Ulysses S. Grant - Michael Korda [44]
For all practical purposes the Civil War was over.
Grant was forty-three years old.
Chapter Eight
MANY BIOGRAPHERS of Grant have suggested that his career after Appomattox was driven mainly by a need to keep busy and for applause. Doubtless there is some truth to that—Grant, as his own mother would point out, had become a great man while he was still young, and neither he nor Julia contemplated a retreat to Galena for the rest of their lives, even though the good citizens of Galena would shortly present the Grants with a house worth sixteen thousand dollars, a tidy sum for the day, completely furnished, right down to the leather-bound sets of books in the library and the pictures on the walls. Still, one must also consider his inflexible sense of duty. The presidency was something he could not avoid.
Had Mrs. Grant not raised objections to the invitation to accompany the Lincolns to the theater—an invitation Grant had as good as accepted, and that he was then obliged to decline with considerable embarrassment—Grant might have been shot by John Wilkes Booth along with President Lincoln. Mrs. Grant made such a fuss over the prospect of another ghastly evening of being snubbed by Mary Lincoln—who had loudly objected to Julia’s remaining seated while she, the president’s wife, stood, on a visit to City Point, and then made an even worse scene about Major General Ord’s wife’s hat—that poor Grant had to fumble around with lame excuses, the lameness of which must have been quite obvious to Lincoln, and was therefore spared being present when Lincoln was shot. Even twenty years later, when he wrote his memoirs, Grant was still concocting new and unconvincing explanations for why the Grants had been obliged to stand the Lincolns up at the last moment.
As soon as he heard the news of the assassination, Grant moved quickly to have Ford, the owner of the theater, arrested by Ord, then settled down to the more than ample work of the commanding general of the army. He would shortly be honored by becoming the first American officer since George Washington to be made a full four-star general.
It explains much about Grant if one compares him to a later general, Dwight D. Eisenhower. Like Eisenhower, Grant was perceived as “a man of the people,” like Eisenhower, his conduct of the war was universally admired, and like Eisenhower, though he was no politician, he could obviously have the presidency when he wanted it—in fact, would be sought for the presidency by both parties whether he wanted it or not. Crowds waited to see Grant trot to the office every morning in Washington, driving himself at a spanking pace, reins in his hands while smoking his trademark cigar, and politicians sought his advice—or at least his presence—at every discussion of national policy. Grant was not just popular, in the vacuum that followed the assassination of President Lincoln, he was one of the major figures, perhaps the major figure, to give the administration of Andrew Johnson authority and gravitas—both qualities the new president conspicuously lacked himself.
Part of Grant’s authority derived from his silence. In a world in which politicians spoke for hours (the speech preceding Lincoln’s address at Gettysburg ran longer than two hours, and most of the audience thought it was too short), Grant’s reluctance to speak at all seemed like proof of his wisdom. People listened carefully to what he did have to say—like the utterances of the Sphinx—puzzled over his meaning, and interpreted his silences as a sign of greatness. In an age when speechmaking was a popular entertainment (the term “stemwinder” comes from a speech so long that listeners had to rewind their watch during its