The Man Who Saved the Union

by H. W. Brands

  He finally screwed up his courage and went. He hardly recognized Fred, who had grown from an infant into a small boy. And Fred didn’t recognize him at all. The boy had known his father was coming, but he mistook other men for him. “Mamma, is that ugly man my papa?” he asked Julia of an officer who visited the house. Her reply reassured him, but he continued to ask about each male who walked in the door. Grant had never seen Ulys, nor Ulys him. The strange face frightened the two-year-old, who required time to let his father get close.

  It was Julia’s reaction that Grant studied most carefully. “How very happy this reunion was!” she wrote later. “One great boy by his knee, one curly-headed, blue-eyed Cupid on his lap, and his happy, proud wife nestled by his side. We cared for no other happiness.” Maybe she really remembered things so. But if she genuinely swelled with pride for her husband she acted more the saint than she often proved to be. She knew he had thrown over the career he had been building his whole adult life; she knew he had no profession or trade; she knew he didn’t get along with his father, who might have set him up in business.

  Still, the homecoming went better than he had feared. Julia greeted him warmly—warmly enough, at any rate, that their third child, Ellen, was born a bit more than nine months later.

  After a month with Julia’s family, Grant reluctantly returned to his parents’ home, accompanied this time by Julia and the boys, to let Jesse and Hannah see their grandsons. “There are no pleasant memories of that visit,” Julia recalled. She thought her father-in-law a skinflint; he judged her a spendthrift. Jesse proposed that Grant join his brothers in a leather business Jesse had established in Galena, Illinois. “My husband was much pleased with the proposition,” Julia remembered. But Jesse added a condition: that Grant go alone and live with one of the brothers to save the expense of starting another household. Julia and the boys could stay with Jesse and Hannah or they could go live with her family in Missouri.

  Grant refused to be separated from Julia and the boys again, and he rejected Jesse’s condition and offer. Julia emphatically supported the decision, to her husband’s immense relief.

  He tried his hand at farming, the only occupation he knew besides soldiering. Julia’s father gave her sixty acres, which Grant could cultivate. But the property included no building suitable for a home, and so they lived in a house on the Dent family farm. The house suited Julia, who didn’t care that it wasn’t theirs and who didn’t have to travel the three miles from the house to the land where Grant spent his waking hours working. But Grant wanted a house of their own, and he soon began felling trees to build it. He also cut trees for firewood and to earn money to buy the seeds and the other items a farm required.

  “I worked very hard, never losing a day because of bad weather,” he recalled of the winter of 1854–55. Gradually his house—a log cabin, in fact—took shape. Julia wasn’t impressed. “I cannot imagine why the Captain ever built it,” she said later. She much preferred the house on the Dent farm—“a beautiful English villa,” she called it, “situated in a primeval forest of magnificent oaks.” She blamed her father for insisting, by his lack of financial support, that Grant build a log house, of materials at hand, rather than a frame house, which would have required paying a sawyer. “So the great trees were felled and lay stripped of their boughs,” she related. “Then came the hewing which required much time and labor.” The house that resulted was distinctly inferior to what she had known or expected of life. “It was so crude and so homely I did not like it at all.” She tried to cover its unsightliness and her disappointment by curtains, blankets and other mementos of her better days, but she soon admitted defeat. “The little house looked so unattractive that we facetiously decided to call it Hardscrabble.”

  Alexander Stephens was proud of the Kansas-Nebraska Act. “I feel as if the Mission of my life was performed,” the Georgia congressman wrote from Washington to a friend upon the measure’s passage. Stephens was a Southerner but no less, he believed, an American. “My sole object here now is to serve the country.” He reviewed the tumult of the last eleven years, from the time the Texas question had erupted in national politics. He faulted the antislavery elements in the North for trying to stunt the growth of the South and by doing so threatening the compact that united the two sections. He took pride in having fought off these enemies of the South and of national comity, and he looked forward to an easing of hostilities. “Are we not in a much better condition today than we were in 1843 when I took my seat on the floor of the House?”

