The Man Who Saved the Union (58 page)

Grant went to Washington, and Julia with him. She had never been prouder of her husband. “
Everyone was wild with delight,” she remembered. “We received calls of congratulations all day.… I went with Mrs. Stanton to the War Department, where we were joined by Mr. Stanton and General Grant. Mr. Stanton was in his happiest mood, showing me many stands of arms, flags, and, among other things, a stump of a large tree perforated on all sides by bullets, taken from the field of Shiloh.” A grand illumination—a fireworks display—was readied for that evening. Grant explained that Julia would ride in a carriage with the Stantons while he, at the request of the president, would ride with the Lincolns. “To this plan I protested and said I would not go at all unless he accompanied me,” she wrote. Grant reacted with surprise, then said he would
ride with her first and subsequently with the Lincolns. “This was all satisfactory to me,” Julia concluded the story, “as it was the honor of being with him when he first viewed the illumination in honor of peace restored to the nation, in which he had so great a share—it was this I coveted.”

She reveled in her husband’s glory that night. The next morning she said she wanted to go to Burlington, New Jersey, where she had placed the children in school. And she wanted him to go with her, as they had seen little of their father lately. “I wish I could,” he replied. “But I have promised Mr. Lincoln to go up this morning and with him see what can be done in reference to the reduction of the army.” She pleaded with him to change his mind. He said he would try to finish early in order to get away that evening. Just then a messenger arrived with a note for Grant from the president, who asked to postpone their interview till afternoon so he could see his son, Robert, just back from the front. Grant sighed to Julia that this would make it even more difficult for him to get out of Washington that day, but he said he would do his best. She should see to preparing their bags.

She was doing so, hours later, when another messenger arrived. Poorly dressed, in tattered coat, trousers and hat, he asked if she was Mrs. Grant. She nodded that she was. “Mrs. Lincoln sends me, madam, with her compliments, to say she will call for you exactly at eight o’clock to go the theater,” the messenger said. Julia remembered gazing at him coolly. “I replied with some feeling (not liking either the looks of the messenger or the message, thinking the former savored of discourtesy and the latter seemed like a command), ‘You may return with my compliments to Mrs. Lincoln and say I regret that as General Grant and I intend leaving the city this afternoon, we will not, therefore, be here to accompany the President and Mrs. Lincoln to the theater.’ ” The messenger reddened. “Madam, the papers announce that General Grant will be with the President tonight at the theater.” Julia was unmoved. “You may deliver my message to Mrs. Lincoln as I have given it to you. You may go now.”

She was still taking pleasure in her riposte when Grant, having completed his business, arrived in time for them to catch the evening train to Philadelphia. No bridge then spanned the Delaware, and they had to wait for the train ferry to transport them across. As Grant had not eaten since morning, they visited a restaurant, where he ordered oysters. His dish was being prepared when a telegraph boy hurried in with a message
from Washington. The message said that President Lincoln had been shot, perhaps fatally.

“
It would be impossible for me to describe the feeling that overcame me at the news,” Grant recalled. “I knew his goodness of heart, his generosity, his yielding disposition, his desire to have everybody happy, and above all his desire to see all the people of the United States enter again upon the full privileges of citizenship with equality among all.” Grant realized that if Lincoln died
Andrew Johnson would become president. He didn’t know Johnson well, but he had heard that Johnson bore a grudge against the leaders of the South. “I feared that his course towards them would be such as to repel and make them unwilling citizens, and if they became such they would remain so for a long while. I felt that reconstruction had been set back, no telling how far.”

Grant immediately summoned a special train to return him to the capital. But learning that it wouldn’t arrive for a few hours, he took Julia on to Burlington, only an hour away. He retraced his path to Philadelphia and rode through the night to Washington. In the morning he learned, with the rest of the capital, of Lincoln’s passing. “
The joy that I had witnessed among the people in the street and in public places in Washington when I left there had been turned to grief,” he recalled. “The city was in reality a city of mourning.”

