The Man Who Saved the Union (92 page)

As the vessel reached its anchorage the crush intensified; everyone wished to be first to see the general. Police pushed the crowds back, making room for the carriages that would convey the hero and his party. A ferry pulled alongside the
City of Tokio
; Grant and his group went aboard. As the ferry approached its slip at the foot of Market Street, the crowd began cheering, and when Grant appeared at the head of the gangway, the cheering became a roar. A band played “Home Again” and the mayor declared, “
Some time has passed since you departed from the Atlantic shore to seek the relief which a long period in your country’s service had
made necessary, but during this absence the people of the United States have not forgotten you.” As if to confirm the mayor’s words, which few of them could hear, the crowd burst into louder applause than ever. The mayor explained that San Francisco had changed since Grant had last been there a quarter century before. “The young city is now the rival of cities which were old when its history began.” But some of the men who had known Grant in the early days were still in the city. “Many of them are here today waiting anxiously to take you by the hand once more.”

The mayor’s statement perhaps gave Grant pause, for some of those old-timers might remember the cloud under which he had left California in 1854. Yet he had been far from the hardest drinker in the gold rush days, and, looking at himself and what he could see of the thriving city before him, he had to say that things hadn’t turned out badly for either of them. He responded succinctly to the mayor’s remarks. He said he was honored by the reception and eager to see all that the San Franciscans had wrought. “It will afford me great pleasure to observe, after the lapse of a quarter of a century, the marvelous growth of your city.” He and Julia entered the carriage reserved for them, and in line with many other vehicles they paraded up Market Street, to the sustained applause and shouts of the hordes that lined both sides of the avenue.

The San Francisco welcome caught the eye of America’s political classes, who had been monitoring Grant’s journey across Europe and Asia. Republicans realized they had no one who could inspire voters the way Grant did, and with the unexciting Hayes having taken himself out of the running for
1880, many of them hoped to put Grant atop the ticket again. Others in the party looked to a Grant candidacy not with hope but with fear—of a return of the spoilsmen who had plagued his second term. Democrats didn’t want to run against Grant, fairly certain they would lose; they hoped for a squabble among the Republicans that would neutralize that party’s continuing advantage in national politics and allow the Democracy to elect one of its own as president for the first time since 1856.

Grant kept quiet. His supporters contended that his decision not to run in 1876 had rested on a George Washington–like forswearing of protracted incumbent advantage rather than a rejection per se of more than eight years in office. His opponents contended that a
third term was a third term, whether consecutive or not, and that Grant’s earlier decision still applied—or should still apply. Grant declined to say what
he
thought.

The questions grew only more pressing as the excitement persisted and spread. “
I cannot venture in the streets except in a carriage for the mob of goodnatured and enthusiastic friends, old and young,” he wrote
Adolph Borie after a week in San Francisco. He and Julia climbed the Sierra Nevada to Yosemite, which hadn’t been discovered by whites at the time of his previous stay in California. They went back to San Francisco for a voyage north to Oregon. “
It seems like returning home again,” he told a tickled audience at Astoria. In Portland he addressed a Grand Army of the Republic convention. “
It is gratifying to me to meet my old comrades again,” he said. Noting the presence of some Confederate veterans in the audience, he added: “And it is particularly gratifying now in the time of perfect peace to take by the hand those who fought against us.” After returning to California, they headed east on the
Central Pacific Railroad. “
No honors that I received abroad were such a real pleasure to me,” he told a crowd at Virginia City, “nor were any so deeply felt, as are those bestowed upon me by my own people in their reception of me on my coming home.” He spoke to audiences large and small across Utah, Nebraska, Iowa and Illinois during late October and early November.

A reporter traveling with Grant, recalling the general’s aversion to public speaking, expressed surprise at the frequency of his remarks now. Grant said he couldn’t help it. “
When I was in Europe I had to speak, and, having done so, it seemed to me it would be very uncivil to refuse the folks at home. It is very embarrassing. I think I am improving, for my knees don’t knock together like they did at first, but I don’t like it, and I am sorry I yielded.” Yet he still valued and practiced brevity. He teased himself before an Illinois audience: “
I am very glad to get back to Illinois again, and very glad to see you all. But I have a great deal of sympathy with these press-men who are along with us and who take down every word. I am a man of economy. I believe in economy. They telegraph every word, and I want to save them expenses.”