  Abraham Lincoln had met Stephens during Lincoln’s one term in Congress, and he respected the Georgian’s intelligence and sincerity. But he couldn’t have disagreed more about the national consequences of the Kansas-Nebraska law, and he told his fellow Illinoisans as much at every opportunity. “I remember he impressed me with the feeling that the country was on the brink of a great disaster,” James Miner wrote later. Miner and his father were in Winchester, Illinois, when Lincoln spoke against the measure. “About one hundred and fifty or two hundred persons gathered in the upper room of the old courthouse,” Miner said. “On the west side of the old courtroom there was a dais or raised platform for the judge’s seat and desk. Lincoln stood in front of this platform on the floor and made his speech.” The leading figure in Illinois politics was Stephen Douglas, the law’s author; Lincoln, who hoped to rekindle a political career that had stagnated after he left Congress, challenged Douglas by attacking the Kansas-Nebraska Act. “He began by telling how in the minds of the people the Missouri Compromise was held as something sacred, more particularly by the citizens of Illinois, as the bill had been introduced in the Senate by a senator from Illinois, Jesse B. Thomas. He spoke of the aggressiveness of the slave-holding party, their eagerness to acquire more slave territory; alluded to several arguments Douglas had made in his speeches in favor of the Kansas-Nebraska bill and replied to them.” Lincoln would learn to use humor to leaven his speeches, but on this day he solicited few smiles. “He was as earnest and solemn as though he had been delivering a funeral oration.” Miner remembered that his father asked a friend what he thought of Lincoln’s performance. The friend replied, “I have heard this winter all the big men in Congress talk on this question, but Lincoln’s is the strongest speech I ever heard on the subject.”

  The “hell of a storm” Stephen Douglas predicted burst over Kansas in the autumn of 1854. Popular sovereignty incited competition among the advocates and opponents of slavery, as each sought to fill the new territory with friends and rid it of enemies. The advocates got there first, pouring over the border into Kansas from Missouri, where slave owners feared that a free state next door would become a hotbed of abolition and a haven for fugitive slaves. The opponents of slavery, refusing to be outdone—that is, to be outnumbered and outvoted in territorial elections and in the writing of a constitution for the state Kansas would become—mobilized in response. The New England Emigrant Aid Company sent a thousand antislavery colonists to Kansas to counterbalance the proslavery settlers. Some came armed with “Beecher’s Bibles,” rifles so dubbed for Henry Ward Beecher, the firebrand abolitionist minister who was reported to have said that in the struggle against slavery there was greater moral power in a single Sharp’s rifle than in a hundred Bibles.

  The approach of the Yankees motivated the Missourians to dispatch reinforcements. The proslavery elements swamped their opponents at the polls in elections for the territorial legislature, which set about fastening slavery upon the region. The abolitionists rejoined with reinforcements of their own, including the monomaniacal John Brown. After crossing paths with Grant’s father in Ohio, Brown went east to school, then into business and farming. His farm did modestly well but his spirit required a cause, which he found in abolitionism. “I pledge myself, with God’s help, that I will devote my life to increasing hostility to slavery,” he told an abolitionist meeting in 1837. (A dramatically revised version of this statement was the one more widely remembered: “Here, before God, in
the presence of these witnesses, I consecrate my life to the destruction of slavery.”) For almost two decades he opposed slavery quietly, but when the struggle for Kansas broke out he determined to take active part. He traveled to the contested region and gathered about him a group of abolitionists. In May 1856, after slavery advocates attacked the antislavery settlement of Lawrence, the Brown group pulled five proslavery settlers from their homes along Pottawatomie Creek and hacked them to death with broadswords.

  The Pottawatomie massacre inflamed the country, as Brown had intended. Additional slavery advocates entered Kansas and at Osawatomie engaged Brown’s followers. Several of the latter died, among them one of Brown’s adult sons. Abolitionists made a hero of John Brown—“Osawatomie Brown”—and a martyr of his son, outraging the slavery advocates the more.

