Crucible of Command

by William C. Davis

  A few weeks later he referred to his engagement as something “laughable, curious, important, surprising, etc.”103 No sooner did he reach Camp Salubrity near Natchitoches, than he worried that her parents might not consent. He was only twenty-two. Did they think him too young and inexperienced?104 When her father objected to army life and argued that it would not suit his daughter, Grant tried to assure Julia that “soldiering is a very pleasant occupation,” and would get better as he won promotion.105 For the next several months his letters to her reflected his insecurity.106 Economical with words, he often used the same wording whether writing to Julia or to a neighbor, and always there was that self-effacing modesty. He added his rank and regiment to a letter, “not because I wish people to know what it is,” he said, but to make sure replies reached him.107

  All he had on his mind was Julia. They had promised each to think of the other when watching a sunset, a time when he usually found himself on parade, fearful that he looked absent-minded to his superiors with his thoughts hundreds of miles away. When her letters failed to arrive when expected he told her “I took the Blues,” and urged her to write more and more often.108 He also begged her to find a name to go with the orphaned “S” in his name.109 For her part, she called one of her bedposts for him, and every evening after watching the sunset she bid it good night.110

  When he returned to Missouri on leave in the spring of 1845, he believed that he was close to a confirmed regular commission, his first step up the ladder.111 The elder Dent was not impressed, but relented to allow them to continue their correspondence.112 Grant’s capability at expressing himself was every bit as good as Lee’s, but when it came to telling her directly that he loved her, his pen hesitated. “What an out I make at expressing any thing like love or sentiment,” he lamented to her.113 Affection was an emotion so little displayed to him by his mother that he grew to manhood with no experience at expressing it. He begged her to write more often, and just as Lee had so often signed himself “R. E. Lee,” so this suitor usually closed his missives “U S Grant.”

  In the fall of 1845 tensions between the United States and Mexico over the annexation of Texas resulted in the 4th Infantry being ordered to Corpus Christi on the Gulf of Mexico. The lieutenant saw little danger of war.114 Rather he suspected Mexicans might lapse into revolution against near dictatorship, establish a more democratic government, and even welcome seeing the United States expand below the Rio Grande River to enfold them in the eagle’s wings.115 By October 1845 Grant still felt secure from imminent hazard. His greatest concern was his engagement. He and Julia had been betrothed well over a year. He did not like immobility. Inaction was defeat. He pressed Julia to give him a definite answer to marriage, offering to resign and enter civilian life if that would satisfy her parents. Her father asked what he might do if he left the army, and coincidentally his own ever-interfering father offered an alternative when he began urging him to resign that fall. Joseph McDowell Matthews, the founder and principal of the six-year-old Oakland Female Seminary in Hillsboro, Ohio, had approached Jesse Grant about employing his son Ulysses to teach mathematics to the ninety young ladies there enrolled at the state’s first school offering a full college education to women.116 Jesse continued pushing ’Lys in that direction through that fall and into the winter.117 He certainly gave it much thought as a means of winning over Julia’s father, but he liked the service. “I do not think I will ever [be] half so well contented out of the Army as in it,” he told her. He urged Julia to agree to elope and marry even without her parents’ permission. He even conquered his clumsiness over feelings and for the first time signed a letter “Your Devoted Lover Ulysses.”118 When Julia sent him her copy of Eugene Sue’s The Wandering Jew, he found a passage she had marked and read it over and over again hoping she had meant him to see themselves in it: “for two drops of dew blending in the cup of a flower are as hearts that mingle in a pure and virgin love.”119

