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In January 1861, a crescendo of state secessions occurred as Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, and Louisiana departed from the Union, seizing control of federal forts and arsenals and widening the rift with the North. Then in February, joined by Texas, delegates from the seceded states met in Montgomery, Alabama, and consecrated the new Confederate States of America, drafting Jefferson Davis as interim president. He made a triumphant journey from his Mississippi plantation to Montgomery, greeted by jubilant crowds at every stop. Secessionists presented themselves as the true heirs to the American Revolution, adopting most of the U.S. Constitution as their own, albeit with special provisions to strengthen states’ rights and protect slavery. On February 18, Davis took the oath of office in a mimicry of Washington, D.C., inaugurations, resting his hand on a Bible and uttering “So help me God!” Saying the time for compromise had vanished, he warned those who opposed the Confederacy that they would “smell Southern powder and feel Southern steel if coercion is persisted in.”46 A true believer, Davis would oversee the Confederacy with a fanatical zeal that never wavered.
Grant had a notably fierce reaction to events in Montgomery. When informed of what had happened, he shook an angry fist and exclaimed, “Davis and the whole gang ought to be hung!”47 For once, Grant and his father thought perfectly in tandem. Living in northern Kentucky, Jesse found himself surrounded by plenty of Confederate apologists, even outright secessionists. In his own mind he was clear about what course he would follow if Kentucky seceded: “If our Union is to be severed, & Ky goes with the southern Confederacy, I shall follow the ‘stars & stripes’ of my country,” he told former Ohio governor Salmon P. Chase.48
With the Stars and Bars fluttering over the Confederate capitol, Abraham Lincoln traveled from Springfield, Illinois, to Washington, pausing in many towns to give mostly bland, extemporaneous speeches, marked by an unadorned eloquence that skirted the combustible issue of how to safeguard federal forts in southern hands. Avoiding hot-blooded rhetoric, he nonetheless refused to rule out the use of force or trim his view that nothing “can ever bring me willingly to consent to the destruction of this Union.”49 Lincoln had fooled himself into believing that the South was bluffing and that Unionist sentiment there would prevail. Then, on February 21, William Seward received word of a plot to murder Lincoln as he changed trains in Baltimore the next day. Traveling incognito, Lincoln changed his hat, switched to a special train from Harrisburg, and slipped unnoticed through Baltimore and into Washington on the morning of February 23, where he was greeted at the station by his old friend Congressman Elihu B. Washburne of Galena. When Lincoln was inaugurated on March 4, he and President Buchanan rode in an open barouche down Pennsylvania Avenue, beneath the watchful gaze of sharpshooters posted on rooftops lining the route. At the swearing-in ceremony, Lincoln invoked the “mystic chords of memory” that bound Americans, even as tense riflemen peered from every window in the Capitol that faced the platform where the new president spoke.50
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AT 4:30 A.M. ON APRIL 12, 1861, the elegant Pierre Gustave Toutant Beauregard—a freshly minted brigadier general in the provisional Confederate army, with dyed black hair, a thick mustache above a chin beard, and a firm, determined gaze—gave orders to shell Fort Sumter amid rejoicing from Charleston citizens, who crowded nearby rooftops as if rooting for a sporting event. Gunners were cheered as they delivered a sustained pounding of several thousand shots before the federal garrison surrendered to overwhelming Confederate force. In the confrontation over the fort, Lincoln had seized the moral high ground and avoided firing the first shot of the Civil War, lest he lend credence to southern charges of being a despot and thereby forfeit the loyalty of border states.
Despite pro-Union sentiment thinly scattered through the South, many southern officers felt that loyalty to their states outweighed attachment to the federal government. The decision of Robert E. Lee, who rebuffed an offer to command the U.S. Army and rushed to Virginia’s defense, was typical of southern officers who opposed secession but stuck with their native states. As Grant recounted, “The Southern feeling in the army among high officers was so strong that when the war broke out the army dissolved.”51 This meant that the South, which accounted for about a third of prewar army officers, would seek to offset northern superiority in manpower with superior generalship. If the North could manufacture everything from railway cars to clothing, the South would even the score with sheer gallantry.
