I suppose there is no man in this Vanity Fair of ours so little observant as not to think sometimes about the worldly affairs of his acquaintances, or so extremely charitable as not to wonder how his neighbour Jones, or his neighbour Smith, can make both ends meet at the end of the year.
—William Makepeace Thackeray
THE STRATEGY for winning a third term was brilliant; the timing was dismal. The trip around the world was the strategy; it was a two-and-a-half-year campaign tour unlike that of any previous candidate for the presidency. John Russell Young’s rich accounts in the New York Herald of the Grants’ stunning receptions, copied in newspapers all across the country, were calculated to say to Americans that they should receive their hero with an equally warm greeting and carry him once more to the republic’s seat of highest honor. Cleansed of the odor of corruption by the exhilarating air of travel, Grant should once more be put in command of the nation’s fortunes. His return to the presidency would seem as irresistible as it was desirable. The victor returned would dazzle with his simplicity and put out of sight all competitors who had spent the time he had been away doing humdrum business.
It might have worked; the trouble was that Grant returned too soon. As nearly endless as the trip had been, he had wanted to go on to Australia to spend some more months away from home, but no steamship service was available from Tokyo. As William B. Hesseltine states in his account of the try for a third term (the finest section of his biography), if Grant had “delayed his return for six months he might have received the Republican nomination in 1880.” Instead, the Grants came home nine months before the convention in June 1880, and before the delegates met, the strenuous attempts to keep the home-coming party going had become visible. Starting east from San Francisco, coming home to Galena, a swing through the East and, later, the South—entering all the regions of the country—the welcomes became labored.1
In Europe, he had put everyone off the scent. Back in the summer of 1878 Young had been deceived—almost. In his diary he wrote of Grant as “the most admirably poised man I ever knew. All this talk of the Presidency never disturbs him, he never alludes to it. On one occasion when some over-kind Americans were pressing him, he answered in an impatient way that he knew what the Presidency was, and had had all he wanted.” Young thought the “bill to add his name to the retired list with any reasonable pay would put an end to the whole business—Still ‘there are more things in Heaven and Earth etc.’” Of earthly matters Grant had written Washburne in October 1878 that “it is bliss to be out of the United States…at a time when every bad element in the country is carrying everything before them. It is to be hoped, and I think confidantly to be relied on, that all the isms will have run their course before /80.” And after the November elections, which resulted in Democratic majorities in both Senate and House, he had written that paradoxically, he was pleased: “It seems to me to put the republican party right for /80. Providence seems to direct that something-should be done just in time to save the party of progress and internal unity & equality.” But in 1879 he jumped the gun on that critical moment. Now Grant’s protests that “I am not a candidate for any office, nor would I hold one that required any manoeuvring or sacrifice to obtain” were contradicted by the intense conversations he held with party leaders at every stop on his American trip. These talks were read by all but the most guileless as studied attempts to lock up delegate votes. Grant’s skill at appearing never to seek the success he so desperately sought failed him.2
He had anticipated that failure. He had known in Japan that he would have to come home to still another attempt to prove himself. In August he wrote Badeau, “At the end of twenty-six months I dread going back, and would not if there was a line of steamers between here and Australia. But I shall go to my quiet little home in Galena and remain there until the cold drives me away. Then I will probably go south—possibly to Havana & Mexico—to remain until April.” The stay in Galena actually lasted only six weeks. Had he been willing to go straight there and settle down, that town might have worked for him in 1880 as it had in 1868. Instead, there were the trips all across the continent, and, finally, there was just one too many of the magnificent banquets.3
The occasion was a vast reunion dinner in Chicago, on November 13, 1879, of the Army of the Tennessee, but the man who brought it all down was not a member of the army, but a Confederate veteran—of a few days service—Samuel L. Clemens. The night before the dinner, Grant had been on the stage of Haverley’s Theater, where, “through all the patriotic rant, the bombardments of praise and adoration, the unfurling of a shredded battle flag and the roar of a thousand men singing ‘Marching through Georgia,’ Grant sat slouching in his chair, his right leg crossed over his left, not moving a muscle, an iron man.” Clemens was fascinated by Grant. He liked other celebrities, but there was more that was intriguing about this man, and a friendship began that eventually took Julia and Ulysses to Hartford and Clemens’s whimsical and beautiful house. Here in Chicago, however, Clemens saw the sphinx as a challenge, and was delighted with the challenge. What Grant was thinking up there on that stage no one knew, but Adam Badeau guessed: “…though he had the faculty of receiving adulation with a greater appearance of equanimity than any other human being I have known, he was not indifferent to the recognition of the world or the praises of his friends. He who never betrayed on that imperturbable countenance that he relished the plaudits of the multitude has told me often with delicious frankness afterward of the compliments he had received….”4
The next evening at the Palmer House, after oysters and beef and buffalo steaks, there was brandy and whiskey—and six hours of oratory. Justin Kaplan, in one of the finest passages of Mr. Clemens and Mark Twain, describes what happened:
Somewhat after two in the morning, Clemens, the fifteenth and final speaker…responded to the toast he himself had devised for the occasion: “The babies—as they comfort us in our sorrows, let us not forget them in our festivities.” By the end of his third sentence—“When the toast works down to the babies, we stand on common ground”—he knew he had mastered his audience, and, all the while watching Grant, who was no longer impassive now but laughing like the others, he marched through an elaborately double-edged tribute to the man of war, majestic on the battlefield but ridiculous in the nursery…. Relentlessly, with an apparent unawareness of the reverence in which these veterans held Grant, he described the future commander in chief of the American armies lying in his cradle and occupied with “trying to find some way of getting his big toe in his mouth.”…This goal, Clemens went on, “the illustrious guest of this evening turned his entire attention to some fifty-six years ago.” Here he remembered that the laughter ceased, there was only “a sort of shuddering silence,”…and then he sprang his masterful and breathtaking surprise: “And if the child is but a prophecy of the man, there are mighty few who will doubt that he succeeded.”
