Grant’s presidency has come in for a good deal of criticism, and it is certainly true that it ended badly in financial and political scandals, but the fact remains that for eight years Grant exerted a calming influence on a country that had only just emerged from a bloody civil war. (Nearly 625,000 Americans had been killed in the war—compare this with 400,000 in World War II and 58,000 in Vietnam, in a country with four or five times the population it had in the mid–nineteenth century—and a large part of the country remained devastated, starving, and sunk in catastrophic defeat.) Grant not only managed to bring the South back into the Union, albeit at a price the Radicals did not want to pay, and with racial problems that would continue to plague the United States a hundred years later, but also managed to avoid foreign wars or entanglements. Grant’s sheer presence, like Ike’s eighty years later, his immense prestige, his “unflappability” (as someone would describe the supposed salient characteristic of the British prime minister from 1957 to 1963, Harold Macmillan), more or less guaranteed that the United States would be taken seriously again by the world’s great powers. Lincoln, with his death, reached, like Gandhi, an international sainthood, but Grant, like Ike, was the symbol of something else: America’s military power, the integrity of its institutions, its basic decency and good intentions, and above all its rock-solid common sense.
Nobody thought Grant would be much good at diplomacy (wrongly), or politics and policy making (which turned out to be true), but his person, his character, his rise from the leather and harness shop in Galena to four-star general and president, confirmed something much larger—the American dream. No other American of the nineteenth century attained such fame and worldwide admiration, not even Lincoln, whose saintly martyrdom and political cunning made him much harder to understand than the bluff, solid Grant.
Pictures of the Grants in the White House do not make it seem as if they enjoyed themselves there. Grant, in civilian clothes, looks rumpled, uncomfortable, and top-heavy, and seems to have put on a good deal of weight (as did Mrs. Grant), and in a magazine illustration of Chief Red Cloud’s visit to a White House reception, Red Cloud and his followers in their blankets and feathers look more elegant and more at ease than their hosts, the Grants. Grant has been criticized for his choice of cabinet officers, but in the nineteenth century as it is today it was considered perfectly acceptable to reward one’s friends with a cabinet post, so it is hardly surprising that Elihu Washburne, the representative who had picked Grant to command the Galena volunteers, was made secretary of state briefly, then American minister to France. Other choices ranged from the banal to the incomprehensible, also very much as they do today, but the selection of Hamilton Fish to replace Washburne as secretary of state was a fortunate one, as was that of former Ohio governor and Civil War general Jacob D. Cox for the Department of the Interior and Grant’s old aide John A. Rawlins as secretary of war. Grant was widely criticized for giving his relatives jobs, but that is an old Anglo-American political tradition, and most of the jobs were small potatoes indeed. To please Julia Grant, one supposes, her brother became a government Indian trader in New Mexico, another brother was appointed a minor customs official in San Francisco, while a second cousin of hers became receiver of public moneys in Oregon. Her brother Frederick became Grant’s appointments secretary in the White House, while her father (already a postmaster, thanks to Andrew Jackson) moved into the White House as a kind of permanent houseguest, waylaying strangers in the halls to describe the glories of the Confederacy and the inadequacies of the Negro race. As these things go, or went, it was not nepotism on any grand scale.
Grant’s grasp of foreign affairs, perhaps due to the help of Hamilton Fish, was better than anybody could have wished. Like most successful generals, his first concern was peace. A burning issue of the day was the fact that the parvenu emperor of France, Napoleon III, nephew of the great Napoleon, had conspired to evade the Monroe Doctrine by putting an Austrian Hapsburg archduke on the hastily improvised throne of Mexico during the Civil War, an idea he hoped would please the Austrians at no great expense to France. This bizarre episode of what would now be called neocolonialism was bitterly opposed by most Mexicans and also deeply resented by Americans. With the end of the Civil War, the United States had available what was arguably the largest, best armed, and most experienced army in the world, and there were many who thought it should be used to invade Mexico and drive the French out. Grant himself had toyed with the idea (“On to Mexico!” he is said to have remarked facetiously when the Civil War ended), but as president he used his best efforts to calm things down between the United States and France, emphasizing that France was America’s first and oldest ally and friend (a sentiment that might usefully have been followed 133 years later by President George W. Bush), and that Napoleon III would doubtless vanish from the scene without American help, which is exactly what happened. The unfortunate Emperor Maximilian of Mexico was executed by a Mexican firing squad, Napoleon III abdicated his throne in 1870 after having been defeated in the field by the Prussians, and the United States avoided the perils of intervention in Mexico and the risk of war with France. Had it existed then, Grant would have deserved the Nobel Peace Prize.
