XVIII

THE PRESIDENT AND HIS CABINET

I hope it will not be considered irreverent to say that Washington, Lincoln and Grant will be regarded as a political trinity.

—Hamilton Fish, approving
the embossing of a medallion
“pater, liberator, salvator”

I have said to Josiah more’n a hundred times that any man or woman ought to be President that knew enough not to talk when they hadn’t nothin’ to say.

—Josiah Allen’s wife

GRANT’S POLITICAL POSITION in the spring of 1868 was unassailable. He was hated by few voters and by no close observers powerful enough to influence the electorate. His dishonorable jettisoning of Andrew Johnson had won him the lasting disrespect of the president, but almost no one was listening to Johnson. Gideon Welles was one of the small band that remained staunchly loyal to the chief, and he too thought Grant despicable, but the old editor no longer had a newspaper with which to spread the word. His hatred for Grant found its eloquent way only into his diary.

Grant stood clear of the passionate battles over impeachment. This tactic was shrewd; when the effort to remove Johnson failed, no one directly involved in the episode was a winner. Edwin M. Stanton was impotent rather than vindicated, Benjamin F. Wade, who as president pro tempore of the Senate was in line to succeed Johnson, did not achieve his promotion, despite his own vote for it. The managers of the impeachment, most notably Benjamin F. Butler, were given enormous attention in the newspapers, but to little positive effect. The trial did not clear the air in Washington. Rather, all the participants, save perhaps Chief Justice Salmon P. Chase, were left in sour disrepute. Incumbency was not an asset. Once again purely a general, Grant stood apart from the vulgar business, and to a great many eyes, he alone appeared clean.

And all eyes should be upon him. James Harrison Wilson was writing a campaign biography that spring; he asked Fred Dent for West Point anecdotes of his roommate: “[I] want all the assistance I can get in telling the people about the man as you and I knew him.” Meanwhile, the man in question was serene. As Johnson’s trial continued, political observers like James Gordon Bennett, who still hoped that somehow Grant could be stopped from reaching the White House, conjectured that he must favor Johnson’s acquittal, on the grounds that glory and power might accrue to a victorious Wade (or Stanton) and cost Grant the nomination. Not so. Grant was untroubled by the prospective removal of Johnson. Indeed, he was in as confident a mood as he was ever to enjoy. In a letter to his friend Charles W. Ford in St. Louis, he spoke of the Gravois Creek farm, grumbled about his in-laws (“It is a matter of surprise to me that the Dents retained anything”), and mentioned that he had reluctantly shipped Butcher Boy, his favorite trotter, west. On a dark muddy night, Butcher Boy had stumbled and sprained an ankle; Grant hoped that the horse would regain strength on the farm and that one day, in Missouri, he would again drive him, as well as Legal Tender and the other horses he kept there. Turning from the animals to politics for a moment, Grant asked Ford, “What is thought about impeachment out with you? My impression is that it will give peace to the Country. I will be out to see you as soon as the question is settled.”¹

But although in private Grant was comfortably articulate about the desirability of Johnson’s departure, in public he was carefully silent. One reporter planted a story that Grant had bet Stanton a box of cigars that Johnson would resign before the trial was over, but Grant did not rise to such bait. He could not be harassed by newspapermen into making statements or even denying unlikely stories. He kept quiet, while allowing others to put him forward. In March, during the impeachment trial, there had been a congressional election in New Hampshire; as usual, the political eyes of the nation were on the Granite State. The Democrats had done well in elections in 1867, and as Bennett’s New York Herald observed, the “proposition of universal negro suffrage, upon which…[the Republicans] had been so signally defeated in Ohio and New York,” weighed against them in New Hampshire. There was, however, another element that could be injected into the contest. General Daniel E. Sickles, splendid as he swung himself forward on crutches (reminding voters of the valor that had cost him a leg at Gettysburg), devoted his campaign to persuading New Hampshiremen that a vote for a Republican was a vote for Grant. He succeeded. “This was, in fact, the initial test of General Grant as a presidential candidate,” stated the New York Herald, conceding that “the results show that he cannot be beaten.”²

On the eve of the Senate’s vote on Johnson, Grant wrote Ford that a “great deal of anxiety is felt here”; he predicted, accurately, “Impeachment is likely to fail.” Ardent advocates of Johnson’s removal, such as Congressman Robert C. Schenck (who confessed to his daughter that “we are in gloom”) privately concurred. They pressed exceedingly hard to counter the view that expulsion of the president would weaken the nation. To this end, they persuaded Grant to issue on the day of the vote a statement that the government was at present “demoralized,” and hence Johnson’s removal was desirable.³

Johnson was not removed, and the American public quickly turned its attention from his trial to its every-four-year bonanza of ebullience, a national political convention. The Republicans were scheduled to meet first, on May 20 (not a week after the key vote on Johnson’s acquittal), but before they did, another convention was held that offered encouragement to the Grant people. Civil War veterans met in Chicago in a Soldiers and Sailors Convention and heard speeches from everyone in sight, including old Jesse Grant, in support of their commander. In fact they “nominated” the general and proposed to demand ratification of their choice by the Republican convention, whose delegates were coming into town. Some thought the veterans were excessively martial, but Grant had already moved to dispel any thought that he was a man on horseback; on May 18 he issued a statesmanlike call for a small standing army, of only fifty thousand men, to provide “protection” from the Indians and “to give a feeling of security to the Southern people.” Both this statement and the veterans’ demand for his nomination kept Grant’s name front and center in the carefully encouraged furor of the preconvention hours. One of Julia’s brothers was quoted as saying Ulysses would decline the nomination; Jesse fervently denied any such nonsense. Grant said nothing. Excitement mounted.⁴

On May 20, preceded by Old Glory, General Sickles—once again the symbol of patriotic sacrifice—led the procession state by state into the Crosby Opera House. After the delegates had found their seats in the orchestra, dignitaries were escorted to the stage, and Jesse Root Grant, “the man who ‘has a boy’” came in surrounded by “sympathizing friends.” Grant’s managers, nervous as usual about the old man’s marvelously unpredictable comments to reporters, hovered over him as if he were on the “verge of the grave.” The women who had been admitted to the proceedings sat up in the family circle, where “gay colors of dusky charmers outshone white sisters.”⁵

General Carl Schurz, the temporary chairman, introduced General Joseph R. Hawley, the governor of Connecticut, who was the permanent chairman. In Hawley’s speech a genuine issue made its unexpected entrance; Hawley, an advocate of fiscal probity, quickly warned those who favored the expansion of the nation’s greenback money supply that they would be shown no quarter: “Every bond, in letter and in spirit, must be as sacred as a soldier’s grave.” As the phalanx of martial gentlemen at the rostrum demonstrated, not all the soldiers had yet been interred. The next day General John A. Logan, the same dark, flamboyantly handsome, confident politician who had ridden into camp to see an awkward colonel take command of his regiment, rose to make a nomination. Now Logan was calling his commander to a new post. As his oratory reached its climax and Ulysses S. Grant’s name was put in nomination, a pigeon painted red, white, and blue was launched from the top gallery. Frantic, the poor bird flew about the hall “in great agitation, not liking the tremendous roaring about him.” Jesse Grant stood at the front of the platform in “mute astonishment” while the tumult mounted. Behind him, the curtain rose, exposing a backdrop on which were painted likenesses of the Goddess of Liberty and General Grant.⁶

In Washington, Grant, appropriately, was at his desk at army headquarters when Secretary Stanton, stifling jealousy and unable to resist political excitement—Badeau said he was “panting for breath lest some one else should precede him”—rushed in with the wire announcing the nomination. Grant was completely calm. He had not hovered at the telegraph, nor had he allowed his aides to do so. He and Julia were determined to press on to higher ground, in order not to lose what they had gained, but unlike his father, they had displayed no sign of grasping for power. The news came to Grant in the same way that the nomination came to him: he had not sought it. But neither could he have endured not having it come to him.⁷

On May 29, 1868, two delegations called on the general in Washington. He received the veterans and their “nomination” at his office at Seventeenth and “F” streets in the morning, and in the afternoon, he and Julia met Governor Hawley and his fellow Republican leaders at their “I” Street house. There, Ulysses S. Grant accepted the Republican party’s nomination as candidate for president, with Schuyler Colfax as his running mate. He ended his short bland speech by saying, “I shall have no policy of my own to interfere against the will of the people.” He had almost said that he would have no policy at all; almost too well he had suggested that he offered the nation a clean slate. More happily, he included in his written statement of acceptance his famous slogan, “Let us have peace,” with its echoes not only of his private expression to his friend Ford of the country’s need at the time of the impeachment crisis but of Appomattox as well.⁸

In June, the Grants quietly assumed their rightful place. When the diplomat Anson Burlinghame escorted Chih-Kang and Sun Chia-Ku, the first Chinese envoys to the United States, through a series of receptions, the attention to protocol revealed equal concern for political realities; schedules were carefully arranged so that Johnson and Grant need not meet. After a state dinner, according to the New York Herald, “the placid Celestials,” whose names were not given, “retired to their rooms, lit their opium chiboques, and in dreams revisited the Flowery Land.” The next morning they rose to pay short morning calls on all the proper dignitaries: Senator Sumner, senior members of the diplomatic corps, Speaker Colfax, and others, including General Grant. After luncheon, they ended their day with their two most formal calls, one on President Johnson and his family at the White House; the other on Julia Grant.⁹

