XXVI

AROUND THE WORLD

…all the world’s my way.

—William Shakespeare

ON MAY 17, 1877, Julia and Ulysses Grant left Philadelphia, sailing on the Indiana for a vacation in England. Two years later, after having been nodded to by almost every crowned head in Europe, after touring fiords in Norway and ruins in Pompeii, after riding donkeys into a city in upper Egypt, and the afternoon train from Paddington Station to spend the night as Queen Victoria’s guests at Windsor, after conversing with Prince Bismarck and Disraeli during the Congress of Berlin, and with Gorchakov in St. Petersburg, after visiting Russia, India, Siam, and China, and receiving a handshake from the emperor of Japan, they came home. Julia and Ulysses had looked at the whole wide world. Theirs was perhaps the grandest tour an American couple had ever made.

At a pyramid in Egypt, 1878. The Grants are in the front row, third and fourth from left. LIBRARY OF CONGRESS

The two tourists were themselves on display. The unpretentious man in the dark suit was his country’s greatest warrior-hero, and the world wanted to have a look at him. The general and his lady were ambassadors of both American simplicity and American power. They exemplified their strange democracy, which had uneasily made itself into a nation-state and was to become a great power. The military strength was not yet there. Or rather, it was gone. With Grant’s help, the Civil War army had been shrunk to minuscule dimensions, matching those of the exceedingly modest navy. But the world had read about the ferocity of the armies that had swollen into huge size and done such terrible battle in Grant’s Civil War. General Grant, coming among them, was a reminder to people around the world that such might could well up in America again.

Ulysses and Julia Grant stood for a stolid American strength that was not to be repudiated for a century. Poking about the world, peering at the sights, they looked through almost every door that America later entered as a world power. A hundred years after, American leaders, more hurried, moved around the world on trips considered mandatory by politicians committed to the idea that the United States must be not merely a strong nation, but the strongest of them all. Lincoln and Grant had reunited this nation; in doing so, they had created a country very different from the one into which they had been born.

A cartoonist’s view of Grant as a traveler. LIBRARY OF CONGRESS

Displaying the visible signs of greatness was a business that English settlers had been about since they had come to the new land and made it theirs and themselves Americans. Assertions of superiority were made by seventeenth-century Englishmen—turned Americans—in their anguished and devout definition of themselves as people of a new and better world. By the time Benjamin Franklin went to Paris there was a new republic to proclaim, and his coonskin cap somehow gave it authenticity. Franklin’s particular salesmanship had something to do with getting venture capital for an exciting new enterprise and for winning a war. But despite his practical urgency, Franklin—and John Adams, and Thomas Jefferson, and other American travelers—spoke for a nation that asserted that its leadership in the world was in the realm of the moral.

Styles changed—Grant carried a tall, black silk hat—but the techniques of a particular brand of American diplomacy did not. Grant was true to American form in the manner he displayed when he called on the most powerful man in Europe. Dispensing with a carriage, the general “saunters in a kind of nonchalant way into the court-yard” of Bismarck’s palace and “throws away a half-smoked cigar” in order to return the salute of the startled guards. Then “before he has time to ring, two liveried servants throw wide open the door, and the Ex-President passes into a spacious marble hall.” Grant had made exactly the entrance he wanted to make. Jefferson, who walked to his inaugural, would have approved. It was American. The difference was that the America that entered by those wide-open doors of world politics was a nation that had lost its republican innocence. American superiority was no longer primarily moral. And the man who embodied both that loss and the material and martial strength that replaced it was the simplest of Americans, Ulysses Grant.¹

The trip began as a personal adventure. The Grants had had eight years in the White House, and they had come under a crescendo of criticism for the corruption of the administration. Since they had nowhere to go and nothing to do, it was natural for them to take a vacation, one that would get them away from all the hectoring. England, where their daughter lived, was the most logical possible destination. It was to be a family visit. And yet from the moment they arrived in Liverpool, or rather, from the time they prepared to leave from Philadelphia, the trip was not private at all. In all the months in England, they spent but a few days with Nellie and her new baby, and these visits seemed almost afterthoughts next to the great republican progression of public occasions on which Julia and Ulysses embarked. The tour was celebrated in two handsome lavender-bound volumes with beautiful illustrations, entitled Around the World with General Grant, that lay on hundreds of fine marble table tops in the 1880’s. The book was written by John Russell Young, a reporter for the New York Herald who was part of the entourage. The trip was anything but simple.

It all began at the Philadelphia home of the Grants’ friend George W. Childs. Grant wrote his youngest son, Jesse, kidding and mildly chastising him: “You young worthless[.] I expected to see you at Grandmas. You will not now get to see her before sailing for Europe.” (The Grants had been visiting the Corbins, with whom Hannah Grant now lived.) “You know we sail on the 17th and if you should not get here you will be left without visible means of support.” Before the seventeenth arrived, there was a luncheon with the banker A. J. Drexel, whose correspondents around the world were to handle Grant’s finances on the trip; a reception at the handsome brick Union League Club on Broad Street; another reception at Independence Hall, at which “2500 people an hour in a steady stream” came to view the former president; fireworks in the city’s handsome Fairmount Park; and yet another banquet. On the day before they left, “a very pretty ceremony took place, when the soldiers’ orphans—wards of the state—marched in procession past Mr. Childs’ residence.” With perfect deportment, the children walked past the man who as much as any was responsible for their dependent status. Grant stood on the steps “extending to each little one…a pleasant word.” On the morning of the seventeenth, Grant breakfasted with his chief lieutenants from the war and from the presidential years—General Sherman and Hamilton Fish—along with Governor John F. Hartranft and old Senator Simon Cameron. Jesse had caught up with his parents by then, and it was time to go.²

So many people escorted the Grants to their ship that two cutters were needed to carry them. Buck Grant and Colonel Fred Grant were there, but Horace Porter was the only one of the old army staff present to say farewell to the general. On Julia’s boat was a man with an eye for grandeur, the artist Albert Bierstadt. Small boats decorated with bunting filled the river and nervously avoided each other as their passengers cheered the general. The party transferred to a third boat for a bon voyage luncheon; then, after seven toasts, with accompanying short speeches, and the general’s reply, they all set off on still more escort boats. Finally, the Grants boarded the Indiana, to sail across the ocean.

Julia was seasick. Ulysses, smoking cigars constantly, was just fine; the first morning at sea, as legend has it, he said “that he felt better than he had for sixteen years.” The general was said to recall later, “…from the 4th of March till the 17th of May I dined formally…every day…and sometimes took two lunches the same day [and therefore] I thought I was a good subject for seasickness, and expected the motion of the ship would turn me inside out. As a matter of fact, I was disappointed.” After ten days they reached Ireland and, the next morning, May 28, 1877, Liverpool. There they encountered an enormous cheering crowd on the dock—as well as Adam Badeau—and, the following evening, a banquet. All these Englishmen, as ardent as any Americans who had ever greeted him, fascinated Grant. Badeau, now consul general in London, was more fascinated by the barrage of invitations to visit other cities. Officiously, he took charge of Grant’s tour of England, but what happened was that England took charge of Grant.³

