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UNDER GRANT’S AEGIS the federal government had mustered a fearsome army, a million strong, that may well have been, as he claimed, the best trained and equipped in the world. Yet his first task as general in chief in the postwar era was to contract that army dramatically, and within six months its numbers had dwindled to 210,000 men. The brick building at Seventeenth and F Streets, from which Grant ran the army and received an unending parade of visitors, was small and unprepossessing and scarcely seemed an imposing seat of power. With its yard and tree in front, Grant’s son Jesse thought it exuded a sedate residential air: “Washington side streets were not paved in those days, and army teams were often stalled, hub-deep in the mud, before headquarters.”1 Showing the loyalty to his staff that was both his blessing and his curse, Grant kept on John Rawlins as chief of staff; Cyrus Comstock, Orville Babcock, Horace Porter, and Fred Dent as aides-de-camp; Adam Badeau and Ely Parker as military secretaries; and Theodore Bowers and Robert Lincoln as assistant adjutant generals.
Only gradually did Grant adapt to the murky ways of Washington—“I have a horror of living in Washington,” he warned Julia, “and never intend to do it”—but residence there proved inseparable from high command.2 He fantasized about living in Philadelphia and commuting to the capital weekly, a dream nearly realized in January 1865 when a group of Philadelphia dignitaries gave him, gratis, a fully furnished house on Chestnut Street “in gratitude for eminent services.”3 These rich citizens spared no expense, outfitting the opulent quarters with an excellent piano, velvet carpets, and lace curtains. However hard it might be to picture the hard-bitten Grant stomping about in this prissy place, he envisioned it as his new home. To her horror, Julia discovered that the new abode came with a complete wine cellar, well stocked with costly wines, brandies, and whiskies, and she quietly consulted Rawlins about how to get rid of such temptation. “Send for some responsible broker . . . have him dispose of the entire stock at once; and put the money in your pocket,” Rawlins advised her, and Julia acted swiftly before her husband was waylaid into fresh temptation.4
Upon occupying the house in May, Grant discovered he had woefully underestimated the time he had to spend in Washington. Predictably he became a prisoner of his heavy workload and Julia, after four years apart from her husband, hated being stranded in another city. In Washington Grant stayed at the Willard Hotel, where he was so hounded by job supplicants that Julia perceived he needed “a home where these petitioners could not penetrate.”5 Also, the upkeep of the tony Philadelphia home was so expensive Grant feared he would be saddled with debt for a decade. Consequently, the Grants rented out the Philadelphia house in November and relocated to Georgetown, decorating their new home with furniture from Philadelphia. The residence at 205 I Street NW was an ample, four-story place with two acres and a fine Potomac view. Hung with banners, swords, bugles, and other wartime trophies, the house contained engravings of Washington, Sherman, and Sheridan, along with a bust of Lincoln.
If the Philadelphia house posed a financial burden for Grant, it never presented an ethical one. Showered with gifts by adoring businessmen, he didn’t question such generosity, accepting it as standard recompense for war heroes. Julia reacted to these gifts as so much manna dropped by a bountiful heaven: “a home, a lovely home, given to my dear, brave husband by a number of strange gentlemen of Philadelphia!”6 In fairness to Grant, one should note that the Duke of Wellington had received a dukedom and a vast fortune from a devoted nation, while Sherman pocketed money and a St. Louis home. But presents from private donors could easily shade over into subtle sources of corruption, especially since Grant’s name was now being bandied about as a future president.
The Georgetown home came from a coterie of well-heeled New York admirers, led by Major General Daniel Butterfield, who transferred $105,000 to Grant in February 1866. Since the money far exceeded the $34,000 mortgage, these rich gentlemen furnished Grant with $55,000 in government bonds and the remainder in cash. No judicial rules yet governed such gifts. One donor was Abel Rathbone Corbin, the former editor of a Missouri newspaper, who later married Grant’s sister Jennie. As we shall see, Corbin wasn’t bashful about trading on his connection with Grant. Grant took this largesse without any apparent misgivings. Once again, what looked like patriotic munificence from one standpoint might look like buying future influence from another.
In Washington, people were struck by how lightly Grant wore his postwar fame. When John Eaton brought two British clergymen to meet him, they expected a profusion of ribbons and medals, but found him dressed instead in a “plain business suit” with a battered old army hat “lying on the table before him.”7 Showing a democratic style, Grant grabbed a streetcar to work each morning and in fair weather pounded the pavement at a rapid clip, smoking and tipping his hat to pedestrians as he whizzed by. The cigar still served as his trademark, though he scaled back consumption from twenty per day during the war to ten, feeling virtuous in his self-restraint. An active, curious pedestrian, he was often caught window-shopping by an amused Sherman. “Hello, Grant,” Sherman would interrupt him, “what are you doing?” Grant would give an embarrassed little laugh. “Taking a little exercise, as usual, and looking around,” he declared.8 The one thing about Washington that seemed to cramp Grant’s style was the absence of long straightaways for racing fast horses.
