Grant: A Novel (17 page)

He had his own liquor cabinet now. Or when that ran dry, he would stroll over to the officers’ mess. He was what in the army was known as a “four-finger” drinker—he held his glass in his fist, said fill it up to the fourth finger, no water ever (“Do you think I’m a camel?”—army joke as old as Julius Caesar).

When the mails finally caught up in late October he learned that Julia had given birth in July to another baby boy and named him U. S. Grant, Jr. This spurred him on for a time—he leased some bottomland by the river and planted twenty acres of potatoes, aiming to sell them next spring down in San Francisco and make a fortune, but the river flooded, the potatoes spoiled; he went part-share in a shipload of ice for that same thirsty city, ice
melted. He bought some hogs, was swindled; went partners in a billiard house, till the manager ran away with the cash.

O
NE OF THE FEW DUTIES THE QUARTERMASTER HAD AT FORT
Vancouver was to outfit surveying parties on their way north, toward Indian country.

I hear his defenders say, well, Grant never drank
on duty
, never let drink interfere with his
work
. Well, yes, he did. Early spring, here comes that poker-assed s.o.b. Captain George McClellan (same as later commanded the Army of the Potomac till Lincoln fired him and took on Grant), leading a survey party inland. And Grant chose his arrival as the time to go on one of his longer sprees, so bad that Captain McClellan fumed and ranted and officially complained (and ten years later tattle-taled to Lincoln).

Loneliness had come down on Grant like a hammer. He carried Julia’s letters wrapped in a bundle under his coat and took them out to read while he wiped his nose and held his bottle. Mrs. Sheffield remembers his pathetic hungry lope down to the mail-boat, his hangdog look when he came back empty-handed. Once she was chattering away about something and Grant abruptly pulled out his latest letter, showed her the last page where Julia had made a pencil trace outline of a baby’s hand, then walked away trembling, tears in his eyes.

Back in Shakespeare’s day the actors used to try an experiment from time to time—present a play one night as a tragedy; next night, exact same play presented as a comedy—it was all in the tone of voice.

Grant’s tone of voice here is what has always bothered me—too much sniffling, too much self-pity. Other men in the West had been away from home longer, had just as much humdrum and disappointment to swallow. (Down in San Francisco about this time Sherman, working as a banker, went totally bust.) Grant couldn’t afford to send for Julia because he kept losing money instead of making it, and that was his own fault, and he felt forsaken and lost and he couldn’t figure out how to live in the woods without her. Same man who had marched through Panama and cholera like a cast-iron angel.

At the end of a year, news arrived informally of his promotion
to captain. He was ordered to leave the comfort of Fort Vancouver and report two hundred miles down the coast at Fort Humboldt, California, which wasn’t a fort at all, just two understrength infantry companies huddled on a mudflat at the edge of a dense pine forest, commanded by a man named Robert Buchanan, who had once been Grant’s commanding officer back in Missouri and didn’t (another one) like him a bit.

Fort Humboldt lay three miles from the city of Eureka—Westerners will name two planks in the road a “city”—which had a seasonal lumber mill, a few scattered houses, and exactly one place of business, called Ryan’s Store. People in Eureka remember seeing Grant tumble off the boardwalk by Ryan’s Store, tipsy. They recall he was sick a good deal with migraine headaches, and when he was not, he would sit by the stove in Ryan’s, near the long-handled wooden dipper and the whiskey barrel, and tell long stories about the Mexican War and read his letters.

Julia wrote to say she wouldn’t go to California at all if she had to cross at Panama. Colonel Dent bragged that the two little boys were growing up at his house to be “true Dents.” Grant’s father wrote that Julia wouldn’t bring the grandsons to Ohio to visit and rarely answered their letters (Julia rarely answers anybody’s letters).

The comic tone just wasn’t in Grant. Four months into his tour at Fort Humboldt he showed up one day at the paymaster’s table so drunk he couldn’t count, and Colonel Buchanan hauled him in and gave him a choice: court-martial or dismissal.

On April 11, 1854, his formal letter of promotion to captain arrived. He wrote the Secretary of War a letter saying he accepted the promotion. Then he pulled out a second sheet of paper: “I very respectfully tender my resignation.”

He wrote Julia he had received a “leave of absence.” At San Francisco he was penniless and had to sleep on a sofa in the harbormaster’s office till a free military ticket on a ship could be found, and then on June first “Useless” Grant started for home again, thirty-two years old and broke and no matter what he thought, still not even halfway down to rock bottom.

The Seventh Illinois Infantry Regiment was mustered into service on June 28, 1861, in Springfield. We were mostly a bunch of ignorant farm boys, so wild and undisciplined that the first colonel assigned to us in the recruiting camp couldn’t stand it and up and vanished.

Two Illinois Congressmen came out for the swearing-in ceremony, Logan and McClernand, and of course being politicians both had to get on their legs and make speeches. McClernand talked for an hour about God and Country. Logan talked even longer, and I tell you, that man was a spellbinder, he orated like a wizard. By the time Logan finished he had us farm boys whipped up to such a patriotic sweat and frenzy we were ready to grab our bayonets and rifles on the spot and make a dash for Richmond.

