The Civil War: A Narrative: Fredericksburg to Meridian

by Shelby Foote

  Other men had other spare-time diversions. Grant’s, it was said, was whiskey. Some denied this vehemently, protesting that he was a teetotaler, while some asserted that this only appeared to be the case because of his low tolerance for the stuff; a single glass unsteadied him, and a second gave him the glassy-eyed look of a man with a heavy load on. He himself seemed to recognize the problem from the outset, if only by the appointment and retention of John A. Rawlins as his assistant adjutant general. A frail but vigorous young man, with a “marble pallor” to his face and “large, lustrous eyes of a deep black,” Rawlins at first had wanted to be a preacher, but had become instead a lawyer in Galena, where Grant first knew him. His wife had died of tuberculosis soon after the start of the war, and he himself would die of the same disease before he was forty, but the death that seemed to have affected him most had been that of his father, an improvident charcoal burner who had died at last of the alcoholism that had kept him and his large family in poverty all his life. Rawlins, a staff captain at thirty and now a lieutenant colonel at thirty-two, was rabid on the subject of drink. He was in fact blunt in most things, including his relationship with Grant. “He bossed everything at Grant’s headquarters,” Charles Dana later wrote, adding: “I have heard him curse at Grant when, according to his judgment, the general was doing something that he thought he had better not do.” Observing this, many wondered why Grant put up with it. Others believed they knew. “If you hit Rawlins on the head, you’ll knock out Grant’s brains,” they said. But they were wrong. Rawlins was not Grant’s brain; he was his conscience, and a rough one, too, especially where whiskey was concerned. “I say to you frankly, and I pledge you my word for it,” he had written eighteen months ago to Elihu Washburne, the general’s congressional guardian angel, “that should General Grant at any time become an 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. For while there are times when I would gladly throw the mantle of charity over the faults of my friends, at this time and from a man of his position I would rather tear the mantle off and expose the deformity.” Grant had cause to believe that Rawlins meant it. And yet, despite the danger to his career and despite what a fellow staffer called Rawlins’ “insubordination twenty times a day,” he kept him on, both for his own good and the army’s.

  Since writing to Washburne, however, the adjutant had either changed his mind about disturbing the mantle or else he had been singularly forgetful. Despite periodic incidents thereafter, in which Grant was involved with whiskey, Rawlins limited his remarks to the general himself, apparently in the belief that he could handle him. And so he could, except for lapses. Anyhow, there was never any problem so long as Mrs Grant was around; “If she is with him all will be well and I can be spared,” he later confided to a friend. The trouble seemed in part sexual, as in California nine years ago, and it was intensified by periods of boredom, such as now. Three weeks of slam-bang fighting and rapid maneuver had given way to the tedium of a siege, and Mrs Grant had been six weeks off the scene. On June 5 Rawlins found a box of wine in front of the general’s tent and had it removed, ignoring Grant’s protest that he was saving it to toast the fall of Vicksburg. He learned, moreover, that the general had recently accepted a glass of wine from a convivial doctor. These were danger signs, and there were others that evening. Rawlins sat down after midnight and wrote Grant a letter. “The great solicitude I feel for the safety of this army leads me to mention, what I had hoped never again to do, the subject of your drinking.… Tonight when you should, because of the condition of your health if nothing else, have been in bed, I find you where the wine bottle has just been emptied, in company with those who drink and urge you to do likewise, and the lack of your usual promptness and decision, and clearness in expressing yourself in writing conduces to confirm my suspicion.” Rawlins himself had become rather incoherent by now, whether from anger or from sorrow; but the ending was clear enough. Unless Grant would pledge himself “[not] to touch a single drop of any kind of liquor, no matter by whom asked or under what circumstances,” Rawlins wanted to be relieved at once from duty in the department. Grant, however, left early next morning—apparently before the letter reached him—on a tour of inspection up the Yazoo River to Satartia, near which he had posted a division in case Johnston came that way. The two-day trip, beyond the sight and influence of Rawlins, became a two-day bender.

