Grant: A Novel (5 page)

“By God, Caddy, I think you’ll be scratching in that notebook when you pass the Pearly Gates!”

Secretary of the Treasury John Sherman, younger brother of William T., had the demented family grin. He stood in front of Cadwallader’s chair, hands on his hips, black silk top hat shoved back on his head like Pericles’s helmet, nodding cordially. Cadwallader put away the notebook he had just pulled out and sprang to his feet.

“Mister Secretary,” he said with a genial bow. “Here to greet the General, no doubt?”

Sherman’s grin stayed diplomatically in place. Even around the Sherman family, “the General” referred only to U. S. Grant, and if U. S. Grant had any important rivals for his third presidential nomination in the spring, one of them was John Sherman of Ohio, thirty “Jumbos” minimum.

“You know my wife, Caddy,” the Secretary said, and Cadwallader bowed again to the voluptuously gowned lady on Sherman’s left arm. “And Mr. Washburne.”

“Congressman,” said Cadwallader, and shook hands with Elihu B. Washburne of Illinois.

“Just saw Bob Ingersoll,” Washburne announced gloomily. Bob Ingersoll, a former Union colonel, was to be the main speaker at the banquet later that night. He was also a notorious atheist and lover of whiskey, and Washburne was both a Methodist and a teetotaler.

“With that awful Mark Twain,” said Mrs. Sherman. “Mr. Cadwallader,” she began, then broke off with a frown. “I can’t hear myself speak,” she shouted into her husband’s ear. Some spirit—Cadwallader guessed it was not unconnected with E. C. Booz & Co.—had seized the band, which was now marching up the grand staircase and playing a brigade call from General Butterfield’s old command, while all around them grown men were raising their glasses and chanting,

Sherman gestured toward a side corridor. At the next alcove Mrs. Sherman tried again. “I have a favor to ask, Mr. Cadwallader,” she said. “The ladies are not permitted at the banquet tonight. I wonder if copies of the speeches—”

From the top of the staircase now came a new chant, to the deafening tune of the army mess call:

Mrs. Sherman gave up. “This stupid,
stupid
war!”

“Rain’s stopped,” Washburne called from a window. “Grant’s outside!”

Fifty feet away the band wheeled toward them with a cheer.

G
RANT WAS INDEED OUTSIDE, STANDING IN THE CANOPIED
reviewing box that had been erected especially for him on the hotel’s second-floor balcony. Cadwallader pushed out through the revolving doors and into the crowd, and shoved and jostled a hundred yards up State Street. The wind was whipping hard off the lake, ice-cold, and the skies looked as if the rain might start again any minute. But the parade was definitely under way. The first of the Illinois infantry regiments was already marching past to a deafening cheer, flags up, swords up, eyes right. Cadwallader watched from the curb for a moment, but found himself slowly losing ground, crushed back against a lamppost, it seemed, by half the shoulders and elbows in Chicago. The Springfield Marching Band came around the corner playing “John Brown’s Body” out of tune, and he shivered and rubbed his face and thought of his nice warm hotel room on the fifth floor, paid for by the
Times
. He had stood in the cold outdoors just about long enough, he figured, to get the flavor of the thing.

Upstairs five minutes later, still shivering, he draped a blanket across his shoulders like an Indian and went over to the window. The Palmer House was nothing if not modern. Under the sill, next
to the baseboard, was an iron-pipe central heating contraption for which a new word had recently been coined: “radiator.” He squatted on his heels and turned a knob. Then he held his hands out, palms down, the way you might warm them over a campfire, until he felt the heat begin to spread from the pipes—radiate—and he braced himself on the wall and creaked to his feet. Fifty-three years old.

He pulled the blanket tighter around his shoulders and sat down in a straight-backed chair two feet from the radiator. Sylvanus B. Cadwallader had only been thirty-six the year he first met Grant, 1862. Working in Milwaukee as City Editor for the Milwaukee
Daily News
; in poor health and bored to tears. And he might be there yet, he thought, covered in cobwebs and bent over his desk like Ebenezer Scrooge, except one day early in October, out of the blue, a telegram arrived from the owners of the Chicago
Times
, and Cadwallader’s world just flipped itself up and over, changed forever. Would he care to go down to Tennessee and write about General Grant’s army for the
Times
? (And by the way, their previous reporter had been tossed in military prison by General Grant for publishing false information—could Cadwallader possibly get the man out?)

Cadwallader could and did. If he closed his eyes and shut out the noise from the street below, he could still picture the grimy little yellow stucco depot in Jackson, Tennessee, and hear the old wooden cars of the army train jerking and squealing to a halt. He could still see the pale consumptive face of Grant’s personal aide, Major John A. Rawlins, as the Major sat in his tent on the outskirts of town and scowled his way through Cadwallader’s stack of press credentials and said the General would talk to him some other time. And he could still see
Grant
’s face when he finally did get to meet him two weeks later.

Cadwallader chuckled to himself. Thirty-six years old and full of conceit and vinegar—what Cadwallader had done was send off his first story to the
Times
even more critical of Grant than his incarcerated predecessor. The Union troops were in the process of maneuvering from Jackson over toward La Grange, getting in position for the cavalry clash that would ultimately be the Battle of Holly Springs. The stragglers and bummers in some of the regiments were plundering and burning every civilian building they
passed, and they needed to be disciplined and punished, and Cadwallader, in the height of his newspaperman’s military wisdom, said so.

