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RIGHT BEFORE HE LEFT MEXICO, in June 1848, Grant suffered a small mishap that would plague him for several years. As quartermaster, he was responsible for the care of regimental funds, which he kept tightly guarded in a trunk. After his own chest was broken into, he took the seemingly prudent step of depositing the $1,000 in his care in the locked trunk of Captain John H. Gore. When that trunk was purloined from Gore’s tent, Grant faced a board of inquiry, which exonerated him of any wrongdoing. It would be some time, however, before he straightened out the situation with authorities in Washington, and, until that happened, he was legally responsible for replacing the lost thousand dollars—an anxious situation for him.
On July 16, after having been camped for one week on a sandy beach under a tropical sun, Grant and his regiment were relieved to quit Veracruz and the yellow fever rampant there. They sailed on transport ships to East Pascagoula, Mississippi, where they were supposed to spend the summer at Camp Jefferson Davis. By this point, Grant, twenty-six, had been engaged to Julia Dent for four years, but had seen her only once three years earlier, a separation that tormented him. In May, having received no mail from Julia for two months, he lashed out in a missive: “I believe you are carrying on a flirtation with someone, as you threaten of doing.”1 Either then or later, the line was blotted out, but it testifies to the grave toll the years apart had taken.
Obtaining a leave of absence, Grant made a beeline for St. Louis, where the Dents spent the summer in the city. Everyone saw, at a glance, that Grant had matured and appeared more worldly and cosmopolitan. Although he had shaved off his beard, restoring his clean-shaven image, he had shed his boyish softness. “When he came back from Mexico he had put on perhaps 20 pounds of muscle, tanned, ready for the battles of life,” said Julia.2 Emma Dent, now twelve, found Grant more reserved, but applauded the changes wrought in her rugged, sinewy hero. “His face was more bronzed from the exposure to the sun, and he wore his captain’s double-barred shoulder straps with a little more dignity than he had worn the old ones, perhaps.”3 The last known photograph of Grant before the Civil War, taken a year later, shows a handsome, dashing young man with something sad and downcast in his expression. His eyes seem crossed, as if turned inward in sorrowful contemplation.
The four-year engagement had confirmed the steadfast attachment between Ulysses S. Grant and Julia Dent. One Dent acquaintance remembered the young couple sitting on the steps of the St. Louis house, holding hands and gazing soulfully at each other. “I remember Grant as a quiet kind of a man who volunteered but little conversation until some topic coming within his experience was referred to, when he would warm up and talk with great interest.”4 By this time, Colonel Dent had encountered financial setbacks and was embroiled in a costly lawsuit, which may explain why he consented to the marriage, even though Grant had decided to stay in the army with a meager $1,000 annual salary. After waiting so long to marry, Grant pressed Julia for a hasty wedding and they set a date for August 22 in St. Louis.
Grant traveled to see his parents in Bethel, Ohio. Across America, small towns embraced Mexican War veterans with patriotic adulation, and Grant drew rapt attention wherever he went. The war had charged his imagination and reminiscing about it became a favorite pastime for the duration of his life. He could be a compelling raconteur with a penetrating power to visualize battles and conjure them up in graphic detail. “How clear-headed Sam Grant is in describing a battle!” a later listener exulted. “He seems to have the whole thing in his head.”5 Adding to public curiosity was that Grant had brought back from Mexico a bright boy named Gregorio, who was only twelve or thirteen and did not speak a word of English; Grant conversed with him in Spanish. An expert with a lasso, the youth instructed Grant in his full repertoire of tricks. “They practiced on my sheep and cows and horses,” said Grant’s uncle. “Ulysses got so he was quite handy with the lasso himself.”6
During Grant’s Bethel stay, Jesse and Hannah Grant must have made plain their displeasure with the slave-owning Dents and explained their refusal to attend the wedding. Savage stories about the Dents circulated in the Grant family, typified by the caustic later commentary of Ulysses’s sister-in-law. “I never met Julia’s father but I heard he was a cross, lazy man, a surly Democrat and a Rebel. They said he was asleep all day except to wake up to eat and argue . . . Jesse Grant . . . grew to know Mr. Dent from Missouri and had no kind words for him or any other Dent. He said they were a lazy, self-satisfied lot, slave owners and worse. He could not believe Ulysses could treat the Rebel father Dent so kindly.”7 The extended Grant family registered its disapproval of the Dent clan by boycotting the St. Louis wedding.
The Dents reciprocated the antipathy. Julia’s cousin Louisa Boggs said of the marriage: “[Grant] was a northern man married to a southern, slave owning family. Colonel Dent openly despised him. All the family said ‘poor Julia’ when they spoke of Mrs. Grant. So you can see why everybody thought Captain Grant a poor match for Miss Dent.”8 A victim of this interfamily feud, Grant was plunged into his own private civil war, uncomfortably suspended between the easygoing, hedonistic Dents and his thrifty, tightfisted family of die-hard abolitionists.
On August 22, 1848, Ulysses S. Grant and Julia Boggs Dent got married in the small brick downtown house that the Dents occupied at Fourth and Cerre Streets. A simple ceremony, illuminated by candlelight, the wedding took place on a sultry night in an overheated parlor, with a banquet table laden with fruit, ices, and wedding cake set up in a back room. Described in a local paper as “a lady of refinement and elegant manners,” Julia swept down the staircase in a white silk dress with a while tulle veil.9 Always flustered in large crowds on formal occasions, Grant fidgeted nervously all night. “He wore his regimentals and some people thought it would have been better had he dressed in civilian’s clothes,” noted Louisa Boggs. “They said he seemed very awkward and embarrassed and his long sword nearly tripped him up on several occasions!”10 Emma Dent depicted the young soldier more charitably. “Captain Grant was as cool under the fire of the clergyman’s questions as he had been under the batteries of the Mexican artillery.”11 James Longstreet served as best man and two groomsmen, Cadmus M. Wilcox and Bernard Pratte, were to join him in the Confederate army; all three later surrendered to Grant at Appomattox.
