Grant

by Ron Chernow

When the pain grew too great, his black valet, Harrison Terrell, sprayed his throat with “cocaine water,” temporarily numbing the area, or applied hot compresses to his head.

But Grant was an adept politician, the only president to serve two full consecutive terms between Andrew Jackson and Woodrow Wilson.

The imperishable story of Grant’s presidency was his campaign to crush the Ku Klux Klan. Through the Klan, white supremacists tried to overturn the Civil War’s outcome and restore the status quo ante. No southern sheriff would arrest the hooded night riders who terrorized black citizens and no southern jury would convict them. Grant had to cope with a complete collapse of evenhanded law enforcement in the erstwhile Confederate states. In 1870 he oversaw creation of the Justice Department, its first duty to bring thousands of anti-Klan indictments. By 1872 the monster had been slain, although its spirit resurfaced as the nation retreated from Reconstruction’s lofty aims. Grant presided over the Fifteenth Amendment, which gave blacks the right to vote, and landmark civil rights legislation, including the 1875 act outlawing racial discrimination in public accommodations. His pursuit of justice for southern blacks was at times imperfect, but his noble desire to protect them never wavered.

In Jesse’s words, his father “lost something of his self-control, and acquired the fondness for stimulants,” a fact worth flagging because of the hereditary component in alcoholism.8 As a result, Jesse Root Grant had to support himself from age eleven, while the younger children were farmed out to relatives and neighbors.

Determined to master tanning—a lucrative business at a time when people needed bridles and saddles—Jesse apprenticed with his older half brother Peter, who owned a tannery in Maysville, Kentucky.

Ohio had been the first state carved out of the old Northwest Territory, where slavery was banned by ordinance in 1787.

Jesse revered Henry Clay, who led the Whigs from 1834 to 1846, endorsing his American System of internal improvements, high tariffs, and a national bank—an orientation later reflected in his son’s presidency.

The mistaken name, which persisted at West Point and beyond, was the bane of the young man’s life and seemed symbolic of his almost comic passivity under Jesse’s heavy-handed tutelage. As Grant later confessed to his wife in frank exasperation, “You know I have an ‘S’ in my name and don’t know what it stand[s] for.”69

Nevertheless, he experienced such foreboding about West Point that he daydreamed about a travel accident that would abort the whole trip. “When these places were visited I would have been glad to have had a steamboat or railroad collision . . . by which I might have received a temporary injury sufficient to make me ineligible, for a time, to enter the Academy,” he wrote with dry humor. “Nothing of the kind occurred, and I had to face the music.”

The flashpoint of controversy was whether the Nueces River formed the southern border of Texas, as Mexico believed, or the Rio Grande, 130 miles farther south, as the Polk administration insisted.

The town’s civilian population had burgeoned to one thousand and was not of the most savory sort, the place reviled by one officer as “the most murderous, thieving, gambling, cut-throat, God-forsaken hole” in Texas.

The appointment was actually a godsend for Grant, turning him into a compleat soldier, adept at every facet of army life, especially logistics.

Taylor gave remarkably lenient terms that seem to foreshadow the generous terms bestowed by Grant at Appomattox.

Between the founding era of the Republic and the Civil War, no figure embodied the American military more splendidly than Winfield Scott, who was promoted to brevet major general by the War of 1812. Straddling two eras, he would serve under presidents as far apart as James Madison and Abraham Lincoln.

To do this, Scott assembled a first-rate team of bright junior officers, including Pierre G. T. Beauregard and George B. McClellan and a rising star on the engineering staff, Robert E. Lee. Throw in a host of other officers who later reappeared in the Civil War—Joseph Johnston, John Pemberton, James Longstreet, Winfield Scott Hancock, Albert Sidney Johnston, Joseph Hooker, George Thomas, Braxton Bragg, and George Gordon Meade—and the Mexican War seemed a dress rehearsal for the later conflict. With a retentive memory for faces and events, Grant accumulated a detailed inventory of knowledge about these varied men that he drew on later.

When Grant asked why he trembled, Pickett replied, “I shall fr-fr-freeze to d-death.” “Oh no you won’t,” said Grant, who found a piece of roasted red chili pepper, blew away the ashes, then handed it to the West Point graduate. “Here, Pickett, you eat that and it will be as good as a stove inside of you.”

The war culminated with the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, a huge bonanza for the United States. It expanded American territory by nearly a quarter, forcing Mexico to shed half its territory.

James Longstreet served as best man and two groomsmen, Cadmus M. Wilcox and Bernard Pratte, were to join him in the Confederate army; all three later surrendered to Grant at Appomattox.

Through the Compromise of 1850, California was admitted as a free state while other territories wrested from Mexico were left free to adopt slavery or not. In exchange, the North appeased the South by submitting to a strict new fugitive slave law that made many northerners feel like accomplices in the hated institution of their southern brethren.

Grant had two congenital weaknesses, children and horses, and was gentle with both.

