Ulysses S. Grant (5 page)

G
RANT HAD WAITED
a long time to marry Julia, and it is clear enough that while the Dents gave in to the inevitable, they were still not overjoyed. Active military service in Mexico had hardened Grant—he was lean, strong, tanned, very much the picture of a conquering hero—but he was still only an infantry lieutenant, and the son of a bumptious Northern leather tanner at that. Ulysses at last got his Julia, thanks to his patience and persistence, but both Julia and her family made it clear that henceforth it would be his responsibility to measure up to the privilege of marrying her. In a sense this was already something of a Grant family tradition—Jesse Grant had taken Hannah Simpson from the brick house her family lived in (brick houses were a rarity in Point Pleasant, Ohio, at the time), and the implication was that he had “married up.” Ulysses, too—at any rate in the eyes of the Dents—had done so, and curiously enough a brick house would play a role in his marriage as well, since Julia yearned for one but was compelled for many years to live in homes she considered beneath her.

That Ulysses and Julia were happy together, physically and emotionally, is crystal clear from their correspondence. No hint of scandal or unfaithfulness would ever touch their lives—Ulysses was the most faithful and devoted of husbands (if not always the most demonstrative) and always would be, while Julia, though more demanding, invariably saw him through rose-colored spectacles. No matter how shabby and down-at-the-heels Grant became—and he would go a long way down before he rose up again—Julia refused to admit it, or possibly even to
see
it. “Captain Grant,” as she always called him once he reached that rank, even when he was clerking in his father’s leather-goods store, “was always perfection.”

In the meantime the young couple’s happiness was in the hands of that most unreliable of institutions when it comes to what we now call “human resources”—the peacetime army, which proceeded to do everything possible to make their lives a misery. Grant was posted to Detroit, by no means an enviable posting to begin with in those days, but no sooner had the Grants arrived there than he was ordered, over his protests, to Sackets Harbor, N.Y., a remote outpost on Lake Ontario, where they spent a long, cold winter enjoying their first taste of domestic bliss.

In the spring of 1849, once they had become used to Sackets Harbor, the War Department finally responded to Grant’s complaints against being sent there by ordering him back to Detroit, where the Grants settled into a modest house and life among the other junior officers and their wives until Julia returned to St. Louis to have her first child, Frederick Dent Grant (named for her father) at home, while Grant was reassigned again to Sackets Harbor, where mother and child rejoined him in 1851.

In 1852 Grant’s regiment was shifted to the Pacific Coast, and although Julia was eager to accompany him, she was pregnant again. It was, in those days, a daunting journey, first by sea to the Isthmus of Panama, then across the mountainous isthmus by mule, in a country where yellow fever and cholera were widespread, and finally the long, rough ocean journey to San Francisco. Many men died of sickness along the way, usually before reaching the Pacific coast of Panama, and no pregnant woman, even one as determined as Julia Grant, would be likely to attempt it.

Grant, it can be perceived, had no friends with influence in the army. He was, besides, ever so slightly under a cloud, having been held responsible for the theft of one thousand dollars while he was a quartermaster in Mexico. Nobody alleged that Grant himself had stolen the money, but the accounts were his responsibility, and he was therefore ordered to repay the sum. Neither his correspondence with the War Department nor Jesse’s on his son’s behalf was sufficient to straighten out the matter, and even a journey Grant made to Washington at his own expense to explain his case met with failure—partly, no doubt, because accounting was not one of Grant’s strengths, and also because he was not particularly forceful or articulate in his own defense.

In any event he sailed from New York City, leaving Julia behind, in the summer of 1852, and after a hazardous and difficult journey eventually reached San Francisco, 150 of the Fourth Infantry party having died of cholera in Panama on the way (about average for the time). Grant’s object was to make enough money by small side ventures to bring Julia and the children out to join him, but monotonously, one after another, each attempt failed. A partnership in a
general store saw Grant’s investment vanish, along with the partner. An attempt to raise hogs failed, as did an attempt to grow potatoes. Whatever Grant tried, bad judgment, bad weather, bad luck got in the way, leaving him poorer than before. It was not from any lack of energy or hard work; Grant simply lacked business sense.

