XV

“ON TO MEXICO”

At first every small apprehension is magnified, every anxiety a pounding terror. Then the pain comes, and I concentrate only on that. Right there is the usefulness of the migraine, there in that imposed yoga, the concentration on the pain. For when the pain recedes, ten or twelve hours later, everything goes with it, all the hidden resentments, all the vain anxieties. The migraine has acted as a circuit breaker, and the fuses have emerged intact.

—Joan Didion

The pain in my head seemed to leave me the moment I got Lee’s letter.

—Ulysses S. Grant

THE SURRENDER at Appomattox is enshrined in American history as the great sacrament of reconciliation. Differences were overcome and disparities made one in the meeting of two brilliantly different men. One—tall, aristocratic, born at “Stratford,” in tidewater Virginia—was dressed in an immaculate new gray uniform and wore a ceremonial sword; the other—short, republican, born in a little house in Point Pleasant, Ohio—was in scruffy army-blue clothing and carried a cigar. In their disparity, Lee and Grant were the perfect celebrants of the mass of reunification. Robert E. Lee, teaching his countrymen the lesson (one they resolutely declined to learn) that quite a good thing can be made of losing a war, was splendid. Grant, as the magnanimous victor, was if possible even more so. No matter how much one might find fault with Grant, one could always look back and be restored by this hour of his undoubted greatness-his finest hour.

Perhaps so. But there is little to suggest that as the war drew to a close Grant expected it to end well. By the beginning of April, Lee was trapped. Grant judged that weakened by casualties and desertions, the Confederate general was, at last, ready to respond to his call for surrender, which went out on April 7. That same day, Lee responded, “Though not entertaining the opinion you express on the hopelessness of further resistance…, I reciprocate your desire to avoid useless effusion of blood, and therefore, before considering your proposition, ask the terms you will offer on condition of…surrender.” The next morning—how early is not clear—Grant replied, “I would say, that peace being my great desire, there is but one condition I would insist upon—namely, That the men and officers surrendered shall be disqualified for taking up arms again against the Government of the United States until properly exchanged.” Grant then added that he would assign men to meet Lee to arrange “definitely the terms upon which the surrender of the Army of Northern Virginia will be received.” He avoided any mention of the immense political ramifications of such a surrender.¹

As the note went to Lee, all of Grant’s military power was converging on him. Meade moved ominously north of the Appomattox River; Sheridan’s cavalry pressed westward toward Appomattox Court House itself, with Ord’s army following. April 8 was a day of more fighting and more deaths, and of great psychic strain on Ulysses Grant. That evening, having still not heard from Lee, Grant rode on his horse Cincinnati into that night’s makeshift headquarters, and uncharacteristically greeted Meade with an affectionate “Old Fellow.” Meade, pleased, was gentle in reply, knowing Grant “had one of his sick headaches, which are rare, but cause him fearful pain, such as almost overcomes his iron stoicism.” The two staffs, Grant’s and Meade’s, shared a farmhouse, and one of the officers was pounding the piano he had discovered there. Music was noise to Grant; he sat bathing his feet in hot water and mustard, and putting mustard plasters on his wrists and the back of his neck. His headache was severe. About midnight, when the farmhouse had at last quieted and Grant rested on a sofa in the front room, a message from Lee finally arrived. Horace Porter and John Rawlins were reluctant to disturb Grant, hoping he had managed to fall asleep, but when Rawlins pushed open the general’s door quietly, Grant immediately called to him to come on in; the headache had kept him awake. He sat up and read Lee’s note by candlelight. “To be frank,” wrote the Confederate general, “I do not think the emergency has arisen to call for the surrender of the army; but as the restoration of peace should be the sole object of all, I desired to know whether your proposals would lead to that end.” He proposed that they meet at ten the next morning “on the old stage-road to Richmond.” Grant did not like to be preached to; he wanted one thing and one thing only—the surrender of Lee’s army. He would not talk of terms; he would not negotiate a peace. He lay down on the sofa again, telling Rawlins and Porter that he would reply in the morning.²

When Porter went to check on Grant at four in the morning, the room was empty, and going outside, he found Grant pacing back and forth, his hands pressed against his head. His migraine was excruciating, and Porter and Rawlins got him some coffee. When the throbbing abated a bit, he wrote Lee, “I have no authority to treat on the subject of peace; the meeting proposed for 10 A.M. to-day could lead to no good.” He did add a plea for a battlefield surrender without any talk of the general political situation: “I will state however, general, that I am equally anxious for peace with yourself, and the whole North entertains the same feeling.” The eloquence of his statement, but perhaps not its persuasiveness, was diminished by his comment that the surrender would save not only “thousands of human lives” but also “hundreds of millions of property not yet destroyed.” In all, the message that went out early in the morning of April 9 had a decidedly urgent tone.³

