by Ron Chernow
Grant rode off on a horse trolley to the fairground near Springfield where the Twenty-First Illinois was encamped. Outfitted in civilian garb—a light-colored shirt, elbow-patched coat, and dented plug hat—he bore no insignia of rank as he sauntered around the grounds. As so often with Grant, people badly underestimated him, and his small size and slatternly appearance brought out sadistic impulses in some men. A few soldiers began to razz their new colonel, hissing in derision, “Well, I’ll be damned. Is that our colonel?” One man said mockingly, “He don’t look as if he knew enough to find cows if you gave him the hay.”17 Grant threw the man a glance that suggested he meant business. One soldier crept up behind him and started to shadowbox tauntingly until another shoved him hard against Grant, who remained imperturbable and offered no reproach. He knew that, to project authority, he had to transcend petty anger.
As he scouted the terrain, Grant noticed that Goode had created a police force of eighty guards, heavily armed with clubs, to prevent men from sneaking off. Grant knew the difference between being strict and punitive, and sat down in the adjutant’s tent to draft an order abolishing these camp guards. The same order announced three daily drills, warning that those who missed them would be subject to confinement. If the men regarded Grant as overly harsh at first, they soon grew to admire his fairness, competence, and aplomb. He never threw temper tantrums, never engaged in theatrics, and performed his duties in a placid, levelheaded manner.
Once he took command, a remarkable change overcame Grant, mirrored in his letters. He now sounded energized, alert, and self-confident, as if shaken from a long slumber. Working with clockwork precision, he briskly issued orders. In his understated style, he was fearless and exacting. When several officers, attempting to flout Grant, showed up for dress parade without the requisite coats, he simply stated, “Dismiss the men to quarters.”18 Then he turned on his heels and departed. Such tomfoolery never recurred. Grant responded to infractions with cool, unwavering rigor. He fumed when a rough old rascal named Mexico showed up at a drill with a hangover. When Grant posted him to the guardhouse, Mexico swore, “I’ll have an ounce of your blood.”19 Grant had him promptly gagged. A few hours later, he assembled the regiment and silently tore off Mexico’s gag. Instead of retaliating, the tamed Mexico slunk off in humbled silence. Within days, Grant had smoothly shaped order from chaos.
In plain blue coat and black felt hat without marks of rank, he showed an egalitarian spirit that the volunteers appreciated. In ten days, he boosted regimental numbers from 630 to a full complement of 1,000. All the while, he found time to study William J. Hardee’s manual of tactics and reports written by George McClellan as a Crimean War observer. Short of cash, Grant turned to his father and Orvil for a loan to enable him to buy a horse and a dress uniform appropriate to his new rank. Both men spurned his request in a last humiliation meted out by his family. Grant was forced to borrow from a Galena bank, with Jesse Grant’s former business partner E. A. Collins endorsing the note. Before too long, Grant purchased a fine, yellow saddle horse named Jack that was to be one of his stable of mounts during the next four years.
Hounded from the army seven years earlier due to drinking, Grant reentered the service beneath a cloud and policed his men with unswerving zeal whenever he discovered evidence of alcohol abuse. How he dealt with drinking infractions reveals much about how he regarded his own alcohol problem. He limited field officers to one pint of liquor for the war’s duration. “He allowed no whiskey in the camp,” said Lieutenant Vance. “I’ve seen him personally inspect the canteens, and spill the liquor on the ground, and yet for all that he was so strict a disciplinarian, he was never angry or vindictive.”20 Grant smashed liquor barrels and warned grocers not to peddle alcohol to his men. “He refused to drink brandy when cold or wet,” said one soldier. “‘I do not use it,’ he said.”21 Clearly Grant did not view alcohol consumption kindly.
