That Ulysses and Julia were happy together, physically and emotionally, is crystal clear from their correspondence. No hint of scandal or unfaithfulness would ever touch their lives—Ulysses was the most faithful and devoted of husbands (if not always the most demonstrative) and always would be, while Julia, though more demanding, invariably saw him through rose-colored spectacles. No matter how shabby and down-at-the-heels Grant became—and he would go a long way down before he rose up again—Julia refused to admit it, or possibly even to see it. “Captain Grant,” as she always called him once he reached that rank, even when he was clerking in his father’s leather-goods store, “was always perfection.”
In the meantime the young couple’s happiness was in the hands of that most unreliable of institutions when it comes to what we now call “human resources”—the peacetime army, which proceeded to do everything possible to make their lives a misery. Grant was posted to Detroit, by no means an enviable posting to begin with in those days, but no sooner had the Grants arrived there than he was ordered, over his protests, to Sackets Harbor, N.Y., a remote outpost on Lake Ontario, where they spent a long, cold winter enjoying their first taste of domestic bliss.
In the spring of 1849, once they had become used to Sackets Harbor, the War Department finally responded to Grant’s complaints against being sent there by ordering him back to Detroit, where the Grants settled into a modest house and life among the other junior officers and their wives until Julia returned to St. Louis to have her first child, Frederick Dent Grant (named for her father) at home, while Grant was reassigned again to Sackets Harbor, where mother and child rejoined him in 1851.
In 1852 Grant’s regiment was shifted to the Pacific Coast, and although Julia was eager to accompany him, she was pregnant again. It was, in those days, a daunting journey, first by sea to the Isthmus of Panama, then across the mountainous isthmus by mule, in a country where yellow fever and cholera were widespread, and finally the long, rough ocean journey to San Francisco. Many men died of sickness along the way, usually before reaching the Pacific coast of Panama, and no pregnant woman, even one as determined as Julia Grant, would be likely to attempt it.
Grant, it can be perceived, had no friends with influence in the army. He was, besides, ever so slightly under a cloud, having been held responsible for the theft of one thousand dollars while he was a quartermaster in Mexico. Nobody alleged that Grant himself had stolen the money, but the accounts were his responsibility, and he was therefore ordered to repay the sum. Neither his correspondence with the War Department nor Jesse’s on his son’s behalf was sufficient to straighten out the matter, and even a journey Grant made to Washington at his own expense to explain his case met with failure—partly, no doubt, because accounting was not one of Grant’s strengths, and also because he was not particularly forceful or articulate in his own defense.
In any event he sailed from New York City, leaving Julia behind, in the summer of 1852, and after a hazardous and difficult journey eventually reached San Francisco, 150 of the Fourth Infantry party having died of cholera in Panama on the way (about average for the time). Grant’s object was to make enough money by small side ventures to bring Julia and the children out to join him, but monotonously, one after another, each attempt failed. A partnership in a general store saw Grant’s investment vanish, along with the partner. An attempt to raise hogs failed, as did an attempt to grow potatoes. Whatever Grant tried, bad judgment, bad weather, bad luck got in the way, leaving him poorer than before. It was not from any lack of energy or hard work; Grant simply lacked business sense.
The army hardly kept him busy. He was eventually posted to the Columbia Barracks, at Fort Vancouver, in Washington Territory, as quartermaster—really a store clerk in uniform—and despite the beauties of the countryside, he grew gloomier and lonelier as the months wore on, and as one unsuccessful commercial venture followed another. Even Julia’s letters began to express a certain impatience with Ulysses, as she waited in Sackets Harbor with her two sons, Fred and Ulysses Junior (called “Buck” by everybody but his mother), the younger of whom Grant had not so far seen.
It was there, in full view of Mount Hood and the Pacific, that the stories of Grant’s drinking began. Let it be said first of all that Grant was never a convivial drunk. He did not haunt barrooms and exchange boozy anecdotes with fellow drinkers. Loneliness, depression, a sense of failure, and the inability to see any improvement in his condition led Grant to drink. He went on solitary binges, alone in his room with a bottle of whiskey. In later life, once he was a rising general, it became the object of his faithful staff to prevent this from happening and to conceal it when they failed to prevent it. Drinking did not make Grant cheerful—indeed his hangovers were made more acute both by his tendency toward migraine headaches, which was exacerbated by alcohol, and by shame at his own weakness in taking to the bottle.