Next day he was passing Grant’s tent on his way to breakfast when the flap shot up with a crack and there was Grant, beckoning him to come in. The General had a mass of newspapers on his table, and without uttering a word he turned through them slowly till he reached the
Times
. Bylines were rare back then. He pointed at the lead article and said he supposed Cadwallader was the author.

Cadwallader was.

The General lit a cigar with a flint-and-steel lighter and blew a puff of gray smoke. “Well,” he said quietly, “it’s factually correct, and steps are being taken to remedy the situation. And if you never write more untruthfully than this, Mr. Cadwallader, you and I won’t have any problems.”

A great cheer came up from the Chicago street, and then what sounded like two different bands playing two different songs at the same time. Cadwallader stretched out his legs and wiggled his toes.

The thing about Grant was that he didn’t
look
the part of a hero. He looked and acted exactly like what he was, a hard luck Western farmer, carrying with him the air of empty fields and dusty roads and the small-town harness shop. For the first two years of the war, in the midst of all those Eastern generals with their tailored uniforms and their polished manners, he was just somebody to ignore.

Only, by 1863 the little Westerner with the unkempt beard and the quiet voice had somehow or other managed to have two separate Confederate armies surrender to him—at Fort Donelson, at Vicksburg—and forced another into headlong retreat at Chattanooga, and when he took command of all the Union forces in 1864, a collective sigh had seemed to go up from the nation. “The
boss
has finally arrived,” one private soldier in the Army of the Potomac told Cadwallader, and Cadwallader printed it in the Chicago
Times
for the whole world to read.

The other thing about Grant, of course, was that he was a thousand times more complicated than he looked, and that was the mystery of him. Lincoln knew it instinctively. Lincoln knew all about the mystery of character. In the worst days after Shiloh,
when that jackass Whitelaw Reid had written his famous article about Grant the bungler and the butcher, the Radical Republicans had sent a Senator over to the President’s Palace to demand that Grant be fired. And Lincoln heard him out, thought it over in silence, then shook his head: “I can’t spare this man: he fights.”

The one and only time Cadwallader ever saw Grant lose his temper was during the Battle of the Wilderness, May 1864. “Uncle” John Sedgwick’s VI Corps had just been routed in a surprise attack and over five thousand Union casualties were already reported. Grant was sitting on a camp stool, smoking his cigar and receiving dispatches, when one of Sedgwick’s surviving officers came thundering up on his horse. As soon as he spotted Grant the officer started stuttering that the army was in a terrible crisis, Lee was about to cut them off at the Rapidan River, and if he
did
cut them off all communications with Washington City would be lost for good, and then they
would
be doomed. And Grant stood up and took the cigar out of his mouth and flung it to the ground.

“I’m heartily tired of hearing what
Lee
is going to do,” he said with genuine fury. “Some of you always seem to think he’s suddenly going to turn a double somersault and land in our rear and on both our flanks at the same time. Go on back to your command and try to think what
we’re
going to do ourselves, instead of what Bobby
Lee
is going to do!” Later that week he wrote General Halleck the famous letter where he said he proposed to fight it out on this line if it took all summer.

Rain pattered against the window and ran down the glass in silver bullets. Out on the street the parade sounded as though it was winding up in a hurry. Cadwallader pulled out his watch. Three more hours till the monumental goddam banquet. Plenty of time for a nap.

There were two reasons the people had elected Grant President twice before.

One was because in his simplicity and competence U. S. Grant embodied the perfect American allegory, rags-to-riches, log-cabin-to-the-President’s Palace. Every man and boy in the country could see it and identify with it and feel some pride in a free society like that, where you might fail once or twice, but Virtue would be Truly Rewarded in the end.

And the other reason, of course, was Appomattox. If any image was going to live forever in American memory, right alongside
Washington at Valley Forge and Andy Jackson at New Orleans, it was surely the perfect glorious contrast of U. S. Grant and Robert E. Lee, sitting down in Wilmer McLean’s brick house at Appomattox to end the war. Everybody in the world knew the scene. Silver-haired patrician Lee in his handsome clean uniform with his yellow sash and his jeweled sword. Laconic little U. S. Grant in his dirty boots and his mud-spattered old private’s uniform with the three stars sewn like an afterthought on the shoulder. Grant writing out the terms of surrender the way he always wrote, without hesitation or pause, then handing them modestly over to Lee, generous, noble terms, Grant’s own initiative and the first great step toward national reconciliation and forgiveness. It took a hard heart indeed to vote against Appomattox.

Cadwallader lay down on the bed and pulled the blanket to his chin. He set his mental clock to wake him up one hour later; yawned. There was one more reason, he thought as he drifted off to sleep, why the people had twice elected Grant as President, and might yet do it again. Grant was the country’s last true connection to the martyred Abraham Lincoln. Grant was Lincoln’s friend and Lincoln’s heir. The two of them had walked side by side down the smoking streets of Richmond in 1865, the tall and the short of it, as Lincoln had joked. What Grant really represented, Cadwallader thought, was Atonement and Tribute at once.

If Grant wanted the Republican nomination, he could probably have it, as the cub reporter said, by spontaneous combustion.