The Man Who Saved the Union (14 page)

G
rant humbled himself to no avail. Jesse continued to withhold his money. Grant toiled more diligently than ever.
Mary Robinson, Julia’s
slave, was astonished to see a white man labor the way Grant did. “
I have seen many farmers,” she remembered, “but I never saw one that worked harder than Mr. Grant.”

For a time Grant’s renewed efforts appeared at least moderately successful. “
My hard work is now over for the season, with a fair prospect of being remunerated in everything but the wheat,” he wrote his sister Mary in August 1857. “My wheat, which would have produced from four to five hundred bushels with a good winter, has yielded only seventy-five. My oats were good, and the corn, if not injured by frost this fall, will be the best I ever raised. My potato crop bids fair to yield fifteen hundred bushels or more.”

But even this success proved fleeting. Julia’s mother had died in January 1857, and her father, complaining of loneliness, had asked Julia and Grant and the boys to live with him. Julia was glad for the excuse to trade their log home for a real house, and Grant agreed to indulge her. As part of the bargain he managed the
Dent farm as well as his—or Julia’s—own.

Managing the Dent farm entailed overseeing slaves. Julia’s household slaves had accompanied her into marriage with Grant, but he had little to do with them. The field slaves of Fred Dent were a different matter, and they put Grant in the awkward position small slave owners often occupied in the South, with an additional difficulty besides. In the North physical labor was a badge of virtue, the measure of one’s devotion to duty and the promise of one’s success. In the South physical labor was the province of chattel—and of those whites who couldn’t rise above the level of slaves. The more Grant sweated and strained, the farther he fell in the estimation of his Missouri neighbors, especially the neighbors whose opinion mattered most to Julia.

The added difficulty was that Grant didn’t believe in the institution of slavery. Most slave owners managed to convince themselves that slavery was part of the natural order, something accepted by the Bible and therefore ordained by God. Grant was no abolitionist, but he
was
from Ohio, where slavery was broadly deemed an affront to free labor and republican principles. He couldn’t have freed his father-in-law’s slaves, and he wasn’t inclined to make Julia dispense with her bound servants. He eventually purchased a slave of his own because he couldn’t find other help. But he never got over the queasiness he felt from the ownership of another human.

His discomfort showed in his inability to get much work out of the
slaves. “
He was not a hand to manage Negroes,” a friend remembered. “He couldn’t force them to do anything. He was just so good and good tempered, and besides, he was not a slavery man.”

Partly as a result, he was not a successful man. He consistently lost money at farming. Just before Christmas 1857 he was forced to pawn his gold watch for twenty-two dollars. He gave up working Julia’s property, deciding to rent it out and concentrate his efforts on the Dent tract. This lessened the time he spent going from one farm to the other—a saving he valued the more as his family continued to grow. Ellen Grant, called Nellie, had been born in 1855, and Jesse Grant arrived in early 1858. Between the needs of his growing children and the expectations of his wife, not to mention his own discouragement, he fell into dark reveries about his past, present and future. “
He was like a man thinking on an abstract subject all the time,” a neighbor recalled.

W
illiam Sherman did even more thinking than Grant, along similar dismal lines. Sherman, like Grant, was a West Point graduate; like Grant he had been stationed in California after the Mexican War; like Grant he experienced the speculative frenzy that infected life all up and down the coast. Like Grant he resigned from the army, at about the same time. But Sherman remained in California, determined to make the most of the opportunities there. He became a banker, the manager of the San Francisco branch of a St. Louis firm. For a time things went well, but the pricking of one of the recurrent bubbles in mining stocks triggered a panic among San Francisco banks and he was forced to close his branch’s doors. Yet his St. Louis superiors liked his work well enough to send him to New York to open an office in Wall Street.

