XVII

THE RISING MAN

It looks to me as if Genl. Grant was to be the rising man. The people love military glory and renown and love to honor it.

—David Davis

President Grant was assured by all about him that he was the delight of the Radicals, greatest captain of the age, and saviour of the nation’s life. It was inevitable that he should begin by believing some of this, and end by believing it all.

—Richard Taylor

ANDREW JOHNSON did not know what to do with Ulysses Grant. He was too popular to have around, and too popular to let go. And the president needed allies. The members of the Republican opposition Congress pulled further and further away from him as Johnson vetoed their Reconstruction bills and they overrode his vetoes. They wanted this legislation enforced, and he very much wanted it to languish. The two antagonists, the president and Congress, strained against each other, and one focus of that struggle was Johnson’s relationship with the man responsible for enforcing Reconstruction policies, his secretary of war, Edwin M. Stanton. Except for the army, there was at this time no federal agency available to carry out the policies of the national government. To be sure, the Department of the Interior functioned in the territories, and the Treasury and Justice departments, and of course the Post Office Department, had some staff in the various states, but the army alone, as a result of the war, provided a presence large enough and centralized enough to impose federal policy in the South. The civilian at the army’s head, the secretary of war, was, therefore, the administrator most critical for Reconstruction. But President Johnson had already lost confidence in Stanton, who like Grant had tried to walk a compromise road between the president and the Radical Republicans. Stanton wanted to hold his job as secretary of war, and his tenacity was great, almost great enough in the long run to pull down a president through impeachment. And from the start of the struggle between Johnson and Stanton, which led both men to politically dangerous extremes, Grant stood in the middle.

When the Radicals achieved passage of the Civil Rights Bill over Johnson’s veto in April 1866, they had done only half the job. That clearly written, splendidly wide-ranging piece of legislation, miraculously still the law of the land, would be effective only if enforced. Senator Lyman Trumbull, who wrote it, knew this, and he anticipated that the Freedmen’s Bureau would become the enforcement agency. But in May a “riot” occurred in Memphis in which an armed band, composed conspicuously of off-duty policemen, killed black citizens despite the presence of a Freedmen’s Bureau agent. Elihu Washburne headed a thorough congressional investigation, which showed that the Bureau was not able to protect its clients’ lives, let alone their rights. More muscle was needed, and that strength would have to come from other sectors of the War Department. It is doubtful whether Stanton had the motivation to conduct that enforcement on his own; it is demonstrable that he could not do so with Andrew Johnson as his president. But in 1866 it looked as if Stanton might try. The Radicals placed their hopes in him, and the secretary of war, to enhance his own power and importance, held firmly to his cabinet position.

It was also in General Grant’s interest that Stanton retain his office. As early as the spring of 1866 there were rumors that Sherman would replace Stanton. General Sherman, with his famous statement in 1884, “If nominated I will not run; if elected I will not serve,” was perhaps that all-but-nonexistent American—the person who genuinely does not want to be president. But his fascination with the delicious evil of politics made even Sherman suspect, at least in 1866, a year in which Ulysses Grant took careful measure of his lieutenant. Grant was worried on two counts. First, he was concerned that the appointment of Sherman, which would make him Grant’s superior, might imperil their very real friendship. Second, he was anxious lest Sherman, coming in as secretary of war, espouse Johnson’s position in his inimitable, outspoken, unequivocal way and turn the leaders of Congress against the army—and against Grant.

Johnson had vetoed a bill to strengthen the Freedmen’s Bureau. That veto had been sustained, but the agency limped along under its original grant of power, and in July 1866 a second bill was passed, over the president’s veto. Meanwhile Johnson turned to other ways of destroying the work of Reconstruction. He headed the executive branch of government; it was his job to enforce the Civil Rights Act and other laws essential to Reconstruction. He chose not to enforce them. For example, he used his appointment power to see that agents in the Freedmen’s Bureau favorable to the freedmen were replaced. At the end of July, the police and firemen of New Orleans put down an interracial demonstration—labeled pejoratively a “riot”—in favor of universal suffrage; clearly, the Freedmen’s Bureau still could not even secure the lives of the freedmen. By official count, forty-eight people were killed. One of Grant’s favorite generals, Philip Sheridan, was posted at New Orleans but had been out of the city on the day the demonstrating integrationists were suppressed. (His absence had not gone unnoticed as the officials of the Johnsonian city government appraised the limits to which they could go in violently repressing the people, black and white, who demonstrated for equality.) Sheridan, when he got back to New Orleans, called the killings a massacre.

The citizens had gathered in support of a convention, called to amend the state constitution, which they hoped would grant Negro suffrage. Johnson had ordered the head of the Freedmen’s Bureau in the city not to bring in troops, though there was a federal army unit a mile outside the city, and this assurance of noninterference invited the attack on black and white demonstrators, and convention delegates, by city police and firemen. The New York Times reporter on the scene was unequivocal in blaming the attackers for a premeditated act, but he put the responsibility for provoking the attack on the “Robespierre of New Orleans,” a radical dentist named A. P. Dostie. Dostie, one of the injured white men, was dying with stoical bravery, not repenting his prophetic warning, in his rousing speeches, that universal equality was the only proper goal for men of his race to pursue in a world of 300,000,000 white people and 900,000,000 nonwhites.¹

The New Orleans violence dramatically polarized opinion. On the one hand, Andrew Johnson was pictured as allowing freedmen to be slaughtered. On the other, his adherents said that unless radicals like Dostie in New Orleans and the whole pack of Republicans were curbed, and sensible moderates were charged with handling race relations in the South, there would be more riots. A week later, at the National Union convention called to rally support for the president in the fall elections, Johnson’s position was championed. When a delegation of conservative leaders was sent from the convention to the White House to present a declaration of support, Johnson used the occasion for a display of executive unity and power. He summoned his cabinet and his commanding general, Ulysses S. Grant.

They responded, or at least most of them did, but the president wondered where the general was when the appointed hour came. The men of the cabinet (except for Stanton, also absent) stood attentively as Senator Reverdy Johnson began his glowing words of praise for the president. Suddenly he was interrupted. Grant had quietly entered, and applause broke out in the crowded room. The general “walked straight up to the side of the President, who turned and shook hands with him.” There was, in Grant’s “manner and looks,” thought the man from the New York Times, something “which all interpreted to mean, ‘I am with you gentlemen. I indorse your proceedings.’” As Senator Johnson completed his remarks, “three cheers were enthusiastically given for ANDREW JOHNSON and three more for GEN. GRANT.” And then the president and the general “retired arm-in-arm.”²

The New York Times had Grant pegged, or so they thought—he was Johnson’s man. Nothing he did in public in August 1866 suggested anything different. However, two days before the visit to the White House for what was taken as his endorsement of Johnson as his leader, the general wrote a letter to Elihu Washburne, another man who had tried playing the uneasy role of patron to Ulysses Grant. In his letter the general demonstrated that he was going to be a lot harder to peg than the Times thought. He was seeking a way to get around being Johnson’s man or Washburne’s man or anyone else’s man but his own. Yes, of course he would be coming home for election day, Grant wrote Washburne, who was running for re-election, but he could not endorse Washburne or any other candidate. And then he proceeded to give the congressman a nonendorsement worth six of the genuine article: “I do not think it proper for an army officer…to take part in elections. Your friendship for me has been such that I should not hesitate to support you on personal grounds…there is no one who cannot recognize great acts of friendship.” Arm in arm with his friends, Grant would move across the Reconstruction landscape, getting exactly where he wanted to go.³

The journey was not to be without its rough passages. Later in that same month, August 1866, the apolitical general set out as a performer in one of the most famous political circuses in American history. Andrew Johnson, frustrated by Congress, took his case to the American people. Few presidents have been happy that they tried this tactic; Johnson was no exception. The effort was a disaster, but not for want of prior attention to public relations. To decorate the venture with heroes, Johnson took along Admiral David G. Farragut and General Ulysses S. Grant as side-ring attractions.

