by Ron Chernow
Just as Grant cherished his newfound worth as a general, General John C. Frémont, commanding the Western Department, replaced him at Ironton with Brigadier General Benjamin M. Prentiss. Without warning, Prentiss showed up on a train bearing orders to take command. Even though both men held the same rank, Grant was technically senior by virtue of his old army rank, but he felt powerless to halt the move. Rudely jolted, he took a midnight train to St. Louis to see Frémont, accompanied by Colonel John M. Thayer, who watched Grant brood silently. “Why he was thus summarily displaced by another he could not divine,” said Thayer. “He felt severely the humiliation of being thus recalled from his command, for which there was no apparent justification; and he was thoroughly cast down and dejected by the wholly unexpected change in his military position.”46 For a man with Grant’s checkered history, the unjust reprimand could only have aroused unpleasant memories.
Popularly celebrated as “Pathfinder of the West,” Frémont had helped to map the Rocky Mountains. A self-dramatizing figure with a fatal penchant for fancy uniforms, he had served as one of California’s first senators and the first presidential nominee of the new Republican Party in 1856. Touched with an imperious streak, he operated from a three-story mansion where he strutted about with monarchical airs. He had converted his headquarters into a private fiefdom, with a Praetorian Guard of foreign mercenaries clad in pretentious uniforms, many stalked by rumors of corruption. The great man vouchsafed only a brief audience to Grant and seemed to ramble on in mumbo jumbo. “Fremont had as much state as a sovereign,” Grant recollected. “He sat in a room in full uniform, with his maps before him. When you went in, he would point out one line or another in a mysterious manner, never asking you to take a seat.”47 When Thayer encountered a subdued Grant afterward, he “did not exhibit an angry spirit, did not utter a harsh word, but his feelings seemed to be deeply wounded.”48
Before leaving St. Louis, Grant paid a call on his former real estate partner, the conservative Harry Boggs. Two years earlier, Grant had lodged in a drab, poorly furnished room in the Boggs home. Now he came clothed with the immense prestige of a brigadier general. “[Boggs] cursed and went on like a Madman,” Grant wrote to Julia. “Told me that I would never be welcome in his house; that the people of Illinois were a poor miserable set of Black Republicans.” In a strange role reversal, Grant felt sorry for the insignificant Harry Boggs, upon whom he had once so sorely depended. “Harry is such a pitiful insignificant fellow that I could not get mad at him and told him so.”49
Although Grant longed to be transferred farther east, Frémont assigned him to take command in Jefferson City, the state capital, deep in the Missouri heartland, a town menaced by marauding raiders and a Confederate force under General Sterling Price. When he arrived, Grant found the countryside “in a state of ferment” and injected discipline into a large body of troops in extreme disarray.50 The soldiers had been “recruited for different periods and on different conditions; some were enlisted for six months, some for a year, some without any condition as to where they were to serve, others were not to be sent out of the State.”51 Grant also grappled with severe shortages of ammunition, weapons, blankets, tents, and clothing. Fortunately, after a week, a bantam colonel with a bushy beard and melancholy eyes, implausibly named Jefferson C. Davis, came to relieve him of his command. “The orders directed that I should report at department headquarters at St. Louis without delay, to receive important special instructions.”52 Within an hour, Grant hopped a train bound for St. Louis.
It was unclear whether he was being promoted or demoted. When he arrived at headquarters, Frémont let him stew in the corridor for several hours. Major Justus McKinstry, who had known Grant in prewar army days, greeted him before proceeding to a staff meeting where Frémont and his officers debated which general could best counter Confederate activity on the Mississippi River. McKinstry argued robustly for Grant, citing his Mexican War gallantry, but was hooted down by others, who alluded to Grant’s 1854 resignation, prompted by a drinking problem. Once embedded in a responsible position, McKinstry claimed, Grant would not revert to the bottle. After an emotional argument, Frémont chose Grant, later writing that “General Grant was a man of unassuming character, not given to self-elation, of dogged persistence, and of iron will.”53 When Grant was ushered into the meeting, he learned that he would preside over the District of Southeast Missouri, encompassing territory south of St. Louis and in southern Illinois. There is a competing story as to how Grant got this highly consequential promotion. Postmaster General Montgomery Blair averred that Lincoln received a gentle nudge from Elihu Washburne, then directed the secretary of war to “send an order to General Frémont to put Grant in command of the District of Southeast Missouri.”54
Whatever the case, Grant was ordered to proceed to Cape Girardeau on the Mississippi River, in southeast Missouri, across the river from Illinois, where he would be poised to operate against Kentucky and Tennessee. Writing to Julia, Grant sounded decidedly hopeful about his newly conferred powers: “I wish I could be kept with one Brigade steadily. But I suppose it is a compliment to be selected so often for what is supposed to be important service.”55 Lifting his mood was his improved financial picture: he would receive a handsome annual salary of $4,000 with only $40 in monthly expenses.
