…war, the ordinary man’s most convenient means of escaping from the ordinary…
—Philip Caputo
ONCE AGAIN Grant was close to silence, a difficult quality to measure in a man, and one which in his case must be read in two ways. There are many men in America who are articulate only to the extent of hinting in clichés at what is locked within them. They talk disparagingly of the weather and of people different from themselves; they joke about sex and theorize solemnly about ways to make money; and as they do so, they work monotonously at something they have no interest in talking about. Their predictable, ritual conversations with one another enable them to endure. Sometimes the talk stops, as it did for Grant at Fort Humboldt; then such a man cannot keep going. The chatter that has been the barrier against nothingness is gone. The void that remains is terrifying. Grant had known that silence as he sought another kind. He wanted a silence born of confidence and command, a time when he could listen to other men’s chatter but have no need to add to it himself. This is the silence not of a man deadened to the world, but rather of one come alive to engage it. It is the silence of Ulysses Grant as he appears in the Brady photograph, sitting on a bench hauled out of a church into the sun during the Wilderness campaign (see p. 167). There, as others busily talked, he sat silent and in control.
As a means of getting one’s back into life, war can be a bad bargain. It can as often be a boring job at a desk or a wearing slog through rough countryside in the wrong season as something more exhilarating. But it is a way out of a leather store. And for some men it is much more than that—it is the fulfillment that the world will yield in no other manner. For these men, war appears as a refutation of evil, whether it be the evil of Hitler’s threat to Marc Bloch’s France or of the slaveholders’ threat to Thoreau’s America, or, less exalted but no less real, the evil of personal hollowness. War, for a man like Ulysses Grant, was the only situation in which he could truly connect to his country and countrymen and be at one with them and with himself. That the price of this connection was killing other men is a fact that many observers quickly note and rightly deplore, but that does not dispose of the matter. The nineteenth-century American world, whether of commerce or wilderness, of politics or sex, of farm or horse, of family or privacy, did not arouse this particular man (and the many others like him) the way war could. Grant did not like the vainglory of victory or the drama of high strategy or the blood of battle, and he did not think all wars worth fighting, yet some essential part of his being was brought into play only in war. He never celebrated this fact, but neither did he deny it; he knew it was true. Only in war—and possibly, at the end of his life, in writing about the war—did he find the completeness of experience that, when engaged in it, was so intensely his.
Grant’s war was coming. The politics of war-causing were over and the politics of warmaking about to begin. They began in Galena much as they did in towns and cities all over the North. In Galena, as everywhere else, in both North and South, it was by no means certain where those lines of loyalty would lead. Sympathy for the Confederacy, and for its position on keeping black people in slavery, was considerable in the Illinois town lying close to the Wisconsin border; but unlike those of his townsmen who had such sympathy, Grant had no problem accepting the basic tenets of Lincoln’s call to preserve the Union. A private citizen without marked political passions, Grant took the two strands of his political past and made of them an untangled line of commitment to the Union. He was a standard war Democrat, with Whig antecedents as well. In an uncomplicated way he made the two traditions one, and he became a general who knew clearly where he stood throughout the war.
