The Man Who Saved the Union (97 page)

He pondered mortality and destiny. “
If it is within God’s providence that I should go now I am ready to obey his call without a murmur.” He was pleased to have lived as long as he had. “It has enabled me to see for myself the happy harmony which has so suddenly sprung up between those engaged but a few short years ago in deadly conflict.” The silver lining of his illness was the broad sympathy it elicited from his countrymen. “It has been an inestimable blessing to me to hear the kind expressions towards me in person from all parts of the country; from people of
all nationalities, of all religions, and of no religion, of Confederate and National troops alike, of soldiers’ organizations, of mechanical, scientific, religious, and all other societies, embracing almost every citizen of the land. They have brought joy to my heart, if they have not effected a cure.” Until far into adulthood he couldn’t have imagined what life would bring him. “I never thought of acquiring rank in the profession I was educated for; yet it came with two grades higher prefixed to the rank of General officer for me. I certainly never had either ambition or taste for a political life; yet I was twice President of the United States. If anyone had suggested the idea of my becoming an author, as they frequently did, I was not sure whether they were making sport of me or not.”

Some days his symptoms retreated and he sat on the porch in the summer sun. “I feel pretty well.… Took a half hour’s nap.… I am as bright and well now, for a time at least, as I ever will be.” He posed for a photograph with his family gathered around. But his relentless companion always returned. “The disease is still there and must be fatal in the end.”

Sam Clemens came to visit; they discussed the book—Clemens speaking,
Grant communicating by pencil. “
He asked me with his pencil, and evidently with anxious solicitude, if there was a prospect that his book would make something for his family,” Clemens wrote later. “I said that the canvass for it was progressing vigorously, that the subscriptions and the money were coming in fast, that the campaign was not more than half completed yet, but that if it should stop where it was there would be two hundred thousand dollars coming to his family. He expressed his gratification, with his pencil.”

Simon
Buckner arrived as Clemens was leaving. Buckner hadn’t seen Grant since the Union capture of
Fort Donelson, when he had surrendered the garrison’s fifteen thousand troops to Grant. He laughed with Grant about the old days, reminding him and others present about the time in 1854 when he had loaned Grant fifty dollars. “
I have my full share of admiration and esteem for Grant,” he said. “It dates back to our cadet days. He has as many merits and virtues as any man I am acquainted with, but he has one deadly defect. He is an incurable borrower, and when he wants to borrow he knows of only one limit—he wants what you’ve got. When I was poor he borrowed fifty dollars of me; when I was rich he borrowed fifteen thousand men.”

Other soldiers remembered Grant as fondly. Letters from comrades conveyed respect and admiration. “
I am older than your Father and of
a shorter lived race than he, therefore never dreamed of outliving him,” William Sherman wrote Fred from St. Louis. “Still, if so ordained I wish to be present when he is entombed, and to be a willing witness to the great qualities which made him the conspicuous figure of our eventful epoch. Keep these facts in your memory and act on them when the time comes, but meantime as long as there is life I have hope.” The Grand Army of the Republic made its annual encampment in Maine and sent Grant its “
profound sympathy in his continued illness.” He replied with thanks and a farewell. “
Tell the boys that they probably will never look into my face again nor hear my voice, but they are engraved on my heart and I love them as my children. What the good Lord has spared me for is more than I can tell, but it is perhaps to finish up my book, which I shall leave to the boys in blue.”

He bade Julia farewell also. She couldn’t talk about his death without breaking down, so he wrote her a letter. “
Look after our dear children and direct them in the paths of rectitude,” he said. “It would distress me far more to think that one of them could depart from an honorable, upright and virtuous life than it would to know they were prostrated on a bed of sickness from which they were never to arise alive.” He told her to make the decision as to where he should be buried.
West Point would be suitable except that she couldn’t lie beside him. Galena was a possibility. New York City, their current residence and a place where she could visit the grave, appeared the most likely. But the decision was hers. “With these few injunctions,” he concluded, “and the knowledge I have of your love and affections and of the dutiful affections of all our children, I bid you a final farewell until we meet in another, and I trust better, world.”