There were other, thornier problems, however, and these Grant failed to grasp. The line the Clinton people threw at George Bush père in the 1992 election campaign might have been aimed with equal effect at Grant: “It’s the economy, stupid.” It was Grant’s misfortune that he had no business sense whatsoever in an age when the economy was rapidly becoming the major issue. After the Civil War the United States was saddled with a huge national debt, the South’s economy was virtually destroyed, the West was being opened up at a rapid pace (despite the increasingly desperate resistance of those whom Grant called “the original occupants of this land”), and industrialization would very shortly make U.S. productivity soar above that of the United Kingdom. New inventions small and large were changing American life at a dizzying pace: the telegraph, the vast expansion of the railroads, gaslight, the iron-hulled, steam-engined ocean liner and battleship, new agricultural machinery, the safety razor, the repeating rifle, the fountain pen—there seemed no end to American invention and ingenuity—while at the same time the cities of the Northeast and Midwest expanded at breakneck speed to accommodate millions of new immigrants, creating a building boom and sending land prices sky-high.
All these things required vast amounts of capital—capital on an unprecedented scale—and Wall Street, with its speculators, financiers, merchant bankers, and stockbrokers, became a power in the land, perhaps, some feared, the power in the land. Jeffersonian democracy, the ideal of the small farmer and the sturdy local merchant—all of that was about to be overwhelmed as surely as the tribes of “hostile” Indians west of the Missouri River. On the subject of the Indians, Grant’s sympathies were pronounced, though he was unable to do much for them, but his sympathies for small farmers and small-town America were clouded by his admiration for people who knew how to think big and make money on a big scale. The Unites States was entering into a period not unlike that of the stock market boom of the 1980s or the great “dot.com” boom of the mid-1990s, in which those who were ruthless, clever, and knew how to swim with the tide would make (and sometimes lose) vast fortunes and live on a scale of lavish consumption and display that European royalty could only envy. Like President Clinton in our own times, Grant, having succeeded beyond his dreams, enjoyed the company of the very rich, the “movers and shakers” in the world of big money, and although he was president, he and Mrs. Grant were very conscious of not being among them. Like any president, Grant could do many things to help them, however—in that sense if in no other, the 1870s were no different than our own age. The concept of “conflict of interest” was less highly developed back then—Lincoln, despite his saintliness, was a successful lawyer for the railroads and would have been by no means a poor man, had it not been for Mrs. Lincoln’s crazed shopping sprees—and Grant tended to take the view t
hat as a victorious general he was owed a certain style of life.
Then as now victorious American generals expected to be taken care of for life, and Grant was no exception. Nowadays they join the boards of major corporations and head think tanks and foundations; then they accepted outright gifts from grateful citizens and remunerative railway directorships. Having moved virtually straight from the army to the White House, Grant had not had an opportunity to cash in on his victories. Later, when the Grants went on their famous world tour, it did not escape their attention that victorious English generals had been rewarded far more lavishly. John Churchill was created Duke of Marlborough for his victories over Louis XIV and given Blenheim Palace and enough money to support it. And Wellington was not only made a duke but given innumerable estates, a great house on Piccadilly at Hyde Park Corner, and a substantial fortune for his victory over Napoleon. By comparison the Grants felt themselves to be very modestly rewarded indeed, particularly since they liked to hobnob with the very richest of the new rich. Galena and (oddly enough) Philadelphia had chipped in with homes for the Grants, but they were far from well off and would be still less so when Grant left the White House.
One reason, therefore, why Grant stayed for two terms as president (and later made an unsuccessful bid for a third) was that the Grants had no concrete plans for the future after he left the White House. It was not so much that Grant enjoyed being president—he had had none of the fierce presidential ambition that motivates so many who seek the office, and indeed, in a very real sense, the office sought him, not the other way round—but he had nothing much else in mind, and once he was settled in, began to think of the White House as his home. It was large, run like a military establishment, furnished richly enough to satisfy Mrs. Grant, and could provide roast turkey at every meal—the only meat Grant ate with anything approaching enthusiasm.
The job of being president he approached with less enthusiasm. It is perhaps one of the real misfortunes of the Grant administration that John A. Rawlins, his aide from Galena and now secretary of war, who had fallen out with Grant during the war, shocked by the growing casualties after the Wilderness, was already a very sick man, suffering from tuberculosis in an age when that was still an incurable disease. Had Grant been surrounded, supported, protected, advised, and “coached,” as modern presidents are, by a team of advisers under Rawlins’s eagle eye, his presidency might have succeeded better than it did. Just as Rawlins, when he had been well, and close to Grant, had mostly been able to keep him from the bottle (and shield him from the consequences when he managed to avoid Rawlins’s vigilance) during the war, so Rawlins in the White House might have been able to protect the president from his natural inability to distinguish cheats, sharpers, thieves, and con artists from honest men. Though in many respects shrewd and thoughtful, Grant was a total innocent when it came to anything involving money, and being almost supernaturally honest himself, he found it difficult to detect dishonesty in others. Besides, he was enormously loyal. He often managed to ignore proof of wrongdoing even when it was brought to him.