The Grants spent two days in Liverpool, where “the party minutely inspected the new dock works in progress,” the town hall, and the “free library.” Next, they went to Manchester for “a round of visits among the celebrated manufactories.” In his response to the mayor’s address of welcome, Grant said, “I was very well aware during the war of the sentiments of the great mass of the people of Manchester”; they had favored the North and the antislavery cause even though, being in the cotton trade, they invited hardship by doing so. “There exists,” the general said, “a feeling of friendship toward Manchester distinct and separate from that which my countrymen feel towards all other parts of England.” At Bedford, the mayor likened Grant, the conqueror, to Hannibal. Then the party took the Midland Railway to London. On May 31, Julia and Ulysses Grant arrived at St. Pancras Station, Sir George Gilbert Scott’s new and glamorous medieval castle in brick.⁴

The next morning, the Prince of Wales and the general met at the running of the Oaks at Epsom; the next night, Julia and Ulysses walked up the curved staircase around the body of Canova’s naked marble Napoleon to enter the magnificent dining room of Apsley House, the home of the duke of Wellington. There Julia saw how the British honored their warrior-heroes; Apsley House was splendidly appointed. The Iron Duke’s son greeted a general who was as flattered by comparisons to the victor of Waterloo as he was dismayed by those which likened him to Napoleon. Looking into the eyes of Lawrence’s fine portrait of Wellington, Grant commented on how much the other warrior had accomplished with fewer men and arms than he had commanded. His host, eager to find brashness in his American guest, took the remark as Grant’s boasting that he was the mightier general. The anecdote, embellished to illustrate American gaucherie, made its rounds in Tory society, but Grant heard nothing of such sotto voce sneers. The next day, Sunday, in Westminster Abbey, the Grants listened as the dean worked a “graceful allusion to the…Ex-President” into his sermon.⁵

On June 5, Edwards Pierrepont got his reward in his particular heaven. At his fine house on Cavendish Square, that particular gentleman gave a reception for the Grants that drew everyone he could have desired, including the Prince of Wales. At dinner, the Prince sat next to Grant and directly across the table from Julia. Afterward, the Grants received a “small and early party” of celebrities, including most of England’s leading politicians. These were present in numbers rivaled only by the society reporters. “Mr. & Mrs. Gladstone,” presumably chatting about something other than the former prime minister’s partisanship of the South during the war, “remained…with General Grant until the arrival of Lord Derby, when…[they] moved loftily away.” The foreign secretary, reported Kate Field, in the next day’s Morning Post, beamed radiantly as he approached the general; a bit later, Grant was cordial as the staunch old Quaker John Bright, “with a wealth of snowy hair which surmounts the massive, cheery face” came up and greeted him heartily.⁶

Outside, a vast awning covered the walk from the street to the door of the minister’s house, the roadway was carpeted, and servants in scarlet opened carriage doors and held lanterns and torches, “so that no tiny foot in satin shoon shall make a false step.” On the opposite curb, the London policemen stood in front of “massed…detachments of England’s poor and hungry,” who had come to “get a glimpse of the fairy land wherein abide riches….” Riches, and Ulysses Grant of Point Pleasant, Ohio. Amid yards of marchionesses and duchesses, the earl of Caithness walked up to Grant: “On his arm was the Countess, whose bosom was,” alarmingly, “literally ablaze with diamonds.” Julia in claret stamped velvet and cream-colored satin, with a high collar and long sleeves—in June—was talking with the “stately and even beautiful Mrs. Gladstone,” who wore soft “blue and white, with a cluster of fine diamonds setting off the long blue plume in her hair.” All the notable Americans in town were present, among them the Junius Spencer Morgans, Julia Ward Howe, and Moncure D. Conway. Robert Browning was there, and so was Arthur Sullivan. The great ladies of London appraised Grant and pronounced him fit. “He looks like a soldier,” said a viscountess.⁷

And on it went. Society reporters outdid themselves: the general and his lady, they said, sat down to dine with fifty peers at the duke of Devonshire’s table and with royalty at Princess Louise’s Kensington Palace. Recalling Grant’s presidency, the marquess of Ripon, who had been in America six years earlier to negotiate the treaty of Washington, gave a dinner, and Sir Edward Thornton was present. The general called on ancient Earl Russell at Pembroke Lodge, and talked, one might guess, more happily of grandchildren than of wartime politics. At the breakfast table of the New York Tribune reporter George Smalley were men of letters: Matthew Arnold, Frank Hill, Robert Browning (again), and Sir Frederick Pollock, but Anthony Trollope, though he hurried to the reception, missed meeting Grant. Benjamin Disraeli gave “my colossal American dinner,” with forty male guests—and Julia. “I sate,” reported the host, “next to the General, more honorable than pleasant.” At the Reform Club there were distinguished Liberals, magnificent cuisine, and a long rambling speech by Lord Granville that, inappropriately, wound up being a tribute to President Hayes’s reunification policy; at Marlborough House, there was dinner with the Prince of Wales and two splendid Tories, Disraeli and Lord Derby, who were most grateful to Granville for having made such an ass of himself with his ignorance of American politics. At midnight, the dinner over, Grant and Badeau went to Printing House Square and saw the presses running off accounts of their activities in the next day’s Times.⁸

The general was treated to the splendor of the Guildhall, where the lord mayor, attended by the aldermen in scarlet, and wearing his own splendid robe, handed the black-clad guest the freedom of the city. After the luncheon for a thousand, Grant rode in the lord mayor’s coach to the Crystal Palace, around which thirty thousand people were said to have gathered. A band played “Hail Columbia” as he entered; in the evening there were thunderous fireworks. Grant sat silently with his cigar and endured them: “After a flight of fiery pigeons to and fro from their cots, there was displayed a portrait in fire of a distinguished man, in whose honour the fête was designed. ‘Do you recognize it?’ said a lady to the ex-President. ‘It is very good,’ he replied.”⁹

The London Times, in a long tribute to Grant on June 4, left it to Americans to judge whether he had “culpably wasted the lives of his men during the war,” and pronounced that during Reconstruction “he failed, as all save one or two men in a generation would have failed,” but nonetheless concluded that “after WASHINGTON, General GRANT is the President who will occupy the largest place in the history of the United States.” Grant, in a private letter to George Childs written in the midst of all this vast and exhausting attention, spoke as if the people crowded on the inelegant docks of Liverpool mattered more to him than all the personages in London. He also indulged in some understandable chauvinism; having mentioned the dinner at Apsley House, he was moved by his American pride to say that he doubted if there were a private house anywhere more tastefully decorated than the Pierreponts’. He was proud of his welcome in England but insisted that “the attentions are more for our country than for me.” He added that it “has always been my desire to see all jealousy between England and the United States abated, and every sore healed,” going on to assert that “together they are more powerful for the spread of commerce and civilization than all others combined, and can do more to remove causes of wars by creating moral interests that would be so much endangered by war.”¹⁰

The London Times, sounding a different note, did not agree with Grant’s vision of the two countries in harmony: “…there is a great, and perhaps growing, difference between [the] two peoples; and nobody could represent it better than the distinguished man to whom the City did honour yesterday.” Speaking of the Guildhall ceremony, the Times continued, “There is a difference in the type of national character, in the manner of the people, in the collective drift of their thought, in their political aspirations, and in that literature which is the best expression of their individuality.” Anticipating Frederick Jackson Turner, the Times concluded, “…the great cause of the difference lies, after all, in the physical peculiarities of the two nations.” And yet, it was not all a matter of America’s having a continent’s worth of land. The Times cited Disraeli’s remark “that if America were to suffer some great political convulsion she could ‘begin again.’” England, the prime minister asserted, could “not begin again.”¹¹

