AFTER TAKING A two-month leave of absence from the Fourth Infantry, Grant arrived in St. Louis on July 28, 1848. He secured a room at the Planter’s Hotel before rushing to the Dents’ residence in the city. Grant was the center of attention, and Julia’s family wanted to hear about his heroics in Mexico. He obliged them with war stories, but his real focus was on marrying Julia. When Grant first started visiting the Dent’s and his affection toward Julia became obvious, neither her father nor her mother thought his middle-class background and career as an army officer would be suitable to support their daughter. Now that he had proved himself in Mexico and was more mature than the last time they saw him, Frederick and Ellen Dent warmed to the idea that he was to become their son-in-law.
At eight o’clock on the evening of August 22, 1848, the wedding took place at the Dent townhouse with much of St. Louis society in attendance. The best man in the wedding party was James Longstreet, Grant’s friend from West Point, an officer in the Fourth Infantry and future Confederate general. Additionally, Longstreet was Julia’s cousin; also attending was Cadmus Wilcox, another future Confederate general. Both Longstreet and Wilcox surrendered to Grant at Appomattox seventeen years later. A friend of Julia recalled how impressed she was with Grant at the wedding:
He was a little brown from his three years in the Mexican War, but this made him look more the soldier; and, as he stood beside his bride, clasping her hand (the smallest hand I ever saw on a woman), he in full uniform, I thought I had never seen a better embodiment of a soldier, nor a more charming wedding, although I had attended the marriage of a number of military officers. Grant’s bearing was admirable; he was dignified and polite, with a marked quiet and frank naturalness.”1
The following morning Grant and Julia left St. Louis for Bethel, Ohio, to meet his parents. It was Julia’s first time away from her hometown. She later marveled at the voyage aboard a steamer and its “breathing, panting, and obedience to man’s will. I was really greatly impressed with the power of man.” To the young bride the trip seemed “like a dream to me and always pleasant.”
In October 1848, Grant returned to the army and was ordered to report to Detroit where the Fourth Infantry was now stationed. He, of course, wanted his new wife to go with him, but she balked at the idea. Julia was not keen on the idea of leaving St. Louis and her family. The ever practical Colonel Dent suggested that she stay with him and that Grant secure a leave of absence once or twice a year and visit White Haven. Grant, not wanting to cause too much stress on his wife allowed Julia to decide. She recognized that not living with her husband was not the best way to commence a marriage and therefore, chose to go with Grant to Detroit.
When they arrived in Michigan, Grant discovered that his orders had been changed and that he needed to report to Sackets Harbor, New York, on the eastern shore of Lake Ontario. Grant protested, but the order to allow him to stay in Detroit did not arrive until after he and Julia reached Sackets Harbor, where they wintered. The newlyweds made the best of their new post despite the cold, snowy winter. Julia set up their living arrangements, and Grant gave her an allowance to hire a cook—a sign of prestige that Julia desperately wanted. Then in the spring of 1849 Grant received orders to return to Detroit. That fall Julia announced she was pregnant and wanted to have their first child at her family’s home. With Julia returning to White Haven, the Colonel got his way after all. While Grant remained behind, Julia returned to St. Louis and on May 30, 1850, she gave birth to Frederick Dent Grant, who quickly became one of the most important people throughout Grant’s life. He was beside his father at Vicksburg, later attended West Point, and served as the family spokesperson when Grant died many years later.
A year after Frederick’s birth, Grant’s regiment was transferred to the Pacific coast, but Julia did not go with him. She discovered she was again pregnant shortly before the troops embarked. In hindsight it was better that Julia did not make the trip because it went poorly and many men fell ill along the way. At Panama, a contractor failed to appear with transportation, and Quartermaster Grant was forced to buy mules to transport the troops across the isthmus. More than 150 men died in a cholera outbreak en route. The contingent did, eventually, reach Fort Humboldt, California.
