Crucible of Command

by William C. Davis

  Even compliments could wound. Lee always preferred buxom women, and was pleased to hear Mary weighed 160 pounds, but then referred to her as “rotund” and reminded her that he only weighed 155 himself.233 By the mid- and late 1850s his weekly letters became formulaic: advice on her health, finances, and the children, and what he saw around him of sickness and death.234 In a neat reversal of their roles when courting, Lee lectured her on piety and resignation, telling her not to want too much in life, nor to take too much pleasure in happy moments, or grieve too much at misfortune. Passions must not guide them, but “what reason & religion dictates.”235 Surely passion was gone.

  Perhaps only his sons and daughters cheered the lonely Virginian. “I have no enjoyment in life now but what I derive from my children,” he told son Custis in May 1859.236 He tried to shape them in the mold he applied to himself so successfully. Believing that children needed to learn “politeness, gentleness, courtesy & a regard for the rights of others,” he advocated education from an early age, including the concept of kindergarten then in its infancy in Europe.237 His sons would be men, and he had very definite ideas of manly deportment, while he wanted his daughters to live a “rational & religious life.”238 Toward those ends they needed his guidance, and he gave it, risking their resentment of “my old habit of giving advice.”239

  The eldest, Custis, was for the most part exemplary. General Scott got him an appointment to West Point, where he excelled from the outset. That is what Lee expected from his sons.240 He hoped Custis would best his own record. “You must be No. 1,” Lee told him. “It is a fine number. Easily found and remembered. Simple and unique. Jump to it, fellow.”241 Custis graduated first in his class in 1854 while his proud father was superintendent. Rooney Lee was his mother’s child, indolent and impulsive, and Lee saw in him both her father and his own.242 Lee intended to provide the best education he could, but refused to be “the means of indulging in extravagance folly or vice.”243 Lee entered Rooney at Harvard College in the fall of 1854, but after two years feared his son seemed “only to have time or thought for running about.”244 As a result, Lee sent one sententious letter after another until the boy stopped responding.245 Rooney drank and smoked. His father had no objection to alcohol, and sometimes sent whisky as a gift to friends, though he also knew men who drank themselves to ruin.246 He thought tobacco “dangerous to meddle with,” and teased his son that kissing young women was a better use for his mouth.247 As for other vices, Lee warned against “every immorality.”248 Thankfully, Rooney turned himself around and through General Scott’s influence, gained a direct commission in a cavalry regiment in 1857. Meanwhile the youngest, Robert Jr., came in for fewer of his father’s lectures.249 “He has always been a good boy,” Lee said, echoing his own father’s words about him.250 In 1860 Lee entered him at the University of Virginia despite reservations about its academic discipline and curriculum.251

  “Our sons are fairly launched forth on the everchanging & tempestuous life they have selected,” he told Mary, wistfully. “Probably they & I will never meet again.”252 Meanwhile, Lee left his daughters to their mother, though he wanted them to learn to dance and play the piano. Of course they should develop punctuality, which their mother never did.253 They must be self-reliant, for as he had found, “no one will attend to your business as well as you will yourself.”254 He wanted them to be active outdoors, exercise, eat wholesome food, and, reflecting the era’s obsession with bowels, “be regular in all your habits.”255 They could read amusing fiction; though the boys should eschew novels, which “paint beauty more charming than nature, & describe happiness that never exists.”256 That was Lee’s father speaking. Above all he told them to “be careful of your conduct,” and seek not what they should not.257 Agnes and Annie delighted him in April 1857 when both become Christians, even when Agnes told him that “I see now I am far more vile and desperately sinful than I ever had the smallest idea of.”258

  He missed much of seeing them grow, and as he turned fifty Lee morbidly feared he might not see any of them again.259 “When I think of your youth, impulsiveness, and many temptations, your distance from me, and the ease (and even innocence) with which you might commence an erroneous course, my heart quails within me,” he told Custis in 1858.260 Two years later in Texas his longing for them kept him wakeful at night, while during the day his focus drifted from his work to them. “I know it is useless to indulge these feelings,” he confessed, “yet they arise unbidden, & will not stay repressed.”261

