Chapter 20:
Grant in society.
Grant was a plain man, but those are greatly mistaken who suppose that he was a common one. His early life he has himself described as that of plain people at the West fifty or sixty years ago. He received, however, the advantages of West Point and its associations, and officers of the army in those days were considered eligible to any company. At St. Louis he married into a family that held itself as high as any in the old society of that semi-Southern city; a society which was undoubtedly at that time provincial and narrow; its members had seen or known little of any world but their own, but the feeling they had that their position was equal to any gave them a certain distinction of bearing that nothing else could confer. It was not a highly educated society, and resembled in some points the squirearchy of England that Macaulay describes; elevated in feeling though contracted in acquirement, and if over-conscious of its own consequence, nevertheless never meeting anybody of more consequence than its own members. In this circle Grant obtained a knowledge of the sentiments and prejudices that are by some supposed to be characteristic only of gentlemen. Many of these he shared by nature, others he acquired, but others he always repudiated.He was, as all the world knows, simple in his tastes and habits, and at one time unacquainted with many of the etiquettes and requirements of an artificial society; not a few of which, indeed, he disliked after he became familiar with [171] them. Forms and ceremonies were always distasteful to him, and though he complied with such as his position rendered unavoidable, he escaped from them in private as speedily and as effectually as possible. But the very simplicity of taste and feeling, the plainness of manner that he preserved in his extraordinary elevation, were proof of a native and genuine refinement.
When he arrived at the capital to receive the command of the armies he was shy and reserved in general company: of course never timid, but he was aware of his deficiencies in social knowledge, and the consciousness made him constrained and sometimes awkward under the honors and congratulations that were heaped upon him. But this very awkwardness in the Conqueror of Vicksburg had a certain charm. It indicated an absence of conceit, a lack of pretence, and a modesty almost unexampled in a man of his achievements, and showed how sweet and gentle a nature lay beneath the sterner qualities which had won his battles and his fame.
He always desired, however, to conform to the requirements of whatever place he was called upon to fill, and was now quite willing to perform his social duties. I accompanied Mrs. Grant when she made her first visit to the White House, over which she was afterward to preside, and General Grant was greatly pleased to have the visit paid. It was at an afternoon reception held by Mrs. Lincoln, and Lincoln himself was present. The President had never met Mrs. Grant, and at first he did not hear her name; he was allowing her to pass with the customary bow that every one receives, but I repeated, ‘Mrs. General Grant, Mr. President’; and the tall, ungainly man looked down upon his visitor with infinite kindness beaming from his ugly, historic face; then placed both his hands on Mrs. Grant's and welcomed her more than warmly. He asked about the General, and himself presented her to Mrs. Lincoln. The [172] mistress of the White House was also gracious; she invited Mrs. Grant to visit the conservatories, and desired me to show them to the lady who was destined herself to dispense the courtesies of the nation in the same Executive Chamber. On our way out several great political women seemed inclined to patronize the Western General's wife; not, of course, offensively, but still they acted as they would hardly have behaved among or toward themselves. But Mrs. Grant at once detected the suggestion of superiority in their courtesies, and asserted herself delicately but skillfully. When they wanted to introduce fine ladies to her in the lobbies of the White House, she regretted that her carriage was waiting, but she would be happy to receive the ladies at her hotel; and when they offered seats in their boxes at the play, evidently in order to be seen with the wife of the General-in-Chief, she politely indicated that a box had already been secured for her; and for this she afterward selected her own company.
Her influence, of course, affected her great husband. He had constantly the suggestions of a woman who understood other women, and who knew instinctively what would be said of him and to him, as well as what she wanted him to say and do in return. Naturally she was anxious about the appearance he made in what is called ‘society.’ He had been ushered all at once into the most distinguished and exacting circles; he would be watched and criticized as well as welcomed and admired; and with a feminine insight she comprehended both the petty craft and the important ambitions that underlie so many of the ceremonies of official life at Washington as well as in aristocratic capitals. When Grant was overmodest, or willing to let himself be passed by, there was always the mentor to caution and urge and stimulate and advise; and sometimes the mentor was needed.