Both sides underestimated the duration and savagery of the warfare ahead, nourishing pleasing fantasies of a massive blow that would knock out the enemy. The U.S. Army was shockingly understaffed, leaving gaping holes in the national defense. Many regular army men had been fighting Indians or protecting western settlers, and only four thousand served east of the Mississippi River. Right after Fort Sumter, Lincoln issued a proclamation to recruit seventy-five thousand state militiamen for ninety days. His northern detractors now saw that this shambling, awkward, loose-limbed man would be a strong, decisive leader, although the move also ratified southern views of him as a would-be tyrant.
Buoyed by a tremendous upsurge of patriotic feeling—Walt Whitman said the news of Fort Sumter’s surrender “ran through the Land, as if by electric nerves”52—energetic northern men stampeded to local recruiting stations to sign up for the fight. The news from Charleston, along with Lincoln’s military call-up, had the effect of broadening the Confederacy, until this point composed of cotton states. It was soon joined by Virginia, Arkansas, North Carolina, and Tennessee, presenting a far more formidable combination. Four slave-owning border states—Delaware, Maryland, Kentucky, and Missouri—stayed in the Union fold.
Soon to turn thirty-nine, Grant lingered in the shadowy wings of history, ready to fight. Emboldened by the cause, he cast off the lethargy and depression that had enwrapped him like a tight cloak. When Ely Parker encountered him, he asked if Grant planned to enter the conflict. “He replied that he honored his country, and that having received his education at the expense of the Government, it was entitled to his services.”53 The Civil War was about to rescue Grant from a dismal record of antebellum business failures. Even his posture became more erect, more military. “I saw new energies in Grant,” said Rawlins. “He dropped a stoop shouldered way of walking, and set his hat forward on his forehead in a careless fashion.”54 Many major figures in history could have succeeded in almost any environment, whereas Grant could only thrive in a narrower set of circumstances. He not only had military skills and experience, but believed wholeheartedly in the Union case. As he reminisced, “I wanted to leave the country if disunion was accomplished . . . I only wanted to fight for the Union.”55
Once again sectional warfare riled his family. “I was not for war,” Julia admitted, noting that Galena was equally divided between those who favored and opposed it.56 “I was Southern by all rights, born and reared in a Southern state” and “a slaveholder at the beginning of the war, and a very pronounced Democrat.” When she tried to nudge her husband toward the Douglas Democrats, he shot back, “I took a solemn oath to support the government and the administration, and that is now Republican.”57 But Julia, a practical woman, recognized the vast potential for wartime glory for her husband and faithfully followed his path, saying Ulysses “could no more resist the sound of a fife or a drum or a chance to fire a gun than a woman can resist bonnets.”58
After Fort Sumter, ebullient crowds surged into Galena’s streets, flags hung everywhere, and small boys donned military caps. The Wide Awakes grabbed muskets for drills and rummaged through military manuals. It was inevitable that Grant, trained at West Point, would step into the huge vacuum of military leadership laid open to seasoned officers. Once Lincoln’s call for volunteers reached Galena, posters announced a courthouse meeting that evening. Entering a packed hall that tingled with excitement, Grant sat down unobtrusively in the rear. The Democratic mayor Robert Brand presided and promptly infuriated the audience. “I am in
favor of any honorable compromise,” he stated. Incensed, Congressman Washburne delivered a stinging rebuttal: “I never will submit to the idea that in this crisis, when war is upon us and when our flag is assailed by traitors and conspirators, the government should be thus dealt with.”59 Denouncing the “wicked and unjustifiable war unleashed in South Carolina,” he introduced a well-received resolution to create two military companies in Galena.60 The audience applauded as Washburne sat down, followed by loud chants that reverberated through the room: “Rawlins! Rawlins!”61
