The Man Who Saved the Union (3 page)

Otherwise Grant simply did what was required, and that not especially well. As the cadets advanced from class to class, their leaders became the academy’s officers. Grant briefly made sergeant, but a rash of demerits knocked him back down to private.

Questionable health contributed to his failure to distinguish himself. Consumption—tuberculosis—ran in his family, killing two of his uncles and later two of his siblings. In his final year at the academy he suffered a cough that lasted six months and intimated an early end for him too. At graduation he weighed less than he had when he entered the academy, though he had gained half a foot in height.

The army registered its doubts in the assignment he was given on completing his studies. He requested the cavalry and should have gotten it on the basis of his equestrian talents. But he received the infantry instead.

He hid his disappointment behind the spanking blue uniform he ordered for his commissioning. He took his oath in July 1843 before a justice of the peace of Ohio’s Clermont County, to which his family had moved while he was at West Point. He mounted a horse and rode to Cincinnati, to see the sights and show himself off. “
While I was riding along a street of that city,” he remembered many years afterward, “imagining that everyone was looking at me, with a feeling akin to mine when I first saw General Scott, a little urchin, bareheaded, barefooted, with dirty and ragged pants held up by a single gallows—that’s what suspenders were called then—and a shirt that had not seen a wash-tub for weeks, turned to me and cried: ‘Soldier! will you work? No, sir-ee; I’ll sell my shirt first!!’ ”

The taunt stung, recalling, as he later admitted, the barbs of his boyhood mates after he paid too much for his colt. When he returned to his parents’ town he caught another shaft. A drunken stableman saw him coming and donned blue pants with a strip of white down the sides, in mocking imitation of Grant’s uniform pants. “The joke was a huge one in the mind of many of the people, and was much enjoyed by them,” Grant wrote. “But I did not appreciate it so highly.”

2

N
OT EVERYONE THOUGHT THE NEW SECOND LIEUTENANT LUDICROUS
. Grant’s West Point roommate
Fred Dent was from St. Louis, conveniently close to Jefferson Barracks, Grant’s first posting. The Dents opened their home to Fred’s friend, who visited during the winter and spring of 1843–44.
Mary Robinson, a slave in the Dent household, remembered Grant as “
an exceedingly fine looking young man.” Fred’s sister Julia shared the opinion or something enough like it to encourage the visits. Grant required little nudging. “At first sight he fell in love with Miss Dent,” Mary Robinson said. The visits grew more frequent.

The springtime of Grant and Julia’s romance became a summer of America’s discontent. For decades American expansionists had eyed
Texas, initially a province of New Spain and then a state of the Mexican republic. Illegal American emigrants had crossed the Sabine River, the boundary between
Louisiana and Texas, until the Mexican government, unable to populate Texas with Mexican nationals and hoping to build a buffer against the
Comanche Indians, invading from the northwest, authorized Virginia native
Stephen Austin to settle three hundred American families on Texas soil. But this simply opened the floodgates, and by the mid-1830s the Americans in Texas, most of whom had arrived illegally, outnumbered the Mexicans ten to one. In 1836 they declared independence, which they confirmed in a brief, bloody war. They then requested annexation to the United States.

The request reopened the debate over slavery. The debate had started at the
Constitutional Convention of 1787, when the framers accepted the anomaly of slavery in a republic in order to secure the support of the Southern states. Most Americans, including many Southerners,
expected slavery to decline and disappear. And so it might have done if cotton hadn’t emerged as a cash crop ideally suited to lands wrested from Indian tribes in the South during the early nineteenth century. As settlement spread west along the Gulf Plain, cotton and slavery spread with it, entrenching both in the minds of Southerners, who came to identify their region with the “peculiar institution.”

By 1820 the culture of cotton and slavery had reached
Missouri, which was admitted to the Union as part of a grand bargain that balanced free-state
Maine against slave Missouri and split the rest of the
Louisiana Purchase into a northern region off limits to slavery and a southern region open to the institution. The balancing was essential to the deal, for by this time the free North had outstripped the slave South in population and therefore in seats in the House of Representatives. The Senate, with its representation by states, formed the crucial redoubt of Southern influence in Washington, and the Southerners insisted that each new free state be matched with a new slave state.

