I have been both indignant and grieved over the statement of pretended personal acquaintances of Captain Grant at this time to the effect that he was dejected, low-spirited, badly dressed, and even slovenly. Well, I am quite sure they did not know my Captain Grant, for he was always perfection.
—Julia Dent Grant
…poverty, poverty, begins to stare me in the face.
—Ulysses S. Grant
NOT LONG AFTER the Mexican War an attractive young woman and a trim, tanned young veteran were chatting on a stage coming into Bethel, Ohio. When they reached town, the gentleman helped the lady down with her luggage. Ulysses Grant’s brothers and sisters ran down from their house. “They all thought as much as could be that it was Julia that I had brought home.” They were wrong. The girl was a stranger who happened to be on her way to Bethel; Grant would not be married for another month, but his siblings had the right idea. It would have been eminently logical for the young bridegroom and his wife, an alert, determined woman, to get off the stage in a new no-nonsense Ohio town, ready to build a solid life. Grant was a veteran of a war which was thought to have worked out well, and in which he had been honorably active. He was twenty-six, healthy, and sufficiently learned in mathematics to be a teacher; if he aspired to something more lucrative, his experience as a regimental quartermaster could count as preparation for a career in business.1
Grant would have been following standard practice if he had resigned his commission—West Point graduates who did so outnumbered those who remained in the army—and he would have been re-entering civilian life with considerable promise. He could have looked forward to time alone with Julia, to children, and to taking over a family business that would command respect and provide the wherewithal for a house and a comfortable life. From West Point and the Mexican War he had obtained a base of prestige that many townspeople in Bethel—or any other American town—could envy. Ulysses and Julia Grant might be said to have had good expectations indeed after their marriage in August 1848.
But the twenty-six-year-old young veteran jumping down from the stage, who looked so ready to be the model man of the mid-nineteenth century, was not sufficiently eager to get into business to be willing to be part of his father’s. Instead, he elected to make his way in the peacetime army, until some business he could call his own came along. The day after their wedding, Ulysses and Julia left St. Louis on a lovely, leisurely journey down the Mississippi and up the Ohio River to Louisville. But even on this wonderful trip—Julia’s first away from St. Louis and her family—Grant’s ceaselessly unsuccessful quest for prosperity intruded. In Louisville, they stopped with his prosperous cousins the Solomon Grants and the James Hewitts. Julia recalled the Hewitt place with admiration—the “house was filled with everything beautiful”—and remembered “too that my dear husband intimated very modestly that if he saw any chance for a business opening he would be glad to resign, and although these gentlemen had large business connections at New Orleans, New York, Liverpool, and, I think Paris, not one of them offered even to introduce him to any businessman.”2
Julia may have exaggerated the reach of the Louisville connections, but the failure of Solomon Grant and his brother-in-law, Hewitt, to seize the opportunity to link their army cousin to some business enterprise may have resulted less from an oversight than from an appraisal, either quickly made or based on family accounts, of Grant’s total lack of business sense. He had none. True, in Mexico, as a quartermaster, he had run a bakery business on the side, but the enterprise was so short-lived that it had no time to fail. His skill as a quartermaster reflected his competence in carrying out the orderly procedures of army affairs, not his possession of either the entrepreneurial urge or the managerial constancy so essential to the businessman.
When they reached Bethel, Julia survived well the ordeal of meeting Ulysses’ family. His splendid Simpson grandmother, she wrote, was “tall and robust, quite my ideal of a Revolutionary mother.” Julia was more restrained however, in her praise of Jesse Root Grant. “The Captain’s father met me cordially, I might say affectionately.”* He was, she noted, “much taller than his son.” Her recollection of Hannah Grant was forthright as far as physical characteristics went, but her portrayal of her mother-in-law’s character was clouded with mists of sentimentality. She found Hannah Grant to be “a handsome woman, a little below medium height, with soft brown eyes, glossy brown hair, and her cheek…like a rose in the snow.” Hannah was, Julia insisted, “the most self-sacrificing, sweetest, kindest woman I ever met, except my own dear mother.” Her description suggested little of Hannah’s elusive personality. Julia liked her husband’s sisters and brothers, and concluded, “Altogether, I was well satisfied with my dear husband’s family.”3
Julia was more than a little snobbish; in her Memoirs she described the “homes we visited” during the six weeks with Grant’s kin and friends in Bethel, Georgetown, and Maysville as “humble, some…not.” She clearly enjoyed the deference her St. Louis origins and reputation engendered, but the best times were those she and Ulysses spent alone. “Ulys always preferred to take me in a buggy with a fleet little steed to draw us.” They saw the world “through magic glasses.”4
In October 1848 Grant’s leave was up and he was ordered to report to Detroit. They had by then returned to St. Louis, and Julia had “to leave my dear home” as well as “parting with papa!” The break was painful: “I could not, could not, think of it without bursting into a flood of tears…” Grant was troubled; he had waited long to have Julia for himself. Luckily, he was helped in achieving their independence of the Dents by the fact that the family’s prosperity, which Julia was later to recall with exaggeration, was not sufficient to enable her father to establish Ulysses in a business and thus keep the couple in St. Louis. Indeed, Dent’s own sons were off seeking their fortunes—one in California and another, Grant’s roommate Frederick, as a career man in the army.5
