The one early hint of Grant’s gift for leadership was his horsemanship. The man’s intuitive connection to horses seems a symptom of the talent Grant would demonstrate for gauging the true strength of men and armies, for sensing the tide of events and of history. At final exercises for his West Point class, he electrified observers by guiding his powerful chestnut-sorrel horse over a bar higher than a man’s head. During the Mexican War, Grant purchased a stallion so wild and strong that his mates shrank from the beast. Grant had the horse blindfolded and saddled, then set off on a three-hour tear that ended with horse and rider trotting comfortably into camp. According to future Confederate General James Longstreet, “For years afterward the story of Grant’s ride was related at every campfire in the country.”
The Mexican War put Grant in the company of a leader he would emulate. General (and future president) Zachary Taylor was known for his informal style and casual dress, for being a fighting commander who did not hold himself above the troops he led. An officer who served under Taylor noted the similarities between Grant and Taylor, writing to his wife, “Sometimes I fancy he models himself on old Zack.”
During the Mexican War—which he disdained as a colonial adventure unworthy of a republic—young Sam Grant discovered in himself the presence of mind that would bring him victory in battle after battle. When a friend asked how he felt during combat, the intuitive Grant gave a striking response: “I do not know that I felt any peculiar sensation. War seems much less horrible to persons engaged in it than to those who read of the battles.”
After the war ended in 1848, Grant fell into a spiral of failure. Assigned to garrison duty on the West Coast, far from his family, he sank into despondency. Within six years he had resigned from the army, probably because he was drunk on duty. Grant was susceptible to hard drink, achieving inebriation with relatively little intake. Much of the time, he tried to stay away from liquor, fending it off with volcanic cigar smoking. Sometimes, though, drink got the better of him. Reunited with his family in 1854, little went well for Grant. He tried farming with help from his wife’s family, but after a time was reduced to selling firewood on street corners in St. Louis. On such a corner in late 1857, Grant encountered William Tecumseh Sherman, another former Army officer who also was struggling in civilian life. In a brief exchange rich in portent for the nation’s future, they agreed that “West Point and the Regular Army were not good schools for farmers, bankers, merchants, and mechanics.” When the Civil War broke out, Grant had moved to Galena, Illinois, where he worked in his father’s leather business as an indifferent clerk.
His generalship is justly the stuff of legend. After months of begging for a command, he took over a regiment of Illinois volunteers and set off to fight the rebels his way. Sometimes defying orders, and other times construing them in unintended ways, he demonstrated rare battlefield skill. Though he managed logistics well, Grant’s battles were rarely pretty affairs. More than once, the enemy caught him by surprise. His distinguishing qualities as a commander were extraordinary focus in the thick of the fight, a powerful drive to strike the enemy, and a wondrously calm expectation that he would win. No one counterattacked more effectively. A staff officer remembered that in quiet times Grant “was often slow in his movements, but when roused to activity he was quick in every motion, and worked with marvelous rapidity.” Another wrote home that “he is cool and quiet, almost stolid as if stupid, in danger, and in a crisis he is one against whom all around…would instinctively lean.”
Like any great leader, Grant commanded the affection and respect of his fellow soldiers. Sherman, his right-hand man during the western campaigns, later a commanding general himself, offered a tribute every soldier would covet: “I knew wherever I was that you thought of me, and if I got into a tight place you would help me out, if alive.” Sherman’s dedication to Grant would prove critical in the impeachment crisis, and was captured in a remark recorded shortly after the Confederate surrender. Acknowledging their bad reputations—Grant as a drunk, Sherman as mentally unsteady—Sherman said:
General Grant is a great general. I know him well. He stood by me when I was crazy, and I stood by him when he was drunk, and now, sir, we stand by each other always.
Despite his wartime victories, Grant was again underestimated when peacetime duties pushed him into the political arena. Sooner or later, most who underestimated Grant came to realize their error. In early 1867, Navy Secretary Welles wrote that the general-in-chief “has no political principles, no intelligent ideas of constitutional government.” In August, Welles dismissed Grant as “a political ignoramus.” By the end of the year, Welles had learned more respect for the “ignorant but cunning” soldier. “I am becoming impressed with the idea,” he noted in his diary, “that Grant may prove a dangerous man.”
In the early months of Johnson’s presidency, the president and the general got along fairly well. Concerned that the Southern states needed functioning governments in order to avoid anarchy, Grant supported Johnson’s early efforts to establish them. Johnson made an effort to cultivate the general. A Grant aide remembered Johnson as “trying to wheedle Grant,” sending him “constant personal and familiar notes and cards—an unusual courtesy, almost a condescension, from a President.” Johnson had enough confidence in Grant to send him on a short fact-finding tour of the South at the end of 1865, hoping the trip would counter reports that Southerners were still rebellious. Grant, who was moved at the end of the war by the suffering of Southerners, concluded that “the mass of thinking men in the South accept the present situation of affairs in good faith.” Johnson was pleased.
