Grant
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Grant displayed small business aptitude and sometimes acted as if the work were so much meaningless drudgery. “He was restless I think,” Julia speculated. “It wasn’t congenial to do the work required of him.”9 Periodically he climbed into a buggy and traveled around collecting debts, but confessed to having “no ‘faculty for dunning people.’”10 In the store, where he sat puffing on his customary clay pipe, Grant struck some folks as haphazard or apathetic. John E. Smith, who owned a nearby jewelry shop, observed that Grant refused to function as an ordinary sales clerk, asking customers to wait until the “real” clerk returned. If the customer was in a hurry, Grant “would go behind the counter very reluctantly, and drag down whatever was wanted; but [he] hardly ever knew the price of it, and, in nine cases out of ten, he charged either too much or too little.”11 With his guileless nature, he was easily hoodwinked by customers who suggested lower prices. Jesse Grant credited his son for working with gusto, although he also thought he did not bother to ingratiate himself with customers. When Ulysses later grew famous, townspeople stood on the sidewalk and peered into the leather shop window, trying to figure out exactly which Grant had turned into the victorious general.
Perhaps too insistently, Grant professed contentment with his job, denying he felt degraded. “In my new employment I have become pretty conversant, and am much pleased with it,” he wrote. “I hope to be a partner soon, and am sanguine that a competency at least can be made out of the business.”12 For the rest of his life, he expressed pride in his Galena accomplishments. Through advances from the firm and gifts from Colonel Dent, Grant slowly regained solvency, paying off residual debts in St. Louis. His niggardly salary of $600 per annum, soon boosted by Jesse to $800, barely supported his family. If he never declined into shabby desperation, he had to practice extreme frugality. One town resident recalled a Sunday morning when he encountered Grant bundled in his old military coat. “People wonder why I wear the coat, fact is I had this coat; it’s a good coat, and I thought I’d better wear it out,” Grant said.13
His brother Simpson had managed the store and built up the business until consumption forced him to retire, making Grant’s advent timely. “We all looked up to him as an older man and a soldier,” said Burke. “He knew much more than we in matters of the world, and we recognized it.”14 By all accounts, Simpson was cut from the same cloth as Ulysses. Thin, quiet, and handsome, he was a gentleman of sterling integrity and sound business sense. He went to live with Ulysses and Julia on the bluff, and on sunny days, people saw him sitting outside, trying to regain his health. Tuberculosis was then an untreatable disease, a gradual, remorseless killer.
Because of Simpson’s illness, Orvil, thirteen years younger than Ulysses, ran the Galena store. With his broad, square face, he bore a conspicuous resemblance to his eldest brother. Orvil’s wife, Mary, said Ulysses “was a bit shorter than Orvil, more muscular, a sturdily built man. They had the same sandy blonde beard, the Captain’s hair was blonder and tawny, Orvil’s hair was reddish.”15 In due time, Orvil would prove a corrupt and irresponsible rascal and already showed signs of a wayward disposition. His reputation was of “an uncongenial soul, quite Grant’s opposite, more like old Jesse, an uninhibited sharper, and rather arrogant and conceited as well, disliked by Galenians heartily,” said one townsman.16 To work under Orvil must have mortified his scrupulous eldest brother. Since the lowly job lay far beneath Grant’s talents, many Galena friends suspected he was simply marking time and awaiting a better opportunity.
In future years, Orvil’s wife, a sharp-tongued, envious woman, took wicked pleasure in entertaining newspapermen with scurrilous gossip about Ulysses and Julia Grant. She snickered at Ulysses as a henpecked husband, helplessly under his wife’s thumb. “She decided for him what he would wear. Even in later years if he wanted to wear a blue coat, she would say he looked better in a black coat and with no word of protest, the black coat would be donned.”17 Like other Grants, she deplored Julia’s boasting and superstition and cringed at her public displays of affection with her husband, complaining that “no two people of that age ever deported themselves quite like that pair.”18 She accused Julia of showing a ghastly temper with servants, while Grant behaved more graciously, tipping generously. Because Orvil and Jesse Grant disapproved of Julia, Ulysses’s wrath flared whenever they carped about her.
