by H. W. Brands
Grant owed his job in the leather business to his father, and he wanted his father’s permission to leave it. “What I ask now is your approval of the course I am taking,” he wrote Jesse. But whether he received permission or not, he would act. “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 and Patriots, and I want hereafter to be ranked with the latter.”
16
“ON ACCOUNT OF THE CARS NOT CONNECTING PROMPTLY, WE DID NOT arrive here until evening yesterday,” Grant wrote Julia from Springfield on April 27. He had drilled the Galena company briefly at home and then traveled with them to the capital to oversee their enrollment in one of the Illinois regiments. “Our trip here was a perfect ovation,” he recounted. “At every station the whole population seemed to be out to greet the troops. There is such a feeling aroused through the country now as has not been known since the Revolution.” Grant’s forecast of an oversubscription to Lincoln’s summons for volunteers was proving true. “Every company called for in the President’s proclamation has been organized, and filled to near double the amount that can be received. In addition to that, every town of 1000 inhabitants and over has from one to four additional companies organized ready to answer the next call that will be made.”
Grant delivered the Galena company to its state regiment and prepared to return home. A personal request from the governor stopped him. Grant had never met Richard Yates, although they were staying at the same hotel in Springfield and eating in the same dining room. “The evening I was to quit the capital I left the supper room before the governor and was standing at the front door when he came out,” Grant remembered. “He spoke to me, calling me by my old army title ‘Captain,’ and said he understood that I was about leaving the city.” Grant replied that that was correct. Yates asked him to stay overnight and come to the office the next morning. “I complied with his request, and was asked to go into the Adjutant-General’s office and render such assistance as I could, the governor saying that my army experience would be of great service there.”
Grant was pleased to be noticed, and he quickly set to the task of enrolling the volunteer regiments. He soon discovered that the paperwork was more than he had encountered in the federal army. Briefly he wondered if he was up to the job. “The only place I ever found in my life to put a paper so as to find it again was either a side coat-pocket or the hands of a clerk or secretary more careful than myself,” he remarked after another two decades of wrestling with documents. Fortunately he found such a clerk in Springfield, and the enlistments proceeded smoothly.
He was impressed and gratified by the patriotic fervor of the men he mustered. “I am convinced that if the South knew the entire unanimity of the North for the Union and maintenance of law, and how freely men and money are offered to the cause, they would lay down their arms at once in humble submission,” he wrote his sister Mary. “There is no disposition to compromise now. Nearly everyone is anxious to see the Government fully tested as to its strength, and see if it is not worth preserving.” To his father he described the masses rallying to the flag. “Galena has several more companies organized but only one of them will be able to come in under a new call for ten regiments. Chicago has raised companies enough nearly to fill all the first call. The northern feeling is so fully aroused that they will stop at no expense of money and men to insure the success of their cause.” Grant acknowledged that the North had no monopoly on fervor. “I presume the feeling is just as strong on the other side,” he told Jesse. But the Southerners would be overwhelmed. “They are infinitely in the minority in resources.”
He began to regret that he had not joined the Illinois volunteers. “I should have offered myself for the Colonelcy of one of the regiments,” he told his father. Yet the politics of a volunteer army were beyond him. “I find all those places are wanted by politicians who are up to log-rolling.” He feared that the North would win before he could find his place. “My own opinion is that this war will be but of short duration,” he told Jesse in early May. “A few decisive victories in some of the southern ports will send the secession army howling, and the leaders in the rebellion will flee the country.” The result would be lasting. “All the states will then be loyal for a generation to come, negroes will depreciate so rapidly in value that no body will want to own them, and their masters will be the loudest in their declamations against the institution in a political and economic view. The nigger will never disturb this country again.”
Events had never moved so rapidly in Grant’s life. A month earlier he had been minding the store in Galena, unknown to anyone beyond his modest circle. Now he was an important man in the state, deeply involved in preparing its army for battle. He traveled the length of Illinois, from Freeport in the north to Cairo in the south, recruiting, supervising, issuing orders, signing contracts for supplies and transport. He scarcely had time to tell Julia where he was. “Kiss the children for me,” he wrote from Mattoon, in the eastern part of the state. “And accept a dozen for yourself.”
Events moved even faster for Robert E. Lee. With the rest of Virginia, Lee watched the secession tide spread from Charleston across the South; with the rest of the officer corps of the U.S. Army, he wondered what role the military would play in the unfolding drama. On April 17 Virginia seceded; on April 18 Lee received a visit from Francis Blair, sent by Lincoln to offer him command of the federal army. The offer came as no surprise; Lee knew of his reputation as the most gifted of the emerging generation of officers. He had decided how he ought to respond to such an invitation as Blair delivered. “After listening to his remarks,” he wrote later, “I declined the offer he made me, to take command of the army that was to be brought into the field; stating, as candidly and courteously as I could, that, though opposed to secession and deprecating war, I could take part in no invasion of the Southern States.”
