The issues that had arisen between the United States and the United Kingdom had escalated during the Civil War, exacerbated by the construction in English shipyards of a number of Confederate commerce raiders and blockade runners, which had inflicted major damage on American shipping. Some of these ships were not only built in the United Kingdom but partly manned by British crews. Preposterous sums were being suggested in Congress as “damages” to be paid by the British, Sumner’s being an eye-popping two billion five hundred million dollars. In addition to this there were such issues as disputed fishery rights (again significant in Sumner’s New England, but not to an Ohio/Illinois man like Grant), Confederate debts, and the growing belief among Radical Republicans that Canada should be annexed, partly to punish the United Kingdom and partly because it seemed obvious to New Englanders, as it had one hundred years earlier, that the Canadians would rather be governed from Washington than from London. However much Grant wanted to annex Santo Domingo, he was not remotely interested in annexing Canada to please Senator Sumner; he doubted that the Canadians wanted to become Americans (they had stoutly—and successfully—resisted an American invasion during the Revolutionary War); and at all costs he didn’t want to provoke a war with Britain, then the world’s dominant superpower. In the end, by artful diplomacy, by calming down the rhetoric over Canada, and by the then-revolutionary innovation of submitting America’s claims to international arbitration in Geneva, Grant managed to achieve a settlement with the United Kingdom that left both countries more or less satisfied and would serve as a model for resolving future international disputes. As a result of this Grant developed a reputation in Europe and the rest of the world rather resembling that of Woodrow Wilson in 1918, as a great statesman who could rise above mere national political concerns—very gratifying, no doubt, but not the best way of winning elections in the United States.
What did Grant’s reputation as a president in, however (and continues to do so today whenever journalists and historians are drawing up lists of the best presidents vs. the worst ones), was the depression of 1873, which ushered in a long period of unemployment and distress, made politically more damaging by accusations that the president’s wealthy friends were making money out of it (comparisons to the economy in 2003, as this book was being written, will come naturally to mind). Even in his first term there were signs that the American economy was faltering, and it cannot be said that Grant ignored the issue, innocent as he may have been of what is now called “economics.” His chief concern was with the question of whether paper dollars (which came to be called “greenbacks” during the Civil War) should be redeemable in specie—that is, gold—partially in specie, or not in specie at all. Since this question was still perplexing Winston Churchill as chancellor of the Exchequer in Great Britain in the 1920s, and Franklin D. Roosevelt in the 1930s, it is hardly surprising that Grant was stumped by it and changed his mind frequently. Since the war had been fought, as all wars are, by printing large amounts of paper money in the expectation that victory would enable whoever was in charge of things at some later date (hopefully somebody else) to sort matters out, the aftermath, apart from a huge national debt, was an awful lot of doubtful paper money floating about, and not enough gold. Of course things were simpler, as they always are, on the losing side—Confederate paper money became worthless long before Appomattox—but in the United States it was obviously vital to peg the dollar to some acceptable value, gold being the traditional one.
It was Grant’s bad luck, given his ignorance of economics, to have to listen to both sides of a monetary discussion that doubtless bored and confused him (Churchill and Roosevelt would be just as bored and confused when their time came), and his tragedy that he was beginning to see himself as one of the “haves” rather than as one of the “have-nots.” He had already been bitten by the gold bug before, when, under the false impression that he understood fiscal policy, he fell under the sway of Jay Gould and James Fisk, Jr., two sleazy financial speculators who would have been right at home on Wall Street in the 1990s. Gould and Fisk wanted to “corner” the market in gold and tried over many dinners and in many private dining cars to persuade the president of the importance of the government’s buying gold rather than selling it. In the end, however, during the autumn of 1869, Grant changed his mind just when they thought they had him securely on the hook, setting off a gold panic that ruined many people in the financial world and causing what we would now call a “minirecession,” in addition to costing him one member of his cabinet and exposing to the world the possibility that Julia Grant herself and some of her relatives may have been involved in, and profited from, the attempts to manipulate the price of gold.
In 1873 the failure of Jay Cooke & Co., a prominent banking firm, precipitated a crash, followed by a protracted, full-blown depression, leaving the country in a mess from which Grant was unable to extricate it and in which his own fortune, such as it was, would soon be consumed. Grant’s presidency was to end in a welter of scandals, none of them directly connected to Grant, but most of them the result of his engaging, but mistaken, loyalty to people who had served in the Grand Army of the Republic during the war, or fast-talking, high-living rogues, or friends, or members of his own or his official or Julia’s family. The names of the scandals alone give some clue to the kind of thing that darkened his final years in the White House—the Whisky Scandal (having to do with the sale of whiskey on a large and remunerative scale without federal tax stamps), and the Indian Trader’s Post Scandal (having to do with the sale and the partitioning of the profits of the lucrative appointments of government trading posts on Indian reservations). A pattern of grift and graft ran through the Grant administration, and though the president was one of the few major figures not to profit from it, he nevertheless seemed unable to do anything to stop it, and he was unwilling to listen to evidence against those he liked or trusted.
