by Ron Chernow
During these years, Grant shrank from the booze-soaked society of army friends. He often ran into fellow officers from Jefferson Barracks, who discovered the new Grant practiced abstinence. Don Carlos Buell, then a captain, averred that Grant “drank nothing but water,” and Major Joseph J. Reynolds agreed: “He will go into the bar with you, but he will not touch anything.”88 When one old West Point classmate invited Grant to the Planter’s House hotel bar, Grant avowed his new sobriety: “I will go and look at you; but I never drink anything myself.”89 The one dissenting voice from this portrait of Grant’s abstinence was Jesse A. Jones, who years later recounted that his relative, Edward Gray, a civil engineer, often said he “had carried Grant home on his back drunk from St. Louis, Mo. to Grant’s home on his farm.”90 Such reports of Grant imbibing in St. Louis are conspicuous by their absence, however, and he appeased his always powerful oral cravings by smoking pipes and cigars. “In those days I often heard doctors tell him his incessant smoking would kill him,” said Mary Robinson. “At that time he chewed tobacco excessively also.”91
Though sober, Grant projected a defeated air on the St. Louis streets, a man with the life beaten out of him. His injured pride cast a deep gloom over him. The depression visible in his expressionless face, seamy clothes, and absence of mirth were discernible to those around him. His need to sell firewood on the streets, huddled in a faded blue army coat, broadcast his decline to the world. “Great God, Grant, what are you doing?” exclaimed an officer who had last seen him in Mexico. “I am solving the problem of poverty,” Grant explained.92 His reliance on Colonel Dent’s charity must have grated. When one officer encountered Grant striding outside the Planter’s House, he inquired what he was now doing, and Grant retorted that he was “farming on a piece of land belonging to Mrs. Grant, some ten miles out in the country.”93
Grant was dignified in his downcast state, exhibiting a rigid sense of honor and virtue. James Longstreet was playing cards at the Planter’s House when Grant walked in, and he was shocked to see how far down the social ladder his old friend had tumbled. Grant was “poorly dressed . . . and really in needy circumstances.”94 The next day, Grant accosted him and pressed a five-dollar gold piece into his palm to repay a debt now fifteen years old. “You must take it,” Grant said, even after Longstreet refused. “I cannot live with anything in my possession that is not mine.”95 To allow Grant to save face, Longstreet reluctantly accepted the money. The two men would next meet at Appomattox Court House, when Longstreet was Robert E. Lee’s chief commander.
A sad letter in Grant’s papers suggests that even his father kept a wary distance from him. Right after Christmas 1856, Grant was shocked to see inscribed in the register of the Planter’s House “J. R. Grant, Ky.” He checked with the hotel clerk that it was indeed his father’s signature. “I made sure it was you and that I should find you when I got home,” Grant wrote to his father. “Was it you?”96 We don’t know what Jesse Grant replied or why he might have been dodging his eldest son in this manner.
On January 14, 1857, Julia’s mother, Ellen Wrenshall Dent, died and a lonesome Colonel Dent asked his daughter and son-in-law to move back into the main house with him. This delighted Julia, who had detested the cramped simplicity of Hardscrabble, but it must have mortified her husband, who had just told his father he hoped to support himself on his farm income before too long and begged him for a $500 loan at a steep 10 percent interest rate. “Ulysses,” Jesse supposedly said, “when you are ready to come North I will give you a start, but so long as you make your home among a tribe of slaveholders I will do nothing.”97 Luckily for Grant, within a year Colonel Dent rented White Haven to him and moved into St. Louis, leaving his son-in-law with 200 acres of plowed farmland and 250 woodland acres.