Julia Grant came alive in the heady atmosphere of Washington politics and was fondly received by the new First Lady, the sickly and reclusive Eliza McCardle Johnson. “Mrs. Johnson was a retiring, kind, gentle old lady,” Julia wrote, “too much of an invalid to do the honors of the house . . . but she always came into the drawing room after the long state dinners to take coffee and receive the greetings of her husband’s guests.”9 After the Grants bought the I Street house, Julia emerged as an ambitious social hostess, with a clear case of Potomac fever. Her receptions were packed with powerful visitors, leading Cyrus Comstock to growl at one gathering about “a horrid jam in which it took about an hour to get from stairway to parlor.”10 At loose ends as a host, Grant seemed misplaced in these fancy gatherings. He “was a quiet, undemonstrative man,” noted a visitor, “whose immobile face rarely relaxed into a smile, and who displayed slight interest in social affairs.”11 If a trifle unsophisticated, Julia was well-meaning and eager to please. “Mrs. Grant is an unpretending, affectionate, motherly person who makes a good impression on everybody,” wrote Rutherford B. Hayes. “Her naivete is genuine and very funny at times.”12
Grant’s postwar fame didn’t spare him the bane of his father-in-law’s glaring presence. After he and Julia settled into their Georgetown home, Colonel Dent had no qualms about moving in with them, forcing the victorious Union general to tolerate under his roof a cranky, unrepentant rebel who pontificated about the North violating southern rights. “Occasionally I get into a discussion against my will with Mr. Dent,” wrote Comstock, who resided with the Grants. “He was a rebel sympathizer during the war & now is always abusing the Yankees & crying ‘unconstitutional.’ It makes me furious once in a while.”13
Many Colonel Dents remained scattered throughout the South, unreconciled to the war’s outcome. As the charitable victor at Appomattox, Grant stood as the foremost symbol of a merciful attitude toward the defeated states. At the same time, as the leading Union general, fully committed to the war’s agenda of preserving the Union and ending slavery, Grant was no less associated with protecting the four million freed people. How to reconcile these two often incompatible impulses as they clashed in postwar America would define the rest of Grant’s life and would prove, in many ways, as baffling a problem as winning the war. Nearly two weeks after Appomattox, Grant had written to Julia, “I find my duties, anxieties, and the necessity for having all my wits about me, increasing instead of diminishing. I have a Herculean task to perform.”14
Lincoln had left behind only vague hints about how to pursue Reconstruction. He had bequeathed no immutable master plan, leading to educated guesswork about what he might have done. “Grant only knew the general magnanimity of the President’s views and his disposition toward clemency,” wrote Badeau.15 In Andrew Johnson, Grant had to deal with a new president who would swing from excessive hostility toward the South to excessive leniency, alienating him at both ends of the spectrum.
Grant’s relationship with Johnson started out amicably despite their differing styles. Grant was circumspect and reserved whereas Johnson blurted out oaths and tirades, heedless of the consequences. Grant disclaimed interest in politics or the presidency. “If I supposed that President Johnson believed that I desired to be President, I would be so ashamed that I could not look him in the face,” he confided.16 With Grant a bona fide war hero, Johnson cultivated the relationship, naming Jesse Root Grant postmaster of Covington, Kentucky. In the view of one lawmaker, Johnson “seemed not exactly to stand in awe of [Grant] but anxious to conciliate rather than resolved to command.”17 From the outset, Grant held decidedly ambivalent feelings toward the hotheaded Johnson, finding him “revengeful, passionate, and opinionated.”18
Complicating their relationship was head-scratching about whether Grant was a Democrat or a Republican. Many Democrats sensed an allied spirit and possible presidential nominee for their party. Later, when their relations soured, Johnson insisted that Grant had started out a stalwart supporter of his policies who was then seduced by Radical Republicans catering to his dawning presidential ambition. “He meant well for the first two years, and much that I did that was denounced was through his advice,” said Johnson. “He was the strongest man of all in the support of my policy for a long while.”19 Johnson overstated his case, conveniently forgetting many points of disagreement. Grant saw himself as a soldier, not a politician, narrowly defining his duties as general in chief. He was allowed to attend cabinet meetings about Reconstruction but piped up only when addressed about specific military issues. Still suffused with the Appomattox spirit, he lobbied Stanton to release Confederate prisoners and argued that former rebel soldiers who qualified as loyal citizens should be eligible for the regular army.
With Congress out of session until December, Andrew Johnson spurned calls for a special session to deal with Reconstruction. Grant thought it a profound error to make such momentous decisions by presidential fiat. At first Johnson appeared tailor-made to appeal to poor southern whites and juggle the conflicting interests of North and South. In Grant’s view, he was “one of the ablest of the poor white class” and started out his presidency as if he “wished to revenge himself upon Southern men of better social standing than himself.”20 With a broad streak of class rage, Johnson seemed to breathe fire against patrician southern planters. Radical Republicans in Congress even thought the president a kindred soul who might support black equality and suffrage. “It was supposed,” Sherman recalled, “that President Johnson would err, if at all, in imposing too harsh terms upon these [southern] states.”21
Fresh from Appomattox, Grant was initially dismayed by the way Johnson lashed out at ex-rebels. “They surely would not make good citizens,” he later wrote, “if they felt that they had a yoke around their necks.”22 Before long, however, he grasped the hidden psyche of Andrew Johnson and saw lurking behind his grievances against southern planters a burning wish to emulate them. Instead of punishing his social betters, he would pose as their champion to win them over. As Grant put it, “As soon as the slave-holders put their thumb upon him . . . he became their slave.”23 A Democrat with a devout faith in limited government and states’ rights, Johnson wasn’t ready to extend federal power to protect blacks. Before long, Grant wrote, Johnson came “to regard the South not only as an oppressed people, but as the people best entitled to consideration of any of our citizens.”24 The new president planned to win a second term through an alliance of southern white Democrats and moderate northern Republicans.
What pretty much guaranteed that Johnson would side with white supremacists was his benighted view of black people. No American president has ever held such openly racist views. “This is a country for white men,” he declared unashamedly, “and by God, as long as I am President, it shall be a government for white men.”25 In one message to Congress, he contended that “negroes have shown less capacity for government than any other race of people.”26 He privately referred to blacks as “niggers” and betrayed a morbid fascination with miscegenation. In his inverted worldview, he wanted to ensure that the “poor, quiet, unoffending, harmless” whites of the South weren’t “trodden under foot to protect niggers.”27 Not only did he think whites genetically superior to blacks but he refused to show the least respect to their most brilliant spokesmen. When Frederick Douglass came to the White House with a black delegation, Johnson turned to his secretary afterward and sneered: “He’s just like any nigger, & would sooner cut a white man’s throat than not.”28 Such a president could only picture southern blacks picking cotton for low wages on their former plantations.