The day after the wedding, Ulysses and Julia Grant left for Bethel so she could meet her new in-laws. A sheltered young woman who had never left St. Louis or even traveled on a boat, Julia relished the dreamlike sensation of a steamboat gliding smoothly down the Mississippi then up the Ohio River to Louisville, where they stopped to visit Grant’s rich cousin, James Hewitt, who entertained them in his opulent home. Grant dropped modest hints that he might resign from the army should an advantageous business opportunity arise, but his cousin turned a deaf ear and Grant stayed in the military. Julia resented that Hewitt left her new husband empty-handed, and she possessed a long memory for such slights: “I always remembered this, and did not forget it when my Lieutenant was General-in-Chief nor when he was President of the United States.”12
For the most part, Julia did not dwell on such unpleasantness and recorded a sweetly sanitized version of her first brush with Grant’s family. When their boat reached Cincinnati, she recalled, “there stood my dear husband’s little brother Orvil with his flaxen curls and blue eyes—as pretty a boy as I ever saw. He had come all the way down to meet us, saying he could not wait for us.”13 Similarly, she remembered Jesse Grant being cordial toward her and Hannah even more welcoming. “Mrs. Grant . . . was then a handsome woman, a little below medium height, with soft brown eyes, glossy brown hair, and her cheek was like a rose in the snow. She too gave me an affectionate welcome, and I must say right here she was the most self-sacrificing, the sweetest, kindest woman I ever met, except my own dear mother.”14 In fact, although Jesse and Hannah Grant treated Julia with all due civility, they could not detach her from their scathing critique of the Dents and harbored secret reservations about her boasting, superstitions, and overt displays of affection for their son.
In November, Grant had to report for duty in Detroit, now home of the Fourth Infantry, and he shepherded Julia back to St. Louis for what he assumed would be a final visit before they launched a new life on an army base. Instead Colonel Dent tried one last time to drive a sharp wedge between his daughter and son-in-law. Having led a narrow, overprotected life, Julia grew distraught at the thought of parting from her father. “I could not . . . think of it without bursting into a flood of tears and weeping and sobbing as if my heart would break.”15 After four years of daydreaming about married life, Grant was distressed by this belated attack of nerves. Colonel Dent intervened with a proposal so cruelly preposterous that Grant must have felt hurt. “Grant, I can arrange it all for you. You join your regiment and leave Julia with us. You can get a leave of absence once or twice a year and run on here and spend a week or two with us. I always knew [Julia] could not live in the army.”16 Grant had now been pushed to the breaking point. His Mexican War exploits had enhanced his self-confidence, and he slipped his arm around Julia, whispering, “Would you like this, Julia? Would you like to remain with your father and let me go alone?” “No, no, no, Ulys. I could not, would not, think of that for a moment.” Grant asserted himself. “Then dry your tears and do not weep again. It makes me unhappy.”17 At that moment, Grant declared his independence and liberated Julia from her father’s manipulative wiles, showing Colonel Dent that he was not a timid young man to be trifled with forever.
On November 7, 1848, General Zachary Taylor emerged victorious in the presidential race, despite a glaring lack of experience in public office. Editor Horace Greeley, among others, writhed with indignation at his proslavery platform: “We scorn it; we spit upon it; we trample it under our feet!”18 Nevertheless, Taylor showed no patience with mounting talk of southern secession. “If they attempted to carry out their schemes,” he warned a senator, “they should be dealt with by law as they deserved and executed.”19 On Election Day, Grant was in Kentucky and couldn’t vote, but he said he would have voted for Taylor. Taylor’s presidential tenure proved remarkably short-lived. In 1850, after attending July Fourth orations on a torrid day, he consumed an enormous quantity of possibly tainted cherries and iced milk and died mysteriously five days later.
When Grant and his bride arrived in Detroit on November 17, he came in for a rude awakening. During his four-month leave of absence, Lieutenant Henry D. Wallen had replaced Grant, who never formally gave up his regimental quartermaster position. Now that he returned, Wallen refused to cede the Detroit position and Grant was reassigned to the bleak outpost of Madison Barracks at Sackets Harbor, New York, on the eastern shore of Lake Ontario, near the Canadian border. Still more infuriating was that Wallen’s own company had been deployed to Sackets Harbor, and he should have departed with them. Sackets Harbor was a frigid, desolate garrison and with winter approaching Grant must have wondered how the sheltered Julia would survive in this inhospitable place. Indignant, he filed an official complaint with the commanding officer in Detroit, who forwarded it to General John E. Wool with the comment that “Lieutenant Grant has unquestionably been hardly and wrongly done by.”20 In the meantime, Grant had no choice but to obey orders and take Julia along, even though cold weather had sealed off traffic on Lake Ontario, forcing them into a prolonged overland journey.
Once installed at Sackets Harbor, Grant was dismayed that soldiers in this inclement climate lacked proper clothing and bedding for the winter. Rather than watch men shiver as they awaited supplies from New York or Philadelphia, he showed his usual initiative by buying up supplies on his own. Now a veteran quartermaster, he was soon busily fixing leaky roofs, repairing dilapidated fences, and refurbishing decaying houses.
The winter stay at Sackets Harbor was much happier than he and Julia had anticipated, and they formed numerous friendships in the tight-knit military community. For the first time, Julia, with scant domestic experience, learned to manage a household without assistance from slaves. She took pride in their small, well-furnished home with its bright carpet, china dishes adorned with floral patterns, and silver cutlery that came as a wedding gift from the Grants. Whenever Ulysses had surplus cash to spend, he journeyed to nearby Watertown and bought finery for Julia at a dry goods store operated by Jesse and Henry Seligman, Bavarian Jewish brothers who became lifetime friends and later emerged as wealthy bankers and substantial donors to Grant’s presidential campaigns. Everyone found Grant modest and retiring, an altogether likable fellow. “His only dissipation was in owning a fast horse,” said a regimental colleague. “He always liked to have a fine nag, and he paid high prices to get one.”21 Grant enjoyed playing chess and checkers, attending parties with Julia, and worshipping with her at the Methodist church.