Both he and Julia were still superstitious, so he consulted a French fortune-teller, who forecast his defeat. “I will come within an ace of being elected, but I will be beaten,” he reported to Julia. “In a short time we will leave the city and I will engage for a time in a mercantile business. Something will happen very soon and then I will begin to rise in the world.”

His holdings included several tanneries near Portsmouth, Ohio, and leather goods stores in Wisconsin, Iowa, and Galena, Illinois.

Grant grew irate when Buchanan, whom he denounced as “the present granny of an executive,” allowed Secretary of War John B. Floyd, a southerner, to redistribute arms from northern arsenals to southern forts in expectation of civil war.

The time had come for Grant to wash his hands of the retail job he detested, and he never again set foot in the hated leather goods store.

Perhaps no state was more savagely divided by internecine warfare than Missouri.

Then, on June 16, 1861, Grant received a telegram from Governor Yates, appointing him colonel of the 7th Congressional District Regiment, shortly renamed the Twenty-First Illinois, the same outfit he had drilled into shape at Mattoon.

He knew that, to project authority, he had to transcend petty anger.

On August 10, at the battle of Wilson’s Creek, Confederate forces handed a stunning defeat to the Union army in southwest Missouri, killing General Nathaniel Lyon—the first Union general to succumb in battle.

The town lay at the juncture of the Ohio and Tennessee Rivers, making it the perfect springboard for securing Confederate territory. No less important, it stood near the confluence of the Ohio and Cumberland Rivers and was thus the linchpin for river traffic in the whole area.

For the first time, Grant demonstrated his fine political tact and a command of the English language that would assist his success. He only stayed in Paducah for a day, leaving behind strict instructions that occupying soldiers should refrain from plunder and respect the rights of residents. When Lincoln set eyes on Grant’s proclamation, he was impressed. “The modesty and brevity of that address shows that the officer issuing it understands the situation and is a proper man to command there at this time.”

“My horse put his fore feet over the bank without hesitation or urging,” Grant wrote, “and with his hind feet well under him, slid down the bank and trotted aboard the boat, twelve or fifteen feet away, over a single gang plank.”21 It was an exquisite display of horsemanship by Grant, who characteristically credited the horse.

He chose to regard Grant as a rival and a threat rather than as a valued extension of his own power and secretly connived to replace Grant with another general. “Hold on to Fort Henry at all hazards,” he notified Grant. “Impress slaves of secessionists in vicinity to work on fortifications.”101 It was a perfect example of the timid, static thinking favored by a desk-bound general beset by fears.

had an overly active mind that always simmered with strong opinions, and sarcastic asides poured forth in rapid utterance.

Passionate in his hatreds, he directed withering scorn at the world’s follies.

Both Grant and Sherman were damaged souls who would redeem tarnished reputations in the brutal crucible of war.

With facetious overstatement, Sherman once remarked, “He stood by me when I was crazy and I stood by him when he was drunk, and now, sir, we stand by each other always.”81

Grant had begun to move his men into position at an old steamboat stop on the Tennessee River known as Pittsburg Landing that lay twenty miles from Corinth and stood near a tiny Methodist meetinghouse, crafted from rough-hewn logs, called Shiloh. (An Old Testament name meaning “place of peace,” Shiloh was the place of Jewish worship before the First Temple.)

“I do not feel that there is the slightest doubt about the result.”10 Only a fine line separated immense self-confidence from egregious complacency and Grant had probably crossed it here.

Those musicians had no idea that their tunes, drifting through darkened woods, could be heard by unseen rebel pickets. The Confederate army, more than forty thousand strong and encamped just two miles away, picked up the drums of Sherman’s division.

Of more than one hundred thousand soldiers who pitched into the fray, twenty-four thousand had been killed or wounded. Shiloh’s casualties eclipsed the total of the Revolutionary War, the War of 1812, and the Mexican War combined.

For Grant, the bloodless fall of Corinth strengthened his belief that only the conquest of Confederate armies, not taking towns, would end the war.

Now that New Orleans, Baton Rouge, and Memphis had been overtaken by Union forces, Vicksburg arose as the major fortress on the Mississippi blocking Union domination of the waterway.

Lincoln soon learned to his regret, Halleck had a brilliant theoretical mind, but was a world-class procrastinator on a par with McClellan and no less likely to disparage threatening subordinates.

It was the most sweeping anti-Semitic action undertaken in American history.

No longer did Lincoln mention schemes to compensate masters for their slaves. The time for halfway measures was over.

Porter knew Grant was staking everything on one enormous roll of the dice.

Confederate cannon ignited in a thunderous pyrotechnic display—“Magnificent, but terrible,” Grant called it—for

(Late in life, he argued that Stonewall Jackson stood out only because he had fought inexperienced Union troops early in the war and would have been destroyed by Phil Sheridan later on.)

Grant tapped Colonel Benjamin H. Grierson to spearhead a bold cavalry raid in eastern Mississippi. This former music teacher and Illinois bandmaster was an improbable choice. Ever since being kicked in the head as a child, he had heartily disliked horses.

Jackson collapsed with stunning speed, becoming the third southern capital after Nashville and Baton Rouge to succumb to the Yankee interlopers.