Grant: A Novel Read online

  PRAISE FOR THE NOVELS OF

  MAX BYRD

  GRANT

  “[A] serious, intricate novel … adroitly deploys a small ensemble of Washington socialites, journalists, and politicians … Byrd builds his characters with a remarkable accretion of details.”

  —The New York Times Book Review

  “An excellent portrait of one of our greatest generals.”

  —National Public Radio

  “Outstanding … sure to strengthen Byrd’s reputation as one of America’s finest historical novelists … Grant is typical of what Byrd does so well—combine a minimum of fictional characters with splendid research, vivid imagination, and above all, historical accuracy to portray a truthful profile of a famous American.”

  —Associated Press

  “A fascinating read for any serious student of the period.”

  Publishers Weekly

  JACKSON

  “Rich, thickly peopled … The heart of the book—its great, almost Homeric centerpiece—is an enthralling, masterly account of the Battle of New Orleans in 1815…. With Jackson, Mr. Byrd has vaulted … into the front rank of American historical novelists.”

  —The Wall Street Journal

  “Byrd’s eye for texture and detail brings 1828 and the beginnings of the Jacksonian era alive.… He makes the story come alive and then keeps it moving.”

  —Raleigh News & Observer

  “This book is for everyone, whether student of history or not, for its wonderful insights into the people and times of our infant republic.”

  —Library Journal

  “Brings history back to life.”

  —Nashville Banner

  JEFFERSON

  “So authoritatively does Mr. Byrd conjure up the day-to-day details of Jefferson’s life, so knowingly does he describe the atmosphere of pre-Revolutionary France, that the reader practically forgets that his novel is based on thousands and thousands of researched facts. Indeed, Jefferson has the organic intimacy of a novel that has sprung full-blown from the imagination of its creator.”

  —The New York Times

  “Absolutely splendid historical fiction that resonates with international, provincial, and individual passion and drama.”

  —Booklist

  “Max Byrd wins the anniversary prize for best book of the year about Jefferson.… It adroitly combines in-depth historical research with the fast-moving plot of a suspense story. Jefferson: A Novel can satisfy the appetites of both casual novel readers and serious scholars.”

  —The Georgia Review

  Grant is a work of historical fiction. Apart from the well-known actual people, events, and locales that figure in the narrative, all names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to current events or locales, or to living persons, is entirely coincidental.

  2013 Bantam Books eBook Edition

  Copyright © 2000 by Max Byrd

  Interview copyright © 2013 by Max Byrd

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Bantam Books, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

  BANTAM BOOKS and the rooster colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  Originally published in hardcover and in slightly different form in the United States by Bantam Books, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., in 2000.

  eISBN: 978-0-345-54427-8

  www.bantamdell.com

  Cover design: Thomas Ng

  Cover art: George Peter Alexander Healy (1866) © Bettmann/CORBIS

  v3.1

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Prologue

  Part One

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Part Two

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Part Three

  Part Four

  Chapter One

  Part Five

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Part Six

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Epilogue

  Note

  Dedication

  A Conversation With Max Byrd

  Other Books by This Author

  About the Author

  EXTRACTS FROM A REPORTER’S NOTEBOOK

  —NICHOLAS P. TRIST, June 1880

  New York is for Ulysses S. Grant. Never defeated—in peace or war—his name is the most illustrious borne by living man. Vilified and reviled, ruthlessly aspersed by unnumbered presses—not in other lands, but in his own—assaults upon him have seasoned and strengthened his hold upon the public heart. Calumny’s ammunition has all been exploded; the powder has all been burned once—its force is spent—and the name of Grant will glitter a bright and imperishable star in the diadem of the Republic when those who have tried to tarnish it have moldered in forgotten graves; and when their memories and their epitaphs have vanished utterly.

  —SENATOR ROSCOE CONKLING

  nominating speech, Chicago Republican National Convention, 1880

  He was unquestionably the most aggressive fighter in the entire list of the world’s famous soldiers. He never once yielded up a stronghold he had wrested from his foe. He kept his pledge religiously to “take no backward steps.” For four years of bloody and relentless war he went steadily forward, replacing the banner of his country upon the territory where it had been hauled down. He possessed in a striking degree every characteristic of the successful soldier. His methods were all stamped with tenacity of purpose, originality, and ingenuity. He depended for his success more upon the powers of invention than of adaptation, and the fact that he has been compared at different times to nearly every great commander in history is perhaps the best proof that he was like none of them.

  —COLONEL HORACE PORTER

  aide to General Grant, 1864–65

  PROLOGUE

  THE SECRET LIFE OF U. S. GRANT

  by Sylvanus Cadwallader

  CHAPTER ONE

  (not for publication)

  START WITH HIS HORRIBLE MOTHER.

