The Man Who Saved the Union (90 page)

H
is party crossed the English Channel. A tour of the European continent had the singular merit of releasing him from the obligation to speak. He and the crowds that greeted him didn’t share a language; they were content for him to nod his thanks at their coming out. Julia liked Paris more than he did. “
We have now been in Paris for nearly four weeks,” he wrote
Adolph Borie in November. “Mrs. Grant is quite well acquainted with the places we hear most of: Worth’s, Bon Marché, Louvre”—three fashionable clothing stores. “It is a beautiful city, but I am quite ready to leave.” Autumn rains dampened the travel but not Grant’s outlook. “
The weather in Paris was most atrocious,” he declared after the party had moved on. “But I got to see most of the people. My opinion of their capacity for self-government has materially changed since seeing for myself. Before coming here I did not believe the French people capable of self-government. Now I believe them perfectly capable, and they will be satisfied with nothing less.”

They headed south and east across
Italy and the Mediterranean to the Middle East. The khedive of
Egypt put them up in a palace in Alexandria. Grant was appreciative but not impressed. “
All the romance given to Oriental splendor in novels and guide books is dissipated by witnessing the real thing,” he wrote Buck. “Innate ugliness, slovenliness, filth and indolence witnessed here is only equaled, in my experience, by seeing the lowest class of Digger Indians found on the Pacific Coast.” Yet Egypt’s history, in contrast to its present, was most alluring. “
I have seen more in Egypt to interest me than in all my other travels,” he wrote Fred from a steamer in the Nile above Thebes. The temples along the river were magnificent, built by an unusual but remarkable society. “The ancient Egyptian was a cultivated man, but governed soul and body by a ruler. Without a thorough command of all the strength, muscle and mind of the inhabitants such structures could never have been built. Without talent, learning and training the inscriptions could not have been made. And without mechanical teaching the large blocks of granite and sandstone could never have been taken from the quarries to their present resting place nor dressed as they are.”

Winter beat them to the Holy Land. “
Our visit to Jerusalem was a
very unpleasant one,” he wrote
Adam Badeau. “The roads are bad and it rained, blew and snowed all the time. We left snow six inches deep in Jerusalem.” They reached Constantinople at a bad time for the Ottomans, who were at war with the
Russians. “
The Russian army was but eight miles outside and the road entirely open from the city to the Russian camp.”
Grant wanted to observe the czar’s military. “But having received the hospitalities of the Turkish officials, I doubted the propriety of such a visit and therefore abstained.” The Turkish sultan showed him the royal stables; Grant admired the purebred Arabians. The sultan made him a gift of one. “
These horses, I am told, have their pedigrees kept for one or two hundred years back, and are of the purest blood,” Grant wrote a friend. “It may be of some value to breeders in the United States to get some of this blood.” He arranged for his new horse to be transported to America ahead of his own return.

The Greeks were on the right track. “
They seem to me to be a very energetic and advancing people,” he wrote from Athens. The Greek capital was a showplace of energy and good government. “The houses are substantial and present a fine architectural appearance; the people, high and low, are well and comfortably clad and everything indicates prosperity. I am inclined to think that if they could regain their former territory, or a good part of it, with the addition of the Greek population this would give them they would become a very respectable nation.”

But they would be working against the grain of the region. “
My impression of peoples are that in the East they have a form of government and a civilization that will always repress progress and development.
Syria and Asia Minor are as rich of soil as the great northwest in our own country, and are blessed with a climate far more suitable to production. The people would be industrious if they had encouragement, but they are treated as slaves, and all they produce is taken from them for the benefit of the governing classes and to maintain them in a luxurious and licentious life. Women are degraded even beneath a slave. They have no more rights than a brute. In fact, the donkey is their superior in privileges.”

