historical bromances delight me

My love for USG continues unchecked. Actually, as many history buffs know, he was born Hiram Ulysses Grant, and his name was accidentally changed for him when he enrolled at West Point. So we'll call him HUG, because those are his initials, and because that's what I want to do to him.

Also in love with HUG? Abe Lincoln. Lincoln was crazy about HUG, and told him so as often as possible. All his previous generals, he said, had wanted him to make the large tactical decisions, which he felt unqualified to do, being a lawyer from Springfield. Grant wanted nothing from him but a free rein, which he was happy to give to the man who finally wanted the Union to fight the war. Lincoln used to visit Grant at the front to get away from the pressures of Washington. A curious mini-break, but one I would have loved to tag along on. Not since Adams and Jefferson have two presidents been more enamored with each other.

One of my favorite stories about HUG happened right after he got a promotion and had a new crop of underlings to meet. When he went to meet George Thomas, who was commanding the Army of the Cumberland, they had dinner together and then sat by the fireside. Neither of them spoke for about 30 minutes, and Thomas' staff was afraid that they were in a fight. In fact, they were kindred stoic spirits, and were enjoying sitting in silence.

Also in love with HUG? Everybody who ever served under him. He was the everyman's general. He was usually wearing a soldier's pants and shirt, "tucked into muddy boots," with his officer's insignia pinned to his shirt. He liked to walk around and talk to the men, or ride around the camp on horseback inspecting preparations. His hero was Zachary Taylor, who also dressed down, and interacted with his troops as often as possible, and was similarly unfussy about battle. It may be said that Zachary Taylor's influence on Grant was his greatest contribution to American history, far outshining his time as president. Men who served with both of them were stunned by how closely HUG modeled himself after Old Rough and Ready.

At this point in my reading of the biography, the war is over and Grant is aiding in Reconstruction when necessary (which is a lot). I feel that the second half won't contain as much guts and glory, but I also wish I could read about Grant forever.

"I can't spare this man; he fights."

I love Ulysses S. Grant. I love him. I've loved and admired many presidents in the past 3 years, but not since John Adams has a president seemed so eminently huggable. As with Adams, I suspect this fondness has everything to do with the biographer. David McCullough and Jean Edward Smith put less stock in "balanced impartiality" than more academic biographers, openly taking sides with their subject in conflict and skewering their enemies.

But beyond that, USG is just so loveable. I recently loved Lincoln, but of course he is larger than life, a majestic enigma. USG is smaller than life, frequently defeated by it. He's the first president I remember being described as "tender-hearted." He has these Charlie Brown moments where he's treated horribly and he's just like awww geeeez, somebody swindled me out of all my money again. But then he presses on with his faith in humanity intact.

Did he have a drinking problem? Yes, to an extent. After the Mexican War ended he had a horrible time trying to find work. He left his family (somewhere in the Midwest) and went to California, planning to send for them when he had raised enough money. But he couldn't do it. Plan after plan failed, and partner after partner stole from him, so years passed and he was all alone. Seven years! And he missed his wife. So he started drinking, and it got him fired from his military post, and he returned to Illinois to work for his father.

Reunited with his wife and kids, and with a small but steady income, he was determined to control his drinking. (He didn't quit drinking entirely, but he rarely had more than one drink a night.) Unfortunately, rumors will be rumors, and too many people in the war department knew the reason he had "resigned." When he was commissioned in the Civil War, he was a habitually excellent commander, but his higher-ups were often reluctant to promote him because of his rep. THEN, his lamebag superior, General Halitosis Halleck, ever trying to advance his own career prospects by degrading the people around him, wrote to Washington that he was "afraid Grant might be drinking again." This had no basis, because Halleck was in St. Louis and Grant was in wilds of Tennessee or something and Halleck had no idea whether or not he was drinking, but he thought he was go ahead and WRITE SUCH A THING TO THE SECRETARY OF WAR. BECAUSE FEDERAL CORRESPONDENCE IS A GREAT PLACE FOR WILD CONJECTURE. What a butthead.

Grant managed to keep winning battle after battle, however, so no matter how the rumors swirled in Washington, Lincoln refused to demote or fire him. "I can't spare this man; he fights." (This in stark contrast to the commander of all the Eastern forces, George McClellan, who avoided battle like it was a rectal thermometer.) HISTORICAL TIP: If you want to secure your legacy, get on the good side of one of the most eloquent men of all time. There will be all these pithy, elegant compliments about you on record.

presidential fact #18

Ulysses S. Grant was a horse whisperer.

