by Ron Chernow
At a Chicago army reunion in December, James H. Wilson was charmed at how natural Grant remained, unspoiled by his new eminence. “He was as good and plain, and frank, as he always was,” Wilson told a friend. “I never saw so modest or so unselfish a man—and I am sure he will make one of the best presidents we have ever had.”59 Yet Grant struggled with more inward pressure than he admitted and achieved his unexampled calm at a steep psychological price. When he got up to thank his old army comrades, he confessed, “I am now suffering from one of those neuralgic headaches with which I am periodically afflicted, and which prevents me, even were I so inclined, from saying anything farther on this occasion.”60 To Julia, he was more forthcoming about his anxiety. “I have been shaken to pieces . . . and will be glad to get started home.”61 Back in Washington, a perceptive reporter detected an “expression of sadness” in Grant, who seemed “borne down with cares” as he strode about in an ordinary black suit.”62 Doubtless adding to his discomfort was an awkward distance from the lame-duck president with whom he never met. To forestall any unpleasant encounter with Johnson, Grant spent New Year’s Day 1869 in Philadelphia, avoiding the customary call at the executive mansion, and he refused to allow his children to attend a special children’s party there.
About his cabinet decisions Grant kept even Rawlins and Washburne at bay until near the inauguration. The most suspense hung over Rawlins’s fate. “All seem to take it for granted that the General is going to do something very handsome,” Rawlins told his wife, “more than he has ever done for me.”63 When Grant procrastinated in making a decision, Rawlins fell prey to nagging doubts. His medical condition had worsened and he looked haggard and sickly, debilitated by lung congestion coupled with a hacking cough. To alleviate these symptoms, he soaked in salt water and took daily horseback rides on Grant’s black pony Jeff Davis, which did little to retard the course of his tuberculosis. By October 1868, as Rawlins fell apart under the strain of work, Grant wondered whether he could cope with the exacting demands of a cabinet job. His gratitude to Rawlins was boundless, but he didn’t want to burden a gravely ill man with intolerable responsibility.64
Grant decided to assign Rawlins to the military command of the Department of Arizona, where the hot, dry climate might relieve his suffering. When Rawlins learned of this, he grew indignant and said he deserved to be secretary of war. Wilson communicated his displeasure to Grant, who replied at once, “You can tell Rawlins he shall be Secretary of War.”65 Rawlins’s appointment was extremely important, for Grant required a deputy who would protect his reputation and serve as a fearless truth-teller, saving him from personal blunders and protecting his innocent nature from designing politicians.
Grant’s elevation to the presidency opened a vacancy for general of the army with Sherman the clear front-runner. He had monitored Grant’s rise with decidedly mixed emotions, believing that “if forced to choose between the penitentiary and the White House for four years, I would say the penitentiary, thank you.”66 At the Chicago army reunion, Grant, refusing to be coy, pretty much offered him the top army job. Then, in early January, Grant informed Sherman of a startling proposition: a group of New York City businessmen, led by the retail mogul Alexander T. Stewart, had offered to buy his I Street residence for $65,000—“which I insisted was more than the property was worth,” Grant admitted—and then donate it to Sherman.67 Even though he admitted the price was excessive, Grant expressed no scruples about the windfall, which almost doubled the price he had paid. On the day of his inauguration, Grant would nominate Sherman as general of the army and Philip H. Sheridan as lieutenant general, jumping them over George Gordon Meade and a deeply offended Henry W. Halleck.
Intense speculation swirled around what would happen to Grant’s chief patron, Elihu Washburne, who had suffered medical problems and to whom Grant incontestably owed more than anyone else in Washington. In Washburne’s present medical state, Grant doubted that he could handle a taxing job and happily acceded to his desire to become minister to France. At the same time, coveting the prestige of a temporary cabinet position, Washburne advanced a bizarre proposal: he wanted to serve briefly as a cabinet secretary so he could forever claim the title. When he suggested treasury secretary, Grant proposed instead a fleeting stint as secretary of state and Washburne agreed. Even though this arrangement devalued the position of secretary of state, Grant didn’t believe he could reject Washburne’s wishful thinking out of hand. It was a well-meant, but politically maladroit, decision. Washburne would hold the post for only five days, leading one senator to wisecrack, “Who ever heard before of a man nominated [as] Secretary of State merely as a compliment?”68 This odd temporary appointment added to a general impression of Grant as a rank amateur.
