I’ve often longed to see a war, and now I have my wish.
—Louisa May Alcott
SO SWIFT was Grant’s advance from the leather shop of Galena to the laurels of Vicksburg that one might imagine it completed in a single leap. Actually, however, the late summer and fall of 1861, the whole of 1862, and, indeed, the period of the Vicksburg campaign of 1863 saw the intensive step-by-step education of a frighteningly effective warrior. The quiet man, wearing an old jacket, slouching and watching, was thought by fools to be a no-account and was represented by jealous enemies as a drunk. But at the end of Grant’s schooling in war another master at deliberately wearing the wrong clothes, Abraham Lincoln, saw someone very different.
Grant had become a student of war, but never made the mistake of thinking that his subject (or any other involving human behavior) was a science. He knew that even in the immediacy of war people are frightened by their pasts and tend to make odd decisions. He recollected, with skill, what he had experienced in the Mexican War. He forgot little of what he had learned while watching people both in the army and out. He drew on what he had seen people do and on what he knew of his own weaknesses to understand the men he had to fight with and against. As Russell F. Weigley has said, Grant taught us that war is annihilation, and he did so because he brought to the fighting of an American war an indispensable horse sense about American politics. As Adam Badeau put it, Grant “understood that he was engaged in a people’s war.” Once a moral nation like America fully committed itself to the war, victory had to be total. And total victory against other committed Americans could be achieved only if there were more men available for dying on one side than on the other.1
William T. Sherman, not Grant, stated that “in our Country…one class of men makes war and leaves another to fight it out,” but Grant would not have disagreed. He knew that politics were both silly and potent and that matters of statecraft and matters of life and death bore no reliable relationship to each other. In a profound sense they did not connect. The nation had been unwilling fully to give over the great divisive question of slavery to politicians, and instead turned to war. Now, even in a war of annihilation, it would not yield everything to the warriors. Politics went on, out of phase with the immediate realities of the battlefield. Grant did not expect or seek to impose a balance between sword and ballot box. Unlike countless other generals, Grant always remembered to defer to Washington, D.C., even in times of exultation or desperation. Grant sensed that by doing so he could give the politicians victories.2
But the most important part of the student’s knowledge was something he carried with him as an almost private joke. He had learned—or had somehow always known—how simple war is. It may have dawned on him as he dozed while sitting erectly at a lecture at West Point, or during the more intense seminar of a Mexican War battle, or at almost any other time. When he learned the lesson does not matter. He knew it. The truth underlying it was uncongenial to American ears, and Grant was too kind and gentle a man ever to come out with it directly. But his whole life was focused on his mastery of the fact and his Memoirs was its record: war is an act; to make war is to kill.
Ulysses Grant in his throw-away lines—in his throw-away life—kept trying to get people to see the colossal sick joke. All you do is take the nicest guy on the block—the one who will not be diverted by dreams of vainglory or revenge or by the nonsense of masochism—and knowing he is not good for much else, let him act on the bald fact that war means killing the guy on the other side, or at least scaring him badly enough so that he will quit fighting. Then, all this man has to do is keep the fact in mind all the way to Appomattox. He need not try to convince himself that war is good; he may very well know the opposite. It doesn’t matter. In 1861 the war was—it existed—and Colonel Grant, conscious of the fact, went off at the head of a regiment of nice guys from Illinois to fight in Missouri. As he later told Julia, he found in her home state “great fools…[who] will never rest until they bring upon themselves all the horrors of war in its worst form. The people are inclined to carry on a guerilla Warfare that must eventuate in retaliation and when it does commence it will be hard to control.” In war, people die. That was the one essential, terrible, toweringly simple fact, and guerrilla fighters were, for him, the most frightening of the killers.3