On March 2, 1849, after four months marooned at Sackets Harbor, Grant learned he had won his appeal and was being sent back to Detroit, where he resumed his job as regimental quartermaster. By all accounts, he was popular with the soldiers, who appreciated his lack of superior airs. Known for impartial honesty and a judicial temperament, he often arbitrated disputes among soldiers, as in Mexico. Still the peacetime army did not showcase his talents and he often seemed mildly bored, as if he needed a bigger challenge to mobilize his energy. According to one officer, Grant struggled with incessant paperwork—never his strong suit—but when it came to “drill, the manual of arms, fighting,” he had no equal in handling the regiment.22 One fellow officer noticed that Grant had both an active, dynamic side to his personality and a curiously passive one, comparing him to “a trained athlete, who leans listless and indifferent against the wall, but who wakes to wonders when the call is made upon him.”23 This split personality was one reason why people could find Ulysses S. Grant quite ordinary one moment and extraordinary the next.
However humdrum his duties, he enjoyed his stay in Detroit, which had a population of about twenty-five thousand and was a raw, unpaved western town with pastures still lying behind many houses. He and Julia moved into a narrow frame house on Fort Street, set off by a white picket fence, in a neighborhood of poor, working families. The house had an arbor covered with wild grapevines and the newlyweds found it an inviting abode. For a time, Gregorio served as valet, bringing food to the table and answering the door, but when he was lured away by higher wages, the Grants felt betrayed by his departure.
Whether playing cards or reading at night, Ulysses and Julia Grant seemed a cozy, companionable pair. More literate than people supposed, Grant perused romances of Sir Walter Scott and historical novels by Edward Bulwer-Lytton. “He would read to me novels, newspapers, books and such,” Julia wrote. “We would discuss what he would read, it was something we looked forward to.”24 In time, Julia recognized how spoiled she had been as a young bride, how unwilling to compromise. When she was difficult or petulant, Grant, instead of chiding her, subjected her to the silent treatment. “The most he would ever say is, ‘Julia, I’m amazed at you.’ That was cutting me to the quick and it would sting like a lash, he said it so calmly.”25 This understated form of rebuke worked: Julia would apologize and beg his forgiveness, which he always offered.
Like many young couples, the Grants flung themselves into an incessant round of parties, dances, and dinners, and Julia took pride in throwing “a fancy dress ball,” a novelty for Detroit and a throwback to her St. Louis girlhood. Local preachers found the concept much too pagan for their tastes. “We had kings, knights, troubadours, and every other character pretty and gay,” remembered Julia, who dressed up as a tambourine girl.26 Grant seemed older and more serious than other young officers, and, undoubtedly feeling a little silly and self-conscious about showing up in a costume, wore his uniform instead. He loitered on the fringes of gatherings, standing with hands clasped behind his back, an impassive spectator who opened up with selected people. When called on to propose a toast at one dinner, Grant grew tongue-tied. “I can face the music,” he confessed blushingly, “but I cannot make a speech.”27 People noticed how Julia overcame his habitual reserve, lightened his somber moods, and fleshed out his life. In the view of one officer, Grant “came out of his shell in her presence. They were two people who hitched well together, they fit like hand to glove.”28
Where Grant clearly shed his inhibitions was in racing horses down Fort Street, when the passionate daring of his nature appeared to advantage. With the town offering few pastimes, Grant electrified the large gatherings who turned out to watch as he whizzed by in his buggy, outstripping competitors and even driving on the River Rouge when it froze. “He was the best horseman I ever saw,” said Colonel James E. Pitman. “He could fly on a horse, faster than a slicked bullet.”29 One impression superseded all others: that Grant was “just power and will and resolution,” said a resident.30
By early fall 1849, Julia was pregnant and decided to return to St. Louis to have the baby. On May 30, 1850, she gave birth to their first child, named Frederick Dent Grant in honor of the Colonel—which could not have thrilled her husband. Two weeks later, Grant applied for permission to travel to St. Louis for “urgent family reasons” and brought Julia and baby Fred back to Detroit.31 From the outset, he was a more relaxed and playful parent than Jesse Grant, free of the persistent badgering and demanding expectations that had so disconcerted him in his own father. Julia was a conscientious, hardworking mother, and one friend remembered her supervising the small household “with a great lump of a baby in her arms.”32
Julia’s prolonged absence during the winter of 1849–50, coupled with a dearth of challenging work, proved a formula for trouble for Grant. Heavy drinking was commonplace in frontier garrisons, making it difficult for Grant, stranded in freezing Detroit, to abstain. The problem was neither the amount nor the frequency with which he drank, but the dramatic behavioral changes induced. He and Julia kept a pew in a Methodist church led by Dr. George Taylor, and perhaps realizing his newfound responsibilities as a father, Grant sought counsel from his pastor about his drinking. “I think that Dr. Taylor helped Grant a great deal,” said Colonel Pitman. “It was said that he had a long talk with Grant at that time and told him that he could not safely use liquor in any form and Grant acknowledged this and took the pledge and thereafter used no liquor at all in Detroit.”33 This episode makes clear that Grant, from an early age, acknowledged that he had a chronic drinking problem, was never cavalier about it, and was determined to resolve it. This overly controlled young man now wrestled with a disease that caused a total loss of control, which must have made it more tormenting and pestered his Methodist conscience.
Even as a young man, Grant was infused with a strong sense of justice. No less than as a boy, he could be proud, a bit moody, and hypersensitive, refusing to be bullied. Colonel Pitman stated that Grant “would whip a man who crossed him or who sold him short cords of wood or who was in any way derogatory towards him.”34 During the winter of 1850–51, Grant slipped on the ice and injured his leg in front of the house of Zachariah Chandler, a big, imposing man soon to be Detroit’s mayor. Grant had the courage to file a complaint against Chandler, claiming he violated a city ordinance demanding that residents keep their sidewalks free of snow and ice. During the trial, Chandler taunted Grant: “If you soldiers would keep sober, perhaps you would not fall on people’s pavements and hurt your legs.”35 One wonders whether Chandler hinted obliquely at rumors of drinking by Grant. Although the jury found Chandler guilty, he was fined a laughable six cents, perhaps suggesting the court agreed with Chandler’s insinuation that excessive alcohol consumption had accounted for the fall.