This clarity of view was not achieved through active participation in the politics of the late 1850’s, and indeed it may owe something to inactivity in them. Grant, as an alert, stimulated young lieutenant, had been more articulate on the political dimension of the Mexican War than he was to be in the confused and defeating peacetime days that followed. In the 1850’s he seemed uninterested in politics, but not ignorant of them. One Missouri friend—John W. Emerson—recalling forty years later the arguments of the 1850’s over slavery and its extension into the territories, recorded, “While Grant lived quietly on his farm from 1854 to 1858, no man was better informed than he on every phase of the controversy.” Emerson also remembered entering Grant’s St. Louis office in 1859 and “on more than one occasion,” finding him “sitting alone at his desk with his hand holding a newspaper hanging listlessly by his side, with every evidence of deep thought, suggesting sadness. At first I supposed these were mere studious and reflective ‘moods.’ But I soon learned from remarks he now and then made in condemnation of some extravagant and vicious sentiments…which he had been reading, that…. he was deeply pained.”1
Emerson had come on Grant on yet another occasion in which silence had overtaken him. Only when his friend pressed him did Grant express concern about the divisive issues in the newspapers; until then, political affiliations had been a function of social milieu. When, upon returning from the West Coast, he had tried to mold himself into the kind of farmer-planter his father-in-law was, he had adopted the political outlook of Colonel Dent and other Missouri landowning slaveholders. But Grant had set free the only slave he, personally, owned. To impute moral indifference to this act would be unfair. It was a decent thing to do, the more so because Grant was in financial trouble and the thirty-five-year-old male in good health was worth about $1,500. The freedom William Jones obtained was no less valuable because manumission was effected at a time when Grant was once again shifting his plans for his life. He had given up trying to establish himself as a plantation owner, Missouri fashion, and was moving to town. In the month before he set Jones free he had been trying to ingratiate himself with businessmen and politicians who were Free-Soilers. The ownership of a slave (for whom in any event there was barely room in the house) was not an asset when talking to them.2
As Ulysses moved away from the Dents’ Democratic world, he was forced back closer to the politics of his father. With the demise of the Whig party, Jesse Grant became a Know-Nothing, and Ulysses joined him briefly in that strange and unattractive political expression of distrust of people unlike oneself. The rhetoric of bigotry that crept into his letters to Jesse in 1859 reflects not only an attempt to accommodate himself, after so many years, to his father’s way of looking at things, but also a bitterness born of being beaten by others. The descendant of Matthew Grant of the Mary and John saw his job as county engineer go to “a Dutchman…. There is,” he continued, “…but one paying office in the County held by an American unless you except the office of Sheriff which is held by a Frenchman who speaks broken English but was born here.”3
Later in his life, reminiscing as a Republican, Grant hinted that he had been sympathetic to the Whig candidacies of his Mexican War commanders, Zachary Taylor in 1848 and Winfield Scott in 1852, and saw them as his political forebears. But in fact, he had voted for neither man. He cast his first presidential ballot in the election of 1856, for James Buchanan. Guessing why people vote as they do is risky business; Grant was a Dent in 1856; in 1860, when his Republican brother Orvil said, “You ought to be ashamed of having voted for Buchanan,” Ulysses replied, “I didn’t, I voted against Frémont.”4
Fortunately for Ulysses Grant’s reputation as a Republican, he had not lived long enough in Illinois to vote in 1860. If he had, he probably would have voted against Abraham Lincoln; Grant was then a Douglas Democrat. Later, when he was a Republican president, he blurred that embarrassing fact by saying nothing of Douglas and stressing, instead, that he had not at all liked the other Democratic candidate, Breckinridge, preferring Lincoln to him. This shift away from Southern planter loyalties again suggests the philosophical aspects of his leaving the Dents and beginning an adjustment to the life of a Northern town, where the concepts of free soil and free enterprise were dominant. And when it came to deciding where he stood on the question of secession and Union, Grant knew exactly where he was. As an observer, he saw it all accurately. By December 1860 Grant regarded his man Buchanan as a “granny of an Executive.” He predicted the Fort Sumter crisis with a remarkable sense of the strategy of warmaking, guessing wrongly only which president of the United States would be forced to respond to shots in a way that would create sympathy for the secessionists in the parts of the South that had not yet seceded. On December 10, 1860, Grant wrote from Galena to his St. Louis friend Charles W. Ford, “It is hard to realize that a State or States should commit so suicidal an act as to secede from the Union yet from all the reports I have no doubt but that at least five of them will do it.” He was writing just over a week before South Carolina seceded, an act to be followed within two months by six of the states of the deep South, with the consequent formation of the Confederacy. Grant expected in December that, with a weak president in office, “some foolish policy will probably be pursued which will give the seceding States the support and sympathy of the Southern states that do not go out.” Unfortunately, neither Grant nor the politicians in power came up with a non-foolish policy. By April a new president was in office, and the warmakers did just what Grant had predicted. Fort Sumter was fired on, Lincoln called for troops, and when the nonslaveholding states of the North immediately indicated they would respond, several of the states of the upper South—including, most critically Virginia—joined the Confederacy.5
But when he wrote to Ford, Grant’s mind was not exclusively on the secession crisis. He regretted his continued inability to pay off an old debt and wondered how secession talk was affecting the troubled city of St. Louis, noting that in Galena, “the only difficulty experienced as yet is the difficulty of obtaining Eastern exchange.” If there is an emphasis on concern for unpaid bills due the firm in this response of Grant’s, there is no absence of clarity. His clearheaded detached judgment of the political scene is striking.6
The politics of slavery and of the relationship to the body politic of the black people who were slaves were not synonymous with the politics of warmaking, but they were inextricably linked. There is no mass of evidence to indicate a complex involvement by Grant in issues of slavery or relationships with slaves. What we do know suggests a straightforward attitude toward the people and the institution that foreshadowed both the liberality and the limitations of his racial policies during the war and during his administration as president. Jesse Grant claimed that his son was raised in a firmly antislavery home, but there is nothing to show that the issue had any powerful influence on Grant as a child. Someone as observant as he can hardly have missed the local arguments over John Rankin’s encouragement of runaway slaves. And yet if he heard the quarrels, Ulysses left no indication of his own views on the Underground Railroad. Of even more interest, given his eight years in the Reconstruction White House, would be Grant’s impressions of the black people he saw living in Ohio and Kentucky, both in Maysville and out in the surrounding country through which he traveled, but we have no record of these impressions.