Colonel Dent was dependent entirely on emotional resources in his attempt to hold his daughter: “The week before we were to leave, papa came into the sitting room where Ulys and I were.” To his son-in-law he said, “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 spend a week or two with us.” Julia, he claimed, “could not live in the army.” Grant’s patience broke. “Ulys’s arm was around me,” Julia recalled, “and he bent his head and whispered: ‘…Would you like to remain with your father and let me go alone?’” She wept: “No, no, no, Ulys.” He told her, “Dry your tears…it makes me unhappy.” She did, and there was “never again a word said about my staying at home.”6
Julia and Ulysses left St. Louis and on a cold moonlit night reached Bethel. From there they traveled to Detroit, only to be told that his orders had been changed and they must go to the Madison Barracks, in Sackets Harbor, New York. Demonstrating to Julia that he was an officer to be reckoned with, Grant immediately protested this change in orders. His request for restoration of his assignment to Detroit was granted, but not before the two of them had made the long, cold, difficult, and expensive trip to Sackets Harbor, on the remote but beautiful eastern shore of Lake Ontario. They received permission to delay their return to Detroit, and by the time the spring thaw made it possible to leave, they were sorry to go. Sackets Harbor was the happiest place in which Ulysses and Julia Grant lived.7
Caught by winter in the self-contained army post, the two adjusted to each other. They set up housekeeping on their first weekend and Julia planned Sunday dinner after church. Ulysses, on his own, asked some of his bachelor friends to join them. Julia, annoyed at his having stolen her event, made him disinvite them. He did; his old messmates missed dinner that day, and when the cooking proved a success, Julia was sorry they had not been there. Invited for dinner the next day, the young officers, nicely ignoring army-post pettiness, opened the door just far enough to poke their heads in and ask if it was really all right for them to enter. Julia responded well to the good-natured teasing and welcomed them. She and Ulysses were at ease with people at Sackets Harbor.8
Julia was an indifferent cook. When asked in 1876 to supply a recipe for a centennial cookbook, she found she had none written down, and had to borrow one from a friend. She took more pride in being able to afford a cook than in cooking. Back in 1848 she was more interested in other matters: “Soon after we were settled…I requested my husband to give me a regular allowance—just what he thought he could afford to give me for housekeeping expenses…” This, she asserted, would give her “the privilege of using our little to the best advantage.” She went on to observe: “I had more than once seen a really loving, good, and devoted wife with her cheeks crimsoned with distress…, her usually most generous and kind husband declaring the bills were too large… I did not intend to have any such scenes in our dovecote.” Ulysses agreed and supplied the allowance regularly. “I never once had to ask for this. I felt…I had assumed a very great responsibility…” She got an account book; when there was an error, Ulysses declined to correct it, choosing rather to make up the deficit. Julia kept the family accounts for the rest of her life.9
The Grants were careful of their means and pleased with the spontaneous comfortableness of their relations with people. They had trouble learning the unattractive lesson of translating these friendships into vehicles to further an army career. But they tried. Back in Detroit in the spring of 1849 they did all—or most—of the things expected of an ambitious up-and-coming young officer and his wife. Once, when Julia was off on a visit, Ulysses sent her a shawl via Captain Irvin McDowell “whose lady you should have called upon.” In addition to keeping alert to army social obligations they met the people of mark of the city. One was Zachariah Chandler, the crude, bright, ambitious businessman and Whig politician who was making his coarse way into power in Michigan. Another was Lewis Cass, titular head of the Democratic party—he had just lost the presidential election to Zachary Taylor—and a powerful man in the nation. Julia claimed Cass as a friend of her father’s but Grant could not turn these relationships to his own use.10
In her Memoirs, Julia defended her clapboard house in Detroit against writers who sought to make a log cabin of every house the Grants lived in until they reached 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. Actually, Julia considered brick as even more in keeping with her station, but she took comfort in the fact that Lewis Cass’s house too was wooden; she saw how far she had to go when she noted that Zachariah Chandler lived imposingly behind bricks. Meanwhile, the young wife had servants to help make up for the clapboards. Julia found, on returning to Detroit, that “some friend had secured a nice house girl for us.” And they still had “the boy (Gregorio)” that “Ulys had brought from Mexico as a valet to attend the table and door.” Julia reported, however, that “Gregorio did not remain with us quite a year, some meddlesome person prevailing upon him that he could do better for himself. He was a nice, cheerful boy until this was put in his head, and then he became sullen. So the Captain told him he was at liberty to go.”11
Julia left Detroit for St. Louis to have her first baby at her parents’ house. Frederick Dent Grant, named for her father, was born on May 30, 1850. The “little dog,” as his father affectionately called him, became a mainstay in Grant’s order of things. Fred spent his life in the role of Ulysses S. Grant’s oldest son. At twelve, he was at Vicksburg with his father; at twenty-one, he was at West Point; at thirty-five, he was the family spokesman when Grant died. He acquired a rich and pretty wife, and was in the public eye, but when he himself died, at sixty-one, he was still someone else’s son more than a man in his own right.12
In the summer of 1851, with splendid disregard for climate, Julia and Fred visited her family in St. Louis, while Ulysses, reassigned to Sackets Harbor, spent his time “fishing, sailing and riding about” the cool and beautiful lakeshore country. He also put much time and thought into fixing up their house: “I have had some very nice furnature made in garrison and otherwise our quarters look very nice. All that we want now to go to housekeeping is the table furnature. That I will not buy until you come on lest I should not please you. The furnature made in garrison is nicer than I would buy in Watertown and more substantial. It consists of lounges, chairs, and a center table.” The chairs, however, proved so tall that Julia’s feet dangled when she sat in them. Footstools were obtained to compensate for the flaw in design.13
