the class, still mounted, was formed in line through the center of the hall. The riding master placed the leaping bar higher than a man’s head and called out “Cadet Grant!” A clean-faced, slender, blue-eyed young fellow, weighing about one hundred and twenty pounds, dashed from the ranks on a powerfully-built chestnut sorrel horse, and galloped down the opposite side of the hall. As he turned at the farther end and came into the stretch at which the bar was placed, the horse increased his pace and measuring his stride for the great leap before him, bounded into the air and cleared the bar, carrying his rider as if man and beast had been welded together. The spectators were breathless.
During Grant’s four years at West Point, some cadets, when they had a free hour, would go to the riding hall just to watch Grant school York and the other horses. In one event, Grant and York cleared a bar placed so high that their performance set an academy record that stood for twenty-five years.
Grant’s roommate in his last year at West Point was Frederick Dent, a cadet from St. Louis. When newly commissioned Lieutenant Grant was assigned to the Fourth Infantry Regiment stationed at Jefferson Barracks, a few miles south of St. Louis, his friend Dent urged him to call on his family at White Haven, the large nearby farm to which the prosperous Dents annually moved from their winter house in St. Louis to spend much of the rest of the year. White Haven was not one of the great Southern plantations, but it had twelve hundred fertile acres situated on the broad Gravois Creek. In addition to the white-painted main house with its traditional big porches running along both the ground floor and the bedroom floor above it, all covered with honeysuckle and other vines, there were eighteen cabins in which the Dent family’s slaves lived. The Dents’ daughter Emma later described the place:
The farm of White Haven was even prettier than its name, for the pebbly shining Gravois ran through it, and there were beautiful groves growing all over it, and acres upon acres of grassy meadows where the cows used to stand knee-deep in blue grass and clover … The house we lived in stood in the centre of a long sweep of wooded valley and the creek ran through the trees not far below it … Through the grove of locust trees a walk led from a low porch to an old-fashioned stile gate, about fifty yards from the house.
Emma was six years old when Lieutenant Grant came to call at this rural scene on a day when her eighteen-year-old sister Julia was away on a long visit to St. Louis. She described their first meeting: “I was nearing my seventh birthday, that bright spring afternoon in 1843 when, with my four little darky playmates, Henrietta, Sue, Ann, and Jeff, I went out hunting for birds’ nests. They were my slaves as well as my chums, for father had given them to me at birth, and as we were all of about an age, we used to have some good times together. This day, I remember, we were out in front of the turnstile and I had my arms full of birds’ nests and was clutching a tiny unfledged birdling in one hand when a young stranger rode blithely up to the stile.”
In answer to this man on horseback’s “How do you do? Does Mister Dent live here?” Emma was speechless. “I thought him the handsomest person I had ever seen in my life, this strange young man. He was riding a splendid horse, and, oh, he sat it so gracefully! The whole picture of him and his sleek, prancing steed was so good to look upon that I could do nothing but stare at it—so forgetting the poor little thing crying in my hand that I nearly crushed it to death. Of course, I knew he was a soldier from the barracks, because he had on a beautiful blue suit with gold buttons down the front, but he looked too young to be an officer.”
When Emma recovered herself enough to answer “Yes, sir,” after the lieutenant asked for the second time if this was the Dents’ house, this scene ensued:
We children followed him up to the porch, trailing in his wake and close to his feet like a troop of little black-and-tan puppies … At the porch we heard him introduce himself to my father as Lieutenant Grant. Then my mother and sister Nellie came out to meet him … My own contribution to the entertainment of the stranger was one continuous stare up at his face … His cheeks were round and plump and rosy; his hair was fine and brown, very thick and wavy. His eyes were a clear blue, and always full of light. His features were regular, pleasingly molded and attractive, and his figure so slender, well formed, and graceful that it was like that of a young prince to my eye … When he rode up to White Haven that bright day in the spring of 1843 he was pretty as a doll.
