After Lincoln

by A. J. Langguth

  Since 1840, the number of Jews in the United States had risen from about 15,000 to 150,000. Now other alarmed Jewish leaders sought their own meeting with Lincoln for guarantees that they were not regarded as aliens.

  Lincoln assured them that he accepted “no distinction between Jews and Gentiles.” Newspapers denounced Grant’s order, Democratic Party leaders in Congress tried unsuccessfully to censure him, and lingering unease persisted among Jews that with the end of slavery they might become the next scapegoat in a divided nation.

  • • •

  Among Grant’s fellow officers, his battlefield success had made him a target of envy. At headquarters, General Halleck revived accusations of drunkenness and wrote that Grant had “resumed his former bad habits.”

  Other charges reached Secretary of War Stanton anonymously—that Grant had vomited during a truce negotiation with the Confederates; that once he had got so drunk that “he had to go upstairs on all fours.”

  Enough officers came to Grant’s defense that Lincoln ordered Halleck either to investigate formally or end the whispering campaign. Halleck backed down, and Grant got his second star. But he neither forgot nor forgave his public humiliation when he felt he had deserved only praise. “I want to whip these rebels once more,” Grant wrote to his wife, “and see what all will be said then.”

  He got more than he wished for—first at Shiloh, then during a siege at Vicksburg, and in March 1864, a third star and appointment as general-in-chief of all U.S. armies.

  A month later, on Grant’s forty-second birthday, he launched a spring offensive that he expected to end the war. He would fight Lee on the field called the Wilderness, south of the Rapidan River on the road to Fredericksburg, Virginia.

  Casualties during the first day were high and, for Grant, intensely personal. Hearing that Brigadier General Alexander Hays, a friend from their cadet days, had been shot in the head, Grant sat on the ground whittling at pine sticks until he could compose himself enough to offer a halting eulogy.

  Grant would learn later that the grinding battle had also severely wounded Pete Longstreet, who took a bullet in the neck. That loss forced Robert E. Lee to take over his army’s right flank, but he could not prevail against the Union forces.

  By the battle’s end, the fighting had set new records for ferocity and lives lost. Close to eighteen thousand Union men had been killed, wounded, captured, or missing. Lee’s army had suffered equal losses. And General Grant had set a record of his own; in a single day, he had smoked twenty of his pungent cigars.

  Soon afterward at Spotsylvania, Lee temporarily blocked Grant, who vowed to frame the terms for their next engagement. “I propose to fight it out on this line,” he said, “if it takes all summer.”

  The result for Grant was a final reversal. At the brutal Battle of Cold Harbor on June 3, 1864, he lost seven thousand Union men in one hour of fighting; Lee lost fifteen hundred. That evening, Grant told his staff, “I regret this assault more than any I have ever ordered.”

  But Grant had resources to draw upon that Lee did not. As he disengaged his troops, he could pursue his strategy of moving his Army of the Potomac into position and defeating the Confederates at Richmond.

  Ten months later, Grant accepted Lee’s surrender at Appomattox, and Congress made him the first four-star general in United States history.

  • • •

  Victory guaranteed that the Republicans would nominate Grant unanimously on the first ballot to replace Andrew Johnson. Despite recent evidence that the selection of a vice president was a crucial one, the convention settled on amiable Schuyler Colfax, the Indiana congressman who had once lost Alice Hooper to Charles Sumner.

  When news of his nomination reached Washington, Grant was called upon to make his first political speech. He fell back on a standard disclaimer: “Gentlemen,” Grant told a rally on Pennsylvania Avenue, “being entirely unaccustomed to public speaking and without the desire to cultivate the power, it is impossible for me to find appropriate language to thank you for the demonstration.”

  His listeners understood that the next president would be expected to bind up the nation’s wounds—not only reconciling North and South but addressing the economic and philosophical divisions that separated factions in both parties, including East Coast merchants from Midwest farmers.

  In Grant, the nation seemed poised to hail a latter-day George Washington, and the last sentence of his letter formally accepting the Republican nomination concluded with four words his countrymen longed to hear: “Let us have peace.”