  Dana went with him, and on the way upriver from Haines Bluff they met the steamboat Diligent coming down. Grant hailed the vessel, whose captain was a friend of his, transferred to her, and had her turned back upstream for Satartia. Aboard was Sylvanus Cadwallader, a Chicago Times correspondent on the prowl for news. It was he who had ridden into Jackson with Fred Grant in mid-May, when they lost the race for the souvenir flag atop the capitol, and it was he who was to leave the only detailed eyewitness account of Grant on a wartime bender—specifically the two-day one which already was under way up the Yazoo. In some ways, for Cadwallader at least, it was more like a two-day nightmare. “I was not long in perceiving that Grant had been drinking,” he wrote long afterwards, “and that he was still keeping it up. He made several trips to the bar room of the boat in a short time, and became stupid in speech and staggering in gait.” The reporter of course had heard rumors of Grant’s predilection, but this was the first time he had seen him show it to the extent of intoxication. Alarmed by the general’s “condition, which was fast becoming worse,” he tried to get the captain and a lieutenant aide to intervene. Neither would; so Cadwallader undertook to do it himself. He got Grant into his stateroom, locked the door, “and commenced throwing bottles of whiskey which stood on the table, through the windows, over the guards, into the river.” Grant protested, to no avail; the reporter “firmly, but good-naturedly declined to obey,” and finally got him quieted. “As it was a very hot day and the stateroom almost suffocating, I insisted on his taking off his coat, vest and boots, and lying down on one of the berths. After much resistance I succeeded, and soon fanned him to sleep.”

  But that was only the beginning. Shortly before dark, when the Diligent neared Satartia, she met two gunboats steaming down, and a naval officer came aboard to warn that it was not safe for the unarmed vessel to proceed. Dana—who later reported tactfully in his Recollections that “Grant was ill and went to bed soon after we started”—knocked on the stateroom door to ask whether the boat should turn back. Grant, he said, was “too sick to decide,” and told him: “I will leave it to you.” Now that he was awake, however, though still not “recovered from his stupor,” Cadwallader said, the general took it into his head “to dress and go ashore,” despite the naval officer’s warning. Once more the reporter prevailed, and got him back to bed. While he slept, the Diligent returned downstream in the darkness to Haines Bluff. Next morning, according to Dana, Grant was “fresh as a rose, clean shirt and all, quite himself,” when he came out to breakfast. “Well, Mr Dana,” he observed, “I suppose we are at Satartia.”

