Our eight years in the Executive Mansion were delightful, but there were some dark clouds in the bright sky. There was that dreadful Black Friday.
—Julia Dent Grant
Friendship is evanescent in every man’s experience, and remembered like heat lightning in past summers.
—Henry David Thoreau
IN MARCH 1869, when the Grants moved into the White House, both Julia’s and Ulysses’ families proved vulnerable to attentions that were at once innocent and dangerous. Jesse Grant, to the delight of reporters, who could count on him for outlandish comments, had become embarrassingly prolix on the subject of his son. Julia’s widowed father, old Colonel Dent, in the White House with his daughter’s family, provided a Confederate chorus in the temple of Republicanism. He did not keep silent any more than did Ulysses’ father. Both old men liked attention and responded to it. Hannah Grant, in her strange silence, was the only member of the family (other than her eldest son) who was able to ward off those who came to collect gossip. And some came with more compelling and dangerous intentions.
Grant’s three sisters had been unmarried and living at home when he went off to war. While he was away, his eldest sister, Clara, and his eldest brother, Simpson, both died. His youngest sister, Mary Frances, was married in 1863 to the Reverend Michael John Cramer, leaving Virginia at home alone with her mother and father. In March 1869, Virginia, or Jennie, a spinster at thirty-seven, was not even sure that she would get to go to Washington for her brother’s inauguration. By June she was in great demand for dinner parties in New York City—when her brother was her house guest. She had been discovered to be a valuable commodity by a sixty-one-year-old financier from New York, Abel Rathbone Corbin. Theirs was not a blind and rapturous romance; unquestionably, she was exploited for her connection to her brother. However, it should not therefore be assumed that she had a bitterly unhappy marriage, like the one her niece later endured. In any case, as Virginia Corbin she saw a good deal more happening than she had as Virginia Grant.
Her marriage to Corbin was part of the chain of events that resulted in Black Friday, September 24, 1869. It all began the previous spring, on a day when Jay Gould joined Ulysses Grant at the Corbins’. Gould and his partner, James Fisk, Jr., were two of the most brilliant young men on Wall Street. Gould, thirty-three and so slight as to seem fragile, had strange energies. He was a historian and a gardener—“a rather peculiar man,” Fisk thought—as well as a financier bold enough to take on and best Cornelius and William Henry Vanderbilt in the “Erie War” for the control of that railroad in 1868. Fisk, probably not equally bright but surely as bold, was at thirty-four a celebrator of the joys of being rich. A brassy dresser, a forthright storyteller, a flamboyant gambler, and a vulgar (that is, successful) womanizer, he was killed in 1872 for having overextended himself in the last of these enterprises. Jealous of Fisk’s success with the beautiful Josie Mansfield, Edward Stokes entered the fashionable Grand Central Hotel and shot Fisk dead. During his lifetime, Fisk was apt to tell the truth if he could not think of any good reason not to, and in his view one good reason for doing so was that he despised hypocrisy in others. He liked being rich and assumed other people had a similar hankering; he enjoyed talking about money.1
Monetary policy is the dullest of subjects. And yet its manipulation, by which men and nations become rich or poor, has provided some of the most exciting times in modern history. The season of one such exciting time was splendidly launched by a dinner that Gould gave for Julia and Ulysses Grant on June 15, 1869, the day of their visit to the Corbins’. It culminated in Black Friday, when brokers who had contracted to buy gold for their customers at $160 an ounce found, after the price collapsed, that payment for the purchases had to be obtained by selling the gold at only $135 an ounce. What was worse, in many cases the original purchase had been made with a loan supported by collateral worth far less than the total of the loan. When payment was called for, the collateral, whether gold or other assets, had to be sold in a rapidly falling market. Scores of Wall Street speculators were ruined; hundreds more lost vast sums.2
Fisk later told a congressional investigating committee that in his years on Wall Street he never saw anything to match Black Friday. There was the “deathlike silence” of intense concentration, as gold was traded up from $143 to $162 an ounce. (Fisk had let out the word that one had better buy at $160 that day; it would cost $200 on the next.) As buying continued, the speculators were held in “dream-like terror” that the swift, unnatural rise could not continue. Then, suddenly, selling began, and there was “the wildest confusion and the most unearthly screaming of men, always excitable, now driven to the verge of temporary insanity by the consciousness of ruin, or the delusive dream of immense wealth.” Noting that they were in “bedlam” and that one of their former associates was now “crazy as a loon,” Gould and Fisk, “not desiring to stay there any longer…went out by a side door” and drove uptown to Fisk’s office over the opera house. When the day was over, it was “each man drag out his own corpse.”3
The Gold Room, in which this scene was played out, and the opportunity for such speculation, were bizarre outgrowths of the government’s successful attempt to pay its bills during the Civil War. The cost of supplies had been enormous, and legislation had been passed empowering the federal government to greatly increase the volume of money in circulation by issuing greenbacks. These were bills of exchange, ordinary dollar bills, that were not backed dollar for dollar by gold—hence the establishment of the market in gold, for use in foreign commerce, that was institutionalized in the Gold Room. The greenbacks were backed by the pledge of the Lincoln government, which, through a confident appeal to patriotism and profit, was able to sell huge bond issues to a well-employed citizenry that had available for their purchase plenty of greenbacks earned by supplying the army. After the war, Andrew Johnson’s secretary of the treasury, Hugh McCulloch, who was conservative, began a policy of severe monetary retrenchment in an effort to return the dollar to a point where it would once again be redeemable in specie. The volume of business also dropped, and the economy was in a mild recession.