“Tornadoes of applause” rang in Clemens’s ears. And laughter—the veterans loved the story and demonstrated that fact, once they had made sure that the one who had received the brunt of it was laughing too. He was. As Clemens put it, “…my truths had wracked all the bones of his body apart.” Kaplan is brilliant in suggesting that “by making this iron man laugh and cheer with all the others he had, in a sense, destroyed him.” “I knew I could lick him.” Clemens boasted; “I shook him up like dynamite.”5
Clemens’s victory was, of course, psychological, but there was a hint of political destruction as well, for his story carried overtones of another tale, that of the emperor’s new clothes. The image of Grant in the cradle, naked, exposed the nakedness of the attempt to regain the presidency. There was no substance to clothe his campaign. It had developed no idea or issue. There was no reason at all why he should be elected president again. Grant had become nothing but a symbol—a mighty one perhaps, but with no more currency than an old battle flag. If the symbol of the nation’s power was reduced to a ridiculous helpless baby, there was not much reason to vote for him. He was simply trying to put his foot in his mouth, and this time he was going to succeed.
He did not know that yet. From Chicago, the Grants went east. One observer there wrote Elihu Washburne, “If he really wants to be President he came home too soon, and having come, he lingered in Philadelphia too long.” The pageant of receiving honors from the citizenry seemed to be degenerating into mere vote-seeking. The former president and his lady spent Christmas 1879 in Washington, D.C.; they went to Florida in January, to Cuba in February, and then to Mexico, to enjoy again the undiluted deference that now was theirs in foreign countries. And perhaps there could be another triumphant return, another burst of enthusiasm, that would carry him to victory in the Chicago convention in June. In Houston, after their visit to Mexico, it seemed that it might happen. The welcome was warm and there was a poignant reminder of what had been a genuine issue indeed. It was the black people of Houston who gave Grant their blessing. An Illinois farmer, T. L. Crowder, who had known Grant at Camp Yates, was there: “I pushed my way through the dense mass of people who packed every available space for blocks around the Hotel, ‘niggers’ by the hundreds[,] thousands, acres of them big and little[,] old and young, good looking and [two words obliterated] well dressed and ragged,…a perfect medley of ‘d——d niggers.’”6
Later, inside, Crowder climbed up on a sofa with a friend to watch the reception for Grant. The black citizens crowded into the room and stood “sandwiched between beautiful ladies in silks and satins.” The general, Crowder continued, “stood calm and serene while the ‘coton fiel’ patriarch with white head, bowed frame, clad in a ‘spiketailed’ coat of the eighteenth century (which his old ‘Master’ gave him) spread out his long bony hand and pronounced his blessing upon him. Those touching scenes would doubtless have brought tears to our eyes…but for the little streak of meanness that my friend and I inherited which led us to enjoy the chagrin and discomfiture of the ‘Colonel Suh’ or the beautiful southern lady who must simply stand and wait until this royal devotion of the liberated man had spent its force.”7
The devotion was real, and so were the problems these Republicans faced in Texas. What was truly spent was the force that had once been Ulysses Grant’s to move these people into the stream of progress he had so confidently made flow for the citizens of the nation. As long as men like Crowder saw only the discomfort of defeated rebels in the earnest reach of the black people of the South toward Grant, there was no hope that this politician or any other would reach back to them, with a program addressed to their problems. Grant would have their votes if he won the nomination, but during his second administration he had allowed the power to be drained from an integrated Republican party in the South. There was little these black Southerners could do to give him a victory this time.
The Grants re-established themselves in Galena, in good proximity to Chicago, where the Republican convention was to be held. “It was now only a few weeks before the convention,” Badeau wrote later, “and Grant manifested as much anxiety as I ever saw him display on his own account.” Julia concurred: “…how can I describe that week of suspense for me!” Badeau recalled that Grant “calculated the chances, he counted the delegates, considered how every movement would affect the result, and was pleased or indignant at the conversion of enemies or the defection of friends….” Julia was particularly conscious of the latter; she did not trust her old friend Roscoe Conkling, whom Grant counted on to rally support among the stalwarts. No doubt Julia wondered if Conkling wanted to rally them in such a way that they would swing from Grant to himself. Within Conkling’s own New York delegation, William Henry Robertson led a group of dissidents who fought the unit rule that would have allowed Conkling to give all the votes of the largest bloc of delegates to a single candidate, and Julia was not persuaded that Conkling was demonstrating sufficient fervor to carry the day for her husband. Soon, in fact, she was sounding like the campaign manager he should have had if he truly wanted to win.8
Grant’s position was strong, but so was that of his chief rival, handsome, compelling James G. Blaine of Maine. On the first ballot, with 370 votes needed for the nomination, Grant had 304 and Blaine 284. John Sherman of Ohio (nominated by James A. Garfield) had 93, George F. Edmunds of Vermont 34, and Elihu B. Washburne, trying now for the presidency on his own, had 30. (Grant never forgave his old sponsor for drawing these votes from him.) The convention deadlocked, and the balloting went on for days.
