Crucible of Command

by William C. Davis

  Lee arrived by train from Baltimore on the morning of May 1 and rushed through a gawking crowd at the station to board a carriage to Georgetown. Then he drove to the White House, arriving about eleven o’clock, and was ushered into the Red Room where he found about twenty other callers waiting, including at least one senator. He sent his card in to the president, and waited while around him a sudden buzz arose when he was recognized. Someone audibly said, “There’s Gen. Lee—wonder what he wants here?” When an aide brought Lee’s card in to him, Grant was meeting with half a dozen congressmen, but he told them, “Gentlemen, you will have to excuse me. I have an engagement with General Lee, who is now waiting outside to keep it, and I wish our interview to be private.” They left grumbling, one senator muttering that “the President sees us in a crowd, and thereby exposes our private business; but when a rebel comes along he is given a private audience.” Another was heard to grouse, “Yes, and we are driven out as if we had no business here, when we are looking after the interests of the country.” And yet another sarcastically observed that “being a rebel is a good card of admission here, it appears.”

  Lee was ushered into the reception room and the two who last met as generals shook hands as presidents. They spoke privately for perhaps half an hour. After some courteous but reserved pleasantries, it became evident to Grant that Lee was not going to volunteer much in ordinary conversation. Speaking “always to the point” as associates noted, Grant told him he wanted to talk about affairs in the South, and especially Virginia and the forthcoming vote on its new constitution. Typically, Lee replied that he preferred not to be understood as speaking for his state or region, but only for himself.3 Grant then asked him a series of direct questions on the matters of interest to him. He asked about sentiment in Virginia, and Lee replied that it was much the same as that expressed in the Rosecrans letter the year before. Virginians accepted the obligations of the reconstruction acts in good faith and wanted good relations between the races and with immigrants. In return they wanted full restoration to the Union and assistance in developing their own internal resources. The new constitution required for readmission would probably be approved; Lee believed that the “best men” in the state would vote for it, but he thought the clauses proscribing and disenfranchising certain classes ought to be voted on separately from the constitution as a whole, so they could be defeated and deleted. Grant agreed entirely and had wanted that from the first, and promised Lee there would be a fair election when the time came. What remained ought to pass handily.

  Lee also referred to the committee of Virginians who came to Washington the previous winter to repudiate their slate of candidates for state office in favor of a conservative Republican ticket endorsed by the state convention, and said he approved of the candidates. In fact, Lee thought there was slight difference between the Republican and Democratic Parties in his state at the moment. Pleased at that, the president said he hoped Virginia would be ready for full restoration of rights soon, and Lee added that he thought all of the former Confederate states could be readmitted quickly so that elected representatives could be sent to Congress. That done, all other outstanding questions should settle themselves. At some point in the discussion, Lee also said he did not think giving black men the vote would be as harmful as many feared.4

  Outside, the speculation began immediately, and continued after Lee left. Some said it was simply a courtesy call, and the two spoke of nothing but the weather, crop prospects, and the new Virginia railroad. Others said Grant talked about the troublesome reconstruction business in Virginia, the new Fifteenth Amendment to the Constitution, and voting rights. Some said Lee frankly condemned some Virginia politicians as corrupt and incompetent. At least one speculated that Grant asked Lee to act as a special envoy to Cuba to investigate affairs there.5 Lee, it was said, spoke “less as a politician than as a leader who possesses the entire confidence of his followers.”6

  That was rather a lot of ground to cover in half an hour. Grant had been disappointed with Lee’s posture three years before, but the answers he got in this discussion seemed much in line with his own views. Lee, for his part, may have been dismayed that the meeting was so short.7 It was a great departure from his customary demeanor for him to seek an audience with Grant, and clearly he would not have done so had he not wanted to speak on some matters of importance. If Grant’s questions touched on them, discussion was necessarily brief, and it seems that the main obstacle to any more extended conversation was the evident discomfort felt by both. Already there were grumblings outside Grant’s door over the president entertaining a former Confederate, and Lee could well expect much the same reaction in Virginia if he appeared to get too friendly with the man who crushed the Confederacy. In contrast to their last meeting, in which so much was accomplished to put the country on the road to peace, this conversation seems to have accomplished little more than to make the two greatest soldiers of their age painfully aware that they were warriors no more.