This is not to say that the country was in a depression—that was yet to come. But some regions suffered more severely than others from the reduction in the money supply. Hardest hit were the South, still desperately poor in the aftermath of the war, and the other great rural part of the nation, the West. Conservative businessmen in New York applauded the retrenchment program, with its promise of a stable currency that would benefit existing businesses. But western wheat growers, with huge crops and little money, were eager to sell their crops overseas, and the program could be expected to discourage foreign purchases by raising the cost of the dollar in terms of other currencies. Gold had held at a relatively stable level from the end of the war until the start of the Grant administration and was selling at a low point of $130 an ounce in March 1869, as Grant and Secretary of the Treasury Boutwell undertook to continue McCulloch’s retrenchment program. The greenbacks, which no longer commanded confidence, were to be turned in (at a discount) and removed from circulation, in exchange for currency redeemable in gold and, hence, expected to appreciate in value. The problem, as the citizens of the West and the South recognized, was that fewer people would hold those fewer dollars.
Prosperity was, of course, the goal of the new administration, and people kept their eye on the president as he went, briefly, among the moneychangers in New York. On Thursday, June 15, 1869, Julia and Ulysses, after visiting Fred at West Point, arrived at the Corbins’ for an afternoon visit before going on to Boston. One of those who called on the president there, and was welcomed cordially by Corbin, was Jay Gould. Grant had already accepted a sumptuous invitation from Gould, and after the visit with Corbin, Gould escorted the president and his lady to the most splendid of his steamships, which carried passengers by way of Long Island Sound to Fall River, Massachusetts. There, they would take the train to Boston. At the dinner party on board were several men active in the financial world who were more than willing to go out of their way to learn Grant’s thoughts on monetary policy. The president was on his own; no one else connected with the government was present. He did not have Secretary of the Treasury Boutwell there to advise him.4
James Fisk recalled the occasion in his testimony before a congressional investigation committee seven months later:
…on our passage over to Boston with General Grant, we endeavored to ascertain what his position in regard to the finances was. We went down to supper about nine o’clock, intending while we were there to have this thing pretty thoroughly talked up, and, if possible, to relieve him from any idea of putting the price of gold down…. We talked there until about half-past twelve. When we first commenced to talk, I could see that he was for returning to a specie basis. I remember the remark that he made that we might as well tap the bubble at once as at any other time, saying that it had got to come to that.
