The Highest Calling, page 13
DR: But he decided to stay in the military. He had to. What was his assignment?
RC: He was assigned to the Jefferson Barracks in St. Louis. He fought for four years in the Mexican War. He was a quartermaster in commissary, which meant that he mastered logistics. That turned out to be extremely important during the Civil War, where he was the head of the Union Army across a 1,300 mile front.
DR: The woman he marries, Julia Grant, was the sister of one of his roommates? Is that how he met her?
RC: Yes, that’s right. At his wedding, James Longstreet and Simon Buckner and these other future Confederate generals are there. Again, it’s one reason why Grant has an understanding of the Confederate generals, because so many of them had been his friends. He had known so many of them at West Point. That’s one of the fascinating things about the Civil War. These people who knew each other intimately were fighting against each other.
DR: Ultimately there’s a gold rush in California in the late 1840s, and the military, I guess to protect the peace out there, sends some people. Grant gets sent there. Why does his military service end?
RC: He’s assigned to a couple of bleak, remote garrisons on the West Coast. The second was near Eureka, California, up in the redwood country there. On his meager army pay, he could not afford to bring his wife and children out. Grant got very depressed, started drinking heavily, and then in 1854 is drummed out of the military when he shows up drunk.
DR: Was he court-martialed? Or he just voluntarily quit?
RC: He was threatened with court-martial, so he quit ahead of being court-martialed.
DR: He goes back to Ohio?
RC: No, to St. Louis. Julia had gotten 60 acres of land as a wedding gift from her father, so Grant handcrafts a log cabin that he nicknamed Hardscrabble, facetiously. Then he tries to make a go of it at farming, and he can’t. He’s so desperate that he begins to sell firewood on street corners in St. Louis. From their farm, he would have to trudge 10 miles each way alongside the cart loaded with wood. He was seedy and unshaved, and he was very depressed. One day when he was selling firewood, one of his old army buddies ran into him and said, “My God, Grant, what are you doing?” And Grant said, “I’m trying to solve the problem of poverty.” He was so poor that winter of 1857, he pawned his watch in order to buy Christmas gifts for his children.
DR: Is he selling firewood in 1861?
RC: In 1860, finally, in complete desperation, he goes to his overbearing father, who lives in the small town of Galena, Illinois, on the Mississippi. Grant begs for a job in his father’s leather goods store, where he goes to work as a clerk, junior to his two younger brothers. You can imagine what a comeuppance that was. So that’s where Grant is one year before the Civil War.
DR: So he’s drummed out of the military for alcoholism, more or less, and he’s selling firewood on the streets, without any real money. How did he wind up in the military in the Civil War?
RC: After the attack by the Confederacy on Fort Sumter, there was a desperate shortage of officers. About one-third of the officers of the regular army were from the South and defected to the Confederacy. Grant still had all the old West Point lore in his mind. He had fought with distinction in the Mexican War for four years. So the governor of Illinois, Richard Yates, makes him a colonel, two months after the outbreak of war. Four months after the outbreak, he’s a brigadier general. Twelve months after the outbreak he’s a major general, and by the end of the war he’s the first lieutenant general since George Washington. He’s the general in chief of the victorious Union army. This man who had never had a single person working for him before suddenly has a million soldiers under his command.
DR: Initially he’s in what’s called the volunteer army. In other words, it wasn’t the regular army.
RC: They were a volunteer regiment.
DR: How does he distinguish himself in the volunteer army so much that the regular army asks him to join them?
RC: His discipline, his fairness, his toughness, his knowledge. Grant was a complete professional. As I was saying, he had mastered logistics. Also, in the Mexican War, as quartermaster he was not obligated to engage in any fighting, but he made a point of fighting in every battle. So he had practical battlefield experience. He knew the Army from top to bottom.
DR: He eventually gets in the regular Army, and then he’s commanding the Union troops in Shiloh and in Vicksburg. Those are two gigantic victories. Why were they so significant to the Union?
RC: Shiloh because it stopped the northern march of the Southern army. Vicksburg was arguably the most important victory for Grant or of the war. It occurred the same week as Gettysburg, so is often overshadowed by that. But Union forces had captured New Orleans, Baton Rouge, and Memphis, so the only remaining Confederate stronghold on the Mississippi River was Vicksburg. Vicksburg was located at a hairpin bend of the river. It had seven miles of elaborate fortification, so it was considered virtually impregnable. Grant runs his ships past the big guns at Vicksburg and marches his soldiers down the west bank of the Mississippi. They cross over, and then he has this lightning campaign of five dazzling victories in three weeks. Instead of going north to Vicksburg, he goes northeast, throws himself between Vicksburg and any possible Confederate reinforcement. When Vicksburg surrenders, this cuts the Confederacy in half. You have to realize that a lot of the cattle and livestock for the Confederacy were west of the Mississippi River.
DR: That was such a big victory that ultimately Lincoln said, “You must be pretty good, why don’t you come east?” Is that what happened?