In May, Johnson unveiled his Reconstruction program with a pair of proclamations. One promised to restore full citizenship to most southerners who agreed to take an oath of allegiance. The second outlined steps by which rebel states would be readmitted to the Union. The president would name provisional governors who would call elections to assemble conventions that would bring forth new state constitutions. These elections, of course, would be limited to white male voters. Whatever hopes Radical Republicans cherished about Johnson were rudely thwarted as he began granting wholesale pardons to white southerners. The conservative men he chose as southern governors showed he didn’t intend to “reconstruct” the South at all or upset its traditional power structure. With presidential acquiescence, the old slave owners would reclaim their firm hold on power.
Grant and Johnson clashed sharply over a possible treason prosecution for Robert E. Lee. Johnson’s amnesty proclamation excluded Confederate military leaders, who were required to apply directly to the president for pardons. Grant knew he would never have extracted the Appomattox agreement if it hadn’t exempted Confederate officers from future punishment, but many northerners still bristled at coddling Lee. As Ralph Waldo Emerson protested, “General Grant’s terms certainly look a little too easy, as foreclosing any action hereafter to convict Lee of treason.”29 A vociferous campaign in the northern press advocated trying Lee on treason charges, with Ben Butler assuring the president that Grant “had no authority to grant amnesty” at Appomattox.30 The issue was a highly charged one. Memories of the war were fresh, the wounds were still raw, and many dead bodies lay unburied around Appomattox Court House and Sayler’s Creek. Johnson insisted that as commander in chief he could override anything done by Grant at Appomattox. Grant objected that the rebels had surrendered on these terms, Lincoln had honored them, and there would have been “endless guerrilla warfare” without this leniency.31
Everybody knew that the treatment of Lee, with his tremendous moral authority, would sway southern opinion during the postwar era. In early May, Halleck informed Grant that many of Lee’s officers had lined up to take amnesty oaths and that Lee himself contemplated petitioning Johnson for a pardon. “Should he do this, the whole population with few exceptions will follow his example,” Halleck insisted.32 Willing to take heat on the issue, Grant showed courage and fairness in endorsing merciful treatment for Lee. “Although it would meet with opposition in the North to allow Lee the benefit of Amnesty,” Grant told Halleck, “I think it would have the best possible effect towards restoring good feeling and peace in the South to have him come in.”33
Any chance for such a harmonious outcome was shattered in late May when federal judge John C. Underwood, a northern abolitionist, convened a grand jury in Norfolk, Virginia, for the express purpose of indicting Lee and other Confederate leaders for treason. Underwood belittled the Appomattox agreement as “a mere military arrangement” that “can have no influence upon civil rights or the status of the persons interested.”34 Following the judge’s lead, the grand jury returned indictments against Lee, Joseph Johnston, James Longstreet, and other high-ranking Confederate generals.
Lee was stunned. Having pledged his sacred honor at Appomattox, Grant was no less flabbergasted that his agreement was being retroactively nullified. Lee sent out feelers to determine whether Grant would support his clemency request and word filtered back that Grant would stand by his solemn pledge at Appomattox. On June 13, Lee wrote to Grant and asked for confirmation that officers and men of the Army of Northern Virginia had surrendered under terms protecting them “from molestation, so long as they Conformed to its conditions.”35 He enclosed a pardon application “with the earnest recommendation that, this application of Gen. R. E. Lee for amnesty and pardon may be granted him.”36 Grant saw a battle royal ahead with Johnson as to whether he had exceeded his authority at Appomattox. He jogged Stanton’s memory that “the terms granted by me met with the hearty approval of the President at the time, and of the country generally. The action of Judge Underwood in Norfolk has already had an injurious effect, and I would ask that he be ordered to quash all indictments found against paroled prisoners of war, and to desist from further prosecution of them.”37
On June 16, Grant met with Andrew Johnson at the White House and the two men engaged in a testy exchange about the fate of Lee and other Confederate generals. Johnson reiterated his vow to make “treason odious” and demanded, “When can these men be tried?” “Never,” answered Grant, “unless they violate their paroles.”38 Grant summarized the dispute:
Mr. Johnson spoke of Lee, and wanted to know why any military commander had a right to protect an arch-traitor from the laws. I was angry at this, and I spoke earnestly and plainly to the President. I said, that as General, it was none of my business what he or Congress did with General Lee or his other commanders . . . That did not come in my province. But a general commanding troops has certain responsibilities and duties and power, which are supreme. He must deal with the enemy in front of him so as to destroy him . . . His engagements are sacred so far as they lead to the destruction of the foe. I had made certain terms with Lee . . . If I had told him and his army that their liberty would be invaded, that they would be open to arrest, trial, and execution for treason, Lee would never have surrendered, and we should have lost many lives in destroying him. Now my terms of surrender were according to military law, and so long as Lee was observing his parole I would never consent to his arrest . . . I should have resigned the command of the army rather than have carried out any order directing me to arrest Lee or any of his commanders who obeyed the laws.39
Grant didn’t lightly throw down a gauntlet in this way. When he returned to the War Department, he notified his staff, “I will not stay in the army if they break the pledges that I made.”40 Johnson must have known the damage Grant’s resignation would do to his administration and Grant won the confrontation hands down. On June 20, at Johnson’s behest, Attorney General James Speed ordered the U.S. attorney in Norfolk to abandon Lee’s prosecution. On the same day, Grant informed Lee that no further actions would be taken to place him behind bars. Lee predicted that the government would procrastinate in granting his pardon, though he couldn’t have predicted that his civil liberties and right to vote would not be restored until Johnson’s broad amnesty in December 1868. His citizenship wasn’t fully restored in his lifetime and more than a hundred years passed before it was posthumously accomplished through a joint congressional resolution in 1975.