The president, like the more conservative of the gentlemen with whom he was dining, expected the economy to shrink. Jay Gould, who did not want it to, recalled at the congressional investigation that Grant “thought there was a certain amount of fictitiousness about the prosperity of the country.” Gould advised the president that the way to combat this was not with further contraction of the currency. Instead, he believed, Boutwell should increase the supply of money in order to stimulate the economy. More stringency, he argued (with a bit of exaggeration that must not have appealed to Grant) could “almost lead to civil war.” Gould went on to assert that “strikes among the workmen, and…the manufactories would have to stop.” Grant, according to Fisk’s recollection, entered into the conversation with a good deal of spirit: “I [Fisk] made up my mind that he was individually paying a good deal of attention to the finances, which he would to a certain extent control.… I know that when we got to Boston, Mr. Gould and myself made up our minds that the prospects [for keeping the government from selling gold and diminishing the money supply still more] did not look promising.” Gould said succinctly that he “supposed from that conversation that the President was a contractionist.”5
Clearly, Fisk and Gould had a job cut out for them. But neither of them was afraid of this particular kind of work. Their ally was to be Abel Corbin, “a very shrewd old gentleman,” said Gould at the investigation, who was “much more far-seeing than the newspapers give him credit for.” Corbin later denied ever having arranged to bring Gould and the president together, but the fact is that after June 15 and prior to September 24 Gould met Grant at Corbin’s house three times. In addition, it was assumed by Gould and Fisk that when alone with the president, Corbin was assiduously pressing their case against the government’s sale of gold. Later, in great distress before the investigating congressmen, Corbin took out of his pocket his daybook and recited all the times his brother-in-law had stopped on his way through town—to Newport, to Saratoga—but he denied arranging any interview for Jay Gould or, emphatically, for James Fisk, Jr.6
Gould, for his part, described for the investigators his three meetings with the president. No occasion was too sacred; when Grant was traveling south to see Rawlins, who was dying, Gould called and found that the “President had changed his views…. he was satisfied that the country had had a very bountiful harvest; that there would be a large surplus; that unless we could find a market abroad for that surplus it would put down prices here….” Gold, dear against the dollar, would be cheap against foreign currencies, and gold was accessible to foreign buyers who needed it to buy American wheat. Gould gained the impression from Grant that he would make sure his administration would “facilitate the movement of breadstuffs.” Gould was impressed by the fact that this international trade “seemed to have been a matter of study with him”; the astute trader was “surprised at the clearness with which he seemed to comprehend the whole question.” Things seemed to Gould to be well in hand.7
Gould’s discussions with Grant left him confident that no gold would be sold by the government. Fisk was reassured on less intellectual grounds. He had arranged an early-warning system. Fisk knew that Corbin had tried to get his first wife’s son-in-law, Robert B. Catherwood, the job of assistant treasurer of the United States. In this capacity he would have handled the sale of gold on the Wall Street market. Catherwood had backed out when he learned that he would be expected to co-operate in the use of a code system to ensure that Corbin and Gould would be informed before public announcement was made of any prospective government gold sales. Failing to get Catherwood into the job, Corbin lobbied successfully for the appointment of General Daniel Butterfield, the man who had headed Alexander T. Stewart’s subscription committee that financed the purchase of Grant’s “I” Street house. The appointment of Butterfield had the reassuring support of Stewart as well as Corbin, and Grant agreed to it. General Butterfield, it turned out, had a particular interest in his work; Gould had arranged a margin account for him, and Butterfield played the market he was supposed to be regulating.8
Still stronger assurance that Grant would support gold appeared in the form of a rumor that Corbin, in addition to carrying an account in gold of $2,000,000 for himself, was carrying speculative accounts of $500,000 each for Julia Grant and Horace Porter. Orville Babcock was also said to have been charmed into accepting such an account. Seven years later, in a congressional investigation of other activities of Babcock’s, evidence was presented to the effect that he had indeed carried a gold account, with Harris C. Fahnestock of Jay Cooke & Company, and had lost $40,000. Fahnestock’s later testimony tends to confirm Porter’s involvement, but there is only the word of James Fisk and a possibly doctored record of the shipment of cash by the Adams Express Company to Mrs. Grant in October to suggest that the first lady too was a speculator. Fisk told the congressmen, “Mr. Gould…sold $500,000 of gold belonging to Mrs. Grant, which cost 33 [$133], for 37 [$137], or something in the neighborhood, leaving a balance in her favor of about $27,000, and…a check for $25,000 had been sent.” It is possible that Corbin and Gould had lied to Fisk in order to induce their ebullient colleague to get Mrs. Grant’s name out on the grapevine, but Fisk’s manner when talking to the congressional investigators suggested that he had long known and accepted with equanimity the fact that she was a fellow speculator.9