Grant was as jaunty as perhaps he was ever to be in his life. At last he was in charge. He expected that before too long his wife would be able to join him; he had his eye out for a horse better than his present one; and in a letter full of these concerns, he gossiped cheerfully. He was respectful of, but bored by, his two senior-officer colleagues: “One is a preacher and the other a member of the Church,” said Grant, observing that he could “never have a game of Eucre with them.” He reported the other officers to be sober and attentive: “For the Field officers of my regt…. one pint of liquor will do to the end of the war.” The men were pleased with the new “order in camp” which he had brought about. Bringing Julia into the activities described in his splendidly drawn letter, Grant asked her to hunt about the house for his copy of General McClellan’s report on the Crimean War and to send it along; there was more war to be studied. With happy exasperation he closed—“This is a very poor letter but I have not written scarsely a single sentence without interruption”—and signed with a pert selection from the fat assortment of pet names he and Julia had for each other. He was joyously “busy from morning until night.” Grant was alive.4
Ulysses Grant is not usually pictured as zestful—or as temperamental. One of the most familiar of the solemn tales about his Spartan stolidness concerns the day he took command and the men of his regiment had to decide whether to re-enlist or to go home. Generals John A. McClernand and John A. Logan, both politician-generals (Democrats from Illinois), came to urge the men to stay. Grant was sure the former was loyal but doubtful about the latter. He was concerned about the wrong man. Later, McClernand proved a liability to him in the war effort and Logan an asset, and on this day Logan, who was from rebel country in downstate Illinois, surprised Grant with a persuasive, emotional, patriotic appeal to the men to re-enlist—which they subsequently did—for the fight to come. Grant, called on to follow Logan with a further exhortation, said simply, “Men, go to your quarters!”5
This line is often quoted as if it were some sort of elegant understatement exemplifying Grant’s mysterious hold over his men. Perhaps it can be regarded in this light, and perhaps not. The truth is that Grant was out of sorts and out of words. “Men, go to your quarters” was in fact, all that, in frustration, he could mutter. Grant had pictured himself that day sitting astride his own horse on a saddle from his family’s shop—in other words, at home with his regiment and confident in the presence of the pretentious visiting politician-generals. But things did not work out that way. Grant was on an undistinguished horse, his own having not yet been brought from Galena. As he rode to the mustering-in, an embarrassing and tedious cousin, sent down from Galena, came “dashing into Camp, on horseback with the fine trappings Orvil sent to me, not on Rondy [Grant’s horse] but a showey Livery horse hired for the occation.” Grant had not spent a dime on transportation for two months, and the cost of the rented steed and of the cousin’s journey, which he would have to pay, flashed into his mind: “I was so disgusted that I passed him with but little ceremony.” The terse “Men, go to your quarters” was expression of annoyance with a cousin who had spoiled his moment of assuming command rather than a stoically simple statement that assured re-enlistment and was, somehow, appropriate to the great responsibilities that lay ahead. Grant had not yet discovered how he wanted to look to his men and to himself.6
In the early summer of 1861 Colonel Grant rode west to the Mississippi at the head of the Twenty-first Illinois Regiment. On foot were civilian soldiers of whom Grant was already proud. One of his officers put it well: “We have the best of order and every thing mooves off pleasantly.” Grant, who insisted on the order, had never been as snobbish as some regular-army officers with respect to volunteers. He had had his doubts in Mexico, but, a bit slowly, he had now grasped the fact that the army that would fight the Civil War, already numbering tens of thousands of men, would not be made up of professional soldiers. It would be composed of civilians turned into soldiers. Grant recognized that to a greater degree than any previous conflict, his would be a people’s war. The student of war became the teacher and made his men students in turn: “My men behaved admirably, and the lesson has been a good one for them. They can now go into camp after a day’s march with as much promptness as veteran troops; they can strike their tents and be on the march with equal celerity.”7
Grant leading the Twenty-first Illinois west from Camp Yates may have overcome his earlier reservations about taking a volunteer regiment, but his father had experienced no such change of heart. Jesse, with his unerring instinct for the best way to cut his son down, suggested that in taking the command, Ulysses once again had not done as well as he should have. In a letter, he not only derided the military accomplishments of his son but also chided him for not being a better correspondent. In his reply, Ulysses obliquely tried to fend off his father’s scorn for the command he had accepted and his father’s hope that he would return to the professional army: “You ask if I should not like to go in the regular army. I should not. I want to bring my children up to useful employment, and in the army the chance is poor.” Limply, he was trying to teach his ineducable father that he was engaged not in a career, but in a war.8
