V

GALENA

The foregoing has the ring of biography, without the satisfaction of knowing that the hero, like Grant, lolling in his general store in Galena, is ready to be called to an intricate destiny.

—F. Scott Fitzgerald

JULIA AND ULYSSES were together again, but their future in 1854 was unpromising. Ulysses had abandoned the only trade he knew and at thirty-two had to find a way to earn a living. His father had recently moved the family to Covington, Kentucky, and after a few weeks with the Dents, Julia and Ulysses went there to discuss a proposition Jesse was making. Julia put it somewhat poetically: “As we stepped from the boat onto the Kentucky shore, the sun (which had shone most gloriously all morning) was at that instant overcast….” Having disapproved of the resignation from the army, Jesse was in no mood to make things easy for this son who had thrown away a chance to better the family’s fortunes. He offered Ulysses a job in the Galena, Illinois, branch of his business, but there was a condition to be met. Julia recalled that her husband was ready to accept the job until “it was suggested and made a necessary part of the agreement that I and my two little boys should remain in Kentucky with them, so as to have the benefit of their school of economy, or go to my father in Missouri.” Clearly, Jesse perceived Julia not as a steadying influence on his son, but as a costly appendage, and he was not prepared to underwrite a second family household. Julia could make do in Covington or St. Louis, and Ulysses presumably could board with his brother in Galena. Julia recorded proudly that “Captain Grant positively and indignantly refused his father’s offer.”¹

This ungenerous reception of the prodigal did nothing to improve Grant’s ties with his father, and it tightened his dependence on his wife. The disastrous separation just ended had taught Julia and Ulysses its lesson; during the remaining peacetime years they were seldom separated, day or night, and during the war Julia joined Ulysses at his command headquarters on every possible occasion, spending more time with her husband than the wives of other generals did with theirs. While president, Grant rarely went on a political trip without his wife. And after he left the White House they did virtually everything together. Only exceptionally did the general leave her for holiday excursions with old friends. They needed each other, and if either needed the other more, it was Ulysses who needed Julia. Theirs was not a ledgerbook relationship of debits and credits owed by one and collected by the other. To a remarkable degree these two limited people became one.

Leaving Covington abruptly, the Grants went back to St. Louis and wintered with Julia’s parents. In the spring of 1855 Ulysses obtained the use of his brother-in-law Lewis Dent’s farm, Wish-ton-Wish, on the family acreage, and put in a crop. With a certain gallantry, Ulysses and Julia set out to recreate their lives in a classically American style—as yeoman farmers in touch with the life of republican virtue. He tilled the good earth, and she kept busy tending the children, Fred, Buck, and their sister Nellie, and keeping an eye on the barnyard. Julia, in fact, turned out to be a quite good chicken farmer and dignified the lowly business of gathering eggs and killing birds by adding ornamental fowl to the flock—she named their Chinese cock Celeste. Julia intended in her Memoirs to present herself as a figure of fragile gentility, but inadvertently, telling a story about churning a tub of butter in ten minutes, she revealed how extraordinarily strong she was. Hastily she added, “I rested here on my laurels. This was my first and only trial at such work (my dear husband on all occasions furnishing me with the necessary help to do my work).” On the farm, Ulysses once again hoed potatoes. He also cleared land Julia’s father gave them for their own farm, and cut, hauled, and squared the timbers with which, in 1856, he framed and closed in his own house, Hardscrabble.²

Hardscrabble was a good house, handmade and plain. It was the only thing Ulysses Grant ever made. The zest with which he (with the help of hired hands) fashioned the points and raised the building suggests that it had true creative meaning for him. Unfortunately, Julia hated it. Instead of a rough, strong, masculine building of hand-hewn timbers, Julia would have preferred a “neat frame house” which “could have been put up in half the time and at less expense.” Ulysses’ house was, she recalled, “so crude and homely I did not like it at all, but I did not say so.” Its timber framed walls handsomely set off, by contrast, the “pretty covers, baskets, books, etc.” which Julia hurriedly brought in, but these did not overcome the “unattractive” shamefulness of the place in her eyes. To Ulysses, the name Hardscrabble was complimentary; Julia used the term “facetiously.” Derisively, she called their home a “cabin”; he described it as the “house” on which he “worked very hard, never losing a day because of bad weather….”³

