Shiloh, 1862 (9 page)

The calls that handsome Lieutenant Grant paid to the Dents must have been refreshing interludes from the drudgery of Jefferson Barracks, and he made the most of them, riding with Julia through meadows “knee deep in bluegrass and clover” and along the banks of sparkling, pebbly Gravois Creek. And before that winter of 1846 faded into spring, Grant’s fancy had turned to love. But just as quickly fate snatched him away to the wilds of western Louisiana, right on the Texas border, where his regiment had been ordered to join a new “U.S. Army of Observation” that would remain as a deterrent force in the ongoing disputes between Texas and Mexico. Less than a decade earlier Texas had gained its independence from Mexico—though Mexico refused to admit it—and was currently in the process of becoming a U.S. state, though the Mexicans promised war if that occurred.

Grant had been on leave with his family in Illinois when news of his assignment reached him, and he rushed back to ask Julia to marry him. He did this in a way that Julia characterized as “awkward,” and she demurred, mainly because old Colonel Dent had sensed what was going on and had spoken with his daughter of the vicissitudes of marrying an ill-paid, low-ranking military officer, whose very career demanded that upon any whim of the War Department he could be seized up and posted hundreds or even thousands of miles away. So Julia did not say yes, but neither did she say no, and there things stood for the next two years while Grant stewed in Louisiana until the long-expected war with Mexico became reality.

Grant was afforded a brief leave and he immediately caught a steamer back to St. Louis. Old man Dent was still against a marriage, but he softened somewhat when Grant informed him that once the war was over he planned to resign from the army and take up teaching, preferably at West Point, where he believed his skills in mathematics would be put to good and profitable use. Colonel Dent relented to the extent that Grant was now permitted to write “courting letters” to Julia.

With that arrangement behind him, Grant returned to the army, only to be informed he had been assigned as quartermaster for his regiment, which was basically a noncombat position. His West Point training, of course, would have made Grant aware that the duties of quartermasters included such critical responsibilities as providing food, ammunition, transportation, living accommodations, pay, and other services fundamental to keeping troops in the field. Grant, however, received the news of his assignment with mixed feelings, since
promotion in the army was almost always tied to experience under fire. On the other hand, Grant—like any sane person—had a fear of combat, a shortcoming that he shared in a letter to Julia.

Be that as it may, Grant somehow managed to find his way into nearly every big fight of the Mexican War. His friend James Longstreet recalled, “You could not keep him out of battle … [He] was everywhere on the field.” During the bloody house-to-house fighting at the Battle of Monterrey, Grant’s regiment was running out of ammunition and a trip to the rear where the supply dumps were located meant riding a lethal gauntlet of Mexican gunfire from every roof and window. Afterward it became the talk of the regiment how young Lieutenant Grant had leapt upon his horse and, clinging Indian-style to the neck and one side, galloped up one street and down the other, dodging bullets until he reached the rear. In his memoirs he modestly recalled going so fast that “generally, I was past and under the cover of the next block before the enemy fired.”

Despite the early American victories, the Mexican War dragged on for 16 more bloody months, during which Grant lost a number of friends and grew disenchanted with the conflict. Nevertheless, in the last days of the final Battle of Mexico City, he managed to drag a small cannon to the bell tower of a church, where he and a squad of men placed fire into the rear of a Mexican column, breaking up their formation.

For this he was made a brevet captain,
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but even with the fall of the Mexican capital the war had persisted, and Grant agonized
over not being able to be with Julia. When at last the fighting concluded, Grant and other regulars were kept on as an Army of Occupation, while the volunteers were sent home and details of the peace were worked out. Soon he became dismayed by the masses of peons, those “poor and starving subjects,” he wrote to Julia, “who are willing to work more than any country in the world,” and yet “the rich keep down the poor with a hardness of heart that is almost incredible.” If Grant made any correlation between this and the slaves of the South he never said so, perhaps out of deference to Julia’s slaveholding family.

Grant found occupation duty in peacetime dreary, which seems to have led to dissolution on his part, if a superior officer’s letter to his family can be believed: “[Grant] drinks too much, but don’t you say a word about it,” wrote the officer, who was from Grant’s hometown. His time in Mexico City also reinforced Grant’s aversion toward the pomp and circumstance of military life. In the first battles, including Monterrey, Grant had served under Gen. Zachary Taylor, whom he greatly admired and who usually dressed in an old leather duster and slouch straw hat. In the later stages of the war, however, Grant’s commanding general had been Winfield Scott, “Old Fuss and Feathers” himself, who Grant said, somewhat derisively, wore “all the uniform prescribed or allowed by law.”

It was also during this period that he found time for further reflection upon the Mexican War, which he decided had been trumped up by President Polk, a Tennessean, as a way of acquiring new U.S. territories from Mexico in order to create new slave states. Years afterward, Grant famously wrote in his memoirs that the conflict was “one of the most unjust wars every waged by a stronger nation against a weaker one.”

In August 1848 Grant returned to St. Louis and, with her father’s blessing, at last married Julia Dent. Among the army officers present were Longstreet, who was still recovering from battle wounds, and Cadmus Wilcox, who one day would face Grant as a Confederate major general commanding a division.

He was soon assigned to a quartermaster post in Detroit where Julia dutifully tried to fill the roll of army wife, but with no cooking or housekeeping experience, and no slaves to assist her, it was a trial. Two years later, Frederick Dent Grant was born and Julia began dividing her time between the army post and her more agreeable family home in St. Louis, which evidently added to Grant’s boredom and the attendant temptations. This, in turn, possibly led to his joining, at one point, the Sons of Temperance, with a pledge to stop drinking.

