Chapter 1Hiram

Foreword

The first thing I ever learned on this beat is that the decisive moment is almost never the intervention. It is the refusal.

Interventions are covered. There are cameras at an intervention, and a briefing room, and a general who will explain the objectives. Refusals happen in a sentence, in an afternoon, usually in a building a long way from the place being discussed, and they are almost never announced as refusals. I spent a good part of the 1990s and 2000s in rooms where the word being avoided was no. In Sarajevo and in Grozny and later in other places I watched governments decline to act and then explain, afterward, in language of considerable sophistication, that the situation had been complex, that the moment had passed, that the domestic circumstances had not permitted it.

They were not lying. That is the part outsiders never quite believe. The domestic circumstances generally had not permitted it. That is what a refusal is made of.

I came to Ulysses Grant because he is the only figure I know of who furnishes a controlled experiment.

On the seventeenth of October, 1871, a proclamation went out over the President's signature lifting the writ of habeas corpus across nine counties of the South Carolina upcountry. Federal marshals and cavalry went in with lists of names. More than six hundred men were arrested, hundreds more fled the state, and the Ku Klux Klan, which had murdered its way through those counties for three years, effectively ceased to exist. Black men in York and Spartanburg voted the following autumn, in the open, in places where they had been hunted the year before. He took the abuse for it and did not answer any of it.

On the eighth of September, 1875, the governor of Mississippi asked him to do the same thing, in a state where the same organizations were doing the same work by the same methods, and he said no. The reason came back through his Attorney General, and the operative clause of it is that the whole public were tired out with these annual autumnal outbreaks in the South.

There was an election in Ohio five weeks later.

Same man. Same power. Same question, asked by the same kind of official about the same kind of people. Four years, and about six hundred miles, between the two answers.

That is the book. Everything else in it, the tannery, Mexico, Donelson, Shiloh, Vicksburg, Appomattox, the gold corner, the whiskey ring, Ward, the peach, the pencil on the mountain, is here because it bears on why the second answer was different from the first.

I should say at once what I concluded, because a foreword that withholds its own thesis is being coy, and this one is not going to be. The difference is not a difference of principle. Nothing about Grant's convictions changed between 1871 and 1875, and this book will show you that they did not. What changed was the price. In 1871 the intervention cost him a great deal and he could afford it. By 1875 he had lost the Congress, the courts had begun dismantling the statutes underneath him, the Attorney General who knew how to use them was four years gone, a depression was in its second year, and his own administration was a byword for theft. So the same act cost more, and at the higher price he would not buy it.

That is the most uncomfortable thing that can be said about a person, because it is the thing that is true of nearly everyone, and it is why I wanted to write about him rather than about someone easier to condemn.

A word about what this book is not.

It is not a Civil War book. Six of its twenty-one chapters deal with the war, and each of them is here to establish one thing about how the man's mind worked, because those things become load-bearing later. There are no battle panoramas. If you want the Overland Campaign at the regimental level there are shelves of it and none of it is here.

It is not a rehabilitation. Ulysses Grant is currently the beneficiary of the most dramatic reputational recovery in American historiography, and the recovery has begun to manufacture its own myth: the antislavery conscience of the Republic, Reconstruction's champion, betrayed by lesser men. It flatters better than the version it replaced and it is no truer, and I have spent twenty-one chapters declining it. This is a man who signed an order throwing an entire people out of three states because he could not bring himself to quarrel with his father; who assured Congress in 1865 that the South could be trusted; who dismissed the finest civil rights lawyer of the century over a railroad dispute two months after that lawyer had broken the Klan for him; and who put his own oath behind the acquittal of his private secretary.

And it is not a prosecution either. The record convicts him of enough without help, and it credits him with more than his detractors have ever been willing to count.

On method.

Every biographer of a living or recent subject fights the same fight, which is that everyone who will talk to you wants something. Working on a man who has been dead for a hundred and forty-one years removes that problem entirely and introduces a different one, which is that you are wholly at the mercy of what somebody chose to write down. I have therefore worked from documents and said so whenever the documents run out.