  Even the Texas wilderness had no comfort for Lee when he returned. ‘I do not know where to fix myself now,” he complained. Everything seemed so uncertain—the Union, his career, Arlington.262 He even found fault with divine will. “How hard it is to get contentment, & to be quiet & gratified under all the dispensations of our merciful God!” he wrote Mary that April.263 “Sad thoughts” oppressed him. He felt “rent by a thousand anxieties” as he contemplated the “divided heart I have too [long] had, & a divided life too long lived.” Duty sent him away from home; his heart called him to Arlington. “I unfortunately belong to a profession, that debars all hope of domestic enjoyment, the duties of which cannot be performed, without a sacrifice of personal & private relations, & one or the other must be abandoned,” he told a friend in 1857. “I cannot in honour abandon the former, while holding the office. I am therefore forced to relinquish the latter.”264 By 1860 he felt “small progress” in his life as a soldier or a man. “Thus I live & am unable to advance either.” He had failed himself and his family.265

  “A soldiers life I know to be a hard one,” Lee admitted.266 As he passed fifty he might expect one more promotion to colonel, perhaps, but probably that was all. Once he hoped for a staff position as inspector general that would allow him to live with his family, else he might have to resign, but that was before two years at Arlington soured him.267 At the same time he took personally the criticism often hurled at the military. When politicians called on Secretary of War Jefferson Davis to disband Lee’s regiment to save money, he scornfully declared that “they may suit themselves in everything relating to my services & whenever they tell me they are no longer required, they will not be obtruded upon them.”268 His patriotism was visceral and no folly of others could take that from him. He spent the Fourth of July in 1856 futilely trying to escape from a scorching Texas sun in the shade of a tent on the bank of the Brazos River. Miserable as he was, he reflected on the day and what it meant to him. “My feelings for my country were as ardent, my faith in her future as true, & my hopes for her advancement as unabated,” he told Mary, “as if I felt under more propitious circumstances.”269

  Lee seemed not unlike his country itself. The optimism of youth was gone. His faith promised only trial and pain until death’s release. Disappointed professionally, disillusioned personally, uncertain of the present and anxious for the future, he felt sad, occasionally depressed, racked by feelings of failure. He looked ahead with dread of infirmity, and anxiety for his children. “Our hardest lesson is self-knowledge,” he told Custis at the close of 1860, “& it is perhaps one that is never accomplished.”270 His own lesson was far from complete. Lee now defined happiness as “independence, the success of our operations, prosperity of our plans, health, contentment, and the esteem of our friends.”271 He had no home of his own, little wealth, and no profession other than arms, and that might soon be the last post he wanted as America rushed to the precipice. By his own measure Lee was not a happy man, but that was God’s will, a small comfort that the fault lay not in himself but in his stars.

  If Lee felt a failure, Grant was one, and no constellation could take the blame. Grant should have known better than to think he could collect bills for others when he rarely collected debts due himself, and there was just enough work to support Boggs. Grant’s application for the position of county engineer in August foundered on the anti-slave majority on the hiring board.272 Jesse suggested he apply for a professorship at Washington University, but Grant dis
missed that as impossible. “I do not want to fly from one thing to another, nor would I, but I am compelled to make a living from the start for which I am willing to give all my time and all my energy.”273 A month later he added, “I hope [for] something before a great while.”274

  Still, he resisted giving up. He traded Hardscrabble and his note for $3,000 for a house in St. Louis. Buoyed by that, he applied for a job as superintendent of the U.S. customs house and got a lesser job that paid $1,200 a year, but found it nothing but “a vacant desk.”275 A month later he left, still trying to find something to avert resort to his father. That winter he even sought a job as teamster to deliver army stores or drive a beef herd to New Mexico, and in February 1860 tried again unsuccessfully for the post of county engineer.276 Now more than ever his words to Jesse the previous fall took on meaning: “What I shall do will depend entirely upon what I can get to do.”277

  Both Lee and Grant were inured to trial by now, yet the greatest trial of their generation lay just over the horizon.