The army hardly kept him busy. He was eventually posted to the Columbia Barracks, at Fort Vancouver, in Washington Territory, as quartermaster—really a store clerk in uniform—and despite the beauties of the countryside, he grew gloomier and lonelier as the months wore on, and as one unsuccessful commercial venture followed another. Even Julia’s letters began to express a certain impatience with Ulysses, as she waited in Sackets Harbor with her two sons, Fred and Ulysses Junior (called “Buck” by everybody but his mother), the younger of whom Grant had not so far seen.

It was there, in full view of Mount Hood and the Pacific, that the stories of Grant’s drinking began. Let it be said first of all that Grant was never a convivial drunk. He did not haunt barrooms and exchange boozy anecdotes with fellow drinkers. Loneliness, depression, a sense of failure, and the inability to see any improvement in his condition led Grant to drink. He went on solitary binges, alone in his room with a bottle of whiskey. In later life, once he was a rising general, it became the object of his faithful staff to prevent this from happening and to conceal it when they failed to prevent it. Drinking did not make Grant cheerful—indeed his hangovers were made more acute both by his tendency toward migraine headaches, which was exacerbated by alcohol, and by shame at his own weakness in taking to the bottle.

To some degree, fame and a sense of purpose overcame Grant’s drinking problem after 1861, and the presence of Mrs. Grant usually appears to have kept him from the bottle. He was not a man who could withstand his own failure or Julia’s absence: It was as simple as that. At Fort Vancouver, however, he could not escape his own failure; he had no sense of purpose; and Julia was fifteen hundred impassable miles away, so he drank. Whether he drank as much as, or less than, people said hardly matters.

Transferred eventually to Fort Humboldt in Northern California, he was lonelier still—he did not even have a horse of his own to ride—and his drinking soon came to the attention of his commanding officer. Ordered to give it up, he tried hard; then he went back to drinking, and finally, in the spring of 1854, he took the drastic step of writing a letter resigning from the army, either under pressure from his commander or out of despair, ironically receiving by letter his promotion to captain on the same day. The captaincy had come too late to make a difference to Grant. His only thought was to get home, explain himself to Julia, and never leave her side again. With at last a purpose in mind, Grant set off as fast as he could, borrowing money for the journey from his West Point classmate Simon Bolivar Buckner. Grant was a civilian again for the first time since the day he had arrived at West Point.

Whatever Julia’s thoughts about the matter, Jesse was determined to set matters right. He, better than anyone, knew how unfit Ulysses was for anything other than soldiering, and was appalled at his son’s throwing away his career, however modest it might be. Jesse wrote at once to his congressman (not the unlucky Hamer this time) to request that the secretary of war reinstate his son Ulysses as a cap
tain, and when that failed to have any effect, followed it up with a letter of his own. The secretary of war wrote back a rather snubbing letter pointing out that it was too late, that his decision on the matter was irrevocable, and suggesting between the lines that there were matters Captain Grant would probably prefer not to face publicly—perhaps a reference to rumors of his drinking on duty, perhaps to the missing thousand dollars.

The secretary of war at the time was, of all people, Jefferson Davis, future president of the Confederacy, and the one man, apart from General Hancock, whom Ulysses Grant in later life would treat as a personal enemy. Hancock, Grant forgave as he lay dying; Davis, who had snubbed Grant’s father, refused to reinstate Grant in the army, and then gone on and betrayed his own country to lead the Confederacy, Grant could never forgive.