  • • •

  Grant did not need to campaign. The New York Times reported that when he went to his brother’s house in Galena, he did allow a group of tanners to serenade him. And setting off as commanding general to inspect forts on the Western frontier, he found that his stops along the route took on the trappings of a campaign tour. For company, he had invited Philip Sheridan and William Sherman, who stood by while Grant waved to crowds at each train station but made no speeches.

  Across the country, Republican surrogates waged the attack in his place. They seized upon Horatio Seymour’s response as governor to the New York City draft riots when he had addressed the rioters as “my friends,” and they made certain that Western voters knew about Seymour’s close ties to the financiers of Wall Street.

  Back home in Galena, Grant turned over his military duties to his chief of staff and told his personal secretary, a former reporter named Adam Badeau, to use his own discretion for any other decisions. Grant wanted no correspondence forwarded unless it absolutely required his personal attention.

  But Badeau could not cope with an outcry that erupted over Grant’s General Order No. 11. The orders had been issued almost six years earlier, but now that he seemed certain to become president, Jewish communities across the country were sending Grant hundreds of anxious letters.

  To reassure them, Grant allowed prominent Jewish leaders to see the answer he sent when a friend, Isaac Morris, forwarded a letter from Adolph Moses, a former captain in the Confederacy. “Our demands,” Moses had written, “are simply to be judged like other people and not to have the vices and shortcomings of our bad men illuminated at the expense of the many virtues and excellent qualities of our good men.”

  Grant replied to Morris that he held “no prejudice against sect or race but want each individual to be judged by his own merit.” He added that, without thinking, he had reacted against men who were trading with the enemy, but his blanket order “would never have been issued if it had not been telegraphed the moment penned, without one moment’s reflection.”

  Mollified, Moses wrote a long letter—printed on the New York Times’ front page—announcing that because Grant had made “a reparation,” Moses would not be distracted by a “side issue” and could now follow his political inclinations and vote for him.

  Grant’s win in November owed more to the 400,000 black voters than to pockets of Jewish support. His margin of 309,584 votes gave him 53 percent of the popular vote and 214 electoral votes to the 80 for Seymour. Grant lost New York by 10,000 votes—Seymour’s home state—and even there Republicans were charging fraud. Republicans carried Ohio and Pennsylvania, two states with a significant number of Jewish voters.

  Grant received results of the balloting while playing cards at a friend’s house in Galena, where a telegraph machine had been set up. At 2 a.m., when the outcome was unmistakable, Grant walked home to his wife, who was waiting impatiently, and told her, “I’m afraid I’m elected.”

  Grant felt he could now permit his apology to the nation’s Jews to be published more widely, and the New York Times praised his “frank and manly confession.”

  • • •

  As Ulysses Grant, at forty-six, prepared to become the youngest president in his nation’s history, Charles Sumner grasped at his last chance to become secretary of state, but Grant was keeping his cabinet selections to himself. As a commander, he had found secrecy a vital element of surprise, a
nd the tactic suited Grant’s independent nature. During the four months leading up to his inauguration, Grant enjoyed frustrating his wife’s curiosity and claimed to wake up often each night to keep Julia from snatching the list of appointees that he kept under his pillow.

  Sumner’s hopes rose briefly when Julia Grant asked if he had any inkling of her husband’s intentions. She said she was afraid to ask him again because Grant had warned her: “Jule, if you say anything more about it, I’ll get a leave of absence, go off west and not come back till the fourth of March.”

  But long before the election, Sumner’s air of superiority, which could amuse Lincoln, had been irking Grant. When told that Sumner did not believe in the Bible, Grant claimed to be unsurprised: “Well, he didn’t write it.”

  Nor did Sumner improve his chances when he insisted on drawling out the new president’s name as “Grawnt.” Worst of all, Grant resented that he felt compelled to adopt an artificial manner with Sumner to conceal his dislike. Finally, the senator from Massachusetts was simply too effete and self-regarding for the modest soldier.