The Demented Moses of Tennessee

I finished reading Impeached about 3 weeks ago and haven't written about it yet, which should tell you exactly how I felt about it. Andrew Johnson is that rare creature - a bad president who is also a boring president. Usually the bad presidents (Buchanan, Adams) are at least fun or educational to read about, and it's the ones whose administrations never get off the ground - your Martin Van Buren and your Franklin Pierce - that seem like a waste of time.

Part of the problem could be that this is the first non-biography I've read. Impeached is mainly an account of Johnson's impeachment trial, obviously, and spends just as much time on his critics as it does on him, because they were actually more involved in the trial than he was. With a traditional biography, I've usually built up some empathy for the presidents before they enter office, so that even if they are terrible I feel for them. But Impeached isn't about a journey to, through, and from the White House, it's about 4 horrible years.

[All this, of course, is neither a flaw or the fault of the book. I'm simply pointing out the differences in my reading experience.]

So, AJ was Lincoln's VP, chosen for that role (AS USUAL) unwisely (AS USUAL) because he was from the South. Did they really check to make sure he was down with Lincoln's policies? No. Did they check to see if he was even reeeeally a Republican? Also no. Did they check to make sure he wasn't a white supremacist? Hahahahaha. When he was sworn in as VP he was hammered, and delivered a long, unintelligible speech that made everyone embarrassed. He would repeat this performance a few years later, when he went on a stump speech tour of the Midwest, talking yards of nonsense at every stop and comparing himself to Jesus.

It would have been hard to fill Lincoln's shoes no matter what, but Johnson was bizarrely ill-qualified. The patient, conciliatory Unionist was replaced by an unreasonable bullhead. The first thing he did was decide that the recently freed slaves should be given neither citizenship nor voting rights. All the abolitionists, who had seen that as the end goal of the war, were like ummmmm wtf? They could expect support from the Republican president, but oh, Johnson had decided he wasn't a Republican anymore. No! He wanted to be a states rights "Jeffersonian." He vetoed the Civil Rights Bill, and all four of the Reconstruction Acts, although these five bills were all passed by a Congressional override. He was against the Fourteenth Amendment, which granted citizenship and federal rights to anyone born in American (except people born on Indian reservations, love you guys), but Congress wisely passed it by state ratification and joint resolution, so it wasn't subject to his veto.

He also disagreed with Republicans on what should be done with Confederate leaders. He didn't think that anyone who had served in the high ranks of the Confederate military or government should be punished in any way, opening the door for them to be reelected to the federal government. This put the fear of re-secession and another war into Republicans, but states rights what can you do?

The Republicans were just spitting mad, and kept writing impeachment articles. Many of them thought that Johnson was going to blindly steer the country right back into the 1850s and that they had to get rid of him in any way possible. The accusation - that he had fired Secretary of War Stanton in violation of the Tenure of Office Act (which they had recently passed) - was vague and purely political. Johnson's defense was that the Tenure of Office Act was unconstitutional and he didn't have to abide by it (which seems, in my opinion, to be true).

As the impeachment vote drew near, a black pastor prayer a public prayer for the conviction of "this demented Moses of Tennessee," which was my favorite part of the book. Johnson avoided impeachment by bribing lots of Senators.

Thaddeus Stevens

"Do you inquire why, holding these views and possessing some will of my own, I accept so imperfect a proposition? I answer, because I live among men and not among angels; among men as intelligent, as determined, and as
independent as myself, who not agreeing with me, do not choose to yield their opinions to mine. Mutual concession, therefore, is our only resort, or mutual hostilities.”

Thaddeus Stevens, a Congressman from Pennsylvania around the time of the Civil War, was one of the greatest statesmen in American history. He was a great orator, fearless abolitionist, and determined reformer.

It may help you to know that he will be played by Tommy Lee Jones in Spielberg's Lincoln.


Lincoln's America was a perfect milieu for him, and Johnson's was not. I think it broke his heart that he had to work under Johnson during Reconstruction, and he went a little crazy. He was so determined to get Johnson impeached that he tried to do so using legal loopholes, and persuasion rather than evidence. He filed impeachment articles 3, maybe 4 times. It's what he's most known for, which is a shame. He should be known for his years of equality-minded legislative work before and during the war, and for his measured view of congressional compromise, as stated above.

About that trip to Gettysburg

This August my friend Kara and I spent 3 days in Gettysburg, PA. This is the essay I wrote about the trip for The Millions.

There is a wonderful exchange in the documentary Moving Midway between the descendant of a North Carolina plantation owner, and the grandson of that same plantation owner’s mixed-race son. The documentary follows the moving of Midway Plantation, which sat across the road from a strip mall, to more secluded acreage. Godfrey Cheshire, the filmmaker (also a descendant of the plantation owners) starts looking into the history of Midway, including its slave families, which is why Abraham Lincoln Hinton, a 96-year old man from Harlem, is invited to the house’s re-opening party.

