by Ron Chernow
Deriving considerable pride from his troops’ behavior at Belmont, Grant praised them the next day, saying he had “been in all the battles fought in Mexico, by Genls. Scott and Taylor, save Buena-Vista, and never saw one more hotly contested, or where troops behaved with more gallantry.”23 He had broken up the enemy camp at Belmont and unleashed the animal spirits of his men, imbuing them with lasting confidence. Indeed, Belmont damaged the mystique that Confederate soldiers were always fearless and fought to the bitter end.
After the battle, Leonidas Polk proudly informed Jefferson Davis of the “complete rout” of Union forces, transmitting an erroneous report that “General Grant is reportedly killed.”24 From a purely statistical standpoint, the bloody battle was a narrow Union victory against overwhelming Confederate numbers. Grant suffered 80 killed, 322 wounded, and 54 missing versus 105 killed, 419 wounded, and 117 missing for the rebels. Grant and Rawlins believed they had averted Confederate mischief in Missouri. “Belmont is entirely abandoned by the enemy,” Rawlins wrote, “and thus the Southeastern portion of Missouri is without a rebel army.”25 As days passed and Grant heard that Memphis was plunged into mourning, its largest hotel converted into a hospital for Belmont casualties, his sense of the magnitude of his victory grew. He collected his first positive notices in the national press, The New York Times saluting Belmont as “in high degree creditable to all our troops concerned in it, and the success of the brilliant movement is due to Gen. Grant.”26
On a personal level, Belmont was Grant’s baptism of fire. He had shown a boldness bordering on impetuosity and a preternatural coolness under fire. He had improvised new solutions when the original battle plan went awry—a key mark of military leadership. Belmont probably removed any doubts about himself that he had carried over from civilian life. It certainly advanced his standing in Washington, where Washburne kept Lincoln minutely apprised of his achievements. On November 20, Grant informed Washburne that the Confederate loss at Belmont “proves to be greater and the effect upon the southern mind more saddening.” Washburne rushed this commentary into Lincoln’s hands, saying, “I want you to take a moment’s time to read this letter of Genl Grant.”27 Speculation was rife that Grant would be promoted to major general. When a relative told Julia Grant that her husband should be content with a brigadier general’s rank, she grew indignant. “There is no danger of his reaching a position above his capacity,” she insisted. “He is equal to a much higher one than this, and will certainly win it if he lives.”28
Grant’s modest Belmont victory was not an unalloyed success. Perhaps thinking of that battle, he later observed, “In the beginning [of the war] we all did things more rashly than later.”29 He had exceeded his instructions and carried out a costly raid that neither seized territory nor captured an army. One northern officer jeered that Belmont was “called a victory, but if such be victory God save us from defeat.”30 Military historians have faulted Grant for not providing sufficient guards for transports; for failing to block the arrival of Confederate reinforcements from Columbus; and for not incorporating the two gunboats into his overall strategy. Belmont also previewed one of Grant’s few salient weaknesses. Intent on his own offensive strategy, he often failed to anticipate countermoves from opposing generals, leaving him vulnerable to dramatic surprises, and Belmont was not the last time he was blindsided by the enemy.
On the same day as the Belmont battle, Julia Grant beheld in her bedroom a grave apparition of her husband that shook her to the roots. As she recounted, “I only saw his head and shoulders, about as high as if he were on horseback.”31 The wraith stared down at her in earnest reproach. Both Julia and Ulysses Grant were still avowed believers in dreams and portents. Reacting to this vision, Julia gathered up the children and left that evening for Cairo, where Grant met her at the train station. “I told him of my seeing him on the day of the battle. He asked at what hour, and when I told him, he said: ‘That is singular. Just about that time I was on horseback and in great peril, and I thought of you and the children, and what would become of you if I were lost.”32 Julia was less than smitten with the town—“I remember how high and angry the river was and how desolate Cairo seemed”—nor was she satisfied by their house, which resembled a “great barracks.”33 She also didn’t warm to the lengthy beard, cut square at the bottom, that her husband now sported, and she had him trim it closer, giving him a somewhat neater look for the rest of the war.
