Crucible of Command

by William C. Davis

  “The N. Y. [Tribune] has attacked me for my treatment of your Grand Fathers slaves (he has left me an unpleasant legacy),” Lee wrote Custis a week later.83 He would not reply, but the Alexandria Gazette tried to defend him, calling the story a “malicious fabrication.”84 Still, it took hold and reappeared again and again, with ever more lurid embellishments: Mary was only sixteen and Lee made her mother watch while he stripped and whipped her; the slaves dreaded Lee more than his overseer; the slaves had not run away but only went fishing; Mary was tied up by her hands so high she could only stand on tiptoe; Lee poured salt brine on her lacerated back after he whipped her.85

  All his life Lee deplored conflict and confrontation, probably because to him it meant loss of control. Shortly before he returned to Arlington, he appeared as a witness at a court martial attended by Albert Sidney Johnston’s wife. With some contempt she noted that he “humed and ha’d” when questioned, concluding that he equivocated because he feared “to become unpopular.”86 Had she known him better she would have realized that what she witnessed was his dread of public confrontation, of speaking ill of anyone to their face. Now the persistent defiance of the Arlington slaves made him a participant in a confrontation that forced him to a violent, though lawful, act. Surely Lee did have them whipped. After eighteen months of surliness, resistance, and insubordination, he was fed up. The plantation, the expense of hiring other workers, apprehending runaways, and paying for jails and rewards devoured his own cash. He had been on the verge of returning to his regiment, thinking he had things in hand.87 The runaways dashed that hope, and now Lee feared for his family’s safety. In that state of mind, he concluded that punishment and example were due. As Wesley Norris later said, Lee told them they needed “a lesson we never would forget.”88

  Lee may have resorted to whippings before, but it seems improbable.89 Given the effect the Norrises’ punishment had on their peers and the press, any others should have generated similar reaction. Lee stripping and whipping Mary Norris personally was just lurid invention for a hungry anti-slavery reading audience. Wesley Norris himself never claimed such a thing, and as for the brine, no mention of it appeared for years until a time when people in the North had other motives to demonize Lee.90 Perhaps he ordered it; probably he did not. He had no patience with soldiers who shirked duty, while a quarter century earlier at Fort Pulaski he complained about slaves being lazy and uncooperative. The Arlington slaves were worse, for they violated trust, they lied, they stole his wife’s jewelry, and they told malicious stories that embarrassed him in the national press. It was all consonant with the incessant agitation over slavery. Lee blamed the abolitionists, and had his conviction confirmed when events in the fall of 1859 embraced him in the greatest antebellum drama to date, and with a boyhood friend of Jesse Grant’s.

  When ’Lys Grant reached home in July 1848 he went first to St. Louis to see his fiancée and make their final wedding plans, then to Ohio where he was a local hero.91 Two weeks later he married Julia on August 22, and the newlyweds spent the next three months on an extended leave before orders sent them first to Detroit, then almost immediately to Madison Barracks at Sackets Harbor, New York, on Lake Ontario, where he helped recruit a company of the 4th Infantry. Along the way his commission as first lieutenant arrived.92 Early in March 1850 orders returned him to Detroit.93 When he left, Julia went on a visit to her family, their first separation since marriage. Grant found Detroit dull, and discovered that already Julia was his anchor.94 “You know dearest without you no place, or home, can be very pleasant to me,” he wrote her, joking that since “I see no one I like half as well as my own dear Julia I have given up the notion.” When her sister Emma teased him about marrying the old maid of the family, Grant told her with typical directness that “I got the very one I wanted, and the only one I wanted.”95

  The Grants spent two years in Detroit, probably their happiest posting. Like Mary Lee, Julia went home to give birth to their first child, Frederick Dent Grant, on May 30, 1850, and Grant later brought them back to Detroit where the next months passed pleasantly enough but for him taking a bad fall on winter ice.96 He went to court to get the walkway cleared in winter and won his case, and in the process became acquainted with rising attorney Zachariah Chandler.97