Modestly, Grant remained at his post as the commanding general until July. Then he and Julia started “home,” going first to St. Louis, then out west, and finally to Galena. Julia had worked carefully and successfully at selecting her clothes; for the train, she had a “short suit” (one that cleared the ground) of “handsome black silk,” which she wore with an “ash-colored bonnet.” While they were on their travels, the capital mourned the death of Thaddeus Stevens and, perhaps unknowingly, marked the end of the deepest of white America’s public commitments to black equality in the Reconstruction period. During his last illness, Stevens had listened as General Howard read the Bible to his fellow “nigger lover,” and crusty as ever, had been glad each day when the Christian General finished and left his bedside. When death came, black citizens filled the Capitol rotunda for the greatest official tribute to a fallen leader since Lincoln had lain in state, and at Union Station, they saw his body off for Lancaster and its pauper’s grave in an integrated cemetery.¹⁰

As Stevens went to his rest, the Grants were on their way through Illinois with the uneasy accusation of courting black votes hurled at them as they went. At Carlinville, the train stopped in the station, and when Grant opened the window to shake hands with the people crowding the platform, he was struck in the face by a hat. Feeling the sting he pulled back. His supporters kicked his assailant, Bill O’Brien, and pushed him away from the train, but the anti-Grant noise would not let up. The train pulled out of the station without the candidate’s having shaken any hands. Reporters claimed matters of race lay at the bottom of O’Brien’s act, which momentarily disrupted Ulysses Grant’s trip. And racism had spoiled the recent trip of another Republican as well. One of the Texas delegates to the Republican National Convention, on board a steamer out of Galveston, had been denied the cabin he had engaged. He was black. George T. Ruby sued for damages of $5,000 under the Civil Rights Act of 1866 and was awarded $250. The compensation may have been insufficient, but the verdict did indicate that the federal courts were responsive to the infringement of Negroes’ rights.¹¹

With many black voters already registered in the South, much of the focus of the 1868 presidential campaign was on the issue constantly referred to in a wide segment of the press as the question of enfranchisement. In the presidential election of 1868, black votes counted in sixteen of the thirty-seven states: eight in the former Confederacy; five in New England (the exception was Connecticut); and three others—New York (with a requirement that black men could vote only if they owned property worth $250), Nebraska (which had enfranchised blacks to meet an 1867 congressional requirement for admission as a state), and Wisconsin (where the highest court had ordered a color-blind vote on constitutional grounds). Negroes were registered to vote in Mississippi, Texas, and Virginia, but the electoral vote in these states was not tallied because they had not yet been readmitted to the Union. Blacks gained the vote as a result of the election of 1868 in Iowa and Minnesota. A great many Northerners who were less than fervent for Negro equality could see the glaring irony in “free” states denying a basic act of citizenship to their black citizens, while requiring that it be granted by the former slave-holding secessionist states. Surprisingly, some former Confederates, such as the South Carolinians James and Mary Boykin Chesnut, Joseph B. Kershaw, and Wade Hampton, were willing to acknowledge that they had lost the war and that some black enfranchisement was a logical result of emancipation. With equal logic, they contended that if they had to put up with it, so should the people of the North. In Ohio, where it had recently been refused, the moderate Rutherford B. Hayes would have preferred to see the party take a national position on the issue, to eliminate bitter local contests like those in his own state. The Republican platform, however, spoke only of the need for the vote in the South (where the freedmen were expected to use it to protect themselves) and of its optional desirability in the North. Grant, following a strategy of harmony, said as little as possible on this passionately divisive issue.¹²

As Grant sought to avoid the heat of the suffrage question, so too was he quietly conservative in the matter of monetary policy. There was, in fact, no issue he cared about deeply; no cause in the furtherance of which he sought the presidency. He did not introduce into the campaign any issue of personal concern to him. On the other hand, he had no greed for power for its own sake. There was nothing of the tyrant in Grant. But though he was without lust for cause or might, he still felt that the presidency had to be his. One politician who knew him well, George S. Boutwell, concluded, “It is an error to assume that General Grant enjoyed the exercise of power, but it is true that he enjoyed the possession of power as evidence of the public confidence.” As a general, Grant had already felt the sensuous pull of a people who trusted and wanted him. In 1868 he sought, quite literally, evidence from them of his election. He wanted—and would get—their votes.¹³

But they were not his yet. In July the Democrats had held their convention. Meeting in New York, they rejected not only the perpetual candidate, Chief Justice Chase, but George H. Pendleton, who was outspoken as an opponent of the advance of black people and as a proponent of the advance of the nation’s poorer white people, which he hoped to achieve through programs that would bring more money into their hands. Pendleton’s “Ohio idea” was an outright call for monetary expansion, and by rejecting him, the convention repudiated any move to the left on financial matters. Instead, the Democrats chose Horatio Seymour, former governor of New York, who was a “sound money” man, as their candidate to oppose Grant.¹⁴

Seymour was an adroit rhetorician, and he made his stand on the money question sufficiently ambiguous to attract voters unsatisfied with what the Republican Congress had done for them. This attraction, however, could not outbalance the stark fact that he had stayed home while Ulysses Grant had gone off to war, and had returned a hero. But Grant took nothing on faith. When Sherman congratulated him on his nomination (speaking of his “sacrifice” at entering the corrupt world of politics) but said that as an army officer he would not endorse him publicly, Grant sought to win more active support from his friend. He borrowed Sherman’s prejudices: “I could not back down without as it seems to me having the contest for power for the next four years between mere toadying politicians.” Grant claimed he understood Sherman’s neutral stance, but shortly General Grenville M. Dodge was imploring Sherman to make the endorsement. And soon Grant saw to it that the endorsement would come into being without Sherman’s having to speak a word. He left St. Louis and took Sherman and Sheridan on a tour of the Indian-war territory; the three simple soldiers, doing their duty, went west to inspect the keeping of the peace on the Great Plains.¹⁵

The New York Times took note of the presence in Colorado of “the greatest Generals of our nation, and the world.” The tour focused the attention of the American electorate on the newest, most promising part of the nation. Publicly there was to be no involvement in politics, but as they crossed Nebraska, Orville Babcock took a private poll of the members of the party. The ladies, 11 to 4, thought Grant would win; the gentlemen, 44 to 13, agreed. The unanimity was less complete than one would have expected, but Babcock contentedly wrote his wife, “and so it will go.” (Then the sobriety of his letter trailed off into an exuberantly lecherous anecdote that closed, “P.S. Genl. Augur has just poured…a whisky.”) Earlier, at St. Joseph, Missouri, the official military progress had looked a good deal like a whistle-stop campaign. Bonfires were lit in the streets, and the three generals were called out onto the balcony of the hotel. Grant, as usual, skillfully avoided saying anything to the cheering crowd other than “I return my sincere thanks.” Noting that this was his first trip into this part of the West, he then asked to be excused: “I am fatigued, weary, dusty, and unable to address you.”¹⁶

Sheridan was less restrained, but as he began a speech someone shouted “Seymour,” and disclaiming advocacy of violence, the general said that if he were a resident of the town, he “would duck that fellow in the Missouri River.” Sherman, characteristically, spoiled the fun by growing testy, saying to the people that he would not try to speak until they “learned to behave.” The three generals had encountered raw politics. They received still another reminder that some saw political content in their trip when a fourth general, Francis Preston Blair, Jr., the Democratic candidate for vice-president, arrived to make his own inspection of the region.¹⁷

Returning to St. Louis, Grant visited his old farm briefly before going on to Chicago. There, at his brother Orvil’s house, he received a delegation of five thousand tanners. Grant thanked them, but again declined to make a speech—and went on to Galena, back to heartland America to await a call to duty. As Lincoln had been and as William McKinley very much was to be, Grant was perceived as the candidate of middle America. The role somehow carried a connotation of special genuineness, and he could appear unbeholden both to the war-creating abolitionist easterners and the war-shunning Democrats like Seymour. The general, who had never stood for any office, was now running for his nation’s highest position not from Washington, or Philadelphia, or New York, or even St. Louis, but from the good, honest, American town of Galena. Small matter that when they got there the Grants might just as well have been opening the summer cottage at Long Branch as the house in Illinois. No one had to know that they had to borrow china and linen in order to establish themselves securely at hearth and home. Grant’s election headquarters were in two handsome second-floor rooms in the DeSoto House, a good hotel on Main Street, but even there, little politicking was in evidence. Grant stood aside from the effort elsewhere to sell him, or seemed to, but every day he walked downtown and carefully read and appraised the reports that came in from his campaign managers.¹⁸

In September, Grant wrote Washburne from Galena, “A person would not know there was a stirring canvass going on if it were not for the accounts we read in the papers of great gatherings all over the country.” This was exactly the pose of detached concern that he counted on to carry the day for him. While the New York Times complimented him on his strategy of silence, a report from Ohio showed how splendidly co-ordinated, if seemingly casual, the Republicans’ national campaign was. They conducted a rally in Oxford for Robert C. Schenck, who was campaigning against Clement L. Vallandigham. According to the Times reporter, “sofas, rockers, tables, a piano and chairs” were on the carpeted platform, from which he heard “beautiful, happy country lasses singing Grant and Colfax songs.” He went on to say that “Bob Schenck never made a better speech,” and in the torchlight parade, “fifteen carloads” of fighting boys in blue and Grant tanners marched. To provide “unbounded humor” a mock detachment of the Ku Klux Klan rode in, only to be swiftly dispersed. (In the same issue of the Times was the report of an uncomic Klan raid on a Republican rally in Camilla, Georgia, in which several voters were killed.)¹⁹

