Grant

by Ron Chernow

  On his way to Springfield, Grant was heartened by the throngs who poured onto platforms and lined tracks at every town, so “the whole population seemed to be out to greet the troops.”76 Not since the American Revolution, he thought, had the citizenry yielded to such patriotic elation. He tagged along with the Galena company because Washburne had promised an introduction to Governor Richard Yates, who might give him a regimental command. Grant encountered a state capital abuzz with war fever: thousands of volunteers flooded the town while the harried governor was buttonholed by supplicants at every turn. Grant thought the South should tremble at mass mobilization in the North, telling his sister Mary that “the conduct of eastern Virginia has been so abominable through the whole contest that there would be a great deal of disappointment here if matters should be settled before she is thoroughly punished.”77

  Since Washburne had served longer than any other House Republican, Grant had enlisted the allegiance of a champion with extraordinary clout in Washington. The relationship had begun inauspiciously. The previous October Grant had met Washburne in the offices of the Galena Gazette when the two men squared off over politics. As Melancthon Burke remembered, they “soon engaged in an earnest discussion . . . Grant had preconceived a dislike for Washburne and regarded him as an ultra extremist especially on the question of slavery. Grant at that time was radically opposed to slavery as an institution, but . . . did not believe it was good policy to interfere with slavery in the existing slave states.”78 Perhaps suspecting their careers would soon dovetail—Grant was Galena’s most experienced military man—Washburne developed a close, almost proprietary feeling about him. As Lincoln subsequently noted, Washburne had “always claimed Grant as his right of discovery.”79

  A big, rawboned man with a thick nose, tufted gray eyebrows, and long gray hair that swept over his collar, Washburne had the bluff, backslapping manner and hearty laugh of a western politician. Energetic, restless, and impatient, he struck many people as brusque but honest. One of eleven children born to a Maine storekeeper, he had enjoyed little formal schooling and worked as a farmhand and a printer’s devil as an adolescent. Largely self-taught, he had been introduced to Shakespeare and Dickens at public libraries, finally gaining admission to Harvard Law School. He became one of three Washburne sons elected to the U.S. Congress from different states, rising to become chairman of several influential committees, including Appropriations, Commerce, and Military Affairs. As young lawyers, he and Lincoln had argued cases before the Illinois Supreme Court and remained so close that Washburne had written a campaign biography for him the year before.

  Unluckily for Grant, Washburne seemed on less than cordial terms with Yates. A Kentucky-born lawyer and former Whig who had served in the state legislature and Congress, Yates found his political leverage dramatically enhanced by his long-standing relationship with Lincoln. In 1854 Lincoln had virtually managed Yates’s gubernatorial campaign, and Yates returned the favor during Lincoln’s presidential bid, functioning as a key Illinois operative. However conservative in other respects, Yates didn’t restrain his views on slavery: “The earliest impressions of my boyhood,” he stated bluntly, “were that the institution of slavery was a grievous wrong.”80 As Illinois’s new governor, he dreaded that neighboring Missouri might defect to the Confederacy, blocking the flow of Illinois farm products down the Mississippi River.

  Charged with assembling volunteer companies and appointing their officers, northern governors such as Yates came to wield enormous power. An entire army was being created overnight with coveted military titles handed out wholesale. After days spent waiting to see Yates, Grant received a brush-off. “I’m sorry to say, captain, there is nothing for you now to do,” said Yates. “Call again.” Augustus Chetlain thought Grant’s appearance worked against him, as if the years of hardship had seeped visibly into his pores. Grant’s “dress was seedy—he had only one suit and that he had worn all winter—his short pipe, his grizzled beard and old slouch hat did not make him look like a promising candidate for a colonel.”81 Indeed, an unimpressed aide informed Governor Yates that Grant’s “features did not indicate any high grade of intellectuality. He was very indifferently dressed, and did not at all look like a military man.”82 Grant’s drinking history may also have come back to haunt him at an inopportune moment. One colleague in the adjutant general’s office regarded Grant as “a dead-beat military man—a discharged officer in the regular army,” making one wonder whether his difficulties obtaining a command stemmed partly from his long-rumored history at Fort Humboldt, now part of army folklore.83