Galena greeted its adopted son ecstatically and urged him to stay. Gratitude to Grant aside, the town needed every resident it could claim, for the construction of the western railroads had deprived the river city of most of its business and much of its raison d’être. Grant expressed appreciation for the slow pace. “
I always like to come here, because I can take my quiet and ease here better than anywhere else,” he told a reporter.

But he wouldn’t settle in Galena, at least not yet. Rutherford Hayes invited him to visit the White House and remain awhile; he declined, saying he and Julia were seeking winter quarters in warmer climes.
What he didn’t say was that he preferred not to provide the endorsement a sojourn at the Executive Mansion would imply. But his search for warmth was sincere, as was his desire to resume his travels. “
We think now of going to Havana and
Mexico,” he wrote Nellie. He had never been to
Cuba, where the insurgency against Spain had finally died out, and he wanted to revisit the Mexican scenes of the war that introduced him to the soldier’s art.

“T
he first time I ever saw General
Grant was in the fall or winter of 1866 at one of the receptions at Washington, when he was general of the army,” Samuel Clemens recalled. “I merely saw and shook hands with him along with the crowd but had no conversation.” Their next encounter occurred during Grant’s first term as president. Clemens’s friend and Nevada’s senator
William Stewart took the author along on a visit to the White House. Clemens by this period had acquired a certain reputation as Mark Twain for his short stories and journalism, but Grant hadn’t heard of him. “I shook hands and then there was a pause and silence,” Clemens wrote. “I couldn’t think of anything to say. So I merely looked into the General’s grim, immovable countenance a moment or two in silence and then I said: ‘Mr. President, I am embarrassed. Are you?’ He smiled a smile which would have done no discredit to a cast-iron image and I got away under the smoke of my volley.”

Ten years passed before the third meeting. Grant had returned from his world tour and in November 1879 traveled to Chicago for a
reunion of the Army of the Tennessee. Clemens was now famous as the author of several bestselling books, and the two were to share the rostrum with several other speakers.
Carter Harrison, the mayor of Chicago, offered to introduce Clemens to Grant. Clemens, assuming Grant didn’t remember him, gladly accepted the offer. The introduction was made. A pause followed, then Grant said, “I am not embarrassed. Are you?”

The Chicago reunion was an extravagant affair with eighty thousand veterans attending. A formal dinner honored Grant; more than a dozen speakers offered toasts to various segments of the American population and to what the general’s great victories meant for them. Clemens was astonished by Grant’s ability to remain calm amid the tempest of adulation. “
He never moved a muscle of his body for a single instant, during thirty minutes!” Clemens wrote. “You could have played him on a stranger for an effigy. Perhaps he never
would
have moved, but at last
a speaker made such a particularly ripping and blood-stirring remark about him that the audience rose and roared and yelled and stamped an entire minute.… General Sherman stepped to him, laid his hand affectionately on his shoulder, bent respectfully down and whispered in his ear. Then Grant got up and bowed, and the storm of applause swelled into a hurricane.”

Clemens had the final toast that evening, and he essayed to spike the earnestness of the affair with his characteristic irreverence. The penultimate speaker had offered a toast “to Woman”; Clemens raised his glass “to Babies.” He explained: “We have not all had the good fortune to be ladies. We have not all been generals, or poets, or statesmen, but when the toast works down to the babies, we stand on common ground.” The liquored crowd laughed when Clemens recounted how even a general had to bow before the infant in his home. “You could face the death-storm at Donelson and Vicksburg, and give back blow for blow, but when he clawed your whiskers and pulled your hair and twisted your nose, you had to take it.” Clemens pushed his concept to a ludicrous extreme, explaining that the baby Grant had learned strategy “trying to find some way to get his big toe into his mouth.” At this point the audience fell silent, and Clemens wondered if he had gone too far. He let the silence persist and the awkwardness mount. “And if the child is but a prophecy of the man,” he concluded, “there are mighty few who will doubt that he
succeeded
.” The silence held a half beat longer and then “the house came down with a crash,” Clemens wrote his wife. The audience roared itself breathless. “And do you know, General Grant sat through fourteen speeches like a graven image, but I fetched him! I broke him up, utterly! He told me he laughed till the tears came and every bone in his body ached.”