  5

  A CRISIS MADE FOR THEM

  FOR ULYSSES GRANT there must come a time when optimism yielded to necessity. It came in the spring of 1860. Julia suggested that he go to Jesse one more time. “His father had always been not only willing but anxious to serve him,” she recalled, though “in his own way, to be sure,” by which she meant the father’s overbearing and spirit-dampening control.1 ’Lys Grant arrived at Covington with a crushing headache. “My head is nearly bursting with pain,” he wrote Julia a few hours after arrival. Periodically he suffered such attacks, possibly migraine, and this one likely from stress as he waited to face his father. For four hours after reaching his parents’ home he just sat in the dining room without leaving it, writing to Julia and talking with his seriously ill brother Simpson, as he tried to distract his mind from the pain.2 In a few weeks he would be in Galena, a move that incidentally presented a new challenge to the Grants and the Dent slaves living with them. Julia wanted to take them with her, but she left them behind in Missouri. “Papa was not willing they should go with me to Galena,” she explained years later, for “if I took them they would, of course, be free.”3

  When Grant arrived he found a small city of eight thousand sprawling over both sides of the Galena River where it flowed into the Mississippi. Galena’s position as western terminus of the Illinois Central Railroad gave it trade with the entire northeast. Probably the city’s most prominent citizen at the moment was Elihu B. Washburne, a founder of the Republican Party, friend of Lincoln’s, and currently member of Congress representing northwest Illinois.4 For $10 a month Grant rented a small two-story brick house on the west side of town some two hundred steps up a bluff from Main Street. Humble defined the place, and Julia felt embarrassed comparing it to the comforts of her father’s White Haven. Their neighbors were respectable but hardly the elite: merchants, cabinet makers, a druggist, a mason, a blacksmith, and a few clerks. Now she, rather than servants, did the family’s washing, cleaned the house, emptied the chamber pots, even sewed the children’s clothes.5 By the summer of 1860 she was able for a time to lodge a hired teenaged girl to help, but mostly Julia’s hands ran the house.6

  As for her husband, every day he went up and down those two hundred steps twice, once to work in the morning and return home in the evening, and the other to come home for his midday meal.7 Those steps took him to the Grants’ store in a four-story brick building at 145 Main Street running back to Commerce. Jesse Grant had opened the leather goods shop with E. A. Collins, and like most of his enterprises it prospered. When he and Collins dissolved the partnership, Jesse announced it in the local newspaper with one of his typical efforts at humorous doggerel:

  TO THOSE WHO OWE US, WE WANT OUR PAY,

  THEN BRING IT ON WITHOUT DELAY.

  They dealt in leather hides, and a general line of harness, shoe parts, and other goods, but did not tan the hides themselves. In fact there was no tannery in Galena, and most of their hides came from Jesse’s shop at Covington, or else they purchased them directly from regional farmers.8 Simpson Grant had been running the store, but when he fell ill in 1859 with the cancer that killed him two years later, his younger brother Orville came to take over. People regarded Simpson as a man of ability, and thought Orville rather the opposite, hence it was good for the business when Ulysses arrived in May 1860.9

  The new brother was not to be a partner in the firm, or not yet. Orville made him general clerk at $40 a month and there would be no raises, though Ulysses filled a genuine need with Simpson now gone.10 Thanks to Orville’s neglect Grant found the books a mess and spent his first three weeks straightening jumbled accounts, which appealed to his mathematical bent.11 That done, Grant showed skill at oversight and management, beginning with the acquisition of stock. When farmers brought tanned hides to sell, he negotiated their purchase out on Main Street and himself often weighed and carried the heavy bundles into the store. Already prone to a careless, occasionally stooped gait, Grant stooped a little lower under those burdens. To protect his clothes he wore a short leather apron that often he forgot to remove when he went about town.12

  Better yet from his point of view, he frequently took the firm’s wagon into the country to buy hides at the source, which made them a little cheaper to acquire, and indulged his zest for travel. While the less-business minded Orville manned the sales counter in the store, ’Lys spent much of his time on trips up the Mississippi to their stores in La Crosse and Prairie du Chien, Wisconsin, and across the river in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. That was precisely the kind of travel that Grant always loved.13

