The Admiral and the Ambassador (4 page)

General Horace Porter during the Civil War.

Photo by Matthew Brady; National Archives, ARC identifier 529380 / local identifier 111-B-5276, item from record group 111, records of the Office of the Chief Signal Officer, 1860-1985

In April 1862 Porter was put in charge of ordnance for an attack on Fort Pulaski at the mouth of the Savannah River, which fell after a two-day bombardment. There the fight for the Carolinas bogged down, and in July Porter was ordered to assume command of the ordnance for the armies of Virginia under General George McClellan. “This is the greatest position a young man has ever held in this country,” Porter boasted in a July 24 letter to his father. “I am very much gratified, but I will have an immense amount of work.”

Porter's rise, though, was soon stymied by the politics and favoritism of McClellan's top command, and after the Battle of Antietam, Porter was transferred to Cincinnati and then Murfreesboro, Tennessee, where he was named chief of ordnance for the Army of the Cumberland, commanded by General William S. Rosecrans. Rosecrans was engaged in pursuing what he presumed to be rebels fleeing southward, and he became overextended. The rebels, under General Braxton Bragg, were actually regrouping, and
on September 19, 1863, they launched an unexpected counteroffensive, engaging the Union troops at Chickamauga, just over the Georgia state line from Chattanooga.

The thinly spread Union troops crumbled and began retreating northward in complete disarray. In the ghastly two-day battle, some thirty-five thousand men on both sides were killed or wounded. As the Union troops were retreating, and in their confusion at the risk of slaughter and the loss of critical artillery guns, Porter rallied some one hundred soldiers to defend a small hill. The ferocity of Porter's efforts fooled the Confederates into believing a much larger force was holding the hill, delaying their advance long enough for the other Union troops to retreat safely with their arms. By the time the retreat was complete, more than half of Porter's men had been killed or wounded; Porter himself suffered a slight hand wound from an exploding shell fragment. The coverage of the retreat had come at a high cost, but Porter's actions likely averted an exponentially higher number of deaths.

The poor progress of the war for the North led to a change in the top command. On October 17, 1863, General Ulysses S. Grant was put in charge of the Military Division of the Mississippi, which included the armies of the Ohio, Cumberland, and Tennessee. A week later, Grant was in Chattanooga, where Porter and the retreating troops had stopped to regroup. One evening Porter was summoned to the headquarters of General George H. Thomas, whom Grant had named to replace Rosecrans after the Chickamauga debacle. It had been raining for two days, and Thomas's quarters, a small one-story wooden house, had a single fireplace to ward off the chill. Porter entered and found the room filled with officers; a soaked and exhausted-looking man sat near the fire.

“He was carelessly dressed, and his uniform coat was unbuttoned and thrown back from his chest,” Porter would later recall.

He held a lighted cigar in his mouth, and sat in a stooping posture, with his head bent slightly forward. His clothes were wet, and his trousers and top-boots were splattered with mud. General Thomas approached this officer, and, turning to me and mentioning my name, said, “I want to present you to General Grant.” Thereupon the officer seated in the chair, without changing his position glanced up,
extended his arm to its full length, shook hands, and said in a low voice, and speaking slowly, “How do you do?” This was my first meeting with the man with whom I was destined afterward to spend so many of the most interesting years of my life.
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Porter was transferred to Washington in November 1863, but Grant intervened with a written request that Porter be reassigned to his staff. In the spring of 1864, Grant took charge of all the Union troops, and by May, Porter was at his side, where the young ordnance specialist would spend the rest of the war as one of the general's top aides. Wherever Grant went, Porter went, including Appomattox Court House in Virginia on April 9, 1865, when General Robert E. Lee signed the surrender papers. For years, Porter would keep in a small wooden box the nub of a pencil he claimed Lee had used that day to make some alterations to the agreement.
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In the months after the war, Porter continued to travel and work with Grant, and he became particularly useful as Grant was sought as a speaker across the northern states. Grant hated speechmaking. Porter, however, discovered that not only did he like it, but he was good at it as well, and so he was often put forward to deliver speeches in Grant's stead. When President Andrew Johnson, who assumed the office with Lincoln's assassination, appointed Grant acting secretary of war, Porter served as his assistant secretary of war. When Grant ran for president, Porter was part of his circle of political intimates and followed him into the White House as one of two personal secretaries.

Conducting a war and running a governmental bureaucracy were two very different things, and the Grant administration was rife with corruption, partly a function of Grant's deep loyalty to friends and aides, which made him slow to respond to reports of malfeasance. Porter was drawn into two of the scandals through accusations by some of the participants, but no credible evidence of wrongdoing ever surfaced.