One Sunday afternoon, shortly before Ellen Dent’s demise, Colonel Dent and Captain Grant sat smoking on the porch, differing over the hotly debated question of admitting new slave states to the Union. Proslavery sentiment was widespread in St. Louis, with auctions still conducted on the courthouse steps and slave plantations dotting the countryside. Ellen Dent was impressed by how thoughtfully her son-in-law dissected the situation. Afterward, she told her daughters, “Remember what I say. That little man will fill the highest place in this government. His light is now hid under a bushel, but circumstances will occur, and at no distant day, when his worth and wisdom will be shown and appreciated.”98
In time, Grant emerged as a staunch critic of slavery. As he stated in his Memoirs, “Southern slave-owners believed that . . . the ownership of slaves conferred a sort of patent of nobility . . . They convinced themselves, first, of the divine origin of the institution and, next, that that particular institution was not safe in the hands of any body of legislators but themselves.”99 At this period, however, Grant, like many northern whites, felt more ambivalent, opposing slavery in theory yet also fearing that outright abolitionism might lead to bloody sectional conflict. Julia still clung to a paternalistic attitude toward slavery, associating it fondly with her girlhood and the southern traditions represented by her father.
In November 1856, Grant cast his first vote in a presidential election. After selling a load of firewood, he was galloping by a St. Louis polling station when he decided to stop, lash his horse to a tree, and vote. The Whig Party had collapsed after the brouhaha over the Kansas-Nebraska Act, leading to the rise of the antislavery Republicans, who nominated John C. Frémont as their first presidential candidate, while the nativist American Party—the Know-Nothings—opted for ex-president Millard Fillmore. To his later embarrassment, Grant voted for Democrat James Buchanan of Pennsylvania, a seasoned diplomat and former secretary of state, who hoped to avert civil war by appeasing the South. Grant knew little about Buchanan, but a good deal about Frémont, the famous “Pathfinder” who had explored the Far West and whom Grant deplored as a shameless self-promoter. “The reason I voted for Buchanan was that I knew Frémont. That was the only vote I ever cast. If I had ever had any political sympathies they would have been with the Whigs. I was raised in that school.”100 In future years, Grant liked to joke that his “first attempt in politics had been a great failure.”101 Even though Abraham Lincoln delivered more than a hundred speeches for the Republican ticket, Buchanan carried Illinois and the election.
It seems unlikely that Grant, having grown up in a household saturated with abolitionist politics, was as ignorant about Buchanan’s views as he claimed. As everybody observed, he was an assiduous newspaper reader. “While Grant lived quietly on his farm from 1854 to 1858,” noted a friend, “no man was better informed than he on every phase of the controversy.”102 In his Memoirs, Grant dropped any pretense that he had solely voted against Frémont and not for Buchanan: “It was evident to my mind that the election of a Republican President in 1856 meant the secession of all the Slave States, and rebellion.”103
Southern fervor, already tinged with violence, threatened the tenuous balance between North and South. In May 1856, Congressman Preston Brooks of South Carolina thrashed and nearly killed Senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts after the latter made a scalding antislavery speech, “The Crime Against Kansas.” Many incendiary political events unfolded not far from where Grant lived. A few days after the Sumner beating, in “Bleeding Kansas,” John Brown and his sons brutally executed five men who endorsed slavery. Abolitionist settlers there, known as Free-Soilers, had to fend off incursions from proslavery forces from Missouri, who employed bullets and fraudulent ballots to secure their goals. In the end, two separate legislatures vied for power in the state.
Then, in March 1857, Chief Justice Roger B. Taney handed down the infamous Dred Scott decision. Scott was a Missouri slave taken to the free state of Illinois and the free Wisconsin Territory who then sued for freedom on this basis after his master died. The court denied Scott’s right to sue on the grounds that he was a Negro, an inferior being, and therefore not a citizen. To worsen matters, Taney said Congress lacke
d power to ban slavery from the territories, annulling the Missouri Compromise. Taney’s verdict made the whole country complicit in the horror of slavery. Bemoaning the decision, the New York editor William Cullen Bryant wrote, “Wherever our flag floats, it is the flag of slavery,” a comment that typified northern outrage.104 Although we have no contemporary observations by Grant on the case, he enjoyed a direct connection to it. After the decision, Dred Scott and his wife were purchased by Taylor Blow, who supported Scott’s lawsuit and then freed the couple. Blow, a close friend of Grant’s, would recommend him for a county job two years later.
