by Ron Chernow
With relatively little work to do, Grant found himself at loose ends. He roved around the post, wearing a battered straw hat and puffing on a pipe or cigar. Taking excellent care of his company, he planted a garden to furnish them with fresh vegetables and arranged with a local hunter to serve fresh elk meat, but such work yielded little comfort. “He was an ordinary looking man with firmly set mouth and deep, searching eyes that seemed to take me in at a glance and then turned indifferently away,” said a local rancher.10 Because local Indians posed no real threat, all the drills and discipline performed at the post seemed pointless and irksome.
Hypersensitive to taunts, Grant had been singled out as a target by bullies since boyhood. As he already knew, the commanding officer at Fort Humboldt, Robert C. Buchanan, was a martinet who had graduated from West Point in 1830, serving with distinction in the Mexican War. For his admirers, Buchanan was a consummate professional with elegant manners. One associate remembered “a man of refined habits, a courtly gentleman . . . Fine physique and of commanding presence, respected and admired, a thorough officer in all duties or obligations to his government or military standard of excellence.”11 But a darker side often governed Robert Buchanan, who enjoyed meting out punishment to those who did not share his punctilious regard for military etiquette. As A. P. Marble, Grant’s body servant, put it, “Colonel Buchanan was an efficient officer but strict in petty details to the verge of absurdity.”12 George Crook, who served under the ornery Buchanan before Grant arrived, left a chilling portrait of his despotism: “Our Commander seemed particularly elated at his own importance . . . He seemed to take delight in wounding the feelings of those under him, and succeeded pretty generally in making himself unpopular amongst the citizens as well as the army.”13
Grant and Buchanan were bound to clash. Grant could be slovenly in dress and careless in his habits and was sure to grate on a spic-and-span officer. He was nettled by this blustering new boss who insisted upon tight procedures at a remote outpost, where such caviling seemed misplaced. Buchanan had already been alerted by Benjamin Alvord to Grant’s drinking problem and pledge of abstinence, a handy weapon to brandish over his new captain.
Unfortunately for Grant, alcohol was ubiquitous at Fort Humboldt. Once morning drills ended, officers resorted to whiskey and poker to pass the time. “Commissary whisky of the vilest kind was to be had in unlimited quantities and all partook more or less,” said a military wife.14 To deal with his private sadness and mitigate the pain of migraine headaches, Grant got into the habit of drinking more frequently, often stopping for alcoholic refreshment at a local saloon or a general store run by James T. Ryan. Buchanan’s adjutant, Lewis Cass Hunt, said Grant “used to go on long sprees till his whole nature would rebel and then he would be sick.”15 Echoing comments made elsewhere, a beef contractor named W. I. Reed claimed Grant drank less often than other officers, but with more harmful consequences for “with his peculiar organization a little did the fatal [work] of a great deal . . . he had very poor brains for drinking.”16
In his Memoirs, Grant was adamant that he left the army voluntarily that spring from a wish to be reunited with his family. “I saw no chance of supporting them on the Pacific coast out of my pay as an army officer. I concluded, therefore, to resign.”17 This became the standard version favored by Julia, the Grant family, and several biographers, and little doubt exists that Grant meditated seriously retirement from the army. “I sometimes get so anxious to see you, and our little boys, that I am almost tempted to resign and trust to Providence, and my own exertions, for a living where I can have you and them with me,” he told Julia in early March 1854. Then in the next breath, he backtracked from this impractical wish. “Whenever I get to thinking upon the subject however poverty, poverty, begins to stare me in the face and then I think what would I do if you and our little ones should want for the necessaries of life.”18 Grant said he was so depressed he hadn’t strayed more than one hundred yards from his quarters for two weeks. “But you never complain of being lonesome so I infer that you are quite contented.” Then he related a dream that seemed laced with fear, jealousy, and barely disguised anger. “I thought you were at a party when I arrived and before paying any attention to my arrival you said you must go, you were engaged for that dance.”19 It was not the first time Grant betrayed jealousy or accused Julia of being indifferent to his desperate plight.