I recall an instance in which I contended for a while [173] against Mrs. Sprague, the daughter of Chief-Justice Chase. Everybody in Washington, Cabinet Ministers, foreign envoys, Senators, even the Judges of the Supreme Court, hurried to call on General Grant after his brilliant successes in the war; the ordinary Washington etiquette of visiting was broken down for him. But the Chief-Justice did not call. He considered himself the second person in the country, the next after the President in position, as under ordinary circumstances he certainly would have been. Besides this he was an aspirant for the Presidency and unwilling to admit Grant's precedence in any way. Mrs. Sprague spoke to me of the matter at a dance at General Grant's house. She, as a Senator's wife, had called upon Mrs. Grant, but she thought General Grant should call on the Chief-Justice. I, however, tried hard to keep the General from paying the first visit. Like all staff officers I magnified the consequence of my chief, and I was younger then and had not seen the preposterous regard for precedence at European courts; perhaps in such matters I was not so good a democrat as studying a real aristocracy has made me since. At any rate I put every obstacle in the way of the visit. But one afternoon General Grant was driving and stopped to call on the Chief-Justice. The visit was instantly returned, and the General and Mrs. Grant were asked to dinner; so Mrs. Sprague triumphed. I always suspected that the General made the visit with malice prepense, for he often used to say, ‘Badeau, you think too much of these things,’ and he would pretend to scold. Once or twice he was in earnest when he thought matters were carried too far.
Nevertheless he conformed to many observances which at first he had found irksome as well as unusual. It was some little time before he consented to wear an evening coat, and the white tie especially was a disagreeable novelty. But he soon discovered that he made himself more conspicuous by avoiding the dress that others wore than by adopting [174] it; and when he ascertained the importance attributed to visits in the official and high political world in which he lived, he became anxious that they should be paid and returned punctiliously. In time it was he who urged Mrs. Grant to make her calls, and those who did not know would hardly believe how particular he grew about placing people at dinner. Not that he regarded these points as important, but others did, whom he was unwilling to neglect or to offend.
So too about his parties. He was always willing to open his house, and wanted no one left out whom it was proper to invite. He had indeed a genuine liking for society; not only because wherever he went he was the chief and the idol, though this might make any one fond of the world; but he was social by nature. He not only had a pleasure in the company of his intimates, not only enjoyed the conversation of important men; but he liked to look at pretty girls and to listen to the talk of clever women. For a long time, however, he was not ready in replying; he had little small talk, and could not make conversation without a theme; but he observed closely under his mask of silence, and I always relished his criticisms of people and manners. He gossiped very genially, and observed little points of behavior and their significance as acutely as many of long experience in what is called ‘the world.’ I had a great deal to do with his early social career. I was very much at his house and his table before he became President; I dispensed the invitations to his receptions, and went with him to dinners and parties innumerable in half the cities of the Union. I stood by him at public receptions when thousands shook him by the hand, and every man put all his enthusiasm and all his patriotism into a single grasp, until Grant's arm became swollen and lame for weeks, and the newspapers published a caricature of ‘The hand we shook so often.’ Sometimes in the crowd the aides-de-camp thrust out their hands and saved him many [175] a squeeze. He possessed the ‘royal’ memory of faces, and when at his own house or headquarters any of the millions called whom he had met before, he always remembered the names which we who had stood beside him were often unable to recall.
For years his unwillingness to make a speech was curious. When he was nominated for the Presidency, he declared he had neither the power of public speaking nor the disposition to acquire it. In the long series of ovations that followed him everywhere after the close of the war not more than two or three words were ever extorted from him in reply to encomiums and even adulation such as few men have ever heard addressed to themselves. I was once traveling with him by railroad during the height of his early popularity. Wherever the train stopped it was surrounded by ardent and patriotic throngs. His silence had now become celebrated, and a woman in the crowd cried out, ‘I want to see the man that lets the women do all the talking.’
At another time his youngest son, Jesse, then a boy of only seven years, came out on the platform when the cries for a ‘speech’ were loudest and his father was as silent as the Sphynx. The lad looked first at the mass of enthusiastic people before him and then at the great soldier by his side, and inquired, ‘Papa, why don't you speak to them?’ But Grant remained mute and Jesse at last cried out: ‘I can make a speech, if papa can't.’ The shouts instantly went up; ‘A speech from Jesse! A speech from Jesse!’Then there was a hush, and the child began in his treble voice, but without a shade of the embarrassment his father would have felt,
The boy stood on the burning deck.
Jesse made another speech during the same summer that was even more felicitous. Grant and his family were at the farm near St. Louis where Mrs. Grant's father resided. One [176] hot day after the two o'clock dinner, when everybody was out on the lawn, Jesse mounted a haystack and exclaimed: ‘I'll show you how papa makes a speech.’ Grant himself laughed, and we all went up to the haystack. Then Jesse made a bow (which his father would not have done), and began: ‘Ladies and gentlemen,—I am very glad to see you; I thank you very much. Good night.’ Everyone laughed, but Grant blushed up to the eyes. I don't think he relished the imitation at all; it was too close. But Jesse was the baby, and we talked about something else.