Nothing went right. At West Point, Grant did not even see his son. Fred had a sore eyelid and was in the infirmary; when Grant went there, the boy had left to look for his father. In the end, everyone in the party visited with Fred except the general. From Albany, Grant complained to his wife of being “pulled and hauled about.” Later the same day, in Auburn, Seward’s home town, a boy fell under the wheel of a carriage as he pressed forward to shake Grant’s hand, and his leg was shattered. Grant visited the injured boy at his house and, that evening, wrote hastily to Julia, “I am getting very tired of this expedition and of hearing political speeches.” Duty bound, he added, “I must go through however.”⁴

Johnson’s speeches were reminiscent of his intensely personal outpouring when he was inaugurated as vice-president; they made his listeners, including Grant, exceedingly uncomfortable. Looking for ways to explain such unrestrained language, slanderous gossips reduced the president and his commanding general to low comics, drunkenly lurching around the northeast. Grant’s own opening act had nothing to do with speeches. It was, instead, an elegant turn in Central Park at the reins of William Jerome’s superb four-in-hand, but reporters’ tales converted the incident into a wild and reckless and just possibly drunken escapade. Almost certainly the drive was exhilarating fun, and few novices could have been more ready to handle the powerful team than Grant, but Julia, having read about it in the papers, remonstrated with Ulysses. In explanation, he said that when they got into the park, Jerome “asked me to drive, which I did. But there was no fast driving to talk of it.”⁵

John Rawlins and the other men of Grant’s personal staff wished that their chief were appearing before the crowds alone. They believed Grant was wasting political capital in Johnson’s company, and as uncomfortable about the trip as Grant, they sought to disassociate him from Johnson. James Harrison Wilson wrote to Orville Babcock, “I hope you and [Horace] Porter will draw your political alliance as close as possible. All good influence which can be exerted should be…to keep the General true to his principles. He has been right so far—but you can see what a terrible effort Johnson has been making to commit him to ‘my policy.’”⁶

The ambitious and shrewd Wilson continued, “If we can judge from the papers, the President has failed ingloriously—and will doubtless turn his anger against the General when ever it suits his purpose to do so.” Wilson urged Babcock to keep Grant’s eye on “success” because “if the General waivers now—it will be as fatal to himself and the country, as hesitation or indecision would have been in the Wilderness!” Wilson claimed to have “seen the people and know their temper.” He was “sure the General knows it too by this time, if [he] ever had any doubt in regard to it.” Wilson was convinced that the tour “ought to leave him [Grant] no doubt as to the relative respect entertained for him & the President.” And the cavalryman left no doubt as to the hopes he entertained for a latter-day George Washington: “He is the Country’s best hope in Peace, as he has been in War!”⁷

Rejoining Johnson’s party after a detour to Detroit with Rawlins, Grant approved a skillfully worded statement to a reporter to the effect that he was accompanying Johnson in his role as head of the army, and nothing else. He would take sides with neither the president nor his opponents. On the president’s train, being neutral was akin to endorsing the opposition, but officially Grant’s stand was that he would not allow the army to “be made a party machine.” According to the reporter, a clause declaring that “when he [Grant] becomes partisan he intends immediately to resign his present position” had been deleted from the statement by Grant on the ground that such a declaration “might be taken to imply that at some future time he did intend to become partisan.” The conversation on this subject between the general and the reporter took place in the “baggage and refreshment car” of the train outside Chicago, in the presence of Rawlins and of General George Stoneman, one of Johnson’s partisans. Grant had taken refuge in this car after refusing to appear before a crowd, on the station platform, that called for him and not for Johnson. Sinking into a chair next to the reporter, Grant spoke his relief at avoiding an insult to Johnson and said that he “would refuse to receive…any…demonstrations tendered separately to himself when traveling with the President.”⁸

From St. Louis, Ulysses wrote Julia that at last the trip was almost over. He was starting east and would arrive at home on Saturday, September 15. “I have never been so tired of anything before as I have been with the political speeches of Mr. Johnson from Washington to this place. I look upon them as a national disgrace.” He cautiously added that Julia must not “shew this letter to anyone for as long as Mr. Johnson is President. I must respect him as such, and it is [in] the country’s interest that I should also have his confidence.” In York, Pennsylvania, Daniel Ammen responded to a telegram and was at the station to meet Grant and Farragut, as the party moved eastward. Grant told his boyhood friend that he did not like “swinging around the circle,” and Ammen was startled at how obviously uncomfortable Grant was: “Perhaps on no other occasion [save this one] have I seen General Grant discomposed.”⁹

Grant had to walk a tightrope. Johnson had put him on display, but now needed to subordinate him; he was too much of a rival. The president also needed to find a way to dispose of Stanton. Johnson shrewdly guessed that public opinion might support the removal of Stanton if the substitute was a popular general. He had his eye on Sherman, whose Reconstruction credentials were similar to Johnson’s own. Johnson, as wartime governor of Tennessee, had been savage in his verbal attacks on the ruling class of the Confederacy; Sherman, in his own inimitable manner, had made himself the most hated of the Federal invaders of the South. Yet both, since the war, had favored returning the government of Southern society to white men who would keep the freedmen in order. Neither encouraged the freedmen in any aspirations to equality or advancement that would stimulate reprisals from white supremacists and cause renewed war. Johnson taunted Stanton and Grant with hints that Sherman was his man. Grant, steady on his feet, kept Johnson wondering if he dared to push him off the tightrope in favor of Sherman—or of anyone else.

On October 14, 1866, Johnson asked Grant if Sherman could not be ordered to Washington for a few days. Grant thereupon wrote to Sherman to come east after they had both attended the Army of the Tennessee reunion in Cincinnati. In his letter, the commander referred to the time earlier that year, in February, when Sherman had counseled Johnson against publishing a letter of Sherman’s which was favorable to Johnson, on the ground that military men should stay out of politics. Grant hinted strongly to Sherman that this advice was still applicable. Speaking frankly of his talk with Johnson, Grant wrote, “Taking the whole conversation together and what now appears in the papers, I am rather of the opinion that it is the desire to have you in Washington either as Act[ing] Sec[retary] of War or in some other way.” Grant was trying to warn his friend to steer clear of such a shoal, which might halt them both. Sherman had achieved his powerful position by always remembering to defer to Grant, while retaining his independence of mind. Grant thought that before Sherman made any commitments, they should talk: “I will not venture in a letter to say all…that I would say to you in person.” The conversation could be held right at the Grants’. The general invited the Sherman family entourage—however large—to stop with him and Julia at their splendid new house. (There would be no overcrowding or immediate strain on the larder; General Daniel Butterfield, Alexander T. Stewart, and their fellow subscribers had provided $30,000 for the mortgage on this fine house. Even more comfortingly, they had supplied $54,000 in government bonds and $20,000 in cash.)¹⁰

When Sherman arrived in Washington on October 25, Stanton fully expected him to be made secretary of war ad interim. Stanton claimed to be untroubled by his pending removal, which, he told Senator William Pitt Fessenden, “is only the forerunner of the efforts to get Grant out of the way.” Grant, however, had a powerful ally in his effort not to be shunted aside. Senator John Sherman, a leading Republican, begged his brother not to “connect your name with this Administration.” An endorsement is “just what he [Johnson] wants but what you ought to avoid.” John Sherman thought Johnson’s swing around the circle had “sunk the Presidential Office to the level of a Grog House.” The senator and Grant prevailed; General Sherman, despite long talks in which Johnson tried to persuade him to take the post, steered safely away from the political currents. Grant, however, was very close to them. And there he stayed. His position in the army and in Washington depended on his remaining loyal to the president without antagonizing Republican legislators.¹¹

In the early fall of 1866, the Grants made plans to go to Galena for Orville Babcock’s wedding to Annie Campbell, a daughter of one of the prominent men of the town. Babcock was immensely proud of his tie to the Grants, and yet for a brief moment that well-organized young man, seeking to provide for his wife in style, talked of leaving Grant’s staff. He wrote Annie on October 10, “The Pacific RR people have been at me today again. If they hire me they will have to pay…me $10,000 a year, or I will not go.” Unluckily for all, including the railroad, which might have made lucrative use of his peculiar talents, Babcock did not get a good enough offer. He was, however, too busy to be regretful; he had another flourishing enterprise at which to succeed—General Grant’s career. He saw his place in it as secure. He wrote his fiancée, after a reception at the “I” Street house, that “Mrs. Grant talks now as if nothing would prevent her from going to Galena.”¹²