It is unclear how closely Grant followed current affairs as the national debate over slavery broadened and intensified. Through the Compromise of 1850, California was admitted as a free state while other territories wrested from Mexico were left free to adopt slavery or not. In exchange, the North appeased the South by submitting to a strict new fugitive slave law that made many northerners feel like accomplices in the hated institution of their southern brethren.
In June 1851, the Fourth Infantry was transferred to Sackets Harbor and Grant at first welcomed returning to a place where he and Julia had launched many satisfying friendships. It occurred at a time when Julia had taken the baby to visit the Grants in Bethel and then enjoyed an extended stay with her family in St. Louis. Little Fred had been very sick in Detroit, likely accounting for Julia’s desire to take him somewhere with superior medical care. Almost as soon as she and the baby were gone, Grant keenly missed them. “You don’t know how anxious I am to see him,” he wrote to Julia. “I never dreamed that I should miss the little rascal so much.”36 Grant had quicky grown domesticated, a doting father at loose ends without his family. As had happened during the Mexican War, he was a faithful correspondent, whereas Julia’s letters turned up sporadically, arousing his already palpable anxiety. “Your not writing keeps me in constant suspense lest poor little Freddy may be sick again,” he informed her after arriving at Sackets Harbor. “Has he improved much since he left? . . . I feel a constant dread lest I shall hear bad news.”37
In his frequent letters, Grant tried hard to sound cheerful and sang the praises of Sackets Harbor with its cool, salubrious climate and excellent fishing, sailing, riding, and picnics. Yet he admitted the town was “as dull a little hole as you ever saw,” and his letters thinly veil a creeping depression dampening his spirits.38 Again and again he complained that Julia did not write often enough, beseeched her to come sooner to Sackets Harbor, and referred to her reluctance to leave St. Louis. He may have dreaded that she was ensnared again in the predatory talons of Colonel Dent and appeared pathetically eager for scraps of news about his baby boy. “Do you think he recollects me?” he asked Julia. “Has he any more teeth? You don’t tell me anything about him.”39 Even though he renewed ties with old acquaintances, the distant outpost did not seem nearly as sociable without Julia. One wonders whether her infrequent letters resulted from her eye problem or whether she silently punished her husband for subjecting her to a cheerless existence at remote army bases. Deprived of the foundation of her love, Grant seemed solitary, adrift, afflicted with excess nervous energy. The underlying pathos of his life grew painfully apparent. As one officer observed, Grant “was regarded as a restless, energetic man, who must have occupation, and plenty of it, for his own good.”40
Loneliness, ennui, frustration, inactivity—such unsettled feelings always conspired to drive Grant to drink. Luckily, he recognized his alcoholism just as the temperance movement gathered strength, and he embraced this new faith with fervor. “I heard John B. Gough lecture in Detroit the other night,” he told a Sackets Harbor friend, “and I have become convinced that there is no safety from ruin by drink except from abstaining from liquor altogether.”41 The full-bearded John Bartholomew Gough was a reformed drinker and failed actor who delivered temperance speeches that mingled folksy humor with spellbinding theatricality to convert wavering listeners. He was a charismatic spokesman for the Washingtonian movement, which was inaugurated in a Baltimore barroom in 1840 and urged adherents to sign pledges of abstinence. It has been estimated that the indefatigable Gough gave more than ten thousand speeches, reaching more than nine million grateful people.42 He was fond of recounting how he had lost his wife and child from drink, a theme that would have resonated powerfully with Grant.
At Sackets Harbor, Grant helped to organize the Rising Sun Division, Lodge No. 210, of the Sons of Temperance and took the pledge not to “make, buy, sell, or use, as a beverage, any Spiritous or Malt Liquors, Wine, or Cider.”43 Despite some local hostility, he advertised his involvement by wearing the lodge’s white sash and red-white-and-blue ribbon in his lapel. He talked freely about his problem with his friend Walter Camp, who recalled that Grant “gave hearty encouragement to the order in the village by his presence. He marched once in the procession, wearing the regalia of the lodge. I heard him refuse to join in a drinking bout once . . . It took courage in those days to wear the white apron of the Sons of Temperance, but Lieutenant Grant was prepared to show his character.”44 Stubbornly protective of her husband’s reputation, Julia Grant always refused to admit publicly to his drinking problem, but her early biographer Ishbel Ross notes, “Grant attended the weekly meetings with Julia’s hearty approval. She hung his parchment proudly in their home.”45
In September 1851, Grant insisted that Julia and the baby come to Sackets Harbor, and she arrived to discover that Grant had charmingly, if rather clumsily, fitted out their small quarters. “I remember a fine center table and two large fine chairs that were so high that when I sat in them my feet were quite a foot from the floor,” the diminutive Julia noted. “This mistake was overcome by his having two pretty little stools made for my feet to rest upon when I sat in those chairs of state.”46 The remainder of their Sackets Harbor stay passed pleasantly enough with diversions ranging from bowling to sleigh rides across the frozen expanse of Lake Ontario, bundled under buffalo robes. They played whist and checkers and attended church.
The Sackets Harbor idyll ended in May 1852 when the Fourth Infantry was ordered to the West Coast, triggering a slow-motion crisis in Grant’s life. The Gold Rush had drawn a stampede of settlers to California that demanded a strengthened military presence. At first, Julia indulged in quaint fantasies of a joint trip and pictured going “through the Caribbean Sea, parting its slashing, phosphorescent waves and sailing under the Southern Cross.”47 But she was now seven months pregnant with their second child, and Grant realized she could not brave the extreme perils of travel from New York to San Francisco. “You know how loath I am to leave you,” he told her, “but crossing Panama is an undertaking for one in robust health; and then my salary is so small, how could you and my little boy have even the common necessaries of life out there.”48 In the end, Julia sadly acquiesced. She and two-year-old Fred went to stay with the Grants and then the Dents, forcing Ulysses to hazard the journey alone. For four grueling years, they had endured separation during the Mexican War and ever since had struggled to forge a stable family life. Now Grant was again being deprived of the one thing indispensable for his emotional health and well-being. Eventually, he hoped, Julia and Fred would be able to join him, but he had no assurance of that as he journeyed to Governors Island in New York to prepare his regiment for the taxing journey to Panama, across the isthmus, then up the West Coast to San Francisco.