Part of Grant’s objection to the Mexican War at the time he fought in it, and more strongly as he looked back, was that it augmented the power of the slaveholding states. But in his sympathetic accounts of the Mexican peasants, exploited not only by those possessing landed and armed power but also by the invading American army, he did not draw analogies to the slaves in the United States. Perhaps because he took the facts for granted, he never wrote similar accounts of the exploitation of black Americans, and by failing to do so he failed fully to confront the parallel. He did not see American Negroes as people to sympathize with. And even Grant’s objections to the war in Mexico were based more on the view that it constituted an unfair invasion of a weaker country by a stronger than on a comprehension of the increased sufferings of an already subjugated class.
Like other officers, Grant had servants, and he brought one of them, Gregorio, back from Mexico. The Mexican, far from home, with limited educational resources with which to confront a country with a different language and, no doubt, receiving a very small wage, was in a highly dependent condition. In fact, one of the man’s functions was to be an amusing exotic boy, doing great tricks with a lariat. In talking about him, Grant did not show sensitivity to Gregorio’s situation, nor did he liken him to a slave. Rather, displaying the same attitude he had toward all of his other servants (save perhaps the last of them, who nursed him as he was dying), he seemed hardly to have noticed him.
Unlike her husband, Julia had always had slaves around her. Her most intimate companions as she acted out childhood fantasies had been the black children at White Haven. The workers in the fields who raised her father’s crops were the fathers, mothers, and older brothers and sisters of her playmates. In her fondness for the other children and for several of the older women, particularly Kitty and Rose, there is no suggestion that Julia was in the least troubled by the fact that her family owned people. She held an attitude of undoubted superiority toward slaves, and then former slaves, throughout her life; it is reflected in the tone she used whenever she spoke of slavery. Even in the White House Julia continued to apologize for slavery, and during critical Reconstruction days, her need to define herself as of a superior class caused her to turn facilely to the concept of black people as inferiors. Unluckily, Ulysses honored his wife’s prejudices. The price of his doing so proved high for black Americans.
When the nation was at a crisis over secession, Grant, unlike his wife, did not forget that one result of any decision made, of any course of action embarked on, would be that the relationship of black people to white would shift. On April 19, 1861, he wrote a letter to his father-in-law that was something of a declaration of independence. Dent emphatically did not support the use of federal power to prevent secession, and his son-in-law, seizing the chance to preach a bit to one who had often preached to him, wrote, “The times are indee[d] startling but now is the time, particularly in the border Slave states, for men to prove their love of country.” Then, after reviewing the strong Northern response to Lincoln’s call for troops and to the secession of Virginia (Grant thought the state should be made “to bear a heavy portion of the burthen of the War for her guilt”), he continued, “In all this I can but see the doom of Slavery. The North do not want, nor will they want, to interfere with the institution. But they will refuse for all time to give it protection unless the South shall return soon to their allegiance, and then too this disturbance will give such an impetus to the production of their staple, cotton, in other parts of the world that they can never recover the controll of the market again for that comodity. This will reduce the value of negroes so much that they will never be worth fighting over again….”7
This was sophisticated economics from a failed businessman and evidence of the intelligence Grant could muster when aroused. Two weeks later he wrote Julia about the imminent danger of civil war within civil war as Missourians displayed their divided loyalties. Rather blandly, he anticipated that the ominous martial events in Missouri might retard the state’s development: “Missouri will be a great state ultimately but she is set back now for years. It will end in more rapid advancement however for she will be left a free state. Negroes are stampeding already and those who do not will be carried further South.” A black exodus north and west, with any remaining blacks forcibly moved south, would leave Missouri free—that is, free for development by white farmers and businessmen, with black labor no longer essential and black people, no longer present, no longer a burden. Five days later, he wrote his father that when the Northern forces were properly trained they would send “the secession army howling….” After that, he predicted, “the states…will…be loyal for a generation to come, negroes will depreciate so rapidly in value that no body will want to own them and their masters will be the loudest in their declaimations against the institution in a political and economic view. The nigger will never disturb this country again.”8