Julia had long been much taken with the attentive younger bachelors of Grant’s staff—Comstock, the ill-fated Bowers, Porter, and Babcock, and the bridegroom knew he had a valuable ally in the general’s lady. Grant too was fond of Babcock. The general had already asserted publicly that the trip would be purely private, with no political overtones. This was not, however, self-evident, and Elihu Washburne was delighted that Babcock’s wedding was to take place shortly before the election, when Grant’s appearance in Galena would be politically useful. Meanwhile, Grant was finding time for quieter political chores; he called on Secretary of the Interior Orville H. Browning about a patent that was of concern to a manufacturer in Washburne’s (and his own) congressional district. Grant was being so helpful and cordial that the congressman was vastly disappointed when he wrote on October 23, “I will not be able to go to Galena for the wedding. I cannot fully explain to you the reason but it will not do for me to leave Washington before the elections.”¹³

Baltimore, not Galena, was getting Grant’s attention. The approaching election was the first general canvass since the war’s end, and there was considerable expectation of violence. The New Orleans “riot” had been a response to the freedmen’s entrance into politics, and the question of their political rights was implicitly present in many of the contests for congressional office in November 1866. The reach of the rank and file of former slaves was greater in the United States than it had been in any other post-emancipation society in history. In the Union state of Maryland (which until 1864 had been a slave-holding state as well) the prospect that black people might make huge gains as a result of the election was causing feelings to run high. And in view of the events in New Orleans, it seemed likely that Grant would have to use the army to maintain order in Baltimore on election day.

Earlier, a Radical Republican had been chosen mayor of Baltimore, in an election in which two police commissioners, Nicolas L. Wood and Samuel Hindes, had the responsibility for voter registration. They were accused of not permitting conservative voters—some of whom had been Confederate sympathizers—to vote. Governor Thomas Swann, a Know-Nothing before the war and now a supporter of Andrew Johnson, was threatening to remove the two for misconduct, right before the election, and to appoint two new police commissioners, James Young and William T. Valiant, to ensure that voters of Conservative leanings could vote.¹⁴

All this was played out to the tune of impending violence. People of all persuasions had visions of another New Orleans. General Sheridan had asserted firmly that if he had been in New Orleans he and his Union soldiers could have prevented the attack on those demonstrating for the black vote. In Baltimore the particulars and of course the cast of characters were different, but the situation itself was potentially not very different. Federal troops could stop violence, but they could also intimidate certain voters, depending on which politician’s drum they marched to. General E. R. S. Canby predicted a repetition in Maryland of the Louisiana killings and in mid-October insisted that Grant meet with him and Governor Swann. After this conference, Grant concluded that there was no likelihood of violence—unless the governor replaced the police commissioners.¹⁵

But this Swann was determined to do. What was more, he wanted a promise of support by federal troops if his action should produce a violent reaction. He had in mind a comprehensive program for controlling former slaves. (And indeed, once the Conservatives were in full power, they implemented Maryland’s notorious apprenticeship program, which substituted for slavery a new system of involuntary servitude. In 1867, Judge Hugh L. Bond, in a decision of great importance in American race relations, found the apprenticeship system unconstitutional under the Thirteenth Amendment.) The Radicals, for their part, were determined to build on their mayoral victory in Baltimore and, in the November 6 election, to win a majority in the state legislature and prevent the passage of anti-Negro legislation.¹⁶

In the draft of a long letter to President Johnson (which he did not send), Grant showed that he had studied the Baltimore situation with great care and that he was exceedingly reluctant to take troops into Maryland. On October 24 his thinking, as expressed in the draft, was as follows: “The conviction is forced in my mind that no reason now exists for giving or promising the Military aid of the Government to support the laws of Maryland. The tendency of giving such aid or promise would be to produce the very result intended to be averted. So far there seems to be merely a very bitter contest for political ascendancy…. Military interference would be interpreted as giving aid to one of the factions no matter how pure the intentions….” Grant was resolute: “I hope never to see arise in this Country whilst I occupy the position of General-in-Chief of the Army [a situation in which I] have to send troops into a state in full relations with the General Government….” He was making a distinction between Maryland and the states of the Confederacy. Anticipating the worst, he concluded, “If insurrection does come[,] the law provides the method of calling out forces to suppress it.”¹⁷

Instead of sending troops Grant took a different course. He risked his immense personal power and sought to turn his own posture of political neutrality to the country’s advantage. On Thursday, November 1, 1866, five days before the election, Grant and Comstock took a morning train to Baltimore and, at the Eutaw House, on the corner of Eutaw and Baltimore streets, met separately with the Radical police commissioners, whom Swann had removed and with a group of Conservatives. His message was that the registration judges of the rival parties should find a way for their poll watchers to validate voters that would not provoke violence. In a crowded day Grant spoke to the Baltimoreans as a private citizen, but his power to summon the army was implicit in all he said.¹⁸

He returned to Washington that evening. The next morning, Friday, when the new Conservative commissioners, Young and Valiant, arrived at police headquarters to take charge, they were denied access to the building by Radical police officers. The crowds in the street thickened and were in a dangerous mood by Saturday. In federal district court, Judge Bond issued a writ for the arrest of Swann’s two commissioners, and they were put in jail, in the charge of a Radical warden. As arguments in the streets grew more heated, General Canby was authorized to bring in seven hundred federal troops from New York City. Governor Swann, with the memory of the genteel opening of the Peabody Institute a week before all but gone, hurriedly entrained for Washington on Saturday evening. In the capital he had a long conference with President Johnson, Secretary of War Stanton, Attorney General Henry Stanbery, and General Grant. The upshot of this meeting was that when the governor left Washington on Sunday evening he took with him to Baltimore a reluctant Ulysses S. Grant. Once again established at the Eutaw House, the “private citizen” met first with a delegation of Radicals including Judge Bond, Mayor John Lee Chapman, and others. Grant’s proposal on Sunday night was, once again, that the election judges for the rival parties in the various precincts agree to disagree and resolve on a case-by-case basis the claims of the would-be voters. The ballots of rejected voters would be kept in separate boxes, for possible later tallying.¹⁹

During the long Sunday the compromise seemed to be sticking, but by 7:00 P.M. it had collapsed. The next morning Grant tried again with the Conservatives, this time at Governor Swann’s house. Once more his message was that he was the mediator; once more the army loomed as a threat. Whom it threatened was not entirely clear, and Grant, no doubt, liked this ambiguity. At 3:00 P.M. on Monday, still determined not to be forced to take sides, Grant left for Washington, “under the delusion,” said the Baltimore Sun sourly, “that he had been chiefly instrumental in settling the Baltimore political difficulties.” But the next day, election day, the spirit if not the details of Grant’s compromise was honored. Radical registration judges were in charge, but Conservatives in the city were permitted to vote. And vote they did, electing by a narrow margin the Swann-Johnson candidates for both the state legislature and Congress, with disastrous consequences for black Marylanders. There was no violence beyond the scuffles standard on any election day. The bars were closed.²⁰

Governor Swann, responding to a serenade from his triumphant admirers, said that it was with “pain” that he read of his own earlier remarks disparaging Grant and Canby. He proclaimed that he had “never made use of language attributed” to him, and regarded the “distinguished gentlemen” as “honorable peacemakers.” Things had worked out fine for him—and for Grant. Emerging from even so short an immersion in Maryland politics unbesmirched was no small feat. But the general had little chance to celebrate.²¹