82

G
RANT WAS FETED ACROSS THE EASTERN HALF OF THE COUNTRY TO
Philadelphia, which threw a giant parade in his honor. He passed quietly through Washington en route to Savannah, where he and Julia boarded ship for Florida and Cuba.

In Havana in February
1880 he received a letter from
Elihu Washburne, who had returned from
France to resume domestic Republican politics. Washburne liked Grant as much as ever and thought the country did too. He said that
James Blaine,
John Sherman and others in the party were maneuvering for the presidential nomination; he hoped Grant would make himself available.

“
All I want is that the government rule should remain in the hands of those who saved the Union until all the questions growing out of the war are forever settled,” Grant replied. “I would much rather any one of many I could mention should be president than that I should have it.” He had served his time in the White House and had no desire for more. Yet a public statement would be pretentious and counterproductive. “I shall not gratify my enemies by declining what has not been offered.” To be clear, without being too explicit: “I am not a candidate for anything, and if the Chicago convention nominates a candidate that can be elected it will gratify me, and the gratification will be greater if it should be someone other than myself.” Grant assumed Washburne would relay this sentiment to those who needed to know. He had a bit more for Washburne alone: “In confidence I will tell you I should feel sorry if it should be John Sherman.” Grant thought Sherman misguided on the money question. “Blaine I would like to see elected, but I fear the party could not elect him. He would create enthusiasm, but he would have opposition in his
own party that might lose him some northern states that the Republicans should carry.”

G
rant’s statement triggered a full fight for the Republican nomination. While he and Julia toured Cuba, Washburne and other Grant partisans gathered forces in preparation for a show at Chicago. Grant didn’t have to say a word as he returned to Galena via Vicksburg; his presence at the site of his momentous victory reminded Americans, at least those of the North, why they loved him. And the North would mean everything in the 1880 election. Hayes’s withdrawal of the federal army from the affairs of the South allowed the completion of what white Southerners called “redemption” and others deemed simply the return to power of the Democrats, who sufficiently intimidated, cheated and otherwise discouraged Republicans, including most of the freedmen, that they counted for little in Southern politics. With any Democratic presidential nominee guaranteed the South, any Republican had to perform overwhelmingly in the North. Blaine’s problem was that he couldn’t; Grant’s strength was that he could.

The Grant forces led going into the convention.
Roscoe Conkling, the veteran senator from New York, directed the Grant men with skill and theatrical aplomb. After
John Logan, Grant’s lieutenant from the Vicksburg campaign and subsequently commander of the
Army of the Tennessee, put Grant’s name in nomination, Conkling leaped on a table to give a seconding speech. A military hero was the man for the hour, he said. “
The election before us is the Austerlitz of American politics. It will decide for many years whether the country shall be Republican or Cossack.” Grant had unified America during the war; he would unify America again. Erstwhile critics could no longer touch him. “Calumny’s ammunition has all been burned once. Its force is spent. And the name of Grant will glitter a bright and imperishable star in the diadem of the republic when those who have tried to tarnish it have moldered in forgotten graves, and when their memories and their epitaphs have vanished utterly.”
Ohio and
Illinois claimed Grant as a favorite son, but the nation as a whole owned him. Turning poetic, Conkling proclaimed: “When asked what state he hails from / Our sole reply shall be, / He hails from Appomattox / And its famous apple tree.”

Grant garnered the most votes on the first ballot, leading Blaine but falling short of a majority. John Sherman came third, far behind. A second
ballot showed little change. Likewise a third and a fourth. Hours passed, then days, and in Chicago’s June heat the delegates grew weary and cross. Gradually it became clear that neither Grant nor Blaine could win and that Sherman had even less chance. The liberals in the party still resented Grant for Santo Domingo, the conservatives for South Carolina. Blaine’s men couldn’t silence questions about their candidate’s connections to certain shady operators. Sherman seemed a lightweight next to Grant and Blaine.