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WHEN GRANT CONFERRED with his father-in-law at White Haven, Colonel Dent made no apologies about his political beliefs or fiery devotion to the Confederacy. The Dent household was already in an uproar about the war. Julia’s brother John angled to be a colonel in the Confederate army, while Aunt Fanny was adamantly pro-Union. Grant and his father-in-law held hot-tempered political discussions, lasting well into the night, with the enslaved Mary Robinson eavesdropping on them: “Dent was opposed to Lincoln, and tried to induce Grant not to fight with the Union army. He wanted him to cast his destiny with the South.”1 When Dent declared that he wanted Julia and the children to spend the war with him, Grant surely heard disquieting echoes of earlier years. In frustration, Grant reported to Julia that “your father professes to be a Union man yet condemns every measure for the preservation of the Union. He says he is ruined and I fear it is too true.”2 During the first year of the war, many White Haven slaves would escape, giving Grant the upper hand with his defiant father-in-law, who suddenly lost the economic foundations of his wealth. The conflict also endowed Grant with the moral fervor to confront him over the treasonous nature of secession, which he thought would prove suicidal for its adherents.
The Colonel never yielded an inch on secession. When he saw Grant was obstinate, he told him to enter the Union army and “rise as high as you can, but if your troops ever come to this side of the river I will shoot them.”3 It wasn’t just Union soldiers Colonel Dent ached to shoot. “After Capt. Grant took up the Northern side,” said Louisa Boggs, “Col. Dent swore with a big oath that if his worthless son-in-law ever came on his land he would shoot him as he would a rabbit.”4 Perhaps no state was more savagely divided by internecine warfare than Missouri.
While in St. Louis, Grant witnessed epochal events as the city divided into two armed camps of northern and southern sympathizers. Its federal arsenal contained the largest cache of weapons—sixty thousand muskets, ninety thousand pounds of gunpowder—of any slaveholding state. Unionists feared that the southern-leaning governor, Claiborne Fox Jackson, would direct his pro-secession militia units, waiting at Camp Jackson on the edge of the city, to grab the arsenal with its rich bounty of munitions. Jackson was a particular hero of Julia Grant’s, who had found it exhilarating when he “called for 20,000 troops to protect my native state.”5
Because of decisive action by Captain Nathaniel Lyon and Representative Francis P. Blair Jr., pro-Union regiments sprang up and covered the arsenal grounds with their white tents. Trailed by frenzied Unionists, they surrounded Camp Jackson and forced its surrender. Confederate flags were lowered blocks from where Grant had recently languished in the real estate business, and he credited Lyon and Blair for quick thinking in saving a major arsenal from Confederate hands. “If St. Louis had been captured by the rebels,” Grant later reflected, “it would have made a vast difference in our war . . . Instead of a campaign before Vicksburg, it would have been a campaign before St. Louis.”6 Grant long remembered rejoicing as he “saw Blair and Lyon bring their prisoners into town.”7
Back in Illinois, Grant mustered troops at Mattoon, southeast of Springfield, for the Twenty-First Illinois Infantry, his brief stay leaving a profound imprint on new recruits. They discerned that Grant “knew his business, for everything he did was done without hesitation,” said Lieutenant Joseph Vance. “He was a little bit stooped at the time, and wore a cheap suit of clothes and a soft black hat,” but anyone “who looked beyond that recognized that he was a professional soldier.”8 The soldiers expressed gratitude for this competent, if transient, visitor, bestowing upon him his first wartime accolade by renaming their encampment “Camp Grant.”
When he finished inducting troops, Grant returned to Springfield and resumed his lonely vigil for a permanent job. He was so broke that he sometimes skipped dinners to husband his limited funds. One editor who accosted Grant at a hotel found him looking “fagged out, lonesome, poor, and dejected.” “What are you doing here, Captain?” he asked. “Nothing—waiting,” Grant replied sulkily.9 He considered anything less than a colonel’s rank insufficient, but Governor Yates offered no such appointment, and he grew convinced that politicians had rigged the process. His friend Davis White claimed that Yates penalized Grant because he assumed Grant was a Democrat. “This is a Republican war and our friends must have the offices,” Yates told him. “Why, Governor,” retorted White, “you can’t fight this war out with all Republicans; Grant is a Democrat but a military educated man.”10
Dejected, Grant trooped back to Galena, where the local newspaper took up his cause, rewarding him with his first press notice: “We are now in want of just such soldiers as he is, and we hope the government will invite him to higher command. He is the very soul of honor, and no man breathes who has a more patriotic heart.”11 Experiencing a sense of duty “paramount to any other duty I ever owed,” Grant yearned to throw himself into the war effort at a suitable level, yet it seemed as if this supreme chance of his life was slipping from his eagerly outstretched grasp.12
In late May 1861, when the Confederate Congress voted to move its capital to Richmond, Grant realized that the war’s principal battles would be fought on Virginia soil, producing terrible insecurity in the Lincoln administration about Washington’s safety. At this point, it seemed unlikely that Grant might figure significantly in the war, and he later admitted that the zenith of his ambition was command of a cavalry brigade. He did not remain entirely passive in awaiting recognition. Swallowing his pride and contrary to his belief of never pushing himself forward, he composed a letter to the adjutant general of the army in Washington, soliciting a position: “I would say that in view of my present age, and length of service, I feel myself competent to command a regiment, if the President, in his judgment, should see fit to entrust one to me.”13 It seemed a modest enough request, given the pressing search for experienced officers, but already bruised by rejection, Grant felt he might be aiming too high. He could have saved himself the paperwork: he never received any acknowledgment from Washington, much less the job he sought.
