Ulysses S. Grant - Michael Korda [46]
By the time Grant returned to Washington, President Johnson was already deeply enmeshed in the struggle with Congress over Reconstruction legislation that would end in his impeachment proceedings. In the summer of 1866, Johnson had taken what we would now call a whistle-stop tour of the Northern states to drum up support for his policies, and ordered Grant to accompany him as window dressing. To Grant’s embarrassment, the tour was a disaster, and even his presence in uniform was insufficient to calm audiences, as they and the president exchanged insults and threats.
By the winter of 1866, fueled by the failure of Johnson’s tour, Congress was busy drafting legislation designed to hog-tie the president hand and foot to the extreme Radical cause—military government was to be imposed on the Southern states, the president was to be enjoined from issuing any orders to the army except through the general in command, and to be forbidden from dismissing any member of his cabinet without the consent of the Senate.
Grant’s views on Reconstruction were complicated—or at any rate contradictory—but he was, above all, not an extremist. He disliked the idea of dividing the South into military districts, but would obey orders, and he was no great enthusiast for attempts “to enfranchise the Negro, in all his ignorance,” though in that too he would obey orders. Above all he did not want to get drawn into the quarrel that was fast developing between the president and the Radical members of his own cabinet, and between the president and Congress. Inexorably, however, he was drawn into the struggle, when Johnson removed Stanton as secretary of war and appointed Grant temporarily in his place. When the Senate set aside the president’s action, Grant obligingly moved out of the office of secretary of war and let Stanton reassume it, thus inviting Johnson’s rage. Johnson thenceforth regarded Grant as having betrayed him, while Grant regarded Johnson as having insulted him.
The turmoil of Reconstruction led finally to Johnson’s impeachment, which he narrowly survived—no thanks to Grant—but which spelled the end of his political career. In May 1868 Grant was nominated unanimously as the Republican candidate for the presidency. He went “home” to his new house in Galena and won the election without making any speeches or a campaign tour or even appearing much in public in Galena. He could be seen from time to time taking a constitutional stroll or a drive, or seated on the porch smoking a cigar, but that was as much as he would contribute to the electoral process, and as much as was needed.
He created something of a stir by refusing to ride in the same carriage as Andrew Johnson on inauguration day, but his failure to campaign and his short and notably bland inauguration speech left most people in some doubt as to what his policies would be—doubt that was shared to a significant degree by Grant himself. Almost seventy years later the outgoing president, Harry Truman, would remark of Eisenhower that he would never know what hit him when he reached his desk in the White House—as a general, when he gave an order it would be obeyed instantly, but in the White House he would give an order and nothing would happen. The same phenomenon hit Grant almost immediately. He too, like Ike, was accustomed to instant obedience, not to the political process of building up support for a policy in Congress, or appealing for support to the public, or wooing newspapermen to obtain it. He expected at the very least the backing of his own party, without realizing that everything in politics has to be negotiated—at a price.
Grant’s presidency has come in for a good deal of criticism, and it is