Grant had finally reached a plateau high enough to suit the social vanity of Julia and her family. Earlier, when Grant was sent to Mexico or posted to the western frontier, Julia and her father had criticized the military life. Now Julia’s heart beat faster at waving flags and the rhythmic tread of troops on parade grounds. She was overcome by the abrupt elevation of her husband’s status. “How proud I was . . . hearing the bands play ‘Hail to the Chief’ as my General rode down the columns inspecting! . . . nothing could be more interesting, more thrilling, than to see these columns of brave men in motion.”34 For the rest of the war, Julia Grant, the slave owner’s daughter, would be heart and soul for the Union army.
With no major battle in the offing, Grant showed commendable zeal in ferreting out corruption and disloyalty he saw spreading around him. He believed the lower Mississippi River was crawling with steamship employees working for the Confederacy and wanted to shut down river traffic south of nearby Cape Girardeau. “There is not a sufficiency of Union sentiment left in this portion of the state to save Sodom,” he declared.35 As part of his anticorruption campaign, he ordered the arrest of the district quartermaster and his chief clerk, informing Washington that “I also had all the books and papers of the department seized and locked up in the safe and the key kept in custody of a member of my staff.”36
A schemer all his life, Jesse Root Grant could not comprehend his son’s ethical purity. Now that Ulysses could be useful to him, he professed to find new virtues in him. “I know that Ulyss was never worth anything in business,” he told an associate; “it’s because he’s all soldier, Ulyss is.”37 First Jesse sought to exploit his son’s standing to obtain a position for a friend, sending Ulysses into a rage. “I do not want to be importuned for places,” he protested. “I have none to give and want to be placed under no obligation to anyone.”38 Next his father sought help in landing a Union army contract to furnish harnesses. “I cannot take an active part in securing contracts,” Grant lectured his father. “It is necessary both to my efficiency for the public good and my own reputation that I should keep clear of Government contracts.”39 As Grant cracked down on illicit trade between northern merchants and southern suppliers, his father lobbied for a commercial pass for yet another friend. “It is entirely out of the question to pass persons South,” he told him in exasperation. “We have many Union Men sacrificing their lives now from exposure, as well as battle . . . and it is necessary for the security of the thousands still exposed that all communication should be cut off between the two sections.”40 Jesse Grant never quite grasped that his incorruptible son refused to be a party to his self-interested schemes.
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ON NOVEMBER 19, 1861, Major General Henry W. Halleck succeeded Frémont as commander of the renamed Department of the Missouri, which also encompassed western Kentucky and Arkansas. Frémont had fallen victim to corruption allegations as well as Lincoln’s emphatic displeasure with his ill-timed emancipation proclamation. The rest of the western command, including Tennessee and the rest of Kentucky, would now fall to the Department of the Ohio under the command of Don Carlos Buell. In Washington, the military boy wonder, thirty-four-year-old George B. McClellan, had superseded the aging Winfield Scott to become field commander of the Army of the Potomac and the youngest general in chief in American history. The conservative McClellan stressed to Halleck that the war was being fought solely to preserve the Union and had nothing to do with freeing slaves. As a result, Halleck banned fugitive slaves from Union camps under his command and Grant duly ob
eyed.
Halleck was a pudgy, odd-looking fellow with a high forehead, balding pate, heavy eye pouches, and bulging, slightly crossed eyeballs. Because of his goggle eye, he often seemed to stare over the shoulder of interlocutors. A brusque, crotchety loner, he often offended people with his peevish remarks. He gave off a strangely uncouth air. One journalist portrayed him as a “short countrified person . . . who picked his teeth walking up and down the halls at Willard’s [Hotel], and argued through a white, bilious eye and a huge mouth.”41 Lincoln’s secretary John Hay mocked Halleck’s uniform as “a little white at the seams, and seedy at the button-holes,” and said he had “a stooped and downward glance.”42
Halleck had worked as a corporation lawyer and mining expert in San Francisco before the war. Even those who disliked him admired his erudition. By the Civil War, he had left behind a rich trove of writing on warfare and international law. His textbook Elements of Military Art and Science was virtually required reading at West Point, and he had also translated from French into English a four-volume biography of Napoleon. So daunting was his knowledge of military lore that when he was later dubbed “Old Brains,” the nickname stuck.