Blair left, disappointed, and Lee went straight to the office of Winfield Scott. He told Scott of the offer made to him and of his response. Scott, a Virginian himself, merely nodded gravely. Lee then crossed the Potomac to his home in Arlington, considering the matter further. By the time he entered the house his obligation had become clear. “I concluded that I ought no longer to retain the commission I held in the United States Army.” On the second morning subsequent he composed a letter to Scott tendering his resignation. “It would have been presented at once but for the struggle it has cost me to separate myself from a service to which I have devoted the best years of my life, and all the ability I possessed,” he explained to Scott. “During the whole of that time—more than a quarter of a century—I have experienced nothing but kindness from my superiors and a most cordial friendship from my comrades.” He hoped his career at arms had ended. “Save in the defense of my native State, I never desire again to draw my sword.”
Lee’s hope may have been sincere, but it was also unrealistic and short-lived. The governor of Virginia, upon learning of Lee’s resignation, invited him to Richmond, where the state’s secession convention was meeting. The convention requested that Lee take command of Virginia’s military forces. Again he wasn’t surprised, and he had remarks ready. “Deeply impressed with the solemnity of the occasion on which I appear before you, and profoundly grateful for the honor conferred upon me, I accept the position your partiality has assigned me,” he said.
Lee’s departure from the army of the United States coincided with Grant’s first efforts to get back in. “Having served for fifteen years in the regular army, including four years at West Point, and feeling it the duty of everyone who has been educated at the Government expense to offer their services for the support of that Government, I have the honor, very respectfully, to tender my services, until the close of the war, in such capacity as may be offered,” he wrote the adjutant general in Washington. He suggested a colonelcy for himself. “In view of my present age, and length of se
rvice, I feel myself competent to command a regiment if the President, in his judgment, should see fit to entrust one to me.” He later admitted to diffidence in drafting his letter. “I felt some hesitation in suggesting rank as high as the colonelcy of a regiment, feeling somewhat doubtful whether I would be equal to the position,” he recalled. “But I had seen nearly every colonel who had been mustered in from the State of Illinois, and some from Indiana, and felt that if they could command a regiment properly, and with credit, I could also.”
The army did not agree. Yet neither did it disagree. Rather it lost Grant’s letter, leaving him uncertain as to where his future lay. Confusion didn’t affect Grant alone; during the early months of the war confusion was often the prevailing motif as the political and legal boundaries between state and federal action shifted and blurred, along with the personal and emotional frontiers between loyalty and secession. Grant encountered the latter blurring on a visit to St. Louis amid his recruiting duties. He had gone to Bellville, Illinois, to muster a regiment, but when he got there he learned that most of the soldiers were still en route and wouldn’t arrive for several days. He employed the opportunity to travel the twenty miles to St. Louis and visit his in-laws. “Your father is in the room, absorbed in his paper,” he wrote Julia. “Lewis Sheets”—a family friend—“is fixing a segarita to smoke and Aunt Fanny is setting by me busy with her work. All are well.” But they might not stay well. Secession was splitting the Dent family. John Dent, Julia’s brother, was an open sympathizer with the South. “I believe he thinks of a colonelcy in the secession army,” Grant told Julia. Frederick Dent leaned in the same direction, although less forthrightly. “Your father says he is for the Union but is opposed to having an army to sustain it. He would have a secession force march where they please uninterrupted and is really what I would call a secessionist.” Dent’s sister, on the other hand, sided with Grant. “Aunt Fanny is strong for the Union.”
The division in the Dent household was writ larger across St. Louis. Although a convention called to consider secession for Missouri had voted against such action, the state’s South-leaning governor, Claiborne Jackson, evidently hoped to use his control of the Missouri militia to seize the federal arsenal at St. Louis. But a quick-thinking Union army captain in the vicinity, Nathaniel Lyon, with critical support from Francis Blair, the district’s Republican congressman, rallied Union loyalists and preempted the blow. Lyon and Blair occupied the arsenal and prepared to march against Camp Jackson, where the governor’s secessionist militia had gathered. “I went down to the arsenal in the morning to see the troops start out,” Grant recalled. “I had known Lyon for two years at West Point and in the old army afterwards. Blair I knew very well by sight. I had heard him speak in the canvass of 1858, possibly several times, but I had never spoken to him. As the troops marched out of the enclosure around the arsenal, Blair was on his horse outside forming them into line preparatory to their march. I introduced myself to him and had a few moments’ conversation and expressed my sympathy with his purpose.” Grant was pleased that Blair’s swift stroke produced the intended effect. “Camp Jackson surrendered without a fight and the garrison was marched down to the arsenal as prisoners of war.”