He was not entirely convinced that serenity was at hand, however, for that same day he wrote Julia that turmoil might result when the Northern army caused the leaders of the rebellion to flee and disorder followed: “The worst to be apprehended is from negro revolts. Such would be deeply deplorable and I have no doubt but a Northern army would hasten South to suppress anything of the kind.” In May 1861 it looked as if Ulysses S. Grant was ready to march not to John Brown’s drum, but to that of the men who hanged him.9
And yet, earlier that spring, despite the government’s call for troops and the massive task of organizing an army and finding commanders for it, the West Point graduate had found no drum to march to at all. On April 16, the day after the news of the fall of Fort Sumter reached Galena, there had been a mass meeting addressed by two townsmen—Elihu B. Washburne, the Republican representing the district in the House of Representatives, and John A. Rawlins, Grant’s dark-eyed intense neighbor, a Douglas Democrat. The alliance for war was made in Galena as it was all across the North, and the patriotic fervor at the meeting was strong. Grant was present, as he was two nights later at another meeting, where the subject was the recruitment of troops. By then, the new man in town, the man in the leather store who lived up on High Street, was known to be a graduate of West Point. Grant was, in fact, the only man in town with professional-army training. He was elected to preside over the meeting, and with a quiet sense that what came his way was exactly what he expected, he took the chair.10
It was a great moment, and if some in the room saw “evident embarrassment” on his face, the man himself sensed personal vindication. “In this season,” recalled his neighbor John Rawlins, “I saw new energies in Grant.… He dropped a stoop shouldered way of walking, and set his hat forward on his forehead in a careless fashion.” Grant himself spoke succinctly of his new confidence as he put aside the nothingness of his life and embraced the war: “I never went into our leather store after that meeting, to put up a package or do other business.”11
During the succeeding days he was active in enlisting men for a Galena company of volunteers, and, in civilian clothes, he went off with them to Camp Yates, in Springfield. It is said that Grant modestly stood aside while an ambitious man, Augustus Louis Chetlain, moved in to claim the captaincy of the company, a position that Grant was better suited to hold. What Grant, in fact, told Chetlain was that for him, a former captain in the regular army, to take command of a volunteer company would be a demotion: “I have been educated at West Point, and therefore deserve a colonelcy.” In the Mexican War he had been less critical than most West Point men of citizen-soldiers, and later, as a general, he never scorned a citizens’ army, but in 1861 Grant was not quick to realize that this huge army would need officers and that the officers would quickly achieve high rank. Instead, petulantly, he claimed he did not want to be “a Capt. under a green Colonel.” He had, after all, been called to chair the local meeting designed to pull together one unit of a vast army coming together from towns all across the nation, and he expected word from the War Department calling him back into the national army. He knew that Winfield Scott, the commanding general, was not in favor of integrating West Point officers into state volunteer-army units. Instead, Scott wanted these trained officers to maintain command of elite regular-army units and, in the higher ranks, to assist in the command of the army as a whole—that is, of the combined regular and volunteer segments. Grant expected an expert army to end the war quickly—“My own opinion is that this War will be but of short duration”—and it was to the regular army once more at war that he hoped to return.12
At Camp Yates he drilled volunteer units and shared a room and a bed with Chetlain while he waited for the commission that did not arrive. Across the country West Point lieutenants were leapfrogging captains and majors to become colonels, by brevet, of volunteer regiments from the various states.* Grant, however, in his “one suit that he had worn all winter, his short pipe, his grizzled beard and his old slouch hat did not…look a very promising candidate for the colonelcy.” He worked in the statehouse in an anteroom of the adjutant general’s, “at a little square table, of which one leg was gone and which had been shoved into a corner to keep it upright.”13
