Grant

by Ron Chernow

  Grant was so broke he could not afford to stay in a hotel or boardinghouse, much less bring his wife and four children to St. Louis. Harry and Louisa Boggs offered him a bare room in their house on South Fifteenth Street, where he turned into a melancholy presence. His austere room had only a bed, a bowl, and a pitcher set on an adjoining chair; since this wretched back room was unheated, he sat with his hosts in the evening, warming himself by their living room fire. “He would smile at times, but I never heard him laugh aloud,” said Louisa Boggs. “He was a sad man . . . he seemed almost in despair.”124 Grant seemed to be staring into an abyss. “I don’t think he saw a light ahead—not a particle. I don’t think he had any ambition further than to educate and take care of his family.”125 Every Saturday Grant trudged twelve miles to White Haven, spent an evening with his family, then retraced his steps on Sunday. The Boggses, well aware of Grant’s drinking history, stayed vigilant about the problem. “It was his one weakness,” said Louisa Boggs. “His worst temptation was in meeting some old army friend.”126 Luckily, Harry Boggs was a strict temperance man and Grant never drank around him.

  As secession gathered strength, Grant discovered a deep-seated patriotism that he may not have known existed before. St. Louis had many residents with southern sympathies and it was dangerous to declare pro-Union sentiments too openly. It seemed as if the “irrepressible conflict,” of which Senator William Seward warned, would soon arrive.127 Profane and blustering, Harry Boggs liked to rant about “black Republicans” and Grant must have found this talk insufferable. “He was Northern,” said Louisa Boggs, “while Mr. Boggs and I were both Southern in sentiment.”128 As he monitored current affairs, Grant was upset by what he read in the press and enjoyed talking with William S. Hillyer, a young Republican lawyer from Kentucky with whom he shared office space. His friend John W. Emerson remembered Grant at the office “sitting alone at his desk with his hand holding a newspaper hanging listlessly by his side, with every evidence of deep thought, suggesting sadness.”129 Grant underwent a slow-dawning political awakening: “When I was in St. Louis the year before Lincoln’s election, it made my blood run cold to hear friends of mine, Southern men—as many of my friends were—deliberately discuss the dissolution of the Union as though it were a tariff bill. I could not endure it.”130 Grant’s views, simple but clear, were fiercely held.

  Grant never said anything to indicate that he saw war coming or might play a prominent part. On the other hand, the attorneys he worked with discerned the evident zest with which he analyzed battles then raging in Italy. He would study newspaper maps and exclaim, “This movement was a mistake. If I commanded the army, I would do thus and so.”131 The attorneys listened with suppressed smirks, as if Grant’s words betrayed a pathetic streak of self-delusion in this thwarted man.

  By early March, Grant brought his family to a house on Seventh and Lynch Streets that proved too expensive. He then swapped Hardscrabble for a snug, plain two-story house at Ninth and Barton Streets on the edge of town. Since Hardscrabble was worth more than the St. Louis town house, Grant received a $3,000 note but was swindled yet again and had to initiate a lawsuit that dragged on for years. His new house was quite modest, with a porch on one side and a low upper story, but he was at least reunited with his family.132 Fred and Buck began to attend school regularly and family life, if threadbare, regained some semblance of normality. Grant delighted in the idiosyncracies of his four children, treating the sturdy Fred like a young man; exercising care with the smart but delicate Buck; being tender with his beloved Nellie; and rejoicing in the antics of mischievous Jesse.

  By this point, the Grants could no longer mask the depressed state of their finances. One day, a business friend of Grant’s suggested to his wife that she drop by and pay a courtesy call on Julia. The woman did so and returned to her husband in high dudgeon. “Why did you send me there? The house is shabbily furnished, and they must be very poor.”133 For Julia, who grew up in pampered comfort, the fall in status contradicted her favored self-image. On one occasion, a lady friend asked Julia to accompany her on a shopping trip downtown. “I can’t do it,” Julia protested. “I have no shoes fit to wear on the street.”134