  “Bleeding Kansas,” as Horace Greeley’s New York Tribune called the embattled territory, summarized the calamitous direction of American politics in the mid-1850s—and then some. The story was too good for the nation’s newspapers to ignore or to refrain from embellishing. Abolitionist editors like Greeley painted Kansas as the place where liberty was dying at the hands of murderers from Missouri and other agents of the slaveholder conspiracy. “Startling News from Kansas,” the Tribune proclaimed after the attack on Lawrence. “The War Actually Begun. Triumph of the Border Ruffians. Lawrence in Ruins. Several Persons Slaughtered. Freedom Bloodily Subdued.” The New York Times echoed, “The War in Kansas. Murders Thickening,” and reprinted an appeal from the front: “Unless the North send us men and means immediately the Free-State men will be compelled to abandon the Territory.” Southern apologists for slavery decried the atrocities committed by the abolitionists and summoned their own heroes to fly to the defense of property rights and the Southern way of life. Both sides sold record numbers of papers—and angered the majority of Kansans who were not involved in any massacres or sackings. One Kansas editor, rightly worried that the sensational accounts were scaring away peaceable settlers, satirized the war stories. “The late civil war in Kansas did not last but a day and a half,” he wrote. “A Kansas correspondent thus sums up the result:

  Killed: 0

  Wounded, contusion of the nose: 2

  Missing: 0

  Captured: 3

  Frightened: 5,718

  Yet there was undeniable reality beneath the exaggerations, and the events in Kansas convinced many Americans their country was heading for a wreck. Congress itself felt the violence when Representative Preston Brooks of South Carolina assaulted Senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts on the floor of the Senate. Sumner was notorious for the invective he spewed at opponents, but he outdid himself in a speech he called the “Crime Against Kansas,” in which he singled out Senator Andrew Butler of South Carolina for having “chosen a mistress to whom he has made his vows … I mean the harlot, slavery.” Preston Brooks was kin to Butler and full of the hair-trigger dignity of the South; he judged that Sumner didn’t merit a duel and so entered the Senate with his walking stick and used it to beat Sumner about the head and neck. Sumner fell to the stone floor and lay in a pool of his blood while Brooks walked away unmolested. The North was appalled at the violation of the sanctity of the temple of democracy; the South applauded the defense of Southern honor; friends of peace shuddered at what it all portended.

  10

  “EVERY DAY I LIKE FARMING BETTER,” GRANT WROTE HIS FATHER AT the end of 1856. “And I do not doubt but that money is to be made at it. So far I have been laboring under great disadvantages but now that I am on my own place, and shall not have to build next summer, I think I shall be able to do much better.” Yet he was pinched for capital, and the shortfall showed. “This year if I could have bought seed I should have made out still better than I did. I wanted to plant sixty or seventy bushels of potatoes, but I had not the money to buy them.” Still, the twenty bushels he had been able to plant yielded well, producing more than 350 bushels, of which he had sold 225 bushels and kept the balance for this year’s planting. And he aimed to diversify. “I have in some twenty five acres of wheat that looks better, or did before the cold weather, than any in the neighborhood. My intention is to raise about twenty acres of Irish potatoes, on new ground, five acres of sweet potatoes, about the same of early corn, five or six acres cabbage, beets, cucumber pickles, and melons, and keep a wagon going to market every day.” Yet here again the lack of capital constrained him. “This last year my place was not half tended because I had but one span of horses, and one hand, and we had to do all the work of the place, living at a distance too, all the hauling for my building, and take wood to the city for the support of the family.… This year I presume I shall be compelled to neglect my farm some to make a living in the mean time, but by next year I hope to be independent.”

  Grant was rarely so loquacious with his father. Jesse doubtless wondered what his son was driving at; he found his answer in the letter’s concluding observation: “If I had an opportunity of getting about $500.00 for a year at 10 per cent I have no doubt but it would be of great advantage to me.”

  Grant evidently hoped to receive the money without having to ask for it explicitly. And 10 percent was a better rate than Jesse could expect elsewhere, so the proposition could be interpreted as a strictly business deal. Jesse, moreover, had earlier told Grant, when the younger man was visiting Covington, Kentucky, to which he and Hannah had moved, that he would help him launch the farm. But Jesse now doubted his son’s prospects, or perhaps he simply didn’t want to part with the money, and he let Grant’s hint fall unanswered.

