Grant

by Ron Chernow

“No amount of poverty or adversity seems to shake their faith; niggers gone, wealth and luxury gone, money worthless . . . yet I see no sign of let up.”38 Only violence on a massive scale, he believed, could subdue such a hardy and refractory breed. “I begin to regard the death and mangling of a couple of thousand men as a small affair, a kind of morning dash,” he wrote. “The worst of the war is not yet begun.”39

Whenever she came to camp, Julia, a sprightly presence, enjoyed taking meals with the officers’ mess and was widely appreciated for her geniality. In the evening, when she and Ulysses sat alone in the corner, they appeared to Porter “as bashful as two young lovers spied upon in the scenes of their courtship.”107 In company, Julia called him “Mr. Grant” and “Ulyss” to his face and sometimes added a private name she had coined for him after Vicksburg’s fall—“Victor.”

Grant had been offended that Julia’s brother John defected to the Confederacy to manage a Mississippi plantation. When he was captured near Vicksburg by Union soldiers, Grant thought his imprisonment a salutary lesson and made little effort to free him. By August 1864, when it looked as if Dent would be sent north in a prisoner exchange, Grant remained caustic, telling his brother-in-law Fred, “I hope John has been thoroughly cured of his secesh sympathies by the long sojourn he has been forced to submit to with the people he defends.”76 In the end, Grant relented and negotiated

John Dent’s release in early March 1865.

as they awaited election returns on November 8. That night, they gathered around a campfire and listened as Grant read aloud a succession of telegrams updating the results. With his puckish humor, Grant again played the prankster and kept telling officers that each new dispatch showed McClellan in the lead. Only after midnight—by which time many dejected officers had drifted off to bed—did he admit delightedly that it had all been a hoax and Lincoln had been ahead the whole time.

On November 7, in a shocking ideological reversal, Jefferson Davis endorsed a plan to buy forty thousand slaves who would take up arms for the South and receive freedom at the end of the war—that is, if the South won. The only alternative to this radical concession was total defeat, Davis concluded, but the response of constituents was overwhelmingly hostile. In the words of Howell Cobb of Georgia, who helped to create the Confederacy, “The day you make soldiers of [slaves] is the beginning of the end of the revolution. If slaves will make good soldiers, our whole theory of slavery is wrong—but they won’t make good soldiers.”

Grant transmitted copies of Sherman’s victory telegram to his corps commanders. Henceforth Sherman, once stigmatized as incurably insane in the northern press, would be lionized as “Tecumseh the Great.”

In a sight scarcely credible to southern eyes, the black Fifty-Fourth Massachusetts Infantry arrived in Charleston, lustily singing “John Brown’s Body.” The headline in The Liberator, William Lloyd Garrison’s abolitionist paper, captured the extraordinary symbolism: “Babylon Is Fallen!”

Lincoln delivered an inaugural address that talked of retribution against the South but also tried to set a forgiving tone for the peace Grant would soon bring about: “With malice toward none; with charity for all; with firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in; to bind up the nation’s wounds; . . . to do all which may achieve and cherish a just, and a lasting peace, among ourselves, and with all nations.”78

Porter recorded a horrifying moment when a Union soldier was struck by a bullet in his neck, which spouted blood. “I’m killed!” the man exclaimed, slumping to the ground. “You’re not hurt a bit!” Sheridan expostulated. “Pick up your gun, man, and move right on to the front.” So commanding were Sheridan’s words that the stricken man hoisted his musket and stumbled forward a dozen paces before keeling over and dropping dead.

army, Grant was never tempted to enter Richmond and play the swaggering conquistador, a piece of symbolism as profound as his upcoming mercy at Appomattox. The historian John Lothrop Motley praised this exemplary restraint: “There is something very sublime to my imagination in the fact that Grant has never yet set his foot in Richmond, and perhaps never will.”41 With poetic justice, black soldiers joined the entrance of Union troops into the ravaged capital on April 3. The message wasn’t lost on the townspeople. “The white citizens felt annoyed that the city should be held mostly by negro troops,” wrote the rebel war clerk John Jones.42

