MANY BIOGRAPHERS of Grant have suggested that his career after Appomattox was driven mainly by a need to keep busy and for applause. Doubtless there is some truth to that—Grant, as his own mother would point out, had become a great man while he was still young, and neither he nor Julia contemplated a retreat to Galena for the rest of their lives, even though the good citizens of Galena would shortly present the Grants with a house worth sixteen thousand dollars, a tidy sum for the day, completely furnished, right down to the leather-bound sets of books in the library and the pictures on the walls. Still, one must also consider his inflexible sense of duty. The presidency was something he could not avoid.
Had Mrs. Grant not raised objections to the invitation to accompany the Lincolns to the theater—an invitation Grant had as good as accepted, and that he was then obliged to decline with considerable embarrassment—Grant might have been shot by John Wilkes Booth along with President Lincoln. Mrs. Grant made such a fuss over the prospect of another ghastly evening of being snubbed by Mary Lincoln—who had loudly objected to Julia’s remaining seated while she, the president’s wife, stood, on a visit to City Point, and then made an even worse scene about Major General Ord’s wife’s hat—that poor Grant had to fumble around with lame excuses, the lameness of which must have been quite obvious to Lincoln, and was therefore spared being present when Lincoln was shot. Even twenty years later, when he wrote his memoirs, Grant was still concocting new and unconvincing explanations for why the Grants had been obliged to stand the Lincolns up at the last moment.
As soon as he heard the news of the assassination, Grant moved quickly to have Ford, the owner of the theater, arrested by Ord, then settled down to the more than ample work of the commanding general of the army. He would shortly be honored by becoming the first American officer since George Washington to be made a full four-star general.
It explains much about Grant if one compares him to a later general, Dwight D. Eisenhower. Like Eisenhower, Grant was perceived as “a man of the people,” like Eisenhower, his conduct of the war was universally admired, and like Eisenhower, though he was no politician, he could obviously have the presidency when he wanted it—in fact, would be sought for the presidency by both parties whether he wanted it or not. Crowds waited to see Grant trot to the office every morning in Washington, driving himself at a spanking pace, reins in his hands while smoking his trademark cigar, and politicians sought his advice—or at least his presence—at every discussion of national policy. Grant was not just popular, in the vacuum that followed the assassination of President Lincoln, he was one of the major figures, perhaps the major figure, to give the administration of Andrew Johnson authority and gravitas—both qualities the new president conspicuously lacked himself.
Part of Grant’s authority derived from his silence. In a world in which politicians spoke for hours (the speech preceding Lincoln’s address at Gettysburg ran longer than two hours, and most of the audience thought it was too short), Grant’s reluctance to speak at all seemed like proof of his wisdom. People listened carefully to what he did have to say—like the utterances of the Sphinx—puzzled over his meaning, and interpreted his silences as a sign of greatness. In an age when speechmaking was a popular entertainment (the term “stemwinder” comes from a speech so long that listeners had to rewind their watch during its course), and when folksy, comic, and sometimes bawdy stories were political assets (Lincoln was the past master of these), Grant had neither a gift nor a taste for either one. Way back when he had been chosen to command a regiment of volunteers by the governor of Illinois, he had listened to other people’s full-blown rhetoric as they addressed the troops; then, when it was his turn, stood before his new men, who were no doubt expecting still more rhetoric, and said, “Go to your quarters, men.”
They had admired him for that, and his gift for brevity had encouraged and rallied troops at Fort Donelson, Shiloh, and elsewhere during the war. It mystified politicians, however, who assumed that Grant’s taciturnity was a way of hiding his opinions, although Julia could have taught them otherwise. Grant’s taciturnity was natural and unaffected. He was a good listener who liked to think things over before speaking his mind, and arrived at his conclusions by some silent, interior process known only to himself.
Grant, like Wellington after Waterloo, soon became a major “fixer” of seemingly insoluble problems, the one man who could be trusted to deal calmly, quietly, authoritatively, and above all fairly with matters that had everyone else in Washington stumped. He was not a party man as such, though he thought of himself as a Republican because of his admiration for Lincoln (his memoirs are nonetheless singularly lacking in emotion on the subject of Lincoln’s death), and for a time a part of his strength was that he was perceived to be above party loyalty and, more important, above party intrigue. He was trusted in the South as well as the North, which gave him a special position at a time when the burning question of the day was how to reintegrate the Southern states into the union, and on what terms.
