On the morning of April 10, 1865, Ulysses S. Grant, the man who had finally cornered Robert E. Lee and the Army of Northern Virginia, telegraphed his wife that he would be home in time for dinner. The war that had torn the nation apart was effectively over, and the victorious general was on his way to City Point, Virginia, where Julia and the wives of his staff had prepared meals and waited with great anticipation.
The evening passed with piano playing and waltzing, but the husbands did not arrive as expected. Disappointed, the women retired. Julia awoke the next morning to find her husband standing over her; their train had derailed several times the day before. When she asked to go to Richmond, Grant refused, not wanting to add to the distress of the former Confederate capital.
Instead, the couple traveled to Washington City, which was in the midst of wild celebration, with bonfires, rockets, pealing bells, and impromptu speeches shaking the capital. On Friday, April 14, Grant attended President Lincoln’s cabinet meeting, where the president warmly congratulated him and asked if any news had arrived from Sherman in North Carolina. Grant had heard nothing yet but expected word at any moment. As the meeting broke up, Grant accepted an invitation to accompany the president and his wife to the theater that evening, but later sent a message declining.
Julia wanted to visit their children in Philadelphia. It was there, around midnight, that the general learned by wire of the tragic fate of the president. Grant returned to the capital and spent the next two days organizing arrangements for Lincoln’s funeral, ordering an African-American regiment north from Richmond to serve as an honor guard and arranging the ceremony held in the East Room of the Executive Mansion on April 19. Years later, Grant wrote of Lincoln: he was incontestably the greatest man I have ever known.
The new president, Andrew Johnson, was someone Grant knew only slightly from when Johnson had served as military governor of Tennessee. Grant sensed the seventeenth president was vindictive, and in fact Johnson had complained to Lincoln that Grant’s terms to Lee were too lenient. On the night of April 21, Grant attended Johnson’s cabinet meeting that ripped into Sherman for his extravagant terms to Joe Johnston in North Carolina. To defuse the situation, Grant volunteered to go to Raleigh unobtrusively, to avoid embarrassing his friend.
While there, he wrote Julia that the suffering in the South the next year would be beyond conception, and that people who talked of further retaliation and punishment either did not conceive of the suffering already endured or were heartless and unfeeling. Though the war was practically over, military business continued. In late April, Grant placed Philip Sheridan in command of a 50,000-man force whose purpose was to take the surrender of all remaining Confederate troops in Louisiana and Texas. In June, Grant visited New York City, where he was received as a national hero, a stark contrast to his last visit in 1854, when he was penniless and broken, discharged from the army with no job and no future.
From there he traveled up the Hudson River to West Point for commencement exercises, his first visit since graduating in 1843. He called upon the 79-year-old Winfield Scott, who presented him with an autographed copy of his military memoirs inscribed from the oldest to the greatest general. The victory tour continued through Boston and Chicago, where he attended a benefit for disabled soldiers and sailors, and finally to Galena, Illinois, his adopted home. When asked during the war if he had political aspirations, Grant said no, but mused he wouldn’t mind being mayor of Galena, and if so, the first thing he would do would be to put in sidewalks.
As he entered town, he passed under arches of greenery, and a great sign read: General, the sidewalk is built. Gifts rolled in from a grateful nation. The city of Philadelphia presented him with a lavish home, and New York merchants presented gifts totaling $104,000. Grant accepted all the offerings without question, seeing them as expressions from a grateful nation for a job well done.
No laws were broken, and the gifts were public and above board. But time would show that the more wealth he accumulated, the more his common sense seemed to decrease. On July 25, 1866, Congress established a new rank, and Grant became the first four-star general in American history. Grant’s relations with President Johnson were quite different from those he enjoyed with Lincoln.
The battle between Johnson and the Thirty-ninth Congress had begun, and Grant found himself caught in the middle, obliged to comply with executive orders but believing the ultimate responsibility for making policy belonged to Congress. After race riots in Memphis, Grant feared the fruits of Union victory might be slipping away. In July 1866, he issued General Order Number 44, instructing all army commanders in the South to arrest civilians for crimes whenever civil authorities failed to act. That summer, Johnson undertook an unprecedented speaking tour to oppose the proposed Fourteenth Amendment, bringing along his cabinet and asking Grant and naval hero David Farragut to join him.