Soon after meeting Grant, the Pathfinder perpetrated a breathtaking act of hubris that confirmed talk of his imperial rule. Without consulting Lincoln, Frémont declared martial law in Missouri, ordered the death penalty for captured Confederate guerrillas, and enunciated his own emancipation proclamation: he would free rebel slaves who took up arms for the Union. Lincoln was aghast. Aside from bridling at the blatant insubordination, he feared the defection of Democrats and border states and asked Frémont to modify his measure. The headstrong Frémont refused, even dispatching his wife, Jessie, to reason with Lincoln. She got an icy reception and her presence only worsened her husband’s predicament, although he was not formally relieved until early November. Lincoln’s decision to cashier Frémont served as a cautionary tale for Grant, who noted, “The generals who insisted upon writing emancipation proclamations . . . all came to grief as surely as those who believed that the main object of the war was to protect rebel property, and keep the negroes at work on the plantations while their masters were off in the rebellion.”56 With few exceptions, Grant would qualify as a model general who accepted military subservience to civilian leadership.
When he took the steamer to Cape Girardeau, he met a journalist from the New York Herald who left a brief verbal sketch of his appearance: “He is about forty-five years of age, not more than five feet eight inches in height, and of ordinary frame, with a slight tendency to corpulency. The expression of his face is pleasant, and a smile is almost continually playing around his eyes.”57 Not often was Grant conjured up in this cheerful vein, and it was clear that Frémont’s orders had, at least temporarily, bucked up his flagging morale.
Before going to his new headquarters, Grant undertook a mission to chase down Brigadier General M. Jeff Thompson, whose Confederate partisans harassed federal forces in the swamps of southeast Missouri. The operation was impeded by a personal clash. Grant had a rendezvous with Brigadier General Benjamin M. Prentiss—the same general who supplanted him at Ironton—but Prentiss recoiled from taking orders from Grant. In his Memoirs, Grant attributed the contretemps to a seniority dispute. Prentiss “was very much aggrieved at being placed under another brigadier-general, particularly as he believed himself to be the senior.”58 But Prentiss, who rushed off to complain to Frémont, may have been moved by baser motives. When the journalist Albert D. Richardson ran into him, Prentiss explained why he had left: “I will not serve under a drunkard.”59 Later on, Grant came to value Prentiss as an able, selfless commander and regretted the earlier history of friction.
Grant decided to make his headquarters at Cairo, at the southern tip of Illinois, a vital intersection where the Ohio River flowed
into the Mississippi. It arose as the perfect hub for massive operations by water that would penetrate the Deep South. Frémont’s master plan was to dominate the Mississippi from Cairo to New Orleans, bisecting the Confederacy, and to control the Cumberland and Tennessee Rivers, natural gateways to Tennessee, Alabama, and Mississippi. No longer was Grant consigned to a lesser stage in the war and now acted in one of its main theaters.
