The Man Who Saved the Union (79 page)

A
GAINST ANY PREVIOUS EXPECTATION
, G
RANT FOUND HIMSELF DURING
the summer of 1873 conducting a detailed correspondence with a member of the British gentry and parliament. The communication was unrelated to the settlement of the
Alabama
claims, though that result made writing
Edward John Sartoris easier for the president than it would have been had the Civil War troubles still roiled Anglo-American diplomacy. The correspondence, rather, involved Grant’s daughter, Ellen, who had taken a cruise to Europe with family friends and met Sartoris’s son, Algernon. “
Much to my astonishment an attachment seems to have sprung up between the two young people,” Grant wrote the elder Sartoris. “To my astonishment because I had only looked upon my daughter as a child, with a good home which I did not think of her wishing to quit for years yet. She is my only daughter and I therefore feel a double interest in her welfare.” Nellie had just turned eighteen; this was her first experience of love. “You must excuse therefore the solicitude I entertain in her behalf, and also the enquiries I make as to the habits, character and prospects of the one upon whom she seems to have bestowed her affections.”

Patriotism joined paternalism in causing Grant to raise a sensitive issue with Algernon’s father. “It would be with the greatest regret that I would see Nellie quit the United States as a permanent home. It is a country of great extent of territory, of fertility, and of great future promise. Its people have lavished upon me and mine great honors. Its institutions and people I love. During my life my desire is to see my children, and my children’s children, remain honored and respected citizens of it. May I ask you therefore in all candor, and strictly confidentially, to state
to me whether your son expects to become a citizen of the United States? And what have been his habits? And what are his business qualifications?”

Grant conceded the delicacy of these questions. But he said he would eagerly provide answers were the situation reversed. He offered certain answers unprompted. “I must state with equal candor that my circumstances are not such as to enable me to do much for my children beyond educating them, having but little income beyond the salary of an office necessarily limited to but a few years’ duration.”

Grant didn’t want Nellie to know he was writing. “May I ask you to keep this letter strictly confidential, and to attribute any apparent bluntness to a father’s anxiety for the welfare and happiness of an only and much loved daughter?”

Sartoris’s reply didn’t survive to enter the historical record. But Grant’s efforts to get Algernon to relocate to America had an effect. The young man purchased property in Michigan and took steps toward acquiring American citizenship.

But then his older brother died and he fell heir to the family’s large estate in the south of England. This altered Grant’s thinking, for he had to admit that if Nellie loved Algernon, as she evidently did, there was no sense in her rejecting such material security as he could now provide. And with Nellie saying she would go to the ends of the earth to be with him, Grant decided he couldn’t and shouldn’t stop her from going to England.

Julia had her own recollection of the engagement. “
When Nellie came back to me,” she wrote in her memoir, referring to the trip on which Nellie had met Algernon, “she was no longer a nestling, but a young woman equipped and ready—ah, too ready—for the battle of life.” Nellie’s decision to follow Algernon to England came as a shock. “This nearly broke my heart,” Julia recalled, “and I ventured to remonstrate by saying to her: ‘Nellie, is it possible you are willing to leave your father and me, who have loved and cherished you all of your life, and go with this stranger for
always
?’ She looked up sweetly and, smiling, said: ‘Why, yes, mamma. I am sure that is just what you did when you married papa and left grandpa.’ ”

J
ulia’s protest was largely for effect. That her daughter was engaged to an English aristocrat tickled the vanity she had indulged since her
husband’s rise to fame. She loved being the First Lady of the land, the center of social life in the capital. “
The President’s levees always seemed brilliant to me,” she recalled. “The senators and representatives with their families, the diplomatic corps and their families, always in full dress, officers of the army and navy in full uniform, all of the society people of Washington in full dress, made a gay and brilliant gathering.” From the distance of decades and the perspective of foreign travel, she judged, “I have visited many courts and, I am proud to say, I saw none that excelled in brilliancy the receptions of President Grant.”