He arrived during the summer of 1857 and got the office running in time to witness the failure that August of the heretofore well-regarded
Ohio Life and Trust Company. The Ohio firm was highly leveraged, and its failure, amid allegations of fraud, spooked New York’s investment community. A bank panic followed but was brought under control, and Sherman thought his new bank would survive. Then, however, a hurricane off North Carolina sank the
Central America
, a steamship of the
United States Mail Company, with four hundred passengers and fifteen tons of California gold. The loss of life elicited mourning among families and friends; the loss of gold renewed the panic on Wall Street. Sherman’s bank was one of the many victims. “
I suppose I was the Jonah that blew
up San Francisco,” he wrote his wife, who tolerated the bleak humor he often favored. “And it took only two months’ residence in Wall Street to bust up New York.”

Sherman traveled to St. Louis to settle accounts with his backers. There he encountered Grant, and the two compared stories of bad luck since leaving the army. They spoke of other comrades who had done no better and wondered what would become of them all. “
West Point and the Regular Army aren’t good schools for farmers, bankers, merchants and mechanics,” Sherman mused.

11

T
HE PANIC OF 1857, BY KNOCKING DOWN FARM PRICES, MIGHT ALONE
have finished off Grant’s career in agriculture, but malaria helped. Like many other Americans of the Ohio and Mississippi Valleys in the nineteenth century, Grant had suffered recurrently from the mosquito-borne illness since childhood. Neither he nor they knew what caused the disease, but it appeared to be associated with low-lying areas, precisely the sort of bottomlands best suited to farming, during summer, the farming season. Black slaves, for reasons then unknown to themselves or their masters but evidently (and later demonstrably) associated with their African heritage, usually avoided the symptoms; their comparative immunity was another argument of the apologists for slavery. Heavy work and constant worry reduced resistance to malaria, as to other diseases, and both contributed to a severe bout Grant experienced during the summer of 1858. The “fever and ague” that provided the common name of malaria alternated irregularly, with Grant sweating profusely and then shivering. Julia suggested that he would get better in St. Louis, away from the disease zone, and that in any case the older children were approaching school age and would benefit from the city’s schools. He had no argument to make against her suggestion, and with
Frederick Dent’s permission he offered the farm for sale.

He went into business with one of Julia’s cousins, a man named
Harry Boggs. The business bought, sold and managed real estate. Under ordinary circumstances it might have done well, for real estate had long been the ladder to success for cash-strapped but enterprising individuals in America. The relentlessly growing American population ensured the demand that pushed up prices and commissions. But the panic of 1857
briefly deranged the market, depressing prices and deterring speculation, and the firm of
Boggs & Grant struggled.

Grant spent his first months in the business living with Harry Boggs and his wife, Louisa. “
We gave him an unfurnished back room and told him to fit it up as he pleased,” Louisa recalled. “It contained very little during the winter he lived here. He had a bed and a bowl and pitcher on a chair and he used to sit at our fire. He used to go home Saturday night to his family. He lived this way all winter”—the winter of 1858–59. “I can see him now as he used to sit humbly by my fireside. He had no exalted opinion of himself at any time, but in those days he seemed almost in despair.”

His attitude improved after he brought Julia and the children to St. Louis. “
We are living now in the lower part of the city, full two miles from my office,” he wrote his father in the spring of 1859. “The house is a comfortable little one just suited to my means. We have one spare room and also a spare bed in the children’s room so that we can accommodate any of our friends that are likely to come see us.”

Grant appreciated that his father, the businessman, would want to know about his prospects. “I can hardly tell how the new business I am engaged in is going to succeed,” he explained. “But I believe it will be something more than a support.” Even so, he could use help, in the form of referrals. “I will send you some of our cards, which if you will distribute among such persons as may have business to attend to in this city, such as buying or selling property, collecting either rents or other liabilities, it may prove the means of giving us additional commissions.”

I
n this letter Grant told his father that Julia would not be taking the children to see Jesse and Hannah in Kentucky that season. He had urged her to make the trip while he was arranging the move to St. Louis, but she had refused. “
With four children she could not go without a servant,” Grant wrote Jesse. “And she was afraid that landing so often as she would have to do in free states, she might have some trouble.”