Upon arriving in Cairo, he donned civilian garb as he awaited his brigadier general uniform from New York. At first, the resident commander, Colonel Richard J. Oglesby, did not catch Grant’s name or realize that the small, forgettable man in mufti had been sent to succeed him. Then Grant scrawled his orders on a sheet of paper and handed it to the bemused colonel, who “put on an expression of surprise that looked a little as if he would like to have someone identify me. But he surrendered the office without question.”60 For his headquarters, Grant set up shop on the second floor of a bank building, where he sat behind a counter, sucking on a meerschaum pipe, as if he were an everyday bank teller. Dr. John H. Brinton, an army surgeon, at first dismissed Grant as “a very ordinary sort of man,” then noticed his unusual concentration, his capacity to make rapid-fire decisions under extreme pressure. Grant got things done without the pomp and frippery of a Frémont. “He did not as a rule speak a great deal . . . did nothing carelessly, but worked slowly, every now and then stopping and taking his pipe out of his mouth.”61 Periodically, as if deep in thought, Grant paused and stared out the window at a fleet of gunboats anchored in the river—a fleet that opened up a wealth of strategic initiatives with the dense network of navigable waterways nearby.
Flooded in many places, Cairo was a hellish place with an infestation of small creatures attracted by standing pools of water. Soldiers were bitten by ubiquitous mosquitoes, dead horses and mules floated downriver, and swarms of rats scurried along muddy streets. Frémont had labeled Cairo “the most unhealthy post within my command” and the pestilential atmosphere bred malaria and dysentery.62 Without a staff to delegate tasks, Grant felt overwhelmed by clerical duties and complained to Julia that his hand had grown cramped from all the letters he drafted. He was obliged to feed, house, and train new regiments who arrived incessantly by train, and he often worked alone until midnight. Burdened with the responsibilities of commissary and quartermaster as well as brigadier general, he conducted an unending battle against mercenary contractors who sought to swindle the government.
Despite his exemplary sense of duty, Grant proved almost laughably inefficient when it came to filing paperwork, much as in his hapless real estate days. He had an absentminded habit of stuffing letters into his pockets and neglecting them. Indeed, one journalist claimed that “the camp story was but slightly exaggerated which asserted that half his general orders were blowing about in the sand and dirt of the streets of Cairo.”63 He urgently needed aides to rescue him from his own disorganized nature. Grant made plain that he did not want as staff officers “these gay, swelling, pompous adventurers,” but young men “who had some conscience.”64 From his former regiment, he plucked Clark B. Lagow, thirty-two, and William S. Hillyer, thirty, the young lawyer with whom he had debated politics at the real estate office in St. Louis. Showing a weakness for nepotism that later caused him no end of trouble, he appointed his brother-in-law, Dr. Alexander Sharp, as brigade surgeon.
Grant needed a commanding personality to manage his office and ride herd over his staff and from the outset selected John Rawlins for a special place in his entourage. Rawlins was the pallid young lawyer with the full dark beard, saturnine aura, and enormous dark eyes who had bowled over Grant with his impassioned oratory at the Galena recruiting meeting. On August 30, Rawlins was appointed assistant adjutant general with the rank of captain, effectively making him Grant’s chief of staff. With no military background, he was startled that Grant gave him such a high appointment.
All through August, Rawlins sat by the bedside of his wife, Emily, as she lay dying of tuberculosis in Goshen, New York. While there, he spotted an item in the New York Tribune about Grant’s appointment as brigadier general and little realized its enormous meaning for him. On August 30, Emily died, leaving the thirty-year-old Rawlins a young widower with three small children. He was tortured by her loss and distraught over his children’s fate: “The God of Heaven only knows what will become of our three little children.”65 He mourned his wife fervently for years, evoking her in saintly terms: “Few of earth’s daughters were so lovely; none in Heaven stands nearer the throne.”66 Once he arranged for his children’s care, he hastened to join Grant’s staff, reaching Cairo on September 14. A photo of Rawlins taken that October betrays the deep ravages of grief: he holds a sword in his hand, but no martial triumph illuminates his eyes, which are sad and haunted with widely dilated pupils. He seems to be peering into a troubled future.