As the strain of the stalemate persisted, there was much jockeying to see who should yield. At a conference in Galena a letter of withdrawal was drafted; it was to be used by the most trusted of the leaders of the Grant forces, the Pennsylvania senator J. D. Cameron, with the concurrence of Senators Conkling and John A. Logan, only if Grant’s position grew hopeless. The politicos wanted to be sure they were in a position to shape the ticket even if their man went down. Grant signed, but when Julia heard of it she let Don Cameron know that he was “not to use that letter. If General Grant were not nominated, then let it be so, but he must not withdraw his name—no, never.” For Julia it was all or nothing.9
The Grants were due to pass through Chicago on Monday, on their way to Milwaukee for a Grand Army of the Republic reunion. “How I entreated him,” wrote Julia, “to go on Sunday night and appear on the floor of the convention on Monday morning.” She knew how he could ignite a crowd; she was desperate for him to try. It might well have worked, but he refused to go: “He said he would rather cut off his right hand. I said: ‘Do you not desire success?’ ‘Well, yes, of course,’ he said, ‘since my name is up, I would rather be nominated, but I will do nothing to further that end.’ ‘Oh, Ulys,’ I said, ‘how unwise, what mistaken chivalry. For heaven’s sake, go—and go tonight. I know they are all making cabals against you. Go, go tonight.’”
Ulysses wanted the nomination, but he would not beg for it. He looked at his wife and said, “Julia, I am amazed at you,” and walked away. Frustrated and embittered, Julia went with her husband not to the convention in Chicago, but to the veterans’ reunion in Milwaukee; in Galena the Gazette of June 8, 1880, stated, “Suspense Over,” and noted, “No Deserters Among the Grant Forces.” But “Ulysses S. Grant” was missing from its masthead, which now read, “For President of the United States, James A. Garfield of Ohio.”10
Grant took it all with a certain equanimity. On June 27, in a long letter to Nellie, he said kiddingly, “If little Algie is such a bother to his pa send him over to us and we will bring him up ‘and away he will go.’” He would pass his ambitions along to his grandson; he was more interested than ever in the family, now” that he had been deprived of something major to do with his life. The letter was full of news of Nellie’s brothers. Fred was stationed on the Rio Grande, and Ida and their daughter, Julia, were there with him. Jesse, back from dabbling in mining ventures in Arizona, would soon leave for New York City, where he was “in business”—Grant did not specify just what the business was, probably because he was not sure. As for the third term: “I felt no disappointment at the result of the Chicago Convention. In fact I felt much relieved. The most unscrupulous means had been resorted to by the friends of other candidates—no doubt by their advice—and even then a good majority of the delegates chosen were for me. But means were resorted to to displace them and give a small majority for all other candidates combined.” If he had control of his disappointment, he had not mastered his bitterness, and neither had Julia mastered hers: “I had been with him on his triumphant journey…and knew the people wanted him. They all told me so, but I knew of the disaffection of more than one of his trusted friends. The General would not believe me, but I saw it plainly.” Neighbor Washburne was one of the friends whom Julia crossed off their list.11
In August the Grants went to Colorado to inspect mines in which he hoped, somehow, to invest. On August 5, stopping at Gunnison, he found a letter from James A. Garfield proposing that they campaign together. He replied immediately, saying that he would be happy to do so. He told Garfield that he would be at the state fair in Madison, Wisconsin, on September 6 and 7, and would also visit two fairs in Illinois, at Rockford and Sterling. Then after a stop at Galena, he would start east for New York and Boston on the twentieth. If Garfield could not fit country fairs into his schedule, “could you not join me some place in Ohio, or further west, and go east with me as far as might be convenient to you?” He added, “I feel a very deep interest in the success of the republican ticket, and have never failed to say a word in favor of the party, and its candidates, where I felt I could do any good.” He was being precise in his choice of words; he spoke unequivocally of his support to the party—without mentioning Garfield’s name. He closed with “my most hearty best wishes for your success in the coming campaign.”12
When Grant reached Galena he found an invitation from Garfield to spend the night under his roof at Mentor on September 27. He wrote saying that he and Julia would be in Chicago that day meeting Jesse and his bride, Elizabeth Chapman, who were arriving from their wedding in San Francisco. The four Grants were then to go on to New York, where the young couple would sail for Europe on a wedding trip. Julia and Ulysses had not been at the wedding, and the brief trip to New York was to be their private celebration. But Ulysses could not stay out of the public world even for this occasion. Julia did not like James Garfield any better than she liked anyone else who had stolen the White House from her: “The General and I were invited to go to Mentor. The General went but I would not go.” The two men actually met in Warren, Ohio, at a large Republican rally, and Grant was the center of a great deal of welcome attention. In October he campaigned in upstate New York, particularly in Utica, to demonstrate his reconciliation—or the absence of any need for one—with Roscoe Conkling.13
