The Man Who Saved the Union

by H. W. Brands

  He tackled Popocatepetl with several comrades. “The day that we arrived at the foot of the mountain we ascended about one half of the way to the top and there encamped for the night,” he wrote Julia. “We had been there but a short time when it began to blow rain, hail, and snow most terrifically, and of course we were in bad plight next morning for ascending a mountain which is difficult at best.… However, we started through a snow storm which had continued from the night before, and the wind blowing hard enough almost to carry a person away.” They couldn’t see more than a few yards ahead or to the side, and in particular they couldn’t see the expansive vistas that were the purpose of the climb. “We plodded on for several hours through all these difficulties, when all found that it was perfect madness to attempt to go farther, so we turned back when about 1000 feet below the crater.”

  Their trials weren’t over. “That night about the time we were going to lay down, first one person would complain of his eyes hurting him, then another, and by 9 o’clock everyone was suffering the most excruciating pain in the eyes. There was but little sleeping done by the party that night. Next morning nine of the officers were blind so that they were obliged to have their horses led.” Fortunately the descent to lower elevation relieved the symptoms with no permanent damage. The weather cleared about this time. “Popocatepetl stood out in all its beauty, the top looking as if not a mile away, and inviting us to return.” Several members of Grant’s party accepted the invitation. “The remainder—I was with the remainder—concluded that we had got all the pleasure there was to be had out of mountain climbing.”

  They visited a large cave on the road to Acapulco. “We explored to a distance of about three miles from the entrance,” Grant recorded, “and found a succession of chambers of great dimensions and of great beauty when lit up with our rockets. Stalactites and stalagmites of all sizes were discovered.” One stalagmite nearly filled the cave, leaving only a narrow passage on either side. Several of Grant’s companions decided some while later to return to the surface. They retraced their steps to the massive stalagmite and circled around it too far before proceeding. “When the rest of us had completed our explorations,” Grant wrote, “we started out with our guides, but had not gone far before we saw the torches of an approaching party. We could not conceive who these could be, for all of us had come in together, and there were none but ourselves at the entrance when we started in. Very soon we found it was our friends. It took them some time to conceive how they had got where they were.”

  At length the news of the peace arrived. “I have no doubt but this will be my last letter from Mexico,” Grant wrote Julia near the end of May 1848. “Already every preparation is being made to move the troops to Vera Cruz.” The move was fraught, as the fever season had commenced on the coast. But with the end of the war the troops couldn’t stay in Mexico.

  Scott’s plan was to hold the troops at Jalapa, above the vomito region, until the transports arrived, and then have them dash through the lowlands and onto the ships. Things didn’t work out this way. Grant’s regiment held its breath as it passed Vera Cruz but inexplicably lingered on the beach outside the city for a week while the fever raged within. Luckily the losses were light; only one officer of the regiment contracted yellow fever and died. In July the Fourth Infantry boarded ships and sailed away from Mexico for home.

  7

  “I REMEMBER ONE DAY, IN THE SPRING OF 1848, THAT TWO MEN, Americans, came into the office and inquired for the Governor,” William Tecumseh Sherman recalled. Sherman was an Ohioan like Grant; he was two years older than Grant and had been three years ahead of him at West Point. He earned a reputation at the academy for being quick in class and unreliable outside it. “At the Academy I was not considered a good soldier,” he acknowledged, “for at no time was I selected for any office, but remained a private throughout the whole four years. Then, as now, neatness of dress and form, with a strict conformity to the rules, were the qualifications required for office, and I suppose I was found not to excel in any of these.… My average demerits, per annum, were about one hundred and fifty.” During the months that produced the war with Mexico, Sherman was stationed at Fort Moultrie in Charleston, South Carolina, serving under Captain Robert Anderson. After the outbreak of war his unit was sent by ship to California, a journey around South America that filled six months. The principal fighting he encountered in California was between American officers John Frémont and Stephen Kearney over who had precedence in that theater of the war; after Kearney hauled Frémont off to face a court-martial in Washington, Richard Mason took over as military governor, with Sherman as his adjutant.

