Grant: A Novel

by Max Byrd

  Grant supervised the move and the fumigation of the troopship. He somehow also talked more medical supplies out of the Panamanians. And every other day for two weeks he took his turn with the other volunteers nursing the sick in their beds. An unexpected image: the Butcher of Cold Harbor sits down on a stool next to a dying soldier, feeds him his meal with a spoon, tenderly wipes his lips with a cloth.

  On the fifth of August the survivors heard the anchor chains rattle up, and the nicely named ship, the Golden Gate, set sail for California.

  Now flip the coin over.

  From the tropical rainforests and cholera plagues of Panama, move north, above the forty-five-degree latitude line, all the way up to the present-day border of Washington State and Oregon. If you have an old map, slide your finger to the rugged little village of Portland, five or six hundred dreary souls perched on a bare hill looking down at the fast-moving, iron-gray Columbia River (no shiny green jungle scum here, no dugout bungoes; just salmon and fog, fog and rain).

  Fifteen or twenty miles farther north, stop at Fort Vancouver, the biggest army outpost in all the Northwest, a dozen makeshift buildings behind a wooden stockade and a fifty-foot watchtower with holes for cannon they don’t have; beyond the stockade, impenetrable spruce and fir woods, silent and dark as a cave. When Grant walks out on his porch in the early morning, a tin cup of coffee in his hands against the chill, his boots clump on rough wood planks. In the distance a horse neighs. Nothing else stirs. Down by the river a waterfowl slaps its wings a few times, then the silence drifts back like the fog.

  Actually, Grant and the Golden Gate stopped first in San Francisco, for medical supplies, and Grant went ashore on leave for twenty-four hours to what was then, in the middle of the Gold Rush, without a doubt the closest thing to Babylon or Babel the planet had to offer.

  In 1848 San Francisco enjoyed a quiet population of under twenty thousand people, mostly fishermen and timber traders. Then, over on a fork of the American River, a laborer named James Marshall bent down one afternoon and started to pick up gold nuggets, so they claimed, as big as a baby’s head. A year later there were a hundred thousand people in San Francisco, from every nation on earth, and Mars and Venus as well. In 1852, when Quartermaster Grant stretched his legs out on the Long Wharf, the city had been burnt down and rebuilt three times already, each time gaudier and grander than before, and people said it had reached a quarter million at least, with no sign of stopping.

  The single day he was there Grant strolled along the docks and admired the polyglot bagnios and brothels and gold assay offices set up right among the ships. He took a carriage ride out past the hills the Chinese coolies were digging up and dragging down for landfill, all the way to the sand dunes that made up the western shore of the city. He won forty dollars in a faro house and spent the better part of it on drinks and a meal in one of those splendiferous and gaudy gold-blown hotels on Market Street, and if friends are to be believed, almost quit the military then and there—I say it again and again, nobody ever believes it. He looks like the mildest, quietest little man in the world, no mystery about him, no steam coming out of his ears like Sherman, no show-off ways like “Old Brains” Halleck or that insane Young Napoleon George McClellan (about to turn up again one page later)—but Grant is a nervous, volatile person, inside. And outside, he craves excitement. Give him a plague to fight or an isthmus to cross—but routine bores him. Monotony drives him back in his shell.

  What he got in Fort Vancouver was monotony squared. A room in a two-story house next to the wood-fence stockade. A quartermaster’s office with barrels for chairs and unpainted walls and order forms and account books and military purchase manuals. One lumpish day after the other of gray skies and gray rain and humdrum routine.

  And he handled it about as badly as a man could do.

  Once at City Point late in the war I remember watching from my tent while Grant and Lincoln tried to settle some matter of routine paperwork, about which neither of them was ever much good. Grant stood there emptying his coat pockets one after the other, each one a worse rat’s nest of crumpled papers and flimsies, while he tried to find his document. Meantime Lincoln had pulled off his old black stovepipe hat and was holding it up to look inside, where he filed his papers.

  “From the kitchen where I worked,” Grant’s old Vancouver cook, a lady named Sheffield, wrote me, “I could see him every day walking back and forth on the porch, smoking and thinking for hours at a time, or else he would order his horse and ride till sundown by himself in the woods.”