  When not in the country, however, Grant was one of two sales clerks in the store itself, a task that virtually all of Galena concluded he was entirely unsuited for, a majority that included Grant himself. “I was no clerk,” he later confessed, “nor had I any capacity to be one.” His idea of filing a paper was to stuff it in his coat pocket, and when Orville was away he preferred not to wait on shoppers at all.14 If someone came in while the other clerk was out, Grant was likely to tell the person to wait a few minutes until he returned. If a customer refused to wait, Grant reluctantly went behind the counter to pull goods from the shelves, but then could not remember the prices, and guessed, often selling some below their value and others for more.15 He was equally inept at wrapping purchases. When a customer asked how ’Lys was coming along, Orville derisively said that “he can do up a bundle after trying two or three times.”16

  Grant also foiled his brother’s somewhat usurious practices. Paper money seriously depreciated in value in 1860, and the enterprising younger Grant used his cash box as a currency exchange, selling gold coin in return for paper at a premium. Among the things Captain Grant bought from farmers was pork, which the firm sent east to the New York market. When farmers brought him their hams and bacon sides, they asked if they could exchange their scrip for gold, since they had taxes to pay and the collector accepted only hard cash. The other clerk offered to sell them gold at Orville’s inflated exchange rate, but hearing that, Grant interrupted and directed them to a local bank where the exchange would be fair, saving them money. “That was the style of the man,” recalled one Galenan.17

  Orville did not care for that style, especially as ’Lys was unable to live on $40 a month and Orville often had to advance more. He got even by taking opportunities to embarrass his brother. One day ’Lys asked him for $5 in front of a New York leather merchant and store clerk John Fishback. Orville gave him $3 and told him he had no business having more money than that. Grant quietly took what was given.18 In front of a customer Orville sniped at his brother, “what are you good for?” Grant matter-of-factly confessed, “I don’t know, but this business don’t suit me.”19

  What did suit him was to sit in the office when there were no customers and talk. His friend John E. Smith, town jeweler, often stopped by on his way home at the end of the day, when the two lit their clay pipes and had a chat. Grant could converse on many subjects, his favorite bein
g his experiences in Mexico.20 If a veteran of that war happened to drop in, Grant might ignore his duties for hours, reminiscing.21 His stories fascinated locals whose horizons never yet extended beyond their side of the Mississippi, and customers often asked Grant to regale them with tales of the land of the Monteczumas. Perched on the store counter, pipe in hand, he spent hours doing so, his enthusiasm for Mexico’s beauty and resources still vivid even after a dozen years.22

  Grant’s time in Mexico was his only claim to celebrity in Galena. Otherwise, most of the population scarcely knew he existed. If ever there was a face in the crowd, it was his. Those who did notice saw a slender man of middle height in an old gray suit wearing a “plug,” or slouch hat, and sometimes in a blue military jacket worn through at the elbows.23 Thanks to the leather apron some people took him to be a porter.24 He had a pipe in his mouth, occasionally a cigar, and held his head low, apparently lost in thought or determined upon some mission. Few people actually knew him, even among the merchants on Main Street.25 Those who did called him “Captain,” and all regarded him as a quiet, humble, unobtrusive man who mixed little in society and had few friends.26 Mostly they saw him going from home to work and back, as one Galenan recalled, “a reticent, unpretending man.”27

  Grant did have friends, and he enjoyed a game of chess, being rated a fine player by opponents.28 His favorite social pastime was a few hands of euchre with neighbors and business associates like the liveryman John C. Calderwood, the Illinois Central station agent Jack Booth, steamboat captain D. B. “Dick” Morehouse of the Galena, and the Swiss-born jeweler John E. Smith, soon to be elected county treasurer. He spent many an evening at the DeSoto House Hotel, where the players gathered in room 198 for conversation and cards, and Grant soon acquired a reputation as the best euchre player in the city. “He was very fond of the game,” recalled one friend, while another noted that Grant “played every one of his cards for what it was worth.” They played for drinks, though Grant often passed when he won, or took a cigar instead. Certainly he had no reputation as a drinker in Galena.29 Despite his rough appearance, his manners were always impeccable. He listened well and attentively. He might tolerate and even laugh at an off-color story, but his own speech was clear, unblotted by profanity.30