  Through it all, Julia maintained her custom of keeping slaves and had two slaves help with the children. In March 1859, she was scheduled to take the family to visit Jesse and Hannah Grant in Kentucky and wanted to take along one slave to care for the children. Upon reflection, she worried what would happen as she passed through Illinois, Indiana, and Ohio. While the Dred Scott decision had endorsed a master’s right to take slaves into free states, Julia was afraid that in passing through free states “she might have some trouble,” Grant explained to his father in citing the reason for Julia canceling her trip.135

  That Grant was progressively more troubled by the immorality of slavery became patently clear that spring. He had acquired from Colonel Dent the mulatto slave named William Jones who had worked on Dent’s farm and was now thirty-five years old. It was the only time Grant ever owned a slave and Jones may have come as a gift. Then, on March 29, 1859, Grant appeared at circuit court in St. Louis to file papers that declared “I do hereby manumit, emancipate & set free said William from slavery forever.”136 Still struggling financially, Grant could have earned a considerable sum had he chosen to sell Jones rather than liberate him. Instead he made good on his pledge to set free Dent slaves when it came within his power. In the inflamed political atmosphere in St. Louis, this bold step planted Grant firmly on the side of those critical of the South’s “peculiar institution.”

  By summer 1859 the partnership of Boggs and Grant teetered in a rocky condition. Grant did not have the stomach for collecting rents and hated how Boggs violated the privacy of clients and retailed gossip behind their backs. Worse still, the flagging business could scarcely support one partner but definitely not two. Louisa Boggs, a schoolteacher, pressed her husband to wind up the business and go into something more lucrative, and the Boggs and Grant partnership was formally dissolved.

  Once again the job outlook for Grant appeared ominous, and he applied for a position as county engineer: he would superintend local roads and receive a $1,500 annual salary. He submitted to the five-member Board of County Commissioners an impressive array of thirty-five supporting letters, including one from Taylor Blow, who had backed Dred Scott. Joseph J. Reynolds, who knew Grant at West Point, wrote that he had “always maintained a high standing, and graduated with great credit, especially in mathematics and engineering.”137 Throughout his life, Grant shrank from applying pressure to obtain positions and now conducted himself in gentlemanly fashion, refusing to lobby the commissioners. Both he and Julia were still superstitious, so he consulted a French fortune-teller, who forecast his defeat. “I will come within an ace of being elected, but I will be beaten,” he reported to Julia. “In a short time we will leave the city and I will engage for a time in a mercantile business. Something will happen very soon and then I will begin to rise in the world.”138

  The selection process for county engineer turned out to be highly politicized, and Grant fell on the wrong side of the political divide. Three of the five commissioners were Free-Soil Republicans, the remaining two Democrats, and Grant was voted down because of his association with Colonel Dent. As a Republican member, Dr. William Taussig, admitted: “The Dents, at least the old gentleman, were known to be pro-slavery Democrats and . . . outspoken rebels. Grant lived with them, and though nothing was known of his political views, the shadow of their disloyalty necessarily fell on him.”139 With a potential war looming, the commissioners stressed Union loyalty and Grant understood the bias against him. “You may judge from the result of the action of the County Commissioners that I am strongly identified with the Democratic party!” he wrote to his father. Aside from voting for Buchanan, he had adhered mostly to Whig tradition and had approached candidates pragmatically. The sensitive Grant reeled from his defeat for county engineer and later refe
rred to the “agony” this caused him.140 Julia long remembered with “some bitterness” her husband’s defeat “by that most unjust majority.”141

  Grant knew the winner was a German immigrant at a time when St. Louis had a large German population. “My opponent had the advantage of birth over me (he was a citizen by adoption) and carried off the prize,” Grant wrote.142 In breaking the news to Julia, he grumbled, “The Germans are loyal to each other.”143 To another local resident, he protested that “no American can get anything in this town” and complained that almost all county jobs were held by immigrants.144 In this woeful mood, Grant flirted briefly with the Know-Nothing Party, which inveighed against immigration and the Catholic Church. As foreign laborers flocked to build railroads, native-born Protestant workers resisted their competition and banded together in the mysterious Order of the Star-Spangled Banner. To safeguard their secrecy, they were instructed to reply to outside questions: “I know nothing.”145 Grant’s attraction to this movement was short-lived: “There was a lodge near my new home, and I was invited to join it. I accepted the invitation; was initiated; attended a meeting just one week later, and never went to another afterwards.”146 In time, Grant renounced such secret societies and any groups that opposed freedom of worship. He also came to view his loss of the county engineer job as a blessing, for had he gotten it, he would have been ensconced in a comfortable position at the outbreak of the Civil War and might never have joined the military.