Before sailing, Grant squeezed in a three-day trip to Washington to settle the matter of the stolen $1,000 in regimental funds that had hovered over him since leaving Mexico. By an unfortunate coincidence, the renowned Whig leader Henry Clay died just before Grant checked into the fashionable Willard Hotel, and he found government offices shut down and the whole town draped in mourning. A southern city still dependent upon slavery, Washington was a dusty, unpaved place with open drainage canals and army cattle browsing around the unfinished Washington Monument. “I was very much disappointed in the appearance of things about Washington,” Grant confided to Julia. “The place seems small and scattering and the character of the buildings poor.”49 While Grant knew almost a dozen members of Congress from the Mexican War, he grew frustrated in tracking down a solution to his problem. It required a congressional act to resolve the matter, and the Military Committee of the House of Representatives would not meet until after he departed Washington. Thus, no action was taken on his petition. For such a proud, honorable man, the stigma of the missing funds must have still rankled.
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AT GOVERNORS ISLAND in New York Harbor, Grant and his regiment endured sweltering weeks of countless drills and roll calls until they attained the requisite number of troops to travel. It was an arduous task to transport an entire infantry regiment and its cumbersome equipment to the West Coast and much of the onus fell on the capable quartermaster. One soldier retained a distinct memory of Grant, “a thin, quiet, reticent man, full of kindly and generous feelings for those about him, giving close and strict attention to his duties.”50 Knowing the rainy season had descended on Panama, with cholera everywhere, Grant already had queasy feelings about the journey and was eager to sail before conditions worsened there. Major Charles S. Tripler, the regimental surgeon, warned the War Department that it would be “murder” to move men through a zone rife with cholera, but he was blandly reassured by army brass that the epidemic would be “quickly over.”51 In the end, his anxiety proved more than justified.
From the outset, the ill-fated trip was an irremediable fiasco. People headed for the California Gold Rush packed the ships bound for Panama—traveling across the continent by wagon train was deemed too dangerous—and only at the last instant did the War Department book places aboard the steamer Ohio. By that point, the ship had secured its full complement of civilian passengers. The Fourth Infantry added 730 people—650 soldiers, 60 wives, and 20 children—so that a vessel built for 330 passengers groaned under a burden of nearly 1,100. The journey on the side-wheeler had a voyage-of-the-damned quality, its three open decks constantly crammed with people milling about to escape stifling conditions belowdecks.
Despite remarkably fine weather and the diversion of fishing, card playing, and whale watching, Grant and other passengers fell hopelessly seasick on the lurching voyage. As the ship edged toward Panama, he scribbled a last letter to Julia: “I write this on deck, standing up, because in the cabin it is so insufferably hot that no one can stay there.” Julia was about to give birth to their second child. The first son having been named after Colonel Dent, Grant insisted upon balancing the family ledger. “If it is a girl name it what you like,” he wrote, “but if a boy name it after me.”52 Indeed, one week later, on July 22, 1852, Julia gave birth to Ulysses S. Grant Jr. Born in Bethel, Ohio, where Julia had stayed with her in-laws, the boy for the rest of his life sported the nickname “Buck” bestowed by White Haven slaves to honor the Buckeye State. “Mother always told us her greatest regret was not accompanying [Father] to the west,” Buck said later, “but in her delicate condition the doctors forbade it.”53 Grant retained vague hopes that Julia would join him that winter, though he would not set eyes on her or the two boys for a couple of miserable years.
On the boat, Grant tolerated the crusty supervision of his commanding officer, Lieutenant Colonel Benjamin L. E. Bonneville, a flamboyant character partial to white beaver hats. He liked to stride the deck, cane in hand, provoking so many quarrels among his men that Grant often had to adjudicate. Bonneville had tried and failed to replace Grant as quartermaster and the latter smarted under the affront. Grant became an “incessant smoker,” who seldom went to bed before 3 a.m., observed a passenger, and “during every day and an early part of each night . . . I would see him pacing the deck and smoking, silent and solitary.”54 The ceaseless smoking betrayed an inner restlessness, doubtless an amalgam of missing Julia and enduring the crushing pressures of the overcrowded ship.
The situation was ripe for a resort to alcohol, and Grant was innocently abetted by the ship’s captain, James Findlay Schenck, who was profoundly impressed by him. Grant “seemed to me to be a man of an uncommon order of intelligence. He had a good education, and what his mind took hold of it grasped strongly and thoroughly digested.”55 Schenck, with no inkling of his drinking history, recalled Grant’s “excellent taste for good liquors. I had given him the liberty of the sideboard in my cabin, and urged him frequently never to be backward in using it as though it were his own, and he never was. Every night after I had turned in, I would hear him once or twice, sometimes more, open the door quietly and walk softly over the floor so as not to disturb me; then I would hear the clink of the glass and a gurgle, and he would walk softly back.”56 These late-night raids on Schenck’s liquor cabinet fit Grant’s later pattern of private, late-night indulgence in alcohol. It seemed as if with Julia’s absence the discipline of the temperance movement and the ringing exhortations of John Bartholomew Gough crumbled during a tumultuous week at sea.