Grant, watching the campaign carefully for signs of success, urged a surprisingly dour Garfield to cheer up. “The news from Maine seems to have improved since your letter was written,” he observed in his response to Garfield’s invitation, and he added, “He laughs best who laughs last.” When that laugh had been had, he wrote Garfield a long, rather formal, and even fulsome letter of congratulations. The victory over Winfield Scott Hancock, who had fought with Grant in Virginia, seemed so sound that he thought it would drive the “unfair and unholy” Democratic party into “dissolution.” Grant was relieved that the Republicans no longer had to rely on Hayes’s “small majority, and the necessity of having to carry three southern states to obtain that majority. The party knew…[it] could not get another electoral vote from the south.” Instead, the party now had a solid Northern base: “I predict for you the least vexation any Executive has had since /60.” Taking note that “papers not heretofore particularly friendly to me, are mentioning my name in connection with a Cabinet position, a foreign mission, or other reward for my supposed services in the campaign,” Grant declared that there was “no position within the gift of the President that I would accept.” He added, “I have great hopes of being able to do [service to the country] by advice in relation to our affairs in Mexico and the East, especially China & Japan. There is a great future for the commerce of this country by a proper understanding with these countries.”14
Generously, Grant had taken the initiative, making it unnecessary for Garfield to offer him a post, but leaving the door ajar for a special assignment in the Far East (and not entirely slamming shut the possibility of becoming secretary of state). Garfield was grateful and gracious. In reply, he told his former commander and former president that his counsel would always be welcome. And Grant did give counsel, not always from the lofty perch of the elder statesman. Sympathizing with Garfield as the newspapers busied themselves “making and unmaking” his cabinet, he wrote candidly about the man both had fought at the convention, James G. Elaine: “I do not like the man, have no confidence in his friendship nor in his reliability.” He nevertheless told the president-elect, “I do not think you ought to ignore him because I do not like him,” and indeed he advised Garfield that he ought to choose no man for his cabinet who was obnoxious to Blaine. But, obsessed with the allotment of patronage by states, as he had been when he was president, he urged Garfield to choose for the cabinet not Blaine, but instead someone from New York. Presumably he was thinking of his ally Roscoe Conkling, and whatever his disclaimers, the point of the letter was to block Blaine, just as Blaine’s candidacy had blocked his. Garfield did not take Grant’s advice, nor did he accept a more cryptic (and bizarre) suggestion a week later that John Jacob Astor be made secretary of the treasury.15
Garfield was grateful to Grant, and gracious, but also wary of accepting him as a mentor. When Garfield named William Henry Robertson collector at the port of New York, Grant wrote a long letter about the appointment, addressed to “Gen J. A. Garfield, President of the U. States.” He had never liked the sanctimonious Rutherford B. Hayes and had had high hopes for Garfield when a first “batch of appointment” of party regulars corrected “a grievous mistake of your immediate predecessor,” who had pandered to “disgruntled Sections” in the party. But he objected when Garfield, without consulting the senators from New York (he meant Roscoe Conkling) appointed “to the most influential position within the gift of the President in this state” a man who “did not support the nominee at the Republican party in 1872.” Robertson, Grant reminded Garfield, “gave indications at the convention which nominated you that if the nominee of 1872 were nominated in ’80 he would not support the ticket.” He continued, “I am disposed to ignore, if I cannot forget, all wrongs perpetrated against me personally, for the general good. But insults and wrongs against others for the crime of having supported me I do feel and will resent with all my power to resent.” Warming in his anger, Grant went on to say, “I gave you a hearty and strong support in the presence of an assembled crowd the moment your nomination was sent over the wires. I claim no credit for this for it was my duty,” for, he acknowledged, he “had been honored as no other man had by the republican party and by the nation…. But I do claim that I ought not be humiliated by seeing my personal friends punished for no other offense than their friendship.”16
Grant was so eager to reach straight to Garfield and to be felt on this matter that he sent the letter by hand, with Senator John Percival Jones of Nevada as courier, “to insure its reaching your hands without going through the hands of a secretary.” But the president sent a long, judicious and firm reply (not written in his own hand, as Grant’s letter had been) in which he rejected Grant’s position. He had “selected one of your warm supporters [Robert Todd Lincoln] for a very important cabinet position”; he had named ten Grant men to posts in New York State; and, he claimed, he had not known when he selected Robertson that he was obnoxious to Conkling. But if he had known, he still would have named him: “I feel bound as you did when President to see to it that local quarrels for leadership shall not exclude from recognition men who represent any valuable element in the Republican party.” He thus rejected Grant’s view that disgruntled elements should not be included in his administration, and, preaching a bit in a way that irritated Grant, he added, “While I am incapable of discriminating against any Republican because he supported you, I am sure you will agree I ought not to permit anyone to be proscribed because he did not support you.”17
Grant did not entirely agree, and he had to learn this very hard way that an ex-president, even one named Ulysses S. Grant, could not direct the White House on appointments, or on any other matter. Indeed, he had already turned to other business; Grant’s letter had been sent from the “City of Mexico.” When he had accepted the fact that the third term was not to be, he had still felt a need to be president of something. As it had for so many of his fellow veteran generals, this something turned out to be a railroad, and despite his earlier dismay about a United States invasion of Mexico, it was a Mexican railroad. Through his friendship with Mafias Romero, whom he had first met at City Point in 1865, when Romero was Mexico’s minister to the United States, he became president of the Mexican Southern Railroad, with a New York office at 2 Wall Street, at the corner of Broadway.18