But what had Grant and America begun after the Civil War? They had, indeed, kept going, but motion to the sound of applause was all that the new beginning amounted to. Grant thought there was more. The world now paid tribute to America for having fought the war and survived. He wrote George Childs, “I love to see our country honored and respected…and I am proud to believe that it is by most all nations, and by some even loved.” He knew something of what does and does not accompany power.¹²

Late in June there was a brief visit with Nellie, who was on the south coast of England with her baby. It was only two summers ago that Julia had spoken so plaintively to Governor Ames about Nellie’s having moved to England—and had tried so hard to persuade Ames, and herself, that Nellie was happy there. Nellie was trying to persuade herself of the same thing. Algernon Sartoris had not turned out to be the splendid figure that the naive young girl on shipboard had thought him. (Henry James, an admirer of his mother, Adelaide Kemble, found him “blowsy.”) He was not grand enough to be brought to London for the great receptions for her parents. The matter was not simply a question of rank—though there was not very much of that—but rather of reputation. He was considered dissolute. All was not well in her marriage, and yet Nellie could not leave her husband. Her own stubborn pride said she must show her parents she had done the right thing, but in June 1877 the Grants could fit into their public world only a few brief days of awkward visits and drives and picnics with Nellie’s English family.¹³

The Grants soon returned to London, and the royal family having circled the Grant flame, and the nation having pronounced the general’s light to be true, the time came at last for England’s queen to stir herself slightly for the American cousin. The honor of all honors arrived—an invitation to Windsor. This visit proved to be a terrifying triumph. The party took the five o’clock train from Paddington Station on June 26, and arrived early. What was worse, like any good American family, which would surely bring the kids along, the Grants brought Jesse—“our pet,” as Julia described him to the queen—though he had not been invited. (There was a minor diplomatic crise, as duchesses mediated, and an ex post facto invitation was begrudgingly achieved.) The court circular said the queen greeted the Grants as they arrived. Actually, and perhaps not entirely by accident, the queen was out riding with her own youngest child when Jesse and his parents reached the castle.¹⁴

Someone did answer the door, arrange a hasty tour of the paintings in the vast halls, and show the Grants to their rooms. There they huddled, not yet knowing how they were to be introduced to Victoria. Adam Badeau, fuming because he and Jesse were to eat with the household, not at the queen’s table, fluttered officiously about, keeping Julia in a state of agitation. Jesse, nearly twenty, but acting ten, took up Badeau’s cry and said he would not eat with “the servants” and wanted to go back to town. No doubt that was what everyone wanted. Victoria’s first response to Jesse’s threat was, “Well, let him go,” but two ladies and two lords in waiting negotiated this second crisis, and Jesse was duly invited to Her Majesty’s table, at which three of the queen’s children were also to sit. Julia was greatly relieved when, at seven-thirty, the earl and countess of Derby, with whom she was now acquainted, joined them to ease the introductions. Half an hour later, there was a decorous commotion outside as the queen arrived back at the castle; half an hour after that, in mourning black but bright with diamonds, Victoria received the Americans in the vast corridor outside her private apartment. Edwards Pierrepont introduced General Grant; Lord Derby escorted Julia past formidably gracious ladies in waiting; and two uncomfortable women—about the same age and with equally excellent capacity for childbearing, but with not much else in common—shook hands. Victoria found Julia “civil & complimentary in her funny American way.”¹⁵

Meeting Queen Victoria at Windsor, 1877. From John Russell Young, Around the World with General Grant.

The Grants were given not a state banquet but the greater compliment of a supper at the queen’s private table, at which sixteen sat. Her Majesty was safely abutted by her son Prince Leopold and her son-in-law Prince Christian of Denmark. The general was flanked by one of Victoria’s daughters and a duchess; farther down the table Jesse sat not next to Princess Beatrice, but between Lady Derby (who had been assigned to take on the scamp) and his mother. Although the band of the Grenadier Guards played outside in the quadrangle, the supper was not jolly, but luckily it did not last long. All the accounts make it clear that after the meal the queen spoke most graciously to each of her guests—not even Jesse was neglected, though afterward she pronounced him “a very ill-mannered young Yankee.” As Victoria was taking her leave, at ten, she complained of her fatiguing duties, and Julia is said to have mustered strength and replied, “Yes, I can imagine them: I too have been the wife of a great ruler.” The queen withdrew. The Grants never saw her again. Early the next morning the general received a telegram: “Your comrades in national encampment in Providence, Rhode Island, send heartiest greetings to their old comrades, and desire, through England’s Queen, to thank England for Grant’s reception.” The folks back home had not forgotten him; comforted, the Grants were driven through Windsor Great Park along lovely fields, under beautiful oaks, and around the equestrian statue of George III, pointing off to nowhere; then they made their escape to London on the ten o’clock train.¹⁶

Julia and Ulysses were as healthy as horses: indeed, they had the stamina of Percherons. The routine of luncheon, followed by an afternoon reception, followed by dinner, followed by another reception, followed by the same the next day, seemed never to tire them. They thrived on it. Much has been said about how Grant, the simple fellow, manfully endured adulation because it was his duty to do so. This is nonsense. He and Julia had come to need this noise. They could not get enough of it. On June 9 Ulysses wrote contentedly to Elihu Washburne that he was engaged every day through the twenty-sixth. He was a private citizen, and the English people were genuinely fond of him; if he had said that he and Mrs. Grant, though grateful, would like to be allowed to be by themselves in a quiet hotel or at their daughter’s house, their wish would have been honored. But he said no such thing. Grant’s private world had been almost totally captured by the public one. In July he wrote his son Buck, “I have not written more frequently because the papers have kept you fully advised of our every movement.” And so, with no exercise other than an occasional walk after one of the stupendous dinners, with food and wine in enormous quantity and richness, followed by brandy which the general countered with countless cigars, the Grants plunged onward from England to Europe.¹⁷

There, every royal and republican capital took its cue from London, and the restless pattern continued. In Belgium the Grants attended another, and easier, royal dinner; then they went on to Germany—to Cologne, Frankfurt, and Hamburg; and then on to Switzerland—to the Lake of Lucerne, Berne, and Geneva. Next they visited the Italian lakes, where they were joined by Ulysses’ sister and her husband, the Reverend M. J. Cramer, whom Grant had named minister to Denmark. Together, they went to Copenhagen. From there, the Grants went to Antwerp, thence back to London, from which they left by train for Edinburgh, where much was made of Grant’s Scottish ancestry.