  While Grant recuperated from his disappointment, John Brown and a group of abolitionist zealots raided the federal armory at Harpers Ferry, Virginia, hoping to seize weapons and foment a slave rebellion in the South. After barricading themselves inside the fire engine house, they were surrounded and seized by a marine contingent led by Robert E. Lee. The unrepentant Brown, charged with murder and treason, was marched off to the gallows, but he left behind an apocalyptic prophecy that “the crimes of this guilty land” would “never be purged away” except with blood.147 For the South, Brown’s raid gave flesh to their worst nightmares and deepened the widening gulf with the North, where many embraced him as a martyr. Grant had grown up hearing stories about Brown from Jesse Grant. Nevertheless, he denounced categorically the abortive raid on Harpers Ferry: “It was certainly the act of an insane man to attempt the invasion of the South, and the overthrow of slavery, with less than twenty men.”148

  As a consolation prize for losing the county engineer position, Grant got a job as a clerk in the custom house, but when the collector died within a month and was replaced by a new person, he prowled the streets again, searching for work. Those who now encountered him never forgot his hopeless, downcast air. “He greeted me kindly but seemed to be in a very distressed and disconsolate condition,” said George W. Fishback. “I had never before seen him so much depressed. He was shabbily dressed, his beard unshaven, his face anxious and the whole exterior of the man denoting a profound discouragement at the result of his experiment to maintain himself in St. Louis.”149 Grant flailed about for a job and devised a quixotic plan to launch a hardware business in Colorado—a far-fetched idea that Jesse Grant refused to finance.

  As the impecunious Grant soldiered on, it became clear that only his father could provide an escape route from his misery. When Julia suggested that he go to see Jesse, he adamantly resisted. Julia then reminded him that his father “had always been not only willing but anxious to serve him (in his own way, to be sure) . . . After a little hesitation at leaving me with the children and servants, he decided to start the next day.”150 Grant must have known his father would try to lure him back north, a position now more appealing than it had been two years earlier. As Fishback surmised, Grant “no doubt foresaw the threatened Civil War and felt that as an old defender of the Flag he had better take his chances among his people in the Northern States.”151

  Within a week, Julia claimed, her husband began sending her from Kentucky “long and cheerful letters,”152 but the documentary record suggests a far more pessimistic picture. As soon as he reached Covington, Ulysses wrote her that he had arrived “with a headache and feeling bad generally . . . My head is nearly bursting with pain.”153 Simpson Grant, then staying with Jesse and Hannah, was waging a losing struggle against tuberculosis, which forced him to keep going south in search of a cure. Although growing deaf in one ear and suffering from failing eyesight, Jesse Grant remained robust at sixty-six, serving as Covington’s postmaster.

  Having prospered as a merchant, Jesse was now worth $100,000—equivalent to nearly $3 million today—and employed about fifty people. When he reached sixty in 1854, he had begun to withdraw from active management of his business interests. His holdings included several tanneries near Portsmouth, Ohio, and leather goods stores in Wisconsin, Iowa, and Galena, Illinois. Ulysses came to Covington at a fortuitous juncture. The ailing Simpson had managed the Galena store and was more capable than his younger brother, Orvil, who assisted him. Simpson’s health and the prospect that the erratic young Orvil would end up running the Galena business must have alarmed Jesse Grant. When it came to a job for Ulysses, he deferred to Simpson, who agreed to send his older brother “to the Galena store to stay until something else might turn up in his favor, and told him he must confine his wants within $800 a year,” Jesse recalled.154

  As it turned out, Ulysses left behind such a long trail of debts in St. Louis that he would draw out $1,500 the first year, money he returned to the store after he went into the Union army. Always honorable about debts, Grant reassured creditors he would eventually repay every dollar. To be forced to serve as a clerk in his father’s store at age thirty-eight, in a decidedly junior position to his two younger brothers, was a demeaning situation that Grant could only have regarded with rueful laughter. He had spent futile years trying to become a successful breadwinner, free of the twin tyrants who had lorded over him, his father and Colonel Dent. Now he had to shed his pride and capitulate to his father’s will. As he told a friend in St. Louis, “because he loved his family so much,” he had decided that “we’ll all go to Galena and starve to death together.”155 So gathering up his family and modest belongings, he set off for Illinois bearing a heavy load of blighted hopes.

