by Bruce Catton
The Col. Commanding regrets that it becomes his duty to notice the fact, that some of the Officers of this command fell out of ranks yesterday, in passing through Jacksonville without authority to do so; and this whilst the rank & file were guarded most strictly. This being the first offence is overlooked, but in future no excuse will be received.13
The emphasis again was on the officers, but the colonel was not above paying direct attention to the sins of the enlisted man. During a brief halt in one small town, many of the regiment visited the local grocery and filled their canteens and themselves with whisky, and when the march was resumed there was much unsteadiness and wabbling in the ranks. Grant noticed, said nothing, called a halt after a time, and then quietly passed down the ranks on foot, making personal inspection of every man’s canteen. If it held whisky, the fluid was immediately poured on the ground and the man was ordered to march for the rest of the day tethered behind a baggage wagon.14
Somewhere near Naples, on the Illinois River, the march was halted; orders now were to wait for steamboat transportation to St. Louis. Grant put the regiment into camp, ordered daily squad, company and battalion drill, and called on all ranks “to give the strictest attention to all their military duties”; a matter of importance, he wrote, “when it is reflected upon how soon we may be called into actual service, and how important it is that everyone should know his duty.” On this same day, July 9, Grant reflected on what had been done thus far and wrote an odd, man-to-man sort of order to the men of his regiment:
The Col. Commanding this Regiment deems it his duty at this period of the march to return his thanks to the Officers and men composing the command on their general Obedience and Military disipline. Having for a period of years been accostomed to strict military duties and disipline he deems it not inapropriate at this time to make a most favorable comparison of this command with that of veteran troops in point of soldierly bearing, general good order, and cheerful execution of commands; making the real necessity of a Guard partially unnecessary. Although discipline has been generaly enforced, yet, the same strictness would have been unnecessary, but for a few unruly men, who have caused the Regt to be more strictly under regulation for their misdemeaniors. The Col. Comdg. trusts that a repetition of disorder on their part may never occur again; but that all may prove themselves Soldiers, fit for duty without any unnecessary means being pursued by him to make them such.15
The regiment waited for several days, at Naples; the expected steamboat had run on a sand bar somewhere, and by the time the vessel was clear orders were changed again. Boarding the cars at last—Grant noted with pride that it took just forty minutes to get men and baggage all ready to go—the 21st moved on to Quincy by rail, and if the men had complaint about the condition of the cars they kept quiet about it.… At Quincy, Grant parted with his eleven-year-old son, Frederick Dent Grant, who had been with him ever since Grant became a colonel. Mrs. Grant and the children would be campaigners, in this war, and Grant would have some or all of them with him whenever he could. He sent Fred home now, supposing that Julia would be worried if he took the lad on into Missouri—“We may have some fighting to do, and he is too young to have the exposure of a camp life,” he explained—and so he put the lad on a boat, to go home to Galena by way of Dubuque. Julia Grant, as it turned out, was quite unworried; she wrote to Grant urging him to keep Fred with him, remarking that Alexander the Great was not older when he accompanied Philip of Macedon. (As a soldier’s wife, she knew her military history.) The letter reached Grant too late, and Fred went home on schedule, and Mrs. Grant recalled years later Grant was rather amused by her letter.16
By mid-July the 21st Illinois had crossed the Mississippi and was in the war zone, if not actually in the war itself, helping to hold northeastern Missouri, especially its bridges and railroads, against Confederate molestation.
It seemed, just at first, that this assignment might bring excitement and danger. A Confederate guerilla leader named Tom Harris had been making a pest of himself in the area assigned to the 21st, and Grant got orders one day to take his regiment and break up this band of marauders. Harris and his men were supposed to be encamped in a creek bottom twenty-five miles away; Grant led his regiment out boldly enough, but along the way he discovered that command carries its own responsibilities and inflicts its own loneliness and fear. He had been in action often enough in the Mexican War, and had stood up under its dangers as well as a professional officer need do; but now, taking an infantry regiment cross-country toward an engagement which—even though it would be no more than a skirmish—would be his men’s first experience of combat, Grant found himself afraid. He wanted desperately, he said, to be back in Illinois; with wry humor, he wrote long afterward that he “lacked the moral courage” even to call a halt so that he could think things over. He just kept on going, dreading the moment when he would bring his regiment over the crest of a hill and find the enemy in view.