The primary sources are unusually good. The thirty-two volumes of The Papers of Ulysses S. Grant are complete, edited to a high standard, and freely searchable, and I have used them directly rather than through anybody's quotation of them. The manuscript of the Personal Memoirs has been digitized at the Library of Congress since 2017, more than a thousand pages in his own failing hand, and I have looked at the pages rather than at descriptions of them. The federal court records of the South Carolina prosecutions exist. The congressional investigations of the gold corner, the whiskey ring, and the Belknap traderships were thorough, adversarial, and printed.

Where an account rests on one interested witness, the text says so, and there are more of those here than I would like. Grant attracted memoirists, and memoirists improve stories. The exchange with Bismarck in Berlin comes to us through a single reporter's book. The threat that stopped the treason prosecution of Robert E. Lee survives in several wordings and one substance. The ten words in Chapter Fifteen are a case where the words are certain and the piece of paper is not, and I say that in the chapter rather than in a note at the back where nobody will find it.

Where the record simply stops, I have said that too. The back matter lists what I could not establish.

One debt and one refusal.

The debt is to the modern scholarship, and particularly to the historians who rebuilt Reconstruction as a subject before anybody could sensibly reassess the President who fought it. Without that work this book would have nothing to argue with. Ron Chernow's biography is the fullest single account of the life and I have taken facts from it gratefully.

The refusal is to its shape. The recovery narrative runs toward vindication, and a life that runs toward vindication cannot accommodate September of 1875 except as an aberration, a stumble, a bad month. It was not an aberration. It was the same faculty that produced Appomattox, operating at a different price, and any account that cannot hold both of those at once is not describing this man.

I have written this in the year of the American semiquincentennial, a hundred and fifty years after the disputed election Grant handed over without a war and a few months short of the anniversary of the soldiers coming out of the Southern statehouses. While I was working, the United States finished undoing a set of renamings it had carried out three years earlier at nine army posts, restoring the old Confederate surnames by locating different men who happened to share them. I mention it not to make the book topical but to establish that its subject is not settled, and has not been settled at any point in the last hundred and ten years.

He is buried above the Hudson, in the largest mausoleum in North America, which ninety thousand strangers paid for.

The nine counties are about seven hundred miles south of it. Yazoo County, Mississippi, is six hundred miles west of the nine counties.

The distance between those two places is the subject of this book.

Vivian Ashcombe London

Chapter 1 · Hiram

The river was the line.

At Ripley, Ohio, the Ohio runs perhaps a quarter of a mile from bank to bank, brown and slow in August, and a man standing on the Ohio side in the morning could see the fields on the far shore clearly enough to count the people working in them. Those people were slaves. Everything on the near bank was free soil, guaranteed by the Northwest Ordinance of 1787; everything on the far bank was Mason County, Kentucky, where a human being was property and had a price, and the distance between those two conditions was a quarter of a mile of water that a strong swimmer could cross in twenty minutes.

So the border was not an abstraction in Brown County, Ohio. It was a thing you looked at. Men crossed it in both directions and for opposite reasons. Slaves came north in the dark and went up the hill at Ripley to the house of the Reverend John Rankin, who kept a lamp burning where it could be seen from the Kentucky shore. Slave-catchers came north in the daylight, legally, with descriptions and handbills and the full protection of federal law, and they were sometimes fed and sometimes shot at, and the county could not agree which. Brown County was not an abolitionist county. It was a county that argued about it constantly, at the mill and the ferry landing and in the newspapers, in the specific, unhandsome way that people argue about a question they cannot get away from because it is standing on the other side of the water looking back at them.

Twelve miles inland from that water, up out of the river hills on a flat of good ground, was Georgetown, the seat of Brown County: a courthouse, a jail, a few hundred souls, and on the eastern edge of the town, close enough that the whole place knew the wind's direction every day of its life, a tannery.

The tannery belonged to Jesse Root Grant, and it stank.

This is not a figure of speech and it is not a small point. Tanning in the 1820s was among the foulest trades a respectable man could practice. Hides arrived green and had to be soaked and limed until the hair slipped, and then the flesh side was scraped clean over a beam, and the scrapings, fat, tissue, the last of the animal, went into a heap. The hides went into pits with ground hemlock and oak bark and stayed there for months, turning the water the color of strong tea and giving off a sweetish rot that got into wool and hair and did not wash out. Every tannery in America was built downwind of the town that needed it, and every tanner's family lived in the smell because the house was next to the works.

