Both armies were still moving west as the two generals communicated, Lee’s slowly and painfully, Grant’s more quickly, while Grant tried to separate Lee from the South. On the morning of the ninth, the head of Lee’s column reached Appomattox Station, only to find Custer’s troopers already in possession of it, and the supplies waiting there. In the meantime Grant was suffering, as he often did when under stress, from a severe migraine headache. He took refuge in a farmhouse and spent the night of the eighth bathing his feet “in hot water and mustard” and applying “mustard plasters” to his wrists and neck.
The early morning of the ninth brought another, longer letter from Lee, implying that he understood Grant’s terms but still not specifically agreeing to them. It was a step in the right direction, however, and it got Grant out of his sickbed and onto his horse. Severe fighting had resumed, and although Appomattox Court House was only two or three miles away as the crow flies, there was no way for Grant to ride through it. Lee sent messengers under the white flag of truce to Meade and to Sheridan, asking for “a suspension of hostilities” to allow for a meeting between himself and Grant. Meade set a time limit of two hours, and Grant rode south with a modest escort, to get around the area where the fighting had been taking place, then turned north and reached Appomattox Court House by the back roads, his head still pounding. On the way he received yet another note from Lee, borne by a Confederate officer, at last agreeing to Grant’s terms, and Grant’s headache instantly vanished. He quickly scrawled a reply to Lee from horseback, saying that he was “four miles West of Walker’s Church,” and asking for an officer to conduct him to where Lee was, and after a long and confusing ride on muddy country roads was led to the McLean house in the village of Appomattox Court House, where Lee was waiting for him. Reading between the lines, it seems likely that Grant plunged off into the Virginia countryside and got lost, something it is possible to do even today in a car, with a map in hand. What is also worth noting is that it took a high degree of courage for a three-star general to ride through back roads where it was only too likely he would meet angry Confederate soldiers, any one of whom might be only too happy to kill the Union commander—a thought that does not even seem to have occurred to Grant.
He arrived slightly embarrassed by his muddy uniform, particularly since Lee was waiting for him on the porch of the McLean house in a brand-new, beautifully tailored pale gray uniform, gold braid glistening on his sleeves, a scarlet sash and a gold-braided belt around his waist, wearing a gilt presentation sword (probably the one presented to him by the state of Virginia), and carrying his white kidskin riding gloves in one hand, every inch the patrician beau sabreur of legend. He stood erect, nearly six feet tall, with gleaming boots, a perfectly trimmed white beard, and the piercing eyes of a born commander of men, a figure of awesome military dignity, as Grant clumped up the steps in his muddy boots and wrinkled uniform to meet him. As Grant commented with undisguised admiration, “What General Lee’s feelings were I do not know. As he was a man of much dignity, with an impassible [sic] face, it was impossible to say whether he felt inwardly glad that the end had finally come, or felt sad over the result, and was too manly to show it.”
Despite the best efforts of Lee’s staff, and of Grant’s, things were not quite ready for the two commanders in the small, cramped house, and they stood making small talk for a few minutes, mostly about the Mexican War. Grant remembered Lee well, and Lee at any rate pretended to remember Grant, despite the fact that they had been separated by a great distance of age and rank, and they chatted together so pleasantly about old campaigns and old army friends that Lee finally had to remind Grant what they were there for.
Once they were inside—Lee raised a well-bred eyebrow at Col. Ely Parker, Grant’s full-blooded Indian staff officer—they sat down together at a small table, and Lee suggested that Grant put the terms he was suggesting in writing. Parker hunted up paper, an inkwell, and a pen, and Grant scratched away while Lee politely stared at the walls. On his own it occurred to Grant to put in a sentence allowing Confederate officers to retain their sidearms, private horses, and baggage, to “avoid unnecessary humiliation.”
No conversation took place until Grant passed the letter to Lee, who put on his reading glasses and perused it carefully. When he came to the part about officers retaining their sidearms, horses, and baggage, he remarked, “with some feeling,” Grant thought, that this would have “a happy effect” upon his army.
