And there shall arise . . . seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt. . . .
GENESIS 41:30
THE MEXICAN WAR ENDED with the capture of Mexico City. The American army remained another ten months because there was no government in Mexico capable of concluding a peace treaty. In late September, after a desultory attempt to besiege Scott’s base at Puebla, Santa Anna resigned and went into hiding. A provisional government was not elected until November, and negotiations did not get underway until December. In the meantime Nicholas Trist had been recalled by Polk, who held him responsible for the failure of the earlier armistice. Instead of obeying his instructions, Trist stayed, and at Scott’s urging successfully negotiated the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, signed on February 2, 1848.1 Under the terms of the treaty, Mexico ceded all of the land north of the Rio Grande, New Mexico (including Arizona), and Upper California. The United States, for its part, relinquished its demand for the Baja Peninsula (Lower California) and agreed to pay the claims of various American citizens against Mexico. It also agreed to provide $15 million directly to the Mexican government. Polk embraced the treaty, faced down Democratic efforts to annex northern Mexico, and then petulantly relieved both Scott and Trist. The Senate gave its consent to the treaty on March 10, 1848, and the Mexican National Congress followed suit on May 30.2
For Grant, the ten months of peacetime service in Mexico were among the happiest of his life. Although he longed for Julia, he developed a deep affection for Mexico and the Mexican people. “No country was ever so blessed by nature,” Grant wrote his betrothed. “There is no fruit nor grain that can’t be raised here nor no temperature that can’t be found at any season. You have only to choose the degree of elevation to find perpetual snow or the hottest summer.”3 Later, as his impressions deepened and his knowledge of Spanish improved, Grant wrote that he pitied Mexico. Despite fertile soil and a wonderful climate, “She has more poor and starving subjects who are willing and able to work than any country in the world. The rich keep down the poor with a hardness of heart that is incredible.”4
The day the fighting stopped, September 14, 1847, Grant was still a second lieutenant. “I had gone into the Battle of Palo Alto a second lieutenant and I entered Mexico City sixteen months later with the same rank, after having been in all the engagements possible for any one man, in a regiment that lost more officers during the war than it ever had present at any one engagement.”5 With peace established, retroactive promotions came quickly. On September 16 Grant was advanced to the permanent rank of first lieutenant in the regular army, and given two temporary promotions for bravery under fire: to first lieutenant with date of rank as of September 8, 1847, “for gallant and meritorious conduct in the Battle of Molino del Rey”; and to captain with date of rank September 13, for his role at the San Cosmé garita. The temporary promotions allowed Grant to wear the insignia and assume the duties of a captain, although he was paid as a first lieutenant and would revert to that rank when the army returned to the United States.
Grant’s belated promotions allowed him to join the eight men in his class who had already become captains. Sixteen classmates received one temporary promotion and were first lieutenants, and ten, most of whom did not see action in Mexico, remained second lieutenants. Four men in Grant’s class were killed in action. That was a relatively low ratio. Between 1802 and 1847 West Point graduated 1,365 officers. Over one third left the army for civil life, but of those remaining, 286 perished in Mexico.6 For the survivors, the Mexican War had been an opportunity to practice their trade under grueling conditions. It was a proving ground that established the value of military professionalism and gave firsthand experience to a generation of American officers. It also revealed the distinction between the theory of battle as taught at West Point and the practice of war in the field. Cadets who thrived on the aphorisms of Napoleon, men such as Henry W. Halleck and George B. McClellan, found the reality of conflict unsettling.7 On the other hand many of Grant’s friends, men like Thomas J. Jackson and D. H. Hill, discovered their calling. Jackson graduated well down in the class of 1846—three years after Grant—yet was now a major in the field artillery. Wounded twice, he had won three brevets for gallantry. Hill, who was sometimes called “the bravest man in the army,”8 was also a major. So too was Longstreet. Braxton Bragg advanced three ranks, moving from first lieutenant to lieutenant colonel, as did Joseph E. Johnston, another officer Grant admired. Robert E. Lee and Joseph Hooker, who began the war as captains, were now colonels. P. G. T. Beauregard, George H. Thomas, and Don Carlos Buell jumped two ranks, from first lieutenant to major. Meade and Buckner, like Grant, advanced two grades and were captains, as was William Tecumseh Sherman, who served in the relatively bloodless conquest of California. Hooker said that as practical soldiers, Buell, Thomas, and Bragg stood highest in the estimation of the army.9 Sherman shared that assessment.10 Grant noted he had served with more than fifty officers “who afterwards became generals on one side or the other in the rebellion, many of them holding high commands.”
The acquaintance thus formed was of immense service to me. . . . I do not pretend that all movements, or even many of them, were made with special reference to the characteristics of the commander against whom they were directed. But my appreciation of my enemies was certainly affected by this knowledge. The natural disposition of most people is to clothe a commander of a large army with superhuman abilities. A large part of the National army, for instance, and most of the press of the country, clothed General Lee with such qualities. But I had known him personally, and knew that he was mortal; and it was just as well that I felt this.11
During the occupation of Mexico, Grant’s regiment was stationed at Tacubaya, a small village four miles southwest of the capital that, because of its higher elevation, was healthier and more accommodating. As regimental quartermaster, Grant found himself busier than most officers in garrison. Initially the problem was clothing. Scott’s army had not been resupplied and uniforms were torn and threadbare. It was Grant’s task to contract with Mexican seamstresses for replacements. That awakened an entrepreneurial impulse, perhaps inherited from his father. In order to raise money for the regimental fund, Grant entered the bakery business. “In two months I made more money for the fund than my pay amounted to for the entire war.”12 Grant was already unlucky with money, however. Thieves broke in and stole the chest in which he kept $1,000 in cash for the fund.13
With his fellow officers Grant explored the Mexican countryside: climbing almost to the rim of Popocatépetl’s volcano; spelunking the great limestone caves at Cuernavaca; attending the racetrack, the theater, and once, a bullfight. Grant left the arena early, sickened by the tormenting of the bulls. “I could not see how human beings could enjoy the sufferings of beasts, and often of men, as they seem to do on these occasions.”14
Grant missed Julia enormously. Regularly each month, as the mail wagon left for Veracruz, he wrote tenderly of his despair.15 When Longstreet, who had been wounded at Chapultepec, departed in January to marry Louise Garland in St. Louis, Grant was more despondent than ever. He asked for leave to return home but was refused.16 In February he pleaded with Julia to send her daguerrotype. “How very much I would like to have it to look at since I must be deprived of seeing the original.”17 In March he speculated about her joining him in Mexico. “How happy I should be if such a thing was possible. If you were here I should never wish to leave Mexico, but as it is I am nearly crazy to get away.”18 Time grew heavy. “There is a great deal of talk of peace here now,” Grant wrote in early May. “It is too bad, ain’t it? Just think we have been engaged almost four years and have met but once in that time, that was three years ago.”19
When the Mexican National Congress accepted the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo on May 30, 1848, Grant knew his separation from Julia was nearly over. In June the army began to withdraw, division by division, back to the coast for passage home. General Worth’s division was the last to leave. Worth, who placed great faith in military symbols, claimed to have been the first man across the Arroyo Colorado, the first into Monterrey, Veracruz, Puebla, and Mexico City. He insisted on being the last to ride out.20 On July 16, after an uneventful march to the sea, the 4th Infantry boarded transports bound for the United States. One week later Grant landed in Pascagoula, Mississippi, and immediately received a two-month leave of absence.21 Booking passage on the first available steamer heading upriver from New Orleans, he arrived in St. Louis on July 28. The Dents were not at White Haven that year; they were spending the summer in the city. Julia, awaiting Grant’s arrival, was surprised when the bronzed captain of infantry strode up to the house on Fourth Street. Grant had changed noticeably in three years; Julia less so. Although Julia was the only woman he ever loved, Sam Grant had become a man of the world: self-assured, secure in his profession, accustomed to command. The Dents noticed he was “sturdier and more reserved in manner.”22 He no longer thought of resigning from the army and becoming a professor, and did not renew his application to teach at West Point. Although he was eager to marry Julia, Grant had decided to remain on active duty. His first lieutenant’s salary, almost $1,000 a year, including rations for his family and fodder for his horses, would provide a secure livelihood.
