They call this traveling for pleasure….
—Bronson Howard, Saratoga, 1870
IN MAY 1865 rich Philadelphians presented the victor with a splendid house at 2009 Chestnut Street, but Philadelphia was not what the Grants had in mind. Julia found the “closets…full of snowy fine linen, the larders and even the coal bins…full,” and a “quantity of fine silver on the table.” Indeed, she claimed she “really felt a pang of disappointment” at not spending the pin money she had been saving to buy fine things for a house of her own. Here were all the makings of a life of sedentary comfort, but it was Washington, not Philadelphia, that was the focus of the general’s postwar quest for an occupation.1
Julia later reported Nellie’s response when she was told that the Philadelphia house was home: “‘No, mamma, no, this is not our home. I have just come from there. Our house is a great, great house (with a struggle to say what it was like) like…like…the picture in my geography of the…the…Capitol in Washington.’” For a time Nellie had to make do with Philadelphia, while her father commuted from Washington, but soon Grant found that he could rarely spend twenty-four hours away from the capital, and the family moved from Philadelphia to Georgetown Heights, in Washington.2
Although he was living in the East, Grant told Elihu Washburne on May 21 that he would not give up his legal residence in Galena: “It would look egotistical to make a parade in the papers about where I intend to make my home, but I will endeavor to be in Galena at the next election and vote there, and disclose my intention of claiming that as my home, and intention of never casting a vote elsewhere without first giving notice.” His political base was thus in Illinois, but, he told Washburne, he must station himself in Washington. He was the commander of the army, and although peace had brought drastic cuts in personnel and budget (of which he approved), his job was not a minor one. But despite Grant’s careful reinforcement of his relationships with the president, the secretary of war, and his fellow officers, it did not carry the magnitude that had been his at Appomattox.3
The Republic could offer its most famous citizen only one position commensurate with the position he had already held—the presidency. But that post was already occupied. It could not be created for him as that of lieutenant general had been; it would have to be taken from someone else. Grant was conscious of the spirit of unanimity with which the people of the North had rallied behind Johnson when Lincoln was shot—and he joined in it—but the idea of becoming president, which had been sparked in 1863, still smoldered. With the greatest political wisdom, he had said the words that banked the fires as long as Abraham Lincoln lived. Now he needed to say nothing, and the flames leaped. On the reviewing stand with Andrew Johnson, he was the greater man. The crowds knew that, and so did he.
In June 1865, Ulysses and Julia went to New York, to make a ceremonial return to West Point and to attend a rally at Cooper Union in support of Andrew Johnson’s presidency. The day of the rally was exhausting; he enjoyed it thoroughly. Crowds gathered early in the morning as the Grants rode from the ferry to the Astor House. The general met first with city officials and businessmen who wanted his support for various projects. At ten o’clock, in accordance with carefully made arrangements—the doors were manned to control the crowd—the people lined up outside his suite were admitted. “Having entered, they stopped. They saw a few young officers in glittering uniforms, but where was the General? Looking for the Lieutenant-General commanding the armies of the United States, they expected to see an imposing figure….” Instead, standing in front of a fireplace was Ulysses S. Grant.4
People have an odd way of getting themselves into what they somehow think is modish dress when they come to New York. Ulysses, or possibly Julia, had selected a brown sack coat, light checked trousers, and patent-leather pumps—exactly what a newly successful businessman in Galena or St. Louis might have worn. If Grant did not have a chance to change, he must have looked strange indeed at the end of the day, at the Union League Club. (His new New York friends soon got him to Brooks Brothers, and for the rest of his life Grant dressed correctly, in quiet clothes. Though sometimes thought of as the most unkempt of our presidents, he was, in fact, exceedingly well tailored.) That morning the civilian general received people for two hours, pausing only to light a continuous chain of cigars, for which he apologized to the ladies in the room. He shook hands till his hand reddened and grew swollen, but he did not stop. One old bore, his top hat firmly on his head, planted himself at the general’s side for an eternity—and talked. Grant gave him “half-an-ear” while “…his entire physicca[l] system was devoted to the crowd.” At noon the lines were longer than they had been when he began, and he moved to the balcony over the front door of the hotel and waved to the crowd waiting in the street to greet him.5