From the very first he was uncomfortable with President Johnson, a former tailor and Democrat who talked too much, was inappropriately quarrelsome with any stranger who expressed disagreement with him, and was prone to act rashly. These failings were exacerbated by the rumor that Johnson was a drunk, which may have come about because of an unfortunate incident. Johnson had been about to address the Congress, and complained of a severe attack of diarrhea—a real problem in a day when speeches were expected to go on for hours. A well-meaning senator advised a stiff shot of brandy to steady the president’s bowels, and Johnson, who was unused to strong drink, followed his advice and as a result made a rambling, inarticulate speech, following which he had to be helped off the podium.
The rumor that the new president had been drunk when he addressed the House and Senate did nothing for Johnson’s popularity—though even without that it would have been hard to follow the martyred Lincoln into the presidency—but at the nub of the problem was Johnson’s view of making peace with the South. Although he was a border state man (which was the reason he had been chosen for the vice presidency in the first place), unlike Lincoln, Johnson wanted Southerners to be punished for rebellion and treason and was determined to take a hard line. This put him at odds with Grant, who, like Lincoln, did not want to see former Confederates punished merely for their opinions, as opposed to what we would now call genuine war crimes, and was reluctant to lend his prestige to attempts on the part of the president to coerce the Southern states. Johnson’s misfortune, however, was that the radical wing of his party wanted him to go even further than he was willing to in punishing the South, so he was caught between a rock and a hard place.
One of Grant’s first tasks was to censure his old friend Sherman, who, in accepting the surrender of Joseph E. Johnston in North Carolina, had wildly and impulsively exceeded his authority with a document that allowed Confederate forces to take their arms home and deposit them in state arsenals, recognized existing state governments, and confirmed “property rights” without defining them, so that there was a possibility that the courts might hold them to include former slaves. What was going on in Sherman’s mind is hard to say—he was recklessly impulsive and prone to touches of megalomania—but Grant was obliged to write him a stiff letter and to repudiate the surrender agreement, then travel by train across the stricken South to take command of Sherman’s army and renegotiate the terms of Johnston’s surrender.
By the time Grant returned to Washington, President Johnson was already deeply enmeshed in the struggle with Congress over Reconstruction legislation that would end in his impeachment proceedings. In the summer of 1866, Johnson had taken what we would now call a whistle-stop tour of the Northern states to drum up support for his policies, and ordered Grant to accompany him as window dressing. To Grant’s embarrassment, the tour was a disaster, and even his presence in uniform was insufficient to calm audiences, as they and the president exchanged insults and threats.
By the winter of 1866, fueled by the failure of Johnson’s tour, Congress was busy drafting legislation designed to hog-tie the president hand and foot to the extreme Radical cause—military government was to be imposed on the Southern states, the president was to be enjoined from issuing any orders to the army except through the general in command, and to be forbidden from dismissing any member of his cabinet without the consent of the Senate.
Grant’s views on Reconstruction were complicated—or at any rate contradictory—but he was, above all, not an extremist. He disliked the idea of dividing the South into military districts, but would obey orders, and he was no great enthusiast for attempts “to enfranchise the Negro, in all his ignorance,” though in that too he would obey orders. Above all he did not want to get drawn into the quarrel that was fast developing between the president and the Radical members of his own cabinet, and between the president and Congress. Inexorably, however, he was drawn into the struggle, when Johnson removed Stanton as secretary of war and appointed Grant temporarily in his place. When the Senate set aside the president’s action, Grant obligingly moved out of the office of secretary of war and let Stanton reassume it, thus inviting Johnson’s rage. Johnson thenceforth regarded Grant as having betrayed him, while Grant regarded Johnson as having insulted him.
The turmoil of Reconstruction led finally to Johnson’s impeachment, which he narrowly survived—no thanks to Grant—but which spelled the end of his political career. In May 1868 Grant was nominated unanimously as the Republican candidate for the presidency. He went “home” to his new house in Galena and won the election without making any speeches or a campaign tour or even appearing much in public in Galena. He could be seen from time to time taking a constitutional stroll or a drive, or seated on the porch smoking a cigar, but that was as much as he would contribute to the electoral process, and as much as was needed.
