Grant

by Ron Chernow

Grant remained the presiding genius of the war effort. Sheridan’s successful rampage through the Shenandoah Valley, Thomas’s demolition of Hood’s army at Nashville, Sherman’s conquest of Atlanta and Savannah—all formed part of the scheme he had envisaged when he became general in chief. He had accomplished exactly what he had set out to do, interweaving his far-flung armies so they cooperated in a single strategy and moved with a common purpose, the result being that the Confederacy was sliced into ever smaller pieces.

“I know how much there is dependent on me and will prove myself equal to the task. I believe determination can do a great deal to sustain one and I have that quality certainly to its fullest extent.”17

“I was instantly struck with the great simplicity and perfect naturalness of his manners, and the entire absence of everything like affectation, show, or even the usual military air . . . of men in his position.”32 The observant Stephens noted Grant’s economical speech and the exceptional intelligence that lay behind his taciturn style: “I saw before being with him long, that he was exceedingly quick in perception, and direct in purpose, with a vast deal more of brains than tongue, as ready as that was at his command.”

Grant had reached his peak powers as a strategist, and Horace Porter noted that his operations now “covered a theater of war greater than that of any campaigns in modern history, and . . . required a grasp and comprehension which have rarely been possessed even by the greatest commanders. [Grant] was at this period indefatigable in his labors, and he once wrote in a single day forty-two important despatches with his own hand.”

Clearly, in Grant’s eyes, the country was slouching toward a crisis that required him to ride to the rescue. He regarded Reconstruction as the Civil War’s final phase and believed Johnson had cast his lot with the disloyal South.

In his political life, there had always been an illusion of passivity, the sense of a massive wave lifting him to the next plateau without corresponding effort on his part, while all the time he had quietly positioned himself to ride its crest. He did not exactly want the presidential job, but neither did he exactly not want it. “I wasn’t sorry to be a candidate,” he later said, “but I was very sorry to leave the command of the army.”

He feared the Democratic Party had become a haven for rebel sympathizers who refused to accept the basic tenets of Unionism, and he saw it as his duty to stand as the Republican nominee.

Conforming to tradition, the convention sent a delegation to Grant with official notice of his nomination. In return, he scratched out a statement that mostly dealt in standard rhetoric, concluding with four words that formed the slogan of his campaign and remained irreversibly associated with him: “Let us have peace.”15 These words, an inspired piece of phrasemaking, were gobbled up by the public and showed Grant’s sound political instincts.

Dating back to the early days of the Civil War, he had maintained a firm belief that one’s worth should be recognized instead of being crassly promoted,

Only in hindsight did Grant fathom his own limitations upon taking office. “I entered the White House as President without any previous experience either in civil or political life,” he admitted. “I thought I could run the government of the United States, as I did the staff of my army. It was my mistake, and it led me into other mistakes.”

Shortly after noon, just as Andrew Johnson vacated the White House, Grant was sworn in as eighteenth president by Chief Justice Salmon Chase. For Grant, it had been an improbable journey to this moment, with many setbacks intermixed with vaulting triumphs.

Grant would prove a far more assertive president than his modest inaugural address had suggested.

While historians have tended to mock Grant’s cabinet as a bunch of mediocrities—and Borie certainly qualified as such—it was actually weighted with former congressmen, senators, governors, and judges. It had figures of real distinction (Fish), Radical Republicans (Boutwell, Creswell), men of exceptional intellect (Hoar), and advocates of civil service reform (Cox). Rutherford B. Hayes was enraptured by Grant’s freedom from party hacks: “His Cabinet looks like a revolution . . . It is an attempt to put fitness and qualification before what is called ‘claims’ and ‘political services.’ If anybody could overthrow the spoils doctrine and practice, Grant is the man.”

“It was unjust to the North,” Grant subsequently lamented. “In giving the South negro suffrage, we have given the old slave-holders forty votes in the electoral college. They keep those votes, but disfranchise the negroes. That is one of the gravest mistakes in the policy of reconstruction.”58

Grant’s soldierly instincts made him persevere in a lost cause instead of trimming his losses. In politics a fight-to-the-finish mentality could be unsound strategy.

While conservative Republicans and Democrats squawked that Grant trespassed on states’ rights—a sacred cause in the South—he employed every weapon in his repertoire to suppress Klan violence.

Welsh published an open letter to Grant that portrayed him as irredeemably blinded by his love for friends: “Every suggestion I ever made to you was promptly responded to, save only the investigation of frauds allowed by your appointees. Even this lamentable trait I believe springs from a distorted virtue. Your protection of General Parker . . . seems wholly unaccountable, except on the hypothesis that love in you is blind.”

Ex-senator James R. Doolittle of Wisconsin, who chaired the convention, gave the game away when he said the true aim of the novel fusion ticket was the “overthrow of Negro supremacy”—the anti-Reconstruction agenda, however thinly masked by reform rhetoric.

For Grant, the election was about more than personal vindication. He had long warned that a Democratic victory in 1872 would overturn the result of the Civil War, degrading the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments into “dead letters.”

Small wonder that civil rights leader George T. Downing reaffirmed that when it came to respecting black rights, “we have not had Grant’s equal in the Presidential chair.”

For Douglass, the black alliance with the Republican Party remained an inviolable trust. “If as a class we are slighted by the Republican party,” he noted, “we are as a class murdered by the Democratic party.”104 He swore he would rather blow his brains out than destroy the Republican Party.

Greeley campaigned from the back of a train, delivering scores of speeches and previewing the whistle-stop style that later marked presidential campaigns. His campaign stumbled from the start and never found a secure footing. He was kept busy explaining his history of derogatory statements about Democrats. “I never said all Democrats were saloon keepers,” he protested. “What I said was that all saloon keepers were Democrats.”114 The more Greeley talked, the lower he sagged in public esteem. “Greeley’s foolish speeches must surely weaken him,” wrote Rutherford B. Hayes, “and destroy what chances he had.”

The hapless Greeley was subjected to such a personal pounding that he afterward sighed, “I hardly knew whether I was running for President or the Penitentiary.”

When it came to Reconstruction, Grant was not the tool of moguls, but the champion of oppressed blacks, leading Henry Ward Beecher to proclaim there “had never been a President more sensitive to the wants of the people.”

Despite conspicuous blunders in his first term, notably cronyism and the misbegotten Santo Domingo treaty, Grant had chalked up significant triumphs in suppressing the Klan, reducing debt, trying to clean up Indian trading posts, experimenting with civil service reform, and settling the Alabama claims peacefully.

Grant had overwhelmingly won the electoral vote, and had garnered the largest popular majority of the century, nearly 56 percent of the vote, the biggest percentage between Andrew Jackson and Theodore Roosevelt.

Henry Clay Warmoth served as the Republican carpetbag governor of the state during Grant’s first term as president. “I don’t pretend to be honest,” he said. “I only pretend to be as honest as anybody in politics.”

In a revealing letter, he told his son “to have the respect of all with whom you come in contact . . . To gain this never deceive nor act an artificial part. Be simply yourself . . . never resort to any means to make believe you know more than you really do.”72 It was as close to a statement of his philosophy as Grant ever came up with for his children.

As he wrestled with the monetary riddle, he experienced such turmoil that he suffered bouts of insomnia. Even on blood-soaked battlefields he had slept more soundly.