Authors: H.W. Brands

The Man Who Saved the Union (98 page)

BOOK: The Man Who Saved the Union

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Grant’s presidency was evoking mixed reactions. In the years since he had left office, influential groups on both sides of the
Mason-Dixon Line had consciously sought reconciliation, which had been Grant’s goal too. But where Grant’s approach to reconciliation was premised on the egalitarian ideals of the
Fourteenth and
Fifteenth Amendments, these new reconciliationists—white Southern Democrats and Northern capitalist-minded Republicans—preferred the path of amnesia. The Southern Democrats forgot that secession was about slavery, they recast the Civil War as a difference over
states’ rights, and they recalled Reconstruction as a carnival of corruption from which they had at length redeemed the
South. The Northern capitalist Republicans lost touch with the antislavery roots of their party, they pushed aside Lincoln in favor of J. P. Morgan and company, and if they didn’t actively embrace the Southern redefinition of the war and its aftermath, they didn’t bother to dispute it. They transmuted the Fourteenth Amendment from a charter of citizenship rights into a guarantor of corporate rights; the Fifteenth Amendment they and their Southern allies-in-amnesia ignored.

To both groups
Grant’s presidency posed a problem, for it stood against their revision of recent history. They responded by attacking his presidency and him as president. They emphasized the scandals, neglecting Grant’s role in defeating the Black Friday gold corner and in bringing the whiskey culprits to justice, and conflating the transgressions that occurred under his authority with such extraneous bilkings as
Crédit Mobilier and the Tweed Ring. They reiterated the tales of Grant’s drinking without demonstrating a single instance where alcohol impaired his performance of duty. They threw his efforts to enforce the Constitution, especially as it pertained to civil rights in the South, back in his face as evidence of a militaristic mindset.

Yet if Grant’s presidential reputation fared poorly with the elites, it resonated positively with those for whom he had fought. Southern blacks and the Northerners who revered Lincoln honored Grant for striving to uphold the vision of the Great Emancipator. They couldn’t know that nearly a century would pass before the country had another president who took civil rights as seriously as Grant did. American Indians recalled Grant as the president whose peace policy offered a distinct alternative to the aggressive exploitation favored by his predecessors and most of his contemporaries. The Indians, like the African Americans, could not claim lasting success for Grant’s endeavors on their behalf; his struggle for minority rights against majority hostility or indifference was a battle he couldn’t win. But he waged a good and honorable fight.

One thing all Americans could agree on was Grant’s central role in saving the Union. As commanding general in the Civil War he had defeated secession and destroyed slavery, secession’s cause. As president during Reconstruction he had guided the South back into the Union. By the end of his public life the Union was more secure than at any previous time in the history of the nation. And no one had done more to produce that result than he.

It was Grant’s role as unifier that those who gathered in New York in April 1897 came to celebrate. Many present had purchased his book,
which sold hundreds of thousands of copies and let
Samuel Clemens pay Julia Grant $400,000 while keeping a nice profit for himself. The book impressed critics, who then and later accounted it a historical landmark and a literary gem. Grant’s clarity in depicting his campaigns enabled his Northern admirers to relive their side’s stirring victories; at the same time, his generous tone and the respect he displayed for his Confederate foes allowed Southerners to read it with equal benefit, if perhaps less enthusiasm.

By the time Grant’s tomb was completed, he had become a symbol of national unity around whom Northerners and Southerners both could rally. Veterans of the war took the lead in the procession to his monument that blustery spring day. They were men who had fought beside Grant in the Union armies of the Tennessee and Potomac; they were men who had served with Lee in the Confederate
Army of Northern Virginia. Their general officers were nearly all gone, although John Gordon, scarred from battle and crippled by age and recent accident, rode in a carriage. The Union veterans of the Virginia campaign lined up to shake this former enemy’s hand, with several nonetheless remarking that in their prime they would have shot him. He cheerfully returned the sentiment, and all shared in the comradeship of battles survived. A sturdy Confederate sallied into the Union ranks in worn but mended grays; he boasted that he was proud of his service on behalf of his cause but had come to honor a valiant soldier and a great man. He was met with backslaps and hurrahs. A company of Confederates reproduced the rebel yell; a Union band struck up “Dixie.”

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The author would like to thank the many people who made this book possible. The librarians and archivists at the University of Texas at Austin, the Library of Congress and the other institutions where I conducted research provided indispensable assistance. Bill Thomas, Kristine Puopolo and Stephanie Bowen at Doubleday were insightful and professional from start to finish. Roslyn Schloss did her usual brilliant job of copyediting. My colleagues and students at the University of Texas allowed me to test my thinking on them. Gregory Curtis, Stephen Harrigan and Lawrence Wright offered weekly literary consultation.