Having mustered in the last regiments authorized by the Illinois legislature, Grant visited his parents in Covington and took advantage of his time there to lobby the wunderkind Major General George McClellan, whose headquarters lay across the Ohio River in Cincinnati. The two men, who had overlapped briefly at West Point, had met during the Mexican War, then again in the Pacific Northwest, when Grant was unfortunately drinking. Retaining considerable respect for McClellan’s talents—he had graduated second in his class at West Point—Grant was eager to serve under the younger man, even as a major or lieutenant colonel. For two consecutive days, he cooled his heels for two hours in the waiting area of McClellan’s headquarters and was pointedly snubbed. Both times he was informed the general had gone out. McClellan never acknowledged Grant’s presence, giving him a foretaste of the arrogance that would so infuriate Abraham Lincoln and Secretary of War Edwin Stanton. At his wit’s end, Grant went off to Columbus, Ohio, hoping to wring from Governor William Dennison, a boyhood friend, a contract to bake bread for soldiers. He no longer pretended that he could passively await recognition of his intrinsic worth.
Then, on June 16, 1861, Grant received a telegram from Governor Yates, appointing him colonel of the 7th Congressional District Regiment, shortly renamed the Twenty-First Illinois, the same outfit he had drilled into shape at Mattoon. No sooner had he digested this long-awaited news and wired acceptance to Yates than he received an offer to command an Ohio regiment, which he declined. Grant’s life had changed abruptly, irrevocably, and rather miraculously. Julia was overjoyed at this sudden turn of fortune, perhaps because she had no sense of just how long and ghastly the war would be. “Strange to say, I felt no regret at his going and even suggested that our eldest son, just then eleven years old, should accompany him . . . I considered it a pleasant summer outing for both of them.”14
Grant replaced Colonel Simon S. Goode, a flamboyant, blustering character—he liked to stuff two revolvers in his belt—with hardly an iota of military experience. A high-spirited, uproarious character, Goode drank to excess and his obliging men followed suit. As his soldiers rebelled against bad food by pillaging local farms and burned down a guardhouse crawling with vermin, discipline crumbled in his disorganized regiment. As Private Joseph H. Wham explained, “We had too much self-respect to serve under a drunken, incompetent colonel.”15 Alarming reports of near-mutiny filtered back to Governor Yates, who summoned the regiment to Springfield and met with its commissioned officers, a majority of whom requested Goode’s replacement by Grant. As Wham said, “There was not a murmur at his being thus promoted over the heads of the ten captains and two field officers who outranked him.”16 It says much about Grant that his professionalism was so palpable to even the most callow soldiers.
Grant rode off on a horse trolley to the fairground near Springfield where the Twenty-First Illinois was encamped. Outfitted in civilian garb—a light-colored shirt, elbow-patched coat, and dented plug hat—he bore no insignia of rank as he sauntered around the grounds. As so often with Grant, people badly underestimated him, and his small size and slatternly appearance brought out sadistic impulses in some men. A few soldiers began to razz their new colonel, hissing in derision, “Well, I’ll be damned. Is that our colonel?” One man said mockingly, “He don’t look as if he knew enough to find cows if you gave him the hay.”17 Grant threw the man a glance that suggested he meant business. One soldier crept up behind him and started to shadowbox tauntingly until another shoved him hard against Grant, who remained imperturbable and offered no reproach. He knew that, to project authority, he had to transcend petty anger.
As he scouted the terrain, Grant noticed that Goode had created a police force of eighty guards, heavily armed with clubs, to prevent men from sneaking off. Grant knew the difference between being strict and punitive, and sat down in the adjutant’s tent to draft an order abolishing these camp guards. The same order announced three daily drills, warning that those who missed them would be subject to confinement. If the men regarded Grant as overly harsh at first, they soon grew to admire his fairness, competence, and aplomb. He never threw temper tantrums, never engaged in theatrics, and performed his duties in a placid, levelheaded manner.
Once he took command, a remarkable change overcame Grant, mirrored in his letters. He now sounded energized, alert, and self-confident, as if shaken from a long slumber. Working with clockwork precision, he briskly issued orders. In his understated style, he was fearless and exacting. When several officers, attempting to flout Grant, showed up for dress parade without the requisite coats, he simply stated, “Dismiss the men to quarters.”18 Then he turned on his heels and departed. Such tomfoolery never recurred. Grant responded to infractions with cool, unwavering rigor. He fumed when a rough old rascal named Mexico showed up at a drill with a hangover. When Grant posted him to the guardhouse, Mexico swore, “I’ll have an ounce of your blood.”19 Grant had him promptly gagged. A few hours later, he assembled the regiment and silently tore off Mexico’s gag. Instead of retaliating, the tamed Mexico slunk off in humbled silence. Within days, Grant had smoothly shaped order from chaos.
In plain blue coat and black felt hat without marks of rank, he showed an egalitarian spirit that the volunteers appreciated. In ten days, he boosted regimental numbers from 630 to a full complement of 1,000. All the while, he found time to study William J. Hardee’s manual of tactics and reports written by George McClellan as a Crimean War observer. Short of cash, Grant turned to his father and Orvil for a loan to enable him to buy a horse and a dress uniform appropriate to his new rank. Both men spurned his request in a last humiliation meted out by his family. Grant was forced to borrow from a Galena bank, with Jesse Grant’s former business partner E. A. Collins endorsing the note. Before too long, Grant purchased a fine, yellow saddle horse named Jack that was to be one of his stable of mounts during the next four years.