The result was sheer anticlimax. Tom Harris had fled, and when the 21st reached the camp site in the creek bottom it was clear that the Southern raiders had cleared out hours before. And it dawned on Grant that Harris had been at least as afraid of him as he himself had been of Harris; an aspect of the situation which, he confessed, had not occurred to him before. He never forgot it, and through all the rest of the war he never again felt the cold, unreasoned sort of panic that beset him on this country road in Missouri. He always remembered that the other fellow had just as much reason to be afraid as he had.17
The 21st put in the rest of the month in and about a town called Mexico not far from Hannibal, in the angle between the Mississippi and the Missouri rivers. There was nothing in particular to do. Union troops here just now were actually a sort of glorified constabulary, keeping the peace and defending the loyalists as much by their presence as by any actual feats of arms, and during the next few weeks Grant had time to carry forward the “disipline” of his recruits and to reflect on the lights and shadows of a civil war. On July 15 he ordered Private Hiram Reynolds, of Company K, dismissed from the service for unspecified misdeeds. (Private Reynolds apparently was a hard case. He re-enlisted in an Indiana regiment, and in the fall of 1863 he was hanged, at Nashville, Tennessee, for killing a fellow soldier.) Before the month ended Grant had broken Corporal George A. Stevens of Company A to private “for intemperance and common street drunkenness.” He had also discovered that soldiers who passed a place where liquor was sold on the line of march had a way of smuggling whisky into camp simply by filling their unloaded muskets with it, plugging the muzzles with pieces of corncob; a trick which a vigilant colonel could detect by ordering a piece cocked and then watching the whisky trickle out at the nipple.18
While he worked with his own men, Grant studied his fellow citizens in Missouri and tried to understand just how men’s attitudes could veer and change under the pressures of a civil war. Writing to his father on August 3, Grant confessed that he found in Missouri a state of mind that he had not expected to meet anywhere in the South. Most of the people in northeast Missouri, he believed, were secessionists, as Northerners would use the word; but they were reluctant secessionists, men who “would make almost any sacrifice” to have the Union restored, and what made them secessionists seemed to be largely a conviction that the Union had in fact broken apart and that they could do nothing but go along with the Confederacy, which was bound to win anyway. (It also stuck in men’s minds, said Grant, that the North’s real reason for making war was to end slavery by force.)
On this frame of mind, he wrote, nothing that he could say made any impression; “they don’t believe a word I don’t think.” Whenever Federal troops moved from here to there, word went out that pro-Southern state troops had waylaid them and had all but annihilated them, even though there had in actual fact been no fighting at all; “My regt. has been reported cut to pieces once that I know of, and I don’t know but oftener, whilst a gun has not been fired at us.” These reports, he added “give confirmation to the c
onviction already entertained that one Southron is equal to five Northerners.”19
Sometimes it seemed that no one quite understood this new war. Grant was sitting in front of his headquarters tent one day when two soldiers came up proudly leading a citizen and two horses. They had “found this feller and brought him up,” they explained, in the course of a little expedition they had dreamed up for themselves; out of patriotic zeal, “we thought we’d go out and look for some ‘seceshers.’” Without removing his pipe from his mouth, Grant asked them who had given them permission to leave camp. When they confessed that they had permission from no one, he ordered them tied to a tree for a few hours in punishment; then he questioned the captive, found the man perfectly willing to take the oath of allegiance to the Federal government, and turned him loose.20
It was hard for the soldiers to realize that campaigning in a slave state, where a large part of the inhabitants were pro-Confederate, did not mean that every soldier could do as he liked with the persons and goods of the inhabitants. Wild stories had gone through the countryside, in advance of the Unionists’ arrival, about the pillage, rapine and arson which were to be expected of the “Lincoln hirelings” and the “lop-eared Dutch.” (Many stout loyalist regiments had been recruited from the German population in St. Louis, and to the credulous imaginations of the strictly nativist countryfolk these “Dutch” soldiers were capable of any crime.) It happened, too, that undisciplined soldiers in the raw Northern regiments that were entering the state often behaved so as to confirm the inhabitants’ fears.