  Following more than a dozen years of marriage, Lee was past poetry. Eight months after the wedding his provisional or “brevet” rank as second lieutenant shifted to full rank.120 He stayed at Fort Monroe until the fall of 1834 when ordered to Washington as an assistant to the chief of engineers. Even with Arlington in view on the heights across the Potomac, he took a room in a boarding house to be close to his office while Mary and the baby stayed with the Custises. He worked long days, and only visited Arlington after dark. When the War Department sent him to survey the contested Ohio-Michigan Territory border, Mary was expecting again.121 He came home in October 1836 to find her ill after giving birth to their second child, Mary Custis Lee. Meanwhile, his only reward for the routine of office work was promotion to first lieutenant in September 1836. That was not enough. “I am waiting, looking and hoping for some good opportunity to bid an affectionate farewell to my dear Uncle Sam,” he complained in February 1837. “I must get away from here.”122 In the capital he saw “so much iniquity [in] more ways than one, that I feared for my morality.”123

  Relief came in April 1837 with assignment to St. Louis to combat the Mississippi River’s efforts to abandon the Missouri city. He left just after Mary delivered their third child, William Henry Fitzhugh Lee, and in the spring of 1838 brought his family with him.124 They stayed in what Lee liked to call “the Western Metropolis” for the next year, where he quipped that “I have been studying mud and water in the West.”125 Missouri was hardly the Old Dominion, and Lee did not care much for the citizenry. “It is a rough country to bring them to,” he told Mackay, “but they smooth it to me most marvellously.”126 However, within weeks of arriving he began to wish himself back in Virginia.127 The army had been good to him, but he bristled at “the manner in which the Army is considered and treated by the country,” telling Mackay that it “is enough to disgust every one with the service, and has the effect of driving every good soldier from it.” He saw how politicians attacked the army for partisan motives, and grumbled that “the miserable slander of dirty legislators is an insult to the Army and shews in what light its feelings are estimated, and its rights sacrificed at the shrine of popularity.”128

  Good news was promotion to captain and the discovery of another pregnancy. Lee took Mary and the children back to Arlington in May 1839, then left before Anne Carter Lee was born in June. During these absences he sent Mary lectures on how to raise the children with discipline and “proper restraint.” Lee himself tried to reason with his children, making it clear that he was unwavering in “my demands” for their behavior. Yet he feared that Mary did not support him. “You must assist me in my attempts,” he urged. “You must not let them run wild in my absence.” Mildness and forbearance, “tempered by firmness and judgment, will strengthen their affection for you,” he told her, “while it will maintain your control over them.” These were the words by which Lee had made sense of his own youth: restraint, discipline, and most of all self-control.129 He missed his children. “I am sure to be introduced to a new one every Xmas,” he told Mackay in November. “They are the dearest Annuals of the season, and I find something in every edition that I in vain look for elsewhere.”130

  Lee was happy to leave St. Louis when reassignment came in 1840.131 Extended contact had not improved his opinion of the population, especially what he called “the lower class,” who he thought “are a swaggering, noisy set, careless of getting work except occasionally.” He dismissed most locals, even what he called “those of the higher order,” as crass and grasping, while he thought their children filthy and ill-mannered, “demanding and dirty.”132 Even the local economic elite in Missouri were “new money.” Men were obsessed with business and making money, and defaulting on debts, and he found the best of them far different from his class at home. They were not like his Virginians.133 He described his departure as “my escape from the West.”134

  Still, the work on the Mississippi enhanced his reputation and reinforced his Whiggish outlook that the government had a role to play in promoting the expansion and econo
mic benefit of the nation through internal improvements.135 No one could escape politics, and Lee showed some interest as an officer must, since it affected his career. When the nullification crisis erupted he groused that Congress did “nothing” in the face of South Carolina’s posturing and threats of secession.136 “Nullification! Nullification!! Nullification!!!,” he grumbled.137 As a Whig he surely condemned it, just as he later abhorred secession. Lee was not especially politically aware as yet, but he paid attention to what might affect the army. On leave at Arlington in the winter of 1832–1833, he sat in the Capitol’s Senate gallery to hear the debates on President Jackson’s so-called Force Bill enabling him to use the military, and Lee, if necessary, to compel South Carolina to comply with the unpopular tariff of 1828. Lee heard now-senator John C. Calhoun’s angry denunciation of Jackson for the measure, which he said threatened civil war.