Hounded from the army seven years earlier due to drinking, Grant reentered the service beneath a cloud and policed his men with unswerving zeal whenever he discovered evidence of alcohol abuse. How he dealt with drinking infractions reveals much about how he regarded his own alcohol problem. He limited field officers to one pint of liquor for the war’s duration. “He allowed no whiskey in the camp,” said Lieutenant Vance. “I’ve seen him personally inspect the canteens, and spill the liquor on the ground, and yet for all that he was so strict a disciplinarian, he was never angry or vindictive.”20 Grant smashed liquor barrels and warned grocers not to peddle alcohol to his men. “He refused to drink brandy when cold or wet,” said one soldier. “‘I do not use it,’ he said.”21 Clearly Grant did not view alcohol consumption kindly.
By June 19, Grant’s soldiers were urged to switch over from short-term militia service to three-year stints in the federal service. Two Illinois congressmen, John A. McClernand and John Logan, arrived and delivered florid speeches, exhorting the men to make the change. Throughout the speeches, Grant hovered discreetly in the background until Logan shoved him to the fore. To thunderous cheers, Logan said, “Allow me to present to you your new colonel, U.S. Grant.” The bashful Grant stepped forward. “Cries of ‘Grant, Grant; Colonel Grant!’ arose and so did the Colonel slowly and with quiet dignity,” said Wham.22 Every man strained to hear what their laconic colonel would say, and he pronounced exactly five words: “Men, go to your quarters.”23 In a resounding affirmation of his leadership, virtually the entire regiment agreed to submit to three-year federal service. “We knew we had the best commander,” boasted one soldier, “and the best regiment in the State.”24
Its first assignment was to travel to Quincy, Illinois, near the state’s western border. Wanting his men to be tough and hardy, Grant made a daring decision: instead of transporting them by train, he would march them halfway across the state, “preferring to train them in a friendly country.”25 On June 3, when the march got under way, whole towns turned out to applaud the soldiers. Women fluttered handkerchiefs and tossed bouquets. From the outset, Grant knew he had to earn the allegiance of the populace and punished those who pinched hens and roosters from local gardens. He brought along his eldest son, Fred, who profited from his father’s popularity. “The Soldiers and officers call him Colonel and he seems to be quite a favorite,” Grant informed Julia.26 He expressed delight with the regiment’s progress, telling them after one week that they compared favorably with “veteran troops in point of soldierly bearing, general good order, and cheerful execution of commands.”27 Grant was back in his element, as proficient in war as he had been ineffectual in business. The incessant activity was clearly therapeutic for a man whose foremost enemy had been unwanted idleness. “I don’t believe there is a more orderly set of troops now in the volunteer service,” Grant wrote proudly to Julia. “I have been very strict with them and the men seem to like it.”28
Grant struck up an intimate friendship with the regimental chaplain, James L. Crane, whom he asked to deliver blessings at meals. Crane marveled at Grant’s cool, unruffled temperament, his candor among trusted friends, and his charitable nature: “He has no desire to rise by the fall of others; no glorying over another’s abasement; no exulting over another’s tears.”29 Invigorated by the cause, Grant evinced no symptoms of the depression that had dogged him in recent years. “He is always cheerful; no toil, cold, heat, hunger, fatigue, or want of money depresses him.” Crane had a chance to probe Grant’s political views. While Grant still lacked patience with extreme abolitionists, he loathed slavery with all his soul. “He believed slavery to be an anomaly in a free government like ours; that its tendency was subversive of the best interests of the master and the enslaved . . . that it resulted in denying the slave the rights of his moral nature.” At this juncture, Grant knew the war’s sole purpose was to preserve the Union and suppress the rebellion, but he already perceived that its inexorable logic would carry more profound repercussions in its wake. “He often remarked . . . that he believed slavery would die with this rebellion, and that it might become necessary for the government to suppress it as a stroke of military policy.”30
Crane noticed that Grant abstained completely from alcohol, refusing all wine and brandy and “usually remarking that he never indulged in anything stronger than coffee and tobacco.”31 With his men, Grant remained extremely vigilant against alcoholic temptation. On July 4, while the regiment stayed at the Jacksonville fairgrounds, Grant stood at the gate, personally examining canteens for illicit whiskey. When he found a local vendor purveying jugs of whiskey from a wagon, he had them confiscated, forcing the seller to scramble away. At Exeter the next day, Grant again emptied canteens in the dust. When all else failed, he had intoxicated soldiers lashed to baggage wagons or tree trunks until they sobered up. When the regiment reached Quincy and the old soldier known as Mexico got roaring drunk, Grant berated him with unwonted severity: “You are a trifling, dirty old dog, and of no account on this earth. You get across the river and never let me see you again.”32
At Quincy, Grant received orders from Brigadier General John Pope to proceed to Palmyra, just across the Mississippi River in Missouri, to rescue an Illinois regiment pinned down by rebels on a railway line. Grant, who had never been in command before and now faced the ultimate test of battle, was seized with trepidation. “Before we were prepared to cross the Mississippi River at Quincy my anxiety was relieved; for the men of the besieged regiment came straggling into town,” Grant wrote. “I am inclined to think both sides got frightened and ran away.”33 An atypical male, Grant never hesitated to admit human fears. It is perhaps no accident that at this stressful moment he suffered migraine headaches, nor that he decided to send young Fred home for his safety.
