by H. W. Brands
Partly as a result, he was not a successful man. He consistently lost money at farming. Just before Christmas 1857 he was forced to pawn his gold watch for twenty-two dollars. He gave up working Julia’s property, deciding to rent it out and concentrate his efforts on the Dent tract. This lessened the time he spent going from one farm to the other—a saving he valued the more as his family continued to grow. Ellen Grant, called Nellie, had been born in 1855, and Jesse Grant arrived in early 1858. Between the needs of his growing children and the expectations of his wife, not to mention his own discouragement, he fell into dark reveries about his past, present and future. “He was like a man thinking on an abstract subject all the time,” a neighbor recalled.
William Sherman did even more thinking than Grant, along similar dismal lines. Sherman, like Grant, was a West Point graduate; like Grant he had been stationed in California after the Mexican War; like Grant he experienced the speculative frenzy that infected life all up and down the coast. Like Grant he resigned from the army, at about the same time. But Sherman remained in California, determined to make the most of the opportunities there. He became a banker, the manager of the San Francisco branch of a St. Louis firm. For a time things went well, but the pricking of one of the recurrent bubbles in mining stocks triggered a panic among San Francisco banks and he was forced to close his branch’s doors. Yet his St. Louis superiors liked his work well enough to send him to New York to open an office in Wall Street.
He arrived during the summer of 1857 and got the office running in time to witness the failure that August of the heretofore well-regarded Ohio Life and Trust Company. The Ohio firm was highly leveraged, and its failure, amid allegations of fraud, spooked New York’s investment community. A bank panic followed but was brought under control, and Sherman thought his new bank would survive. Then, however, a hurricane off North Carolina sank the Central America, a steamship of the United States Mail Company, with four hundred passengers and fifteen tons of California gold. The loss of life elicited mourning among families and friends; the loss of gold renewed the panic on Wall Street. Sherman’s bank was one of the many victims. “I suppose I was the Jonah that blew up San Francisco,” he wrote his wife, who tolerated the bleak humor he often favored. “And it took only two months’ residence in Wall Street to bust up New York.”
Sherman traveled to St. Louis to settle accounts with his backers. There he encountered Grant, and the two compared stories of bad luck since leaving the army. They spoke of other comrades who had done no better and wondered what would become of them all. “West Point and the Regular Army aren’t good schools for farmers, bankers, merchants and mechanics,” Sherman mused.
11
THE PANIC OF 1857, BY KNOCKING DOWN FARM PRICES, MIGHT ALONE have finished off Grant’s career in agriculture, but malaria helped. Like many other Americans of the Ohio and Mississippi Valleys in the nineteenth century, Grant had suffered recurrently from the mosquito-borne illness since childhood. Neither he nor they knew what caused the disease, but it appeared to be associated with low-lying areas, precisely the sort of bottomlands best suited to farming, during summer, the farming season. Black slaves, for reasons then unknown to themselves or their masters but evidently (and later demonstrably) associated with their African heritage, usually avoided the symptoms; their comparative immunity was another argument of the apologists for slavery. Heavy work and constant worry reduced resistance to malaria, as to other diseases, and both contributed to a severe bout Grant experienced during the summer of 1858. The “fever and ague” that provided the common name of malaria alternated irregularly, with Grant sweating profusely and then shivering. Julia suggested that he would get better in St. Louis, away from the disease zone, and that in any case the older children were approaching school age and would benefit from the city’s schools. He had no argument to make against her suggestion, and with Frederick Dent’s permission he offered the farm for sale.
He went into business with one of Julia’s cousins, a man named Harry Boggs. The business bought, sold and managed real estate. Under ordinary circumstances it might have done well, for real estate had long been the ladder to success for cash-strapped but enterprising individuals in America. The relentlessly growing American population ensured the demand that pushed up prices and commissions. But the panic of 1857 briefly deranged the market, depressing prices and deterring speculation, and the firm of Boggs & Grant struggled.
Grant spent his first months in the business living with Harry Boggs and his wife, Louisa. “We gave him an unfurnished back room and told him to fit it up as he pleased,” Louisa recalled. “It contained very little during the winter he lived here. He had a bed and a bowl and pitcher on a chair and he used to sit at our fire. He used to go home Saturday night to his family. He lived this way all winter”—the winter of 1858–59. “I can see him now as he used to sit humbly by my fireside. He had no exalted opinion of himself at any time, but in those days he seemed almost in despair.”
His attitude improved after he brought Julia and the children to St. Louis. “We are living now in the lower part of the city, full two miles from my office,” he wrote his father in the spring of 1859. “The house is a comfortable little one just suited to my means. We have one spare room and also a spare bed in the children’s room so that we can accommodate any of our friends that are likely to come see us.”
Grant appreciated that his father, the businessman, would want to know about his prospects. “I can hardly tell how the new business I am engaged in is going to succeed,” he explained. “But I believe it will be something more than a support.” Even so, he could use help, in the form of referrals. “I will send you some of our cards, which if you will distribute among such persons as may have business to attend to in this city, such as buying or selling property, collecting either rents or other liabilities, it may prove the means of giving us additional commissions.”
