Read Grant: A Novel for Free Online

WAS INDEED OUTSIDE, STANDING IN THE CANOPIED reviewing box that had been erected especially for him on the hotel’s second-floor balcony. Cadwallader pushed out through the revolving doors and into the crowd, and shoved and jostled a hundred yards up State Street. The wind was whipping hard off the lake, ice-cold, and the skies looked as if the rain might start again any minute. But the parade was definitely under way. The first of the Illinois infantry regiments was already marching past to a deafening cheer, flags up, swords up, eyes right. Cadwallader watched from the curb for a moment, but found himself slowly losing ground, crushed back against a lamppost, it seemed, by half the shoulders and elbows in Chicago. The Springfield Marching Band came around the corner playing “John Brown’s Body” out of tune, and he shivered and rubbed his face and thought of his nice warm hotel room on the fifth floor, paid for by the
Times
. He had stood in the cold outdoors just about long enough, he figured, to get the flavor of the thing.
    Upstairs five minutes later, still shivering, he draped a blanket across his shoulders like an Indian and went over to the window. The Palmer House was nothing if not modern. Under the sill, nextto the baseboard, was an iron-pipe central heating contraption for which a new word had recently been coined: “radiator.” He squatted on his heels and turned a knob. Then he held his hands out, palms down, the way you might warm them over a campfire, until he felt the heat begin to spread from the pipes—radiate—and he braced himself on the wall and creaked to his feet. Fifty-three years old.
    He pulled the blanket tighter around his shoulders and sat down in a straight-backed chair two feet from the radiator. Sylvanus B. Cadwallader had only been thirty-six the year he first met Grant, 1862. Working in Milwaukee as City Editor for the Milwaukee
Daily News
; in poor health and bored to tears. And he might be there yet, he thought, covered in cobwebs and bent over his desk like Ebenezer Scrooge, except one day early in October, out of the blue, a telegram arrived from the owners of the Chicago
Times
, and Cadwallader’s world just flipped itself up and over, changed forever. Would he care to go down to Tennessee and write about General Grant’s army for the
Times
? (And by the way, their previous reporter had been tossed in military prison by General Grant for publishing false information—could Cadwallader possibly get the man out?)
    Cadwallader could and did. If he closed his eyes and shut out the noise from the street below, he could still picture the grimy little yellow stucco depot in Jackson, Tennessee, and hear the old wooden cars of the army train jerking and squealing to a halt. He could still see the pale consumptive face of Grant’s personal aide, Major John A. Rawlins, as the Major sat in his tent on the outskirts of town and scowled his way through Cadwallader’s stack of press credentials and said the General would talk to him some other time. And he could still see
Grant
’s face when he finally did get to meet him two weeks later.
    Cadwallader chuckled to himself. Thirty-six years old and full of conceit and vinegar—what Cadwallader had done was send off his first story to the
Times
even more critical of Grant than his incarcerated predecessor. The Union troops were in the process of maneuvering from Jackson over toward La Grange, getting in position for the cavalry clash that would ultimately be the Battle of Holly Springs. The stragglers and bummers in some of the regiments were plundering and burning every civilian building theypassed, and they needed to be disciplined and punished, and Cadwallader, in the height of his newspaperman’s military wisdom, said so.
    Next day he was passing Grant’s tent on his way to breakfast when the flap shot up with a crack and there was Grant, beckoning him to come in. The General had a mass of newspapers on his table, and without