Back in Washington, despite his contribution to the Johnsonian cause, Grant still had to worry about whether Sherman would become his boss. The Baltimore newspapers, and others across the country, were again full of reports that the long conversations carried on by Sherman and Johnson would result in the general’s appointment as secretary of war. After the election, which despite the success in Maryland had been a defeat for Johnson, the president and Secretary of State Seward proposed that Grant accompany Lewis Davis Campbell, the American minister to Mexico, on a mission to that country to negotiate with the liberal government of Benito Pablo Juárez. Johnson was shrewd in picking a Mexican assignment as a way to get Grant out of town. Grant, “zealous on that subject,” was an admirer of Juárez, who had fought successfully against the foreign government imposed on his country—a country Grant had learned to love twenty years earlier. But Grant smelled the rat. He did not dare go to Mexico and leave the field at home open for the president to replace Stanton with Sherman. And so he went to a cabinet meeting. He was frequently invited to attend by cabinet members seeking to bolster their positions with his support. This day he accompanied Secretary of State Seward, but he withheld his support when instructions were read directing him to go to Mexico. Grant startled everyone—or everyone save Stanton—by saying (as Welles recorded it) that “he did not think it expedient for him to go out of the country.” Stanton had expressed his objection to a Grant mission in almost identical language at an earlier meeting, and Welles was suspicious. “The President,” he noted, “was surprised and a little disconcerted. He could not fail to see there was an intrigue. I think something more.”²²

“Grandfather Welles,” as Grant called him privately, was always suspecting a conspiracy between Stanton and Grant. He was wrong. It was often in the interest of each to agree with the other, but it would have been in no way useful for Grant to be tied conspiratorially with the volatile secretary of war. The general was his own man, and he was not going to be exiled to Mexico. Grant was strong enough not only to refuse an order from his commander in chief, but also to amend that order. He proposed that instead of himself, the president’s representative on this important mission should be the man Johnson had recently been praising, General Sherman. Sherman was in town amidst new rumors that he would become secretary of war. Instead, he found himself aboard the Susquehanna with Minister Campbell on a futile mission to Mexico. Grant had disposed of Sherman, but his own trip past Scylla and Charybdis was not yet complete.²³

Moderate advisers of the president, such as Senator James R. Doolittle of Wisconsin, had for a long time been urging him to replace Stanton not with Sherman, who was sure to irritate the Radicals, but with Grant, thereby identifying Grant with the administration. Gideon Welles saw the appointment as the only way to prevent Grant from being taken up by the Radicals and made their candidate for president in 1868. Doolittle could not understand Johnson’s seeming indifference to the possibility that Grant might become his opponent in the next presidential contest, but Welles guessed that Johnson was watching Grant closely and was exceedingly uneasy about entrusting him with too much power. The president was wary lest Grant become so strong that such a nomination would be inevitable.²⁴

At the first meeting of the cabinet in 1867, Grant was present for a discussion of Reconstruction in the District of Columbia. The experience of having to consider the position of freedmen in the nation’s capital was critical in the education of white Northerners to the Southern white-supremacy position. Supporting civil rights far off in the conquered South was all well and good; to do so in the town in which federal politicians lived for a good portion of every year was quite another thing. Congress had passed a bill disfranchising certain former rebels while giving the vote to black citizens of the District, and white liberals were squirming. The reaction of Secretary of State William Henry Seward beautifully illustrates their dilemma on the question of true black equality. He had voted for Negro suffrage in New York State, where black people were decidedly and safely in the minority. Welles noted, sardonically, in his diary that Seward justified himself by saying that “in the District and in the States where there was a large prepondering negro population it was different.” If the black people “were not in a majority[,] they were a large minority” in the capital. The thought of black men governing the governing city of the nation made Seward, and a great many other white men, uneasy.

Seward’s imagination rambled toward Egypt, of all places, and he speculated that one day universal suffrage would come to the world. Until it arrived universally, however, he opposed it particularly at home in Washington. He supported the president’s futile veto message. So did cabinet members from Connecticut, Ohio, and Maryland—and so did General Grant. Welles noted that Grant did not seem to mind the disfranchisement of the rebels, but “thought it very contemptible business [for members of Congress] whose States excluded the negroes, to give them suffrage in this District.”²⁵

In distant Arkansas it was a different matter. A delegation was in the city seeking advice on how Arkansas could obtain readmission to Congress, and Welles was disgusted to learn that Grant, privately, had responded by urging that the state ratify the Fourteenth Amendment (with its provisions guaranteeing the rights of citizenship of the freedmen, but not giving them the vote). This was a break from Johnson, but only on the precise point of support of the Fourteenth Amendment. Publicly, Grant was still on the president’s side, as witness his view, published in the New York Times, that Northerners had better eschew hypocrisy and grant the vote to Negroes in their own states before bestowing it on the black citizens of the capital. The interview in which he insisted on this national standard was given after the president’s veto of the District suffrage bill had been overridden. Black citizens of Washington were not as adamant about consistency. They had filled the congressional galleries when the bill was debated and, decorum abandoned, cheered when it cleared the veto. To them this legislation was a step toward equality, and Grant’s disapproval of it was a deep disappointment. The general’s words, however, were more than acceptable at the White House, and so were he and Julia. They continued to be entertained there, along with the cabinet, as members of the official family.²⁶

Early in 1867, the army, the commanding general of the army, and the secretary of war were given an extraordinary role in the governing of the country. Congress passed legislation requiring that in five districts transition governments headed by military governors be established. The intent was not to send in an army of occupation, but to have senior army men serve as temporary governors general and junior officers act as voter-registration officials and peace-keepers for state governments under which former slaves would register to vote and participate as officeholders along with their former masters. It is in this context of social and political Reconstruction, and not that of the plot of a comic opera, that the tenure-of-office crisis, the removal of Secretary of War Stanton from office, and the subsequent impeachment of the president should be viewed. Congress, its Republican ranks enlarged by the election of 1866, set out to enact, and what was more, to enforce its own Reconstruction program, in opposition to the Conservative policies of the National Union party president. Johnson had refused to enforce the Civil Rights Act of 1866, and the governments that Johnson had recognized in the Southern states had also failed to protect their black citizens.

Republicans in Congress who were concerned with the welfare—the safety—of the freedmen in the South could see nowhere to turn but to the army as the agent of enforcement of the law. But there was nothing in the record, either during the war or after it, that argued that an army man—simply because he was an army man—could be counted on to be a judicious defender of the rights of blacks in the South. Quite the contrary, there was a great deal of evidence to suggest that Old Massa’s warnings to his slaves to beware the Yankee soldiers had been very much in order. As usual, the question of precisely who did the job was critical, and here the choice was Grant’s. He commanded the army; he would decide which generals were to be ordered south as governors.

Grant had to be the one in charge of this program. General Howard, the head of the Freedmen’s Bureau, had the confidence of many civilian philanthropists, but he had not proved strong enough to stand up to the president or to assert his authority over his fellow army commanders, many of whom sneered in embarrassment at his Christian virtue. No one of smaller stature than Grant could get the generals to carry out the Radical Republican plan for a Reconstruction that would guarantee the lives and rights of blacks in the South. There was much political pressure to accomplish this goal; “I’m afraid to do anything against the Negro,” Sherman had said as early as December 1865, while he nevertheless mustered black regiments out of the army. All through 1867 Grant was courted by the leaders of Congress, who had given him the immense responsibility of assigning the generals. His friend Sherman gave evidence that which ones were chosen did indeed matter when he wrote General Ord, “You and Pope and Reynolds all lean against the Nigger”; if this statement was correct, the blacks would doubtless be pleased to have someone else sent to protect them.²⁷

It was essential to Johnson that Grant’s generals not do Congress’s bidding, and he worked assiduously to hold Grant in his camp. Grant, despite his support of the Fourteenth Amendment, did not seem lost to Johnson. (Indeed, not a few observers have noted that the Johnsonian Southerners might have been very smart to take the general’s advice. If they had accepted the Fourteenth Amendment and come back into Congress, they would have been in a splendid position to persuade their white brethren in the North to leave the establishment of racial mores in the South to those who “knew best.” They would thereby have achieved the Compromise of 1877 and the emasculation of the amendment ahead of historical schedule.) Even those of Johnson’s supporters who insisted on opposition to the Fourteenth Amendment as a test of loyalty to the president were willing to close their eyes in Grant’s case because he was too popular to lose as an ally.

