Chapter 52:
Conclusion.
while General Grant lay lingering in his final illness one of the greatest wits of this generation called at his house and waited in the next room until he could be received by the sufferer. The visitor was a personal friend as well as an admirer of Grant, and he and I talked of the great revulsion in popular feeling which had occurred—the sympathy and affection that had revived as soon as the hero was known to be dying. It made me think of Lincoln, reviled and maligned for years, but in one night raised to the rank of a martyr and placed by the side of Washington. ‘Yes,’ said the other, with the terrible sententiousness almost of Voltaire: ‘The men that want to set up a new religion ought always to get themselves crucified.’The speaker was anything but heartless, and the utterance was not so irreverent as it seemed. For the Head of our religion Himself was brought nearer to the race He came to save—through suffering, disgrace, and death; and every mythology has been forced to represent its deities in human form before the world could realize their existence. So, Lincoln and Grant, the baboon and the butcher, as they were called by their enemies, will be forever associated in the reverent affection of their countrymen—not only as triumphant colleagues, but as brothers in some of the bitterest trials that men can ever endure.
Lincoln, however, like Elijah, passed at once, in a chariot of fire, into the haven of historic appreciation, while Grant was reserved for a career in Peace that rivaled his struggles [591] and successes in War. The applause which his magnanimity at Appomattox extorted from fallen foes died away in the Reconstruction strife, and when he insisted on carrying out the law and the will of those who had conquered, a fiercer animosity was aroused than had existed during the Rebellion. The rancor of his Presidential terms rivaled any that was poured on Lincoln, and the damage done to his reputation by open enemies and pretended friends wounded him all the more acutely because for a while he had been used to popularity.
Then came the wonderful tour abroad, and after this his return to party strife. The aspirations that were crushed at Chicago, the hostility with Garfield, the slights from Arthur, embittered his final years, and his political sun went down in eclipse; while the odious story of his business failure flung an additional cloud around his fame. Last of all appeared disease—the result of mental agony.
But the self-same hand that struck the soldier to the earth tore away all that had obscured the real Grant from his countrymen. They saw him suffering, struggling with Death, and all the light of his past was reflected on the scene; his errors were blotted out, his great deeds remained. Partisan and personal hostility alike were hushed, and the world remembered, as posterity will, that his name is indissolubly connected with the salvation of a country, the emancipation of a race, and the triumph of the democratic principle. It was for him, not only to overthrow the hosts that threatened the existence of the nation, but to reconstruct in peace the fragments that had been shattered in war; and then to be recognized by the whole world as the foremost representative of the rights of the individual man; more even than this—as the statesman, the diplomatist, the soldier—who kept in view throughout his entire career the sentiment of his own simple but historic words—Let us have Peace.