While her husband enjoyed anticipating domesticity and waited with “an eligant horse and a buggy to take you and Fred, out with evry day,” Julia made the long railroad trip to Sackets Harbor. Just because Ulysses was insistent that she travel with someone, she stubbornly came alone, even furloughing her maid in Detroit. In the coach, at night, she and Fred were startled by the sudden screams of a “maniac en route to an asylum,” which understandably unnerved her. The journey finally over, she found herself, with the only baby at the barracks, the center of attention in a community in which Ulysses felt confident. Shortly before she arrived he wrote, “Sackets Harbor is as dull a little hole as you ever saw but the people are very clever as you know very well and all together we could not have a more pleasant station.” Their winter together was a good one, but in the spring Ulysses was again ordered away from the Madison Barracks and they were separated.14
Grant’s unit of the Fourth Infantry Regiment was to be transferred to the Pacific Coast. Initially, the transfer order evoked for Julia romantic images of “the Caribbean Sea,” with her ship “parting its slashing, phosphorescent waves and sailing under the Southern Cross.” But she never made this journey: “When we were almost ready to ship, my dear husband quietly and calmly told me that…he had come to the conclusion that it would be impossible for me to go…in my condition.” She was pregnant. Strong as Julia was, Grant’s decision turned out to be a wise one. About a third of the people in his party were to sicken and die during the crossing of the Isthmus of Panama. If Julia had gone along, she would have given birth to her child on the mule trail into the town of Panama.15
Before leaving for the West Coast, Grant had an errand to attend to. Since the Mexican War he had been laboring under a cloud. He had been ordered to make good a thousand dollars that had been stolen while he was regimental quartermaster. There was never an allegation that Grant had taken the money; regulations simply made the officer in charge responsible for covering such losses. Grant and his father tried to wield what influence they possessed to have the requirement for repayment set aside. They had written letters, and now, in the spring of 1852, Grant himself made a trip to Washington, his first to the capital. Calls on Senator Cass, on Ohio congressmen and senators, and on a California congressman he had known in Mexico—“I know some ten or twelve members of the two houses of Congress”—did not produce the private bill in Congress that would have relieved him of both the financial obligation and the stigma of involvement in an unsavory bit of business. Grant did not state his case with clarity. He could write clearly, but his documentation of the case was spare to a fault. No picture of the circumstances emerges, nor any sense of personal urgency.16
Furthermore, his timing was unlucky; Henry Clay had just died: “Consequently evry house in the city was closed and evrybody at the funeral.” Grant, staying at Willard’s Hotel, put aside his own errand to watch the capital city in mourning: “Mr. Clay’s death produced a feeling of regret that could hardly be felt for any other man.” Returning to his own business, Grant did speak to individual members of Congress who might help him, but was put off with the word that he must meet with a full committee; the committee was not scheduled to meet again until after he was due back at Governors Island, in New York Harbor, to sail for the West Coast, so Grant gave up. The young officer calling on the inhabitants of Capitol Hill was eminently forgettable. He left with the obligation still hanging over his head.17
The trip on the Ohio, on which he sailed from New York, began pleasantly enough for Grant. Delia B. Sheffield, a young woman aboard the same vessel, left an observant account of the thirty-year-old officer. On deck one day Grant pointed out a school of whales. Nonchalantly, she told him she had seen whales before. Surprised that this was not her first time at sea, and flirting a bit, he then asked where her parents were. Asserting her maturity, Mrs. Sheffield claimed a husband, and Grant told her she was too young to be married: “You ought to be under your mother’s care, sleeping in your trundle bed.” Mrs. Sheffield was intrigued and kept her eye on him: “Captain Grant was…an incessant smoker and very taciturn, thoughtful and serious, though affable in manner, and during every day and an early part of each night of the voyage, I would see him pacing the deck and smoking, silent and solitary.”18
The ship reached the Isthmus on July 13, 1852, in the rainy season, and the passengers contended with slippery puddles and mud in the port towns. They then went by railroad as far as the Chagres River and from there proceeded on flat-bottomed boats poled by “stark naked” black “natives” (who fascinated both Ulysses and Delia), to the town of Cruces, about twenty-five miles from the Bay of Panama, on the Pacific side of the Isthmus. From Cruces the party had to journey on foot or mule back on steep mountain paths. Many of the travelers were ill and dying. Indeed, more would have died if Grant himself had not demonstrated great steadiness. As regimental quartermaster he was in charge of the logistics of the move across the Isthmus, and in discharging what proved to be a difficult assignment, he demonstrated the organizational strength that would later characterise his command in the Civil War, together with a dimension of humanitarian concern that never as fully emerged again. When a contractor failed to deliver mules already arranged for, Grant, faced with extortionate charges from another supplier, sensibly agreed to the demand for “twenty-four dollars American gold for each riding mule” to get his people to the Bay of Panama. (Some earlier-arriving passengers had paid up to fifty dollars a mount.) Captain Grant got reluctant riders on reluctant animals, and single file, led by men with whom they could not converse, the women proceeded to the tattered town of Panama, with its mixture of old dilapidated houses and half-finished new ones built to accommodate people on the way to California. Grant stayed behind in Cruces until the last of his party could be gotten on the road to Panama. By the time he reached the port, cholera had broken out.19
