For this he was made a brevet captain,1 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 So
uth 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 1860.2 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 35.3
Matters had boiled over and a fight was quickly becoming the only thing that would settle it. Grant understood this, and, being a military man, he felt honor-bound to offer his services to the Union. As he saw it, if Washington allowed the South to secede, nothing would prevent other states from doing the same, until in the end the first and only true experiment in democracy the world had ever known would dissolve itself into a disastrous and irretrievable collection of petty states squabbling among themselves.
He had also concluded that despite the Confederacy’s seizure of enormous Federal stores, munitions, and military equipment in Southern forts and armories, and the defection of so many West Point–educated officers, the war nevertheless would be a short one. The Northern population was nearly twice that of the South, and its industrial superiority would soon take the starch out of the rebellion. Once that had occurred, Grant wrote in a letter to his father, with the abolitionist Republicans in control of the government, the market for slaves would bottom out until “the nigger will never disturb this country again.” So reasoned Ulysses S. Grant.
After the attack on Fort Sumter in April 1861, Lincoln called for the various states to raise 75,000 volunteers to put down the rebellion. This resulted in an overwhelming response in most Northern states, including Illinois, where Grant helped to muster in troops. It also resulted in the secession of four more Southern states. On May 4, 1861, Grant wrote a letter to the adjutant general of the U.S. Army offering his services. It was never answered. Puzzled, he went to Cincinnati to see his old West Point acquaintance George B. McClellan, who had just been made a major general. He waited for three days but McClellan wouldn’t see him.4
Grant was about to return to Galena, 39 years old and washed up, with the war passing him by, when a message came that the Illinois governor Richard Yates wished to see him. He went to Springfield, where the governor was waiting with an offer. There was a new regiment of volunteers, the governor said, who had revealed themselves as little more than a mob of chicken thieves led by a drunkard. Would Grant take charge of these people and try to straighten them out? He would have the rank of colonel. It was a stroke of fate that would change Grant’s life forever.
In a month of hard work, patience, and liberal doses of the guardhouse, Grant had whipped these miscreants into such fine shape that Governor Yates turned over to him three other errant regiments. The number of troops under Grant now constituted a brigade, and technically the rank of brigadier general was his due. Still, Grant was stunned to read in the St. Louis newspapers that he had just been promoted, with some unexpected help from an acquaintance from Galena, Republican congressman Elihu Washburne. In two months Sam Grant had gone from a has-been former captain, failed farmer, and second-rate businessman to the command of several thousand men and induction into the most exclusive club the U.S. Army had to offer.
Not long after news of the North’s disaster at the Battle of Bull Run in Virginia had reached the western command, Grant was put in charge of the District of Southeast Missouri, with headquarters at Cairo, Illinois, at the confluence of the Mississippi and Ohio Rivers. At that point Missouri and Kentucky were hanging in the Union by the slenderest political thread. As slave states, their loyalties were decidedly mixed and in the outlying areas Rebel detachments, abetted by Southern sympathizers, were recruiting, reconnoitering, burning bridges, and shooting at Yankee patrols. It was Grant’s job to suppress these activities, and he was given considerable latitude to accomplish it.
The first thing Grant decided to do after he reached Cairo was seize the nearby city of Paducah, Kentucky, whose citizens were merrily anticipating the arrival of the Rebel general Gideon Pillow and his band of Confederates. This, Grant said, he had learned “from a scout belonging to General [John. C.] Frémont,” who commanded the department. Control of Paducah, located about 40 miles east of Cairo at the confluence of the Ohio and the Tennessee Rivers, was critical if the Union planned to use the rivers as highways into the heart of the Confederacy.
One of the most brilliant ideas that the Union came up with during the war was the concept of the armed river gunboat as a strategic weapon. Rivers were, and had been, main arteries of travel, but until Robert Fulton’s development of the steamboat in 1807 it was nearly impossible for a military operation to go against the current of a river. Now the Union snatched up a number of large river vessels, reinforced their superstructures with heavy oak, and armed them with big guns. These became the so-called timberclads, two of which played such a large role at the Battle of Shiloh. At the same time, the Yankees were developing an even more powerful river warship—the ironclad. These were shoal draft vessels up to 200 feet in length carrying crews of 150 or more. Their armament consisted of 2½-inch-thick iron plate over heavy oak blocking from 12 to 24 inches deep. The ship’s main batteries consisted of 32-pounder cannons, as well as big 42- and 64-pounder Dahlgren guns. By comparison, the typical army field gun was a mere 6-pounder or 12-pounder Napoleon gun. The ironclads were self-sustaining, except for coal tenders that supplied their fuel, and their firepower could flatten an average-size town within half a day. Eight of these enormous craft were produced in less than four months in 1861–62.