  Grant may not have volunteered that his own ideas were in perfect accord with Lee’s to a point. He, too, favored submitting the new Virginia constitution to voters without the disenfranchisement clause, and then holding a separate referendum on that. He could see that in the Old Dominion the Democrats and moderate Republicans were unhappy with the excesses of the Radicals, and ready to make common cause to exchange resistance to black suffrage for restoration of rights to whites. As summer arrived, and with it nominations for Virginia’s governorship, Grant withheld support from the Radicals’ candidate and tacitly supported a coalition ticket of moderate Republicans headed by Gilbert C. Walker, a Northern-born moderate widely supported by former Whigs in the commonwealth. That put him much in tune with Lee’s antebellum political stance before the war experience made him more conservative. Walker was also aligned with Grant and Lee on the issue of submitting the new constitution and the difficult voting rights clause to separate referenda. Though he could not vote, Lee watched elective politics in Virginia closely, and in June word leaked out that he favored the Walker ticket, as did Grant.8

  In a close election, Walker won in November to become Virginia’s first Republican governor. As a result, once the constitution passed and it and the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments were ratified, military rule ended and Virginia would be readmitted to the Union on January 26, 1870, making it the only state to escape enduring radical reconstruction. Lee may have declined to speak out as Grant wanted, but his views and support for Walker nevertheless became known, and to the extent that Grant was right about Southerners following Lee’s example, the Confederate had an impact. At arm’s length to be sure, Grant and Lee had helped to shape the peace with a template for other states to follow if they chose.

  Meanwhile, the advice Lee most commonly gave was that “work is what we now require, work by everybody.” Labor and thrift would get Southerners through this difficult period. “The good old times of former days,” he told his cousin Hill Carter, “will return again.” They might not see them, but their children would. Despite what he said about the interdependence of white planters and black workers in the letter to Rosecrans, he believed that if they should have to hire workers, they must “get white labour on every account,” that they needed work done “especially by white hands.”9 That was so important to him that, despite his earlier prejudices, he favored European immigration as the best source of “a respectable class of laborers from Europe.” They needed not only white reliable laborers, “but good citizens, whose interests and feelings would be in unison with our own.” For that reason, he rejected bringing in Chinese or Japanese workers, fearing their presence might result in injury to the country and its institutions. He endorsed state-sponsored immigration societies to attract “honest, steady, willing men,” care for them on arrival, and make arrangements for their new homes and jobs. Families would be better yet, for that promoted contentment and permanency, something else his experience told him black laborers would not provide. He actually endorse
d the Virginia Immigration Society in a public letter in September 1869 saying, “I should rejoice to see a plan in successful operation calculated to develop the wealth and to promote the prosperity of the South.”10

  Meanwhile, he advised friends that the people of the South should pay less attention to national politics, and more to their own fortunes. If they had done that from the founding of the old Union, the Southern view of the Constitution might have carried more weight in Washington. “It was from the want of this weight,” he said, “that it failed, when it attempted to maintain its views.” The war to maintain those views he now described as “the struggle of the states for their rights & for Constitutional Government.”11

  Over and again he counseled developing the untapped resources of the South as a means to make it a phoenix rising from the ashes of war. Virginia would never recover its former position of leadership in the nation until it capitalized on its resources and rebuilt its population.12 “There is no subject upon which the material interests of the country now so much depend, in my opinion, as upon agriculture,” he told a Georgian, “nor is there one more worthy of the earnest attention of the people.”13 In their small way the Lee family encouraged Southern manufacture, among other things, by using South Carolina gingham for his daughters’ dresses, declaring that “no silks or any other dress would be so well suited to his views as this article manufactured in the Southern country.”14 Invited to attend the Memphis Commercial Convention in 1869, he declined, but added that “it would afford me great gratification to aid in every way in my power the efforts that [you] are making to restore the prosperity of the country.”15 He also begged off attending a similar meeting in Louisville that fall, but responded with perhaps his most optimistic estimate:

  If we turn to the past history of the country and compare our material condition with that of our forefathers when they undertook, in the face of the difficulties which surrounded them, its organization and establishment, it would seem to be an easy task for us to revive what may be depressed and to encourage what may be languishing in all the walks of life. We shall find it easy if we will cherish the same principles and practice the same virtues which governed them. Every man, however, must do his part in this great work. He must carry into the administration of his affairs industry, fidelity and economy, and apply the knowledge taught by science to the promotion of agriculture, manufactures and all industrial pursuits. As individuals prosper, communities will become rich, and the avenues and depots required by trade and commerce will be readily constructed.16

  By the time he had his last meeting with Grant, it was plain for all to see that Lee’s health was waning. He no longer felt up to riding Traveller every day, but he soldiered on.17 By late summer of 1870 he felt wretched much of the time. Then on September 29 he came home late from a church vestry meeting for the evening meal. “We have been waiting for you,” Mary scolded him, asking where he had been, but he could not speak to answer. Doctors diagnosed a stroke, bled him, and he slept for a solid two days. He spoke occasionally in his sleep, muttering things that suggested his mind had gone back to the old battlefields. Once he turned his head over his shoulder and said, “Tell [A. P.] Hill he must come up. Strike my tent.” Able to sit up, he ate a little but muttered only a few occasional words. Still, he squeezed Mary’s hand when she spoke to him, and physicians thought he might recover, though they doubted he wanted to when he said “tis no use” to medicines. Thus he lingered, and in his last forty-eight hours he seemed largely unaware of those around him. On October 12 he gave a deep sigh and died.18 A few days later the city of Lexington laid him to rest in a tomb beneath the college chapel, where Mary joined him three years later. A century afterward Traveller’s bones were buried just outside the chapel, a few yards away from his master. Long before then, the college changed its name to Washington and Lee University.

  Grant was nineteen months into his presidency when Lee died. At forty-six he was the youngest elected president to date, running on the motto “Let us have peace.” The first chief executive to serve two full terms since Andrew Jackson, he was the most productive of all save Lincoln. Just as he had as a general, he consulted no one on cabinet appointments and some other issues before simply announcing his decisions, a policy he later admitted caused him some trouble.19 His choice of cabinet also reflected his conciliatory approach by avoiding leading Republicans who expected portfolios. He pushed successfully for passage of the Fifteenth Amendment, and thereafter strove to ensure safety for freed blacks and their full civil rights, an approach that led to the creation of the Department of Justice in 1870, the Enforcement Acts of 1870–1871, and a concerted effort to put down the Ku Klux Klan and other groups intimidating black voters. The collapse of the KKK in 1872 was largely due to Grant’s efforts, and in the elections that year blacks in great numbers voted for the first tine. The Civil Rights Act of 1875 sought to guarantee them further equal treatment.

  Grant’s relations with the South were strained, though his Amnesty Act restoring political rights to all ex-Confederates was a sincere gesture of conciliation, and Lee would not be the last former enemy Grant welcomed to the White House. Unfortunately, violence against blacks and Republicans, especially a deadly riot in New Orleans, forced him to retain military garrisons in several former Confederate states to keep civil order, as a group called the Redeemers gradually regained white Democratic control over one Southern state after another. In the election of 1876 his support was of course behind Republican candidate Rutherford B. Hayes, but he also acknowledged that the Democrat Samuel J. Tilden might have legitimately won the contest with the disputed electoral votes of three former Confederate states. Since the settlement was handled entirely by Congress, Grant did not influence the final decision by which Democrats agreed to give the presidency to Hayes in return for virtually ending reconstruction, but he did honor the compromise by commencing the removal of Federal occupying troops before he left office.