He created something of a stir by refusing to ride in the same carriage as Andrew Johnson on inauguration day, but his failure to campaign and his short and notably bland inauguration speech left most people in some doubt as to what his policies would be—doubt that was shared to a significant degree by Grant himself. Almost seventy years later the outgoing president, Harry Truman, would remark of Eisenhower that he would never know what hit him when he reached his desk in the White House—as a general, when he gave an order it would be obeyed instantly, but in the White House he would give an order and nothing would happen. The same phenomenon hit Grant almost immediately. He too, like Ike, was accustomed to instant obedience, not to the political process of building up support for a policy in Congress, or appealing for support to the public, or wooing newspapermen to obtain it. He expected at the very least the backing of his own party, without realizing that everything in politics has to be negotiated—at a price.
Grant’s presidency has come in for a good deal of criticism, and it is certainly true that it ended badly in financial and political scandals, but the fact remains that for eight years Grant exerted a calming influence on a country that had only just emerged from a bloody civil war. (Nearly 625,000 Americans had been killed in the war—compare this with 400,000 in World War II and 58,000 in Vietnam, in a country with four or five times the population it had in the mid–nineteenth century—and a large part of the country remained devastated, starving, and sunk in catastrophic defeat.) Grant not only managed to bring the South back into the Union, albeit at a price the Radicals did not want to pay, and with racial problems that would continue to plague the United States a hundred years later, but also managed to avoid foreign wars or entanglements. Grant’s sheer presence, like Ike’s eighty years later, his immense prestige, his “unflappability” (as someone would describe the supposed salient characteristic of the British prime minister from 1957 to 1963, Harold Macmillan), more or less guaranteed that the United States would be taken seriously again by the world’s great powers. Lincoln, with his death, reached, like Gandhi, an international sainthood, but Grant, like Ike, was the symbol of something else: America’s military power, the integrity of its institutions, its basic decency and good intentions, and above all its rock-solid common sense.
Nobody thought Grant would be much good at diplomacy (wrongly), or politics and policy making (which turned out to be true), but his person, his character, his rise from the leather and harness shop in Galena to four-star general and president, confirmed something much larger—the American dream. No other American of the nineteenth century attained such fame and worldwide admiration, not even Lincoln, whose saintly martyrdom and political cunning made him much harder to understand than the bluff, solid Grant.
Pictures of the Grants in the White House do not make it seem as if they enjoyed themselves there. Grant, in civilian clothes, looks rumpled, uncomfortable, and top-heavy, and seems to have put on a good deal of weight (as did Mrs. Grant), and in a magazine illustration of Chief Red Cloud’s visit to a White House reception, Red Cloud and his followers in their blankets and feathers look more elegant and more at ease than their hosts, the Grants. Grant has been criticized for his choice of cabinet officers, but in the nineteenth century as it is today it was considered perfectly acceptable to reward one’s friends with a cabinet post, so it is hardly surprising that Elihu Washburne, the representative who had picked Grant to command the Galena volunteers, was made secretary of state briefly, then American minister to France. Other choices ranged from the banal to the incomprehensible, also very much as they do today, but the selection of Hamilton Fish to replace Washburne as secretary of state was a fortunate one, as was that of former Ohio governor and Civil War general Jacob D. Cox for the Department of the Interior and Grant’s old aide John A. Rawlins as secretary of war. Grant was widely criticized for giving his relatives jobs, but that is an old Anglo-American political tradition, and most of the jobs were small potatoes indeed. To please Julia Grant, one supposes, her brother became a government Indian trader in New Mexico, another brother was appointed a minor customs official in San Francisco, while a second cousin of hers became receiver of public moneys in Oregon. Her brother Frederick became Grant’s appointments secretary in the White House, while her father (already a postmaster, thanks to Andrew Jackson) moved into the White House as a kind of permanent houseguest, waylaying strangers in the halls to describe the glories of the Confederacy and the inadequacies of the Negro race. As these things go, or went, it was not nepotism on any grand scale.