Hardscrabble, the house Grant built. LIBRARY OF CONGRESS

Grant was trying hard to have confidence in his new life. At Christmastime in 1856 he wrote his father, “Evry day I like farming better and I do not doubt but that money is to be made at it.” None was. Julia was already uneasy. Soon after she moved into the still unfinished Hardscrabble, she was, she reported, “feeling quite blue (which was rare with me), when a feeling of the deepest despondency like a black cloud fell around me, and I exclaimed (aloud, I think): Is this my destiny?” She hated the “rough surroundings” and the relentless daily routines of the farm. Julia claimed in her Memoirs that she rallied herself: “I have never since lost my courage, not even in the dark day of that (what shall I call him?) Ward.” She was referring to Ferdinand Ward and another time, a quarter of a century later, when poverty nearly overtook them, with the failure of the Wall Street firm of Grant & Ward. During 1856 there had been only fifty dollars to spend on clothing for the family, and while Julia had determination, she had no inclination to go on being the wife of a dirt farmer. She could not understand why Ulysses had wanted to leave Wish-ton-Wish, and she was more than willing to leave Hardscrabble and go back to White Haven when her mother died in February 1857. She had no awareness that her repudiation of Hardscrabble was a repudiation of Ulysses.⁴

One problem with Hardscrabble was that it presented only an illusion of independence, not the reality. The Grants had not truly set off on their own. They were not settlers on the fertile new lands of Oregon or northern California; they were on her father’s land. As much of themselves as they put into building their own house, into caring for their own animals and crops, all was still done under the sponsorship of Julia’s father. Indeed, the Grants were financially dependent on him, and to make matters worse, although Colonel Dent had land and slaves, he had little money. Julia’s brothers had left to make their living away from White Haven. The “poverty, poverty” which had haunted Grant in the West came east with him.

Grant struggled ineptly, even pathetically, with the economics of farming. In 1855, while at Wish-ton-Wish, he had made a bit of money on his potatoes while the corn and oats fed the animals and, in part, the family. In 1856 his labor was diverted to the building of Hardscrabble. Lacking working capital for the farm, or even “a few dollars to buy any little necessaries, sugar, coffee, etc,” to say nothing of wages for the hired men who did the cutting, Grant tried to obtain cash by selling firewood in St. Louis. Between April 1856 and February 1857 these sales brought in only “a fraction over 48 dollars per month.”⁵

In short, the economic situation was desperate. During the winter months Captain Grant, West Point 43, hauled firewood into St. Louis and sold it on street corners. It was a sad business. Legend has it that he stood sullenly next to his cords of wood in his fading blue army overcoat. This activity did, however, get him away from the wretched farm. While in town he was always on the lookout for old army friends—not, in disgrace, avoiding contacts, but actively seeking them. He hunted for them in the hotel lobbies and, though the evidence is flagrantly conflicting, apparently in the barrooms as well. Once his search for someone familiar led to a poignant moment. In the book at the front desk of the Planter’s House he saw registered “J.R. Grant, Ky.” He wrote to his father, “I made shure it was you and that I should find you when I got home,” but Jesse Grant did not arrive, and inquiring again, Ulysses found “J. R. G. had just taking the Pacific R.R. cars.” He could scarcely believe that his father had been in town and not visited him. Plaintively, he asked, “Was it you?”⁶

Meanwhile, the farm required cash. In February 1857 Grant wrote his father, “Spring is now approaching when farmers require not only to till the soil, but to have the wherewith to till it, and to seed it.” In the past two seasons he had raised only three unprofitable crops—potatoes, oats, and corn—but now he had twenty-five acres planted in wheat and had paid to have three hundred cords of wood cut for sale the following winter. He was in need of money for tools and other necessities for diversifying his crops: “To this end I am going to make the last appeal to you. I do this because, when I was in Ky. you voluntarily offered to give me a Thousand dollars, to commence with, and because there is no one els to whom I could, with the same propriety, apply. It is always usual for parents to give their children assistince in beginning life (and I am only beginning, though thirty five years of age, nearly) and what I ask is not much.” Grant asked his father to lend him (or to borrow for him) five hundred dollars “at 10 pr. cent payable annually or semi anually if you choose, and with this if I do not go on prosperously I shall ask no more from you.” There is no record of the loan having been made. In the 1857 season, Grant’s wheat crop, projected at “four to five hundred bushels” came to only seventy-five, but even as he confessed this disappointment to his sister Mary, he indicated that he hoped for fifteen hundred bushels of potatoes, along with some sweet potatoes, melons, and cabbages which could be marketed. In the end, these crops did not translate into money enough to keep his family in comfort; before Christmas 1857, Ulysses Grant pawned his gold watch for twenty-two dollars.⁷