  Sherman was in Mason’s office at Monterey the spring the war ended—but before the news of the treaty arrived—when the two Americans entered. “I asked their business,” Sherman recalled, “and one answered that they had just come down from Captain Sutter on special business, and they wanted to see Governor Mason, in person.” Sherman knew John Sutter by reputation, as a Swiss immigrant with a large ranch and trading post at the confluence of the American and Sacramento Rivers. “I took them in to the colonel, and left them together. After some time the colonel came to his door and called to me. I went in, and my attention was directed to a series of papers unfolded on his table, in which lay about half an ounce of placer-gold. Mason said to me, ‘What is that?’ I touched it and examined one or two of the larger pieces, and asked, ‘Is it gold?’ ” Mason asked Sherman if he had ever seen gold in its unrefined state. He answered that he had, in Georgia, several years earlier. It didn’t look much like this specimen, being considerably finer. But he said that any gold could be readily tested by acid, to see if it tarnished, and by its malleability. Mason handed him the Sutter gold. “I took a piece in my teeth,” Sherman remembered, “and the metallic lustre was perfect. I then called to the clerk, Baden, to bring an axe and hatchet from the backyard. When these were brought, I took the largest piece and beat it out flat, and beyond doubt it was metal, and a pure metal. Still, we attached little importance to the fact, for gold was known to exist at San Fernando, at the south, and yet was not considered of much value.”

  Sutter evidently had a different opinion, for he asked Mason to grant him title to the land from which the gold was taken. Mason said this was impossible, as California still belonged to Mexico. Yet Mason and Sherman were intrigued and grew more so as further reports of gold filtered in. “Stories reached us of fabulous discoveries, and spread throughout the land,” Sherman wrote. “Everybody was talking of ‘Gold! Gold!!’ until it assumed the character of a fever.… I of course could not escape the infection, and at last convinced Colonel Mason that it was our duty to go up and see with our own eyes, that we might report the truth to our Government.” They rode overland to San Francisco, a small village on the bay of the same name, crossed the bay by boat and then rode to Sutter’s fort and the American River. They found hundreds of men working the streambed, washing the gravel to obtain flakes and nuggets of gold. “We spent nearly a week in that region, and were quite bewildered by the fabulous tales of recent discoveries.” They couldn’t vouch for all the stories, but their own eyes confirmed that something remarkable was afoot.

  On returning to Monterey, Sherman drafted for Mason’s signature a letter relating what they had seen. “The most moderate estimate I could obtain from men acquainted with the subject was that upward of four thousand men were working in the gold district…,” Sherman wrote for Mason, “and that from $30,000 to $50,000 worth of gold, if not more, was daily obtained.… I have no hesitation now in saying that there is more gold in the country drained by the Sacramento and San Joaquin rivers than will pay the cost of the present war with Mexico a hundred times over.”

  Sherman and Mason entrusted this letter to an army lieutenant with orders that it be carried to Washington as quickly as possible. As additional evidence they sent along a can filled with two hundred ounces of gold dust.

  The envoy reached Washington in late November, just in time
for Polk’s annual message. Rumors of the gold in California had been circulating in the capital, but they seemed incredible. “The accounts of the abundance of gold in that territory are of such an extraordinary character as would scarcely command belief,” Polk now declared, “were they not corroborated by the authentic reports of officers in the public service who have visited the mineral district.” Polk told of the mission of Mason and Sherman to the gold fields, and he explained that their observations revealed that the gold mines were very rich and already employed thousands of people. “Nearly the whole of the male population of the country have gone to the gold districts. Ships arriving on the coast are deserted by their crews and their voyages suspended for want of sailors.”

