Crucible of Command

by William C. Davis

  That was the most difficult year at the Academy, but still “U. H. Grant” acted as president of the Dialectic Society, the literary and debating club, and despite the heavy course of study he made time to read light fiction: Charles Lever’s Charles O’Malley, the Irish Dragoon and The Confessions of Harry Lorrequer, comic works on military life in the Napoleonic wars, and Eugene Sue’s Adventures of Hercules Hardy, a South American adventure.53 By March 18, 1843, with just three months to graduation, pressure or impatience must have gotten to him and he took it out on his horse during cavalry exercise, which got him one week under arrest.54 Despite that, he managed two demerit-free months, and closed the year with 78, of which 12 were remitted.55 At the general examination on June 5, 1843, Grant faced a board headed by General Scott. Despite an illness that term that reduced him to 117 pounds, he still passed, finishing a lackluster 28th in ethics, the same in infantry tactics, and somewhat better at 25th for artillery tactics. However, in mineralogy and geology he ranked a respectable 17th, and 16th in engineering. His overall standing slipped to 21st of 39, but he made it into the middle third overall at 156th of 223.56

  Suddenly what Grant later called “an interminable four years” were done, and somewhat to his own surprise, Ulysses S. Grant was a brevet second lieutenant in the United States Army.57 His trip home on leave while awaiting assignment became something of a progress, stopping in Philadelphia to visit Daniel Ammen, then to Pittsburgh for the steamboat, stopping briefly at Maysville to visit Richeson at the Academy, and modestly declining an opportunity to step into a female classroom to allow the young ladies to view the uniformed graduate. At each visit he no doubt told all of his recent achievement.58 Understandably he had hoped for a place in the mounted dragoons, but shortly after reaching Bethel he received notification of his commissioning in the 4th United States Infantry, with orders to join his regiment at the end of September at Jefferson Barracks at St. Louis. On July 28 Grant swore his oath of allegiance to the United States and three days later notified the adjutant general of his acceptance. For the first time he signed his name Ulysses S. Grant, another battle he decided to lose.59

  As similar as their West Point experiences were for both young graduates, circumstances set them on different personal and professional paths from the moment they took their commissions. Even while his mourning was fresh, Lieutenant Lee concluded that he was in love.60 While in Georgetown he visited Arlington to see Mary Custis for the first time in two years. Their time together was brief, but they walked and rode over the grounds at Arlington, read together, and perhaps stole a few chastely private moments in its outbuildings.61 By the time Lee left in August he was in the grip of an emotion quite new to him, as if his grief at his mother’s death opened the door to other feelings.62 His sister Mildred found him distracted and erratic, “uttering as he left the room, confused sentences about beauty and size,” she wrote Mary, and “how little could be added to the former and how much to the latter.” Teasingly she told the object of those feelings that “you know when one is much agitated, their expressions are generally intricate and difficult to be understood.”63

  For the moment Lee could not press his suit, for on August 21 notice came of his appointment as brevet second lieutenant in the engineers, with orders to report in mid-November to Cockspur Island in the Savannah River to work on a new masonry seacoast defense called Fort Pulaski.64 The ensuing months of hard toil on the hot, barren island passed slowly for want of anything but secondhand news of Mary. He still had not expressed the true depth of his feelings, and of course said nothing to her parents. No wonder loneliness surrounded him. After six months he told brother Carter that “I feel, and doubly feel, a hundred times more wretched than the day we parted,” feelings enhanced when his uncle William Henry Fitzhugh died unexpectedly from what appeared to be an accidental poisoning. He urged Carter to tell Mary “she must write to me, & if she does not I’ll tell her mother.” Even if she only permitted him to write to her, then “she will have to answer me through common politeness.”65

  Lee returned to Virginia early in July 1830, though now he had no home there, and immediately went to Arlington. Within days Mary revealed her love for him, but Lee found her changed. An epiphany at their mutual uncle Fitzhugh’s sudden death propelled her toward an evangelical fervor foreign to Lee, for whom religion was still an arm’s-length affair. Seeing Fitzhugh die aged only thirty-two fixed her mind on the brevity of human existence, and in its way that may have accelerated her relations with Lee. “Strange things have happened here this Summer,” he wrote brother Carter before he left Arlington late in September. “I am engaged to Miss Mary C.” They had an understanding for a spring wedding, and already his family talked of marriage and him resigning his commission.66 Father Custis gave his permission for them to correspond, but that was all. He liked Lee, but doubted his pampered daughter could make a happy army wife.