As news spread that Grant had saved Lee, it confirmed his special status as a forgiving, merciful northern general. As one southern editorial writer said, “Though a past uncompromising enemy of that successful Captain, we now take a special pleasure in recording this our testimony to his soldierly good faith.” The paper quoted a ringing paean from the Alabama politician Clement Clay: “Gen. GRANT is not disposed to oppress the South; on the contrary he is striving to lighten her burden.”41
With the treason indictment behind him, Lee accepted the presidency of Washington College in Lexington, Virginia, a quiet town in the shadow of the Blue Ridge Mountains, where he hoped to dodge the spotlight. But the war’s passions hadn’t subsided. William Lloyd Garrison wondered how “the vanquished leader of the rebel armies” could inculcate in his students loyalty to the Union “which he so lately attempted to destroy!”42 Lee ducked attempts to draft him into politics, calling it “extremely unpleasant” that his “name should be unnecessarily brought before the public.”43 Although he preached acceptance of the war’s verdict, he remained an unreconstructed southerner. Where he had once emphasized his original opposition to secession, he now stressed states’ rights and constitutional principles to justify the South’s action, clinging to a prejudiced view of blacks. As he told a cousin, “I have always observed that wherever you find the Negro, everything is going down around him, and wherever you find the white man, you see everything around him improving.”44 In February 1866, he testified before Congress to oppose suffrage for former slaves: “My own opinion is that, at this time, they cannot vote intelligently, and that giving them the right of suffrage would open the door to a great deal of demagoguism, and lead to embarrassments in various ways.”45
Most consequential for Grant’s historic reputation was the way southerners of the Lost Cause school would begin to idealize Lee, portraying him as a gallant, noble general who had far outshone Grant and lost the war only because his opponent was backed by limitless manpower and industrial machinery. Even in the North, praise for Lee grew so effusive that Frederick Douglass would complain in the 1870s, “We can scarcely take up a newspaper that is not filled with nauseating flatteries of the late Robert E. Lee.”46 However statesmanlike he outwardly appeared, Lee remained a southern partisan, privately lamenting “the vindictiveness and malignity of the Yankees, of which he had no conception before the war.”47 He never retreated from his retrograde views on slavery, signing a manifesto during the 1868 presidential campaign that proclaimed: “The idea that Southern people are hostile to the negroes and would oppress them . . . is entirely unfounded . . . They have grown up in our midst, and we have been accustomed from childhood to look upon them with kindness.”48 The signers proposed a restoration of the “‘kindness and humanity’ of their former social system.”49 Grant came to believe that Lee, far from accepting the war’s outcome gracefully, was secretly hostile to it and abetted southern fantasies that their defeated cause would rise anew.
While Lee’s case was the most celebrated, Grant furnished legal protection to scores of southern generals who turned to him for pardons. One by one the top brass of the Confederate army besieged him with doleful letters. Grant’s most improbable intervention came on behalf of John Singleton Mosby, the notorious “Gray Ghost,” whose raiders had bedeviled his army in northern Virginia. Mosby’s wife went to President Johnson in distress and pleaded that her husband couldn’t earn a living as a lawyer because his freedom of movement was restricted. Grant issued a safe conduct that allowed Mosby to move about, rescuing him financially. Mosby repaid the surprising kindness by becoming a steadfast friend and ally of Grant, who later described him as “an honest, brave, conscientious man.”50
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FOR GRANT, THERE remained an unfinished piece of business from the Civil War: Mexico. In 1862, Napoleon III began to send an army of occupation to Mexico, under the pretext of collecting overdue debts, to topple the legitimate government of Benito Juárez and install a puppet regime under Ferdinand Maximilian, an Austrian archduke. Lincoln had grown alarmed for multiple reasons: the invasion had flouted the Monroe Doctrine, provided potential asylum for Confederate soldiers, and might lead France to side with the Confederacy. Refusing to recognize this forcibly imposed government, Lincoln rushed to shore up Union forces in Texas to stem any possible French incursion from Mexico.
Ever since Grant had fought there as a young soldier, Mexico had exerted a powerful romantic charm over his imagination. A confirmed republican, he feared the French action was “a foothold for establishing a European monarchy upon our continent . . . I, myself, regarded this as a direct act of war against the United States.”51 There was so much cross-border skulduggery between France and the rebels during the Civil War—the Confederacy regularly smuggled supplies across the Rio Grande while its soldiers used Mexico for sanctuary—that Grant classified Napoleon III as “an active part of the rebellion.”52 Convinced his position reflected the sentiments of many Union soldiers, he lobbied President Johnson and Secretary of State Seward for postwar action against Mexico. Right after Appomattox, a young staff officer recalled, Grant returned to his office one day and announced, “Now for Mexico.”53 According to Matías Romero, a Mexican minister allied with Benito Juárez who plotted with Grant to liberate his country, the lieutenant general told him that “60,000 veterans from the United States would march into Mexico as soon as they were mustered out, and this government would not oppose that action.”54
With such decided views on Mexico, Grant allowed his political judgment, which could be faulty, to supersede his military caution. During the war, he had been exemplary in bowing to civilian leadership, whereas he now tried to circumvent the secretary of state. On May 17, 1865, he dispatched Phil Sheridan with fifty thousand men to pacify Texas and parts of Louisiana still controlled by the Confederate general Edmund Kirby Smith, offering him the same surrender terms granted to Lee and Johnston. Such actions fell well within Grant’s jurisdiction as general in chief, but he had an ulterior motive in advising Sheridan to line up a strong force along the Rio Grande. He pictured Sheridan fording the Rio Grande, joining up with Juárez, and proceeding to overthrow Maximilian. Better a small war now, Grant reckoned, than a larger one later on. Like Grant, Sheridan regarded Maximilian’s downfall as the war’s final phase and subscribed wholeheartedly to the plan. It was atypical of Grant to defy the avowed wishes of the secretary of state. “With regard to this matter,” Sheridan recalled, Grant had said it would be necessary “to act with great circumspection, since the Secretary of State, Mr. Seward, was much opposed to the use of our troops along the border in any active way that would be likely to involve us in a war with European powers.”55
During the war, Grant had grown acquainted with Seward when he visited the City Point headquarters. Henry Adams thought the secretary possessed “a head like a wise macaw,” with its gray hair and thickly tufted eyebrows.56 Disfigured by a knife attack the day Lincoln was shot, Seward still bore an enormous scar on his right cheek. A short, affable man, he liked to smoke, drink, and hold court in a rasping voice, issuing oracular statements. Perhaps it was inevitable that Grant and Seward would clash: Grant was blunt and straightforward in style, while Seward prided himself on being a master of diplomatic wiles. In time, Grant came to think that Seward had sacrificed his principles to retain his influence under President Johnson.