Julia set the wedding for August 22. St. Louis society took on a decidedly martial tone with the return of the army to Jefferson Barracks, and the family’s comfortable town house overflowed with Southern belles and officers in full dress. Longstreet, who was Julia’s cousin, was Grant’s best man; his messmate, Cadmus Wilcox, and Bernard Pratte of St. Louis served as ushers. All three would surrender to Grant at Appomattox. At 8 P.M. the knot was tied. “My wedding cake was a marvel of beauty,” wrote Julia. “We had music, and I think two of my bridesmaids took a turn around the room.”23 The following day, the couple left for the home of Grant’s parents, sailing down the Mississippi to its confluence with the Ohio, and then upstream to Louisville and Cincinnati. Julia marveled at the steamboat on which they traveled. “It seemed to me almost human in its breathing, panting, and obedience to man’s will. Then I enjoyed sitting alone with Ulys. He asked me to sing to him, something low and sweet, and I did as he requested.”24
Following its return to the United States, the 4th Infantry was assigned to frontier duty on the Canadian border. Regimental headquarters was established at Detroit and the various companies were dispatched to a string of small posts from Sault Ste. Marie in Michigan to Plattsburgh and Sackets Harbor in New York. This was the peacetime army. Officers were reduced to their permanent rank, a parsimonious Congress pared the active-duty strength of the military establishment to 8,000 men, and command of the 4th Infantry reverted to Colonel William Whistler, an elderly relic whom Taylor had relieved at Matamoros and sent home. After an extended honeymoon, Grant, with his new bride, reported for duty November 17, 1848. He recognized that this was a different army from the one he had known in Mexico. Instead of assigning him to Detroit, where his duties as quartermaster required his presence, Whistler ordered Grant to join the two rifle companies at Sackets Harbor. Whistler’s decision reflected ignorance, not spite. Not having served in the Mexican campaign he was unfamiliar with the post of regimental quartermaster Taylor had created and simply assumed it had expired at war’s end. To him, Grant was another lieutenant available for troop duty.25
Grant objected to the posting as soon as he was informed. This was a different Grant from the young plebe who obligingly changed his name to suit the military academy’s bureaucracy. Two years of combat duty had hardened him. Perhaps Grant took himself too seriously, but he understood his prerogatives as an officer and knew he was still regimental quartermaster. He may also have wanted to remain with Julia in Detroit, rather than subject her to the rigors of an outlying detachment. “I will, of course, obey your orders, Colonel Whistler, but you must know that I will make a remonstrance at once to Washington.”26
Because it was late in the year and the lakes were closed to navigation, Grant and Julia made the overland trek to Sackets Harbor, a remote village on the east shore of Lake Ontario, arriving on December 2.27 The post, designated Madison Barracks in honor of the fourth president, had been established after the War of 1812. It was twenty-five miles below Fort Frontenac, the main British base on the Canadian border, and was an important link in America’s northern defense chain.28 When Grant arrived he discussed his assignment with the garrison commander, an old friend from Mexico, Colonel Francis Lee. (It was Lee who recommended Grant be decorated for gallantry at the San Cosmé garita.)29 Despite the fact he was short of officers at Madison Barracks, Lee agreed that Grant’s proper place was in Detroit. Accordingly, with Lee’s approval, Grant wrote to Major General John E. Wool, commander of the Eastern Department, requesting orders be cut returning him to regimental headquarters. “In no way, either by resignation or removal, have I vacated the office of Regimental Quarter-Master, neither has the Colonel Commanding ever considered that I have.”30 Lee endorsed the request (“Lieutenant Grant has unquestionably been hardly and wrongly done by”),31 and General Wool concurred. On March 2, 1849, Grant received orders transferring him back to Detroit.32
Because of the mistaken assignment, Grant and Julia spent the winter of their first year of marriage at Madison Barracks. Ironically, it proved a delightful sojourn. Grant’s duties were not arduous, and he and his new bride enjoyed their quiet time together. They set up housekeeping, Grant gave Julia a monthly allowance (which she usually exceeded), and they settled into the comfortable routine of garrison life on the northern frontier. Servants were plentiful, Julia enjoyed entertaining (though she seldom cooked), and the Grant household became a model of domesticity. “Grant, you look so happy, so comfortable here, that we are all almost tempted to get married ourselves,” Julia quoted several bachelor officers as saying.33
In the spring of 1849, when the lakes thawed, Grant returned to Detroit. Julia took advantage of the transfer to visit her parents at White Haven, stopping to see Grant’s parents en route. Grant adapted easily to the routine at regimental headquarters, and rented a five-room frame house that he furnished and had ready for Julia when she arrived in July. Duty in Detroit was, if anything, less demanding than at Sackets Harbor. Grant filled his leisure hours tending his horses, racing them occasionally down Jefferson Avenue, while Julia occupied herself with the house parties and entertaining incumbent upon an officer’s wife.34 In the spring of the following year, the Grants’ first child was born, named Frederick Dent Grant in honor of Julia’s father.
As the months passed, duty at regimental headquarters lost its attraction for Grant. He had relished being quartermaster in Mexico, where added responsibilities heightened the excitement of service in the field. In Detroit, he discovered that peacetime paperwork offered little challenge. “I was no clerk, nor had I any capacity to become one. The only place I ever found in my life to put a piece of paper so as to find it again was either a side coat-pocket or in the hands of a clerk more careful than myself.”35 A brother officer noted Grant “read little, smoked a pipe incessantly, [and] was regarded as a restless, energetic man, who must have occupation, and plenty of it, for his own good.”36
Grant received a respite from his ennui in the spring of 1851 when the War Department reduced the size of its installation in Detroit, moving the headquarters of the 4th Infantry to the field. Colonel Whistler was given the choice of Fort Niagara or Madison Barracks, and to Grant’s delight he chose the latter. Grant wrote Julia (who was visiting her parents) that he was glad the colonel’s wife was out of town when the order arrived from Washington. “The old lady disliked Sackets Harbor very much. You know . . . that if she had been here the Col. would never have dared make the change.”37 As quartermaster, Grant supervised the move, and he and Julia were pleased to be back among old friends at Madison Barracks.38 That spring brought another pleasant surprise when Grant was restored to the temporary rank of captain.39 The War Department, under General Scott’s direction, was sorting out the officer corps and many of the brevet ranks awarded in Mexico were reactivated.
Grant’s second assignment to Sackets Harbor was short-lived. The discovery of gold in California triggered a tidal wave of prospectors and settlers to the state, and in the spring of 1852 the 4th Infantry was ordered to reinforce the slender American garrison on the West Coast. For Grant it was a mixed blessing. On the one hand he relished the adventure of going to California, but on the other, Julia was eight months pregnant with their second child and in no condition to face the perils of such a trip. As quartermaster, Grant energetically undertook arrangements to assemble the regiment on Governors Island in New York harbor preparatory to sailing, and did his utmost to insure that dependents accompanying the unit were accommodated. When Julia insisted on going despite her condition, Grant’s better judgment prevailed. “You know how loath I am to leave you, but crossing Panama is an undertaking for one in robust health.”40 It was agreed that Julia would go first to Grant’s parents in Ohio, and then on to White Haven. He would send for her and the children as soon as it was possible.41
The California posting marked a watershed in Grant’s life. He was instinctively a loner, but after four years of marriage he and Julia had become inseparable. She filled a void he had never known existed, and he depended upon her more than he realized. Separation would prove more than he could bear. In the spring of 1852 neither Grant nor Julia anticipated they would be separated for a long period of time. And while he was involved in organizing the regiment’s move, Grant did not feel her absence keenly. But when he said farewell to Julia on June 15, 1852, a new phase of his life began: a phase characterized by misery, misfortune, and failure.
