Ulysses S. Grant

by Michael Korda

  No sooner were the Grants back in the United States than he began to explore the possibility of being nominated by the Republicans for a third term. Whether or not Grant was conscious of it himself, he needed to perform a difficult balancing act—he had to appear everywhere, making himself look electable, but he must never be seen to be seeking the nomination. Whether it had been a good idea for him to spend two years traveling abroad is a difficult question. On the one hand it kept him out of the country, while the press sent back flattering reports of his tour, but on the other he was out of the loop of Republican politics and obliged to travel around the United States accepting applause at public functions without actually saying anything or explaining what he would do in the White House if the party and the public persuaded him to run.

  Besides, 1880 was not 1869. The Republican Party had as good as conceded the South to the Democrats by failing to stand up for black voters, and while respect for Grant still ran high among Republicans of every stripe and the mass of voters, there were new issues confronting the nation, and Grant’s victories, while still admired, were not sufficient to compensate for the absence on his part of any concrete program. A new generation of voters was coming of age, in any case, for whom Grant’s victories were their fathers’ battles.

  Even so, Grant managed to get a respectable number of votes—he was in the lead on the first ballot at Chicago—and he might very well have swept to the nomination on the enthusiasm of the delegates had he condescended to visit the convention hall, as Julia urged him to do. But he could not or would not play that kind of role; it was simply not in his nature, and as a result he lost the nomination to James A. Garfield, who handily defeated the Democratic candidate, Gen. Winfield Scott Hancock—the man who broke Pickett’s charge on the third day of Gettysburg, and against whom Grant nursed a burning resentment.

  Grant made his peace with Garfield, and most (but not all) of those Republicans who had failed to support him, but he did not get a seat in Garfield’s cabinet or even an ambassadorship. He was left with nothing much to do and not much money to do it with. A visit to Mexico, a country he had been fond of even when fighting there, offered the possibility of playing a major role in an American plan to build railways there, but although Grant had set himself up with a handsome residence on East Sixty-sixth Street in New York City and an office on Wall Street in expectation of success, his hopes as a railway entrepreneur eventually came to nothing, leaving him once again with the difficult problem of what to do, and the even more difficult one of how to make money. The Grants liked to live in style, and in a manner fitting for a former president who moved in wealthy financial circles, with hardly any income to support it. If a cabinet post, an ambassadorship, or the Mexican railways would not do the trick, Grant would have to find something else.

  Opportunity appeared from, of all people, one of his sons, Ulysses Grant, Jr. Buck Grant had made an advantageous marriage and gone into business on Wall Street with capital provided by his father-in-law. His partner was Ferdinand Ward, a plausible and attractive young man with a certain business flair. Buck Grant, like his father, was a true believer in other people’s business schemes, and it seemed to him logical for his father to sink his remaining capital into the firm of Grant & Ward and make a fortune. It is a measure of Grant’s enduring—and endearing—naïveté that he was persuaded to attempt to become a Wall Street tycoon—few things were as clear as Grant’s poor judgment about money and schemes to make money—yet that is precisely what he decided to do.

  Buck was an innocent dupe, Ward a clever con man. And the outcome was predictable. Ward’s idea was to use Grant as a front to attract investments from Civil War veterans. With Grant’s name on the letterhead the money flowed in, and Ward used each new investment to show a profit to the previous investors—what would come to be known as a Ponzi scheme. In the meantime Ward was stealing the partnership blind, which became only too shockingly apparent when Ward had to admit, in May 1884, that the firm was technically bankrupt. In one last burst of confidence trickery, Ward persuaded Grant to borrow $150,000 from the formidable William Vanderbilt, which Vanderbilt agreed to on Grant’s personal word. Then Ward vanished into protracted litigation and prison along with Vanderbilt’s $150,000, and Grant was left holding the bag, bankrupt, an object of scorn or pity (depending on which party you belonged to), by any standards ruined. No American ex-president had ever fallen so low, and except for Harding and Nixon, none ever would again.