  He had his own liquor cabinet now. Or when that ran dry, he would stroll over to the officers’ mess. He was what in the army was known as a “four-finger” drinker—he held his glass in his fist, said fill it up to the fourth finger, no water ever (“Do you think I’m a camel?”—army joke as old as Julius Caesar).

  When the mails finally caught up in late October he learned that Julia had given birth in July to another baby boy and named him U. S. Grant, Jr. This spurred him on for a time—he leased some bottomland by the river and planted twenty acres of potatoes, aiming to sell them next spring down in San Francisco and make a fortune, but the river flooded, the potatoes spoiled; he went part-share in a shipload of ice for that same thirsty city, ice melted. He bought some hogs, was swindled; went partners in a billiard house, till the manager ran away with the cash.

  ONE OF THE FEW DUTIES THE QUARTERMASTER HAD AT FORT Vancouver was to outfit surveying parties on their way north, toward Indian country.

  I hear his defenders say, well, Grant never drank on duty, never let drink interfere with his work. Well, yes, he did. Early spring, here comes that poker-assed s.o.b. Captain George McClellan (same as later commanded the Army of the Potomac till Lincoln fired him and took on Grant), leading a survey party inland. And Grant chose his arrival as the time to go on one of his longer sprees, so bad that Captain McClellan fumed and ranted and officially complained (and ten years later tattle-taled to Lincoln).

  Loneliness had come down on Grant like a hammer. He carried Julia’s letters wrapped in a bundle under his coat and took them out to read while he wiped his nose and held his bottle. Mrs. Sheffield remembers his pathetic hungry lope down to the mail-boat, his hangdog look when he came back empty-handed. Once she was chattering away about something and Grant abruptly pulled out his latest letter, showed her the last page where Julia had made a pencil trace outline of a baby’s hand, then walked away trembling, tears in his eyes.

  Back in Shakespeare’s day the actors used to try an experiment from time to time—present a play one night as a tragedy; next night, exact same play presented as a comedy—it was all in the tone of voice.

  Grant’s tone of voice here is what has always bothered me—too much sniffling, too much self-pity. Other men in the West had been away from home longer, had just as much humdrum and disappointment to swallow. (Down in San Francisco about this time Sherman, working as a banker, went totally bust.) Grant couldn’t afford to send for Julia because he kept losing money instead of making it, and that was his own fault, and he felt forsaken and lost and he couldn’t figure out how to live in the woods without her. Same man who had marched through Panama and cholera like a cast-iron angel.

  At the end of a year, news arrived informally of his promotion to captain. He was ordered to leave the comfort of Fort Vancouver and report two hundred miles down the coast at Fort Humboldt, California, which wasn’t a fort at all, just two understrength infantry companies huddled on a mudflat at the edge of a dense pine forest, commanded by a man named Robert Buchanan, who had once been Grant’s commanding officer back in Missouri and didn’t (another one) like him a bit.

  Fort Humboldt lay three miles from the city of Eureka—Westerners will name two planks in the road a “city”—which had a seasonal lumber mill, a few scattered houses, and exactly one place of business, called Ryan’s Store. People in Eureka remember seeing Grant tumble off the boardwalk by Ryan’s Store, tipsy. They recall he was sick a good deal wit
h migraine headaches, and when he was not, he would sit by the stove in Ryan’s, near the long-handled wooden dipper and the whiskey barrel, and tell long stories about the Mexican War and read his letters.

  Julia wrote to say she wouldn’t go to California at all if she had to cross at Panama. Colonel Dent bragged that the two little boys were growing up at his house to be “true Dents.” Grant’s father wrote that Julia wouldn’t bring the grandsons to Ohio to visit and rarely answered their letters (Julia rarely answers anybody’s letters).

  The comic tone just wasn’t in Grant. Four months into his tour at Fort Humboldt he showed up one day at the paymaster’s table so drunk he couldn’t count, and Colonel Buchanan hauled him in and gave him a choice: court-martial or dismissal.