Still, the experience scarred Porter and left him ambivalent about continuing a career in Washington politics. A man with a knack for making friends and organizing public events, Porter left government work at the
end of Grant's first term in 1873 for the third chapter of his life: making money. He was hired at a salary of $10,000 a year as the New York—based vice president for the Pullman Company and traveled to Europe in 1877 to try to expand the market for the luxury passenger train cars. He met with limited success. Most of his work, though, centered on New York and the East Coast train routes (he paid one ineffective visit to Chicago during the infamous 1894 Pullman strike, hoping to talk the workers into returning to their jobs). While still working for Pullman, he became involved with other rail businesses—some successful, some not—and his wealth grew.
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Porter maintained his position with Pullman until 1896, when the company decided to close down the New York office. By then, Porter had cemented his position among the Manhattan industrialists, capitalists, and high society. Porter had married Sophie McHarg on December 23, 1863, during his Washington, DC, assignment with the Union Army. Their first child, Horace M., was born in October, followed by Clarence in 1871, William in 1878—he died shortly afterward—and Elsie in 1879. The family was part of the Manhattan society circles, and Porter and Sophie were mentioned regularly in newspaper columns, either attending or hosting different luncheons and galas. They bought a summer place in Long Branch, New Jersey, then a popular getaway spot for wealthy Manhattanites. It also became the site of the Porter family burials, and in September 1890 son Horace M. joined his brother, William, in the family plot. Typhoid had stricken the second son just months after his wedding, and less than two years after his graduation from Princeton University. “It was after Horace's funeral,” Elsie wrote, “that I noticed gray hairs over my father's temples and lines in his forehead that I had never seen before. Horace was his idol; he represented everything that a proud father could wish for in a son…. The day of the death marked the end of a chapter in my father's life. He seemed to age ten years.”
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Porter returned part-time to writing after the closing of the Pullman office freed him of the time commitments that went with that job. The former general had earlier published a few articles, including one about Lincoln and Grant that appeared in
Century
magazine in October 1885, three months after Grant's death. This was followed by another piece on the end of the Civil War and the now-famous surrender scene at Appomattox Court
House. But then he laid down his pen. After he left Pullman, though, Porter returned with a series of articles that began running in the fall of 1896 in the
Century
recalling his experiences as Grant's aide.

Porter was apparently pleased with the articles: He sent a letter to the magazine setting up gift subscriptions for his wife, his daughter-in-law, his surviving son, his neighbor Cornelius Bliss, his old friend General Edward F. Winslow in Paris, and Mark Hanna's wife in Cleveland.
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Porter then rewrote and expanded the articles into a book, published in December 1897,
Campaigning with Grant,
best read as both a loyal subordinate's close-up view of Grant in the latter stages of the war and a companion to Grant's own memoirs.

Porter also was active in the growing world of patriotic societies, serving five years as the third president of the national Sons of the American Revolution, which came together in 1889 to mark the centennial of the US Constitution. (Porter was eligible as the grandson of Andrew Porter.) He was a familiar face at gatherings of the New York chapters of the Grand Army of the Republic and the Military Order of the Loyal Legion. He also served as president of the highly influential Union Club of New York and was a member of at least seven other organizations, including the Century Association, the Down Town Association, the Grolier Club, and the University Club.
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Porter's oratorical skills kept him in demand as a speaker at formal dinners and Republican Party political functions. In 1892, during the party's presidential nominating convention in Minneapolis, Porter had delivered the second nominating speech backing his friend, New York editor Whitelaw Reid, as President Benjamin Harrison's running mate. (They lost.)

By the summer of 1896, Porter had become deeply involved in the looming presidential campaign. There was even some talk, which quickly went away, of Porter as a possible vice presidential candidate.
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For Porter, the campaign was partly an effort to help an old friend, McKinley, whom Porter had first met while the two men were soldiers in the Civil War. The summer before, Porter had hosted a dinner for McKinley at his Madison Avenue home, and the guest list included some of the biggest New York City names in the Republican Party: Porter's neighbor and mutual McKinley friend Cornelius Bliss, Elihu Root, Mayor William Strong,
Chauncey Depew, Theodore Roosevelt, and Cornelius Vanderbilt among them. (Thomas Platt, the autocratic head of the New York state Republican machine, was notably not invited.)
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Porter also was a loyal party man and eager to see the Republicans' pro-business policies become federal government policies. Porter and Bliss, a dry goods magnate, took over the Auxiliary Committee, which was the finance arm of the Republican National Committee. Beginning in August, they used an intricate scheme of distributing “subscription” books to fellow Republicans prominent in different businesses, who in turn used them to record donations from their colleagues and competitors. This early version of “bundling” was hugely successful. Most of the money was used to create and distribute policy books and pamphlets, as well as humanizing portraits of the taciturn McKinley and his wife, Ida, who suffered from epilepsy. One of the campaign bios emphasized that her frailty emerged following the deaths of her mother and two infant daughters, an effort to counter planted rumors that she was “an English spy, a mulatto, a Catholic, a battered wife, or a lunatic.” McKinley similarly was targeted by whisper campaigns that he “was a common drunkard, an agent of the pope, a swindler.”
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But the driving campaign issues were the economy and American monetary policy.
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In 1893 the financial system had been staggered by a series of bank failures tied to the collapse of a number of railroad companies following a massive and highly competitive buildup. It was the worst American economic depression prior to the Great Depression, and as in that later decade of hardship, there were few safety nets. When jobs dried up and farm prices plummeted, people starved. Incumbent Democratic president Grover Cleveland was on the losing end of a split within his party over protective tariffs aimed at shoring up American businesses, and for most voters, Cleveland became the face of the depression. After losing 113 seats in the House of Representatives in the 1894 midterm election, the party abandoned Cleveland for William Jennings Bryan, and the rotund president became something of a recluse, rarely leaving the White House, which he had ringed with guards.
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In the weeks running up to Election Day, Bryan's campaign began faltering, due in no small part to the funding disparity. The Democrats had raised only about $300,000 for Bryan's campaign, and the candidate often
could be seen lugging his own suitcase through train stations. The Republicans, under Hanna's direction and with Porter's work in New York City, raised about $3.4 million. And Porter achieved that despite being outside New York's Republican political machine, controlled by Platt, who had tried to derail McKinley's campaign at the party convention so that he and other powerbrokers could handpick a presumably beholden candidate. But by the final weeks of the campaign, Platt and the internal GOP fighting had faded into irrelevance.