Ulysses S. Grant was well on his way to that war. Julia Dent Grant had only started out. The idea that women have no taste for war ran deeply at the time, and women were very rarely allowed to behave in a manner inconsistent with the premise that only men are hunters and fighters. All the social conventions of the nineteenth century argued that Julia must not participate, except by allowing herself the emotional indulgence of nobly sending a man off to war. Such a posture, however, was not what she had in mind. She had been left behind when Ulysses went to Mexico, but at that point, not yet his wife, she was still a daughter in her father’s family. She had been left behind again when Ulysses went to the West Coast. For him, the result of that separation had been disastrous, but whatever Julia might have gained by joining her husband there would have been obtained at the price of a very unexciting army-post life. Now things looked like much more fun. Her “favorite pet name for the Captain”—Victor—had been chosen, she said, “after he read to me the triumphs of Victor Emmanuel,” and she indulged in reveries of romantic glory. Julia craved to be in the middle of Ulysses’ adventure and barely remembered that war was regarded solely as a man’s world.9
At first, she went to war vicariously, trying to assuage her intense wish to be there herself by sending both her husband and a son: “Strange to say, I felt no regret at his [Ulysses’] going and even suggested that our eldest son just then eleven years old, should accompany him.” Thus it was thanks in part to his mother that Frederick Grant was with his father at Camp Yates and on the march to Missouri. But Ulysses sent the young boy home when he anticipated that the summer’s fun might turn into actual fighting: “Fred, started home yesterday and I did not telegraph you because I thought you would be in a perfect stew until he arrived. He did not want to go at all and I felt loathe at sending him but now we are in the enemies country I thought you would be alarmed if he was with me.” Fred, whom his father praised as being “very manly,” went by boat up the Mississippi and walked from Dubuque to Galena with an army knapsack on his back.10
Before Fred arrived, Julia was indeed “in a perfect stew,” but not for the reason her husband expected. In response to Ulysses’ letter, she quickly wrote, “Do not send him home; Alexander was not older when he accompanied Philip. Do keep him with you.” She was too late; Fred was on his way home. Undaunted, Julia soon recognized that there was no reason why she herself should not be with her Philip on a march of conquest. She might actually get to go to war. The colonel wanted—needed—his family with him. The night that Fred left, Ulysses had written Julia that he had had “one of those terrible headaches which you know I am subject to,” and within a week he wrote again, saying, “I should like very much to go into camp some place where you could visit me.”11
As they moved toward Missouri, Grant was pleased with his men for making “their marches as well as troops ever do.” They got good marks for their restraint as well, as he faced a problem that was to become ubiquitous in the wake of marching troops: “There have been a few men who show a disposition not to respect private property such as hen roosts and gardens, but I have kept such a watch on them, and punished offenders so, that I will venture that the same number of troops never marched through a thickly settled country like this committing fewer depridations.” During the first week of July, Grant’s men marched through beautiful country to Quincy, and crossed the Mississippi into Missouri.12
The Missouri campaign—coming, in a sense, before the real war began and involving no great battle—has seldom received the attention it deserves. The year 1861 was the year of the process of disunion. There was no divinely ordained map establishing a Confederacy of eleven Southern states and a Union of twenty-three Northern states. South Carolina seceded in December 1860. Only six states of the deep South followed before the firing on Fort Sumter, and through the winter it was the hope of the federal government, if not the basis of its policy (for there seemed to be no policy), that no such thing as the solid South existed, or that if it did exist, it consisted only of the southernmost tier of states—from Florida through Georgia and South Carolina west through Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Texas. The focus of attention for Abraham Lincoln and his advisers in the days of the Sumter crisis was how best to keep other states, particularly Virginia, from joining the Confederacy. The firing on the fort accomplished what the disunionists had hoped for; Lincoln called for troops, and four more states—Arkansas, Tennessee, North Carolina, and Virginia—did join the Confederacy. Lincoln next tried to keep in the Union the slave states bordering those that had seceded. The nation’s capital was isolated south of slave-holding Maryland, and troops were harassed by legions of rebel sympathizers as they moved through Baltimore. Lincoln refused to disturb the institution of slavery; he kept Maryland and Delaware in the Union and fought to maintain his hold on the other two slave states, Kentucky and Missouri.