Grant established a hospital on a beached ship on the shore a mile from the town and a hospital tent camp on an island in the bay. Delia Sheffield remembered that it was “a common sight to see strong men…taken with cramps and die in a short time.” She credited the surgeons with “timeless energy” and remarked, “It was not an easy task to control almost seven hundred men during a siege of cholera, for they grew nervous and panic-stricken and Captain Grant had not only the sick ones to contend with but also the well.” Grant also had to contend with private grief. Among the 150 people in the Fourth Infantry party who died was John H. Gore, with whom he had spent much of his army life. Grant comforted Gore’s widow and arranged for her, along with the other survivors, to sail for San Francisco on the Golden Gate.20
When Grant himself reached the city, on his way to Vancouver, he wrote Julia, “We are going to a fine country, and a new one, with a prospect of years of quiet, when one [once?] settled. Chances must arrise merely from the location of land if in no other way, to make something which if it should not benefit us soon will at least be something for our children.” It was a muddled, muffled cry of hope, a tentative promise that he would at last make good their expectations. “There is no reason why an active energeti[c] person should not make a fortune evry year.” He toyed with all kinds of schemes but never made any of them work. Only four years after the gold rush and with quick riches still in the air, Grant entered partnership with Elijah Camp, a merchant from Sackets Harbor whom he and Julia had known and liked. Camp persuaded Grant to invest all the salary he had earned since leaving New York in a store in San Francisco, and then, arguing that he could run the business better alone, persuaded Grant to leave his money in the venture and take notes totaling $1,500. Next, Camp persuaded Grant to destroy the notes—and trust him to make the business a success—because, said Camp, he could not sleep nights worrying that Grant might come by to collect when there was not sufficient cash on hand. By mail, Julia chided her husband that compared to Grant “the Vicar of Wakefield’s Moses was a financier.” In her view, the storekeeper’s insomnia should have been cured with “something to make him sleep: the poker.” But Grant went on trusting the man even after the store failed and Camp went back to Sackets Harbor. In 1854, after he resigned from the army and sailed back to New York, Grant took the train all the way to Lake Ontario to try to collect a portion of the funds he had invested. There he learned that Camp had gone out sailing on a new boat. There was always an Elijah Camp in Ulysses Grant’s business deals.21
Grant saw people like Camp all around him in California and Oregon in the 1850’s. He stayed once with his brother-in-law John C. Dent, who ran a ferry and tavern in Knights Ferry, California, and also talked with old Mexican War friends who were sure they could take what they had learned in their service travels and convert that experience into cash—lots of cash. Grant felt compelled to try for the dollars too, but except for eagerness he had no entrepreneurial instincts. At various times he talked of entering all kinds of enterprises—lumbering, storekeeping, farming—but when he made his move, his gullibility was exceeded only by his bad luck. Assigned in 1852 to the remote but busy chief post on the Columbia River, the Columbia Barracks at Fort Vancouver, in what the next year became the Washington Territory, Grant found that the job of keeping the post in stores, as quartermaster, left him with much time on his hands. Magnificent Mount Hood rose just west of Fort Vancouver, and Grant once went with a group which included some who made the ascent. John W. Emerson—a friend, later, in St. Louis—claimed Grant was in the climbing party, but Grant himself never told of having reached the top. He said no, as usual, to hunting and seems to have derived little pleasure from the spectacularly beautiful Columbia River valley. He did try to put some of his time to use in an enterprise of his own. Seeing immigrants along the river in want of food, he logically set out to raise oats and potatoes as cash crops. In later years, Washingtonians put up a bronze plaque to commemorate his potato patch, but they were saluting a failure. Grant had not anticipated that the river would flood. He lost his crop. Nothing went right.22
Among the tales Grant later had to tell about this period was one John Emerson recalled having heard from him at Barnum’s Hotel, in St. Louis. It concerned a “solitary miner…heating his coffee over a little fire of twigs.… He was friendly…but his conversations seemed tinged with sadness…. After…sharing a cup of coffee and a hard biscuit, Grant…mounted and bade him goodbye.” But the miner called him back and showed him a packet of letters from a woman “pathetically pleading with him” to return to her. The miner, as Emerson recalled Grant’s account, “had been genteel and refined, and had dressed like a civilized man before he came to California; but now he was coarse; he knew he had lost his good manner, and had forgotten to talk…as he should talk.” Grant claimed he told the miner to take his gold to San Francisco, sell it, and go back to the woman who had written him. The miner promised to take his advice, but later Grant met him in the city: “All his money had been lost in one of the gambling palaces…and the poor fellow was in utter despair. Two days later his body was taken from the waters of the bay, and the coroner’s ‘guess’ was that it was a suicide.” We have only Emerson’s word that his friend told this barroom story, but it is a believable parable of Grant’s own fears, and Grant did remain steadfastly unromantic about solitary adventurers in the West for the rest of his life.23
