Our One Common Country by James B. Conroy Page A

Several hours up the twisting river, nine miles east of the siege line, high on a steep plateau, City Point came into view. Next to nothing had been here six months ago. Now it was a military metropolis, its waterfront choked with vessels of every description, including a steam-driven fleet of paddle wheelers hauling generals, politicians, and war profiteers to Washington City and back. Steep wooden stairs ran up the bluffs to the army’s nerve center, where tens of thousands of men assembled the tools of war in some three hundred buildings of every size and utility, all of it under the wing of Ulysses S. Grant.

    It was hard not to like Grant, impossible not to respect him. Stanton’s Assistant Secretary of War Charles Dana, a sharp-eyed newspaperman fresh from Horace Greeley’s Tribune, thought Grant was the mostmodest, honest, fearless man he ever knew. “Not a great man, except morally; not an original or brilliant man, but sincere, thoughtful, deep,” fond of a good joke, “ready to sit up with you all night, talking in the cool breeze in front of his tent.” Possessed of a certain wit, Grant had once said that he only knew two songs. One was “Yankee Doodle” and the other wasn’t. A superb horseman, he was fit and athletic but smaller than most of his men, with sloping shoulders, brown hair and beard, and “a foxy tinge to his moustache.” Bereft of a warrior lineage, the general was a tanner’s son, born in a two-room house, raised in rural Ohio. The most powerful man in the army at the age of forty-two, he was unselfconsciously plain. “He talks bad grammar,” an admirer said, “but talks it naturally, as much as to say, ‘I was so brought up, and if I try fine phrases I shall only appear silly.’ ”
    For all of his simplicity, Grant was a presence close up. His square-cut features seemed “carved from mahogany,” set off with blue-gray eyes, lion’s eyes, Dana called them, that could stare down the devil or shine with pure benevolence. An aide said no coarse language was uttered in his presence and none “passed his lips, and if by some rare chance a story a little broad was told before him, he blushed like a girl.” Unfailingly courteous to men of all ranks and women of all stations, there was “no noise or clash or clangor in the man.” There was no need for any. When Ulysses S. Grant talked, people listened.
    Now he welcomed the Blairs to City Point. Preston’s younger son, Frank, serving further south with Sherman, was one of Grant’s favorite generals. The Blairs who stood before him needed no introduction. They were awed by the might laid before them, impressed by Grant and his officers and their talk of catching Hood. The odds are more than good that Preston charmed the general as he charmed almost everyone else; Montgomery, not so much. Like the Blairs, Grant was a former Democrat, and had lived in St. Louis, Montgomery’s home ground, quite enough for Preston to work with. When the pleasantries were done, the Old Gentleman handed Grant two sealed letters addressed to Jefferson Davis. The general had them sent up the James immediately on the Union flag-of-truce boat, City of New York. Both letters asked for leave to come to Richmond, and both gave a reason, one true, one false.
    The first letter said that Blair was in search of documents taken by “some persons who had access to my House” when General Early’s army were in possession of it (a polite way to put it), and he wished to come to Richmond to look for them.The second letter said that the first would answer any bureaucrats’ questions about his visit. The truth he would share with Davis alone. He had come to explain his views on the state of “our country,” to help repair the ruin that the war had brought on “the nation” and, rather cryptically, to “promote the welfare of other nations that have