After several days at Palmyra, the next objective for Grant’s regiment was to apprehend General Thomas A. Harris, who commanded a force of twelve hundred mounted secessionists in northern Missouri. So far, Confederates in the region constituted a ghostly but destructive presence, tearing up railroad tracks and pouncing on small pockets of Union troops. Harris was rumored to be in the small town of Florida, some twenty-five miles south. With rising dread, Grant led six companies through a deserted landscape. They approached a hill where they expected to find Harris and his men lurking at a creek bottom on the other side. In an oft-quoted passage of his Memoirs, Grant described his first whiff of fright as his heart “kept getting higher and higher until it felt to me as though it was in my throat. I would have given anything then to have been back in Illinois, but I had not the moral courage to halt.” To his relieved astonishment, Grant discovered that Harris and his men had absconded in response to his approach. “My heart resumed its place. It occurred to me at once that Harris had been as much afraid of me as I had been of him.”34 This anticlimactic moment was formative for Grant, who never forgot the nugget of practical wisdom learned. He would emerge as a master of the psychology of war, intuitive about enemy weakness. Henceforth he would project himself into opponents’ minds and comprehend their fears and anxieties instead of blowing them up into all-powerful bugaboos, giving him courage when others quailed. Around this time, Mark Twain belonged to a small, irregular Confederate company and later claimed for comic effect that he had been pursued by Grant’s troops. As he said facetiously, “I did not know that this was the future General Grant or I would have turned and attacked him. I supposed it was just some ordinary Colonel of no particular consequence, so I let him go.”35 In fact, Twain had been in the vicinity weeks earlier.
On July 20, Grant’s regiment set off by train southward for Mexico, a town in Missouri. The next day, a sweltering Sunday in the East, Union troops staged the war’s first major confrontation, assaulting Confederate forces at Manassas, Virginia, west of Washington. General Winfield Scott, who oversaw the northern war effort, was too old, creaky, and overweight to lead armies into battle, so the task fell to the tall, bearded General Irvin McDowell, a West Pointer who had served in the Mexican War. A student of military strategy, McDowell had enrolled at a French military college, but he had never commanded troops in the field. The battle of Bull Run (First Manassas) drew a vast flock of enraptured spectators from the federal capital, including six senators and at least ten congressmen, not to mention fashionable ladies hoping to enjoy some bloodshed as a holiday outing and history lesson. What had looked like certain victory degenerated into a panicky rout of Union forces, who streamed back into the capital in a dreary, drenching rain.
President Lincoln and his cabinet were shocked by the unexpected vigor of southern resistance and a shaken Elihu Washburne wrote home that he had never seen “a more sober set of men.”36 Bull Run dashed the confidence of armchair generals who had predicted the North would coast to easy victory, breeding a corresponding euphoria in southern towns. It also exposed for the first—but not the last—time the shortcomings of Union generals in the eastern theater. It always irritated Grant that the competent McDowell was stigmatized for his loss. “You will remember people called him a drunkard and a traitor,” Grant later said. “Well, he never drank a drop of liquor in his life, and a more loyal man never lived.”37 In the days after Bull Run, the president signed two bills to enlist a million new volunteers as the scale of the conflict exploded dramatically and the nation lurched toward total war.
When his regiment reached Mexico, Grant found himself in Missouri territory infested with secessionists, and as he gauged the depth of the irrational emotions driving secession, he feared guerrilla warfare would spiral out of control. “I hope from the bottom of my heart I may be mistaken,” he told Julia, “but since the defeat of our troops at Manassas things look more gloomy here.”38 Thanks to a decision by General Pope, Grant now commanded three infantry regiments and a section of artillery. Attuned to the war’s political imperatives, he again worked hard to prevent his troops from alienating local residents by pilfering food and drink.
While in Mexico, Grant grappled for the first time with a runaway slave who appeared in camp and asked for the commanding colonel. As Chaplain Crane recalled, the man—frightened, exhausted, breathing heavily—explained that he had been treated atrociously by his master. “Kin yo help me, cunnel?” he asked Grant. “Can’t help you, sir, we are not here to look after negroes, but after rebels,” Grant rejoined. “You must take care of yourself.” Crestfallen, the man hung his head and sighed dejectedly. “Lawd, I’s afeerd massa ’ll be onto me!”39 Although Grant did not help the man, Chaplain Crane gave him bread, meat, and money and steered him to an escape route across the Mississippi. When the slave’s master and his sidekick appeared in camp two hours later and inquired about the fugitive’s whereabouts, Grant not only shielded the runaway, but demanded that the two men divulge their feelings about the rebellion. When they evaded his question, Grant detained them in camp until they agreed to take an oath of allegiance, giving their former slave more time to escape.