Grant told Horace Porter that morning, at the start of the greatest day of his life, that the best thing that could happen to him that day would be for the pain of the headache to clear. It was still torturing him, but he turned down an ambulance, mounted Cincinnati, and rode off. One would expect that with hopes so high for an affirmative message from Lee, he would have alerted officers to his whereabouts at every imaginable point. Instead, finding one road blocked, he went off with Rawlins, Porter, and Babcock to look for another, without leaving word of his destination. Perhaps there was a curious want of confidence at a moment when none but Grant could imagine such a thing; perhaps he dreaded still another rebuff by Lee. As he had done after Donelson and again in Louisville (when, shortly after he had been given his first great command, Stanton could not find him), he now put himself out of touch with his own generals—and with Lee.⁴

Lee had ridden to the point on the Richmond road where he had expected to meet Grant at ten, only to receive Grant’s note saying he was not coming. With his military position worsening by the hour, Lee could no longer continue the grim comedy of manners. The time was gone for playing for terms that did not involve an admission of defeat, and with great sadness, he agreed to surrender. When this message reached the Union lines, Meade was notified and ordered a truce. Lieutenant Charles E. Pease, sent to find Grant, had to do considerable hunting. An hour and fifty minutes after Lee wrote the crucial note, Pease came upon Grant and Rawlins, who were off their horses, lighting cigars. Pease galloped up, and Rawlins opened the envelope, read the message, and handed it to Grant, who read it with no noticeable emotion. Then he sat down on the grass and wrote his reply to Lee. In this letter he specified with precision the road on which he would be riding, so that a second message, naming a place to talk, could reach him. He then sent Orville Babcock galloping off with the letter for Lee, mounted Cincinnati, and rode toward Appomattox Court House at a trot. The headache was gone.⁵

He had worn down Lee’s great armies and defeated the great patriarch in war, and now he had managed to beat him in the gentlemanly art of war-ending. From the moment Lee’s note arrived, Grant was in perfect command of himself, and from then on every move of the day was a quiet triumph played out with consummate skill. There was even an appropriate moment of absurdity; as they rode swiftly westward on the road, intent on reaching Lee, Grant and his two aides suddenly spotted a swarm of graycoats and it “looked for a moment as if Grant [might] become a prisoner in Lee’s lines instead of Lee in his. Such a circumstance,” wrote Horace Porter, “would have given rise to an important cross-entry in the system of campaign bookkeeping.” Quickly, the Yankees cut across country, found another road, and rode into the village of Appomattox Court House. Sheridan was there with Orville Babcock, who showed Grant the way to a farmhouse.⁶

The passing of the headache was no signal for Grant to step out of character and make a vainglorious entrance at the meeting. But it should not be assumed that he had given no thought to this moment. He had delayed other meetings to suit his plans; he could have rearranged the Appomattox meeting if it were not going to be conducted exactly as he had wanted it to be. Lee, arriving first, “had on the handsomest uniform” his aide had ever seen him wear, and wore a sword in an English-leather scabbard worked in gold. Grant wore no sword at all, his coat was unbuttoned, and “his clothing was somewhat dusty and a little soiled.” Later he made a disingenuous apology for his appearance: “I had not expected so soon the result that was then taking place, and consequently was in rough garb.” Grant did not wear the unpressed jacket and mud-spattered trousers to insult Lee, or because he had no time to change. He had wanted to be away from headquarters when called to talk to Lee; he had wanted to ride in straight from the field. His attire had been chosen as long ago as the day the little boy mocked the fancy-dress uniform of the West Point graduate; the worn clothing gave him the same sense of confidence that the elegant uniform gave Lee.⁷

Grant walked into the parlor and shook hands with Lee. Grant’s personal staff was with him, but except for Sheridan, none of his commanding generals were there; he surrounded himself with men as comfortable as his clothes. He and Lee chatted, and Lee politely tried to suggest that he remembered Grant. He did not; Grant, on the other hand, did remember Lee. They talked about old times in the army in Mexico for so long that Lee had to remind Grant why they were there. Grant then took a pencil and paper and, with his usual directness, wrote that he would accept a surrender if the officers of each of the Confederate’s regiments would sign a parole for all of their men, pledging that they would fight no more. He ordered all equipment and supplies turned over to the Union army, except side arms, privately owned horses, and personal baggage. The men who surrendered, he added, would be allowed to go home.⁸