By June 19, Grant’s soldiers were urged to switch over from short-term militia service to three-year stints in the federal service. Two Illinois congressmen, John A. McClernand and John Logan, arrived and delivered florid speeches, exhorting the men to make the change. Throughout the speeches, Grant hovered discreetly in the background until Logan shoved him to the fore. To thunderous cheers, Logan said, “Allow me to present to you your new colonel, U.S. Grant.” The bashful Grant stepped forward. “Cries of ‘Grant, Grant; Colonel Grant!’ arose and so did the Colonel slowly and with quiet dignity,” said Wham.22 Every man strained to hear what their laconic colonel would say, and he pronounced exactly five words: “Men, go to your quarters.”23 In a resounding affirmation of his leadership, virtually the entire regiment agreed to submit to three-year federal service. “We knew we had the best commander,” boasted one soldier, “and the best regiment in the State.”24
Its first assignment was to travel to Quincy, Illinois, near the state’s western border. Wanting his men to be tough and hardy, Grant made a daring decision: instead of transporting them by train, he would march them halfway across the state, “preferring to train them in a friendly country.”25 On June 3, when the march got under way, whole towns turned out to applaud the soldiers. Women fluttered handkerchiefs and tossed bouquets. From the outset, Grant knew he had to earn the allegiance of the populace and punished those who pinched hens and roosters from local gardens. He brought along his eldest son, Fred, who profited from his father’s popularity. “The Soldiers and officers call him Colonel and he seems to be quite a favorite,” Grant informed Julia.26 He expressed delight with the regiment’s progress, telling them after one week that they compared favorably with “veteran troops in point of soldierly bearing, general good order, and cheerful execution of commands.”27 Grant was back in his element, as proficient in war as he had been ineffectual in business. The incessant activity was clearly therapeutic for a man whose foremost enemy had been unwanted idleness. “I don’t believe there is a more orderly set of troops now in the volunteer service,” Grant wrote proudly to Julia. “I have been very strict with them and the men seem to like it.”28
Grant struck up an intimate friendship with the regimental chaplain, James L. Crane, whom he asked to deliver blessings at meals. Crane marveled at Grant’s cool, unruffled temperament, his candor among trusted friends, and his charitable nature: “He has no desire to rise by the fall of others; no glorying over another’s abasement; no exulting over another’s tears.”29 Invigorated by the cause, Grant evinced no symptoms of the depression that had dogged him in recent years. “He is always cheerful; no toil, cold, heat, hunger, fatigue, or want of money depresses him.” Crane had a chance to probe Grant’s political views. While Grant still lacked patience with extreme abolitionists, he loathed slavery with all his soul. “He believed slavery to be an anomaly in a free government like ours; that its tendency was subversive of the best interests of the master and the enslaved . . . that it resulted in denying the slave the rights of his moral nature.” At this juncture, Grant knew the war’s sole purpose was to preserve the Union and suppress the rebellion, but he already perceived that its inexorable logic would carry more profound repercussions in its wake. “He often remarked . . . that he believed slavery would die with this rebellion, and that it might become necessary for the government to suppress it as a stroke of military policy.”30
Crane noticed that Grant abstained completely from alcohol, refusing all wine and brandy and “usually remarking that he never indulged in anything stronger than coffee and tobacco.”31 With his men, Grant remained extremely vigilant against alcoholic temptation. On July 4, while the regiment stayed at the Jacksonville fairgrounds, Grant stood at the gate, personally examining canteens for illicit whiskey. When he found a local vendor purveying jugs of whiskey from a wagon, he had them confiscated, forcing the seller to scramble away. At Exeter the next day, Grant again emptied canteens in the dust. When all else failed, he had intoxicated soldiers lashed to baggage wagons or tree trunks until they sobered up. When the
regiment reached Quincy and the old soldier known as Mexico got roaring drunk, Grant berated him with unwonted severity: “You are a trifling, dirty old dog, and of no account on this earth. You get across the river and never let me see you again.”32
At Quincy, Grant received orders from Brigadier General John Pope to proceed to Palmyra, just across the Mississippi River in Missouri, to rescue an Illinois regiment pinned down by rebels on a railway line. Grant, who had never been in command before and now faced the ultimate test of battle, was seized with trepidation. “Before we were prepared to cross the Mississippi River at Quincy my anxiety was relieved; for the men of the besieged regiment came straggling into town,” Grant wrote. “I am inclined to think both sides got frightened and ran away.”33 An atypical male, Grant never hesitated to admit human fears. It is perhaps no accident that at this stressful moment he suffered migraine headaches, nor that he decided to send young Fred home for his safety.