In the afternoon there was a dinner at which tediously predictable worthies of New York—John A. Dix, Horace Greeley, and a divine or two—gave speeches. At the close of the tributes, Grant rose and, as he had done in St. Louis more than a year earlier, gave the speech which was to become his trademark. The New York Times report included the response of his audience: “I rise only to say I do not intend to say anything. [Laughter] I thank you for your kind words and your hearty welcome. [Applause].” From the dinner he went to the meeting which ostensibly was the reason for his being in New York—the meeting in celebration of the new presidency of Andrew Johnson. The New York Times, as always, enjoyed being dismayed by the vulgarity of a crowd and reported with relish on the exuberance of the mass of people that jammed Cooper Union. The meeting had been called to order and Daniel S. Dickinson was in midsentence when General Grant came into the hall: there was a roar, and the general learned, perhaps for the first time, how fine a chant his name made. “Grant-Grant-Grant, Grant-Grant-Grant,” the crowd insisted. When he sat down on the stage, amid the fulsome attention of Moses Taylor, Moses Grinnell, and a host of others of the elect, people had trouble seeing him. And so Grant “rose and walked to the further end of the platform, while every step was a signal for an outburst of applause—a perfect triumph of enthusiastic hurrahing.”6
There were calls for a speech, seconded by earnest requests to the general from the presiding officials. Grant at first demurred and then went to the very edge of the platform and “spoke a few brief words of thanks.” They included no mention of the man he had come to honor, President Andrew Johnson. “Had the general uttered weighty words of wisdom—had he announced his confirmed intention of giving to each person in the audience a large farm with modern implements, had he told them their sins were forgiven ‘on the spot,’ the people could not have been more excited. The American vocabulary is inadequate for the occasion,” wrote the Times reporter, trying to make it do, “the hall was too densely crowded to permit of the turning of summersaults, but from head to foot, from limb to limb, the entranced and bewildered multitude trembled with extraordinary delight…with the foregoing ‘speech.’”7
Grant was conscious of the excitement. Dickinson resumed his speech, but—if the Times account is to be believed—no applause followed his references to President Johnson; instead, the speaker was interrupted with the renewed chant “Grant-Grant-Grant” until the general once more rose to be applauded. Finally, pleading a promised appearance at the Union League Club, Grant’s escorts led him from the hall. Only when the hero had left could Generals Francis P. Blair, Jr., and John A. Logan, with speeches flowery in their praise of Andrew Johnson, extract from the crowd the cheers for the president that the occasion had been designed to arouse.8
After the reception at the club, Grant went back to the Astor House; there, from the balcony, he received a serenade from New York’s proud Seventh Regiment. Then the Grants allowed the press, except for the reporter from the Times, to think they were taking the night boat to West Point. Instead, they left early the next morning from Castle Garden on a small dispatch boat, the Henry Burden—with the Times reporter aboard. Flags fluttered and passing boats saluted as the party enjoyed the loveliest of excursions, the trip up the Hudson to West Point. There, at the library, Grant received the officials and later the cadets of the academy. During the day, he borrowed Samuel Sloan’s carriage and drove to the Couzzens Hotel to call on splendid old Winfield Scott, who had been born before there were presidents of the United States. Scott, with great grace, had sent Grant a telegram of support “from the oldest general to the ablest,” and the meeting was cordial.9
That afternoon, too, from across the river in Garrison, came Mrs. Hamilton Fish with Mrs. William Morris Hunt and Mrs. George Templeton Strong. They came to call on the “simple-mannered, plain, quiet woman” who was Mrs. General Grant, and all the years of being unimportant were over. After Julia Kean Fish had called on Julia Dent Grant, there was no going back to Mudville.10