  • • •

  When Grant chose as secretary of state his friend Elihu Washburne, Galena’s congressman since 1852, Sumner retreated to his chairmanship of the Foreign Relations Committee to try to manage foreign policy from the Senate.

  Sumner’s sole consolation was seeing Henry Seward equally disappointed. After calling on Grant in his private railroad car during a trip to New York, Seward had entertained a distant hope that he would be kept on in the new cabinet.

  But it turned out that Seward would have more in common with Sumner than their dashed ambitions. At the age of sixty-eight, Seward had fallen in love with a twenty-eight-year-old woman.

  Seward’s wife, Frances, had died three years earlier. Following the election, Seward had described to an ambassador’s wife “how I accept with thankfulness every expression of feminine respect and affection.”

  Olive Risley, a good-looking brunette, was the daughter of a New Yorker beholden to Seward for his job in the Treasury Department. Miss Risley declined Seward’s invitation to accompany him on an impeccably chaperoned tour of Alaska with his son Fred and his daughter-in-law, but during the trip, Seward wrote to her longingly, “Why did I ever allow myself to become dependent on you so entirely?”

  Returning from the Alaska territory—which Seward predicted would become a state one day—Seward’s entourage traveled to Los Angeles and on to Mexico. Before he embarked, Seward told the audience at a banquet in his honor that the island of Cuba, being so close, should also become part of the United States.

  While Seward was completing his travels in the Caribbean, Olive Risley contracted typhoid fever, then recovered sufficiently to spend a month as Seward’s houseguest in Auburn, accompanied by her father.

  Later that season, Thurlow Weed arrived and taunted Seward about his prediction in December 1860 that the Southern rebellion would be over in sixty days. The jibe stung, and Seward protested that he had only been trying “to calm the public pulse.”

  When Seward proposed a round-the-world trip in the autumn of 1870, Olive Risley agreed to go in a party that would include her father, her sister, and Seward’s valet. During the voyage, Seward decided that he must find a way to keep Olive at his side—he described her as “noble, impressive, intellectual and attractive”—but not as his wife.

  In Shanghai, Seward proposed adopting her, Olive agreed, and Seward redrafted his will to divide his estate evenly among his three sons and his new daughter.

  • • •

  In Grant’s final weeks before assuming office, he lived inconspicuously in Washington at his house on I Street, winding up his army duties and naming William Sherman to succeed him as a four-star general.

  Grant’s business reverses had left him wary about his financial prospects after his presidency, and he was grateful when Alexander Stewart, a department store owner from New York, offered to buy Grant’s house for sixty-five thousand dollars and donate it as a residence for General Sherman. Grant had already agreed to sell the house to the mayor of Washington for forty thousand dollars, but he withdrew from their contract, rode out the mayor’s accusations of bad faith, and pocketed the difference.

  • • •

  On a cold and overcast March 4, 1869, Grant took the oath of office from Chief Justice Chase on the Capitol’s east portico. For the third time in U.S. history, an incoming president’s predecessor did not attend.

  John Adams had left the capital before dawn to avoid Thomas Jefferson’s inaugural. His son, John Quincy Adams, upheld his family’s unsporting tradition by refusing to appear with Andrew Jackson. In Grant’s case, it was again the president-elect who was snubbed. Stopping at the White House for Andrew Johnson, Grant’s entourage was told that Johnson would be too busy to attend the ceremony.

  Grant was also rebuffed when he tried to scuttle the traditional inaugural ball. Overruling him, the gala’s organizers attracted six thousand guests at ten dollars a ticket to a dance at the new Treasury building.

  Julia Grant made an attempt of her own to revise the capital’s protocol. During her first reception at the White House, a staff member approached to ask: “Madame, if any colored people call, are they to be admitted?”

  Mrs. Grant had taken only a moment to reply: “This is my reception day. Admit all who call.”

  Her gesture went for nothing. No black guests showed up during the entire time the Grants lived in the White House. Julia Grant took their reluctance as proof that Negroes were “modest and not aggressive.” She was sure, though, that “as a race” they had loved her husband “and fully appreciated all he had done for them.”

