The Man Who Saved the Union (95 page)

F
itz John Porter had graduated from West Point two years behind Grant and served alongside him in the war with Mexico. He remained in the army during the 1850s and won command of a division and then
a corps of the
Army of the Potomac. At the
second battle of Bull Run he refused an attack order from
John Pope on grounds that the recent arrival of
James Longstreet’s Confederate force rendered an attack suicidal and counterproductive. Pope, embarrassed by the Union defeat in the battle, blamed Porter, who was arrested, court-martialed and convicted.

Grant had observed the proceedings from the banks of the Mississippi. By the time he took command of the army the case was forgotten, except by Porter, who spent the decade after the war struggling to have his reputation restored. Grant reviewed the matter while general-in-chief and again as president but saw no reason to reopen the case or overturn the verdict.

Yet Porter persisted, and after Grant returned from his world tour Porter sent him the evidence he had amassed in his favor. Grant examined the material and concluded that Porter indeed had been unjustly convicted. “
The reading of the whole of this record has thoroughly convinced me that for these nineteen years I have been doing a gallant and efficient soldier a very great injustice in thought and sometimes in speech,” he wrote President Arthur. “I feel it incumbent upon me now to do whatever lies in my power to remove from him and from his family the stain upon his good name.” He published a detailed article on the Porter case in the
North American Review
. The article carried the title “
An Undeserved Stigma” and included the arguments of the prosecution, which Grant proceeded to dismantle. “A literal obedience to the order of the 27th of August”—the crucial directive—“was a physical impossibility,” Grant declared. Porter was a good soldier who had been “grossly wronged.”

Grant’s reversal won him the gratitude of Porter and the respect of many who knew the case only by reputation. “
The undersigned, once soldiers under your command, desire to express their hearty and grateful thanks for your recent paper in vindication of General Fitz John Porter,” a group of Boston veterans wrote Grant. “They feel that no act, whether of valor or of policy, which has marked your great career should bring you more honor than the moral courage and the spirit of fairness and justice exhibited in this defense of a gallant Union soldier condemned on insufficient or mistaken evidence.” Though Arthur’s attorney general determined that the verdict of the Porter court-martial could not be overturned so long past the fact, the president commuted the remaining part of his sentence, his disability from holding public office.

James Longstreet wrote Grant as well. After the war he and Grant
had resumed the acquaintance secession had suspended, and they exchanged notes on various battles and aspects of the war. Longstreet read Grant’s Porter article and sent a letter saying that Porter and, belatedly, Grant were right. “
As you state, it was not possible for Porter to attack under the 4:30 order, the failure to do which was alleged to be his high crime,” Longstreet told Grant. Had Porter tried to attack, he would have played directly into Confederate hands. “He would have given us the opportunity that we were so earnestly seeking all of that day, and in the disjointed condition of their army”—the Union army—“on that day, the result might have been more serious than that of the next day”—when the Confederates won in a rout. Longstreet explained that in making that next-day attack, he had exceeded his own orders, reinterpreting them to suit changed circumstances, much as Porter had reinterpreted
his
orders. But because the Confederate side won, he was accounted self-confident rather than insubordinate. “Soon after this campaign I was promoted and assigned as Senior Lieutenant General of the Confederate Army,” Longstreet said. Such were the fortunes of war.

A
t 8:15 on the morning of June 29, 1882, the commuter express train of the New Jersey Central pulled out of Long Branch for its seventy-minute run to Jersey City, where the bankers, brokers and merchants aboard would transfer to the Hudson ferry to Manhattan. The business crowd regularly pressed the railroad and its crew to make better time, that they might get to their offices earlier. The train was traveling forty miles per hour as the locomotive approached a newly installed switch at the southern end of a trestle over Parker’s Creek, a tidewater arm of the Shrewsbury River. Witnesses later said that the locomotive and the first six cars of the train got safely past the switch but the final car jumped the track, lurched to the side and dragged several of the cars ahead of it into the creek.