In early August, Crane handed Grant a copy of the Daily Missouri Democrat and remarked, “I see that you are made brigadier-general.” Taken unawares, Grant sat down to study the news item from Washington, which said his name had been sent to the Senate for the post. “Well, sir, I had no suspicion of it,” he said. “It never came from any request of mine.” Grant guessed correctly that the appointment derived from Washburne’s amicable relations with Lincoln. Crane was amazed by Grant’s unflappable response as “he very leisurely rose up and pulled his black felt hat a little nearer his eyes . . . and walked away about his business with as much apparent unconcern as if some one had merely told him that his new suit of clothes was finished.”40 For Grant it was a dreamlike transformation: the man who had recently toiled as a store clerk, who had felt cursed by fate, who had lobbied wearily for appointment as a colonel, had been unexpectedly bumped up to brigadier general in charge of four regiments, or about four thousand men, without having fought a single battle. And in the end he required political pull to do so. After years of wandering, Grant had popped up in the right congressional district in the right state. Lincoln had the power to appoint brigadier generals of volunteers, and the Illinois caucus enjoyed such sway that six Illinois brigadiers were selected, two more than any other state. “This is certainly very complimentary to me,” Grant told his father, “particularly as I have never asked a friend to intercede in my behalf.”41 Back home in Galena, Julia trumpeted the news everywhere. She was unapologetically ambitious for her husband, perhaps expressing what he secretly felt but dared not say. As Orvil’s wife noted with chagrin, “Julia boastfully told the townsfolk that her Ulyss had become a Brigadier and she had always known his mettle.”42
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AFTER YEARS OF SEEING his life maddeningly stalled, Grant began to experience gigantic leaps in power. On August 8, the new brigadier general took command of the military district of Ironton, a railway terminus seventy miles south of St. Louis, then threatened by Confederate troops under General William J. Hardee. Here Grant made his headquarters in a small rustic farmhouse, hard by a lovely spring, amid mountain scenery that he found bracing. He still lacked a sword, a sash, or a uniform befitting his new rank, but he had always led by the force of personality, not by gold braid and ribbons. Under a spreading oak tree, he set out a pine table and surveyed maps, marking them with a red pencil. Significantly, he ordered a new set of maps with an expanded overview of the region. Already a grand strategy began to germinate in his mind of how to exploit the broad waterways that provided entry into the heart of Confederate territory.
Although he had brought along the Twenty-First Illinois, Grant had new regiments under his supervision in Ironton and labored to whip these amateurs into a band of crack troops. “The loud laugh and bluster, the swagger of loafing squads, were hushed,” said one soldier approvingly. “Instead you heard the bugle calls, the roll of drums, the sharp commands of officers to the drilling and marching and wheeling battalions.”43 Since alcohol abuse was widespread among local troops, Grant shut down saloons in Ironton and the railroad station at Pilot Knob.
On August 10, at the battle of Wilson’s Creek, Confederate forces handed a stunning defeat to the Union army in southwest Missouri, killing General Nathaniel Lyon—the first Union general to succumb in battle. While Grant still hoped the Confederacy might be conquered by the following spring, Wilson’s Creek made him wonder. As he admitted to his sister, the rebels were so persistent “that there is no telling when they may be subdued.”44 Grant viewed himself as relegated to a backwater of the war and itched to be farther east. “I should like to be sent to Western Virginia but my lot seems to be cast in this part of the world.”45 He had not yet fully grasped the vast strategic opportunities and chances to sparkle afforded by the western theater.
Just as Grant cherished his newfound worth as a general, General John C. Frémont, commanding the Western Department, replaced him at Ironton with Brigadier General Benjamin M. Prentiss. Without warning, Prentiss showed up on a train bearing orders to take command. Even though both men held the same rank, Grant was technically senior by virtue of his old army rank, but he felt powerless to halt the move. Rudely jolted, he took a midnight train to St. Louis to see Frémont, accompanied by Colonel John M. Thayer, who watched Grant brood silently. “Why he was thus summarily displaced by another he could not divine,” said Thayer. “He felt severely the humiliation of being thus recalled from his command, for which there was no apparent justification; and he was thoroughly cast down and dejected by the wholly unexpected change in his military position.”46 For a man with Grant’s checkered history, the unjust reprimand could only have aroused unpleasant memories.
Popularly celebrated as “Pathfinder of the West,” Frémont had helped to map the Rocky Mountains. A self-dramatizing figure with a fatal penchant for fancy uniforms, he had served as one of California’s first senators and the first presidential nominee of the new Republican Party in 1856. Touched with an imperious streak, he operated from a three-story mansion where he strutted about with monarchical airs. He had converted his headquarters into a private fiefdom, with a Praetorian Guard of foreign mercenaries clad in pretentious uniforms, many stalked by rumors of corruption. The great man vouchsafed only a brief audience to Grant and seemed to ramble on in mumbo jumbo. “Fremont had as much state as a sovereign,” Grant recollected. “He sat in a room in full uniform, with his maps before him. When you went in, he would point out one line or another in a mysterious manner, never asking you to take a seat.”47 When Thayer encountered a subdued Grant afterward, he “did not exhibit an angry spirit, did not utter a harsh word, but his feelings seemed to be deeply wounded.”48
Before leaving St. Louis, Grant paid a call on his former real estate partner, the conservative Harry Boggs. Two years earlier, Grant had lodged in a drab, poorly furnished room in the Boggs home. Now he came clothed with the immense prestige of a brigadier general. “[Boggs] cursed and went on like a Madman,” Grant wrote to Julia. “Told me that I would never be welcome in his house; that the people of Illinois were a poor miserable set of Black Republicans.” In a strange role reversal, Grant felt sorry for the insignificant Harry Boggs, upon whom he had once so sorely depended. “Harry is such a pitiful insignificant fellow that I could not get mad at him and told him so.”49
Although Grant longed to be transferred farther east, Frémont assigned him to take command in Jefferson City, the state capital, deep in the Missouri heartland, a town menaced by marauding raiders and a Confederate force under General Sterling Price. When he arrived, Grant found the countryside “in a state of ferment” and injected discipline into a large body of troops in extreme disarray.50 The soldiers had been “recruited for different periods and on different conditions; some were enlisted for six months, some for a year, some without any condition as to where they were to serve, others were not to be sent out of the State.”51 Grant also grappled with severe shortages of ammunition, weapons, blankets, tents, and clothing. Fortunately, after a week, a bantam colonel with a bushy beard and melancholy eyes, implausibly named Jefferson C. Davis, came to relieve him of his command. “The orders directed that I should report at department headquarters at St. Louis without delay, to receive important special instructions.”52 Within an hour, Grant hopped a train bound for St. Louis.