  Hannah Simpson Grant, lately deceased. Not much missed. In his eight full years in the President’s Palace in Washington City, Hannah Grant never once visited her famous son. During the war, when a group of neighbors came rushing in one day to tell her about Grant’s brilliant victory at Vicksburg—the single most intelligent act of generalship in American military history—she just stood up and left the room without a word: life was Fate, Hannah claimed to be
lieve, whatever happened was God’s will; to praise somebody for doing God’s will was a sin. When Grant came home after winning the war, she met him at the door and said, “Well, Ulysses, you’re a great man now, I guess,” and went back into her kitchen.

  Horrible mother, worse father.

  Jesse Root Grant had arrived in Hannah’s home town of Point Pleasant, Ohio, in June of 1820, all alone, without encumbrance of family, to go to work in the tannery.

  He was twenty-five years old. Two decades earlier his drunken, newly widowed father, Captain (from the Revolutionary War) Noah Grant, had moved out to Cincinnati from Pittsburgh, part of that first big emigration season of 1799, when land-hungry settlers started pouring west into Ohio like water through a broken dam. But Noah Grant was a restless and footloose man, and in the year 1805 he decided to pull up stakes and decamp again, this time in the direction of Kentucky. Before he took off, however, he simply deposited his five younger children on the doorsteps of various flabbergasted neighbors and relatives and left the two oldest ones to cope for themselves, Susan (age thirteen, who would soon marry) and Jesse (age eleven).

  And if ever there was somebody born to cope, it was horrible Jesse Root Grant. If Hannah Simpson was silent and torpid, waiting passively with her hands in her lap for whatever God’s will might turn out to be, Jesse more than made up for it with activity and obnoxious bluster.

  Point Pleasant was a quiet township of almost two thousand people then, the majority of them farmers and Southern transplants, and as soon as he got out of the stagecoach and put down his valise on the hotel steps, Jesse set about enlightening them one and all on the great subjects of the day. He was going to be rich, he announced, and that would be a good thing for the town. He was a Democrat and a Mason. He was against slavery and in favor of abolition, and he had his doubts about the politics of that arch-Southerner Andy Jackson. One week after he climbed down from the coach his first Letter to the Editor appeared.

  For all his bluster, though, Jesse was a shrewd man. He had chosen the tannery business because he correctly saw that a new territory, in the process of settlement, was going to have a growing demand for leather goods, and also because the vast green shimmering forests of the Ohio Valley (all gone now, stripped as if by locusts armed with axes) would give a perpetual supply of oak bark, whose tannic acid was what you needed to tan your hides. If he hadn’t been such a self-satisfied, opinionated cuss, Jesse might have become the Leather King of the Middle West. As it was, despite his personal unpopularity he quickly prospered; he made some money and bought his own tannery, and at the age of twenty-eight, consulting a “life schedule” he had drawn up for himself, noted that it was time to go out and find a wife.

  Three engraved illustrations from A Boy’s Life of General Grant, published in that year of glory 1865.

  Picture Number One A two-room clapboard house, 16 by 19, the closest thing to a log cabin you could get in Point Pleasant. This is 1822, long before the invention of photography, so the artist is free to use his imagination. The front room has a fireplace where Hannah cooks and a few straight-backed chairs on a bare pine floor. The six-week-old infant General is sleeping in a crib made from a drawer. The rest of the family is pulled up in a circle by the fire. On Jesse Grant’s lap sits an old black slouch hat crammed with slips of paper torn from a tablet—Hannah has written “Albert” on one of them because they’re choosing the baby’s name and for some peculiar reason she’s always liked Albert Gallatin, who was Thomas Jefferson’s Secretary of Treasury; Hannah’s sister Anne has written “Theodore” on her slip because she thinks it’s romantic; Grandfather Simpson considers “Hiram” a handsome name, but his wife and Jesse, who have both been reading in an odd lot of books that Jesse bought, want “Ulysses” after the great Grecian warrior in Fenelon’s Telemachus (names are Fate). Anne, the youngest, is about to pull out a slip of paper, Jesse is bending forward to read.…

  Picture Number Two Hiram Ulysses Grant, age nine, on a horse—the army in its inimitable and intractable way will mistakenly change his name to Ulysses S.—bareback in his father’s tannery yard in Georgetown, Ohio, where the family has moved from Point Pleasant. The prosperous new brick house is in the background, also the tannery sheds and the quiet tree-shaded brook that runs beside them, trickling down toward the Ohio River five miles distant. A pleasant scene, right out of Mark Twain’s little book Tom Sawyer. What the artist can’t show is the blood everywhere, specks and globules of red and drying blood all over the hides, the sheds, the workers’ arms, clothes, hair, and faces, not to mention the stench of scraped and decaying animal flesh and lumps of fat quivering on the ground and the sharp counter-smell of tannic acid from the oak bark in the iron grinder. What he can’t show either is the boy Ulysses in actual motion (we’d need one of Mr. Edison’s zoopraxiscopes), galloping his horse down the main street of Georgetown like a Tartar.

