walking he leans forward and toddles. Such being his appearance, however, I do not think that any intelligent person could watch him, even from
such a distance as mine, without concluding that he is a remarkable man. He handles those around him so quietly and well, he is cool and quiet, he is a man of the most exquisite judgment and tact.

  —CAPTAIN CHARLES FRANCIS ADAMS

  to his brother Henry Adams

  On the subject of assassination, Bismarck expressed indignation at those who had caused Lincoln’s death. “All you can do with such people,” said the General quietly, “is kill them.” “Precisely so,” answered the prince.

  —JOHN RUSSELL YOUNG

  Around the World with Grant

  CHAPTER ONE

  THE SECRET LIFE OF U. S. GRANT

  by Sylvanus Cadwallader

  CHAPTER FIVE

  BACK IN THE EARLY DAYS OF THE WAR, FEBRUARY 1862 IN fact, when Grant was laying siege to Fort Donelson, Tennessee, it happened by an odd coincidence that the commander of the Confederate troops inside the fort was an old, old friend, Simon Bolivar Buckner. Buckner had been at West Point with Grant, one year behind, and fought with him in Mexico at the battle of Churubusco. He was an unflamboyant but practical-minded general, competent enough to see that at Donelson he was completely surrounded and cut off from help. So on February 16, after three days of miserable, go-nowhere fighting, Buckner sent over a reasonably cordial letter, considering the circumstances, full of fine Southern rhetorical flourishes and asking what might be his old comrade’s terms for armistice.

  Grant rubbed his jaw and thought about it for awhile, and then rode off to get the advice of the elderly gent who was his second in command—also (as it happened) the former commandant of West Point when both Grant and Buckner were students—who instantly flung the letter down on the ground and growled, “No terms for any damned Rebels!” Which sentiment Grant revised somewhat in one of the most beautifully concise little communications any soldier since Julius Caesar has ever written:

  Yours of this date proposing Armistice and appointment of Commissioners to settle terms of capitulation is just received. No terms except unconditional and immediate surrender can be accepted. I propose to move immediately upon your works.

  Your obt. svt.

  U. S. Grant

  Brig. Gen.

  Buckner (no literary critic) grumbled that this was harsh to an old classmate and friend. Grant made no comment. But after he received his prisoners and signed all the military forms, he took Buckner quietly aside and pulled out his wallet and asked if Buckner needed any money to see him home. Nobody but Buckner observed the gesture. Nobody but Buckner would have understood.

  Fact was, the last time the two had met was just about eight years earlier, when Grant was not a victorious general, not a general at all, not even a soldier. In midsummer 1854, having drunk himself right out of the army in California, Grant had stepped off the Panama steamer in New York City absolutely penniless. He wanted to check into a hotel and write his father for money, but the hotel clerk, sizing up his man, said cash in advance was required. Grant wandered out into the streets, hopeless, and somewhere along Broadway, at an army recruiting office, spotted his old friend Buckner, who (sizing him up as well) said he wouldn’t give him cash (which would likely be spent on drink), but he would guarantee his hotel bill and all his meals; and gratefully, humbly, soberly, Grant sat down to wait for a letter from home.

  Not coincidence at Donelson, I guess, as much as Greek tragedy reversal. Or just old red Mars giggling and laughing up his sleeve.

  Jesse Grant hadn’t giggled much when he got his son’s letter. First thing he did, as if Ulysses were a schoolboy in trouble with his teacher, was to write the Secretary of War and ask if the army couldn’t overlook the lad’s hasty resignation. Grant, he wrote, hadn’t really known what he was doing. The Secretary wrote right back—more Greek reversal—resignation already accepted, matter closed, Yours truly, Jefferson Davis, Sec. of War.

  There never was any question, evidently, of Grant’s going back to the tannery. Jesse was too humiliated by having a disgraced down-and-out son around, and Grant still clung to his youthful vow never to work at curing hides again. But Julia owned outright, in her name, some sixty acres of hilly wooded land near her father’s house in St. Louis, and these Grant eventually decided he would turn into a farm.

  Colonel Dent was not much happier than Jesse Grant about his son-in-law’s failure. Still, Julia was his favorite daughter. The old man advanced the couple the money to buy seeds and tools, and rocked on his porch and watched.

  For the first few months Grant set to work like a man possessed. Cleared fields, sold cordwood in St. Louis, started to build a two-story log cabin for Julia and the two little boys (he named it “Hardscrabble” in a dig at Colonel Dent’s pretensions). But as anybody at all could have predicted, nothing prospered.

  He was too easy on the slaves, for one thing—they belonged to Julia and were supposed to work in the fields, but Grant could never bring himself to drive them hard. Neighbors shook their heads when he paid free Negroes for extra labor (overpaid them, by local standards) and talked about setting his own people free as soon as he was able.

