The Admiral and the Ambassador Read online

  The poor progress of the war for the North led to a change in the top command. On October 17, 1863, General Ulysses S. Grant was put in charge of the Military Division of the Mississippi, which included the armies of the Ohio, Cumberland, and Tennessee. A week later, Grant was in Chattanooga, where Porter and the retreating troops had stopped to regroup. One evening Porter was summoned to the headquarters of General George H. Thomas, whom Grant had named to replace Rosecrans after the Chickamauga debacle. It had been raining for two days, and Thomas’s quarters, a small one-story wooden house, had a single fireplace to ward off the chill. Porter entered and found the room filled with officers; a soaked and exhausted-looking man sat near the fire.

  “He was carelessly dressed, and his uniform coat was unbuttoned and thrown back from his chest,” Porter would later recall.

  He held a lighted cigar in his mouth, and sat in a stooping posture, with his head bent slightly forward. His clothes were wet, and his trousers and top-boots were splattered with mud. General Thomas approached this officer, and, turning to me and mentioning my name, said, “I want to present you to General Grant.” Thereupon the officer seated in the chair, without changing his position glanced up, extended his arm to its full length, shook hands, and said in a low voice, and speaking slowly, “How do you do?” This was my first meeting with the man with whom I was destined afterward to spend so many of the most interesting years of my life.9

  Porter was transferred to Washington in November 1863, but Grant intervened with a written request that Porter be reassigned to his staff. In the spring of 1864, Grant took charge of all the Union troops, and by May, Porter was at his side, where the young ordnance specialist would spend the rest of the war as one of the general’s top aides. Wherever Grant went, Porter went, including Appomattox Court House in Virginia on April 9, 1865, when General Robert E. Lee signed the surrender papers. For years, Porter would keep in a small wooden box the nub of a pencil he claimed Lee had used that day to make some alterations to the agreement.10

  In the months after the war, Porter continued to travel and work with Grant, and he became particularly useful as Grant was sought as a speaker across the northern states. Grant hated speechmaking. Porter, however, discovered that not only did he like it, but he was good at it as well, and so he was often put forward to deliver speeches in Grant’s stead. When President Andrew Johnson, who assumed the office with Lincoln’s assassination, appointed Grant acting secretary of war, Porter served as his assistant secretary of war. When Grant ran for president, Porter was part of his circle of political intimates and followed him into the White House as one of two personal secretaries.

  Conducting a war and running a governmental bureaucracy were two very different things, and the Grant administration was rife with corruption, partly a function of Grant’s deep loyalty to friends and aides, which made him slow to respond to reports of malfeasance. Porter was drawn into two of the scandals through accusations by some of the participants, but no credible evidence of wrongdoing ever surfaced.

  Still, the experience scarred Porter and left him ambivalent about continuing a career in Washington politics. A man with a knack for making friends and organizing public events, Porter left government work at the end of Grant’s first term in 1873 for the third chapter of his life: making money. He was hired at a salary of $10,000 a year as the New York—based vice president for the Pullman Company and traveled to Europe in 1877 to try to expand the market for the luxury passenger train cars. He met with limited success. Most of his work, though, centered on New York and the East Coast train routes (he paid one ineffective visit to Chicago during the infamous 1894 Pullman strike, hoping to talk the workers into returning to their jobs). While still working for Pullman, he became involved with other rail businesses—some successful, some not—and his wealth grew.11

  Porter maintained his position with Pullman until 1896, when the company decided to close down the New York office. By then, Porter had cemented his position among the Manhattan industrialists, capitalists, and high society. Porter had married Sophie McHarg on December 23, 1863, during his Washington, DC, assignment with the Union Army. Their first child, Horace M., was born in October, followed by Clarence in 1871, William in 1878—he died shortly afterward—and Elsie in 1879. The family was part of the Manhattan society circles, and Porter and Sophie were mentioned regularly in newspaper columns, either attending or hosting different luncheons and galas. They bought a summer place in Long Branch, New Jersey, then a popular getaway spot for wealthy Manhattanites. It also became the site of the Porter family burials, and in September 1890 son Horace M. joined his brother, William, in the family plot. Typhoid had stricken the second son just months after his wedding, and less than two years after his graduation from Princeton University. “It was after Horace’s funeral,” Elsie wrote, “that I noticed gray hairs over my father’s temples and lines in his forehead that I had never seen before. Horace was his idol; he represented everything that a proud father could wish for in a son…. The day of the death marked the end of a chapter in my father’s life. He seemed to age ten years.”12