“The General was always fond of traveling.” So said Julia, with no equivocation, and travel the two did throughout 1865—and, indeed, for the rest of their lives. They were in demand. In New York that fall George Templeton Strong wrote, in his diary, “[Mrs. Strong] slipped in an invitation to dinner and it was cordially accepted. William B. Astor’s was declined, but I am verging on snobbery.” After visiting West Point, the Grants went to Chicago and then back to Washington. On the way to a Fourth of July celebration in Albany, the general, Horace Porter, and Orville Babcock stopped off in New York City. From there, William Henry Vanderbilt escorted them in his private railroad car to the state capital. At a military review, the crowd seeking to get near Grant overloaded a grandstand and it collapsed; there were, however, no serious injuries. That evening, on the night boat going back down the Hudson, the general found the celebration not yet over. Sitting on deck, he dandled children on his knee, and when he retired to his cabin, he enjoyed overhearing a joyous mockery of the day’s patriotic solemnity, in which he had been the chief performer. The celebrants sang a ribald serenade in parody of the music of the glorious Fourth and then gave silent speeches that were greeted with vast applause. When the party subsided, an indefatigable reporter spotted the general back out on deck in his “duster,” enjoying a cigar in solitude as the boat moved down the Hudson. This was one of the rare trips on which Julia did not accompany him. Grant was alone at the rail that evening.11
After a reception in Boston’s Faneuil Hall General O. O. Howard, the head of the Freedmen’s Bureau, tried to link Grant to his faltering effort to save the abandoned lands for the freedmen by taking his fellow general and commander with him, on August 4, to the commencement exercises at Bowdoin College. From Maine the Grants moved on to Nova Scotia, Quebec, New Hampshire, and Vermont; then to Union College, in Schenectady, New York, for yet another honorary degree, to Saratoga for a holiday, and finally on August 18, 1865, to Galena. Although Grant had lived in the town for less than a year, a ceremonial return of the native was obligatory. The celebration was a wondrous mixture of hokiness and real enthusiasm. The Grants came to town on a fine railroad car and the line, aware of the commercial importance of its valuable cargo, gave credit where it was due: “The [Chicago and] Northwestern acknowledge the valuable assistance rendered by Messrs. Tobey & Brother, furniture dealers, and Messrs. Hollister and Wilkins, upholsterers.” Leaving the splendid car, the Grants rode down Main Street, and the town made good on an answer to a newspaperman’s question to Grant about what he would do after the war. He was said to have replied that he would run for mayor of Galena and put in a sidewalk; now across the path of his triumphant entry was stretched a banner: “General, here is your sidewalk.” And over the boardwalk, great bowers of flowers and greenery were entwined on makeshift triple arches stretched across the street in front of the DeSoto House.12
The townspeople were aware that their claim on the Grants was slim; in truth, few of them knew him. Naturally enough, they wanted to identify the war’s greatest hero as their own, but the thrifty burghers had no intention of throwing money away, and one can sense in what they chose to present to him just a trace of the inclination to cut the upstart down to size. They gave him a second-best house, built in the 1850’s. If not as grand as Elihu Washburne’s or the best of the dwellings up on High and Prospect streets, it was a good house, but when the Grants went inside they found the pleasant furnishings were largely suitable for the summer. It was as if they were being reminded that no one expected them to move in to stay. Indeed, when they left, Grant lent the house to Joe Bascom, his successor as a clerk at Grant & Perkins. Bascom looked around at the furniture and commented, “When I say it is not very rich I do not mean it is poor”; it did seem to him not as fine “as some I have seen in Galena.”13
While in Galena, Grant acted out the myth of the return of the simple lad who had gone off to war. He visited the old store for the first time since he had happily abandoned it in April 1861. Joe Bascom wrote, “Men rush in while I [am]…writing letters or Invoices[,] seize me by the hand (without a particle of warning) and shake and pull it until it seamed as though they wanted to pull it out of the socket to carry home with them as a relic from Grant’s store.” As Bascom wrote this letter, the general himself, he said, was at the “oposite side of the desk writing and (of course) smoking.” The owner of the business had composed an advertisement on the occasion of his son’s visit; one of its verses read:
Since Grant has whipped the Rebel Lee
And opened trade frome sea to sea
Our goods in price must soon advance
Then dont neglect the present chance
To Call on GRANT and PERKINS.