  Not a popular position in Missouri in the late fifties. Colonel Dent was far from the only pro-slavery man in the state. Just up the way in the Kansas Territory a crazed abolitionist named John Brown, soon to be heard from again, murdered five slave-holder settlers one day, and instantly hundreds and hundreds of armed Missouri vigilantes swarmed across the border to try and hunt him down—Grant’s kind of loose talk was only bringing a crisis closer (curiously enough, old Jesse Grant had gone to school with John Brown and remembered his playmate fondly).

  Day by day Grant’s debts increased. When the crops came in poor he took to selling his cordwood in town himself. One day General William Harney, who had been a colonel back in the Mexican War, came riding down a St. Louis street in a brand-new gold-trimmed uniform. Harney stopped beside a wagon and looked over at the driver, a shabby man in a faded blue army overcoat.

  Looked again.

  “Why, Grant, what in blazes are you doing here?”

  Grant scraped his muddy boot on the buckboard. “Well, General. I’m hauling wood.”

  Harney took him into a restaurant and bought him a meal.

  Cump Sherman passed through town, likewise out of the army. He had been a banker in San Francisco till the bank went bust, and now he too was stone broke, on his way back to Ohio to work for his father-in-law. “I’m a dead cock in the pit,” he told Grant, and moved on.

  General Edward Beale, who had known Grant back in California, ran into him one day outside the Planters Hotel and asked him to come inside and have supper.

  Grant gestured at his filthy coat and boots and said he wasn’t dressed.

  “Oh, that don’t matter,” Beale said, taking his arm, “not in the least.”

  But it mattered to others. The officers out at Jefferson Barracks took to looking the other way when Grant came by with his wood. Colonel Dent’s prosperous friends and neighbors would cross the street rather than speak to him. Jesse Grant sent a few stingy checks, but the farm kept gobbling everything up. Two days before Christmas 1858, Grant walked into a St. Louis pawnshop and handed over his gold hunting watch and chain so he could buy a few presents for Julia and the babies (three of them now, a fourth on the way). His health began to fail—a boyhood asthma came back, along with the shaking ague, courtesy of Panama—and the neighbors started to whisper that Captain Grant was taking to drink again.

  In the fall of that same year he gave up on Hardscrabble and moved the family into a rented house in the poor section of the city for twenty-five dollars a month. Colonel Dent made one last effort and persuaded a friend named Harry Boggs to set his son-in-law up as a real estate salesman and rent collector. But Grant was too softhearted to press anybody with a hard-luck story for rent, and too shy and diffident ever to sell a house.

  Worse, he slept late many days, out of bad health or just plain temperament (even in the war Grant liked his sleep). Sometimes he would go up the street and wa
ste time chatting with another merchant, William Moffett, who had a red-haired brother-in-law, steamboat pilot, liked to sleep late too. One afternoon the brother-in-law sat down at Moffett’s piano and made up a song about himself:

  Samuel Clemens! The gray dawn is breaking,

  The cow from the back gate her exit is making,—

  The howl of the housemaid is heard in the hall;

  What, Samuel Clemens? Slumbering still!

  Mark Twain says that this was the first time they ever met; Grant just shakes his head and says he don’t remember.

  In any case, Boggs had had enough. He fired Grant and turned him out of the office. For a few weeks hope fluttered—Grant applied for the job of County Engineer and thought that as a graduate of West Point, with a degree in engineering, he stood a good chance. But slavery politics entered into every part of government now, especially in Missouri. The board of appointments was anti-slavery. The son-in-law of Colonel Dent was presumed to share the old man’s pro-slavery politics. The job went to somebody else.

  Grant pulled his hat down lower over his eyes and sat morose and listless in his rented room. Maybe, as rumor said, he opened a bottle or two when he could. People who knew him then remember he wandered downtown sometimes from office to office, just asking about jobs, looking haunted, shabbier than ever. In December 1859 they hanged his father’s old boyhood friend John Brown, who went to the gallows saying, “The crimes of this guilty land will never be purged away but with blood.” Grant was too down and broke almost to notice. He got a month’s worth of work as a customs house clerk, but the superintendent died and the politicians swept him out again.

  By February 1860, two years exactly before Fort Donelson, he was living on borrowed money, from those few friends of Julia’s who would still take a little pity on the family. He had no job, no prospects, not even—for the first time in his life—a horse. Jesse Grant, fuming and disappointed and sitting on his tannery wealth, hadn’t spoken to his son for months, but Grant had nowhere else to turn. Halfway through the spring, thirty-eight years old, he swallowed what was left of his pride. He scraped up train fare from somebody and went to Ohio to ask the old man for help. Anything at all, work, charity. Down to the bottom at last. Unconditional surrender. At about which excellent time, the war gods started to chuckle.