Born in East Galena, Rawlins was the second of nine children in a poor family. His mother, a pious Christian woman of Scotch-Irish heritage, taught him hymns that he often recited at bedtime during the war. His Kentucky-born father was a farmer who burned charcoal to sell to local lead mines. For three years his father tested his luck in California’s gold fields, forcing the adolescent John to care for his family and charcoal business. When the young man entered Galena politics, he carried the nickname “the Coal Boy of Jo Daviess County.”67 Some dispute exists as to whether Rawlins’s father was a full-blown alcoholic—“He hit the bottle liberally, wasn’t a drunkard at all, but drank freely,” a nephew testified—but his drinking was excessive enough to convert Rawlins into a fierce temperance advocate.68 His friend James H. Wilson later wrote, “It is certain that from his earliest manhood John A. Rawlins exhibited an earnest and uncompromising hatred for strong drink, and during his military life waged constant warfare against its use in the army. His dislike of it amounted to a deep and abiding abhorrence, and . . . he was often heard to declare that he would rather see a friend of his take a glass of poison than a glass of whiskey.”69 Because of his father’s fondness for alcohol and irresponsible nature, Rawlins received a spotty education and always regretted his deficient schooling. Yet he was smart and determined enough to pass the bar after a one-year apprenticeship with a local lawyer and soon became a city alderman and auditor.
Rawlins’s family history with alcohol abuse gave him a special purchase on Grant’s drinking troubles, making it an all-consuming preoccupation. Before joining his staff, he extracted a pledge from Grant that he would not touch a drop of liquor until the war ended, and he would monitor this vow with Old Testament fervor, carrying on a lonely, one-man crusade to keep Grant sober. That Grant agreed to this deal shows his strong willingness to confront his drinking problem. The mission perfectly suited Rawlins’s zealous nature. With Grant’s consent, he laid down draconian rules to curb drinking, forbidding the open use of liquor at headquarters. In general orders that announced Rawlins’s appointment, Grant berated men who “visit together the lowest drinking and dancing saloons; quarrel, curse, drink and carouse . . . Such conduct is totally subversive of good order and Military Discipline and must be discontinued.”70 With Rawlins on the premises, even senior officers drank secretly in their tents. Any staff member who furnished Grant with alcohol faced the fervid wrath of Rawlins and likely dismissal. Rawlins fretted over Grant, agonizing over suspected lapses from the straight path of abstinence. He had no compunctions about chastising Grant for lapses, and his unflagging vigilance was remarkable in its forthright passion and candor.
Rawlins’s papers reveal another dimension to the story. He feared his own susceptibility to alcohol, so that in saving Grant from temptation, he was perhaps saving himself as well. One year after joining Grant’s staff, he signed a pledge not to drink, along with Clark B. Lagow and William S. Hillyer: “This pledge signed by me shall never be broken. Teach my boy its great value, tell him his father never was a drunkard, but [he] signed this that he might exert a proper influence over those with whom a
nd under whom he served his country.”71
Grant never discussed publicly his drinking pact with Rawlins, but he must have taken it to heart since Rawlins became his right-hand man and alter ego during the war. He allowed Rawlins to be the moralistic scourge and resident conscience of his staff. Later in the war, Grant wrote that Rawlins “comes the nearest being indispensable to me of any officer in the service.”72 In entering the army and assuming tremendous responsibilities, Grant must have feared he would be hurled back into the hard-drinking world of officers from which he fled in 1854, endangering the hard-earned sobriety of his St. Louis and Galena years. A general could not afford even occasional bouts of dissipation. In the army Grant would also lack the firm, restraining hand of his wife. Prolonged absence from Julia could easily set him up for a major relapse into the periodic degradation of his West Coast years. With some notable exceptions, Rawlins largely succeeded in his role as self-appointed watchdog. In later years, Grant’s Galena physician, Dr. Edward Kittoe, paid tribute to “Grant’s repeated efforts to overcome the desire for strong drink while he was in the army, and of his final victory through his own persistency and advice so freely given him by Rawlins.”73
The ever-watchful Rawlins enjoyed special license to be frank and even scold Grant. “It was no novel thing to hear the zealous subordinate administer to his superior a stiff verbal castigation because of some act that met the former’s stern disapproval,” said the cipher operator Samuel Beckwith. “And Grant never resented any reprimand bestowed by Rawlins.”74 Rawlins spoke to him with a freedom that flabbergasted onlookers. Only he could slap Grant on the back or engage in familiar banter. Grant shrank from profanity, yet he tolerated with amusement the barrage of oaths that constantly poured from Rawlins’s mouth.