  Porter returned part-time to writing after the closing of the Pullman office freed him of the time commitments that went with that job. The former general had earlier published a few articles, including one about Lincoln and Grant that appeared in Century magazine in October 1885, three months after Grant’s death. This was followed by another piece on the end of the Civil War and the now-famous surrender scene at Appomattox Court House. But then he laid down his pen. After he left Pullman, though, Porter returned with a series of articles that began running in the fall of 1896 in the Century recalling his experiences as Grant’s aide.

  Porter was apparently pleased with the articles: He sent a letter to the magazine setting up gift subscriptions for his wife, his daughter-in-law, his surviving son, his neighbor Cornelius Bliss, his old friend General Edward F. Winslow in Paris, and Mark Hanna’s wife in Cleveland.13 Porter then rewrote and expanded the articles into a book, published in December 1897, Campaigning with Grant, best read as both a loyal subordinate’s close-up view of Grant in the latter stages of the war and a companion to Grant’s own memoirs.

  Porter also was active in the growing world of patriotic societies, serving five years as the third president of the national Sons of the American Revolution, which came together in 1889 to mark the centennial of the US Constitution. (Porter was eligible as the grandson of Andrew Porter.) He was a familiar face at gatherings of the New York chapters of the Grand Army of the Republic and the Military Order of the Loyal Legion. He also served as president of the highly influential Union Club of New York and was a member of at least seven other organizations, including the Century Association, the Down Town Association, the Grolier Club, and the University Club.14

  Porter’s oratorical skills kept him in demand as a speaker at formal dinners and Republican Party political functions. In 1892, during the party’s presidential nominating convention in Minneapolis, Porter had delivered the second nominating speech backing his friend, New York editor Whitelaw Reid, as President Benjamin Harrison’s running mate. (They lost.)

  By the summer of 1896, Porter had become deeply involved in the looming presidential campaign. There was even some talk, which quickly went away, of Porter as a possible vice presidential candidate.15 For Porter, the campaign was partly an effort to help an old friend, McKinley, whom Porter had first met while the two men were soldiers in the Civil War. The summer before, Porter had hosted a dinner for McKinley at his Madison Avenue home, and the guest list included some of the biggest New York City names in the Republican Party: Porter’s neighbor and mutual McKinley friend Cornelius Bliss, Elihu Root, Mayor William Strong, Chauncey Depew, Theodore Roosevelt, and Cornelius Vanderbilt among them. (Thomas Platt, the autocratic head of the New York state Republican machine, was notably not invited.)16

  Porter also was a loyal party man and eager to see the Republicans’ pro-business policies become federal g
overnment policies. Porter and Bliss, a dry goods magnate, took over the Auxiliary Committee, which was the finance arm of the Republican National Committee. Beginning in August, they used an intricate scheme of distributing “subscription” books to fellow Republicans prominent in different businesses, who in turn used them to record donations from their colleagues and competitors. This early version of “bundling” was hugely successful. Most of the money was used to create and distribute policy books and pamphlets, as well as humanizing portraits of the taciturn McKinley and his wife, Ida, who suffered from epilepsy. One of the campaign bios emphasized that her frailty emerged following the deaths of her mother and two infant daughters, an effort to counter planted rumors that she was “an English spy, a mulatto, a Catholic, a battered wife, or a lunatic.” McKinley similarly was targeted by whisper campaigns that he “was a common drunkard, an agent of the pope, a swindler.”17