Lee had made no requests for special conditions. Reading Grant’s letter accepting his surrender, he commented that the generous provisions for the retention of horses and gear would “have a happy effect upon his army.” Trying to make a good thing better, Lee sought to have the animals used by the enlisted cavalrymen and artillerymen treated as private property and asked if men who were not officers might also be allowed to take home the horses they had been using. Grant said his letter, as written, forbade that, but noting that the Southerners would need these animals to get a crop in that spring, he agreed that these animals too could go. Except for this permission to take horses back to the plow, the surrender involved no political terms whatever. Lee asked his aide Charles Marshall to draft a reply, and then, removing some stuffy verbiage, wrote out a simple acceptance. It was not the surrender of one government to another; it was simply—and importantly—the surrender of one army to another. But one of these armies was greatly diminished; Lee’s once huge, proud Army of Northern Virginia had only eight thousand men remaining in it.⁹

Grant’s letter of acceptance was presented to Lee, and the two men shook hands. When they were about to part, Lee told Grant that his men were destitute. Grant ascertained from Sheridan that rations for twenty-five thousand men could be supplied and asked Lee if these were enough. They were. As for the horses, it was just as well that Grant had been generous and permitted the disbanding Confederates to take them; there was no forage in the region save the scant early-spring growth on the land. Four years of gore came to this quiet end, and the great day’s outcome produced a curious flatness in Grant. He sent the most expressionless of victory messages:

Headquarters Appomattox C. H., Va.,

April 9th, 1865, 4.30 P.M.

Hon. E. M. Stanton, Secretary of War, Washington.

General Lee surrendered the Army of Northern Virginia this afternoon on terms proposed by myself. The accompanying additional correspondence will show the conditions fully.

U. S. Grant,

Lieut.-General

This was the word the capital was waiting for; it brought huge crowds into the streets in front of the White House to serenade President Lincoln. But in Virginia, Grant silenced the guns that were being fired in a victory salute. He “felt like anything rather than rejoicing….”¹⁰

The next day, Grant once more met with Lee and tried to persuade him to use his influence to make his fellow commanders elsewhere in the South surrender. With great political skill, Grant had appeared apolitical at Appomattox on the ninth, but on the tenth he was trying to push his former antagonist into the politics of dissolving the Confederacy. Lee once more avoided doing more than surrendering his army; he said he could not urge other surrenders without conferring with his president. Not discouraged, Grant parted amica bly from Lee and “spent an hour pleasantly” with officers of both armies at the McLean farmhouse in Appomattox, where they were enjoying reunions with West Point classmates and looking “very much as if all thought of the war had escaped their minds.” Then he rode on Cincinnati to the point to which the railroad had been rebuilt, and began a two-day train journey—punctuated with repeated derailments caused by the hasty, inadequate repairs—back to City Point. He arrived at midnight. Julia, exhausted from waiting, had fallen asleep in her clothes, but awakened to greet “her ‘Victor.’” The next morning, as Grant walked through his headquarters post and into his cabin, Admiral Porter was having round after round of victory salutes fired in his honor from his flotilla in the James. Annoyed with the noise, Grant sat down and wrote some dispatches, among them a letter to Sherman; when this job was finished, he turned to his office aide and said, “On to Mexico.”¹¹

Here was Grant’s odd low-key humor. It was a dismissal of the bravado of victory, a call to himself and his staff to get back to work, and a recognition that new work must be found. The journey of his mind to Mexico may have been in remembrance of another war that had ended, leaving him with no life to lead. The leap was also a shrewd guess at where the next war might be. In Mexico there was another liberal cause to be fought for, another nationalist struggle under way. The French puppet was a potential ally to whom desperate Confederates might be drawn; Maximilian’s enemies were Mexico’s patriots, with whom patriotic Americans might join. Grant’s throw-away comment was not as bad a joke or as inaccurate a prophecy as it may seem. Grant himself, in 1866, came close to going to the Mexican border before he recognized the assignment as the exile that President Johnson intended. Sheridan, the fiery little man in whom so many of Grant’s private urges found expression, was on the border within a year—and came close indeed to taking the army into a war in Mexico. And on April 12, 1865, the trip to Mexico that Grant’s mind took was a journey of continuance. He himself had concluded a peace, and yet, personally, he could not let the war end. He had to keep his life going. The war was not a discrete event with finite walls of time, separate from something called peace; rather, it was the core of his life. Ulysses Grant was reluctant to let go of war.