I
t was also a city of fear. Lincoln’s assassin,
John Wilkes Booth, had organized a conspiracy that targeted Andrew Johnson and William Seward, besides Lincoln. The conspirator assigned to kill Johnson lost his nerve and didn’t attack the vice president, but Seward was assaulted in his bed and was stabbed nearly to death. Who else might be in danger was anyone’s guess in the hours and days that followed. And whether the attacks signaled a continuation of the war, by agents of the Confederate government or by diehard irregulars, was equally and frighteningly unclear.

Grant had to assume he was on the assassins’ list. Booth had read the notices announcing his presence in the box with Lincoln at
Ford’s Theater; the assassin must have been surprised not to find the victorious general there. Julia later convinced herself that the plotters had been watching her. She suspected, after the fact, that the unkempt messenger at her hotel room was in league with Booth, and she concluded that
some men sitting near her at lunch that day were planning her husband’s murder. On the night of the shooting
Charles Dana wrote Grant from the War Department warning him to be careful on the train ride back to Washington. “
Permit me to suggest to you to keep a close watch on all persons who come near you in the cars or otherwise,” Dana said. “Also that an engine be sent in front of the train to guard against anything being on the track.” Grant directed the Union commander at Baltimore to send a company of soldiers to meet his train and join him for the rest of the trip to Washington. The next day Grant received an unsigned note indicating that the precautions had been well taken. As Julia recalled the note, it read: “
General Grant, thank God, as I do, that you still live. It was your life that fell to my lot, and I followed you on the cars. Your car door was locked, and thus you escaped me, thank God!”

On arrival at the capital Grant sent orders to his generals in the field to tighten security. He told
Edward Ord at Richmond to arrest the mayor, city council and any paroled Confederate officers who hadn’t taken the oath of allegiance to the United States. “
Extreme rigor will have to be observed whilst assassination remains the order of the day with the rebels,” Grant said. When Ord replied that Lee and his staff were in the city and that to arrest them would risk reopening the rebellion, Grant rescinded the order but still urged Ord to keep close watch for assassins and saboteurs. Meanwhile he wrote Phil Sheridan to prepare to march again. Joe Johnston hadn’t surrendered and Grant aimed to ensure that he not escape Sherman, who was short of cavalry. “
I want you to get your cavalry in readiness to push south and make up this deficiency if it become necessary,” Grant told Sheridan.

I
t didn’t become necessary; Johnston surrendered to Sherman a short while later. Grant got the news directly from Sherman. “
I enclose herewith a copy of an agreement made this day between General
Joseph E. Johnston and myself, which, if approved by the President of the United States, will produce peace from the Potomac to the Rio Grande,” Sherman wrote proudly. Grant winced as he read these words, for Sherman had no authority to negotiate anything so sweeping. Sherman evidently had anticipated Grant’s objection, for he explained: “You will observe that it is an absolute submission of the enemy to the lawful authority of the United States, and disperses his armies absolutely, and the point to which I attach most importance is that the dispersion and disbandment
of these armies is done in such a manner as to prevent their breaking up into guerrilla bands.” Grant couldn’t dispute the importance of this accomplishment, which was the central issue at this stage of the conflict from a strictly military standpoint. His nightmare had been that the Confederate army would take to the hills and continue fighting a partisan campaign for months, even years. Yet he had to question, in light of his own experience in the Mississippi Valley, Sherman’s subsequent observation: “I know that all the men of substance in the South sincerely want peace.” And he wondered at Sherman’s conclusion: “I have no doubt that they will in the future be perfectly subordinate to the laws of the United States.”

Then he read the agreement itself, beginning with the most immediately operative clause: “The Confederate armies now in existence to be disbanded and conducted to their several State capitals, there to deposit their arms and public property in the State arsenal, and each officer and man to execute and file an agreement to cease from acts of war and to abide by the action of both State and Federal authority.” Grant shook his head. Sherman appeared to be allowing the Confederates to surrender to themselves. And a promise to abide by state and federal authority begged the question of what they would do when state authority clashed with federal—which had been the central issue of the whole war.

There was more, including “the recognition by the Executive of the United States of the several State governments on their officers and legislatures taking the oaths prescribed by the
Constitution of the United States.” Aside from the fact that the Constitution prescribed no oaths for state officials, Grant saw this clause as the primary deal breaker. Where did Sherman think he got the authority to commit the president to recognize the governments of the Confederate states? By Sherman’s interpretation, there was nothing to reconstruct; the old governments would remain in power.