Missouri, rising north of the line defined in the compromise to which the state gave its name, was a psychological and strategic threat to the Unionists. It represented the extension of slavery as well as the thrusting of the Confederacy into the North. If slave-holding Missouri had followed the wishes of its governor, Claiborne Jackson, and joined the Confederacy, there is no reason why its precedent could not have been followed elsewhere. People in southern Illinois sympathetic to the idea of keeping a black population controlled could have followed Missouri out of the Union, and if they had done so, could not Indiana have followed? If Indiana, why not New York City? There was no certain logic to disunion.
Maintaining control of Missouri was essential both for stopping the process of dissolution of the Union and for demonstrating the utility of military force in achieving that goal. It was critical to the control of the Mississippi River. Had Missouri gone with the South, St. Louis, a river port and rail-traffic center, would have been the largest city in the Confederacy. Grant missed the “battle” that initially saved Missouri for the Union. On May 10, 1861, not yet in the army, he was at White Haven visiting his father-in-law, who, he said, “professes to be a Union man yet condemns evry measure for the preservation of the Union.” On that day Captain Nathaniel Lyon led Union men into an arsenal and prevented its seizure by a band of zealous St. Louis Confederates. Governor Jackson, the leader of the pro-Confederacy faction in Missouri, bitterly resented Lyon’s forcible intrusion of federal power into the affairs of his state. Grant’s sympathies were with Lyon, not Jackson, and by July, this one-time Missouri farmer was leading an Illinois regiment into his former home state to assist in the military effort to keep it in the Union.13
As he crossed into Missouri, Grant was aware that, for the first time in his life, he was in command of men whom he would have to send into battle. At Palmyra, he found no opposition, but moving to the Salt River he came in sight of an encampment of the Confederate colonel Thomas Harris: “As we approached the brow of the hill from which it was expected we could see Harris’ camp, and possibly find his men ready formed to meet us, my heart kept getting higher and higher until it felt to me as though it was in my throat. I would have given anything then to have been back in Illinois, but”—he continued, oddly, in his Memoirs—“I had not the moral courage to halt and consider what to do; I kept right on.” He found the Confederates had left the camp: “My heart resumed its place. It occurred to me at once that Harris had been as much afraid of me as I had been of him. This was a view…I had never taken before; but was one I never forgot afterwards. From that event to the close of the war, I never experienced trepidation upon confronting an enemy, though I always felt more or less anxiety. I never forgot that he had as much reason to fear my forces as I had his. The lesson was valuable.”14
While stationed at Mexico, Missouri, with orders to keep stable the northeastern corner of the state, Grant learned that he was to become a general. A bit disingenuously he wrote his father on August 3, 1861, “I see from the papers that my name has been sent in for Brigadier Gen.!” And, getting back at his father for having heretofore arranged his life for him, he added, “This is certainly very complimentary…particularly as I have never asked a friend to intercede in my behalf.” And it was true that Grant’s promotion to brigadier general was much more a matter of routine than his awkward attainment of a colonelcy had been. On July 31, 1861, to staff the growing army, Lincoln submitted to Congress the names of twenty-six men for promotion to brigadier general. Most of these were officers with regular-army commissions rather than men who were, or knew, powerful political figures. In the promotions of early August 1861, preference was given first to regular-army officers who had not resigned and then to regular-army officers who, like Grant, had returned to service. Among the latter, Grant ranked sixth. The promotion was what one might have expected for a man who was doing a good job as a regimental colonel.15