Grant did not, however, pursue war into Mexico; he went instead to Washington and straight into Reconstruction politics. Reluctantly, Lincoln had preceded him there. After Richmond, the president had gone back to the capital, to the relief of both congressional radicals and cabinet conservatives. Secretary of the Navy Welles called the president’s stay at City Point “an unusual absence at an important period.” Indeed, said Welles, Secretary of State Seward, “who usually attended [Lincoln] on his excursions and was always anxious to do so[,] was taken by surprise” by Lincoln’s visit to City Point. The cabinet members had reason to worry. Lincoln had indeed seemed ready to make peace at either Grant’s capital or that of the fallen foe, rather than at the nation’s. All of the cabinet members, including Welles and Seward, who later were advocates of programs very like those Lincoln initiated at Richmond, thought that the decisions should be made at Washington—and with their participation. Lincoln was all too much at home with the generals, who were themselves not immune to thoughts of a brotherly peace between men who had fought each other for so long. If there was to be a Reconstruction that was not simply a restoration of amenities and a rebuilding of the old social order of the South, it would have to be engineered in Washington. However, Lincoln was brought back to Washington before the surrender of Lee not by any theory about where decision making properly should be done, but by an accident. Seward was thrown from his carriage and seriously injured. The president had to give up his chance of being with Grant for the end of the war in order to visit the secretary of state.¹²

Lincoln returned to the White House on April 9, not yet aware of Lee’s surrender, and Welles found him “looking well and feeling well.” Soon the celebrations began, and when the serenades celebrating Grant’s victory were over, Lincoln met with his cabinet and asked what they thought of his plan to have the existing Confederate legislature of Virginia take that state out of the rebellion. Welles, conservative and skeptical, said he had “not great faith in negotiating with large bodies of men” and was worried lest the legislature take an action that the federal government would have to repudiate. He also reminded Lincoln that a wartime Unionist government for Virginia had already been recognized. It did not, of course, speak for the defeated but proud Confederate Virginians, but simply to pretend that the Unionist government did not exist was awkward. Stanton was far more adamant in his insistence that Congress would accept no such lenient program. He persuaded Lincoln to stop the legislative meeting in Richmond, and a telegram went to General Godfrey Weitzel, in command in Richmond, telling him that as Lee had now surrendered, the need for a repudiation session of the legislature was unnecessary and those who had already arrived for this session were to be sent home.¹³

By Friday, April 14, Grant had arrived in the capital, and he attended a meeting of Lincoln’s cabinet. Gideon Welles’s diary makes it clear that Grant’s opinions on a wide range of issues were eagerly sought and readily given. Welles’s unexpectedly favorable assessment of Grant’s performance should be read as recognition that on that particular day the general agreed with the secretary of the navy, but nonetheless, Grant’s performance truly impressed Welles. (In contrast, exactly a week earlier, although crediting Grant with being “masterly” at war and possessing great “persistency” of character, Welles had described him as “slow and utterly destitute of genius.”) The subject of the meeting was “the relations of the Rebels, the communications, the trade, etc.,” and there is no evidence that Grant showed any reluctance to discuss these nonmilitary topics. Surely he had no trouble being enthusiastic about Secretary of the Treasury Hugh McCulloch’s suggestion that they get rid of the Treasury agents who were in charge of trade in all the captured rebel ports. These men, and the speculators who surrounded them, had exasperated Grant throughout the war and now he “expressed himself very decidedly against them, thought them demoralizing, etc.” Welles argued for free trade all along the coast, but Stanton thought this should be permitted only where the Northern army was present and in firm control. Grant said he thought the region in which open trade could be allowed “might embrace all this side of the Mississippi.”¹⁴

Stanton then raised the basic question of Reconstruction. What were to be the relationships of the various people of the South to one another, and to the Union to which they were returning? He had a document for his colleagues to study, and he led the discussion. Lincoln, who had often before achieved his own policy goals by biding his time before announcing them, said little beyond requesting that the gentlemen “deliberate and carefully consider the proposition.” Grant had watched as Sherman, on the River Queen, advocated lenience toward the white Southerners while Lincoln listened; now he saw the president listening to a contradictory proposal. Lincoln sat impassively, and so did Grant. Men like William T. Sherman and Edwin M. Stanton could mistake Lincoln’s waiting game for acquiescence, but Grant did not. He knew how to watch and wait himself. There is no indication that in this part of the meeting the general said a word, or missed a word said by anyone else.¹⁵

