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Chapter 22:
there was a positive antagonism between
Grant and
Seward.
Their characters were as unlike as their policies and achievements.
During the last months of the war
Seward paid a visit at
Grant's headquarters at
City Point, and while there he told me a story which illustrates more than one point in his character.
He was describing the alarm and anxiety of the
North in the autumn of 1864.
For months
Grant had accomplished nothing in front of
Richmond;
Hood had forced
Sherman to retrace his steps from
Atlanta, and
Early had nearly captured
Washington.
The opponents of the
Government at the
North made the most of the situation for political purposes.
The elections were approaching, and a Cabinet council was held.
It was necessary,
Seward said, to throw something overboard in order to save the ship, and Emancipation was to be the Jonah.
He was selected, he told me, to make the sacrifice, and proceeded to
Auburn, where he delivered the speech which many will remember, re-opening the whole question of slavery and Emancipation, when the States should return to the
Union.
‘When the insurgents,’ he said, ‘shall have disbanded their armies and laid down their arms, the war will instantly cease; and all the war measures then existing, including those which affect slavery, will cease also; and all the moral, economical, and political questions, as well questions affecting slavery as others, which shall then be existing between individuals and States and the
Federal Government, whether they arose before the
Civil War
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began, or whether they grew out of it, will by force of the
Constitution, pass over to the arbitrament of courts of law, and to the councils of legislation.’
So spoke the
Secretary of State a year and a half after the proclamation of Emancipation had been made.
A few days later he returned to
Washington, and soon the news was brought of
Sheridan's victory at
Winchester.
Seward took the telegram to the
President.
It was long past midnight, and
Lincoln came to the door of his bedroom in his nightgown.
There he held the candle while the
Secretary of State read to him the great intelligence.
The President was delighted, of course, at the victory, but
Seward exclaimed: ‘And what,
Mr. President, is to become of me?’
He told me this story, I suppose, to illustrate his spirit of self-sacrifice, but when I repeated it to
Grant the soldier looked at the act in a different light.
He thought the sacrifice of principle should not have been made, and was shocked that
Seward could have thought of himself at such a crisis.
But
Seward believed in sacrificing even political principle to the success of a great cause, or the salvation of a country.
He said to me at this time: ‘Nations have never more virtue than just enough to save themselves.’
Grant's course under somewhat similar circumstances was different.
He often told me of the pressure brought to induce him to sign what was known as the
Inflation Act. Personal and political friends of importance assured him that his refusal would be fatal to Republican success at the polls, and although his judgment was opposed to the measure, he finally wrote out a message approving the bill.
He even read the message to his Cabinet, but in writing and reading it the weakness of his forced reasoning became more apparent than ever.
He could not bring himself to do violence to his own convictions.
That night he tore up the message and wrote another which contained the veto that forever defeated Inflation.
Each of these men had in his own way accomplished great
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things for the
State.
Seward was an adroit and intellectual strategist, a man born with the instincts and used to the arts of diplomacy; a statesman who had aimed at the highest place, but when he failed in his aim, had humbled himself to take a secondary post, in which he conceived and carried out an international policy for his triumphant rival; a man who after the war and the success of the principles and the party with whom and for whom he had battled half a lifetime, found himself suddenly in the
Cabinet of a Southerner determined to bring the defeated Southerners back to the position and the power they had enjoyed before they rebelled; and
Seward not only acquiesced in the design, but aided it with all the skill and intellect he had once employed on the other side.
There was nothing in such a character or career to attract or to assimilate with
Grant, who was by nature blunt and plain in word and act; a soldier to the core; unused to bending when he could not break, and ignorant of any means to accomplish his purposes but the most direct and forcible.
Even in war he had been less of a strategist than a fighter, and he carried the same characteristics into civil affairs.
Indeed whenever later in his political career he was induced by political associates to lay aside his own peculiar directness and attempt manoeuvring he failed.
His ways were never those of diplomacy, nor even of legitimate craft.
The more of a technical politician he became, the less was his hold on the people, and the less the success he achieved.
When he returned to his native straightforwardness and outspokenness his influence and popularity were regained.
Such a man could not appreciate
Johnson's
Secretary of State.
Seward had succeeded by temporizing and negotiating, by patience and subtle skill, by submitting to what was inevitable and obtaining whatever was attainable, in at first postponing, and at last preventing, the active intervention of
England and
France in favor of the
South during the
War; and he hoped afterward to secure the withdrawal of
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the
French from
Mexico by the same means.
But to
Grant this seemed to indicate indifference to the result, and he finally came to believe that
Seward was willing for
Maximilian to remain.
Here was their first open difference.
They were antagonists apparently even in aim, and certainly in means and methods and manner.
The consequence was not only a marked divergence of opinion, but on
Grant's part, a coolness of feeling that lasted for years and was never entirely removed.
But though
Grant at times could hardly force himself to be civil, and disliked even to go to Seward's house, the courteous
Secretary kept up his visits and his compliments.
Mr. Blaine, in his ‘Twenty Years of Congress,’ attributes to
Seward the conception of
Johnson's entire scheme of restoring the States, but
Grant never gave
Seward credit for the plan.