If enlisted men found it hard to understand just how the Federal Army ought to behave in a slave state, the inhabitants also had trouble. While Grant was at Mexico a fugitive slave came to camp, out of breath and nervous, the exhaustion of flight still on him, demanding, “Whar’s de cunnel?” The chaplain took him to Grant, heard the fugitive beg for help, heard Grant say: “Can’t help you, sir. We’re not here to look after Negroes, but after Rebels. You must take care of yourself.” Disheartened, the slave turned to leave. The chaplain followed him, gave him fifty cents and a sack of hardtack and cold meat, told him the quickest way to the Mississippi River, and advised him to get over into Illinois as fast as he could. Then, having guided the man past the Union sentries, the chaplain returned to regimental headquarters—just in time to see the slave’s indignant owner show up, demanding justice and the detention of the fugitive. To the slaveowner Grant made the same reply he had made to the slave: the Army was here to tend to Rebels, not to Negroes, and it had nothing to do either with freeing or with catching the slave.… Neither citizens, soldiers nor black folk themselves seemed to grasp the idea that the Army might possibly act to suppress secession without doing anything at all about slavery. As if by instinct, everyone was assuming that this war somehow carried with it the fate of slavery, no matter what men in Washington and Richmond might say about war aims.21
Grant himself saw it that way, as a matter of fact, and his point of view had nothing to do with any feeling about slavery’s rightness or wrongness. As long ago as April, when the North was making its first enthusiastic response to President Lincoln’s call for troops to put down rebellion, Grant spoke his mind in a letter to his father-in-law, the devoutly Southern-minded Colonel Frederick Dent. To Colonel Dent, Grant wrote about the Northern insistence that the Union be preserved, adding:
In all this I cannot but see the doom of slavery. The North does not want nor would they want to interfere with the institution. They refuse for all time to give it protection unless the South shall return soon to their allegiance.
Slavery, as Grant saw it, could never survive of itself; in one way or another it needed the active support of the central government, and with that support gone—as it was gone, now that war had come—slavery was a cut flower in a vase. Reasoning thus, he believed that the war would be very short. After “a few decisive victories in some of the southern ports” the principal Rebels would flee the country, the price of slaves would fall so far that nobody would want to own slaves any more, and the Federal Armies might find themselves called on to go South in order to suppress a Negro insurrection.… It was easy to foresee a quick and simple end to all of the trouble, in that time before the real fighting had begun, when human affairs might still be expected to go by logic.22
August had come. The 21st Illinois had been in Missouri for about three weeks, and Grant had been Colonel for a little more than one month; and now, suddenly, the picture changed, and Grant was Colonel of the 21st no longer. From Washington came news that Abraham Lincoln had granted him the star of a brigadier. Now he was Brigadier General Grant.
That this happened was owing to nothing much more complicated than the innocent way in which the Republican administration was combining military business with political pleasure in this summer of 1861. A large Volunteer Army was being created, and it must have a good many generals: a handful of major generals and more than thirty brigadiers. The appointments would be made by the President and would be confirmed (or rejected) by Congress, which was now in session; and it seemed quite logical for the President to parcel out these generalships by states, just as if postmaster-ships or customs house appointments were to be distributed among the deserving. By this dispensation, Illinois was entitled to name four brigadiers, and the Illinois Congressional Delegation met to agree on a slate. In this delegation was the impressive Congressman from Grant’s home town of Galena, the Honorable Elihu B. Washburne.