These are not the ideal characteristics for a president of the United States, and in the absence of a personality as forceful as Rawlins (who died in 1869, in the first year of Grant’s presidency), Grant was left pretty much to his own devices in a White House that was, by modern standards, chaotic and open to an endless crowd of office seekers, admirers, and total strangers. Lincoln had thrived on this kind of thing—he was, after all, a natural politician—but Grant was an army man and needed the kind of staff and efficiency that surrounded his headquarters in the field. It didn’t help that he had been nominated for the presidency unanimously, or that he had run for the presidency without making speeches or leaving his new home in Galena. He had never been called upon to define what he wanted to accomplish as president, and his fame and status as a great man and a four-star general were such that practically nobody felt entitled to question him on the matter. His silence made it appear to most people that he was deep in thought or busy formulating plans, but for the most part that was an illusion, although not a deliberate one. Grant certainly desired to produce “peace,” “prosperity,” “harmony,” and the reintegration of the South into the American body politic on terms that protected the former slaves (now called “freedmen”) without necessarily making them equal to whites, but he had no idea how to go about achieving these aims.
No less an authority than the historian Allan Nevins summed up Grant’s presidency by remarking on “his vast ignorance of civil affairs, economics and his tendency to look upon the presidency as a reward, not a responsibility,”1 and there is no denying the truth of this, but one must add to it an unfortunate tendency to pursue with the utmost tenacity ideas that had been planted in his head by others and made no sense in the first place. Grant astonished his own cabinet, his own party, and almost everybody who mattered in the U.S. Senate by a politically doomed plan to annex the island of Santo Domingo (later the Dominican Republic) to the United States (he would not be the last American president to get into trouble in the Caribbean). Santo Domingo was weak, split among rival factions, and up for grabs, and once Grant’s attention had been directed toward it, he was moved both by a mild sense of imperialism, a late-blooming case, as it were, of Manifest Destiny (although he did not propose to conquer Santo Domingo so much as to buy it), and by the belief that it might absorb perhaps as many as four million American blacks. At one stroke, he imagined, America’s position in the Caribbean would be made secure, American investment and ingenuity would turn Santo Domingo into a paying proposition, and the problem of what to do with (and about) the freed slaves in the South would be solved. There was not the slightest enthusiasm for the idea anywhere, as it turned out, except among those Dominican political figures who were eager to sell the country to the highest bidder. Radical Republican senators raised strong objections to the idea of suppressing one of the few existing black republics, American blacks showed no more enthusiasm for the idea of being transplanted to a Caribbean island than they had for being shipped en masse to Liberia—to the extent that they were consulted about it—and hardly anybody wanted to add a black American territory (or, eventually, even less desirable, a state) to the Union. Most vehemently opposed to annexation was the formidable Sen. Charles Sumner of Massachusetts, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, whose firm abolitionist beliefs went back long before the Civil War, when he had been savagely beaten with a cane at his seat in the Senate by Preston Brooks, a member of the House from South Carolina, because of his fierce opposition to slavery, and became thereafter both a martyr and a hero to the cause of black rights.
Grant fought this battle to the bitter end, and he lost it. Nor was he a good loser. As Nevins put it, Grant suffered from “his lack of magnanimity, for despite the Appomattox legend, he bore grudges and was a vengeful hater.” He became Sumner’s sworn enemy, and Sumner—being one of the most respected, even venerated, of Radical Republicans—was a poor choice of enemy. It was not so much that Grant was “a vengeful hater,” true though that was, but that he remained thin-skinned, sensitive, and burdened with the inferiority complex of a boy who had been brought up by harsh and distant parents, made fun of at school, been passed over for promotion in the army, failed at every attempt to make money or improve his situation, and eventually settled into life as a clerk in his father’s store and the town drunk until the Civil War came along and saved him. He was deeply conscious of the gaps in his education and resentful of any perceived slight. A patrician New Englander, a Harvard man, wealthy, imperious and formidably well read, Sumner was just the man to make Grant conscious of his own shortcomings, and Sumner’s opposition to the Santo Domingo scheme was merely the straw that broke the camel’s back.2
Photographs of Grant in the White House are a painful contrast with those taken of him as a general—he looks puffy, peevish, unfocused; and his civilian suits, obviously meant to be the height of fashion, merely seem pretentious and ill fittin
g—he doesn’t look nearly as comfortable in them as he did in uniform. His hair is slicked back and his shoes look like something a farmer might wear to milk the cows, rather than those of an elegantly dressed politician. There is something about his expression that is at once furtive and depressed, like somebody who is carrying out an impostiture or has stumbled into a place where he doesn’t belong—say the drawing room of a club of which he is not a member.
The truth is that Grant looks lost, and of course in a certain sense he was. Despite the fact that the citizens of Philadelphia had given the Grants a home, as well as those of Galena, Grant was stuck in the White House, beset with problems he couldn’t solve by ordering an attack.
He had his successes, to give him his due. He resolved the complex set of problems that was endangering relationships with Great Britain, in part due to his own determination to remain calm, in part due to Hamilton Fish’s common sense, understanding of diplomacy, and ability to pacify the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, even the formidable Sumner, who, like many New Englanders, was a confirmed Anglophobe. Appeasing Great Britain was not by any means a popular move in the latter part of the nineteenth century, particularly in New England, where the battles of Lexington, Concord, and Bunker Hill had taken place less than a hundred years before and were still deeply etched in people’s memories, as if the Redcoats might reappear at any moment. The feeling was made more acute in the minds of Massachusetts politicians by the increasing presence of large numbers of Irish, whose hatred of the English was bred into their bones, as a voting block.
Ulysses S. Grant Page 11