  Even before taking ship for Georgia, Lee fell into a foul humor at separation, almost wishing he could refuse to go, though of course he would never consider disobeying an order. “I will go on,” he told her, but he felt things keenly now that he had never felt before, and it amazed him that “I may give vent to them, and act according to their dictates, but this is fast recurring to me.”67 He worked hard at the business of love letters, and knew enough of French and the works of Cervantes and Goethe to include allusions demonstrating the breadth of his education and tastes, but he refrained from hypocritically implying familiarity with works that might pander to her evangelicalism.68 Lee presented himself in his best light, but he would not pretend to be what he was not.

  In response Mary revealed a divided agendum when she began pushing him toward a faith in keeping with her own.69 She sent him books on religion, but when he looked at the pages all he saw was her.70 Longing to read sweet endearments, he got more preaching than poetry. Lee told her she was too anxious and to be patient. “I am sure no one could have a greater inducement than I have,” he admitted, “but Sweetheart don’t expect miracles in my case.” She must let time work to “make me feel what I desire, and so seek that I may find.”71 This young man who had no time for fiction and the world of imagination even fantasized about having a magic carpet to whisk him to her, only to have her scold him that the pain of parting would spoil the joy of reunion. All he wanted was to know what she was thinking and perhaps hear her laugh.72

  As Christmas approached time became a burden. “It does go so slowly here,” he told her. “The days appear to pass away, but the nights, the long nights, I sometimes think that day will never come again.”73 Feeling “a poor lone man as I am,” he craved more flirting and less proselytizing.74 “She writes me little sermons every time,” Lee complained. Condemning men’s earthly ambitions, the wickedness of soldiers and men, and his own shortcomings, “she boxes all around the compas, giving me no respite at all,” he grumbled, excusing her only because “she is young yet & knows nothing of human nature.” He credited her good intentions, but feared “she will make bad, worse.”75 He would not misrepresent himself nor give her false expectations. “Perhaps I may be better, but I see no prospect of it now,” he told her. “I have always remained the same sinful Robert Lee.”76 She did not appreciate his sense of humor, and never would. It did not help that his banter often took a sarcastic turn, as when she scolded him when he told her he found her last lecture disappointing, then backpedaled in his next letter by assuring her that “I was not ‘disappointed in my lecture this time’ for I read it more plainly than it was written & felt it more deeply than was intended.” Even flattery of “your great superiority to all in sweetness” did not deflect her. Yet within him there was a man wanting to have his way, too, frustrated with a fiancée who would not defer to him. “Recollect how good I am,” he told her rather bluntly, “and do not presume to lecture.”77

  The fact that he persisted in spite of Mary’s romantic diffidence and religious zeal is ample evidence that Lee genuinely loved her, but also of his determ
ination to be a married man. If he felt more invested in their engagement than she, his youth may be held to account. She was his first and only love after years in an emotional desert. Still, sense of duty trumped his affections. When Mary hinted that her father’s influence might get him assigned to Washington, he protested that “I could not ask another having a higher claim than myself to be set aside for my benefit.”78

  In time her tone changed, confidences became more personal, and the endearments more heartfelt. Lee even felt secure enough to begin writing about her weight—he wanted her to weigh more. He spoke of her becoming “fat & rosy,” happy that “you are getting so fat,” asking “are you perfectly fat,” scolding her when she failed to put on pounds, and telling her that at their next meeting “I do expect to find you very fat.”79 In a letter to her mother he spoke of a friend whose fiancée weighed 140 pounds, saying, “Oh bountiful nature what a quantity of love the fellow will have.”80 Perhaps Lee really preferred plump women, or he equated a fuller figure with health, and Mary already showed signs of future chronic illness. Then there was childbirth, which seemed difficult for slender women, and Lee wanted a family.