L
ooping back west and then north, the travelers toured
Italy before crossing the Alps to Germany. The
New York Herald
had sent
John Russell Young to report on Grant’s journey; he accompanied Grant to a Berlin
interview with Otto von Bismarck at the chancellor’s residence. “
The General saunters in a kind of nonchalant way into the courtyard,” Young related. “The sentinels eye him for just an instant, perhaps curiously, and then quickly present arms. Somehow or other these grim soldiers recognize at once, as the salute is returned, that it comes from a man who is himself a soldier. His visit had been expected, it is true, but it was supposed that an Ex-President of the United States would have come thundering in a coach and six accompanied by outriders, and not quietly on foot. The General throws away a half-smoked cigar, then brings up his hand to his hat, acknowledging the military courtesy, and advances in the most quiet way to the door.”

Bismarck met him at the head of a marble hall. He extended his hand. “Glad to welcome General Grant to Germany,” he said in slow but precise English. Grant answered that he had looked forward to this meeting. Bismarck expressed surprise that Grant seemed so young, but comparing ages they discovered that only eleven years separated them. “That shows the value of a military life,” Bismarck said. “You have the frame of a young man, while I feel like an old one.”

They took seats in the library of the chancellor’s palace. Bismarck inquired about General Sheridan, whom he had encountered when Sheridan traveled to Europe to observe the
Franco-Prussian War. “Sheridan seemed to be a man of great ability,” Bismarck observed. Grant nodded. “Yes,” he said, “I regard Sheridan as not only one of the great soldiers of our war, but one of the great soldiers of the world—as a man who is fit for the highest commands. No better general ever lived than Sheridan.”

Bismarck apologized for the absence of Emperor Wilhelm, who was nursing wounds from an attempted assassination just weeks earlier. Grant conveyed his good wishes for the emperor’s recovery. Wilhelm thanked him and said, “It is so strange, so strange and so sad. Here is an old man, one of the kindest old gentlemen in the world, and yet they must try and shoot him!…I should have supposed that the Emperor could have walked alone all over the empire without harm, and yet they must try and shoot him.”

Grant agreed that it was a terrible turn of events. The same thing had happened to Lincoln, he said. A man of the kindest and gentlest nature had been killed by a vengeful assassin.

Bismarck said the emperor had spoken of taking Grant to see the Prussian army; his wounds prevented his doing so. The crown prince
would stand in. Grant accepted the invitation but with a modest smile said that his military days were over. And he hoped his country’s military days were over, too.

“You are so happily placed in America that you need fear no wars,” Bismarck replied. “What always seemed so sad to me about your last great war was that you were fighting your own people. That is always so terrible in wars, so very hard.”

“But it had to be done,” Grant said.

“Yes, you had to save the Union just as we had to save Germany.”

“Not only save the Union but destroy slavery.”

“I suppose, however, the Union was the real sentiment, the dominant sentiment.”

“In the beginning, yes. But as soon as slavery fired upon the flag it was felt, we all felt, even those who did not object to slaves, that slavery must be destroyed. We felt that it was a stain to the Union that men should be bought and sold like cattle.”

“I suppose if you had had a large army at the beginning of the war it would have ended in a much shorter time.”

“We might have had no war at all. But we cannot tell. Our war had many strange features; there were many things which seemed odd enough at the time but which now seem providential. If we had had a large regular army, as it was then constituted, it might have gone with the South. In fact, the Southern feeling in the army among high officers was so strong that when the war broke out the army dissolved. We had no army; then we had to organize one. A great commander like Sherman or Sheridan even then might have organized and put down the rebellion in six months or a year, or at the farthest two years. But that would have saved slavery, perhaps, and slavery meant the germs of a new rebellion. There had to be an end to slavery.”

“It was a long war, and a great work well done. I suppose it means a long peace.”

“I believe so.”

G
rant had left America in part to give Hayes the opportunity to establish his own presidency. “
I propose to stay away till after the exciting scenes that will surround the test of Mr. Hayes’s policy, for the reason that if I were at home I would be charged with having a hand in every kind of political maneuvering,” he told William
Copeland, a colleague of
John Young’s at the
New York Herald
. But he couldn’t avoid all comment on American affairs, even from a distance. The death of
John Motley, a protégé of Charles Sumner’s, revived talk of the dispute between Grant and Sumner, with certain of Sumner’s surviving friends suggesting that Grant’s removal of Motley from the post of minister to Britain somehow contributed to his death these several years later. Copeland invited Grant to defend himself. He did so, saying more about Sumner than he had said while in office or perhaps than he now intended. The
Herald
of course printed Grant’s remarks, prompting the Sumnerites in America to recount their champion’s side of the old story in greater detail than ever. The transatlantic rehashing did little credit to Grant, Sumner or anyone else, but it did sell papers, which had been the
Herald
’s point all along.

