We need a palate cleanser. It is Easter (whose theme is resurrection and salvation), Passover (freedom and remembering) and Ramadan (devotion). So let us go back to affectionate days and men of stature.
It has been noted that the first and only previous American president to be arrested was Ulysses S. Grant. He was arrested in 1872, while president, for “fast driving” his two-horse carriage not far from the White House. The arresting officer, William West, was a Union Army veteran, a black man a few years on the police force. There had been complaints men were speeding their horses in the “aristocratic” part of town. One day officer West stopped the president, whom he recognized, and gave him a warning. “Your fast driving, sir . . . is endangering the lives of the people who have to cross the street.” The president apologized. But the next night, patrolling at 13th and M Streets, West saw a slew of carriages barreling down the street at high speed, with the president in the lead.
West held up his club. Grant got control of his horses and asked, abashed, if he’d been speeding. In 1908, when the story broke in Washington’s Sunday Star, West said Grant had the look of a schoolboy caught in a guilty act. He reminded Grant of his promise to stop speeding. West told Grant: “I am very sorry, Mr. President, to have to do it, for you are the chief of the nation and I am nothing but a policeman, but duty is duty, sir, and I will have to place you under arrest.”
Grant did something he hadn’t done much, which was surrender. He invited West into his carriage and drove to the station house. On the way they talked about the war. West had been at the evacuation of Richmond. Grant said he admired a man who does his duty. At the station house Grant put up $20 and stayed long enough to be amused by friends, also hauled in, who were protesting their arrests. Days later word reached him that West’s job might be in danger. Grant dispatched a quick message to the chief of police, complimenting West on his fearlessness and making clear he hoped no harm would come to him. None did.
In coming years they’d greet each other on the street, talk about horses. West served another 25 years in the department, distinguishing himself in detective work. He didn’t tell the story of arresting the president until he’d retired. The Metropolitan Police Department confirmed the account a century later.
Last year at this time we wrote about Grant, recounting his role in the most history-drenched Holy Week in U.S. history, the seven days in 1865 that spanned the end of the Civil War, the stillness at Appomattox, and the assassination of Abraham Lincoln.
More can be said. A thing that always fascinates is a quality Grant had that left close observers balancing in their minds two different and opposite thoughts. One: There is nothing special in this plain, quiet, undistinguished fellow. The other: He is marked by destiny; something within him encompasses the epic working out of fate, even of nations.
The obscure former soldier and unsuccessful farmer would become, over two or three years, the only indispensable man in the Union after Lincoln. Then, all worlds conquered, he would lose everything in a cascade of misfortunes that yielded . . . a final and transcendent human triumph.
That famous story, from Ron Chernow’s still-splendid “Grant”:
On Christmas Eve in 1883, Grant, hale and prosperous at 61, was dropped off at his Manhattan town house. Pivoting to give the driver a holiday tip, he slipped on the ice, fracturing his hip. Pleurisy followed; arthritis “crept up his legs”; he was bedridden and then had trouble walking. Grant had earlier formed a business partnership with the “Young Napoleon of Finance,” 29-year-old Ferdinand Ward, a financial genius who was, alas, the Sam Bankman-Fried of his day. His profits were revealed as nonexistent; in the spring of 1884 Grant found out he was ruined, broke, his public reputation severely damaged. A few months later—“When sorrows come they come not single spies, but in battalions”—he bit into a piece of peach and cried aloud in pain, thinking he’d swallowed a wasp. The feeling of fire in his throat wouldn’t go away, and months later he was told it was cancer.
Now he summoned everything he had to do what he’d long refused to do, write his memoirs. He did it for money, so his wife and family would be safe.
He wrote sitting up in a chair, his legs on a facing chair, with a wool cap on his head, a shawl at his shoulders, “a muffler around his neck concealing a tumor the size of a baseball.” After he ate or drank he required opiates, but opiates clouded his mind so he wrote long days without eating or drinking. Yet the words flowed, “showing how much thought and pent-up feeling lay beneath his tightly buttoned façade.” He wrote 275,000 words of “superb prose” in less than a year.
The first sentence—“My family is American, and has been for generations, in all its branches, direct and collateral”—has the compressed beauty of his battlefield dispatches. He died on July 23, 1885, three days after he finished the manuscript. The unexpected masterpiece became a publishing phenomenon.
Mark Twain, who published it, watched Grant’s funeral procession for five hours from the windows of his office on Union Square. Afterward he joined William Tecumseh Sherman for drinks and cigars at the Lotos Club. They talked about the marvel and mystery of Grant’s personality. Sherman thought his close friend had been a mystery even to himself. He had no peer as a military genius—“Never anything like it before”—but he wasn’t steeped in the literature of war, of strategy and grand tactics. He was nothing like the purified, prissy Grant emerging in the newspapers. “The idea of all this nonsense about Grant not being able to stand rude language and indelicate stories!” He roared at off-color tales. “Grant,” said Sherman, “was no namby pamby fool; he was a MAN—all over—rounded & complete.”
Twain confessed a regret. In helping supervise and edit Grant’s memoirs he had never pressed Grant on his struggle with alcohol. His enemies had called him a drunk; his friends had acknowledged wartime binges. Sherman himself had said of their friendship, “He stood by me when I was crazy, and I stood by him when he was drunk.” But Twain hadn’t thought to probe, and knew now he should have, for the people would have appreciated it, and understood.
Why do we remember greatness? What purpose is there in remembering?
To remind us who we’ve been. To remind us what’s still lurking there in the national DNA.
So we know what greatness looks like. So we can recognize it when it’s within our environs. Because human greatness will never completely go away, even though you may look north, east, south and west and be unable to see it. You’re not sure it’s anywhere around. But it will be there.
Maybe it’s there. Look closer. Maybe that’s a seed. Help it grow.