by H. W. Brands
The survey team assigned to seek a northern route was headed by an officer of the engineer corps named George McClellan, a West Point graduate three years behind Grant. He had served with distinction in Mexico among the engineers of Winfield Scott, who happened to be a friend of McClellan’s father, a famous Philadelphia doctor. He subsequently explored and mapped the sources of the Red River and the harbors of Texas, translated (from the original French) a manual on the proper use of the bayonet, and earned a reputation as the most promising of the younger generation of officers except for Robert E. Lee.
McClellan and his survey team launched into the northern Cascade Mountains from Fort Vancouver, where Grant had the task of arranging transport. “I have purchased for them within a few days some two hundred horses besides other property and still have more to get,” he told Julia. “The present state of the Columbia”—he wrote during the flood that drowned his crops—“makes transportation very difficult so I have to get Indians to pack, on their backs, all the provisions of one of these parties over the portage at the Cascades”—a turbulent stretch of river where the Columbia breached the Cascade Mountains—“about forty five miles above here.” Grant found the horses and hired the Indians, and McClellan set off into the mountains, where his actions (or rather inaction) embroiled him in a dispute with the governor of the newly created Washington Territory, who detected in McClellan a penchant for promising more than he delivered.
Grant’s hopes for bringing Julia and the boys to Oregon foundered upon the army’s decision to reassign him to northern California. The death of an officer ahead of him opened a captaincy at Fort Humboldt, a recently established post on Humboldt Bay that served the northern gold mines—the town near the fort was called Eureka—and the growing timber industry. Getting to the post required Grant to return to San Francisco, which had grown even wilder since his last visit. “Besides the gambling in cards there was gambling on a larger scale in city lots,” he remembered later. “These were sold ‘On Change,’ much the way stocks are now sold on Wall Street. Cash, at time of purchase, was always paid by the broker; but the purchaser had only to put up his margin. He was charged at the rate of two or three per cent a month on the difference, besides commissions. The sand hills, some of them almost inaccessible to foot-passengers, were surveyed off and mapped into fifty-vara lots—a vara being a Spanish yard. These were sold at first at very low prices, but were sold and resold for higher prices until they went up to many thousands of dollars. The brokers did a fine business, and so did many such purchasers as were sharp enough to quit purchasing before the final crash came.”
Grant reached Fort Humboldt in January 1854, in the dreariest season on that rainy coast. “I cannot say much in favor of the place,” he wrote Julia. “Imagine a place closed in by the sea having thrown up two tongues of land, closed in a bay that can be entered only with certain winds.” A more isolated post was hard to imagine, and there was little to keep the soldiers busy. “I do nothing here but set in my room and read, and occasionally take a short ride on one of the public horses.” Some of the officers entertained themselves by hunting the ducks, geese, deer, elk and bears that surrounded the fort, but Grant disliked the killing. The mail came infrequently and irregularly. “I got one letter from you since I have been here,” he wrote Julia in February, “but it was some three months old.… The only way we have of getting letters off is to give them to some Captain of a vessel to mail them after he gets down”—to San Francisco. “In the same way mails are received. This makes it very uncertain as to the time a letter may be on the way.”
The isolation aggravated the disappointment he experienced at not being able to bring his family west. “You do not know how forsaken I feel here!” he wrote. “I feel again as if I had been separated from you and Fred long enough, and as to Ulys, I have never seen him. He must by this time be talking about as Fred did when I saw him last. How very much I want to see all of you. I have made up my mind what Ulys looks like, and I am anxious to see if my presentiment is correct. Does he advance rapidly? Tell me a great deal about him and Fred, and Fred’s pranks with his Grandpa.”
The gloomy weather darkened his mood and increased his sense of isolation. Psychologists of a subsequent era would describe a syndrome called seasonal affective disorder, a depression that afflicts some people when winter sunshine is scarce. Winter sunshine is scarcer on the northern coast of California than just about anywhere else outside the polar regions, and Grant seems to have fallen victim. “I have not been a hundred yards from my door but once in the last two weeks,” he moaned in March. “I get so tired and out of patience with the loneliness of this place.” When no letters arrived from Julia he couldn’t tell whether they had been delayed or lost or she just hadn’t written. “I have had only one letter from you in three months, and that had been a long time on the way.… I sometimes get so anxious to see you, and our little boys, that I am almost tempted to resign and trust to Providence, and my own exertions, for a living where I can have you and them with me.” He wondered if she was forgetting him. “How do I know that you are thinking as much of me as I of you? I do not get letters to tell me so.” He blamed the army and his fate for their long separation, but he didn’t wholly absolve her. “I could be contented at Humboldt if it was possible to have you here, but it is not. You could not do without a servant, and a servant you could not have. This is too bad, is it not? But you never complain of being lonesome so I infer you are quite contented.” A recent dream made him worry the more. “I thought you were at a party when I arrived, and before paying any attention to my arrival you said you must go; you were engaged for that dance.… If I should see you, it would not be as I dreamed, would it, dearest?”