  The next spring Julia took their son to spend the season with her family. She loved her husband, and loved him even more as the years wore on, but dull Detroit was no match for St. Louis where she enjoyed the social life, her father’s pampering, and living in ease. Grant indulged her, though it meant missing his son’s first birthday. “I never dreamed that I should miss the little rascle so much,” he told her.98 Unfortunately, she was a poor correspondent. For six weeks he heard nothing from her, and in June he complained that “I have not had the scratch of a pen from you.”99 Meanwhile reassigned to Sackets Harbor, Grant indulged his favorite pastime, travel. He visited Niagara Falls, then got leave for an extended trip to New York City, West Point, Quebec, and Lake Champlain. He felt no hesitation at making “this little exkursion” on his own, and there was a difference between himself and Lee.100 Despite the Virginian’s worldly class, Lee had none of Grant’s curiosity of the world. ’Lys was always anxious to see more.

  When Julia came back they passed a delightful season until May 1852 when the army ordered the 4th Infantry to California.101 Julia went to Bethel to await their next baby’s arrival, while Grant prepared his regiment for the trip. He still found time to travel to Washington, which failed to impress him, as he wrote Julia that “the place seems small and scattering and the character of the buildings poor.”102 He most looked forward to his ocean voyage, hoping to see many South American ports, but on the day they sailed all he thought of was that “I never knew how much it was to part from you.”103

  Instead of sailing around Cape Horn, they landed on the Panama Isthmus and marched overland to the Pacific.104 The War Department’s failure to plan ahead left them largely to themselves. Seven companies went ahead, while Grant’s followed with the baggage, arms, the band, a few officers’ families, and a number of men sick with cholera. He took them by barge up the Chagres River to Cruces, only to find no transportation waiting for the baggage. Sending his company ahead, he spent days hiring mules to pack the sick. Daily he halted to bury the dead, then reached the Pacific on July 25 or 26 to find so many sick there that he was assigned the care of all. While tending them he also prepared the regiment for the voyage to California, miraculously avoiding the cholera himself. When the 4th Infantry left aboard the Golden Gate on August 5, at least eighty-four soldiers were dead.105 Grant firmly believed that many of them need not have died if someone in Washington had better prepared for their journey, confiding that “there is a great accountability some where for the loss which we have sustained.”106 It was a tragic object lesson in the importance of being ready before launching any operation.

  Landing at San Francisco on August 18, the regiment moved to Benicia Barracks.107 “We are going to a fine country, and a new one,” he told Julia.108 Still, he keenly felt the separation, not yet knowing that he had another son, Ulysses Jr., born July 22.109 “I am almost crazy sometimes to see Fred,” he wrote a month later. “I cannot be separated from him and his Ma for a long time.”110 Her first letter only reached him on December 3 after three months. “You have no idea how happy it made me feel,” he wrote in his joy, but the euphoria did not last.111 To feel close to her, he kissed the leaves and flower petals that she had kissed and enclosed in her letter.112

  Two things above all characterized Grant from youth: his industry and enterprise. He liked to work hard, his mind constantly focused on improving his situation. The setbacks he suffered never dulled his optimism. He simply looked for the next opportunity. He believed in using his sweat and imagination to make his own luck. It helped that he was by nature curious. At every new posting he explored the countryside, and here he embraced California and investigated ways to share in its promise.113 “Alltogether I am, so far, a Ca
lafornian in taste,” he wrote Julia.114 He saw no reason “why an active energeti[c] person should not make a fortune evry year.” Still, he reined his optimism. His career was a certainty; California’s promise “might prove a dream.”115