After several days at Palmyra, the next objective for Grant’s regiment was to apprehend General Thomas A. Harris, who commanded a force of twelve hundred mounted secessionists in northern Missouri. So far, Confederates in the region constituted a ghostly but destructive presence, tearing up railroad tracks and pouncing on small pockets of Union troops. Harris was rumored to be in the small town of Florida, some twenty-five miles south. With rising dread, Grant led six companies through a deserted landscape. They approached a hill where they expected to find Harris and his men lurking at a creek bottom on the other side. In an oft-quoted passage of his Memoirs, Grant described his first whiff of fright as his heart “kept getting higher and higher until it felt to me as though it was in my throat. I would have given anything then to have been back in Illinois, but I had not the moral courage to halt.” To his relieved astonishment, Grant discovered that Harris and his men had absconded in response to his approach. “My heart resumed its place. It occurred to me at once that Harris had been as much afraid of me as I had been of him.”34 This anticlimactic moment was formative for Grant, who never forgot the nugget of practical wisdom learned. He would emerge as a master of the psychology of war, intuitive about enemy weakness. Henceforth he would project himself into opponents’ minds and comprehend their fears and anxieties instead of blowing them up into all-powerful bugaboos, giving him courage when others quailed. Around this time, Mark Twain belonged to a small, irregular Confederate company and later claimed for comic effect that he had been pursued by Grant’s troops. As he said facetiously, “I did not know that this was the future General Grant or I would have turned and attacked him. I supposed it was just some ordinary Colonel of no particular consequence, so I let him go.”35 In fact, Twain had been in the vicinity weeks earlier.
On July 20, Grant’s regiment set off by train southward for Mexico, a town in Missouri. The next day, a sweltering Sunday in the East, Union troops staged the war’s first major confrontation, assaulting Confederate forces at Manassas, Virginia, west of Washington. General Winfield Scott, who oversaw the northern war effort, was too old, creaky, and overweight to lead armies into battle, so the task fell to the tall, bearded General Irvin McDowell, a West Pointer who had served in the Mexican War. A student of military strategy, McDowell had enrolled at a French military college, but he had never commanded troops in the field. The battle of Bull Run (First Manassas) drew a vast flock of enraptured spectators from the federal capital, including six senators and at least ten congressmen, not to mention fashionable ladies hoping to enjoy some bloodshed as a holiday outing and history lesson. What had looked like certain victory degenerated into a panicky rout of Union forces, who streamed back into the capital in a dreary, drenching rain.
President Lincoln and his cabinet were shocked by the unexpected vigor of southern resistance and a shaken Elihu Washburne wrote home that he had never seen “a more sober set of men.”36 Bull Run dashed the confidence of armchair generals who had predicted the North would coast to easy victory, breeding a corresponding euphoria in southern towns. It also exposed for the first—but not the last—time the shortcomings of Union generals in the eastern theater. It always irritated Grant that the competent McDowell was stigmatized for his loss. “You will remember people called him a drunkard and a traitor,” Grant later said. “Well, he never drank a drop of liquor in his life, and a more loyal man never lived.”37 In the days after Bull Run, the president signed two bills to enlist a million new volunteers as the scale of the conflict exploded dramatically and the nation lurched toward total war.
When his regiment reached Mexico, Grant found himself in Missouri territory infested with secessionists, and as he gauged the depth of the irrational emotions driving secession, he feared guerrilla warfare would spiral out of control. “I hope from the bottom of my heart I may be mistaken,” he told Julia, “but since the defeat of our troops at Manassas things look more gloomy here.”38 Thanks to a decision by General Pope, Grant now commanded three infantry regiments and a section of artillery. Attuned to the war’s political imperatives, he again worked hard to prevent his troops from alienating local residents by pilfering food and drink.