In a fine essay on Grant as one of a series of American promoters in late-nineteenth-century Mexico, David M. Pletcher has traced the course of Grant’s interest in the nation’s neighbor to the south. The young lieutenant had been sensitive to the oppressive poverty cruelly enforced by rich landowners, when, as part of the American invading army, he had been in Mexico in the 1840’s. He was a partisan of the reformers who sought to oust Maximilian and, as our Civil War ended, even contemplated leading an army into Mexico in support of Juárez. Pletcher, looking at Grant’s urge to annex Santo Domingo, his championship of an American Isthmian canal, and his encouragement of trade with the Far East, sees Grant as “an expansionist” who was “a little ahead of his age.” He does not, however, accuse the general of having had annexationist urges toward Mexico during his presidency, and he claims that Grant scrupulously insisted, to both American and Mexican audiences, that his new railroad was planned not as a prelude to a land grab, but rather was intended to foster the free trade he had advocated all around the world on his tour.19
Grant’s love affair with Mexico stretched back to his Monterrey days, but Whitelaw Reid of the New York Tribune knew that the real reason for his interest in the Mexican Southern Railroad was that he was “exceedingly eager to make money.” This unfriendly critic accurately predicted that the “dazed” general was “sure to be used in these [Mexican] schemes until he is only a squeezed orange.” But Grant’s partner in the undertaking, Matías Romero, remained a close friend for the rest of Grant’s life. When Julia and Ulysses had visited Mexico early in 1880, as part of the buildup of Grant as a world leader, the people had saluted their one-time foe with the same glorious tumult that had become the routine of the Grant travels. There were great banquets and musical tributes, and Grant took it all in his usual stride, all save the bullfight. This was too reminiscent of the tannery for him to stomach, and he left the stadium before the slaughter was completed. At the other, happier, events given in the Grants’ honor, Romero was one of the chief celebrants, and when his friend failed to get the nomination for the American presidency in 1880, he saw a fine opportunity to obtain the services of the ideal promoter for his dream of a railroad in southern Mexico. The idea was to open the southern state of Oaxaca to commerce with a railroad running from Mexico City and then connect the line to United States railroads by means of a branch running north across the Rio Grande.20
Carrying a concession from the governor of Oaxaca to build the railroad, Romero came to New York in the fall of 1880 and on November 11 gave a dinner at Delmonico’s that would have satisfied the most demanding enthusiast for robber-baronry. Collis P. Huntington was there, Jay Gould was there, and the guest of honor was Ulysses S. Grant. Over excellent food and wine the gentlemen disingenuously agreed to act in consort in the further development of railroads in Mexico, in general, and in support of the new Mexican Southern Railroad, in particular. They planned to meet again in January, but never did; the dinner, however, provided enough impetus to launch the enterprise. On March 23, 1881, after the New York State legislature had responded to a request from Gould and Grant for a special law enabling that state to sanction corporate enterprise slightly outside its jurisdiction, the Mexican Southern Railroad was incorporated. Ulysses S. Grant was president, Grenville M. Dodge (a Gould ally), vice-president, and Russell Sage, treasurer. Three days later, Grant and Romero left for Mexico City. There Grant found that hopeful businessmen were somewhat less celebrated than visiting Caesars, but he put some Mexican critics at ease with a speech assuring potential investors that he sought commerce and not annexation. Nonetheless, it took two months for Grant and Romero to overcome anxieties in the Mexican government and gain from it the concession they sought. That goal achieved, Grant came home, and he and the family went to Long Branch for the summer.21
For Grant, the most immediate result of not being re-elected president of the United States was that he did not go back on the payroll. Therefore, the former president was assiduously trying to effect a major improvement in his finances. The investments that had been made with the subscription funds given him produced an income of only six thousand dollars a year. Julia described their position by saying, “General Grant was poor”; she did not say, “We were poor.” When the Grants came east in the fall, after a short stay in Galena, they moved into the Fifth Avenue Hotel, but even with the “very liberal terms” established by the hotel, they were hard pressed. They counted on the Mexican Southern Railroad, and once again, on George W. Childs. The Philadelphian had been a leader in buying the Philadelphia house and had contributed to the Washington house; now he and A. J. Drexel successfully raised still another fund for Grant, with which he bought an unpretentious but excellent house at 3 East Sixty-sixth Street. This was the perfect Upper East Side address for a gentleman of affairs.22
From his Wall Street office, Grant continued to champion the cause of international free trade. In addition to his Mexican Southern Railroad post, he was president of a company promoting construction of a canal across the Isthmus in Central America, and later, in October 1882, he persuaded President Justo Rufino Barrios of Guatemala to allow a railroad extension running 250 miles into his country. The avenues of trade were to be extensive indeed.23