Through marriage into the Dent family, Grant was thrust into a vexing situation vis-à-vis the passionate slavery controversy. Colonel Dent had given Julia the use of four slaves—Dan, Julia, John, and Eliza—all teenagers. “They were born at the old farm and were excellent,” wrote Julia, “though so young.”105 Colonel Dent never transferred to Julia legal title to these slaves for the simple reason that, under Missouri law, his hated son-in-law would become their owner. Having grown up in an ardent abolitionist household, Grant made it known, according to Mary Robinson, that “he wanted to give his wife’s slaves their freedom as soon as possible.”106 Emma Dent, who thought Grant still conflicted about slavery, commented tartly, “I do not think that Grant was such a rank abolitionist that Julia’s slaves had to be forced upon him.”107 At the same time, she conceded Grant’s opposition “to human slavery as an institution.”108 Most people sensed that Grant opposed slavery and, when a neighbor doubted the loyalty of a Dent slave, Grant shot back: “I don’t know why a black skin may not cover a true heart as well as a white one.”109 Henry Clay Wright, who milled Grant’s grain, detected his dissatisfaction with slavery: “We were all slaveholding farmers in that day, and Grant’s wife had a couple of slaves, and yet we felt that he was not exactly one of us.”110 Legend claims that Grant halted the whipping of a slave by a local farmer.
Since Julia’s four slaves were young, they remained house servants. For field work, Grant hired two black men and employed a Dent slave named William Jones to help raise corn, potatoes, oats, wheat, and clover. He exhibited no false pride in working alongside these men, something that would have been beneath the dignity of his purse-proud father-in-law. It was not in Grant’s nature to coerce people and his just treatment of black men said much about his egalitarian feelings. As Julia’s cousin recalled, “He was no hand to manage negroes. He couldn’t force them to do anything. Mrs. Grant would say aren’t you going to whip Jule for doing that? And he would only smile and say, ‘No I guess not.’”111 One slave, Uncle Jason, confirmed that Grant “was the kindest man he ever worked for.”112 Grant hired free black workers and paid them a decent wage, which bothered slave-owning neighbors.
Every time Ulysses S. Grant appeared to touch rock bottom, his fortunes sank even further. Despite his initial lack of knowledge about farming, he had gamely tried to succeed until his hands grew coarse, he visibly aged, and he developed a permanent stoop. “The work was done . . . principally with his own hands, notwithstanding the fact that many of his neighbors owned slaves and considered manual labor beneath a gentleman,” observed an acquaintance.113 As early as February 1857, Grant warned his father that it was pointless to persist in farming without a fresh cash infusion. To survive, he continued to hawk firewood on the St. Louis streets and the time thus spent destroyed any chance of prospering as a farmer: “I regard every load of wood taken, when the services of both myself and team are required on the farm, is a direct loss of more than the value of the load.”114
By that summer he bewailed that his wheat crop yielded only seventy-five bushels instead of the four or five hundred he had projected, although he still bravely held out hope for his potato, sweet potato, melon, and cabbage crops. Then the 1857 economic depression provoked widespread bank failures, massive unemployment, and precipitous declines in commodity prices, dashing any chance of an economic rebound for Grant. As his life steadily unraveled, he pawned his gold watch and chain for $20 on December 23, 1857, to purchase Christmas presents for his children—perhaps the symbolic nadir of his life. Then, on February 6, he and Julia had a fourth mouth to feed with the birth of a third son, named Jesse after his grandfather. That Grant named a son after his fallible father shows how he still loomed very large in his life.
Perhaps in response to stress, Grant developed crippling headaches as frequently as once a month. “Oh, do not ask me to speak,” he would moan to Julia. “I have a dreadful headache.”115 Julia would seat him in an armchair, dim the lights, then bathe his feet in mustard solution. Ever since childhood Grant had been afflicted with “fever and ague,” whose signs were severe chills and sweats. In 1858 this malady recurred along with malaria, likely contracted while crossing Panama or Nicaragua and with similar symptoms. In Galena, his brother Simpson was slowly wasting away from tuberculosis, and Grant must have feared he was drifting in that direction. His various illnesses hung on for months, even as a cold spring played havoc with his crops, and he curtailed drastically the time devoted to farming. Julia and the slaves also fell sick until White Haven resembled a small hospital ward. Most upsetting was that Fred came down with typhoid fever and Grant worried he might not survive. Although Fred pulled through, the time had come for him and Buck to get proper schooling, which would further hamper the straitened family finances. Until this point, Grant had schooled the two older boys at home, teaching them arithmetic, reading, and spelling.