Grant came to call several times, always urged to stay for supper by Mrs. Dent, who liked him immediately. Of the slender lieutenant’s quiet political discussions with her husband, she commented, “That young man explains politics so clearly that I can understand the situation perfectly.” Emma and her fifteen-year-old sister Nellie began to regard him as a gift that had somehow been bestowed upon them. Then their vivacious older sister Julia, who had recently turned nineteen, came back from St. Louis. “She was not exactly a beauty,” Emma said, mentioning that one of Julia’s eyes would go out of focus in a condition known as strabismus, “but she was possessed of a lively and pleasing countenance.” Grant suddenly began to ride over from the barracks every other day. “It did not take Nell and myself long to see that we were no longer the attractions at White Haven,” Emma noted. Having grown up on a big farm with three older brothers as well as her three younger sisters, Julia loved the outdoors. “He and she frequently went fishing along the banks of the creek, and many a fine mess of perch I’ve seen them catch together.” Julia’s impression of her new friend Lieutenant Grant was that he was “a darling little lieutenant.”
An excellent rider, Julia had a spirited Kentucky mare. According to Emma, “Lieutenant Grant was one of the best horsemen I ever saw, and he rode a fine blooded animal … Many a sharp race they used to have in the fine mornings before breakfast or through the sunset and twilight after supper.”
White-haired Colonel Dent—a courtesy title by which many men of his station in life were then known in the South, regardless of military experience—could be a peevish man, given to sitting by himself on the porch reading a newspaper and puffing on a long reed-stemmed pipe, but he, like his wife, believed in having many young guests. Grant was encouraged to bring his brother officers with him. There were picnics and dances around the countryside; one of the young officers always included was a handsome giant named James Longstreet, a cousin of Colonel Dent’s who had been known at West Point as Pete.
When Julia’s pet canary died, Grant organized a funeral for the bird. Julia remembered that “he was kind enough to make a little coffin for my canary bird and he painted it yellow. About eight officers attended the funeral of my little pet.”
It seemed not to occur to this young couple that they were falling in love. At a time when Grant was home on leave visiting his family in Ohio, his regiment was ordered to Louisiana to become part of the Army of Observation during the annexation of Texas, in the confrontation that would lead to the Mexican War. An officer friend told Julia that if Grant did not appear at White Haven by the following Saturday, it would mean that he had gone straight on down the Mississippi from Ohio to catch up to his regiment and “would not be at the Barracks again.” Julia later wrote: “Saturday came and no Lieutenant. I felt very restless and, ordering my horse, rode alone towards the Barracks … I halted my horse and waited and listened, but he did not come. The beating of my own heart was the only sound I heard. So I rode slowly and sadly home.”
Grant was in fact hastening toward St. Louis from Ohio, where, on learning that he was about to be sent far from Julia for a long time, he discovered that there was something “serious the matter with me.” When he arrived at Jefferson Barracks, the post was virtually deserted, with his friend Lieutenant Richard Ewell finishing the last of the departed regiment’s paperwork before following the unit down the Mississippi. Ewell readily wrote out a few days’ extension of Grant’s leave, and Grant found a horse and set out for White Haven that evening. Normally the Gravois Creek was shallow, but a placid stream was not what he encountered that night: “On this
occasion it had been raining heavily, and when the creek was reached, I found the banks full to overflowing, and the current rapid. I looked at it a moment to consider what to do. One of my superstitions has always been when I started to go anywhere, or to do anything, not to turn back, or stop until the thing intended was accomplished … So I struck into the stream, and in an instant the horse was swimming and I being carried down by the current.” With Grant hanging on to the horse’s mane as the animal swam through the foaming water in the darkness, both horse and man reached the opposite bank. When he arrived at White Haven, drenched and dripping, little sister Emma was right there, and her memory for such matters later enabled her to render this account of that moment:
We all enjoyed heartily the sight of his ridiculous figure with his clothes flopping like wet rags around his limbs, and none laughed more heartily than my sister Julia. Lieutenant Grant took it all good humoredly enough, but there was a sturdy seriousness in his usually twinkling eyes that must have suggested, perhaps, to Julia that he had come on more serious business, for the teasing did not last long. [Older brother] John carried him off to find some dry clothes, and when he returned the usually natty soldier looked scarcely more like himself … John was taller and larger than Grant, and his clothes did not fit the Lieutenant “soonenough.”Of course, this roused more laughter, which the soldier took in the same good part, but those rosy telltale cheeks of his reddened, as usual with him when the inward state of his feelings did not agree with his outward composure.