In this letter Grant told his father that Julia would not be taking the children to see Jesse and Hannah in Kentucky that season. He had urged her to make the trip while he was arranging the move to St. Louis, but she had refused. “With four children she could not go without a servant,” Grant wrote Jesse. “And she was afraid that landing so often as she would have to do in free states, she might have some trouble.”
Julia was right to anticipate trouble. For decades the Mason-Dixon Line and the Ohio River had symbolized the boundary between slavery and freedom in American life, but the boundary allowed loopholes and exceptions. When wealthy Americans of the nineteenth century traveled they often took personal servants with them; in the case of Americans from the South, these personal servants were typically slaves. As long as the Southerners were simply traveling, the free-state bans on slavery didn’t apply to their slaves, who remained legally bound. But when the travel stretched to sojourns of weeks or months, questions arose and sometimes wound up in the courts.
Dred Scott was a slave purchased by John Emerson, an army doctor in St. Louis. Emerson was subsequently posted to Wisconsin, a free territory to which he took Scott. After several years and further postings, Emerson returned to St. Louis, again taking Scott. Emerson died, but Scott remained in the possession of Emerson’s widow, the former Eliza Irene Sanford. Scott knew enough of Missouri law to appreciate that its principle of “once free, always free”—that a Missouri slave taken to live on free soil and then returned to Missouri could claim freedom—ought to apply to him. A Missouri court ruled that it did, but the Missouri supreme court, amid the rising furor of the 1850s, reversed the judgment.
Scott’s lawyers appealed to the United States Supreme Court, where the case became known as Dred Scott v. Sandford (upon the misspelling of the name of John Sanford, to whom Eliza Sanford Emerson had entrusted her affairs). The case gained significance as the sectional issue grew still more divisive, and by the time the high court delivered its decision, in March 1857, the nation hung on the outcome.
The court ruled on two aspects of the case. First, it
said that Scott had no standing to bring a case in federal court because he was not a citizen of the United States. Blacks could be citizens of the separate states if those states chose to make them so, but they were not citizens of the United States. The court might have stopped there and left the Missouri verdict alone. But Chief Justice Roger B. Taney hoped the judicial branch could accomplish what the legislative and executive branches had failed to do: determine once and for all what power Congress possessed over slavery. Tackling the issue squarely, Taney, a slaveholder from Maryland, declared that Congress had no power over slavery. The Constitution gave Congress no authority to restrict the property rights of slave owners, and hence the Missouri Compromise, the basis for making Wisconsin a free territory, had been unconstitutional from the start. On this ground as well, Scott remained a slave.
Six other justices joined Taney in the Dred Scott decision, which angered and alarmed many Northerners. Most in the North accepted that Congress lacked jurisdiction over slavery in the states, but the assertion that the federal legislature was impotent to control slavery in the federal territories seemed absurd on its face and frightening in its implications. The hope of moderate opponents of slavery was that the obnoxious institution could be kept from expanding and would thereby be encouraged to die a gradual death as morality and perhaps the economy evolved. This hope had been dealt a blow by the Kansas-Nebraska Act, which repealed the Missouri Compromise but left in place the principle that Congress could restrict slavery in the territories if it once again chose to. The Dred Scott case smashed the moderates’ hope. Nothing, it seemed, stood in the way of the slave power.
The Dred Scott decision, though bad news for blacks’ freedom, was good news for Abraham Lincoln’s career. Lincoln had been cast adrift by the breakup of the Whig party in the aftermath of the Kansas-Nebraska Act; finding a new political home required sifting among the flotsam of the Whigs and the various successors they spawned. The American party grew out of the Know Nothing movement of the 1840s, whose members complained that the large immigration of Catholics from Ireland and Germany threatened to overwhelm the English and Protestant values on which the country had been founded. When the Democrats adopted the Irish who landed in New York and other eastern cities, the American party swung into anti-Democratic opposition. There it met the new Republican party, which originated in either Wisconsin or Michigan depending on whose story was to be believed. Two issues inspired the Republicans: resistance to slavery and support for business. The antislavery resistance ranged from moderate displeasure at the Dred Scott decision to radical abolitionism. The pro-business agenda included a protective tariff and internal improvements, starting with a railroad to the Pacific.
Lincoln found his way to the Republicans, who in Illinois were a cautious bunch, at first refusing even to call themselves Republicans for fear of being branded abolitionists by the pro-Southern elements that ran strong in parts of Illinois. At their founding convention in Bloomington in 1856, the Illinois Republicans endorsed the minimal antislavery position of the national party: opposition to an extension of slavery in the western territories. Lincoln approached the Republicans with folksy humor that made some people smile and others groan. He acknowledged that most members of the party were better known than he, and he said he felt like an ugly man who met an outspoken woman on the road. “You are the homeliest man I ever saw,” the woman asserted. The man replied, “I can’t help it.” “I suppose not,” the woman retorted. “But you might stay at home.”
Yet Lincoln could be serious too. At the Bloomington convention he delivered a stirring speech on the necessity of preserving the values of American democracy against the iniquitous and unconstitutional demands of the slaveholders, some of whom threatened secession if they didn’t get their way. He concluded by quoting Daniel Webster: “Liberty and Union, now and forever, one and inseparable.”