  Reassignment stunted that dream when orders sent him to Fort Vancouver on the Oregon coast.116 Quickly the “prospects of the country” engaged his imagination, for its soil could grow produce that he could sell to immigrants at several times its value in the East.117 Almost at once he made a deceptively quick profit with partner Elijah Camp when they bought a store on credit, then within weeks he sold Camp his share for a promissory note of $1,500.118 After barely a month in the territory Grant was an enterprising entrepreneur. Traveling up the Columbia River to the spot where wagon trains portaged rapids, he bought livestock to sell to immigrants in the spring, and oxen to replace their teams, expecting thereby to double his money.119 “It is necessary in this country that a person should help themselves,” he concluded, but Oregon offered everything for the taking.120 “So far as I have seen it it opens the richest chances for poor persons who are willing, and able.”121 He and other officers leased and cleared a hundred acres to sow potatoes and oats in the spring. Grant thrived on the work, gaining weight as he plowed the ground in a mild January.122 He spent every dollar on seed potatoes.123 He cut and sold timber to buy a wagon, horses, and tools, and planted twenty acres in potatoes and onions, then sowed more acres in grain. By March 1853 he expected that he could make enough to last his family for some years.124 Still he expanded, buying cordwood to sell steamers on the Columbia, while he and Captain Henry Wallen of the 4th Infantry partnered to operate wagons hauling goods.125 He also learned essential rules of management. “One is that I can do as much, and do it better, than I can hire it done,” he wrote Julia. “The other is that by working myself those that are hired do a third more than if left alone.”126

  “Hard work and the climate agrees with me,” he told her.127 When she warned him to be careful of the local Indians, he dismissed her concerns. “Those about here are the most harmless people you ever saw,” he told her. Echoing his attitude toward Mexicans, he added that “the whole race would be harmless and peaceable if they were not put upon by the whites.”128 The only natives were Klickitats, and occasionally Cowlitz and Dalles tribesmen, “and even this poor remnant of a once powerful tribe is fast wasting away before those blessings of civilization ‘whisky and Small pox.’”129

  He diversified beyond livestock, produce, and boiler wood. On a visit to San Francisco he called on a firm he dealt with as quartermaster and concluded an arrangement to alert them when he saw a rise in demand for an article in Oregon. They would then provide as much as he could take on credit to sell, splitting the proceeds.130 “This dear Julia is the bright side,” he told her in June. But then he confessed that “I have been quite unfortunate lately.” Floods on the Columbia ruined some of his onion and grain crop before harvest, while to save his steamboat wood he paid to move it to dry ground, which almost eradicated his profit. Moreover, he had not outgrown his youthful naïveté, and trusted too easily. Elijah Camp left the territory owing him some $800.131 Grant made substantial purchases on credit, and though at the end of 1852 he thought he had made $2,000, in fact much of that was in notes due to him. Soon a banking house sued him, and though he paid the debt, it was a sign of weakness as a businessman.132

  Yet Grant was still the optimist. He salvaged some of the potato crop, bought a shipment of pork in San Francisco that netted almost $400, and expected more to yield $1,000 in June and the same in July, meanwhile making money wholesaling groceries and barrels of salt pork.133 On his trips to San Francisco he visited Michael Phelan’s Metropolitan Saloon and enjoyed watching Phelan, one of the finest billiard players of his era. While some thought Grant handy with a cue, he rarely played if others were watching.134 He saw other potential in the game. Officers and gentlemen needed a club, a place to gather.135 Grant, Wallen, and navy lieutenant Thomas H. Stevens leased part of the first floor of the newly opened Union Hotel at Kearny and Merchant Streets at $500 a month, and opened their own billiard saloon, charging fifty cents a game.136

  Then the army put Grant out of business by reassigning him to Fort Humbolt on Humbolt Bay, California. He had no choice but to close all his enterprises, while the hired manager at the billiard hall closed it for him by embezzling its receipts. On Christmas Day 1853, in San Francisco about to leave for Humbolt, Grant authorized Wallen and Stevens to sell his share of the tables and equipment.137 He left Oregon owing at least $350 to creditors, soon referring to his business partnerships with Wallen as “our unfortunate San Francisco speculations.”138 Now he had small but mounting debts and on the very eve of departing borrowed $600 to satisfy creditors.139

  Grant quickly found Humbolt Bay too confining to engage his entrepreneurial spirit. Instead, it all but shut it down.140 The sudden interruption of his projects showed in his letters home.141 “You do not know how forsaken I feel here!” he wrote two weeks after arriving. He just sat in his room and read or occasionally went riding. His last letter from Julia came just before he left San Francisco in January, but it was dated the previous October. His thoughts returned to the possibility of resignation.142 “I think I have been from my family quite long enough,” Grant wrote her in February. “The suspense I am in would make paradice form a bad picture.” Though only thirty-two, he thought he looked half again older, and he soon went on the post sick roll.143