In Hartford, Connecticut, one evening 2 little girl stood at the front door of a downtown house (not far from that of “Aunt Harriet” Beecher Stowe) and watched a torchlit parade of hundreds of uniformed soldiers. The house glowed—“In every one of our tiny window-panes we had stuck a candle”—and there were lamps on either side of her at the doorway. “In the full light of those lamps stood a Goddess of Liberty—eight years old! A white dress, a liberty cap, a liberty pole (which was a new mop-handle with a red-white-and-blue sash tied on it and a cornucopia of the same colors on its top), and a great flag draped around me—there I stood—Living. One crowded hour of glorious life, that was to a motionless, glorified child.” When the companies of marching soldiers came to “a specially illuminated house the leader would turn and march backward, keeping time with his sword, and it was: ‘ONE! TWO! THREE! U! S! G! HURRAH!’…” Charlotte Perkins Gilman, recalling it all decades later, said, “I can hear them now.”²⁰

The campaign manager, William E. Chandler, in his New York headquarters in the Fifth Avenue Hotel, was worried more about the Midwest than about Connecticut. In a note to Schenck he said that he had “dropped in to [Collis P.] Huntington’s at the Central Pacific RR (who had already given us $5000) and upon hearing my fears about you he promptly gave me $500.” Ten days later Chandler wrote Washburne that Alexander T. Stewart, Edwards Pierrepont, and others were thinking of buying the National Intelligencer in order to use it to assault the Democrats nationwide. “They are a mercenary and unprincipled set” and “I may be mistaken…in dickering with these scoundrels. ‘Can a man touch pitch and not be defiled?’ but I am conscious of the correctness and purity of my own motives, and do not dare turn away from this opportunity of demoralizing the Democracy. I hope you will approve; also Gen. Grant, if by any chance he should hear what is being done.”²¹

Grant heard everything that was being done. He had a telegraph line extended across the river to Washburne’s house, on the other side of town, and there, with Washburne, Badeau, Comstock, and a room full of Galenans, Grant carefully followed the results from the troubling state of Indiana in the October elections. The vigil ended happily; from New York Chandler reported, “All looks gloriously; but what an escape we have had in Indiana. But we have got them and they know it. People are already beginning to talk about the offices.” He had been to Alexander Stewart’s for dinner and found contributors, scenting a win, ready with cash and eager for collectorships. And Chandler, a party man, was already concerned that regular Republicans might be squeezed out by men loyal only to Grant. From Maine, James G. Blaine, that most enthusiastic of all campaigners, sent unclouded congratulations:

Not so deep as well

Nor so wide as a church Door,

But tis enough.

Glory to God and Congratulations

to the General.²²

Campaigning in the nineteenth century was blessedly free of the television prissiness of the twentieth. Scurrilous charges kept things lively, and of these, the fathering of illegitimate children was a particular favorite. The child attributed to Grant had the added charm of being interracial. The candidate was said to have sired an Indian daughter in Vancouver, but the rumor faltered, not only because quickly assembled facts showed that the alleged Grant daughter had been born less than nine months after Ulysses arrived there and that her father was probably one Richard Grant, but also because tomcatting seemed to everyone to be out of character for the general.²³

Although people did not rise to this sexual bait, the Democrats did not give up trying to find a way to embarrass the general. To the tune of “Captain Jinks of the Horse Marines,” backers of Seymour were invited to sing loud and clear the dispraise of his opponent:

I am Captain Grant of the Black Marines,

The stupidest man that ever was seen.

Another verse ran:

I smoke my weed and drink my gin,

Paying with the people’s tin.

The theme of Grant the drunk was familiar enough, but those “Black Marines” provided a newer, lustier chorus. The Democrats sought to damn Grant as a black Republican, as a latter-day abolitionist, as a nigger lover, and they were not entirely off target. Black Americans, needing someone in the White House who would, if not love them, at least act to protect their persons and rights, were anxious indeed to vote for “Captain Grant.” One careful observer described the consequences of their eagerness in Savannah on election day:

A crowd of Negroes had collected early in the morning to exercise the “inalienable right”—and as soon as the polls were opened, crowded to the main entrance of the Courthouse…. Some white people complained that they couldn’t get in at the main entrance, and the police (officered of course, by rebel officers) were ordered to make a way through the darkie crowd in the course of which, it is said, some negro resisted, and with other citizens present, they [the police] discharged their revolvers into the dense crowd, killing…six to ten and wounding a great many. In the course of the melee two policemen were killed, though who by, I do not suppose any body knows. The Negroes dispersed and did not come near the polls again to vote. If Gen. Meade’s dispatch that a riot occurred…which was quelled by the police had read that the police and citizens made murderous attack upon the negroes and drove them away from the polls, it would have been more nearly the truth.

It remained to be seen whether Grant, if elected, would accept assignment as captain of a black company.²⁴

In Galena, on election day, the great general walked unobtrusively through the rainy streets to his neighbor’s house to hear the election returns. The telegraph company had been perfectly willing to carry an extra line to Grant’s house, but arranging to await the results in his own parlor would have made him appear too eager. Instead, the telegraph machinery was set up in Washburne’s library “in front of the window that looks out on the porch.” Babcock’s father-in-law, B. H. Campbell, William R. Rowley, and several other Galena gentlemen were there, as well as Grant’s aides Badeau and Comstock and a friend from Quincy, Illinois. Grant arrived just after 6:00 P.M., and the long wait began. One of the men in the room noticed that “the General was very cool, yet anxious.” Julia, barred by convention from the masculine activity of receiving returns, had to maintain an excruciating vigil at home with the children. Washburne’s “little old library looks like a Committee room of Ward politicians” commented one of the men who crowded into it. Finally, “After success seemed to be assured the Lead Mine Band came over and gave us some music and we felt pretty foxy.” Just to be certain, one member of the party stayed up with the telegraph operator. A switch of 29,862 of the 5,717, 246 votes cast would have elected Seymour instead of Grant, but that switch did not occur. At 7:00 A.M. Ulysses Grant went home to give Julia the news.²⁵

The morning Grant found out where he would be living for the next four years, he wrote in high good humor to his old friend J. Russell Jones, telling him to be ready to join him and Julia when their train paused briefly in Chicago. He could think of no one else that he wanted to accompany them. His object was to get back east as soon as possible, now that his home town had served its campaign purposes. In the middle of the school year, the Grants sold the Galena house and took the children back to Washington. Sold too was the Philadelphia house, leaving them with the “I” Street place, the only house, other than their childhood homes, that Julia or Ulysses had lived in for more than two years. That house had stood the Grants in good stead. After the general had broken with President Johnson in January 1868, each maintained his own court, with aspiring Republicans in attendance. The rivalry between them was not masked. For example, on an evening late in June, the Grants gave a “private” reception, with the general and all his aides in full uniform, for the Chinese dignitaries—private so that the president did not have to be invited. Later in the year the Grant children were kept home from the White House Christmas party.²⁶

Grant also still had his army-headquarters office, which was not in the War Department. Secretary of War Schofield (in Johnson’s cabinet) and Grant (not speaking to the president) were not a team; instead, with official correctness, they maintained separate offices. Grant’s was at Seventeenth and “F” streets in a small two-story private house opposite the Navy Department; his room at the front of the second floor looked more like a parlor than a command post. Grant’s standard office desk stood on a bright carpet between two windows. At a side window was a desk for an aide, and on the opposite wall was a six-foot-long table piled high with documents tied with the inevitable red tape. A reporter, coming into the room, rediscovered the often startling fact that famous people may indeed look like their pictures. The pictures of them are not always flattering, as were those of President Johnson, whose lined face showed strain that was missing from his photographs. In contrast, the forty-six-year-old president-elect looked as young and smooth-skinned as he did in his campaign pictures. But the reporter did not see a buoyant man. Instead, Grant was pale, with an “expression of sadness.” He wore a plain black suit and moved about the room with a shuffling gait, appearing stooped and “borne down with cares.” While the reporter was present, a senator and a Louisiana judge (unnamed in the account) arrived, and Grant did not dismiss the newsman as the newcomers lobbied for his support for government subsidies to rebuild levees on the Mississippi River. They had scarcely begun their plea when Grant said, “I hope the government will not do it.” The reporter found this response “not only decisive and final…but almost stunning.”²⁷

Trying once again, the two callers said that all they wanted was a government guaranty for their company’s bonds, “so we can sell them without a ruinous discount.” Grant replied, “I never knew a government to become responsible for any amount that it did not ultimately have to pay.” Grant suggested that private Northern capital be invited in to provide the financing and he added that Negroes should be allowed to provide some of the labor. Told they were too lazy to be counted on, he replied, “They’ll work if you pay them for it.” The reporter was struck by Grant’s “remarkable quietness” of manner and his “positiveness of utterance.” But his readers were being misled. Frequently, as president, Grant demonstrated this same immediate firmness and good sense on confronting a situation, only to vacillate later and fail to uphold his own good first judgment.²⁸

