Ulysses S. Grant - Michael Korda [55]
Their tour around the world was of unprecedented length—nearly two years—partly because travel in those days was slow, and partly because Grant had shrewdly calculated that the longer they stayed away from the United States, the more curiosity there would be to greet them when they got home. Two years is a long time in politics—long enough for people to become fed up with President Rutherford B. Hayes and look back on Grant’s presidency as a golden age. Or so, no doubt, Grant hoped.
In England the Grants were treated like royalty, even by royalty, and given the unusual honor of a private dinner with Queen Victoria at Windsor, marred only by the embarrassing insistence of their bumptious son Jesse that he sit at the queen’s table, to which her majesty finally consented though she found the young man ill-mannered and pushy. The Grants were given dinners by the Prince of Wales (the future Edward VII), the Duke of Devonshire, and the second Duke of Wellington, as well as fulsome public banquets, including one at the Guildhall in which the Lord Mayor of London presented him with the freedom of the City of London, and in general feted him from one end of the realm to the other. Perhaps most extraordinary were the enormous number of English workingmen who turned out to greet Grant, seeing in him not only the man who had destroyed slavery but who represented something that was still unthinkable in Great Britain—the rise of a former leather tanner and shop clerk to four-star general and president. Grant seems to have been overwhelmed and bewildered by his popularity among “the working classes,” but it was a fact, and he came to accept it. His inarticulateness helped too—the fact that he did not make long, windy speeches appealed to them; he was “a man of few words,” and many people who got close enough to him remarked on his robust physique, his apparent physical strength, and his big, blunt-fingered workingman’s hands—hands that had at one time plowed fields, felled trees, cut hay, harnessed horses, and raised pigs, however unsuccessfully.
His reception in France and in Italy was hardly less extraordinary. The Grants saw all the sights—including Pompei—then went on to Egypt, and from there to the Holy Land (at the time still a Turkish province), to Constantinople, back to Italy, and on to Holland, Denmark, Norway, Russia, Germany, and Spain. Grant met Czar Alexander II, Bismarck, Pope Leo XIII, and French premier Georges Clemenceau—everybody who mattered in Europe. Then, after a trip back to England, the Grants set out for India, China, and Japan via the Suez Canal: two well-fed, solidly built Americans with an apparently inextinguishable appetite for food and travel—the prototypes for generations to come of American world travelers. The farther Grant journeyed from his native land, the more he was treated as a distinguished world figure, the peak being reached when he was presented to the emperor Meiji of Japan, who actually shook hands with Grant, something no Japanese emperor had ever done before with anyone, native or foreign.
Through it all Grant ate, read, and gazed at the sights placidly, apparently beyond boredom. There were rumors that from time to time he got drunk—who could blame him?—and in India the viceroy, Lord Lytton, whose account of an evening with the Grants is quoted in McFeely’s biography of Grant, claimed that it took six British sailors to haul a drunken Grant away from a shipboard reception at which he had pinched young ladies’ bottoms and indecently ogled their decolletés, and place him in another room where he satiated his lust on Mrs. Grant, then threw up on her. Lytton was a man who enjoyed telling tall tales and, no shrinking violet himself when it came to the