To some degree, fame and a sense of purpose overcame Grant’s drinking problem after 1861, and the presence of Mrs. Grant usually appears to have kept him from the bottle. He was not a man who could withstand his own failure or Julia’s absence: It was as simple as that. At Fort Vancouver, however, he could not escape his own failure; he had no sense of purpose; and Julia was fifteen hundred impassable miles away, so he drank. Whether he drank as much as, or less than, people said hardly matters.
Transferred eventually to Fort Humboldt in Northern California, he was lonelier still—he did not even have a horse of his own to ride—and his drinking soon came to the attention of his commanding officer. Ordered to give it up, he tried hard; then he went back to drinking, and finally, in the spring of 1854, he took the drastic step of writing a letter resigning from the army, either under pressure from his commander or out of despair, ironically receiving by letter his promotion to captain on the same day. The captaincy had come too late to make a difference to Grant. His only thought was to get home, explain himself to Julia, and never leave her side again. With at last a purpose in mind, Grant set off as fast as he could, borrowing money for the journey from his West Point classmate Simon Bolivar Buckner. Grant was a civilian again for the first time since the day he had arrived at West Point.
Whatever Julia’s thoughts about the matter, Jesse was determined to set matters right. He, better than anyone, knew how unfit Ulysses was for anything other than soldiering, and was appalled at his son’s throwing away his career, however modest it might be. Jesse wrote at once to his congressman (not the unlucky Hamer this time) to request that the secretary of war reinstate his son Ulysses as a captain, and when that failed to have any effect, followed it up with a letter of his own. The secretary of war wrote back a rather snubbing letter pointing out that it was too late, that his decision on the matter was irrevocable, and suggesting between the lines that there were matters Captain Grant would probably prefer not to face publicly—perhaps a reference to rumors of his drinking on duty, perhaps to the missing thousand dollars.
The secretary of war at the time was, of all people, Jefferson Davis, future president of the Confederacy, and the one man, apart from General Hancock, whom Ulysses Grant in later life would treat as a personal enemy. Hancock, Grant forgave as he lay dying; Davis, who had snubbed Grant’s father, refused to reinstate Grant in the army, and then gone on and betrayed his own country to lead the Confederacy, Grant could never forgive.
After a good deal of correspondence and unnecessary travel back and forth between New York City and Sackets Harbor, Grant finally rejoined Julia in St. Louis, a failure at the early age of thirty-two, with no trade beyond the one he had just resigned. Since no help was forthcoming from Jesse, who did not disguise his feeling that Ulysses had thrown away a perfectly good position, or feel like supporting not only Ulysses but Julia and their two children (with a third already on the way), Grant was obliged to throw himself on the mercy of his father-in-law, and took over some of his brother-in-law’s farmland in Kentucky. With his own hands Grant built a house, which he called, with some accuracy (and perhaps
a degree of irony), “Hardscrabble,” tilled the soil, and put in a crop. Julia adapted to this life of primitive yeoman farming—the kind of thing Jefferson had dreamed of as the backbone of the infant republic, but from which everybody who tried it was eager to escape—but she did not pretend to like it. She called the house “crude,” as indeed it was, and does not seem to have had much confidence in Ulysses’ ability to survive as a farmer, even with the help of the Dent family slaves. She would soon be proved correct. The presence of the slaves may have taught Grant something about the notorious inefficiency of slave labor—after all, hard work gained the slave nothing—but it did not save the farm. Still, the Grants survived nearly two years of backbreaking labor, poor returns, and mounting debt, while she bore him two more children, a girl, Nellie, and another boy, Jesse, named after Ulysses’ father—a sentimental gesture that failed to soften the old man’s heart.
Once again it was not for lack of hard work that Grant failed as a farmer—it was the business of farming that defeated him. He could do anything that was needed on the farm, it appeared, except make a profit out of it.
