Andrew Johnson and Ulysses S. Grant: Their Epic Battle

By Garry Boulard

In the spring of 1865, after the end of the Civil War and the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, two men bestrode the national government as giants: Andrew Johnson and Ulysses S. Grant.

How these two men viewed what a post-war America should look like would determine
policy and politics for generations to come, impacting the lives of millions of people, North
and South, black and white.

While both Johnson and Grant initially shared similar views regarding the necessity of
bringing the South back into the Union fold as expeditiously as possible, their differences,
particularly regarding the fate of millions of recently-freed African Americans, would soon
reveal an unbridgeable chasm.

Add to the mix that Johnson, having served at every level of government in a career
spanning four decades, very much liked being President and wanted to be elected in his own
right in 1868, at the same time that a massive move was underway to make Grant the next
president during that same election, and conflict and resentment between the two men
became inevitable.

In fact, competition between Johnson and Grant would soon evolved into a battle of personal
destruction, one lasting well beyond their White House years and representing one of the
most all-consuming and obsessive struggles between two presidents in U.S. history.

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: Sep 15, 2022
• ISBN: 9781663244628

Garry Boulard

Garry Boulard is an author whose reporting has appeared in the New York Times and Los Angeles Times. His essays and reviews have appeared in the Journal of Southern History, Louisiana History, the Journal of Mississippi History, and Florida Historical Quarterly. He is the author of The Expatriation of Franklin Pierce—The Story of a President and the Civil War (iUniverse 2006), and The Worst President—The Story of James Buchanan (iUniverse 2015).

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Copyright © 2022 Garry Boulard.

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ISBN: 978-1-6632-4461-1 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-6632-4462-8 (e)

iUniverse rev. date: 09/13/2022

For Nick

Porraro—Friend Extraordinaire

Contents

Chapter One

A Middling-Sized Ordinary Man and the Noblest Roman of Them All

Chapter Two

A Request in the Form of an Order

Chapter Three

A Man Making Speeches on the Way to His Funeral

Chapter Four

Authorized and Empowered

Chapter Five

Lear Roaring at the Storm

Chapter Six

He is Such an Infernal Liar

Chapter Seven

The Gate of the Citadel

Chapter Eight

I Am Sick Again

Chapter Nine

A Stratocracy

Chapter Ten

Pure and Upright Motives

Endnotes

Chapter One

A Middling-Sized Ordinary Man and the Noblest Roman of Them All

O N THE BRIGHT AND slightly warm morning of May 23, 1865, Andrew Johnson, President of the United States for only six weeks, arrived by coach from a private home on Massachusetts Avenue, before skipping up the steps to a large wooden reviewing stand colorfully decorated with American flags and bunting, facing out onto Pennsylvania Avenue.

At 56 years of age, standing at 5, feet, 10 inches, with a tan complexion and piecing black eyes, Johnson was an enigma to most of his fellow Americans.

President upon the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, Johnson had received a measure of fame for the fierce manner in which he had stood up to the Confederates during the Civil War in his home state of Tennessee. While other anti-secessionists in the U.S. Senate had plenty bad to say about the Confederacy, Johnson, who had also been a member of the upper chamber for five years, actually did something about it.

Appointed as Military Governor by Lincoln once Union forces had retaken the Volunteer State in early 1862, Johnson was daily in danger, his life repeatedly threatened by Confederate sympathizers who regarded him as a traitor to the South. Valiantly, he re-established a government administration in the state, busted up newspapers and even banking institutions he fingered as Confederate hotbeds of support, and refused to leave the capital city of Nashville even while Confederate forces were on the verge of invading.

I am not a military man, Johnson remarked as Nashville residents fled the city and those who stayed did so by hiding in their homes and shops behind boarded up windows, but anyone who talks of surrender I will shoot. ¹

Johnson, judged the Baltimore American in 1864, was a particular kind of patriot, one who stood in the defense of right when all around him were faithless in their trust. ²

If he was widely admired in the North for his Civil War bravery, a bravery that the manipulative War Secretary Edwin Stanton said placed him in a position of personal toil and danger, perhaps more hazardous than was encountered by any other citizen or military officer of the United States, Johnson was also somewhat mistrusted for the vituperative spirit he displayed upon the final fall of the Confederacy. ³

Unlike Lincoln, who emphasized themes of reconciliation and forgiveness, Johnson wanted revenge. Asked what should become of Jefferson Davis and other leaders of the now-failed Confederacy, Johnson was adamant. I would arrest them, I would try them, I would convict them, and I would hang them, he proclaimed. ⁴