With Mexico Grant played a dangerous game, hoping to reunite North and South under the banner of a popular foreign war. Under Sheridan’s invigorating leadership, he thought such a war would be “short, quick, decisive, and assuredly triumphant,” smashing Napoleon’s Mexican empire with one blow.57 Seward imagined he could accomplish the same goals bloodlessly through patient diplomacy. On June 30, Grant received a message from Sheridan that vindicated his most vivid fears: defeated Confederates were sacking federal arsenals and hauling artillery across the border into Mexico. “Everything on wheels artillery horses mules . . . have been run over into Mexico. Large and small bands of rebel soldiers and some citizens amounting to about two thousand have crossed the Rio Grande into Mexico.”58 This evoked the specter that renegade rebels might perpetuate the war in exile, producing the very guerrilla chaos Grant had worked so hard to avoid. A rump group of rebel soldiers formed a colony west of Vera Cruz called Carlota, which soon burgeoned into a community of five thousand people. Among southern generals flocking to sanctuary in Mexico were Jubal Early, Edmund Kirby Smith, Sterling Price, J. B. Magruder, and Joseph Shelby as well as governors of three southern states and members of the Confederate cabinet. With Maximilian’s connivance, these refugees began to advertise in southern newspapers that cheap land and labor were plentiful in Mexico.
At a June 16 cabinet meeting, Grant made a vigorous case for a confrontational approach with Maximilian, arguing that Confederate refugees would join the latter’s imperial army and precipitate hostilities with the U.S. government. He predicted a long, bloody war, fueled by thousands of former Confederate soldiers, and proposed that the federal government issue a solemn protest against the Mexican monarchy. Seward, in an eloquent rebuttal, said this tough approach would “wound French pride and produce a war with France.” In his estimation, Maximilian’s reign “was rapidly perishing, and, if let alone, Maximilian would leave in less than six months, perhaps in sixty days, whereas, if we interfered, it would prolong his stay and the Empire also.”59 After this debate, Gideon Welles issued his private verdict that “Seward acts from intelligence, Grant from impulse.”60 Cynical and curmudgeonly, Welles spied in Grant’s concern for Mexico a concealed taste for power, writing that he “naturally perhaps, desires to retain a large military force in service.”61 The war had certainly made Grant far more accustomed to exercising power, but he had been active in disbanding troops ever since Appomattox.
The Mexican question roiled Johnson’s cabinet and grew only more heated when the president read aloud on July 14 a truculent letter from Sheridan that was endorsed by Grant. Sheridan bragged that his army was in “magnificent trim” and hoped shortly to “have the pleasure of crossing the Rio Grande with them with our faces turned towards the city of Mexico.”62 Secretary of the Treasury Hugh McCulloch warned that a Mexican war might bankrupt the U.S. government. For his part, Seward was astounded by Sheridan’s bellicose message. “Said if we got in war and drove out the French, we could not get out ourselves,” Welles recorded.63 Meanwhile, Grant advocated deeper involvement in Mexico by sending a general there to act as a liaison with liberal forces and sell them arms from federal surplus stock. When General John Schofield was chosen as the intermediary, Seward adroitly steered him to Paris instead, telling him “to get your legs under Napoleon’s mahogany and tell him to get out of Mexico.”64 Grant’s hawkish stand on Mexico helped Seward’s dovish diplomatic efforts since the latter could present himself to the French as a peaceful alternative to Grant’s belligerence.
Even though Seward made clear that the United States would rely on diplomacy to settle differences with Mexico, Grant clung to a more muscular policy. On August 10, The New York Times carried an interview in which Grant warned that “the French would have to leave Mexico peaceably, if they chose, but forcibly if they refused.”65 Grant denied making any such explicit threat, but he was clearly applying pressure on the administration instead of passively serving as its chief soldier. In early September, he renewed his obsessive campaign against Mexico, telling Johnson that the United States should serve notice on the French to withdraw their troops. Sheridan found it difficult to restrain his men from crossing the Rio Grande. All the while, imperial French troops continued to extend their control over Mexico.