The victory transformed the mood in the city. “Up to this time the enemies of the government in St. Louis had been bold and defiant, while the Union men were quiet but determined,” Grant wrote. “As soon as the news of the capture of Camp Jackson reached the city the condition of affairs was changed.” The Unionists gained confidence and began standing up to the secessionists. Grant observed—and got involved in—a confrontation at a downtown building that served as headquarters of the secession party, complete with a rebel flag. “I stepped on a car standing at the corner of 4th and Pine streets, and saw a crowd of people standing quietly in front of the headquarters, who were there for the purpose of hauling down the flag.” Behind the Unionists was a crowd of Southern sympathizers. “They too were quiet but filled with suppressed rage, and muttered their resentment at the insult to what they called ‘their’ flag.” One of the latter, a young man, got into the streetcar Grant was riding. “He was in a great state of excitement and used adjectives freely to express his contempt for the Union and for those who had just perpetrated such an outrage upon the rights of a free people.… He turned to me saying: ‘Things have come to a damned pretty pass when a free people can’t choose their own flag. Where I come from, if a man dares to say a word in favor of the Union we hang him to a limb of the first tree we come to.’ I replied that ‘after all we were not so intolerant in St. Louis as we might be; I had not seen a single rebel hung yet, nor heard of one; there were plenty of them who ought to be, however.’ The young man subsided.”
The surge of support for the Union made Grant wish more than ever to be under arms. After mustering the last of his regiments at Springfield, he arranged to travel to Kentucky, ostensibly to visit his parents but really to call on George McClellan, who had been promoted to army major general with headquarters at Cincinnati. “I was in hopes that when he saw me he would offer me a position on his staff,” Grant explained afterward. But McClellan, likely remembering Grant’s drinking troubles in the West, was too busy. “I called on two successive days at his office but failed to see him on either occasion,” Grant wrote.
Grant returned to Springfield and discovered that while McClellan and the United States might not think they needed him, Governor Yates and Illinois did. The hastily mustered state regiments included some with officers who knew nothing of military command. A colonel named Simon Goode led one regiment very badly. He had never been to war and never served in an organized army. He brandished three braces of revolvers and a large hunting knife, with which he vowed to skin Jefferson Davis alive. But he boozed as flamboyantly as he walked and talked, and he kept no semblance of military discipline, leaving the conscientious among his men at the mercy of the dissolute and damaging the reputation of the regiment, the militia and the Union cause. The complaints of his men and of the neighbors reached the ears of Yates, who asked around for a replacement. Grant wasn’t his first choice, being a relative newcomer to Illinois and lacking the connections that might have rendered his appointment politically valuable. Apparently Yates too had heard the stories of Grant’s drinking, which gave him additional pause. But the members of the regiment knew Grant from their mustering, and they respected his calm, straightforward demeanor. Yates offered to make Grant a colonel and give him the command.
It wasn’t what Grant had wanted, but it was the best position available, and he took it with relief and comparative pleasure. “In accepting this command,” he informed his new subordinates, “your Commander will require the cooperation of all the commissioned and non-commissioned officers in instructing the command and in maintaining discipline, and hopes to receive also the hearty support of every enlisted man.”
The instruction began at once. “Hereafter no passes to soldiers to be out of camp after sun down will be valid unless approved by the Commanding Officer of the Regiment,” he said. “All men when out of camp should reflect that they are gentlemen; in camp, soldiers.… The guards are required in all cases to arrest all men coming into camp after retreat unless provided with a pass countersigned by the Regimental Commander.”
Certain of the soldiers resisted their lessons. “It is with regret that the commanding officer learns that a number of the men composing the guard of last night deserted their posts, and their guard,” Grant said in a subsequent order. “This is an offense against all military rule and law.… It cannot, in time of peace, be accompanied with a punishment less than the forfeiture of $10 from the pay of the soldier, together with corporal punishment such as confinement for thirty days with ball and chain at hard labor. In time of war the punishment of this is death.” Grant cut the offenders some first-time slack, choosing to interpret their failure as stemming from ignorance rather than malice. But he warned the miscreants and the entire regiment: “It will not be excused a
gain.”
His firmness paid off. “The guard house was not large enough for the first few nights and days,” one of Grant’s lieutenants informed his wife. “But yesterday there was but two or three in and today none.… So you see we have the best of order and every thing moves off pleasantly.” Grant himself remarked of his regiment, in a letter to Julia: “It was in a terribly disorganized state when I took it, but a very great change has taken place. Everyone says so and to me it is very observable. I don’t believe there is a more orderly set of troops now in the volunteer service. I have been very strict with them and the men seem to like it. They appreciate that it is all for their own benefit.”
His timing couldn’t have been better. Just as his regiment was beginning to look like an army unit, it became an army unit. The first Northern enlistments, in response to Lincoln’s April call, had been for ninety days in state militias, with Lincoln hoping that an enthusiastic show of force would overawe the rebels. When the enlistments had no such effect, the president adopted a new approach. He issued another call, this time for three-year enlistments in the federal army. The state units already in existence would be absorbed into the army if the officers and men so chose.
Grant happily accepted the transfer, but some in his regiment initially had doubts. Two Illinois congressmen came to his camp requesting to address the men. Grant knew them only by reputation, and the reputation of one—a Democrat from the southern part of Illinois, where sympathy for the South was especially strong—gave him cause for concern. But they were members of Congress and he a mere colonel, and he didn’t feel he could stop them. To his relief, patriotism informed the speeches, especially the one by the Democrat. “It breathed a loyalty and devotion to the Union which inspired my men to such a point that they would have volunteered to remain in the army as long as an enemy of the country continued to bear arms against it,” he remembered. The regiment overwhelmingly followed their colonel into the federal army.