Impeached: The Trial of President Andrew Johnson and the Fight for Lincoln's Legacy (11 page)

W
ALKING INTO ANDREW
Johnson’s White House on August 1, 1867, General Ulysses Grant had to have conflicting feelings. Johnson, who would soon offer to appoint him interim secretary of war, was his superior officer. The Constitution made the president the commander-in-chief of all military forces. But Grant’s loyalties did not follow organization charts, even the one established by the Constitution, and definitely not with this president.

Despite his mild demeanor, Grant was an unusually poor subordinate. For some years, he had paid little attention to the views of his nominal superiors. Through the Civil War and since, Grant had grown used to relying on his own judgment, even to the point of disobeying direct orders. Grant’s approach works only for generals who win, and not always for them, but the quiet man pulled it off with a unique combination of battlefield success and disarming modesty. When reports circulated during the war that Grant and Stanton had argued, Lincoln’s secretary dismissed them, insisting, “Grant quarrels with no one.” The general might not quarrel, but he also did not do as he was told.

With Johnson, Grant’s personal views supported his habit of nonsubordination. The general disliked Johnson’s policies toward the Southern states. During the Swing Around the Circle eleven months before, compelled to attend rally after painful rally, Grant feared being identified with the president. “I am disgusted with this trip,” he wrote to his brother. “I am disgusted at hearing a man make speeches on the way to his own funeral.”

That Grant was in the White House in the middle of 1867, sparring with the president on more or less equal terms, marked an astonishing personal turnaround. Eight years before, Grant despaired of being able to feed his family. Now, forty-five years old, he commanded the nation’s military, was adored by the northern two-thirds of the nation, and was the presumptive Republican candidate for president the following year. Facing Johnson that day, Grant could wonder what it would be like to sit on the other side of the desk.

To Johnson, the bearded man before him had never seemed impressive. Small and quiet, puffing on cigars from breakfast until bedtime, Grant failed to impress people most of his life. As one of his senior generals observed, because Grant was “very reticent and somewhat ill at ease among strangers,…a first impression is never favorable.” Abraham Lincoln described him as “the quietest little fellow you ever saw,” then gave him command of the nation’s armed forces.

In a military world filled with blustering popinjays and vainglorious peacocks, Grant stood out for his plainness and his ability (as one contemporary put it) to remain silent in several languages. If conversation was absolutely necessary, Grant chatted about horses, his passion. Ben Wade of Ohio, the president pro tem of the Senate, once complained: “As quick as I’d talk politics, he’d talk horses, and he could talk for hours on that without getting tired.”

Army comrades struggled to describe how such an unassuming character rose to command the largest fighting force that ever marched in the Western Hemisphere. One called him “the most modest, the most disinterested, and the most honest man I ever knew, with a temper that nothing could disturb,” adding with apparent puzzlement that Grant was “[n]ot a great man, except morally; not an original or brilliant man, but sincere, thoughtful, deep, and gifted with courage that never faltered.” One of his officers during the war thought he looked “as if he had determined to drive his head through a brick wall, and was about to do it.”

General-in-Chief Ulysses S. Grant.

As a West Point cadet, Grant got an early start on not impressing his peers, graduating in the bottom half of his class. “He couldn’t, or wouldn’t, dance,” one classmate remembered. “He had no facility in conversation with the ladies, a total absence of elegance.” Grant did not much care for his courses at the military academy, preferring to read novels. Evidence of Grant’s unpretentious manner begins with the transformation of his name. Before West Point, he was Hiram Ulysses Grant. The congressman who nominated him to the academy mistakenly submitted his name as “Ulysses S. Grant.” When another cadet saw a list featuring “U. S. Grant,” he said the new student must be “Uncle Sam Grant.” Thus, Grant lost his real first name (Hiram) and gained both a middle initial (S.) and his army nickname (Sam). Grant accepted all three changes without objection.

The one early hint of Grant’s gift for leadership was his horsemanship. The man’s intuitive connection to horses seems a symptom of the talent Grant would demonstrate for gauging the true strength of men and armies, for sensing the tide of events and of history. At final exercises for his West Point class, he electrified observers by guiding his powerful chestnut-sorrel horse over a bar higher than a man’s head. During the Mexican War, Grant purchased a stallion so wild and strong that his mates shrank from the beast. Grant had the horse blindfolded and saddled, then set off on a three-hour tear that ended with horse and rider trotting comfortably into camp. According to future Confederate General James Longstreet, “For years afterward the story of Grant’s ride was related at every campfire in the country.”

The Mexican War put Grant in the company of a leader he would emulate. General (and future president) Zachary Taylor was known for his informal style and casual dress, for being a fighting commander who did not hold himself above the troops he led. An officer who served under Taylor noted the similarities between Grant and Taylor, writing to his wife, “Sometimes I fancy he models himself on old Zack.”

During the Mexican War—which he disdained as a colonial adventure unworthy of a republic—young Sam Grant discovered in himself the presence of mind that would bring him victory in battle after battle. When a friend asked how he felt during combat, the intuitive Grant gave a striking response: “I do not know that I felt any peculiar sensation. War seems much less horrible to persons engaged in it than to those who read of the battles.”

After the war ended in 1848, Grant fell into a spiral of failure. Assigned to garrison duty on the West Coast, far from his family, he sank into despondency. Within six years he had resigned from the army, probably because he was drunk on duty. Grant was susceptible to hard drink, achieving inebriation with relatively little intake. Much of the time, he tried to stay away from liquor, fending it off with volcanic cigar smoking. Sometimes, though, drink got the better of him. Reunited with his family in 1854, little went well for Grant. He tried farming with help from his wife’s family, but after a time was reduced to selling firewood on street corners in St. Louis. On such a corner in late 1857, Grant encountered William Tecumseh Sherman, another former Army officer who also was struggling in civilian life. In a brief exchange rich in portent for the nation’s future, they agreed that “West Point and the Regular Army were not good schools for farmers, bankers, merchants, and mechanics.” When the Civil War broke out, Grant had moved to Galena, Illinois, where he worked in his father’s leather business as an indifferent clerk.