He thought it the child of
Johnson's brain, developed by the situation in which he found himself, of a humble Southerner suddenly raised to a position in which he could dispense essential favors to those who had always seemed his superiors but now courted him for their own purposes.
Grant in his ‘Memoirs’ speaks of
Johnson as a ‘
President who at first aimed to revenge himself upon Southern men of better social standing than himself, but who still sought their recognition, and in a short time conceived the idea and advanced the proposition to become their
Moses to lead them triumphantly out of all their difficulties.’
I remember once returning to him from the
White House, and describing to him what I had seen; the antechamber of the tailor-President crowded with magnates of the
South,
Hunter and
Richard Taylor and others of that sort, waiting for a chance to ask to be pardoned.
Grant, like every other human being, was sometimes unjust in his judgments, and did not always allow the credit of the highest motives to those who opposed him. He thought
Johnson was affected by the influences I have
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described, and that
Seward for the sake of place and power followed in the political somersault.
No word intimating a belief that
Seward originated
Johnson's policy ever escaped him in my hearing, either in the excited intercourse of the time or in the deliberate discussions of later years.
It is needless to say that
Grant thought
Seward intellectual and able; and of course he never dreamed of denying his patriotism; but the genius of the one was so diametrically opposed to that of the other that
Grant could not do justice to the considerations, whether of legitimate ambition or lofty statesmanship, that may have actuated
Seward.
He was too intensely himself to be sympathetic.
He could not put himself into
Seward's place.
He could not understand how
Seward could reverse the feelings and principles of a lifetime to remain in
Johnson's Cabinet.
He could not perceive that
Seward, once the bugbear of the slave-holders, might take an exquisite pleasure in the thought that they owed their exemption from many misfortunes to the man they had so long and so bitterly reviled.
But although
Grant thought
Seward only a follower of
Johnson in the Reconstruction policy, he certainly believed that many of the devices of
Johnson were due to
Seward's suggestion.
He did not think
Johnson clever enough to initiate all the craft that gave the country and Congress so much trouble and alarm.
Many of the acutest arguments in defense of
Johnson Grant thought were in reality perversions of
Seward's intellect in an unworthy cause; and the effort to send
Grant to
Mexico he always attributed to
Seward.
The conception was worthy of the diplomatic
Secretary, to whom it would fall to carry out the device if it succeeded; for if
Grant had accepted the position pressed upon him he must have received his instructions from
Seward, who had opposed and defeated
Grant's Mexican policy.
Those instructions, in fact, were written out, and
Seward once began to read them in Cabinet, but
Grant refused to hear them.
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Even after this they were forwarded to
Grant through the
Secretary of War, but were finally turned over to
Sherman.
It would indeed have been a Machiavellian triumph to have got rid of
Grant at that juncture in affairs at home and at the same time forced him to carry out
Seward's policy in
Mexico.
But though, as I have said,
Grant never got over his dislike of
Seward's course, either in the
Mexican matter or in the general policy of the Administration,
Seward was determined not to quarrel with
Grant.
He was never personally conspicuous in the stratagems which
Grant was obliged to contest, and even at the crisis of the relations between
Grant and
Johnson, when other
Cabinet Ministers ranged themselves on the side of the
President,
Seward contrived to write a letter not entirely unsatisfactory to his chief, while yet he refrained from giving the lie to
Grant.
Thus their relations, although after this period never intimate, were not absolutely interrupted.
Some of
Seward's admirers even proposed to
Grant, when he became President-elect, to invite
Seward to remain in the State Department, but he never entertained the idea
I remember a dinner at the house of
Mr. Thornton, the
British Minister, given after
Grant's election, at which
Seward sat on the right of the host and
Grant on the left; and
Seward remarked, as he took his seat, ‘After the 4th of March, General, you and I will be obliged to exchange places at table.’
But there were many even then who placed
General Grant above the
Secretary of State, and
Grant himself, in more important matters than rank or etiquette, was asserting his own consequence.
He had endeavored, as I have shown, to prevent the host who was then entertaining them from negotiating a treaty with
Seward, and he had striven successfully to lessen the influence of
Seward's Minister to
Mexico.
Still the honors were divided.
Seward had defeated
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Grant in what the soldier had so much at heart,—the forcible expulsion of
Maximilian, accomplishing the overthrow of the empire by diplomatic means, though he risked, as
Grant believed, the existence of the
Mexican Republic; but
Seward himself was defeated in the great object of
Johnson's Administration,—the Reconstruction policy; and in this defeat
Grant was the principal figure and instrument.
Grant's election, indeed, was the seal of
Seward's and
Johnson's overthrow.
Up to the last their differences continued.
In sending
Rosecrans to
Mexico,
Seward must have known the affront he offered
Grant, and by the rejection of the
Clarendon-Johnson Treaty, which
Grant did so much to accomplish, the final effort of
Seward's diplomacy was foiled.
But, after all, both were patriots, both were indispensable to the salvation of the
State.
Grant's victories would have been useless, if not impossible, unless
Seward's skill had stayed the hostile and impatient hands of
England and
France; and
Seward's diplomacy required
Vicksburg and the
Wilderness to be of any avail.
As
Lincoln once said to
Sickles, when they were discussing the
battle of Gettysburg, ‘There is glory enough to go all around.’
Nevertheless, it is well to tell the whole truth about great men in great emergencies.