In the middle of September, soon after the third conversation with Grant, Gould once again became nervous, not about Grant this time, but about Boutwell. He knew that his Wall Street enemies the contractionists were working hard to persuade the secretary of the treasury to adopt a policy of selling gold and buying and retiring greenbacks, and that they had planned a dinner party for Boutwell. Wondering if it was possible that the president might change his mind and agree to the government’s sale of gold, or that Boutwell might do so on his own authority, and drive the price of gold down, he looked to Corbin for reassurance. “I went to see Mr. Corbin about it,” Gould testified at the congressional investigation, and “he said he did not think it possible, the President had so thoroughly made up his mind….” Corbin, because “he knew the man so well” was confident that his brother-in-law, who had “arrived at his conclusions after a good deal of deliberation and examination,” would not change them.10
Gould, who did not want this important matter left to chance, persuaded Corbin to write a long letter to the president, which proved to be a hortatory lecture on the benefit to the nation of not depressing the market by the sale of government gold holdings. The Grants were then visiting relatives of Julia’s in Washington, Pennsylvania, and Fisk provided a trusted messenger, W. O. Chapin, to make sure the brotherly letter reached its destination. Later, no one seemed clear on whether Chapin reached the western Pennsylvania city on September 18, 19, or 20; the nineteenth is most likely. Grant and Porter were playing croquet when Chapin arrived—a proper, well-dressed Wall Street messenger, appearing important, but in fact simply a dutiful employee unaware of the significance of the letter he carried. Not spoiling the president’s shot, a servant told Porter that a gentleman was waiting, and Porter replied that they would be in as soon as the game was finished. As they entered the house, Porter went into the parlor to receive Chapin, while Grant remained on the porch. Porter then asked Grant to come into the parlor; the president took the letter from the messenger, and walked back out on the porch to read it. Porter, exceedingly curious, followed him, but later he pointedly said that he had walked out “in another direction”—that is, he did not sneak a look. Grant did not read the letter to him, and Porter went back into the parlor and chatted with Chapin about the weather. Grant presently returned, and the messenger, anxious to be of service, asked if there was any reply. Grant said that everything was all right, that there was no answer, and the man left the house, went to town in his buggy, and sent a telegram to New York: “Delivered. All right.”11
Back at the house, his curiosity aroused, Porter asked the president who the man was. Grant had assumed he was simply an accommodating local postman, but Porter told him that he had come with a letter of introduction from Corbin. It was clear to Porter, as it now was to Grant, that Corbin had gone to the great trouble of sending a specially chosen messenger equipped with credentials that would ensure his letter’s being put straight into Grant’s hands. Corbin’s urgency was approaching desperation, and now, at last, Ulysses Grant smelled a rat. The letter from Abel was not a selfless treatise on the wisdom of one economic measure in contrast to another.12
Julia was in the library, reading and answering a second letter brought by the messenger—one written to her by Jennie Corbin. Ulysses walked in and asked her to whom she was writing. Julia, in her Memoirs, recorded this less than blissful moment in her marriage: “I answered, ‘your sister.’ He said: ‘Write this.’ Then he dictated….” Now, Ulysses Grant did not dictate to his wife; if he did so in that instance—and the word is hers—it was because she was in a compromising position. Around the household, she was in charge; she did not silently defer to her lord and master, particularly on money matters, unless she was in a very tight spot. She later recalled that in the “delightful” eight years in the White House, “there were some dark clouds in the bright sky.” She was referring to this day when one very dark cloud indeed fell over Washington, Pennsylvania—just before “that dreadful Black Friday.”13
According to Corbin and Gould, the only two men known to have read Julia’s letter to Jennie Corbin, she wrote her sister-in-law, “Tell your husband that my husband is very much annoyed by your speculations. You must close them as quick as you can!” This would have been understood by Jennie as a warning that the president was not prepared to be duped any further and would instead size up the market without reference to possible harm to his sister and her husband. The possibility that gold might be sold by the government was not stated. It did not need to be. The letter was signed “Sis.” There are not a great many of Julia Grant’s letters extant, and it is impossible to know how frequently she used such a term; there were certainly some occasions on which she and her relatives did use the affectionate nickname “Sis.” In any event, its adoption in this instance strikes one as a highly convenient way to avoid having “Julia Grant” attached to a very sensitive and authoritative document.14