In 1882, while Grant was promoting his railroad, he was appointed by President Chester A. Arthur to negotiate a reciprocal-trade agreement with Mexico. He was joined in the negotiations by an old friend whom he had met on his tour of the South in 1865. William H. Trescot of South Carolina had led the negotiations which resulted in the dispossession of the freedmen from the Sea Islands after the war, and he had lost none of his diplomatic skills. The Mexican members of the commission charged with writing the treaty were Estanislao Canedo and, once again, Matias Romero. The agreement, known as the Grant-Romero Treaty, was concluded by the commissioners on January 20, 1883. It established a list of products and manufactured goods that could be imported into the respective countries free of tariff. To Grant’s chagrin, his prestige and long-term commitment to free trade did not sweep away protectionist opposition. He was roundly criticized for having negotiated a treaty for his own personal gain, and after his death, the treaty was rejected by the United States Senate.24
Things went no better in Grant’s private undertakings. The initial capital of the Mexican Southern Railroad carried the office expenses and paid Grant’s salary, but he saw none of that vast money that other railroad presidents enjoyed. He never would. There was a great deal of negotiating for concessions, some surveying, and very little laying of track. There were no profits. Until the needed study of Jay Gould’s mind and finances is made, we cannot know what game he was playing, but it is likely that he never intended to do his part in the arrangements and develop the northern branch of the road. Since profits depended on trade with the United States, this long connecting link was critical to Grant and Romero’s hopes for the southern branch of the line, for which they were responsible in Oaxaca. What was more, two competing lines from Mexico City to the Rio Grande would very likely have outstripped the Mexican Southern Railroad even if Grant’s other business misfortunes had not completed its descent into bankruptcy in 1884 and caused the revocation of the Mexican government’s concession. Later, a narrow-gauge railroad was built from Mexico City to Oaxaca along the Mexican Southern route, and once subsidized and in rich British hands, this railroad paid dividends from 1897 to 1914. Nevertheless Pletcher concludes, “With no support other than that of the fickle opportunist Gould, it is highly doubtful that Grant could have done even this well.” By 1883, Ulysses Grant was on his way to failure as a railroader. But he still lived in New York; he was accustomed to an office on Wall Street; and so he set out on yet another venture in his attempt to bring a fortune to the family. This time he would make his try in partnership with his son Ulysses S. Grant, Jr.25
Buck Grant was a rotund, cheerful young man with a fresh face and his father’s coloring. He had received much the best education of anyone in the family, having attended Exeter, Harvard, and Columbia Law School, and on November 1, 1880, he married Fannie Josephine Chaffee. The bride’s father, like the groom’s, had clerked in a store, and Jerome B. Chaffee had also done some schoolteaching—one trade Grant had never tried—in Andrian, Michigan, on his way west from Lockport, New York. He had next tried Missouri, then Kansas, and finally Colorado, where he made a great deal of money in mining, land speculation, and banking. President of the First National Bank of Denver from 1865 to 1880, Chaffee was territorial delegate to Congress when Colorado was admitted to the Union, and became one of that state’s senators. The marriage of Josephine and Buck was considered a fine one; there was no more comfortably placed young man in America in 1880 than Ulysses S. Grant, Jr.
Buck went into business. In 1881, with a hundred thousand dollars obtained from his father-in-law, he entered into partnership with Ferdinand Ward in a new Wall Street brokerage firm, Grant & Ward. Young and handsome, Ward was regarded as one of the rising stars on Wall Street. He was the son of a Baptist minister in Geneseo, New York; he had come to New York in 1875, taken a job as a clerk in the produce exchange, married Henriette Green, the daughter of the cashier (chief operating officer) of the Marine Bank, and, for a modest sum, bought a seat on the produce exchange. He also traded in securities in elevated railways, thus participating in the urbanization-suburbanization speculation which was the unglamorous source of several great fortunes in the late nineteenth century. He was a man of great expectations, and his financial marriage to Ulysses S. Grant, Jr., in 1881 seemed to promise vast prosperity.26
By 1883 the books showed that young Grant’s initial investment had increased fourfold; he was on his way to being a millionaire. His father’s Mexican-railroad enterprise had not been equally successful, and Buck saw Grant & Ward as the opportunity to be rich—to be secure—that his father had looked for all his life. Ex-presidents are hard to place. As silent partners they lend prestige and draw business, but one can never be certain they will remain silent. Any number of the men who had subscribed to the fund for the Sixty-sixth Street house could have taken Grant into their firms, but none of them did. Instead, Grant was left in the embarrassing position of being an object of charity. If he were to become rich, like them, he still, at sixty, had to make his own start. The Mexican railroad, like the mines he had seen in the West and had considered as his way to make money, had not made him a rich man. Now his goodhearted, genial son wás offering him his chance. He took it, and invested a hundred thousand dollars in Grant & Ward. (The name now took on a useful ambiguity; people assumed the general had been the founder.)27
Encouraged by the apparent strength of the firm, investors bought securities through Grant & Ward and, according to established Wall Street procedure, left them with the firm as collateral on loans with which they bought still more securities. Grant & Ward, then, in a perfectly legal and normal procedure, borrowed against the securities in order to invest for the firm’s own account. What was not legal was the fact that Ferdinand Ward was rehypothecating the securities improperly by pledging the same stocks to support more than one bank loan. He was doing so with the collusion of the fourth partner in the firm, James D. Fish, who was also president of the Marine Bank. And it was the Marine Bank that was making the loans, against inadequate security.