  Chapter Ten

  RUINED AND SADDLED WITH DEBT, Grant was, in some respects, back where he had started when he was working at the leather shop in Galena. As always in his extraordinary life, however, a chance to rise was once again about to present itself. Once again he would need to go through pain and suffering; once again he would overcome them to win glory. This time the weapon would be the pen, not the sword.

  In the aftermath of the failure of Grant & Ward, Grant had rather reluctantly agreed to write an account of Shiloh for Century Magazine, for a fee of five hundred dollars; more articles were called for, and it gradually dawned on the editor of the Century that a book might eventually come of all this. It also dawned on a former Confederate soldier, Samuel Clemens (more famous under his writing name of Mark Twain), that such a book would sell. Clemens was a publisher as well as a humorist and writer, and owned his own publishing house, Charles L. Webster & Co., having discovered that he could make more money by selling his books door-to-door than through conventional publishers and booksellers, who even then were thought to be behind the times when it came to marketing their product. Clemens knew the general slightly and dropped in to see him at East Sixty-sixth Street—Clemens was a celebrity, the late-nineteenth-century equivalent of a major talk-show host, as well as a famous writer, and he had the rare gift of being able to make Grant smile, so no doubt he was welcome. He was also a man with a vision, and proposed to secure for Grant at least $25,000 for his war memoirs, against very favorable royalty terms that would make him, once again, a rich man. Grant typically countered with the loyalty that he owed to the Century people, but Clemens promised him they would never match his offer or come up with anything like it, and he was proved right. The head of the Century—typically of a publisher—declared rather stuffily that he would never guarantee the sale of 25,000 copies of any book ever written, and Clemens, therefore, got Grant’s memoirs, thus making Grant the first in a long line of presidents who would secure their financial future with a book deal, including Truman, Eisenhower, Nixon, and Bill Clinton.

  Unlike most of them, however, Grant aimed to write his book himself, without the help of a “ghostwriter.” Every word would be his. Clemens was shrewd enough to know that Grant’s prose was one of his greatest strengths. His letters and dispatches, however hastily written, were always models of brevity, clarity, and simplicity—he had only to keep at it steadily to produce a major bestseller.1

  But there was one problem. Grant had been suffering for some time from a pain in the throat, accompanied by difficulty in swallowing. He had experienced it shortly after the collapse of Grant & Ward, when his mind had been on other things—disgrace and ruin—and had paid, at first, little attention to it. It was diagnosed as a cold, but the pain persisted long after the cold should have gone away, and as throat specialists were called in, the diagnosis became clearer and more dire—Grant was suffering from cancer of the throat, an incurable disease in the age before radiation and chemotherapy, in effect a death sentence, and a slow and painful death at that.

  Grant took the news stoically, but he was determined to finish his book before he died. The writing was laborious, slow work, and became daily more difficult as Grant’s cancer spread, rendering it impossible for him to swallow and eventually depriving him of his voice. Still he labored on, day after day, convinced by now that it was the only way in which his debts could be settled and Julia and his family provided for.

  What fate had in store for Grant was a race against time—a race against death,
really—and the struggle wiped away every trace of the man who had twice been president and tried so hard to get a third term without actually asking for it. That Grant, overweight, puffy-faced, overdressed in clothes that didn’t suit him, the Grant who had yearned to be a Wall Street tycoon or a Mexican railways baron, and who had traveled around the world accepting as his due the homage of huge crowds of ordinary people and the company of crowned heads, was now burned away day by day, bit by bit, by pain, suffering, and remorselessly hard work under overwhelming pressure. Photographs taken of Grant in his illness show the flesh pared away, the strong bones reappearing in his face, the eyes once again melancholy but focused with disconcerting concentration on the object of his attention, as they had once been in battle. In these photographs Grant, the heroic young officer of the Mexican War; Grant, the fledgling colonel of the Illinois Volunteers who surrounded Buckner at Fort Donelson; Grant, the victor of Shiloh, Vicksburg, and the long, bloody struggle against Lee in 1864 and 1865, reappears as if the other Grant had never existed. He was, in fact, at war again, not only in his head, as day by day he reconstructed with phenomenal exactitude and in succinct lapidary prose the history of his wars and his battles, but also in his heart, as he took the measure of the cancer that was killing him; figured out how much pain he could bear and how much morphine he could afford to take before it clouded his mind and stopped his writing; drew on his own strength, courage, and stubborn determination to fight his last battle, in which the only victory would be to complete his book before death took him.