Meanwhile, in New York, the telegram saying everything was all right had been received, and Fisk, Gould, and Corbin took it to mean not that the message had been delivered, but that Grant had acquiesced to the logic of Corbin’s letter and would not sell gold. On the evening of September 22 Fisk talked with Mr. and Mrs. Corbin at their house:
Mrs. Corbin came into the room. I had been introduced to Mrs. Corbin before. The thing had gone beyond…mere courtesy…. That was the first time I had seen her in reference to this transaction. We sat down and talked the matter over quite fully. I did not cover any matters up. I took it for granted that they had bought gold, and…had as much interest in the matter as I had. She made this remark: “I know there will be no gold sold by the government; I am quite positive there will be no gold sold; for this is a chance of a lifetime for us; you need not have any uneasiness whatever.”15
On September 23 the Corbins opened their mail and were terrified by the letter from dear “Sis.” The jig was up; Ulysses was on to what they were doing. When in the later investigation Congressman Norman B. Judd asked repeatedly, “What do you mean by ‘Sis’?” Corbin replied, “I mean just what I say. That was the signature to the letter. I am so agitated…. I am a little excited, very weak, and very nervous. I am perfectly broken down, and there is but a wreck left.” But the questioner did not relent, and Corbin had to resume his testimony and state that he was sure the letter was from his wife’s sister-in-law. He also described how he had reacted when shown the letter: “I was very much excited, and my wife still more so—such rumors were so disgraceful…. Engaged in buying and selling gold; what a terrible thing!…I never did have a more unhappy day than I had when witnessing the distress which that letter inflicted upon my wife. I must get out instantly—instantly!”16
It was not until evening that Corbin got Gould to call at his house and showed him the letter. Barely credulous, one of the investigating congressmen asked, “Did you put it into his hands?” Corbin replied, “No, sir. The correspondence was between two ladies…. We were in my library, sitting under one of the chandeliers, in front of the table, so that he might possibly have looked over my shoulder and seen it; but I think [he was] too much of a gentleman to do that.” Gould recalled no such delicate indiscretion: “I took the letter in my hands, and of course I had to glance at the whole of it. He [Corbin] called my attention to the particular parts.” Gould could see, as Corbin had, that there was no longer any assurance that the government would not sell gold. Indeed, the opposite was likely.17
Now the question for both of them was how to get out of the market without starting a panic that would depreciate their holdings before they could sell them. Corbin tried to get Gould to buy his account, so he could say to his brother-in-law that he owned no speculative gold. Gould refused to bail Corbin out. Instead he maneuvered to lock him in and proposed giving him a check for $100,000 to feed out to parties of interest. Gould did not dare permit the sale of Corbin’s gold for fear it would trigger a collapse in the market, and he still wanted to hold Corbin hostage against Grant’s actions. On the night of September 23, talking to Gould, Corbin still hoped to use his supposed influence over Grant to save the speculators’ day. He wanted Gould to agree to buy his gold; then he would write the president that “he had not a dollar of interest in gold or governments,” and would urge the president, as a disinterested observer, not to allow Boutwell to sell any gold. Said Gould, “I did not bite….”18
Gould had to keep Corbin in the deal: “Mr. Corbin, I am undone if that letter gets out.” Perhaps $100,000 would ensure that it would not, and that Corbin would stay in the market. Gould urged Corbin to think about it overnight. Returning to the Corbins’ on Friday morning, September 24, Gould was admitted to the hall of the house, and standing at the foot of the stairs, said to the old man on the landing, “If you will remain in and take the chances of the market I will give you my check for $100,000.” Jennie Corbin joined her husband at the railing and pleaded with him to give up the speculation. Corbin turned to his caller: “Mr. Gould[,] my wife says, ‘No; Ulysses thinks it wrong, and that it ought to end.’” Gould’s reaction was later described by Corbin to the investigators: “Mr. Gould stood there for a little while looking very thoughtful—exceedingly thoughtful. He then left—about 10 o’clock—and went into Wall Street….” There Gould forced the price of gold still higher on the basis of the fact that Corbin was still in the market, which, he implied, meant that Mrs. Grant too was still in the market. Then Gould began, anonymously, selling from his own gold account; he knew what was apt to be coming from the Treasury.19