Orvil’s wife saved her most poisonous barbs for Grant’s indulgence toward his children, especially the rapscallion Jesse. “He and the Captain would spend time rolling around on the floorboards, kicking, wrestling and paying no mind to the dust or trouble they stirred up.”19 Other friends admired the Grants’ tolerant attitude toward their offspring, who darted in and out of the kitchen with abandon, their home a favorite haunt of neighborhood children. As an adult, Jesse looked back fondly on his daily tussles with his father. When Grant mounted the long wooden stairs at day’s end, Jesse confronted him in mock defiance: “Mister, do you want to fight?” Grant countered: “I am a man of peace; but I will not be hectored by a person of your size.”20 In their subsequent wrestling match, he would allow Jesse to emerge triumphant. Despite his permissive nature, Grant wanted respectability for his children, and Fred complained he couldn’t go barefoot like other boys and had to wear a waistcoat buttoned down to his trousers.
In general, Grant lived a quiet, unobtrusive life, attending the Methodist church, smoking his clay pipe, and reading aloud to Julia every evening as she sewed. Although he and Julia were well respected in Galena, they didn’t venture out much and stuck to a small circle of friends. Their constricted social life safeguarded Grant from the temptation of drink in a town with forty saloons. Most people who knew Grant agreed he did not touch a drop of liquor during his time in Galena. Burke said he even abstained from hard cider, but he also knew alcoholism was endemic in the Grant clan. “The family couldn’t drink. They all were so constituted that to drink was fatal.”21 The only time Grant ever strayed was when he was away from Julia and collecting overdue bills in his buggy in Iowa and Wisconsin, where he “usually followed the evening meal with a drink of whiskey,” according to one source.22
The one significant tale of Grant drinking in Galena came from a full-blooded Seneca Iroquois sachem, Ely S. Parker, who grew up on an Indian reservation in upstate New York and was a chief of the Six Nations. Trained as a civil engineer, he was a man of giant girth with jet-black hair, penetrating eyes, and exceptional strength who styled himself a “savage Jack Falstaff of 200 [pound] weight.”23 After working on the Erie Canal and Great Lakes lighthouses, he was assigned by the Treasury Department to build a new limestone building in Galena for the post office and custom house. Parker frequented the Grant leather goods store and something about the “diffident and reticent” Grant seized his attention. “Selling goods from behind a counter did not seem to be his forte, for if he was near the front door when a customer entered, he did not hesitate to make a pretty rapid retreat to the counting-room.”24 Over time, Grant lost his shyness with Parker, showing a “warm and sympathetic nature” and forming a strong bond with him.25
An early Parker biographer repeated a barroom story about Grant’s drinking that supposedly originated in a letter written by Parker himself.26 Parker told how he had been passing a Galena tavern when his attention was arrested by a loud scuffle inside and he heard Grant’s voice. He rushed in to Grant’s defense, he claimed, and the two men warded off the attackers together. The story does not gibe with Grant’s drinking history for several reasons. He was not a brawling type, much less a drunken one. He was also a solitary drinker who shied away from bars and public exposure. It is also hard to imagine that, if such an incident occurred, it never drifted back to Grant family members.
A riveting storyteller, Grant loved to regale people with anecdotes of his Mexican War exploits. One person enthralled by these tales was his neighbor John Rawlins, a young lawyer who did work for the leather goods store, which evolved into a small hotbed of poli
tical debate, with Grant doing much of the talking. “Grant’s unusual conversational powers easily made him the prominent figure among those who frequented the leather store for . . . discussing politics and the turmoil in the southern states,” maintained Melancthon Burke.27 The issue of whether to extend slavery into the new territories had precipitated a final showdown over its future. Grant’s acquaintances noticed a shift in his thinking, not all the way to the Republican side, but with newfound sympathy for the antislavery viewpoint. Augustus Chetlain, a Republican grocer, said Grant became a Free-Soil Democrat before the end of Buchanan’s administration.28
The major party conventions that year testified to the extreme fragmentation of American politics. When Democrats gathered in Charleston, South Carolina, in April, Stephen Douglas led the balloting but could not secure the two-thirds vote needed for nomination. Breaking away and reconvening in Baltimore, the Douglas men nominated their champion, who campaigned on a pledge of allowing new territories to decide their own future on slavery, thus “burying Northern Abolitionism and Southern Disunionism in a common grave.”29 Although Douglas presented himself as a candidate of regional compromise, the middle ground was fast disappearing. Many southerners were spoiling for a fight that would harden the battles lines. In a self-destructive act that helped to elect a Republican, southern Democrats created a new Democratic Party, nominating Vice President John C. Breckinridge of Kentucky to head their ticket.