Grant did not want to go but felt obligated, and so reluctantly he went. The tour was an unmitigated disaster. Johnson’s delivery was often vulgar and on occasion slurred due to alcohol, and time and again he alienated citizens and allies. Radical Republicans planted hecklers in the crowds who shouted traitor and liar.
Grant was embarrassed and humiliated, believing Johnson a national disgrace. At one point, Grant and Farragut hid in the baggage car of Johnson’s train, with Grant smoking endlessly and taking to the bottle. He pleaded illness and family reasons and fled the scene. Back in Washington, the two had a particularly unpleasant encounter.
Johnson wanted Grant away from the capital, hoping to send him on a diplomatic mission to Mexico City to deal with Maximilian. It all came to a head on October 23, 1866, at a cabinet meeting, when Johnson asked Secretary of State William Seward whether Grant’s diplomatic instructions were prepared. Seward said they were and began to read them. Grant interrupted to reassert that he did not want to go.
Johnson lit his fuse, turning to his attorney general and asking whether there was any reason Grant should not obey his orders. Grant was on his feet, staring directly at Johnson, and said: I am an officer of the army, but I am a citizen also. The service you ask of me to perform is a civil service, and as a citizen I may accept or decline, and I decline it. No power on Earth can compel me to do it.
Johnson remained silent. Grant turned and left the meeting. The man who had worn down and cornered Robert E. Lee was learning the difference between military and political confrontation.
There had been another high-profile confrontation between the two. Back in June 1865, Robert E. Lee had learned that a federal grand jury in Norfolk had indicted him for treason. Lee wrote to Grant, perplexed that the terms at Appomattox were not free from molestation.
Grant agreed with Lee’s interpretation, but Johnson begged to differ, asking when these men could be tried. Grant answered: never, unless they violate their paroles. Johnson responded with fire, asking by what right a military commander interfered to protect an arch traitor from the laws. Grant answered with steel: I have made certain terms with Lee, the best and only terms.
I will resign my command of the army rather than execute any order directing me to arrest Lee. Nothing else was ever done. In the midterm elections of 1866, Johnson and his political supporters took a beating. Both houses of Congress now had a two-thirds Radical Republican majority, enough to override any Johnson veto.
Grant urged Johnson to compromise, but it fell on deaf ears. By early 1867, Grant found himself favoring Congress’s anti-Johnson Reconstruction Acts, and he was now convinced that freedmen should not only be citizens but be allowed to vote. In August 1867, Johnson tried to weaken Reconstruction officials by removing Secretary of War Edwin Stanton, a Radical ally, and asked Grant to fill the position. Stanton refused to step down, and Johnson suspended him, asking for the office and its files to be turned over to Grant.
Caught in the middle of yet another political crossfire, Grant followed executive orders and agreed to take over the office on a temporary basis. Johnson then went after Union Reconstruction officers Philip Sheridan and Daniel Sickles. Grant refused to remove them. Relations between Johnson and Grant were at their worst; all dialogue between the two ceased.
On January 13, 1868, the Senate voted to abide by the Tenure of Office Act and reinstate Stanton. A relieved Grant gladly gave up his role as temporary Secretary of War. At the Republican convention in Chicago on May 20, 1868, John Logan of Illinois rose to place Grant’s name in nomination. The convention erupted, and the decision was unanimous.
Back in Washington, Stanton walked into Grant’s office and told him he had been nominated for president. Grant looked up, took the news in silence, and impassively accepted the congratulations. He accepted the nomination by letter the next day, endorsing the Republican platform, promising to execute the laws, and closing with a line that would be repeated: Let us have peace. Grant refused to campaign, knowing he was a poor public speaker, and remained at his post as general-in-chief.