Ulysses and Julia Grant, however, were not used to being able to count on the expected—certainly not when it was something as desirable as a generalship. The colonel had learned from humiliation. He had played the game wrong once and was determined not to do so again. This time Grant did not beg, but it is unlikely that Julia or his brother Orvil, in Galena, missed a chance to suggest to Congressman Washburne that he remember his townsman when promotions were to be made. Washburne, having sponsored Grant for his colonelcy, had a vested interest in his success. Later on, as Grant became famous, everyone wanted the credit for convincing Lincoln that he should be made a general, and there has been great speculation about just who did so. Washburne probably deserves the honor—at least that part not due to Grant’s own satisfactory record—but it would be wrong to see Grant even at this early point as simply a creature of the congressman’s. (Soon, in fact, the tail was wagging the dog.) Grant was doing well in his job in Missouri, and the winning posture for him at the time of his promotion to brigadier general—and later—was to eschew the “pulling and hauling for favors” that he denounced so vehemently in letters to his father.16
When the appointment came, he wrote Julia a simple, graceful letter (with a wonderful slip in the first line) designed to be shown to any of the people who had helped him achieve the promotion:
I certainly feel very greatful to the people of Ill. for the interest they seem to have taken in me and unasked too. Whilst I was about Springfield I certainly never blew my own trumpet and was not aware that I attracted any attention but it seems from what I have heard from there the people, who were perfect strangers to me up to the commencement of our present unhappy national difficulties, were very unanimous in recommending me for my present position. I shall do my very best not to disappoint them and shall hope by dilligence to render good account of some of the Ill. Vols. All my old Regt. expressed great regret at my leaving them and applied to be attached to my Brigade.
Shortly thereafter, Grant wrote his congressman in a dignified vein: “Mr. Washburn allow me to thank you for the part you have taken in giving me my present position. I think I see your hand in it….”17
Toward the middle of August, he wrote to Julia in a totally different but still triumphant tone. He had been to St. Louis and had hoped to be able to take a few days leave and surprise her. Orders to move a regiment into southern Missouri had spoiled that plan, but he was full of confidence. He had asked one of those friends back in Galena, John A. Rawlins, to join his staff. Grant did not know Rawlins well enough to spell his name correctly—he wrote it “Rollins”—but was so eager to have the aggressive young lawyer with him that he urged Julia to have his brother Orvil press Rawlins to accept quickly. He was feeling fond of the town which had been the agency of his recognition—“Give my love to all the good people of Galena”—and, in a highly private voice, told her of squaring accounts in a bigger town that had mocked him: “I called to see Harry Boggs the other day as I passed through St. Louis. He cursed and went on like a Madman. Told me that I would never be welcome in his hous; that the people of Illinois were a poor misserable set of Black Republicans, Abolition paupers that had to invade their state to get something to eat. Good joke that on something to eat. Harry is such a pittiful insignificant fellow that I could not get mad at him and told him so where upon he set the Army of Flanders far in the shade with his profanity.” Grant’s successful skirmish with Boggs could be said to have been as important a personal victory as Vicksburg was to be. His account of it was a declaration that at last other people would have to reckon with his strong sense of self. He had learned much about himself. The confidence revealed here was indispensable for all the satisfying and terrifying things that Ulysses S. Grant was to do in the Civil War.18
When, with justifiable pride, Grant wrote his father that he was to get his generalship—not bad, for a failure, was the unspoken theme of the letter—he took particular joy in the reaction of the officers in his regiment: “Hearing that I was likely to be promoted…with great unanimity, [they] have requested to be attached to my Command. This”—he went on, again in the self-deprecatory vein—“I dont want you to read to others for I very much dislike speaking of myself.” Jesse still refused to be proud of his son. His exasperating response was to try to use his influence with this new general officer of the army to get a job for the son of a friend (whom he thought capable of reciprocating the favor). Jesse did not succeed. Grant had moved swiftly. “My Staff,” he told Julia, “are J. A. Rawlins [correctly spelled now], Clark B. Lagow & W. S. Hillyer, three of the cleverest men…anywhere. Father’s recommendation came too late.” While still a colonel he had fended off other seekers of place, not having many positions to fill in the regiment and not wanting to be saddled with the wrong people. He had told Julia to discourage, gently, a Galena man wanting a job: “You can say to him that as Col. of a Regt. I have no appointments outside of the Regt. and as Brig. Gen. should I get the appointment, none outside the army. In the latter position however it might be possible to secure him a place…with the Quarter Master.” Grant was already practicing the patronage politics that would so preoccupy him in the White House, and doing so with a decisiveness seldom seen in the presidential years.19