Farmers suffered in the wake of the severe depression of 1857, and the year that followed it was disastrous for Grant. Reluctantly, he rented Hardscrabble, and when his widowed father-in-law moved to town, he farmed his land. He had no greater luck on these acres than on his own; he began to give up, and talked about selling Hardscrabble and moving either to Covington, where his father might get him a job, or to St. Louis, where Colonel Dent might find him a position.

The men who worked the farm with him were slaves. There had probably been twelve at White Haven, but it is not clear how many moved to town with the colonel and how many remained under Grant’s supervision. In 1858 he hired two slaves from their owners and borrowed one, William Jones, from his father-in-law. Jones, whom he subsequently bought, was about thirty-five years old and five feet seven inches tall, resembling Grant in both age and build, and they worked closely together. Though Ulysses owned just this one person, Julia owned four—Eliza, Julia, John, and Dan. The latter two appear to have been young boys, possibly the sons of Eliza and of Julia. Before Julia Grant moved to Galena, Illinois, where these slaves would have been free, she leased them. When the war to free the slaves liberated Julia Grant from Galena, she reclaimed her slave Julia, who thenceforth went along as her maid on her frequent visits to General Grant’s headquarters. Julia’s Julia was, in fact, almost stolen from her mistress at Holly Springs.

Despite his great need for cash, Grant seems never to have contemplated selling any of his wife’s slaves or his own. Julia, who regarded the sale of “dear family servants” as déclassé, denied rumors that her husband used a slave to repay a debt to Judge John F. Long. However, when Grant considered joining his father in Covington in 1858, he did offer to defer to Jesse’s judgment as to whether one of the youths owned by Julia should be hired out in St. Louis or brought along to learn to be a blacksmith. The only evidence that Grant disapproved of the institution of slavery is his humane regard for the men—slave and free—who worked with him in the fields and cutting wood. One former slave whom Grant had hired, “Old Uncle Jason,” was quoted as saying that Grant was the kindest man he ever worked for: “He used ter pay us several cents more a cord for cuttin’ wood than anyone else paid, and some of the white men cussed about it….” One must be wary of aged persons who remember extraordinary early virtue in famous men, but a white Confederate sympathizer, seeking to demonstrate how common Grant was, confirmed the story, sneering about “his fooling away his money paying them —— free niggers ten and fifteen cents a cord too much…and a-spoiling them, sir.” On one occasion Grant was reported to have stopped the whipping of a slave by a farmer neighbor, and in 1859, when he was leaving the farm to go into business in St. Louis and was severely pressed financially, he did not sell William Jones but instead set him free.⁸

Grant appears to have had close relationships with some of his white neighbors, but these friendships presented greater psychological risk than did his friendships with the black men who worked for and with him. By associating with dirt farmers he risked being looked down on by Julia’s friends, the O’Fallons and Longs and others who, like the Dents, had pretentions to the gentry. Once, Grant befriended a farmer about to lose his mule to a bill collector, and in an action demonstrating the best of his nature, lent the man money he could not afford to lose. Such close ties with poverty must have served to suggest to him how near he himself was to begging funds to save a mule. And there is evidence to indicate that Grant was indeed taking small loans from some of these farmers in order to get by. Julia had little patience with such people; she much preferred to see benevolence in terms of noblesse oblige, not reciprocity. She proudly told how, in Galena, when her sunny open child Ulysses junior befriended a very poor boy, she generously allowed the child to eat meals in her kitchen. It must have been profoundly disturbing for both Julia and Ulysses to find themselves in the ranks of the have-nots, but on the failing farm outside St. Louis, that is exactly where they were.⁹