With his son cast into this abject state, Jesse Grant showed up and made a vigorous pitch for him to move his family to Covington, Kentucky, and join his business. Where he once boasted of his son’s prowess, he now openly disparaged him. When an old Georgetown neighbor ran into him, Jesse said “he would have to take U. S. and his family home and make him over again, as he had no business qualifications whatever—had failed in everything—all his other boys were good business men.”116 With extreme reluctance, Ulysses agreed to wind up the farm and relocate to Kentucky, a plan scotched when his sisters protested. Julia had “bitterly opposed” the plan and celebrated its demise. “I was joyous at the thought of not going to Kentucky, for the Captain’s family, with the exception of his mother, did not like me . . . They considered me unpardonably extravagant, and I considered them inexcusably the other way and may, unintentionally, have shown my feelings.”117 According to Julia Boggs, even Hannah Grant had quietly soured on her daughter-in-law. “Old Mrs. Grant was a woman who did her own house work, and she couldn’t think well of a daughter-in-law who employed slaves, though she said very little about it.”118
Notwithstanding his medical and monetary travails, Grant watched with mounting dread the political turmoil convulsing the country. From August 21 through October 15, Abraham Lincoln and Stephen A. Douglas, rivals for the U.S. Senate in Illinois, squared off in a series of debates that focused on slavery and Grant followed the newspaper coverage. Like Grant, Lincoln was plain in dress and traveled from one debate to the next on ordinary passenger trains. Grant admitted he was “by no means a ‘Lincoln man’ in that contest; but I recognized then his great ability.”119 He thought it “a nice question to say who got the best of the argument” in the debates.120 Even though Lincoln lost the election, the debates elevated him to a figure of national stature, while Republicans scored stunning triumphs in New York, Pennsylvania, and Indiana that fall.
After four frustrating years, by autumn 1858 Grant’s farming ambitions had foundered forever and he auctioned off his stock, crops, and farming equipment. This capped a four-year period of failure so excruciating that Grant skipped over it altogether in his Memoirs. He now paced the St. Louis streets, searching for work, obscure and invisible to the many people he passed, a bleak, defeated little man with a mysterious aura of solitude. “He walked about like any citizen,” said one woman, “but people made way for him, and he walked through the crowd as though solitary.”121 Grant could never escape the shadow of his father and father-in-
law and it was now Colonel Dent who turned to his relative Harry Boggs for help. In early 1859 Boggs agreed to join Grant in a real estate partnership titled Boggs and Grant in which Grant would serve as a glorified clerk. Grant still knew many army officers at Jefferson Barracks and Colonel Dent thought that despite his son-in-law’s abysmal ignorance of real estate, he might woo them as clients. While eager for her husband to find work, Julia suspected he lacked professional aggression and would overly sympathize with debtors. “I cannot imagine how my dear husband ever thought of going into such a business, as he never could collect a penny that was owed to him.”122
Boggs and Grant operated from the Pine Street law offices of McClellan, Hillyer & Moody, its stated mission to buy and sell real estate, collect rents, and negotiate loans. At the outset Grant was hopeful about the firm, but when a dozen similar real estate partnerships sprang up downtown, the glut doomed its prospects. Julia was prescient that her husband was not cut out for collecting rent. If he dunned an old army comrade, he ended up lighting a cigar and whiling away the afternoon with reminiscences. Grant also lacked administrative skills and kept untidy records. “Mr. Boggs went east on business, leaving the Captain in charge, and when he returned he found everything upside down,” recalled Louisa Boggs. “The books were in confusion, the wrong people had been let into houses and the owners were much concerned.”123 Still debilitated by fever and ague, Grant sometimes had to be helped to the streetcar by one of the McClellan, Hillyer & Moody lawyers.