Grant did, however, have the attention of the others when he was anxiously asked how he thought Sherman was doing in his pursuit of Johnston in the Carolinas. Entirely confident of himself, he replied that he was expecting word—and he thought it would be good news—at any moment. At this juncture the meeting took on a mystical note; Lincoln spoke of a dream he had had the night before, a dream that was to turn into legend when it came to be seen as the prophecy of his own death. The president told of being carried “in some singular, indescribable vessel” that moved with “great rapidity towards an indefinite shore.” The dream had occurred before every victory during the war, Lincoln claimed, and then spun off a list of these, including Stones River. Grant sourly interrupted the president to say that Rosecrans and Thomas’s battle at Stones River “was no victory,—that a few such fights would have ruined us.” Lincoln, intrigued by the challenge, “looked at Grant curiously and inquiringly” and said he and Grant might have to “differ on that point, and at all events his dream preceded it.” Gideon Welles was fascinated by this intrusion by Grant into Lincoln’s personal reverie and saw it as a sign of Grant’s envy of other generals. Lincoln appears to have judged it both as an expression of jealousy and as an appealing instance of candor. The two men knew each other well by then; Grant could correct his chief, and Lincoln could challenge the correction. No one leaving that cabinet meeting could have thought that Grant would slide into obscurity simply because the war was almost over.¹⁶

Earlier that morning, Grant had hoped to have a long private talk with Lincoln, but the president postponed their conference until eleven o’clock, and shortened it, in order to visit with his son Robert. Grant understood; both men were very used to having familial concerns woven into their days. When Grant did get to the White House, Lincoln asked if he and Mrs. Grant would join him and Mrs. Lincoln at the theater that evening. The general knew better than to accept any invitation without first checking with Julia—even so commanding a one as an opportunity to accompany the president of the United States on his first jubilant outing after the victory. He was right to check; Julia’s reaction was an immediate no, thank you. She had had more than enough of Mary Lincoln’s imperiousness at City Point. She sent a note to this effect to Ulysses at the White House, and the commanding general was left to make to the president the most classic—and limp—of American excuses: he could not go because of the children. Julia was taking an afternoon train back to Burlington to be with them, and Ulysses was to go with her.¹⁷

It was Lincoln’s turn to understand. Apparently he sensed what he could not allow himself to acknowledge: his wife could be nasty, and his own extreme emotional heights and depths had helped make her that way. These two men, who silently showed a sense of how personal torment could enter public events, were comfortable together. They agreed that the party was off. (Then, the Lincolns seem to have spent the day scouring Washington for anyone who could stand being in a theater box with them. Turned down by the commanding general of the army, the Speaker of the House of Representatives, and who knows who else, they finally went to Ford’s Theater in the company of a senator’s daughter and the army major who was courting her.)

When Grant, having said good-by to Lincoln, left the White House, there were many people on the sidewalks cheering him—too many to please Mary Lincoln, it was reported. He returned to the Willard, where Julia had had lunch, and late that afternoon, the Grants took a carriage from the Willard to Union Station and left Washington by train. At about midnight, in Philadelphia, a messenger from the telegraph company waited at Bloodgood’s Hotel. A carriage “drew up at the door, and inside we saw the light of the General’s cigar.” Charles E. Bolles, the messenger, waited until the Grants had entered the hotel and then followed them inside; Julia Grant was sitting on a settee in the dining room, taking off her hat, when the general answered his knock and accepted a telegram. Grant read the message and, showing no emotion, handed it to his wife. It was from Major Eckert, still in command of the telegraph office in the War Department, and stated unsensationally but unflinchingly that Lincoln had been shot “and cannot live.” Grant was asked, at Stanton’s behest, to return to Washington immediately. Julia read the wire and quietly began to cry.¹⁸

Grant sent a telegram in response saying that he would return immediately, but soon a second wire from-Washington, this one from Assistant Secretary of War Charles A. Dana, introduced, cautiously, the subject of security. The shooting of Lincoln was not the act of a single assailant; Seward and his son had also been attacked. Grant was not told to surround himself with bodyguards but was instructed “to keep close watch on all persons who come near you in the cars” and to send “an engine…in front of the train to guard against anything being on the track.” Julia was frightened, and very likely, so was her husband; although he had telegraphed that he would return immediately, Grant accompanied Julia across the river, by ferry, and together they took the train the short distance to Burlington, with a scapegoat engine running ahead of them on the track. On the train, Grant “silent and in deep thought” turned as Julia asked who he thought had done it. “Oh, I don’t know,” was his diffident response, but he did not brush Julia off when she asked, “This will make Andy Johnson President, will it not?” “Yes,” he replied, “and…I dread the change.”¹⁹