Grant’s excellent sense of the public political events from the start of the secession crisis, and his elation as he left his store, were not matched by a grasp of the private politics of finding an important place in these events. He might have been shrewd in not taking (or angling to get) the captaincy of the Jo Daviess County volunteer company if that decision had been coupled with a skillful campaign to get a better appointment, but it was not. His strolls through the lobby of Springfield’s hotel produced nothing. He had no friends to whom he could appeal, and when he finally made a formal request for such a position he did it so drearily that failure was ensured. True, some of his friends, like Simon Bolivar Buckner, were on the Confederate side and therefore could not help him, but it is poignant that after four years at West Point and eleven in the Fourth Infantry Regiment he knew no one to whom he could simply write, “I’m in good shape; help me get back into the army.” The stigma of being thought a drunk was powerful. “I don’t know whether I am like other men or not,” said Grant, exposing to Chetlain, a hearty Swiss-American, his fear of being different, “but when I have nothing to do I get blue and depressed….” And then, as Chetlain told Hamlin Garland, Grant confessed that he was afraid he would start to drink: “This is the key to Grant’s drinking habits. Whenever he was idle and depressed this appetite came upon him.”14
Grant complained to his father that he “was perfectly sickened at the political wire pulling for all these commissions” and asserted that he “would not engage in it.” His diffident ways precluded his use of the more blatant and flamboyant forms of self-advertising practiced by others, but his true distress lay less in his contempt for those pulling the wires than in his inability to get a hand on them himself. It took him a month to communicate with the army headquarters in Washington, and when he did, he just sent an impersonal and unenthusiastic letter to Lorenzo Thomas, an older officer who was adjutant general. The letter was never answered. He went to Missouri to appeal to two Mexican War veterans, but was rebuffed by both of them—Nathaniel Lyon, the Federal Commander at St. Louis, and Francis P. Blair, Jr., a Unionist politician who was raising Federal troops. He sent hints for a commission to other men in Missouri and Ohio; in Covington, Kentucky, he called on Colonel and Mrs. William Whistler, whom he and Julia had known in Detroit, but the eighty-year-old colonel, old and infirm, had at last yielded the command of the Fourth Infantry Regiment and could not help him. Two days later, he summoned courage, submerged pride, and went to the headquarters of someone nearer his own age, an officer who was already important in the new army, Major General George B. McClellan. During his final year at West Point, Grant had known McClellan, then a plebe, and he had seen him again in Mexico; this was a promising contact. Deferentially, Grant, once McClellan’s superior, waited, but did not get to see the general. Checking pride once more, he came back and waited the next day. Again, McClellan did not see him.15
“Blue as a whet-stone,” Grant was close to giving up. He went back to Galena, but, he wrote his father, “the six days I have been at home I have felt all the time as if a duty was being neglected that was paramount to any other duty I ever owed.” He told his father to write him “at Springfield”; he was on his way back to his tasks as a mustering officer. The letter, which expressed Grant’s very real patriotic sentiment, would not be unhelpful if Jesse did some lobbying for his son’s appointment as colonel. It was recognition, as well, that he could not succumb to his depression and stay at home. To do so would have put an intolerable collar on the energy that the prospect of war had begun to stir. But when he returned to Springfield and the wearisome work of organizing the Illinois recruits, he had no assurance that he could get anyone to rescue him by giving him his own command.16
The trip home had proved more than a testing of Grant’s despair. He discovered that he had been doing his campaigning in the wrong places. It was fruitless to look up men he had known in his army past, but across the river in a fine house right there in Galena was a man who saw Grant not in the shadow of a tarnished reputation, but in the light of great possibilities. This was Elihu B. Washburne, the congressman for the district. Like many other ambitious politicians, he sought to increase his influence by having an officer beholden to him, for if that officer did well, the politician would have the whole nation in his debt. Washburne took Grant with him to see the governor and was long glad that he had, but his intervention may not have been the key to Grant’s finally receiving a commission. (Half of Illinois claimed credit for getting Grant his colonelcy—after he became a commanding general.) There was political jealousy between Washburne and Governor Richard Yates, and when Yates at last gave Grant a place, a nice confusion remained over whether Grant had received the commission because of Washburne’s help or simply because the man then in command, an old filibusterer named Simon S. Goode, had proved to be flagrantly and eccentrically incompetent. On June 17 Grant wrote Julia some family news about a visit to Covington, and added, “You have probably seen that I have been appointed to a Colonelcy?”17