The Man Who Saved the Union (16 page)

“Not this way,” Douglass said. “It is you and your men who will be surrounded. Nothing will be easier for the local militia than to cut off your escape routes. And when you are captured or killed it will be worse for those in bondage than it was before.”

But Brown was beyond discouragement and almost beyond reason. He assumed a false identity and rented a farm near Harpers Ferry, where he gathered and drilled a cadre of misfits and fanatics devoted to him and his cause. On the night of October 16, 1859, they slipped into Harpers Ferry and subdued the single guard on duty. Brown dispatched several of his men to spread the word among slaves in the surrounding district that the war of their liberation had begun and arms awaited them in Harpers Ferry. Others snatched hostages as defense against the inevitable counterattack.

The slaves knew better than Brown. Those who got the word wanted nothing to do with this crazy man, who clearly valued his life less than they did theirs. As a result Brown and his band were left to face the counterattack alone. Militia units from Virginia and Maryland arrived first, laying siege to the armory and killing eight of Brown’s men. Federal troops reached the town on the evening after the initial attack. Colonel Robert E. Lee led a company of marines, assisted by Lieutenant J. E. B. Stuart. Lee had superintended West Point after the Mexican War, then fought Indians in Texas before returning east to manage a family plantation across the Potomac from Washington. The news of the attack on Harpers Ferry prompted
James Buchanan’s secretary of war,
John Flood, to summon Lee back into service. “
Reached Harpers Ferry at 11 p.m.,” Lee wrote in his journal. “Posted marines in the United States Armory. Waited until daylight, as a number of citizens were held as hostages, whose lives were threatened. Tuesday about sunrise, with twelve marines, under
Lieutenant Green, broke in the door of the engine house, secured the insurgents, and relieved the prisoners unhurt. All the insurgents killed or mortally wounded, but four, John Brown, Stevens,
Coppie, and Shields.”

Brown and the other survivors were tried and convicted of treason against Virginia, a capital crime. At his sentencing Brown appealed to a higher court. “
I see a book kissed, which I suppose to be the Bible, or at least the New Testament, which teaches me that all things whatsoever
I would that men should do to me, I should do to them,” he said. “It teaches me further to remember them that are in bonds, as bound with them. I endeavored to act up to that instruction. I say I am yet too young to understand that God is any respecter of persons. I believe that to have interfered as I have done in behalf of His despised poor is no wrong, but right. Now, if it is deemed necessary that I should forfeit my life for the furtherance of the ends of justice, and mingle my blood with the blood of millions in this slave country whose rights are disregarded by wicked, cruel, and unjust enactments, I say let it be done.”

Brown’s valedictory justification was published in all the Northern papers. It sent guilty chills through those abolitionists who thought more should be done on behalf of the slaves. Church bells tolled the execution of the martyr to the cause of freedom and justice. Albany fired a hundred-gun salute in Brown’s honor; Akron declared a day of mourning; public prayers were offered in Syracuse, Rochester and New York City. A meeting in Cleveland resolved: “
The irrepressible conflict is upon us, and it will never end until Freedom or slavery go to the wall.”
William Lloyd Garrison, a heretofore nonviolent abolitionist, proclaimed to a large crowd in Boston: “Success to every slave insurrection at the South.”

As Southerners read of the celebrations in the North, many abandoned hope for a future in the Union. A Baltimore paper called “
preposterous” the idea “that the South can afford to live under a Government the majority of whose subjects or citizens regard John Brown as a martyr and a Christian hero rather than a murderer and robber.” A North Carolinian who professed to have been a “
fervid Union man” said the reaction to John Brown’s raid had changed his mind. “I am willing to take the chances of every possible evil that may arise from disunion sooner than submit any longer to northern insolence and northern outrage.”

B
y early 1860 Grant was desperate. His appeals to his father had produced disapproval, rejection and then cold silence. But at Julia’s urging he appealed once more. He gathered what little cash he could and bought a train ticket to Kentucky. “
I arrived here at half past 11 with a head ache and feeling bad generally,” he wrote her from Covington. A wreck on the track, which had delayed his arrival, seemed ominous. His trip of hundreds of miles ended with hesitation at his father’s very threshold. “As I was walking up the street home, I saw him turn down
another street not more than half a square ahead of me, but I supposed he was just going down town for a few minutes and would be back home for dinner.” Grant couldn’t get himself to call out, even to say hello. He went into the house, where his mother explained that Jesse had just left on an out-of-town trip. “I shall have to remain until his return,” he told Julia. He didn’t relish the wait. “My head is nearly bursting with pain.”