Washburne drew a good deal of water in Republican politics, both in his own state and in Washington. An admiring newspaper correspondent described him as “broad-shouldered, good-bellied, large and yet thin,” a transplanted Yankee who looked like a State of Maine man, which he was, but who somehow contrived also to be wholly typical of Illinois; “the model is Yankee, but the cargo is Western.” Washburne was beginning to be on Grant’s side. The two were not yet intimate; indeed, they had not met before April, when the loyal folk of Galena began to hold mass meetings to let Washington and the new Confederacy know where they stood on the matter of secession; but Grant had made something of an impression on Washburne, and in any case a Galena Congressman who could bring home a brigadier’s commission for a Galena resident would be bound to do so. Thus, because he had good support, Grant was one of four Illinoisans named for generalships. The others were Stephen A. Hurlbut, Benjamin M. Prentiss, and John A. McClernand; Grant was the one West Pointer in the lot. Of thirty-four new brigadiers named early in August, Grant ranked seventeenth, almost exactly in the middle; the same position, oddly enough, that he had occupied in his graduating class at West Point.23
The chaplain of the 21st Illinois stumbled across the news of Grant’s promotion one day early in August, as he sat in the shade reading his copy of the Daily Missouri Democrat. He hurried over to the Colonel’s tent, found Grant, and announced:
“Colonel, I have some news here that will interest you.”
Grant, naturally, asked what he was talking about, and the chaplain told him. Then Grant sat down beside him, and said about all that he ever had to say about his appointment as General:
“Well, sir, I had no suspicion of it. It never came from any request of mine. That’s some of Washburne’s work. I knew Washburne in Galena. He was a strong Republican and I was a Democrat, and I thought from that that he never liked me very well. Hence we never had more than a business or street acquaintance. But when the war broke out I found that he had induced Governor Yates to appoint me mustering officer of the Illinois Volunteers, and after that had something to do in having me commissioned Colonel of the 21st Regiment, and I suppose this is more of his work.”
Whereupon, General Grant got up, tugged his black felt hat down over his eyes, ran his hands through his whiskers—which, at that time, were quite long and luxuriant—and strolled off. To his father he wrote that he had not asked anyone to intercede for him. He had seen so much pulling and hauling for favors during his tour of duty at Springfield, he said, that he determ
ined then never to ask for anything for himself. He permitted himself a moment of quiet pride in what he had done with the 21st Illinois: “I took it in a very disorganized, demoralized and insubordinate condition and have worked it up to a reputation equal to the best, and I believe with the good will of all the officers and men.” Some rumor of his coming appointment had reached camp, he said (as a matter of fact, he had had some foreknowledge of it himself) and the regimental officers came to him and asked to be attached to his command. To easy-talking Jesse Grant, the new General added the warning: “This I don’t want you to read to others for I very much dislike speaking of myself.”24
He disliked speaking of himself; yet it seems clear that he recognized this landmark in his life and that it moved him. The last promotion he had received from his government had come in September of 1853, when he had been made Captain in the 4th Infantry. Formal papers of commission did not reach him until April, 1854; he had acknowledged them formally, in a letter to the Adjutant General, and at the same time he had written his own resignation from the Army, asking that it be made effective as of July 31, 1854. Seven years had passed, and now—having resigned in apparent disgrace—he was a brigadier general, entitled to wear a star on each shoulder, with a coat that had two parallel rows of brass buttons down the front, the buttons marching two by two in the manner prescribed by the regulations. He was entitled to wear this uniform, but he did not yet own it, and he hoped to return to Galena and buy one. To Julia he wrote that “I want very much to get back into civilization for a few days to get some things that I very much need. I am without a sword, sash or uniform of every description according to my grade and see no chance of getting them”—but he could not get back to Galena just now, and he did an odd thing: he discarded his colonel’s uniform, even though he had not yet paid off the debt he had run up in order to buy it, and now he wore whatever clothing came to hand, with no insignia of rank.25 Did the promotion mark such a turning point in his own inner life that he would wear no uniform at all until he could don the one that belonged with the new commission?