  PART TWO

  A Life of War

  CHAPTER SIX

  —

  The Store Clerk

  IN APRIL 1860, Ulysses S. Grant, cloaked in his old blue army cape, arrived in Galena aboard the Mississippi steamer Itasca. Clasping in each hand chairs that had served the family as deck seats, Grant, along with Julia and the four children, stepped ashore into what they hoped would be a new, more secure life. As Julia recalled, “The atmosphere was so cool and dry, the sun shone so brightly, that it gave us the impression of a smiling welcome.”1 However inviting the atmosphere, nothing could distract from the unpleasant truth that Grant had been a failure, battered by life at every turn. Everything indicated he would someday die a forgotten and thoroughly forgettable American, leaving no trace in historical annals.

  Hidden away in the northwest corner of Illinois, across the Mississippi from Iowa, Galena was an affluent town filled with lead miners, lumberjacks, and riverboat roustabouts. A profitable hub for regional commerce, it had boomed along with nearby lead mines, but its prosperity had started to fade a few years earlier when the Illinois Central Railroad chose Dubuque as its western terminus. “It used to be a great business center,” Elizabeth Cady Stanton wrote elegiacally some years later, “but since the railroad and Dubuque put their heads together to plot against its welfare, its glory has departed.”2

  After spending a few days with Simpson and Orvil, the newcomers established their residence in a snug brick house on a high bluff that afforded excellent vistas of the Galena River and the business district below. Set on the aptly named High Street, the modest house had shuttered windows and a pitched roof. Grant imagined that Galena, with its good schools and churches, might be a fine place to raise children and would provide him with so
me long elusive financial stability.3 Julia seemed jittery away from Missouri, so Grant assisted her in decorating the house, trying to set her homesick mind at ease. When she broke open a box and found a cracked antique mirror from White Haven, an heirloom associated with her father, she sobbed uncontrollably. “The Captain, in place of being impatient with me, tried to soothe me, saying, ‘It is broken, and tears will not mend it now,’” she remembered appreciatively.4

  Every day Grant descended to the downtown business center via a long, steep wooden staircase, negotiating hundreds of steps that bottomed out right by the leather goods store. He moved with his typical no-nonsense stride, eyes straight ahead, purposeful but aloof. “At this period Grant was a square shouldered spare built man with a very perceptible stoop caused as he said by the Mexican campaign followed by hard work on the St. Louis farm,” said a new colleague.5 His confidence, if damaged, had not been snuffed out and he retained an underlying self-esteem despite the vagaries of recent years. Fred Grant described his father’s mental state in 1860: “He was a sensitive and retiring man, but behind his modesty was a fair estimate of his own worth. He tolerated no disrespect and was most determined.”6

  At a bend in the meandering Main Street, Jesse’s leather goods store was a handsome establishment, housed in a prime four-story brick building and dealing in everything from fancy saddles to boot leather. As befit employment in a family firm, Ulysses performed multiple functions, serving customers, buying and selling hides, handling paperwork, and collecting bills. Melancthon T. Burke, a relative who worked with him, said Grant’s brawn served him well in heaving hides that sometimes weighed more than 250 pounds. He would hop up on the carts of farmers who came to town and bid on their cargo of carcasses, which were then shipped to one of Jesse’s tanneries. “Grant was of great physical strength and I have seen him many times lift a hide that no ordinary man could manage,” Burke said. “After tossing and weighing the hides, he would calmly walk over and wash his hands. Then he would resume his common position of reclining in a chair, feet on the counter.”7 Orvil’s wife recalled Grant hefting hides effortlessly on his shoulder, then hurling them down a chute to a basement storage area. He tossed them “with a fling of his arm, whereas Orvil could not, nor could Simpson when he was in the business.”8