Northerners insisted on the same principle, reversed, and when Texas applied for admission they were the ones who objected. The Texans practiced slavery, and Texas was so large that it seemed likely to spawn multiple slave states. Such Northerners as
John Quincy Adams, returned to Congress from Massachusetts after being evicted from the White House by
Andrew Jackson, decried the Texas project as a slaveholder conspiracy. Adams and the adamant antislavery bloc formed a minority in Congress, but a minority was all that was necessary to prevent the Senate from granting a Texas treaty the two-thirds support required for ratification.

Rejected by Washington, the Texans embarked on a career as an independent republic. They established diplomatic and commercial relations with Britain and
France, but their finances were in shambles and they couldn’t defend themselves against attack from Mexico, which refused to acknowledge the loss of its erstwhile state. Twice the Mexican army reoccupied San Antonio, deep in Texas territory.

The government of Texas, headed by
Sam Houston, once more turned to the United States. Houston, a protégé of Jackson’s, informed his retired mentor that if the
American government continued to spurn Texas, he and the Texans would have no choice but to ally with Britain. Houston knew that the teenage Jackson had been taken prisoner during the Revolutionary War and been mistreated by his British captors; he knew that Jackson had unleashed his pent-up anger upon the British army at New Orleans in 1815; he knew that Jackson still smoldered
whenever he pondered the perfidiousness of Albion. And he guessed that Jackson would move heaven and earth to prevent an alliance between Texas and Britain.

Jackson remained the dominant Democrat despite advanced age and ill health, and he responded to Houston’s challenge by insisting that the contenders for the
1844
Democratic presidential nomination pledge their support for Texas annexation. When
Martin Van Buren, Jackson’s former vice president and then successor in the White House, waffled, Jackson singlehandedly crushed his candidacy. And when
James Polk, a dark horse from Tennessee, enthusiastically endorsed annexation, Jackson ensured his nomination.

Polk’s embrace of Texas revived the opposition of Adams and others; it also roiled American relations with Mexico. The Mexican government asserted that annexation would be tantamount to a declaration of war against Mexico and that, if war came, Mexico would defend itself.

John Tyler, the current occupant of the White House, hadn’t been elected president, merely vice president, and when
William Henry Harrison died shortly after his 1841 inauguration no one knew for certain whether Tyler became president or simply
acting
president, since the
Constitution didn’t specify. But he did indeed
act
like a president, on no subject more than Texas. He ordered American troops to western Louisiana to meet any Mexican challenge.

G
rant’s regiment, the Fourth Infantry, was part of Tyler’s deployment. The unit would join others near Fort Jessup, Louisiana, a short distance from the Texas border.

Grant had commenced a leave of absence to visit his parents in Ohio when the deployment order arrived. A message chased him up the Ohio and reached him in Bethel, where they now resided. His father told him that he had gotten all the good from the army he was likely to get and that he should quit to join the family business; Ulysses’s deployment, to the back of beyond, was just what he could expect of a military career. Grant didn’t like the leather business any more than he had as a boy, and he rejected his father’s advice. But neither did he immediately follow the army’s order. Instead of traveling straight from Ohio to Louisiana, he returned to Missouri for a parting word with Julia Dent.

He later recalled approaching the Dent home. The road from Jefferson Barracks to the Dent house crossed a creek, which in most seasons a
man on a horse could splash across with no difficulty whatever. But recent rains had swollen the creek to flood stage. “
I looked at it a moment to consider what to do,” Grant related. “One of my superstitions has always been when I started to go anywhere or to do anything, not to turn back or stop until the thing intended was accomplished. I have frequently started to go to places where I had never been and to which I did not know the way, depending upon making inquiries on the road, and if I got past the place without knowing it, instead of turning back, I would go on until a road was found turning in the right direction, take that, and come in by the other side.” On this day he had both a destination and a purpose, and there was no chance he would turn back. “I struck into the stream, and in an instant the horse was swimming and I being carried down by the current.” Horse and man were swept swiftly along, with both becoming thoroughly soaked and more than a little worried. But the horse proved a strong swimmer, and they eventually gained the far bank.