Johnson’s desire to punish the Confederate elite for a war he regarded as both illegal and immoral was strong enough to startle even Massachusetts Senator Charles Sumner, who had devoted his career to ending slavery, and now, too, wanted the South to have to pay for seceding. But even so, after listening to Johnson, just weeks after he had become president, spell out exactly how he planned to teach the Confederate elites a lesson, Sumner couldn’t help but wonder: How many are to be executed in each state? ⁵

Johnson was on this morning about to witness an extraordinary spectacle, the beginning of a parade of more than 200,000 Union soldiers, members of both the massive Army of the Potomac and the Army of the Tennessee, as well as the Army of Georgia, marching down Pennsylvania Avenue over the course of the next two days in lines stretching from curb to curb and attracting tens of thousands of onlookers, white and black, young and old, who waved flags, threw bouquets of flowers, and cheered deliriously for hours on end.

Like so many other epic events of the war, the Grand Review was almost happenstance, gotten up and organized just days before in response to special orders issued out of the offices of the Adjutant General on May 18 stating that on both mornings of the parade, the soldiers would pass around the Capitol to Pennsylvania Avenue, thence up the avenue to the Aqueduct Bridge, and across to their camp.

The troops will be without knapsacks, marching at company front, closed in mass, and at route step, except between Fifteenth street and New York Avenue and Seventeenth street, where the cadence step will be observed. ⁶

Despite the precise instructions for the review, it was inevitable that a certain spirit of spontaneity would invade the proceedings, as Benjamin Brown French, Commissioner of Public Buildings, happily noted, observing horses and mules loaded down with bags, guns, mining tools, and what seemed to be the debris of the whole army, passing by towards the end of the first day’s proceedings.

The animals were not ridden by soldiers, noted Brown, but rather caretakers, stragglers, ex-slaves, and children of all sizes, colors and complexions, all of whom seemed to be in high spirits and enjoying themselves hugely. ⁷

An additional unexpected entertainment occurred during the first day of the review when the horse belonging to 24-year-old Major General George Armstrong Custer suddenly broke off in a panic, spooked by a wreath of flowers that an admiring woman heaved in Custer’s direction. The powerful stallion galloped off with Custer holding the wreath in one hand and the riding reins in the other. The run-away horse prompted frightened screams from some onlookers that quickly turned to cheers when Custer, his shoulder-length blondish red hair waving in the breeze, gallantly regained control of the animal, inspiring, noted a reporter for the Chicago Tribune, round upon round of hearty applause with the reviewing officers joining in. ⁸

Johnson was hugely enjoying the show, looking out at the taunt, trained, and victorious soldiers marching in their units in a splendid orgy, as historian Shelby Foote would put it, of engineers with ponderous equipment, artillerists riding caissons trailed by big-mouth guns. ⁹

Commanders, as they neared the White House reviewing stand, saluted the new president, of whom they had read so much in the nation’s press. In response, Johnson, dressed conservatively and typically fastidiously in a black frock coat, repeatedly stood to return the soldiers’ salute, other times simply and happily waving at them.

The intercourse was proper and decorous, but the response was entirely different when the soldiers next caught sight of the man sitting next to Johnson: Ulysses S. Grant, General-in-Chief of the United States Army, and at the age of 43, undoubtedly the most admired man in the country. Upon visiting New York where he was mobbed by a crowd of several thousand men and women, Grant, thought the New York Tribune, with the single exception of Abraham Lincoln, has probably won more human hearts than any other breathing individual. ¹⁰

He was repeatedly given gifts by his admirers, including boxes of cigars, swords, certificates of tributes, and even, from Philadelphia, a house on Chestnut Street, and a second dwelling in the town of Galena, Illinois, where he once lived. Solid and muscular, Grant stood 5 feet, 7 inches tall, with blue eyes, wavy brown hair, and a trimmed beard lightly flecked with gray. Although for years sloppily dressed, his attire, like Johnson’s, was now entirely presentable, with his suits and uniforms designed by Brooks Brothers of New York.

Johnson and Grant in May of 1865 were not only the two most important public figures in America, they were also, with the exceptions of the secretaries of War and State, the most consequential. They also represented an idea: that the top rungs of power and influence in America were open to even it’s poorest citizens.

In Johnson’s case, this meant a laborious rise from the suffocating poverty of his youth. Born in Raleigh, North Carolina in 1808, Johnson was only 3 years old when his father died, forcing his mother to eventually agree to sign Andrew and his older brother William over as indentured apprentices to a Raleigh tailor. This was a real opportunity to learn a real trade, providing the Johnson boys, upon the completion of their training, with a stable means of income. But something about the arrangement grated on the two boys, who eventually ran away, forcing the tailor, James J. Selby, to post an ad in the Raleigh Gazette offering an award for their capture.