At this summons, Grant’s young, bearded lawyer friend, fated to play an outsize part in his life, mounted the platform. At five feet eight inches in height, wiry and muscular, the thirty-year-old Rawlins had tousled hair that tumbled over a high forehead, penetrating black eyes, and pale skin. Of an emotional, bombastic nature, he tended to speechify at a moment’s notice. Possessed of a fiery nature, he would have made a superb, charismatic preacher. A patriot of spotless purity, he had voted for Stephen Douglas and been such a die-hard Democrat that friends had warned that, if he attended the town meeting, he might damage the party. “I don’t know any thing about party now,” he objected. “All I know is, traitors have fired on our flag.”62
In a rich baritone voice, his eyes smoldering, Rawlins let loose a stemwinder of a speech that lasted forty-five minutes. His voice throbbing with emotion, he thundered, “I have been a Democrat all my life; but this is no longer a question of politics. It is simply country or no country. I have favored every honorable compromise; but the day for compromise is passed.” Electrified, the crowd rose, stamped their boots, emitted lusty cheers. “If you are ready to die for your country, enlist,” Rawlins had told friends. “I for one am.”63 As the audience drifted from the hall, William Rowley commented to Grant, “It was a fine meeting after all.” To which Grant replied with quiet assurance, “Yes, we’re about ready to do something now.”64 Grant said he had listened with “rapt attention” to Rawlins’s speech, which wiped away any residual doubts about pitching into the war effort. Rawlins, in turn, was filled with a powerful conviction that Grant, with his military background, would advance rapidly in the impending conflict. Strolling home with Orvil, Grant fell into a reflective mood. “I think I ought to go into the service,” he said. “I think so too,” rejoined Orvil. “Go, if you like, and I will stay at home and attend to the store.”65 The time had come for Grant to wash his hands of the retail job he detested, and he never again set foot in the hated leather goods store.
Two days later a larger crowd convened at the courthouse to raise the first company of Galena volunteers. Before the meeting, Washburne huddled with Augustus Chetlain and they agreed on Grant as the optimal person to chair the gathering. He had fought in Mexico and his former Democratic tendencies might lend a useful bipartisan veneer to the evening. That decision first propelled Grant into the public spotlight. When a motion was made to have “Captain U.S. Grant for chairman,” one person protested that he had a slave-owning wife from St. Louis, but the rest of the crowd shouted its approval. A bit nervously, Grant edged toward the platform, then drew to a full stop before it. “Go up, Captain!” the audience hollered. “Platform! Platform!” Still a bit jittery, Grant climbed to the podium, wearing his old blue army coat and a dented black hat. His light-brown beard was full and closely cropped. “With much embarrassment and some prompting,” he spoke for the first time at a public gathering: “Fellow-citizens: This meeting is called to organize a company of volunteers to serve the State of Illinois.”66 The company would be named, after the county, the Jo Daviess Guards.
Washburne and Rawlins stirred the crowd with resounding speeches before Grant gave a tutorial in military life: how many men were in a company, how many in a regiment, and what their duties would be. All the old lore stored in his head sprang to fresh life. Characteristically, he delivered a sober speech for grown-ups, stripping away romantic flourishes from military rhetoric, and honestly foretold the grim sacrifices ahead. “The army is not a picnicking party,” he emphasized. “Nor is it an excursion. You will have hard fare. You may be obliged to sleep on the ground after long marches in the rain and snow. Many of the orders of your superiors will seem to you unjust, and yet they must be borne.”67 When people posed questions, Grant showed his encyclopedic knowledge of warfare, prompting twenty-two young men to enroll that night, joined by another eighteen by noon the next day. Within a week, this company—the first in northwest Illinois outside of Chicago—was fully recruited.
Though the town clamored to have Grant as its captain, he rejected such a post as beneath his experience and knew he needed to aim much higher. Augustus Chetlain stepped up as captain instead. The self-confidence that had eluded Grant in civilian life now revived in this well-trod military setting. As he explained to Chetlain, “I have been graduated at West Point, I have been a Captain in the regular army and I should have a Colonelcy or a proper staff appointment—nothing else would be proper.”68 Nonetheless, Grant happily drilled and provided pointers for the Jo Daviess Guards.