  Cadwallader relaxed his guard, despite the 25-mile geographical error, presuming that “all necessity for extra vigilance on my part had passed,” and was profoundly shocked to discover, an hour later, “that Grant had procured another supply of whiskey from on shore and was quite as much intoxicated as the day before.” Again the reporter managed to separate the general from his bottle, only to have him insist on proceeding at once to Chickasaw Bayou. This would have brought them there “about the middle of the afternoon, when the landing would have been alive with officers, men, and trains from all parts of the army.” Conferring with the captain as to the best means by which to avoid exposing Grant to “utter disgrace and ruin,” Cadwallader managed to delay the departure so that they did not arrive until about sundown, when there was much less activity at the landing. As luck would have it, however, they tied up alongside a sutler boat whose owner “kept open house to all officers and dispensed free liquors and cigars
generously.” Alarmed at the possibilities of disaster, the reporter slipped hastily over the rail, warned the sutler of what was afoot, and “received his promise that the general should not have a drop of anything intoxicating on his boat.” Back aboard the Diligent, Cadwallader helped the escort to unload the horses for the five-mile ride to army headquarters northeast of Vicksburg; but when this was done he looked around and could find no sign of Grant. Fearing the worst, he hurried aboard the sutler boat “and soon heard a general hum of conversation and laughter proceeding from a room opening out of the ladies’ cabin.” There he saw his worst fears realized. The sutler was seated at “a table covered with bottled whiskey and baskets of champagne,” and Grant was beside him, “in the act of swallowing a glass of whiskey.” Cadwallader once more intervened, insisting that “the escort was waiting, and it would be long after dark before we could reach headquarters.” Grant came along, though he plainly resented the interruption. His horse was a borrowed one called Kangaroo “from his habit of rearing on his hind feet and making a plunging start whenever mounted.” That was his reaction now; for “Grant gave him the spur the moment he was in the saddle, and the horse darted away at full speed before anyone was ready to follow.” The road was crooked, winding among the many slews and bayous, but the general more or less straightened it out, “heading only for the bridges, and literally tore through and over everything in his way. The air was full of dust, ashes, and embers from campfires, and shouts and curses from those he rode down in his race.” Cadwallader, whose horse was no match for Kangaroo, thought he had lost his charge for good. But he kept on anyhow, hoping against hope, and “after crossing the last bayou bridge three-fourths of a mile from the landing,” caught up with him riding sedately at a walk. Finding that Grant had become “unsteady in the saddle” as a result of the drink or drinks he had had from the sutler, and fearing “discovery of his rank and situation,” the reporter seized Kangaroo’s rein and led him off into a roadside thicket, where he helped the general to dismount and persuaded him to lie down on the grass and get some sleep. While Grant slept Cadwallader managed to hail a trooper from the escort, whom he instructed to go directly to headquarters “and report at once to Rawlins—and no one else—and say to him that I want an ambulance with a careful driver.”

  Waking before the ambulance got there, Grant wanted to resume his ride at once, but the reporter “took him by the arm, walked him back and forth, and kept up a lively rather one-sided conversation, till the ambulance arrived.” Then there was the problem of getting the general into the curtained vehicle, which he refused to permit until, as Cadwallader said, “we compromised the question by my agreeing to ride in the ambulance also, and having our horses led by the orderly.” They reached headquarters about midnight to find the dark-eyed Rawlins and Colonel John Riggin, another staff officer, “waiting for us in the driveway.” The reporter got out first, “followed promptly by Grant,” who now gave him perhaps the greatest shock of the past two days. “He shrugged his shoulders, pulled down his vest, ‘shook himself together,’ as one just rising from a nap, and seeing Rawlins and Riggin, bid them good night in a natural tone and manner, and started to his tent as steadily as he ever walked in his life.” Cadwallader turned to Rawlins, who was pale with rage—“The whole appearance of the man indicated a fierceness that would have torn me into a thousand pieces had he considered me to blame”—and said he was afraid, from what they had just seen, that the adjutant would think it was he, not Grant, who had been drinking. “No, no,” Rawlins said through clenched teeth. “I know him, I know him. I want you to tell me the exact facts, and all of them, without any concealment. I have a right to know them, and I will know them.”

  He heard them all, from start to finish, but he never reported the incident to Washburne, any more than Dana did to the War Department, not only out of loyalty and friendship, but also perhaps on reflecting that if anything brought about Grant’s removal, or even his suspension during an inquiry, command of the army would pass automatically to McClernand, whom they both despised. As for Cadwallader, despite assurances from Rawlins—“He will not send you out of the department while I remain in it,” the adjutant told him—he spent an anxious night, “somewhat in doubt as to the view of the matter Gen. Grant would take next day,” and “purposely kept out of his way for twenty-four hours to spare him the mortification I supposed he might feel.” As it turned out, he need not have worried. “The second day afterward I passed in and out of his presence as though nothing unusual had occurred. To my surprise he never made the most distant allusion to [the matter] then, or ever afterward.” From that time on, he said, it was “as if I had been regularly gazetted a member of his staff.” Passes from Grant enabled the reporter to go anywhere he wanted; he could requisition transportation and draw subsistence from quartermaster and commissary authorities; his tent was always pitched near Grant’s, and his dispatches often were sent in the official mail pouch; in short, he “constantly received flattering personal and professional favors and attentions shown to no one else in my position.” All this was in return for his respecting a confidence which he kept for more than thirty years. In 1896, a seventy-year-old sheep raiser out in California, he wrote his memoirs, including an account of Grant’s two-day trip up the Yazoo and back. For nearly sixty years they remained in manuscript, and when at last they were published, ninety years after the war was over, they were attacked and the writer vilified by some of the general’s long-range admirers, who claimed that what Cadwallader called “this Yazoo-Vicksburg adventure” never happened.