Julia was right to anticipate trouble. For decades the
Mason-Dixon Line and the Ohio River had symbolized the boundary between slavery and freedom in American life, but the boundary allowed loopholes and exceptions. When wealthy Americans of the nineteenth century traveled they often took personal servants with them; in the case of Americans from the South, these personal servants were typically slaves. As long
as the Southerners were simply traveling, the free-state bans on
slavery didn’t apply to their slaves, who remained legally bound. But when the travel stretched to sojourns of weeks or months, questions arose and sometimes wound up in the courts.

Dred Scott was a slave purchased by
John
Emerson, an army doctor in St. Louis. Emerson was subsequently posted to Wisconsin, a free territory to which he took Scott. After several years and further postings, Emerson returned to St. Louis, again taking Scott. Emerson died, but Scott remained in the possession of Emerson’s widow, the former Eliza Irene Sanford. Scott knew enough of Missouri law to appreciate that its principle of “once free, always free”—that a Missouri slave taken to live on free soil and then returned to Missouri could claim freedom—ought to apply to him. A Missouri court ruled that it did, but the
Missouri supreme court, amid the rising furor of the 1850s, reversed the judgment.

Scott’s lawyers appealed to the United States Supreme Court, where the case became known as
Dred Scott
v.
Sandford
(upon the misspelling of the name of
John Sanford, to whom Eliza Sanford Emerson had entrusted her affairs). The case gained significance as the sectional issue grew still more divisive, and by the time the high court delivered its decision, in March 1857, the nation hung on the outcome.

The court ruled on two aspects of the case. First, it said that Scott had no standing to bring a case in federal court because he was not a citizen of the United States. Blacks could be
citizens of the separate states if those states chose to make them so, but they were not citizens of the United States. The court might have stopped there and left the Missouri verdict alone. But Chief Justice
Roger B. Taney hoped the judicial branch could accomplish what the legislative and executive branches had failed to do: determine once and for all what power Congress possessed over slavery. Tackling the issue squarely, Taney, a slaveholder from Maryland, declared that Congress had
no
power over slavery. The Constitution gave Congress no authority to restrict the property rights of slave owners, and hence the Missouri Compromise, the basis for making Wisconsin a free territory, had been unconstitutional from the start. On this ground as well, Scott remained a slave.

Six other justices joined Taney in the Dred Scott decision, which angered and alarmed many Northerners. Most in the North accepted that Congress lacked jurisdiction over slavery in the states, but the assertion that the federal legislature was impotent to control slavery in the federal territories seemed absurd on its face and frightening in its implications.
The hope of moderate opponents of slavery was that the obnoxious institution could be kept from expanding and would thereby be encouraged to die a gradual death as morality and perhaps the economy evolved. This hope had been dealt a blow by the Kansas-Nebraska Act, which repealed the Missouri Compromise but left in place the principle that Congress
could
restrict slavery in the territories if it once again chose to. The Dred Scott case smashed the moderates’ hope. Nothing, it seemed, stood in the way of the slave power.

The Dred Scott decision, though bad news for blacks’ freedom, was good news for Abraham Lincoln’s career. Lincoln had been cast adrift by the
breakup of the Whig party in the aftermath of the Kansas-Nebraska Act; finding a new political home required sifting among the flotsam of the Whigs and the various successors they spawned. The
American party grew out of the
Know Nothing movement of the 1840s, whose members complained that the large immigration of Catholics from Ireland and Germany threatened to overwhelm the English and Protestant values on which the country had been founded. When the Democrats adopted the Irish who landed in New York and other eastern cities, the American party swung into anti-
Democratic opposition. There it met the new Republican party, which originated in either Wisconsin or Michigan depending on whose story was to be believed. Two issues inspired the Republicans: resistance to slavery and support for business. The antislavery resistance ranged from moderate displeasure at the Dred Scott decision to radical abolitionism. The pro-business agenda included a protective tariff and internal improvements, starting with a
railroad to the Pacific.