  Lacking Napoleonic ambitions, Grant did not envisage himself at the helm of vast armies and merely aspired to head a regiment or cavalry brigade. As always, he studiously avoided jockeying for position. Reared with Methodist modesty, he could never admit nakedly to the true depth of his ambition. In this way, he was strictly Hannah Grant’s son, not Jesse’s. Ethical and honorable, he wanted to receive jobs based squarely on his merits, a faith he held so unalterably he called it “one of my superstitions.”84 Refusing to grovel, he considered it unseemly to profit from favoritism. It irked him to watch others maneuver for position, and he was “sickened at the political wire pulling for all these commissions and would not engage in it,” he wrote.85 Chummy with few politicians, Grant labored at an extreme disadvantage in securing a commission. “I was a carpetbagger and knew but few of them.”86

  Once the Galena company was mustered into service, Grant despaired of a command and was on the verge of taking a night train home when he ran into Governor Yates after dinner in his hotel. Yates addressed him as “Captain,” said he had heard of his impending departure, and requested that he stay and check with his office the next morning. Grant happily complied. At a follow-up meeting the next day, Yates invited Grant to join the adjutant general’s staff where, he predicted, his army experience would prove of inestimable value.

  For several weeks, a disheartened Grant toiled at tedious administrative tasks, filling out reports and submitting requisitions for supplies. As a former quartermaster, he was well drilled in military bureaucracy. With no systems in place to handle such matters or even printed forms, Grant took blank sheets and drew lines across them. This paperwork must have felt like another degradation, another slap in the face, more suitable for an aide-de-camp than a veteran officer. Chetlain was shocked at the primitive cranny to which Grant was consigned, an anteroom of the adjutant’s office. “He was seated at an old table with but three legs, which was shoved into a corner in order to stand. He had his hat on, and his pipe in his mouth, and was writing busily. As I spoke he looked up, with an expression of disgust on his face, and said, ‘I’m going to quit. This is no work for a man of my experience. Any boy could do this. I’m going home.’”87 Nonetheless, Grant’s consummate professionalism stood out clearly amid the pervasive amateurism.

  While confined to this back office, the despondent Grant was suddenly sprung from his solitary drudgery by an unexpected break. At West Point and in the Mexican War, he had befriended Captain John Pope. From a well-to-do family, Pope enjoyed the privileged network of connections Grant lacked and was in charge of Camp Yates, a mustering site on the outskirts of Springfield. When Pope stormed off in high dudgeon after being denied appointment as a brigadier general of Illinois volunteers, Yates elevated Grant to “mustering officer and aide” and he became the camp’s temporary commandant for four days. In that brief interval, Grant instilled discipline in the new soldiers with an air of military precision. No longer chained to a desk, he seemed rejuvenated in the field. Doubtless harking back to his West Coast days, he confided to Chetlain that “when I have nothing to do I get blue and depressed.”88

  Impressed by the ongoing rush of new recruits, Grant again thought the South might be cowed by this show of northern power. He worried about “negro revolts,” he told Julia, whose family may well have influenced such thinking. “Such would be deeply deplorable and I have no do
ubt but a Northern army would hasten South to suppress anything of the kind.”89 The initial war objective, however, was preserving the Union, not eliminating slavery. Grant’s thinking would evolve quite rapidly on the slavery issue as the war progressed.

  Goaded by Washburne, Governor Yates came to realize that Grant’s talents demanded greater leeway. When the Illinois legislature authorized him to raise ten additional regiments, he assigned Grant to oversee the process of mustering them in at Mattoon, Belleville, and Anna. Grant spent a day in Mattoon, then went on to Belleville, which was not yet ready to stock a full regiment. Since Belleville lay just east of St. Louis, he decided to visit Colonel Dent and debate with him what to do about Julia and the four children while the war lasted.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  —