Jesse Grant's eldest son could not bear it.

He said so later, plainly, in the only unguarded book he ever wrote: he detested the trade and would have preferred almost any other labor. He would not work in the beam house. He would not watch the killing. All his life, at every table he ever sat at, a mess table in Mexico, a headquarters table in Virginia, a state dinner table with the Emperor of Japan across from him, he required that his meat be cooked until it was black, and he would push away anything that showed red at the center, and he did not eat fowl because he had seen how a fowl is made ready. He never developed a taste for hunting. He shot at game a few times as a boy, in a county where every other boy shot at game, and gave it up.

Consider what that means about the man who is the subject of this book. He commanded the largest armies the Western Hemisphere had ever assembled. He fought the two bloodiest days in American history to that date at Shiloh and then fought a seven-week campaign in Virginia that cost sixty thousand of his own men, and his enemies called him a butcher and got a century of American historiography to agree with them. And he could not look at an underdone steak. The squeamishness was not a pose adopted afterward to soften the record; it is in the childhood testimony of a hundred Georgetown neighbors, decades before anyone had a reason to shade it. Whatever it was in him that could order the assault at Cold Harbor, it was not appetite and it was not indifference to the sight of blood. It was something else, and the whole difficulty of Grant is that the something else has no obvious name.

Jesse Grant, in every other respect, was a loud man.

He had been born in 1794 in western Pennsylvania to a father who moved often, prospered never, and drank. His mother died when he was eleven and the family scattered; Jesse was passed among households, and at sixteen he was apprenticed to the tanning trade, and by the time he was a grown man he had built himself entirely out of nothing but grievance and industry. He had lived for a time in Deerfield, Ohio, in the house of Owen Brown, a hard-shell Calvinist who hated slavery with a completeness that was rare even among people who opposed it, and whose son John was a boy in that house at the time. Jesse came out of it with opinions.

He never stopped voicing them. He wrote letters to newspapers under his own name and under others. He argued politics in the street. He was, by the general agreement of everyone who has left a record of him, the most talkative man in Brown County, and his favorite subject after politics was himself, and his favorite subject after himself was his eldest son. Jesse boasted about the boy to strangers. He boasted about him in print. Thirty years on, when the boy was a lieutenant general commanding all the armies of the United States, Jesse was still doing it, writing to editors, selling anecdotes, telling reporters what his son thought about matters his son had told him nothing about, and Ulysses S. Grant, who by then could have had the man silenced with a sentence, never said the sentence, and simply went quiet, and stayed quiet, and let his father talk.

Hannah Simpson Grant, whom Jesse married in June 1821, was the other pole. She was a Methodist of the plain kind, and she was silent in a way that struck everyone who met her as remarkable even in an era that prized reticence in women. She did not praise her children and she did not complain about them. She did not weep when her son went to war. She did not visit him in the White House, not once, in eight years. There is no record of her ever having said, in the hearing of anyone who wrote it down, that she was proud of him.

Their first child was born on the twenty-seventh of April, 1822, in a one-room frame house at Point Pleasant on the Ohio, and eighteen months later the family moved up to Georgetown, and the boy did not have a name for some weeks.

The naming was done by committee, at the house of Hannah's father, and it went the way such things go: the Simpsons offered candidates and voted. Somebody proposed Hiram, out of the Old Testament, for its dignity. Hannah's stepmother had been reading Fénelon's Telemachus and proposed Ulysses, for the wanderer who was cleverer than the men who were stronger than him. Both were entered. Hiram Ulysses Grant.

The boy hated it. Not the names, the initials. H.U.G. He was small, he was quiet, he was the only son of the loudest man in town, and he was going to walk into a world of other boys carrying a trunk stenciled HUG. He understood this early and he minded it for years, and when the time finally came to leave, he did the only thing available to a person with no power over the facts: he reversed the order himself, on the trunk, in his own hand, and hoped no one would ask.

What he had instead of size, or volume, or protection, was horses.