That Galena man did not get a job with Grant, but in mid-August, John A. Rawlins accepted his. Rawlins, nine years younger than Grant, was the second eldest of nine children of a failed, and reportedly drunken, lead miner who had left the family to try, with equal unsuccess, to make a fortune in the gold fields of California. Rawlins’s mother and her children had lived in poverty on a farm outside Galena which consisted of the house and its garden, cut into two hundred acres of grassland and trees that the Rawlinses acquired in the government land sales of 1847. John, at sixteen, was listed as the owner and was the head of the household. The family’s cash income came from the sale of timber for charcoal, used in smelting the lead mined near Galena. His schooling was limited. For eight years, beginning when he was seven, it consisted of a three-month term each winter. The family did manage to acquire enough money to send his sister to the Galena Academy, and John attended the Rock River Seminary in Mount Morris, Illinois, for two years. Unable to afford to return and graduate, he spent the summer of 1853 in the intense labor of cutting wood, firing his own pits, and delivering the charcoal with a team of oxen. The story is that in September, having earned $250, he sold the oxen, gave up the charcoal trade for good, and moved into Galena; how this act affected the family he left is not known. In Galena, he persuaded an attorney, Isaac P. Steven, to let him read law in his office. Rawlins, “at that time blessed with a strong, robust body, a vigorous constitution, and a mind but partly developed, was self-reliant and confident.” He was admitted to the bar at age twenty-three, entered Steven’s office, and, on the retirement of his partner in 1855, became head of the firm. A Douglas Democrat, he was elected city attorney when he was twenty-six; a year later, in 1858, he entered into partnership with David Sheean. When he met his new neighbor, whose house was close by and whose shop was down Main Street from his law office, the dark, intense, and compelling John A. Rawlins was about as impressive a new success as Ulysses Grant could have hoped to encounter.20
Hannah Grant’s sister lived next door to Rawlins, who became acquainted with her nephew Ulysses as soon as he moved to Galena. “I got to know Grant slowly and respectfully,” he told a reporter eight years later. Rawlins listened as his new friend told fond stories of Mexico, and when disunion came, Grant found Rawlins a fervent advocate of strong prosecution of the new war. Grant may not have known the spelling but he knew the sound of his name when he wrote it as “Rollins” in his letter to Julia. He did not choose Rawlins on someone else’s recommendation. The man was Grant’s own choice. The general needed strong men around him, but not men he was uncomfortable with. Rawlins’s success was not one that had intimidated him; it did not point to Grant’s own lack of success.21
Rawlins was an attractive man—intelligent and strong, but not so powerful as to make Grant feel in the least weakened. Jacob Dolson Cox, who knew both men in camp, wrote long afterward of the relationship between them:
[Rawlins’s] friendship for his chief was of so sacredly intimate a character that he alone could break through the taciturnity into which Grant settled when he found himself in any way out of accord with the thoughts and opinions of those around him. Rawlins could argue, could expostulate, could condemn, could even upbraid, without interrupting for an hour the fraternal confidence and good will of Grant. He had won the right to this relation by an absolute devotion which dated from Grant’s appointment to be a brigadier-general in 1861, and which had made him the good genius of his friend in every crisis of Grant’s wonderful career. This was not because of Rawlins’ great intellect, for he was of only moderate mental powers. It was rather that he became a living and speaking conscience for his general; as courageous to speak in a time of need as Nathan the prophet, and as absolutely trusted as Jonathan by David.