It did not help that nobody was happy with the chaos and disarray and sheer brutality of events in the former Confederate states. Under military government blacks began to play a role proportional to their number in state legislatures, but as the states gradually escaped from what they described as “carpetbagger” government, the black freedmen were systematically disenfranchised and prevented from voting by organized campaigns of violence, murder, and lynching, in which the nascent Ku Klux Klan played a large role. In very short order, de facto racial segregation, sharecropping, and political impotence enforced by whites became the substitute for slavery in the South.
Grant was unwilling—again very much like Ike less than a hundred years later—to use federal force to defend the rights of blacks or to challenge the Southern status quo—Grant had won the Civil War but had no interest in refighting it—and at the same time he had no wish to reward former Confederates or unreconstructed racists. He preferred to get the army out of there and leave the Southern states to their own devices, in the hope that time and political realities would produce some form of amelioration of the Southern racial situation without necessarily making blacks the equal of whites. This was, it goes without saying, apostasy to Republicans like Charles Sumner, old abolitionists who could still be stirred by the mention of John Brown, but it seemed like plain common sense to Grant and indeed to much of the country. The destruction of slavery, Grant would later tell that supreme political realist, German chancellor Bismarck, was necessary to end the rebellion and defeat the South, but like most white Americans for the next hundred years, Grant was unwilling to take the next step and accept the former slaves as equals or force the former Confederate states to do so.
(It was typical of the era that the few blacks to enter West Point as cadets, having surmounted almost impossible difficulties intended to keep them out, were persecuted and treated with contempt by the student body and the officer instructors alike. Here was an area in which even a word from Grant might have ended the campaign of discrimination, but it was not forthcoming, and it would not be until the mid–twentieth century that th
e experiment was tried again.)
Perhaps the brightest spot in Grant’s eight years as president was the marriage of his beloved daughter, Nellie, in the White House. Nellie, to judge from photographs, was pretty, intelligent, and good-humored—she was lucky to have inherited her looks more from her father than her mother—and the Grants were especially gratified when she fell in love with a handsome, elegant young Englishman with the almost too perfect name of Algernon Sartoris, whom she met on a transatlantic steamer. Sartoris was a nephew of the great actress Fanny Kemble, and his family was prosperous, with just enough connections to the aristocracy to thrill the Grants, or at any rate to thrill Julia and Nellie. One might have thought that Sartoris would have been pleased to have wooed and won the daughter of the president of the United States, but the Grants appear to have been more dazzled by him than he was by them. In any event, despite a glamorous wedding in the White House, the marriage, except for the fact that it produced four children, was a flop. Sartoris seems to have been a philanderer, a cheat, and a drunk, and reading between the lines may have been under the impression that Grant was wealthy, as well as a famous general and president—the discovery by Sartoris, when it was too late, that he had not married into money may have been partly responsible for the marital problems, but in any case Nellie would eventually return to the United States with her children, though many years were to pass before she could get a divorce.
Whatever else can be said of Grant, he was the most indulgent of parents—clearly his own harsh childhood had taught him something, and he seems to have found in his family life a happiness that eluded him in his public life.
Still, taking it all in all, his presidency was not the failure that historians have portrayed it. He kept America out of two wars; if his attempt to annex Santo Domingo was foolish, his refusal to try to annex Canada was courageous and smart, and the failure of the economy was perhaps beyond his control or anybody else’s. The corruption that marked the Grant administration was brought about by his innocence and his trust in other people, not by any desire for personal gain, and was, in any case, endemic to what came to be called the “Gilded Age.” The United States was growing too fast, in too many different directions at once, and the inevitable consequence was corruption and an unstable economy, and it would have taken a more astute man than Grant to slow things down or clean them up.
All the same the middle period of Grant’s life is disappointing. Appomattox was his greatest moment—the years afterward, despite two terms as president, show him as a man drifting into late middle age without a sense of direction, eager to become a wealthy and respected bourgeois but congenitally ill equipped to do so. Failure as a young man had honed and hardened him for war, and war, when it came, made him a hero; now another long and difficult period of failure would offer him another opportunity for heroism. Not too many people are given two chances to be a hero in a lifetime. Although Grant could not have guessed it, as he prepared to leave the White House, he was to be one of them.
Chapter Nine
IN 1877 RETIRING PRESIDENTS did not have the benefits that they do today—no “presidential library” to build and administer, no office and staff at government expense, no Secret Service protection, no generous pension. The Founding Fathers had intended that presidents should return to everyday life, hopefully to their farms or plantations, as ordinary citizens, and certainly the first presidents did so, following the example set by Washington. Grant, however, was still a comparatively young man and had no equivalent of Mount Vernon or Monticello to hold him. He had invested a good deal of money in a horse farm built on Dent land near St. Louis, but as usual, that had turned out to be a bad investment, and in any case he was hardly likely to spend the rest of his life raising trotters. Galena held no attractions for him, and he and Mrs. Grant knew hardly anyone in Philadelphia, in both of which they had been given houses by a grateful public.