On Election Day, November 3, he went to the polls with his neighbors in Galena and voted for every Republican on the ballot, but deliberately refrained from voting for himself. By two in the morning, the wire brought news of victory. Grant carried 26 of 34 states, with an electoral victory of 214 to 80 over Horatio Seymour. On March 4, 1869, on a cold and rainy Thursday, the eighteenth president took the oath of office.
He wrote his own inaugural address, consulting no one about its content. Half of it concerned fiscal matters: payment of the national debt, collection of revenue, and cutting back government spending. He reserved his most heartfelt passages for African-Americans and Native Americans, making it clear he supported black suffrage. He consulted no one about his cabinet appointments, selecting men based on their potential personal chemistry rather than political clout.
The Senate took less than two hours to approve his nominees. Among his nominations was an old friend, former Confederate general James Longstreet, for the office of Surveyor of Customs at the Port of New Orleans, and his longtime aide Ely S. Parker, a Seneca Indian, for the Bureau of Indian Affairs. Grant approached the presidency as if he were still in military command, but he quickly learned that alliances were transitory, and criticism and backbiting were constant.
Early on, a decision to change the organization of the War Department alienated his dearest friend, William Sherman. In the spring of 1869, Robert E. Lee visited Washington and met Grant at the Executive Mansion. They shook hands, and Grant joked about their having more to do with destroying railroads than building them.
The joke fell flat, and there was awkward silence. Alone for fifteen minutes, they stood, shook hands, and the reunion ended. They would never see one another again. In September 1869, financiers Jay Gould and Jubilee Jim Fisk moved to corner the gold market, believing they had duped Grant into unwitting assistance.
But the president figured out their plan and instructed his Secretary of the Treasury to sell government gold if prices continued to rise. The effect was immediate. Grant saw through the ploy and took direct action to break the gold ring, saving the country from financial panic. More scandals would dog him over western land policy, banking, railroads, and whiskey rings.
Although he rarely met a businessman he did not trust and accepted hospitality and gifts from rich men, he never allowed them an unfair advantage. His foreign policy, usually overlooked, kept the nation out of war with Spain over Cuba, settled the Alabama claims with Great Britain, and established a precedent for arbitration in international disputes. In the treatment of Native Americans, Grant felt a romantic kinship. His policy was one of peace rather than bloodshed; he truly wanted to give them full membership into American society.
But despite his efforts, his peace policy fell victim to racial bigotry, corruption, greed, and incompetence. Grant was committed to using the power of the federal government to break the Ku Klux Klan’s reign of terror. In March 1871, he and his entire cabinet made a rare visit to Capitol Hill to push for what became the Ku Klux Klan Act. With its passage in April, Grant followed through, empowering the military to break up the terrorist organization.
In October, he proclaimed a condition of lawlessness in nine upland counties in South Carolina, suspended habeas corpus, and ordered in military reinforcements. By 1872, the Klan’s power was broken, and African-Americans voted in record numbers. Yet by then, the Republican party seemed on an unprecedented mission to reap personal gain, and Grant’s own party split. The Liberal Republicans nominated Horace Greeley, and in a strange set of affairs, the Democrats did the same.
Grant refused to campaign, but most northern voters were not ready to trust white southerners or Democrats. On Election Day, November 5, 1872, Grant won reelection in a landslide, receiving 56 percent of the popular vote, the highest proportion of any presidential candidate between Andrew Jackson in 1828 and Theodore Roosevelt in 1904. He carried every state north of the Mason-Dixon line and eight of eleven states in the old Confederacy. The second term was marked by scandal and corruption, though Grant himself was never a beneficiary.
By the time of the midterm elections in 1874, the Democrats gained control of the House for the first time since 1856. Northern voters had lost interest in the plight and protection of African-Americans. In 1876, at the conclusion of a tainted administration, Grant wrote a farewell letter to Congress, admitting he had come to high office without political experience, that he had made mistakes, and that he meant well. When historians ranked the presidents in a C-SPAN survey in 2000, Grant was ranked tenth worst, in large part due to the corruption that occurred around him.