Grant arrived at Governors Island with the rifle companies from upstate New York on June 19. It would take a week or more for the detachments from Michigan to arrive, and a sailing date had not been set. “All preparation for starting devolves on me,” he wrote Julia, “so that I am the only one who cannot get a leave of absence.”42 Grant did manage a brief trip to Washington, his first visit to the capital, where he unsuccessfully attempted to settle the matter of the $1,000 stolen from the regimental fund in Mexico. A military board of inquiry had found Grant was not to blame, and the War Department lost interest after that.43 But federal statutes prevented government auditors from writing off the loss, and so the deficit was carried forward from year to year on the books of the 4th Infantry.44 This gnawed at Grant. He considered it a point of honor to have the record cleared, and since only Congress could provide relief, he decided to lay his case before the Military Affairs Committee of the House of Representatives.45 It was a quixotic effort. When he arrived in Washington, Congress was in recess mourning the death of Henry Clay, and Grant returned to Governors Island empty-handed.I
On July 5, 1852, the 4th Infantry sailed from New York on the steamship Ohio. Moving a complete infantry regiment with its equipment and dependents to the Pacific Coast was a daunting undertaking in the 1850s. The army had never attempted such an enterprise by sea and the quartermaster general’s office, which made the arrangements, had been lulled into false optimism by the Mexican War. Scott and Taylor had moved their armies from the Gulf Coast to Mexico and back with little difficulty, and staff planners simply extrapolated. As the War Department saw it, the 4th Infantry’s move divided into three phases: a steamer from New York to Panama; an overland trek across the isthmus; and then another steamer to San Francisco. Simple on paper, but fraught with danger for a unit exceeding 700 men, women, and children with no base of support along the way. “How little did we realize what awaited us,” recalled Delia Sheffield, the wife of a sergeant in Company H. “Had we known a tithe of the perils of the trip and that nearly one-half of the brave fellows who took ship with us, with such pleasant anticipations and high hopes, would not live to reach their journey’s end, we should have shrunk in horror for the embarkation.”46
The 4th Infantry’s travail began when it boarded the Ohio. The 3,000-ton side-wheeler, one of the newest plying the New York–Panama route, was designed to carry 330 passengers in comfortable cabins on three relatively spacious decks.47 But these facilities were completely booked when the War Department decided to send the 4th Infantry. As a result, the regiment spent ten days on open decks, eleven hundred persons sharing accommodations designed for one third that number.48 The combination of overcrowding and exposure took its toll. Despite calm seas, seasickness was rampant and the troops disembarked considerably weakened by the voyage.
The discomfort aboard ship was merely a prelude to the chaos that met the regiment when it went ashore. It was the rainy season in Panama. A cholera epidemic was raging and the local transportation arranged by the War Department failed to materialize. Grant, who was responsible for the regiment’s logistics, confronted the crisis with the calm determination that would become his hallmark. He discharged the local contractor, sent the able-bodied men ahead, used his knowledge of Spanish to rent pack animals on the open market—regulations to the contrary notwithstanding—and then organized a mule train of dependents and baggage that he led single file across the mountains.49 Meanwhile, cholera worked its will. “Men were dying every hour,” wrote Grant. Delia Sheffield said, “The ravages of the disease were dreadful. We did not know who would be the next victim, and it grew to be a common sight to see strong men be taken with cramps and die in a short time.” She credited Grant and the surgeons with great presence of mind and tireless energy in checking the spread of the disease. “It was not an easy task to control almost seven hundred men during a siege of cholera, for they grew nervous and panic-stricken and Captain Grant had not only the sick ones to contend with but also the well.”50
When the regiment reached Panama City on the Pacific Coast, the disease was raging even more virulently. Grant established a field hospital on nearby Flamingo Island and moved the worst cases to an old barge anchored a mile off shore. When orderlies balked at tending the sick, Grant undertook the nursing himself. “He was like a ministering angel to us all,” said one survivor. Another called Grant a “man of iron, so far as endurance went, seldom sleeping, and then only two or three hours at a time.” Captain Henry Wallen, who served with Grant throughout the Mexican War, recalled that when cholera struck, Grant was one of the few who kept his head. “He was the coolest man I ever saw.”51 Grant survived the epidemic unscathed, but would often reflect upon the suffering he saw. “The horrors are beyond description,” he wrote Julia.52 “Every child of Fred’s age or younger, and there were twenty of them, either died on the crossing or shortly thereafter.”53 Those who knew Grant in later years said he talked more about Panama than any of his battles.54 Certainly his recollection of crossing the isthmus remained vivid. In his first presidential message to Congress, December 6, 1869, he recommended construction of a canal linking the two oceans, and instructed the navy to explore various Central American alternatives.55, II
By early August 1852 the cholera epidemic had run its course. After three weeks on the isthmus, 450 survivors of the regiment boarded the steamship Golden Gate for passage to San Francisco. According to shipping figures, about 35,000 passengers made the journey across Panama that year, but none suffered more severely than the 4th Infantry.56 The Panama Herald wrote, “There is great fault somewhere and just censure should be meted out . . . the whole business reflects great discredit upon the United States.”57 Military authorities in California blamed the War Department, recommending that in the future troops be sent by ship around Cape Horn. “Recent experience has shown that, unless in a case of emergency, the Isthmus is a very trying route, causing much sickness, and a great loss in public property, besides doubling the expense, compared with the other route. The 4th Infantry, which recently arrived, show the impractibility as their loss has been great, while those who have arrived are broken down by disease, the seeds of which were engendered in the Isthmus.”58 Grant wrote Julia, “There is great accountability somewhere for the loss which we have sustained,” but he declined to point his finger at anyone.59
After two uneventful weeks at sea, the Golden Gate tied up at San Francisco’s long wharf the evening of August 17, 1852. The gold rush was at its height. California, which was admitted to the Union in 1850, and whose population barely totaled 20,000 in 1848, now numbered 225,000 with more than 50,000 persons arriving annually.60 San Francisco, a simple fishing village in 1849, boasted almost a fifth of the total. Eggs sold for $10 a dozen and a shot of whiskey cost a pinch of gold. Grant called the city “the wonder of the world. It has been burned down three times and rebuilt each time better than before.”61 In his words: “Steamers plied daily between San Francisco and both Stockton and Sacramento. Passengers and gold from the southern mines came by the Stockton boat; from the northern mines by Sacramento. In the evening when those boats arrived, Long Wharf was alive with people crowding to meet the miners as they came down to sell their ‘dust’ and to ‘have a time.’ ”62
Grant was caught up in the excitement. His first evening ashore he won $40 at faro and treated himself to a splendid dinner.63 Three days later he wrote Julia he had “seen enough of California to know that it is different from anything that a person in the states could imagine in their wildest dreams. There is no reason why an active, energetic person should not make a fortune a year.” Already officers such as Henry Halleck and Joseph Hooker were amassing money moonlighting (Halleck as a lawyer, Hooker speculating in land), and Grant raised the possibility of leaving the army. In one year, he told Julia, he could make enough money “to make us comfortable” for the rest of our lives. “Of course I do not contemplate doing anything of the sort, because what I have is a certainty, and what I might expect to do, might prove a dream.”64 Nevertheless, the lure of easy money beckoned. Having miraculously avoided infection by cholera in Panama, Grant was bitten by the gold bug as soon as he landed in California. Years later, matured by his own unhappy experience, he wrote with wry understatement that “those early days in California brought out character.”65
The 4th Infantry remained in the San Francisco area four weeks. Grant spent the time visiting Julia’s two brothers, who had struck it rich operating a hotel and ferry service on the Stanislaus River—midway between San Francisco and the diggings. Grant’s envy was manifest. He told Julia “there are three stages per day, each way, crossing at the ferry, and generally come loaded with eight to twelve passengers each. All of these stop at the hotel and dine.” Dinner cost $1 and the ferry $2. The brothers also ran a livery service and a cattle ranch—“all worth about tribble what they would be in the Atlantic States. . . . [A]s to profits they are clearing about fifty to one hundred dollars daily.”66