Grant solved the problem, initially, by the traditional American solution to retirement: taking a world tour.
How curious Grant was about the rest of the world is hard to say, but the rest of the world was intensely curious about him, so that it became like a royal tour, in which the Grants were the sightseeing attraction, rather than the scenery or famous monuments. In the United States, though his popularity was still immense, he was nevertheless, for many people, a Republican former president, which is to say that there were those who disagreed with his actions as a political figure though not as a general. Abroad he was simply a celebrity, the first American president to travel around the world offering himself up to the millions who saw him and Mrs. Grant as if they were part of P. T. Barnum’s circus and freak show.
Their tour around the world was of unprecedented length—nearly two years—partly because travel in those days was slow, and partly because Grant had shrewdly calculated that the longer they stayed away from the United States, the more curiosity there would be to greet them when they got home. Two years is a long time in politics—long enough for people to become fed up with President Rutherford B. Hayes and look back on Grant’s presidency as a golden age. Or so, no doubt, Grant hoped.
In England the Grants were treated like royalty, even by royalty, and given the unusual honor of a private dinner with Queen Victoria at Windsor, marred only by the embarrassing insistence of their bumptious son Jesse that he sit at the queen’s table, to which her majesty finally consented though she found the young man ill-mannered and pushy. The Grants were given dinners by the Prince of Wales (the future Edward VII), the Duke of Devonshire, and the second Duke of Wellington, as well as fulsome public banquets, including one at the Guildhall in which the Lord Mayor of London presented him with the freedom of the City of London, and in general feted him from one end of the realm to the other. Perhaps most extraordinary were the enormous number of English workingmen who turned out to greet Grant, seeing in him not only the man who had destroyed slavery but who represented something that was still unthinkable in Great Britain—the rise of a former leather tanner and shop clerk to four-star general and president. Grant seems to have been overwhelmed and bewildered by his popularity among “the working classes,” but it was a fact, and he came to accept it. His inarticulateness helped too—the fact that he did not make long, windy speeches appealed to them; he was “a man of few words,” and many people who got close enough to him remarked on his robust physique, his apparent physical strength, and his big, blunt-fingered workingman’s hands—hands that had at one time plowed fields, felled trees, cut hay, harnessed horses, and raised pigs, however unsuccessfully.
His reception in France and in Italy was hardly less extraordinary. The Grants saw all the sights—including Pompei—then went on to Egypt, and from there to the Holy Land (at the time still a Turkish province), to Constantinople, back to Italy, and on to Holland, Denmark, Norway, Russia, Germany, and Spain. Grant met Czar Alexander II, Bismarck, Pope Leo XIII, and French premier Georges Clemenceau—everybody who mattered in Europe. Then, after a trip back to England, the Grants set out for India, China, and Japan via the Suez Canal: two well-fed, solidly built Americans with an apparently inextinguishable appetite for food and travel—the prototypes for generations to come of American world travelers. The farther Grant journeyed from his native land, the more he was treated as a distinguished world figure, the peak being reached when he was presented to the emperor Meiji of Japan, who actually shook hands with Grant, something no Japanese emperor had ever done before with anyone, native or foreign.
Through it all Grant ate, read, and gazed at the sights placidly, apparently beyond boredom. There were rumors that from time to time he got drunk—who could blame him?—and in India the viceroy, Lord Lytton, whose account of an evening with the Grants is quoted in McFeely’s biography of Grant, claimed that it took six British sailors to haul a drunken Grant away from a shipboard reception at which he had pinched young ladies’ bottoms and indecently ogled their decolletés, and place him in another room where he satiated his lust on Mrs
. Grant, then threw up on her. Lytton was a man who enjoyed telling tall tales and, no shrinking violet himself when it came to the ladies, he was probably exaggerating. Photographs of Mrs. Grant at the time make the incident as he describes it seem unlikely—given her bulk and obvious strength, she could surely have resisted the general, and from what we know of her the suggestion that she would have had sexual intercourse with him in any kind of public view seems very improbable. That Grant was drinking again, however, is undeniable—he shared a brandy with Bismarck, and champagne with the Prince of Wales, and endless wines were served at the innumerable banquets that were held in the Grants’ honor. It would have been very difficult for him to refuse a drink or a toast without being rude, and with Grant one drink led to another. By the time Grant reached India he had been traveling for almost a year and a half, and like many another tourist, the charm of seeing yet another famous monument in the company of his wife may have worn thin by then.
Since Lord Lytton’s is, so far as I know, the only allegation of sexual impropriety against Grant, I am prepared to dismiss it or at least overlook it, but the drinking is more of a problem. For Grant sobriety was all important—the lack of it was a sign that he was getting restless, as indeed he must have been.1
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