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OUTSIDE OF WASHINGTON, Grant remained a celebrity, smothered with adulation everywhere. It was impossible to restrain admirers who surged around him at every turn. On June 8, he attended commencement exercises at West Point and was embraced by Winfield Scott, gray eminence of the army, who lived in a hotel on the academy grounds. “Thank God you have passed through so much peril unharmed,” Scott exclaimed upon seeing Grant. “Welcome to my bachelor home!”66 Such camaraderie must have seemed dreamlike to Grant, who had first glimpsed the majestic Scott as a West Point plebe. Now the two men strolled arm in arm, as comfortable as well-worn pals. Still tremendously tall, Scott was white-haired, corpulent, and wrinkled and sat with Julia on a verandah while Grant surveyed marching cadets. Having recently published his memoirs, he gave Grant a copy with a warm inscription that must have bowled him over: “From the oldest to the greatest General of the Army of the United States.”67 Before long, Fred Grant would enter the academy and Grant noted proudly he was “full three inches taller than I was when I entered West Point and better prepared.”68
From July 24 through October 6, Grant embarked on a tour of the East and Midwest with Julia, the four children, and an entourage that included Babcock, Badeau, Parker, and Porter. The trip brought home how much the modest Grant had become a helpless casualty of his own fame. William Wrenshall Smith left this impression of a beleaguered Grant on the road:
He was so famous and so celebrated that everyone wanted to stare at him and shake him to death . . . crowds gathered by the 50,000 to look at him. He seemed to shrink away from them, to be pained by the attentions paid to him, but the people loved him better for it. When the crowds would gather thick and fast, he sometimes clenched his hands together, as if pained by it all. He also liked to have his young son Jesse stand in front of him because Jesse was a little show off and seemed to deflect the people. Grant stood with his hands on his small son’s shoulders, never seeing anything, just mechanically shaking and looking on absently. It was a terrible drain on him.69
Admitting to a poor memory for speeches, though not for faces, Grant declared that public speaking was “a terrible trial for me.”70 He considered the political custom of shaking hands “a great nuisance” that should be abolished and complained that the 1865 trip left his right arm sore.71 At a Chicago fair, Grant announced that his hands were so swollen he would shake no more hands. A woman protested loudly that it didn’t matter, since the women wanted to kiss him. “Well,” Grant joked, “none of them have offered to do it yet.”72 The women called his bluff by rushing forward in considerable numbers to give him a buss. Being the object of such female adoration was a completely novel experience for Grant.
The most rapturous reception came in Galena, where he arrived aboard a private car provided by the railway company. When a fellow passenger noted the contrast between this luxurious conveyance and the Wilderness, Grant retorted, “Yes, it is very fine; and but for the suffering of the men I greatly prefer the wilderness.”73 Five years before Grant had arrived in Galena in a state of shame and misery. Now ten thousand people greeted him, backed by brass bands, thunderous cannon, and blizzards of bunting. A political agenda informed the town’s decision to honor Grant. Elihu Washburne and local officials had grown worried when he accepted the Philadelphia house and declared he would reside there. In Galena this was regarded as a serious breach of faith, even though Grant had resided there only one year before the war. In May, Washburne reminded Grant that he first “commanded an Illinois regiment” and “was appointed a brigadier general, a major general and a lieutenant general, all from Illinois, and I may say all, through Illinois influences.”74 This was a not-so-subtle reference to Washburne’s steadfast sponsorship. In reply, Grant promised Washburne he would vote in Galena at the next election and officially proclaim it as home.75 But Grant, having scaled national heights, wasn’t eager to crawl back into the prosaic life of a small town in western Illinois.
Grant strode through Galena’s streets beneath flowery arches, one emblazoned with the names of his famous victories. He had once quipped that he wanted to be town mayor so he could put in a new sidewalk from his house to the station, and one arch announced in floral lettering: “General, the sidewalk is built.”76 Near the old leather goods store where he had labored, Grant was pelted with bouquets by thirty-six girls, representing the states of the Union. After Washburne delivered a speech, the Grants were ushered to a fully furnished house, a gift of local businessmen costing $16,000 and designed to tether them to the town. Beautifully situated on a prime hilltop location, it had lawns sloping away to afford fine vistas. Grant was moved by the transformation four years had wrought and one neighbor spotted “tears trickling down his cheeks” as he left the house.77 Grant told Rawlins he found the Galena reception “flattering though somewhat embarrassing” and wished the generosity had been lavished on him when he most needed it.78 Another time, upon receiving a costly overcoat, he commented, “There have been times in my life when the gift of an overcoat would have been an act of charity. No one gave it to me when I needed it. Now when I am able to pay for all I need, such gifts are continually thrust upon me.”79 The Galena house remained something of a showpiece for Grant, grand and a trifle stuffy, and it never showed the true imprint of his residence.
Whenever he visited Galena, Grant shied away from the leather goods store, which didn’t stop Jesse Root Grant from cashing in on his son’s presence in the most mercenary fashion. He wrote this advertising jingle for the Galena Gazette: “Since Grant has whipped the Rebel Lee / And opened trade from sea to sea / Our goods in price must soon advance / Then don’t neglect the present chance / To Call on GRANT and PERKINS. J.R.G.”80 Old family jealousies still festered and Orvil’s wife, Mary, reacted to Grant’s visit with her old tart-tongued perspective about her brother-in-law. “He was the same, maybe a little more self impressed, but Julia was much worse,” she said. “She still ran after him, bragged on him, told me, ‘Isn’t he ever more handsome with his three-star boards?’ and like nonsense. She togged herself in expensive clothes, but he still was dressed like he rolled out of bed, though Julia always said he was the handsomest soldier, always fussing and hovering over him, which he lapped up like a boy in a confectionery.”81
Later in the trip, returning to another scene of dismal failure, Grant visited St. Louis and was feted by ten thousand people in Lafayette Park, culminating in a congratulatory speech by Missouri’s lieutenant governor. On the way back to Washington, he made a side trip to Covington to visit his parents. Hannah Grant was as hesitant to bask in her son’s fame as Jesse was eager. She had been horrified on July Fourth when she was coaxed onto a political platform outside Cincinnati amid earsplitting applause. Now she wanted to make sure her son wasn’t spoiled by idolatry. “Well, Ulysses,” she said in her no-nonsense style, standing in her apron, “you’ve become a great man, haven’t you?”82 Then she proceeded with her usual round of chores, avoiding any show of maternal warmth.