Grant was sitting in the smoker car, third from the locomotive. About forty passengers, all men, were enjoying their cigars and the morning papers. The other cars contained some 150 passengers. Grant’s car and the others came to rest on their sides in the water of the creek, which somewhat cushioned the blow of the crash. Yet water rushed in through the shattered windows of the cars, and the passengers had to clamber out as best they could. Three didn’t make it and drowned in the brackish water. Grant received a cut on his leg but climbed through the
window on what was now the skyward side of the smoking car. “
He had lost his hat but still had his morning’s cigar between his teeth,” a reporter swift to the scene related. Authorities and the railroad determined that the cause of the accident was improper installation of the new switch; participants and observers agreed that, considering the velocity of the train and the number of passengers, the casualty count—seventy injured beyond the three fatalities—was thankfully light.

85

T
HE NATION KNEW OF
G
RANT’S COMMUTES AND OTHER MOVEMENTS
not least because the papers regularly published articles under the headline “General Grant’s Movements.” Americans learned that President
Arthur hosted Grant and Julia for a state dinner at the White House in January 1883. They read weeks later that he had testified before the Senate on behalf of a treaty reducing tariffs between the United States and
Mexico. They followed him on a summer trip to the Pacific Northwest when the Northern Pacific completed the third transcontinental line—after the Union Pacific–
Central Pacific and the Southern Pacific—and Grant joined a group of notables for a test of the new road. They winced during the Christmas holidays when he slipped on an icy curb in front of his house on New York’s East Sixty-sixth Street and badly bruised the leg he had injured during the war.

Though he denied interest in a return to public life—“
I have washed my hands of politics,” he told an interviewer—a national poll placed him among the frontrunners for the
1884 nomination. He showed especially well among Southern Republicans, who still influenced their party’s nomination process despite having scant luck in
elections. Republicans of both races in Dixie recalled how he had come to their aid when the rest of the party was willing to give them up for politically dead. “
There is no man on either side who fills the public eye as Grant did in 1868, 1872, and
1880,” a poll respondent wrote from Raleigh. The chief concern of this man and others was whether their hero wanted the nomination. “If Grant was known to be a candidate, there would be but one opinion in this state,” the North Carolina man wrote of his fellow Republicans.

O
f Grant’s three sons Buck seemed to have the most promising financial future. He had taken work with a New York law firm with close ties to Wall Street. Professionally he preferred Ulysses Jr. to Buck, and his famous name attracted the attention of potential business associates, among whom
Ferdinand Ward cut the most striking figure. Ward was about Buck’s age and as charming as a young man could be. Older men wished to be his father, young women to be his wife. The wishes of one of each came to pass when he married the daughter of an officer of the
Marine National Bank. The union seemed a splendid match and gave Ward entrée to the highest echelons of Wall Street influence. Buck Grant had begun to handle some of his father’s finances, as well as money held in trust for other clients; Ward invited him to invest in ventures he knew to be sure winners on the basis of information not widely shared. Buck did so, the ventures paid handsomely and Ward seemed a genius. When Ward proposed that the two open a firm together, Buck considered himself very lucky.
Grant & Ward leased offices at 2 Wall Street and commenced an active business.
Bradstreet, the rating agency, bestowed its “gilt-edged” seal of approval on the firm;
James Fish, the president of Marine Bank, extended an open line of credit.

Buck’s father was proud of the boy, concluding that while the Grant family’s talent for business might have skipped over him, it had landed squarely on Buck. Grant was pleased to become a nonmanaging partner in Grant & Ward, investing his entire liquid capital of $100,000. He refused to countenance dealing in government contracts, as that would seem to be trading on his position as former president, but he otherwise let Ward use his name in developing the business. “
I am willing that Mr. Ward should derive what profit he can for the firm that the use of my name and influence may bring,” Grant wrote James Fish, who had become a partner as well.

The firm’s business boomed. The economy as a whole was rebounding from the depression of the 1870s and Grant & Ward benefited from the bounce. Its ledger books showed profits of double and triple digits, which Ward as directing partner put back into the business. His private life seemed a model of moral and ethical regularity; he had no vices and his only excess, if such it could be called, was a driving ambition to emulate the giants of Wall Street. “
It is my plan to build up a great firm
that shall live after Grant and Ward, its founders, have passed away,” he said.