While Grant laid down the preferred version of his resignation in his Memoirs, where he never breathed a syllable about his drinking problem to posterity, he was more candid in later private conversations, telling Civil War chaplain John Eaton that “the vice of intemperance had not a little to do with my decision to resign.”20 To General Augustus Chetlain he admitted that “when I have nothing to do I get blue and depressed, I have a natural craving for a drink, when I was on the coast I got in a depressed condition and got to drinking.”21
Overwhelming evidence suggests that Grant resigned from an alcohol problem. Lewis Cass Hunt told several people how Buchanan sent him to reprimand Grant after one drinking episode. As Colonel Granville O. Haller heard the tale, Hunt told Grant that Colonel Buchanan would “withdraw the drinking charge if Grant didn’t offend again—he had Grant write out his resignation, omitting the date.” There was an “explicit understanding that if Grant forgot his pledge, Buchanan would forward his resignation and save Grant the odium of being cashiered by a General court martial.”22 The journalist Benjamin Perley Poore later confirmed that Buchanan had warned Grant, “You had better resign or reform,” to which Grant responded, “I will resign if I don’t reform.”23
One Sunday morning, Grant showed up at his company’s pay table under the influence of drink. Bristling at this display, Buchanan told Hunt to buckle on his sword and lay down the law to Grant, warning that if he did not resign, he would face a court-martial. According to Colonel Thomas M. Anderson, who heard the story from Hunt, “Grant put his face down in his hand for a long time and then commenced writing something . . . Grant said that he did not want his wife to know that he had ever been tried . . . Grant then signed his resignation and he gave it to the commanding officer.”24 Some of Grant’s friends, convinced he would have been acquitted, pleaded with him to stand trial. Henry C. Hodges said the regiment deemed Buchanan’s action “unnecessarily harsh and severe.”25 Rufus Ingalls, Grant’s old roommate at West Point and Fort Vancouver, believed that since Grant had not been incapacitated by drink, he would have been exonerated, but he confirmed that Grant refused to stand trial because “he would not for all the world have his wife know that he had been tried on such a charge.”26 The idea that Grant feared Julia’s wrath makes one wonder whether she had extracted a strict promise from him to refrain from drinking altogether.
During the Civil War, Thomas M. Anderson discussed Grant’s resignation with Robert Buchanan, then his commander in the Army of the Potomac. “I was very intimate with Col. Buchanan & had my first information as to the Humboldt episode . . . from him . . . I remember absolutely that Col. Buchanan told me distinctly that he had condoned a similar offense in Grant before he fired, or as he said permitted his resignation as a favor.” From discussions with Lewis Cass Hunt, Anderson, later commander at Fort Vancouver, added that Hunt had warned Grant not to show up intoxicated at the pay table and had even volunteered to go in his place, but Grant had refused.27
On April 11, 1854, Grant received his formal commission as full captain. Having achieved this rank, he tendered his resignation to Colonel Buchanan while confirming his commission in a simultaneous letter to the War Department. His resignation may have stemmed from a convergence of factors. Grant knew Buchanan was conducting a vendetta against him and did not want to endure a humiliating trial. He may also have reflected that he was profoundly unhappy with army life, could not afford to bring his family out West, and was dying a slow death in the service. Hence, Grant may have seen a redeeming side to his resignation, even though it had been wrung from him agai
nst his will.