Grant’s grasp of foreign affairs, perhaps due to the help of Hamilton Fish, was better than anybody could have wished. Like most successful generals, his first concern was peace. A burning issue of the day was the fact that the parvenu emperor of France, Napoleon III, nephew of the great Napoleon, had conspired to evade the Monroe Doctrine by putting an Austrian Hapsburg archduke on the hastily improvised throne of Mexico during the Civil War, an idea he hoped would please the Austrians at no great expense to France. This bizarre episode of what would now be called neocolonialism was bitterly opposed by most Mexicans and also deeply resented by Americans. With the end of the Civil War, the United States had available what was arguably the largest, best armed, and most experienced army in the world, and there were many who thought it should be used to invade Mexico and drive the French out. Grant himself had toyed with the idea (“On to Mexico!” he is said to have remarked facetiously when the Civil War ended), but as president he used his best efforts to calm things down between the United States and France, emphasizing that France was America’s first and oldest ally and friend (a sentiment that might usefully have been followed 133 years later by President George W. Bush), and that Napoleon III would doubtless vanish from the scene without American help, which is exactly what happened. The unfortunate Emperor Maximilian of Mexico was executed by a Mexican firing squad, Napoleon III abdicated his throne in 1870 after having been defeated in the field by the Prussians, and the United States avoided the perils of intervention in Mexico and the risk of war with France. Had it existed then, Grant would have deserved the Nobel Peace Prize.
There were other, thornier problems, however, and these Grant failed to grasp. The line the Clinton people threw at George Bush père in the 1992 election campaign might have been aimed with equal effect at Grant: “It’s the economy, stupid.” It was Grant’s misfortune that he had no business sense whatsoever in an age when the economy was rapidly becoming the major issue. After the Civil War the United States was saddled with a huge national debt, the South’s economy was virtually destroyed, the West was being opened up at a rapid pace (despite the increasingly desperate resistance of those whom Grant called “the original occupants of this land”), and industrialization would very shortly make U.S. productivity soar above that of the United Kingdom. New inventions small and large were changing American life at a dizzying pace: the telegraph, the vast expansion of the railroads, gaslight, the iron-hulled, steam-engined ocean liner and battleship, new agricultural machinery, the safety razor, the repeating rifle, the fountain pen—there seemed no end to American invention and ingenuity—while at the same time the cities of the Northeast and Midwest expanded at breakneck speed to accommodate millions of new immigrants, creating a building boom and sending land prices sky-high.
All these things required vast amounts of capital—capital on an unprecedented scale—and Wall Street, with its speculators, financiers, merchant bankers, and stockbrokers, became a power in the land, perhaps, some feared, the power in the land. Jeffersonian democracy, the ideal of the small farmer and the sturdy local merchant—all of that was about to be overwhelmed as surely as the tribes of “hostile” Indians west of the Missouri River. On the subject of the Indians, Grant’s sympathies were pronounced, though he was unable to do much for them, but his sympathies for small farmers and small-town America were clouded by his admiration for people who knew how to think big and make money on a big scale. The Unites States was entering into a period not unlike that of the stock market boom of the 1980s or the great “dot.com” boom of the mid-1990s, in which those who were ruthless, clever, and knew how to swim with the tide would make (and sometimes lose) vast fortunes and live on a scale of lavish consumption and display that European royalty could only envy. Like President Clinton in our own times, Grant, having succeeded beyond his dreams, enjoyed the company of the very rich, the “movers and shakers” in the world of big money, and although he was president, he and Mrs. Grant were very conscious of not being among them. Like any president, Grant could do many things to help them, however—in that sense if in no other, the 1870s were no different than our own age. The concept of “conflict of interest” was less highly developed back then—Lincoln, despite his saintliness, was a successful lawyer for the railroads and would have been by no means a poor man, had it not been for Mrs. Lincoln’s crazed shopping sprees—and Grant tended to take the view that as a victorious general he was owed a certain style of life.
Then as now victorious American generals expected to be taken care of for life, and Grant was no exception. Nowadays they join the boards of major corporations and head think tanks and foundations; then they accepted outright gifts from grateful citizens and remunerative railway directorships. Having moved virtually straight from the army to the White House, Grant had not had an opportunity to cash in on his victories. Later, when the Grants went on their famous world tour, it did not escape their attention that victorious English generals had been rewarded far more lavishly. John Churchill was created Duke of Marlborough for his victories over Louis XIV and given Blenheim Palace and enough money to support it. And Wellington was not only made a duke but given innumerable estates, a great house on Piccadilly at Hyde Park Corner, and a substantial fortune for his victory over Napoleon. By comparison the Grants felt themselves to be very modestly rewarded indeed, particularly since they liked to hobnob with the very richest of the new rich. Galena and (oddly enough) Philadelphia had chipped in with homes for the Grants, but they were far from well off and would be still less so when Grant left the White House.