T
hrough it all he kept working. “
I must try to get some soft pencils. I could then write plainer and more rapidly.” He drafted the last chapter. “I have been writing up my views of some of our generals, and of the character of Lincoln and Stanton. I do not place Stanton as high as some people do. Mr. Lincoln cannot be extolled too highly.”

By the middle of July the end was in sight. “
Buck has brought up the last of the first volume in print,” he wrote. “In two weeks if they work hard they can have the second volume copied ready to go to the printer. I will then feel that my work is done.” Things went faster than he thought. On July 16 he decided he had made all the additions and corrections he wanted to make. “There is nothing more I should do to it now.” He
added, “Therefore I am not likely to be more ready to go than at this moment.”

He took his leave days later. His body was starving from lack of nourishment; his weight fell below one hundred pounds. He couldn’t sleep and grew ever more exhausted. For months he had slept in a chair, the better to clear his throat; now, too weak to sit, he went to bed. He drifted in and out of consciousness; Julia and the children gathered around him. In the predawn hours of July 23 he slipped into a final reverie. His limbs began to grow cold. His breathing grew fainter until, a few minutes past eight, it stopped and didn’t resume.

87

T
HE COUNTRY HAD BEEN BRACING FOR THE NEWS, BUT NO ONE
expected the flood of emotion that followed. In cities and towns all across America, memorials and resolutions were read extolling the accomplishments of the great man. The South joined the North and the West in commemorating his virtues; New Orleans and Richmond matched New York and Chicago in celebrating the life well lived. Condolences came from most countries of Europe and several in Asia and Latin America; London’s Westminster Abbey held a special service in his honor.

The
African American community mourned particularly. “
In General Grant’s death the colored people of this and all other countries, and the oppressed everywhere, irrespective of complexion, have lost a preeminently true and faithful defender,” a group of black veterans resolved in New York City. Hundreds of black churches prayed for the soul of their departed champion.

People recalled and related stories about Grant. A veteran of the Richmond campaign told of entering the Confederate capital and seeing graffiti scrawled in charcoal on the wall of a church: “
Ulysses S. Grant: May he be hung, drawn, and quartered.” Angry Union troops prepared to burn the church. But one of the soldiers discovered a statement riposting the first: “Hung with laurels of victory, drawn in the chariot of peace, and quartered in the White House at Washington.” The church was spared.
M. D. Leggett, who had served on Grant’s military staff, remembered his leadership traits. “
I heard him say once with a little impatience that he had less concern for an officer who was afraid to face the enemy than for one who hesitated in forming a judgment when he knew all the necessary
facts. He said that the most cowardly officer in the command of troops was the one that was afraid of his own judgment.… His confidence in his own judgment seemed to be unbounded. Of all the men I ever met he was the most self-poised and the most self-reliant. It seemed impossible to confuse him or even to annoy him in great emergencies.” His bravery allowed him to focus on the problem at hand. “When under fire Grant never gave an indication that he was thinking of the bullets. He went where his duty took him, regardless of personal considerations. This was just as true of him in everything else. He seemed always to drop himself out of his consciousness in his devotion to the especial work before him.” Leggett acknowledged that Grant was criticized for adhering too long to friends. “It is a trait of every unselfish nature. A selfish, ambitious man will use a friend as long as he can serve his selfishness, and then will throw him aside as he would the rind of a well-squeezed lemon. A man with an honest, unselfish nature cannot be thus, but will remember the friend that stood by him when he needed friends.”

A reporter caught Phil Sheridan on a train. The cavalryman was at a loss for words. “
Everything has been said about General Grant that can be said,” he declared. “I would willingly add to it if I could, for everybody knows how I regarded him. He was the greatest soldier in our history.”
Oliver Howard told of a moment just after the war when fear of a renewed insurgency gripped the capital. Grant assigned a particular officer to command the troops guarding Washington. “
Why, you cannot trust that officer; he is ‘coppery’!” another officer exclaimed, referring to the man’s known Southern connections. Grant looked calmly at the speaker and said, “You must trust him. If you do not have confidence, soon you can trust nobody. Trust him, sir, and he will be true.” The impugned officer performed magnificently.
James Longstreet spoke succinctly from Georgia: “
He was the truest as well as the bravest man that ever lived.”