Yet there were early signs of the troubles that would arise between the two men. First, and contrary to the president’s wishes, Grant recommended retaining the army and the Freedmen’s Bureau in the South because “the white and the black mutually require the protection of the general government.” Though Grant had worked slaves owned by his wife’s family, and had never been an abolitionist, the war changed his views. As he described it, he concluded “early in the rebellion that the North & South could never live at peace with each other except as one nation, and that without Slavery.”
Because of that conclusion, Grant was troubled in late 1865 when former General Carl Schurz delivered a report that highlighted the violence and discrimination inflicted by Southern whites on the freed slaves. Grant directed his commanders to report to him “all known outrages…committed by white people against the blacks, and the reverse.” This concern for Southern conditions would eat away at Grant’s support for the president.
By March of 1866, after Johnson’s Washington’s Birthday address from the White House balcony, an aide noted that Grant was “getting more and more Radical.” Fielding regular reports about the racial violence in the South, Grant could not accept Johnson’s view that the Southern states should have greater power over their own affairs. Circumstances were pushing Grant into an uneasy partnership with War Secretary Stanton, a man he did not like. A Grant aide reported a “personal barrier” between the two men, observing that the general resented Stanton’s “asperities.” When it came to dealing with Stanton, Grant sympathized with Andrew Johnson. Noting that Stanton was “very offensive” to the president, Grant told his wife that the war secretary “would have gone and on a double-quick long ago if I had been President.”
Despite his personal antipathy toward Stanton, Grant came to agree with the war secretary that Johnson’s policies were encouraging white violence and imperiling both the freedmen and the military. The general-in-chief joined with Stanton to block the president’s actions. When Congress asked in early 1867 for information on violence against Southern blacks, Grant wrote that he intended to “make a report showing [that] the courts in the [South] afford no security to life or property…and to recommend that martial law be declared over such districts.” Stanton presented the evidence in February, to Johnson’s great displeasure. As Congress shaped its Reconstruction legislation in the first half of
1867, Grant worked openly with Republicans to develop provisions that reinforced military authority. In a private letter, he scorned the president’s veto message for the first Reconstruction Act. It was, Grant wrote, “one of the most ridiculous that ever emanated from any President.” When the attorney general construed the military’s powers narrowly, Grant instructed his Southern commanders that the opinions were without “the force of orders,” so “I would not be controlled by them further than I might be convinced by the argument.” In July, Grant and Stanton worked with Congress on legislation that would deny Johnson the power to direct military commanders on Reconstruction issues; indeed, the first draft of the bill was in Stanton’s handwriting. Grant’s senior aide, General Adam Badeau, summarized the rift in the government: “[The president] disregarded the will of Congress, and the officers of the army disregarded his. The situation was approaching mutiny on one side, or else treason on the other.”
By August 1, 1867, when Grant sat with the president at the White House, each man viewed the other as an adversary. In Badeau’s words, experience taught that with Johnson, “frankness…was giving away the game, and [Grant] never liked to be beaten.” Keeping his own counsel came naturally to Grant and would see him through the coming conflict. Johnson, though, saw Grant as a military man who was out of his depth. In the president’s mind, Stanton was the great obstacle to be removed at all costs. Without Stanton’s intellectual and moral support, he reasoned, the inarticulate general could be managed. Moreover, Stanton was a far easier political target. The cantankerous war secretary was admired but not liked, and enjoyed little popular following. Grant, on the other hand, was the lion of the nation. As one contemporary described the adulation:
Wherever Grant went he was attended by enthusiastic crowds; audiences at theatres and congregations in churches rose when he entered; the actors themselves applauded him from the stage, the preachers prayed for him from the pulpit; towns were illuminated because of his arrival; triumphal arches were built for him.
No sane politician would lightly challenge such a living icon. The president understood that. Indeed, he resolved to appeal to Grant’s vanity, offering to make him the new secretary of war. That, Johnson thought, should seal the deal. In this calculation, he was wrong.
Johnson carefully selected August 1 for his move against Stanton. Congress had adjourned more than ten days before, fleeing Washington City’s dread heat and humidity. For two centuries, presidents have timed controversial actions for the swelter of Washington in August, when the machinery of politics and that of news reporting are both short-staffed, and it’s too hot to stay angry very long.
The general, according to notes made by Johnson’s secretary, did not embrace the president’s plan to demand Stanton’s resignation. Those who opposed Stanton, Grant argued, had opposed the war. When Johnson offered to place Grant as interim secretary of war, the general said he would not shrink from any public duty, yet repeated “his opinion as to the impolicy” of removing Stanton.
The president also explained that he intended to remove General Philip Sheridan from command of the military district that included Louisiana and Texas. The news was not entirely unexpected. Sheridan had no patience for Southern officials who failed to embrace the Reconstruction policies of Congress. He had dismissed from office the governor of Texas, most of the elected officials of New Orleans, and Louisiana’s attorney general and governor. Sheridan, in short, had been on a collision course with the president for weeks.
However foreseeable it might have been, Johnson’s plan to remove Sheridan rocked the general-in-chief. The headstrong Sheridan was a favorite. Months before, when Sheridan’s peremptory actions drew the president’s wrath, the general-in-chief maintained that his former cavalry commander was “the same fearless, true man he [was] in the field. He makes no mistakes.” An aide described Grant’s feelings for Sheridan as “a story from Homer” that entailed “the friendship of chieftains, the love of strong men who had stood side by side in war.” Indeed, those feelings could loosen even the wooden Grant tongue, as he “always became eloquent when he talked of Sherman or Sheridan.”