The one area of personal relationships where Grant’s hold was firm was in his own immediate family. On February 6, 1858, Julia and Ulysses’ fourth and last child was born. He was named Jesse, after his grandfather. Jesse was a healthy baby and grew to be an impish child. And Grant himself was a child again, romping with the children. He genuinely enjoyed being with them. There was an affectionate innocence about the roughhousing of the father down on the floor in comfortable physical rapport with his children. The ease of it all was in strong contrast to the austerity of his own childhood, and there was always deep affection between the father and his children. As the years went on, he worried about their education, as well he might; at eight, Fred still could not read, and Jesse when he finally went off to college had had almost no formal education. But such worries never overcame Grant’s deep love for and confidence in his children.¹⁰

In 1858 the Grants at last gave up the farm. The family was not flourishing there, and Ulysses’ own health was not good. He had what he believed to be ague, but there can be little doubt that he worried lest the shivering and fever and cough heralded in him the same tuberculosis that was slowly killing his brother Simpson. Illnesses, coupled with their economic plight, meant they had to move. As early as 1857 he had said, “The fact is, without means, it is useless for me to go on farming,” and in September 1858 Ulysses wrote his loyal sister Mary that “there was so much sickness in [the] family, and Freddy so desperately ill” that he had been reluctant to alarm her with a letter. For a short time he and Julia planned a move to Covington to join forces with Jesse and his family, but Julia acted determinedly to block that alternative by appealing to a cousin, Harry Boggs, to take her husband into his firm in St. Louis. In the winter of 1858–59, the Grants moved to a small, unstylish house in town, and Ulysses went into the nasty business of rent collecting with Boggs. No one could have been less fit for the aggressive, shameless job of bill collector than Ulysses Grant. He soon found himself disapproving of his partner’s jokes about their victims; by summer Boggs and Grant had quarreled and Ulysses was desperate to leave the firm of Boggs & Grant.¹¹

In August 1859 some of Grant’s friends—he never forgot the people in St. Louis who stood by him in those days, or those who scorned him—tried to secure for him the position of county engineer. For one, Joseph J. Reynolds, a professor of mechanics and engineering at Washington University, wrote a strong letter in his support. In the end, politics, not lack of qualifications, cost Grant the job. One way that Grant had thrown himself into the Dents’ world in St. Louis was by voting for a Democrat, James Buchanan, for president in 1856. Now the two Democratic members of the county council voted to appoint Grant as county engineer, but the three Free-Soilers voted against him. His usual luck had held. He stayed on with Boggs, growing increasingly less fond of his partner as their business faltered.¹²

In December 1859, in a letter to his father, Grant outlined, with some confusion, the complex financial transaction which cost him Hardscrabble. He sold it in exchange for a St. Louis house. The former owner was required to discharge a small mortgage on the house; when he failed to do so, Grant sued. The suit was settled with the recovery of Hardscrabble only in 1867. Town life was proving as disastrously unsuccessful as country life had been. The evening he was rejected for the job as engineer, the Grants sat alone in the parlor of their St. Louis house. The children were out playing; the prospects for their parents were bleak. Julia, though it cost her much pride to make the suggestion, told Ulysses he had better go once again and ask his father for help. Jesse, she recalled later, “had always been not only willing but anxious to serve him (in his own way to be sure).” Grant tried to put off going on the ground that the trip would be costly, but Julia countered by suggesting that it would be a chance to get away from his troubles in St. Louis for a few days. Reluctantly, he agreed to go. This was to be the most painful trip of his life.¹³

At thirty-seven Grant had to go back and admit that he was still a failure: the boy who could not bargain for a horse had become a man who could not bring in a crop of potatoes or collect a batch of bills. It was humiliating. The letter he wrote to Julia on March 14, 1860, describing his return to his father’s dominion, makes exceedingly distressing reading. (And here Julia’s memory surely failed her; she remembered receiving “long and cheerful letters from my husband” while he was on this trip.) Grant arrived at Covington “with a head ache and feeling bad generally.” A wreck on the tracks had made him late for his appointment with his father. “As I was walking up the Street home I saw him turn down another street not more than half a square ahead of me….” Grant was so uncomfortable about seeing his father that he did not even run to catch him. He thought he would see him at dinner; instead, he learned that his father was on his way out of town and would be away for the next three days.¹⁴