Perhaps because business success had eluded Grant, he held wealthy folks in high esteem and selected Alexander T. Stewart for treasury secretary. The Irish-born department store merchant had amassed a colossal fortune in the luxury trade, had faithfully supported Grant, and had spearheaded the money collected for his Washington house. Far from seeing a political payoff involved, Grant saw only a talented businessman willing to sacrifice his economic interests for the sake of public service.
Grant’s fealty to Reconstruction appeared in his choice of an attorney general, whose portfolio would be central to protecting black rights in the South. He turned to Ebenezer Rockwood Hoar, a bespectacled Republican with a grizzled beard, who was born in Concord, Massachusetts, and attended Harvard College and Law School. A former member of the Free-Soil Party, an upright gentleman of starchy integrity, he had served on the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court where he used sarcasm to savage lesser mortals. “When on the bench,” wrote an observer, “he was said to be unhappy because he could not decide against both litigants.”69 In Boston, he belonged to the so-called Saturday Club with Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and Oliver Wendell Holmes. One group luminary, James Russell Lowell, was enamored of Hoar’s intellect: “The extraordinary quickness and acuteness, the flash of his mind (which I never saw matched but in Dr. Holmes) have dazzled and bewildered some people so that they were blind to his solid qualities.”70 Even so hearty a Grant hater as Henry Adams allowed that “in the Attorney-General’s office, Judge Hoar seemed to fill every possible ideal, both personal and political.”71 Hoar loathed the spoils system and Grant would back him in appointing high-caliber judges. Because many of Andrew Johnson’s judicial appointees had shown little concern for black citizens, Congress had introduced nine new circuit judgeships and Grant would name some distinguished progressives to occupy them, including Hugh Lennox Bond, a Republican judge and abolitionist from Baltimore, who championed black education after the war.
For navy secretary, Grant tapped a genial, well-to-do Philadelphia businessman named Adolph E. Borie, a card-playing companion who lacked credentials for the job, injecting a touch of cronyism into the administration. He had contributed to the Philadelphia house given to Grant after the war. Grant portrayed Borie as “a merchant who had amassed a large fortune” and was “perfectly fitted for any place”—another example of Grant preferring to view rich businessmen through rose-colored glasses.72 A modest man, Borie tried to decline the office: “I told [Grant] that I did not consider that I knew enough about the navy and naval affairs . . . He said that was all nonsense; that I knew about ships and one thing and another.”73 Borie was in poor health, but Grant intimated he would serve as a figurehead while David Dixon Porter ably ran the department and so he consented to take the job. Borie “is now a mere clerk to Vice-Admiral Porter, not the Secretary of the Navy,” Gideon Welles jeered.74 Borie would last just four months, replaced by the attorney general of New Jersey, George M. Robeson, a roly-poly Princeton graduate with muttonchop whiskers and a sociable bent, who had been a brigadier general in the war. He would prove a capable if often slipshod administrator, shadowed by suspicions of corruption.
For interior secretary, Grant recruited Jacob Dolson
Cox, a Union major general and highly literate Oberlin graduate who had rendered distinguished service at Antietam and whom Grant and Sherman had wanted to succeed Stanton as war secretary. As Ohio governor, Cox preached against black suffrage and for racial segregation, making him a conservative member of Grant’s administration. On the other hand, he enjoyed a reputation as an efficient administrator and energetic ally of civil service reform, favoring a merit system for the Department of the Interior, a notorious mare’s nest of corruption. It is important to note that corruption was rife in many departments before Grant took office. In January 1869, the journalist John Russell Young told Washburne that somebody was needed in the Interior Department “who will take the many-headed serpent of robbery and strangle it in its various shapes—Indian Rings, Patent Rings, Stationery Rings and Railroad Rings. This work will, of course, make a tremendous howl among Congress-people.”75
For postmaster general, Grant made a superb choice, selecting John A. J. Creswell of Maryland. A Dickinson College graduate, he had practiced law in Maryland and served as a representative and U.S. senator from the state. Having started out a Democrat, he joined the Radical Republican ranks and became a protégé of Henry Winter Davis, a militant on Reconstruction. There was no job richer in patronage positions than the postmaster general’s—he would employ a veritable army of sixty thousand employees—and Creswell appointed a record number of African American postal workers.76 He introduced new efficiencies into mail delivery by rail and steamship, innovated with a penny postal card, and expanded mail routes.