  The Quiet Man

  WHEN GRANT CONFERRED with his father-in-law at White Haven, Colonel Dent made no apologies about his political beliefs or fiery devotion to the Confederacy. The Dent household was already in an uproar about the war. Julia’s brother John angled to be a colonel in the Confederate army, while Aunt Fanny was adamantly pro-Union. Grant and his father-in-law held hot-tempered political discussions, lasting well into the night, with the enslaved Mary Robinson eavesdropping on them: “Dent was opposed to Lincoln, and tried to induce Grant not to fight with the Union army. He wanted him to cast his destiny with the South.”1 When Dent declared that he wanted Julia and the children to spend the war with him, Grant surely heard disquieting echoes of earlier years. In frustration, Grant reported to Julia that “your father professes to be a Union man yet condemns every measure for the preservation of the Union. He says he is ruined and I fear it is too true.”2 During the first year of the war, many White Haven slaves would escape, giving Grant the upper hand with his defiant father-in-law, who suddenly lost the economic foundations of his wealth. The conflict also endowed Grant with the moral fervor to confront him over the treasonous nature of secession, which he thought would prove suicidal for its adherents.

  The Colonel never yielded an inch on secession. When he saw Grant was obstinate, he told him to enter the Union army and “rise as high as you can, but if your troops ever come to this side of the river I will shoot them.”3 It wasn’t just Union soldiers Colonel Dent ached to shoot. “After Capt. Grant took up the Northern side,” said Louisa Boggs, “Col. Dent swore with a big oath that if his worthless son-in-law ever came on his land he would shoot him as he would a rabbit.”4 Perhaps no state was more savagely divided by internecine warfare than Missouri.

  While in St. Louis, Grant witnessed epochal events as the city divided into two armed camps of northern and southern sympathizers. Its federal arsenal contained the largest cache of weapons—sixty thousand muskets, ninety thousand pounds of gunpowder—of any slaveholding state. Unionists feared that the southern-leaning governor, Claiborne Fox Jackson, would direct his pro-secession militia units, waiting at Camp Jackson on the edge of the city, to grab the arsenal with its rich bounty of munitions. Jackson was a particular hero of Julia Grant’s, who had found it exhilarating when he “called for 20,000 troops to protect my native state.”5

  Because of decisive action by Captain Nathaniel Lyon and Representative Francis P. Blair Jr., pro-Union regiments sprang up and covered the arsenal grounds with their white tents. Trailed by frenzied Unionists, they surrounded Camp Jackson and forced its surrender. Confederate flags were lowered blocks from where Grant had recently languished in the real estate business, and he credited Lyon and Blair for quick thinking in saving a major arsenal from Confederate hands. “If St. Louis had been captured by the rebels,” Grant later reflected, “it would have made a vast difference in our war . . . Instead of a campaign before Vicksburg, it would have been a campaign before St. Louis.”6 Grant long remembered rejoicing as he “saw Blair and Lyon bring their prisoners into town.”7

  Back in Illinois, Grant mustered troops at Mattoon, southeast of Springfield, for the Twenty-First Illinois Infantry, his brief stay leaving a profound imprint on new recruits. They discerned that Grant “knew his business, for everything he did was done without hesitation,” said Lieutenant Joseph Vance. “He was a little bit stooped at the time, and wore a cheap suit of clothes and a soft black hat,” but anyone “who looked beyond that recognized that he was a professional soldier.”8 The soldiers expressed gratitude for this competent, if transient, visitor, bestowing upon him his first wartime accolade by renaming their encampment “Camp Grant.”

  When he finished inducting troops, Grant returned to Springfield and resumed his lonely vigil for a permanent job. He was so broke that he sometimes skipped dinners to husband his limited funds. One editor who accosted Grant at a hotel found him looking “fagged out, lonesome, poor, and dejected.” “What are you doing here, Captain?” he asked. “Nothing—waiting,” Grant replied sulkily.9 He considered anything less than a colonel’s rank insufficient, but Governor Yates offered no such appointment, and he grew convinced that politicians had rigged the process. His friend Davis White claimed that Yates penalized Grant because he assumed Grant was a Democrat. “This is a Republican war and our friends must have the offices,” Yates told him. “Why, Governor,” retorted White, “you can’t fight this war out with all Republicans; Grant is a Democrat but a military educated man.”10