Additional weeks passed with no letters, and he grew more miserable. “I do not feel as if it was possible to endure this separation much longer,” he wrote. “By the time you receive this, Ulys will be nearly two years old and no doubt talking as plainly as Fred did his few words when I saw him last. Dear little boys—what a comfort it would be to see and play with them a few hours every day!”
Worry about earning a living outside the army was all that kept him from resigning. “It would only require the certainty of a moderate competency to make me take the step. Whenever I get to thinking upon the subject, however, poverty, poverty begins to stare me in the face, and then I think what would I do if you and our little ones should want for the necessities of life.”
“There is but one thing to console,” he inserted amid the laments. “Misery loves company, and there are a number in just the same fix with myself.”
In their distant post on that rainy shore, a world removed from those they loved, the soldiers at Fort Humboldt did what soldiers in like circumstances have done for thousands of years: they drank their sorrows away. George Crook, a young lieutenant whose path crossed Grant’s during this period, later described the drinking culture among the officers of the Fourth Infantry in California. “There was not a day passed but what these officers were drunk at least once, and mostly until the wee hours of the morning,” Crook declared. One officer drank himself to death and was buried with full honors. “Major Day, whose head was as white as the driven snow, commanded the escort, and when all of us officers had assembled in the room where the corpse was lying, he said, ‘Well, fellows, old Miller is dead and he can’t drink, so let us all take a drink.’ I was never more horrified in my life.”
Grant had never drunk to such regular excess, but he sometimes drank more than his constitution could handle. “One glass would show on him,” a fellow officer recalled, “and two or three would make him stupid.” Army practice allowed for officers who drank, but not for those who couldn’t hold their liquor. George McClellan never forgot an incident at Fort Vancouver when Grant got wobbly, and Grant’s commander at Fort Humboldt, Robert Buchanan, took personal offense at his subordinate’s incapacity. “One day while his company was being paid off, Captain Grant was at the pay table slightly inebriated,�
�� Henry Hodges, a lieutenant at Humboldt, remembered. “This came to the knowledge of Colonel Buchanan; he gave Grant the option of resigning or having charges preferred against him.”
This likely wasn’t the first time Grant’s drinking interfered with his work; Buchanan was known as a stickler, but at a place like Fort Humboldt, so far from home and with so few officers, even a martinet had to allow for human weakness. Perhaps Grant was the final straw in a haystack of tipsy subordinates and Buchanan wanted to make him an example for the rest. The other officers encouraged Grant to call what they considered Buchanan’s bluff. “Grant’s friends at the time urged him to stand trial, and were confident of his acquittal,” Rufus Ingalls, one of Grant’s roommates from West Point and a close friend at Humboldt, asserted afterward.
But Grant decided not to. His loneliness already had him on the brink of resigning; if he fought the charge and won, his victory would be a sentence to more of what was making him miserable. Even if he did win, the charge against him would be a matter of record. The army didn’t forget, acquittals notwithstanding.
Rufus Ingalls thought a more personal consideration mattered most. “He said he would not for the world have his wife know that he had been tried on such a charge,” Ingalls said. Grant already worried that Julia was drifting away, and he wouldn’t risk giving her a reason for thinking less of him.
So he abruptly made a decision he had been unable to reach uncompelled. “I very respectfully tender my resignation of my commission as an officer of the Army,” he wrote to the adjutant general in Washington. He did not explain but simply asked that the resignation take effect on the last day of July, four months hence. The adjutant general, on the recommendation of Colonel Buchanan, accepted the resignation and the proposed timing.
9
WHEN GRANT HELPED GEORGE McCLELLAN ORGANIZE HIS SURVEY of a route for a transcontinental railroad, they both acted in implicit alliance with Stephen Douglas. The Illinois Democrat headed the Senate committee on federal territories, which set the rules for administering and organizing most of the trans-Missouri West. Douglas recognized railroads as the transforming technology of the era, and he saw that railroads could make Chicago, as yet a modest town on the shore of Lake Michigan but one in which he had sizable investments, the great metropolis of the West.
Accomplishing his ambition required that Douglas arrange territorial governments for the districts through which a Pacific railroad would run. The congressional Compromise of 1850, besides admitting California as a free state, had established territorial governments for New Mexico and Utah without prejudice for or against slavery. Douglas hoped to apply the same principle to Kansas and Nebraska, the territories just west of the Missouri River. The problem was that the Missouri Compromise of 1820 promised that these territories would be free. The opponents of slavery insisted that the promise be kept, but the advocates threatened to veto the organizing of Kansas and Nebraska unless slaveholders were allowed to settle there with their slaves. David Atchison of Missouri, the leader of the proslavery forces on the Kansas issue, vowed to see the region “sink in hell” before he’d vote to ban slavery there.
Douglas understood that tampering with the Missouri Compromise was asking for trouble. “It will raise a hell of a storm,” he predicted. But he thrust ahead, presenting the Senate at the beginning of 1854 with a bill that placed the future of slavery in the new territories in the hands of their settlers. In the climactic debate he told his colleagues that to vote against the bill would be to stand in the way of history. “Do you suppose that you could keep that vast country a howling wilderness in all time to come, roamed over by hostile savages, cutting off all safe communication between our Atlantic and Pacific possessions?” America would expand whether the Senate willed it or not. “You cannot fix bounds to the onward march of this great and growing country. You cannot fetter the limbs of the young giant. He will burst all your chains.” The Senate must act. “You must decide upon what principles the territories shall be organized; in other words, whether the people shall be allowed to regulate their domestic institutions in their own way, according to the provisions of this bill, or whether the opposite doctrine of congressional interference is to prevail.”