One reason, therefore, why Grant stayed for two terms as president (and later made an unsuccessful bid for a third) was that the Grants had no concrete plans for the future after he left the White House. It was not so much that Grant enjoyed being president—he had had none of the fierce presidential ambition that motivates so many who seek the office, and indeed, in a very real sense, the office sought him, not the other way round—but he had nothing much else in mind, and once he was settled in, began to think of the White House as his home. It was large, run like a military establishment, furnished richly enough to satisfy Mrs. Grant, and could provide roast turkey at every meal—the only meat Grant ate with anything approaching enthusiasm.
The job of being president he approached with less enthusiasm. It is perhaps one of the real misfortunes of the Grant administration that John A. Rawlins, his aide from Galena and now secretary of war, who had fallen out with Grant during the war, shocked by the growing casualties after the Wilderness, was already a very sick man, suffering from tuberculosis in an age when that was still an incurable disease. Had Grant been surrounded, supported, protected, advised, and “coached,” as modern presidents are, by a team of advisers under Rawlins’s eagle eye, his presidency might have succeeded better than it did. Just as Rawlins, when he had been well, and close to Grant, had mostly been able to keep him from the bottle (and shield him from the consequences when he managed to avoid Rawlins’s vigilance) during the war, so Rawlins in the White House might have been able to protect the president from his natural inability to distinguish cheats, sharpers, thieves, and con artists from honest men. Though in many respects shrewd and thoughtful, Grant was a total innocent when it came to anything involving money, and being almost supernaturally honest himself, he found it difficult to detect dishonesty in others. Besides, he was enormously loyal. He often managed to ignore proof of wrongdoing even when it was brought to him.
These are not the ideal characteristics for a president of the United States, and in the absence of a personality as forceful as Rawlins (who died in 1869, in the first year of Grant’s presidency), Grant was left pretty much to his own devices in a White House that was, by modern standards, chaotic and open to an endless crowd of office seekers, admirers, and total strangers. Lincoln had thrived on this kind of thing—he was, after all, a natural politician—but Grant was an army man and needed the kind of staff and efficiency that surrounded his headquarters in the field. It didn’t help that he had been nominated for the presidency unanimously, or that he had run for the presidency without making speeches or leaving his new home in Galena. He had never been called upon to define what he wanted to accomplish as president, and his fame and status as a great man and a four-star general were such that practically nobody felt entitled to question him on the matter. His silence made it appear to most people that he was deep in thought or busy formulating plans, but for the most part that was an illusion, although not a deliberate one. Grant certainly desired to produce “peace,” “prosperity,” “harmony,” and the reintegration of the South into the American body politic on terms that protected the former slaves (now called “freedmen”) without necessarily making them equal to whites, but he had no idea how to go about achieving these aims.
No less an authority than the historian Allan Nevins summed up Grant’s presidency by remarking on “his vast ignorance of civil affairs, economics and his tendency to look upon the presidency as a reward, not a responsibility,”1 and there is no denying the truth of this, but one must add to it an unfortunate tendency to pursue with the utmost tenacity ideas that had been planted in his head by others and made no sense in the first place. Grant astonished his own cabinet, his own party, and almost everybody who mattered in the U.S. Senate by a politically doomed plan to annex the island of Santo Domingo (later the Dominican Republic) to the United States (he would not be the last American president to get into trouble in the Caribbean). Santo Domingo was weak, split among rival factions, and up for grabs, and once Grant’s attention had been directed toward it, he was moved both by a mild sense of imperialism, a late-blooming case, as it were, of Manifest Destiny (although he did not propose to conquer Santo Domingo so much as to buy it), and by the belief that it might absorb perhaps as many as four million American blacks. At one stroke, he imagined, America’s position in the Caribbean would be made secure, American investment and ingenuity would turn Santo Domingo into a paying proposition, and the problem of what to do with (and about) the freed slaves in the South would be solved. There was not the slightest enthusiasm for the idea anywhere, as it turned out, except among those Dominican political figures who were eager to sell the country to the highest bidder. Radical Republican senators raised strong objections to the idea of suppressing one of the few existing black republics, American blacks showed no more enthusiasm for the idea of being transplanted to a Caribbean island than they had for being shipped en masse to Liberia—to the extent that they were consulted about it—and hardly anybody wanted to add a black American territory (or, eventually, even less desirable, a state) to the Union. Most vehemently opposed to annexation was the formidable Sen. Charles Sumner of Massachusetts, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, whose firm abolitionist beliefs went back long before the Civil War, when he had been savagely beaten with a cane at his seat in the Senate by Preston Brooks, a member of the House from South Carolina, because of his fierce opposition to slavery, and became thereafter both a martyr and a hero to the cause of black rights.