Cox knew both Grant and Rawlins well. His words carry conviction. Unlike some of Grant’s critics, Cox did not see Rawlins as the man who did Grant’s military thinking for him, but he did credit Rawlins with carrying on conversations in which conflicting propositions were presented, without accompanying advice, so that having listened, Grant could make his own decisions.22
But Rawlins’s role involved far more than making military decisions. Rawlins was a man of passion, of absolutes. He could be rude to powerful generals and compassionate with people who were powerless, as he was to be later with the freedmen and with the Cuban insurgents. His friendship with Grant was so intense that he would curse him; so valuable that Grant accepted his rage. Rawlins’s father is said to have died an alcoholic, and liquor was the son’s deadly enemy. He wanted so much to be loved by Grant that he could test their friendship by admonishing Grant not to drink. Sometimes those warnings were listened to; sometimes they were ignored—the friendship survived these severe tests, for Grant too was a man of passion.
In some ways the human relationship that is the hardest to fix securely when recreating a man’s past is friendship. The nature of a relationship to a colleague or even to a spouse seems easier to be sure of than what it means to have been someone’s friend. There were few true friends in Grant’s life. Yet he needed people around him. He seems to have been a loner and yet to have been terrified of being alone. As a boy, he had liked journeys by himself with his horse, but as a man, he did not trust himself to go that route. The picture of a man sufficient unto himself in the wilds of California was seductive, but that same man might also be the derelict he feared becoming. While commanding thousands during the Civil War, Grant needed a handful of men around him and a friend like Rawlins to keep him in command of himself. Those who were with him in his command posts during the war, and later in the White House, were of immense importance to him.
In these years no one from Georgetown days reappeared, save occasionally and steadfastly Daniel Ammen. Despite the flood of generals who coursed past Grant between 1861 and 1869, few old friends from West Point, from the peacetime barracks, or, more surprisingly, from the Mexican War returned to buttress the general during his second war or his tenure in Washington. Two West Point roommates, Rufus Ingalls and Frederick Dent, in differing ways did, but neither they nor William T. Sherman, who proved so important to Grant in other respects, was as close to Grant as were the men on his immediate staff.
Sherman’s brilliant mind was not as comfortable to make camp with as theirs. Charles W. Ford, a fellow officer at Sackets Harbor who left the army to live in St. Louis and remained a civilian, was a friend and business confidant for the remainder of Grant’s life. Most other St. Louis people seem to have invoked troubling memories. As they tried to capitalize on their connection to Grant, they brought back to him the unevenness of the Missouri days. Instead of remembering these men comfortably, he was reminded of the time when the search for influence was reversed and he was thought to have been clumsy in using them as assets. An exception was William S. Hillyer, a realestate man who had rented Boggs & Grant office space and sponsored Grant when he applied to be county engineer; Hillyer joined Grant’s staff early in the war.23
Joseph D. Webster was close to Grant until he was promoted to a position supervising railroad transportation and left the headquarters staff, and Clark B. Lagow also departed, after being accused by William R. Rowley and others of being an exuberant drinker and, worse, of encouraging Grant to drink. Rowley, like Rawlins, was a back-fence neighbor from Galena. Theodore S. Bowers (also from Illinois) was another of the early staff who remained with Grant throughout the war and beyond. In due time, Ely S. Parker (who succeeded Rowley) and Adam Badeau—opposite in appearance, temperament, and taste—joined the group, as did Horace Porter (who became the staffs most astute chronicler) and Cyrus B. Comstock, whom a New Englander observed was a “Massachusetts man” with “somewhat the air of a Yankee schoolmaster.” So too did Orville E. Babcock, who quickly gained an intimate place in the company. Only two of the men were from Galena, but all, somehow, were Galena men: a nondescript lot of ordinary men who provided the utterly essential comradeship in the small cluster of tents of Grant’s army headquarters. It was only in the encampments of war that he could find this unassuming but vitally sustaining companionship.24