He was on them before he could be trusted with anything else. At five he was riding; at seven or eight he was standing upright on the back of a trotting horse with the reins in his hands, and a traveling circus is supposed to have come through Georgetown with a trick pony that had thrown every boy in three counties, and the tanner's son is supposed to have ridden it, a story that has the shine of legend on it and that no one in Georgetown ever bothered to deny. By eleven he was doing all the plowing on his father's fifty acres. By twelve he was hauling logs alone, with a team and a chain, work that grown men did in pairs.

The gift was not strength and it was not daring, though he had a sufficient amount of both. It was that he could read an animal. He could tell what a horse was about to do before it did it, and he could tell what it was afraid of, and, this is the part that the Georgetown witnesses all circle around without quite naming, he did not fight them. He did not break horses by exhausting them. He took the fear away and then the horse did what he wanted, and neighbors brought him animals nobody else could handle, and a boy who could not make his father stop talking about him found that he could make a fifteen-hundred-pound animal walk quietly into water it was frightened of.

There is a small story from the roads that is worth more than the circus. Coming home from Kentucky one day with a horse he had traded for, the animal was rushed by dogs and went half wild in the traces, on a bad road, with the boy alone on the seat. He did not whip it and he did not jump. He got down, untied the bandana from his own neck, tied it over the horse's eyes, got back up, and drove the rest of the way home in the dark with a blindfolded animal that could not see the thing it was afraid of and therefore was no longer afraid.

Remember the shape of that. He is going to do it again, at Belmont and at Donelson and above all on the night of April 6, 1862, when his army has been driven back to the river and every professional in the theater has concluded that the campaign is lost. He will not be able to make the situation less frightening. He will simply decline to look at the part of it that produces fright, and go forward.

The other thing Georgetown remembered about the boy, remembered for fifty years, remembered with pleasure, remembered until he was famous and then remembered harder, was the business of the colt.

He was eight years old and he wanted a colt belonging to a farmer named Ralston. His father did not want to pay Ralston's price. Jesse, being Jesse, worked out a negotiating position and, being Jesse, explained it to his eight-year-old in full and sent him to conduct it.

The boy went to Ralston's and said, more or less: Papa says I may offer you twenty dollars for the colt, but if you won't take that, I am to offer twenty-two and a half, and if you won't take that, to give you twenty-five.

He paid twenty-five.

Georgetown never let it go. It was too good, the tanner's boy, the tanner who told the whole county what everything cost, and here was the son laying his father's entire hand face-up on the table for a horse. Boys shouted it after him in the road. Some of them called him Useless, which is what happens to a name like Ulysses in the mouths of children who have found a soft place. He was a grown man, a general, an ex-president, a dying man writing on a mountain in New York, and the story of the colt was still in circulation, and he knew it, and when he came to write his own account of his life he put it in himself, unprompted, and recorded that it had given him great pain and that the pain had lasted.

That is the earliest documented wound in Ulysses Grant, and it is worth being precise about its nature, because everything else in this book runs off it.

He was not humiliated for being weak. He was not humiliated for losing. He was humiliated for telling, for having in his possession information whose value depended entirely on its being withheld, and letting it out into the air where other people could use it. The lesson available to an eight-year-old in that position is not subtle and he appears to have learned it completely, on the spot, and permanently.

From that day forward, Ulysses Grant told people nothing.

It became the single most consistent feature of his character and the source of nearly every misunderstanding of him. He did not announce his intentions. He did not explain his reasoning. His own staff officers, men who slept within twenty feet of him for three years, said they could not tell from his face whether an army was winning or losing. Sherman, who loved him and talked constantly, said he did not understand him and did not think Grant understood himself. He would sit through a council of war saying almost nothing, whittling, and then issue an order that no one had heard him consider. And when the country turned on him, over Shiloh, over the whiskey thieves in his own house, over the nine counties in South Carolina, his instinct was never to explain and always to endure, which is a form of courage and also, when a man holds the power of the United States government and declines to say what he is doing with it or why, a form of abdication.

The tannery taught him what he did not want to be. The horses taught him how to take fear out of a frightened animal. Ralston's colt taught him to keep his mouth shut. He was eight.

His schooling was the ordinary schooling of the Ohio Valley, which is to say it was thin.