For a week the papers filled their columns with the preparations for the funeral. Julia had decided on New York as his resting place. Washington put in a late bid, with advocates of the capital contending that a national hero should be buried on national ground.
Samuel Clemens rejoined: “
Wherever General Grant’s body lies,
that
is national ground.”

T
he final leg of his journey began with a predawn artillery salute on the slopes of Mount McGregor. A thousand people arrived for the
outdoor service that sent him on his way to New York. Thousands more lined the track from Mount McGregor to Saratoga and from there to Albany. Bells in each town tolled a dirge as the funeral train, draped in furlongs of black cloth, rolled past. The casket was taken from the train at Albany and placed in the state capitol, where a constantly replenished line of mourners with bared and bowed heads filed slowly past. The casket was returned to the train the next day and continued south. The crowds grew thicker along the tracks as the train neared New York. It reached Grand Central Station in the late afternoon. “
There was a burst of sunlight and a rainbow spanned the eastern sky,” an onlooker observed. The casket was again removed from the train and this time carried to City Hall. During nineteen hours of public showing, 125,000 people paid their respects to the Union’s savior.

The last several miles, from City Hall to Riverside Park, took half a day to traverse. A million and a half people, the largest crowd in New York’s history, clogged the procession’s route; their black attire, against the black that hung from doors and windows and lampposts, cast a fitting gloom over the city. A hundred thousand pedestrians streamed across the recently finished Brooklyn Bridge; the city’s commuter railroads, ferries and trolleys carried more passengers than ever before. The city’s hotels and restaurants broke all records for business.

Tens of thousands of people marched in the procession. Dozens of active-duty regiments from several states—infantry, cavalry, artillery—tramped, clopped and rumbled along the streets. Grizzled veterans of the Grand Army showed equal fervor if less energy. Winfield Scott Hancock, on a glistening charger, led the procession; Virginia’s
Fitzhugh Lee represented the Confederacy. President
Grover Cleveland was accompanied by former presidents
Rutherford Hayes and Chester Arthur. Cabinet secretaries, Supreme Court justices, senators and representatives likewise paid the federal government’s respects. Mayor
William Grace conveyed the regards of the city of New York, while police commissioner
Fitz John Porter, fully rehabilitated after Grant’s exoneration of him, oversaw security. Dozens of foreign diplomats bespoke the respect in which the hero was held in their home countries.

Twenty-four black horses pulled the catafalque to the tomb site. As it reached the ridge crest and came in sight of the Hudson, more than a hundred feet below, the guns of several warships in the river boomed a salute. The pallbearers, including William Sheridan, Phil Sherman, Admiral
David Porter and Confederate generals Joseph Johnston and
Simon Buckner, guided the casket to the cedar box into which it was lowered, pending the construction of the permanent tomb. The drums of the U.S. Marine band rolled while the undertaker screwed on the lid. A wreath of oak leaves was placed on top. Several moments of silence ensued. Then the people of New York were permitted in. They moved quietly through the site for several hours until, at six o’clock, the police closed the doors, with instructions to the thousands still in line that they could return the next day.

T
hey returned the next day and for days and weeks following. Only gradually did their number diminish, till Grant’s resting place became a tourist site the locals mostly left alone. But a dozen years after the funeral the city and country turned out again in force. By 1897 Grant’s legacy was coming into view. His stature as a military hero had never been higher. A few white Southerners still dreamed that secession could have succeeded and slavery been preserved, but most had let the Lost Cause go. Those who nursed a grudge against the bluecoats reserved their special animus for Sherman, who outlived Grant by a half decade without evincing second thoughts about the march to the sea. Students of the military arts rehearsed and analyzed Grant’s campaigns and observed that for all the honor paid Lee for brilliance and daring, it was Grant who had the harder task in their epic struggle. Grant fought in enemy territory against an army that typically stood behind developed defenses; Grant had to win while Lee had merely to avoid losing. Attackers almost always suffer greater casualties than defenders, but
Grant’s casualties, as a portion of his army, were lower than Lee’s. His mistakes were few and never decisive. And in the reckoning that overrode all others, he came out on top: he won the war.