When the ship arrived at the port of Aspinwall, the steaming town, drenched with torrential rains, stood “eight or ten inches under water,” Grant wrote, “and foot passengers passed from place to place on raised footwalks.”57 According to Schenck, Grant remained “sleeplessly active” in rescuing his charges from the submerged city.58 A new railroad lay under construction across the isthmus, and terrifying reports contended that forty of one hundred workers had perished from cholera. The Fourth Infantry took this incomplete railroad as far as the Chagres River, where they boarded long, flat-bottomed boats pushed along by scantily clad locals wielding long poles. When they reached the upstream town of Cruces, the soldiers marched the remaining distance, but their families were supposed to mount mules to carry them across the mountain trails. Here disaster struck. The steamship company had signed an agreement with a contractor who failed to deliver a single animal, the Gold Rush passengers having wooed them away with higher prices. Still worse, no agent of the steamship company even greeted the party. As Grant wrote, “There was not a mule, either for pack or saddle, in the place.”59
With his split metabolism, Grant came alive in emergencies, drawing upon a fund of strength that often lay dormant in more tranquil times. Taking the initiative as quartermaster, he dismissed the original contractor and entered into an agreement with one who demanded extortionate prices. While Grant wrestled with this intractable problem, “cholera had broken out, and men were dying every hour.”60 Since Bonneville left him with the most vulnerable passengers, Grant stayed behind for a week with 150 sick soldiers, women, children, and regimental baggage until adequate transportation was arranged. Cholera was a swift and lethal disease that could carry off its victims within hours. One woman under Grant’s care, Delia Sheffield, claimed it was “a common sight to see strong men . . . taken with cramps and die in a short time.” In Grant she saw not only a streak of humanity but true nobility in his solicitude for his wards. “Captain Grant . . . and the surgeons did everything in their power to check the spread of the disease, and to alleviate the sufferings of the stricken ones. Too much praise cannot be given them for their tireless energy and great presence of mind during this outbreak of cholera.”61
When Grant and his entourage finally moved out, the women rode mules, led by native guides, while men walked and carried parcels; several nuns had to be hoisted in hammocks. Drum major J. D. Elderkin never forgot how Grant saved his wife by giving him a $20 gold piece to hire a mule, while also furnishing her with a coat to shield her from malarial flies. As they wound over narrow, twisting hillside paths, Grant tended this strange cavalcade, making sure they didn’t drink water from contaminated springs and urging them to drink wine sparingly instead. In spite of these precautions, many members died from cholera and had to be hastily buried by the wayside.
When they at last reached Panama City on the Gulf of Panama—then a backward village of adobe houses with thatched roofs—the cholera epidemic was not yet contained. For the most virulent cases, the coolheaded Grant converted an old relic of a ship into a temporary hospital and bravely tended many patients himself. “He was like a ministering angel to us all,” said Elderkin, “a man of iron, so far as endurance went, seldom sleeping, and then only two or three hours at a time.”62 Altogether Grant estimated that one-third of the people under his care died at Cruces or Panama City as well as one-seventh of the Fourth Infantry group that had left New York Harbor. As the hellish story surfaced, it provoked fierce condemnation of War Department negligence, an indictment Grant endorsed, telling Julia darkly “there is a great accountability somewhere for the loss which we have sustained.”63
To Julia, Grant emphasized the wisdom of having omitted her from the trip. “My dearest you never could have crossed the Isthmus at this season . . . The horrors of the road, in the rainy season, are beyond description.”64 He felt vindicated in not having allowed their firstborn son, Fred, to come along. “Had you come he no doubt would now be in his grave.”65 Grant stated that all twenty children who made the passage died either from the rigors of the overland journey or from diseases contracted along the way. For Grant, with his special fondness for children, this part of the saga must have been particularly haunting.
During the ghastly crossing, Grant had undergone a trial as harrowing as anything he experienced during the Mexican War. The nightmarish odyssey was seared into his memory, and he would unburden himself of the story many times in his life. Perhaps some of this obsession arose from lingering guilt about those he could not save, but there must also have been extraordinary pride in his courage and fortitude. Perhaps no episode before the Civil War so exposed his superlative leadership gifts. From the Panama ordeal sprang his later vision of a canal between the oceans that would do away forever with lengthy, hazardous journeys across the isthmus. Not surprisingly, Grant would always prefer Nicaragua as the site for such a project.
By early August, the exhausted remnants of the Fourth Infantry embarked on the steamer Golden Gate, bound for California. For a month, the soldiers stayed in Benicia Barracks, northeast of San Francisco, until they had recuperated from the Panama crossing and were reinforced by the arrival of additional troops who had been ailing when the steamer sailed. San Francisco was then aflame with Gold Rush fever, and Grant was entranced by its roaring, brawling atmosphere, where men “wore their pantaloons in their boots, and carried about with them an arsenal of bowie-knives and pistols.”66 He was susceptible to get-rich-quick schemes in a city jammed with hucksters of every stripe. “There is no reason why an active energetic person should not make a fortune every year,” he told Julia. “I feel that I could quit the Army to-day and in one year go home with enough to make us comfortable . . . all our life.”67 It appears patent that Grant entertained such pipe dreams because he could not afford to bring his family to the West Coast. “No person can know the attachment that exists between parent and child until they have been separated for some time,” he told Julia. “I am almost crazy sometimes to see Fred.”68
Grant kept busy during his Benicia stay. The soldiers improvised a theater, with log boxes constructed for officers, and Grant attended regularly. He visited two of Julia’s brothers, who had cashed in on the Gold Rush by running a hotel and ferry service on the Stanislaus River, but his favorite diversion was card playing. San Francisco was chock-full of gambling houses and Grant, mesmerized by games of chance, immediately went ashore with a friend and won money for dinner at the faro table. Always a probing observer of human nature, Grant was touched by the plight of well-to-do young men who had flocked to San Francisco, lured by dreams of riches, only to slave away as carpenters or masons. “Many of the real scenes in early California life exceed in strangeness and interest any of the mere products of the brain of the novelist,” he declared.69
On September 14, the Fourth Infantry left for its new home at Columbia Barracks, on the Columbia River, in Oregon Territory, across the water from the small settlement of Portland. (The barracks was renamed Fort Vancouver in July 1853 and the land became part of Washington Territory.) The ship that transported the regiment up the coast, the Columbia, had a turbulent voyage, encountering three days of gale-force winds that made Grant and other passengers seasick. Right before arriving at Columbia Barracks, Grant had a vivid dream, telling Julia “that I got home and found you, Fred. and a beautiful little girl, all asleep. Fred. woke up and we had a long conversation and he spoke as plainly as one of ten years old.”70 Grant still did not know the sex of the baby he presumed had been born in late July and imagined it as a girl. The letter reveals the extent of his anxiety about a prolonged separation from his family.