It was during the Edinburgh visit that reporters began to wonder what Grant was up to. He almost seemed to be running for president—but of what, was not clear. Why did he not abandon the campaigning and go home? He acknowledged that the handshaking was “a great nuisance, and it should be abolished…. It demoralizes the entire nervous and muscular system.” But shake thousands of hands he did. With his mind firmly on politics—as T. S. Eliot has said, one needs something to protest if one is to be a protestant—he declared he had no political ambitions and was staying away from home to keep out of President Hayes’s way. This absence would, he might have added, also keep him disassociated with anything unpopular that his successor might do. And during the months in Britain he found out how enormously popular he still was, wherever he went.¹⁸

In September, Grant experienced that extraordinary triumph in Newcastle. In an amalgamation of the burning energies of working-class and of middle-class England, Englishmen came to cheer him. At first, the visit seemed routine. When his train pulled in from Edinburgh, the station was jammed with people, just as others had been all up and down the island. There was the obligatory excursion to a castle, a demonstration of seaside life-preserving techniques, and the inevitable luncheon given by the chamber of commerce—with speeches. But then, on September 22, came one of the most remarkable days in Ulysses Grant’s life. People poured into Newcastle from all over the North Country by train, by wagon, and on foot to see this man who personified the bourgeois virtues they so greatly honored. In the procession in his honor they claimed the silent, powerful man from America as one of their own and as the champion of each of a myriad of causes:

Then came the Durham Miners’ Association, carrying a blue silk banner, bearing a design which represented the change in the condition of pit-boys, by the introduction of short hours of labor; the Hepworth and Ravensworth colliers, carrying a blue silk banner, representing the union of capital and labor, a coal owner and workman in friendly conversation, with the legend, “Reason, Truth, and Friendship”; the Blaydon Colliery, with the inscription, “The Workman is the Pride and Stay of the Country”; the Pelaw Union Wardley Colliery; the Urpeth Colliery; the Kingston Union of Odd Fellows. Then came the Northumberland miners, sixteen different collieries, represented by their banners and designs, under marshals and captains, each colliery with its own band of music. Some of these banners had significant emblems. The Seaton Burn Collieries had the following lines on their banner:

“No gloss or coloring will avail,

But truth and justice here prevail:

’Tis education forms the youthful mind,

Just as the twig is bent the tree’s inclined.”

Another showed a figure representing emancipation, and the tree of union in full bloom. Another banner, of blue silk with yellow border, contained the words, “We claim manhood suffrage.”

After the miners came the Newcastle dock laborers and trimmers, carrying a new banner of blue silk with crimson border, bearing this motto:

“A golden era bursts upon the world:

The principle of right shall soon prevail:

Meek truth and justice soon shall lift their heads,

And wrong shall sink to everlasting night.”

Then came the Hammermen’s Society, the Plumbers, the House Furnishers, and the Tanners of Elswick. The latter carried a banner bearing these words: “Welcome back, General Grant, from Arms to Arts,” “Let us have Peace,” “Nothing like Leather.” The Masons, the Independent Order of Mechanics, the Newcastle Brass Moulders and Finishers, the Tyne District Carpenters and Joiners, and the Mill Sawyers and Machinists followed. The Sawyers carried a banner with these words: “Welcome, General Grant, to Newcastle. Tyneside rejoices to see thee. Welcome, Hero of Freedom.” The United Chainmakers’ Association finished the procession. These workmen marched in good order like battalions of soldiers. There was no disturbance of the peace, and a few policemen only kept the line. It was a moving stream of red and blue banners, and badges, and insignia.

After the procession, Grant rode in a carriage into an open area jammed with thousands of expectant people; “the cheers…could be heard at St. Thomas’s Church, nearly a mile distant,” as he walked out onto the platform.¹⁹

Thomas Burt, the great North Country workingmen’s Liberal leader, with a long career ahead of him and already a past master at getting out a crowd, had organized the meeting, but not even he could have made his people respond with the affection they displayed for Grant. Burt was delighted with the demonstration. In his address of welcome, he began, “General: in the name of the working classes of Northumberland and Durham, we welcome you to Tyneside…,” and he ended, “General! we beg your acceptance of this address as a testimony of the…admiration in which you are held among the working people….” It was then that Grant replied with his splendid statement of solidarity with the workingmen; he talked of how wars, when they come, “fall upon the many, the producing class, who are the sufferers,” the ones who must furnish the means for those engaged “in destroying and not in producing.” It was a speech that Karl Marx could have made. Then, after a few polite words about English and American friendship, Grant drew to a close: “I do not know, Mr. Burt, that there is anything more for me to say, except that I would like to communicate to the people whom I see assembled before me here this day how greatly I feel the honor which they have conferred upon me.”²⁰

Only a few of the thousands of people watching Grant could hear him, but he had communicated with them all. Caught up in the mood of the day, a newspaper reporter present described Grant as

delivering, for him, an unusually long speech, and speaking with an evident feeling which shows that the crowd, as is nearly always the case with men who have handled large bodies of men, has touched his sympathies. The vast concourse, still rushing up from the turnpike, and which now musters at least eighty to a hundred thousand, estimate the unheard speech after their own thoughts…. Hats are waved with a self-sacrificing obliviousness to the affection subsisting between crown and brim which is beautiful to witness. And right in the center of the crowd, little shining rivulets glistening on his ebony cheeks, and his face glowing with intense excitement, the whole soul within him shining out through his sable skin like a red-hot furnace seen through a dark curtain, stands a negro, devouring Grant with a gaze of such fervid admiration and respect and gratitude that it flashes out the secret of the great liberator’s popularity.²¹

Newcastle upon Tyne, September 22, 1877. From John Russell Young, Around the World with General Grant.

Purple prose of a reporter with a good story, of course, but the writer was onto something. Grant had a gift given to few men; he could reach ordinary people without condescending to them. He was, they sensed, one of them. They saw themselves in him. They loved him for both his failures and his successes. They saw in them their own aspirations. And he, at Newcastle, looking down, saw all of this in their faces. Why couldn’t he reach the same kind of people—or rather, sustain their embrace, once reached—back home in Pittsburgh or Milwaukee or Lowell? Why did this gift of Grant’s dissipate into Black Fridays, banquets, and all the other colossal wastes of this greatest of his talents?

In October, the Grants spent ten days with Nellie in Southampton and then went on to Paris. They had planned earlier to be there for the Fourth of July, but had been persuaded not to go, to avoid political embarrassment. While president, Grant had congratulated the Prussians on their victory in the war with France, and Victor Hugo’s cry of outrage had been vigorous. It was not at all clear that the Grants would be as popular in Paris as they had been in London. Now, in October, the Grants were received at the Elysée Palace by Marshal MacMahon (whom John Russell Young, in the privacy of his diary, said looked like a “stupid Irishman”) and were guests at superb dinners, but they were also left to their own devices as tourists. (They were not, however, totally outside notice; the inimitable Paris police had Grant under surveillance, and every time he walked out to buy cigars the details of his coming and going were recorded.) The Grants visited the studio of G. P. A. Healy, who had painted one of the finest portraits of Grant, and there met the republican hero Léon Gambetta, whom Grant regarded as one of the two greatest men he met on his trip, the other being Bismarck. Young’s call on Georges Clemenceau, who had been in America as a reporter, did not produce any hope that France’s greatest writer would receive the general. “Hugo is an old man,” Young noted in his diary, “and great enough to do what he pleases.”²²

Young saw to it that Grant was photographed reading the paper in the Herald’s Paris office. Julia went to Worth’s. Young himself went to the Jardin Mabille and pretended to be “disgusted” by the cancan. While the Grants were on their second trip to Paris a year later, police were told of a party of four Americans who entered the Bal Valentino by “une porte secrète” one evening and went upstairs to a private box from which to watch the spectacular dancers. The shadows were deep, but the informant was sure that one of the party, the one with the ordinary build, gray beard, and fresh complexion, was the “ancien Président de la République des Etats-Unis d’Amérique.” Paris was perplexing to everyone in the Grant party. Reporter Young was, in general, not much taken with the French—“monkeys and barbers” a friend of his called them—and found the American colony in the city “regarded very much by Paris…as New York would regard a German colony in Hoboken….”²³