When they arrived, people were outside their Burlington house in the starlit night to ask if the news that Lincoln had been shot was true. In Washington the death agony of the president was accompanied by hysteria. The stabbing of the secretary of state was taken as confirmation that the attacks were not the act of one madman, but part of a rebel conspiracy to kill the heads of the government. Word that Grant, by not going to the theater, had had a narrow escape from death began to circulate on the periphery of the feverish talk of the assassination itself. When she paused to recollect the day, Julia Grant told of being rudely watched by a lean mustached man in the dining room of the Willard that afternoon and described the fierce look of that same man as he had galloped past their carriage and then ridden back to stare closely into their faces while she and the general were on the way to the railroad station. The memory of these frightening encounters, real or imagined, underscored the belief that Grant had been one of the intended victims of the conspiracy. It was, in fact, logical that an angry murderer might have pursued an intended victim who was unknowingly making his escape. And Julia’s description fitted John Wilkes Booth.²⁰

At the time, Grant talked little of this story, but later both he and Julia did tell of receiving a letter from an anonymous and repentant would-be assailant who said he had failed to shoot the general on the train from Washington to Philadelphia only because the porter had locked the door to the Grants’ car. This letter may well have been from a crank, but the evidence in the trial of the conspirators does suggest that Grant had been marked for killing. An examination of the evidence, however, reveals—not surprisingly—that the interrogations concerning the preparations for the theater assassination concentrated very largely on Lincoln as Booth’s target. The fact that a hole was bored in the door of the box has been regarded by many as an indication that Booth’s attention was focused on only one target, but the hole was large—large enough for the scouting of more than one victim—and one conspirator quoted Booth as saying he intended to kill both Lincoln and Grant. Whatever the intention, however, there was just a single victim in Ford’s Theater.²¹

When Grant got to Washington the day Lincoln died, he seems, uncharacteristically, to have caught the hysteria of others. Perhaps it was stimulated by Stanton’s frantic officiousness, or his own fear of civil disorder, or both. As commanding general, Grant ordered the arrest of the civilian Confederate peace negotiator John A. Campbell, who was on his way to Washington for another conference with Lincoln, to try to restore their previous agreement, from which the president, with Stanton’s urging, had begun to retreat. Grant had had most amiable relations with Campbell, but now, it seemed possible that he was a conspirator. With three victims and two assailants there had certainly been a conspiracy, and the secretary of war publicly stated that it was a rebel plot, thus implicating the Confederate government. Campbell went to prison briefly, and was not much surprised that he had been sent there. Philosophically, he viewed his jailing as the result of a misjudgment about who had planned the assassination, rather than as an act of vindictiveness by Grant. But in the immediate context of the assassination, the ordering of such an arrest by a military man seemed to confirm the belief commonly held since the event that an ambitious and dangerous secretary of war had tried to take advantage of the emergency to exercise martial authority over the nation.²²

If there was ever a real danger of such a usurpation, it had no time to reach fruition before being averted by that marvelously flexible instrument, the Constitution of the United States. Secretary of the Navy Gideon Welles, Attorney General James Speed, and, significantly, Edwin M. Stanton himself turned to that document, and visited Vice-President Andrew Johnson to inform him that he should prepare to accede to the office of president of the United States. At 11:00 A.M. on April 15 he was sworn in. The nation had a president, and the activities of Stanton and Grant that afternoon were those of subordinates. When they issued orders, however impulsively, they did so as officers of the government under constitutional authority. They could be held to account.

Andrew Johnson had met Ulysses Grant only once and scarcely knew the men of the cabinet when, right after being sworn in, he met with them briefly and asked them to continue in office. The next morning, Sunday, at a second meeting, Secretary of War Stanton bustled in an hour late, much to the annoyance of Gideon Welles and, one might imagine, of the new president, though he had himself been half an hour late. Late or not, Stanton seized the day; Lincoln was dead and there was no way to refute the secretary’s claim that Lincoln’s mind had not been made up on Reconstruction—that the issue was still undecided. Then Stanton produced the document he had introduced at Lincoln’s last cabinet meeting and insisted it should be immediately agreed upon, and Welles knew that the secretary of war was making a counterattack against a policy of accommodation of white Southerners by advocating that the federal government make decisions for a defeated South. Stanton was keenly aware that Lincoln, while at the front, had discussed his mild conciliatory policy with Grant and Sherman. According to Grant, this policy, which did not anticipate post-emancipation racism, was based on Lincoln’s “desire to have everybody happy, and above all his desire to see all people of the United States enter again upon the full privileges of citizenship with equality among all.”²³