Then Logan held out his arm in a big flourish and said, “Men, allow me to present to you your new commander, Colonel U. S. Grant!”

The regiment started to whoop and carry on and slap each other on the back, everybody bellowing, “Grant! Grant! Give us a speech—Grant!”

But Grant stepped forward without a word and just stood there waiting. And it slowly began to dawn on a few of us that this was a new world and a new kind of war. It wasn’t going to be won in the old Andy Jackson style by the commander who rode out in front of his troops and waved his sword for a charge. Not by speeches either. After a while the noise and uproar died down and the room got perfectly silent. Then Grant merely said, “Men, go to your quarters.”

We looked at each other, then back at him. Then we turned around and did what he said.

C
UMP SHERMAN,” CADWALLADER SAID, POINTING HIS CIGAR
, “has
presence
. Look at him.”

The young reporters obediently turned their heads and observed, through the barroom grill of the Grand Pacific Hotel of Chicago, the tall, ferocious, and thoroughly present figure of General William Tecumseh Sherman, Grant’s right hand in the war, the Scourge of Georgia. As was his custom, Sherman was bare-headed to display his brilliant crown of red hair, but he wore a dark blue full-dress uniform with gold braid, gold stripes, and he looked every inch what he was, commander-in-chief of the U.S. Army.

“Grant don’t have it,” Cadwallader said. “Sometimes you think he
deliberately
makes himself inconspicuous. Grant goes into a room of people, he just disappears, you don’t ever notice him. First time Secretary of War Stanton met him, he come on a special train to Indianapolis in ’63, walked right up to Ed Kittoe, who was a doctor on Grant’s staff, and said, ‘Why, General Grant, how are you? I’d know you anywhere, you look so much like your photographs!’ Grant was standing over to one side, slouched-like, chewing his cigar, kind of amused. Didn’t say a word, just smiled. I was there,” Cadwallader added, though in fact he wasn’t.

The reporters looked at him, looked back at Sherman, who was surrounded in the lobby now by dozens of noisy backslapping well-wishers and admirers, including two or three young ladies in tight pastel dresses, not backslappers, who did not appear, if appearances were correct, to be anybody’s wives.

“Come to see his brother, I guess,” said a skinny young reporter from some twice-a-week newspaper in Maine.

“Why don’t you go ask him?” Cadwallader said with a grin, and all the other young reporters laughed and picked up their glasses again, because, young as they were, even they knew better than to walk up uninvited to Sherman, whose hatred of all reporters, young and old, was a national fact. “He foams at the mouth at the mere sight of a newspaper reporter,” somebody had written the other day in the New York
World
. “He actually
snaps
at them.” Back in the war, when a bursting Confederate shell killed three reporters at Vicksburg, somebody had run and told Sherman and he had just nodded his head with that amoral, half-animal little grin that was one of his secrets with women and said, “Good. Now we’ll have news from Hell for breakfast.” Of course, he had his reasons back then. That same New York
World
had gone on for weeks and weeks in 1862 about his supposed nervous breakdown and mental collapse and almost got Sherman kicked out of the army, till Halleck, who always liked him, stepped in. But Sherman had ever been friendly to Cadwallader. Gave him one of his nicest quotations one day just before the elections of 1864, when Lincoln looked likely to lose and Sherman was fulminating against democracy and all its misguided principles, which had got us, he thought, into this war in the first place.
“Vox populi, vox humbug,”
Sherman had said, and watched to make sure Cadwallader wrote it down correctly.

Out in the lobby he was now moving through a dense mass of people toward the staircase and his brother John’s second-floor campaign headquarters (suite 268, worth a pint of E.C.B. two days ago; now everybody knew it).

“Are
you
going to interview General Sherman?” one of the other young men asked, respectfully.

“Already saw him,” Cadwallader replied. He finished his glass of bourbon that they had been kind enough to buy him and gathered his bundle of out-of-town newspapers. “Saw him at the train station last night. Passing through on his way to St. Louis, he is.”

“Does he think his brother has a chance?”

Cadwallader folded the papers into a bulky package and tucked it under his arm. In fact, he
had
bumped into Cump Sherman last night, and Sherman thought like everybody else that his younger brother John, who was a fine, outstanding Secretary of Treasury but not a politician, didn’t have a Chinaman’s chance on the convention floor next week. But Sherman said he didn’t want to be quoted, and Cadwallader knew when he meant it.

“General Sherman stays out of politics completely, you know that.”

Now Cadwallader was halfway to the door and the packed swarm of agitated sightseers and hangers-on and flunkies in the lobby that a political convention always attracted like demented ants to a sugar spill. But one of the young reporters evidently had drunk more than Cadwallader would have thought, because he swayed a little and raised his voice to be heard over the hubbub.