The basic issue became clear in the winter of 1867. General Howard, at the Freedmen’s Bureau, had thousands of carefully documented reports from his agents of murders and mutilations of freedmen all across the South. He turned to his commander, General Grant, to try to get someone to pay attention to them. Some Republicans in Congress were also concerned about such atrocities, and in January, Congress formally requested that the president explain why he had not prevented them by enforcing the Civil Rights Act. The War Department response to the request was a long report by Howard, giving details of killings that the government had not been able to prevent. In a cabinet meeting on February 15, at which Grant was not present, Secretary of War Stanton brought in Howard’s account, accompanied by a covering letter from Grant. Gideon Welles, who chose to regard the report as nothing but an “omnium gatherum of newspaper gossip” and “rumors” that Howard’s agents had “picked up” here and there in the South, sought, along with the president, to find a way to suppress the document.²⁸

It soon became apparent that an effort to hide Howard’s report by referring it to the attorney general for further investigation would prove futile, because members of Congress already had copies of both the report and Grant’s letter. Welles, who at this point still loathed Stanton more than he did Grant, thought that the secretary of war had deliberately leaked the report, not only to discredit the president but to “help generate difference between the President and the General.” Welles, unwilling to believe that anyone truly cared about the freedmen, reasoned that Stanton, like almost everyone else in Washington, was jealous of Grant. Suspicious though the secretary of the navy was of the general, he knew how important it was that Johnson not lose Grant’s allegiance. The president himself seemed unwilling to find out exactly where Grant did stand in the virulent division over Negro policy. He was on the verge of summoning the general from his army headquarters office to come to the cabinet meeting to explain his letter accompanying—or was it, perhaps, endorsing?—Howard’s report, when he stopped himself. He told Welles that “but for the rain,” he had been of a mind to send “for Grant to know how far he really was involved in the matter.” Johnson did not quite want to know what Grant was up to.²⁹

Grant was magnificently cagey at not tipping his hand. And as long as he did not do so, cards of speculation were sure to fall according to the dealer’s political desires. By the summer of 1867, however, it was becoming harder for Grant to avoid declaring himself. In New Orleans, the outspoken Philip H. Sheridan was in charge of one of the five military districts, and he used his soldiers vigorously as voter-registration officials, enrolling black voters. He publicly declared that he would continue to do so regardless of the president’s views. In June, Sheridan sent Johnson an insulting letter, and the president, enraged, asked his cabinet to discuss it. This time Grant was present. He blunted a call for Sheridan’s immediate removal, supporting a rebuke instead. Sheridan, however, had gotten under Johnson’s skin, and the president was determined to get rid of him. Acrimony was in the air; it was an ideal time for the man caught between the two to take a summer vacation.³⁰

Winslow Homer, Long Branch, New Jersey, 1869. CHARLES HENRY HAYDEN FUND 41.631. COURTESY, MUSEUM OF ARTS, BOSTON

Long Branch, New Jersey, in the 1860’s was a lovely seaside village of small houses—true cottages—with wonderful filigreed porches from which one could look out from high bluffs over the Atlantic. The beaches and the surf were fine, and it was here that the Grants spent their summers from 1867 onward. They took the house next door to that of the publisher George W. Childs and immediately liked it. The general “drove out twice a day,” the first time just after breakfast; he often went a good distance, returning at mid-morning to read the newspaper and his mail quietly on the porch overlooking the ocean. He was there, at the shore, away from the Johnson and Sheridan quarrel, when a crisis broke out in Tennessee that required fast stepping if he was not to be required to leave Long Branch. Johnson wanted federal troops sent in to Tennessee on the ground that the Radical Republican governor, William G. Brownlow, was planning to use the state militia to intimidate voters. Grant sent the president a telegram saying that General Thomas had been ordered to the state and that he did not think his own presence there necessary. Johnson was pleased by the dispatch of troops, but noted that Grant was more reluctant to expose himself than he had been in Maryland the previous fall. Grant now appeared unwilling to risk another involvement as a “neutral” in a situation that might result in political defeat for the Radicals.³¹

The president was still not sure of the loyalty of his commanding general, and he still needed it badly. In July he called Grant to Washington for a long talk. Disgusted with both Sheridan and Stanton, Johnson was moving at last to follow Senator Doolittle’s advice and tie Grant to himself by making him secretary of war. When the subject was broached he found Grant hesitating. The response proved to be more than hesitation; after the conversation, on August 1, 1867, Grant wrote Johnson a letter which in places shows signs of the guiding hand of a lawyer. It informed the president tactfully but firmly that such an appointment would break the law. The Tenure of Office Act had been passed March 2, 1867, by the Republican Congress, in an effort to hold the gate against defiance of their legislation by the president. Invoking its constitutional right to consent to cabinet nominations, the Senate claimed the right to deny its consent to the removal of men sitting in the cabinet. And there was nothing abstract in these constitutional contortions; the intention was to keep in office Lincoln’s wartime secretary of war, Edwin M. Stanton. He and he alone among those in the top reaches of the executive branch seemed likely to do the bidding of Congress. Andrew Johnson regarded the bill as unconstitutional and wanted the Supreme Court to say so, but that court cannot rule on a hypothetical issue. Therefore, the president moved to replace Stanton without congressional consent, appointing in his stead someone he thought the country would not take exception to, General Ulysses S. Grant. If the appointment was challenged, the Court could speak.³²

Grant’s letter declining the appointment stressed not only that the Tenure of Office Act was being repudiated but that the repudiation was being done, unwisely, while Congress was not in session. And then, in a passage that was to make Johnson even more uncomfortable, Grant took the occasion to defend Sheridan, the one general in the South who was actively upholding the Radical Republican plan of Reconstruction: “It is unmistakably the wish of the country that Gen. Sheridan not be removed.” Grant did not argue with Johnson in support of Sheridan’s pro-freedman policies—the words would have reached deaf ears—but he did remind the president that Sheridan was immensely popular and that his removal would be in defiance of a law passed by Congress. To Johnson, as to Welles, in whom the president confided, the movement of Grant toward the Radicals was clear. “Grant is going over,” said Welles. “Yes,” responded Johnson.³³

But the president was not going to allow Grant to get over the fence to the Republicans without making a major effort to keep him corralled. To this end he developed a new plan: he would dismiss Stanton and make Grant secretary of war ad interim. A temporary appointment would test the situation. If the president’s constitutional position, in combination with Grant’s popularity, had the strength to gain public approval of this change, Congress would return in December with Stanton’s replacement already accomplished. The time to act, Johnson concluded, in defiance of Grant’s advice, was in August, with Congress out of session.

If Grant had truly wanted to remain the simple soldier who simply carried out statesmen’s orders, there would have been no insurmountable barrier to his refusing the appointment on the ground that it was inappropriate for him to move to a civilian desk in the War Department. Given Grant’s great popularity, a statement to that effect, made public, would have forced Johnson to accept his decision and either name another secretary or keep Stanton. But Grant did not say no. He took this particular administrative post because he was already on an inescapable track toward another. Everyone in Washington talked of the general as the next president. For example, in May 1866, in the House debate on the bill, easily passed, raising Grant’s rank to general and giving him a corresponding increase in salary, Thaddeus Stevens had declared—to accompanying laughter and applause—that he was willing to promote “this Marlborough, this Wellington,” to “a higher office whenever the happy moment shall arrive.” The elevation to the White House had begun a good while ago.³⁴

Even those who thought the general a dullard were convinced that he too had his eye on the presidency. Shrewd politics might have argued that his surest way of getting that job was to refuse the office of secretary of war, but there was a risk in refusing. If Johnson appointed a subordinate of Grant’s, like Sherman, to the cabinet post, and the new man stole the limelight, he might also steal the nomination. Or the new man might do so good a job as part of the president’s team that Johnson himself would look strong enough to win the nomination. If Grant was not to get lost in the shadow of these possibilities, he had to take the job. For the first time since his becoming colonel and his rise out of failure, he had been on the verge of saying no to a new position, and old terrors were at work. Grant did not dare turn down any job, lest he end with none.