His generalship is justly the stuff of legend. After months of begging for a command, he took over a regiment of Illinois volunteers and set off to fight the rebels his way. Sometimes defying orders, and other times construing them in unintended ways, he demonstrated rare battlefield skill. Though he managed logistics well, Grant’s battles were rarely pretty affairs. More than once, the enemy caught him by surprise. His distinguishing qualities as a commander were extraordinary focus in the thick of the fight, a powerful drive to strike the enemy, and a wondrously calm expectation that he would win. No one counterattacked more effectively. A staff officer remembered that in quiet times Grant “was often slow in his movements, but when roused to activity he was quick in every motion, and worked with marvelous rapidity.” Another wrote home that “he is cool and quiet, almost stolid as if stupid, in danger, and in a crisis he is one against whom all around…would instinctively lean.”

Like any great leader, Grant commanded the affection and respect of his fellow soldiers. Sherman, his right-hand man during the western campaigns, later a commanding general himself, offered a tribute every soldier would covet: “I knew wherever I was that you thought of me, and if I got into a tight place you would help me out, if alive.” Sherman’s dedication to Grant would prove critical in the impeachment crisis, and was captured in a remark recorded shortly after the Confederate surrender. Acknowledging their bad reputations—Grant as a drunk, Sherman as mentally unsteady—Sherman said:

Despite his wartime victories, Grant was again underestimated when peacetime duties pushed him into the political arena. Sooner or later, most who underestimated Grant came to realize their error. In early 1867, Navy Secretary Welles wrote that the general-in-chief “has no political principles, no intelligent ideas of constitutional government.” In August, Welles dismissed Grant as “a political ignoramus.” By the end of the year, Welles had learned more respect for the “ignorant but cunning” soldier. “I am becoming impressed with the idea,” he noted in his diary, “that Grant may prove a dangerous man.”

In the early months of Johnson’s presidency, the president and the general got along fairly well. Concerned that the Southern states needed functioning governments in order to avoid anarchy, Grant supported Johnson’s early efforts to establish them. Johnson made an effort to cultivate the general. A Grant aide remembered Johnson as “trying to wheedle Grant,” sending him “constant personal and familiar notes and cards—an unusual courtesy, almost a condescension, from a President.” Johnson had enough confidence in Grant to send him on a short fact-finding tour of the South at the end of 1865, hoping the trip would counter reports that Southerners were still rebellious. Grant, who was moved at the end of the war by the suffering of Southerners, concluded that “the mass of thinking men in the South accept the present situation of affairs in good faith.” Johnson was pleased.

Yet there were early signs of the troubles that would arise between the two men. First, and contrary to the president’s wishes, Grant recommended retaining the army and the Freedmen’s Bureau in the South because “the white and the black mutually require the protection of the general government.” Though Grant had worked slaves owned by his wife’s family, and had never been an abolitionist, the war changed his views. As he described it, he concluded “early in the rebellion that the North & South could never live at peace with each other except as one nation, and that without Slavery.”

Because of that conclusion, Grant was troubled in late 1865 when former General Carl Schurz delivered a report that highlighted the violence and discrimination inflicted by Southern whites on the freed slaves. Grant directed his commanders to report to him “all known outrages…committed by white people against the blacks, and the reverse.” This concern for Southern conditions would eat away at Grant’s support for the president.

By March of 1866, after Johnson’s Washington’s Birthday address from the White House balcony, an aide noted that Grant was “getting more and more Radical.” Fielding regular reports about the racial violence in the South, Grant could not accept Johnson’s view that the Southern states should have greater power over their own affairs. Circumstances were pushing Grant into an uneasy partnership with War Secretary Stanton, a man he did not like. A Grant aide reported a “personal barrier” between the two men, observing that the general resented Stanton’s “asperities.” When it came to dealing with Stanton, Grant sympathized with Andrew Johnson. Noting that Stanton was “very offensive” to the president, Grant told his wife that the war secretary “would have gone and on a double-quick long ago if I had been President.”

Despite his personal antipathy toward Stanton, Grant came to agree with the war secretary that Johnson’s policies were encouraging white violence and imperiling both the freedmen and the military. The general-in-chief joined with Stanton to block the president’s actions. When Congress asked in early 1867 for information on violence against Southern blacks, Grant wrote that he intended to “make a report showing [that] the courts in the [South] afford no security to life or property…and to recommend that martial law be declared over such districts.” Stanton presented the evidence in February, to Johnson’s great displeasure. As Congress shaped its Reconstruction legislation in the first half of 1867, Grant worked openly with Republicans to develop provisions that reinforced military authority. In a private letter, he scorned the president’s veto message for the first Reconstruction Act. It was, Grant wrote, “one of the most ridiculous that ever emanated from any President.” When the attorney general construed the military’s powers narrowly, Grant instructed his Southern commanders that the opinions were without “the force of orders,” so “I would not be controlled by them further than I might be convinced by the argument.” In July, Grant and Stanton worked with Congress on legislation that would deny Johnson the power to direct military commanders on Reconstruction issues; indeed, the first draft of the bill was in Stanton’s handwriting. Grant’s senior aide, General Adam Badeau, summarized the rift in the government: “[The president] disregarded the will of Congress, and the officers of the army disregarded his. The situation was approaching mutiny on one side, or else treason on the other.”