He arrived at the Dent home drenched but determined. He explained to Julia that the prospect of leaving for Louisiana and possibly going to war had made him realize how much he loved her. He couldn’t go without asking her to marry him.

She accepted his proposal conditionally. Her parents had mixed feelings about Grant. “
Old man Dent was opposed to him, when he found he was courting his daughter, and did everything he could to prevent the match,”
Mary Robinson remembered. “But Mrs. Dent took a great fancy to him in his venture. Mrs. Dent used to say to me: I like that young man.” Julia thought she and her mother could work on her father and eventually bring him around. But until he changed his mind, the engagement must be a secret.

Grant was elated.
Frederick Dent’s veto centered on his judgment that army life was no fitting existence for his daughter; Grant considered this merely a temporary impediment, as he didn’t intend to make a career of the army. He at once wrote to his mathematics professor at West Point asking to be appointed his assistant, in which capacity he might serve out his obligation to the army and prepare himself to be a civilian mathematics professor. He laid a plan of informal study to extend his mastery of the subject. And he congratulated himself on having won his true love, in principle at least.

M
eanwhile he had to report to Louisiana. He had never been so far south or seen anything like the swamps and bayous that constituted much of the state. “
The country is low and flat and overflown”—by the Red River—“to the first limbs of the trees,” he wrote Julia of his journey up that stream. “Alligators and other revolting looking things occupy the swamps in thousands; and no doubt the very few people who live there shake with the ague”—the chills of malaria—“all summer.”

He was pleased to report that his regiment had found a better neighborhood for its camp. “We are on the top of a high ridge, with about the best spring of water in Louisiana running near.” But they had company. The pine forest surrounding the camp was “infested to an enormous degree with ticks, red bugs, and a little creeping thing looking like a lizard that I don’t know the name of.” The tents couldn’t keep the critters out. “This last vermin is singularly partial to society, and become so very intimate and sociable on short acquaintance as to visit our tents, crawl into our beds.” Water entered as easily. “We have had a hard shower and I can tell you my tent is a poor protection. The rain runs through in streams.”

Grant and the Fourth Infantry remained at
Camp Salubrity, as the bivouac was hopefully named, during the summer and autumn
of 1844. The name proved accurate for Grant. He spent most of his time outdoors and on horseback and rid himself of the cough that had nagged him since West Point. He gained weight and forgot about the consumption that afflicted his family.

The only fighting of the season took place in American politics, where Polk and the Democrats campaigned on a platform of aggressive expansion, against the more diffident Henry Clay and the Whigs. Polk won a narrow victory, in part because the abolitionist Liberty
party bled votes from Clay in the decisive state of New York. Polk prepared to implement what he pronounced a mandate for expansion, but
John Tyler got there first. The lame-duck president circumvented the Senate veto of a
Texas treaty by proposing to annex the Lone Star Republic by a joint resolution, requiring mere majorities in both houses of Congress. The antislavery, anti-Texas bloc lacked the votes to forestall this maneuver, and the resolution passed. When the Texans endorsed the deal in the summer of 1845, the union was consummated.

“O
ur orders are for the western borders of Texas,” Grant wrote Julia that July. “But how far up the Rio Grande is hard to tell.” He was glad to be going, although the deployment would put more distance between him and her. “In the course of five or six months I expect to be promoted, and there are seven chances out of eight that I will not be promoted in the Fourth, so that at the end of that time I shall hope to be back to the United States,” where he
would
be closer to her. This happy result would surely transpire, “unless of course there should be active service.”

He missed her terribly. He wrote her often—more often than she replied, which made him wonder if she still loved him. “
I have waited so long for an answer to my three letters…,” he lamented, “that I began to despair of ever receiving a line from you.” But then a letter or two or three together would arrive and all would be well. “I have read them over and over again and will continue to do so until another comes.”