Johnson, at some point separated from his brother, initially found work in two different towns in North Carolina and South Carolina, before moving to Greeneville, Tennessee, just over 300 miles to the east of Raleigh, where his luck finally improved. Knowing enough about tailoring to open his own shop, Johnson met a teenage girl named Elizabeth McCardle, who helped to teach him to read and write.

They were married in 1827, just two years before Johnson would begin one of the most awesome and steady climbs in American political history, winning election first as an alderman and then mayor of Greeneville, before being elected to the Tennessee legislature, initially as a representative and later as a senator. In 1843, at the age of 35, Johnson won his first election to the U.S. House, following that up a decade later by winning the Tennessee governorship, and finally, in 1857, a seat in the U.S. Senate. Along the way, Johnson proved an astute businessman, buying up properties and houses in Greeneville to the point of becoming one of the town’s most prosperous leaders.

In the first weeks of his presidency, the country was entirely impressed with his story and it’s romantic connection to the American Everyman: The new President has ever evidenced sympathy with the toiling masses of the people, declared the Washington Constitutional Union. We are assured, therefore, that no official act of his will ever be in contradiction to his life-long conviction. ¹¹

Like Lincoln, he is a man of the people, said the Lawrence Tribune. He has surmounted obstacles that almost seem insuperable. That voters in Tennessee had continued to support him for a variety of offices through the years is proof of his fidelity to their interests and of their convictions of his excellence as a man. ¹²

It was in the Senate where Johnson was first able to advocate for the rights of the working poor in a national forum, passionately pushing for legislation giving average citizens the right to own federal lands they were willing to cultivate. The idea of giving land to poor working people horrified the elites of the South. Those same elites were soon outraged when Johnson came out solidly against the secession movement, bluntly remarking If the doctrine of secession is to be carried out upon the mere whim of a state, this government is at an end, it is not stronger than a rope of sand; it’s own weight will tumble it to pieces. ¹³

Johnson’s remarks, well-ordered and condemning, put his life in peril. From this day forth you are a marked man in this republic, an admirer in Washington, T. W. Lander, remarked. ¹⁴

From Alabama, a secessionist named Hiram Smith wrote to tell Johnson that he was a traitor to your country and that you should receive your just deserts. ¹⁵

A gathering in Friars Point, Mississippi, typical of the outraged gatherings then being held across the South, not only hung Johnson in effigy but followed that up by stuffing the cloth figure of him into a barrel, and attaching the following message: Andrew Johnson, the traitor of the South, barrelled up and rolled into the river at Friar’s Point, January 5, 1861. ¹⁶

Johnson returned to an angry and divided Tennessee in the spring of 1861 where his family was now, too, under assault, forced to continually move as Confederate soldiers seized their property and threatened arrest. He soon found it impossible to stay in one place in Tennessee for very long, aware that there was a bounty on his head. Succumbing to the pleas of friends and supporters, Johnson left Tennessee in mid-summer, telling an appreciative crowd in Cincinnati that he was no fugitive from justice, but rather a fugitive from tyranny, a fugitive from the reign of terror. ¹⁷

Quietly, once returned to Washington and working with President Lincoln and the War Department to arrange for a shipment of arms to East Tennessee in support of Union efforts there, Johnson soon received a coveted appointment via the White House: he was now the first military governor of Tennessee, War Secretary Stanton informed him, with all the powers, duties, and functions pertaining to this office. ¹⁸

The appointment only came after Union forces had pushed back the Confederates in a series of triumphant skirmishes in northern Tennessee, giving a somewhat shaky control of the state back to the Federals. Historian Lately Thomas would note that the appointment made Johnson the virtual dictator of Tennessee until a civil government should be established. ¹⁹

Johnson’s three-year reign as military governor gave him a taste for how military organizations operated, the bureaucracies within the bureaucracies, and what soon seemed to him a maddening inertia in planning and action. Petty jealousies and contests between Generals wholly incompetent to discharge duties assigned to them have contributed more to the defeat and embarrassment of the Government than all other causes combined, Johnson would eventually angrily tell Lincoln, after repeatedly asking Don Carlos Buell, commander of the Fourth Division of the Army of the Ohio, to both move into East Tennessee while also protecting the state’s capital city of Nashville. ²⁰

For his part, Buell largely ignored Johnson, complaining at one point that the need to send troops to the southern part of the state was a matter of greater moment than the gratification of Governor Johnson, whose views upon the matter are absurd. ²¹

Although Buell would soon be replaced, with the Union Army in Tennessee coming under the leadership of William Rosecrans, commander of the Army of the Cumberland, the military situation in the state was only marginally improved by 1863. A Confederate victory in the Battle of Chickamauga led to Rosecrans’ dismissal. Ulysses S. Gant, on October 18, was given command of the entire Military Division of the Mississippi, the most important command in the United States, as his long-time aide John Rawlins put it. Swiftly, Grant appointed in Rosecrans’ place 47-year-old George Thomas, a Southerner like Johnson not at all enamored with the Confederacy. ²²

The appointment of Grant, meanwhile, was a long time coming for a man who had graduated from West Point in 1843 and served nearly two years in the Mexican-American war as a first lieutenant and later as regimental quartermaster, hugely regretting his participation in a conflict he would come to regard as unjust.