  One example of Grant’s favor came in his brief inaugural remarks. He called for approaching the next four years “calmly, without prejudice, hate or sectarian pride.” Then, along with pledging a new policy toward the nation’s Indians, Grant urged passage of the Fifteenth Amendment, which would extend the vote to black men.

  No one had expected Grant on the podium to match the eloquence of Lincoln, but his address was warmly received, as were most of his cabinet appointments when he finally revealed them.

  An exception was Grant’s nomination of Alexander Stewart, his recent benefactor, as secretary of the Treasury. Grant was not alert enough to the Senate’s new sensitivity about its powers, and he sent up Stewart’s name for confirmation without consulting Roscoe Conkling, the senior senator from Stewart’s home state. Nor had Grant considered the ban—initiated by Alexander Hamilton in 1789—against anyone actively engaged in trade or commerce as head of the Treasury Department.

  When Charles Sumner objected to an exception being made for Stewart, Grant gratefully accepted Stewart’s offer to withdraw his name.

  That setback was followed in the same week by the abrupt resignation of Elihu Washburne, who claimed that his health was too frail to allow him to serve as secretary of state. His appointment had been merely a sop from Grant when he could not oblige Washburne with the Treasury post he had already promised to Stewart.

  Washburne then asked that he and his French wife be sent to the embassy in Paris. First, though, for the prestige of it, he wanted to be secretary of state for several days. Grant agreed. The day after Washburne resigned that post for health reasons, he was appointed minister to France, where he would serve for eight and a half years.

  For other positions, Grant tried to draw upon men with the political shrewdness and social grace he did not claim for himself. He was not alone in his self-deprecation. When Henry Adams was taken to the White House to meet the man who was following his grandfather and great-grandfather in the presidency, the thirty-one-year-old Adams was unimpressed. “The progress of evolution,” he wrote, “from President Washington to President Grant was alone evidence enough to upset Darwin.”

  Adams had sat out the war in London as secretary to his father, the ambassador Charles Francis Adams. But his brother, Charles, Jr., had fought with the First Massachusett
s Cavalry, and although he found Grant’s appearance “ordinary,” he also recognized in him “a man of the most exquisite judgment and tact.”

  That tact was on display in Grant’s handling of the War Department. He held off immediately replacing John Schofield as thanks for Schofield’s discreet behavior during the Stanton affair. Then, when he made the change, Grant fulfilled his promise to appoint his chief of staff, John Rawlins, even though he thought Rawlins’s history of tuberculosis made him better suited to the climate of the military department in Arizona.

  Picking genial Judge Ebenezer Hoar of Massachusetts as attorney general could be expected to gratify Hoar’s good friend Senator Sumner. Equally convivial, John Creswell had delivered the Maryland delegation for Grant at the Republican convention and was rewarded with the Post Office Department. Jacob Cox, the former governor of Ohio, became secretary of the interior.

  When advisers urged Grant to appoint a Pennsylvanian, he chose Adolph Edward Borie from Philadelphia as secretary of the navy. Enriched by his East Indian trade, Borie, like Stewart, was one of Grant’s benefactors and had once given Grant his house on Chestnut Street.

  Grant believed that any gifts he received were offered as reward for his military service and not as a down payment on future favors. But some journalists saw the presents differently. In the New York Sun, Charles Dana wrote that Grant’s appointments were “chiefly distinguished for having conferred on him costly and valuable benefactions.”

  When Grant selected several of his wife’s relatives for positions in his administration, the New York World responded as though no president had ever found jobs for his family. The paper warned that civil service examinations would soon ask only two questions: “Are you a member of the Dent family or otherwise connected by marriage with General Grant?”

  For the time, Grant could shrug off the attacks.

  • • •

  With Washburne on his way to Paris, Grant was free to name a man better versed in foreign affairs, and he chose Hamilton Fish from New York as secretary of state. Now that Stewart was disqualified for the Treasury, Grant picked George S. Boutwell from Massachusetts.