As he stands in the front hall, Godfrey tells him that the house had originally been built in 1848. “This house?” asks Hinton, “built then, and stood up like this?”

“That’s because your family built it,” says his host.

Everyone relaxes, including the viewer, with sheer relief that someone has said something candid. These two men, who are connected by a long, ugly history, but who weren’t personally involved, and both seem very gentlemanly, have such a strange, limited space in which they can relate to each other. Engaging the history of the South would be too sober a task and, quite frankly, not their responsibility, but acting as if they’re just two guys meeting on a porch is too flippant. The resulting atmosphere is cordial but constricted.

This is how I felt for the entire three days I recently spent in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. Just being there reminds you that, had you been born in a different time or place, there were people you would be expected to hate. Not everyone chooses to travel to the physical embodiment of racial and sectional conflict, but then I am a history fan. And, as I wrote in March, I’m in the process of reading a biography of each American president. Having recently arrived at the Civil War, I decided to celebrate, if such a word can be used, by visiting Gettysburg.

Along with everything else, Gettysburg is beautiful. The three-day battle spread itself for miles around the town, and because the battlefield is now a national park, Gettysburg is surrounded by woods and fields that have remained untouched except by monuments. As Kent Gramm writes in the opening of his book, Gettysburg, “It is the most beautiful place on earth. But death is everywhere — in every meadow, along every Virginia rail fence, all over those quiet, rocky hills at sunset.” My friend Kara, who traveled with me, and I spent our time learning and relearning the story of the battle. A topographically-based battle is remarkably easy to grasp, especially when the topography is preserved, and you are walking around on it.

There are two long, parallel ridges – Cemetery Ridge and Seminary Ridge – that extend southward from the edge of town and frame the second and third day’s fighting. Then there are the contested hills – Culp’s Hill, Oak Hill, Little Round Top, and Big Round Top – that provided more brief, concentrated action. The major events of the battle – Buford’s stand on the first day, the Wheatfield and the Little Round Top bayonet charge on the second day, Pickett’s Charge on the third day – cluster around these high grounds.

We spent the first day at the Gettysburg visitors’ center and museum, plus a visit to the room-sized diorama. The next day we went on the self-guided auto tour, for which you listen to a CD in your car that tells you what points to drive to and what to know about them (usually: the next stop is a spot where many brave men died), and walked in the National Cemetery in the evening. The third day I went on a horseback ride along the Confederate encampment lines with a Robert E. Lee impersonator. As Kara said, you can’t throw a rock in Gettysburg without learning a historical fact (did you know Union Major General Daniel Sickles shot and killed Philip Key – son of Francis Scott Key – for sleeping with his wife, and was one of the first people to be acquitted of murder via a plea of temporary insanity?). By the end of the trip we knew the narrative of the battle like the backs of our hands.

The town of Gettysburg is entirely dedicated to teaching you what happened there 148 years ago, but it avoids interpreting itself. The museum’s 15-minute orienting film introduced me to the Gettysburg gaze — a particular brand of narration (in this instance supplied by Morgan Freeman, impartial as the voice of god always is) that pervades the town, describing every skirmish as good vs. good. Good wins.


Michael Shaara’s Gettysburg novel The Killer Angels, which we listened to on our drive, is the champion of the Gettysburg gaze. Its film adaptation, Gettysburg, takes it even further. Scored like NBC scores the Olympics, the film features commanders in freshly dry cleaned uniforms who philosophize more than they command. One Union commander, marveling at General Lee’s success, says “It’s amazing what one honest man can do.” “One honest man,” his superior replies, “and a cause.”

This is freakishly off point. The Southern campaign for independence was not one honest man and a cause. It was the culmination of near a century of sectional conflict which, among others, The Missouri Compromise, The Wilmot Proviso, The Compromise of 1850, the repeal of The Missouri Compromise, popular sovereignty, and The Kansas-Nebraska Act all in turn failed to assuage, and finally escalated into a fury. Sure, it all started as Jeffersonian democracy versus Federalism, but those were hardly the rallying cries of the armies as they shot at each other.