J.R.G.14
A month later, in September, Grant went on a sentimental journey that was more authentically affectionate; he returned to Georgetown, Ohio, where he had grown up, and visited nearby Ripley, where he had gone to school, and Bethel, where he had happily spent vacations from West Point. But even in Ohio there was no escaping celebrity, no chance to truly go home again, for everything had become elaborate. Mary Louise Williams, the granddaughter of Grant’s host in Cincinnati, wrote a fine account of going “to see the great man of our day.” She paid a call on the Grants at their hotel and found the general, again in civilian clothes, cordially greeting the leaders of the city’s society; she was delighted when she and her mother were invited to join the Grants as they moved on to Columbus. In addition to Ulysses and Julia, the party included all four of the Grant children, and Julia’s father. (Conspicuously absent were the general’s own relatives, left behind after a visit immediately across the river in Covington, Kentucky.) The railroad car moved at a ceremonial pace: “At all the places along the road,” wrote Mary Louise Williams, “the people were collected to get a look at the noble General, but the train only stopped at the largest towns. At Xenia and London the people called so loudly for the Gen. that he went on the platform, they wanted him to speak but he shook his head. Then they wanted to see his children, the two youngest Nellie & Jessie went out.”15
In a parade in Columbus, the “Generals carriage was drawn by four beautiful black horses,” and he rode with the mayor. In the first carriage behind him was David Tod, the wartime governor of Ohio and the son of Judge George Tod, to whom Grant’s father had once been apprenticed. There was an immense reception for invited guests, and from the window, Grant bowed to crowds of uninvited Ohioans jammed into the street outside. Porter and Babcock adroitly maneuvered the general through the ceaseless day. When it came time in the evening for the party to go to the Opera House, “Mrs. Grant being very tired did not go.” Politely, the other women began to decline as well, but luckily they were rescued: “The gentlemen insisted so we finally consented.” They took a streetcar the short distance to the theater. “The play had begun, but when the General entered everything was stopped with prolonged cheers.” He and his children took seats in the first row of the parquet; the rest of the party were ranged behind him. “The play was very poor, and as all were tired we were not sorry to see the General start early to go.” Getting what must have been the only relaxed breath of fresh air that day, they walked back to the hotel on “a beautiful bright moonlight night.” At the hotel, they sat up in the parlor with the Grants “until it was time for them to leave for Pittsburg”—for another reception just as strenuous as those in Cincinnati and Columbus.16
After he returned to Washington, Grant had a conference with the banker Jay Cooke, who had accepted the Grants’ confidence and “changed our speculation” so that it should yield “about $25.00 [sic]” (presumably $2,500 in annual income). He also wrote Elihu Washburne, “My whole trip has been condusive to health, if one judges from corpulancy…. Mrs. Grant and children keep pace with me in enjoyment of travel, if one judges from the dificulty with which they are got up [in the morning].” Grant was anticipating his friend’s arrival in Washington, as Congress was about to come back into session after having been adjourned since before the war ended. The congressmen were, at last, to return to work, and in November 1865, just before their reconvening, President Johnson gave General Grant an important assignment as well. He sent him on a fact-finding trip, and it is a mark of the general’s stature that this “hasty” excursion, as Charles Sumner scornfully described it on the floor of the Senate, is referred to as Grant’s Tour of the South. His observations, based on five days crowded with travel, were heeded as if an oracle had spoken.17
The words in Grant’s report to Johnson’s cabinet on December 15 were measured, and his generalizations, based on his small sampling of evidence, were logical. They were certainly not radical. At both Savannah and Charleston, Grant was just a short boat ride away from the Sea Islands, where black people were engaged in experiments in independent farming, but he did not make the trip to observe them. If he had, he would have arrived during the closing phase of the earliest and strongest attempt by black farmers to establish their economic self-sufficiency. Grant might have been powerful enough to block the return of their land to the former white owners, but he never got into that battle. He never saw the Negroes’ independent farms for himself, nor did he listen to reports of the injustices involved in breaking them up. He talked instead to the white men who were getting the land back and forcing independent black farmers into the position of dependent laborers.