These callers were typical of the steady stream of visitors who came to Grant’s parlor office hoping to plead their cause. Just before the inauguration, a group of black citizens from Nashville came to seek Grant’s support of the proposed Fifteenth Amendment, which would enfranchise all of the nation’s black men. He listened and they were encouraged, but he was noncommittal. Friends of the proposal hoped, and foes feared, that Grant was leaning toward its support, but neither side could get him to state his position on enfranchisement—or on assuring a whole range of other rights for black people, a question which, in Washington, was proving to be anything but abstract. The freed slaves were emancipating their free-born but severely restricted Northern brethren, and all were taking the business of gaining equality seriously. When Secretary and Mrs. Orville H. Browning planned a reception at their house for all the employees of the Interior Department, somehow none of the black clerks received invitations. Just before the party someone, very likely one of the Brownings’ own servants, protested this discrimination, and the next day a messenger was sent to the homes of the excluded employees with a verbal invitation to a party at the Brownings’. The secretary of the interior described the circumstances in his diary: “Very abundant preparation had been made for our entertainment yesterday, and enough was left to furnish…another, so we permitted our colored boys, Nat & Henry to give a reception this P.M…. to the colored employees in the Interior Department and the Atto Genls Office…. I went into the room and was introduced to such as I did not know.” Browning was rewarded with a formal address of thanks for his graciousness. Social equality had not yet come to Washington, but the ball was rolling and the argument that black people would be uncomfortable in a white man’s house did not seem to be holding as much water as some Washington hosts and hostesses had hoped. There were black people in at least three cabinet departments, and General Howard, out at the new Howard University, shamelessly kept pushing new candidates forward. Black people were moving into the city in large numbers; they were even moving right next door. They were pressing for places in the city government and on the school board and generally not behaving at all like the dear old souls Julia chose to remember from her White Haven childhood. And they were all looking to her Ulysses to do for them what Andrew Johnson had so disappointingly chosen not to do.²⁹"

In February Grant gave up the fiction that his job was running the army; he and Julia began accepting invitations to formal dinners given by the diplomatic corps. These grand occasions heralded his accession to the presidency, as did speculation about who would be in his cabinet. For example, when the Grants went to a wedding in Pennsylvania, a fellow guest who had served for four days in Zachary Taylor’s cabinet was proclaimed certain to be appointed secretary of the treasury. In this game Grant played his cards close to the chest; even the proprietors of Washington boardinghouses did not know who would be in town. One lady, asked why she wished to speak to the general, told an aide (or perhaps a reporter) that she was calling to learn whom he had chosen, as she had rooms to rent. While rumors flourished, Grant let it be known that he would release the names only when he formally submitted them to the Senate for confirmation. Everyone assumed, unhappily, that someone else was being consulted; the party leaders in Congress had not yet realized that none of them was being asked for advice. Once again Grant was seeking to enter the capital alone.³⁰

On the morning of March 4, 1869, at nine-thirty, Ulysses S. Grant and John A. Rawlins stepped into Julia Grant’s fine new phaeton. The general waved to his wife and children, who were standing at the door, and pulling on his cigar to keep it lit, stretched a white fox rug over his knees; his black coachman flicked the reins, and the two fine bays carried Grant off to his inauguration. He and Rawlins stopped first at his office, where Company K of the Fifth Cavalry, which had guarded him since the war, was on duty. Grant, in an excellent black suit from Brooks, sat at his desk in his swivel armchair smoking a cigar (and spoiling his fine kid gloves) and chatting with his brother-in-law Fred Dent and Schuyler Colfax. At ten-forty he walked out to the curb past a group of admiring black citizens, and he and Rawlins set off again in the open carriage, to end a disgraceful charade. Grant had avoided Johnson’s 1869 New Year’s Day reception (and underscored the insult by sending three aides, including an Indian, Ely S. Parker, to represent him), and since then there had been speculation about whether Johnson and Grant would ride together to the inauguration. The day before the ceremony, the New York Times reported that Johnson had graciously written a note proposing that they go to the Capitol together. But, noted the Times, Grant denied receiving such a note and had announced he would ride alone. Rebuffed, on the morning of the ceremony Johnson called the members of his cabinet to the White House at nine o’clock and, to the surprise of most of them, quietly said, “I think we will finish our work here without going to the Capitol.” They then made themselves busy reading and examining bills. Grant and Rawlins, now making their belated bid to be gracious, paused at the gates of the White House, only to be told that the president was too occupied to get away. So, alone save for his old friend, Grant rode to Capitol Hill; while he was being sworn in, Andrew Johnson left the White House for the last time.³¹

When Grant reached the Capitol, there was a huge crowd that, once again, included a strikingly large number of black citizens. He gave them all a “very good natured smile” and climbed the long stairs to the Senate chamber to witness the swearing in of Schuyler Colfax. There Grant sat “calm” and “compact” as the glistening diplomatic corps rattled its way into the room, and a reporter wrote of the contrast between the republican dignity of this inauguration of a vice-president and Andrew Johnson’s “plebeian harangue,” which had been grist for the anti-republican diplomatic mill four years earlier. As Chief Justice Chase swore in Colfax, and the new vice-president gave his speech, Grant watched with “wonderful coolness and self-possession.”³²

Julia, her children, her father, and her sisters and brothers were all in their place on the portico of the Capitol, waiting to see Grant sworn in. So too was Jesse Grant, but Hannah Grant was not there. Back in February, Jesse had written in a very shaky hand a letter to Julia’s brother; the salutation was “Gen. Dent,” and it began, “I rec’d a letter from Ulysses, yesterday, in which he says his house will be full.” General Grant’s father was asking Fred Dent for a favor: to find a room, either in a hotel “or at some respectable private house,” for the two women who he hoped would accompany him. They would arrive a day or two before the inauguration. “It is not yet decided whether Mrs. Grant or Jennie will go with me.” He then told Dent that if arrangements could not be made for both, he wanted “the Mother to go.” The letter closed “Yours most truly” and was signed “J. R. Grant.”³³

Jesse Grant could be a Uriah Heep on occasion, but no degree of irritation with his tiresome ways can excuse Ulysses Grant’s callous disregard of his father’s search for accommodations for the family. There were not ten houses in Washington that would not have been honored to have the president’s mother as a guest. In some still shrouded way, Hannah was too much of an embarrassment to be allowed to spoil Ulysses and Julia’s great day. When Jesse arrived without his wife, reporters, understandably, asked where she was. His reply—that she had been invited but declined—prompted the worst fake-rustic copy imaginable; allegedly, Hannah Grant had responded to the invitation by saying, “Pop, do you think I would go to Washington and be stared at by fifty thousand people and every stitch on me printed in fifty thousand newspapers; no, indeed.”³⁴

At twelve-thirty Grant came forward on the portico of the Capitol, waited “impatiently” for the twenty-two-gun salute to end (he never liked the sound of cannon), and with his hand on the Bible held by a sergeant at arms, was sworn in by Chief Justice Chase as the eighteenth president of the United States. Then he took his speech from his breast pocket and, reading it, told America that he entered his office “without mental reservation…. The responsibilities of the position I feel, but accept them without fear.” It was pure Grant prose. The word usage was slightly wrong, the effect compellingly right.³⁵

He immediately repudiated what he and the Radical Republicans regarded as Johnson’s abrogation of acts of Congress lawfully passed over the president’s veto. Grant asserted that he would express his views to Congress and veto legislation if need be, “but all laws will be faithfully executed, whether they meet my approval or not.” Noting that the country had “just emerged from a great rebellion,” he announced that “the greatest good for the greatest number is the object to be attained.” In words that all would take as referring to the outlaw disruption of integrated political life in the South, he called for laws to establish the “security of person, property, and free religious and political opinion in every part of our common country.” With the phrase “our common country” Grant harked back to his negotiations with Abraham Lincoln and the peace commissioners, but he was now emphatically applying it to the chief issue of Reconstruction.³⁶

Grant never knew how to make money. Making monetary policy did not come any easier, but he proved a diligent student of the dreary subject that so profoundly touched so many Americans. Early in the campaign he had written to Elihu Washburne intelligently about the shortage of money in the South and West, which severely hampered farmers in those regions. At the outset of the war, Grant himself had experienced the problems of doing business when one’s drafts were heavily discounted because banks in the area were short of cash with which they could be purchased. Since then he had talked to his merchant friends George H. Stuart and Alexander T. Stewart; his monetary views were now conservative, and in his inaugural speech he disavowed an expansive greenback currency when he said, “To protect the national honor, every dollar of Government indebtedness should be paid in gold, unless otherwise expressly stipulated in the contract.” He went further: “Let it be understood that no repudiator of one farthing of our public debt will be trusted….” (How many farthings can Grant have seen? This hortatory cry was not characteristic.) He no longer knew exactly what it was he was trying to say, but he predicted prosperity and placed his hope in a higher authority than his banker and merchant friends: “Why, it looks as though Providence has bestowed upon us a strong box in the precious metals locked up in the sterile mountains of the far West….”³⁷

Grant made a general comment about foreign affairs and then moved on to two statements of the greatest importance. He noted that the suffrage question was likely “to agitate the public” as long as the vote was withheld from any citizens and therefore called for the ratification of the Fifteenth Amendment. Even more startling was one still briefer paragraph: “The proper treatment of the original occupants of this land—the Indians—is one deserving of careful study. I will favor any course toward them which tends to their civilization and ultimate citizenship.” Humanitarians anxious to halt the terrible decimation of these people took heart.³⁸

The ceremony over, the official party was escorted to the White House by a military troop. Behind the soldiers a group of black citizens, in frayed clothes and holding up umbrellas against the rain, joined the march, to the “intense merriment” of the white crowd on the curbs. They had heard what Ulysses Grant said about the Fifteenth Amendment and were as unembarrassed as they were hopeful. At the White House, however, the black appeared in a role more traditionally his in America. The Grants paused at the empty house to meet the staff, and the new president was introduced to the “body servant” whose services would pass now from Andrew Johnson to Ulysses Grant. The New York Times reported him to be “a perfect specimen of ornate ebony.”³⁹

