IN 1877 RETIRING PRESIDENTS did not have the benefits that they do today—no “presidential library” to build and administer, no office and staff at government expense, no Secret Service protection, no generous pension. The Founding Fathers had intended that presidents should return to everyday life, hopefully to their farms or plantations, as ordinary citizens, and certainly the first presidents did so, following the example set by Washington. Grant, however, was still a comparatively young man and had no equivalent of Mount Vernon or Monticello to hold him. He had invested a good deal of money in a horse farm built on Dent land near St. Louis, but as usual, that had turned out to be a bad investment, and in any case he was hardly likely to spend the rest of his life raising trotters. Galena held no attractions for him, and he and Mrs. Grant knew hardly anyone in Philadelphia, in both of which they had been given houses by a grateful public.
Grant solved the problem, initially, by the traditional American solution to retirement: taking a world tour.
How curious Grant was about the rest of the world is hard to say, but the rest of the world was intensely curious about him, so that it became like a royal tour, in which the Grants were the sightseeing attraction, rather than the scenery or famous monuments. In the United States, though his popularity was still immense, he was nevertheless, for many people, a Republican former president, which is to say that there were those who disagreed with his actions as a political figure though not as a general. Abroad he was simply a celebrity, the first American president to travel around the world offering himself up to the millions who saw him and Mrs. Grant as if they were part of P. T. Barnum’s circus and freak show.
Their tour around the world was of unprecedented length—nearly two years—partly because travel in those days was slow, and partly because Grant had shrewdly calculated that the longer they stayed away from the United States, the more curiosity there would be to greet them when they got home. Two years is a long time in politics—long enough for people to become fed up with President Rutherford B. Hayes and look back on Grant’s presidency as a golden age. Or so, no doubt, Grant hoped.
In England the Grants were treated like royalty, even by royalty, and given the unusual honor of a private dinner with Queen Victoria at Windsor, marred only by the embarrassing insistence of their bumptious son Jesse that he sit at the queen’s table, to which her majesty finally consented though she found the young man ill-mannered and pushy. The Grants were given dinners by the Prince of Wales (the future Edward VII), the Duke of Devonshire, and the second Duke of Wellington, as well as fulsome public banquets, including one at the Guildhall in which the Lord Mayor of London presented him with the freedom of the City of London, and in general feted him from one end of the realm to the other. Perhaps most extraordinary were the enormous number of English workingmen who turned out to greet Grant, seeing in him not only the man who had destroyed slavery but who represented something that was still unthinkable in Great Britain—the rise of a former leather tanner and shop clerk to four-star general and president. Grant seems to have been overwhelmed and bewildered by his popularity among “the working classes,” but it was a fact, and he came to accept it. His inarticulateness helped too—the fact that he did not make long, windy speeches appealed to them; he was “a man of few words,” and many people who got close enough to him remarked on his robust physique, his apparent physical strength, and his big, blunt-fingered workingman’s hands—hands that had at one time plowed fields, felled trees, cut hay, harnessed horses, and raised pigs, however unsuccessfully.
His reception in France and in Italy was hardly less extraordinary. The Grants saw all the sights—including Pompei—then went on to Egypt, and from there to the Holy Land (at the time still a Turkish province), to Constantinople, back to Italy, and on to Holland, Denmark, Norway, Russia, Germany, and Spain. Grant met Czar Alexander II, Bismarck, Pope Leo XIII, and French premier Georges Clemenceau—everybody who mattered in Europe. Then, after a trip back to England, the Grants set out for India, China, and Japan via the Suez Canal: two well-fed, solidly built Americans with an apparently inextinguishable appetite for food and travel—the prototypes for generations to come of American world travelers. The farther Grant journeyed from his native land, the more he was treated as a distinguished world figure, the peak being reached when he was presented to the emperor Meiji of Japan, who actually shook hands with Grant, something no Japanese emperor had ever done before with anyone, native or foreign.
Through it all Grant ate, read, and gazed at the sights placidly, apparently beyond boredom. There were rumors that from time to time he got drunk—who could blame him?—and in India the viceroy, Lord Lytton, whose account of an evening with the Grants is quoted in McFeely’s biography of Grant, claimed that it took six British sailors to haul a drunken Grant away from a shipboard reception at which he had pinched young ladies’ bottoms and indecently ogled their decolletés, and place him in another room where he satiated his lust on Mrs. Grant, then threw up on her. Lytton was a man who enjoyed telling tall tales and, no shrinking violet himself when it came to the ladies, he was probably exaggerating. Photographs of Mrs. Grant at the time make the incident as he describes it seem unlikely—given her bulk and obvious strength, she could surely have resisted the general, and from what we know of her the suggestion that she would have had sexual intercourse with him in any kind of public view seems very improbable. That Grant was drinking again, however, is undeniable—he shared a brandy with Bismarck, and champagne with the Prince of Wales, and endless wines were served at the innumerable banquets that were held in the Grants’ honor. It would have been very difficult for him to refuse a drink or a toast without being rude, and with Grant one drink led to another. By the time Grant reached India he had been traveling for almost a year and a half, and like many another tourist, the charm of seeing yet another famous monument in the company of his wife may have worn thin by then.