  Meanwhile, Grant sought reform in Indian policy, believing that the continuing friction with the native peoples “were entirely owing to the bad faith kept towards the Indians by the white settlers.”20 He promoted free public schooling for all children, and reinforced separation of church and state. Seeking a platform for the American navy in Caribbean waters, he unsuccessfully negotiated for the annexation of the Dominican Republic, which he also thought might act as a safety valve in race relations by attracting blacks from the South to emigrate. He made a special effort to redress his offense to American Jews during the war, paying tribute to their contribution to the Union war effort, and began appointing Jews to public positions within days of taking office. For all the failures and occasional scandals of Grant’s tenure, he was the first two-term chief executive to display a modern approach to domestic involvement and world outlook.

  Yet the scandals dogged him for the rest of his life. He made several unwise appointments, starting with making Rawlins secretary of war. Rawlins’s feud with Sherman, whom Grant made commanding general of the army, strained relations between the two friends. His appointed heads of the Treasury and Interior Departments, and the New York Customs House, all became linked either to corruption and bribery, or to covering up cases of malfeasance, and Grant loyally clung to them far too long. He had always been too trusting, and especially naïve, especially when it came to friends, and it seriously tarnished his administration.

  Grant left Galena in the summer of 1861 as largely unmolded clay politically. The war itself gave him political form. His indifference to slavery and emancipation became a commitment both to freedom for the slaves and civil rights for the freedmen. His realization of the power of the United States in fielding its armies and defeating the rebellion gave him an awareness that his country was now a major actor on the world stage, capable of making itself felt anywhere as a force for justice and fair government, though he recognized how that power could be misused. At home, he assumed the primacy of the central authority, a view shaped by the unwillingness o
f many in the former Confederacy to acquiesce in Federal actions without Federal force. Throughout, his attitude toward the Constitution and the laws remained what it had been during the war. Like it or not, law was law and he would enforce it to the full.

  Grant never lost his passion for travel and new scenes. On leaving office in 1877 he continued expanding his horizons by taking Julia on a two-year trip around the globe, from England and Europe, to Palestine, India, Southeast Asia, and finally China and Japan. While in Japan he voluntarily negotiated a settlement to a territorial dispute that averted war between China and Japan, the first time an American president acted as diplomat without portfolio in using personal prestige to keep peace abroad. He returned with renewed respect and reputation, and almost won nomination for a third term. Having nearly gone broke paying for the world tour, he invested in a brokerage firm in which his son Ulysses Jr. was partner. The firm lost everything in questionable trading practices, though Grant himself had no knowledge of them, and in 1884 at age sixty-two he was nearly as bankrupt as he had been thirty years before. Worse, there was cancer in his throat.

  Typically, he sought renewal elsewhere, and found it in writing, first articles for popular magazines, and then a memoir of his life contracted for publication by his friend Samuel L. “Mark Twain” Clemens. He began writing in New York City, then moved to the cooler air of Mount McGregor. There, bundled in a blanket, Grant wrote in a wicker chair on the veranda of a summer home, often interrupted by hundreds of the curious and well-wishers who walked past, or by calls from old friends like Sherman, Sheridan, and Buckner.21 Racing against his own mortality, he finished the two-volume narrative in mid-July 1885. He knew he had little time left. “There never was one more willing to go than I am,” he scrawled on July 16. He had willed himself to live to finish the book, and now it was done. “There is nothing more I should do to it now, and therefore I am not likely to be more ready to go than at this moment.” A week later he left.22 Eminently fair, though not entirely unprejudiced, and occasionally defensive, Personal Memoirs of U. S. Grant not only saved his family financially, but also became—and remains—perhaps the greatest of American autobiographies. It is thoroughly reflective of its author, the writing crisp, the humor self-deprecating, and most of all “to the point.”