The auto tour ends on the Union side of Pickett’s Charge, the foolhardy press of 12,000 Confederate soldiers towards the better-situated Union line, which decimated Lee’s troops, ended the three-day battle, and turned the tide of the war. You stand on Cemetery Ridge, looking at Seminary Ridge on the other side of town, and you try to imagine two armies watching each other across that distance, preparing to fight each other because the Constitution didn’t explicitly prohibit slavery. Your brain tries to fill in all the steps in between and obviously falters. In Gettysburg, Kent Gramm argues that the Civil War was fought for opposing abstract ideals — union and independence. As you stand on Cemetery Ridge, picturing 7,000 dead bodies scattered in the valley before you, it’s hard to comprehend that they got there because of opposing abstract ideals. So you stand with furrowed brow for a bit longer — that bizarre requisite time you spend standing silently at complicated historical locations, usually about two minutes — and go back to the car.

All our days ended this way. The stories and statistics would build up until it was impossible to grasp, so we’d go back to the hotel and collapse on the beds to read the AV Club and update our Facebook statuses. This is when the Gettysburg gaze comes in handy. Everything turned out fine, you tell yourself, everyone involved was brave and good and civil rights were just around the corner. (That sounds ridiculous, but one narration we heard drew a direct line from Gettysburg to Jackie Robinson.)

The closest encounter I had with partisanship during my visit was talking with the Robert E. Lee impersonator on a horseback tour of the battlefield. He bemoaned the fact that I was from Indiana, preferring to socialize with his fellow natives of “God’s country.” I told him, though, that my family had lived in North Carolina before settling in Indiana in the 1850s, and that the relatives who remained behind served for the South. He praised the brave deeds of the regiments from that state, to which I assured him he was welcome. Eager to use my outsized knowledge of 19th century politics, I chatted with him about George McClellan and John C. Calhoun, the presidential elections of 1852 and 1856, and the Mexican-American war (which he fought in, although he disagreed with policies of James K. Polk, who is a long distant cousin of mine, and this caused some tension). In all this he avowed Southern partiality, but in a passive, melancholy way.

The New York Times published an editorial in 1867 that read: “The contest touches everything, and leaves nothing as it found it. Great rights, great interests, great systems of habit and of thought disappear during its progress. It leaves us a different people in everything from what we were when it came upon us.” The greatest mercy of Gettysburg is that it releases you from culpability. It’s the American Mordor. Whatever the sins of the past, they were destroyed there in fire. Surely we continue to read about and visit Gettysburg to learn what happened, but just as much to confirm that it did.

the kids

My friend Kara, who is also a history buff, is a big fan of Lincoln. Last summer she and I traveled to Gettysburg together. The summer before she went on a Lincoln road trip around Illinois and Kentucky. She has this to say about the Lincoln children:

The story of Abe Lincoln’s children is probably the central tragedy of his life. Only one of his children, Robert, survived past childhood.

During the happy times, the Lincolns were notoriously permissive parents (ed. - This is so true. Tad couldn't read or write at the age of 9. 9! And when people commented on it Abe was like, it's no big deal). The boys would mess around in Lincoln’s law office while he and his partner were working, and would be asked to recite poetry at dinner functions for Abraham and Mary Todd’s Springfield cronies, which was considered gauche at the time. Mary Todd would dress up in costumes to perform in Robert’s plays, and once Lincoln had accumulated some cash, he purchased a stereoscope for the boys, the Xbox 360 of its time.

Eddie died at age three of consumption in Springfield. The Lincolns were devastated by his death, and historians believe this was the start of the unraveling of Mary Todd. Mary Todd is arguably one of the most criticized of first ladies, but this is an area where I believe historians should just give the lady a break. Three of her children died young! How could any woman stay sane?

Two of Lincoln’s boys, Willy and Tad, were White House kids, and are the source of many anecdotes that fall under my favorite category of presidential tales: Kids Clowning Around the White House Stories. Supposedly the White House roof was converted into a play area for the boys (The whole thing? Did they put up a railing?), and their pet goat would pull a cart through the hallways.

By the time the Lincolns headed to Washington, Robert was away at college. Robert was significantly older than the two little White House boys. He held some resentment toward his father for Abe’s career, which had resulted in money, power and the most famous address in the country for the younger kids, but had mainly resulted in Robert not having seen his father much during Robert’s formative years. Willie died in 1862 at age 11, and the whole nation grieved. Lincoln removed
himself from public correspondence for days, and Mary Todd basically went off the deep end. Tad was eight years old, and Robert was nineteen.

After Lincoln was killed, Mary Todd and the boys moved to Chicago. Everyone’s future had been destroyed in different ways by the assassination. Robert had been on the path toward a very promising law career, but instead had to head back to the Midwest to care for his mother and little brother. Mary Todd struggled with her mental health, and she and Robert clashed. Tad supposedly did okay in Chicago, making “many warm friends” according to Mary Todd, until his untimely death at
age 18 from congestive heart failure. Robert eventually had Mary Todd committed, and burned many of her letters.