If all of Grant & Ward’s investments had been successful, if all the loans had been repaid, no one would have needed to know that the security had been inadequate. Indeed, ex post facto, it would not have been. The whole point of capitalistic enterprise is to gain people’s confidence and persuade them to invest in ventures that will profit the entrepreneurs—the organizers of the enterprise—and, concomitantly, society. If investors can be found to build an elevated railway to the outskirts of a city, and more investors can be found to build houses at the end of the line, and banks, appraising both investments, are willing to give mortgages on the houses, and salesmen can persuade people to have the confidence to buy a dream house on a remote sandy stretch of, say, New York City’s borough of Queens, then, all along the line, the venture will have been a success. With confidence as the key commodity for sale on Wall Street, it is not surprising that the men of that street were so testy about talk of “confidence men” and so wary lest a gentleman break a rule of the club and shake the public’s understandably tentative confidence in the investment business. The crises of 1869 and 1873 were, after all, not ancient history in 1884.
Many conservative businessmen suspected that the credit of Grant & Ward was unethically inflated. In a hypothecation agreement, the securities pledged are understood to support no other loan. Those pledged by Grant & Ward did support more than one loan, and Ferdinand Ward and James Fish knew it. But did the other partners, Ulysses S. Grant and Ulysses S. Grant, Jr., know it? With money rolling in from the flourishing young firm, was it possible that the two Grants did not guess that something dubious was under way? Not even Buck’s fondest relatives ever claimed that he was a man of piercing intellect, but he could read, he was a lawyer, and the language of a hypothecation agreement, if turgid, is unequivocal. Of course it is possible that neither Buck nor his father looked at the transactions to which their partners, Ward and Fish, could, in perfectly standard fashion, sign the firm’s name. But if Buck’s father was not alert, what about his father-in-law, who was, after all, himself the president of a bank? And what about all of Grant’s friends? Weren’t people like Childs and Drexel and Hamilton Fish suspicious, and, if so, why didn’t they say something to Ulysses and Julia?
It is not an easy problem. How does one tell a former president of the United States that his partner is doing something crooked, which is tantamount to saying that he himself is crooked? And if it would be hard indeed to say this to the general about himself, it would be harder still to say it to a doting father about his son. Horace Porter told of going to Sixty-sixth Street to try to do just that, only to find Ward present and exuding such confident charm that his courage faltered and he said nothing.28
On Sunday, May 4, 1884, Ward’s own confidence faltered. He lived in Brooklyn Heights, but had spent this Sabbath morning at the office. He knew that the next morning he would be unable to cover the day loans he had taken at the end of the week; his only hope was one last display of confidence. He went uptown and told the general probably not all, but enough to persuade him that matters were at a crisis. Once more, Grant had the props pulled out from what had seemed to be as secure a fortress as those his friends inhabited. Once more, he was forced to be a funny little boy unable to trade like a man for a horse. William Henry Vanderbilt, almost the same age as Grant, had never fought any wars, and had never been president of the United States, but now Grant, in danger of disgrace, turned to this great monied patriarch as he had turned, in destitution, to his father in Covington a quarter of a century earlier. At the behest of a brassy young man, and to save his son, General Grant set out to rescue Grant & Ward. That Sunday afternoon, hat in hand, he went to Vanderbilt’s house, and struggled lamely (he had fallen at Christmastime) up his fine steps to ask for a loan.29
The reasoning was that if Vanderbilt would show his confidence by giving Ulysses Grant $150,000 on his name alone, then downtown, the next morning, the banks would agree to carry Grant & Ward until payment could be made. We know that Vanderbilt said yes to Grant, who left with a note for the $150,000—payable to him, not to Grant & Ward. But we do not know what Vanderbilt subsequently said to his own bankers. C. W. Moulton wrote his uncle William T. Sherman, who, as usual, was posted on everything going on in America, “The opinion on the Street is very unfriendly not only to the young men, but to the General…. The practice of re-hypothecation is looked upon here as an offense against the law and the ethics of mercantile dealing. No man or firm who have engaged in it have ever survived the condemnation that is placed upon it. There is much sympathy for the General, but it is mingled with much fault finding.” Moulton’s reading proved accurate. The good bankers elected not to save either Grant & Ward or the Marine Bank. Both failed, pulling several other brokerage houses and banks (and the Mexican Southern Railroad) down with them, and Ward fled the country. Fish was tried in 1885 and sent to jail, at a time when Grant was too ill to do more than submit a deposition.30