  On April 11, 1854, his formal letter of promotion to captain arrived. He wrote the Secretary of War a letter saying he accepted the promotion. Then he pulled out a second sheet of paper: “I very respectfully tender my resignation.”

  He wrote Julia he had received a “leave of absence.” At San Francisco he was penniless and had to sleep on a sofa in the harbormaster’s office till a free military ticket on a ship could be found, and then on June first “Useless” Grant started for home again, thirty-two years old and broke and no matter what he thought, still not even halfway down to rock bottom.

  EXTRACTS FROM A REPORTER’S NOTEBOOK

  —NICHOLAS P. TRIST, JUNE 1880

  “Interview in Chicago with John Corson Smith, Union veteran”

  The Seventh Illinois Infantry Regiment was mustered into service on June 28, 1861, in Springfield. We were mostly a bunch of ignorant farm boys, so wild and undisciplined that the first colonel assigned to us in the recruiting camp couldn’t stand it and up and vanished.

  Two Illinois Congressmen came out for the swearing-in ceremony, Logan and McClernand, and of course being politicians both had to get on their legs and make speeches. McClernand talked for an hour about God and Country. Logan talked even longer, and I tell you, that man was a spellbinder, he orated like a wizard. By the time Logan finished he had us farm boys whipped up to such a patriotic sweat and frenzy we were ready to grab our bayonets and rifles on the spot and make a dash for Richmond.

  Then Logan held out his arm in a big flourish and said, “Men, allow me to present to you your new commander, Colonel U. S. Grant!”

  The regiment started to whoop and carry on and slap each other on the back, everybody bellowing, “Grant! Grant! Give us a speech—Grant!”

  But Grant stepped forward without a word and just stood there waiting. And it slowly began to dawn on a few of us that this was a new world and a new kind of war. It wasn’t going to be won in the old Andy Jackson style by the commander who rode out in front of his troops and waved his sword for a charge. Not by speeches either. After a while the noise and uproar died down and the room got perfectly silent. Then Grant merely said, “Men, go to your quarters.”

  We looked at each other, then back at him. Then we turned around and did what he said.

  CHAPTER ONE

  CUMP SHERMAN,” CADWALLADER SAID, POINTING HIS CIGAR, “has presence. Look at him.”

  The young reporters obediently turned their heads and observed, through the barroom grill of the Grand Pacific Hotel of Chicago, the tall, ferocious, and thoroughly present figure of General William Tecumseh Sherman, Grant’s right hand in the war, the Scourge of Georgia. As was his custom, Sherman was bare-headed to display his brilliant crown of red hair, but he wore a dark blue full-dress uniform with gold braid, gold stripes, and he looked every inch what he was, commander-in-chief of the U.S. Army.

  “Grant don’t have it,” Cadwallader said. “Sometimes you think he deliberately makes himself inconspicuous. Grant goes into a room of people, he just disappears, you don’t ever notice him. First time Secretary of War Stanton met him, he come on a special train to Indianapolis in ’63, walked right up to Ed Kittoe, who was a doctor on Grant’s staff, and said, ‘Why, General Grant, how are you? I’d know you anywhere, you look so much like your photographs!’ Grant was standing over to one side, slouched-like, chewing his cigar, kind of amused. Didn’t say a word, just smiled. I was there,” Cadwallader added, though in fact he wasn’t.

  The reporters looked at him, looked back at Sherman, who was surrounded in the lobby now by dozens of noisy backslapping well-wishers and admirers, including two or three young ladies in tight pastel dresses, not backslappers, who did not appear, if appearances were correct, to be anybody’s wives.

  “Come to see his brother, I guess,” said a skinny young reporter from some twice-a-week newspaper in Maine.