The story of Grant’s resignation echoed down the years into the Civil War. In the small peacetime army, libels and scandals traveled swiftly among officers, whose rotations at far-flung outposts guaranteed wide currency for gossip. In such a situation, soldiers had to guard their reputations or missteps could dog them for years. Starting in April 1854, Grant’s bibulous nature became a part of army folklore and, rightly or wrongly, he was never again entirely free from charges of being a “drunkard.” “The reason for Grant’s resignation in 1854 . . . was known,” General Michael R. Morgan subsequently commented. “Grant’s case was unusual at the time and was discussed by the Army.”28 During the Civil War, both sides knew what had unfolded at Fort Humboldt. As the Union general James H. Wilson wrote: “It is a part of the history of the times that [Grant] had fallen for a season into the evil ways of military men serving on the remote frontier and that his return to civil life was commonly believed to have been a choice between resignation and a court-martial.”29 The grapevine even reached deep into the Confederacy, where diarist Mary Chesnut would allude to Grant’s earlier downfall in the Far West. “Put out of the army for habitual drunkenness.”30
Grant did not notify his censorious father of his resignation, an omission suggesting deep fear or shame. A perturbed Jesse Grant learned about it after Jefferson Davis accepted the resignation on June 2, and then he tried to prevail upon his local congressman, Andrew Ellison, to get the decision reversed. When that failed, he sent a humane letter to Jefferson Davis, entreating him to withdraw his acceptance of the resignation. He thought Ulysses had been conditioned by the army and could never readjust to civilian life. He penned prophetic words: “I think after spending so much time to qualify himself for the Army, & spending so many years in the service, he will be poorly qualified for the pursuits of private life.” He requested a six-month leave for his son, who “has not seen his family for over two years, & has a son nearly two years old he has never seen. I suppose in his great anxiety to see his family he has been induced to quit the service.”31 Unfortunately, Davis considered the matter settled, and his reply delicately evaded the true reason behind the resignation. He observed that since Ulysses had “assigned no reasons why he desired to quit the service, and the motives which influenced him are not known to the Department,” he would let the decision stand.32 Grant’s failure to specify a reason for departing from the army strengthens the suspicion that drinking lay at its root.
Fiercely protective of her husband’s reputation, Julia’s “indignation was intense as stories spread in army circles and were whispered in St. Louis” about Ulysses’s resignation, wrote Julia’s biographer Ishbel Ross.33 Her sister Emma was no less irate at the notion that alcohol had undone Grant’s army career: “It is not true that the Captain’s personal habits at that time led him into such difficulties that he was asked to resign.”34 Julia spent a lifetime reflexively denying such problems and glossing over the purgatorial months at Fort Humboldt. “He was happy in the fight and the din of battle, but restless in the barracks,” she later explained to a reporter. “He resigned from the army, and took a plantation in Missouri, and went to farming.”35 Grant was no less breezily dismissive to the press: “When I resigned from the army and went to a farm I was happy.”36 Grant stood on firmer ground in later arguing that his army departure was providential. “If I had stayed in the army I would have been still a Captain on frontier duty at the outbreak of the war and would thus have been deprived of the right to offer my services voluntarily to the country.”37 Indeed, his momentary disgrace can be seen in retrospect as his salvation, preserving him for a starring role in the Civil War instead of stranding him at a post in the hinterland.
The nearly two years of hardships on the West Coast had engraved a worried expression on Grant’s face, giving sad depths to his eyes. He tried to sound sanguine as he prepared to leave Fort Humboldt: “Whoever hears of me in ten years will hear of a well-to-do old Missouri farmer,” he told his comrades.38 He was still beset by ailments, including migraine headaches and fever, and Colonel Buchanan reported to the Pacific Department Headquarters on May 1, “Captain Grant is too unwell to travel just yet . . . but will proceed to San Francisco by the first steamer.”39 Having turned thirty-two, Grant retained enough self-confidence to know that his life to date did not reflect the wealth of talent stored up inside him. Dr. Jonathan Clark had treated his ailments at Fort Humboldt. In bidding him farewell, Grant spoke these parting words: “Well, doctor, I am out. But I will tell you something and you mark my words: my day will come, they will hear from me yet.”40 Despite his grim stint at Fort Humboldt, Grant had fallen in love with the natural beauty of northern California and grown so attached to the place that he had visions of making it his permanent home in future years.
On May 7, 1854, Grant boarded the steamer Arispe, heaped with timber and gold dust, bound for San Francisco. A few days earlier, he had written Julia an evasive letter that was short, cryptic, and devoid of his usual effusive affection. He chided her again for not writing, made no mention of his resignation, and simply announced that he had taken a leave of absence. “After receiving this you may discontinue writing because before I could get a reply I shall be on my way home. You might write directing to the City of New York.”41 It was a weirdly elliptical message that testifies to Grant’s confusion as to how he should break the shocking news to Julia.