  Thirty-two years later, in April 1865, Lee recalled that Calhoun’s eloquence “fell like a thunderbolt on an iceberg, glanced, hissed and was extinguished.” Nevertheless, in 1833 the Force Bill could conceivably result in Lee facing fellow Southerners across drawn battle lines. He heard Daniel Webster stand in defense of Jackson, and remembered that he “never saw a more striking object than Webster in the Senate.” A few years later, again in Washington, Lee heard Henry Clay speak in the Senate in denunciation of presumed British aggressions, and found him a natural orator. Of all that great triumvirate, however, in 1865 he regarded Calhoun as possessed of the greatest moral force, perhaps because the Carolinian had spoken of Southern rights against Northern aggression, a subject on which Lee’s own position had shifted dramatically.138

  Like so many officers, he tried to keep himself clear of politics and politicians. “I never mention politics,” he told Jack Mackay in 1834, “thinking that you will see all the Slang-whang in the papers, & care & believe as much as I do.”139 In common with Whigs, he had little use for President Martin Van Buren and his weak administration’s “bold front,” yet watched without emotion as Southern Democrats gradually joined forces with those in the North to support a bill to take the government out of the banking system. By 1840 he believed the Whigs were “gathering head and are in fine spirits,” yet congress seemed to do little but pass appropriations for their own salaries.140

  He looked on from afar for several years as the Seminoles of Florida successfully stymied the army’s efforts to contain them. The Seminole sore festered until 1842, replaced by vague threats of war with Britain over Canada, which Lee thought nothing but talk. “There will be no war with England this year,” he predicted in February 1843. “Our worthy members of Congress have another opportunity to make belligerent speeches,” he thought, but nothing more. He felt anxious about a bill to annex the Oregon territory, but most of all watched Congress and its budget reductions for military works with pessimism, despite the fact that fellow officers whom he styled “the boys in Wash[ington]” were optimistic. “No man can tell what Cong[ress] will do for the plain reason that they do not know themselves,” he told Mackay.141

  Even if Lee did not formally identify himself as a Whig, still he looked more favorably on their policies. They were the ideological heirs of his family’s Federalists. They supported those internal improvements—the roads and canals and bridges—to be constructed and maintained by the engineers, meaning they were anxious to keep him employed. The Whigs buttered his side of the bread. In 1844 Lee even called personally on President John Tyler, a fellow Virginian and a Whig, to intercede on behalf of a young man seeking appointment to the Military Academy.142 From early manhood Lee held a low opinion of politicians, and believed military men should stay out of politics. When a fellow officer ran for the office of city engineer in St. Louis, Lee chided him that “to become a political partizan would be derogatory to your office & profession,” and that “your opinions & acts should be grounded by your judgment & not with a benefit of this or that party.” He distrusted the common voters, especially the foreign born, as he viewed them as a clamorous mob cynically manipulated by scheming politicians, perhaps an echo of the mob that nearly killed his father. Any officer who entered politics, however well born, would have no choice but to “throw up your hat with the highest & hurrah with the loudest.”143 His brother Carter felt no such reluctance, and openly identified himself with the Whigs, making a Fourth of July speech in support of Clay’s 1844 presidential candidacy. “I do not in general admire the introduction of party politics on such an occasion,” Robert scolded, but he gladly passed a copy of a campaign song of Carter’s on to the Henry Clay Club of Brooklyn while stationed at Fort Hamilton.144 “We’ve been Whig and nothing else,” went its refrain, “And now on fire for Clay!”