Observing the people of Mexico up close, his sympathies were shortly entirely with them. I pity poor Mexico, Grant feelingly reported to his always emotionally-supportive wife Julia in January of 1848. With a soil and climate scarcely equal in the world she has more poor and starving subjects who are willing and able to work than any country in the world. The rich keep down the poor with a hardness of heart that is incredible. ²³

Once that war was over, Grant was assigned to various posts in New York, Michigan, California, and the Oregon Territory over the course of the next 6 years before joining Julia and children in St. Louis. Unlike Johnson, Grant soon found it exceedingly difficult to turn a dime into a dollar, unsuccessfully trying to run a farm, then joining a real estate agency that also proved unprofitable, before finally going to work in his father’s leather goods store in Galena, work that, while providing a regular income, he found inordinately depressing.

Also unlike Johnson, Grant was essentially non-political and disillusioned with most political parties, once telling his father that he voted for Democrat James Buchanan in the 1856 presidential election against Republican John Charles Fremont primarily because he thought the abolitionist Fremont in the White House would spur the secession of the South. Even so, Grant observed, In all elections I have universally selected the candidates that in my estimation were the best fitted for the different offices, and it never happens that such men are all arrayed on one side. ²⁴

While Johnson was making headlines in the winter of 1860-61 denouncing the secession movement from the floor of the U.S. Senate, Grant quietly went to work organizing Galena’s volunteers for the war. Exhibiting an early, calm command, Grant was appointed colonel of the Twenty-first Illinois Infantry stationed in Missouri in June 1861; two months later he was named a brigadier general.

As commander of the southeast Missouri district, Grant’s early 1862 military successes in Tennessee inspired no small amount of newspaper stories regaling readers with his extraordinary ability as a horseman, his unobtrusive manner, his reluctance to ever boast or brag, the nine or ten cigars he smoked daily, and his absolute determination to always, under any condition or challenge, move his troops forward. Grant’s late 1863 promotion as lieutenant general only increased the national interest in him, as Lincoln increasingly realized that here was one commander absent of complaints and excuses who could always be relied upon to produce results.

On his way to join his army in Chattanooga, Grant stopped in Nashville on October 20, providing Johnson with an opportunity to get a closer look at the man the North was closely coming to regard as its greatest warrior. Grant’s successful siege of Vicksburg three months earlier, coupled with the string of victories he enjoyed in the battles of Fort Henry and Fort Donelson, as well as Shiloh and Corinth, cemented his reputation as a solid strategist, one whom the press in particular could not seem to praise enough.

For this position the claims and qualifications of General Grant could not be ignored, noted the Daily Missouri Republican in approving of Grant’s appointment as commander. Grant, agreed the Washington Evening Star, has justly won the title of the Napoleon of the war. ²⁵

Checking into Nashville’s St. Cloud Hotel, Grant soon found himself hailed by Johnson in a spirited outdoor ceremony comparing his military achievements with that of Napoleon or Caesar himself. ²⁶

Grant, unlike Johnson, never a willing or comfortable public speaker, listened to an address he regarded as both too long and too effusive, recalled years later: I was in torture while he was delivering it, fearing that something would be expected from me in response. ²⁷

When the gathered crowd called out for Grant to speak, the General politely declined, remarking that he had never made a speech in his life, and was too old to learn now. ²⁸

Several days later Grant and several of his top officers paid a courtesy call on Johnson at the state house. One of the officers, Major Granville Dodge, later acknowledged that we were a hard-looking crowd, wearing worn and stained uniforms, a fact that did not go unnoticed by the ever-tidy Johnson. Grant, observing Johnson’s reaction, told him that the men had not had time to change into their dress uniforms, when in fact, Dodge would recall, Grant knew we had no others. ²⁹

How Johnson and Grant sized each other up during these initial encounters is impossible to know. Grant was generally unimpressed with politicians, especially those, like Johnson, who seemed markedly windy. But Grant was in no way unaware of Johnson’s lone and brave stand as Tennessee’s Military Governor.