  Grant began his task late in 1884 and finished it in July 1885—an amazing and Herculean labor. At first he dictated, but then, as his ability to speak deteriorated, he took to writing on lined yellow legal pads with a pencil, in his clear, firm script. He did not have an army of researchers and draft writers, like Winston Churchill for instance. He sat on his porch, if the weather allowed it, and wrote away industriously, often watched by sightseers who had come to see the great man die. The Grants had been obliged to sell their seaside cottage in New Jersey, and took a small house at Mount McGregor, near Saratoga Springs, New York. There Grant can be seen, in numerous photographs, dressed in a dark, frock-coated suit with silk lapels, a black silk top hat on his head and a white napkin or towel wrapped around his throat, resolutely writing.

  He knew he was dying, and very shortly the country knew it, too. Visitors came to pay their last respects, crowds of tourists came up from Saratoga Springs to stand and gawk at Grant; he was, as was so often the case in his life, on public display. In an age when deathbed scenes were popular and apt to be protracted, and when people died at home rather than in a hospital, Grant’s was perhaps the biggest and longest deathbed scene of all, and through it he kept working, surrounded by his family, and receiving occasional visitors.

  It was a national drama of unprecedented proportions, and as his health declined and pain began to overwhelm his defenses, his enemies and his detractors fell away, one by one. Those who had thought he was wasteful of his men’s lives in the war, those who had opposed his presidency, those who had lost their life’s savings in the crash and depression that darkened his second term in office, or had unwisely invested their money in Grant & Ward because of his name, came to forgive him—dying made him again what he had once been, a national hero.

  He finished the last chapter only a week or so before his death and was still struggling with questions about the maps and the proofs when death was almost ready to take him. On his own terms, and in his own way, he had fought death and won.

  Now that it was too late, final honors poured in—Congress passed a bill restoring him to his rank in the army (he had had to resign in order to run for president); encomiums filled the newspapers; people of every rank, from all over the world, sent letters and cards; but Grant was past all that. He had finished his book, and now he was ready, perhaps even impatient, to die.

  He would never know it, of course, but the book would indeed save the Grants—it would earn more than $450,000 in royalties, an immense sum for the day, but one that would have to be multiplied by twenty or more to give an idea of it in comparable modern terms. Sold door to door in several different editions, it became the biggest bestseller in American history, excluding the Bible.

  All over the United States in the late nineteenth century, in the simplest of homes and farmhouses, one could always count on finding two books, the Bible and Grant’s Memoirs, side by side, on a shelf or on the mantelpiece, its penultimate words, “Let us have peace,” representing, so very clearly, the deepest feelings of America’s most successful general.

  Epilogue

  Why Grant?

  THERE ARE MANY BIOGRAPHIES of Grant, so many that it seems to be something of a minor industry; some of them, like William S. McFeely’s Grant, are works of literature, many others more humdrum or narrowly military in interest. But from time to time it is necessary to remind Americans about Grant, first of all because his is a kind of real-life Horatio Alger story, exactly the one that foreigners have always wanted to believe about American life (hence the immense crowds that greeted Grant on his world tour), and that Americans want to believe about themselves. He came from a humble background; he had a harsh childhood; success eluded him at every turn no matter how hard he worked; then, all of a sudden, he rose to fame, to command, to power, to victory; then managed as few other people could have done (perhaps only Lincoln) to end the Civil War on a note of grace; served two terms as president; and ended his life by writing the most successful book in American literature. He was, in his lifetime, living proof of a substantial element of the American dream, and after his death continued to be for many years.