In May, Republicans met in Chicago at a huge, barnlike wooden structure known as the Wigwam where Abraham Lincoln emerged as the presidential standard-bearer. While his opposition to extending slavery was well known, he ducked many controversial issues. A comparative unknown, a dark horse who could juggle conflicting constituencies, he became the nominee less because he appealed to the most people than because he offended the fewest. Instead of trying to cultivate friends, he sought to avoid making enemies, refraining from utterances designed to soothe or antagonize the South. Even though Lincoln attempted to appeal to former Whigs, many ended up voting for John Bell of Tennessee, who had been nominated by the Constitutional Union Party a week earlier. Among those who fervently greeted Lincoln’s nomination was Jesse Grant. “When I return home, I will take Springfield in my rout[e], & make the acquaintance of Mr. Lincoln,” he wrote in late May. “And I am going to work for the success of the ticket.”30 Both Simpson and Orvil Grant cast votes for Lincoln as well.
Stymied as a newcomer by Illinois residency requirements, Ulysses was ineligible to vote for president in 1860. “I was really glad of this at the time,” he wrote sheepishly in his Memoirs, “for my pledges would have compelled me to vote for Stephen A. Douglas, who had no possible chance of election.”31 In fact, Grant was torn by indecision that mirrored his predicament as the son of an abolitionist and the son-in-law of a slave owner. After attending a Douglas speech in Dubuque, he was asked to appraise the candidate. “He is a very able, at least a very smart man,” answered Grant, “but I can’t say I like his ideas. If I had the legal right to vote I should be more undecided than ever.”32 A letter he wrote in early August shows his defection from the Democrats, though he could not bring himself to sign up with the Republicans: “The fact is I think the Democratic party want a little purifying and nothing will do it so effectually as a defeat. The only thing is I don’t like to see a Republican beat the party.”33 When the race boiled down to Lincoln versus Breckinridge, Grant wrote that “he wanted . . . to see Mr. Lincoln elected.”34 Grant did not foresee how momentous the November election would be, nor how profoundly it would transform his entire existence.
As political emotions mounted, Galena’s streets were often illuminated at night by torchlight processions snaking through town. The Republican marching club was known as the Galena Wide Awakes—Orvil Grant was a member—and as they tramped along, clad in dark oilcloth capes and caps, their martial air portended war. Grant rebuffed an effort, spearheaded by John Rawlins, to help the Douglas Democrats learn how to drill, but one night, after spotting the erratic marching of the Galena Wide Awakes, led by Augustus Chetlain, he discreetly offered tips on military style behind closed doors.
As the election approached, Grant drifted closer to positions articulated by Lincoln, a process observed by Melancthon Burke, who accompanied Grant to a speech given by the Illinois abolitionist congressman Owen Lovejoy: “On the way home from the Lovejoy speech he discussed the situation seriously and with deep concern stating that the election of Lincoln was a political necessity if majority rule was to be maintained.”35 However much he feared the supposed extremism of some Republicans—an exaggerated fear Burke attributed to Grant’s long residence among Missouri slave owners—Grant realized that Unionism and abolitionism had become intertwined issues. “As long as slavery was confined to the states where it belonged I wouldn’t interfere with it,” he told Burke, “but if it is to be used as an instrument to disrupt the government I hope every slave will rise against his master.”36
Grant’s conversion to Republicanism was probably retarded by Julia’s firm adherence to her Democratic roots. One night, while she and the children gazed down from the bluff on a Wide Awake torchlight procession, she imagined she beheld “a great, fiery serpent” that “would crush in its folds the beloved party of my father, of Jefferson, of General Jackson, of Douglas, and of Thomas Benton.”37 Colonel Dent had attempted to dissuade her from going to Galena, warning, “You know you cannot do without servants.”38 Afraid of bringing her slaves into the free state of Illinois, she left them behind with her father and relied instead on a competent maid named Maggie Cavinaugh. While Julia would soon find her husband enlisted in the Union cause, her own attitude toward slavery remained far more ambivalent.
