by Ron Chernow
Grant kept busy during his Benicia stay. The soldiers improvised a theater, with log boxes constructed for officers, and Grant attended regularly. He visited two of Julia’s brothers, who had cashed in on the Gold Rush by running a hotel and ferry service on the Stanislaus River, but his favorite diversion was card playing. San Francisco was chock-full of gambling houses and Grant, mesmerized by games of chance, immediately went ashore with a friend and won money for dinner at the faro table. Always a probing observer of human nature, Grant was touched by the plight of well-to-do young men who had flocked to San Francisco, lured by dreams of riches, only to slave away as carpenters or masons. “Many of the real scenes in early California life exceed in strangeness and interest any of the mere products of the brain of the novelist,” he declared.69
On September 14, the Fourth Infantry left for its new home at Columbia Barracks, on the Columbia River, in Oregon Territory, across the water from the small settlement of Portland. (The barracks was renamed Fort Vancouver in July 1853 and the land became part of Washington Territory.) The ship that transported the regiment up the coast, the Columbia, had a turbulent voyage, encountering three days of gale-force winds that made Grant and other passengers seasick. Right before arriving at Columbia Barracks, Grant had a vivid dream, telling Julia “that I got home and found you, Fred. and a beautiful little girl, all asleep. Fred. woke up and we had a long conversation and he spoke as plainly as one of ten years old.”70 Grant still did not know the sex of the baby he presumed had been born in late July and imagined it as a girl. The letter reveals the extent of his anxiety about a prolonged separation from his family.
An army outpost since 1849, Columbia Barracks was set in a beautiful wilderness sparsely populated by Indian tribes and frontier settlers. When the weather was clear, it disclosed glistening vistas of snow-covered Mount Hood shimmering in the distance. But when it rained, the fort could seem lonely and godforsaken; when it snowed, the river grew icy. By December, snow stood ten inches thick on the ground and the mercury often dipped below freezing. “It either rains or snows here all the time at this place so I scarcely ever get a mile from home, and half the time do not go out of the house during the day,” Grant reported to Julia.71 For someone prone to depression, the everlasting rain and snow, combined with enforced confinement, were sure to prey on his mind. Grant began to suffer cramps in his legs and feet in the damp, frigid climate, a possible symptom of alcoholic neuropathy.72 “He was quiet and kept his room a good deal,” said one officer. He “was not a man who showed his griefs with his friends. He suffered alone.”73
Originally an important trading post for the Hudson’s Bay Company, Columbia Barracks still had the wooden stockade and three-story guard tower from that era. Grant was lucky to live in a building known as the Quartermaster’s Ranch, where he resided with his old West Point roommate Rufus Ingalls and two other officers. With porches on three sides, the two-story building stood on a slope above the Columbia River and Grant thought it the finest house in the territory. Made in New England, it had been dismantled and shipped around Cape Horn to the West Coast. At first, Grant was subordinate to Captain Thomas Lee Brent, but when the latter was transferred in May, Grant assumed total responsibility as regimental quartermaster, superintending all buildings, a blacksmith shop, a tin shop, a saddler’s shop, a carpentry shop, and two hundred mules.
As if touched with Gold Rush mania, Grant rashly entered into a business venture that caused him no end of grief. In Sackets Harbor, he and Julia had befriended a prominent family, the Camps, who were ruined by a railway investment. To rescue Elijah Camp, Grant paid for him to accompany the regiment to Columbia Barracks, where Camp opened a sutler’s store and Grant, with pay saved up from the Panama journey, supplied the needed $1,500 in capital. The con artist and the scoundrel always found a ready target in U. S. Grant. While the business boomed, Camp balked when Grant asked for a profit statement and “began to groan and whine and say there was no money in his trade at all,” Julia said.74 Perhaps detecting Grant’s gullibility, Camp complained that he would feel better owning the business outright. Grant, always good-natured to a fault, agreed to withdraw his $1,500, apparently taking $700 in cash and $800 in personal notes from Camp. “I was very foolish for taking it,” Grant admitted to Julia, “because my share of the profits would not have been less than three thousand per year.”75 Still not satisfied, Camp began to assert he couldn’t sleep at night, worrying that the notes Grant held might fall into the wrong hands. The obliging Grant then burned the notes by candlelight in front of Camp. Camp sold gunpowder in the shop, and when some of it accidentally blew up the store, he decided to return to Sackets Harbor. He refused to pay Grant the $800 he owed him, even though he had earned ten times that amount.