The stop at the White House was brief; then they went home to “I” Street and batches of congratulatory messages; one of the most cordial came from Prussia’s Bismarck, who was numbered among the general’s warm admirers. That evening the Grants returned to Pennsylvania Avenue for the inaugural ball in the handsome Treasury Building. The new north wing, fine but starkly classical, had been decorated with cedar and spruce under the direction of Fred Dent, Julia’s brother, who was in charge of all the inaugural festivities. Some guests almost came to blows in the crush at the men’s cloakroom, and the crowds were too dense to permit much dancing, but the ball was pronounced a splendid success. Society reporters, always eager for trouble, could find no fault; Dent had found a single solution for two social dilemmas. The ball was called a private party (though attended by hundreds of people the Grants had never met), so neither Andrew Johnson nor black Republican officeholders had to be invited. Of the latter, the Times society reporter felt happier asserting that they had thoughtfully declined to come.⁴⁰

“Nobody knows yet anything about Ulysses the Silent’s Cabinet, that is to be,” wrote George Templeton Strong in his diary on the last day of Andrew Johnson’s administration. That cautious New York Republican did not regret Johnson’s departure—“There will be dry eyes at his exodus”—and he had “singular hopes” for the Grant administration. Grant’s honesty, Strong wrote, “will stand the ordeal it is to undergo for four years from tomorrow.” It was a good sign, thought Strong, that “Odysseus knows how to keep his own counsel, and shuts up, close as an oyster”; he enjoyed the fact that those who had tried to pump Grant for information or solicit appointment to a government job had come away without even the raw material for convincing gossip. Correctly predicting that even Republicans would be “denouncing him within a month,” he went on to note that “a certain pachydermatism seems to be among his virtues, and he can stand a good deal of newspaper fire….”⁴¹

Henry Adams, in Washington, knew no more than Strong in New York. He lived in the same boardinghouse as Adam Badeau, “General Grant’s historiograph,” but long talks with that “sociable little man with red face and spectacles,” who claimed to know his master’s mind, yielded no correct speculation. Adams’s guesses at the end of February were all wrong, but he was not alone in his ignorance: “The politicians, I am told, are furious at not being consulted.” Not without secret aspirations of his own, Adams “went to the Capitol” the day after the inauguration “to hear the carefully guarded secret of Grant’s cabinet.” He found the gallery jammed and, looking down on the floor of the Senate, saw General Rawlins, whose presence was assumed to mean that he had brought Grant’s list of nominees. There was an interminable prayer and the painful scene of William G. Brownlow—“Parson” Brownlow, the new senator from Tennessee—being sworn in at his chair, his once powerful body so broken with palsy that his arm had to be supported as he took the oath, but when these preliminaries were over, Rawlins still did not step forward. Then Senators A. H. Cragin and James W. Grimes (seemingly recovered from his stroke and surely not in disgrace for having voted to acquit Johnson) were sent to receive the nominations from the president and in a carriage “sped like lightning to the White House.” There they found doorkeepers turning away, at Grant’s direction, “any who do not have business with me.” These constituted a sizable crowd.⁴²

The senators “grave and reverend were admitted to the second floor where, amid the redecorating workmen, they searched for ‘the Chief Magistrate,’ who not being comfortably settled in any particular room was sometimes in one, sometimes in another.” He was finally found in the room Andrew Johnson’s secretary had used. Grant, wearing his hat, was “dividing his time between several officers of his staff and his cigar.” After chatting for about ten minutes, the president thanked the two for their courtesy, but explained that Rawlins had the list of nominations. Back on the Senate floor again, Grimes announced to the eager assembly that Grant was indeed ready to nominate a cabinet, and looked over toward Rawlins, who produced a message from the president. As he did so, one of the senators, realizing that none of them had had time to examine the choices before they were made known to the public, called for an executive session. Adams, disgruntled but now doubly curious, left the chamber along with everyone else and stood in the crowded hall outside, waiting for the news. Rawlins would tell them nothing as he left. Shortly, when the senators emerged and the appointments were revealed, several people were heard to ask, “Who’s Borie?”⁴³

The cabinet, 1869. Paying no attention to the president are, left to right, Cox, Fish, Rawlins, Creswell, Boutwell, Borie, and Hoar. LIBRARY OF CONGRESS

It was a curious list that the senators had unanimously accepted out of deference to Grant and despite his failure to consult them before making his choices. Elihu B. Washburne was to be secretary of state; Alexander T. Stewart, secretary of the treasury; John M. Schofield was to stay on, temporarily, as secretary of war; Adolph E. Borie had been named secretary of the navy; Jacob Dolson Cox was to be secretary of the interior; Ebenezer Rockwood Hoar, attorney general; and John A. J. Creswell, postmaster general. Washburne, Cox, and Creswell were the only active politicians on the list, and not one of them was party leader. Creswell, from Maryland, representing the old slaveholding region, was the only Radical. The appointment of Washburne was viewed, despite his many years in the House of Representatives, as being simply a reward for his early championship of Grant, and that of Cox was seen as a nod to Ohio and to anti-Radical racial policies. Schofield had been carried over from the previous administration. Borie, giving Pennsylvania a place, was unknown—“Who the mischief is Borie?” asked Joseph Medill of the Chicago Tribune. Hoar was from Massachusetts and Harvard. Stewart was from New York and was very rich.⁴⁴

Alexander T. Stewart was, in fact, the centerpiece of the list. His selection spoke eloquently for what Ulysses Grant was trying to accomplish as he moved into the uncertainties of the White House. Stewart was a storekeeper who had not failed. Born in 1803 in Ulster, he was a Protestant who had obtained enough education to know that he could not go as far as he wanted to go if he stayed in Ireland. In 1819 he sailed for New York. There he taught school and eventually opened a small store on Broadway near Chambers Street. From the start he was a careful and shrewd merchant; he purchased at auctions cheap, unpromising batches of “sample lots” of much-handled salesmen’s display goods. He took them home, and in the evenings, “gloves were redressed[,] laces made to look as if they had never been corrupted.” Moving to a bigger store, he took the risk of keeping his profit margin small, selling just over his costs. As a result, he held his customers through the panic of 1837 while other merchants, who had operated with higher profits and higher prices, were forced to dispose of their wares at auction. Stewart was there to buy what they sold. He also had the wit to hire exceedingly handsome young clerks to lure in the customers, and by 1862 was so successful that he could open, on Broadway between Ninth and Tenth streets, the largest retail store in the world. When the Civil War came, Stewart, with suppliers beholden to him, could assure government contract agents quick and certain delivery on badly needed uniforms and blankets. And so the rich man grew still richer. With wonderful disdain for privacy, the newspapers during the Civil War published the names and amounts of income tax paid by large taxpayers. The New York Times reported Stewart’s income to be the largest in New York, and the New York Herald estimated that he was worth forty million dollars. He had diversified his investments, and owned the Metropolitan Hotel (where the Grants stopped when they visited New York) and more real estate in the city than anyone else, except perhaps the Astors and the Goelets. At the time Grant nominated Stewart, his great mansion on Fifth Avenue was nearing completion; less far along were his model housing units for his clerks, being built at a cost projected at two million dollars: “…so far events seem to have prevented the consummation of a most laudable intention,” noted the Herald.⁴⁵

Stewart was married, but he had no children; hence his name has not come down to us as a symbol of great fortune. But great his fortune was. Americans reading about Grant’s money man the morning after his nomination saw Stewart compared to the Rothschilds and read, “His is, without doubt, the greatest success in a mercantile career that the world has ever known.” Stewart’s appointment underscored the fact that Grant was the first truly Republican president. Lincoln was a Whig, and his concern was not commerce but the re-establishment of the Union. Elected as a Republican, he had created the National Union party to win Democrats to the cause of victory in the war, and it was this party that re-elected him in 1864. Andrew Johnson was a Democrat, placed on the ticket to get votes for Lincoln from Southern border Unionists and Northern war Democrats. Johnson’s four years in office were dedicated to recreating a Democratic alliance, with a new national base. In time, it would stand powerfully, but it was not yet sturdy enough to sustain an Andrew Johnson. Instead, Grant, the Republican, was now president.⁴⁶

Many Americans, in voting for him, had affirmed their belief in a world in which any man, even a black former slave or one of Stewart’s notoriously underpaid clerks, could have the opportunity to raise himself from the bog of insecurity. They hoped that Grant, who had been there himself, would help them find their way out. Instead, he had found his way to Alexander T. Stewart. The naturalist John Burroughs, who was then a clerk in the Treasury Department, took Grant on his first tour of the offices and money rooms in the Temple; he liked the president’s simple manner but observed that “he walked with men of money now.”⁴⁷

Grant was not bitter toward those who had succeeded where he had failed; they had simply pulled themselves out onto different safe rocks. Theirs were department stores; his was Vicksburg. Preferring not to dwell on how close they all had come to drowning, the general and the businessmen now forgot the difficulty of the struggle and preached the bland doctrine that any diligent workingman could do what they had done. Over and over as president, and later as the ambassador of American virtue in Great Britain, Ulysses Grant preached this gospel. He saluted the efficiency of Stewart’s clerks and drew attention not to the fines they paid when they made errors at the cash register, but to the housing Stewart built for them in Garden City. The idea of the contented, self-respecting workingman, moving up by his own efforts into middle-class respectability and security, had a charm different from Jefferson’s pastoral vision of a citizenry, similarly respectable and secure, of yeoman farmers. But this has been the idea—perhaps “notion” is a closer word—that has permeated and defined the Republican party. The party was (and is) turned to by men and women so lacking in self-regard as to crave an institution ready to promise it in fair measure. The maintenance of opportunities to improve one’s position (upon which self-regard was based) depended on the strength of the business world, and the counting house was more to be trusted than the farm. There was something slightly dirty, lazy, foreign, or effete about Democrats. Republicans were four square; Grant would look just right on the fifty-dollar bill.

