by Ron Chernow
Johnson thought of naming a new war secretary who stood a fair chance of Senate confirmation. Sherman suggested Governor Jacob D. Cox of Ohio, whose term would shortly expire. As a former Union general with a commendable war record, he would find favor with Grant and Republicans, while as an opponent of universal black suffrage, he might also entice moderates. According to Sherman’s recollections, Grant “urged me to push the matter all I could, saying that Governor Cox was perfectly acceptable to [him], and to the Army generally.”47 Johnson evinced scant enthusiasm for the idea.
On January 13, the full Senate ratified the judgment of the Military Affairs Committee and overwhelmingly voted for Stanton’s restoration as secretary of war. That evening, to the astonishment of official Washington, Grant attended a reception at the executive mansion. Julia had female friends staying with them who were eager to go, but when she asked her husband to escort them, he balked. “I would like to gratify you, but, really, under the circumstances, I do not think I ought to go.”48 Nevertheless, he yielded gallantly to the ladies. As they were leaving, a messenger arrived with news of the Senate vote, which Grant perused by the flickering glow of gaslight. He found himself in the excruciating bind he had feared, trapped between Stanton and Johnson. When he reached the White House, Johnson shook his hand genially and the two men chatted for several minutes; Grant later admitted his embarrassment at the show of presidential cordiality. At another dreadful Washington soiree that evening, Sherman chatted with Secretary of the Interior Browning, who wrote afterward that Sherman “spoke bitterly of Stanton’s restoration and seemed to think the President blameable, as he might, he said, have prevented it by nominating some moderate Republican for Secy of War who would have been confirmed by the Senate, and the whole subject disposed of in that way.”49
In Grant’s view, his tenure as temporary war secretary ended when he read the Senate announcement by gaslight. Early the next morning, he showed up at his War Department office, locked the door from the outside, then transferred the keys to the adjutant general. “I am to be found at my office at army headquarters,” he announced.50 Never a man to tarry, Stanton was back at work in an hour, converting his old office into a gloomy fortress, buttressed by guards. Though Grant had saved him, the graceless Stanton immediately started bossing him around. Grant resented his “discourteous mode” and the uncomfortable situation Stanton had created by his obstinacy.51 Even young Jesse Grant recollected Stanton’s boorish behavior. “Small boy that I was, I remember the rudeness of his manner.”52 Grant notified the president that he had vacated the office and no longer functioned as war secretary. Faced with this fait accompli, Johnson was furious, believing Grant should have resigned his post and allowed him to name a successor.
Bent on showing that Grant was still war secretary, Johnson demanded his presence at a cabinet meeting, one of the most rancorous in American history. After everyone was seated, Johnson canvassed the room, asking each secretary to name a subject for discussion. When he came to Grant, the latter reminded him that he was no longer a cabinet member and attended only at his request. An enraged Johnson began to grill Grant like a prosecutor, castigating him for abandoning his office, then asked point-blank: “Why did you give up the keys to Mr. Stanton and leave the Department?”53 According to Johnson loyalists, he reminded Grant of their understanding “that if you did not hold on to the office yourself, you would place it in my hands that I might select another?” “That,” said Grant, “was my intention. I thought some satisfactory arrangement would be made to dispose of the subject.” Browning quoted Grant as confessing he had agreed to hold the office until courts ruled on the Tenure of Office Act.54
Grant left a strikingly different version. As diplomatically as possible, he told the president he “might have understood me in the way he said, namely that I had promised to resign if I did not resist the reinstatement. I made no such promise.”55 He wondered aloud why Johnson had passed over the opportunity to appoint Governor Cox, which would have created a convenient exit from the impasse. He also explained that after his original talk with Johnson on the subject, he had read the Tenure of Office Act and learned of the severe penalties for violating it. Once again Johnson volunteered to pay the fine or serve the prison stretch. Feeling his integrity questioned, Grant abruptly asked to be excused from the meeting. According to Welles, he left in an “almost abject” state after enduring the president’s “cold and surprised disdain.”56 When he was gone, Johnson inveighed against his “secret intrigue in this business” and blasted him for having acted “under the direction of the chief conspirators.”57
During these critical days, Grant knew he was going to be damned by either the Radical Republicans or the president. Through studied ambiguity, he had tried to keep his options open until the last moment. In the end, he couldn’t please both sides and wound up antagonizing the president. By this point, both his political future and fundamental principles led him to line up with Radical Republicans against Johnson, who had so patently sabotaged the work of his southern commanders. Grant wasn’t being opportunistic, only true to his principles.