Years afterward I thought of this scene in Missouri when I heard Grant at a great table in the Guildhall at London address a brilliant company in felicitous language that evoked cheers of admiration from some of the acutest critics of eloquence in the world. For he certainly acquired the art of putting one or two appropriate thoughts into fitting language on such occasions in as high degree as any one I ever listened to. His replies were models not only of terse and modest expression, but of epigrammatic force and fluent wit, timely in suggestiveness, personal in application, and almost always conveying a wise as well as graceful sentiment. Indeed, the shyness and awkwardness that were so apparent at the beginning of his career had passed completely away before the end. Perhaps a little lingered until he became President, but the sense of the greatness of his position that came to him then took away all shyness. He was not only the first wherever he went, but the Chief of the State, and he felt that the Government was upon his shoulders. There was no personal vanity implied in maintaining or even in asserting such a dignity. In small things as well as great this feeling was apparent. He never entered the street-cars while he was President, although often before he had mortified his staff and his family by using the democratic conveyance; he was careful whom he visited, and regarded etiquette scrupulously in this matter; he selected the company and [177] arranged the precedence at his dinners, frequently disappointing relatives and intimate friends who saw themselves displaced on public occasions for public dignitaries, though in his private life he returned to his former associates.
During the first year of his Presidency I spent eight months on duty at the Executive Mansion, where, although I was no longer the official secretary, I had my own room and saw him with much of my old intimacy. I revised with him and for him his first annual message to Congress, and Cabinet Ministers came to me to have passages inserted which they did not venture themselves to propose. Thus I watched the growth of the new manner. I observed a greater dignity of feeling, a conscious and intentional gravity, an absence of that familiar, almost jocular mood which once had been so frequent. And yet he did not forget, much less repel, his former friends. They were what they had always been to him, just as worthy, perhaps just as intimate as ever, and the very few were certainly as dear; but he was the President.
The great changes, however, were more apparent later. In the second year of his Presidency I was made Consul-General at London, and I saw him afterward on only two or three occasions during a short visit to this country until the close of his last Administration. In this interval had come all the storm of calumny that burst upon him, all the anxieties of the last sad year of his official life, all the falsity of friends, the attacks upon his honor, the injury he received from the association of those who used and abused his name and his friendship for their own purposes. Besides all this there was of course the increase of years, the long occupancy of the highest place, the weight of national cares, the familiarity with authority. I met him on the steamer that brought him to Liverpool, and saw him first in the captain's cabin, where he was waiting for me, alone. He threw his arms around me—and I kissed him. He was my chief, my [178] General, my friend. From that moment dated a new intimacy, closer than the old. I was with him incessantly during his stay in England. He wrote at once a telegram to the Government asking that I might be permitted to accompany him, but I changed the message and put it in my own name, so that he who had been President should not be placed in the position of soliciting favors from his successor.
But with all my intimacy I noticed now a broader man in manner and character. He was far more conscious; he understood himself better; he knew his powers; he knew what he wanted to do and say under all circumstances. He was a greater man than the one I had left in America seven years before. I was especially struck with his poise in the new situations into which he was thrown. No one had anticipated the great popular enthusiasm that welcomed him everywhere in England; but he was as calm and undisturbed as of old, ready to receive and acknowledge the ovation, for such it was, gratified deeply, but not elated. His fluency of speech amazed me. He had learned the art since I had met him last.
In his association on more than equal terms with the most distinguished Englishmen, at the dinners with dukes and Prime Ministers, at which he was always first, in the company of Princes and of the Queen, he preserved his composure. The etiquette was of course unfamiliar to him, but he advised himself of it in advance, and then conformed just so far as he thought proper and dignified in his position, but no further. He was in no way neglectful of ceremonies, far less offensive, but he did not forget that he was a republican, nor that he had been a President. He said everywhere that the compliments paid to him were meant for the nation that he represented, which was a very proud sort of humility. But it was no assumption in him to assume that he represented America. He remained as simple as ever in his bearing, and still almost plain, but he was seldom awkward or [179] embarrassed now. He was able to criticise Queen Victoria's manner, and he declared to me that he thought it uneasy. He said her Majesty seemed too anxious to put him at his ease, and he implied that the anxiety was unnecessary. With the President of the French Republic, Marshal Mac-Mahon, he was on delightful terms. They walked up and down the Champs Elysees arm in arm, Grant talking English and MacMahon French, for each understood the other's language, though unable to speak it. He received the first visit from the King of the Belgians, and asked, as any one else might with an equal, when he and Mrs. Grant could pay their respects to the Queen. I was present at the interview, and thought of Galena and the neighbors there of this man who was exchanging visits with sovereigns. On this occasion he was exact in his etiquette; he went himself to the door of the room, but directed me to wait upon the King to his carriage. But his Majesty would not permit this attention, and said peremptorily that I must not descend the staircase. I remembered the story of Louis XIV and Lord Stair, and replied that when the King commanded I could only obey. Grant approved my behavior.