Grant was not prepared to place the making of a reconstructed Union even partially in the hands of the freedmen. Instead, he was willing to entrust the black people to the “thinking people of the South.” That hoary euphemism for the keepers of a social order, in this instance those committed to white dominion over black, gave Grant no pause. When he used it, he greatly encouraged Andrew Johnson and his allies in the White House who, by December 1865, were seeking to build a new political coalition that included such Southerners. Indeed, after the cabinet meeting, Gideon Welles, the most racially conservative man in Johnson’s cabinet, said of Grant (whom he normally did not trust), “His views are sensible, patriotic, and wise.” Welles urged the general to put them in writing, and after Johnson made the same request, Grant’s famous account of his tour came into being.18
The report was as brief as the trip; it took less than a full column in the New York Times. Grant, with Babcock, Adam Badeau, and Cyrus B. Comstock as staff, crossed Virginia, visiting Julia’s sister and her husband in Richmond. At Cape Fear, a reporter saw him, in plain civilian dress, “buying an apple and calmly surveying the slow motions of a gang of dusky creatures seemingly making an effort to smash the luggage or pile it on a diminutive, snorting tugboat.” He spent a day in Raleigh, two in Charleston, and one each in Savannah and Augusta, and said nothing concerning what he saw that was uncongenial to Andrew Johnson. Grant did call for the continuation of the Freedmen’s Bureau, having no way of knowing that two months later Johnson would try unsuccessfully to use the veto to end the agency. However, he had no plaudits for those in the Bureau who were seeking to promote black interests. Instead, Grant spoke approvingly of the conservative critics of the Bureau, who sought to drive out agents (of whatever color) who were favorable to the Negroes. Grant credited tales of “abuses” told by enemies of black advancement and recommended that agents perpetuating them be removed. He did not ask if perhaps the sin of these agents was that they favored the freedmen; he simply left the impression that they were corrupt.19
Grant would have brought the Bureau more completely within the army—that is, more directly under his own control—and yet he described as “able” its commissioner, General O. O. Howard, who hoped it would develop as an independent liberal welfare agency. Grant’s praise contributed to the pressure on Howard to play for more such compliments by having the Bureau abandon efforts to deal with the needs of its freedman clients in favor of a concentration on keeping order. As he read the report, Howard reasoned that he could placate Johnson and Grant and keep his job only if he met Grant’s criticism of those agents who were attempting to execute the act of Congress of March 3, 1865, which permitted limited redistribution of Southern lands to the freedmen.20
Grant contended that army garrisons were still needed in the South, to ward off foreigners—approaching, perhaps, from Mexico—who might view the South as the nation’s Achilles’ heel. “The white and the black mutually require the protection of the general government.” But none of the troops should be colored; the existence of black soldiers would encourage the freedmen to be assertive. “The presence of black troops, lately slaves, demoralizes labor, both by their advice and by furnishing in their camps a resort for the freedmen for long distances around.” He praised the statements made by General Howard on his trip—just prior to Grant’s—during which the commissioner had urged the freedmen to acquiesce to the paternal authority of their old masters. If the former slaves were to be returned to their role as a subordinate labor force, the presence of proud gun-bearing black soldiers would be an anomaly. “White troops generally excite no opposition, and therefore a small number of them can maintain order in a given district.” On the other hand, Grant shrewdly noted, black troops could invite guerrilla attacks; if there were to be any black troops at all in the South, they would have to “be kept in bodies sufficient to defend themselves.” He knew they would be greatly resented by white Southerners.21
Those who were sources of potential disorder were all to be found, according to Grant, in the lowest ranks of society: “It is not the thinking men who would use violence toward any class of troops sent among them by the general government, but the ignorant…might; and the late slave seems to be imbued with the idea that the property of his late master should, by right, belong to him, or, at least should have no protection from the colored soldier.” Grant claimed there was danger of “collision” with the established order in any move toward black solidarity. In areas where there were many freedmen, he insisted, the troops should all be white: “The reasons for this are obvious….”22
Grant saw a stable future for his nation if it was protected from any threat by an underclass of disaffected, poor people—white or black. He wrote of the eagerness on the part of citizens of the Southern states to work within the Union, provided there were nothing “humiliating to them as citizens.” Speaking in support of President Johnson’s hope that unhumiliated, unreconstructed Southerners would be permitted to enter Congress, he ended his report by stating, “It is to be regretted that there cannot be greater commingling at this time between the citizens of the two sections, and particularly of those intrusted with the law-making power.”23
Grant’s report on his Southern trip is a disturbingly good example of his philosophy, if that is not too pretentious a term for his thinking. Now that he had reached the high ground of national eminence, he was going to stay there. Personally, he was terrified of obscurity; publicly, he was frightened by the obscure. Whiggishly, he trusted only the “thinking men”—he used the term twice in his short document—but in truth he was referring less to men of thought than to men of property. Instead of looking around him and understanding those with whom his own early experience should have prepared him to have empathy, he called for a “commingling” of the better people. One of the great and powerful now, Ulysses Grant had forded his river. He was not, if he could help it, going to swim in treacherous common waters again.24
Grant’s report—his program for Reconstruction—touched the question that everyone was talking about in Washington in December 1865. The freedmen, feared or feared for, were the subject of the day. When the new session of the Congress opened, the first bill introduced in the Senate had to do with the welfare of the former slaves. The Congressional Globe was full of speeches on the subject of the mistreatment of Negroes in the South. On December 18, 1865, the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution was ratified, but the black people’s troubles were far from over. This was the first time the Congress had met since Andrew Johnson had taken office, and the president and the congressional Republicans had not yet taken their positions at opposite poles. The legislators were still trying to line up with the new chief executive. But it was hard to know where he stood. His performance as the wartime governor of Tennessee suggested that he would take a hard line on the rebels and support the freedmen. His pardoning policy, which restored the old leaders of the South to power, suggested the opposite. Many senators and congressmen assumed that they would find a position compatible with that of the president. Grant had already found such a position; the last sentence of his report put him on the side of the president and in opposition to Congress on the first of the major divisions between the two.