He sufficiently impressed his fellow Republicans in Illinois that when the national party held its first presidential nominating convention that year at Philadelphia, the Illinois delegates arranged to have Lincoln offered for vice president. The effort failed, but it won him notice outside his state. He campaigned vigorously around Illinois for the Republican presidential nominee, John Frémont, who had survived his Mexican War court-martial to become rich on California gold, famous for his audacity and envied for his beautiful and forceful wife, Jessie Benton Frémont, the daughter of Thomas Hart Benton. Though Frémont lost to Democrat James Buchanan in the general election, Lincoln earned credit for his service on behalf of the Republicans.
He redeemed some of that credit in 1858 when the Illinois Republicans nominated him for the Senate against Stephen Douglas. Lincoln understood that he needed to capture the attention of the public, and in accepting the Senate nomination he uttered a chilling prophecy. “A house divided against itself cannot stand,” he said. “I believe that this government cannot endure permanently half-slave and half-free.… It will become all one thing or all the other. Either the opponents of slavery will arrest the further spread of it, and place it where the public mind shall rest in the belief that it is in the course of ultimate extinction; or its advocates will push it forward till it shall become alike lawful in all the states, old as well as new, North as well as South.”
Lincoln’s shocking prediction brought him the notice he sought, and it compelled Douglas to accept Lincoln’s challenge to a series of debates on the Kansas-Nebraska Act, the Dred Scott decision and related aspects of the sectional struggle. During the late summer and early autumn of 1858 Lincoln and Douglas toured Illinois, with Douglas defending his record of compromise over slavery and Lincoln assailing that record as capitulation to the slave tyranny. “Henry Clay once said of a class of men who would repress all tendencies to liberty and ultimate emancipation, that they must, if they would do this, go back to the era of our independence and muzzle the cannon which thunders its annual joyous return,” Lincoln told an audience in Ottawa, Illinois. “They must blow out the moral lights around us. They must penetrate the human soul and eradicate there the love of liberty. And then, and not till then, could they perpetuate slavery in this country. To my thinking, Judge Douglas is, by his example and vast influence, doing that very thing.”
Louisa Boggs felt sorry for Grant. “It was a hard situation for him,” she remembered. “He was a northern man married to a southern, slave owning family. Colonel Dent openly despised him. All the family said ‘poor Julia’ when they spoke of Mrs. Grant.… Everybody thought Captain Grant a poor match for Miss Dent.”
Louisa Boggs considered Grant a decent soul who was simply out of his element in civilian life. “We thought him a man of ability but in the wrong place. His mind was not on such things as selling real estate. He did clerical work and wrote a good clear hand, but wasn’t of much use. He hadn’t the push of a business man. His intentions were good, but he hadn’t the faculty of keeping affairs in order. Mr. Boggs went east on business, leaving the Captain in charge, and when he returned he found everything upside down. The books were in confusion, the wrong people had been let into houses and the owners were much concerned.”
Grant didn’t appear to resent the low esteem in which he was held. “He didn’t blame us to think poorly of him,” Louisa Boggs said. “He thought poorly of himself. I don’t think he had any ambition further than to educate and care for his family. His mind was always somewhere else. He said very little unless some war topic came up. If you mentioned Napoleon’s battles or the Mexican war or the question of secession, he was glib enough.” Grant’s knowledge of his ineptitude at the business of life shaped his emotions, she believed. “He seemed to me to be much depressed. Yes, he was a sad man. I never heard him laugh out loud. He would smile, and he was not a gloomy man, but he was a sad man.”
He grew sadder as he realized that the partnership with Boggs wouldn’t work. He couldn’t object when Boggs cut him loose; there was scarcely enough business for one partner, let alone two.
He applied for a j
ob as county engineer. His army background, even if in infantry, gave his application a certain plausibility, but the decision rested with the county board of commissioners, who took other considerations into account. His brief residence in St. Louis told against him; he lacked the friendly connections that often facilitated public appointments. And though he kept out of partisan politics, he had voted for James Buchanan in 1856. “It was evident to my mind that the election of a Republican President in 1856 meant the secession of all the Slave States, and rebellion,” he explained afterward. “Under these circumstances I preferred the success of a candidate whose election would prevent or postpone secession, to seeing the country plunged into a war the end of which no man could foretell.” His preference for Buchanan was known, voting being a public act in those days, and it pleased the two Democrats on the county board, but the three Republicans—or Free-Soilers, as they were still called in Missouri—were less happy.
“Should your honorable body see proper to give me the appointment,” he wrote the board as part of his application, “I pledge myself to give the office my entire attention and shall hope to give general satisfaction.” He produced references, including Joseph Reynolds, a West Point classmate who currently taught mechanics and engineering at Washington University in St. Louis. “He always maintained a high standing, and graduated with great credit, especially in mathematics, mechanics, and engineering,” Reynolds exaggerated of Grant. “From my personal knowledge of his capacity and acquirements as well as of his strict integrity and unremitting industry I consider him in an eminent degree qualified for the office of County Engineer.”