In mid-September the 4th Infantry boarded ship for passage to its final destination, Fort Vancouver on the Columbia River. The regiment was ordered to spread its force over northern California and the Oregon Territory to protect the incoming settlers. Regimental headquarters would be at Fort Vancouver, the former headquarters of Great Britain’s Hudson’s Bay Company, about six miles down the Columbia from Portland in what is now the state of Washington. At the beginning of the nineteenth century the Hudson’s Bay Company enjoyed a monopoly of the fur trade on the Pacific Coast and was a leading force in the settlement of the region. A territorial dispute between the United States and Great Britain riled relations between the two nations for decades, but in 1846 the Polk administration concluded a treaty with the government of Lord Aberdeen fixing the boundary at the 49th parallel. The treaty was a compromise between the American demand expressed in the slogan “Fifty-four Forty or Fight” and the British desire to set the boundary at the north bank of the Columbia River. The final outcome left Fort Vancouver in American hands. The Hudson’s Bay Company moved its headquarters northward to Victoria Island in British Columbia, but continued to do business in the region until the Civil War.67
Grant settled easily into the routine at Fort Vancouver. Unfortunately, without Julia, he was soon adrift on a sea of financial speculation. “Living is expensive,” he wrote his wife in early October, “but I have made fifteen hundred dollars since I have been here and I have every confidence that I shall make more than five thousand within the year.”68 The profit was illusory, and the first in a long string of financial misadventures had begun. Grant seldom met a man he did not trust, and all too often his trust was misplaced. In this case the man was Elijah Camp, a merchant from Sackets Harbor who accompanied the 4th Infantry to San Francisco. Camp persuaded Grant to go into partnership in a sutler’s store: Grant to provide the capital, Camp to run the store. The enterprise prospered initially, and after a month Camp offered to buy Grant out for $1,500. Rather than paying cash, however, he gave Grant an unsecured note for that amount. In the spring of 1853 Camp tired of California, sold out, and returned to Sackets Harbor still owing Grant for his original investment. Afterward, Julia chided her husband for his credulity. “Compared to you, the Vicar of Wakefield’s Moses was a financier.”69, III
Grant’s ill-fated deal with Camp was just the beginning. In the autumn of 1852 he began buying cattle and hogs to sell in the spring. Captain Henry Wallen threw in with him and took the animals to market. “We continued that business until both of us lost all the money we had,” said Wallen.70 Later that winter Grant, Wallen, and Grant’s West Point classmate Rufus Ingalls, who was also stationed at Fort Vancouver, heard ice was selling for an outrageous price in San Francisco. They cut and loaded 100 tons aboard a sailing schooner bound for the metropolis and waited for their windfall. The windfall came, but it was a headwind blowing offshore that retarded the vessel’s progress by two weeks. The ice melted and their investment was lost.71
Then, in the spring of 1853, Grant, Wallen, and two fellow officers decided they could make money farming. They leased 100 acres from the Hudson’s Bay Company, bought horses, a wagon, harness, farming implements, seed stock, and hired enlisted men to clear the underbrush. The costs were substantial. “Seed potatoes cost $2 a bushel,” Grant wrote Julia, “and I shall put in 200 bushels.”72 In early March, prospects looked good. “By the end of the coming week myself and partners will have planted twenty acres of potatoes and an acre of onions. In a week or two more we will plant a few acres of corn.”73 Grant said he was farming in earnest. “All the ploughing and furrowing I do myself. I was surprised to find that I could run as straight a furrow now as I could fifteen years ago and work all day quite as well. I never worked before with so much pleasure either, because now I feel sure that every day will bring a large reward.”74
Grant also bought an enormous quantity of timber, which he had cut and stacked to sell to incoming steamboats. “I will get $2.50 per cord more than it cost me to get it cut,” he wrote Julia.75 But disaster struck. In late spring the snow on the Cascade range melted, the Columbia River flooded, and the officers’ vegetable crop was destroyed. The potatoes and onions rotted in the ground, the grain was washed away, and the wood had to be removed and restacked, wiping out the profit Grant anticipated.76
Desperate to recoup their investment, Grant and Wallen entered the chicken business. They bought up all the chickens within twenty miles of Fort Vancouver, chartered a vessel, and shipped them off to San Francisco. Once again the vessel was delayed, the chickens died, and they lost the money they put into the effort.77 The would-be moguls turned next to the entertainment business. Remembering their experience at the Aztec Club in Mexico City—a social club established by American officers after the armistice—they leased space in the Union Hotel in San Francisco and hired an agent to operate it as a social club and billiard room. San Francisco was full of unattached males and the idea looked foolproof. However, the agent they hired absconded with the officers’ funds. Yet another project had miscarried.78 Wallen expressed the problem succinctly. “Neither Grant nor myself had the slightest suggestion of business talent. He was the perfect soul of honor and truth, and believed everyone as artless as himself.”79
Grant longed for Julia. Her first letter did not arrive until December 1852, and by then he was desperate for news of her and the children. Whether she had given birth successfully, whether it was a boy or a girl, whether they were well and properly cared for—all of this he had yet to hear. “Just think, our youngest is at this moment probably over three months of age, and yet I have never heard a word from it,” he wrote that fall.80 On December 3 the mail drought ended and the steamer brought four long-delayed letters from Julia. Grant was beside himself. “When I got these letters I jumped with joy. You have no idea how happy it made me feel.”81 But the mail steamer came to Fort Vancouver only twice a month, and even when it did bring a letter from Julia, it was a poor substitute for the companionship Grant needed. By year’s end he was more dispirited than ever. “I would prefer sacrificing my commission and try something [else] to continuing this separation. If I could see Fred and hear him talk, and see little Ulys [his second son, Ulysses S. Grant, Jr., born July 22, 1852], I could then be contented provided their mother was with them.”82
As Grant’s financial situation deteriorated his letters became more melancholy. Repeatedly he asked about the children. “Does Fred know his letters yet?”83 “What does the S stand for in Ulys’s name? In mine you know it does not stand for anything.”84 “Does Ulys walk yet?”85 Julia’s letters to Grant have been lost, but from his replies it is apparent she encouraged him to resign and go into business with his father. Grant was not convinced. “I have heard nothing of the proposition to resign that you spoke of. I shall weigh the matter carefully before I act.”86
Separated from his wife and children, and in despair over his failure to earn the money that might enable them to join him on the West Coast, Grant began to drink more than was good for him. The army was a harddrinking outfit in those years, especially on the frontier where officers were without family. Virtually everyone drank, and drank quite a lot, but in Grant’s case a little liquor went a long way.87 His slight frame (Grant stood five feet seven inches and weighed 135 pounds) would have limited his capacity in any event, but his metabolism was such that every drink showed. A couple of swallows slurred his speech, and a drink or two made him drunk.88 Lieutenant Henry Hodges, a close friend of Grant’s who served with him at Fort Vancouver, said the future commanding general recognized his problem and usually abstained. “He would perhaps go on two or three sprees a year, but was always open to reason, and when spoken to on the subject would own up and promise to stop drinking, which he did.”89
In 1853 Grant’s “sprees” became more frequent and for the first time began to affect his performance. One of Grant’s responsibilities as quartermaster was to outfit the numerous survey parties dispatched by the War Department to map the Oregon Territory. One such party, headed by Captain George B. McClellan, arrived at Fort Vancouver in July, intent on exploring the Cascade range and locating, if possible, a pass for the Northern Pacific Railroad. McClellan and Grant were acquainted from the Mexican War, and Little Mac had recently acquired professional prominence in the Corps of Engineers for his surveys of the Red River and the Texas coast. Grant worked diligently to assemble the horses and supplies McClellan needed.90 Before the task was finished, however, Grant began drinking and as Hodges recalled, “got on one of his little sprees, which annoyed and offended McClellan exceedingly, and in my opinion he never quite forgave Grant for it, notwithstanding the necessary transportation was soon in readiness.”91
Grant, who had held the temporary rank of captain since the spring of 1851, was now the ranking first lieutenant on the permanent roll of the 4th Infantry. The next vacancy among the regiment’s regular army captains would bring a permanent promotion and with it a new assignment and an increase in pay.IV In anticipation, Grant resigned as regimental quartermaster at the end of August 1853 and wrote the War Department requesting a return to Washington to settle his accounts. “I am particularly anxious to be present in Washington for the reason that I had public funds stolen from me during the Mexican War, and for which I have been petitioning Congress ever since.”92 Grant’s request was a cry for help. He missed Julia and the children terribly, and believed that if he returned to Washington he could retrieve them and bring them to California.93 Traveling under military orders would defray the costs. That was Grant’s rationale, and his commanding officer at Fort Vancouver, Lieutenant Colonel Benjamin Bonneville, endorsed the request.94 But the War Department turned Grant down. “There is no necessity for your presence at Washington to settle your accounts,” wrote the quartermaster general. “You have only to forward them and they will be properly settled.”95 Grant, in his brooding loneliness, had exaggerated his importance and convinced himself the War Department would order his return. Army regulations were specific as to how quartermaster accounts should be settled, however, and the refusal he received was routine.