Abraham Lincoln bravely strode Richmond’s streets, past hundreds of charred, blasted buildings, his steps shadowed by black people who shouted with rapture, as if suddenly beholding the Messiah. One elderly black man exclaimed, “Glory, hallelujah!” and knelt reverently at his feet. Lincoln stood chagrined. “Don’t kneel to me,” he admonished the man tenderly. “That is not right. You must kneel to God only, and thank Him for the liberty you will hereinafter enjoy. I am but God’s humble instrument.”43 Lincoln traveled to the Confederate White House—his face “pale and haggard,” said one observer, with “a serious, dreamy expression” said another—and occupied the chair so recently warmed by Jefferson Davis.44

Grant said in a disarmingly soft-spoken voice, “I have a great mind to summon Lee, to surrender.”67 Taking up his dispatch book, he wrote on its thin yellow pages, interleaved with carbon sheets. In his usual concise style, he began his letter to Lee: “GENERAL, The result of the last week must convince you of the hopelessness of further resistance on the part of the Army of Northern Va. in this struggle. I feel that it is so and regard it as my duty to shift from myself, the responsibility of any further effusion of blood by asking of you the surrender of that portion of the C. S. [Confederate States] Army known as the Army of Northern Va. Very respectfully your obt. svt U. S. Grant Lt. Gn.”68 Riding under a flag of truce, Brigadier General Seth Williams and an orderly disappeared down darkening country lanes to deliver this momentous message to Lee.

On February 7, President Johnson met at the White House with five black leaders, including Frederick Douglass, who came to lobby for a civil rights bill. The black leaders were treated in a tasteless, abusive manner. After they shook hands with the president, their spokesman, George T. Downing, said they hoped he would support voting rights for blacks, which elicited a bizarre, rambling monologue from Johnson. He admitted to having owned slaves, but boasted of never having sold one, as if that would somehow ingratiate him with his visitors. He presented himself as a kindly master who had been “their slave instead of their being mine.” To promote civil rights, Johnson went on, would “result in the extermination of one [race] or the other.” If given the vote, “the colored man and his master, combined,” would conspire to keep poor whites “in slavery,” denying them a portion “of the rich land of the country.”5 After the bewildered delegation filed out, Johnson boasted to his secretary, “Those damned sons of bitches thought they had me in a trap.”6

For vice president, the Democrats picked the irascible Francis Preston Blair Jr. of Missouri, who had fought gallantly as a Union general before emerging as a biting critic of Reconstruction. Right before the convention, Blair published a letter that contested black suffrage in the South, proposing a plan to raze the entire scaffolding of Reconstruction. He wanted the new president to “declare the reconstruction acts null and void; compel the army to undo its usurpations at the South; [and] allow the white people to reorganize their own governments.”19 Once nominated, Blair freely bashed Grant, accusing him of wanting to uphold military “usurpations over the eight millions of white people at the South, fixed to the earth with his bayonets.”20 Though his brother Montgomery had represented Dred Scott before the Supreme Court, Frank Blair was an unabashed racist who vowed that as vice president he would “prevent the people of our race . . . from being driven out of the country or trodden under foot by an inferior and semi-barbarous race.”21 Walt Whitman summed up the Democratic ticket by calling it “a regular old Copperhead Democratic ticket, of the rankest kind—probably pleases the old democratic bummers around New York and Brooklyn—but everywhere else they take it like a bad dose of medicine.”22

Seymour supporters invented new lyrics to a ditty called “Captain Jinks of the Horse Marines,” with words that went: “I am Captain Grant of the Black Marines, / The stupidest man that ever was seen.” The song also featured this nasty couplet: “I smoke my weed and drink my gin, / Paying with the people’s tin.”29 Nobody was more disgusted by the drinking tales than Julia Grant. One morning in Galena, she read a newspaper story that her husband was “in a state of frenzy and is tearing up his mattress, swearing it is made of snakes.” Then