  His presidency was clearly flawed, but what he sought as president—peace, prosperity, the binding together of North and South despite the wounds of four years of civil war, and good relations with foreign powers—was sought after by most Americans then and continues to be today. In domestic politics Grant sought to achieve fairness and failed, certainly in the case of black Americans; in foreign policy he avoided a bullying or a moralistic tone and refrained from the use of military force. Like Winston Churchill he believed that “It is better to jaw, jaw, jaw than to war, war, war,” and his decision to submit American claims against the United Kingdom to international arbitration and not to encourage the annexation of Canada shows a degree of common sense that we might well wish to see repeated in our own day.

  As a general Grant defined for all time the American way of winning a war, from which, nearly 150 years later, we deviate at our own risk. Grant understood better than anyone that, first of all, any American war must be firmly based on the support of the American people and have an essentially moral base, and that the best way for the United States to win a war was to use to the full its great industrial strength and its reserves of manpower—and to apply them both unhesitatingly on the battlefield.

  Grant was not a showy general. No admirer of Napoleon, he nevertheless had to some degree what Napoleon called “le coup d’oeil de génie,” the quick glance of genius, by which Napoleon meant the ability to see at once on the battlefield where the enemy’s weakness lay and how to exploit it with one unexpected blow. Grant, like Napoleon himself, didn’t rise to that level every time—at Shiloh he was caught off guard and fumbled his way through the first day of the battle, to be saved by Johnston’s death on the battlefield and Buell’s arrival at the last minute with fresh troops—but usually his keen grasp of the enemy’s position and its potential weaknesses was remarkable.

  Lee had that quality, too, of course, though it failed him at Gettysburg, where he allowed the battle to become a “pounding match,” in Wellington’s phrase, which, given the enemy’s position on high ground with interior lines and Lee’s own inferiority in numbers, he could only lose, even though Lee was a better general than Meade. Both Grant and Lee were masters of the quick, surprising movement, the sudden change of plans that, for example, brought Grant’s army from north of Richmond to so
utheast of it, and led to the siege of Petersburg and, eventually, the end of the war.

  The war they fought is studied all over the world in staff colleges, still today—indeed German tank commanders like Rommel, Guderian, Manteuffel, and Manstein (and their Soviet equivalents) learned Stonewall Jackson’s Shenandoah campaign by heart, so that for them Winchester, Harrisonburg, New Market, Harpers Ferry, Port Republic, and Cross Keys were as familiar as German place names, and the landscape of the Shenandoah Valley was as firmly planted in their minds as that of the Rhine or the Elbe or eastern France. Similarly, in every imaginable language, in military academies all over the world, Grant’s capture of Vicksburg, his pursuit of Lee from the Wilderness to Appomattox, and his swift, implacable movements to the left to isolate the Army of Northern Virginia and force Lee’s surrender are taught and studied down to the last detail. The machine gun, the tank, the aircraft, the computer and “smart” weaponry have changed the way wars are fought, but not the way they are won. Grant understood topography, the importance of supply lines, the instant judgment of the balance between his own strengths and the enemy’s weaknesses, and above all the need to keep his armies moving forward, despite casualties, even when things have gone wrong—that and the simple importance of inflicting greater losses on the enemy than he can sustain, day after day, until he breaks. Grant the boy never retraced his steps. Grant the man did not retreat—he advanced. Generals who do that win wars.

  When the United States has succeeded in war, it has been by following Grant’s example.

  When asked who France’s greatest poet was, the nineteenth-century French literary critic Charles-Augustin Saint-Beuve replied, “Victor Hugo, hélas.” If I were asked who America’s greatest general was, I should have to echo Saint-Beuve: Ulysses S. Grant, alas.