The most remarkable proof of his sudden transformation was the forthright letter he now wrote to Colonel Dent. Old pent-up anger boiled to the surface. He did not mince words about the political situation, warning that “now is the time, particularly in the border Slave states, for men to prove their love of country. I know it is hard for men to apparently work with the Republican party but now all party distinctions should be lost sight of and every true patriot be for maintaining the integrity of the glorious old Stars & Stripes, the Constitution and the Union.” Prophesying slavery’s “doom,” he predicted the North would “refuse for all time to give it protection unless the South shall return soon to their allegiance.”69 He envisioned a war that would destroy the South’s export markets for cotton and render worthless slaves working in the cotton fields. Colonel Dent didn’t heed the warning and remained an unreconstructed rebel throughout the war.
Much harder for Grant was to break away from his father’s domination. On April 21, he wrote to him about his intention to leave the leather goods store in Orvil’s hands and join the army. “What I ask now is your approval in the course I am taking, or advice in the matter.” He stressed that political differences between them, the cause of earlier friction, had now ended. Having abandoned irrevocably the Dents, he drifted back for good into the Grant camp. “Whatever may have been my political opinions before I have but one sentiment now. That is we have a Government, and laws and a flag and they must all be sustained. There are but two parties now, Traitors & Patriots and I want hereafter to be ranked with the latter.”70
To issue spirited pleas for volunteers, Grant, Rawlins, and Rowley traveled to schools and courthouses in nearby towns. After one meeting, Rowley remarked naively to Grant, “I guess the seventy-five thousand troops the President has called for will stop all the row.” Grant, who knew southern officers intimately, was not convinced. “I think this is a bigger thing than you suppose. Those fellows mean fight, and Uncle Sam has a heavy job on his hands.”71 He lectured several optimistic friends that the South had “most of the equipment and ammunition and nearly all the regular army now in their possession.”72
Back in Galena, Grant took the inexperienced local company, many of them farm boys, clerks, and mechanics, and broke them down into squads, teaching them to march on the broad lawn of Elihu Washburne’s house as they hoisted pine laths instead of real guns. Grant’s core competency from his old army days remained perfectly intact as he fell back into the familiar grooves of military habits. However much he may have preferred that his talents lay elsewhere, he came startlingly alive within the daily, sometimes hourly, challenges of a military world.
By April 24, Galena’s soldiers wore brand-new uniforms with blue frock coats and gray pants. The next day, they were ready to travel to the state capital in Springfield, where they would be assigned to a regiment called the Eleventh Illinois Volunteer Infantry. As the Jo Daviess Guards marched
to the train station, serenaded by brass bands and rewarded with a beautiful silk flag sewn by town ladies, they basked in a huge outpouring of patriotic ardor. Amid the delirium, few noticed a small, inconspicuous man in civilian dress with a slouch hat and a small carpetbag, also bound for Springfield. He distanced himself from the green troops, calling no attention to himself. Grant “seemed oblivious to all that was passing around him,” said Chetlain, “and was apparently the least of all that vast throng.”73 En route to the train depot, Grant bumped into Rawlins. “Rawlins,” he cried, “if I see anything that will suit you, I’ll send you word.” “Do captain!” the young lawyer replied.74 Rawlins was soon sidetracked from the war effort, however, by word from his wife, Emily, staying with her family in Goshen, New York, that she suffered from consumption; Rawlins would shortly leave to join her. As her husband left Galena, Julia Grant felt apprehension for his safety mingled with rising exaltation for his prospects. When pastor John Heyl Vincent dropped by to transmit his hope that Ulysses “might be preserved from all harm and restored to his family,” Julia fairly burst out with a new fantasy: “Dear me! I hope he will get to be a major-general or something big!”75