Returning to his office after meeting the president, Grant composed a formal letter of protest. The Tenure of Office Act, he insisted, required Senate approval of any action against Stanton. Sheridan, “beloved by the people who sustained the Government through its trials,” had served ably in the most difficult Southern military district. Dismissal of Stanton and Sheridan, he warned, would revive sectional conflict, as it was “more than the loyal people of this country…will quietly submit to.”
The president was not interested in advice from this political novice. On August 5, Johnson wrote to Stanton that “[p]ublic considerations of a high character constrain me to say, that your resignation as Secretary of War will be accepted.” Having been warned that the president was about to make his move, Stanton spat Johnson’s words back at him. “Public considerations of a high character,” he replied, “which alone have induced me to continue at the head of this department, constrain me not to resign.”
The stalemate festered for almost a week. Johnson sat down again with Grant and asked whether “there was any thing between us” that would prevent the general from taking the job of secretary of war. In a remarkable episode of miscommunication, Grant advised the president that there was “nothing personal” between them, adding that they did disagree “respecting the constitutional amendment [the Fourteenth] and the reconstruction acts.” Somehow, perhaps due to Grant’s unassuming style, perhaps because Johnson had already decided to replace Stanton with Grant, the president inexplicably took comfort in the statement that the general differed with him only on the central political issues facing the nation, which were at the heart of the secretary of war’s duties.
When he finally acted, Johnson made a critical choice. Rather than solely rely on his authority as president under the Constitution, his letter to Stanton on August 12 followed the requirements of the Tenure of Office Act. Instead of dismissing Stanton, the letter only suspended him and appointed Grant as interim Secretary. By proceeding this way, Johnson could not appoint a permanent secretary of war unless the Senate confirmed his choice when it reconvened in December.
When Stanton relinquished his office to Grant, Johnson expressed his satisfaction with a classical metaphor: “The turning point has at last come,” he told his secretary. “The Rubicon is crossed.” But who was making that metaphorical crossing—the president, or Ulysses Grant?
No doubt one of Grant’s principal goals as interim war secretary was to protect Sheridan, but the general swiftly discovered he could not do it. When Johnson ordered Sheridan’s transfer on August 17, Grant lodged a passionate protest “in the name of a patriotic people who have sacrificed hundreds of thousands of loyal lives, and thousands of millions of treasure.” Removing Sheridan would be seen “as an effort to defeat the laws of Congress,” Grant insisted, and would “embolden” the nation’s “unreconstructed element.” Johnson was unimpressed. Out went Sheridan.
The president then took aim at General Daniel Sickles, commander of the military district including North and South Carolina, who had aggressively squelched the resistance of local courts to Reconstruction laws. Outmaneuvered in Cabinet meetings over both Sheridan and Sickles, the general-in-chief could not contain his anger. In a bitter letter at the end of August, Grant wrote to Johnson that the nation would see the president’s purpose as “the defeat of the laws of Congress,” which would endanger “the quiet and prosperity of the country.” Johnson recognized the letter as insubordinate and summoned the general. After a “full and free conference,” Grant agreed to a tactical retreat. He withdrew his letter. Sickles, too, was gone. Like Sheridan, he was replaced with a conservative general who would allow state officials to evade the Reconstruction laws. Grant asked to be excused from future Cabinet meetings unless military matters were to be discussed.
It seemed that Johnson had routed his insubordinate
general and commanded the political situation. The president followed up with a proclamation that extended the Southern amnesty he previously granted. Now he pardoned all Southerners of treason except those who had held office in the Confederate government or military, those who were on parole or in prison, and those who had served in the United States forces before secession and then renounced their duties.
The Republican reaction was swift. A St. Louis newspaper proclaimed the beginning of “the New Rebellion.” Calling the president a madman, Carl Schurz wrote that he “bites at all about him like a wounded and anger-crazed boar.” Another Johnson foe reported “an angry gloom” in Washington, which is “in the midst of a revolution.” Fessenden of Maine reported that in New England “I meet no man who is not in favor of impeachment if any decent pretense can be found for it.” Radical newspapers talked freely of impeachment, and some called for Johnson’s removal. Similar demands came in letters to Republican congressmen.
But this time Johnson judged the mood of the country better than his foes did. Fatigue with the continuing conflict over Reconstruction, and a simple desire for peace, reinforced the president’s position. That fall, the Democrats prospered in the off-year elections. Though the contests in twenty states were mostly local affairs, and none involved direct election of congressmen, the Democrats made progress everywhere. Seizing control of the Ohio legislature, they would soon be able to use that majority to replace Bluff Ben Wade in the Senate. The president was gratified, and as melodramatic as ever. “I have always had an abiding confidence in the people,” he declaimed in a speech. “They have come, and thank God they have come, and…our Republic will be saved.”
Impeached: The Trial of President Andrew Johnson and the Fight for Lincoln's Legacy Page 11