But this formulation left the freedmen’s position in grave doubt. Surely, they could not enter again upon the privileges of citizenship; only white Southerners—lately rebels—could do that. Stanton recognized that Lincoln’s death meant the River Queen doctrine could be abrogated; the time was ripe for a fundamentally different approach toward the South. At the meeting, Welles found Johnson “not disposed to treat treason lightly,” and Grant judged Johnson’s attitude toward white Southerners as one that would “make them unwilling citizens.” The assassination provided a chance for a radical leap forward into new social arrangements, but Grant later said of the day that “reconstruction had been set back, no telling how far.” To Grant’s dismay, Stanton persisted in undoing Lincoln’s policy. That evening, with Johnson not present, Stanton called a small meeting of influential people to discuss the direction public affairs should take. At this War Department gathering, he did not hesitate to bring up private cabinet business, and he presented his plan for the reorganization of the Southern state governments to Senator Charles Sumner, Congressmen Schuyler Colfax, Daniel W. Gooch, and Henry L. Dawes, and a former congressman, John Covode. Two “general officers” of the army were also there, but it is unlikely that either was Ulysses Grant. However, Gideon Welles was present—uneasily. It is not clear whether he happened to be at the War Department on business—perhaps checking the telegraph office—got wind of the meeting, and deliberately stayed to find out what Stanton was up to, or whether for some reason, Stanton wanted to have his chief cabinet opponent on hand. In any case, Welles was exceedingly uncomfortable, particularly when “Mr. Sumner declared he would not move a step—not an inch if the right of the colored man to vote was not secured.” At this point a messenger providentially arrived with a telegram, and the secretary of the navy, with relief, left “abruptly.” Reconstruction was taking an interesting turn indeed. Sumner’s black men were a far cry from the white gentlemen Lincoln and Campbell had pictured reassembling in Richmond. They had no place whatever in the thinking of William Tecumseh Sherman, who was still at war in North Carolina.²⁴

General Sherman surrendered to the Confederate general Joseph E. Johnston on April 18, 1865, or so a reader of the Radical press in the North would have thought. The two generals were hurrying history. The kind of arrangement envisioned in their surrender agreement came about when other men compromised in 1877. In 1865, however, not all Northerners and few blacks in the South were willing to forgo a try at reconstructing the nation. Papers like the New York Times hinted that Sherman was a traitor, and the determined patriot-general fought back, with both grandeur and pettiness, to regain his strong position in the public esteem. All that Johnston had conceded to Sherman in the surrender agreement was that his Confederate soldiers would fight no more. The civilian governments of the states that had sent these men off to fight the Union were not required to lay down their arms. Instead, they were charged with the responsibility of continuing to govern—of maintaining order—and the guns of Johnston’s soldiers were to go back into the state arsenals, ready for use by state officials to repress any kind of uprising.²⁵

Sherman could never understand why he was criticized for agreeing to these terms. As he explained in a letter to Grant, it was perfectly logical that he and Johnston should “not drive a people into anarchy,” something far worse than a state of war. Lincoln had been shot. Sherman was terrified of popular disorder in the wake of the assassination conspiracy. As another brilliant conservative, Herman Melville, put it:

There is sobbing of the strong,

And a pall upon the land;

But the People in their weeping

Bare the iron hand:

Beware the People weeping

When they bare the iron hand.

When Sherman had received the telegram, in cipher, informing him of Lincoln’s murder, he had told not even the generals in command of his armies, saving the news for Johnston. And when the Confederate learned of the assassination, sweat stood out on his brow. Like Sherman, Johnston feared that in the wake of the assassination the soldiers would turn to guerrilla warfare. Sherman’s explanation of his lenient agreement stated the matter clearly: “I confess I did not desire to drive General Johnston’s army into bands of armed men.” Both Grant and Sherman had long ago expressed fear that after the organized Confederate armies collapsed, the war would continue in the mountains, and now it was anticipated that the assassination might provoke widespread wantonness by men of both armies. (Sherman and Johnston could not have been more wrong. The news of Lincoln’s death was numbing rather than provocative on both sides of the line.)²⁶

Quite apart from the fact that the assassination made a quick settlement desirable, Sherman thought his agreement with Johnston was in line with his discussion with Lincoln and Grant earlier in the month at City Point. None of the terms accepted at Raleigh were out of harmony with what Lincoln had done at Richmond. The trouble was simply that Sherman, as if to confirm his lifelong disgust with Washington politics, was moving in a direction precisely opposite from that in which the heirs of Lincoln’s civil power had embarked on the morning after the murder of the president.

