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By Root 209 0

ladies, he was probably exaggerating. Photographs of Mrs. Grant at the time make the incident as he describes it seem unlikely—given her bulk and obvious strength, she could surely have resisted the general, and from what we know of her the suggestion that she would have had sexual intercourse with him in any kind of public view seems very improbable. That Grant was drinking again, however, is undeniable—he shared a brandy with Bismarck, and champagne with the Prince of Wales, and endless wines were served at the innumerable banquets that were held in the Grants’ honor. It would have been very difficult for him to refuse a drink or a toast without being rude, and with Grant one drink led to another. By the time Grant reached India he had been traveling for almost a year and a half, and like many another tourist, the charm of seeing yet another famous monument in the company of his wife may have worn thin by then.

Since Lord Lytton’s is, so far as I know, the only allegation of sexual impropriety against Grant, I am prepared to dismiss it or at least overlook it, but the drinking is more of a problem. For Grant sobriety was all important—the lack of it was a sign that he was getting restless, as indeed he must have been.1

No sooner were the Grants back in the United States than he began to explore the possibility of being nominated by the Republicans for a third term. Whether or not Grant was conscious of it himself, he needed to perform a difficult balancing act—he had to appear everywhere, making himself look electable, but he must never be seen to be seeking the nomination. Whether it had been a good idea for him to spend two years traveling abroad is a difficult question. On the one hand it kept him out of the country, while the press sent back flattering reports of his tour, but on the other he was out of the loop of Republican politics and obliged to travel around the United States accepting applause at public functions without actually saying anything or explaining what he would do in the White House if the party and the public persuaded him to run.

Besides, 1880 was not 1869. The Republican Party had as good as conceded the South to the Democrats by failing to stand up for black voters, and while respect for Grant still ran high among Republicans of every stripe and the mass of voters, there were new issues confronting the nation, and Grant’s victories, while still admired, were not sufficient to compensate for the absence on his part of any concrete program. A new generation of voters was coming of age, in any case, for whom Grant’s victories were their fathers’ battles.

Even so, Grant managed to get a respectable number of votes—he was in the lead on the first ballot at Chicago—and he might very well have swept to the nomination on the enthusiasm of the delegates had he condescended to visit the convention hall, as Julia urged him to do. But he could not or would not play that kind of role; it was simply not in his nature, and as a result he lost the nomination to James A. Garfield, who handily defeated the Democratic candidate, Gen. Winfield Scott Hancock—the man who broke Pickett’s charge on the third day of Gettysburg, and against whom Grant nursed a burning resentment.

Grant made his peace with Garfield, and most (but not all) of those Republicans who had failed to support him, but he did not get a seat in Garfield’s cabinet or even an ambassadorship. He was left with nothing much to do and not much money to do it with. A visit to Mexico, a country he had been fond of even when fighting there, offered the possibility of playing a major role in an American plan to build railways there, but although Grant had set himself up with a handsome residence on East Sixty-sixth Street in New York City and an office on Wall Street in expectation of success, his hopes as a railway entrepreneur eventually came to nothing, leaving him once again with the difficult problem of what to do, and the even more difficult one of how to make money. The Grants liked to live in style, and in a manner fitting for a former president