Grant reveled in the good fortune that had finally blessed his economic endeavors. “
We are much better off than ever we were before,” he wrote Nellie. “The family are enjoying as much prosperity as we ought to expect.” His balance with Grant & Ward grew larger each month; he withdrew modest amounts for living expenses but reinvested the remainder, and the compounding interest swelled his balance the more. By the spring of 1884 he silently congratulated himself on being
almost a millionaire.

The first sign that anything was amiss came on a Sunday afternoon in May. Ward paid a visit to the Grant household, where Buck and his wife were living with Grant and Julia. Ward took father and son aside and said that Marine Bank, which handled some of Grant & Ward’s accounts, was suffering short-term liquidity problems. Marine needed an emergency bridge loan.

Buck knew that Grant & Ward had more than $700,000 deposited with Marine. He asked if the bank was good for that amount. Ward said it was, but if word got out that Marine was in trouble, the spillover effect could damage Grant & Ward. Neither Buck nor Grant had any reason to doubt Ward, and when Ward inquired if Grant could raise $150,000 quickly, the general was disposed to try. Ward asked if Grant knew
William Vanderbilt; Grant acknowledged that he did. Could he ask the railroad magnate for a loan? Grant supposed he could. Grant drove to Vanderbilt’s house and related the story Ward had told him. Vanderbilt said he cared nothing for Marine Bank and little more for Grant & Ward, but he respected and admired Grant and would give him the money as a personal loan.

Grant handed Vanderbilt’s check to Ward, and briefly all seemed to be well. But Marine Bank’s troubles proved to be deeper than Ward had let on, and two days later the bank was forced to close its doors. Almost immediately Grant & Ward suspended operations too, as it became known that Ward and Marine president James Fish had speculated heavily in real estate and lost. Ward disappeared and Fish refused to come out of his office. The financial community shuddered, fearing a repetition of the
panic of 1873. But
Jay Gould, by now the acknowledged sage of Wall Street, shrugged his shoulders and said the failed companies weren’t important enough to cause wide worry. The business of the street proceeded almost as usual.

Yet the
Grant name evoked interest, and the nation watched to see the response of the famous silent partner. “
General Grant was informed of the difficulties of the firm early in the day,” the
New York Times
reported. “He reached the firm’s office about noon and remained in the private office until 2 o’clock, when he stepped into a carriage and was driven home. He was as calm as usual, but declined to talk about the trouble.” Grant’s supporters wanted to lend a hand. “Many offers of aid were made to the ex-President, but he said that he did not feel at liberty to accept any of them.”

Explaining and resolving the firm’s failure took months. As examiners and prosecutors scrutinized the books they discovered that Ward had been cheating for years. The high returns were illusory, artifacts of an unsustainable pyramid scheme. Ward was tried for grand larceny, found guilty and sentenced to ten years’ hard labor at Sing Sing prison.

T
he verdict and sentence presumably satisfied public demands for accountability in the case, but they did nothing for Grant financially. After decades of striving to achieve material security, he was worse off financially than on the day he had left home for West Point. “
The Grant family is ruined,” he wrote a longtime friend. He wasn’t merely penniless; he was deeply in debt. The $100,000 he had invested in Grant & Ward was gone, and so too the $150,000 he had borrowed from Vanderbilt. The second amount he considered a debt of honor, to be paid whatever the sacrifice. He sold some of his and Julia’s property and deeded much of the rest to Vanderbilt, to whom he also handed over the various presents and souvenirs he had brought back from his world tour, along with ceremonial swords and other mementos given him by his American admirers. Vanderbilt didn’t need the money and tried to forgive the debt, but Grant wouldn’t hear of it.

In his desolation in the 1850s he had lamented that “poverty, poverty” stared him in the face; he felt its icy gaze again. He tried to maintain the appearance he considered necessary for one who had been president of the United States, but he had trouble simply meeting the expenses of his household. Merchants with whom he and Julia did daily business had to wait to be paid, until they learned to insist on cash. He and she cut corners where they could and worried where they couldn’t.