On the other hand, while still on the Pacific Coast Grant at times talked as if he were a frontiersman, gone west alone to make a fresh start in life. The appeal of this persona was repeatedly evident—for example, in his remarks when in 1864, with awe, he took stock of his responsibilities as lieutenant general, and when, with apprehension, he returned from his trip around the world in 1879, with no responsibilities at all. But if there were a few zestful days at the Columbia Barracks, when Grant saw himself as a new man in the West, there were far more when he saw himself as an exile, separated from his wife and children. He wanted, initially, to combine an army career with business activity, hoping to earn enough from outside investments to bring his wife and children out west, where they could all begin again, away from their Missouri and Ohio families. Business failures kept postponing the reunion, and his army career moved along satisfactorily only as long as he was stationed at the Columbia Barracks, at Fort Vancouver. It collapsed as badly as the business ventures when he was transferred in 1854 to Fort Humboldt, a tiny and bleak post on a bluff on the California coast, where he encountered a malicious superior officer. In that year, he grew so lonely and despondent, and felt so powerless, that he gave up.
Grant’s loneliness overrode all the distractions of his attempts to make money. He missed Julia, his son Fred, and his second son, whom he had never seen. Julia had gone, inexplicably, not to her mother and father’s but to Grant’s family in Bethel for the birth, on July 22, 1852, of Ulysses S. Grant, Jr. Grant had quietly but unequivocally insisted on the name. “If its a girl name it what you like, but if a boy name it after me.” Julia resisted the inevitable pressure from other advisers to call the baby Telemachus. He became Ulysses, but for the rest of her life she fought good-naturedly and unsuccessfully to stop people from calling her cheerful Buckeye State son Buck.24
The hardest thing to understand in the story of Grant’s intense unhappiness while on the Pacific Coast, which culminated in his resignation from the army, is Julia’s seeming unconcern. In her Memoirs she told of the pleasant dancing parties at White Haven for her brother and his new bride in 1852, of efforts to begin the education of her older child, Fred, and of getting “our little man” into properly masculine clothes for his third birthday, the next spring. She said nothing about her husband, other than to tell how he had been swindled by Camp, to explain that it was a banker’s fault and not Ulysses’ that he had to use a quartermaster’s pass rather than his own money to get home, and to make clear that Grant stayed respectably with her brother John, at Knights Ferry, while waiting for the pass. (Carefully unmentioned was the rumor she sought to refute: that his money had gone for whiskey and he had spent the time waiting to sail alone and drunk in an attic room on the San Francisco waterfront.)25
She did not mention his great unhappiness, writing only that after “an absence of over two years, Captain Grant, to my great delight, resigned his commission…and returned to me, his loving little wife.” Her letters from the period do not survive, and the references to them in his few letters suggest that they were not numerous and were greatly delayed in arriving. In September, two months after Buck’s birth, he still knew nothing about Julia’s delivery. He realized, of course, that the child must have been born, and dreamed one night of coming home and finding Julia, 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.”26
In October he still had not heard about the baby, but confidently spoke of it as being alive. At last, in December, the steamer “not only brought me a letter from you, but four letters and two more from Clara,” his sister. He knew now that both his wife and his five-month-old son were well. His response was joyous, and he tried to take part in the life of both his children by offering a bit of not very serious advice about their upbringing. But when the next steamer came, he was let down: “I had no doubt that I would find letters. I was disappointed.” Two weeks later a long letter arrived, and he was relieved. In February he received a letter Julia had sent in early December. In March there were two more cheerful letters, but on March 31, 1853, he wrote, “The Mail has just arrived bringing me a very short and very unsatisfactory letter. You speak of not joining me on this coast in a manner that would indicate that you have been reflecting upon a dream which you say you have had until you really imagine that it is true. Do not write so any more dearest. It is hard enough for us to be separated so far without borrowing imaginary troubles. You know that it was entirely out of the question for you to have come with me at the time I had to come. I am doing all I can to put up a penny not only to enable you and our dear little boys to get here comfortably, but to enable you to be comfortable after you do get here.” We do not know what Julia said about the dream that seemed to bar her from her husband, but apparently she reproached him for not having allowed her to accompany him out west in the first place. And it is clear that he wanted them to join him rather than to return himself.27
On June 15 three more sustaining letters arrived from Julia, but in response, Ulysses had to give her the news that the Columbia had overflowed its banks, ruining his potato crop and with it, the prospects of obtaining enough money for her to join him. On June 28, 1853, the steamer brought no letters from home: “Where mails come but twice per month it does seem as though I might expect news from you….” He had a bad cold, and in a troubled letter repeated the story of the failed potato crop, but told her as well of his hopes that he would make six hundred dollars selling some pigs he had bought and of speculations he had made in flour futures in San Francisco. In July he was remorseful that he had troubled her with his statement that he had “lost a number of hundreds of dollars which if you had would educate our dear little boys.” And he also had to disappoint her with the information that earlier news about an expected promotion had proved premature. He was deeply discouraged: “In a former letter I told you, for the first time, of the downs of all I had done. (Before I had never met with a down.)” but he tried to bolster her spirits (and his) with a claim that he was now making money by speculating in food items. He was still at the Columbia Barracks, and still not totally without hope.28