To some degree that was not his fault. “Manifest Destiny” had increased the power of Wall Street, and the world of high finance and railway building, over that of Jeffersonian yeomen, small farmers, and pioneers. The time had come “to pay the piper” for the enormous increase in America’s size, many times larger than what had been acquired by the Louisiana Purchase, and requiring huge amounts of capital for what we would now call “development,” in a nation with a largely unregulated banking system. As a result bank crises and a sharp decline in agricultural prices ruined many small farmers shrewder than Grant.
While he had been planting his crops and building Hardscrabble, the consequences of the annexation of Texas and victory over Mexico had been coming home to roost. The United States was now a continental nation, but the question of slavery still divided it. Mrs. Grant might gush over the loyalty and affection to her person of the Dent family slaves, but the burning question of whether slavery could be extended to the new territories of the West still perplexed and infuriated Americans. Slavery was no longer a debating issue but a fighting one.
In the North abolitionists took the gloves off. Mrs. Harriet Beecher Stowe wrote Uncle Tom’s Cabin, the book that caused Queen Victoria to cry, that made Simon Legree the symbol of Southern oppression, and that would eventually cause Lincoln to say to its author, on meeting her, “So you’re the little lady who started this war.” The North reacted with outrage to the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision, in the Dred Scott case, that a slave was merely property who could be hunted down and returned to his owner, even from the North. On the floor of the U.S. Senate, distinguished senators slashed at each other with canes, and members of both houses took to carrying Col. Samuel Colt’s new pocket revolver. And in the Kansas Territory, “Bleeding Kansas,” the question of whether slavery could be—would be—extended farther West was beginning to be played out in blood, not just ink.
It is against this background of rising tension and anger that Ulysses Grant’s failure as a farmer must be seen. Like the rest of the nation, he was waiting, appalled and impotent, for the storm to break. He could not have predicted the swift and dreadful chain of events—the spiraling outbreak of murder and lawlessness between abolitionist and proslavery factions in Kansas, culminating in the fearful outrage enacted by the followers of John Brown and his sons on the hapless slave-owning farmers at Pottawatomie Creek, whom Brown dragged from their beds and executed with a broadsword—the fearful plunge toward civil war that had been set in motion by the victories that Grant had helped to win. Still it was there, like a thunderstorm building over the plains, distant but threatening, and only the deaf failed to hear the ominous rumbling.1
These events did not, of course, take place at once, but sputtered, like a burning fuse, over nearly a decade of increasing acrimony and sporadic, often gleeful, butchery on the part of fanatics on both sides, as a war of words hardened into the prospect of a real war—perhaps the only profession for which Captain Grant, failed farmer and small entrepreneur, was properly trained. All over the country the state militias drilled, mostly clumsy country bumpkins, clueless; without uniforms; sometimes shoeless; armed, if at all, with weapons that went back to the War of 1812; guided, if they were lucky, by some old textbook on infantry drill in the hands of one of their elected officers; and by a firm belief in the national myth of the Minute Men at Concord and Lexington, the amateur soldiers who had left their homes and farms, hunting rifles in hand, to confront the Redcoats.
In the meantime Grant, having failed at farming, was forced to undergo the ultimate humiliation. In the summer of 1860 he was obliged to turn back to his father, tail between his legs, and ask for help. Jesse’s terms were harsh and not negotiable. The Grants could come back and live in Galena, Illinois, and Ulysses would work as a clerk in Jesse’s harness and leather shop there, under the supervision of his younger brothers, Orvil and Simpson.
Like many other writers, F. Scott Fitzgerald, in The Great Gatsby, speculated on Grant “lolling in his general store in Galena” as the prototype of the seemingly ordinary American waiting patiently to be called to a high destiny, but it cannot have appeared so to Grant, or anybody else in Galena. His salary was small and grudgingly paid; he and his family lived in a tiny house, which Julia could have compared with White Haven only with great dissatisfaction—an Irish maid was no substitute for a bevy of slave house servants—and Grant’s total lack of any of those qualities that make for a good salesman were only too obvious, to both his brothers and the customers. Even those in Galena who did not think he was a secret drinker—and they were few—could hardly fail to notice his dull, vacant expression, his shuffling gait, his threadbare clothes, and his total lack of interest in the leather and harness business.