Unluckily for Grant, Halleck was strictly an armchair, by-the-book general. Steeped in the theory of war, he lacked Grant’s visceral instinct for fighting. Halleck was a soldier in his brain, whereas Grant was a soldier in his marrow. By nature a spectator, Halleck was the sort of military bureaucrat who preferred to keep a safe distance from the battlefield. He severely punished army infractions and kept a tight rein on subordinates. He carped at generals in a way that offended rather than motivated them. At first taken with him, Lincoln came to view Halleck as a paper-pusher who ducked tough decisions in the field. Hay later encapsulated Halleck’s conduct by saying he “hates responsibility; hates to give orders,” while Secretary of the Navy Gideon Welles groused that he “suggests nothing, is good for nothing.”43 Such insights still lay in the future, however, and for the moment Halleck was riding high, winning the admiration of Grant, Sherman, and other generals.
The overworked Grant worried that Halleck would ditch him in favor of a personal favorite. “I am somewhat troubled lest I lose my command here,” he confided to his father, “though I believe my administration has given general satisfaction not only to those over me but to all concerned.”44 While proud of his men’s hard-earned discipline, he found himself bogged down in minutiae. He was short on transportation, grumbled about inferior uniforms, and protested the dated flintlock muskets he received. “Eight Companies are entirely without arms of any description,” he complained.45 Grant persisted in his crusade against profiteering, annulling overpriced contracts that added up to 30 percent to prices paid by the government. Instead of sweetheart deals, he favored open, competitive bidding.
Grant’s honesty won him a host of business enemies who sought revenge by any means. One disaffected contractor was Captain William J. Kountz, hired by the government to buy, charter, and operate boats for transporting troops on the Ohio River. Thirty-one Cairo boatmen protested his appointment, claiming “a more unpopular man with all classes of boatmen, could not have been selected.”46 Grant suspected irregularities in Kountz’s handling of this business, and after a violent argument, he and Rawlins tossed the quarrelsome captain from the room. On January 14, 1862, Grant ordered Kountz’s arrest for “disobedience of orders and disrespect to his superior officer.”47
After fourteen days stewing in the brig, the venomous Kountz retaliated against Grant with blistering charges about his allegedly drunken behavior. After Belmont, Grant had met his Confederate counterparts aboard a steamer, under a flag of truce, to work out burial arrangements for dead soldiers and prisoner exchanges. During one such meeting, Kountz declared, Grant became “by the use of intoxicating liquors . . . beastly drunk.”48 Writing to Washington, Kountz laid down sensational charges. He accused Grant of “drinking with traitors and enemies to the Federal Government, while under a Flag of Truce”; of “occupying the cook’s room on a Government Steamer while under a Flag of Truce, and vomiting all over the floor”; and of “getting drunk at the St Charles Hotel and losing his sword and uniform.” He further accused Grant of visiting a drunken “Harlot” at her private hotel room; drunkenly attending a “Negro Ball” with aides; and getting “so drunk that he had to go up stairs on all fours, conduct not becoming a man.”49 Kountz demanded an investigation, if not a court-martial, of Grant. Grant was never investigated and thought it best not to dignify such vitriol with a response. One Grant colleague scoffed at the allegations: “I saw [Grant] after he came back from Belmont, he was sober as a judge.”50
It is tempting to write off Kountz’s allegations as the baseless ravings of a vindictive man. While there is clearly a large element of grotesque exaggeration in his statements, they loosely conform to a pattern of wartime drinking charges against Grant. These sporadic episodes often occurred in the aftermath of large battles when Grant could afford to relax and take short side trips and when neither Rawlins nor Julia was present. The Kountz charges find echoes in a letter by William Bross of the Chicago Tribune, a passionate Lincoln supporter, to Secretary of War Simon Cameron. On December 30, 1861, two weeks before Kountz’s arrest, Bross wrote “that Gen. U.S. Grant commanding at Cairo is an inebriate . . . The inclosed anonymous letter would not deserve a moment’s attention, were [there] not facts abundant from other sources that what the letter writer says is true.”51 The anonymous writer accused Grant of “being perfectly inebriate under a flag of truce with rebels.”52 The writer also detected grumbling in Cairo about Julia Grant bringing a slave into camp: “Until we can secure pure men in habits and men without secesh [secessionist] wives with their own little slaves to wait upon them, which is a fact here in this camp with Mrs. Grant, our country is lost.”53