It was unclear whether he was being promoted or demoted. When he arrived at headquarters, Frémont let him stew in the corridor for several hours. Major Justus McKinstry, who had known Grant in prewar army days, greeted him before proceeding to a staff meeting where Frémont and his officers debated which general could best counter Confederate activity on the Mississippi River. McKinstry argued robustly for Grant, citing his Mexican War gallantry, but was hooted down by others, who alluded to Grant’s 1854 resignation, prompted by a drinking problem. Once embedded in a responsible position, McKinstry claimed, Grant would not revert to the bottle. After an emotional argument, Frémont chose Grant, later writing that “General Grant was a man of unassuming character, not given to self-elation, of dogged persistence, and of iron will.”53 When Grant was ushered into the meeting, he learned that he would preside over the District of Southeast Missouri, encompassing territory south of St. Louis and in southern Illinois. There is a competing story as to how Grant got this highly consequential promotion. Postmaster General Montgomery Blair averred that Lincoln received a gentle nudge from Elihu Washburne, then directed the secretary of war to “send an order to General Frémont to put Grant in command of the District of Southeast Missouri.”54
Whatever the case, Grant was ordered to proceed to Cape Girardeau on the Mississippi River, in southeast Missouri, across the river from Illinois, where he would be poised to operate against Kentucky and Tennessee. Writing to Julia, Grant sounded decidedly hopeful about his newly conferred powers: “I wish I could be kept with one Brigade steadily. But I suppose it is a compliment to be selected so often for what is supposed to be important service.”55 Lifting his mood was his improved financial picture: he would receive a handsome annual salary of $4,000 with only $40 in monthly expenses.
Soon after meeting Grant, the Pathfinder perpetrated a breathtaking act of hubris that confirmed talk of his imperial rule. Without consulting Lincoln, Frémont declared martial law in Missouri, ordered the death penalty for captured Confederate guerrillas, and enunciated his own emancipation proclamation: he would free rebel slaves who took up arms for the Union. Lincoln was aghast. Aside from bridling at the blatant insubordination, he feared the defection of Democrats and border states and asked Frémont to modify his measure. The headstrong Frémont refused, even dispatching his wife, Jessie, to reason with Lincoln. She got an icy reception and her presence only worsened her husband’s predicament, although he was not formally relieved until early November. Lincoln’s decision to cashier Frémont served as a cautionary tale for Grant, who noted, “The generals who insisted upon writing emancipation proclamations . . . all came to grief as surely as those who believed that the main object of the war was to protect rebel property, and keep the negroes at work on the plantations while their masters were off in the rebellion.”56 With few exceptions, Grant would qualify as a model general who accepted military subservience to civilian leadership.
When he took the steamer to Cape Girardeau, he met a journalist from the New York Herald who left a brief verbal sketch of his appearance: “He is about forty-five years of age, not more than five feet eight inches in height, and of ordinary frame, with a slight tendency to corpulency. The expression of his face is pleasant, and a smile is almost continually playing around his eyes.”57 Not often was Grant conjured up in this cheerful vein, and it was clear that Frémont’s orders had, at least temporarily, bucked up his flagging morale.
Before going to his new headquarters, Grant undertook a mission to chase down Brigadier General M. Jeff Thompson, whose Confederate partisans harassed federal forces in the swamps of southeast Missouri. The operation was impeded by a personal clash. Grant had a rendezvous with Brigadier General Benjamin M. Prentiss—the same general who supplanted him at Ironton—but Prentiss recoiled from taking orders from Grant. In his Memoirs, Grant attributed the contretemps to a seniority dispute. Prentiss “was very much aggrieved at being placed under another brigadier-general, particularly as he believed himself to be the senior.”58 But Prentiss, who rushed off to complain to Frémont, may have been moved by baser motives. When the journalist Albert D. Richardson ran into him, Prentiss explained why he had left: “I will not serve under a drunkard.”59 Later on, Grant came to value Prentiss as an able, selfless commander and regretted the earlier history of friction.
Grant decided to make his headquarters at Cairo, at the southern tip of Illinois, a vital intersection where the Ohio River flowed into the Mississippi. It arose as the perfect hub for massive operations by water that would penetrate the Deep South. Frémont’s master plan was to dominate the Mississippi from Cairo to New Orleans, bisecting the Confederacy, and to control the Cumberland and Tennessee Rivers, natural gateways to Tennessee, Alabama, and Mississippi. No longer was Grant consigned to a lesser stage in the war and now acted in one of its main theaters.