No longer needing to appease Grant, Johnson broadcast his anger against him to the press. The next day, an editorial in the National Intelligencer recounted the cabinet meeting and damned Grant for supposed duplicity. Upset by the leak, Grant and Sherman went to the White House to protest. Johnson claimed he hadn’t read the article and insisted that Grant had betrayed him. In Johnson’s recollection, Grant had said he would make an effort to prevail upon Stanton to resign; Grant insisted he had only said he thought Stanton would resign.
Two days later, Johnson had the Intelligencer piece read aloud to his cabinet and asked them to comment on its authenticity. While they all agreed on its accuracy, one wonders how anyone could have dissented knowing Johnson’s desired response. All four cabinet supporters of Johnson’s version of the truth were his rabid partisans. Only William Seward disputed the consensus, maintaining that Grant’s statements had been ambiguous and his admissions “rather indirect and circumstantial.”58 Grant had not lied but he may well have equivocated, which to Johnson amounted to the same thing. The president demanded that Grant obey no orders from Stanton unless issued by presidential direction, a move that Grant would rebuff. When Grant went to Stanton and discussed his possible resignation, he realized such advice was useless with the headstrong Stanton. Welles maintained that Stanton assumed “an imperious and angry look” toward Grant and spoke “loud and violently,” leaving Grant not “daring to make known the object of his mission.”59
In the firestorm of charges and countercharges, the press divided along predictably partisan lines. Pro-Johnson papers dredged up old drinking charges against Grant, asserting he was inebriated during the Stanton imbroglio. The Republican press refused to accept that Grant, a stickler for the truth, would ever stoop to dishonesty. “In a question of veracity between U.S. Grant and Andrew Johnson, between a soldier whose honor is as untarnished as the sun, and a President who has betrayed every friend, and broken every promise, the country will not hesitate,” wrote the New York Tribune.60
On January 28, Grant sent Johnson a letter on Stanton’s suspension and attempted to show he had consistently denied he would defy a Senate ruling in the matter. He reiterated that his views had changed after studying the Tenure of Office Act. Far from tugging his forelock, Grant adopted a waspish tone that accelerated the break between the two men. He “in no wise admitted the correctness” of Johnson’s recollection of events and denied he had ever made a promise to resign as war secretary.61 When the letter surfaced around town, Radical Republicans seemed jubilant as any appearance of amity between Johnson and Grant vanished. “He is a bolder man than I thought him,” Thaddeus Stevens said of Grant. “Now we will let him into the church.”62 At a stroke, Grant had virtually guaranteed he would be the Republican nominee for president.
Rawlins had returned from Galena to support Grant in the con
troversy. On February 3, dropping any pretense of impartiality, Grant sent Johnson an impassioned letter that essentially called him a liar, a coward, and a lawbreaker. To have resisted Stanton’s reinstatement, Grant alleged, would have meant breaking the law. “And now, Mr. President, where my honor as a soldier and integrity as a man have been so violently assailed, pardon me for saying that I can but regard this whole matter, from the beginning to the end, as an attempt to involve me in the resistance of law . . . and thus to destroy my character before the country.”63 These were shockingly bold words from Grant, who accused the president of smearing his reputation and attempting to bully him into committing a crime. According to Badeau, Rawlins told Grant that neutrality with Johnson was impossible and that the time had come for an open breach. To that end, Rawlins redrafted Grant’s February 3 letter, making its language even more scorching. Rawlins had always exercised an outsize influence on Grant, but this intervention seemed extraordinary. “I never in my intercourse with Grant saw another instance where another exercised so direct and palpable and important an influence with him,” wrote Badeau. “It made [Grant] a Republican. Rawlins knew this.”64 Rawlins again functioned as Grant’s alter ego, his conscience, his better self.