Bross’s warning landed on the president’s desk. On January 4, Lincoln penned atop it: “Bross would not knowingly misrepresent. Gen. Grant was appointed chiefly on the recommendation of Hon. E. B. Washburne—Perhaps we should consult him.”54 The war secretary forwarded the letter to Washburne, who needed no prompting in the matter. He had just received a message from Benjamin H. Campbell of Galena, who had heard similar reports of Grant drinking on a recent trip to St. Louis. “I am sorry to hear from good authority that Gnl [sic] Grant is drinking very hard, had you not better write to Rawlins to know the fact.”55 Washburne dashed off a concerned letter to Rawlins, inquiring about “liquor drinking in high places.”56
In reply, Rawlins stated in an outraged tone that he was “astounded at the contents” of Washburne’s note. “I would say unequivocally and emphatically that the statement, that ‘Genl. Grant is drinking very hard’ is utterly untrue and could have originated only in malice. When I came to Cairo, Genl Grant was as he is today, a strictly total abstinence man, and I have been informed by those who knew him well, that such has been his habit for the last five or six years.”57 He noted Grant’s extraordinary productivity as a commander—he even wrote his own reports—and said an intemperate man could never accomplish this. Rawlins provided a detailed account of every drop of liquor Grant had touched. Because of stomach trouble, a physician had prescribed two glasses of ale or beer daily, but Grant had never exceeded that amount. Rawlins also mentioned that Grant drank with visiting friends at the St. Charles Hotel—a detail mentioned by Kountz—“but in no instance did he drink enough to manifest it, to any one who did not see him drink.” Grant had also enjoyed half a glass of champagne with a visiting railroad president, but right after that “he voluntarily stated he should not during the continuance of the war again taste liquor of any kind.”58
Rawlins concluded his message with a melodramatic flourish:
No one can feel a greater interest in General Grant than I do; I regard his interest as my interest . . . I love him [as] a father, I respect him because I have studied him well, and the more I know him the more I respect & love him. Knowing the truth, I am
willing to trust my hopes of the future upon his bravery & temperate habits . . . I say to you frankly and I pledge you my word for it, that should General Grant at any time become a [sic] intemperate man or an habitual drunkard, I will notify you immediately, will ask to be removed from duty on his staff (kind as he has been to me) or resign my commission.59
Already Rawlins functioned as Grant’s protector as well as watchdog. Before sending the reply to Washburne, he showed it to Grant, who perused it closely. “Yes, that’s right; exactly right,” he told Rawlins. “Send it by all means.”60 A month later, William Rowley waded into the controversy, asserting to Washburne that anyone who accused Grant of becoming dissipated was “either misinformed or else he lies. [Grant] is the same cool, energetic and unassuming man that you supposed him to be.”61
In general, Julia Grant avoided any mention of her husband’s drinking, although she noted the confrontation between Grant and Captain Kountz in her memoirs: “Of course, Captain Kountz was very angry and at once proclaimed broadcast that General Grant and his staff were all drunk.”62 Despite the varied drinking anecdotes about Grant, they possess one common denominator: Julia Grant was absent when they supposedly happened. Late in life, Grant told Mrs. Leland Stanford how Julia had cured him of drinking. Once, when they were traveling together, a friend had sent him a small keg of fine whiskey, which he stood on a washstand. As Mrs. Stanford related the tale: “That night the General was awakened by a noise, and found that Mrs. Grant was up. Asked what the gurgling noise was, she told him that she had drawn the stopper and was letting the whiskey run down the drainpipe to prevent him from drinking it. He declared this cured him of the habit.”63