Grant held his fire until a day soon thereafter when several of the Dents set off to attend a friend’s wedding, with Grant included in the group. He arranged matters so that he and Julia were alone in a buggy, with him at the reins. As they approached a little wooden bridge across the still-turbulent Gravois, which had a torrent of water roaring just beneath the wooden planks, Julia began to worry about the safety of crossing.
I noticed, too, that Lieutenant Grant was very quiet, and that and the high water bothered me … He assured me, in his brief way, that it was perfectly safe, and in my heart I relied upon him. Just as we reached the old bridge I said, “Now, if anything happens, remember I shall cling to you, no matter what you say to the contrary.” He simply said “All right” and we were over the planks in less than a minute. Then his mood changed.
As Julia put it, he used her statement about clinging to him to ask her to cling to him forever. Grant’s only recorded comment on his proposal was, “Before I returned I mustered up the courage to make known, in the most awkward manner imaginable, the discovery I had made on learning that the 4th infantry had been ordered away from Jefferson Barracks … Before separating it was definitely understood that at a convenient time we would join our fortunes, and not let the removal of a regiment trouble us.” Julia told her “Ulys,” as she had taken to calling him, not to ask her father for her hand in marriage just then; she was his, but she did not want an engagement to be announced.
During the next four years, the couple saw each other only once, when he returned from Louisiana on a brief leave before his regiment was sent into the Mexican War. On that visit, he received Colonel Dent’s permission to marry his daughter, despite the colonel’s dislike of what he knew of the conditions that army wives often encountered. From Mexico, Grant sent Julia letters that expressed great longing for her. Telling her of the American victory at Matamoros early in the war, he wrote, “In the thickest of it I thought of Julia. How much I should love to see you.” His short, clear descriptions of the battles in which he fought mentioned little of his own part in them. In fact, young Lieutenant Grant participated in most of the major engagements. At the Battle of Monterrey, as his regiment advanced through city streets in house-to-house fighting, Grant’s commander realized that his men were running out of ammunition. Someone had to ride back through streets swept from one side by enemy fire with the order that more ammunition be brought forward immediately. Believing that whoever tried to carry this message would probably be killed, the colonel asked for a volunteer. Grant swung up on a gray mare named Nellie and put his arm around the horse’s neck and a foot over the hind part of the saddle. Then, hanging down along the side of the horse away from the enemy, he galloped back through the street crossings, which, he said, “I crossed at such a flying rate that generally I was past and under the cover of the next block before the enemy fired.”
Serving at times as regimental quartermaster, a position calling for attention to supplies and transportation at the rear of the fighting, Grant did all that in superior fashion and still repeatedly fought at the front. He was to say, “I never went into a battle willingly or with enthusiasm … was always glad when a battle was over,” but his friend Longstreet saw a different picture: “You could not keep him out of battle … Grant was everywhere on the field. He was always cool, swift, and unhurried … as unconcerned, apparently, as if it were a hail-storm instead of a storm of bullets.” Among the officers in the thick of the fighting was Julia’s brother Fred, Grant’s West Point roommate. At Molino del Rey, Grant came upon Fred, who was in another regiment, minutes after his future brother-in-law was wounded in the thigh by a musket ball. He was soon able to write Julia that Fred would recover quickly.
On the day before General Winfield Scott’s victorious entry into Mexico City, Grant distinguished himself in the attacks made along the aqueduct road leading toward the complex of buildings and defenses on the city’s outskirts known as the Garita [city gate] San Cosme. He repeatedly took different kinds of initiatives. Grant moved forward on his own, actually working his way around an enemy breastworks until he was behind the Mexicans who were firing at the Americans. Returning to the American lines, he asked for volunteers and got twelve men. Grant led them, and an American company he came upon that was just entering the battle, back around to the side of the enemy position, attacked the Mexicans on their unprotected flank, and forced a retreat. When the numerically superior enemy reoccupied the breastworks later in the day, Grant’s Fourth Infantry led the American counterattack that finally won it back: another lieutenant reported that he and Grant were “the first two persons to gain it.”