Daily life in the White House was more mundane. Julia was accustomed to servants, but until recently hers had been slaves, with no choice about where they worked or what they did. On the other hand, hired servants were cheaper to replace than slaves. “
The servants I had in my home were thoroughly demoralized,” she said of the staff she brought to the president’s house. The Johnsons had not been good caretakers of the Executive Mansion, which Julia pronounced to be in a condition of “utter confusion.” The servants were overwhelmed. “Perhaps they thought they were incapable of doing the work in the White House. I was forced to let most of them go.”

She likewise let go of certain traditions linked to her new home. “
I was somewhat annoyed by the fact that the grounds back of the Mansion were open to the public,” she related. “Nellie and Jess, the latter just learning to ride on a velocipede, had no place to play, and I no place to walk save on the streets. Whenever we entered these grounds, we were followed by a crowd of idle, curious loungers, which was anything but pleasant.” She asked Grant if the grounds were public property. He said that they were not, at least in the sense of being necessarily open to the public. She asked if he might order the gates closed and the public kept out. He said he would, and he did. “Of course a ripple of comment followed: ‘The Grants are getting a little too exclusive,’ ” she recalled. “But the children and I had that beautiful lawn for eight years, and I assure you we enjoyed it.”

In truth the children were only occasional residents of the White House. Julia’s aging father joined her and Grant in the mansion, but the children spent academic years at boarding schools and much of their summers at the cottage Grant purchased for the family in Long Branch. The older children became adults during their father’s presidency, with Nellie being merely the third out of the nest. Fred graduated from West Point and was assigned to accompany William Sherman when the general
made a tour of Europe. Sherman’s purpose was to show the American flag and register America’s interest in the affairs of the continent; Fred’s purpose was to see the world. “
The papers make the most of Prince Fred,” Sherman wrote his wife. “He is a good fellow but cares for little. He went to see his aunt at Copenhagen and joined me at Berlin, but asked to stay a few days more, and at the time he was to join me, he wrote that he would go to Paris to see Nellie and would rejoin me at Geneva or Paris.… I go on my course utterly regardless of him, and don’t want anyone to find fault with General Grant for sending him with me, as I know Mrs. Grant did it, and of course she did it as a mother, thinking herself very smart to catch the chance.” Sherman was somewhat more tactful in his letters to Grant. “
I hope Fred has kept you advised of matters most interesting to himself, though I fear he has not,” he wrote from Sevastopol. “He is perfectly well, and will profit much by his experience and observations on this trip.” From St. Petersburg Sherman wrote of the journey’s value and its cost. “
We certainly have had a most interesting and instructive trip, seeing much and hearing much, but the greatest advantage will be that hereafter we can understand history, and events as they transpire. Expenses in
Russia are heavy, and this cause may force us to hurry, for in spite of disclaimers I am treated as a commanding general and Fred as a sort of prince. Hotel charges and railway charges are made to correspond.”

Ulysses Jr.—Buck—entered Harvard with the class of 1874. He saw his parents on college vacations but, like Fred and Nellie, made use of family connections to travel to Europe and other enticing spots. Jesse spent the most time of the children with his mother and father, and as the youngest he brought the frankness and insouciance of youth to their lives. When Grant learned that
Edwin Stanton had fallen gravely ill, he paid the former war secretary a visit and took Jesse along. “
Oh, mamma!” the boy exclaimed on returning to the White House. “Mr. Stanton looked so badly when we went in—just like a dead man!” When his father tried to insist that Jesse come to breakfast on time, saying that as a boy he himself had had to feed several horses and chop wood each morning before breakfast, Jesse replied: “
Oh, yes, but you did not have such a papa as I have.”

G
rant’s own father remained a complicated topic with him. In the summer of 1873, just as he learned he might be losing Nellie to marriage,
Grant lost his father to death. The end came as no surprise, since the older man had been declining. “
He expressed himself to friends, for several weeks before his death, as entirely resigned, and did not hope for, or wish, strength to hold out longer, saying that he had reached a ripe old age without pain or sickness,” Grant wrote a friend after attending the funeral. “He had been so long gradually failing that my mother and sister, who were with him, had discounted his death in advance so that they did not grieve as they would have done for one who had suddenly sickened and died or for one who was not entirely resigned to his fate.”