Most Southerners supported Douglas, but not all. Sam Houston of Texas, who had learned devotion to the Union at the knee of Andrew Jackson, judged that Douglas had fashioned a formula for secession and civil war. “I adjure you to regard the contract once made to harmonize and preserve this Union,” Houston pleaded. “Maintain the Missouri Compromise! Stir not up agitation! Give us peace!”
The opponents of slavery screamed betrayal. A group calling itself the Independent Democrats castigated the Kansas-Nebraska bill as “a gross violation of a sacred pledge” and “a criminal betrayal of precious rights.” William Fessenden of Maine called the Douglas measure “a terrible outrage.” Fessenden added, “The more I look at it, the more outraged I become. It needs but little to make me an out-and-out abolitionist.” Slavery opponents summoned “anti-Nebraska” meetings, which voted resolutions condemning Douglas and the Kansas-Nebraska bill. “This crime shall not be consummated,” one promised. “Despite corruption, bribery, and treachery, Nebraska, the heart of our continent, shall forever continue free.”
Yet Douglas had the votes. The Kansas-Nebraska bill passed the Senate easily. Approval in the House came harder; the debate in the lower chamber lasted two weeks and involved the brandishing of mortal threats and personal weapons. But Alexander Stephens of Georgia, applying what he characterized as “whip and spur,” delivered the votes for the bill, and President Franklin Pierce signed it into law.
Grant read about the Kansas-Nebraska Act en route from San Francisco to New York, via Nicaragua. He returned east deeply uncertain about his present and his future. He didn’t know how Julia would respond to his resignation from the army. He had no means of supporting her and the boys. He wondered whether she had grown to enjoy being apart from him. Her infrequent and lukewarm letters suggested that perhaps she had.
He wondered as well about his father. Jesse Grant had gotten Ulysses into the army by arranging the appointment to the military academy, and he thought the army was the place his son ought to stay. When Jesse heard of Grant’s resignation, he immediately sought to reverse it. He knew of Grant’s loneliness in California but not of his drinking, and, supposing Grant simply needed time with his family, Jesse wrote to his congressman requesting a leave of absence for his son. Upon being told that Grant’s resignation had already been accepted and therefore that a leave of absence was impossible, Jesse wrote directly to Jefferson Davis at the War Department. “I would be much gratified if you would reconsider and withdraw the acceptance of his resignation, and grant him a six months leave, that he may come home and see his family,” he said. “I never wished him to leave the service. I think after spending so much time to qualify himself for the Army, and spending so many years in the service, he will be poorly qualified for the pursuits of private life.”
Whether Davis thought it odder that a father should presume to manage his grown son’s life or that the father had such a dismal opinion of his son’s abilities, the war secretary didn’t say. Doubtless Davis had heard through the army grapevine that Grant was a drinker, and he realized there was more to the story of Grant’s resignation than appeared in the official record. He was sufficiently solicitous of Grant’s privacy—and the army’s—not to share this realization with Jesse Grant. Davis responded, “I have to inform you that Capt. Grant tendered his resignation, but assigned no reasons why he desired to quit the service, and the motives which influenced him are not known to the Department.” Grant was within his rights in resigning, and the army had followed procedure in accepting the resignation, which had been recorded and published. “The acceptance is, therefore, complete, and cannot be reconsidered.”
Grant saw his father before he saw Julia. He arrived in New York short of cash and appealed to Simon Bolivar Buckner, a fellow cadet from Wes
t Point and a comrade from the Mexican War. “Grant landed in New York in 1854 poor and forlorn,” Buckner recalled. “One day he came into my office and asked for help. He had been staying at the old Astor House, and his money was all gone and he had been unable to get anything to do and had no means to reach home. He asked for a loan in order to repay his bills at the hotel and reach his father in southern Ohio. I went back to the hotel with him and introduced him to the proprietor of the hotel, whom I knew. And I said Captain Grant was a man of honor and though in hard luck he would see that his bills were paid. I vouched of him, and Grant wrote to his people in Ohio and received money shortly thereafter, enough to take him home.”
His mother was happy to see him, but his father frowned. Jesse didn’t hide his disapproval of Grant’s resignation and of what his son wasn’t making of his life. “West Point spoiled one of my boys for business,” he said, according to a neighbor’s recollection. To which Grant replied, “I guess that’s about so.”
Despite the tension in his parents’ home, Grant tarried before continuing west. The closer he got to Julia the more he worried that she wouldn’t welcome him. Since their engagement a decade earlier they had spent but three years together, and though their separations weighed depressingly on him, she seemed to stand them quite well. Would she find his presence confining? Was she disappointed in him? Her family and friends had thought she could do better in a beau when they were courting; did she now feel she could have done better in a husband?