Grant was promoted to captain on August 5, 1853, but this was little consolation. He missed Julia terribly, and like many officers in the regular army, he suffered from boredom, loneliness, and poor prospects, which led to drinking. Grant’s consumption of alcohol affected his performance and placed him in a dark mood. It is not that Grant drank a lot—he simply could not handle his liquor. In March 1854 his loneliness increased for Julia and the boys (Grant’s family now included a second son, Ulysses Jr.) and was reflected in two letters he sent home that month. On the sixth he wrote, “I have only one letter from you in three months, and that had been a long time on the way. I know there are letters for me in the Post Office somewhere, but when shall I get them?” Three weeks later he again complained about the lack of mail from Julia: “I have just one solitary letter from you since I arrived at this place and that was written about October of last year. I cannot believe that you have neglected to write all this time but it does seem hard that I should not hear from you.”2
While stationed in the West, Grant repeatedly tried to raise the money to bring his wife and family to California. With each endeavor he failed. Throughout this period—indeed, throughout almost all of his life—Grant proved time and again that he was not an adept businessman. Among his efforts to raise funds Grant became a partner in a sutler’s store in San Francisco with a man named Elijah Camp, whom he had met in Sackets Harbor. The plan was for Grant to provide the funding while Camp ran the store. Initially the business prospered, and Camp offered to buy out Grant’s share for fifteen hundred dollars. Grant agreed, and Camp gave him an unsecured note instead of cash. Without Grant’s knowledge Camp sold the business and returned to Sackets Harbor. Grant never saw any of his investment and failed several times to recover some of the initial money. In another attempt at prosperity, Grant and two fellow officers tried their hands at farming. They leased one hundred acres from the Hudson Bay Company and planted potatoes on the banks of a Washington river, only to have the river flood and destroy the entire crop.
Largely due to Grant being separated from Julia, he spent much of his California posting feeling miserable. It appeared his wife showed little concern for his feelings during their separation, adding to his sadness. The twice-yearly mail steamer sometimes arrived empty of letters. He had a dream that Julia was dancing with others when he had not heard from her in months. This was all in Grant’s head. There is no reason to suspect that Julia was anything but devoted to her husband. She was certainly busy raising two young children, and already proved to be not much of a writer. During the Mexican War he often complained about the lack of mail received from her.
As far as Grant was concerned the only solution was to resign from the Army and return to his family and make a go of it somehow as a civilian. So on April 11, 1854, he wrote the War Department and resigned, effective July 31. There remains much controversy over the exact reason Grant resigned. Rumors circulated around the army that Grant was forced to resign by the Fort Humbolt post commander, Robert C. Buchanan. It is suggested that Grant was threatened with court-martial by Buchanan for excessive drinking, or resign instead. There is no documentation to support this claim, but regardless, Grant was now thought of as a drunkard by the army officer corps and this was a hard stigma to shake. Despite the lack of facts to support he was a drinker, it haunted him throughout his life. His former West Point classmate and lifelong friend, Rufus Ingalls, claimed to know the real story:
Grant, finding himself in dreary surroundings, without his family, and with but little to occupy his attention, fell into dissipated habits, and was found one day, too much under influence of liquor to properly perform his duties. For this offense Colonel Buchanan demanded that he should resign, or stand trial. Grant’s friends at the time urged him to stand trial, and were confident of his acquittal; but, actuated by a noble spirit, he said he would not for all the world have his wife know that he had been tried on such a charge. He therefore, resigned his commission, and returned to civil life.3
Jesse Grant was not at all happy that his son was resigning from the Army and did his best to get him to reconsider. He tried unsuccessfully to block his son’s resignation, appealing to a senator and even to Secretary of War Jefferson Davis. But neither stood in Grant’s way and the resignation was approved. Jesse was clearly disappointed with his son. He recognized that his eldest had no business acumen and wondered what would become of him outside of the military where he had a job and received a steady salary. On July 31, 1854, Grant left the army, and not having the money to get back to Missouri, he had to borrow it from Simon Bolivar Buckner, another West Point classmate and friend.