  But the driving campaign issues were the economy and American monetary policy.18 In 1893 the financial system had been staggered by a series of bank failures tied to the collapse of a number of railroad companies following a massive and highly competitive buildup. It was the worst American economic depression prior to the Great Depression, and as in that later decade of hardship, there were few safety nets. When jobs dried up and farm prices plummeted, people starved. Incumbent Democratic president Grover Cleveland was on the losing end of a split within his party over protective tariffs aimed at shoring up American businesses, and for most voters, Cleveland became the face of the depression. After losing 113 seats in the House of Representatives in the 1894 midterm election, the party abandoned Cleveland for William Jennings Bryan, and the rotund president became something of a recluse, rarely leaving the White House, which he had ringed with guards.19

  In the weeks running up to Election Day, Bryan’s campaign began faltering, due in no small part to the funding disparity. The Democrats had raised only about $300,000 for Bryan’s campaign, and the candidate often could be seen lugging his own suitcase through train stations. The Republicans, under Hanna’s direction and with Porter’s work in New York City, raised about $3.4 million. And Porter achieved that despite being outside New York’s Republican political machine, controlled by Platt, who had tried to derail McKinley’s campaign at the party convention so that he and other powerbrokers could handpick a presumably beholden candidate. But by the final weeks of the campaign, Platt and the internal GOP fighting had faded into irrelevance.

  Hoping to drive a final spike into Bryan’s campaign, Hanna ordered up a series of parades in different cities for the days before the election. Porter organized the New York City “business men’s parade,” or “sound money parade,” on October 31 as an over-the-top signal of the support by American business for McKinley. Porter pulled strings, called in favors, and micro-managed to a surprising level. Noting that there was construction on Fifth Avenue, he beseeched city officials, from the city streets department all the way to the mayor’s office, to get the projects either finished or covered over in time for the parade. “The great howl is over the construction at Fifth Avenue between 30th and 34th Streets,” he wrote to Mayor William L. Strong, a single-term mayor whose biggest impact on New York and American politics was appointing Theodore Roosevelt police commissioner.

  Mrs. Hanna and her party and lots of people have engaged every room of the Waldorf, and this will prevent the procession from going past that building. I believe the contractor would be patriotic enough in such an emergency (like the cable car company and all others concerned) to move his stone and earth onto the sidewalk and board over the ditch for the 31st. Won’t you please see if this cannot be accomplished, then the parade will go off without a hitch, and we can have the greatest parade that was ever known.20

  A week later, in a separate letter, Porter sought to put words in the mayor’s mouth, suggesting Strong issue this statement: “As the parade on the 31st instant will continue for some hours after night-fall, the occupants of houses along the line of the march are earnestly requested to light as brilliantly as possible the front rooms of their buildings and raise the window shades in order to assist in illuminating the streets along which the parade will pass.” Porter told the mayor he could have issued the statement himself “but I think it would be more appropriate to have you take this action,” using the tone of a man accustomed to having his way.21

  The attention to detail paid off. On Halloween, some one hundred thousand people marched for McKinley and “sound money,” none of them under overt political banners but as members of different industrial and trade groups. The idea was to portray the parade as an act of nonpartisan solidarity, and the impressive display drew some 750,000 spectators, far exceeding expectations and setting records. “Never before in this nation’s history have so many flags been waved as were waved by the army that mustered in the streets of New-York City yesterday,” reported the pro-McKinley New York Times. “No such political demonstration has ever been seen on the continent. The city kept holiday. Adorned with the red, white, and blue, resounding to the music of patriotic arts, echoing with the cheers of hundreds of thousands of throats, and blessed with the brightest, most genial sunshine, New-York City never before saw such a day.”22

  The credit belonged to Porter. On election night, Porter joined hundreds of fellow Republicans at the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company building on Madison Square to await the returns, which came in fits and spurts via telephone from the national headquarters in Chicago and party boiler rooms in Baltimore, Boston, Des Moines, and other cities. By eight o’clock it was clear McKinley had won enough states to take the Electoral College, and the celebrating began, capped by a dinner for two hundred on the building’s tenth floor.23