Other Grant comments bore on contemporary topics. The summer of 1877 saw the greatest labor strike in American history when rail workers responded to wage cuts by walking off the job and paralyzing transport from coast to coast. Violence followed the walkout, with workers battling private security forces and freelance arsonists piling in. Grant supported Hayes’s decision to use federal troops to suppress the violence. “
The United States should always be prepared to put down such demonstrations promptly and with severe consequences to the guilty,” he wrote a friend. But he thought it ironic that many of the American papers that now praised the use of force to protect the property of the railroads had been quick to condemn his earlier use of force to protect the rights of Southern blacks and Republicans. “It does seem the rule should work both ways,” he said.

Months later Congress passed a bill to expand the
currency by minting new silver coins. Hayes vetoed the bill but Congress overrode, and the
Bland-Allison Act became law. Grant thoroughly disapproved. “
The country, and the country’s credit, has not received so severe a blow since the attempt of the Southern states to secede,” he wrote William Sherman. “We stand more or less disgraced.” To banker
Anthony Drexel he said of the law: “
It shows a willingness on the part of a majority to repudiate a percentage of their indebtedness, and people who will do that are capable of repudiating the whole. The man who would steal a lamb would not be safe to trust with a sheep.”

At times he felt gloomy about the direction of American politics. The Democrats were gaining, and as they did they corroded the meaning of the Union victory in the war. “
It looks to me that unless the North rallies by 1880 the government will be in the hands of those who tried so
hard fourteen—seventeen—years ago to destroy it,” he wrote his sister’s husband. Grant suspected that when he eventually returned to America he would be called upon by his old supporters to rescue the republic, and the Republicans, once more. “
They have designs for me which I do not contemplate for myself,” he told
Adam Badeau.

He found himself refighting the war in other ways. Badeau was completing what would be published as the
Military History of Ulysses S. Grant
; he regularly wrote Grant for his recollections of this battle or that campaign. Sherman had published his own memoir, and his descriptions of some of his superiors provoked spirited rejoinders. Grant was informed he was among those Sherman criticized. “
I cannot tell you how much I was shocked,” he told a reporter. “I could not believe it in Sherman, the man whom I had always found so true and knightly, more anxious to honor others than win honor for himself.” He sent for a copy of the book and prepared to write a rebuttal. “I do not think I ever ventured upon a more painful duty.” But as he read, his mind was put at ease. “When I finished the book I found that I approved every word—that it was a true book, an honorable book—creditable to Sherman, just to his companions, to myself particularly so—just such a book as I expected Sherman to write.… You cannot imagine how pleased I was.… Sherman is not only a great soldier but a great man. He is one of the very great men in our country’s history.… As a writer he is among the first. As a general I know of no man I would put above him.… There is not a false line in Sherman’s character.”

Sherman’s memoir aside, Grant thought the South was getting the better of the war writing. “
Everything that our armies did was wrong, could have been done so much better,” he paraphrased the commentary on the war. “Everything that our opponents did was perfect. Lee was a demigod, Jackson was a demigod, while our generals were brutal butchers.… The Southern generals were models of chivalry and valor; our generals were venal, incompetent, coarse.… If we won a battle like Shiloh, for instance—one of the most useful victories of the war, one of the most important in its results—our own papers set to work to belittle the victory and give the enemy as much advantage as possible.” Accounts of other battles were similar. “I do not recite these things to complain especially,” Grant said. “I have nothing to complain about.… Having conquered, it is not for us to say anything unkind or in disparagement of our enemies. That is not my purpose. I merely mention these points in a general way, as points which our historians overlook.”