Grant wrote little more about his feelings upon his father’s death. He must have reflected on the many difficulties in their relationship and on how, after four decades of disappointing his father, he had finally earned the old man’s respect. For whatever it revealed of his thoughts and feelings about his father, his hand slipped while drafting the letter just quoted. Before corrections, the last line initially asserted of his mother and sister that “they did not grieve as they would have done for me who had suddenly sickened and died or for me who was not entirely resigned to his fate.”

D
eath elicits notice of time’s fleeting nature, and it reminded Grant that he wouldn’t be president forever. His first-term salary of $25,000—the same as
George Washington would have received had he not refused pay—was increased to $50,000 in 1873, placing him in the top few percent of earners in the country. But the moment he left the White House he would be off the government’s payroll and required to fend for himself. He had never possessed his father’s knack for commerce; farming was the only enterprise he contemplated with anything like pleasure. During his first term he purchased a farm outside St. Louis and hired a manager,
William Elrod, to direct operations in his absence. The appointment proved less than ideal. “
You spoke of mixing lime with manure before putting it upon the ground!” Grant remonstrated to Elrod in the summer of 1871. “That will not do. Lime and manure should not be used at the same time. The lime would release the ammonia, the most valuable ingredient, from the manure.” Elrod kept sloppy accounts and wrote Grant less often than Grant thought he should. “Let me hear all the news from the farm: how many cows, calves, colts, etc.,” Grant insisted. “I like to hear particulars.”

Grant aimed to make the farm as self-sufficient as possible. “
I send you $600
to pay for a lime kiln,” he wrote Elrod. “Build a good-sized one, and where another can be joined to it if it is desirable hereafter.” He explained how the kiln should be fueled: “
I do not want any land cleared to get wood to burn lime with. My idea was that all the dead and down timber on the place might be cut up, and the woods thinned out all over the place so as to leave the timber about the right thickness to grow. After that is gone, wood might be purchased or the kiln changed to use coal.”

Grant sent instructions on cattle breeding. “
I engaged a thoroughbred Alderney bull calf in the East which will be sent out to you this fall,” he told Elrod in October 1871. “He will do for service in the spring. You may then sell or kill the bull you now have.… Alderney bulls are so vicious when they get old that it is best to dispose of them as soon as they are three.”

Horses had been Grant’s fancy since youth, and so they remained. “
You had better purchase a pair of large strong mares,” he wrote Elrod in the spring of 1872. “They could be put to the horse and still do full work this year. If all should breed then next year more would have to be bought, but it is not likely that all will.” Grant bred trotters for the racetrack and for his personal use. “If you think proper, take out a license and stand young Hambletonian on the farm this spring. I would not have him go to exceed fifteen or twenty mares, besides mine, and would set the price at $30 the season for this year, pasturage extra.” Fred Grant visited the farm in early 1873 and sent welcome news. “
Fred tells me that the two oldest colts of Topsey will make good matches, and that both promise to be fast!” Grant wrote Elrod. “If so I will probably have them, with Jennie’s colt, brought east in the spring.”

Grant’s hopes for the farm grew despite Elrod’s dubious performance.
Charles Ford oversaw Grant’s affairs in Missouri and consulted regarding the farm. “
I telegraphed you to draw on me for money to settle up everything,” Grant wrote Ford. “I want the program you laid out executed: that is, I want the twenty outside box stalls, the additional box stalls inside, windows in front of the stalls, cracks battened, and everything put in first rate order about the barn. I want every debt and encumbrance on the place lifted, and want the training track made.… I want my stallions driven, and also the colts as they become old enough. I would like also to have the stallions prepared for the fair, together with a suckling, a yearling, and a two-year-old colt of Hambletonian. If Elrod is scarce of horsepower to run the farm I think it will be well to purchase for him two large mares and let him breed them. They could do full work
this year, and by next spring I expect to send twelve or fifteen mares from the East.”