Grant returned to New York and waited there for word from Julia that he would be welcomed home. When a less-than-warm response followed, he began the journey for St. Louis, arriving in August 1854. He described this bleak period many years later in his memoirs: “My family, all this while, was at the East. It consisted now of a wife and two children. I saw no chance of supporting them on the Pacific coast out of my pay as an army officer. I concluded, therefore, to resign, and in March applied for a leave of absence until the end of the July following, tendering my resignation to take effect at the end of that time.” Grant found civilian life to be just as hard as military service. Although he was back with Julia, making a living to support their family proved extremely difficult. He farmed the sixty acres south of St. Louis that his father-in-law had given Julia as a wedding present. The most valuable crop he produced on this land was firewood, which he sold in the city. To help him, he hired free blacks to whom he paid more than the prevailing wage, much to the consternation of the neighbors. He stopped drinking and worked long hours on the farm he named “Hardscrabble.” It was a perfect name for the property because no matter how hard he tried to make it prosper, the more difficult it became. On July 4, 1854, Julia gave birth to a daughter, Ellen. Her parents nicknamed her Nellie, and according to Julia, “being the only girl, [she] was forced to participate in amusements more suitable to boys, like marbles.” She was her father’s favorite, who always called her “my little daughter.”4
Grant was not the only “retired” officer having difficulties. In late 1857 Grant was walking in downtown St. Louis when he encountered William Tecumseh Sherman. They had last seen each other sixteen years ago at West Point, and like Grant, Sherman had resigned from the army. He left in 1853 to become a banker, but lost everything four years later in a panic that struck the United States in August 1857. The two former soldiers commiserated about their hard luck, and both concluded that “West Point and the Regular Army were not good schools for farmers, bankers, merchants and mechanics.”5 Indeed, by 1858 Grant recognized that farming could not support his family. He tried selling real estate and collecting rent in St. Louis with his father-in-law’s nephew Harry Boggs. They formed Boggs and Grant, but it largely failed because Grant just did not have it in him to collect rent or sell real estate. Grant was becoming distraught once again, which was exacerbated by a bout of chills and fever that left him debilitated for a time. All of this caused him to resume drinking. Adding to the stress was the birth of another child, Jesse.
Named for Grant’s father, he was born on February 6, 1858. “Jesse was a most important member of our household,” his mother later said. “He was first waited on at the table. His smallest word was listened to by all of us, and, if there was the least hint of a jest, he had an appreciative audience.” Jess, as his parents liked to call him, “would challenge his father to a wrestling match. His father would say: “I do not feel like fighting Jess, but I can’t stand being hectored in this manner by a man of your size.” Grant would then roll on the floor with Jess and act as though he was also a child.
Continuing to try to find steady employment, Grant applied for a job as county engineer, but failed to secure the position. He did however, work for a brief period as a clerk in the United States customs house, which paid a nice salary of twelve hundred dollars a year. But bad luck followed him again. He lost the job when the collector of customs died and he was replaced by a political appointee. Fed up, Grant realized he had to leave St. Louis and find work elsewhere. It was obvious to anyone who knew Grant that he was suffering terribly. His friend George W. Fishback recalled seeing him on the street: Grant was “shabbily dressed, his beard was unshorn, his face anxious, the whole exterior of the man denoting a profound discouragement at the result of his experiment to maintain himself in St. Louis.” Grant told Fishback, “I must leave, I can’t make a go of it here.”6
During his last year in St. Louis, Grant had a firsthand experience with slavery when he acquired a young slave named William Jones from Colonel Dent. Unlike his abolitionist father, Grant was ambivalent about slavery. When he made the decision to leave St. Louis, Grant briefly thought of selling Jones and certainly could have made a nice sum of money by doing so, but his morals got the better of him and he went to the circuit court and filed manumission papers to free the slave.
Determined to leave St. Louis, Grant wrote his father, asking for a job, and Jesse responded enthusiastically. His leather business had taken off, including retail outlets in the upper Mississippi Valley, and he offered his son employment at the firm’s headquarters in Galena, Illinois. Although the tannery profession was far from appealing, Grant eagerly accepted.