On November 6, 1860, Abraham Lincoln was elected president in a vote full of troubling omens. Besides winning less than 40 percent of the popular vote, he did not win a single vote in the Deep South, where his name failed to appear on the ballot; he carried every northern state, except for New Jersey, where he managed a split with Douglas. Almost universally underrated, Lincoln was deemed a mediocrity at best, a coarse bumpkin from the backwoods. Grant’s fortuitous move to Illinois on the eve of the election had monumental consequences, conveniently situating him in the president’s home state and overtly pro-Union northern Illinois. It also placed him in the district of Congressman Elihu B. Washburne, an emphatic Lincoln supporter. Had Grant remained in Missouri, riven by internal strife, he would never have enjoyed the same chance for rapid advancement in the coming war.
Although Galena voted for Stephen Douglas by a narrow margin, local Wide Awakes burst into festivities on election night, complete with trumpets, fireworks, and cannon fired from the bluff. Down at the Grant store, Orvil hosted a little party where he distributed oysters and beer. Rampant speculation arose that Lincoln’s election would bring southern secession, touching off a militant mood among townspeople who had never set foot on a battlefield. Grant’s friend William R. Rowley, a clerk at the circuit court—Grant had met him when he went to the courthouse to install leather for a desk chair—declared, “There’s a great deal of bluster about these Southerners; but I don’t think there’s much fight in them.” Grant’s dour correction was prescient. “Rowley, you are mistaken. There is a good deal of bluster—that’s the result of their education—but if they ever get at it, they will make a strong fight.”39 It started to dawn on Grant that his West Point education and Mexican War experience had readied him for further service to his country, and he talked to John Rawlins “of his military education, his debt therefore to the country, and . . . the capacities of the North to raise troops.”40
For many southerners, Lincoln’s election threatened to halt the spread of slavery into new territories, stifling their homegrown institution and dangerously eroding their national power. Fire-breathing secessionists exploited the interregnum between the election and inauguration to stoke rabid fears. Thinking the move suicidal, Grant believed the South wou
ld stop short of the “awful leap” of secession.41 Then, on December 20, 1860, delegates in Charleston, South Carolina, voted to secede from the Union. The decision was taken in an exuberant holiday atmosphere and with no sense that this would prove the catalyst for the bloodiest war in American history. The step was especially fateful, for three federal forts that stood in the harbor now lay in foreign territory. The feckless President Buchanan, who opposed secession, thought the federal government powerless to stop it, and in his last annual message blamed the “incessant and violent agitation of the slavery question throughout the North for the past quarter of a century.”42
If Grant had dithered on how best to deal with slavery, secession clarified his thinking on preserving the Union, turning him into an outright militant. He conceded that the Constitution might have allowed one of the original thirteen states to secede, but such a right “was never possessed at all by Florida or the states west of the Mississippi, all of which were purchased by the treasury of the entire nation. Texas and the territory brought into the Union in consequence of annexation, were purchased with both blood and treasure.”43
Every night, Grant read the newspaper aloud to Julia, who thought, somewhat illogically, that states had a right to leave the Union, but that the national government had a duty to prevent it—a blatant contradiction that amused her husband. Grant grew irate when Buchanan, whom he denounced as “the present granny of an executive,” allowed Secretary of War John B. Floyd, a southerner, to redistribute arms from northern arsenals to southern forts in expectation of civil war.44 Riding his buggy through Wisconsin, Minnesota, and Iowa that winter, Grant engaged local townspeople in heated discussions, predicting the North would defeat the South in any war in ninety days—a mistaken optimism he maintained through the early period of conflict. Suddenly Grant was fired by a mission, a clear sense of purpose, something that had been lacking in the 1850s. He was now wide awake, his pulse quickened by an overriding sense of duty. A young Methodist clergyman named John Heyl Vincent met Grant on a frosty morning in Dubuque as they warmed themselves before a hotel stove. “Standing by the fire, in his old blue army overcoat, his hands clasped behind him, he reminded me then of the familiar picture of Napoleon,” recalled Vincent. The grasp shown by Grant “of national questions, his knowledge of men and measures, his . . . ambition and earnestness, both surprised and interested me.”45