  It is a celebrated fact about him, of course, as soon as he could stand up and walk Grant found his way into the company of horses. At West Point he was known as the finest rider of his era—set a record for the high jump that still stands—and in Georgetown he was known as little Grant who could ride, break, or train any horse he saw. When he was three a frantic Grant neighbor banged on the window to shout that the baby was swinging from horses’ tails in the stable (Hannah merely nodded and went on with her business). At age eight he was driving his father’s wagon by himself all over the backroads of the county, hauling in bark. At nine he bought his first horse, a dappled white mare, with his own money. (Grant could read a horse, somebody said, with the same natural fluency Dr. Johnson could read Latin.) If you are small and lonely and looking for power, and we all are, a tall, strong horse between your legs will do it.

  Shadows of the future bankrupt: when he was twelve or so, his father sent him to buy a neighbor’s horse, and he struck the bargain by saying, “Papa says I should offer you twenty dollars, but if you won’t take that I can go to twenty-two and a half, and if you won’t take that I should give you twenty-five.”

  Picture Number Three Fourteen-year-old “Useless” Grant, as his fellow students call him, stands on the doorstep of his one-room schoolhouse. He’s alone and the illustration makes him look disconsolate: he does no better in school than his horse-bargaining story would suggest. Satisfactory in mathematics, a remarkable visual memory (for landscapes, terrain), which school doesn’t test; poor in all other subjects. His ambitious braggart father nonetheless declares him a “genius” and sends him to one country school after another, covering the same lessons over and over—I heard so many times, Grant says now, that a noun is the name of a thing that I even began to believe it—but “Useless” still doesn’t shine.

  If he walks outside the wrinkled gray border of the engraving and we follow him, we see him telling his father he will work in the hated tannery as required until the day he comes of age, never one minute after that. Now he goes down into the cellar of the new brick house. In a locked cupboard is some all-purpose home fever medicine, fifty percent alcohol—the world before the Civil War was boiling with all varieties of fevers—and young Hiram Grant is kneeling down, undoing the lock.

  Lincoln used to say that he was a product of the Kentucky backwoods of the 1820s (just the other side of the Ohio from Grant) and he didn’t think there had ever been such heavy drinking anywhere in the world as there was back then—men, women, even children. I myself remember the cask of whiskey and the tin cup on every store counter. There were jugs at the end of furrows, for the plowman’s comfort, at the end of corn rows for huskers. There were jugs in the fence corners for the farmhand’s dinner. This part of Ohio grows grapes and makes bad but abundant wine. The town hotel is an endless gurgling tap room. Every kind of celebration centers around the whiskey barrel. If a man isn’t dead drunk three or four times a year—on the Fourth of July, certainly, and Andy Jackson’s birthday—why, he loses all standing in the community.

  What leads young Grant furtively down the cellar s
teps? Well, inheritance maybe; his paternal grandfather was without a doubt a drunkard. Loneliness, too, perhaps, the feeling that he is unloved by his silent mother, misunderstood by his awful father. The village boys mock him because he won’t go hunting and shoot a living animal with a firearm. They mock his prudery—no boy, no man in the army would ever hear Grant swear or tell an off-color story. A few years later, at age seventeen, he will stand only five feet one inch tall, weigh 117 pounds. He will not swim or bathe naked in front of anybody, he has a fragile, rather feminine delicacy of feature (pull aside the coarse beard and cigar—in the Mexican War the other officers called him “Little Beauty”). Put your face close to the picture. Under the shell of a mute, determined reserve do you hear a sad and sensitive little boy crying?

  A child’s feelings are like the stars, they never burn out. They have to be buried or drowned.

  Thus great generals are born.

  CHAPTER ONE

  AN AUTHOR,” SAID MAUDIE CAMERON, AGED TEN, WEARING A crisp white pinafore and an expression of pug-nosed disdain, “is a dreadful person who writes books.”

  Nicholas Trist III scratched his chin stubble with the palm of his hand and studied a crystal decanter of amber-brown whiskey just to the child’s left, on a tabletop otherwise uselessly cluttered with little colored porcelain figures of cats and dogs in bonnets.

  “My father never reads books,” Maudie said. “He says books are a damn-blasted waste of time.”

  “That’s quite enough, Maudie.” The child’s governess was knitting or sewing or vivisecting something furry and blue in her lap, and without actually looking up she narrowed her eyes in a professional frown. Trist caught a glimpse of his own red-rimmed eyes in one of the room’s six mirrors. He placed his hand on his knee and stood up and dropped his hat.

  “You wrote a book,” Maudie said.

  “But nobody read it,” Trist assured her. Despite himself he licked his lips. Three steps to the decanter. Five steps to the door. Five thousand steps back to the steamship docks at Baltimore. His hat somehow found its way to his fingers again. There were four separate kinds of malarial fever according to the drunken Arab doctor he had seen in Marseilles, and Trist had managed to come down with the least severe but the most persistent strain, though for the life of him just now he couldn’t remember the technical Latin name of it.