Grant was not troubled by the fact that Stewart, along with virtually all of the stable businessmen in New York City, had supported Andrew Johnson; they had done so because the Radicals, who talked of land confiscation, seemed to promise vague but drastic change in the political economy. Grant did not seem as dangerous, and Stewart, old enough to be his father, had met and liked him, and was happy both to advise and support him. What was more, Julia liked his wife, Cornelia Mitchell Clinch Stewart; both Grants felt sustained by this powerful New York couple. But Grant was able to count on this sustaining force in his cabinet for only a week; then Charles Sumner took him away.

A law, described by the New York Herald as “very old fogy” and as having been passed in the days when only those “born with a silver spoon in their mouth” were fit to govern, was unearthed to deprive Grant of the immigrant boy who had made good. Neither Grant nor, at first, anyone in the Senate had been aware of an act of May 28, 1784, that declared that “no person…appointed a commissioner of the treasury…shall be permitted to be engaged…in any trade or commerce.” This provision was continued in an act of September 2, 1789, and some bright lawyer in 1869 remembered it and brought it to Charles Sumner’s attention. The powerful Massachusetts legislator was not the least aggrieved of the senators at not having been consulted, and he was delighted to have an opportunity to teach the president that he must not be ignored. When Grant was told of this legal barrier, he regarded it as just a technicality and was undaunted. Carl Schurz, the new senator from Missouri, calling on his old commander the morning Grant was confronting the problem, saw that the president was busy “writing something on a half sheet of notepaper” and said, “My business can wait.” “Never mind,” Grant replied, “I am only writing a message to the Senate.”⁴⁸

That afternoon in the Senate, Schurz listened to the reading of Grant’s request that the provision disqualifying Stewart be waived. No reasons were given for the request, and no thanks, in advance, were offered. Senator John Sherman was immediately on his feet and “asked unanimous consent to introduce a bill” to accomplish the president’s wishes, but Sumner, supported by Roscoe Conkling, a New Yorker of whom Stewart did not approve, demanded instead that the matter go to committee. Such a delaying tactic could easily have produced a prolonged vacancy in what Republicans regarded as the most important post in the cabinet. Several senators, knowing Sumner and fearing a deadlock between him and Grant, conferred hastily in the cloakroom and decided to send Washburne to persuade Grant to replace Stewart. Grant listened to the bearer of bad news, but he did not give up. Instead, he sought the advice of a close friend, George H. Stuart—a Philadelphia merchant, originally from Ulster, who was of the same stripe as Stewart—and then permitted Stuart to go to the Ebbitt House to try to persuade his nominee to sell his business. This Stewart refused to do, but the two shrewd merchants came up with what they regarded as a better idea. When Stuart got back to Grant he had two documents in his pocket. One was a draft of an instrument placing Stewart’s vast mercantile interests in trust to William E. Dodge and two other men for as long as he was secretary of the treasury; the other was a letter of resignation. Grant, beginning to wonder if his adroit business friends understood the world of congressional politics and conscious of Washburne’s warning that any proposal for getting around the annoying old law could be held up in committee for a long time, reluctantly rejected the concept of a trust. Instead, he accepted Stewart’s resignation. When he got home and told Julia what he had done, she was even more unhappy than he.⁴⁹

If the matter of the Stewart nomination deprived the Grant administration of a confident beginning, Elihu Washburne’s short tenure as secretary of state gave it a note of confused mystery. One of the few preinaugural rumors that later proved correct had been that Washburne would be named minister to France. However, on the way he made a layover as secretary of state, and that route did not make sense. The proposition, often offered, that Washburne was given the senior position in the cabinet in order to enhance his prestige for the Paris post is silly. One does not go downward in a hierarchy to gain prestige. A more likely explanation is that in a moment of exuberance and gratitude on the night he heard the election returns in Washburne’s house, Grant made a snap promise. “No other idea presented itself stronger to my mind in the first news of my election…than that I should continue to have your advice and assistance” was the way he later put it. However, when Ulysses and Julia got back east and talked things over with some of their newer, grander friends, Grant was persuaded that a country fellow like Washburne would not do as secretary of state. The nation’s ambiguous sense of how to present itself to the world resulted in the view that the man chosen as a chief diplomat should be of elegant mold. If true intellectual power was not available, as it had been in Thomas Jefferson and John Quincy Adams, then the diplomat at least had to be able to talk with aplomb to the aristocratic dignitaries of antirepublican Europe. Elihu B. Washburne, with roots in Maine and a truly fine town house in Illinois, was not much more provincial than William Henry Seward of Auburn, New York. But Seward had always seen himself as the titular head of Abraham Lincoln’s party, and there was more intellect and much more of the social animal in him than in the “coarse, comparatively illiterate” Washburne.⁵⁰

The real question is not how Grant came to name Washburne, but how, having done so, he got him to relinquish the post. There is, surprisingly, no clue to the way this was accomplished, but the fact that it happened with apparent amicability suggests that Washburne had acquiesced to the change before the inauguration. The two men were on very friendly terms (“There will always be a spare room for you,” Grant had written from Washington to Galena in the fall of 1865), but the key to the mystery of Washburne’s departure from the cabinet in the spring of 1869 is probably that Grant had outgrown his patron and Washburne knew it. He was an intelligent hard-working congressman, but he was not the kingmaker he had once dreamed of being. He had spotted Grant almost at the outset of the war and had been his champion thereafter, in activities which were climaxed by his steering through Congress the promotion to lieutenant general. But that promotion had had easy passage. Grant’s career had its own momentum by then; it no longer needed a congressional engine. Grant knew that Washburne and William E. Chandler had worked energetically and effectively in his 1868 campaign, but he also knew that they recognized how slight the impact of all their efforts was in comparison with what he had accomplished simply by being on the ticket. It was the general for whom the voters voted. Grant, in Washburne’s parlor, had been grateful but not beholden. When Washburne came as the bearer of bad news with respect to Stewart and forced on Grant advice he did not want to take, the prospect of his absence seemed more attractive. If Grant could bestow the secretaryship, he could also take it away; Washburne agreed—and went off to France, where he served throughout the period of the Commune, reporting accurately if unsympathetically on the fierce events from which other diplomats fled.⁵¹

Grant’s second choice for secretary of state was much more comforting to the mannerly. He was the man on whom, in the flood of rumors that always attended the selection of a cabinet, the New York Times had placed its bet—Hamilton Fish of New York. Save for Washburne’s six days, Fish was to serve Grant for the full eight years of his administration. The two men got on splendidly, but in March 1869 they did not know each other well. They had both served as trustees of the Peabody Educational Fund, but there is no record of any extensive private conversation before the appointment of Fish to the cabinet. In his two volumes on Fish’s life, subtitled The Inner History of the Grant Administration, Allan Nevins never mentions how the two men got to know each other, and it is perfectly possible that when Ulysses Grant chose Hamilton Fish, he had not yet taken much measure of him. But Julia Grant had.

Fish was a large, comfortably ugly man with an impeccable Manhattan and Hudson Valley lineage full of Stuyvesants and Livingstons. He served his single term in the House of Representatives—where he was followed by his namesakes in the next three generations—from 1843 to 1845, and he served as a senator from New York, also for a single term, from 1851 to 1857. When he left the Senate, he seemed also to have left the public world for the aristocratic responsibilities of being, for the rest of his life, president-general of the Society of the Cincinnati. He could have puttered out his years on his lovely Hudson River estate, Glenclyffe, at Garrison or, in town, attended to the excruciatingly dull duties of a leading citizen of New York City, as did his friend George Templeton Strong. Had he done either, he would have had as his mate in boredom Julia Kean Fish.

Julia Fish was consigned to what was called weak health. Whenever her husband needed an excuse for not engaging in an enterprise, he declined, or threatened to do so, on the ground that her infirmity prevented it. Coming from a New Jersey family of founding fathers that was even more financially secure than her husband’s, she could do little to free herself from the indolence of privilege, but in 1865 she made one small gesture that enabled her to escape genteel New York and move into the rougher, riskier waters of gauche and exciting Washington. The gesture was not a very dangerous one. Julia Fish, as Anthony Trollope said of an equally highly placed Englishwoman, could “know whom she chooses,” and in 1865 she had made a choice when she crossed the Hudson to pay a call on Mrs. General Grant, at West Point. Julia Grant was just coming out of obscurity, and her “ideal of an empress,” Julia Fish, “became a true friend.” The latter might have intimidated her new acquaintance simply by her stately presence and by being flawlessly, and hence formidably, well bred. Instead, she was kind. Others were obsequious in the presence of the general’s wife and scornful behind her back, but Julia Fish had no need to try to hoist herself above another woman by tearing her down. She never mocked Julia Grant for her twitching eye, her poor figure, or what others called her country manners. Julia Fish and her husband could afford to be unequivocally respectful of the general and his lady, and that respect was appreciated. In 1869, Julia Grant saw to it that Julia Fish’s husband became secretary of state.⁵²