  Dejected, Grant trooped back to Galena, where the local newspaper took up his cause, rewarding him with his first press notice: “We are now in want of just such soldiers as he is, and we hope the government will invite him to higher command. He is the very soul of honor, and no man breathes who has a more patriotic heart.”11 Experiencing a sense of duty “paramount to any other duty I ever owed,” Grant yearned to throw himself into the war effort at a suitable level, yet it seemed as if this supreme chance of his life was slipping from his eagerly outstretched grasp.12

  In late May 1861, when the Confederate Congress voted to move its capital to Richmond, Grant realized that the war’s principal battles would be fought on Virginia soil, producing terrible insecurity in the Lincoln administration about Washington’s safety. At this point, it seemed unlikely that Grant might figure significantly in the war, and he later admitted that the zenith of his ambition was command of a cavalry brigade. He did not remain entirely passive in awaiting recognition. Swallowing his pride and contrary to his belief of never pushing himself forward, he composed a letter to the adjutant general of the army in Washington, soliciting a position: “I would say that in view of my present age, and length of service, I feel myself competent to command a regiment, if the President, in his judgment, should see fit to entrust one to me.”13 It seemed a modest enough request, given the pressing search for experienced officers, but already bruised by rejection, Grant felt he might be aiming too high. He could have saved himself the paperwork: he never received any acknowledgment from Washington, much less the job he sought.

  Having mustered in the last regiments authorized by the Illinois legislature, Grant visited his parents in Covington and took advantage of his time there to lobby the wunderkind Major General George McClellan, whose headquarters lay across the Ohio River in Cincinnati. The two men, who had overlapped briefly at West Point, had met during the Mexican War, then again in the Pacific Northwest, when Grant was unfortunately drinking. Retaining considerable respect for McClellan’s talents—he had graduated second in his class at West Point—Grant was eager to serve under the younger man, even as a major or lieutenant colonel. For two consecutive days, he cooled his heels for two hours in the waiting area of McClellan’s headquarters and was pointedly snubbed. Both times he was informed the general had gone out. McClellan never acknowledged Grant’s presence, giving him a foretaste of the arrogance that would so infuriate Abraham Lincoln and Secretary of War Edwin Stanton. At his wit’s end, Grant went off to Columbus, Ohio, hoping to wring from Governor William Dennison, a boyhood friend, a contract to bake bread for soldiers. He no longer pretended that he could passively await recognition of his in
trinsic worth.

  Then, on June 16, 1861, Grant received a telegram from Governor Yates, appointing him colonel of the 7th Congressional District Regiment, shortly renamed the Twenty-First Illinois, the same outfit he had drilled into shape at Mattoon. No sooner had he digested this long-awaited news and wired acceptance to Yates than he received an offer to command an Ohio regiment, which he declined. Grant’s life had changed abruptly, irrevocably, and rather miraculously. Julia was overjoyed at this sudden turn of fortune, perhaps because she had no sense of just how long and ghastly the war would be. “Strange to say, I felt no regret at his going and even suggested that our eldest son, just then eleven years old, should accompany him . . . I considered it a pleasant summer outing for both of them.”14

  Grant replaced Colonel Simon S. Goode, a flamboyant, blustering character—he liked to stuff two revolvers in his belt—with hardly an iota of military experience. A high-spirited, uproarious character, Goode drank to excess and his obliging men followed suit. As his soldiers rebelled against bad food by pillaging local farms and burned down a guardhouse crawling with vermin, discipline crumbled in his disorganized regiment. As Private Joseph H. Wham explained, “We had too much self-respect to serve under a drunken, incompetent colonel.”15 Alarming reports of near-mutiny filtered back to Governor Yates, who summoned the regiment to Springfield and met with its commissioned officers, a majority of whom requested Goode’s replacement by Grant. As Wham said, “There was not a murmur at his being thus promoted over the heads of the ten captains and two field officers who outranked him.”16 It says much about Grant that his professionalism was so palpable to even the most callow soldiers.