Lee raised only one point, which was that in the Confederate army cavalrymen and “artillerists” owned their own horses, and asked if they would be permitted to retain them. Grant pointed out that the exemption was for officers only, and that he could not or would not rewrite his letter, but since most of the men were small farmers, and would need to plant their crops, his officers would be instructed to allow any Confederate soldier who claimed a horse or a mule to take the animal to his home. Lee remarked again that this would have “a most happy effect,” and, taking a piece of paper, wrote out his acceptance of the terms in five brief lines.
While the exchange of letters was being copied, Lee and Grant chatted quietly, filling in time. Lee, in the end, did not offer Grant his sword, nor would Grant, in view of the line he had written into the surrender terms, have accepted it. Lee did point out, with some embarrassment, that his troops were starving, and Grant agreed to provide him rations for 25,000 men. With that they parted, perhaps the most famous scene in American history having been completed in less than an hour, and Grant wrote out a few lines to be telegraphed to Stanton with perhaps the least self-congratulatory or exultant message of victory in the history of warfare:
Headquarters Appomattox C. H., Va., April 9th, 1865, 4:30 P. M.
Hon. E. M. Stanton, Secretary of War,
Washington.
General Lee surrendered the Army of Northern Virginia this afternoon on terms proposed by myself. The accompanying additional correspondence will show the conditions fully.
U. S. Grant,
Lieut.-General.
As the news spread through the Union lines, the Union artillery began to fire a one-hundred-gun salute. Grant, whose headache was returning, sent word to have it stopped. Whether he actually said, “We are all Americans again now,” is doubtful, but that was certainly his thought. “The Confederates,” he later wrote, “were now our prisoners, and we did not want to exult over their downfall.”
What he thought about the story that Custer, the “boy general,” had ridden off from the McLean house with the small table on which the surrender had been signed held upside down on his head, taking it away as a souvenir, we do not know, but it may well have been one of the many reasons for his dislike of Custer, whose death at the Little Big Horn Grant took with something that goes well beyond stoicism, approaching a certain satisfaction. In any event the next day he permitted his officers to visit any friends they might have in the Confederate camp (the professional army was a small world), and he himself rode over to the McLean house again for a long and friendly chat with Lee. Lee gracefully declined to issue a call for the remaining Confederate armies to surrender, saying that he could not do so without consulting his president, and the two men shook hands and parted, Lee to return to his defeated army, Grant to proceed by railway to Washington, where, he felt, his presence was urgently required.
For all practical purposes the Civil War was over.
Grant was forty-three years old.
Chapter Eight
MANY BIOGRAPHERS of Grant have suggested that his career after Appomattox was driven mainly by a need to keep busy and for applause. Doubtless there is some truth to that—Grant, as his own mother would point out, had become a great man while he was still young, and neither he nor Julia contemplated a retreat to Galena for the rest of their lives, even though the good citizens of Galena would shortly present the Grants with a house worth sixteen thousand dollars, a tidy sum for the day, completely furnished, right down to the leather-bound sets of books in the library
and the pictures on the walls. Still, one must also consider his inflexible sense of duty. The presidency was something he could not avoid.
Had Mrs. Grant not raised objections to the invitation to accompany the Lincolns to the theater—an invitation Grant had as good as accepted, and that he was then obliged to decline with considerable embarrassment—Grant might have been shot by John Wilkes Booth along with President Lincoln. Mrs. Grant made such a fuss over the prospect of another ghastly evening of being snubbed by Mary Lincoln—who had loudly objected to Julia’s remaining seated while she, the president’s wife, stood, on a visit to City Point, and then made an even worse scene about Major General Ord’s wife’s hat—that poor Grant had to fumble around with lame excuses, the lameness of which must have been quite obvious to Lincoln, and was therefore spared being present when Lincoln was shot. Even twenty years later, when he wrote his memoirs, Grant was still concocting new and unconvincing explanations for why the Grants had been obliged to stand the Lincolns up at the last moment.