The pain had diminished but not the embarrassment by the time Jesse returned two days later. Once more Grant had to acknowledge his ineptitude at making an independent living. Previously he had asked for help on his own terms; now he had to accept help on his father’s terms. Jesse’s leather store in Galena was operated by Grant’s younger brothers, Simpson and Orvil; Grant could go to work for them. He would start as a salaried employee. Following a successful probation he might hope to become a profit-sharing partner.

Julia was relieved to learn of the arrangement. She didn’t like leaving Missouri, which meant, among other things, having to do without her servants—that is, her slaves. Grant had already
emancipated the one slave he personally owned, upon moving from the Dent farm to St. Louis. He might have sold the man,
William Jones, and certainly could have used the money, but his conscience told him not to. So instead he let Jones try to find his way in the world, as Grant himself was trying. Julia had lived with slaves her whole life and had a different kind of conscience, as did
Frederick Dent. “
Papa was not willing they should go with me to Galena, saying the place might not suit us,” Julia remembered. “And if I took them they would, of course, be free.” But anything was better than slowly starving in St. Louis, and she arranged for her four house slaves to be hired out to masters in Missouri.

She and Grant gathered their children and their modest household possessions and boarded a river steamer for Galena. The April runoff made the Mississippi flow high and fast; the journey against the current took four days. The geographical distance from St. Louis to Galena was almost three hundred miles, the nautical distance twice that and the cultural distance greater still. St. Louis was part of the South, with Southern attitudes toward labor, race, politics, women, children and most other aspects of life. Galena, at the northwestern corner of Illinois, an easy walk from Wisconsin, was part of the North, with corresponding Northern attitudes. The inhabitants of Galena had more than a little Yankee in them, valuing the ambition and diligence Jesse Grant admired and Frederick Dent scorned. Visitors who knew Latin looked immediately
for the lead mines that gave the town its name; beyond the mines they discovered a brashly growing economy.

The Grant leather business partook of the growth. It thrived sufficiently to support Simpson and Orvil and their dependents in reasonable comfort. Whether it could also support Grant and his family was unclear, but nobody pressed the issue since Simpson was dying of consumption. Everyone involved understood that Jesse was giving Grant the Galena job in part because Simpson wasn’t long for either the world or the business.

Grant worked around the store and traveled about the region the business served: northwestern Illinois, southwestern Wisconsin, southeastern Minnesota, northeastern Iowa. Everyone liked him, and many asked for stories about the Mexican War. He wasn’t the pushing type his father had always wanted him to be, but the work matched his talents and temperament better than anything he had tried since leaving the army. “
In my new employment I have become pretty conversant and am much pleased with it,” he wrote a friend. “I hope to be a partner soon, and am sanguine that a competency at least can be made out of the business.”

Others noticed the improvement in his disposition. Orvil’s wife, Mary, remembered Grant from the Galena years. “
He was a bit shorter than Orvil, more muscular, a sturdily built man,” Mary recalled. He had “thrower’s forearms,” she said, and explained: “In a leather and saddlery business there is always the strongest one who would throw the frozen hides down the chute for them to be cleaned and distributed. The Captain could take a hide which weighed over two hundred pounds and throw it with a fling of his arm, whereas Orvil could not, nor could Simpson.” Mary remembered Grant as quiet but apparently at peace with himself. “He smoked a small pipe. He was reflective. He seemed like he was meditating on some project all the time, quiet, a composed man. He didn’t laugh so much aloud, but smiled with his eyes.”

