Ulysses S. Grant - Michael Korda [45]
They had admired him for that, and his gift for brevity had encouraged and rallied troops at Fort Donelson, Shiloh, and elsewhere during the war. It mystified politicians, however, who assumed that Grant’s taciturnity was a way of hiding his opinions, although Julia could have taught them otherwise. Grant’s taciturnity was natural and unaffected. He was a good listener who liked to think things over before speaking his mind, and arrived at his conclusions by some silent, interior process known only to himself.
Grant, like Wellington after Waterloo, soon became a major “fixer” of seemingly insoluble problems, the one man who could be trusted to deal calmly, quietly, authoritatively, and above all fairly with matters that had everyone else in Washington stumped. He was not a party man as such, though he thought of himself as a Republican because of his admiration for Lincoln (his memoirs are nonetheless singularly lacking in emotion on the subject of Lincoln’s death), and for a time a part of his strength was that he was perceived to be above party loyalty and, more important, above party intrigue. He was trusted in the South as well as the North, which gave him a special position at a time when the burning question of the day was how to reintegrate the Southern states into the union, and on what terms.
From the very first he was uncomfortable with President Johnson, a former tailor and Democrat who talked too much, was inappropriately quarrelsome with any stranger who expressed disagreement with him, and was prone to act rashly. These failings were exacerbated by the rumor that Johnson was a drunk, which may have come about because of an unfortunate incident. Johnson had been about to address the Congress, and complained of a severe attack of diarrhea—a real problem in a day when speeches were expected to go on for hours. A well-meaning senator advised a stiff shot of brandy to steady the president’s bowels, and Johnson, who was unused to strong drink, followed his advice and as a result made a rambling, inarticulate speech, following which he had to be helped off the podium.
The rumor that the new president had been drunk when he addressed the House and Senate did nothing for Johnson’s popularity—though even without that it would have been hard to follow the martyred Lincoln into the presidency—but at the nub of the problem was Johnson’s view of making peace with the South. Although he was a border state man (which was the reason he had been chosen for the vice presidency in the first place), unlike Lincoln, Johnson wanted Southerners to be punished for rebellion and treason and was determined to take a hard line. This put him at odds with Grant, who, like Lincoln, did not want to see former Confederates punished merely for their opinions, as opposed to what we would now call genuine war crimes, and was reluctant to lend his prestige to attempts on the part of the president to coerce the Southern states. Johnson’s misfortune, however, was that the radical wing of his party wanted him to go even further than he was willing to in punishing the South, so he was caught between a rock and a hard place.
One of Grant’s first tasks was to censure his old friend Sherman, who, in accepting the surrender of Joseph E. Johnston in North Carolina, had wildly and impulsively exceeded his authority with a document that allowed Confederate forces to take their arms home and deposit them in state arsenals, recognized existing state governments, and confirmed “property rights” without defining them, so that there was a possibility that the courts