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Palace. Every man and boy in the country could see it and identify with it and feel some pride in a free society like that, where you might fail once or twice, but Virtue would be Truly Rewarded in the end.
    And the other reason, of course, was Appomattox. If any image was going to live forever in American memory, right alongsideWashington at Valley Forge and Andy Jackson at New Orleans, it was surely the perfect glorious contrast of U. S. Grant and Robert E. Lee, sitting down in Wilmer McLean’s brick house at Appomattox to end the war. Everybody in the world knew the scene. Silver-haired patrician Lee in his handsome clean uniform with his yellow sash and his jeweled sword. Laconic little U. S. Grant in his dirty boots and his mud-spattered old private’s uniform with the three stars sewn like an afterthought on the shoulder. Grant writing out the terms of surrender the way he always wrote, without hesitation or pause, then handing them modestly over to Lee, generous, noble terms, Grant’s own initiative and the first great step toward national reconciliation and forgiveness. It took a hard heart indeed to vote against Appomattox.
    Cadwallader lay down on the bed and pulled the blanket to his chin. He set his mental clock to wake him up one hour later; yawned. There was one more reason, he thought as he drifted off to sleep, why the people had twice elected Grant as President, and might yet do it again. Grant was the country’s last true connection to the martyred Abraham Lincoln. Grant was Lincoln’s friend and Lincoln’s heir. The two of them had walked side by side down the smoking streets of Richmond in 1865, the tall and the short of it, as Lincoln had joked. What Grant really represented, Cadwallader thought, was Atonement and Tribute at once.
    If Grant wanted the Republican nomination, he could probably have it, as the cub reporter said, by spontaneous combustion.

CHAPTER FIVE

    Y OUR FRIEND MARK TWAIN,” SAID WILLIAM TECUMSEH “CUMP” Sherman, and he turned his head to the left and covered his mouth, “is a piece of
work
!”
    Somebody whooped his name, and Sherman stood up and wagged his cigar and sat down again to a foot-stamping chorus of “Uncle Cump! Uncle Cump!” He leaned over to pour a little more coffee in Grant’s cup. “Twain told me he came up the staircase tonight, into the hall”—Sherman swept his cigar across the spectacularly resplendent banquet room that the Palmer House Hotel claimed was the largest in the world—“found all those women lined up on the stairs to watch us go in. Says, ‘Don’t you think the General ought to come out for
female rights
tonight? Win some
votes
?’ There he is now.”
    Grant saw him, three tables away, lanky on his feet, all red hair and red moustaches, glass of water raised in their direction like a gladiator giving a toast. Twain said something to the group at his table and they fell apart in raucous laughter, though you could only tell that from their pantomime, because by now there were five hundred men in the room, and what seemed like five hundred more waiters, and over the noise of the voices and laughter and glasses and silver there was still the orchestra playing every CivilWar march ever written. Twain blew a kiss to Sherman, and the table went to pieces.
    “He’s coming over,” Sherman said.
    And indeed he was. Grant studied his menu. They had passed the oyster, turtle soup, and salmon courses, and the waiters were starting to fan out with the roast beef servings, and as far as he could tell, Mark Twain had yet to take a bite.
    “He’s wild as can be,” Sherman said.
    Grant smiled at the thought. He had carried
The Innocents Abroad
with him on his round-the-world tour, and he enjoyed the idea of Mark Twain running wild anywhere. He looked at Sherman, who was now standing up again and leading the orchestra with both arms. He looked past Sherman, down the head table, where little Phil Sheridan, brand-new father of twins and the