  More and more the dynamo driving both speeches and songs was slavery, and Lee’s attitude toward it mirrored his feelings about politics. If his family, friends, tutors, and other associations in Alexandria were almost unanimous in praying for an end to chattel servitude in America, still few if any favored governmental emancipation. In youth Lee had little personal interaction with slaves other than his mother’s house servants and Nat the coachman, but Alexandria’s many slave pens made numbers of them a common sight every day, while there were many more at Ravensworth and Eastern View. From his earliest expressions on the subject, Lee echoed his mother’s view that slaves were “a species of property extremely inconvenient and disagreeable.” He had no need of them as an officer in the field. His wife always had the use of her father’s when she visited home, and when the newlyweds left for Fort Monroe in 1831, her parents sent Mary’s “girl” Judy Meriday along. Judy and her brother Philip would be with them often over the years. When stationed in a free state like New York, Lee hired them out.145

  Certainly the explosive potential of the slavery question came home to him early on. He barely got his new bride to Fort Monroe after their wedding before the famed Nat Turner slave rebellion erupted barely forty miles west of them, in Southampton County on August 22, 1831. Lee was not with the soldiers sent to quell the uprising, but when the detachment returned he heard stories of a scheme “widely extended,” plotted in the slaves’ religious gatherings that he thought “ought to have been devoted to better purposes.” He made no comment on the broader issue of their bid for freedom, but there is no question that he believed the rebels deserved the harsh retribution they received at the noose. However, he spoke well of loyal servants who tried to defend their masters from the murderous assaults, and showed pity for one such whom he believed was mistakenly slain “from the inconsiderate & almost unwarrantable haste of the whites.”146

  Lee got his first actual experience trying to manage slaves on Cockspur Island, and it confirmed his ambivalence. Given charge of a gang of 150 hired blacks to excavate foundations for the future fort, he initially felt sympathy for what he called “my Black Walloons,” almost regretting that he had to make the “poor creatures” work so hard.147 But before long, he complained that “no one will do their duty without being made.” Spending days knee deep in mud and water overseeing dilatory laborers, he grumbled that “I have to depend upon others, & if they would do as I tell them I should have no trouble, but this they will not do & I must let them have their own way.”148 When Mary suggested that he instruct the slaves in religion, he told her “I do teach those men something Good, for I learn them to do their work faithfully handsomely and scientifically.”149 He teased her for teaching “those little Plagues,” the slave children at Arlington, and belittled her friends’ efforts for another Custis emancipationist concern, the African Education Society.150 If Lee did not endorse slavery now, he did not condemn it either. It was simply a fact of life in the slave states, like the weather.

  And now he was a slave owner himself.151 When Ann Hill Lee died in 1829 she bequeathed a few domestic slaves to her two daughters. The residue of her estate, to be liquidated as inheritance for her three sons, contained an unspecified number of others, all out at hire.152 Her executor William Carter kept them rented whi
le settling the estate, though it took some eighteen months before debts were cleared and Smith and Carter Lee agreed on a division among the three brothers in 1832, conveying to Robert sole title in four women, Catty or Cassy, Jane, Letitia, and a woman named Nancy Ruffin with her three children, as well as a man named Sam whom Lee in 1833 traded with his brother Carter for another slave named Gardner.153 Lee called them “our Georgetonians” and “those people in Geotown,” and had little use for any of them. Nancy was neither a good cook nor a washerwoman, and only Letitia was worth keeping at home. Coming into possession of them as he did soon after his marriage, he left their disposition to Mary immediately after she reached Arlington pregnant with their first son. She could keep, hire, or sell them, “but do not trouble yourself about them, as they are not worth it.”154

  They kept Catty, Jane, and Letitia no more than a couple of years, and by early 1835 Nancy and her three “plagues,” as he called slave children, were “all of the race in my poss[ession].” He likely would have been happy to be rid of them as well, for he frankly admitted his belief that obdurance, stubbornness, and unreliability were typical of what he called their “sex, color & caste.”155 Oddly, Lee’s comment about “all of the race in my poss” seemingly overlooked the slave he sometimes referred to as “my man Gardner,” though he probably meant only those slaves actually with him and his family. His cousin Hill Carter in Charles City County had handled Gardner’s hire for Ann Lee after 1822 at least, and Lee may not have seen him since, but the annual rent payments continued coming in to the executors, then to Carter Lee, and after 1834 or 1835 directly to Lee himself.156 He had little interest in or patience with Nancy, but still kept her out at hire at Custis’s White House plantation in New Kent County until 1847 or later.157