Grant fought this battle to the bitter end, and he lost it. Nor was he a good loser. As Nevins put it, Grant suffered from “his lack of magnanimity, for despite the Appomattox legend, he bore grudges and was a vengeful hater.” He became Sumner’s sworn enemy, and Sumner—being one of the most respected, even venerated, of Radical Republicans—was a poor choice of enemy. It was not so much that Grant was “a vengeful hater,” true though that was, but that he remained thin-skinned, sensitive, and burdened with the inferiority complex of a boy who had been brought up by harsh and distant parents, made fun of at school, been passed over for promotion in the army, failed at every attempt to make money or improve his situation, and eventually settled into life as a clerk in his father’s store and the town drunk until the Civil War came along and saved him. He was deeply conscious of the gaps in his education and resentful of any perceived slight. A patrician New Englander, a Harvard man, wealthy, imperious and formidably well read, Sumner was just the man to make Grant conscious of his own shortcomings, and Sumner’s opposition to the Santo Domingo scheme was merely the straw that broke the camel’s back.2
Photographs of Grant in the White House are a painful contrast with those taken of him as a general—he looks puffy, peevish, unfocused; and his civilian suits, obviously meant to be the height of fashion, merely seem pretentious and ill fitting—he doesn’t look nearly as comfortable in them as he did in uniform. His hair is slicked back and his shoes look like something a farmer might wear to milk the cows, rather than those of an elegantly dressed politician. There is something about his expression that is at once furtive and depressed, like somebody who is carrying out an impostiture or has stumbled into a place where he doesn’t belong—say the drawing room of a club of which he is not a member.
The truth is that Grant looks lost, and of course in a certain sense he was. Despite the fact that the citizens of Philadelphia had given the Grants a home, as well as those of Galena, Grant was stuck in the White House, beset with problems he couldn’t solve by ordering an attack.
He had his successes, to give him his due. He resolved the complex set of problems that was endangering relationships with Great Britain, in part due to his own determination to remain calm, in part due to Hamilton Fish’s common sense, understanding of diplomacy, and ability to pacify the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, even the formidable Sumner, who, like many New Englanders, was a confirmed Anglophobe. Appeasing Great Britain was not by any means a popular move in the latter part of the nineteenth century, particularly in New England, where the battles of Lexington, Concord, and Bunker Hill had taken place less than a hundred years before and were still deeply etched in people’s memories, as if the Redcoats might reappear at any moment. The feeling was made more acute in the minds of Massachusetts politicians by the increasing presence of large numbers of Irish, whose hatred of the English was bred into their bones, as a voting block.