Before any of these allies had joined him, Grant’s orders took him to Ironton, in the foothills of the Ozarks. He was therefore not present at the battle of Wilson’s Creek, west of Springfield, Missouri. Nathaniel Lyon, a general now, who bravely but rashly attacked the Confederate force there, was killed, and his Union force was routed. It was another Bull Run—the second significant defeat of the Union in a war in which it had yet to achieve a victory. Wilson’s Creek was potentially a more dangerous loss than it ultimately proved to be, for as the Union forces retreated, two-thirds of Missouri was in rebel hands. The Union commander in St. Louis was Major General John Charles Frémont, the flamboyant former senator from California who had been, in 1856, the Republican candidate for president. Frémont and his beautiful, powerful Missouri wife, Jessie Benton Frémont, had been in France when he was appointed a general; they came back unhurriedly through New York, and on July 25, 1861, in St. Louis, set up court with a bodyguard company of three hundred men “made up of the very best material Kentucky could afford; average height, 5 feet 11-½ inches, and measuring 40-½ inches around the breast.” The week that this feudal baron moved west, the North had been stunned by the defeat at Bull Run. Gone now was the dream that a big army would scare the South into submission or a quick thrust would defeat it, though few had yet come to realize how long the war would last. In any event, John Frémont would not be the one in command; he lasted only slightly over three months. His fall was due not only to his famous attempt to change the war into a crusade against slavery by declaring Missouri slaves free, but also to his misunderstanding of an army of which, though he chose not to know it, he was but one of many generals. He panicked after the defeat at Wilson’s Creek on August 10, and disregarding the authority of both his superior officer, General Winfield Scott, and Secretary of War Simon Cameron, wrote imperiously to Lincoln, demanding his lord’s attention: “Will the President read my urgent dispatch to the Secretary of War?” He also sent another, inaccurate, message: “General Grant, commanding at Ironton, attacked yesterday at 6 by a force reported at 13,000.” As Kenneth P. Williams has pointed out, no such attack had occurred; Frémont was simply bolstering his case for the immediate need for additional troops. But he had lied—and thereby lost the president’s confidence.25
Lincoln sent Frémont the reinforcements he wanted, but began looking around for a new general for the Western Department. The replacement was not Ulysses Grant, but an almost unremembered general, David Hunter. Keen students of the Civil War, such as E. B. Long, regard Grant as lucky for not having been discovered too early for such a post. Instead he was able, before he took part in any major battle, to learn how to make an army work, and watching Frémont was one good way to learn how not to make it work.
On September 1, 1861, Grant was ordered to Cape Girardeau. Then on September 2, he moved across the Mississippi and southeastward to Cairo, Illinois. There he was to stand guard over the juncture of the Ohio and Mississippi rivers at the southern tip of Illinois, a point farther south than the Confederate capital at Richmond. Quietly, still more in the manner of the quartermaster of Mexican War days than the fierce warrior of the campaigns ahead, Grant dealt with troop movements and supply problems. He wrote Julia, “I am now in command of all the troops from Ironton to this place.” He did not know how long he would be at Cairo, but he told her, “I want you to come here. Get the children clothed so as to be in readiness to start when I write to you.” It was, however, two months before she and the children joined him there.26
At the river town of Cairo Grant’s command truly began. His participation in the Missouri campaign had been critical in his education and had culminated in his promotion to general. But Grant came into his own in Cairo. His general’s uniform arrived a month after his promotion, and wearing it, he sat for the worst photograph ever made of him. Perched too far to the back of his head is an out-of-style hat, its right brim rising vertically and a black ostrich plume foppishly flowing along its left side. He holds a sword in a lap full of tassels, and only his hands look real. Behind his regular trimmed beard falls a longer second beard, a Stantonesque squared fringe of frizzled hair. Julia, when she arrived to join the general in his headquarters at Cairo, persuaded him to get rid of these bizarre whiskers, the hat disappeared, and seldom again did he bother with the sword. This silly excursion into self-ornamentation quickly over, Grant put his old jacket back on and settled down to work in Cairo.27