Young was not unhappy when, after a month, the party headed for the Mediterranean and boarded the Vandalia, a United States Navy ship. They cruised to Naples, where Young was appalled to find a wine named Lachrymae Christi (“horrible irreverence”). The general wanted to go to the top of Vesuvius, and an early start was planned, “but many high people in uniforms, commanding one thing or another, had to come on board” and the party was delayed. Once under way, the carriage moved slowly up the mountain and at the end of the road stopped. The passengers picnicked in a gloomy building that Young was sure had been a dungeon. They got a fire started and had their luncheon “in good homely American fashion, for we were as far from the amenities of civilization as though we were in Montana.” By then it was cold and getting late, so they decided to turn back; once more, Ulysses Grant did not get quite to the top.²⁴

At Pompeii they indulged in the romance of imagining the life of the city that had been stopped in time, were bored by a laboriously arranged “dig”—“nothing came of any startling import”—and carefully avoided the “house of unspeakable shame which the guide, with glistening eyes” pointed out to the general as the special object of interest to tourists—“but our General had no interest in scenes of shame and vice….” Grant did comment on a flaw in the pavement of one of the roads, and someone made a joke about Boss Tweed and municipal contracts. The inscriptions on the walls of the rooms suggested to Young that “there was a great deal of human nature—of Massachusetts and Brooklyn human nature—in the Pompeiians. In those days people wrote on the walls, as home idiots do now, their names and inscriptions, verses from a poem….” If the innocents abroad did not themselves turn toward home, their allusions always did.²⁵

Julia and Ulysses and Jesse spent Christmas 1877 on the Vandalia, lying in the harbor at Palermo. On shore, Grant went for a walk in the rain while some of the officers went to the Episcopalian chapel. Julia, at the holiday table with naval officers, Young, Ulysses, and Jesse, was the only woman in the party (except for her maid)—and she was entirely happy about it. The Vandalia was Julia’s idea of home, and the illustration that accompanies the story of their Christmas Day in Young’s book provides perhaps the most honest and most attractive picture of Julia Grant that survives.

The Grants had now been traveling so long that newspapers at home, seeking to poke up a fire where there were no embers, conjectured that the former president was in a kind of exile, that he was spending vast amounts of money, and that the money was not his own. Young maintained that the money was Grant’s own, its source being the income from the gifts the general had received at the end of the war—invested, presumably, by A. J. Drexel. The ship was, he allowed, paid for by the nation, but it would have been cruising the Mediterranean even if the Grants were not aboard. The Grants did not take pretentious and costly quarters in the fine hotels at which they stayed in the various cities, and their party was never large. On this part of the trip, their only companion was Young; their only servants were a maid and a valet-secretary-translator named Jacques Herzog, whom they called “the Marquis.” He took on the role of buffoon, adopting an attitude of obsequiousness, and he was endlessly and flatteringly curious about his famous master.

Grant was not noticeably masterful. Tanned and relaxed, he went on deck in the morning, lit a cigar, and read a newspaper if there was one, or else Artemus Ward, Mark Twain’s Innocents Abroad, or the Nasby Papers. He also talked a great deal. “His manner is clear and terse,” wrote Young. “He narrates a story as clearly as he would demonstrate a problem in geometry” (he would have made a good mathematics teacher, after all). He spoke easily and unresentfully about the war and the men who had fought it with him. Young gained “the impression…that he has immense resources in reserve,” and “has in eminent degree the ‘two o’clock in the morning courage’ which Napoleon said he alone possessed among his marshals and generals.” The war—the time when these traits were needed—was relived there on shipboard as Grant told about it. Some of Grant’s most revealing comments about his campaigns came out under the gentle shipboard prodding of the Herald reporter.²⁶

“Entering Siout,” Upper Egypt, 1878. From John Russell Young, Around the World with General Grant.

The party steamed into Alexandria on January 5, 1878, moved on to Cairo, and then set off up the Nile. This ageless journey was the quintessence of the nineteenth-century Westerner’s examination of his history. For the Grants, it was a marvelous jumble of quiet movement along riverbanks that had been inhabited for longer than anyone in the party could comprehend, and the noisy welcomes of the “King of America” by village people confused by the European-style receptions arranged for Grant by the Syrian traders who served as consuls for the United States. On several wonderful days, in the immense clothes of 1878 and with her head swathed in scarves against the desert dust, Julia Grant rode sidesaddle on a donkey past “fields parched, and brown, and cracked,” and dry irrigation ditches, into remote villages. The drought was severe (it was a year of a “bad Nile”) and “with the exception of a few clusters of the castor bean and some weary, drooping date palms, the earth gives forth no fruit. A gust of sand blows over the plain and adds to the somberness of the scene.” There were ancient farm villages, and there was Luxor and Karnak and Thebes. The Grants missed scarcely anything that was in the guidebooks.²⁷

Next on the trip was the Holy Land, where the list of places that had to be seen was even more numbing. Reaching for appropriately reverent rhetoric, Young wrote, “Of course to feel Jerusalem one must come with faith”—which rather left Ulysses and Julia unprepared. He acknowledged “heathen questionings” among the party, but claimed that both in Egypt and in the Holy Land—this was for him its only name—the past carried one out of any unbelief. The general trudged, and rode on donkeys, and took it all in. Mark Twain helped.²⁸

Leaving the Holy Land, the party seemed to have been biblically blessed. It was as if a nineteenth-century Red Sea parted for the great American: “General Grant’s arrival in Constantinople had been fairly well timed, as it occurred but a few days after the treaty of San Stefano.” Even wars yielded for him. The Turks and the Russians stopped theirs, and he could visit Saint Sophia and shop in the bazaars. Next they sailed to Greece, but surprisingly, Ulysses did not indulge any urge to trace the route of his namesake; instead, they went straight to Piraeus and, in Athens, to the Acropolis—and still another royal reception. “The General is gradually getting over the idea that it is possible for him to travel as a private citizen,” Young noted. After Greece, there was Rome and a call on the new pope, Leo XIII. For the sake of his solidly Protestant readers, Young hastily added that the “interview…of a most agreeable character…was not to be considered as partaking of anything of a religious character.” But Julia’s cross was blessed by the Holy Father. Then King Humbert fed them.²⁹

In April they moved on to Florence, and in that lovely city visited the Uffizi and the Pitti Palace in pursuit of their “usual [and thorough] programme for sight-seeing.” Young recorded the party’s tribute to great European masters, but saved some applause for an American, the sculptor and teacher Hiram Powers, who had lived in Florence until his death in 1873, and for students from home: “As for Americans engaged in art studies, we hardly ever visited a gallery of any distinction without finding some one from the United States busy with brush and palette, diligently working away, and studying the grand old masters.”³⁰

After Florence, there was Venice, where Grant is said to have made his famous statement that it would be a fine city if they drained it. Edmund Wilson, less romantic than some about the odorous canals, has speculated that Grant was being a sanitarian. As astute historians have observed, Victorians cared greatly about their drains, Americans not less than Englishmen, and Wilson is correct in stating that more than one American has thought draining, cleansing, and refilling the canals would not be the worst of ideas.³¹

Nellie was spending the spring in Italy with her husband and his parents, and as a fellow tourist, joined her own father and mother for sight-seeing in Rome and Florence and went with them to Paris, where the Grants visited the Paris exposition. The nineteenth century measured everything, and one of the objects on display was a magnificent scale. Ulysses and Julia weighed themselves and kept the evidence. In Holland they visited their first zoo and a model farm where, Julia was pleased to notice, a McCormick reaper was in use. And later that year they went on to Denmark and Norway, to St. Petersburg (for a formal call on Czar Alexander II and “hours spent chatting and smoking” with Gorchakov), Moscow, Warsaw, and Vienna, and finally to Spain.³²