Two weeks after writing to Washington, Grant received notification of his promotion to captain in the regular army.96 With the promotion he became an officer of the line and a company commander. Secretary of War Jefferson Davis instructed him to “proceed, without delay, to join your company (F) at Fort Humboldt, California.”97 Located on a high bluff above Humboldt Bay, 250 miles north of San Francisco, the post to which Grant was assigned had been established by the 4th Infantry shortly after its arrival on the Pacific Coast. It was remote and largely inaccessible except by water, but its idyllic location amidst the towering redwood forests of northern California made it a desirable posting and many of Grant’s contemporaries considered it preferable to Fort Vancouver.98 The garrison consisted of two companies—B and F—and the commanding officer was Brevet Lieutenant Colonel Robert C. Buchanan, a West Point graduate of the class of 1830 who, like Grant, had spent his entire military career in the 4th Infantry. Buchanan was “old army”—a phrase used by soldiers to describe a commanding officer more punctilious than the situation required. Lieutenant Hodges considered him “a very good soldier but a martinet.”99 Breveted twice for gallantry in the Mexican War—it was said he forced the doors of Molino del Rey with his bare hands100—Buchanan was the senior captain in the regular army in 1853 and there is no question he ran a tight ship. The inspector general rated Fort Humboldt highly. “The discipline is good, arms and equipment in good serviceable order, and attention paid to the comforts of the men.”101
Grant was dubious about his new assignment. There were no family quarters at Fort Humboldt and mail delivery was even more irregular than at Fort Vancouver. On the other hand, Buchanan was due for permanent promotion to major and as Grant told Julia, “I should [then] have command of the post, with double rations and two companies.”102 Nevertheless, Grant was in no rush to join his new command. He took three months to settle his accounts at Fort Vancouver, and did not arrive until January 5, 1854. Two weeks later Grant wrote Julia that his feelings about Fort Humboldt were mixed. The remoteness was unbearable. “Imagine a place . . . closed in by a bay that can be entered only with certain winds.”103 But F Company was better than he expected. “All the men are old soldiers and very neat in their appearance. The contrast between them and the other company here is very great.” Grant’s company was only at one third of its authorized strength, however, and aside from garrison routine there was little to keep him busy. By early February the tedium got to him. Grant was suffering from the military equivalent of cabin fever. “You do not know how forsaken I feel here,” he wrote Julia. “I do nothing but sit in my room and read and occasionally take a short ride on one of the public horses.”104
A contractor who supplied the garrison with beef saw what was happening to Grant:
The line captain’s duties were fewer and less onerous than the quartermaster’s had been and the discipline was far more rigid and irksome. No greater misfortune could have happened to him than this enforced idleness. He had little work, no family with him, took no pleasure in the amusements of his fellow officers—dancing, billiards, hunting, fishing, and the like. The result was a common one. He took to liquor. Not in enormous quantities, for he drank far less than other officers. . . . [But] like Cassio, he had a poor brain for drinking.V The weakness did not belong to his character, for in all other respects he was a man of unusual self-control.105
As each day passed Grant’s loneliness increased. By mid-February he had not received a single letter and was not yet aware the War Department had denied his request to return to Washington. “The state of suspense I am in is scarcely bearable,” he wrote Julia. “I think I have been from my family quite long enough and sometimes I feel as though I could almost go home ‘nolens volens.’VI I presume, under ordinary circumstances, Humboldt would be a good enough place but the suspense I am in would make paradise form a bad picture.” Grant consoled himself with the thought that many were in a worse fix than he. “Misery loves company, and some have been separated much longer from their families than I have been.”106
The separation began to take a physical toll on Grant. For the first time in years he became ill—first with a tooth that had to be extracted, then with chills and fever. Fort Humboldt post returns list him as “sick” for the month of February.107 In March, utterly despondent, he wrote Julia he was “so anxious to see you, and our little boys, that I am almost tempted to resign and trust to Providence, and my own exertions for a living where I can have you and them with me. . . . Whenever I get to thinking upon the subject however poverty, poverty, begins to stare me in the face and then I think what would I do if you and our little ones should want for the necessities of life.”108 In the summer he planned an excursion out to the gold mines, and in the fall he would take a trip along the immigrant trail. “This will help pass off much of the time.”109
Despite the morose tone of his letters to Julia, there is no indication Grant planned to leave the army. To the contrary. On April 3 he wrote that he feared Fort Humboldt would be shut down and he would be transferred to a less desirable post in the interior. “The best we can hope for is Fort Jones [located on the Scott River in the mountains of northern California] where the buildings . . . are just rough log pens, covered over, with places for a door and windows but left without these luxuries as well as without floors.” Grant told Julia his health had improved and repeated his plans to spend a month on the trail.110
The following week, Grant resigned abruptly. Addressing a one-sentence letter to the adjutant general, he wrote:
I very respectfully tender my resignation of my commission as an officer of the Army, and request that it may take effect from the 31st of July next.
Very Respectfully,
Yr. Obt. Svt.
U.S. GRANT, Captain 4th Inf.111
That was it. No reason. No explanation. Only a simple declarative statement. Army gossip holds that Colonel Buchanan forced Grant’s resignation after discovering him inebriated during pay call. Because of Grant’s distinguished service in Mexico, Buchanan allegedly offered him the choice of resigning or being court-martialed, and Grant chose to resign. Lieutenant Hodges summarized the episode: “It seems that one day while his company was being paid off, Captain Grant was at the pay table, slightly under the influence of liquor. This came to the knowledge of Colonel Buchanan; he gave Grant the option of resigning or having charges preferred against him. Grant resigned at once.” Hodges said the regiment thought Colonel Buchanan “was unnecessarily harsh and severe,” and perhaps should have overlooked “this first small offence at his post.”112
Rufus Ingalls, who roomed with Grant plebe year at West Point and who remained his lifelong friend, corroborated the account. According to Ingalls:
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 the 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.113
The story rings true. Grant, in his letters to Julia, flirted with the idea of resigning but always backed off: “poverty, poverty, begins to stare me in the face.” The week before his resignation he wrote he was in good health and planned to spend a month in the mountains. He even seemed to appreciate Fort Humboldt’s attractions. There is no doubt he missed his family, had too little to do, and was drinking too much, but there is no evidence that he was seriously contemplating leaving the army. His resignation was too abrupt to have been a calculated move. And whatever one may say about Grant, precipitate action was not characteristic of his behavior.
Neither Grant nor Buchanan made any public comment about the episode—which lends further authenticity to the tale. If Buchanan were giving Grant an honorable way out, honor would dictate nothing more be said. Grant’s official explanation was that he resigned because he could not support his wife and children on the Pacific Coast on his army salary.114 Years later, however, he told educator John Eaton “the vice of intemperance had not a little to do with my decision to resign.”115 Buchanan said nothing until the Civil War, when he was pressed for details by one of his regimental commanders, at which point he confirmed that he had given Grant the choice of resigning or standing trial.116, VII
Julia’s reaction is difficult to determine. In her Memoirs she wrote simply, “After an absence of over two years, Captain Grant, to my great delight, resigned his commission in the U.S. Army and returned to me, his loving little wife.”117 The record, however, indicates Grant was sufficiently concerned as to what Julia’s response might be that he did not write her until May 2, the day after he was relieved of command, and even then did not mention he had resigned. The letter is curt, almost abrasive:
Dear Wife: I do not propose writing you but a few lines. I have not yet received a letter from you and as I have a “leave of absence” and will be away from here in a few days do not expect to. After receiving this you may discontinue writing because before I could get a reply I shall be on my way home. You might write directing [the letter] to the City of New York.118
Grant’s father was stunned when he heard the news. Grant had not written to him either. In early June, Jesse was informed by Congressman Andrew Ellison that the War Department had announced Grant’s resignation, effective July 31, 1854.119 Jesse intervened immediately. He was not aware of the circumstances but felt instinctively his son was making a mistake. Jesse urged Congressman Ellison to have the War Department order Grant home on recruiting duty, and if that were not possible, then to allow him a six-month leave of absence. Ellison, who was an old friend of the Grant family, transmitted Jesse’s request to Secretary of War Jefferson Davis, but to no avail.120 On June 7, 1854, Davis confirmed Grant had resigned, and that his resignation had been accepted. It is doubtful if Davis knew of the situation at Fort Humboldt, but the army had a surplus of officers after the Mexican War and only by death or resignation could that surplus be reduced.121 When Ellison informed Jesse of the secretary’s reply, Grant’s father wrote to Davis on his son’s behalf:
If it is consistent with your powers and the good of the service, I would be much gratified if you would reconsider and withdraw the acceptance of his resignation and grant him a six month leave, that he may come home and see his family.