Even though Ulysses missed Julia intensely, he found life at the Columbia Barracks bearable because the people with whom he lived formed a kind of family. At Sackets Harbor the Grants had had as servants a splendid couple. In the best tradition of keeping servants in their place, the woman was known only by her first name—Maggy—while her husband, an enlisted man, was known by his last—Getz. Maggy, disheveled but cheerful and affectionate, managed the household and was Frederick’s nurse. Getz maintained the house, cut the wood, and tended the garden and the horses. The Getzes went west with the Fourth Infantry Regiment and provided the domestic center without which Grant’s world would not hold. From Vancouver, in January 1853, he had written proudly and with seeming security, “The house I am living in is probably the best one in Oregon.” He told Julia of the men sharing mess with him—his old West Point roommate Rufus Ingalls, another officer, and their three enlisted men. The tall house had porches upstairs and down on three sides, so little of the splendid view could be missed. And they were comfortable: “Maggy cooks for us and Getz assists about the house. Everybody says they are the best servants in the whole Territory. With Getz’s pay, the sale of his rations, the wages we give and Maggy’s washing, they get about 75 dollars per month.” Whenever mail arrived, Maggy asked after Julia and Fred; Ulysses could not quite fathom why she was not equally curious about Ulysses junior. Once, in a package, he enclosed a present for Fred from Maggy and Getz. Maggy was the woman around the house who was so essential to Grant; she was the mother his mother had never been, the wife—though there is no reason to imagine any sexual link to Maggy—while his own was two thousand miles away. As long as Maggy kept the house, Grant was safe.29
Apparently Maggy and Getz saved enough of their pay for him to leave the army, and these two strong people moved out of Grant’s life in the summer of 1853. On July 19 Grant wrote a reference: “The bearer, Margaret Getz, has lived with me over two years…. She is a washer, ironer, plain cook and in evry way qualified to undertake the entire work of a small family,” Maggy was the key member of the couple; he added in her letter that “Getz is sober, industrious, and capable…and no doubt would prove a good porter in a store.” Maggy and Getz were planning to move out of domestic service and keep a shop.30
The next February, Grant was transferred from the Columbia Barracks to Fort Humboldt, in northern California. There he found no household, no fraternal community, no surrogate family. No Julia; no Maggy. Grant was bereft. He shared quarters with Lewis Cass Hunt. This balding young man was a friend of Julia’s brother John, and had known Julia and Ulysses in Detroit and Sackets Harbor days; there seems, however, not to have been sufficient strength in the friendship to sustain Grant. His loneliness yielded to a profound despair that neither Julia nor the men at Fort Humboldt could have failed to notice. He despised his superior officer, Lieutenant Colonel Robert Christie Buchanan, who responded in kind, and now even his army career seemed in jeopardy. On February 2, 1854, he wrote his wife that he had no horse of his own and found riding an effort: “I do nothing but set in my room and read and occasionally take a short ride on one of the public horses.” Such solitude was not natural to Grant, and not safe. Though he was not gregarious in the sense of being an effusive conversationalist, he needed people. He had to have their company; he had to be able quietly to tell stories and be with other men. He was an effective people watcher; he literally studied those around him—as he had studied Scott and Taylor in Mexico. When he described himself as sitting alone in his room in this letter to Julia, he did not speak as a man quietly sustaining himself through reading or some other creative solitary occupation. Rather, his behavior was evidence of dangerous alienation from the world. It was this letter that began, “You do not know how forsaken I feel here.”31
Four days later, when the mail boat had again brought no letter from Julia, he wrote, “I could almost [quit and?] go home ‘nolens volens.’” A month later his whole commitment to an army career began to collapse: “I sometimes get so anxious to see you and our little boys, that I am almost tempted to resign and trust to Providence, and my own exertions, for a living where I can have you and them with me.” The desire to resign from the army and embark on a civilian career was natural enough, but in truth Grant did not trust either Providence or his own exertions. He had no hankering for his father’s business, he had bungled every try at speculation in the West, no one trusted him to make a dime as a businessman. And he did not trust himself. He went on, “It would only require a moderate competency to make me take the step. Whenever I get to thinking upon the subject however, poverty, poverty, begins to stare me in the face….”32
Grant had already missed the wonderful exploring years with Fred, when the child was two and three and four; as early as August 1852 he had written, “I am almost crazy sometimes to see Fred,” and he had never seen his two-year-old namesake, Ulysses. In this letter he rambled; he could, he claimed, be happy at Fort Humboldt if Julia and the children were there, but, a bit cruelly, he added, “You could not do without a servant and a servant you could not have. This is bad is it not? But you never complain of being lonesome so I infer that you are quite contented.” This last thought troubled him. Never before had Grant written reprovingly of Julia’s absence; he had missed her, but he had not equated her being away from him with rejection. “I dreamed of you and our little boys the other night the first time for a long time I thought you were at a party when I arrived and before paying any attention to my arrival you said you must go you were engaged for the dance. Fred, and Ulys. did not seem half so large as I expected to see them.” He was trying to stop the clock on his children’s growing up, and more urgently, he had a sense that he was losing Julia. Seeking reassurance, he asked, “If I should see you it would not be as I dreamed, would it dearest? I know it would not.”33