Since New York had voted for Seymour, no favors were due the state. The appointment of Fish was not a political pay-off. His value lay in his quiet dignity and in his not being beholden to any man or faction. Much has been made of the gulf in style—in class—between Grant and Fish, with the assumption that tanner and patrician must have been unable to reach each other. Not so; Grant had never liked tanning, and as long as there was the opportunity to escape to Garrison, Fish enjoyed Washington. Like his wife, Hamilton Fish was kind, and if his style was different from that of Grant’s other friends, he nevertheless never exhibited, even inadvertently, any form of social arrogance that would have made Grant ill at ease. The two men liked each other’s company. General Grant’s walks over to Fish’s house to talk with his friend were a comfortable and important aspect of their eight years of association. Repeatedly Fish threatened to resign—only so he could get the response which on one occasion he recorded meticulously in his diary: “Don’t think of that—your presence in the cabinet, & the association with you, is to me the greatest possible comfort. I can’t think of your quitting.” The austere secretary of state was formidable at cabinet meetings, and his advice was not always good, but he was accessible to Grant, who needed companionship. And Julia Fish was steadfastly at Julia Grant’s side during eight years of White House pomp and silliness. (The Henry Adamses would have loved the Fishes’ assignment. No one offered it to them.)⁵³

For his invitation to the New Yorker to enter the cabinet, Grant used what he took to be the rhetoric of Fish’s world: “I have thought it might not be unpleasant for you to accept the portfolio of the State Dept. If not will you do me the favor to answer by telegraph tomorrow to the effect that you will be in Washington soon.” When the letter arrived, Hamilton Fish had just gotten back from Washington, where he had avoided the vulgarity of the inaugural ball by dining with Charles Sumner and John Lothrop Motley. He declined by telegram, and in the letter that followed gave his wife’s health as the reason. Grant, troubled by not having his cabinet settled, had not waited for an acceptance from Fish before sending his name to the Senate. A withdrawal of this public announcement would have been highly embarrassing, so when Fish’s telegram arrived, Grant sent Orville Babcock with another letter, in which he urged Fish to change his mind, accept the post, and retain it at least until Congress adjourned. Babcock (who acknowledged Julia Fish as his ally) was persuasive; Hamilton Fish accepted.⁵⁴

Secretary Fish did not like the thought of vulgar people impinging on his world, and he recognized their vague threat to him most easily when they were of an inappropriate color. After a trip to Cuba in 1855, he had written, “We all returned charmed with the climate, the scenery, and the natural productions of the island ‘where only man is vile.’ With its present population, the island of Cuba will be anything else than a desirable acquisition to the United States, and I can see no means of getting rid of a population of some 450,000 called white but really of every shade and mixture of color, who own all the land on the island.” This attitude accounts for his later resistance to expansionist schemes in the Caribbean far more persuasively than does the theory that he dared not take the side of Cuban insurgents lest he seem to be emulating the British when they sympathized with the Confederates. Such a racial delineation of a class feeling also goes further in explaining Fish’s distaste for the strong Freedmen’s Bureau Bill early in 1866 than does the cant with which he extolled constitutional principles when he celebrated Andrew Johnson’s veto of the bill. Fish did not want a portion of America governed by landowners with whom he would be uncomfortable dining, and this objection went not only for Cuba but for Mississippi. He closed his eyes to atrocities against nonwhites in both places because he refused to face the prospect of the success which such people were likely to have if they were protected and supported.⁵⁵

Reversing the course he took in finally selecting his secretary of state, Grant chose as his new secretary of the treasury a congressman, George S. Boutwell of Massachusetts. An underestimated politician, Boutwell showed himself capable of supporting idealistic positions within the Republican party from the 1860’s, when he championed the rights of black freedmen, to 1898, when he broke with his party to become president of the Anti-Imperialist League. Boutwell had led the first, unsuccessful, effort to bring a bill of impeachment against Andrew Johnson, on grounds more germane than those involving the quarrel with Stanton: Boutwell’s thorough hearings on conditions in the South established the degree to which Johnson had willfully refused to execute the Reconstruction laws passed by Congress. He too had worked as a clerk in a store as a young man, but he was not known for a strong interest in fiscal matters. Henry Adams, conservative about money (because his mother had so much) and patrician where Boutwell was plebeian, complained that “Boutwell is not a Wells man.” David Ames Wells, an economist, was the man that Adams and others who advocated free trade and noninflationary money hoped would be appointed to the Treasury post. Boutwell was not the intellectual that Wells was, but his appointment was swiftly confirmed. Just as quickly, he set about liquidating the debt of the United States. He did so good a job that the shrinkage of currency resulting from the retirement of government bonds and the release into the market of gold with which the bonds were bought almost ruined the nation’s farmers and, incongruously, such risk-taking entrepreneurs as James Fisk, Jr.⁵⁶

Along with Boutwell’s appointment, the Senate confirmed that of John A. Rawlins as secretary of war, replacing Schofield. Rawlins was dying of tuberculosis, but had lost none of his dark and passionate zeal. His fellow cabinet member Jacob Dolson Cox, secretary of the interior, was fascinated by the relationship between Grant and Rawlins and regarded Rawlins’s death, in September 1869, as “an irreparable loss” to Grant and his administration. “Other men might fill the office of Secretary of War,” wrote Cox, “but no other man could be found who could be the successful intermediary between General Grant and his associates in public duty. His friendship for his chief was of so sacredly intimate a character that he alone could break through the taciturnity into which Grant settled when he found himself in any way out of accord with the thoughts and opinions of those around him. Rawlins could argue, could expostulate, could condemn, could even upbraid, without interrupting for an hour the fraternal confidence and good will of Grant.” Cox considered that Rawlins “had won the right to this relation by an absolute devotion” which ran back to the first year of the war and which had made Rawlins “the good genius of his friend in every crisis of Grant’s wonderful career.” In Cox’s judgment, this power came not because of Rawlins’s “great intellect, for he was of only moderate mental powers. It was rather that he had become a living and speaking conscience for his general; as courageous to speak in a time of need as Nathan the prophet, and as absolutely trusted as Jonathan by David.”⁵⁷

Rawlins had undertaken to be the conscience of Grant’s personal life in 1863 when he remonstrated so firmly against alcohol, and in the cabinet he became the president’s moral mentor in the public realm as well. Quick to react with anger to what he saw as injustices perpetrated on him, Rawlins was equally sensitive to injustices done to people who had not the power to protect themselves. With the possible exception of Boutwell and Creswell, he was the only member of the original cabinet who could identify with the suffering and bitter disappointment of the freed slaves, who were being intimidated and driven back into a state of dependency, and he was the leading exponent of intervention on the side of the oppressed people of Cuba, who were in revolt against their Spanish masters. Even those, like Fish and Cox, who opposed these and other policies that Rawlins espoused, admired his “openness of character” and contrasted him in this respect to Babcock, to the latter’s distinct disfavor. Cox also compared Rawlins to the secretary of state and reflected on his rectitude: “Rawlins might have differed from Mr. Fish as to the foreign policy of the government, especially in regard to Cuba, but he would have seen to it that no kitchen cabinet committed the President to schemes of which his responsible advisers were ignorant. Indeed,” concluded his cabinet colleague, “there was no danger that a kitchen cabinet could exist till Rawlins was dead.” Rawlins might have protected Grant from the dubious informal advice he was to receive.⁵⁸

No doubt there were army officers who were uncomfortable to have as secretary of war the sharp-tongued lawyer who had sometimes made their calls at Grant’s wartime headquarters less than pleasant. Furthermore, Rawlins was firm in keeping in check those officers who were most cruel to the Indians whom they encountered on duty in the West. He was equally alert to oppose people whom he regarded as leading his president away from the straight and the true: “He had blunt, wrathful words of objurgation for those who put in Grant’s way temptations that he knew to be dangerous.” As Cox put it: “A moral monitor and guide not hesitating at big oaths and camp expletives seems a strange type of man, but no one could deny that Rawlins’s heart was as true and his perception of the thing demanded by the honor and welfare of his chief was as clear as his manners and words often were rough.” Rawlins was the one cabinet member who could alter the direction of a conversation until it engaged Grant’s attention, who would insist that information be obtained and analyzed before the president made up his mind, and who could be counted on to know what the Dents and Babcock and Porter were saying to Grant in all those hours between cabinet meetings.⁵⁹

Jacob Dolson Cox of Ohio, the secretary of the interior, had been born in Montreal. His family was from New York—“Cox” had originally been “Koch,” and the Dolsons too had been Dutch. He had attended Oberlin College, where he not only studied with Charles Grandison Finney but married his daughter, Helen. A lawyer, a Whig, and an early Republican, Cox became a Civil War general. He had no protracted close contact with Grant during the war, but in what contact they had Grant was sufficiently at ease for it to make sense early in 1868 for Sherman to propose Cox as Grant’s superior during the crisis with Andrew Johnson over the position of secretary of war. Cox had by then served a term as governor of Ohio. None of Grunt’s cabinet appointments can have been more dismaying for the freedmen than that of Cox. Not only had he opposed Negro suffrage in postwar Ohio, but, in a message to his abolitionist alma mater, Oberlin, he had advocated forcible segregation of the races, with the black people to be placed on a reservation deep in the South. Those Republicans whom he would have thus discarded could perhaps persuade themselves that Cox’s Department of the Interior had nothing to do with the racial issues of Reconstruction—the faint hope that the federal government would aid the blacks of the South to move onto homestead lands in the West was already dim to the point of extinction—but they knew that his negative voice would be heard at the cabinet table.