  “Why don’t you go ask him?” Cadwallader said with a grin, and all the other young reporters laughed and picked up their glasses again, because, young as they were, even they knew better than to walk up uninvited to Sherman, whose hatred of all reporters, young and old, was a national fact. “He foams at the mouth at the mere sight of a newspaper reporter,” somebody had written the other day in the New York World. “He actually snaps at them.” Back in the war, when a bursting Confederate shell killed three reporters at Vicksburg, somebody had run and told Sherman and he had just nodded his head with that amoral, half-animal little grin that was one of his secrets with women and said, “Good. Now we’ll have news from Hell for breakfast.” Of course, he had his reasons back then. That same New York World had gone on for weeks and weeks in 1862 about his supposed nervous breakdown and mental collapse and almost got Sherman kicked out of the army, till Halleck, who always liked him, stepped in. But Sherman had ever been friendly to Cadwallader. Gave him one of his nicest quotations one day just before the elections of 1864, when Lincoln looked likely to lose and Sherman was fulminating against democracy and all its misguided principles, which had got us, he thought, into this war in the first place. “Vox populi, vox humbug,” Sherman had said, and watched to make sure Cadwallader wrote it down correctly.

  Out in the lobby he was now moving through a dense mass of people toward the staircase and his brother John’s second-floor campaign headquarters (suite 268, worth a pint of E.C.B. two days ago; now everybody knew it).

  “Are you going to interview General Sherman?” one of the other young men asked, respectfully.

  “Already saw him,” Cadwallader replied. He finished his glass of bourbon that they had been kind enough to buy him and gathered his bundle of out-of-town newspapers. “Saw him at the train station last night. Passing through on his way to St. Louis, he is.”

  “Does he think his brother has a chance?”

  Cadwallader folded the papers into a bulky package and tucked it under his arm. In fact, he had bumped into Cump Sherman last night, and Sherman thought like everybody else that his younger brother John, who was a fine, outstanding Secretary of Treasury but not a politician, didn’t have a Chinaman’s chance on the convention floor next week. But Sherman said he didn’t want to be quoted, and Cadwallader knew when he meant it.

  “General Sherman stays out of politics completely, you know that.”

  Now Cadwallader was halfway to the door and the packed swarm of agitated sightseers and hangers-on and flunkies in the lobby that a political convention always attracted like demented ants to a sugar spill. But one of the young reporters evidently had drunk more than Cadwallader would have thought, because he swayed a little and raised his voice to be heard over the hubbub.

  “You ought to go down to Galena, Caddy, interview Grant, that’s what. That’s a story.”

  “Well, he won’t come up to Chicago, you’re right.”

  “Damn shame how he treated you after the war, Caddy.”

  Cadwallader merely nodded and closed down his face a little (like Grant) and went on out.

  On La Salle Street the sun was shining and hot, just the way late May ought to be, and the streets were full of traffic and more convention hangers-on and about seven thousand yards of banners and bunting on every window and storefront from the Grand Pacific to Exposition Hall. Cadwallader hunched h
is papers tighter under his arm and started to walk in the opposite direction, toward the lake.

  At two or three intersections he paused to watch some of the marching brass bands that were out on the streets, practicing, raising hell by weaving between streetcars and carriages, scaring the horses. Somebody had told him there were more than twenty such bands in town already, and most of them weren’t officially attached to any candidate, so they just went in and out of the hotel lobbies whenever they felt like it, on a lark, and played patriotic songs and collected tips and drinks and generally contributed to the vox humbug. God bless our Cump, he thought, and sat down on a bench just above the sandy strip of beach at the corner of Michigan and Fourth.

  Usually it was windy by the lake in the afternoon, but May had been so hot the winds had never really got into a Chicago rhythm. Today it was blistery and still as a steam bath. Cadwallader loosened his collar and took off his coat and opened the first of his papers. He always read the New York Times, though he thought the prose was so dry and bad it sounded like a woodchuck gnawing a sausage. And he read the New York Tribune, since he was ostensibly one of their correspondents. But this afternoon the first paper he pulled out of his stack was the Washington Post, whose owner was a maniac but had a good eye for writers.

  He put his coat on top of the other papers. A barge full of something black and smelly was hovering offshore, under a cloud of flapping white seagulls, and there were toy boats and paddle-steamers and more barges farther away on the horizon, busy as a city street. Down at the water’s edge a woman with a white parasol stood holding her little girl’s hand and looking out. Nobody ever stands the other way, Cadwallader thought, with their backs to the water, staring at the land. He wondered if that were a profound observation. Decided not.