His stock has risen in recent years, thanks to his excellently written memoirs and a new interpretation of Reconstruction history. In a 2021 C-SPAN survey, historians ranked him as the twentieth best president, and among the fourteen presidents from 1849 through 1901, Grant is ranked third, with only William McKinley and Abraham Lincoln ranked higher. When Grant turned over the office to Rutherford B. Hayes, he commented that he felt like a boy getting out of school.
With a pension that wasn’t enough to maintain their home, the Grants decided to travel the world. They left in May 1877 with no fixed plans and would be gone for two and a half years, seen as living examples of American simplicity and democracy. Hundreds of thousands of people and dignitaries greeted them, comparing Grant to Hannibal. They stayed at Windsor Castle with Queen Victoria, met Otto von Bismarck, and were received by royalty across Europe.
The trip took them through the Holy Land, Constantinople, Athens, Italy, Russia, and on to Egypt, where they rode camels to see the statues of Egypt’s founder. In Japan, Emperor Meiji stunned his court when he received Grant with a handshake. The family returned to San Francisco in September 1879. Wealthy men in New York bought the couple a townhouse and provided an income, but Grant adjusted to private life poorly.
He and his son formed a brokerage firm with Wall Street operator Ferdinand Ward. From 1881 to 1884 it was boom time, with some investors reaping dividends that reached 40 percent annually. But on May 6, 1884, Grant walked into the office and found a panicked son. Grant and Ward had failed; Ward had fled.
It had all been a pyramid scheme. Financial obligations exceeded $16 million, while assets totaled $57,000. Grant walked home that evening with $80 in his wallet. He refused to let Vanderbilt waive his debt, and made good every one of his personal debts, selling wartime relics, gold medals, swords, and even his commissions from second lieutenant to four-star general.
Ward was found, tried, and sent to jail for ten years. Then an incredible offer arrived. Century Magazine commissioned Grant to write four Civil War articles. Building on the popularity of his Shiloh article, the magazine wanted Grant to write his memoirs.
Samuel Clemens, who was about to publish Huckleberry Finn, heard of the offer and was appalled. Clemens offered an advance of $50,000 with a promise of royalties, and Grant agreed, though he collected only $20,000 of the advance. In the summer of 1884, while gathering information, he bit into a peach and felt excruciating pain at the back of his throat. In October, he was told the disease was serious, epithelial in character, and located in a place where surgery was out of the question.
By early 1885, the cancer was spreading. Cocaine was painted on his ulcerated throat, and morphine was a constant companion. Still, somehow, he managed to write or dictate 10,000 words a day, holding off death with one hand as he wrote with the other. By June 1885, it had become too hot in the city, and Grant traveled to Mount McGregor, a cottage that faced east toward Vermont’s Green Mountains.
On Thursday, July 16, one month after his arrival, Ulysses S. Grant finished his memoirs. In less than a year, he had written some 275,000 words. His memoirs sold half a million copies, twice as many as Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn.
Clemens later presented Julia the largest royalty check ever written at that time: $200,000. The royalties totaled $450,000, restoring the family’s financial security. Upon completion, Grant noted there was nothing more he should do, and he was not likely to be more ready to go than at that moment. On the evening of July 22, he wanted out of the prison that was his chair, and they put him in bed.
Around eight in the morning on Thursday, July 23, withered to less than one hundred pounds, Ulysses S. Grant finally surrendered. He was sixty-three years old. The funeral was the most superb military and civil pageant in the nation’s history, a procession seven miles long that spanned five hours.
Simon Bolivar Buckner, the man who had loaned Grant money in 1854 to get home after his resignation from the army, and who had surrendered to Grant at Fort Donelson, was there, as was Philip Sheridan, Joseph Johnston, and William Sherman, who stood by the casket and cried. The man who created the stillness at Appomattox had been stilled. Twelve years later, Grant’s remains were transferred to an 8. 5-ton red granite sarcophagus and placed in the mausoleum of what we now call Grant’s Tomb.
The monument was dedicated on Tuesday, April 27, 1897, with over a million in attendance. The day was symbolically significant: it was the seventy-fifth anniversary of Grant’s birth. Cut into the granite was a simple inscription, a line from his first inauguration, a wish just as relevant and important now as then: Let us have peace.