The campaign’s most chilling feature was the huge wave of murder and arson orchestrated by the Ku Klux Klan against black and white Republicans in the South. As state conventions drafted new constitutions that endowed blacks with the franchise, the white South acted to stamp out that voting power through brute force. Nathan Bedford Forrest boasted that the Klan had recruited forty thousand men in Tennessee alone, half a million across the South. This bloodthirsty backlash grew out of simple arithmetic: in South Carolina and Mississippi, blacks made up a majority of the electorate, while in other southern states, the substantial black populace, joined with white Republicans, appeared set to prevail during Reconstruction.

In May 1869, Robert E. Lee came to the White House to discuss a railroad venture. As at Appomattox, Grant attempted to smooth over an awkward situation with a little levity and small talk. “You and I, General,” said Grant, “have had more to do with destroying railroads than building them.”11 Lee would not be drawn into this sort of pleasantry. According to Badeau, he “refused to smile, or to recognize the raillery. He went on gravely with the conversation, and no other reference was made to the past.”12 The diplomat John Lothrop Motley, who was there, detected “a shade of constraint” in Lee’s manner.13 On political matters, Lee worked hard to sound reasonable, expressed approval of the Fifteenth Amendment, and professed to see no “prodigious harm” in permitting blacks to vote. “All the Southern States should be in harmony with the National Government,” he declared.14 But before too long, Lee rose to his feet, bid Grant a frosty farewell, and departed. The two wartime titans were destined never to meet again. Lee died on October 12, 1870.

During one Indian war in 1867, Sherman advised Sheridan, “The more [Indians] we kill this year, the less we would have to kill next year.”18 Many in Congress had few qualms about pursuing a policy of outright genocide, with one Nevada congressman calling for “extinction. And I say that with a full sense of the meaning conveyed by that word.” A Texas legislator warned that “he who resists gets crushed. That is the history of the wild Indian.”19

Government relations with Indians soured in January 1870 after the U.S. cavalry under Major Eugene M. Baker massacred 173 Piegan Blackfeet in the Montana Territory, the vast majority of them women, children, and the elderly. Many were roasted alive when their tepees were set ablaze or hacked apart with axes. Sheridan had likely contributed to the ferocity by hectoring Baker to “strike them hard!” and he blithely characterized the massacre as “well-merited punishment.”27 The episode mocked Grant’s Peace Policy and prompted a congressional backlash against the army’s handling of Indian relations. This led to banning military officers as Indian agents, a move that was partly Congress’s way of reclaiming the lucrative patronage powers lost to it.

But for Grant the most potent argument related to the aftermath of American slavery. Santo Domingo, he asserted, was “capable of supporting the entire colored population of the United States, should it choose to emigrate.”36 He emphasized that this was not a colonization or deportation scheme. He was by no means urging African Americans to emigrate to the Caribbean island, but simply acknowledging that it could function as a critical safety valve if white Americans refused to honor their rights: “The present difficulty in bringing all parts of the United States to a happy unity and love of country grows out of the prejudice to color. The prejudice is a senseless one, but it exists.”37 If a black person could resort to a Caribbean sanctuary, Grant reasoned, “his worth here would soon be discovered, and he would soon receive such recognition as to induce him to stay.”38 Or, as he subsequently wrote: “If two or three hundred thousand blacks were to emigrate to St. Domingo . . . the Southern people would learn the crime of Ku Kluxism, because they would see how necessary the black man is to their own prosperity.”39 The memorandum shows Grant in a visionary frame of mind, grappling with large issues of racial justice. Blacks would enjoy the option of resettling outside the continental United States, yet remain citizens under the full jurisdiction of the federal government: “I took it that the colored people would go there in numbers, so as to have independent states governed by...