That November, Grant’s old card-playing partner from the Mexican War, Franklin Pierce, won the presidency on the Democratic ticket, defeating General Winfield Scott, who carried only four states for the Whigs. This lopsided defeat threatened the Whigs’ survival and would soon lead to formation of the Republican Party. As Charles Sumner told William Seward, “Now is the time for a new organization. Out of the chaos the party of freedom must arise.”76
Forlorn in the frosty northern woods, Grant must have felt quite distant from national politics. He wore a long beard, grew stout, and agonized over his separation from Julia. Their psychological distance seemed even greater than the geographical. As the Columbia River froze and blocked mail steamers, it took two months for her letters to reach him, and his morose return messages make for pitiable reading. “Just think,” he wrote in October, “our youngest is at this moment probably over three months of age, and yet I have never heard a word from it, or you, in that time.”77 Not until December 3, 1852—more than four months after his birth—did Grant learn that Julia had brought Ulysses Jr. into the world. Simultaneously he received confirmation from his sister Virginia and brother Orvil, and he bubbled over with relieved excitement: “It made tears almost start in my eyes, with joy, to hear so much about them by one mail,” he confided.78
Despite long absences from Julia, Grant’s life was miraculously free from allegations of womanizing. He would show up for dances, watch couples wordlessly for a while, then retire to the privacy of his room. “He did not run after the women as some of the officers did,” said Elderkin. “When he was in Oregon in 1852, his wife was in the eastern states, and he never ran after anyone.”79 Everyone noticed how he pined for his wife. “Often, of a winter’s night, when we were seated around the fire,” wrote Delia Sheffield, “he would tell me of his wife and children and how he missed them.”80 One morning, Grant dropped by the cottage of the artillery sergeant Theodore J. Eckerson, who recalled Grant showing him a letter from Julia where she “had laid baby Fred’s hand on the paper and traced with a pencil to show the size of it. He folded the letter and left without speaking a word; but his form shook and his eyes grew moist.”81 All the while, Grant struggled with gnawing suspicions that Colonel Dent wished to sabotage his marriage and steal away his children. As he wrote to Julia in July 1853, with a noticeable touch of anger, “How can your pa & ma think that they are going to keep Fred. & Ulys always with them?”82
The only rumor of philandering that ever trailed Grant concerned a Native American woman, named either Moumerto or Maria, who later claimed she gave birth to a daughter fathered by Grant. Grant’s fellow soldiers tended to discount the story, which remains vague and wholly unsubstantiated.83 What is certain is that Grant showed striking sympathy for Indians whom his regiment had come to police. “It is really my opinion that the whole race would be harmless and peaceable if they were not put upon by the whites,” he told Julia.84 He saw firsthand the fraud and abuse practiced upon Native Americans by corrupt white agents who swindled them on goods, not to mention the devastating effects of smallpox and measles communicated by white settlers.
Army pay was paltry in these years. One officer pointed out that “laborers and mecha
nics could in one week earn a captain’s pay . . . even the highest officers . . . were compelled to practice the most rigid economies.”85 Many officers, like Grant, couldn’t afford to bring their families to the western outpost. The Gold Rush inflated prices to stratospheric levels, sharpening the pinch for Grant, who feared military life would condemn him to a nomadic existence at frontier garrisons without his family. Under the circumstances, he told Julia in May 1853 that if he could “get together a few thousand dollars,” he might quit the army and rejoin her.86 At the very least, he could then send for her and the boys. The speculative atmosphere bred by the gold miners must have buttressed the idea that one business bonanza—one big killing—might free him from this lonely exile.