Congress refused to seat the representatives from the Southern states; Johnson wanted them seated. Their acceptance would have marked the completion of the Reconstruction program he had been conducting vigorously during the months that Congress had been out of session. It was toward just such a reunion that the final sentence of Grant’s report spoke. His call for a “commingling at this time between the citizens of the two sections,” to which he added the political coda “particularly of those intrusted with the law-making power,” was exactly what Andrew Johnson had in mind. Charles Sumner, on the other hand, in a series of vitriolic speeches denounced Johnson’s lack of concern for the freedmen and attacked not only the president but the stupid people advising him. Other senators sought to keep Grant on their side, but Sumner was burning his bridges. Grant was Johnson’s most prestigious adviser, and the general did not easily forget taunts like those hurled his way by the senator from Massachusetts.25
Charles Sumner may not have known how to protect his own political future, but he did know what was at stake for the freedmen. Black slaves had been emancipated, but Jubilee Day was over. The freedmen were desperately poor, and they were being killed and intimidated by other Southerners, who were frightened that the former slaves, having been released from bondage, could not be contained. Northerners, miles away from the immediacy of such fears, heard of outrages against the freedmen and wanted to prevent their repetition. From afar they sought to prescribe for the region in which these people lived (and they hoped, would continue to live), with the aim of placing the new black citizens in the position of plain ordinary American middle-class citizens. Such a seemingly unrevolutionary goal was, in fact, radical: under the clearly delineated class system of the South, achieving it would have required raising the members of the lowest class not one notch, but two. They would move from slavery past the involuntary servitude of an indentured or apprenticed laborer to the level of the freeholder. In the mythical kingdom of a classless society inhabited by the Republicans, the free black farmer was unthreatening to his fellow Americans; in the realities of the South, the step of the freedmen into the yeomanry would raise them not only above slavery but above the landless white poor.
Superficially, the politics of Reconstruction were not new to America. Andrew Johnson was trying to build one new coalition of partisan supporters, and the Republicans in Congress were trying to build another. The difference in these years was that the makings of class struggle were present, concealed under the flamboyant clothes of race. The opponents of the Radicals were keenly aware of the danger cloaked in the conflict between the president and Congress. Never before had class unrest erupted in so disconcerting a way in America. On the surface, the appearance was of politics as usual. Andrew Johnson was trying to create a new alliance of Democrats and others committed to white supremacy in the nation. Republicans were trying to make their victorious war party permanently dominant. Both factions sought allies in the South and in the North. Their activity seemed to be coalition politics of the kind that had rendered radicalism harmless since colonial days, except that now, in the wake of the war, race and poverty were open issues.
Grant was in the thick of these politics. His personal need was to retain the immense respect in which he was held everywhere in the North and even, be discovered on his trip, in the South. He was aware that he was a symbol of national union. But, as after Donelson and Shiloh and Vicksburg, he knew that he could get nowhere as a stationary hero. He needed to move, to be seen, to have something to do, or he would be forgotten. He was the most popular person in the land—or at least in the North—and enjoyed the confidence both of men in Congress and of the president of the United States. In 1866 Congress voted that Grant should have the rank of general—with no limiting adjective. He was lieutenant to no one. He outranked the Father of his Country. But privately, Grant was not sure he could even measure up to his father—to Jesse Grant’s standards. Publicly, he was considered a force that people on all sides had to reckon with. Initially, of course, his power derived from his being the commander of a fearsome army. But when he had won the war, he still held power. People still needed to know that Grant was on their side, that they stood well with the general.