At the house he found his arrival was considered an insufficient demonstration of familial loyalty: his mother and sisters wondered where Julia and the children were. “They were quite disappointed,” he wrote, “that Fred. & Buck were not along. My head is nearly bursting with pain….” He continued the letter with greetings for the children and with an apology to Julia’s father for not writing a promised letter in support of an absurd claim the colonel had brought for land mentioned in an ancient Spanish grant. He signed with an affectionate nickname (Dado), said in a postscript that his brother Simpson had confided that he felt no better, and concluded, “I have not been through the house to see how things look though I have been here three or four hours.” He had simply sat down in the dining room, paralyzed by what he had come back to. But back he had come; and this time Grant’s father, on his return, said Ulysses could enter the business and bring his family with him.¹⁵

In the summer of 1860, then, the Grants gave up the St. Louis house, leased the slaves, packed their household goods, and took a river boat, the Itaska, north to Galena. The town, a short distance up the Galena River from the Mississippi, was still an important center of river trade. Its wharves were busy in August as Julia carried the baby and herded the other three children ahead of her down the gangway while Ulysses followed with the two kitchen chairs they had used as seats on the boat deck. At thirty-eight a still youthful-looking and thoroughly domesticated American male, he appeared ready for a fresh start.

A strikingly high bluff rises abruptly behind the business streets of Galena. The Grants climbed a steep flight of stairs to Prospect Street, on which half the houses of High Street, a short block below, rudely turned their backs. Although Grant’s house down toward the end of High Street was small, it had dignity and charm and like its slightly more important neighbors was made, reassuringly, of brick. A disarmingly comfortable and rambling graveyard lay out back, and Julia and Ulysses could walk easily across the open lots beside it to the small wooden houses of their new neighbors, the Rawlinses and the Rowleys. The people of Galena became the true inhabitants of Grant’s world. They did not flood him with friendship when he arrived in the small city; they did not take in the middle-aged clerk in his father’s store and make a success of him, but when Grant went to war and to the White House, some of them went with him. Galena people moved to the center of his vision. They made sense to him. Galena people, he discovered, were as anxious as he to get out of town.

When Grant arrived in Galena, he gave no one a signal that he was a man one could profitably befriend. Yet with the High Street house as a secure base he might, given time, have become a respected and dependable burgher in the small midwestern city. Galena was prosperous. There were lead mines nearby. The channel of the Galena River was open and deep and goods came to the docks up the short distance from the Mississippi. Until the railroads enabled its rival, Chicago, to outstrip it, Galena was an important center for commerce with the rest of northwestern Illinois and with Iowa and Wisconsin. Its boom days had been in the 1840’s, when Jesse Grant, in partnership with E. A. Collins, opened the store on Main Street. The firm, later styled Grant & Perkins, sold harnesses and other leather goods and purchased hides from farmers in the area. By 1860 the business was Jesse’s alone and was run by his sons Orvil and Simpson.¹⁶

Ulysses made an effort to be a leather merchant, taking trips to Iowa as a salesman and a hide buyer. To prove his commercial respectability, he attended the Methodist church and put in tedious hours in the Main Street store, being solicitous of the customer buying a new strap for an old saddle. He made small talk about the weather or politics and told stories about the Mexican War. But there is no evidence that the men of the town had yet taken him into account. Perhaps given enough time and enough demonstrations of his steadiness they would have. There was no reason why Ulysses could not soon have become a partner, rather than a clerk. He spoke confidently of such a prospect, and the sad fact that his brother Simpson was slowly dying made it likely that the time for promotion was not far off. Orvil Grant, in manner Jesse’s true son, was in charge, and as Ulysses could have anticipated, the business was aggressively and prosperously run by this younger brother. Everything was propitious for him to fit in, except for the fact that Ulysses Grant was still Ulysses Grant. Perhaps he could have lived out his days as a solid townsman and successful merchant in Galena. Or perhaps he was lucky not to have to work in the store long enough for the façade to crack.¹⁷

Julia, making do with an Irish girl in place of her Missouri slaves, was game about being a newcomer in town, rather than the Dent daughter who counted in St. Louis. She was not resentful of having had to move north with Ulysses, but there was a hint of self-consciousness and a sense of superiority in her insistence on dressing two-year-old Jesse in finer clothes than were usual in Galena. Only such minute expressions of differentness were open to her. There was no way for her to play out the energy and determination that she had displayed when she and Ulysses rode horseback vigorously at White Haven or churned butter at Hardscrabble. Nor was there any outlet for him. He no longer even owned a horse. People talked of his vacant expression as he went down the long, long flight of stairs to work and climbed back up them to his house at the end of the day.¹⁸