  At any rate, no harm had resulted from the army commander’s two-day absence from headquarters, drunk or sober. The repulse of Taylor at Milliken’s Bend and Young’s Point by the gunboats, on the second day, increased Grant’s confidence rather than his fretfulness, which in fact seemed to be cured. “All is going on here now just right,” he wrote to a friend on June 15, and added: “My position is so strong that I feel myself abundantly able to leave it and go out twenty or thirty miles with force enough to whip two such garrisons.” He had small use for Pemberton, characterizing him as “a northern man [who] got into bad company.” Nor did he fear Joe Johnston. Though he respected his ability, he said he did not believe the Virginian could save Vicksburg without “a larger army than the Confederates now have at any one place.” Next day, moreover, the watchful eye of former congressman Frank Blair enabled Grant to dispose of his third opponent, John McClernand, and thus wind up the private war he had been waging all this time. Scanning the columns of the Memphis Evening Bulletin, Blair spotted a congratulatory order McClernand had issued to his corps, claiming the lion’s share of the credit for the victory he foresaw. Blair sent the clipping to Sherman, who forwarded it to Grant next day, calling it “a catalogue of nonsense” and “an effusion of vain-glory and hypocrisy … addressed not to an army, but to a constituency in Illinois.” He also cited a War Department order, issued the year before, “which actually forbids the publication of all official letters and reports, and requires the name of the writer to be laid before the President of the United States for dismissal.”

  Grant had waited half a year for this, passing over various lesser offenses in hopes that one would come along which would justify charges that could not fail to stick. But now that he had it he still moved with deftness and precision, completing the adjustment of the noose. That same day, June 17, he forwarded the clipping to McClernand with a note: “Inclosed I send you what purports to be your congratulatory address to the Thirteenth Army Corps. I would respectfully ask if it is a true copy. If it is not a correct copy, furnish me one by bearer, as required both by regulations and existing orders of the Department.” Next day McClernand acknowledged the validity of the clipping. “I am prepared to maintain its statements,” he declared. “I regret that my adjutant did not send you a copy as he ought, and I thought he had.” With the noose now snug, Grant sprang the trap: “Major General John A. McClernand is hereby relieved from command of t
he Thirteenth Army Corps. He will proceed to any point he may select in the state of Illinois and report by letter to Headquarters of the Army for orders.” Grant signed the order after working hours, supposing that it would be delivered the following morning, but when James Wilson came in at midnight and heard what was afoot—there was bad blood between him and McClernand; the two had nearly come to blows a couple of weeks ago—he urged Rawlins to let him deliver the order in person, without delay, lest something come up—a rebel sortie at dawn, for example, which might enable McClernand to distinguish himself as he had done at Shiloh—to cause its suspension or cancellation. Rawlins agreed, and Wilson put on his dress uniform, summoned the provost marshal and a squad of soldiers, and set out through the darkness for McClernand’s headquarters. Arriving about 2 o’clock in the morning, he demanded that the general be roused. Presently he was admitted to McClernand’s tent, where he found the former congressman seated at a table on which two candles burned. Apparently he knew what to expect, for he too was in full uniform and his sword lay before him on the table. Wilson handed him the order, remarking that he had been instructed to see that it was read and understood. McClernand took it, adjusted his glasses, and perused it. “Well, sir, I am relieved,” he said. Then, looking up at Wilson, whose expression did not mask his satisfaction, he added: “By God, sir, we are both relieved!”