  Grant waited six weeks, until the planting season was near, and tried again. His tone this time was plaintive, almost desperate. “Spring is now approaching, when farmers require not only to till the soil, but to have the wherewith to till it, and to seed it,” he wrote Jesse. “For two years I have been compelled to farm without either of these facilities.” He confessed that for all the optimism of his previous letter, he was in dire shape. “The fact is, without means it is useless for me to go on farming, and I will have to do what Mr. Dent has given me permission to do: sell the farm and invest elsewhere. For two years now I have been compelled to neglect my farm to go off and make a few dollars to buy any little necessaries—sugar, coffee, etc.—or to pay hired men.” He had not been extravagant. “My expenses for my family have been nothing scarcely for the last two years. Fifty dollars, I believe, would pay all that I have laid out for their clothing.” But things had been very difficult. “I have worked hard and got but little.”

  He no longer hinted; he had to ask directly. “I am going to make the last appeal to you. I do this because, when I was in Kentucky you voluntarily offered to give me a thousand dollars to commence with, and because there is no one else to whom I could, with the same propriety, apply. It is always usual for parents to give their children assistance in beginning life (and I am only beginning, though thirty-five years of age, nearly) and what I ask is not much.” He wanted not a gift but rather a loan—of the five hundred dollars at 10 percent, for two years. “With this sum I can go on and cultivate my ground.” If Jesse would lend the money, Grant wouldn’t approach him again. “If I do not go on prosperously I shall ask no more from you.”

  Grant humbled himself to no avail. Jesse continued to withhold his money. Grant toiled more diligently than ever. Mary Robinson, Julia’s slave, was astonished to see a white man labor the way Grant did. “I have seen many farmers,” she remembered, “but I never saw one that worked harder than Mr. Grant.”

  For a time Grant’s renewed efforts appeared at least moderately successful. “My hard work is now over for the season, with a fair prospect of being remunerated in everything but the wheat,” he wrote his sister Mary in August 1857. “My wheat, which would have produced from four to five hundred bushels with a good winter, has yielded only seventy-five. My oats were good, and the corn, if not injured by frost this fall, will be the best I ever raised. My potato crop bids fair to yield fifteen hundred bushels or
more.”

  But even this success proved fleeting. Julia’s mother had died in January 1857, and her father, complaining of loneliness, had asked Julia and Grant and the boys to live with him. Julia was glad for the excuse to trade their log home for a real house, and Grant agreed to indulge her. As part of the bargain he managed the Dent farm as well as his—or Julia’s—own.

  Managing the Dent farm entailed overseeing slaves. Julia’s household slaves had accompanied her into marriage with Grant, but he had little to do with them. The field slaves of Fred Dent were a different matter, and they put Grant in the awkward position small slave owners often occupied in the South, with an additional difficulty besides. In the North physical labor was a badge of virtue, the measure of one’s devotion to duty and the promise of one’s success. In the South physical labor was the province of chattel—and of those whites who couldn’t rise above the level of slaves. The more Grant sweated and strained, the farther he fell in the estimation of his Missouri neighbors, especially the neighbors whose opinion mattered most to Julia.

  The added difficulty was that Grant didn’t believe in the institution of slavery. Most slave owners managed to convince themselves that slavery was part of the natural order, something accepted by the Bible and therefore ordained by God. Grant was no abolitionist, but he was from Ohio, where slavery was broadly deemed an affront to free labor and republican principles. He couldn’t have freed his father-in-law’s slaves, and he wasn’t inclined to make Julia dispense with her bound servants. He eventually purchased a slave of his own because he couldn’t find other help. But he never got over the queasiness he felt from the ownership of another human.

  His discomfort showed in his inability to get much work out of the slaves. “He was not a hand to manage Negroes,” a friend remembered. “He couldn’t force them to do anything. He was just so good and good tempered, and besides, he was not a slavery man.”