In Madrid, the United States minister was the affable poet James Russell Lowell, whom Grant had met in 1870. The arrival of the general and his lady meant arduous duty for the Lowells in the intricately formal Spanish court, but the Grants were as the Bostonians remembered them—“simple-minded and natural people”—and Lowell admired the way the general confronted the receptions with “a dogged imperturbability.” Grant balked only at one constant threat, the opera. After five minutes he claimed that the only noise he could distinguish from any other was the bugle call and asked Mrs. Lowell, “Haven’t we had enough of this?” The Lowells felt sympathy both with Grant at the opera and for Julia at a splendid dinner when, with serene naiveté, she simply disregarded the fact that neither of her dinner partners spoke English—and spoke English. Her “confidence in the language of Shakespeare & Milton as something universally applicable that had triumphed over Babel was sublime.”³³

That was Madrid, but nothing was as memorable as Bismarck’s Berlin. The Congress of Berlin was meeting and the powerful were balancing their world—Europe and the parts of Asia that abutted it. The United States was not participating—neither President Hayes nor Secretary of State Evarts was there—but an ex-president and ex-general named Ulysses Grant, a private citizen, was present. He was a tourist in a hotel, yet Prince Bismarck sent in his card, and General Grant set out to return the call. A few minutes before four, the time set for the appointment, he left his hotel, lit a cigar, walked the short distance to the gates of Radziwill Palace, entered the courtyard, and to the astonishment of the erect, lavishly uniformed guards, walked up to the door, tossed away the stump of his cigar, and for all the world looked as if he were going to knock and see if anyone was home, when alert servants opened the door to General Grant. There had been no fine carriage, let alone a splendid military escort, to accomplish the entrance. Grant had done it much better. The simple, good American had come on foot.

Bismarck, in uniform, greeted Grant and in slow careful English began a conversation in which the two men proved to be extraordinarily compatible. Bismarck commented on how young Grant was, and at fifty-six the general, only a bit thick in the waist despite the vast quantities of food that had confronted him on the trip, was indeed in fine shape. They chatted about a man they both admired, Philip Sheridan, who in Europe recently had observed with outspoken admiration the success of the Prussian army in the Franco-Prussian War. Grant pronounced Sheridan as great a general as had ever lived; Bismarck paid tribute to his guest’s wonderfully quick eye.

This common ground established, they turned not to matters of state, but to questions of the philosophy of statehood. They were men of power who spoke of order and disorder. Grant approved of Bismarck’s having convened the congress, although ostensibly Germany had no stake in the settlement of the recent war between Russia and Turkey that was the occasion for the meeting of the great powers. That meeting pointed toward order in Europe, and Grant asked how it was progressing. Wearily, Bismarck replied that it was hot in Berlin and he was glad that he and the other old men at the congress were about through, for he wanted to get to the country. Nevertheless, he was clearly pleased that Grant could appreciate what was being accomplished in the way of redefinition of power, redefinition which in no way diminished the strong position of Germany. He was pleased that a man like Grant noticed.

There was another kind of disorder on the minds of the two men. Emperor Wilhelm was in seclusion following an assassination attempt by a socialist with a Ph.D. (“So much for philosophy,” said Queen Victoria.) Cautiously, and hopefully, Bismarck said he expected his master to recover. In praise of the emperor’s character, Bismarck insisted that he was “so republican in all things that even the most extreme republican if he did his character justice would admire him.” He could not understand the attempted murder: “Here is an old man—one of the kindest old gentlemen in the world—and yet they must try and shoot him!” Grant (according to Young’s report, based on Grant’s account to him of the conversation) “answered that the influence which aimed at the Emperor’s life was an influence that would destroy all government, all order, all society, republics and empires.” It would lead to the same chaos and disorder that he and Sherman had feared when Lincoln was assassinated. The American advocated the “severest punishment” for the unsuccessful assassin, saying that “although at home there is a strong sentiment against the death penalty, and it is a sentiment that one naturally respects, I am not sure but it should be made more severe rather than less severe.” (Presumably he meant it should be more widely applied.)³⁴

Bismarck leaped to agreement, recalling how he had “resigned the government of Alsace because I was required to commute sentences of capital nature.” According to Young, he stated that “‘as the French say,…something was due to justice, and if crimes like these are rampant they must be severely punished.’ ‘All you can do with such people,’ said the General quietly, ‘is to kill them.’ ‘Precisely so,’ answered the Prince.”³⁵

After this chilling exchange they passed on to an even more sanguinary topic, the American Civil War, and Grant, as he had not done elsewhere on his trip, agreed to review a detachment of troops, with Crown Prince Frederick the next day—not, however, before protesting that he was “more of a farmer than a soldier” and that although he had fought in two wars, he “never went into the army without regret and never retired without pleasure.” This standard observation of Grant’s was followed by Bismarck’s equally familiar European observation: “You are so happily placed…in America that you need fear no wars.” But then Bismarck turned to consider one of them, and this exchange followed:

“What always seemed so sad to me about your last great war was that you were fighting your own people. That is always so terrible in wars, so very hard.”

“But it had to be done,” said the General.

“Yes,” said the prince, “you had to save the Union just as we had to save Germany.”

“Not only save the Union, but destroy slavery,” answered the General.

“I suppose, however, the Union was the real sentiment, the dominant sentiment,” said the prince.

“In the beginning, yes,” said the General; “but as soon as slavery fired upon the flag it was felt, we all felt, even those who did not object to slaves, that slavery must be destroyed. We felt that it was a stain to the Union that men should be bought and sold like cattle.”

The conversation continued:

“I suppose if you had had a large army at the beginning of the war it would have ended in a much shorter time.”

“We might have had no war at all,” said the General; “but we cannot tell. Our war had many strange features—there were many things which seemed odd enough at the time, but which now seem Providential. If we had had a large regular army, as it was then constituted, it might have gone with the South. In fact, the Southern feeling in the army among high officers was so strong that when the war broke out the army dissolved. We had no army—then we had to organize one. A great commander like Sherman or Sheridan even then might have organized an army and put down the rebellion in six months or a year, or, at the farthest, two years. But that would have saved slavery, perhaps, and slavery meant the germs of new rebellion. There had to be an end of slavery. Then we were fighting an enemy with whom we could not make a peace. We had to destroy him. No convention, no treaty was possible—only destruction.”

“It was a long war,” said the prince, “and a great work well done—and I suppose it means a long peace.”

“I believe so,” said the General.³⁶

The conversation, if Young had reconstructed it accurately—and neither Grant nor Bismarck denied that he had—was a remarkable one. Grant was never more articulate about the war that he had won. Too brief a war, Grant suggested, would not have ended slavery, would not have produced the order Grant had maintained as president—and, though this thought remained unspoken—would not have given Grant his personal chance to do what Bismarck called his “great work.” Save for his unequivocal position in opposition to slavery, the Grant sitting in Bismarck’s library was in vivid contrast to the one the workingmen had cheered at Newcastle. Bismarck accompanied his guest to the door, and they parted. Outside, Grant lit a cigar and walked back to the hotel.