But his depression was not dispelled. He continued, “I am getting to be as great a hand for staying in the house now as I used to be to run about. I have not been a hundred yards from my door but once in the last two weeks. I get so tired and out of patience with the lonliness of this place that I feel like volunteering for the first service that offers.” But he passed up chances to go on trips along the coast or into the mountains. Neither the exuberance of the days in the Valley of Mexico nor the wildness within him, which he had seen reflected in the gold-rush men, emerged. He suppressed everything and allowed himself to remain trapped at the base. He kept hoping for a transfer order, but it did not come. Grant’s frustration mounted not only because his commanding officer, Buchanan, was an irritating martinet, but also because as a lieutenant colonel, Buchanan was the only man who outranked him at Fort Humboldt—the man in whose absence Grant would have been in command. Eventually, Grant’s request for transfer was denied. He had been cast upon a beautiful remote coast and was desperate.34
Why didn’t Julia, after reading the letters he had written in February, get on the next boat for California? To be sure, she had two very small children, she was used to being cared for, and she was somewhat frightened of traveling alone; but she was strong, and the Isthmus crossing was less dangerous in spring than in summer. She did not have the money for such a journey, but she should have been able to coax it from her father or from Jesse Grant. The trip would take perhaps two months. (Indeed, had she set forth in response to his letters, she would have arrived probably too late to stop his resignation and perhaps even too late to find him before he left.) In any case, she did not start out.
Julia’s sense of frustration during this period must have been intense. She had gone to her husband’s family for the birth of her second child, for reasons we do not know—perhaps there was illness in St. Louis, perhaps either she or Ulysses sought to achieve independence of White Haven—and she was not very articulate. It is possible that what Ulysses took as petulance in two of her letters was a muffled cry of despair. She may have written so seldom because she doubted her ability to conceal from her husband that she too was severely depressed. Of course, another possible explanation for the paucity of letters is that out of sight was out of mind, but Julia did not have a rich source of alternative concern and there is little to suggest she wanted to discard her husband. She did chide him for undertaking pie-in-the-sky ventures and let him know that, in essence, she felt he had abandoned her. And now he felt as if she and the whole world had abandoned him.
Perhaps Julia had given up on the army career before Ulysses did, and wanted him to come back east, but if she had, one would expect to find him responding to suggestions from her that he resign, and no such responses are to be found in his letters. In their respective memoirs Julia and Ulysses were succinct about his days on the West Coast. He wrote with brevity but acumen about the Indians and about life in San Francisco, to which hopeful young men had come and died. In 1852 he had found it a one-wharf new town; in 1853, when he returned, he saw a dissolute city with no reliable foundations, in which murdered gamblers found watery graves beneath the houses built over San Francisco Bay. By the time he left in 1854 it was, he claimed, “staid and orderly.” Of himself, he wrote merely, “My family all this while, was at the East. It consisted now of a wife and two children. I saw no chance of supporting them on the Pacific coast out of my pay as an army officer, I concluded therefore to resign….” Julia, for her part wrote briefly and breezily of this period in their lives: “Captain Grant, to my great delight, resigned his commission…and returned to me, his loving little wife”; her tone caused Bruce Catton to suggest that the interlude may not have been as important as other students of Grant have thought. This is a cheerful idea, but not a convincing one. In a letter of March 6, 1854, Grant introduced one of his characteristic bits of gallows humor. He juxtaposed a description of the base as “a very healthy place” with the throw-away line “I believe there has been but two deaths. One by accidentally shooting himself and the other by a limb from a tree falling on a man.” Such asides can have been no more reassuring to Julia than they are to the modern reader.35
When Grant is mentioned, most people respond by asking, in one way or another, “Was he a drunk?” The idea that he drank prodigiously is as fixed in American history as the idea that the Pilgrims ate turkey on Thanksgiving, but the evidence for it is more elusive. All the rivers of alcohol—imagined or real—flow down from the Fort Humboldt days. And Grant’s letters do make stories of drinking in this period easy to believe. No eyewitness accounts of his drinking at this time exist, but rumors that he drank were widespread in headquarters in San Francisco then—and ever after. Rufus Ingalls, who was his roommate at West Point, his housemate at Vancouver, and his lifelong friend, believed he was drinking at Fort Humboldt. Hamlin Garland, a careful and thoughtful writer whose excellent biography is favorable to Grant, interviewed a great many people who knew Grant and inquired particularly about the question of alcohol. His conclusion was that Grant did drink.36
Whether or not Ingalls and Garland were correct, what surely is more important than estimating the quantity of whiskey consumed or speculating on Grant’s favorite brand (we do not know what it was) is understanding the extent of the depression that occasioned the drinking. When a man who has needed the closeness of people with whom he can comfortably talk, who has previously wanted to be alone only to indulge his curiosity about a strange town, and who thoroughly enjoys working with horses, goes to his room during the day, not to read, but simply to be alone, he becomes disconnected from everything outside himself and, finally, even from himself. The watch, if it has not stopped, has run down. In a basic sense, Grant had nothing to do. Without friends, without Julia and the two boys, without any responsibilities on the base, he was at the danger point. The bottle was the signal that it had been reached. Grant did not leave the army because he was a drunk. He drank and left the army because he was profoundly depressed.
