Grant

by Ron Chernow

When his son Jesse asked why Santo Domingo was so important, an injured Grant replied: “Because it should belong to us. There is not one sound argument against annexation, and one day we shall need it badly.”31 He had expended too much of his political capital on the battle and badly miscalculated the strength of hostile forces arrayed against him.

Frederick Douglass wisely saw that the random corruption cases that tarnished the administration’s reputation were far less consequential than the president’s unqualified support for southern blacks.

THE SAME FLINTY DETERMINATION that informed Grant’s spectacular campaign against the Klan harmed him when dealing with the Santo Domingo treaty, an obsession he could not discard.

As Julia Grant once said of her husband, he had “lots of friends and no enemies until political ones came on.”44 This was not quite true, for he had enemies during the war who tried to injure him. But the politicians now plotting his downfall were craftier and more ruthless and had played the game far longer than he had. Grant lacked the normal human quota of cynicism and had paid for it.

Thus, while Grant paid lip service to reform and became the first president to urge creation of a professional civil service, he ended up willy-nilly a captive of the spoils system. His detractors sensed that his heart wasn’t really in reform and that he privately questioned their methods. For reformers, Grant came to embody the system they despised.

Grant has suffered from a double standard in the eyes of historians. When Lincoln employed patronage for political ends, which he did extensively, they have praised him as a master politician; when Grant catered to the same spoilsmen, they have denigrated him as a corrupt opportunist.

For Douglass, Grant was the general who had effected with the sword Lincoln’s emancipation policy, then extended those gains by backing the Fifteenth Amendment. “To Grant more than any other man the Negro owes his enfranchisement,” Douglass stated.

During the Johnson administration, the Union Pacific Railroad had set up a dummy construction company, Crédit Mobilier, with the same executives as the parent railroad. The directors of Crédit Mobilier awarded themselves lavish salaries, all covered by government payments that far exceeded the actual cost of constructing the railroad.

Hayes always denied there was any deal, but true to his informal understanding with the Democrats, he removed troops from the South—or at least from the statehouses, returning them to their barracks—leaving blacks to the tender mercies of the vengeful white community. Reconstruction was now officially dead and the Democratic Party in charge across the South. “Half of what Grant gained at Appomattox,” said Wendell Phillips, “Hayes surrendered for us on the 5th of March.”

“It is easy to see why Grant is so often belittled,” wrote David Herbert Donald, the eminent Lincoln biographer. “He was not well educated, was not articulate in arguments, was not flashy, and had no connection with the Eastern world of intellect and power. On the other hand, he was not merely a remarkable general but . . . a skillful and successful politician. After all, he was the only President between Abraham Lincoln and Woodrow Wilson [besides McKinley] to be elected to two consecutive terms of office.”83 Donald singled out Grant as the most underrated American president.

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.”

Grant was correct. He and his three sons had plowed their life savings into the criminal venture. Instead of being worth $1 million, Grant was suddenly worth $80 and Julia $130. The magical profits had evaporated overnight.

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. Once again he had thoroughly conquered adversity. For Grant, the end of writing now meant the end of life.

Summing up Grant’s career, Frederick Douglass wrote: “In him the Negro found a protector, the Indian a friend, a vanquished foe a brother, an imperiled nation a savior.”153

Twain realize that in supervising the Memoirs, he had failed to press Grant on one key point that would have completed the human portrait and now he kicked himself for this critical omission: Grant had not addressed his struggle with alcohol. It was a contest, Twain reckoned, as huge as any of the titanic battles he had fought and won. “I wish I had thought of it!” Twain exclaimed with frustration. “I would have said to General Grant, ‘Put the drunkenness in the Memoirs—& the repentance & reform.