Julia had liked the cheers for the general in the city on the Tyne, and had pronounced it a great day, but there was no day like the one in Berlin when Bismarck, with his daughter, came to call on Julia. Later there was a reception at the British legation with Disraeli, a dinner one evening with Crown Prince Frederick and Princess Victoria—Julia was getting expert at carrying homey bits of family news from court to court—and another dinner, given by Bismarck at Radziwill Palace. “Nothing,” she pronounced, “could exceed the cordiality of our reception by this great and most distinguished man.” The chancellor showed them the room where the Congress of Berlin was meeting, and in response to Julia’s coquettish request to know what the meeting was all about, he is reported (one hopes inaccurately) to have said that Russia had swallowed too much turkey and they were trying to get her to relieve herself. Julia remembered that as they left, Bismarck’s daughter “took my wrap from the attendant and wrapped it affectionately around my shoulders. When I gave my hand to Prince Bismarck to say farewell, he bent low over my hand and kissed it. I said, laughing, ‘If that were known in America, Prince Bismarck, every German there would want to be kissing my hand.’ The Prince, still holding my hand in his great palm, looked down admiringly upon it and said: ‘I would not wonder at all at them.’ I was, of course, enchanted with Prince Bismarck.” This passage from Julia’s Memoirs conveys the character of her prose and suggests too why the trip went on and on and on. The memory books were balanced in Berlin. Humiliations—being laughed at for her uncontrollable eye, being regarded as married to a failure, being cut down by Mary Lincoln—all were made up for at Prince Bismarck’s palace. She was at last the princess of childhood fantasies at White Haven. Julia could not get too many princely attentions.³⁷

Leaving the Continent, they went again to England, where Julia visited Nellie while Ulysses went on to a string of ceremonial visits in Ireland. No sensible American politician skips Ireland, but that duty done, the Grants concluded that they had had enough of the restless crisscrossing of Europe. Wanderlust truly had hold of them, and from Marseilles, a reconstituted party, with James Gordon Bennett of the New York Herald paying the bills, set out for Asia. Jesse, who had been practicing writing, had gone home to make a try at life in California. His brother Fred now joined his parents; so did amiable and querulous old Adolph Borie, along with his nephew, a doctor. Young, the lavender-bound Boswell, continued his duties as the Herald’s reporter of the great adventure. Once again Julia and her maid were the only women on a long, long journey.

They rode a train down the length of the Suez Canal and, the only Americans aboard, sailed south on the Red Sea on a commercial ship. They took for their own an awning-covered space in the stern, atop a grating through which they could watch the sea churning. There, Julia “sits back in a sea chair, wearing a wide-brimmed Indian hat, swathed in a blue silk veil,” for there was “the sun to fight.” Grant too had “fallen into Indian ways enough to wear a helmet”; his was “girded with a white silk scarf.” Borie read old copies of the Philadelphia Ledger, while Fred, with uncharacteristic verve, read Vanity Fair and was sure that Becky Sharp was modeled on a woman he knew in Washington. He was getting “a fine bronzed mahogany tint, and it is suggested that he will soon be as brown as Sitting Bull.” The general sat, smoked, and listened as Young read to them from travel books on India. In anticipation, Colonel Fred “laid out a campaign of tiger shooting,” while his father, hearing a different part of the Indian story, recalled the cholera epidemic with which he had coped twenty-five years ago in Panama.³⁸

In India they first visited Bombay and emulated the life of their English hosts on Malabar Point: “The General strolled over a few minutes ago with some letters for the post…a scarlet servant running ahead to announce him, other scarlet servants in train.” Each of the party hired a servant, for a rupee a day. In describing this part of the journey, Young babbled on about problems with the servants—they were lazy and worthless—in a manner calculated to amuse his readers. But to do him justice, this chatter abated as he moved into his second volume, with its important accounts of Grant’s view of the Civil War and of politics, as well as voluptuous tales of Asian splendor. There was a gorgeous visit to the maharajah of Jeypore and then tours of Delhi and Lucknow. British imperialism was in full flower, and the entertainment was splendid. But no matter how sumptuous the arrangements, it all added up to one stuporous dinner after another on an endless trip, and one looks for evidence that Grant sometimes beat the boredom. He deserved to get drunk, and apparently he sometimes did. The most spectacular occasion came while the Grants were the guests of the viceroy, Lord Lytton. As the host recounted it:

On this occasion “our distinguished guest” the double Ex-President of the “Great Western Republic”, who got as drunk as a fiddle, showed that he could also be as profligate as a lord. He fumbled Mrs A., kissed the shrieking Miss B.—pinched the plump Mrs C. black and blue—and ran at Miss D. with intent to ravish her. Finally, after throwing all the…female guests into hysterics by generally behaving like a must elephant, the noble beast was captured by main force and carried (quatre pattes dans l’air) by six sailors…which relieved India of his distinguished presence. The marine officer…reports that, when deposited in the public saloon cabin, where Mrs G. was awaiting him…this remarkable man satiated there and then his baffled lust on the unresisting body of his legitimate spouse, and copiously vomited during the operation. If you have seen Mrs Grant you will not think this incredible.

To be clinical, if Grant had consumed as much liquor as Lytton (and the vomiting) suggests, it is unlikely that he could have achieved an erection. And if he had, it is inconceivable that Julia would have allowed him to have sex in the presence of half the British navy. She was, after all, at least as strong as her husband and quite capable of pushing aside sexual advances made in front of others. With respect to her comeliness, or lack of it, the less said about Lytton’s gallantry the better.³⁹

John Russell Young’s account of a state dinner, a cruise on a steamer, a “merry pleasant feast” under a banyan tree, and a vast reception for Indian nobility, mentions nothing of the incident, and Lytton, who knew how to carouse himself, surely took more than a little poetic license as he wrote his letter recounting the event. There is, however, no reason to assume the tale is all a lie. There is a certain locker-room admiration in its brisk telling, and this salacious gossip affords an untrustworthy but not uninteresting glimpse of a force in Grant more elemental, perhaps, than the one which so beguiled Henry Adams. That it took six fit British sailors to subdue a short middle-aged American is not the least of the compliments paid Ulysses Grant.⁴⁰

In the markets of Benares, things had been tamer as the Grants went shopping. Ulysses, in a messily scrawled note to Young, who had not gone along, told of the experience in the blandest of tourist language: “Met many merchants who accosted us on the streets, and more beggars. Purchased from the former—at their prices—and contributed to the latter.” Teasingly he suggested that they might be ruined by this economy: “But we will try to get through to Calcutta, even if we have to leave a hostage. I should fear to leave Mr. Borie because he would contract such obligations.” Next, they moved on to Burma and to Singapore, and they visited the exquisite court of young King Chulalongkorn of Siam, whose father had opened his nation to the West and had had his son educated by the British teacher Anna Leonowens.⁴¹

