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By Root 190 0

to thrill the Grants, or at any rate to thrill Julia and Nellie. One might have thought that Sartoris would have been pleased to have wooed and won the daughter of the president of the United States, but the Grants appear to have been more dazzled by him than he was by them. In any event, despite a glamorous wedding in the White House, the marriage, except for the fact that it produced four children, was a flop. Sartoris seems to have been a philanderer, a cheat, and a drunk, and reading between the lines may have been under the impression that Grant was wealthy, as well as a famous general and president—the discovery by Sartoris, when it was too late, that he had not married into money may have been partly responsible for the marital problems, but in any case Nellie would eventually return to the United States with her children, though many years were to pass before she could get a divorce.

Whatever else can be said of Grant, he was the most indulgent of parents—clearly his own harsh childhood had taught him something, and he seems to have found in his family life a happiness that eluded him in his public life.

Still, taking it all in all, his presidency was not the failure that historians have portrayed it. He kept America out of two wars; if his attempt to annex Santo Domingo was foolish, his refusal to try to annex Canada was courageous and smart, and the failure of the economy was perhaps beyond his control or anybody else’s. The corruption that marked the Grant administration was brought about by his innocence and his trust in other people, not by any desire for personal gain, and was, in any case, endemic to what came to be called the “Gilded Age.” The United States was growing too fast, in too many different directions at once, and the inevitable consequence was corruption and an unstable economy, and it would have taken a more astute man than Grant to slow things down or clean them up.

All the same the middle period of Grant’s life is disappointing. Appomattox was his greatest moment—the years afterward, despite two terms as president, show him as a man drifting into late middle age without a sense of direction, eager to become a wealthy and respected bourgeois but congenitally ill equipped to do so. Failure as a young man had honed and hardened him for war, and war, when it came, made him a hero; now another long and difficult period of failure would offer him another opportunity for heroism. Not too many people are given two chances to be a hero in a lifetime. Although Grant could not have guessed it, as he prepared to leave the White House, he was to be one of them.

Chapter Nine

IN 1877 RETIRING PRESIDENTS did not have the benefits that they do today—no “presidential library” to build and administer, no office and staff at government expense, no Secret Service protection, no generous pension. The Founding Fathers had intended that presidents should return to everyday life, hopefully to their farms or plantations, as ordinary citizens, and certainly the first presidents did so, following the example set by Washington. Grant, however, was still a comparatively young man and had no equivalent of Mount Vernon or Monticello to hold him. He had invested a good deal of money in a horse farm built on Dent land near St. Louis, but as usual, that had turned out to be a bad investment, and in any case he was hardly likely to spend the rest of his life raising trotters. Galena held no attractions for him, and he and Mrs. Grant knew hardly anyone in Philadelphia, in both of which they had been given houses by a grateful public.

Grant solved the problem, initially, by the traditional American solution to retirement: taking a world tour.

How curious Grant was about the rest of the world is hard to say, but the rest of the world was intensely curious about him, so that it became like a royal tour, in which the Grants were the sightseeing attraction, rather than the scenery or famous monuments. In the United States, though his popularity was still immense, he was nevertheless, for many people, a Republican former