After leasing one hundred acres near the Columbia River, Grant and three other officers began to plant potatoes, oats, onions, and corn, the diligent Grant doing all the plowing and furrowing himself. His hands grew rough and callused from hard labor and he developed a slight stoop from bending in the field. “Passing this field one day, in the early spring, I saw Captain Grant, with his trousers tucked in his boots, sowing oats broadcast from a sheet tied about his neck and shoulders,” remembered Delia Sheffield.87 By the spring, his efforts had yielded a bumper crop. Then in June, the sudden melting of snow from the Cascades caused the Columbia River to overflow, drowning the oats, onions, and corn, and half the potato crop. The rising water also wrecked timber that Grant had neatly stacked for sale to steamboat captains. To aggravate matters, the price of potatoes plummeted and the four partners had to pay someone to cart away a rotting, worthless crop.
After the farming venture backfired, Grant and a partner bought up chickens and shipped them to San Francisco, only to have most perish en route. Then Grant and Rufus Ingalls learned that ice sold for exorbitant prices in San Francisco. To capitalize on this, they packed one hundred tons aboard a sailing vessel only to have headwinds detain the ship and melt the ice; by the time it arrived in San Francisco, other boats packed with ice had preceded it, leading to a price skid. To top things off, Grant and another officer tried to start a social club and billiard room at the Union Hotel only to have the hired manager abscond with their funds.
Why did Grant’s speculative schemes invariably go awry? Partly the explanation lies in his desperate desire to bring Julia and the boys to Fort Vancouver. He aimed to make a windfall and exploit sudden rises in price instead of engaging in sure, steady work. It was also the triumph of hope over experience: he never learned from earlier mishaps that commodities are perishable items with wildly fluctuating prices. He was also congenitally naive in business. Sincere himself, he could never imagine how deviously other people could behave. “Neither Grant nor myself had the slightest suggestion of business talent,” said partner Henry D. Wallen. “He was the perfect soul of honor and truth, and believed everyone else as artless as himself.”88
As in many frontier garrisons, soldiers dealt with boredom and loneliness by escaping into an alcoholic stupor. Second Lieutenant George Crook claimed officers were drunk daily “and most until the wee hours of the morning. I never had seen such gambling and carousing before or since.”89 Grant drank less often than other officers but went on “sprees” consistent with his lifelong tendency to engage in sporadic binge drinking. “He would perhaps go on two or three sprees a year,” said Lieutenant Henry C. Hodges, “but was always open to reason, and when spoken to on the subject, would own up and promise to stop drinking, which he did.”90 The problem was not the frequency with which Grant drank but the extreme behavioral changes induced. Officer Robert Macfeely observed: “Liquor seemed a virulent poison to him, and yet he had a fierce desire for it. One glass would show on him,” his speech became slurred, “and two or three would make him stupid.”91 Alcohol loosened up Grant’s tightly buttoned personality, giving him a broader, often jovial emotional range; the description of being “stupidly” or “foolishly” drunk would recur with striking regularity in future years. Rumor mills hummed busily in the small, insular peacetime army before the Civil War, and when Grant made a public spectacle of himself, those who glimpsed him in this silly, sloppy state never forgot the sight.
Drinking may have been a needed release from the nervous tension he accumulated during the long abstinence between episodes. Brought up in a strict Methodist household, Grant was moralistic enough to reprimand others who succumbed to alcoholic temptation. Delia Sheffield recalls the time the skipper of a small boat got drunk and disturbed the audience during a private theatrical. “Captain Grant walked to where he was sitting, and taking him firmly by the collar, marched him out of the hall. He had a true soldier’s love of order.”92 But Grant’s drinking lapses would be costly and ultimately ruinous to his reputation. Robert Macfeely says that one day Grant was riding a pony that slipped and fell on top of him on a muddy road, leaving him bruised and disheveled and giving rise to reports that he was drunk. Brevet Major Benjamin Alvord “preferred charges against him. Grant protested that he had not been drinking then, but Alvord sent in charges against him and Grant pledged himself not to drink any more.”93 Alvord would forward this pledge to the commanding officer of Grant’s next posting, with calamitous results.