A week later, the president sent Grant a reply that matched his blunt vehemence: “First of all, you here admit that from the very beginning of what you term ‘the whole history’ of your connection with Mr. Stanton’s suspension, you intended to circumvent the President. It was to carry out that intent that you accepted the appointment.”65 Even by the lowly standards of Washington blood sport, this was bare-knuckled politics. All the while, said Senator George Williams, Grant had remained “cool and undisturbed, though his honor was at stake, and undismayed by the formidable array of power and influence against him.”66
Increasingly desperate, Johnson turned to Sherman, hoping to enlist the army on his side in a showdown with Congress. On February 12, he ordered Grant to create a new military division that would encompass Washington, with Sherman as its commander and its headquarters located in the capital. By this transparent subterfuge, Johnson hoped to neuter Grant and control the army through Sherman. Having tried to divide Grant and Stanton, he now attempted to do the same with Sherman, who again feared the arrangement would jeopardize his long-standing relationship with Grant. In distress, he told Grant that “I never felt so troubled in my life” and objected to “the false position I would occupy as between you and the President.”67 Sherman composed a deeply felt letter to Johnson, expressing discomfort at being placed in a rivalrous position with his old friend. If difficulties arose between them, he would have “no alternative but resignation.”68 In an earlier letter to the president, Sherman had noted the unfortunate changes wrought in the trusting Grant by Washington’s corrosive atmosphere. He had been with Grant through “death and slaughter . . . and yet I never saw him more troubled than since he has been in Washington, and been compelled to read himself a ‘sneak and deceiver,’ based on reports of four of the Cabinet, and apparently with your knowledge.”69 In the end, Johnson decided that he couldn’t afford to alienate the two leading war heroes and withdrew his controversial order.
—
THE WORSE THINGS LOOKED FOR Andrew Johnson, the brighter was the political future for Grant. In early February, when the New York Republican Convention endorsed him for president, it gave a tremendous fillip to his potential candidacy. His actions during this pivotal time have been interpreted in two ways: that he either kept his head down and didn’t dabble in politics or, under the cloak of serving Congress, cannily angled for Radical Republican support for president. The two interpretations perhaps reflect his own ambivalence. After the war he had attained an exalted stature in North and South that transcended party labels and a political career could threaten that appeal. Still a relative newcomer to politics, he recoiled from the dishonest wrangling in Washington. “Indeed, the spectacle of Johnson dishonored, impeached, almost deposed, was not calculated to make one who stood so near at all eager to become his successor,” wrote Badeau.70 When people inquired about his presidential aspirations, Grant met them with perfect silence and a blank, stony face that mystified even the most penetrating observers.
