After Lincoln by A. J. Langguth

Author:A. J. Langguth
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster

Ulysses S. Grant

CHAPTER 13

ULYSSES S. GRANT (1869)

JULIA GRANT HAD BEEN RELIEVED when Andrew Johnson escaped conviction in the Senate. She sympathized with those who thought Johnson’s light punishment of the Southern states seemed to condone their rebellion, but she also felt that his trial “savored of persecution” and set “a dangerous precedent.” By that time, Mrs. Grant realized that her husband would very likely be the next president, and she did not want him hamstrung by Congress or defied by a cabinet secretary like Edwin Stanton.

Nor did she share Grant’s ambivalence about the presidency. She had gloried in being the wife of the general-in-chief, alert to any slights or snubs and able to avenge them. It had given her satisfaction to decline somewhat curtly the White House invitation to attend the theater on the night Lincoln was shot.

Now, as the Republicans departed for their nominating convention in Chicago, she asked Grant directly, “Ulys, do you want to be president?” His answer was fatalistic. “No, but I do not see that I have anything to say about it. The convention is about to assemble, and from all I hear, they will nominate me. And I suppose if I am nominated, I will be elected.”

Grant knew the job. With no feigned modesty, he thought he could handle it better than anyone else, and he was sure that Southerners would see him as a fair-minded president who enforced the law without prejudice against them.

Grant also understood that his wife, devoted but willful, required a combination of tact and firmness and might be unnerved by the full glare of a presidential campaign. William Sherman, Grant’s friend and fellow general, tried to warn her:

“Mrs. Grant, you must now be prepared to have your husband’s character thoroughly sifted.”

Julia Grant responded with fervent praise for her husband that made Sherman smile. “Oh, my dear lady,” he said, “it is not what he has done, but what they will say he has done, and they will prove, too, that Grant is a very bad man indeed. The fact is, you will be astonished to find what a bad man you have for a husband.”

• • •

Partisan abuse had been familiar to Grant as he was growing up along the Ohio River. His father, Jesse, was working as a tanner on April 27, 1822, when his first child—Hiram Ulysses Grant—was born in a one-room shack.

But Jesse Grant’s shrewd business sense—which was not to be his son’s inheritance—had led to his becoming a man of substantial property who could move his wife, Hiram, and their next five children to a two-story brick house in Georgetown, Ohio.

A loud and ornery voice at town meetings, Grant would proclaim that he had left Kentucky because he “would not live where there were slaves and would not own them.” That led to his being reviled by neighbors who depended on slave labor for their lucrative tobacco trade.

Addicted to reading, Jesse Grant consumed the local newspapers and the books that came his way. He regretted his own lack of formal education, and he was determined to avoid that fate for his children.

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