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She fell in love with the handsome young man who parted his hair down the middle.
May I ask you therefore in all candor . . . to state to me whether your son expects to become a citizen of the United States? And what has been his habits? And what are his business qualifications.”84
Only in retrospect would it be clear that the boom had been built on a flimsy scaffolding of speculation and that excessively generous credit had overextended the nation’s railways.
Far from being transitory, the crisis was deep and intractable and persisted for more than five brutal years. It would be termed “the Great Depression” until eclipsed by the 1930s downturn.
Through it all, Grant remained imperturbable. He had won battles precisely because he never succumbed to panic, but his congenital calm now made him seem out of touch to some colleagues.
It was a turning point in Reconstruction, much as Vicksburg’s fall had been during the war. White Democrats had demonstrated that without the protection of federal troops, they could resurrect the prewar power structure.
The Civil Rights Act of 1875 was struck down as unconstitutional by the Supreme Court in 1883. Not until 1957 would Congress dare to pass another civil rights bill, and it was only with the long-overdue Civil Rights Act of 1964 that many of the 1875 legislation’s protections for blacks became the enduring law of the land.
Grant drafted a speech “on the backs of envelopes and the stray scraps of paper at hand in his room.”74 It was a historic plea for public education and the need to save the nation’s classrooms from religious interference. Grant started out by emphasizing the importance in a republic of a knowledgeable citizenry: “The free school is the promoter of that intelligence which is to preserve us as a free nation.” With an unaccustomed rhetorical flourish, he affirmed that in the near future “the dividing line will not be Mason & Dixons but between patriotism, & intelligence on the one side &
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This wasn’t a minor statement: the victorious Union general of the Civil War was saying that terror tactics perpetrated by southern whites had nullified the outcome of the rebellion. All those hundreds of thousands dead, the millions maimed and wounded, the mourning of widows and orphans—all that suffering, all that tumult, on some level, had been for naught. Slavery had been abolished, but it had been replaced by a caste-ridden form of second-class citizenship for southern blacks, and that counted as a national shame.
Grant proved remarkably fair-minded, declaring that “should there be any grounds of suspicion of fraudulent counting on either side it should be reported and denounced at once . . . Either party can afford to be disappointed in the result but the Country cannot afford to have the result tainted by the suspicion of illegal or false returns.”
Convinced Hayes would win, Grant sent him a cordial invitation to stay in the White House until the inauguration, but Hayes thought this unwise given the murky situation and he didn’t arrive in Washington until March 2, right before the inauguration.
At Wormley’s Hotel on February 26, five Hayes people pledged that federal troops would be withdrawn from the South; new “redeemer” governments would be tolerated and “home rule” restored; the four southern Democrats promised, in return, fair treatment of the black community. The influence of the so-called Wormley Conference has been greatly overstated, for it merely culminated months of bargaining and confirmed what was already clear: that Hayes would bring an end to Reconstruction. It was a pyrrhic victory for Republicans, who sacrificed their idealism in exchange for perpetuating their rule.
“He comes up to the mark so grandly on great occasions,” wrote Ebenezer Hoar, “that I wish he were more careful of appearances in smaller matters.”
A lifelong naïf, Grant had been seared by Washington’s cynical politics, which left a bitter aftertaste.
Even as his party and cabinet became bitterly divided over Reconstruction, he showed a deep reservoir of courage in directing the fight against the Ku Klux Klan and crushing the largest wave of domestic terrorism in American history. It was Grant who helped to weave the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments into the basic fabric of American life.
By the end of Grant’s second term, white Democrats, through the “redeemer” movement, had reclaimed control of every southern state, winning in peacetime much of the power lost in combat. They promulgated a view of the Civil War as a righteous cause that had nothing to do with slavery but only states’ rights—to which an incredulous James Longstreet once replied, “I never heard of any other cause of the quarrel than slavery.”87 In this view, Reconstruction imposed “an oppressive peace on honorable men who had laid down their arms.”88 But the South never laid down its arms. When it came to
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Léon Gambetta, interior minister during the Franco-Prussian War, who had escaped from Paris by balloon.
In Madrid, James Russell Lowell, the American minister there, left priceless vignettes of the Grants as rustic innocents. When Lowell took them to the opera, Grant could scarcely endure the high-pitched screeching. “Haven’t we had enough of this?” he asked after five minutes.
He also noticed how Julia, when stuck with dinner companions who spoke no English, simply chattered away in English, sure she would be understood. Her “confidence in the language of Shakespeare & Milton as something universally applicable . . . was sublime.”81
spent a week in Shanghai, attending a torchlight parade and a ball in his honor. Repelled by the filth, squalor, and overcrowding he found in China, he also admired the industry and enterprise of the people and shrewdly sized up their economic potential. “My impression is that the day is not very far distant when they will make the most rapid strides toward modern civilization, and become dangerous rivals to all powers interested in the trade of the East.”
Had Napoleon been thoroughly unselfish, Grant suggested, he would have been the greatest man in history, such was his military genius. When a young woman on board asked Grant to name the two figures he detested most in history, he shot back, “Napoleon and Robespierre.”
Having survived the world tour on dividends from the Consolidated Virginia Mining Company in Nevada, the Grants spent three days in mining country there. A photo shows a gray-bearded, burly Grant in a porkpie hat and rough miner’s coat, carrying a lamp and preparing to descend into the mine. He looked more like a grizzled, weather-beaten prospector than a former president.
When he bet Julia that she wouldn’t dare to descend into the mine, located seventeen hundred feet below, it roused her fighting spirit and she proved him wrong. Grant surfaced from the deep mine, red-faced and perspiring, and joked that it was a good place “to leave the newspapermen.” “Would you not leave the politicians, too?” asked John H. Kinkead, the Nevada governor. “Yes,” Grant said drily, “but there ain’t room for all that ought to be put here.”130
It showed Grant’s success in dealing with his alcohol problem that he was now able to endorse temperance so publicly.
When he rose to nominate Grant, he leapt onto a table reserved for journalists, folded his arms across his chest, then waited until a hush had fallen. He began by softening up the crowd with some light verse: “When asked what state he hails from, / Our sole reply shall be, / He comes from Appomattox, / and its famous apple-tree.”60 This set off an uproarious ten-minute celebration for Grant.
Instead of being worth $1 million, Grant was suddenly worth $80 and Julia $130.
Similarly, when Grant told Twain that, at the doctors’ behest, he had been restricted to one cigar daily, he claimed to have lost the desire to smoke it. “I could understand that feeling,” Twain later proclaimed. “He had set out to conquer not the habit but the inclination—the desire. He had gone at the root, not the trunk.”
Somehow, in agony, he had produced 336,000 splendid words in the span of a year. He had made a career of comebacks and this one was arguably his most impressive as he battled against mortality to preserve his legacy and protect Julia.
Twain had more than literary reasons to celebrate the book, which sold in excess of 300,000 two-volume sets. Seven months after Grant’s death, Julia received a whopping $200,000 check from Twain and $450,000 in the end—an astonishing sum for book royalties at the time. No previous book had ever sold so many copies in such a short period of time, and it rivaled that other literary sensation of the nineteenth century, Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Clearly Grant had emerged victorious in his last uphill battle.