Not everyone was prepared to excuse the Grants, fils et père, as dolt and dupe. Hugh McCulloch, secretary of the treasury for Presidents Lincoln, Johnson, and Arthur, and a conservative banker, had admired Grant only for his ability as a warrior. When he looked back on Grant in 1889 he was critical indeed: “His name was known and respected throughout the world, but he was not content.” Deprived of a third term as president, Grant was shunted into private life, and “his ambition now was to be rich…. For rich men he had great respect; for poor men, no matter how distinguished they might be by intellectual attainments, he had but little regard. He had felt the crushing influence of poverty for many years,” and despite good salaries as general and president and “many valuable presents, he was, in comparison with most of his personal friends, poor. The love of money grew with the free use of it by himself, and by his observation of the influence which it commanded.” And so he went “into a business for which he had no fitness, and with a man of no repute.”31
McCulloch was not among those who believed that Grant should not be held responsible for his financial fate; neither were some newspaper writers. The New York World headed its story “Is Grant Guilty?” and the implication was that he was. Why weren’t his involvements pursued as vigorously as were those of the hapless James Fish? Once again, Grant’s eminence rescued him. He maintained a dignified silence, and the nation closed ranks around the belief that he was one who had been wronged, not a wrongdoer. One intelligent modern observer looks to psychology for a sensible explanation: “…the matter of General Grant was one of cognitive dissonance—Americans wanted to see Grant as a truly great hero, so they blocked out any conflicting information.”32
Some of that dissonance could be seen in Grant’s own mental processes. As Moulton told Sherman, he seemed “to be a perfect child in financial matters.” He had learned precisely nothing from Black Friday except that Jay Gould was still a rich man. He lacked discernment; he had an exceedingly limited moral sense. Or perhaps he was too simple to figure out who on Wall Street was ethical and who was not. There was something that Karl Marx would have recognized in Grant’s upside-down sense of the capitalistic world he only half understood: To him, the man who won—who got rich and stayed rich—was the one who was moral and could make the judgments. All that mattered was success.33
Grant was destitute and on display as an object of national pity. Friends came to the Sixty-sixth Street house to offer their condolences as if someone in the family had died. When Matías Romero picked up his hat to leave, he quietly put a check for a thousand dollars in its place. (Julia claimed they considered it a loan and paid it back within a month.) Grant had been party to a financial debacle that mocked everything he had claimed to have saved the Union for. He had lowered himself—if not to the depth he had reached at Fort Humboldt, then to as great a degree of embarrassment as any nineteenth-century president had suffered. Not even Andrew Johnson, impeached, had been as humiliated. None had gone broke. But this very degree of humiliation laid the base for his last and greatest victory. He could treat his countrymen to another performance of heroism. He could publicly pull himself and his family up out of poverty. In May 1884, however, how to do so was not entirely clear.34
Nine years earlier, General Sherman had published his Memoirs. They were infused with the fire of the man and, in headlong prose, told well the story of his campaigns. Other generals had published their accounts of the war in magazine articles and books; reminiscences of the Civil War were a well-established genre of American writing. Before the failure of Grant & Ward, Robert U. Johnson, associate editor of Century Magazine, had tried to interest Grant in taking his turn at telling about the war. “It is all in Badeau,” Grant had replied, referring to Adam Badeau’s three-volume Military History of Ulysses S. Grant. Now, sensing that Grant might be more interested, Johnson approached Badeau, who was doing an article for Century on Grant, to see if he could persuade the general to write for the magazine. Whether persuaded by Badeau or by Johnson’s own persistent calls on him, Grant did agree to try his hand at accounts of his battles.35
Grant had never before thought of himself as a writer, but he set to the task with the same lack of fuss that had characterized him twenty-one years earlier when he swiftly, clearly wrote his orders, revealing his remarkable grasp of realities, that first night in Chattanooga. The first draft of “Shiloh” reached the Century office on July 1; it was essentially a copy of Grant’s official report of the battle. Johnson encouraged him to rewrite the piece to reflect his personal sense of what had gone on. Grant did so, and the article appeared in the February 1885 issue. During July he wrote “Vicksburg,” working four hours a day, seven days a week. This diligence, and the fact that the prose was of excellent quality, made Johnson and his associates at Century become ambitious initially for a fuller series of articles on the war (which eventually resulted in the collection of memoirs by various veterans published as Battles and Leaders of the Civil War) and later for a single work by Grant on the whole war—on his whole life. They paid Grant $500 for each article, and as they began negotiating for the book they offered him the standard 10 percent royalty, which on the projected sales of 200,000 to 300,000 would bring $20,000–$30,000, about what Sherman told Grant he had made on his book. This would not suffice to pay back Vanderbilt or restore Grant’s financial health and that of his sister Virginia Corbin, who had lost heavily in Grant & Ward, but it would give him and Julia a desperately needed income. And so, that summer at Long Branch he wrote his two articles, and considered writing a book.36