In 1852, with Julia pregnant again, and young Fred only two, the Fourth Infantry was ordered to the Pacific coast, and there was no question of Julia going with him. Instead, Grant set out from New York on a steamship with several companies of the regiment and their dependents, bound for the Isthmus of Panama and thence overland to the Pacific. The journey across Panama was risky and abominable under the best of conditions, but in Grant’s case it was nightmarish from the beginning.

Mules that the army had requisitioned to carry everyone through the fetid and pestilent swamps did not arrive, and Grant had to hire dugout boats operated by drunken knife fighters who spoke no English. People came down with tropical fevers, including malaria, and an epidemic of cholera broke out. By journey’s end more than a third of Grant’s party—a hundred soldiers, their wives, and their children—had perished in Panama. By all the participants’ accounts Grant was an angel of mercy to the sick and dying and worked tirelessly throughout
the ordeal to save lives, but he soon got a taste of the capriciousness of the press after an English newspaper blamed him for the disaster.

When what remained of the party reached California, Grant was sent to Fort Vancouver at the mouth of the Columbia River in the wilds of the Washington-Oregon borderlands. Presently word arrived that Julia had given birth to a boy, Ulysses S. Grant, Jr. In an attempt to enhance his poor army pay Grant bought a piece of land and in his spare time planted a crop of potatoes and chopped wood to sell to steamships. Floods drowned the potato fields and washed away the wood. An endeavor to raise poultry and livestock likewise failed, as did Grant’s attempts to collect money he lent to fellow officers.

All this, and more, were reflected in melancholy letters to Julia, in which his gloominess and ennui were palpable. Not surprisingly, perhaps, Grant returned to drinking. It was commonly agreed that even a small amount of liquor had a disproportionate effect on him. After only a glass or two his speech would slur, and any more would “make him stupid.” By varying accounts he either became a “consistent” drinker or indulged in “sprees” that could last for days. On a certain occasion in the officers’ mess it was said that his conduct was taken account of by his fellow West Pointer George McClellan, whose surveying party Grant had been detailed to outfit.

After two years at Fort Vancouver Grant was reassigned to the even more remote outpost of Fort Humboldt, 250 miles north of San Francisco. There, with wife and family half a world away, he began to think of resigning from the army, but before that developed an unhappy incident occurred that haunted Grant for the rest of his army career. There are several accounts, but the gist of it was that Grant was discovered to be drunk while on duty as quartermaster on payday and was given the choice of facing court-martial or resigning
from the service. Later, some of his friends defended Grant, saying that the commander “had it in for him,” but the end result was that in May of 1854 Grant wrote Julia that he was coming home.

Even before his hasty resignation from the army Grant had begun to picture himself as a gentleman Missouri farmer, but he had no savings and in fact had to borrow money from his West Point classmate Simon Bolivar Buckner just to get home. As a wedding present Colonel Dent had given him and Julia 60 acres of White Haven, which Grant planned to farm and expand until he could make a respectable living from the land, but this did not work out. Despite his toiling in the fields alongside Julia’s slaves, fluctuating crop prices, droughts, and other farming perils all conspired to undo farmer Grant. Barely able to make ends meet, Grant was finally reduced to cutting and hauling wood up to St. Louis, just as he had done as a boy back in Illinois.

During the panic and subsequent depression of ’57, Grant was so poor he had to pawn his gold pocket watch to buy Christmas presents for the family. Finally he gave up. A cousin of Julia’s helped him find a job at a St. Louis real estate concern, but Grant failed at that too. He hated collecting rents and despised the idea of evicting anyone. Instead he sought a position as county engineer, for which his West Point training had made him eminently qualified, but partisan politics cost him the job. At last he swallowed his pride and accepted a clerkship at his father’s leather-goods store in Galena, Illinois, near the Wisconsin border.

While Ulysses endured more than a decade of abject failures, his father Jesse Grant had become quite prosperous and owned
leathermaking enterprises in several midwestern states. He had also become an insufferable windbag, inserting himself into local politics and vilifying Julia’s family as “that tribe of slaveholders.”

In the spring of 1860 Grant rented out the family slaves in Missouri and made his way north to Galena, which was across the Mississippi River and a little southeast of Dubuque, Iowa. Customers at his father’s store there remembered him as an indifferent salesman, and that when the leaves began to fall he walked to and from work wearing his old army greatcoat and a dark slouch hat. That same autumn Abraham Lincoln was elected President, and talk of Southern secession electrified the air. It had been twenty years since Grant had entered West Point, and his career since then had gone in a downward way. But it was there, on the banks of the northern Mississippi River, that war found him.

Grant was not surprised by the firing on Charleston’s Fort Sumter by the new Confederate States of America. He had spent too much time with Julia’s family in Missouri and among his Southern West Point classmates and officers in the Mexican War to think that the South would not fight. Grant’s own feelings were ambivalent; he detested the notion of disunion and in fact had voted against the Republican ticket in the election of 1856 because he believed its success would cause the South to secede. He did not vote in the election of 1860.
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He also disliked slavery yet kept his wife’s slaves within his own household and in fact even acquired a
slave of his own, one William Jones, whom he freed in 1859 when Jones was 35.
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