I never wished him to leave the service. I think after spending so many years in the service, he will be poorly qualified for the pursuits of private life.122
Jesse told Davis that Grant had fought in all of the battles of the Mexican War except Buena Vista, and had a two-year-old son whom he had never seen. “Would it then be asking too much for him to have a leave that he may come home and make arrangements for taking his family to his post?” Davis replied that Grant had given no reasons as to why he wanted to leave the service and his motives were unknown. “He only asked that his resignation should take effect on the 31st July next and it was accepted accordingly. The acceptance is, therefore complete, and cannot be reconsidered.”123
Grant arrived in New York on June 25, 1854, dejected and virtually penniless.124 His passage from the West Coast had been arranged by Major Robert Allen, the chief quartermaster of the Pacific Division, an old friend from southern Ohio who did his utmost to assist.125 No letter from Julia was waiting for him when he arrived and Grant was uncertain whether he could return home.VIII Simon Bolivar Buckner, who was on commissary duty in New York, recalled Grant coming to his office for help. “He had been staying at the old Astor House and his money was gone. He asked for a loan in order to pay his bills at the hotel, and reach his father in southern Ohio.”126 Buckner took charge of Grant, guaranteed his bills at the Astor House, and urged him to write his father for money. For Grant that had been unthinkable—a humiliation he could not face. Reluctantly, he accepted Buckner’s advice. Jesse sent the money promptly, whereupon Grant paid his New York bills and bought a train ticket to Cincinnati. Buckner noted that when their positions were reversed after the surrender of Fort Donelson and “I became his prisoner, Grant tendered me the use of his purse. It showed his appreciation of my aid to him years before, which was really very little.”127
Grant did not leave New York immediately. He still had not heard from Julia and so decided to go to Sackets Harbor to collect the money Elijah Camp owed him. Grant wrote Camp he was coming, Camp left town, and Grant returned to New York so much the poorer for the trip.128 His only satisfaction was that Julia’s letter was waiting for him. Laying to rest his worst fears, it welcomed him home with open arms.129
Grant’s odyssey in the wilderness was just beginning. For the next seven years he would struggle to support his family, without capital, occasionally destitute, working with his hands to make ends meet. It was one of the lowest periods in Grant’s life. It was also a time of testing. As he and Julia faced hardship together, they rekindled a love that tided them through the worst times. He did not drink and he seldom lost hope. In 1862 he would defend the Union’s overrun position at Shiloh with the same stoicism and resolve. Grant recalled those lean years in Missouri with clarity:
In the late summer of 1854 I rejoined my family, to find a son I had never seen. I was now to commence, at the age of thirty-two, a new struggle for our support. My wife had a farm near St. Louis, to which we went, but I had no means to stock it. A house had to be built also. I worked very hard, never losing a day because of bad weather, and accomplished the object in a moderate way. If nothing else could be done I would load a cord of wood on a wagon and take it to the city for sale. I managed to keep along fairly well until 1858, when I was attacked by fever and ague. It lasted over a year, and, while it did not keep me in the house, it did interfere greatly with the amount of work I was able to perform. In 1858 I sold out my stock, crops and farming utensils at auction and gave up farming.130
The farm to which Grant referred consisted of sixty acres of uncleared land given to Julia by her father as a wedding present. Grant spent the first year clearing the land and the second building a house—a squared-off log structure with hand hewn timbers and the rough appearance of a pioneer dwelling. “It was so crude and so homely I did not like it at all,” wrote Julia. “It looked so unattractive that we facetiously decided to call it Hardscrabble.”131 Strapped for operating expenses, Grant did the best he could. He had only one team of horses and one field hand, and was often unable to buy seed.132 “I wanted to plant sixty or seventy bushels of potatoes,” he wrote his father at the close of 1856, “but had not the money to buy them.” The same was true of the cabbages and cucumbers he wanted to plant.133 Grant swallowed his pride and asked for a loan. “It is always usual for parents to give their children assistance in beginning life (and I am only beginning, though nearly thirty-five years of age) and what I ask is not much. I do not ask you to give me anything. But what I do ask is that you lend, or borrow for, me five hundred dollars, for two years, with interest at 10 percent payable annually, and with this if I do not go on prosperously I shall ask no more from you.”134 Jesse did not reply and the money was not forthcoming.
Whatever income Grant derived—and it rarely exceeded $50 a month—came from selling firewood in St. Louis. Grant would load his wagon, hitch his team, and drive to the city, where he would pull up at a busy street corner and peddle the wood to passers-by. Occasionally he would meet former comrades. “Great God, Grant, what are you doing?” asked one officer who had not seen him since Mexico.
“I am solving the problem of poverty,” Grant replied.135
Lieutenant William W. Averell of the 3rd Infantry, off on an expedition to New Mexico, had progressed fourteen miles west of St. Louis when he saw “a horseman in a faded blue overcoat, a hat broken and worn, and a stubby, sandy beard” overtake the column and engage the commissary officer, Lieutenant William Craig, in conversation. After a time the man rode away and Craig said, “That’s old Ulysses S. Grant of the 4th Infantry. He wanted a job as a commissary clerk to drive beef cattle and issue rations as we were crossing the plains. I couldn’t employ him.”136
Brigadier General Edward F. Beale won Grant’s undying loyalty one day when, arriving from California, he saw a man outside the Planters’ Hotel wearing old army clothing from which the insignia had been removed. The general recognized Grant instantly and invited him to dinner.
“I’m not dressed for company,” said Grant.
“Oh, that doesn’t matter, come in!”
Grant talked easily with the officers accompanying Beale but his conversation, they noted, was about old friends—where they were now and what they were doing.137
Officers from Jefferson Barracks who regularly saw Grant reported he did not drink. Don Carlos Buell, then with the adjutant general’s department, said Grant “drank nothing but water.” Major Joseph J. Reynolds, a classmate of Grant’s who was resigning to become an engineering professor at Washington University in St. Louis, confirmed Buell’s assessment. “He will go into the bar with you,” said Reynolds, “but he will not touch anything.”138
One day in late 1857 Grant met another down-and-out West Pointer on the streets of St. Louis. William Tecumseh Sherman had resigned from the army in 1853 to become a banker, only to lose everything in the financial panic that struck the United States in August 1857. The two ex-soldiers had not seen each other in sixteen years and they briefly compared notes on their parallel careers. Sherman considered himself “a dead cock in the Pit”; Grant told of his farming misadventure. Both agreed that “West Point and the Regular Army were not good schools for farmers, bankers, merchants, and mechanics.”139
Grant too lost heavily in the Panic of 1857. Just when it seemed he might make it, commodity prices collapsed. “My oats were good, and the corn . . . the best I ever raised.”140 The potatoes, cabbages, and melons also produced bumper crops. But Grant was stuck with them. With no market, most of his produce had to be given away. On December 23, 1857, he pawned his gold watch—his last valuable possession—so his family might have money to celebrate Christmas.141
When the nation’s economic distress eased in the spring of 1858, a new glimmer of hope appeared for Grant. Colonel Dent, now a widower, decided to leave White Haven and move to the city. He rented the farm to Grant and Julia, and the two anticipated a bright future. They moved into the big house, leased Hardscrabble, and began planting. Grant optimistically wrote his sister Mary, “I have now three Negro men, two hired by the year and one of Mr. Dent’s, which, with my own help, I think, will enable me to do my farming pretty well. I shall have about 20 acres of potatoes, 20 of corn, 25 of oats, 50 of wheat, 25 of meadow, some clover and other smaller products.”142 But even this was not to be. As with his farming venture in California, it was the weather that proved Grant’s undoing. A cold spring destroyed most of the crops and a record freeze on June 5 killed what remained. Grant was reduced once more to peddling firewood on St. Louis street corners.