The frosty relations that had marked Grant’s dealings with Andrew Johnson ever since the feud over Stanton had never thawed. Hence the change of administrations represented one of the more acrimonious power transfers in American history, and the two men traded petty snubs. For two months before the inauguration, the outgoing president dithered over whether to attend. In January, he grumbled that Grant was “a dissembler, a deliberate deceiver” and swore he would not “debase” himself by going to the ceremony.77 Grant failed to extend friendly overtures and refused to share a carriage with Johnson at the inaugural parade. Johnson passed on the chance to ride in a separate carriage. Gideon Welles reminded Johnson that President-elect Andrew Jackson had never called upon John Quincy Adams, who retaliated by boycotting Jackson’s swearing-in. “The President said he was not aware of that fact,” Welles wrote. “It was a precedent for us which he was glad to learn.”78 The upshot was that Johnson stayed doggedly put in the White House until noon on March 4, distracting himself with signing bills and tying up loose ends. A few minutes after noon, he escorted his cabinet to the main entrance portico, where carriages awaited them. “I fancy I can already smell the fresh mountain air of Tennessee,” Johnson said as he departed from the White House forever.79 It was a fitting end to a sad, sometimes shabby, presidency. In future years, bent on a comeback, Johnson was defeated in contests for the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives, although the Tennessee legislature made him a U.S. senator in 1875. “Thank God for the vindication,” Johnson remarked, then died five months after being sworn in.80
In the inaugural parade, Grant and Rawlins, with the Fifth Cavalry as their escort, rode together in an open carriage despite cold, rainy weather, presenting a portrait of the unique partnership that had won the war. At the last moment, Grant relented and stopped his carriage at the White House, inviting Johnson to come along, but the lame-duck president sent back word that he was too busy to comply. The cavalcade then proceeded to Capitol Hill, passing hordes of spectators who had poured into the capital for days. Since Grant was a military hero, the parade possessed a suitably martial air, with eight divisions of marching soldiers, including several black companies. Once at the Capitol, Grant strode into the Senate chamber, where he saw Schuyler Colfax sworn in as vice president, then emerged onto the building’s eastern facade before a vast multitude of perhaps fifty thousand people gathered under gray, gusty skies. He stood calmly during a twenty-two-gun salute in his honor. At forty-six, Grant was still trim and fit, the youngest man elected president until then. Having weathered the crucible of war, he was a more worldly figure than in earlier years, his face showing curiosity, intelligence, and skepticism. Lacking the tall, upright carriage or silver mane of a prototypical politician, Grant, in black suit and yellow kid gloves, looked more like a man on a minor business errand than a statesman embarking on high office. To those who knew him well, he seemed a bit tense, perhaps awed by his removal to a wholly new realm. “That day,” wrote Badeau, “there was no geniality, no familiar jest, hardly a smile.”81
Shortly after noon, just as Andrew Johnson vacated the White House, Grant was sworn in as eighteenth president by Chief Justice Salmon Chase. For Grant, it had been an improbable journey to this moment, with many setbacks intermixed with vaulting triumphs. Jesse Root Grant sat prominently among dignitaries on the eastern portico. He had grown quite deaf and learned to compensate with a booming voice. In the course of the day, he suffered a severe fall, tumbling down a flight of stairs. “It is not probable that his injury will shorten his life,” Grant told his sister Mary, “but will probably make him lame for life.”82 Despite the leg injury, Jesse was hounded by office seekers who saw him as their most convenient conduit for reaching his son.