He went to subscription schools in Georgetown, held in a log room, where a single master taught every child in the town every subject he knew, and where the disciplinary instrument was a beech switch and there was never a shortage of them, in part because the older boys were sent out to cut fresh ones. Grant recalled a single sentence as the sum of his grammatical education, a noun is the name of a thing, repeated so many times, year after year, that he came to accept it as true without ever quite learning what to do with it. He had two winters away: at a seminary in Maysville, Kentucky, across the river, and at an academy in Ripley, in the shadow of Rankin's house on the hill. He was good at mathematics. He was good at nothing else in particular. Nobody who taught him predicted anything.

But he traveled. This is the underrated fact of his boyhood and it separates him from almost every other child in Brown County. Jesse's business needed hides moved and leather delivered, and Jesse trusted the boy with a team before other men would trust a son with a hoe, and so by the age of eleven or twelve Ulysses Grant was driving alone to Cincinnati, forty miles; to Chillicothe; across into Kentucky; once, on his own initiative, taking paying passengers in the wagon to make the trip earn its keep. He slept in strange houses. He negotiated with strangers, having learned at eight what happens if you say too much to one. He formed, before he was fifteen, the habit that would define him as a soldier and would look like mysticism to people watching from outside: a completely unanxious sense of distance and country, of how far a loaded wagon goes in a day, of what is on the other side of a ridge, of the fact that a place you have never seen is only a number of hours away and can be gone to.

At seventeen he told his father he would not spend his life in the tannery. He would do anything else, farm, trade, go down the river, but he would not go into the beam house.

Jesse Grant took this in and made, characteristically, a decision on his son's behalf without consulting him. If the boy would not be a tanner he would be educated at public expense, and the cheapest education in America was West Point.

The Brown County seat had already been given to a boy named Bailey, who had failed and been sent home, which meant the appointment was open. Jesse wrote to Senator Thomas Morris. Then he wrote to Thomas L. Hamer.

Hamer was Georgetown's congressman and had been Jesse's close friend, and the two of them had fallen out completely over Andrew Jackson and the Bank, in the total way that men of that generation fell out over politics, and had not spoken in years. Jesse wrote to him anyway. That is who Jesse was: he wanted the thing more than he minded the humiliation of asking. Hamer, who was in the last days of his term and had days to fill the seat, wrote the appointment out and sent it in.

He wrote the boy's name from memory. He knew the family called him Ulysses, because everyone did. He knew the mother had been a Simpson. He wrote Ulysses S. Grant.

The boy did not want to go. He said so directly, I'll not go, and his father said he thought he would, and the son later recorded, in a line that says as much about the household as any document that survives, that he thought so too, if his father did. He traveled east in May of 1839 by steamboat to Pittsburgh, canal boat to Harrisburg, and then, for the first time in his life, at a speed he had not previously known a body could move, by railroad to Philadelphia, where he lingered five days doing nothing in particular, in no hurry at all to arrive. He hoped along the way for some accident that would prevent him without disgracing him. He hoped, he admitted afterward, that Congress might abolish the Military Academy outright before he got there.

He arrived at West Point at the end of May, seventeen years old, five feet one inch tall and one hundred and seventeen pounds, and reported to the adjutant, and found that the United States Army had no record of any person named Hiram Ulysses Grant.

It had a warrant for a cadet named Ulysses S. Grant, and if he was not that person he could go home.

He protested. He was told the rolls could not be altered. He signed.

The initials H.U.G. were gone forever, which he had wanted, and in their place was a name with a letter in it that stood for nothing at all, not Simpson, not anything; a clerk's guess about a mother's maiden name, made in a hurry, in a room in Washington, by a man who would be dead of fever in a Mexican camp seven years later with this same young officer serving a few miles away. The other cadets read the initials on the trunk and on the barracks list, U.S., and called him Uncle Sam, and then just Sam, and Sam Grant is what the Army called him for the next twenty-two years.

He never changed it back. He never petitioned, never corrected the record, never explained. For the rest of his life, on his commissions, on his surrender terms at Appomattox, on the proclamation suspending the writ of habeas corpus in nine counties of South Carolina, and on the last page he wrote with a pencil three days before he died, he signed the name that a distracted congressman had gotten wrong.