He was, however, never a man on horseback. The great compliment Stanton’s biographers Benjamin P. Thomas and Harold M. Hyman paid the secretary of war for maintaining civilian control over things military has less force when one recognizes that the nation’s most likely military dictator never for a moment thought of becoming such a despot. Ulysses Grant was not driven to crush a world that had tried to crush him. He wanted something much more simple. He wanted to matter in a world he had been watching closely all his life. A little recognition—a little understanding that he did know what he was doing—was all he required. He needed to be taken into account. And now that he had the eyes—and the ears—of the movers and shakers of the land, he thought he had something to say to them.26
What he wanted to say—what he sought to express as he moved about the country—was clearly stated in the conclusion of his Memoirs, written at the very end of his life. He sought “such a commingling [he liked the word] of the people that particular idioms and pronunciation are no longer localized….” He wanted the country to be “filled up ‘from the centre all around to the sea’” with railroads connecting “the two oceans and all parts of the interior….” Maps “nearly perfect” were his metaphor for a clearly delineated America. He wanted to be done with the terrors of the unknown. Before the war, “an immense majority of the whole people did not feel secure against coming to want should they move among entire strangers.” Ulysses Grant had suffered such insecurity. He had only a trace of romantic yearning for the life of the man alone in the wilderness, and yet this was the man Grant was most conscious of, the man he most feared becoming. He told of trappers—what a curious group for the dying general to have thought about—who, long before his own day in St. Louis, were a “class; people who shunned contact with others,” and who got for their pelts just enough money for “little articles of luxury…two or three pounds of coffee, more of sugar, some playing cards, and if anything was left over of the proceeds of the sale, more whiskey.”27
As Grant traveled, on the nation’s railroads—the first transcontinental connection was completed in 1869—he believed he was “commingling.” He saw vast numbers of his countrymen, he shook hands with thousands—and he did not realize how far he had moved from the discarded people of the nation. He seems not to have sensed that the shabby Ulysses Grant of 1860 would not have been invited even to a back table at one of the testimonial dinners of 1866. He was wearing well-cut gentleman’s clothes now and forgetting the troubled man they covered. He had been able to put on old clothes for Robert E. Lee; why could he not have put them on again once in a while and talked to some of the people around the country who still spoke in “particular idioms,” people who had no clothes fit for a hotel suite in which a great general received? Why could he not have talked to a black dock worker in North Carolina or an out-of-work white man in New York? He had the personality to do so. He was not formidable.
There is a story, probably apocryphal, about a time when Grant, traveling by train, stopped at a midwestern town for a luncheon and found a prepossessing welcoming committee armed with a fine brass band on one side of the tracks and a modest fife-and-drum contingent from the local “Grant” veterans’ club on the other. Grant was said to have guessed that the latter group had been excluded from the official welcome because “the municipal dignitaries wanted no vulgar fellows in faded blue jackets at their jollification, at which toasts were to be proposed and high-flown speeches were to be made.” He listened “grimly” to the welcome of the officials who came into his car, but when he left the train he crossed on the gravel and ties to shake hands and visit comfortably with the veterans. When a pretentious official came across to tell Grant that it was getting late and he should move on to the luncheon, he allowed that it was indeed late, boarded the train—and left town. “Just like him,” a veteran said, “he believes in common folk and he don’t like frills.” Maybe so, but the story suggests what people wanted Grant to be, rather than what he had become. It would be good to think that there had been more than one such a moment of intimacy with “vulgar fellows” and more than one escape from an official luncheon, but unfortunately the record shows twenty years of almost uninterrupted attention to the fancy folk on the right side of the tracks. A workingman, in old age, remembered that once, as a little boy, he had been crossing the narrow footbridge over the river in Galena and, too late to turn back, looked up to see the great General Grant approach him. After nearly a century, he recalled that he had been frightened at first and then was put at ease with a quiet greeting from the “little man about as tall as me.” (The workingman, Jacob Gunn, was about five feet six or five feet seven.) What if Grant had stopped a little longer and talked with the boy? Or had listened to what was on the mind of the boy’s father, a local lead miner? Why didn’t Grant omit just one of those great dinners in his honor and join the men in a working-class bar instead?28
The problem was that he was frightened of intimacy with people on the other side of the tracks. In such a relationship, their discomfort would have been momentary, the result of finding themselves in the company of a great man; they would have relaxed when they found that he was not a man of pretensions. The source of his discomfort, on the other hand, was far more deeply seated. He did not dare to talk to them, to mingle with them, to become one with them again. He was afraid of falling back. Seeing groups of ordinary people brought reminders of the possibility of failure—and failure frightened him. He could not allow it to return and engulf him. So he kept his distance and lived with the illusion that he was one with everyone and that the “commingling” of the great trips was genuine contact with people. A harmonious, orderly society was the true aim of his famous slogan in 1868, “Let us have peace.” The words evoked Appomattox, but they were more an injunction to dissident and potentially disorderly workers than a reference to the days of the past war.