He could no longer accept any superior except—temporarily—President Johnson. And he could not step aside into any kind of retirement, even temporarily. He was forty-five. His son Fred’s education, at West Point, was costing him no money, but the three younger children needed educating, and he and Julia had no wish to return to second-rate clothes or second-rate living. He could do nothing except stay at the top, and if that icy summit was glazed with an assignment in the cabinet, he must dutifully accept. Grant wrote Stanton an awkward letter, praising the man’s long service both to the nation and to him, but indicating that “I have no alternative but to submit, under protest, to the superior force of the President.” One observer, John Lothrop Motley, who was no dunce himself, was immensely impressed with how well Grant had succeeded in playing the part of the “dumb, inarticulate man of genius,” though he thought the time when the mask should be discarded was “fast approaching.”³⁵

That genius was about to be sorely tried. On August 5, 1867, Grant wrote Julia, who was in Pennsylvania, that because of “a startling piece of news, which will probably be published in the morning papers,” he could not join her but would have to stay in Washington. He was about to become a cabinet member. His acceptance of the post was not a clear-cut leap into a civilian role; he was still a general, his appointment was an interim one, and his portfolio involved military matters. And yet, Ulysses Grant was moving into the administration, into the executive branch of the government. Formally, he was now in politics.³⁶

Ironically, this political debut was in defiance of the will of a Republican Congress, as expressed in the Tenure of Office Act. Johnson had appointed Grant secretary of war ad interim in order to remove Stanton, the man the Radicals sought to protect. Under the congressional plan for the South, the secretary of war was required by law to administer the military Reconstruction program. During the fall of 1867, Grant increasingly undertook to support the congressional concept that he should interpret and obey the laws of Congress directly, rather than accept instructions from the president. But still he did not break with Johnson.

Ulysses and Julia Grant were determined not to be forgotten, but they worried lest in retaining their grasp on prominence they loosen their almost desperate hold on financial security. In 1867, John W. Forney, the editor of the Washington Daily Chronicle, set out to be a president-maker once again. He had the wit to laugh at his own credentials, having helped secure nomination for James Buchanan and Andrew Johnson. Undaunted, he now sought to redeem himself by gaining the White House for Grant. At the outset, he met with a strange rebuke from Grant’s man Rawlins. “General Grant does not want to be President,” reported Rawlins, going on to state, however, that Grant “thinks the Republican party may need him, and he believes, as their candidate, he can be elected and re-elected.” Rawlins then went on to ask, “What is to become of him after his second Presidential term—what, indeed, during his administration?” The problem was money. As general, Grant was sure of receiving “from seventeen to twenty thousand dollars a year”—for life. Rawlins was frank: “To go into the Presidency at twenty-five thousand dollars a year for eight years is, perhaps, to gain more fame; but what is to become of him at the end of his Presidency?” He would have to resign from the army, and there was no pension for ex-presidents. Calculations had been closely made: “Eight years from the 4th March 1869,” Grant would not yet be fifty-six. Still relatively young, he would be without a job or an income.³⁷

The general, his lady, and his other closest advisers had canvassed the full range of contingencies. “It looks…as if Genl Grant was to be the rising man,” observed David Davis dourly, “the people love military glory….” Most Americans were more enthusiastic. Not only could Grant be elected, he could be re-elected. And he did not have to look eager for the position, the Republican party needed to have him assume it. Julia was determined that he not be had at too cheap a price, and in his conversation with Forney, Rawlins permitted himself a comparison of the United States to England, which had seen fit to “enrich and ennoble” its Wellingtons and Nelsons. Rawlins suggested that if Forney was powerful enough to create presidents, then surely he could bring Congress to a prior act of financial magnanimity toward the hero of Vicksburg—the substitution of a permanent annual allowance for Grant’s army pension, which would lapse if he resigned to run for president. Forney got the hint, but was unable to oblige; Congress refused to authorize such a stipend. “In our country the man who fights for and saves the Republic would be a beggar if he depended upon political office,” Forney declared. “Mark it,” he continued, “if Grant takes anything from the rich, whose vast fortunes he has saved, after he is President, he will be accused as the willing recipient of gifts.”³⁸

Julia would have to settle for the White House alone, without the stipend, but to the end of her days she resented the ingratitude of a people unwilling to provide for her Wellington. This is apparent from her reaction on visiting in 1877 the splendidly rich Apsley House of the Iron Duke’s son in London. Aware that having left the White House, she and Ulysses had only that raw red-brick box of a house in Galena, she mused, “How would it have been if General Grant had been an Englishman—I wonder, I wonder?” Back in 1867 the chief object was to get at least a four-year lease on 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. Forney wrote a five-column piece for his and other papers identifying Grant with a willingness to carry Republican ideals into the White House and, “after it was in type,” took it to Grant’s office. Rawlins was delighted and wanted it in the next day’s editions, but Forney was too savvy to print it without Grant’s blessing. He told Rawlins that if it appeared “without authority,” Grant’s opponents would get a reporter to ask the general if he had sanctioned the article. Grant, honestly, would say he had never seen it, thus reinforcing the idea that Forney had simply made up the story. Determined to prevent this from happening, Forney enlisted Rawlins in the task of getting Grant to read the article, warning that if he got off the hook, “all your schemes to make him President will gang a gley.”³⁹

Rawlins took the article into Grant’s office and was gone a long time. When he finally emerged, he said, “General Grant is quite pleased with your statement of his political record, and surprised that he proves to be so good a Republican.” Grant had carefully not admitted that he wanted to be president, but Forney was satisfied: “Upon this hint I printed.” As predicted, those who hoped Grant would not get the nomination tried, in letters to the newspapers, to suggest that Grant was furious about the piece and also tried to get up a story that Grant and Washburne had broken over the latter’s efforts in behalf of Grant’s candidacy. Forney categorically denied that Grant was displeased or had broken with Washburne. Grant, save in the matter of money, was exactly where he wanted to be. He could insist in conversation with President Johnson or Secretary Stanton or General Sherman that all the talk about the presidency was the work of columnists and politicians with Potomac fever. But he did not have to deny Forney’s skillfully constructed statement that he was leaning the Republican way. From St. Louis, in October 1867, Sherman wrote, “I am just back from Washington, where I left the General and his folks well, & calm as a ‘Summer Morn.’”⁴⁰

When Congress reconvened in December 1867, Johnson, complying with the Tenure of Office Act, reported the suspension of Stanton and asked Congress to consent to his removal. The action was considered by the Senate Committee on Military Affairs, which in January 1868, in a report brought to the floor of the Senate by Senator Jacob M. Howard of Michigan, called for the reinstatement of Stanton. The Senate as a whole began debate on the subject on Friday, January 10; on Saturday, with a pledge (not kept) that debate would be continued on Monday, Johnson’s supporters conducted a filibuster. This gave Johnson and Grant—and Stanton—a little time to maneuver. And maneuver they did, about as maladroitly as can be imagined.

At issue—quite apart from minor matters like construction of the Constitution and the protection of the lives and rights of four million black Americans—was the question of who would become president in 1868. That damnable lodestar the presidency lured three of the principals in the clumsy drama and perhaps the fourth as well. Andrew Johnson had the job; Edwin M. Stanton wanted it; so did Ulysses S. Grant; and so—just possibly—did William Tecumseh Sherman. Johnson hoped that the Supreme Court would come to his rescue. (With still another hopeful, Salmon P. Chase, sitting as chief justice, one had to worry about motives in that chamber too.) The president’s plan was that Grant would retain the office of secretary of war, Stanton would sue to regain it, and the Supreme Court would declare the Tenure of Office Act unconstitutional. Grant promised, so Johnson contended, that he would hold the office until the court acted. Stanton would go, and Johnson would look victorious—and electable. In the state and local elections in 1867 there had been an upsurge of Conservative votes across the North, and Johnson hoped the Stanton crisis could be used to strengthen that trend.