  On the basis of what he knew, he seemed to miss Julia much more than she missed him. “You never complain of being lonesome,” he wrote in March, “so I infer that you are quite contented.” He dreamed of her often, but now in a dream he saw her at a party where she was too busy dancing with others even to talk to him. He seemed at risk of turning inward on himself. He became “so tired and out of patience with the lonliness of this place” that he scarcely ventured more than a hundred yards away for weeks at a time.144 His imagination played on his fears. “I do not feel as if it was possible to endure this separation much longer,” he wrote her, “but how do I know that you are thinking as much of me as I of you?” But then his old optimism returned and he assured her that “you write I am certain and some day I will get a big batch all at once.”145

  Occasionally he and others rode a few miles into the country, but that was all. Englishman Richard W. Brett ran the one good tavern in Eureka, with two billiard tables that perhaps drew Grant from time to time.146 Occasionally he might have drowned boredom and loneliness with more liquor than was wise, but not habitually, and not to the detriment of performance of his official duties or his standing with his fellow officers.147 He could ill afford to spend much on liquor. “Living here is extravigantly high,” he told Julia, “besides being very poor.”148 Unlike Robert E. Lee, who counseled his wife against excessive spending, Grant trusted Julia to use good judgment. “Do as you please with your money dearest Julia,” he told her. “I know you are always prudent.”149

  By late March Grant was back in fine health and resolved to “find something to do.”150 Still, his even keel was fragile. He clung to the hope that a request for orders to Washington might be approved, so that he could settle the matter of a trunk containing $1,000 in quartermaster funds that was stolen in 1848 from a fellow officer’s room, where Grant had placed it for safekeeping. No one blamed or suspected Grant, but it was nonetheless his responsibility until the government relieved him, making it one more debt on his mind. He would try unsuccessfully for years to get resolution. His frustration mounted when his request was needlessly delayed in San Francisco before going to Washington.151

  Then on April 11 came notice of his promotion to captain. After ten years and eight months in uniform he had risen two grades, well ahead of the average eighteen years.152 Even the exemplary Lee took almost nine years to make captain. Grant immediately accepted, but then, perhaps with the pen still in his hand, he wrote another brief communication to the adjutant general. Effective J
uly 31, 1854, he was resigning from the army.153 After nearly two years away from his family and a son he had never seen, he had had enough. As recently as March 6 he wrote Julia that “I sometimes get so anxious to see you, and our little boys, that I am almost tempted to resign.” When he contemplated resignation, however, “poverty, poverty, begins to stare me in the face.” All he needed to tip the scales was what he called “the certainty of a moderate competency.”154 In fact, the means were at hand, for Frederick Dent had recently given his daughter a hundred acres of his White Haven plantation.155 A captain’s pay would not support his family. Grant had always wanted to be a farmer, and this was his opportunity.156 Moreover, Humboldt’s climate set off malarial fevers, and he was on the sick list again.157

  There was nothing precipitate in his resignation. Deliberately he weighed risks and advantages, and acted only when sure of his course. Grant had been heartily weary of what he called “that detestable Quarter Master business” for some time.158 Inspecting stoves and comparing prices on maple versus hickory firewood hardly compared with a gallop through the streets of Monterey under fire.159 Still, he had handled the business well. He oversaw all materiel purchases, maintained buildings, and even supervised the smithy, the tin shop, the saddler, carpenters, and some two hundred pack animals, all with only one clerk and no additional pay.160 He outfitted two surveying expeditions looking at possible routes for a transcontinental railroad, one of them commanded by Captain George B. McClellan, an acquaintance from West Point days.161 He was responsible for more government money than any officer in the regiment, as much as $38,000 at the end of 1853.162 Grant handled all of this business on time, though occasionally his accounts were late reaching Washington.163 Sometimes the delays were actually due to slow mails but, otherwise, when reminded he produced the documents directly.164