And yet there was more: “a general amnesty, so far as the Executive of the United States can command, on condition of the disbandment of the Confederate armies, the distribution of the arms, and the resumption of peaceful pursuits by the officers and men hitherto composing said armies.” This provision of the surrender agreement and others would take effect upon approval by the responsible authorities on both sides.

Grant appreciated that Sherman’s outline for reconstruction followed the spirit of Lincoln’s plan for restoring the Southern states to their places in the Union. Leniency had informed Lincoln’s policy toward Louisiana
and other states brought under federal control during the war. And leniency had inspired his second inaugural address, in which he summoned the spirit of charity to bind the nation’s wounds.

But Grant also appreciated that Lincoln was dead, slain by a Southerner who knew nothing of charity and had no desire to bind the nation’s wounds. He appreciated that the death killed the chance of an easy reconstruction. Those in the North who wanted vengeance would receive it, or at least they would fight for it. Sherman’s agreement said nothing about slavery; at the very least the North would insist—rightly, Grant thought—that the South formally abjure the institution that had brought the conflict on.

He shook his head once more as he reread the letter and the agreement. He sympathized with Sherman in wanting to end the bloodletting. He understood Sherman’s desire to put military considerations above politics. He himself had desired the same thing throughout war. But the war was over, to all intents and purposes. And politics again prevailed.

He forwarded Sherman’s letter and agreement to Edwin Stanton. “
They are of such importance that I think immediate action should be taken on them, and that it should be done by the President, in council with his whole Cabinet,” Grant said.

Johnson and the cabinet convened that day and emphatically rejected Sherman’s agreement. Grant was summoned to the White House and directed to travel to North Carolina to take personal charge of Sherman’s army.

Grant didn’t tell Sherman he was coming. Security suggested not wiring ahead lest assassins intercept the telegram and waylay the Confederacy’s principal antagonist. Grant had another reason for discretion: he didn’t wish to embarrass Sherman. He reached Sherman’s camp at dawn; the two men repaired to Sherman’s headquarters for a confidential discussion. Grant told him the president had rejected his surrender agreement with Johnston. Sherman was to resume hostilities pending Johnston’s surrender on the same terms Grant had offered Lee—that is, surrender of Johnston’s army, with nothing said about broader political issues.

The hostilities did not resume, however. Johnston accepted the new terms on April 26. Grant left for Washington the next day without, Sherman believed, the country’s knowing that he had been in Carolina. “
I thought the matter was surely at an end,” Sherman recalled afterward.

H
e discovered his mistake upon the arrival of a copy of the
New York Times
, dated April 24. The paper printed a statement by Stanton that reflected humiliatingly on Sherman. It recounted the administration’s overwhelmingly negative response to Sherman’s initial peace agreement with Johnston. It explained that Grant had been sent to North Carolina to take charge of Sherman’s army. And it reproduced, with the specificity of a criminal indictment, Stanton’s reasons why Sherman’s agreement was insubordinate, wrongheaded and illegitimate: “
It was an exercise of authority not vested in General Sherman.… It was a practical acknowledgment of the rebel government.… It undertook to reestablish the rebel State governments, that had been overthrown at the sacrifice of many thousand loyal lives and an immense treasure, and placed arms and munitions of war in the hands of the rebels at their respective capitals, which might be used as soon as the armies of the United States were disbanded, and used to conquer and subdue the loyal States.… By the restoration of the rebel authority in their respective States, they would be enabled to reestablish slavery.” Adding personal insult to professional injury, Stanton asserted that Sherman was all but conspiring with Jefferson Davis in the Confederate president’s efforts to escape justice. Stanton reproduced a statement from a source in Richmond regarding Davis, his fellow Confederate officials and the gold they were reported to have spirited out of the city: “They hope, it is said, to make terms with General Sherman or some other Southern commander, by which they will be permitted, with their effects, including this gold plunder, to go to Mexico or Europe. Johnston’s negotiations look to this end.”