  Polk congratulated himself and his administration for possessing the vision to further America’s westward expansion. Amid the struggle with Mexico the president had negotiated a deal with Britain fixing the boundary of the Oregon country at the Forty-ninth Parallel. “The acquisition of California and New Mexico, the settlement of the Oregon boundary, and the annexation of Texas, extending to the Rio Grande, are results which, combined, are of greater consequence and will add more to the strength and wealth of the nation than any which have preceded them since the adoption of the Constitution.”

  None could deny that the western territories added greatly to the wealth of the United States; whether they added to American strength was another matter. Polk’s message triggered a massive migration to California during the spring and summer of 1849; eighty thousand “forty-niners” poured across the plains and mountains of the American West, over the isthmus of Panama or around Cape Horn in a headlong rush to lay hands on the riches of California. Before that summer was out they numbered enough to qualify California for admission to the Union as a state. Most of them assumed Congress would be as eager to admit them as they were eager to join, and they held a constitutional convention at Monterey to draft a state charter, which they sent to Washington in December 1849.

  But Congress was not eager to admit California. The war with Mexico had intensified the slavery debate, with those Whigs and antislavery Democrats who had denounced the annexation of Texas as a slaveholder conspiracy repeating their allegations and applying them, only slightly modified, to the rest of the territory Polk intended to take from Mexico. David Wilmot, a Democratic congressman from Pennsylvania, appended to a military appropriations bill a provision asserting that slavery must not be allowed in any territory acquired in the war. The Wilmot proviso passed the House of Representatives but failed in the Senate, convincing slavery advocates that their cherished institution was under mortal assault and slavery opponents that the slave bloc would stymie any restraints on slavery’s expansion. Subsequently reintroduced and reintroduced again, with the same results, the proviso became a touchstone of the growing polarization between proslavery and antislavery forces in Congress.

  Among those voting for the Wilmot proviso was a first-term congressman from Illinois. Abraham Lincoln shared the distrust most of his fellow Whigs felt for James Polk and the expansionist schemes of the Democratic party, and though he missed the initial vote on the proviso, not taking his seat in the House until 1847, he voted for it subsequently. He also delivered a speech casting the darkest aspersions on Polk’s explanation of the events along the Rio Grande that had triggered the war. Lincoln demanded that Polk produce irrefutable evidence that the place where the first hostilities occurred was indeed American soil. “If he cannot or will not do this…,” Lincoln said, “then I shall be fully convinced of what I more than suspect already, that he is deeply conscious of being in the wrong; that he feels the blood of this war, like the blood of Abel, is crying to Heaven against him; that he ordered General Taylor into the midst of a peaceful Mexican settlement, purposely to bring on a war; that originally having some strong motive—what I will not stop now to give my opinion concerning—to involve the two countries in a war, and trusting to escape scrutiny by fixing the public gaze upon the exceeding brightness of military glory—that attractive rainbow that rises in showers of blood, that serpent’s eye that charms to destroy—he plunged into it, and has swept on and on.”

  Lincoln’s statement was entirely for effect; Polk ignored this gadfly, as Lincoln supposed he would. Yet effect was the purpose of much of what happened in Congress by now regarding slavery. The House regularly voted against slavery, reflecting the advantage the more numerous North enjoyed in that chamber. The Senate, in which the South balanced the North, consistently beat back the House measures.

  The California constitution landed like a grenade in Congress at the beginning of 1850. The California charter banned slavery from the new state, endangering the Senate balance on which the South increasingly depended. Southerners refused to countenance a free California unless they got something in return. The customary quid pro quo had been a slave state, but no slave territory possessed sufficient population to qualify.

  For weeks the California question roiled Congress. Gradually Henry Clay of Kentucky, the Senate’s master compromiser, crafted a package that wrapped the admission of free California inside a stiffened fugitive slave law—something the South had wanted for years—and several slightly less provocative provisions.