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BACK IN WASHINGTON in early October, Grant compiled a report that charted the army’s reorganization from a war footing to peacetime conditions. He proudly informed Stanton that the Armies of the Potomac and the Tennessee had been disbanded in July without major disruptions. Grant already had a premonition that the army would occupy a central role in Reconstruction and suggested an eighty-thousand-man peacetime force to deal with “unsettled questions between the white and black races at the south.”83 He wanted the president to have authority to raise an additional twenty thousand black troops if necessary. “Colored troops can garrison the sea coast entirely,” he told General George Thomas, “and the number of interior posts may be reduced as low as you deem expedient.”84 In the end, prodded by Stanton, Grant reduced the projected army to fifty-three thousand soldiers.
As Grant toiled under heavy burdens, Rawlins felt duty-bound to assist him. He assembled much of the material for the army report, which Grant wrote in his home library. With the war over, Rawlins had hoped to devote time to recovering his health, but Grant’s crammed schedule made that difficult. Grant remained solicitous of Rawlins’s health, urging him to spend several months recuperating at his new Galena home. “The house presented to me by the kindness of the Citizens is entirely at your service if you choose to do so,” he told Rawlins. “You will find it very comfortable and containing everything necessary for housekeeping.”85 But Rawlins found it difficult to tear himself away from Washington as the debate over the military and Reconstruction grew ever more acrimonious.
With the army report off his desk, Grant allowed himself another interval of hoopla and hero worship in New York, arriving there by private railway car and staying for ten days. On November 20, flanked by General Joseph Hooker and magnate William B. Astor, he attended a reception in his honor at the posh Fifth Avenue Hotel that seemed to contain every luminary in the city. Suddenly Grant was the darling of the city’s plutocrats. Generals galore were there, including Winfield Scott, John C. Frémont, George Gordon Meade, Ambrose Burnside, and Lew Wallace, as well as poets, journalists, and five senators. Three thousand people supped on oysters and champagne before watching a fireworks display outside. The Grants also hobnobbed with high society, attending a dinner party thrown by George Templeton Strong. “Mrs. Grant is the plainest of country women,” Strong wrote, “but a lady, inasmuch as she shows no trace of affectation or assumption, and frankly admits herself wholly ignorant of the social usages of New York.”86 While Grant’s aides tired of this social whirl, Grant soaked up the attention, perhaps showing the first signs of political ambition. His intimates feared this might look like grandstanding or even a blatant attempt to upstage President Johnson. “If everybody knew him as you and I do, it would be different,” wrote Washburne to Badeau, “but as they do not, they attribute to him motives that we know never entered his head.” Happy that Grant and Johnson seemed in “perfect accord,” Washburne hoped Grant would succeed him as president in the 1868 race.87
As the year progressed, Grant was drawn ever more deeply into the debate on Reconstruction. In early March 1865, the federal government had assumed responsibility for aiding freed slaves through the creation of the Freedmen’s Bureau. Since it was set up as a War Department agency, drawing funds and staff from it, Grant was directly involved in its operations. The bureau’s mandate was to feed, clothe, and educate former slaves, providing them with medical supplies and legal protection and relocating them on more than 850,000 acres of land the federal government came to control during the war. It was overseen by General Oliver O. Howard, whom Grant had met outside Chattanooga and who later helped to found Howard University.
Because southern slaves had inhabited a rural culture, the pivotal issue for their future was whether they could receive land from the federal government. With a plot of land, they had a chance for an independent life; if condemned to remain landless, they would be thrown back into servitude to the same plantation barons who had owned them. On August 16, Johnson issued an order that allowed southern whites to recapture land confiscated from them during the war—a move that made him heroic to whites while dealing a crushing blow to black hopes. It forced freedmen to abandon the forty-acre plots they had started to work, turning the men into powerless sharecroppers, bound to land owned by whites. Within weeks, a white delegation from the former Confederacy rushed to the White House to express “sincere respect” for Johnson’s desire “to sustain Southern rights in the Union.”88
By the end of 1865, so-called Black Codes began to forge a new caste system in the South, a segregated world where freed slaves worked as indentured servants, subject to arrest if they left jobs before their annual contracts expired. It was a cruel new form of bondage, establishing the foundations of the Jim Crow system that later ruled southern race relations. In South Carolina, blacks were confined by law to their plantations, forced to work from sunup to sundown. In Florida, blacks who showed “disrespect” to their bosses or rode in public conveyances reserved for whites could be whipped and pilloried. In Mississippi, it became a criminal offense for blacks to hunt or fish, heightening their dependence upon white employers. Thus, within six months of the end of the Civil War, there arose a broadly based retreat from many of the ideals that had motivated the northern war effort, reestablishing the status quo ante and white supremacy in the old Confederacy.
During the summer of 1865, President Johnson sent Carl Schurz, the Prussian-born journalist and Union general, to the South to report on the progress of Reconstruction. His forty-six-page report didn’t present the rosy view of a reconciled South that Johnson preferred. Instead he painted the white South as angry and defiant, still insisting that secession had been legitimate. His portrayal of freed blacks described them as languishing in wretched conditions of poverty, reinforced by Black Codes that trapped them in a new subservience. For Radical Republicans, the Schurz report crystallized their discontent with Johnson’s approach to Reconstruction, which seemed to favor whites instead of blacks. Even though Johnson blocked the document, excerpts appeared in the Boston Daily Advertiser. So strongly did the president deplore the report that he said his sole error thus far as president had been to dispatch Schurz to the South.
To undo the damage, Johnson decided in late November to exploit Grant’s prestige and send him south on a fact-finding tour. Grant was already fielding reports from southern commanders that suggested a resurgence of violence in the region, with many white atrocities against blacks. George Meade warned that withdrawing federal troops “would very likely be followed by a war of races,” while General Peter J. Osterhaus said white militias, with telltale names such as the Jeff Davis Guards, were springing up across Mississippi.89 At first, Grant wavered as to whether he should undertake such a risky assignment and was perhaps swayed by Cyrus Comstock’s advice that “he had better go so that he might be able to speak decidedly on questions of reconstruction.”90
As he pondered the region’s future, Grant was mildly sanguine that with slavery’s demise, a widespread social transformation would overtake the region. Had the Confederacy won the war, he thought, it would have become a pariah state in the world economy, doomed to stagnation. Slavery, he later wrote, had been a barbaric system that “degraded labor, kept it in ignorance, and enervated the governing class.”91 He hoped that poor downtrodden whites who had never owned slaves would now make common cause with northern liberals rather than the large planters who had conspired to keep them in an impoverished, dependent state.