In Cochin China, they found Saigon as decidedly French as India and Singapore had been British. Aware of being in a part of the world few Americans had seen, Grant wrote Washburne about the people of southeast Asia and the “Governments that have been forced upon them.” He had arrived in Singapore thinking “English rule” was “purely selfish,” with “pampered sons sent here to execute laws enacted at home, and nothing for the benefit of the governed”; now this opinion had altered. “I will not,” he continued, “say that I was all wrong, but I do say that Englishmen are wise enough to know that the more prosperous they can make the subject the greater consumer he will become, and the greater will be the commerce and trade between the home government and the colony and greater the contentment of the governed.” It was his view that if the English were to leave they would “scarcely get off the soil before the work of rapine and murder and wars between native chiefs would begin.” From Saigon the Grants moved on to Hong Kong, and then to Canton, where their hosts were not Europeans or Americans but Chinese. In a procession half a mile long the Grant party was borne by sweating coolies in sweltering heat to the palace of Liu K’un-i, the governor general. Bamboo poles rested on red welts on their shoulders, as they carried the brilliantly painted boxes in which sat, awkwardly, the Americans in evening clothes. A “Chinese crowd, densely packed, silent, staring” lined the route. Young studied “the strange faces…so unlike the faces at home, with nothing of the varying expressions of home faces—smooth, tawny, with shaven head and dark, inquiring eyes.” As Grant passed, some of the more elegant of the young men “looked upon the barbarian with a supercilious air, contempt in their expression, very much as our young men in New York would regard Sitting Bull or Red Cloud from a club window as the Indian chiefs went in procession along Fifth Avenue.”⁴²

From Canton, they went to Shanghai and then up the Yangtze, apparently oblivious to the drought north of the river that was affecting millions of people and causing death by starvation for tens of thousands. Later, in Tientsin, flags and bunting covered hundreds of junks as the Grants went ashore. The disagreeable noise of guns firing salutes was mingled with the strange and beautiful reverberations from gongs. General Li Hung Chang—“tall and gorgeous to behold,” as the Grants’ granddaughter found him years later when he planted a tree near Grant’s grave in New York—greeted his guest with the simple statement: “You and I, General Grant, are the greatest men in the world.” Li, perhaps the most powerful person in China, was regarded by the American party as “the Bismarck of the East,” and he was indeed thinking of himself as a builder of national union when he said, in his welcoming speech, “General Grant and I have suppressed the two greatest rebellions known in history.” He was referring to the bloody repression of the Tai Ping rebellion in the same years that Grant had put down the American rebels. Li was so impressed with Grant that he asked the general to carry a message to the Japanese government with respect to a territorial quarrel between China and Japan. This Grant agreed to do and, subsequently, negotiations between the two countries were opened.⁴³

In Peking, Grant was urged by fellow Westerners to help hammer away at the exclusivity of the Chinese by requesting an interview with the seven-year-old emperor, Kuang Hsü, but he declined. He found calls on dignitaries who were children to be demeaning. Instead, he visited at length with the sophisticated head of the government, Prince Kung. After this conversation and similar talks in Japan, Grant, in long, intelligent letters, predicted the power China would attain in the twentieth century and compared China’s prospects to the bright commercial future he saw for Japan.

Hiroshige III, General and Mrs. Grant with Japanese Emperor. Julia is second and Ulysses fifth from left in main reviewing stand. NATIONAL. PORTRAIT GALLERY, SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, WASHINGTON, D.C.

In Japan, which Grant found “beautiful beyond description,” the ceremonies were, if possible, even more opulent than anywhere else the Grants had been. They were taken into a forbidden world, the imperial palace, to meet Emperor Mutsuhito and Empress Haruko. The emperor was another of the nineteenth-century rulers who had put down a major rebellion. In September 1877 his army had suppressed an uprising by the Satsuma samurai; like his guest, he had greatly consolidated his nation’s power. The general, in evening dress, escorted by the American minister, naval officers, and the heads of the Japanese government and members of the royal household, moved from chamber to chamber and “entered another room, at the farther end of which were standing the Emperor and the Empress…. Our party slowly advanced, the Japanese making a profound obeisance, bending the head almost to a right angle with the body…. The Emperor stood quite motionless, apparently unobservant or unconscious of the homage that was paid him.” The emperor looked young and slim, and “but for the dark, glowing eye, which was bent full upon the General, you might have taken the imperial group for statues.” The empress, “at his side, wore the Japanese costume, rich and plain. Her face was very white, and her form slender and almost childlike.” Young found the “solemn etiquette that pervaded the audience chamber…peculiar,” but reminded his readers that the Emperor was so sacred that even to be received at all “might be called a revolution.” When the group was formed, “His Imperial Majesty…advanced and shook hands with General Grant…. This seems a trivial thing to write down, but such a thing was never before known in the history of Japanese majesty…. The manner of the Emperor was constrained, almost awkward, the manner of a man doing a thing for the first time, and trying to do it as well as possible.” Calmly, even cordially, Ulysses Grant had made another conquest and achieved another notable surrender.⁴⁴

At last the restless roaming around the world was ending. The previous winter they had talked of getting back in June; in April, from Singapore, Grant had written Washburne, “It looks now as if we would reach San Francisco as early as August. I am both homesick and dread going home. I have no home but must establish one when I get back; I do not know where.” But, finally, the return could not be avoided, and the City of Tokyo brought the commoner-king and his party home across the Pacific. In San Francisco they were greeted as royally as they had been in Copenhagen or Karnak or the “ancient city of Philadelphia,” from which they had sailed twenty-six months earlier. They were welcomed to a “young city,” which the mayor compared favorably to all the others the Grants had visited. If California lacked anything, it was surely not buoyancy. As they moved through the streets on one of their processions, they were startled by an explosion of sound and looked up to a balcony; there an Italian diva and, as the press had it, a chorus of five hundred sang an ode of welcome. The Grants kept right on with their royal progression, scarcely noticing that this was not still another foreign port.⁴⁵

Buck, Julia, and Ulysses Grant (standing, center), Virginia City, Nevada, 1879. LIBRARY OF CONGRESS

On November 1, 1879, they were taken out to see the natural wonders of Yosemite Valley, in the national park which had been created during Grant’s presidency, and from there, after a quarter of a century, Grant revisited Oregon. General O. O. Howard was in command at Vancouver, and he walked with the Grants past the house where, without Julia, Ulysses had lived. “After looking at the house for some moments, he turned to the right in the evening twilight—we could see quite a distance up the river—and said: ‘Julia, that is the field where I planted my potatoes.’” Slowly he was beginning to get back into things American. From Oregon he traveled to Sacramento, the California capital, to speak to twenty thousand people (a good many of whom could vote), review a military procession, and watch a sham battle. Young wrote in his diary, “The General is as severe a traveler as he was in the East; fierce, hard, merciless to himself.” Back in San Francisco at the Palace Hotel—a long way from the attic room in which Grant had spent his final defeated night in the city after resigning from the army—Senator William Sharon, rich in silver, gave him an entertainment as splendid as any he had received from an Eastern potentate. Two hundred and fifty gentlemen took home their menus as souvenirs of the dinner; theirs were engraved in silver, General Grant’s was worked in gold. Later, in Virginia City, Nevada, the “center of our El Dorado,” as Julia put it, the party was invited to inspect a deep mine. Ulysses lost a wager that Julia would decide against joining the men, and donning dusters and floppy hats and clutching lanterns, they were all lowered down a shaft. Up in the light once more, she reflected on what “cruel, hard work this mining is” and concluded that “it is pleasanter far to ‘wear the gem than delve the mine.’”⁴⁶

The Grants completed the circle on December 16, 1879, with their return to the place where it had all started, Philadelphia. “The procession took four hours passing a given point” on Chestnut Street, and was “decorated with exquisite taste.” Grant’s open carriage passed under one arch draped with flags and bunting that said, noncommittally, “Philadelphia’s welcome to his her representative citizen” and then under another, above Eighth Street, described as “far outshining the former in beauty and massiveness. Upon this arch were five hundred ladies.” Unfortunately, none of them could vote.⁴⁷