Stanton and the Republicans in Congress were equally committed to stopping it. Grant continued to try to bluff his way through the pass between Johnson and the Republicans in Congress, but his friend Sherman was less sanguine. When he came east in January to stand ready to succeed Grant as commanding general of the army, he was given a temporary office next door to Grant’s, and the two men talked every day. On Saturday, January 11, 1868, with a decision by the Senate imminent, Sherman pressed his chief to face the problems before him and decide on a plan of action. “I think I asked you,” stated Sherman in a memorandum of that miserable weekend written later in the month at Grant’s request, “if you had not promised to give notice to the President and also what course you intended to pursue.” “Promised” was the key word; Sherman would scarcely have referred to such a commitment, which had become so sore a point between Grant and Johnson, if he had not indeed heard of such a pledge from the general. Clearly, it was at the center of the conversation the two generals had that Saturday morning. Sherman pointed out that President Johnson’s sense of the obligation was that Grant should hold onto the office of secretary of war in defiance of any act of Congress, or, at the very least, should resign so that Johnson could appoint another man, ad interim, who would stand up to Congress. Grant recalled that when he had replaced Stanton the previous July, he had given Stanton two days notice; now, he contended, Stanton would surely do the same. With such notice, Grant could take the problem to the president—and avoid involvement in the direct confrontation with Stanton and Congress.⁴¹

Sherman was not reassured by this logic. Things might not work out as Grant thought—or, rather, hoped (there seemed to have been little thought involved). Discussing the provisions of the Tenure of Office Act, which Grant had belatedly read, Sherman, with his sense of blunt realism, did not let his friend miss the fact that he would be subject to a ten-thousand-dollar fine and even a jail sentence if he broke the law. To be sure, such punishments would scarcely be imposed on the man of Appomattox, but the humiliation of their prospect was not to be ignored. Sherman urged Grant to get to the White House, fast, and tell the president he wanted no further part of the confrontation between Johnson and Congress.

Before Grant could do so, Sherman, characteristically, took his own advice. Accompanying his friend General John Pope, who was in town and obliged to pay his respects to the president, Sherman went to the White House; when Pope left after a friendly few minutes with Johnson, Sherman remained to talk. While he was warming to his subject, Grant walked in. Sherman, glad that Grant had finally decided to talk the matter over with Johnson, and embarrassed (if Sherman can ever be said to have been embarrassed) at having been caught speaking his superior’s piece for him, left the two alone. The general and the president then had a long and badly remembered conversation. Johnson talked in constitutional terms of the defense of he power of the executive branch of the government and of the need to defy the Tenure of Office Act, should Congress reinstate Stanton, in order to force the Supreme Court to decide the legislation’s constitutionality. Grant realized that he was in the unenviable position of being the sacrificial lamb. Neither popularity nor protestations that he was merely a simple soldier obeying a command would save him in court. When such a decision is handed down, there is no middle ground; one either wins or loses. Grant was no lawyer, but neither was he a fool, and he knew his chances of being the loser were good indeed. Johnson apparently spoke of Grant’s great opportunity to serve the interest of the Union; Grant reminded the president that the reward for this lofty service would be a stiff and humiliating fine. Johnson (rather grandly) said that he himself would pay any such fine; it would be a small price for the upholding of constitutional principle. Grant had no trouble sizing up the usefulness of the offer. He wanted out.

What was said in the remainder of the conversation is uncertain. It is clear only that Grant proposed that someone else be given the assignment of defying Congress should Stanton come to take his office back. But either he did not move swiftly or else Johnson parried skillfully, for Grant did not succeed in getting Johnson to replace him right then and there, that Saturday. Instead, the conversation ended inconclusively. Johnson claimed ever afterward that Grant had reaffirmed his obligation to hold the office against Stanton until a court test or until Johnson could replace him with another man—who presumably would do the defying. Grant never categorically denied having accepted such an assignment; he simply suggested that he had made no promise to stay in office and that he expected Johnson to find a replacement before Monday, when Congress would presumably vote on reinstating Stanton. Rumors from the Senate on Saturday made it seem very likely that this reinstatement would be voted, and yet the two men parted with only what Johnson remembered as a promise by Grant that they would talk again on Monday, before any action was taken at the War Department.

While they talked, the Senate, over John Sherman’s objections—he wanted his brother to have more time in which to stave off the crisis—went into extraordinary executive session and privately discussed, for better than three hours, the reinstatement of Stanton. As usual in Washington, shop talk did not end when the gentlemen left Capitol Hill. That evening, at a large party, Julia Grant was particularly gracious to Congressman Robert C. Schenck of Ohio, in order to find out what the Radicals were up to. Schenck was happy to pay court to the general’s lady and found it not painful; he reported later to his daughter that in a becoming dress Julia “looked a little better” than usual. The Potomac drama was an exciting one, and Schenck, despite a barren temperance dinner earlier in the evening at the Colfaxes’, was in good humor. Julia came away alerted, by his eager gossip, to the likelihood of Stanton’s reinstatement.⁴²

The cuisine was better at the home of Senator Reverdy Johnson. There, over good wine, the Sherman brothers proposed a compromise that appealed to the Conservative Democrat from Maryland. The idea was to appoint Jacob Dolson Cox secretary of war on Monday (the very day his term as governor of Ohio would end). Reverdy Johnson, who was close both to his namesake and to Secretary of State Seward, agreed to go to the White House the next day to urge the president to accept this solution. Then, after a typical Washington, D.C., Saturday evening, the official city went to bed.⁴³

On the Sabbath two old warriors sat down again to take counsel together. Ulysses S. Grant and William Tecumseh Sherman would need all they had learned besting General Halleck—and more—to get Grant out the jam he was now in. The best hope, as Sherman saw it, was to make Cox secretary of war. The idea appealed to that side of Grant which was comfortable with any position that pleased everyone as long as it did not please anyone too much. The Cox plan could be counted on to satisfy everyone—except perhaps the nation’s black citizens and Edwin Stanton. Cox was popular, but not too popular; he had been a good general during the war, but not too good; and since then had been the governor of his state—and had opposed Negro suffrage. In short Cox was a moderate and was not imposing enough to be a threat to Grant. It was hoped that Johnson would be happy to nominate him and that the Senate would be unable to bring itself to deny him confirmation. Once Cox had been confirmed—so the plan ran—the Senate would lose enthusiasm for reinstating Stanton and instead would be content with monitoring Cox, under the Tenure of Office Act. Grant gave his assent, and Sherman passed the word along to Reverdy Johnson, who was to persuade the president to appoint Cox. But at the end of this critical Sunday, Sherman was dismayed to find no message from the Maryland senator. Apparently, Reverdy Johnson had not seen the president, or if he had, had failed to convince him.⁴⁴

On Monday, January 13, Sherman himself called on President Johnson to urge him to name Cox. Johnson, evasive (or shrewd), left Sherman with the impression that he would make the appointment. The impression was deceptive. In fact, the president seems to have determined on a very different course. He would hold Grant to his promise—and thus force Grant and Stanton into a disagreeable confrontation. Grant, for his part, was getting ready to abandon Johnson—or so Julia Grant’s account of that Monday suggests. “And now,” she told her readers in her Memoirs, “I must not fail to tell of how General Grant happened to be at the President’s levee on the evening of January 13, 1868, the night the Senate reinstated Stanton as secretary of war, every circumstance of which I so perfectly remember.” She had out-of-town guests who were eager to attend the party, but her husband seemed uncomfortable at the thought of going to the White House that evening: “I would like to gratify you,” he said, “but, really, under the circumstances, I do not think I ought to go.” (If the “circumstances” had included his loyally standing by Johnson, surely he would have been delighted to go.)⁴⁵

As usual, Julia had her way; she and her friends were all ready for the party, and rather than disappoint them, Ulysses assented. “Just as we were leaving the house,” she recalled, “a messenger arrived from the Capitol with a note, which the General read by the gaslight in front of the house.” It was the notice that the Senate, after six hours in executive session (but no more public debate), had voted that Stanton would be reinstated. Again Grant hesitated about going to the reception—Julia recalled his being afraid that most senators would view his presence at the White House as an “expression of sympathy” for Johnson. Again Julia insisted, and Ulysses went to the White House. On the way home he told her “he really felt embarrassed when the president grasped his hand so cordially.” Grant already knew that he was going to jettison the president.⁴⁶