While in Mexico, Grant grappled for the first time with a runaway slave who appeared in camp and asked for the commanding colonel. As Chaplain Crane recalled, the man—frightened, exhausted, breathing heavily—explained that he had been treated atrociously by his master. “Kin yo help me, cunnel?” he asked Grant. “Can’t help you, sir, we are not here to look after negroes, but after rebels,” Grant rejoined. “You must take care of yourself.” Crestfallen, the man hung his head and sighed dejectedly. “Lawd, I’s afeerd massa ’ll be onto me!”39 Although Grant did not help the man, Chaplain Crane gave him bread, meat, and money and steered him to an escape route across the Mississippi. When the slave’s master and his sidekick appeared in camp two hours later and inquired about the fugitive’s whereabouts, Grant not only shielded the runaway, but demanded that the two men divulge their feelings about the rebellion. When they evaded his question, Grant detained them in camp until they agreed to take an oath of allegiance, giving their former slave more time to escape.
In early August, Crane handed Grant a copy of the Daily Missouri Democrat and remarked, “I see that you are made brigadier-general.” Taken unawares, Grant sat down to study the news item from Washington, which said his name had been sent to the Senate for the post. “Well, sir, I had no suspicion of it,” he said. “It never came from any request of mine.” Grant guessed correctly that the appointment derived from Washburne’s amicable relations with Lincoln. Crane was amazed by Grant’s unflappable response as “he very leisurely rose up and pulled his black felt hat a little nearer his eyes . . . and walked away about his business with as much apparent unconcern as if some one had merely told him that his new suit of clothes was finished.”40 For Grant it was a dreamlike transformation: the man who had recently toiled as a store clerk, who had felt cursed by fate, who had lobbied wearily for appointment as a colonel, had been unexpectedly bumped up to brigadier general in charge of four regiments, or about four thousand men, without having fought a single battle. And in the end he required political pull to do so. After years of wandering, Grant had popped up in the right congressional district in the right state. Lincoln had the power to appoint brigadier generals of volunteers, and the Illinois caucus enjoyed such sway that six Illinois brigadiers were selected, two more than any other state. “This is certainly very complimentary to me,” Grant told his father, “particularly as I have never asked a friend to intercede in my behalf.”41 Back home in Galena, Julia trumpeted the news everywhere. She was unapologetically ambitious for her husband, perhaps expressing what he secretly felt but dared not say. As Orvil’s wife noted with chagrin, “Julia boastfully told the townsfolk that her Ulyss had become a Brigadier and she had always known his mettle.”42
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AFTER YEARS OF SEEING his life maddeningly stalled, Grant began to experience gigantic leaps in power. On August 8, the new brigadier general
took command of the military district of Ironton, a railway terminus seventy miles south of St. Louis, then threatened by Confederate troops under General William J. Hardee. Here Grant made his headquarters in a small rustic farmhouse, hard by a lovely spring, amid mountain scenery that he found bracing. He still lacked a sword, a sash, or a uniform befitting his new rank, but he had always led by the force of personality, not by gold braid and ribbons. Under a spreading oak tree, he set out a pine table and surveyed maps, marking them with a red pencil. Significantly, he ordered a new set of maps with an expanded overview of the region. Already a grand strategy began to germinate in his mind of how to exploit the broad waterways that provided entry into the heart of Confederate territory.
Although he had brought along the Twenty-First Illinois, Grant had new regiments under his supervision in Ironton and labored to whip these amateurs into a band of crack troops. “The loud laugh and bluster, the swagger of loafing squads, were hushed,” said one soldier approvingly. “Instead you heard the bugle calls, the roll of drums, the sharp commands of officers to the drilling and marching and wheeling battalions.”43 Since alcohol abuse was widespread among local troops, Grant shut down saloons in Ironton and the railroad station at Pilot Knob.
On August 10, at the battle of Wilson’s Creek, Confederate forces handed a stunning defeat to the Union army in southwest Missouri, killing General Nathaniel Lyon—the first Union general to succumb in battle. While Grant still hoped the Confederacy might be conquered by the following spring, Wilson’s Creek made him wonder. As he admitted to his sister, the rebels were so persistent “that there is no telling when they may be subdued.”44 Grant viewed himself as relegated to a backwater of the war and itched to be farther east. “I should like to be sent to Western Virginia but my lot seems to be cast in this part of the world.”45 He had not yet fully grasped the vast strategic opportunities and chances to sparkle afforded by the western theater.