Julia adjusted to the new surroundings, albeit with effort. Initial attempts at cooking made her long for the servants she had left behind. Mary Grant sent over a girl to help in the kitchen; Julia asked if she knew how to prepare Southern biscuits. The girl, Jennie, confessed she did not, and Julia offered to demonstrate. The biscuits proved inedible. “
I told the Captain it was because the flour was not good,” Julia recalled. “And then he asked me rather severely (thinking, I presume, that the cook would have done better) if I had ever prepared any before. I really had not. I had only cut out small cakes with my thimble from the dough prepared by
black Mammy.” The next time Julia let Jennie handle the baking. “We had delicious bread,” she related. “The Captain, turning to me, said facetiously, ‘I see, Julia, you have come to a good stratum in the flour.’ ”

Grant’s home life was more satisfactory than it had ever been. He ate his meals at his own table, except when he was traveling for the business. He played daily with the children. Jesse, two, received the most attention. “Jess would challenge his father to a wrestling match,” Julia recalled. “His father would say, ‘I do not feel like fighting, Jess, but I can’t stand being hectored in this manner by a man of your size.’ Whereupon, being struck on the knees by his opponent’s little fists, he would roll on the floor with Jess in his arms and, after a few struggles, place the little fellow firmly on his breast, saying, ‘It is not fair to strike when a man is down.’ The Captain would take twenty or more punches from the dimpled fists, and so it went on until he thought Jess had had fun enough, when he would cry for quarter, saying, ‘I give up. I give up.’ Then Jess would proudly step off and help his father to arise.”

13

W
ILLIAM
S
HERMAN MOVED TO
L
OUISIANA FOR THE SAME REASON
Grant went to Galena: to take a job. Sherman’s bad experience at banking had put him off that profession. “
I would as soon try the faro table as risk the chances of banking,” he told his wife. He traveled to Kansas to become a lawyer but began to wonder about the standards of the bar when he was admitted to practice on grounds of basic intelligence alone. “If I turn lawyer, it will be bungle, bungle from Monday to Sunday,” he wrote home. “But if it must be, so be it.” He stuck with law long enough to bungle a few cases, then quit. He tried to rejoin the army, but the army said it didn’t require his services.

Sherman was better connected than Grant; his foster father (who was also his father-in-law) was
Thomas Ewing, serially senator from Ohio, secretary of the interior and secretary of the Treasury. Sherman’s connections helped him land a job as superintendent of the state-sponsored military academy in Alexandria, Louisiana. He liked the academy and the cadets, but the deepening rift between the sections made his position politically uncomfortable. His neighbors knew that his younger brother John was an ardent Republican and a rising star in Congress; many assumed William shared his views. In fact he didn’t, and he urged John to tamp down passions on slavery. “
Avoid the subject as a dirty black one,” he wrote. He complained that everything in politics was being reduced to “the nigger question,” and he believed this a grave mistake. “I would not if I could abolish or modify slavery,” he wrote his wife’s brother. “I don’t know that I would materially change the actual political relation of master and slave. Negroes in the great numbers that exist here must of necessity be slaves.” The South had legitimate grievances, and as a resident
of the South he was willing to support his neighbors. “If they design to protect themselves against negroes, or abolitionists, I will help.” But he drew a sharp line at secession. “If they propose to leave the Union on account of a supposed fact that the northern people are all abolitionists like Giddings and
Brown”—
Joshua Giddings, a radical Republican who advocated slave rebellion, and John Brown—“then I will stand by Ohio and the Northwest.”

Among his Louisiana friends Sherman tried to be diplomatic. Governor Thomas Moore owned a plantation near Alexandria; one evening Moore invited Sherman and several members of the state legislature to dinner. “
Colonel Sherman,” he said, “you can readily understand that, with your brother the abolitionist candidate for speaker”—of the House of Representatives—“some of our people wonder that you should be here at the head of an important state institution. Now, you are at my table, and I assure you of my confidence. Won’t you speak your mind freely on this question of slavery, that so agitates the land? You are under my roof, and, whatever you say, you have my protection.”

“Governor Moore,” Sherman replied, “you mistake in calling my brother, John Sherman, an abolitionist. We have been separated since childhood, I in the army and he pursuing his profession of law in northern Ohio; and it is possible we may differ in general sentiment, but I deny that he is considered at home an abolitionist; and although he prefers the free institutions under which he lives to those of slavery which prevail here, he would not of himself take from you by law or force any property whatever, even slaves.”