On Tuesday morning, Grant walked into the office reserved for the secretary of war, bolted a side door from the inside, left by the main door, which he locked, gave the key to a War Department functionary, and went to his old commanding general’s headquarters. He had yielded the office; he had not returned it to the president. An hour later Stanton arrived—the timing was neat enough to suggest that the two men were not unaware of each other’s exits and entrances. Triumphantly Stanton called for the key, walked into the office of the secretary of war, wrote a draft for his own back pay, and dictated a memorandum to Grant and the War Department stating that he, Stanton, was once again in command. Grant, meanwhile, sent Cyrus B. Comstock to the White House with a formal letter to the president, of which he was not the sole author. In it Grant alluded to the “Hon. E. M. Stanton” and used other uncharacteristic and lawyerly locutions to state that the action of Congress made it impossible for him to continue as secretary of war ad interim.⁴⁷

Tuesday, as it happened, was the day the cabinet met, but the White House was not totally trusting to habit. Comstock was sent back to Grant with a reminder that the secretary of war ad interim was expected at the meeting. Stanton, of course, was not summoned, and he did not budge from his departmental chair. Grant set out to attend, but the short walk to the White House cannot have been a pleasant one. He chose to go to the meeting not as the secretary of war ad interim, but as the invited commanding general of the army. When he entered the cabinet room, the president politely but pointedly called for a report from the secretary of war and looked at Grant. Grant replied that he no longer held that office, and Andrew Johnson, after two and a half years of wooing Ulysses Grant, tore into him not with a wild tirade, but much more tellingly, with an icy dressing-down. Cowed and embarrassed, Grant took it. There is no proof that he had lied to the president—we do not know what had passed between them on Saturday—but Johnson said he had done so. The fact that Grant took this nasty medicine suggests that the accusation was true, but what may have discouraged Johnson more than the lie was the realization that all those months of attempting to placate the general were for naught. Grant had “gone over.”⁴⁸

And Grant’s greater deception, a lie more troubling to Johnson than the matter of the promise to hold onto Stanton’s office, was the subtle impression of disinterested duty that he had fostered. Johnson was enraged by Grant’s presentation of himself as a simple soldier from Galena who would carry out any orders required of him by the constitutional head of the Republic. Grant wanted to be the president himself, and anticipated that if he defied Congress on the removal of Stanton he might not get to that goal. Openly now, Grant was a creature of private ambition rather than of public service. No longer was he the servant of the public weal, one who stood above selfishness and could always be counted on to do his duty. Grant “felt the few words put to him, and the cold and surprised disdain of the President in all their force,” Gideon Welles observed. “Almost abject,” he asked to be excused and left the cabinet meeting. The commanding general of the United States had been caught cheating. In punishment, the president treated him as a bad little boy.⁴⁹

The bleak day was not over for Grant. He left the White House and went back to his army headquarters, perhaps expecting some appreciation from the person to whom he had yielded the secretary’s office. None was forthcoming. Instead, Stanton pretentiously summoned Grant. The general—more vulnerable to Stanton’s imperiousness than usual, with his pride distorted by guilt—obeyed. Sherman, his own vast curiosity past restraint, looked in on the two and saw Grant standing, and Stanton seated, in the once disputed office.⁵⁰

For the moment Stanton appeared to be the winner. Johnson had been thwarted, Grant demoted, and Stanton—with the formal endorsement of the Senate—was the man of the hour. It is possible, even probable, that Stanton had known the night before that Grant would not prevent his return to the office. But there had not been collusion in the conspiratorial sense, as Gideon Welles claimed. Even if Stanton did know Grant’s intentions, it is not likely that he had gained that knowledge at first hand. The interests of Stanton and Grant were not synonymous either before the day began or afterward, and once that dreadful Tuesday was finally over, Grant did not intend that Stanton long remain the winner at his expense.

The morning after Grant’s humiliation, January 15, the National Intelligencer let the public know Johnson’s side of the story. Deeply distressed, Grant called formally on the president to deny the newspaper’s accusation that he had lied. The general enlisted Sherman as an ally, and in a long letter to the president, Sherman stated that he had seen Grant “after Shiloh when messengers were speeding to and from his army to Washington, bearing slanders, to induce his removal[,]…in Chattanooga when the soldiers were stealing the corn of the starving mules,…and yet I never saw him more troubled than…[now] in Washington…compelled to read [of] himself as a sneak and deceiver.” The Radical press carried Sherman’s defense of Grant, and for two weeks, with much fanfare, the nation’s newspapers featured the rival stories, with little documentation to support either. On January 24 (and again on January 25) Grant asked for written instructions from the president to confirm oral ones he had received to the effect that he was not to take instructions from the secretary of war—from Stanton. Johnson wrote coldly (in the third person) on Grant’s letters that the general was indeed to take no instructions from the secretary. Upon taking Johnson’s reply to Stanton, Grant was told by Stanton that he had received no orders not to issue instructions to Grant, and therefore would continue to do so. Grant, formally informing the president of this response, did not say whether or not he would honor Stanton’s instructions.⁵¹

Stanton sent copies of all correspondence having to do with Johnson and Grant to the Republican Schuyler Colfax, who was Speaker of the House of Representatives. The fact that the file included correspondence between Johnson and Grant indicates that Stanton was acting with Grant’s acquiescence. In the House, the general’s final letter, a “masterly rejoinder,” was brought to the floor, and the “reading of Gen. Grant’s letter was several times interrupted by an involuntary applause, and the whole was listened to with most earnest attention.” Grant never denied lying; he simply stated that his veracity had been questioned and his honor besmirched. In rejoinder, Johnson had made all of his cabinet members (save an equivocal Seward) certify that Grant had conceded in their hearing that he had promised to return the office to the president before Stanton could get it back. But by then, if the public cared at all, it had come down to a choice between the president’s word and the general’s. Grant stood for victory and virtue. He received little castigation, while Johnson faced much in the impeachment trial that ensued. Stanton, after enjoying a brief flurry of admiration for his audacity, looked silly barricaded in his office; Johnson looked villainous when, in defiance of Congress, he did at last remove Stanton from office. Grant, somehow, remained unsullied in the eyes of the people. He had won the Johnson-Stanton campaign.⁵²

But in that spring of 1868, Grant at last had to accommodate himself to a new secretary of war—one who would serve for the final year of the Johnson administration. William M. Evarts, the president’s lawyer, not relying on courtroom rhetoric to win an acquittal, sought someone whose appointment as secretary of war would be acceptable to both Johnson and the Radicals and would win acquittal votes from wavering moderate Republicans. With this end in view, he invited General John M. Schofield to his room in the Willard. Schofield was a respected general in command in Virginia, where he was engaged in the successful politicking that resulted in racially conservative Reconstruction within the framework of the Radical legislation. At the hotel he was explaining that he dared not accept the appointment without General Grant’s approval—when Grant was announced. The commanding general was not aloof from matters that affected him.⁵³

Later that evening, during a walk with Grant, Schofield gingerly raised the possibility of becoming his superior’s superior. Grant did not demur, and reassured, Schofield promptly reported to Evarts. At 11:00 P.M., he called at Grant’s house to say he had agreed to have his name submitted. Then he left for Virginia. In truth, Grant wanted no superiors; annoyed with the self-important Schofield, and conscious that a new secretary of war might be just what senators anxious not to remove a president were looking for, he soon advised Schofield, in a private letter, to withdraw. Schofield replied that it was too late, as his name had already been sent to the Senate. After Johnson had been acquitted, at the end of May, the appointment of Schofield was overwhelmingly confirmed. He and Grant maintained correct but distant relations for the rest of Johnson’s term. Similarly, Grant had remained publicly distant from the drama of the impeachment trial on Capitol Hill. During the intense excitement of this crisis—when Johnson’s highest crime, for some, was his removal of Stanton—Grant stayed close to the ground. Almost everyone else was caught in the cross fire, but the general was perfectly safe.⁵⁴