The Man Who Saved the Union (20 page)

Blair left, disappointed, and Lee went straight to the office of
Winfield Scott. He told Scott of the offer made to him and of his response. Scott, a Virginian himself, merely nodded gravely. Lee then crossed the Potomac to his home in Arlington, considering the matter further. By the time he entered the house his obligation had become clear. “I concluded that I ought no longer to retain the commission I held in the United States Army.” On the second morning subsequent he composed a letter to Scott tendering his resignation. “It would have been presented at once but for the struggle it has cost me to separate myself from a service to which I have devoted the best years of my life, and all the ability I possessed,” he explained to Scott. “During the whole of that time—more than a quarter of a century—I have experienced nothing but kindness from my superiors and a most cordial friendship from my comrades.” He hoped his career at arms had ended. “Save in the defense of my native State, I never desire again to draw my sword.”

Lee’s hope may have been sincere, but it was also unrealistic and short-lived. The governor of Virginia, upon learning of Lee’s resignation,
invited him to Richmond, where the state’s secession convention was meeting. The convention requested that Lee take command of Virginia’s military forces. Again he wasn’t surprised, and he had remarks ready. “Deeply impressed with the solemnity of the occasion on which I appear before you, and profoundly grateful for the honor conferred upon me, I accept the position your partiality has assigned me,” he said.

L
ee’s departure from the army of the United States coincided with Grant’s first efforts to get back in. “
Having served for fifteen years in the regular army, including four years at West Point, and feeling it the duty of everyone who has been educated at the Government expense to offer their services for the support of that Government, I have the honor, very respectfully, to tender my services, until the close of the war, in such capacity as may be offered,” he wrote the adjutant general in Washington. He suggested a colonelcy for himself. “In view of my present age, and length of service, I feel myself competent to command a regiment if the President, in his judgment, should see fit to entrust one to me.” He later admitted to diffidence in drafting his letter. “
I felt some hesitation in suggesting rank as high as the colonelcy of a regiment, feeling somewhat doubtful whether I would be equal to the position,” he recalled. “But I had seen nearly every colonel who had been mustered in from the State of Illinois, and some from Indiana, and felt that if they could command a regiment properly, and with credit, I could also.”

The army did not agree. Yet neither did it
dis
agree. Rather it lost Grant’s letter, leaving him uncertain as to where his future lay. Confusion didn’t affect Grant alone; during the early months of the war confusion was often the prevailing motif as the political and legal boundaries between state and federal action shifted and blurred, along with the personal and emotional frontiers between loyalty and secession. Grant encountered the latter blurring on a visit to St. Louis amid his recruiting duties. He had gone to Bellville, Illinois, to muster a regiment, but when he got there he learned that most of the soldiers were still en route and wouldn’t arrive for several days. He employed the opportunity to travel the twenty miles to St. Louis and visit his in-laws. “
Your father is in the room, absorbed in his paper,” he wrote Julia. “
Lewis Sheets”—a family friend—“is fixing a segarita to smoke and Aunt Fanny is setting by me busy with her work. All are well.” But they might not stay well. Secession was splitting the
Dent family.
John Dent, Julia’s brother, was an
open sympathizer with the South. “I believe he thinks of a colonelcy in the secession army,” Grant told Julia.
Frederick Dent leaned in the same direction, although less forthrightly. “Your father says he is for the Union but is opposed to having an army to sustain it. He would have a secession force march where they please uninterrupted and is really what I would call a secessionist.” Dent’s sister, on the other hand, sided with Grant. “Aunt Fanny is strong for the Union.”