As if that were not enough for the last afternoon of the war, Grant, scouting on his own again, “found a church off to the south of the road, which looked to me as if the belfry would command the ground back of the Garita San Cosme.” Once again, Grant trusted his instincts: he rounded up an officer in command of a mountain howitzer and its crew, and directed them as they wrestled the small cannon up the steps of the bell tower. When they opened fire on the Mexican soldiers who were behind walls where they thought they could not be seen, “The shots from our little gun dropped in upon the enemy and created great confusion.”
The commander of this wing of the American attack, Brigadier General William Worth, was studying the enemy position through a spyglass. This sudden successful development surprised him as much as it did the Mexicans. He sent his aide Lieutenant John C. Pemberton to bring Grant to him. Telling the gunners to keep up the fire, Grant reluctantly left the bell tower and reported to General Worth, who congratulated him, saying that “every shot was effective.” He ordered Grant to take a captain with another mountain howitzer and its crew back with him, and get it up in the tower to double the fire.
“I could not tell the General,” Grant said of that moment in which he combined military obedience and common sense in the middle of a hard-fought battle, “that there was not room enough in the steeple for another gun, because he probably would have looked upon such a statement as a contradiction from a second lieutenant. I took the captain with me, but did not use his gun.”
By nine the next morning, General Scott entered the center of Mexico City and walked into the National Palace accompanied by a group of his officers. After a last uprising and enemy effort to reenter the city that was quelled within twenty-four hours, the fighting in the Mexican War came to an end. Grant wrote Julia that the highly professional American forces had won “astonishing
victories,” but added, “dearly have they paid for it! The loss of officers and men is frightful.” Twenty-one officers of the Fourth Infantry Regiment, many of them guests at the merry picnics and dances held near White Haven, and some who had attended the funeral Grant organized for Julia’s pet canary, had been sent from Jefferson Barracks to Mexico. Seventeen of them died there. In all, 78,718 American soldiers served in the Mexican War; 13,283 died, a higher percentage than in any other conflict in which the United States has been engaged. As for Grant’s view of the war, he later termed it “one of the most unjust wars ever waged by a stronger against a weaker nation.” That was Grant, in essence: he might disagree with his nation’s policy, but he had sworn to carry it out.
So, after varying lengths of time serving in the army of occupation, the men who would have to choose between fighting for the North or South thirteen years later began coming home. There were officers clearly marked for future high command, such as Robert E. Lee, whom Winfield Scott called “the very best soldier that I ever saw in the field,” and the two unrelated Johnstons, Joseph E. and Albert Sidney, who would also side with the South. George Gordon Meade, Winfield Scott Hancock, and John Sedgwick had gained important experience that they would use in fighting for the Union. Other men received notice: at the climactic moment of the Battle of Chapultepec, Lieutenant George Pickett, the future Confederate general whose division would be slaughtered as part of the doomed Pickett’s Charge at Gettysburg, pulled down the Mexican flag that had been flying over the bravely defended Military College and hoisted an American flag. In the same battle, an artillery lieutenant from Virginia named Thomas Jonathan Jackson, later known as “Stonewall,” managed to advance his cannon so far up Grasshoppers Hill in the face of intense musket fire that his gunners finally left the gun and hid behind some rocks. The tall young warrior with blazing gray eyes strode back and forth as bullets cracked past him, shouting to his crouching men, “There’s no danger! See, I’m not hit!” In the final house-to-house fighting in Mexico City, Lieutenant George B. McClellan, who early in the Civil War would be the Union Army’s general in chief, saw a Mexican kill an American sergeant; grabbing the sergeant’s musket, McClellan killed the Mexican.
Grant and Sherman: The Friendship that Won the Civil War Page 2