  Clay’s compromise elicited learned comments from the cerebral members of Congress, including South Carolina’s John Calhoun; eloquent statements from the legislature’s great orators, notably Daniel Webster of Massachusetts; threats of violence from the most passionate lawmakers, conspicuously Thomas Hart Benton of Missouri and Henry Foote of Mississippi; and clever cloakroom maneuvers by the political operators, preeminently Stephen A. Douglas of Illinois. It was Douglas who, after Clay’s omnibus package stalled, disassembled the measure, arranged votes on its separate pieces and put the parts delicately back together. Douglas graciously acknowledged the inspiration of Clay. “No man was governed by higher or purer motives,” he declared. Yet the Compromise of 1850 marked Douglas as the new arbiter of the sectional struggle.

  Most of the Americans who fought in Mexico were volunteers; in the wake of the peace treaty these temporary warriors returned to their permanent vocations. Farmers left battlefields for wheat fields; mechanics put down muskets and picked up tools; shopkeepers doffed uniforms and donned aprons. For citizen soldiers, peace was the norm and war the anomaly.

  For Grant, however, and for the other professional warriors of the regular army, the situation was reversed. War was what they trained for and what allowed them to advance in their profession. Peace promised only boredom and stagnation. For some, in fact, the outbreak of peace would produce career backsliding as officers promoted by brevet during the war reverted to their lower peacetime ranks.

  Grant had other things on his mind, though. He was awarded a leave of absence when he arrived from Mexico; he traveled to St. Louis to see Julia, then to Ohio to visit his family and then back to St. Louis. Julia was as eager to wed as he was, and her father decided, amid the celebrations surrounding the American victory over Mexico, that she could do worse than marry a soldier. The ceremony came together quickly. “I had had four years in which to prepare for this event and therefore required only a week or so to make the few last arrangements,” Julia recalled. The wedding was simple by the standards of St. Louis, as August was predictably hot and many persons who would have attended had left the city till fall. But the bride and groom hardly noticed their absence.

  Their wedding trip took them up the Ohio River to visit his family. Julia had never been away from St. Louis nor ever on a boat. “How I marveled at this great creature, as I felt it to be, gliding so swiftly along and obeying the slightest motion of the hand in the pilothouse,” she remembered. “It seemed to me almost human in its breathing, panting, and obedience to man’s will.” At Louisville they circumvented the Falls of the Ohio via the canal and locks there. “It was like a dream to me,” she said of the river journey as a whole.

  The dream soured slightly when she met some of Grant’s cousins. Ja
mes Hewitt had married into the Grant family and obviously done well at business. He and his wife lived a few miles from Louisville. “The approach to their beautiful residence was through broad meadows until we reached the hills covered with a fine old forest,” Julia recalled. “This house was filled with everything beautiful, suited to the wealth and cultivated tastes of our host and hostess.” Julia imagined herself living in such a house and shared her vision with Grant, who responded as she hoped. “My dear husband intimated very modestly that if he saw any chance for a business opening he would be happy to resign”—from the army. But neither Hewitt nor his associates showed an inclination to help. “Although these gentlemen had large business connections at New Orleans, New York, Liverpool, and, I think, Paris, not one of them offered even to introduce him to any businessman.” Julia added, years later, “I always remembered this, and did not forget it when my Lieutenant was General-in-Chief nor when he was President of the United States.”

  Her introduction to Grant’s immediate family went better. Jesse Grant welcomed her cordially. “His voice was low and pleasant,” Julia remembered. Hannah Grant greeted her as a daughter. “She was the most self-sacrificing, the sweetest, kindest woman I ever met, except my own dear mother,” Julia said. Grant’s brothers and sisters were curious about their sister-in-law. Simpson, Grant’s closest sibling at three years younger, was gone from the home, but Clara, Virginia, Orvil and Mary looked her over, and she them. Neither side of this scrutiny found much to complain of. “Altogether I was well satisfied,” Julia remarked of her new family.