  The victory was definitive. McKinley won the general vote by 51 percent to 47 percent and the Electoral College with 271 votes to Bryan’s 176 votes. McKinley took a day or two for rest but was already contemplating political appointees and developing plans for the inauguration itself, some four months away. Given the historic heft of the New York “sound money” parade on Halloween, the logical choice of an organizer for the inaugural parade was Porter, a duty the former general shouldered with equanimity. “I have not much liking for the expenditure of time I shall have to put on the preparations for the inaugural ceremonies at Washington, but Governor McKinley invited me to his house in Canton and made the request, and, of course, I had to reply,” he wrote to a friend in late December. “If we have good weather, we will have a fine show.”24 Speculation also swirled about a possible role for Porter in the McKinley administration. Given Porter’s Civil War record, his work in the Grant administration as a military liaison, and his history of support for fellow veterans, secretary of war was the post most often mentioned.

  Porter, though, had had his fill of the hornet’s nest of Washington politics during the Grant years. Porter told friends that the widely traveled and well-connected president-elect knew who the best appointees might be and would have his own ideas about who he could count on in his cabinet, a selection “so personal, being a good deal like the selection of a personal staff, that all persons naturally hesitate to make suggestions upon this subject to a president-elect.”

  Yet Porter didn’t hesitate for long. He pushed for his friend, neighbor, and fellow Republican fundraiser Cornelius Bliss—like himself, a figure outside the Platt political machine, which was pressing for some high-level job to go to a New Yorker. “I would really rather see Cornelius Bliss there than anyone else,” Porter wrote to a friend.

  He has done splendid work in the campaign, and a high position in Washington would be rather a novelty for him, and perhaps be attractive, whereas I served there as assistant secretary of war and for a short time was acting secretary of war, in charge of the department, so that I have tasted of all the sweets, if there are any in such places. Of course, any citizen would be glad to be identified with Governor McKinley’s administration in a prominent capacity, but so far as a Cabinet officer from New
York is concerned, I should really, as I have said, rather see Bliss there.”25

  It’s unclear when Porter and McKinley first discussed a role for the former general in the new administration, but it was probably during a trip by Porter to Canton in early December to confer on the plans for the inaugural parade. “The Governor has had very full and frank talks with me about all his preparations for the future, Cabinet, etc.,” Porter wrote to a friend.

  I told him at the outset that nothing could induce me to camp in Washington and undertake the African slavery of running a Department of the Government; that I was trying to get rest in these days rather than confining work. He is all adrift as to a secretary of war, but he will no doubt be able to get a good man before the 4th of March. As you say, it is more important than ever that there should be a proper head to the Military Department of the Government, particularly if we should have more domestic insurrections or a foreign war.”26

  Porter was a bit of a Francophile. Over the years, he worked at his French, occasionally hiring a private tutor, and made a near-daily ritual of reading aloud in French. While working for Pullman, he had made at least one trip to Paris and found the city fascinating.

  By mid-February, word was circulating that Porter would become McKinley’s ambassador to France, speculation that Porter seemed to confirm while trying to be nonresponsive. “I have your letter and note what you say about my going to France,” he replied to a friend. “This, as well as some other matters pending, will not take definite shape and be announced until after the 4th of March, and whatever announcement will be made will come from Washington. If the matter takes such shape that it can be announced earlier, I will most gladly communicate with you at once.”27

  McKinley, in fact, worked hard to incorporate his political friends into his new administration, while also trying to shore up support within the party. His pick for secretary of war was a questionable call: Russell A. Alger, a former lumber baron and governor of Michigan, who despite his Civil War experience (more than sixty battles and twice wounded) was an inept planner and leader of military forces. “Alger’s appointment is unfavorably received in many quarters,” Porter wrote. “I think it will probably be more popular in the West than here. Only future events can tell how successfully he will serve.”28