As soon as he heard the news of the assassination, Grant moved quickly to have Ford, the owner of the theater, arrested by Ord, then settled down to the more than ample work of the commanding general of the army. He would shortly be honored by becoming the first American officer since George Washington to be made a full four-star general.
It explains much about Grant if one compares him to a later general, Dwight D. Eisenhower. Like Eisenhower, Grant was perceived as “a man of the people,” like Eisenhower, his conduct of the war was universally admired, and like Eisenhower, though he was no politician, he could obviously have the presidency when he wanted it—in fact, would be sought for the presidency by both parties whether he wanted it or not. Crowds waited to see Grant trot to the office every morning in Washington, driving himself at a spanking pace, reins in his hands while smoking his trademark cigar, and politicians sought his advice—or at least his presence—at every discussion of national policy. Grant was not just popular, in the vacuum that followed the assassination of President Lincoln, he was one of the major figures, perhaps the major figure, to give the administration of Andrew Johnson authority and gravitas—both qualities the new president conspicuously lacked himself.
Part of Grant’s authority derived from his silence. In a world in which politicians spoke for hours (the speech preceding Lincoln’s address at Gettysburg ran longer than two hours, and most of the audience thought it was too short), Grant’s reluctance to speak at all seemed like proof of his wisdom. People listened carefully to what he did have to say—like the utterances of the Sphinx—puzzled over his meaning, and interpreted his silences as a sign of greatness. In an age when speechmaking was a popular entertainment (the term “stemwinder” comes from a speech so long that listeners had to rewind their watch during its course), and when folksy, comic, and sometimes bawdy stories were political assets (Lincoln was the past master of these), Grant had neither a gift nor a taste for either one. Way back when he had been chosen to command a regiment of volunteers by the governor of Illinois, he had listened to other people’s full-blown rhetoric as they addressed the troops; then, when it was his turn, stood before his new men, who were no doubt expecting still more rhetoric, and said, “Go to your quarters, men.”
They had admired him for that, and his gift for brevity had encouraged and rallied troops at Fort Donelson, Shiloh, and elsewhere during the war. It mystified politicians, however, who assumed that Grant’s taciturnity was a way of hiding his opinions, although Julia could have taught them otherwise. Grant’s taciturnity was natural and unaffected. He was a good listener who liked to think things over before speaking his mind, and arrived at his conclusions by some silent, interior process known only to himself.
Grant, like Wellington after Waterloo, soon became a major “fixer” of seemingly insoluble problems, the one man who could be trusted to deal calmly, quietly, authoritatively, and above all fairly with matters that had everyone else in Washington stumped. He was not a party man as such, though he thought of himself as a Republican because of his admiration for Lincoln (his memoirs are nonetheless singularly lacking in emotion on the subject of Lincoln’s death), and for a time a part of his strength was that he was perceived to be above party loyalty and, more important, above party intrigue. He was trusted in the South as well as the North, which gave him a special position at a time when the burning question of the day was how to reintegrate the Southern states into the union, and on what terms.
From the very first he was uncomfortable with President Johnson, a former tailor and Democrat who talked too much, was inappropriately quarrelsome with any stranger who expressed disagreement with him, and was prone to act rashly. These failings were exacerbated by the rumor that Johnson was a drunk, which may have come about because of an unfortunate incident. Johnson had been about to address the Congress, and complained of a severe attack of diarrhea—a real problem in a day when speeches were expected to go on for hours. A well-meaning senator advised a stiff shot of brandy to steady the president’s bowels, and Johnson, who was unused to strong drink, followed his advice and as a result made a rambling, inarticulate speech, following which he had to be helped off the podium.