The issues that had arisen between the United States and the United Kingdom had escalated during the Civil War, exacerbated by the construction in English shipyards of a number of Confederate commerce raiders and blockade runners, which had inflicted major damage on American shipping. Some of these ships were not only built in the United Kingdom but partly manned by British crews. Preposterous sums were being suggested in Congress as “damages” to be paid by the British, Sumner’s being an eye-popping two billion five hundred million dollars. In addition to this there were such issues as disputed fishery rights (again significant in Sumner’s New England, but not to an Ohio/Illinois man like Grant), Confederate debts, and the growing belief among Radical Republicans that Canada should be annexed, partly to punish the United Kingdom and partly because it seemed obvious to New Englanders, as it had one hundred years earlier, that the Canadians would rather be governed from Washington than from London. However much Grant wanted to annex Santo Domingo, he was not remotely interested in annexing Canada to please Senator Sumner; he doubted that the Canadians wanted to become Americans (they had stoutly—and successfully—resisted an American invasion during the Revolutionary War); and at all costs he didn’t want to provoke a war with Britain, then the world’s dominant superpower. In the end, by artful diplomacy, by calming down the rhetoric over Canada, and by the then-revolutionary innovation of submitting America’s claims to international arbitration in Geneva, Grant managed to achieve a settlement with the United Kingdom that left both countries more or less satisfied and would serve as a model for resolving future international disputes. As a result of this Grant developed a reputation in Europe and the rest of the world rather resembling that of Woodrow Wilson in 1918, as a great statesman who could rise above mere national political concerns—very gratifying, no doubt, but not the best way of winning elections in the United States.
What did Grant’s reputation as a president in, however (and continues to do so today whenever journalists and historians are drawing up lists of the best presidents vs. the worst ones), was the depression of 1873, which ushered in a long period of unemployment and distress, made politically more damaging by accusations that the president’s wealthy friends were making money out of it (comparisons to the economy in 2003, as this book was being written, will come naturally to mind). Even in his first term there were signs that the American economy was faltering, and it cannot be said that Grant ignored the issue, innocent as he may have been of what is now called “economics.” His chief concern was with the question of whether paper dollars (which came to be called “greenbacks” during the Civil War) should be redeemable in specie—that is, gold—partially in specie, or not in specie at all. Since this question was still perplexing Winston Churchill as chancellor of the Exchequer in Great Britain in the 1920s, and Franklin D. Roosevelt in the 1930s, it is hardly surprising that Grant was stumped by it and changed his mind frequently. Since the war had been fought, as all wars are, by printing large amounts of paper money in the expectation that victory would enable whoever was in charge of things at some later date (hopefully somebody else) to sort matters out, the aftermath, apart from a huge national debt, was an awful lot of doubtful paper money floating about, and not enough gold. Of course things were simpler, as they always are, on the losing side—Confederate paper money became worthless long before Appomattox—but in the United States it was obviously vital to peg the dollar to some acceptable value, gold being the traditional one.
It was Grant’s bad luck, given his ignorance of economics, to have to listen to both sides of a monetary discussion that doubtless bored and confused him (Churchill and Roosevelt would be just as bored and confused when their time came), and his tragedy that he was beginning to see himself as one of the “haves” rather than as one of the “have-nots.” He had already been bitten by the gold bug before, when, under the false impression that he understood fiscal policy, he fell under the sway of Jay Gould and James Fisk, Jr., two sleazy financial speculators who would have been right at home on Wall Street in the 1990s. Gould and Fisk wanted to “corner” the market in gold and tried over many dinners and in many private dining cars to persuade the president of the importance of the government’s buying gold rather than selling it. In the end, however, during the autumn of 1869, Grant changed his mind just when they thought they had him securely on the hook, setting off a gold panic that ruined many people in the financial world and causing what we would now call a “minirecession,” in addition to costing him one member of his cabinet and exposing to the world the possibility that Julia Grant herself and some of her relatives may have been involved in, and profited from, the attempts to manipulate the price of gold.
In 1873 the failure of Jay Cooke & Co., a prominent banking firm, precipitated a crash, followed by a protracted, full-blown depression, leaving the country in a mess from which Grant was unable to extricate it and in which his own fortune, such as it was, would soon be consumed. Grant’s presidency was to end in a welter of scandals, none of them directly connected to Grant, but most of them the result of his engaging, but mistaken, loyalty to people who had served in the Grand Army of the Republic during the war, or fast-talking, high-living rogues, or friends, or members of his own or his official or Julia’s family. The names of the scandals alone give some clue to the kind of thing that darkened his final years in the White House—the Whisky Scandal (having to do with the sale of whiskey on a large and remunerative scale without federal tax stamps), and the Indian Trader’s Post Scandal (having to do with the sale and the partitioning of the profits of the lucrative appointments of government trading posts on Indian reservations). A pattern of grift and graft ran through the Grant administration, and though the president was one of the few major figures not to profit from it, he nevertheless seemed unable to do anything to stop it, and he was unwilling to listen to evidence against those he liked or trusted.