Meanwhile, the Grants had had enough of croquet and left Washington, Pennsylvania, for the District of Columbia. Secretary Boutwell also arrived in the capital on Thursday, September 23, and that evening he and the president had a conference at the White House. The belief was that a price of about $145 an ounce would encourage the sale of wheat abroad. But now the price of gold was expected to go still higher. The gold market no longer reflected foreign trade; runaway speculation had begun. The president and the secretary of the treasury, recalling the panic of 1857, agreed that if the price went up again on Friday they would sell government gold to drive the price down. The next morning, with the price still climbing, the only question remaining was how much gold to sell. The two men, meeting alone, discussed the amount. Boutwell proposed $3,000,000; Grant—with the conviction of a convert—suggested $5,000,000; finally, they settled on $4,000,000. The sell order was sent over two telegraph lines, to ensure its arrival and to deprive Butterfield, whom they may already have suspected of collusion, of the opportunity to get advance notice to anyone. They did take the risk that some telegraph-company employees might have been paid to tip off a broker, who could then act seconds before the news became public. In any event, regardless of whether any other traders sneaked out whole, as Gould did, there was no stopping the impact of the government’s sale of gold. The telegram reached New York at 11:57 A.M. The price of gold had passed $160 at 11:53 but perhaps because of Gould’s gold sales, had begun to fall by 11:54, before the arrival of the telegram. The result of the government’s sale was a rout. By 12:07 the price was down to $140. It was a day of hysterical trading in the Gold Room. Some men were ruined. Others, who had gambled that the price would fall, became rich. Because of the collapse, Corbin could not realize enough on the sale of his gold to cover the loan he had taken out to buy it. Although not altogether ruined, he did find himself in greatly diminished circumstances. The Corbins moved to Jersey City.20
Black Friday caused severe panic in the gold-buying community and in the financial world that supplied the credit for its speculations. One bank, the Tenth National Bank of New York, failed, but a general recession like the one that was to be triggered by the failure of Jay Cooke in 1873 did not occur. Had the government in the preceding months not tried to be neutral but instead participated actively—buying or selling gold as necessary to keep the market stable—the game would not have been the speculators’ alone. It would then have been possible to execute either an expansionist or a contractionist policy without causing the kind of panic that broke out when, after no activity for so long a period, the government sold gold worth $4,000,000. (It is interesting that so small a sum could have so large an effect. The total amount of money in 1869 was very limited indeed.)
The Congress that voted to investigate the circumstances of the panic was in the control of Grant’s own party, but the committee nevertheless subjected the administration to close scrutiny. As a result of its findings, General Butterfield was forced to resign; Grant had suffered his first experience of the exposure of a corrupt official in his administration. The chairman of the committee, Congressman James A. Garfield of Ohio, worked hard to convert the taking of testimony into a seminar on monetary questions. A champion of “sound money,” he wanted the events in the Gold Room on Black Friday turned into a metaphor for the horrors of an expansionist monetary policy. The committee Democrats, on the other hand, doggedly focused their attention on matters less exalted than economic theory. They wanted to question Mrs. Corbin and Mrs. Grant about whether the Corbins’ account was also, in fact, Julia Dent Grant’s speculative account. The Republican majority blocked the summons of the two women to appear as witnesses, but did not prevent a limited inquiry into a mysterious shipment that had arrived that fall at the White House for Julia. Rumors that the first lady had received a package that did not contain clothes or curtains led to a check of the records of the Adams Express Company. Suspicious congressmen wondered if the amount of money—apparently in cash—delivered to Mrs. Grant was $2,500, even though a clerk at Adams’s insisted that there had always been a decimal point in the figure listed in the record book and that Mrs. Grant had received only $25.00.
No firm proof exists that the packet of money was connected with a speculation by Julia Grant, but why would she have received cash in the mail unless someone could not write her a check? And why had Ulysses been so uncharacteristically stern with her when he discovered her writing the letter to his sister on that “dreadful” day? Julia was both naive and shrewd. She knew little of the ways of the New York financial world, but she knew everything about being deprived of money. She believed fervently that her Ulysses—and she—deserved well of the Republic, and she lived in a world that, in large part, saw rewards in terms of money. They had been able to accept gratefully railroad passes and houses with closets full of fine linen, financed by subscription; why could there not be a small loan permitting her to make a perfectly legal investment? But if Grant’s wife as well as his sister had been involved in the speculation, did he now fear that he was in danger of exposure as having been a party to Julia’s attempt to add to their not very stable fortune? We do not know. We do know that here, in the fall of his first year as president, the greed for money of people at least as close as his sister had left its touch on his administration.