RC: Finally, in February 1864, Congress revives the rank of lieutenant general. In early March 1864, Grant comes to Washington to become general in chief, checking into the Willard Hotel. Coincidentally there was a reception going on in the White House that night. He goes around the corner to the White House, walks into the Blue Room, and there’s Lincoln in a packed reception of people. It was the first time that Lincoln had ever set eyes on Grant. There was such pandemonium in the room that they had Grant, who was relatively short, get up on a sofa so the crowd could see him. He was a very bashful man. He was sweating heavily, and Grant later said that the hottest campaign he ever fought was standing on the couch in the White House that night.
DR: People complained to Lincoln about Grant, said he was an alcoholic. What was Lincoln’s response to that?
RC: There’s a famous story, which is a true story, that a group of congressmen went to him to complain about Grant’s drinking. Lincoln had all these procrastinating, do-nothing generals, and he said to the congressmen, “If you find out what brand of whiskey Grant drinks, I’d like to send a barrel to all of my other generals.” But had it not been for all of the stories about the drinking, I think that Grant probably would have been named general in chief sooner in the war.
DR: In the end, it comes down to the effort to win the South. Grant sends General Sherman to go through the South, and then he decides to go against Lee in Richmond. How does he outmaneuver Lee in Richmond?
RC: Grant was a master of logistics. If you look at the campaign in Richmond and Petersburg that finally ends the war, Grant has Lee and his Army of Northern Virginia pinned down in defensive positions at Richmond and Petersburg. What Grant does is he systematically cuts off every single railroad and canal linking Lee to food and other supplies. He essentially starves him out. When Lee takes his army and flees west to Appomattox Court House, it’s because his army is starving. They’re hoping there will be supplies when they arrive there. That was really how Grant won.
DR: Ultimately, Lee sends word that he’d like to surrender. They meet at Appomattox Court House. U. S. Grant used to stand, in the view of some, for Unconditional Surrender Grant. Why was he so polite at this surrender?
RC: The most beautiful passage in Grant’s memoirs is when he’s talking about Appomattox. When he first got the letter from Lee saying that he’s going to surrender, Grant said that he was jubilant, but then very quickly his mood changed. He writes in the memoirs, “I felt like anything other than rejoicing over the downfall of a foe who had fought so long and so valiantly, and had suffered so much for a cause, even though that cause was the worst for which I could imagine an army fighting.” Grant realized that only by being magnanimous was there any possibility of North/South reconciliation. It was fascinating because he not only fed the famished Confederate soldiers, he refused to enter Richmond, the Confederate capital that fell. Julia wanted him to go and Grant said to Julia, “Don’t you realize how bitter defeat is to these people? Would you have me make it worse?” There was a proposal after the Civil War for a large historical painting in the Capitol Rotunda that would show Lee surrendering to Grant, and Grant vetoed the idea, because he felt that it would only embitter and humiliate the South.
DR: After Appomattox, the war’s essentially over. Not too long after, Lincoln is assassinated. What did President Johnson think about Grant, and what role did he give him?
RC: The first year of the relationship wasn’t too bad. Grant said that President Andrew Johnson was, as he put it, vengeful, passionate, and opinionated. They clashed over Reconstruction. Andrew Johnson was violently opposed to Reconstruction, had very little sympathy with the aspirations of the four million former slaves who were now citizens. Andrew Johnson, as president, said, “This is a white man’s country, and by God, as long as I’m president, it’s going to be a white man’s government.” Grant was a strong supporter of the Civil Rights Act of 1866, a strong supporter of the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments. So he and Andrew Johnson were bound to clash.
DR: Johnson is impeached but not convicted in the Senate by one vote. A groundswell forms to keep him from being president again. He doesn’t get the nomination. Did Grant want to be the nominee of the Republican Party?
RC: Grant’s funny. As I said, he was always very uncomfortable overtly showing ambition. He said that he had regrets about giving up the job as general in chief, which he loved, although he seemed happy enough becoming president. But the situation that happened in 1868 was not unlike the situation that happened in 1952 with Eisenhower, the war hero who had been studiously nonpartisan. Everyone was guessing what party Grant belonged to in 1868, the same way that everyone was guessing which party Ike belonged to in 1952.
DR: So Grant didn’t campaign for the job?
RC: No, he didn’t, again because of Appomattox. Grant had a symbolic value where he stayed above the fray. He was a symbol of national reconciliation. And he won narrowly in the popular vote but in the Electoral College overwhelmingly.
DR: But in those days, he didn’t go to the convention?
RC: No. He was in Galena, Illinois. At that time, it was still considered unseemly to campaign. You didn’t go to the convention. Then, in 1872, he won reelection by the biggest landslide between the elections of Andrew Jackson and Teddy Roosevelt.
DR: As president of the United States, Grant served for eight years. But it was widely thought at the time that his administration had a lot of corruption. Was he personally corrupt, or he just couldn’t figure out who was worth keeping, who was honest or not?
RC: That’s the strange thing about Grant’s presidency, because he himself was almost prudishly honest. Throughout the Civil War, he was prosecuting war profiteers. He was not involved in the scandals. He prosecuted all of them vigorously. But Grant was strangely and almost incurably blind to unscrupulous people around him. One of the worst rascals turned out to be a man named Orville Babcock, who was effectively his chief of staff. And this blindness of Grant, this fatal innocence, is something that didn’t change throughout his life.