The rumor that the new president had been drunk when he addressed the House and Senate did nothing for Johnson’s popularity—though even without that it would have been hard to follow the martyred Lincoln into the presidency—but at the nub of the problem was Johnson’s view of making peace with the South. Although he was a border state man (which was the reason he had been chosen for the vice presidency in the first place), unlike Lincoln, Johnson wanted Southerners to be punished for rebellion and treason and was determined to take a hard line. This put him at odds with Grant, who, like Lincoln, did not want to see former Confederates punished merely for their opinions, as opposed to what we would now call genuine war crimes, and was reluctant to lend his prestige to attempts on the part of the president to coerce the Southern states. Johnson’s misfortune, however, was that the radical wing of his party wanted him to go even further than he was willing to in punishing the South, so he was caught between a rock and a hard place.
One of Grant’s first tasks was to censure his old friend Sherman, who, in accepting the surrender of Joseph E. Johnston in North Carolina, had wildly and impulsively exceeded his authority with a document that allowed Confederate forces to take their arms home and deposit them in state arsenals, recognized existing state governments, and confirmed “property rights” without defining them, so that there was a possibility that the courts might hold them to include former slaves. What was going on in Sherman’s mind is hard to say—he was recklessly impulsive and prone to touches of megalomania—but Grant was obliged to write him a stiff letter and to repudiate the surrender agreement, then travel by train across the stricken South to take command of Sherman’s army and renegotiate the terms of Johnston’s surrender.
By the time Grant returned to Washington, President Johnson was already deeply enmeshed in the struggle with Congress over Reconstruction legislation that would end in his impeachment proceedings. In the summer of 1866, Johnson had taken what we would now call a whistle-stop tour of the Northern states to drum up support for his policies, and ordered Grant to accompany him as window dressing. To Grant’s embarrassment, the tour was a disaster, and even his presence in uniform was insufficient to calm audiences, as they and the president exchanged insults and threats.
By the winter of 1866, fueled by the failure of Johnson’s tour, Congress was busy drafting legislation designed to hog-tie the president hand and foot to the extreme Radical cause—military government was to be imposed on the Southern states, the president was to be enjoined from issuing any orders to the army except through the general in command, and to be forbidden from dismissing any member of his cabinet without the consent of the Senate.
Grant’s views on Reconstruction were complicated—or at any rate contradictory—but he was, above all, not an extremist. He disliked the idea of d
ividing the South into military districts, but would obey orders, and he was no great enthusiast for attempts “to enfranchise the Negro, in all his ignorance,” though in that too he would obey orders. Above all he did not want to get drawn into the quarrel that was fast developing between the president and the Radical members of his own cabinet, and between the president and Congress. Inexorably, however, he was drawn into the struggle, when Johnson removed Stanton as secretary of war and appointed Grant temporarily in his place. When the Senate set aside the president’s action, Grant obligingly moved out of the office of secretary of war and let Stanton reassume it, thus inviting Johnson’s rage. Johnson thenceforth regarded Grant as having betrayed him, while Grant regarded Johnson as having insulted him.
The turmoil of Reconstruction led finally to Johnson’s impeachment, which he narrowly survived—no thanks to Grant—but which spelled the end of his political career. In May 1868 Grant was nominated unanimously as the Republican candidate for the presidency. He went “home” to his new house in Galena and won the election without making any speeches or a campaign tour or even appearing much in public in Galena. He could be seen from time to time taking a constitutional stroll or a drive, or seated on the porch smoking a cigar, but that was as much as he would contribute to the electoral process, and as much as was needed.
He created something of a stir by refusing to ride in the same carriage as Andrew Johnson on inauguration day, but his failure to campaign and his short and notably bland inauguration speech left most people in some doubt as to what his policies would be—doubt that was shared to a significant degree by Grant himself. Almost seventy years later the outgoing president, Harry Truman, would remark of Eisenhower that he would never know what hit him when he reached his desk in the White House—as a general, when he gave an order it would be obeyed instantly, but in the White House he would give an order and nothing would happen. The same phenomenon hit Grant almost immediately. He too, like Ike, was accustomed to instant obedience, not to the political process of building up support for a policy in Congress, or appealing for support to the public, or wooing newspapermen to obtain it. He expected at the very least the backing of his own party, without realizing that everything in politics has to be negotiated—at a price.
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