Grant had been as eager as everyone else in Washington to get the word of the end of hostilities between Sherman and Johnston, but when the telegram came on April 21, his response was political. He sent a message to Stanton telling him of the agreement and recommending that the president call the cabinet into session to discuss it. Had Grant wanted to avoid politics, he would have congratulated Sherman on his victory and left to Stanton and others the question of the terms of the surrender. (In his Memoirs Grant recorded only that he was “sent for” to attend the meeting, not that he had, in fact, himself instigated it.) As bidden, the cabinet met hastily at eight that evening. Sherman was denounced, and the decision made that his agreement must be repudiated. Grant was present. Welles noted that he avoided denouncing his lieutenant, but did not disagree with the repudiation order he was instructed to transmit. Sherman, of course, had no way of knowing that the wind was blowing so strongly away from City Point, but Grant was well aware of the change and could see that it was essential to bring Sherman into line. Gideon Welles was delighted when Grant decided to take the order to Sherman in person.²⁷

The diplomatic mission was a great success. We do not know what Grant and Sherman said to each other, but clearly Grant handled the interview with great skill. The surrender was rescinded, and Sherman, though furious, did not buck. Johnston was informed that the fighting would resume, but at the same time negotiations to end it were invited. When Johnston again agreed to discuss surrender with the Union officers, Grant shrewdly allowed Sherman to go to the meeting without him. Off the record, Sherman could say whatever he liked to Johnston to escape the humiliation of having been sent back to do a better job. This time the terms they agreed to were identical with those made by Grant and Lee at Appomattox.²⁸

Sherman had been humbled, and he delivered fiery blasts in damnation of all his tormentors—all, that is, except the person at whom one would have expected him to be angriest, Grant. Sherman, a true conservative, respected and feared power. He took out his wrath on those of whom he dared be contemptuous. He excoriated Halleck and even refused to communicate with him. Halleck, aware that Grant, and not he, had been the instrument of Sherman’s humiliation, could only turn the other cheek publicly, while in private he made sardonic remarks about Grant’s adroit avoidance of blame.

Although a few units were still officially at war—the surrender of Zachary Taylor’s son, General Richard Taylor, came on May 4 and that of General Edmund Kirby Smith’s army west of the Mississippi on May 26, 1865—the new agreement between Sherman and Johnston effectively ended the conflict. To celebrate the victory, the armies of the west were called to join the huge armies that had been with Grant in Virginia for a two-day march through Washington, the Grand Review, on May 23 and 24. Sherman came with his men, and those in Washington who knew him wondered whether their fate would be ostracism or a scorching from his blistering tongue. As he approached the capital, he was speaking only to old friends from the Army of the Tennessee days. On May 22, from across the Potomac, he wrote John A. Rawlins:

Ole Peter Hansen Balling, Grant and His Generals. Sherman is at Grant’s right hand; Sheridan, pushing to the front, is farther along. NATIONAL PORTRAIT GALLFRY, SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, WASHINGTON, D.C.

Send me all orders and letters you may have for me, and let some…newspaper know that Vandal Sherman is encamped near the Canal Bridge half way between the Long Bridge & Alexandria to the west of the Road, where his friends if any can find him. Though in disgrace he is untamed and unconquered.

As ever your friend
W. T. Sherman

Two days later he led his men up Pennsylvania Avenue. A band played “Marching through Georgia” as he reached the White House, briskly dismounted, walked up into the reviewing stand, and with all eyes on him, shook the hand of the president of the United States and then, with calculated offense, carefully refused the hand of Secretary of War Stanton, turning instead to greet warmly his good friend Ulysses Grant.²⁹

Grant had had a series of days of triumph. First there was Appomattox and the victorious return to Washington; then came the smaller achievement of having overridden Sherman while keeping his friendship with an old comrade intact. Finally, he spent two days reviewing the vast panoply of victorious armies—his armies—marching as the conquerers that they were. At the end of the exhausting celebration, he needed a break of the kind ordinary soldiers gave themselves in the lulls between battles, but when he and Orville Babcock saddled their horses that evening, they did not strike out to the northwest for the escape of a gallop down a back-country road. Instead, Grant rode down to Pennsylvania Avenue and looked at the people who still filled the sidewalks even though the parade was over. They had not expected to see the greatest soldier of the day out by himself—and in a good-natured informal way they cheered him. He nodded and rode on. After the reviewing-stand hosannas he had needed still more accolades; he had needed assurance that the people knew him.³⁰