DR: Despite these problems, could he have been reelected for a third term?
RC: I argue in the book that the corruption scandals were the minor story of the administration, however unfortunate. The big story that I spent a lot of time on is that Grant crushed the original Ku Klux Klan. At the time that Grant became president, the Klan was killing thousands of Blacks who were registering to vote for the first time under the Fifteenth Amendment. Grant hires a crusading attorney general from Georgia named Amos Akerman. The Justice Department was created in 1870. Akerman brings 3,000 indictments, gets a thousand convictions against the Klan, and that original Klan is destroyed. The Klan that we know, that unfortunately is still with us, was from the revival of the group in the 1910s and 1920s. Grant doing this, and his campaign against the Klan, seems to me one of the great acts in presidential history, and I felt that this was, in many ways, a forgotten story.
DR: He could have been reelected. In those days, you could run for a third term. Why did he decide not to run?
RC: He said that, from the time at Fort Sumter to the end of his second term, for 16 years he had been essentially carrying the weight of the nation on his shoulders. He said he was under constant strain, he was worn-out, he was burned-out. His last day in the White House, he said he never wanted to get out of any place as much as he wanted to get out of there. He said he felt like a boy who had been let out of school.
DR: He was elected president when he was 46. Eight years later, at 54, a relatively young age, he leaves the White House. What does he do immediately when he leaves?
RC: Grant always had a romantic longing for travel, so he takes a trip around the world that lasts for two years and four months. He meets with every head of state. He meets with Queen Victoria, Bismarck, the pope, the czar, the emperor of Japan. I should mention that he traveled with his own personal journalist, John Russell Young, who was the Librarian of Congress when this building was built. Young wrote a beautiful book called Around the World with General Grant. Grant pioneered a new role, postpresidential diplomacy. He ended on this around-the-world tour arbitrating an offshore dispute between Japan and China. He was traveling on a warship provided by the government, and he was really an unofficial representative of the country.
DR: When he finally gets back after two and a half years, does he say, “I might like to be president again”?
RC: Julia was interested in getting back into the game. She was, in many ways, more ambitious than he was, and so he very nearly got a third Republican nomination. He felt that after this around-the-world tour he was much more cosmopolitan and worldly. He felt that he could contribute a lot in terms of foreign policy. He also felt strongly that the so-called redeemer governments were coming into power in the South. These were governments that were bent upon repealing all of Reconstruction, which bothered him, because he had been such an instrumental force in Reconstruction. But he very narrowly lost the Republication nomination to James Garfield, who of course became president.
DR: So he goes to New York and he decides to get into the investment business. Does he have any acumen for business?
RC: Zero. And Grant was cheated once again. I should mention that in giving up his job as general in chief, he sacrificed his military pension. There was no presidential pension at the time. So his son Buck knew a young financier named Ferdinand Ward, who’d been lionized as the young Napoleon of Wall Street. Grant formed this partnership with him, Grant and Ward. Unfortunately, Ferdinand Ward was the Bernie Madoff of his day. The whole thing was a big Ponzi scheme. Grant in his innocence imagined that he was a multimillionaire, and he woke up one morning in 1884 and discovered that he was worth $80 and Julia was worth $130.
DR: So he borrows money from William Henry Vanderbilt, and then he loses that investment.
RC: Yes, and two things happened almost simultaneously. He and his wife and all his children were wiped out financially. At the same time, he was diagnosed with what would be terminal cancer of the throat and tongue, so he did something that he had vowed he would not do. He wrote his Civil War memoirs.
DR: He was a gigantic cigar smoker, 19 a day or something like that.
RC: Twenty a day during the war. He felt very virtuous after the war when he cut down to 10.
DR: So he smoked a lot of cigars and the doctor said he had cancer. He had previously not been willing to write any memoirs. He thought it was not a good thing to write memoirs. Why was he against it initially?
RC: He thought that there was something very egotistical about the way that all these Civil War generals rushed to cash in on it, rushed to give their point of view of how wonderful they’d been as generals. So he swore he wouldn’t do it. But he had cancer of the throat and tongue. He was petrified that when he died, which he knew was imminent, that Julia would be left destitute. So he wrote these now-famous memoirs in terrible pain. He said that even to swallow a glass of water felt like swallowing a glass of molten lava.
What he would do when he was writing the book was that he would not eat or drink for four or five hours at a time, because when he ate or drank, he was in such excruciating pain, he would then have to take the opiates or some painkiller that would fog his brain. The fact that he did this magnificent memoir in unbearable pain, under these conditions, is nothing short of miraculous. He finished the memoirs just three days before he died in July 1885. He had willed himself to stay alive to finish them.
DR: While they’re the most famous presidential memoirs, they don’t deal with the presidency. Why did he not write about the presidency?
RC: Number one, I think he wanted to relive his glory days as a general. Two, he was really doing this for money, and it was the Civil War that sold. His presidency was a much more mixed record, and he would not have had the time or energy to go into it.