On November 27, Grant headed south along with Comstock, Babcock, and Badeau. The two-week trip was terribly brief and superficial, taking them through Virginia, the Carolinas, Georgia, and Tennessee, before returning to Washington on December 11. The ruinous state of southern railroads made the journey slow and oppressive. Eager to rush back to Washington for the opening of Congress, Grant felt himself a prisoner to an overly tight schedule. In many towns his time was consumed by ceremonial visits from mayors, aldermen, and merchants as well as ex-rebel governors and former Confederate cabinet members. While he reviewed a black regiment on the Sea Islands of Georgia, he spent most of his fleeting trip huddled with white leaders. In Raleigh, North Carolina, he met with committees from both houses of the legislature and sent this bland synopsis to Julia: “There seems to be the best of feeling existing . . . by both original Secessionists and Unionists, to act in such a way as to secure admittance back and to please the general Government.”92 Everywhere Grant was lavishly complimented by white southerners who honored his charity at Appomattox. Badeau summed up the fawning treatment: “The man who had done most to subdue the South was universally recognized as its protector and savior from further suffering.”93 Unfortunately, such reverence made it impossible for Grant to deliver the astringent, cold-eyed critique the situation required.
Cyrus Comstock kept a diary of the trip that provides glimpses of the South that tally with Carl Schurz’s assessment, not Grant’s. In Charleston, he spoke to Oliver O. Howard’s brother, who told him that “the feeling between whites & negroes is bad, the negroes having no trust in the whites & the latter fearing a rising.”94 He noted that many southern ladies made angry faces at Yankee officers. En route to Augusta, when they were all squeezed into an ambulance car, they passed a former rebel soldier who called out, “Well if there ain’t a whole coach full of full blooded Yankees.”95 At the close of the trip, Comstock came up with a blunt assessment: “There is much bitter feeling still at the south . . . the government will have to exercise some control over the south for a year to come to secure the best treatment of the negro.”96
On December 18, the Thirteenth Amendment, which banned slavery, went into effect. Until then slavery had remained legal in most southern states, making the amendment more than merely symbolic. It presented a pivotal moment in attitudes toward Reconstruction. William Lloyd Garrison closed up shop at The Liberator, believing the work of emancipation done. With the amendment and the creation of state governments in the South, Seward imagined Reconstruction would soon be completed. For Radical Republicans, however, the hard work had only just begun. “Liberty has been won,” contended Senator Charles Sumner. “The battle for Equality is still pending.” Unless freed blacks received the vote, warned Frederick Douglass, “we should have slavery back again, in spirit if not in form.”97
On the same day the amendment was ratified, Grant filed his report on his southern trip with Andrew Johnson, presenting his findings in unconvincingly Panglossian terms. “I am satisfied that the mass of thinking men of the South accept the present situation of affairs in good faith. The questions which have heretofore divided the sentiment of the people of the two sections, Slavery and States Rights . . . they regard as having been settled forever.”98 To assure the safety of blacks and whites, Grant suggested the maintenance of small garrisons in the South. In a controversial passage, he recommended that only white troops should be stationed in the southern interior, appeasing white fears that black soldiers might “instigate” their southern brethren: “The presence of Black troops, lately slaves, demoralizes labor both by their advice and furnishing in their camps a resort for the Freedmen for long distances around. White troops generally excited no opposition.”99 Grant opposed land redistribution, which had excited so much hope among freedmen, saying “the late slave seems to be imbued with the idea that the property of his late master should by right belong to him.”100 Such thinking could incite dangerous collisions, he was persuaded, and he blamed agents of the Freedmen’s Bureau for fomenting such incendiary ideas. On the other hand, he urged the bureau’s continuance to safeguard black rights.
In his laudable desire to restore goodwill between North and South and remain the grand conciliatory figure of Appomattox, Grant had submitted a remarkably naive, anodyne report. While presuming to know the thoughts of freed people, he hadn’t spent much time with them. He showed a desire to protect black civil liberties, but recapitulated the party line fed to him by white planters when he wrote that unrealistic fantasies about receiving land from their former plantations discouraged blacks from signing labor contracts. Pleased that Grant had submitted a report endorsing his conservative policies, Johnson sent it to the Senate along with the antithetical one by Carl Schurz. White southerners were predictably pleased by Grant’s report, while Radical Republicans in Congress, who had their own plans for Reconstruction, denounced it as a whitewash of presidential policies. Close readers of the report noted that Grant hadn’t relinquished his desire to protect freed slaves, and the radical Boston Daily Advertiser emphasized his statement that the federal government “shall stand as the guardian of those whom it has freed, until it sees them firmly established in the rights of citizenship.”101
Historians have been quick to pounce on the blind spots in Grant’s report. Less noticed is that he almost immediately recanted what he wrote. As early as January 12, 1866, Carl Schurz informed his wife that “Grant feels very bad about his thoughtless move and has openly expressed regret for what he has done.”102 When Schurz encountered Grant at a soldiers’ reunion in December 1868, Grant was still more regretful, admitting that on his southern tour “I traveled as the general-in-chief and people who came to see me tried to appear to the best advantage. But I have since come to the conclusion that you were right and I was wrong.”103 Here Grant echoed a famous line Abraham Lincoln had written to him, showing he was a big enough man to confess frankly to past error. In the future, he wouldn’t pull his punches about black-white relations in the South or the need for decisive military action to safeguard freed people.