Never slow in self-assertion, Stanton boasted to a friend in October 1869: “There is a vacancy on the Supreme Bench for which I have adequate physical power, & so far as I can judge of my intellect, its powers are as acute & vigorous as at any period of my life—and perhaps more so.”61 Some in the press wondered whether the cantankerous Stanton possessed an even judicial temperament. Nonetheless, he enlisted enthusiastic supporters on Capitol Hill, including Vice President Colfax and House Speaker James G. Blaine, who bombarded Grant with lists of legislators clamoring for his appointment. On December 20, bowing to pressure, Grant nominated Stanton to replace Grier. Thanking Grant, Stanton reflected that a Supreme Court seat was “the only public office I ever desired, and I accept it with great pleasure.”62 Stanton’s name flew through the Senate confirmation process, winning approval by a 46 to 11 vote; then he died of heart failure days later, at age fifty-five.

Grant pushed the anti-Klan crusade despite sturdy resistance within his own administration. At cabinet meetings, he repeatedly allowed Akerman to expatiate on Klan horrors even though some members could not have cared less. After one session, Hamilton Fish complained wearily in his diary: “Akerman introduces Ku Klux—he has it ‘on the brain’—he tells a number of stories—one of a fellow being castrated—with terribly minute & tedious details of each case—It has got to be a bore, to listen twice a week to this same thing.”100 Akerman’s speeches were hardly a bore to Grant or the terrified people victimized by Klan thuggery in the South.

Early on the morning of June 16, 1885, a shrunken man with white hair and a gray-flecked beard—Grant had now dropped sixty pounds—shuffled from 3 East Sixty-Sixth Street and stepped into bright sunlight. Despite a sweltering day, he stood bundled in a black coat and black beaver hat, a white scarf concealing a neck tumor “as big as a man’s two fists put together,” wrote a journalist.107 Grant was accompanied by Julia, Fred and Ida, Nellie, and five grandchildren, plus Dawson, Terrell, and Dr. Douglas. A carriage bore them to Grand Central Depot, where Grant disembarked and moved slowly toward the train, leaning on his cane, his slippers scraping the pavement. He traveled aboard a private car owned by William H. Vanderbilt, which was emptied to make room for two bulky leather armchairs that enabled Grant to sit on one and rest his legs on the other. As the train chugged upstate, small crowds gathered at stations and crossings and waved as he sped by. Once at Mount McGregor, he boarded a narrow-gauge railroad that lifted him to the summit. With customary grit, he tried to totter up the last stretch of dirt path alone, aided by his cane, under a welcoming arch that proclaimed, “Our Hero.”108 When his strength failed, two husky police officers deposited him in a wicker chair and carried him the remaining distance to the cottage.

Frail, emaciated, starving to death from his inability to eat, he wore warm clothing in the early summer heat. His wit never abandoned him. Sneaking peeks at news headlines, he told Dr. Shrady that The New York Times has been “killing me off for a year. If it does not change, it will get it right in time.”111 Racing against the Grim Reaper, Grant put in several hours of work per day, often pausing, short of breath, after an hour. Unable to talk any longer, he kept a pad and pencil at his side, scribbling tiny notes to family and doctors. “About an hour ago,” he wrote to Dr. Douglas, “I coughed up a piece of stringy matter about the size of a small lizard.”112 In another message he wrote, “I am a verb instead of a personal pronoun. A verb is anything that signifies to be; to do; or to suffer. I signify all three.”113 One day, when he seemed to drift off into the twilight of death, he suddenly awoke. “I was passing away peacefully and soon all would have been over,” he wrote. “It was like falling asleep.” There was something poignant about Grant as he mutely raised his eyes, searching the faces of interlocutors. As Buck said, “His eyes were always expressive and it hurt me to look at him and see his suffering . . . Watching him suffer was the hardest thing I have ever been through.”114