Cox was convinced that had Rawlins lived, Grant’s administration would have remained admirable. As it was, Cox early became associated with men who became critics of the president. Grant, for his part, came to dislike Cox’s moralistic tone. Along with Attorney General Hoar, Cox opposed the effort to annex Santo Domingo in 1869–70 and, further alienating Grant, sneered at advisers like Orville Babcock, calling them a “kitchen cabinet,” while he pleaded for civil-service reform. Grant did, in fact, implement a merit-related personnel policy in the government, but he did not like those who, like Cox, espoused that cause in a way he took to be critical of men he had appointed and, therefore, of himself. After Hoar had departed, Cox, on October 5, 1870, was next to go. Grant was not sorry: “General Cox thought the Interior Department was the whole government, and that Cox was the Interior Department. I had to point out to him that there were three controlling branches of the Government, and that I was the head of one of these and would so like to be considered by the Secretary of the Interior.” Cox went off to the Liberal Republican movement—which was just the fate that Grant thought he deserved—and to become dean of the Cincinnati Law School, a writer, and student of Gothic cathedrals.⁶⁰

Adolph E. Borie, the secretary of the navy, was a rich Philadelphia merchant, but unlike Grant’s other Philadelphia friends—George H. Stuart and George W. Childs—he seems not to have felt obliged to exemplify the Protestant ethic. His mother was a Huguenot. His father had been a tradesman first in Santo Domingo and then, with great success, in Philadelphia. Borie was born in 1809, graduated from the collegiate department at what is now the University of Pennsylvania at sixteen, studied in Paris, and by 1869 was exceedingly happily situated at his “country seat” some dozen miles outside Philadelphia. Grant liked to visit there, partially because he could admire his own oil painting, of the Indian family and the trader, which he had given to Borie and of which he was justifiably proud. Borie was shrewd, affable, and lazy. He wasted little time on church and philanthropic activities. He liked to play cards, and he did so interminably with Grant on the trip around the world which the former president took in 1877. Borie had rested well for the contest. He served in the cabinet only until June 1869, when he retired to private money making. He was replaced by George M. Robeson, a New Jersey lawyer, who served till the end of Grant’s incumbency. To both Borie and Robeson, ships were things that carried goods; neither man conceived of the navy in terms of martial function, and it declined from its Civil War level of efficiency.⁶¹

To ensure high moral tone in the cabinet, a Massachusetts man was chosen as attorney general; to be certain that local vote-getting patronage was sensibly dispensed, a Maryland man was chosen as postmaster general. The appointment of Ebenezer Rockwood Hoar as attorney general “promised friendship” to Henry Adams, but most of his fellow cabinet members found little friendship in Judge Hoar’s less-than-wholehearted participation in the Grant administration. Hoar was named both to reward the Republicans of Massachusetts and to please that state’s powerful senior senator, Charles Sumner. Fish thought him supercilious and could not stand him. Hoar had made still other Whigs uncomfortable when, before the war, he spoke approvingly of himself as a Conscience Whig. He later joined the Free-Soil party, and then the Republican party, and for ten years had been on the Massachusetts Supreme Judiciary Court.⁶²

Hoar’s father, Samuel, was a hero to black Americans. In 1844 he had been sent to Charleston, South Carolina, to protest the jailing there of black Massachusetts seamen while their ships were in port. A resolution of the South Carolina legislature and a mob outside his hotel made his departure mandatory, but his slow, firm step as he walked past the many who wanted to drag him out of town made him a proud symbol of defiant opposition to slaveholding. His son had graduated to a more abstract opposition to the “oligarchy of color,” as the press put it, but nothing except his friendship with Charles Sumner gave a clue as to his precise position on racial matters. When he was nominated by Grant, the New York Herald noted that “his taste and habits, especially of late years have led him to more conservative ways.” Spectacled, slightly stooped, Hoar was a pillar of the American Unitarian Association and the perfect Harvard gentleman: “He is,” insisted the New York press, “the man of most wit and of most humor” in the Saturday Club, in company with Oliver Wendell Holmes and James Russell Lowell. That wit was not to save him from an early and severe clash with Grant.⁶³

John A. J. Creswell was a Whig in 1850, but by 1856 he was a Democrat. Subsequently becoming Republican, he was a congressman from Maryland during the war, a senator from 1865 to 1867, and a Grant delegate at the Chicago convention in 1868. To the surprise of many who expected little but partisanship from a man who loved the shifts of politics, he proved an efficient administrator; he both improved the mail service and made it less expensive. He remained in the cabinet until July 1874 and served as counsel in the Alabama-claims negotiations before returning to private practice as a lawyer. After a temporary replacement, Creswell was succeeded by Marshall Jewell, a manufacturer of leather belting from Hartford, Connecticut, where he was also active in insurance, banking, and railroading. He had already served under Grant as minister to Russia. Once in the cabinet he sided with critics of the president, and he was replaced in the summer of 1876 by James N. Tyner, a former congressman who had specialized in postal matters.

There were three generals at Grant’s cabinet table—Cox, Rawlins, and Grant himself. Given the temper of the times and the huge supply of military men, the presence of more generals in the Grant administration would not have been surprising. There was no army “take-over.” Washburne, Fish, Boutwell, Creswell, Hoar, Borie, and Vice-President Colfax were all civilians. Except for Boutwell, whose appointment the Radicals pushed when a place opened in the cabinet, none could be called a party regular, let alone a party leader. Gideon Welles, totally hostile to Grant, wrote, “The Radicals are astounded, thunderstruck, mad, but…try to reconcile themselves…that things are no worse—that Grant has not, besides kicking them one side, selected Democrats.”⁶⁴

“The Stewart fiasco has given a dreadful shock to the prestige of the new administration,” wrote Horace White of the Chicago Tribune to Elihu Washburne. “The bad start we have got has almost made me sick….” He was troubled not so much because Boutwell had replaced Stewart, or because rumor had it that Boutwell’s entrance would require Hoar’s exit (since both were from Massachusetts), “but because it is such boys’ play.” Herman Melville, who regarded all soldiers as boys, could not have been surprised that Grant should gather as his presidential staff those who had played with him during the war. Horace Porter, Fred Dent, and Orville Babcock were all announced as aides to the president, as Grant began to assemble his official household.⁶⁵

Julia was not entirely happy about where that household was to be. She disliked the White House, which she thought of as the Johnsons’ home, and after the inauguration made only a ceremonial stop there before going home to “I” Street. Aware that she would have to take up official residence in the Executive Mansion, she did visit it the next day, and while Ulysses tried to make himself at home in the offices, she prowled the house, finding it “in utter confusion.” With an assistant, she took measurements and made drawings of every room, and set workmen to the task of completely redecorating the place; Mary Lincoln’s notoriously costly curtains were banished; fresh paint was brushed on everywhere.⁶⁶

Meanwhile, the “I” Street house was still full of relatives and other house guests who had come for the inauguration, and she used them as her excuse to put off moving. Ulysses was less hesitant; one day soon after he took office, he told Julia he had sold the house. Startled and angry, she asked who the buyer was, and how much he was to pay. Grant replied that Sayles J. Bowen would pay him forty thousand dollars, over ten years. She then asked why they had to sell at all; if they rented the house, they would have it after Grant left office. When he answered that he did not want to rent the house, she proposed that they close it:

To this, he only replied: “I have already sold it, I told you, and the matter is settled.” “Then have I nothing to say in this matter?” I had enjoyed my independence too long to submit quietly to this, and like a flash it occurred to me that whenever papa had bought a piece of land, he was obliged to make his wife a handsome present to induce her to sign the deed or else the deed would be imperfect. With exasperating coolness, I said: “You have sold the house?” “Yes,” he repeated. “But,” I calmly asked, “if I decline to sign the deed, what will the consequences be?”

The General looked up with an incredulous laugh and said: “Oh, nothing. It would make no difference except it would be a little embarrassing to me; that is all.” “Oh, is that so! Well,” I answered, “I will not sign it.”

At this, the General looked over his paper and said: “Very well, I will send word to Mr. Bowen that my wife will not let me sell the house.” The dear General thought this shaft would annihilate me, but it did not. I said, as I left the room quite indignant, “Very well, you may do so.”⁶⁷

It was Alexander Stewart who settled this family quarrel. Bowen, the mayor of Washington, did not get the “I” Street house (and in the midst of the 1872 campaign threatened to sue Grant for breach of contract), but Stewart led still another subscription committee composed of Grant’s admirers, and raised the money to purchase the house at a price more acceptable to Julia Grant. It was then presented to General Sherman (who grumbled for years about the cost of its upkeep).⁶⁸

With renovation of the White House only begun, the Grants took up residence there two weeks after the inauguration. Horace Porter and Orville Babcock moved in with the family, and so too did Grant’s father-in-law, that unlovable old unreconstructed rebel Colonel Dent, who happily invaded enemy headquarters at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. There he insulted phalanxes of Yankee guests; his presence stood as Julia’s reminder to Ulysses that he was not quite the master of his own White House.

But the White House was the first house of the nation. Julia and Ulysses Grant were, in the spring of 1869, at the top of the street. Whatever they had been previously denied could be denied them no more, and yet they still searched for evidence that this was so. On the Sunday after the inauguration the first family set off for church. Many visitors were still in town; the Metropolitan Methodist Church was crowded and the service well under way when the Grants arrived. Ulysses started down the center aisle toward the front pew that he had been told would be kept vacant for him. But the pew was occupied; the people in it, startled, stared at him, and he at them. He turned, Julia caught his eye, and gathering her children and sisters, she started for the rear door. Ushers, realizing what was happening, scurried for chairs, while one of them raced down the aisle and whispered to Julia that seats would be found. But embarrassed and indignant, Julia kept on toward the door and left the church. Ulysses followed her out and on to the First Presbyterian Church, where a black sexton showed them to their rented, and empty, pew.⁶⁹