On April 11, 1854, while listed on the company roll as “sick,” Ulysses Grant wrote two letters. One formally accepted promotion to the permanent rank of captain, a position of considerable prestige in the small peacetime army of 1854, in which there were only fifty captains on active duty. The second letter read, “I very respectfully tender my resignation of my commission as an officer of the Army….” A short while later, in San Francisco, an old army friend, James Elderkin, “was almost ashamed to speak to him on the street, he looked so bad.”37
It is difficult to measure the response of Julia and others to this action because we do not know how long it took for Grant’s letters describing his extreme loneliness to reach them. Grant had asked that the resignation be effective on July 31, 1854. In June, Jesse learned what he had done and moved to stop it. At the last moment, once again trying to reconstruct his son’s life, he wrote to Andrew Ellison, an Ohio congressman from Georgetown, asking him to intervene with a fellow Democrat, Secretary of War Jefferson Davis. Ellison, in turn, wrote Davis, “Jesse R. Grant Esq—the father of Captain Ulysses Grant of the Army…requests that I would ask to have Capt Grant ordered home on the recruiting service, as a favor, to obtain some rest and see his friends and family[.] If that cannot be permitted, then to allow him a six month leave of absence…. It is stated in one of the papers of this city that Capt Grant has resigned, if this be the fact, what I ask is not needed….”38
The congressman missed the point. Jesse desperately wanted to keep his son in the army. Ever since Ulysses was a boy managing not to be around the tanyard very much, Jesse had known that he had no sense for business. He had gotten him into the army in the first place because he did not know what else to do with him. Shrewdly, even desperately, he wanted to find a way for his son to keep his commission. When Davis confirmed to Ellison that Grant had indeed resigned, Jesse wrote directly to the secretary of war, citing both his son’s Mexican War record (which might have impressed Davis, also a veteran of that war) and the fact that Ulysses had a two-year-old son he had never seen. Jesse sought to have the resignation rescinded and to obtain a leave for Ulysses, during which he could arrange to take his family to the West Coast. Davis replied that as Grant “assigned no reasons why he desired to quit the service, and the motives which influenced him are not known to the Department” he saw no reason to revoke the resignation, and it stood. The secretary of war’s refusal was irrevocable. Davis’s letter also suggested, with considerable fact, that Grant’s motives were not something he wanted to have to face officially. It was not, that is to say, on the record that the young officer was a drunk, but word to that effect was abroad in the gossipy ranks of the army. These stories were more insidious and harder to combat than even a negative official record. They haunted Grant into the Civil War—and into history.39
“Poor and forlorn,” Grant came back east, but did not immediately make a cleansing new start. The fear of poverty was still stronger than his need to admit to it and hurry home. The slips of paper that pathetically marked inept California speculations still stuck to his fingers. Reaching New York, he borrowed money to pay his bill at the Astor House from Simon Bolivar Buckner, and did not take the first train back to Julia. Instead, borrowing the fare, again from Buckner, he made the long detour to try unsuccessfully to collect $800 of the $1,500 which Elijah Camp had inveigled from him. Grant wanted to get back to his father and his father-in-law with some indication of manly success in affairs to show for his years on the West Coast.40
It is not known just how tense Grant’s reunion with his family was. Hamlin Garland believed Jesse Grant was exceedingly cool toward Ulysses on his return, and Julia, amid her effusions of joy in the Memoirs, let slip one sentence that suggests that Grant was not entirely sure she wanted him back: “Ulys turned to me and said: ‘You know I had to wait in New York until I heard from you.’” Grant’s last letter to her from the West Coast is the stiffest he ever wrote: “May 2, 1854—Dear Wife; I do not propose writing you but a few lines. I have not yet recieved a letter from you and as I have a ‘leave of absence’ and will be away from here in a few days do not expect to…. You might write directing it to the City of New York.” There was no letter from her when he reached the city, and so, futilely, he went on to Sackets Harbor, and then returned to New York to await word from White Haven. He was afraid to return to Missouri without reassurance that he would be welcome. When, at last, she provided the encouragement in a letter, he set out for St. Louis, and by October, Ulysses and Julia were back together. Their third child was conceived in the month he got home; Nellie Grant was born the next year on the Fourth of July.41