The San Francisco that Grant encountered was no longer the rip-roaring, wide-open town he first saw. “Gambling houses had disappeared from public view,” he wrote. “The city had become staid and orderly.”42 Short of funds, he went to his friend Captain Thomas H. Stevens Jr., an officer who had begun a banking business. Grant had left $1,750 with Stevens in January and expected to collect that amount. Stevens offered 2 percent monthly interest and a more sophisticated investor might have realized no legitimate banker paid such exorbitant rates. “I can’t pay you now,” Stevens insisted, “but if you will wait a couple of weeks I will pay you in time for you to take the next steamer.”43 The obliging Grant agreed. Julia narrated the sequel: “At the end of the two weeks, the captain returned to find that Stevens had conveniently gone out of town and the captain was again cheated.”44 Once more the credulous Grant had been duped by a trickster in what had become a striking pattern. Clearly other people thought him something of a simpleton who could be defrauded with impunity. Not until 1863, amid the Civil War, did Julia send Stevens a blunt letter and finally receive belated payment.
While waiting for Stevens to pay, Grant visited Julia’s brother Lewis on the Stanislaus River only to return and find Stevens had vanished. With his life spiraling out of control, Grant grew desperate in his hunt for money. As he walked the streets, consumed with anxiety, he bumped into J. D. Elderkin, who was stunned by Grant’s seedy appearance. “I was almost ashamed to speak to him on the street, he looked so bad. I felt very sorry for him—poor fellow.”45
Thanks to the Elijah Camp fiasco, the perfidious T. H. Stevens, and the abortive farming ventures, Grant had squandered money he could ill afford to lose. The chief quartermaster on the West Coast, Robert Allen, an old friend of Grant’s, learned he was holed up in a cheap miner’s hotel called “What Cheer House.” He found Grant in a spartan garret room furnished with a cot, a pine table, and a chair. “Why, Grant, what are you doing here?” Allen asked. “Nothing,” Grant replied. “I’ve resigned from the army. I’m out of money, and I have no means of getting home.”46 Allen promised to help Grant and encouraged him to stop by his office.
Grant could only book passage to New York if he presented a certificate at the quartermaster’s office that entitled him to a $40 per diem payment the government owed him. Office clerk Richard L. Ogden remembered Grant shuffling into his work space late one afternoon, bearing the certificate. When Ogden announced it was improperly drawn up and he had no cash on hand, Grant’s “countenance fell, and a look of utter despair came over it.” Grant asked if he co
uld sleep on a threadbare old lounge chair there, explaining “I have not a cent to my name.” The good-hearted Ogden offered him a dollar for lodgings. “I am greatly obliged,” Grant said, “but, with your permission, I will use the dollar for my dinner and breakfast and the lounge will save me the dollar.” The next morning, Ogden not only cashed Grant’s certificate but escorted him to the office of the Pacific Mail Steamship. Since the quartermaster gave ample business to the steamship line, Ogden cajoled the manager into awarding Grant something “tantamount to a free pass to New York.” This was a godsend for Grant, who received a stateroom far more luxurious than anything he had imagined and would still have $15 when he arrived in New York.47
On June 1, 1854, Grant boarded a passenger ship owned by Commodore Cornelius Vanderbilt, the Sierra Nevada, that would carry him down to Nicaragua. In Washington, Congress had just passed the Kansas-Nebraska Act, which repealed the Missouri Compromise of 1820 and opened the possibility that settlers could create new slave states in the vast territories of Kansas and Nebraska, igniting explosive controversy. Southern Whigs joined with Democrats to enact the bill, leading Horace Greeley to predict that “the passage of this Nebraska bill will arouse and consolidate the most gigantic, determined and overwhelming party for freedom that the world ever saw.”48 That new party would be the Republican Party. These seminal events would profoundly affect the fortunes of Ulysses S. Grant, who likely knew little of what was happening.
When his boat reached the west coast of Nicaragua on June 13, Grant wrote to Thomas H. Stevens that the place was “as hot as the final resting place of the wicked.” He referred to Stevens’s scandalous behavior in exceedingly mild terms. “I was sorry not to see you before starting. I was anxious to see if some money could not be raised.” He said he was owed $500 from Humboldt Bay, which would be sent directly to Stevens. “I wish you would send me a N[ew] York check for $500.00 as soon as you can.”49 There is no evidence the money was ever paid. Within a few days, Grant had crossed Lake Nicaragua and embarked on the steamer Prometheus, which carried him with more than five hundred other passengers to New York, where they landed on June 25.