It did not help that nobody was happy with the chaos and disarray and sheer brutality of events in the former Confederate states. Under military government blacks began to play a role proportional to their number in state legislatures, but as the states gradually escaped from what they described as “carpetbagger” government, the black freedmen were systematically disenfranchised and prevented from voting by organized campaigns of violence, murder, and lynching, in which the nascent Ku Klux Klan played a large role. In very short order, de facto racial segregation, sharecropping, and political impotence enforced by whites became the substitute for slavery in the South.
Grant was unwilling—again very much like Ike less than a hundred years later—to use federal force to defend the rights of blacks or to challenge the Southern status quo—Grant had won the Civil War but had no interest in refighting it—and at the same time he had no wish to reward former Confederates or unreconstructed racists. He preferred to get the army out of there and leave the Southern states to their own devices, in the hope that time and political realities would produce some form of amelioration of the Southern racial situation without necessarily making blacks the equal of whites. This was, it goes without saying, apostasy to Republicans like Charles Sumner, old abolitionists who could still be stirred by the mention of John Brown, but it seemed like plain common sense to Grant and indeed to much of the country. The destruction of slavery, Grant would later tell that supreme political realist, German chancellor Bismarck, was necessary to end the rebellion and defeat the South, but like most white Americans for the next hundred years, Grant was unwilling to take the next step and accept the former slaves as equals or force the former Confederate states to do so.
(It was typical of the era that the few blacks to enter West Point as cadets, having surmounted almost impossible difficulties intended to keep them out, were persecuted and treated with contempt by the student body and the officer instructors alike. Here was an area in which even a word from Grant might have ended the campaign of discrimination, but it was not forthcoming, and it would not be until the mid–twentieth century that the experiment was tried again.)
Perhaps the brightest spot in Grant’s eight years as president was the marriage of his beloved daughter, Nellie, in the White House. Nellie, to judge from photographs, was pretty, intelligent, and good-humored—she was lucky to have inherited her looks more from her father than her mother—and the Grants were especially gratified when she fell in love with a handsome, elegant young Englishman with the almost too perfect name of Algernon Sartoris, whom she met on a transatlantic steamer. Sartoris was a nephew of the great actress Fanny Kemble, and his family was prosperous, with just enough connections to the aristocracy to thrill the Grants, or at any rate to thrill Julia and Nellie. One might have thought that Sartoris would have been pleased to have wooed and won the daughter of the president of the United States, but the Grants appear to have been more dazzled by him than he was by them. In any event, despite a glamorous wedding in the White House, the marriage, except for the fact that it produced four children, was a flop. Sartoris seems to have been a philanderer, a cheat, and a drunk, and reading between the lines may have been under the impression that Grant was wealthy, as well as a famous general and president—the discovery by Sartoris, when it was too late, that he had not married into money may have been partly responsible for the marital problems, but in any case Nellie would eventually return to the United States with her children, though many years were to pass before she could get a divorce.
Whatever else can be said of Grant, he was the most indulgent of parents—clearly his own harsh childhood had taught him something, and he seems to have found in his family life a happiness that eluded him in his public life.
Still, taking it all in all, his presidency was not the failure that historians have portrayed it. He kept America out of two wars; if his attempt to annex Santo Domingo was foolish, his refusal to try to annex Canada was courageous and smart, and the failure of the economy was perhaps beyond his control or anybody else’s. The corruption that marked the Grant administration was brought about by his innocence and his trust in other people, not by any desire for personal gain, and was, in any case, endemic to what came to be called the “Gilded Age.” The United States was growing too fast, in too many different directions at once, and the inevitable consequence was corruption and an unstable economy, and it would have taken a more astute man than Grant to slow things down or clean them up.
All the same the middle period of Grant’s life is disappointing. Appomattox was his greatest moment—the years afterward, despite two terms as president, show him as a man drifting into late middle age without a sense of direction, eager to become a wealthy and respected bourgeois but congenitally ill equipped to do so. Failure as a young man had honed and hardened him for war, and war, when it came, made him a hero; now another long and difficult period of failure would offer him another opportunity for heroism. Not too many people are given two chances to be a hero in a lifetime. Although Grant could not have guessed it, as he prepared to leave the White House, he was to be one of them.