Peacetime brought irony. In March 1866, Grant accompanied Fred to West Point, where he was a cadet, and Theodore S. Bowers, Grant’s aide since Cairo days, went along. After Fred was settled, the two soldiers crossed the Hudson to Garrison to take the train back to New York. Grant boarded, but for some reason Bowers was delayed. The train started and began picking up speed. Bowers jumped; his foot missed the step and was caught in the coupling. He was killed and dragged 150 feet down the tracks, his face crushed by the wheels and his arms sliced from his body. The rails were wet with his blood when the train stopped and Grant got off. The New York Times reported that he could scarcely recognize the mutilated body of his close friend. Years later James A. Garfield heard a different version of the episode from James G. Blaine, who used it to illustrate Grant’s “singularly impassible character.” According to Blaine, after the accident, when the train stopped and alarmed passengers moved to the doors, “Grant did not rise from his seat but wrote a telegram, giving orders about the dispo[si]tion of the body, and let the train go on.”29
Bowers was thirty-four when he died. The small, alert newspaperman from Mount Carmel, Illinois, had joined Grant’s staff in 1862. He was an amateur soldier; he brought no professional knowledge of war to the job, but, said the New York Times, “he read character and detected motives with great precision.” The slender, dark-eyed bachelor was a man of “remarkable self possession.” He wrote well and took over much of Rawlins’s work, as the latter’s duties expanded. But more important than his utility as a clerk was Bowers’s membership in the close family formed by Grant’s staff. He was one of the men whose talk was so essential to the general. The easy obbligato of their voices reached Grant; he learned what he needed to know of army gossip from them. By being there with him, these men sustained the general. Bowers was the first in Grant’s staff family to die. Now, in the most banal of civilian accidents—slipping while rushing for a train—a young friend was lost to him. Grant and the rest of the party went on into the city, and when arrangements for the funeral had been made, he and Comstock and Badeau returned to West Point for the service. Then Grant went back to Washington.30
The next month the Grants participated in a very different ceremony. On April 6, 1866, in their new Douglas Row house at 205 “I” Street, N.W., Julia and Ulysses gave a party. A reporter wrote, “Gen. Grant’s reception tonight, the closing one of the season, is a grand affair. The capacious drawing rooms and library are literally packed with guests. The President is present and stands between Gen. Grant and Mrs. Grant….” The general and his lady had received regularly since the opening of Congress, but this was their most ambitious attempt at bringing official Washington together, and it succeeded. “It is rumored,” wrote the reporter expansively the next day, “that the ladies, are if possible, more elegantly and richly attired this evening than at any reception…this season.” Gideon Welles, being “somewhat indisposed,” planned to send his son as his wife’s escort, but when Edgar Welles did not get to town, the secretary of the navy, let his curiosity get the best of him and, despite a severe headache, went to have a look at the “numerous but…miscellaneous company of contradictions.”31
That afternoon the Senate had overriden the president’s veto of the Civil Rights Bill, and the Radicals, heady with their audacity, had—Welles recorded in his Diary—“some pre-understanding…to attend and to appropriate General Grant, or at least his name and influence to themselves. But,” continued Welles, “most unexpectedly to them, as I confess it was to me, the President and his two daughters appeared early….” Lyman Trumbull, the author of the Civil Rights Bill and hero of the hour for having sustained it against Johnson’s opposition, arrived later with Thaddeus Stevens (who would shortly steer the bill through the House of Representatives). The triumphant Radicals, were “astonished and amazed” to find at the party not only Andrew Johnson but another former vice-president, Alexander H. Stephens. Grant’s indomitable little friend from the peace-conference days of the previous year proved, in the reporter’s eyes, to be “quite a lion”; he was soon “surrounded by Senators and Representatives, most of them radicals, who [gave] him cordial greeting.” And turning from the Confederate to his conqueror, the politicians hovered over Grant, each of them hoping to nudge the general his way. Ulysses and Julia, no lesser politicians than anyone else in the room, had achieved a success. The civility, so studiously sought in the Washington evenings that followed rancorous days, united the whole company; all joined in the common activity of bringing the general to the center of political life. Amidst discord over Reconstruction, the Grants had created their own evening of temporary national reunion.32