After a good deal of correspondence and unnecessary travel back and forth between New York City and Sackets Harbor, Grant finally rejoined Julia in St. Louis, a failure at the early age of thirty-two, with no trade beyond the one he had just resigned. Since no help was forthcoming from Jesse, who did not disguise his feeling that Ulysses had thrown away a perfectly good position, or feel like supporting not only Ulysses but Julia and their two children (with a third already on the way), Grant was obliged to throw himself on the mercy of his father-in-law, and took over some of his brother-in-law’s farmland in Kentucky. With his own hands Grant built a house, which he called, with some accuracy (and perhaps a degree of irony), “Hardscrabble,” tilled the soil, and put in a crop. Julia adapted to this life of primitive yeoman farming—the kind of thing Jefferson had dreamed of as the backbone of the infant republic, but
from which everybody who tried it was eager to escape—but she did not pretend to like it. She called the house “crude,” as indeed it was, and does not seem to have had much confidence in Ulysses’ ability to survive as a farmer, even with the help of the Dent family slaves. She would soon be proved correct. The presence of the slaves may have taught Grant something about the notorious inefficiency of slave labor—after all, hard work gained the slave nothing—but it did not save the farm. Still, the Grants survived nearly two years of backbreaking labor, poor returns, and mounting debt, while she bore him two more children, a girl, Nellie, and another boy, Jesse, named after Ulysses’ father—a sentimental gesture that failed to soften the old man’s heart.

Once again it was not for lack of hard work that Grant failed as a farmer—it was the
business
of farming that defeated him. He could do anything that was needed on the farm, it appeared, except make a profit out of it.

To some degree that was not his fault. “Manifest Destiny” had increased the power of Wall Street, and the world of high finance and railway building, over that of Jeffersonian yeomen, small farmers, and pioneers. The time had come “to pay the piper” for the enormous increase in America’s size, many times larger than what had been acquired by the Louisiana Purchase, and requiring huge amounts of capital for what we would now call “development,” in a nation with a largely unregulated banking system. As a result bank crises and a sharp decline in agricultural prices ruined many small farmers shrewder than Grant.

While he had been planting his crops and building Hardscrabble, the consequences of the annexation of Texas and victory over
Mexico had been coming home to roost. The United States was now a continental nation, but the question of slavery still divided it. Mrs. Grant might gush over the loyalty and affection to her person of the Dent family slaves, but the burning question of whether slavery could be extended to the new territories of the West still perplexed and infuriated Americans. Slavery was no longer a debating issue but a
fighting
one.

In the North abolitionists took the gloves off. Mrs. Harriet Beecher Stowe wrote
Uncle Tom’s Cabin
, the book that caused Queen Victoria to cry, that made Simon Legree the symbol of Southern oppression, and that would eventually cause Lincoln to say to its author, on meeting her, “So you’re the little lady who started this war.” The North reacted with outrage to the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision, in the Dred Scott case, that a slave was merely property who could be hunted down and returned to his owner, even from the North. On the floor of the U.S. Senate, distinguished senators slashed at each other with canes, and members of both houses took to carrying Col. Samuel Colt’s new pocket revolver. And in the Kansas Territory, “Bleeding Kansas,” the question of whether slavery could be—
would
be—extended farther West was beginning to be played out in blood, not just ink.

It is against this background of rising tension and anger that Ulysses Grant’s failure as a farmer must be seen. Like the rest of the nation, he was waiting, appalled and impotent, for the storm to break. He could not have predicted the swift and dreadful chain of events—the spiraling outbreak of murder and lawlessness between abolitionist and proslavery factions in Kansas, culminating in the fearful outrage enacted by the followers of John Brown and his sons
on the hapless slave-owning farmers at Pottawatomie Creek, whom Brown dragged from their beds and executed with a broadsword—the fearful plunge toward civil war that had been set in motion by the victories that Grant had helped to win. Still it was there, like a thunderstorm building over the plains, distant but threatening, and only the deaf failed to hear the ominous rumbling.
¹

These events did not, of course, take place at once, but sputtered, like a burning fuse, over nearly a decade of increasing acrimony and sporadic, often gleeful, butchery on the part of fanatics on both sides, as a war of words hardened into the prospect of a real war—perhaps the only profession for which Captain Grant, failed farmer and small entrepreneur, was properly trained. All over the country the state militias drilled, mostly clumsy country bumpkins, clueless; without uniforms; sometimes shoeless; armed, if at all, with weapons that went back to the War of 1812; guided, if they were lucky, by some old textbook on infantry drill in the hands of one of their elected officers; and by a firm belief in the national myth of the Minute Men at Concord and Lexington, the amateur soldiers who had left their homes and farms, hunting rifles in hand, to confront the Redcoats.