No other place in the United States is more associated with Ulysses S. Grant than Galena. Grant, Julia, and their four children packed up their belongings in St. Louis and boarded the steamer Itasca for the journey north on the Mississippi. About 144 miles northwest of Chicago, Galena was an impressive place in May 1860, with a population of about 14,000, many of whom lived in the town’s 3,500 houses of either frame or brick. The Grants settled into a small rented brick home on South High Street, on a bluff high above the river. The house provided a perfect view of the downtown business district, including the Milwaukee block where the firm of J. R. Grant, his family’s leather store, was located. It was Jesse’s idea that his eldest son would help out since his younger brother Simpson was sick with consumption. He was to receive a salary of eight hundred dollars a year.
He had little work to do, so his brothers gave him menial tasks about the shop. 7 Grant was a poor salesman and never liked to wait on customers. If someone came in the shop and the clerks were absent, he told him to wait a few minutes till one of the clerks returned. If the person couldn’t wait, the general went behind the counter rather reluctantly and dragged down whatever the customer wanted without hardly knowing the price of it. In nine cases out of ten he charged either too much or too little. He would rather talk about the Mexican War than wait on a loyal customer.
Grant took part in political discussions at the local debating club, as well as drills of the “Wide Awakes,” described as a Republican club that Grant frequently assisted in military exercises. He also liked spending time with children. One local citizen, John C. Smith, remembered that the spring of 1860 in Galena was wet, “the river overflowing its banks and flooding Main Street. When going uptown I had to pass the Grant store in front of which several boys were engaged in sailing boats and with them I saw Captain Grant whittling shingles, putting in a stick or two to make sloop or schooner, helping dress the fore and aft rig with paper sails and there was no one of the party seemingly enjoying himself more than our future president.”
Among those Grant immediately impressed was Reverend John H. Vincent. He first met Grant on a cold morning in 1860 at the Dubuque Hotel in Galena. Grant was a member of Vincent’s congregation and struck up a conversation with him about secession, a topic that was on the mind of just about everyone in the United States. “His knowledge of men and measures, discrimination, animation and earnestness,” Vincent recalled, “both surprised and fascinated me.” Grant was an imposing figure that day. “Standing by the fire, in his old army overcoat, his hands clasped behind him,” Grant reminded Vincent of “the picture of Napoleon.” The former emperor of France was often painted with either his right hand tucked inside his coat or both hands clasped behind his back. Officers of Grant’s generation often posed this way for their portraits or official photographs.
Prior to the Civil War, Galena was an important stop within the trade routes of the Mississippi Valley. The Galena River was a headwaters navigation port for river trade that extended as far east as Chicago. The city was surrounded by towering hills. From their rented house Grant could see the spire of the Methodist Episcopal Church in the valley below where each Sunday, at Julia’s encouragement, they would go to worship. At the bottom of a steep stairway of several hundred steps stood the little Methodist church of brick, and there Captain Grant, his wife, and their flock of four small children7 were to be seen almost as regularly as the deacons themselves—they even had their own pew.
During the fall of 1860 it was time for Americans to select a new president. The next resident of the White House would have to concern himself with the issue of secession by the southern states. Grant had voted for James Buchanan in the presidential election of 1856 and considered himself a Douglas Democrat over Lincoln because he feared that Republican victory would break up the Union. As the country split further apart over states’ rights and slavery, Grant saw that war was inevitable, and he wanted to do his part to preserve the Union. Secession became a daily topic of discussion in the store, and Grant was an active participant. When he heard William R. Rowley, clerk of the circuit court, proclaim, “There’s a great deal of bluster about the Southerners, but I don’t think there’s much fight in them,” Grant told him this was not true. “There’s a good deal of bluster; that’s the result of their education, but if they once get at it they will make a strong fight.”8 And Grant was absolutely correct—as the next four years would prove.