Upon arriving in Cairo, he donned civilian garb as he awaited his brigadier general uniform from New York. At first, the resident commander, Colonel Richard J. Oglesby, did not catch Grant’s name or realize that the small, forgettable man in mufti had been sent to succeed him. Then Grant scrawled his orders on a sheet of paper and handed it to the bemused colonel, who “put on an expression of surprise that looked a little as if he would like to have someone identify me. But he surrendered the office without question.”60 For his headquarters, Grant set up shop on the second floor of a bank building, where he sat behind a counter, sucking on a meerschaum pipe, as if he were an everyday bank teller. Dr. John H. Brinton, an army surgeon, at first dismissed Grant as “a very ordinary sort of man,” then noticed his unusual concentration, his capacity to make rapid-fire decisions under extreme pressure. Grant got things done without the pomp and frippery of a Frémont. “He did not as a rule speak a great deal . . . did nothing carelessly, but worked slowly, every now and then stopping and taking his pipe out of his mouth.”61 Periodically, as if deep in thought, Grant paused and stared out the window at a fleet of gunboats anchored in the river—a fleet that opened up a wealth of strategic initiatives with the dense network of navigable waterways nearby.
Flooded in many places, Cairo was a hellish place with an infestation of small creatures attracted by standing pools of water. Soldiers were bitten by ubiquitous mosquitoes, dead horses and mules floated downriver, and swarms of rats scurried along muddy streets. Frémont had labeled Cairo “the most unhealthy post within my command” and the pestilential atmosphere bred malaria and dysentery.62 Without a staff to delegate tasks, Grant felt overwhelmed by clerical duties and complained to Julia that his hand had grown cramped from all the letters he drafted. He was obliged to feed, house, and train new regiments who arrived incessantly by train, and he often worked alone until midnight. Burdened with the responsibilities of commissary and quartermaster as well as brigadier general, he conducted an unending battle against mercenary contractors who sought to swindle the government.
Despite his exemplary sense of duty, Grant proved almost laughably inefficient when it came to filing paperwork, much as in his hapless real estate days. He had an absentminded habit of stuffing letters into his pockets and neglecting them. Indeed, one journalist claimed that “the camp story was but slightly exaggerated which asserted that half his general orders were blowing about in the sand and dirt of the streets of Cairo.”63 He urgently needed aides to rescue him from his own disorganized nature. Grant made plain that he did not want as staff officers “these gay, swelling, pompous adventurers,” but young men “who had some conscience.”64 From his former regiment, he plucked Clark B. Lagow, thirty-two, and William S. Hillyer, thirty, the young lawyer with whom he had debated politics at the real estate office in St. Louis. Showing a weakness for nepotism that later caused him no end of trouble, he appointed his brother-in-law, Dr. Alexander Sharp, as brigade surgeon.
Grant needed a commanding personality to manage his office and ride herd over his staff and from the outset selected John Rawlins for a special place in his entourage. Rawlins was the pallid young lawyer with the full dark beard, saturnine aura, and enormous dark eyes who had bowled over Grant with his impassioned oratory at the Galena recruiting meeting. On August 30, Rawlins was appointed assistant adjutant general with the rank of captain, effectively making him Grant’s chief of staff. With no military background, he was startled that Grant gave him such a high appointment.
All through August, Rawlins sat by the bedside of his wife, Emily, as she lay dying of tuberculosis in Goshen, New York. While there, he spotted an item in the New York Tribune about Grant’s appointment as brigadier general and little realized its enormous meaning for him. On August 30, Emily died, leaving the thirty-year-old Rawlins a young widower with three small children. He was tortured by her loss and distraught over his children’s fate: “The God of Heaven only knows what will become of our three little children.”65 He mourned his wife fervently for years, evoking her in saintly terms: “Few of earth’s daughters were so lovely; none in Heaven stands nearer the throne.”66 Once he arranged for his children’s care, he hastened to join Grant’s staff, reaching Cairo on September 14. A photo of Rawlins taken that October betrays the deep ravages of grief: he holds a sword in his hand, but no martial triumph illuminates his eyes, which are sad and haunted with widely dilated pupils. He seems to be peering into a troubled future.
Born in East Galena, Rawlins was the second of nine children in a poor family. His mother, a pious Christian woman of Scotch-Irish heritage, taught him hymns that he often recited at bedtime during the war. His Kentucky-born father was a farmer who burned charcoal to sell to local lead mines. For three years his father tested his luck in California’s gold fields, forcing the adolescent John to care for his family and charcoal business. When the young man entered Galena politics, he carried the nickname “the Coal Boy of Jo Daviess County.”67 Some dispute exists as to whether Rawlins’s father was a full-blown alcoholic—“He hit the bottle liberally, wasn’t a drunkard at all, but drank freely,” a nephew testified—but his drinking was excessive enough to convert Rawlins into a fierce temperance advocate.68 His friend James H. Wilson later wrote, “It is certain that from his earliest manhood John A. Rawlins exhibited an earnest and uncompromising hatred for strong drink, and during his military life waged constant warfare against its use in the army. His dislike of it amounted to a deep and abiding abhorrence, and . . . he was often heard to declare that he would rather see a friend of his take a glass of poison than a glass of whiskey.”69 Because of his father’s fondness for alcohol and irresponsible nature, Rawlins received a spotty education and always regretted his deficient schooling. Yet he was smart and determined enough to pass the bar after a one-year apprenticeship with a local lawyer and soon became a city alderman and auditor.