An army outpost since 1849, Columbia Barracks was set in a beautiful wilderness sparsely populated by Indian tribes and frontier settlers. When the weather was clear, it disclosed glistening vistas of snow-covered Mount Hood shimmering in the distance. But when it rained, the fort could seem lonely and godforsaken; when it snowed, the river grew icy. By December, snow stood ten inches thick on the ground and the mercury often dipped below freezing. “It either rains or snows here all the time at this place so I scarcely ever get a mile from home, and half the time do not go out of the house during the day,” Grant reported to Julia.71 For someone prone to depression, the everlasting rain and snow, combined with enforced confinement, were sure to prey on his mind. Grant began to suffer cramps in his legs and feet in the damp, frigid climate, a possible symptom of alcoholic neuropathy.72 “He was quiet and kept his room a good deal,” said one officer. He “was not a man who showed his griefs with his friends. He suffered alone.”73
Originally an important trading post for the Hudson’s Bay Company, Columbia Barracks still had the wooden stockade and three-story guard tower from that era. Grant was lucky to live in a building known as the Quartermaster’s Ranch, where he resided with his old West Point roommate Rufus Ingalls and two other officers. With porches on three sides, the two-story building stood on a slope above the Columbia River and Grant thought it the finest house in the territory. Made in New England, it had been dismantled and shipped around Cape Horn to the West Coast. At first, Grant was subordinate to Captain Thomas Lee Brent, but when the latter was transferred in May, Grant assumed total responsibility as regimental quartermaster, superintending all buildings, a blacksmith shop, a tin shop, a saddler’s shop, a carpentry shop, and two hundred mules.
As if touched with Gold Rush mania, Grant rashly entered into a business venture that caused him no end of grief. In Sackets Harbor, he and Julia had befriended a prominent family, the Camps, who were ruined by a railway investment. To rescue Elijah Camp, Grant paid for him to accompany the regiment to Columbia Barracks, where Camp opened a sutler’s store and Grant, with pay saved up from the Panama journey, supplied the needed $1,500 in capital. The con artist and the scoundrel always found a ready target in U. S. Grant. While the business boomed, Camp balked when Grant asked for a profit statement and “began to groan and whine and say there was no money in his trade at all,” Julia said.74 Perhaps detecting Grant’s gullibility, Camp complained that he would feel better owning the business outright. Grant, always good-natured to a fault, agreed to withdraw his $1,500, apparently taking $700 in cash and $800 in personal notes from Camp. “I was very foolish for taking it,” Grant admitted to Julia, “because my share of the profits would not have been less than three thousand per year.”75 Still not satisfied, Camp began to assert he couldn’t sleep at night, worrying that the notes Grant held might fall into the wrong hands. The obliging Grant then burned the notes by candlelight in front of Camp. Camp sold gunpowder in the shop, and when some of it accidentally blew up the store, he decided to return to Sackets Harbor. He refused to pay Grant the $800 he owed him, even though he had earned ten times that amount.
That November, Grant’s old card-playing partner from the Mexican War, Franklin Pierce, won the presidency on the Democratic ticket, defeating General Winfield Scott, who carried only four states for the Whigs. This lopsided defeat threatened the Whigs’ survival and would soon lead to formation of the Republican Party. As Charles Sumner told William Seward, “Now is the time for a new organization. Out of the chaos the party of freedom must arise.”76
Forlorn in the frosty northern woods, Grant must have felt quite distant from national politics. He wore a long beard, grew stout, and agonized over his separation from Julia. Their psychological distance seemed even greater than the geographical. As the Columbia River froze and blocked mail steamers, it took two months for her letters to reach him, and his morose return messages make for pitiable reading. “Just think,” he wrote in October, “our youngest is at this moment probably over three months of age, and yet I have never heard a word from it, or you, in that time.”77 Not until December 3, 1852—more than four months after his birth—did Grant learn that Julia had brought Ulysses Jr. into the world. Simultaneously he received confirmation from his sister Virginia and brother Orvil, and he bubbled over with relieved excitement: “It made tears almost start in my eyes, with joy, to hear so much about them by one mail,” he confided.78
Despite long absences from Julia, Grant’s life was miraculously free from allegations of womanizing. He would show up for dances, watch couples wordlessly for a while, then retire to the privacy of his room. “He did not run after the women as some of the officers did,” said Elderkin. “When he was in Oregon in 1852, his wife was in the eastern states, and he never ran after anyone.”79 Everyone noticed how he pined for his wife. “Often, of a winter’s night, when we were seated around the fire,” wrote Delia Sheffield, “he would tell me of his wife and children and how he missed them.”80 One morning, Grant dropped by the cottage of the artillery sergeant Theodore J. Eckerson, who recalled Grant showing him a letter from Julia where she “had laid baby Fred’s hand on the paper and traced with a pencil to show the size of it. He folded the letter and left without speaking a word; but his form shook and his eyes grew moist.”81 All the while, Grant struggled with gnawing suspicions that Colonel Dent wished to sabotage his marriage and steal away his children. As he wrote to Julia in July 1853, with a noticeable touch of anger, “How can your pa & ma think that they are going to keep Fred. & Ulys always with them?”82
The only rumor of philandering that ever trailed Grant concerned a Native American woman, named either Moumerto or Maria, who later claimed she gave birth to a daughter fathered by Grant. Grant’s fellow soldiers tended to discount the story, which remains vague and wholly unsubstantiated.83 What is certain is that Grant showed striking sympathy for Indians whom his regiment had come to police. “It is really my opinion that the whole race would be harmless and peaceable if they were not put upon by the whites,” he told Julia.84 He saw firsthand the fraud and abuse practiced upon Native Americans by corrupt white agents who swindled them on goods, not to mention the devastating effects of smallpox and measles communicated by white settlers.