There was still another dimension of ugliness to the frantic money grubbing of September 1869; this was the fact that it coincided with the death of Ulysses Grant’s closest friend. John A. Rawlins had consumption, the “dreaded dark disease.” In August, while with his young wife and three infant children at her family place in Danbury, Connecticut, Rawlins had an attack, but when he received notice of a cabinet meeting he set off for Washington. His wife, possibly afraid the children would catch the disease, stayed behind. In New York he had another hemorrhage but, on a hot dusty day, insisted on making the trip to the capital. In Washington he again hemorrhaged, and Grant and Hamilton Fish, who had come down from New York for the meeting, were surprised to see Rawlins at his customary place at the cabinet table, next to the president.21
Grant had watched his brother Simpson die of tuberculosis; there had been lapses and recoveries and then the long final process of the disease. Now Rawlins had the same affliction, and Grant must have known his friend would die. The day after the cabinet meeting, Rawlins sought out Grant at the White House; after a long visit, Grant said good-by to his closest friend and resumed his restless summer travels, going north in a private railroad car to rejoin Julia at Saratoga. There the Grants prepared for a side trip to Utica with Senator Roscoe Conkling. But on Sunday, September 5, while on his way back from church with Horace Porter, Grant was handed a message saying that Rawlins was not expected to survive the day. At the hotel he wrote Conkling a note, asking to be excused from the Utica trip because he wanted to get back to Rawlins, although, Conkling reported him as saying, “[I] scarcely…[have] a hope I may see him alive.”22
Rawlins, alone in Washington without his wife or best friend, was tended by another of the band of men who had been so close during the war, Ely Parker. That Sunday, Tecumseh Sherman was also at his bedside, as was Jacob Cox, who had known neither Grant nor Rawlins intimately during the war, but had come to visit his cabinet colleague. As Rawlins talked—or struggled to—Cox became intensely aware of how powerful was the pull of friendship between Rawlins and Grant. At one point, when they expected him to die at any moment, Rawlins said to Sherman, “What time is it?” And as Sherman looked at his watch, Rawlins said, “When will he get here?” Sherman gently lied: “In about ten minutes.”23
Grant had not yet left Saratoga. He did not know if he had too little time or plenty with which to reach Rawlins, he disliked disrupting Julia’s plans, and, with little taste for melodrama, he wished to avoid summoning a special train on a Sunday afternoon. At 4:45 a telegram arrived from Sherman, saying that Rawlins was calling for Grant, and the president realized he must go at once. Julia, possibly fearing for her own children and, consciously or unconsciously, resentful of Rawlins, did not want to go to Washington. So Ulysses set out without her, on the 5:50 train. (Julia followed the next day, as far as the Corbins’, in New York; the White House, being redecorated, was still “uninhabitable,” was the excuse given the press for her staying away from Washington.) On the train a private area had been screened off in a dining car for the president, but he had to endure the company of Roscoe Conkling and Judge Ward Hunt, who had come to escort him to Utica. When he got off the train, Conkling told reporters that Grant was “melancholy” and “talked of little else but the close relationship that had long been held between himself and General Rawlins.”24
Reaching Albany a little after 7:00, Grant was dismayed not to find the special train he thought had been arranged for. Rather than wait until 2:00 A.M. for the next regular train to come through from Chicago, he took the night boat to New York and spent much of the maddeningly placid trip south on the Hudson sitting alone on deck, talking to no one. The boat docked early in the morning; he took a taxi to the Astor House for breakfast and a conference with Jay Gould, then another taxi and a ferry to Jersey City, where, again, a promised special train was not waiting. On the regular train, at Wilmington, he was given a message that Rawlins was sinking. At Baltimore, the special locomotive and car at last appeared, and he sped the last lap of the trip into Washington. Sherman and Cox were on the platform and, his face immobile in sorrow, “the President almost buried himself in the carriage,” during the drive from the station. Ulysses Grant walked into John Rawlins’s room at 5:15 P.M.; his friend had died at 4:12.25
When the doctor told the president how his patient had repeatedly called for him, Grant could only mutter that he had wanted to be there. Flooded with frustration, he “explained to Dr. Bliss the obstacles that lay in the way of his reaching here sooner.” Then, as if he had been there on time, he sat down and wrote a message of condolence to Mrs. Rawlins: “Your beloved husband expired at twelve minutes after four this afternoon….”26
The meaning of the death of John Rawlins to Ulysses Grant lay not in the removal of an honest voice of humanitarian conscience, great though that loss was. Grant had never seen Rawlins as a mere adviser; he was a friend. He was the friend Grant had been deprived of as a boy and as a young man. He had been powerfully present during the intense years of the war; they had been through it together. No one could replace John Rawlins. Now in the first year of the frightening business of the presidency, Rawlins was stolen from Grant, and he had not even been on hand to protest the theft.