Rawlins’s family history with alcohol abuse gave him a special purchase on Grant’s drinking troubles, making it an all-consuming preoccupation. Before joining his staff, he extracted a pledge from Grant that he would not touch a drop of liquor until the war ended, and he would monitor this vow with Old Testament fervor, carrying on a lonely, one-man crusade to keep Grant sober. That Grant agreed to this deal shows his strong willingness to confront his drinking problem. The mission perfectly suited Rawlins’s zealous nature. With Grant’s consent, he laid down draconian rules to curb drinking, forbidding the open use of liquor at headquarters. In general orders that announced Rawlins’s appointment, Grant berated men who “visit together the lowest drinking and dancing saloons; quarrel, curse, drink and carouse . . . Such conduct is totally subversive of good order and Military Discipline and must be discontinued.”70 With Rawlins on the premises, even senior officers drank secretly in their tents. Any staff member who furnished Grant with alcohol faced the fervid wrath of Rawlins and likely dismissal. Rawlins fretted over Grant, agonizing over suspected lapses from the straight path of abstinence. He had no compunctions about chastising Grant for lapses, and his unflagging vigilance was remarkable in its forthright passion and candor.
Rawlins’s papers reveal another dimension to the story. He feared his own susceptibility to alcohol, so that in saving Grant from temptation, he was perhaps saving himself as well. One year after joining Grant’s staff, he signed a pledge not to drink, along with Clark B. Lagow and William S. Hillyer: “This pledge signed by me shall never be broken. Teach my boy its great value, tell him his father never was a drunkard, but [he] signed this that he might exert a proper influence over those with whom and under whom he served his country.”71
Grant never discussed publicly his drinking pact with Rawlins, but he must have taken it to heart since Rawlins became his right-hand man and alter ego during the war. He allowed Rawlins to be the moralistic scourge and resident conscience of his staff. Later in the war, Grant wrote that Rawlins “comes the nearest being indispensable to me of any officer in the service.”72 In entering the army and assuming tremendous responsibilities, Grant must have feared he would be hurled back into the hard-drinking world of officers from which he fled in 1854, endangering the hard-earned sobriety of his St. Louis and Galena years. A general could not afford even occasional bouts of dissipation. In the army Grant would also lack the firm, restraining hand of his wife. Prolonged absence from Julia could easily set him up for a major relapse into the periodic degradation of his West Coast years. With some notable exceptions, Rawlins largely succeeded in his role as self-appointed watchdog. In later years, Grant’s Galena physician, Dr. Edward Kittoe, paid tribute to “Grant’s repeated efforts to overcome the desire for strong drink while he was in the army, and of his final victory through his own persistency and advice so freely given him by Rawlins.”73
The ever-watchful Rawlins enjoyed special license to be frank and even scold Grant. “It was no novel thing to hear the zealous subordinate administer to his superior a stiff verbal castigation because of some act that met the former’s stern disapproval,” said the cipher operator Samuel Beckwith. “And Grant never resented any reprimand bestowed by Rawlins.”74 Rawlins spoke to him with a freedom that flabbergasted onlookers. Only he could slap Grant on the back or engage in familiar banter. Grant shrank from profanity, yet he tolerated with amusement the barrage of oaths that constantly poured from Rawlins’s mouth.
Because of the purity of his motives, Rawlins became Grant’s closest friend. “Gen. Grant was a man who made friends very slowly,” noted a journalist. “While he had a great many acquaintances, I think he had a very limited circle of friends—I mean men whom he trusted or whose advice he accepted.”75 Only Rawlins could penetrate the zone of privacy that Grant drew subtly about himself. With his single-minded devotion, Rawlins could confront him with uncomfortable truths and fiercely contest his judgment, spouting opinions in a stentorian voice. With his thoroughgoing skepticism and mistrust of people, he was the ideal foil to Grant’s excessively trusting nature. Rawlins “was always getting excited about something that had been done to Grant,” recalled Lieutenant Frank Parker. When someone showed disrespect for Grant, “he would prance around and say, ‘General, I would not stand such things’ to which Grant would say, ‘Oh, Rawlins! what’s the use in getting excited over a little thing like that; it doesn’t hurt me and it may make the other fellow feel a little good.’”76
Perhaps because it contrasted vividly with his listless manner at the Galena store, Rawlins never forgot his initial glimpse of Grant at Cairo: “He had an office in a great bank there, and I was amazed at the quiet, prompt way in which he handled the multitude of letters, requisitions, and papers, sitting behind the cashier’s window-hole, with a waste basket under him, and orderlies to dispatch business as he did.”77 Fresh from personal calamity, Rawlins threw himself into a whirl of military activity. Before long, he worked day and night, tidying up Grant’s office, creating files, and instituting sound working procedures. Long politically active—Grant thought him the most influential young man in northern Illinois—Rawlins also assisted Grant in perfecting his relations with Washington. When Washburne boasted to Secretary of the Treasury Salmon P. Chase that Grant in Cairo was “doing wonders in bringing order out of chaos,” Rawlins surely deserved much of the credit.78
Such was the influence of John Rawlins over Grant that some observers would later exaggerate or misinterpret the nature of his power, attributing to him the military acumen that properly belonged to Grant. He had excellent common sense and swiftly grasped many basic principles of warfare, especially the need to concentrate forces instead of spreading them too thinly. And he became a formidable warrior in his own right, personally signing off on every letter and plan of campaign that came from Grant’s command and never hesitating to differ with him. Nevertheless, Rawlins had no military background and lacked Grant’s general knowledge of warfare. He could never have done what Grant did. While Grant developed tremendous respect for Rawlins’s fearless judgment, it was Grant who originated the plans, Grant who improvised in the heat of battle, and Grant who possessed the more sophisticated strategic sense.