The division in the Dent household was writ larger across St. Louis. Although a convention called to consider secession for Missouri had voted against such action, the state’s South-leaning governor,
Claiborne Jackson, evidently hoped to use his control of the Missouri militia to seize the federal arsenal at St. Louis. But a quick-thinking Union army captain in the vicinity,
Nathaniel Lyon, with critical support from
Francis Blair, the district’s Republican congressman, rallied Union loyalists and preempted the blow. Lyon and Blair occupied the arsenal and prepared to march against Camp Jackson, where the governor’s secessionist militia had gathered. “
I went down to the arsenal in the morning to see the troops start out,” Grant recalled. “I had known Lyon for two years at West Point and in the old army afterwards. Blair I knew very well by sight. I had heard him speak in the canvass of 1858, possibly several times, but I had never spoken to him. As the troops marched out of the enclosure around the arsenal, Blair was on his horse outside forming them into line preparatory to their march. I introduced myself to him and had a few moments’ conversation and expressed my sympathy with his purpose.” Grant was pleased that Blair’s swift stroke produced the intended effect. “Camp Jackson surrendered without a fight and the garrison was marched down to the arsenal as prisoners of war.”

The victory transformed the mood in the city. “
Up to this time the enemies of the government
in St. Louis had been bold and defiant, while the Union men were quiet but determined,” Grant wrote. “As soon as the news of the capture of Camp Jackson reached the city the condition of affairs was changed.” The Unionists gained confidence and began standing up to the secessionists. Grant observed—and got involved in—a confrontation at a downtown building that served as headquarters of the secession party, complete with a rebel flag. “I stepped on a car standing at the corner of 4th and Pine streets, and saw a crowd of people standing quietly in front of the headquarters, who were there for the purpose of hauling down the flag.” Behind the Unionists was a crowd of Southern
sympathizers. “They too were quiet but filled with suppressed rage, and muttered their resentment at the insult to what they called ‘their’ flag.” One of the latter, a young man, got into the streetcar Grant was riding. “He was in a great state of excitement and used adjectives freely to express his contempt for the Union and for those who had just perpetrated such an outrage upon the rights of a free people.… He turned to me saying: ‘Things have come to a damned pretty pass when a free people can’t choose their own flag. Where I come from, if a man dares to say a word in favor of the Union we hang him to a limb of the first tree we come to.’ I replied that ‘after all we were not so intolerant in St. Louis as we might be; I had not seen a single rebel hung yet, nor heard of one; there were plenty of them who ought to be, however.’ The young man subsided.”

The surge of support for the Union made Grant wish more than ever to be under arms. After mustering the last of his regiments at Springfield, he arranged to travel to Kentucky, ostensibly to visit his parents but really to call on George McClellan, who had been promoted to army major general with headquarters at Cincinnati. “
I was in hopes that when he saw me he would offer me a position on his staff,” Grant explained afterward. But McClellan, likely remembering Grant’s drinking troubles in the West, was too busy. “I called on two successive days at his office but failed to see him on either occasion,” Grant wrote.

G
rant returned to Springfield and discovered that while McClellan and the United States might not think they needed him, Governor Yates and
Illinois did. The hastily mustered state regiments included some with officers who knew nothing of military command. A colonel named
Simon Goode led one regiment very badly. He had never been to war and never served in an organized army. He brandished three braces of revolvers and a large hunting knife, with which he vowed to skin
Jefferson Davis alive. But he boozed as flamboyantly as he walked and talked, and he kept no semblance of military discipline, leaving the conscientious among his men at the mercy of the dissolute and damaging the reputation of the regiment, the militia and the Union cause. The complaints of his men and of the neighbors reached the ears of Yates, who asked around for a replacement. Grant wasn’t his first choice, being a relative newcomer to Illinois and lacking the connections that might have rendered his appointment politically valuable. Apparently Yates too had heard the stories of Grant’s drinking, which gave him additional pause. But the
members of the regiment knew Grant from their mustering, and they respected his calm, straightforward demeanor. Yates offered to make Grant a colonel and give him the command.

It wasn’t what Grant had wanted, but it was the best position available, and he took it with relief and comparative pleasure. “
In accepting this command,” he informed his new subordinates, “your Commander will require the cooperation of all the commissioned and non-commissioned officers in instructing the command and in maintaining discipline, and hopes to receive also the hearty support of every enlisted man.”

The instruction began at once. “
Hereafter no passes to soldiers to be out of camp after sun down will be valid unless approved by the Commanding Officer of the Regiment,” he said. “All men when out of camp should reflect that they are gentlemen; in camp, soldiers.… The guards are required in all cases to arrest all men coming into camp after retreat unless provided with a pass countersigned by the Regimental Commander.”