Burdened with debts, stuck at last in his father’s leather business, which he had always sought to avoid, with no prospects and not even a horse to ride, he waited—for what? In the leather shop the customers talked about the news and politics, and Grant listened silently, tying packages with twine and perhaps making the occasional sale. He had no gift for small talk, and he kept his opinions to himself, but we know from his memoirs what those opinions were. He had opposed the Mexican War, he was against the expansion of slavery, he thought President James Buchanan was a weakling, and he was moving from being a Democrat to becoming a Lincoln Republican. Above all, he recognized what few other people had thought through yet: If the Southern states seceded from the Union, there would be war; if there was war one result would eventually be the destruction of slavery; and that war, if and when it came, would be incalculably more bloody than anyone supposed, and would be won only by brute force and killing on a scale that would eclipse all previous wars.
The election of Abraham Lincoln set in motion the events that were to bring Ulysses S. Grant out from behind the counter of the harness shop for good. On April 15 the news of the firing on Fort Sumter reached Galena, and a mass meeting was called by local congressman Elihu B. Washburne, a Galena man, at which Grant was present. Two days later another meeting was held, to discuss the recruitment of troops. As the only man in town who was a graduate of West Point, Grant was asked to chair the meeting and did so. In his own words, “I never went into our leather store after that meeting, to put up a package or do other business.”
Grant’s star had not yet risen, but it was about to, and would carry him away from Galena and into such fame as few men have experienced. For once he moved with a sure step. He went, still in his shabby civilian clothes, and at his own expense, with the company of Galena volunteers to Springfield, where they were to be mustered, and declined to advance himself for the captaincy on the grounds that as a former officer of the Regular Army he was entitled to something better—a stroke of cunning and realism that was new to Grant but may simply have been the instinctive understanding of how the army works coming back to him, a West Pointer and regular
officer, as if he had never taken off the uniform. For weeks Grant was in limbo, a civilian in a volunteer army that was slowly being put into uniform, with no rank or position. Looking at his Galena volunteers, he might have agreed with the Duke of Wellington’s comment on the first sight of his troops in the Peninsula: “I do not know what effect they will have on the enemy, sir, but by God, they frighten me!” He lobbied his old senior officers of the Mexican War days, with no result; he paid two calls on Maj. Gen. George B. McClellan, whom he had known at West Point, and was twice ignored, left waiting and rebuffed; he begged Jesse to intercede for him and seek an appointment for him as a colonel; then finally, almost by accident, Grant himself hit upon the right lever to pull, and went back to Galena to seek the support of Representative Washburne, who saw in Grant something nobody else had seen (except Julia): a rare degree of determination, real experience of war, and, perhaps most important to Washburne, the fact that here was a fellow Galena man, somebody who would be grateful to the politician who gave him a push.
Grant returned to Springfield, and on June 17, in his own matter-of-fact way, was able to write home that he had been appointed a colonel.
The war was about to begin in earnest.
Chapter Five
GRANT MAY HAVE BEEN a colonel, but he still had no uniform or horse. Opportunity had knocked before he was kitted out for it. The officers of the Twenty-first Illinois Volunteers, which had been formed at Mattoon, had complained bitterly to the governor that their commanding officer was incompetent and drunk, and when it was clear that they meant business (and were probably correct), the governor suggested Colonel Grant to replace him. Grant arrived to take command of his regiment in wrinkled civilian clothes and a battered hat, and found them “ragged and barefoot themselves,” as well as undisciplined. The uncertainty and sense of failure that had haunted him as a civilian seemed to drop away from him instantly. Men who were insolent to officers he had tied to posts and, when necessary, gagged; foul language he punished severely; saluting he insisted upon. Very shortly the Twenty-first became a model regiment, except for Grant himself, who still had no uniform, military equipment, or horse. His father, Jesse, and his brothers were not prepared to put up another penny toward Ulysses’ military career, while his father-in-law now considered him a traitor to the Southern cause and made it clear that while there would always be a place at his table for Julia, there would henceforth be none for Ulysses (ironically, Colonel Dent would end up living in the White House as a kind of permanent house guest once Grant became president, surprising people with his staunchly Confederate views). Eventually a Galena merchant took pity on Grant and loaned him enough money for his uniform and equipment, and Grant took the Twenty-first to war.
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