Major James Longstreet, returning that summer from an assignment in Texas, stopped briefly at the Planters’ Hotel where he met several old friends from Jefferson Barracks. According to Longstreet, “It was soon proposed to have an old-time game of brag.” Finding themselves one short, Captain Edmund Holloway, also in from Texas, said he would find someone. “In a few minutes he returned with a man poorly dressed in citizen’s clothes and in whom we recognized our old friend Grant.” It was a happy reunion but Longstreet was saddened because he saw “Grant had been unfortunate, and he was really in needy circumstances.”
The next day I was walking in front of the Planters’, when I found myself face to face again with Grant who, placing in the palm of my hand a five dollar gold piece, insisted that I should take it in payment of a debt of honor over fifteen years old. I peremptorily declined to take it, alleging that he was out of the service and more in need of it than I.
“You must take it,” said he. “I cannot live with anything in my possession which is not mine.” Seeing the determination in the man’s face, and in order to save him mortification, I took the money, and shaking hands we parted.
Longstreet said, “The next time we met was at Appomattox, and the first thing that General Grant said to me when we stepped aside, placing his arm in mine, was: ‘Pete, let’s have another game of brag, to recall the old days which were so pleasant to us all.’ His whole greeting and conduct was as though nothing had ever happened to mar our pleasant relations.”143
By autumn 1858 Grant had had enough. The chills and fever that crippled him as a youth had returned, and he decided to sell out and seek employment in St. Louis.144 Grant found no job at first, and walked the streets looking for work.145 Eventually Colonel Dent secured a place for him in the real estate business of his nephew Harry Boggs. The firm was restyled “Boggs & Grant,” and they advertised themselves as general agents who collected rents, negotiated loans, and bought and sold real estate. Grant’s task was to keep the records, push the properties listed with the firm, and collect rents for various landlords. He hoped to trade Hardscrabble for a house in the city as soon as possible and move his family into town. In the meantime, he stayed with Harry and Louisa Boggs at 209 South Fifteenth Street. “We gave him an unfurnished back room and told him to fit it up as he pleased,” recalled Mrs. Boggs. “It contained very little during the winter he lived there. He had a bed, and a bowl and a pitcher on a chair; and, as he had no stove, he used to sit at our fire almost every evening.” On Saturdays Grant walked the twelve miles to White Haven, and on Sundays he walked the twelve miles back. Louisa Boggs thought Grant was “a very domestic man and extremely homelike in his ways,” but always seemed depressed. “He would smile at times, but I never heard him laugh out loud. He was a sad man. I don’t believe he had any ambition other than to educate his children and take care of his family.”146
Grant’s unfitness for commercial life soon became apparent. He was too tenderhearted to be a rent collector and too candid to sell real estate. Property values were soaring in St. Louis (between 1856 and 1858 the assessed valuation of the city’s real estate climbed from $60 million to $82 million147) and demand was brisk. Nevertheless, the firm of Boggs & Grant languished. A lawyer who worked with Grant said, “He just doesn’t seem to be calculated for business, but a more honest, more generous man never lived. I don’t believe that he knows what dishonesty is.”148
Grant was so trusting that even the sale of Hardscrabble miscarried. In the spring of 1859 he traded the property for a house of lesser value in St. Louis and took a $3,000 note to cover the difference. The city house was mortgaged, however, and the seller undertook to discharge the mortgage as part of the transaction. This he failed to do. Grant did not get clear title to the house until he paid the mortgage himself. The $3,000 note Grant held on Hardscrabble also was not paid and he was forced to sue. The litigation was interrupted by the war, and Grant did not regain possession of the farm until 1867.149
The circumstances are not clear, but sometime during his last year at White Haven he acquired possession of the young slave Colonel Dent left behind, a thirty-five-year-old man named William Jones. Grant’s views on slavery were ambivalent and Jones was the only slave he ever owned. When he moved to St. Louis, Grant was initially tempted to rent the man out, but soon decided against it. On March 29, 1859, he went to circuit court and filed the manumission papers to emancipate Jones.150 Grant never discussed his motives, but the action speaks for itself. Able-bodied slaves sold for a thousand dollars or more, and Grant surely could have used the money. Instead, he set Jones free.
By the summer of 1859 it was apparent the firm of Boggs & Grant could not survive. Grant withdrew from the partnership and resumed his search for employment. In August, when the position of county engineer became vacant, he applied for the job. His application was supported by a number of prominent St. Louis citizens, including the former president of the American Medical Association and the publisher of the Missouri Democrat. Professor Joseph Reynolds, Grant’s classmate, wrote a strong personal endorsement as did Daniel Frost, another West Pointer in business in St. Louis.151 Grant failed to secure the position, but the decision of the five-man county council was primarily political. It did not reflect upon Grant’s qualifications for the job. The two Democratic members of the council voted for him; the three Free-Soilers voted against. Grant was disappointed but not surprised. He wrote his father that because of his relationship with the Dents he was tagged as a Democrat, although he had never voted the Democratic ticket.152 Grant said he had supported James Buchanan for president in 1856, but that was only to defeat former general John C. Frémont, who was running as a Republican.153 In later years Grant quipped he voted for Buchanan because he didn’t know him, and voted against Frémont because he did.154
That winter Grant found employment as a clerk in the United States customshouse. The pay was $1,200 a year and the income was steady. His ill luck, however, continued. Within a month the collector of customs died and the new Democratic appointee let Grant go.155 High and dry once more, he looked desperately for work. He was behind in his rent, could not meet the family’s daily living expenses, and was going deeply into debt to maintain the semblance of a normal lifestyle. A friend who met him on the street said Grant was disconsolate. “I had never before seen him so depressed. He 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. ‘I must leave,’ he said. ‘I can’t make a go of it here.’ ”156
Grant faced up to the inevitable. With no place to turn, and with Julia’s encouragement,157 he asked his father for a job. As a boy, Grant had sworn he would never work in the family’s tannery.158 Now, the leather business was his last hope. In April, he would be thirty-eight. The older he got the more rapidly failure seemed to strike. Four years at West Point; eleven years as an officer in the regular army—including two years of combat in Mexico; four years farming; two years collecting rents and hunting for jobs. After twenty-one years his prospects were nil. It was a wrenching experience for Grant to admit he had failed. When he visited his father he suffered a severe migraine, yet he stated his case directly.159 He needed work. Jesse responded sympathetically. He had declined to help Grant so long as he remained in Missouri but now, realizing his son’s desperation, Jesse offered him a place in the Galena, Illinois, headquarters of the business. It was no more than a clerkship initially, the salary was $600 a year, and Grant would be working under his two younger brothers. But it was a job, it would secure his future, and Grant promptly accepted.
The worst was over. Years later, when he was living in the White House, Grant entertained an old acquaintance from St. Louis who happened to be passing through Washington. During his Missouri years Grant often delivered cord wood to the man’s home, piling it on the woodpile at the rear of the house, and going to the door afterward to get his money. Nostalgia colored Grant’s recollection. “There were happy days,” the president told his guest. “I was doing the best I could to support my family.”160
Grant departed for Galena in May 1860. Jesse’s leather business had prospered over the years and now employed upward of fifty people. In addition to the tannery, the firm operated a half dozen retail outlets in the upper Mississippi valley with the nerve center located in Galena. Situated in the northwest corner of Illinois on a navigable tributary of the Mississippi, Galena was a bustling commercial and lead mining town of 14,000 people and, until the railroads bypassed it, the principal trading center for settlers heading west. The 200-room DeSoto Hotel, pride of the Northwest, hosted scores of Yankee merchants, steamboat gamblers, and Southern lawyers. More than fifty saloons slaked the thirst of Welsh miners and Irish deckhands, while German, Swiss, and Scandinavian immigrants thronged the land offices, seeking to establish themselves on the virgin farmlands nearby. The Grant firm was one of the most active in the region, and at 145 Main Street, it was located in what many regarded as the best business building in town, the Milwaukee Block.161 Grant established his family in a small brick house a short distance from the store and set about learning the leather business.