Acting upon the information provided by Frémont’s scout, Grant telegraphed Frémont for permission to depart that night on riverboats for Paducah and occupy it with two regiments and a battery. When he received no reply from the department commander, Grant again telegraphed his plans to Frémont. Again no reply was forthcoming, so Grant went ahead, and imagine the surprise on the faces of the dumbfounded Paducahans when instead of the Confederate army they had anticipated they were met by a blue-coated regimental band playing “Hail Columbia” as it marched to the town square. Once there, however, the citizens seemed relieved when Grant delivered a proclamation that began, “I have come among you as your friend and fellow citizen” and went on to pledge to respect their “rights and property,” which both parties understood to include slaves.
Grant’s bloodless occupation of Paducah was just the sort of thing Abraham Lincoln liked to see, and he certainly had not seen much of it since the war began. Only last month there had been the awful humiliation of the Battle of Balls Bluff right outside Washington, and now the British were threatening to intercede on behalf of the South because of the notorious Trent Affair.5 With things looking down in the East, Lincoln had cast an eye to the war in the West, not least because of political concerns, including the upcoming congressional elections of 1862.
With the Mississippi River closed to Northern traffic since the war started, the midwestern states were suffering badly from lack of an outlet to sell their products to the South or ship them abroad. The result was steamboats rotting at the wharfs, crops rotting in the fields, timber and manufactured goods piling up in sheds, and no market for hogs, cattle, and dairy products. Almost since war broke out Lincoln had been pressing for a Union advance downriver but to no avail.
Part of the problem seemed to be finding a Union general willing to risk his reputation in battle against the Confederates. The only one who had tried, Nathaniel Lyon, was killed and his army defeated at the Battle of Wilson’s Creek several months earlier. But the greatest problem of all seemed to lie with famed general “Pathfinder” Frémont, mastermind of the California conquest a decade and a half past.
Once disgraced by court-martial for insubordination and sentenced to dismissal from the service, Frémont had political connections (he was married to the daughter of Thomas Hart Benton, an influential Democratic senator for 30 years) that had brought him out of mothballs
and installed him in this important job. A series of published accounts of his western exploits had made Frémont a national hero, but he was trained as a topographical engineer and had no formal military education, nor any experience in handling large bodies of troops. The results ranged from disorder to chaos.
Like a self-imposed Prisoner of Zenda, Frémont established himself in a palatial St. Louis mansion surrounded by a ridiculous coterie of pompously dressed guards, and he received almost no one in his headquarters, including his own generals. Inquiries went into the headquarters and remained there, mysteriously ignored. His logistics were hopelessly plagued by extravagant government contracts with unscrupulous dealers, while Frémont’s attention seemed focused on freeing slaves wherever and whenever he could—a policy that, for political reasons, was the last thing Lincoln wanted.
It was under these stressful circumstances that Grant set out to do battle with the Confederates who had recently established themselves near the small settlement of Belmont, Missouri, about 25 miles downriver from Cairo. After his peaceful occupation of Paducah, Grant had looked for some new task and decided that the concentration of Rebels at Belmont was not only a menace to navigation but offered an opportunity for his troops to get some real battle experience.
Even that early in the war, Grant seemed to grasp that the overarching Union strategy in the West should focus on clearing the Mississippi River—as opposed to merely capturing cities—and restoring Federal commerce from the Midwest to the Gulf of Mexico, while at the same time cleaving the Confederacy in two. Accordingly, he applied to the navy for steamship transportation and gunboat protection, and early on the morning of November 1, 1861, he shoved off downriver with five infantry regiments, six artillery batteries, and two companies of cavalry—about 3,100 men in all—accompanied by the “timberclad” gunboats Tyler and Lexington.