Since Lord Lytton’s is, so far as I know, the only allegation of sexual impropriety against Grant, I am prepared to dismiss it or at least overlook it, but the drinking is more of a problem. For Grant sobriety was all important—the lack of it was a sign that he was getting restless, as indeed he must have been.1
No sooner were the Grants back in the United States than he began to explore the possibility of being nominated by the Republicans for a third term. Whether or not Grant was conscious of it himself, he needed to perform a difficult balancing act—he had to appear everywhere, making himself look electable, but he must never be seen to be seeking the nomination. Whether it had been a good idea for him to spend two years traveling abroad is a difficult question. On the one hand it kept him out of the country, while the press sent back flattering reports of his tour, but on the other he was out of the loop of Republican politics and obliged to travel around the United States accepting applause at public functions without actually saying anything or explaining what he would do in the White House if the party and the public persuaded him to run.
Besides, 1880 was not 1869. The Republican Party had as good as conceded the South to the Democrats by failing to stand up for black voters, and while respect for Grant still ran high among Republicans of every stripe and the mass of voters, there were new issues confronting the nation, and Grant’s victories, while still admired, were not sufficient to compensate for the absence on his part of any concrete program. A new generation of voters was coming of age, in any case, for whom Grant’s victories were their fathers’ battles.
Even so, Grant managed to get a respectable number of votes—he was in the lead on the first ballot at Chicago—and he might very well have swept to the nomination on the enthusiasm of the delegates had he condescended to visit the convention hall, as Julia urged him to do. But he could not or would not play that kind of role; it was simply not in his nature, and as a result he lost the nomination to James A. Garfield, who handily defeated the Democratic candidate, Gen. Winfield Scott Hancock—the man who broke Pickett’s charge on the third day of Gettysburg, and against whom Grant nursed a burning resentment.
Grant made his peace with Garfield, and most (but not all) of those Republicans who had failed to support him, but he did not get a seat in Garfield’s cabinet or even an ambassadorship. He was left with nothing much to do and not much money to do it with. A visit to Mexico, a country he had been fond of even when fighting there, offered the possibility of playing a major role in an American plan to build railways there, but although Grant had set himself up with a handsome residence on East Sixty-sixth Street in New York City and an office on Wall Street in expectation of success, his hopes as a railway entrepreneur eventually came to nothing, leaving him once again with the difficult problem of what to do, and the even more difficult one of how to make money. The Grants liked to live in style, and in a manner fitting for a former president who moved in wealthy financial circles, with hardly any income to support it. If a cabinet post, an ambassadorship, or the Mexican railways would not do the trick, Grant would have to find something else.
Opportunity appeared from, of all people, one of his sons, Ulysses Grant, Jr. Buck Grant had made an advantageous marriage and gone into business on Wall Street with capital provided by his father-in-law. His partner was Ferdinand Ward, a plausible and attractive young man with a certain business flair. Buck Grant, like his father, was a true believer in other people’s business schemes, and it seemed to him logical for his father to sink his remaining capital into the firm of Grant & Ward and make a fortune. It is a measure of Grant’s enduring—and endearing—naïveté that he was persuaded to attempt to become a Wall Street tycoon—few things were as clear as Grant’s poor judgment about money and schemes to make money—yet that is precisely what he decided to do.
Buck was an innocent dupe, Ward a clever con man. And the outcome was predictable. Ward’s idea was to use Grant as a front to attract investments from Civil War veterans. With Grant’s name on the letterhead the money flowed in, and Ward used each new investment to show a profit to the previous investors—what would come to be known as a Ponzi scheme. In the meantime Ward was stealing the partnership blind, which became only too shockingly apparent when Ward had to admit, in May 1884, that the firm was technically bankrupt. In one last burst of confidence trickery, Ward persuaded Grant to borrow $150,000 from the formidable William Vanderbilt, which Vanderbilt agreed to on Grant’s personal word. Then Ward vanished into protracted litigation and prison along with Vanderbilt’s $150,000, and Grant was left holding the bag, bankrupt, an object of scorn or pity (depending on which party you belonged to), by any standards ruined. No American ex-president had ever fallen so low, and except for Harding and Nixon, none ever would again.