Army pay was paltry in these years. One officer pointed out that “laborers and mechanics could in one week earn a captain’s pay . . . even the highest officers . . . were compelled to practice the most rigid economies.”85 Many officers, like Grant, couldn’t afford to bring their families to the western outpost. The Gold Rush inflated prices to stratospheric levels, sharpening the pinch for Grant, who feared military life would condemn him to a nomadic existence at frontier garrisons without his family. Under the circumstances, he told Julia in May 1853 that if he could “get together a few thousand dollars,” he might quit the army and rejoin her.86 At the very least, he could then send for her and the boys. The speculative atmosphere bred by the gold miners must have buttressed the idea that one business bonanza—one big killing—might free him from this lonely exile.
After leasing one hundred acres near the Columbia River, Grant and three other officers began to plant potatoes, oats, onions, and corn, the diligent Grant doing all the plowing and furrowing himself. His hands grew rough and callused from hard labor and he developed a slight stoop from bending in the field. “Passing this field one day, in the early spring, I saw Captain Grant, with his trousers tucked in his boots, sowing oats broadcast from a sheet tied about his neck and shoulders,” remembered Delia Sheffield.87 By the spring, his efforts had yielded a bumper crop. Then in June, the sudden melting of snow from the Cascades caused the Columbia River to overflow, drowning the oats, onions, and corn, and half the potato crop. The rising water also wrecked timber that Grant had neatly stacked for sale to steamboat captains. To aggravate matters, the price of potatoes plummeted and the four partners had to pay someone to cart away a rotting, worthless crop.
After the farming venture backfired, Grant and a partner bought up chickens and shipped them to San Francisco, only to have most perish en route. Then Grant and Rufus Ingalls learned that ice sold for exorbitant prices in San Francisco. To capitalize on this, they packed one hundred tons aboard a sailing vessel only to have headwinds detain the ship and melt the ice; by the time it arrived in San Francisco, other boats packed with ice had preceded it, leading to a price skid. To top things off, Grant and another officer tried to start a social club and billiard room at the Union Hotel only to have the hired manager abscond with their funds.
Why did Grant’s speculative schemes invariably go awry? Partly the explanation lies in his desperate desire to bring Julia and the boys to Fort Vancouver. He aimed to make a windfall and exploit sudden rises in price instead of engaging in sure, steady work. It was also the triumph of hope over experience: he never learned from earlier mishaps that commodities are perishable items with wildly fluctuating prices. He was also congenitally naive in business. Sincere himself, he could never imagine how deviously other people could behave. “Neither Grant nor myself had the slightest suggestion of business talent,” said partner Henry D. Wallen. “He was the perfect soul of honor and truth, and believed everyone else as artless as himself.”88
As in many frontier garrisons, soldiers dealt with boredom and loneliness by escaping into an alcoholic stupor. Second Lieutenant George Crook claimed officers were drunk daily “and most until the wee hours of the morning. I never had seen such gambling and carousing before or since.”89 Grant drank less often than other officers but went on “sprees” consistent with his lifelong tendency to engage in sporadic binge drinking. “He would perhaps go on two or three sprees a year,” said Lieutenant Henry C. Hodges, “but was always open to reason, and when spoken to on the subject, would own up and promise to stop drinking, which he did.”90 The problem was not the frequency with which Grant drank but the extreme behavioral changes induced. Officer Robert Macfeely observed: “Liquor seemed a virulent poison to him, and yet he had a fierce desire for it. One glass would show on him,” his speech became slurred, “and two or three would make him stupid.”91 Alcohol loosened up Grant’s tightly buttoned personality, giving him a broader, often jovial emotional range; the description of being “stupidly” or “foolishly” drunk would recur with striking regularity in future years. Rumor mills hummed busily in the small, insular peacetime army before the Civil War, and when Grant made a public spectacle of himself, those who glimpsed him in this silly, sloppy state never forgot the sight.
Drinking may have been a needed release from the nervous tension he accumulated during the long abstinence between episodes. Brought up in a strict Methodist household, Grant was moralistic enough to reprimand others who succumbed to alcoholic temptation. Delia Sheffield recalls the time the skipper of a small boat got drunk and disturbed the audience during a private theatrical. “Captain Grant walked to where he was sitting, and taking him firmly by the collar, marched him out of the hall. He had a true soldier’s love of order.”92 But Grant’s drinking lapses would be costly and ultimately ruinous to his reputation. Robert Macfeely says that one day Grant was riding a pony that slipped and fell on top of him on a muddy road, leaving him bruised and disheveled and giving rise to reports that he was drunk. Brevet Major Benjamin Alvord “preferred charges against him. Grant protested that he had not been drinking then, but Alvord sent in charges against him and Grant pledged himself not to drink any more.”93 Alvord would forward this pledge to the commanding officer of Grant’s next posting, with calamitous results.
One other consequential encounter returned to hurt Grant a decade later. One of his quartermaster duties was to supply pack animals and other provisions for parties surveying a railroad route through the Cascade mountains for what became the Northern Pacific Railway. In July 1853, one such survey was led by the twenty-six-year-old brevet captain George B. McClellan. Unlike Grant, McClellan had graduated near the top of his West Point class and showed little patience for slipshod performance. While his expedition was being outfitted at Fort Vancouver, said Henry C. Hodges, “Grant got on one of his little sprees, which annoyed and offended McClellan exceedingly, and in my opinion he never quite forgave Grant for it.”94 Though suffering from a severe cold, Grant delivered two hundred horses and other supplies on time, but he had made a powerful enemy who would associate him with this alcoholic binge.
By now Grant was despondent and almost frantic to be reunited with Julia. “Mrs. Sheffield, I have the dearest little wife in the world,” he exclaimed. “I want to resign from the Army and live with my family!”95 Then on August 5, 1853, Captain William W. S. Bliss died and the resulting vacancy led to Grant’s promotion to full captain. Secretary of War Jefferson Davis ordered him to report to Company F of the Fourth Infantry at Fort Humboldt, California. Grant had known that, if promoted, he would likely go there, having told Julia a few months earlier, “Col. Buchanan is there at present, I believe, establishing the post.”96 Lieutenant Colonel Robert C. Buchanan was all too familiar to Grant as the strict disciplinarian who used to fine him wine bottles at Jefferson Barracks for his frequent late returns from White Haven. The memory of this bogeyman could only have depressed his mood as he got ready to leave Fort Vancouver for the wilds of northern California.