Despite Jesse’s wealth, he and Hannah still lived in a plain two-story brick house on an unfashionable block in Covington. Hannah didn’t accompany her tightfisted husband to the inauguration, occasioning much press speculation, especially since she never visited Washington during her son’s two terms in office. With her silver hair and kind, maternal face, she remained reticent, shy, and self-contained. “In her old age,” said a journalist, “she had calm winning manners, and a face still sweet and still young.”83 Her absence from Washington may have sent a political message since she came from a family of Jacksonian Democrats. More likely it had to do with the eternal Dent-Grant psychodrama: Hannah detested the Dent clan and didn’t care to meet them in Washington. Jesse tried to coax her into going, but she decided firmly against it when informed she would have to sit among dignitaries. “Do you think I want to set [sic] up there for 50,000 people to gaze & point at?” she told her husband. “I would rather go when there are no strangers there.”84 This attitude says much about Hannah Grant’s plainspoken, homespun ways. Rumors later ran around Covington that at the hour when her son took the oath of office, Hannah was spotted “on the rear porch of her residence, with broom in hand sweeping down the cobwebs.”85
Once the swearing-in ended, Grant fished from his coat pocket the inaugural address that he had kept a secret, releasing no advance copies. In composing it, Grant again displayed the extreme self-reliance that had marked his career. Three weeks earlier, he had given Badeau a handwritten copy, told him to stash it in a drawer, and even hid it from a frustrated Julia. Now he delivered that speech almost verbatim. Once again the secretive Grant had forgone the insights of old political hands who might have made some constructive suggestions. As he began his speech, the huge throng pressed forward to hear his soft, almost inaudible, voice. Most of the speech, a mere twelve hundred words, was businesslike and uninspired. Grant declared himself an independent, not a professional politician: “The office has come to me unsought, I commence its duties untrammeled.”86 Striking the conciliatory Appomattox note, he drew a discreet veil over the violence tearing apart the South and promised to approach remaining war issues “calmly, without prejudice, hate or sectional pride.”87 No one knew better than Grant the war’s cost and he left no doubt that, as a hard-money man, he wished to bolster American credit and pare down debt. “To protect the national honor every dollar of Government indebtedness should be paid in gold unless otherwise expressly stipulated in the contract.”88
The speech lacked soaring cadences or memorable lines, yet it touched on two explosive issues at the finale. He advised Native Americans that their days as a hunting, gathering people were numbered and that he favored “
civilization, christianization and ultimate citizenship” for them.89 Then, in sharp contrast to his predecessor, Grant championed black suffrage. “It seems to me very desirable that the question should be settled now, and I entertain the hope . . . that it may be by the ratification of the fifteenth article of amendment to the Constitution.”90 All winter long, he had stood foursquare behind the amendment, telling delegates from the first national black political convention in Washington that as president he would ensure that “the colored people of the Nation may receive every protection which the law gives them.”91 By late February, the amendment, having won the needed two-thirds vote in Congress, went to the states for ratification. It suffered from decided limitations—it disappointed feminists, who hoped it would encompass women, and didn’t bar discriminatory tests to keep blacks from voting—but it qualified as a stunning triumph nonetheless. “Nothing in all history,” William Lloyd Garrison wrote, equaled “this wonderful, quiet, sudden transformation of four millions of human beings from . . . the auction-block to the ballot box.”92 Grant termed it “the most important event that has occurred, since the nation came into life.”93 George Boutwell, who had introduced the proposed amendment in the House, said Grant had thrown his immense prestige behind it and that “its ratification was due, probably, to his advice . . . Had he advised its rejection, or had he been indifferent to its fate, the amendment would have failed.”94
When Grant finished his speech, a wild cheer went up from the crowd and he bowed gratefully. He then bent over, planted a kiss on Julia’s cheek, and handed her the address. “And now, my dear,” he said facetiously, “I hope you’re satisfied.”95 Thirteen-year-old Nellie bounded over in a bright blue dress, golden tresses tumbling down her shoulders, to kiss her father. In a charming gesture, the new president left the platform holding her by one hand and Schuyler Colfax by the other. Grant’s speech was derided as flat and platitudinous. It didn’t announce a transformative presidency, nor did it articulate a sweeping vision or enlist followers in a grand social movement. Still Republicans thought it true and honest, a reflection of Grant’s pragmatic authenticity. “I think it the most remarkable document ever issued under such circumstances,” said James Wilson. “The beauty of it is, that every word of the address is Grant’s.”96 Grant would prove a far more assertive president than his modest inaugural address had suggested.