Badeau thought the Democratic sympathies of the Dents may have held Grant back, but this seems highly unlikely since Julia, who had been brought up to daydream of a higher destiny, was always ambitious for her husband. Ideology was less important to her than power, whose trappings she now craved. When he considered a presidential run, Grant told Julia he didn’t relish being president but considered himself well situated to effect a rapprochement between North and South. “The South will accept my decision on any matters affecting its interests more amiably than that of any other man. They know I would be just and would administer the law without prejudice.”71 Julia didn’t prod him to run—she bristled at the idea she was a pushy wife—but once he made the decision, she followed him most devoutly. “I became an enthusiastic politician,” she would recall. “No delegation was too large, no serenade too long.”72
It goes without saying that Jesse Root Grant promoted his famous son with unashamedly bumptious pride. When the New York Ledger assigned a reporter to collect stories about Ulysses’s boyhood, Jesse furnished a bumper crop of three letters recounting favorite anecdotes. They soon appeared in weekly newspaper installments under the rubric “The Early Life of Gen. Grant.” Once Grant found out about his father’s latest escapade, he was predictably outraged and interceded to block publication of further letters. The newspaper’s editor assured Jesse that his letters contained no political allusions to his son and couldn’t be misconstrued as “writing him up as a Presidential candidate,” but they indeed looked like a blatant campaign ploy.73
The prospect of a Grant candidacy led to microscopic scrutiny of his personal behavior, producing fresh drinking allegations. After New York Republicans endorsed him, the New York World branded him “a commonplace man. He has no military talent . . . is hated by the army. He is generally drunk.”74 It’s hard to know whether these rumor mills simply rehashed wartime chatter. That January, a woman named Helen Griffing, who resided in Washington, told the New York editor Theodore Tilton that she had walked down F Street on a recent evening and “passed two gentlemen, one of them very intoxicated, leaning on the arm of the other. The one who was intoxicated I believe to be Gen. Grant.”75 In March, Elihu Washburne, long a clearinghouse for Grant drinking stories, heard from his friend Rufus P. Stebbins that Grant had reportedly been “seen reeling on the street.” After stating with alarm that “twenty millions of the best men women and children would weep at the bare possibility of this being true,” Stebbins suggested that Grant agree to a total abstinence pledge.76
After President Johnson despaired of luring Sherman to Washington, he moved swiftly to banish Stanton. On February 21, without consulting the Senate, he fired him and replaced him as secretary of war ad interim with General Lorenzo Thomas, the army adjutant general. Grant saw Stanton soon afterward and told him to hold his ground as secretary. As word spread to the Capitol, Charles Sumner fired off a telegram to Stanton with a single imperative syllable: “Stick.”77 Stanton turned his office into a veritable locked bunker, pocketing the key. Thomas notified Grant that he would operate from his H Street residence, while Stanton remained “camped in the war office,” as one editor phrased it.78
Johnson had unleashed the political equivalent of an act of war against Congress. Retaliating against the president’s violation of the Tenure of Office Act, the House introduced a resolution to impeach Andrew Johnson for high crimes and misdemeanors. Three days later, the resolution passed by an overwhelming 126 to 47 vote, with every Republican aligned against the president. Until recently, Grant had frowned upon impeachment as an extreme remedy, but Johnson’s press vendetta against him and their wounding exchange of letters had changed his mind. Badeau observed that “when the motion for impeachment was finally passed he he
artily approved it.”79 Grant now harbored deep antagonism toward Johnson that burst out when he rode a streetcar with Senator John Henderson of Missouri. “I would impeach [Johnson] . . . because he is such an infernal liar,” Grant exclaimed.80 Rawlins was openly indignant against the president, while Grant, no less enraged, was more circumspect in style.
Eleven impeachment articles were filed against Johnson, all but two revolving around Stanton’s firing. Those two struck closer to the source of congressional discontent, accusing the president of refusal to implement Reconstruction laws and employing “intemperate, inflammatory and scandalous harangues” against legislators.81 As Congressman William Kelley of Pennsylvania proclaimed: “The unsheeted ghosts of the two thousand murdered negroes in Texas, cry . . . for the punishment of Andrew Johnson.”82 Radicals took a broad view of impeachment, hoping Johnson would stand trial for combating Reconstruction, sparing them the need to document violation of a particular law. Moderates championed the narrower view that a president could only be removed for committing a specific crime; hence their emphasis on the Tenure of Office Act.
For pro-impeachment forces one complicating factor was that Johnson had no vice president, so that if he were removed, the office would fall to the president pro tempore of the Senate, Benjamin Wade of Ohio, whose Radical Republican views offended moderate Republicans and Democrats alike, one chiding him for being “the first to secure the nigger suffrage enactment.”83 As the impeachment trial approached, an apocalyptic mood seized the country, arousing fears of a violent confrontation. For weeks, Gideon Welles had warned Johnson that Congress meditated a military coup, employing Grant as its cat’s-paw. After Johnson was impeached, General Ord told Grant that someone had asked him “what I thought would be the course of Army officers if the President should . . . call on them to support him as against the Congress—and I told him that nine tenths or perhaps more of the officers would Certainly support Congress.”84