SOURCES

The principal sources for the present work are the letters, orders, memoranda, presidential messages and other writings of Ulysses S. Grant. The most comprehensive collection of these materials is
The Papers of Ulysses S. Grant
, carefully and revealingly edited by John Y. Simon and published in thirty-one volumes by Southern Illinois University Press between 1967 and 2009. The great majority of entries are from Grant’s own hand, but numerous incoming letters and other supporting material are included in the extensive notes. Many of these incoming letters have not been available to previous biographers, and they afford new insight into Grant’s presidency, in particular his campaign against the Ku Klux Klan. In the source references below, letters and other documents written by Grant and taken from this collection are cited by date alone. Collateral materials from this collection (which often appear out of chronological order) are cited in the form
Papers of Grant
, volume, page.

The Ulysses S. Grant Papers at the Library of Congress cover much of the same ground as the published collection, especially for the years of Grant’s presidency. To an even greater degree than the published Grant papers, this collection includes incoming and collateral correspondence. References to this collection are given as “Grant Papers, Library of Congress.”

Grant’s
Memoirs
are another essential source. Widely considered the finest autobiographical work by any president, they merit this distinction in part by avoiding the presidency. The memoirs recount Grant’s early life and especially his service in the Union army during the Civil War. The memoirs convey the authority of command and indeed echo the clear, direct prose of his wartime orders. They gain additional credibility
from the unusual circumstances of their composition, during Grant’s final months of life, when he knew he was dying of cancer. The edition cited in the present work is the one published by the Library of America in 1990.

Any account of the military campaigns of the Civil War must depend heavily on the mammoth collection of orders and reports published by the War Department in seventy volumes between 1880 and 1901 as
The War of the Rebellion: The Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies
. The collection is unwieldy, as the user often has to jump between series and volumes to follow a given campaign, but it is invaluable. It is cited here as
Official Records
.

The letters and papers of Abraham Lincoln shed great light on Grant’s relations with his commander in chief, as well as on the broader aspects of Lincoln’s policies during the Civil War.
The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln
is the published version; the Abraham Lincoln Papers at the Library of Congress are the unpublished counterpart.

Very many of the military officers and civilian officials active during Grant’s lifetime published memoirs. Several of these are cited in the notes below; the most important and revealing by one of Grant’s fellow officers is William T. Sherman’s. The Library of America edition of Sherman’s memoir, published in 1990, is the one cited here. Many of these same officers and officials left collections of papers; the most important repository is the Library of Congress.

The Personal Memoirs of Julia Dent Grant
occupy a special category. They convey aspects of Grant family life unavailable in other sources, as well as Julia Grant’s occasional comments on the politics of the army and the presidency.

Digital archives have become indispensable to historians and biographers. One devoted to Grant, the Ulysses S. Grant Homepage (
granthomepage.com
), includes transcripts of interviews of individuals who knew Grant, as well as clippings from nineteenth-century newspapers. The best digital archive of the American presidency is the American Presidency Project (presidency.ucsb.edu), which includes the public papers of Grant and every other president. This collection is cited as “Public Papers.”

The secondary literature pertaining to Grant’s life and career is much too large to summarize in even a cursory fashion. Substantially more than a hundred biographies of Grant have been published; significant studies of the Civil War number in the tens of thousands. Many
of these have been cited in the notes below, but absence from the notes does not imply lack of importance. This said, special mention should be made of a small number of works: William S. McFeely,
Grant
(1981); Brooks D. Simpson,
Let Us Have Peace: Ulysses S. Grant and the Politics of War and Reconstruction, 1861–1868
(1991), and
Ulysses S. Grant: Triumph over Adversity, 1822–1865
(2000); Geoffrey Perret,
Ulysses S. Grant: Soldier and President
(1997); Jean Edward Smith,
Grant
(2001); and Charles Bracelen Flood,
Grant and Sherman: The Friendship That Won the Civil War
(2005).

NOTES

PART ONE: PROUD WALLS

CHAPTER 1

“I was not studious”
: Ulysses S. Grant,
Memoirs and Selected Letters
(Library of America, 1990), 21.

“He was always a steady, serious sort of boy”
: Hannah Simpson Grant interview,
New York Graphic
, Sept. 16, 1879,
granthomepage.com
.

“He would rather do anything else … the bridle reins”
: Jesse Root Grant interview,
Ulysses S. Grant Association Newsletter
, Oct. 1970 and Jan. 1971,
granthomepage.com
.

“Papa says … from the peculiarity”
:
Memoirs
, 22-27.

“Ulysses, I believe … had been reached”
:
Memoirs
, 28-31.

“I slept for two months”
: to R. McKinstry Griffith, Sept. 22, 1839.

“When the 28th of August came”
:
Memoirs
, 31.

“We have tremendous long…‘or an animal?’ ”
: to Griffith, Sept. 22, 1839.

“With his commanding figure”
:
Memoirs
, 33.