One other consequential encounter returned to hurt Grant a decade later. One of his quartermaster duties was to supply pack animals and other provisions for parties surveying a railroad route through the Cascade mountains for what became the Northern Pacific Railway. In July 1853, one such survey was led by the twenty-six-year-old brevet captain George B. McClellan. Unlike Grant, McClellan had graduated near the top of his West Point class and showed little patience for slipshod performance. While his expedition was being outfitted at Fort Vancouver, said Henry C. Hodges, “Grant got on one of his little sprees, which annoyed and offended McClellan exceedingly, and in my opinion he never quite forgave Grant for it.”94 Though suffering from a severe cold, Grant delivered two hundred horses and other supplies on time, but he had made a powerful enemy who would associate him with this alcoholic binge.
By now Grant was despondent and almost frantic to be reunited with Julia. “Mrs. Sheffield, I have the dearest little wife in the world,” he exclaimed. “I want to resign from the Army and live with my family!”95 Then on August 5, 1853, Captain William W. S. Bliss died and the resulting vacancy led to Grant’s promotion to full captain. Secretary of War Jefferson Davis ordered him to report to Company F of the Fourth Infantry at Fort Humboldt, California. Grant had known that, if promoted, he would likely go there, having told Julia a few months earlier, “Col. Buchanan is there at present, I believe, establishing the post.”96 Lieutenant Colonel Robert C. Buchanan was all too familiar to Grant as the strict disciplinarian who used to fine him wine bottles at Jefferson Barracks for his frequent late returns from White Haven. The memory of this bogeyman could only have depressed his mood as he got ready to leave Fort Vancouver for the wilds of northern California.
CHAPTER FIVE
—
Payday
ON JANUARY 5, 1854, Ulysses S. Grant, after sailing 250 miles up the coast from San Francisco on a “long and tedious voyage,” arrived at Fort Humboldt, a scenic but abysmally secluded destination.1 The fort commanded a hundred-foot bluff with spacious views of Humboldt Bay and the sea beyond, and was hemmed in by deep stands of towering sequoia and redwood trees, steeped in perpetual shadow. Since one could only reach San Francisco by water, mail trickled in on an irregular basis. The largest nearby town was Eureka, a modest hamlet with a handful of sawmills and approximately five hundred people. The officers’ quarters and furnishings were rough-hewn from giant logs cut from nearby forests. Aside from recreational drinking and dancing, the only available pastimes were fishing and hunting elk, deer, and black bears, activities that awakened little interest in Grant.
The claustrophobic setting exacerbated his solitude, making him feel fearfully cut off from the outer world and tipping him over the edge psychologically. “Imagine a place closed in
by the sea having thrown up two tongues of land, closed in a bay that can be entered only with certain winds,” he told Julia.2 Only a month after his arrival, he lapsed into self-pity. “You do not know how forsaken I feel here!”3 A pall smothered his often sparkling prose, which lost its humor, buoyancy, and charm. “I got one letter from you since I have been here but it was some three months old,” he complained, speculating that little Ulysses Jr. must be talking by now.4 His laments betray the earmarks of acute depression, including lethargy and indifference to his environment: “I do nothing here but sit in my room and read and occasionally take a short ride on one of the public horses.”5 He had applied for orders to travel to Washington to settle his Mexican War account and remained despondent over unaccountable delays. “The state of suspense that I am in is scarcely bearable,” he declared.6
Grant watched despair etch deep lines in his face. When he had a troublesome tooth extracted, his face swelled up until it was “as round as an apple,” and, as he stared at himself in the mirror, he reflected gloomily: “I think I could pass readily for a person of forty five.”7 He came down with chills and fever that February and had to be treated for “severe attacks.”8 His colleagues readily intuited his profound yearning for his family and the turmoil engendered by their absence. One day, when he lost a ring that Julia had given him at their engagement, he was beside himself. “The intrepid soldier, who preserved his coolness in the bloodiest battles, was completely unstrung,” recalled a local businessman. “The next morning half of the command was turned out and the parade ground was ‘panned’ until the ring was found.”9