Certain of the soldiers resisted their lessons. “
It is with regret that the commanding officer learns that a number of the men composing the guard of last night deserted their posts, and their guard,” Grant said in a subsequent order. “This is an offense against all military rule and law.… It cannot, in time of peace, be accompanied with a punishment less than the forfeiture of $10 from the pay of the soldier, together with corporal punishment such as confinement for thirty days with ball and chain at hard labor. In time of war the punishment of this is death.” Grant cut the offenders some first-time slack, choosing to interpret their failure as stemming from ignorance rather than malice. But he warned the miscreants and the entire regiment: “It will not be excused again.”

His firmness paid off. “
The guard house was not large enough for the first few nights and days,” one of Grant’s lieutenants informed his wife. “But yesterday there was but two or three in and today none.… So you see we have the best of order and every thing moves off pleasantly.” Grant himself remarked of his regiment, in a letter to Julia: “
It was in a terribly disorganized state when I took it, but a very great change has taken place. Everyone says so and to me it is very observable. I don’t believe there is a more orderly set of troops now in the volunteer service. I have been very strict with them and the men seem to like it. They appreciate that it is all for their own benefit.”

His timing couldn’t have been better. Just as his regiment was beginning to look like an army unit, it
became
an army unit. The first Northern
enlistments, in response to Lincoln’s April call, had been for ninety days in state militias, with Lincoln hoping that an enthusiastic show of force would overawe the rebels. When the enlistments had no such effect, the president adopted a new approach. He issued another call, this time for three-year enlistments in the federal army. The state units already in existence would be absorbed into the army if the officers and men so chose.

Grant happily accepted the transfer, but some in his regiment initially had doubts. Two Illinois congressmen came to his camp requesting to address the men. Grant knew them only by reputation, and the reputation of one—a Democrat from the southern part of Illinois, where sympathy for the South was especially strong—gave him cause for concern. But they were members of Congress and he a mere colonel, and he didn’t feel he could stop them. To his relief, patriotism informed the speeches, especially the one by the Democrat. “
It breathed a loyalty and devotion to the Union which inspired my men to such a point that they would have volunteered to remain in the army as long as an enemy of the country continued to bear arms against it,” he remembered. The regiment overwhelmingly followed their colonel into the federal army.

17

F
ROM
A
PRIL TILL EARLY SUMMER
, L
INCOLN CONDUCTED THE WAR ON
his own authority. But as the rebellion persisted, the president decided he needed help. In particular he required money, which necessitated summoning Congress. The legislators wouldn’t have met until December;
Lincoln now compelled them to brave the heat of Washington for a special summer session. He greeted them with a war message. He recapitulated the events of the winter and spring, culminating in the assault on
Fort Sumter. He explained the actions he had taken to defend the Union, acknowledging that in raising an army without congressional concurrence he had stretched tradition and perhaps even the
Constitution. “
These measures, whether strictly legal or not, were ventured upon under what appeared to be a popular demand and a public necessity, trusting then as now that Congress would readily ratify them.” He requested authority to expand the army to 400,000 men at a cost of 400 million dollars. This was a great deal of money, he admitted, but it was no more per capita than what America had spent to win its independence from Britain. And it was a necessary investment in America’s future—and humanity’s. “A right result, at this time, will be worth more to the world than ten times the men and ten times the money.”

Lincoln expanded on the universal meaning of the current conflict, in words that foretold a more famous address. “This issue embraces more than the fate of these United States. It presents to the whole family of man the question whether a constitutional republic, or a democracy—a government of the people, by the same people—can, or cannot, maintain its territorial integrity against its own domestic foes.” The struggle would answer a profound question. “Must a government, of necessity, be
too
strong
for the liberties of its own people, or too
weak
to maintain its own existence?” The result would culminate eighty years of republican history. “Our popular government has often been called an experiment. Two points in it our people have already settled: the successful
establishing
and the successful
administering
of it. One still remains: its successful
maintenance
against a formidable internal attempt to overthrow it. It is now for them to demonstrate to the world that those who can fairly carry an election can also suppress a rebellion.”