Grant’s addition to the firm caused little stir. W. T. Burke, a cousin who was also employed as a clerk, said it was really a family partnership. “Nominally we were to get $600 per year, but as a matter of fact, we were all working for a common fund, and we had what we needed. We were not really upon salaries in the ordinary sense. Captain Grant came into the firm on the same terms. There was no ‘bossing’ by Simpson or Orvil [Grant’s younger brothers]. There was no feeling against Ulysses coming in, no looking down on him as a failure. We all looked up to him as an older man and a soldier. He knew much more than we in matters of the world, and we recognized it.”162
Grant became the firm’s billing clerk and collection agent, but he also sold goods, bought hides, and handled the paperwork. Whether he had his heart in his work is open to doubt. Jesse Grant was satisfied with his son’s progress, but others were skeptical.163 John E. Smith, who owned a jewelry shop nearby, thought Grant made a poor businessman. He made little effort to ingratiate himself with the townspeople and didn’t like to wait on customers. “If a customer called in the absence of the sales clerks, he would tell them to wait a few minutes till one of the clerks returned. If [the customer] couldn’t wait, he would go behind the counter, very reluctantly, and drag down whatever was wanted; but he hardly ever knew the price of it, and, in nine cases out often, he charged either too much or too little.”164
Because Grant insisted on paying back all of the money he had borrowed in St. Louis—personal loans, back rent, various small grocery bills, and the like—he initially found it difficult to make ends meet. But the firm advanced him additional money, and by the end of the year he was solvent. “I have become pretty conversant in my new employment,” Grant wrote to a friend in December 1860. “I hope to be a partner soon, and am sanguine that a competency at least can be made out of the business.”165 As in Missouri, Grant avoided liquor. Friends in Galena noted that while he smoked to excess, “he totally abstained from drink.” John M. Shaw, whose law office was adjacent to the Grant store, and who saw Ulysses daily, said “there was not the slightest lapse from sobriety.” The bartender at the DeSoto Hotel remembered when Eastern salesmen “treated” Grant, he took a cigar, not a drink. A tavern keeper in Wisconsin with whom Grant often stayed while on business said he usually took one drink after the evening meal, but none at other times.166 Grant was a perfect family man. Had peace prevailed he would have lived out his days as a slightly rumpled shopkeeper in the upper Mississippi valley, indistinguishable from his friends and neighbors.
But that was not to be. On December 20, 1860, following confirmation of Abraham Lincoln’s election as president, South Carolina announced its decision to secede from the Union. In Washington the outgoing administration of James Buchanan dithered, and the dreadful chain of events was set in motion. Mississippi followed South Carolina’s lead on January 9, Florida acted the next day, and Alabama the day after. On January 19 Georgia joined the secessionists, as did Louisiana on the 26th, and Texas on February 1. Lincoln took office five weeks later, March 4, 1861, determined to preserve the Union. After renewing his pledge to respect slavery where it existed and to enforce the fugitive slave law, the president advised the Southern states that the Union was perpetual and indissoluble. “I shall take care, as the Constitution expressly enjoins me, that the laws of the Union be faithfully executed in all of the States. . . . In your hands, my dissatisfied fellow-countrymen, and not in mine, is the momentous issue of civil war.”167
Undeterred by the president’s words, the Congress of the newly organized Confederate States of America voted immediately to raise an army of 100,000 volunteers. Federal property in the seceded states was ordered seized, and by the beginning of April only Fort Sumter in Charleston harbor, and Fort Pickens at Pensacola, remained in Union hands. On April 11, Brigadier General Pierre G. T. Beauregard, who had resigned as superintendent of the United States Military Academy to assume command of Confederate forces in Charleston, demanded the surrender of Fort Sumter. Beauregard’s demand was cloaked in the genteel civility common among officers in the old army.168 Fort Sumter’s commander, fifty-six-year-old Major Robert Anderson, who had been Beauregard’s artillery instructor at West Point, and who was himself a former slave owner from Kentucky, declined with equal politeness.169 Anderson’s sympathies lay with the South, but he declined to forsake his duty to the Union. With Anderson’s reply, the requirements of military etiquette had been satisfied. At 4:30 the following morning, April 12, 1861, Beauregard’s guns opened fire. The Civil War had begun.170
I. On June 17, 1862, two months after the battle of Shiloh, a grateful Congress enacted legislation settling Grant’s account as quartermaster of the 4th Infantry and appropriating $1,000 for that purpose. Public Laws, Thirty-seventh Congress, 2d sess., 1862, chapter 56.
II. David McCullough, principal historian of the Panama Canal, reports that “Grant, despite his subsequent reputation as a President of little vision or initiative, was more keenly interested in an isthmian canal than any of his predecessors had been. He was indeed the first President to address himself seriously to the subject. If there was to be a water corridor, he wanted it in the proper place—as determined by civil engineers and naval authorities—and he wanted it under American control.” The Path Between the Seas 26 (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1977).
III. The reference is to Moses Primrose, second son of the Vicar of Wakefield, who, in Oliver Goldsmith’s novel, was “designed for business” but easily swindled.
IV. Permanent rank (and pay) in the pre–Civil War army was determined on a regimental basis. Each regiment had a permanent roster of officers, many of whom were detached to serve elsewhere, but who nevertheless were carried on the regiment’s roll. Advancement from one rank to the next was based strictly on seniority whenever a vacancy occurred.
V. The reference is to Michael Cassio, Othello’s lieutenant in Shakespeare’s play, an abstemious soldier whom Iago plies with strong drink and then discredits. “Reputation, reputation, I have lost my reputation! I have lost the immortal part, sir, of myself, and what remains is bestial.” Act II, scene 3, lines 254–57. Cassio survived, and at the end of the play is given command of Cyprus, thereby loosely fitting Shakespeare’s formula of a man who suffers in order to be cleansed.
VI. Usually translated as “whether willing or not,” or “willy-nilly,” but in the military vernacular the phrase was used to mean going absent without leave (AWOL).
VII. Buchanan was the quintessential professional soldier. His troops from the 4th Infantry put down the Rogue River Indian uprising in 1856, and he led the U.S. forces that reasserted federal authority in Utah during the Mormon War of 1857–1858. When the Civil War came, he was given command of the Regular Brigade of the Army of the Potomac—the closest American equivalent to Napoleon’s Old Guard. Brevetted twice more for gallantry, his troops fought with distinction at Gaines Mill, Malvern Hill, Antietam, Fredricksburg, and the second battle of Bull Run. When McClellan broke off his attack on Richmond in 1862 and retreated to Harrison’s Landing, it was the Regular Brigade that covered his withdrawal. The Dictionary of American Biography states Buchanan “was affectionately known to Civil War soldiers as ‘Old Buck,’ and his brigade of regular soldiers proved always a dependable reserve in many of the earlier battles of the war. That such was the case was largely due to his wide experience, fine attainments, and high sense of duty and discipline.” 3 DAB 217–18.
Promoted to major general on Grant’s recommendation in 1865, Buchanan served as assistant commissioner of the Freedmen’s Bureau until 1867 when he was tapped to assume command of the military occupation of Louisiana, which had encountered great difficulty. General Sheridan, the first commander, had been too rigid, and Winfield Scott Hancock, his successor, had been too lenient. To restore order, Grant turned to Buchanan, who proved once more he was a complete professional. He followed Grant’s instructions to the letter (volume 18 of the Grant Papers is replete with telegrams between Grant and Buchanan), deferred to the commanding general’s judgment on political issues, and successfully terminated the occupation following the state’s ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment. John Rose Ficklen, History of Reconstruction in Louisiana 201 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1910).
VIII. In her Memoirs, Julia quotes Grant as saying, “You know I had to wait in New York until I heard from you.” The implication is that Grant did not know whether he would be welcome at White Haven. The Personal Memoirs of Julia Dent Grant 72, John Y. Simon, ed. (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1975).