  Old Custis consented at last in March 1831, unfortunately at the same time that “Black Horse Harry” returned to the press accused of stealing millions while a diplomat.81 Lieutenant Lee well knew of Mr. Custis’s concerns about the reputations of his brother and late father. “Of these no one can be more sensible than myself, or less able to devise a remedy,” Robert wrote Mary in April. “But should I be able to escape the sins into which they have fallen, I hope the blame, which is justly their due, will not be laid to me.” This only made him the more anxious to set a date before Custis changed his mind.82 Reassignment in May to Fort Monroe at Old Point Comfort, Virginia, less than two hundred miles from Arlington, only added to his anxiety.

  By mid-May he told her “I declare I cannot wait any longer.” He threatened to demand an immediate furlough, and if his superior refused, then “Uncle Sam may go to—France—For what I care.” It was as close to profanity as Lee came, his only other occasional attempt being the anodyne “God knows for I don’t.” Though written in jest, it revealed his ill humor when he added that “I never expected You would be mine & you see how it has turned out.”83 Fearing she would take his insistence for bullying, he added that “I will not Consent that every body should yield to my wishes.” His good humor returned, and by early June he could tease her that if she did not set a date, “I will be an old Man soon, Bald, toothless & every thing else.”84

  When finally she agreed on a date doubts haunted him. Two weeks before their nuptials he told her mother that “there is nothing I covet so much as the power of benefitting those I love, though I fear it will be many years, if ever, before my means will equal my desires.”85 A week later he wrote to ask Mary “if you are as anxious as I am.” He feared she would be sorry she married him. “You have been so much at home & seen so little of mankind,” he reflected, “that you will not be prepared to find them as they are, & the change from Arlington to a Garrison of wicked & Blasphemous soldiers will be greater & more shocking to you than you are aware of.”86 Nevertheless, on June 30 at Arlington, perhaps to Lee’s amazement, it all happened without a hiccup other than an inconvenient rain. They spent a month on honeymoon at Arlington and Ravensworth, and then began Lee’s real voyage of discovery as a married man. His brother Carter thought Robert’s “fancy & recollections of the Arabian Nights,” encouraged by Mary’s red cheeks, would soon lead him to regard her as a new Queen Gulnare of the Sea.87

  Surely there was joy, yet within months sides of Mary appeared that courtship, distance, and letters had concealed. He was punctuality to a fetish; she habitually late. He never left their quarters unless impeccably uniformed; her dress sense was, at best, casual, and often just inappropriate. He wanted neatness and order in his physical environment, as befit an engineer and a West Point graduate with no demerits; she was, by his own account, absent-minded, untidy, and lazy at housekeeping, forcing Lee to apologize preemptively to guests for the state of his home. A few years after their marriage she awoke one morning to find her hair badly tangled, so she cut it all off. Lee masked embarrassment by joking that he would find her one day completely bald.88

  They were temperaments at odds. In response to the disorder of his youth, Lee wanted and needed control in all aspects of his life. He understood that, even if he could not always keep it in check, and sometimes it led to conflict. Barely thirty months after their wedding he apologized after an argument, saying, “I don’t know that I shall ever overcome my propensity for order & method But I will try.” Then he lapsed into the tones of defeat by adding, “yet for that as for anything else I am now unfit.”89 Scarcely more than a newlywed, Lee had learned resignation. “Do as you please Molly in all things,” he told her. Disagreeing over her dress, he gave up. “Since my taste is so difficult,” he told her, “I will conform to yours.” That was a man choosing his battles.90

  Mary also showed her independence by going home to Arlington, and for long periods. Less than a month after her arrival at Fort Monroe homesickness set in. “I have a husband always ready to go with me when his duties will permit,” she wrote her mother, and appreciatively confessed that “I must give him a little just commendation sometimes.”91 These were not separations in anger, but rather visits that seemed to last longer than Lee had expected. After six months at Fort Monroe, already pregnant, she returned to Arlington with her mother. She gave birth to George Washington Custis Lee on September 16, 1832, and after a brief visit to Lee, by November Mary and baby were back at Arlington. A year later they went again. Left to himself at Fort Monroe, he missed “My Sweet little Boy,” as he called little Custis. “The house is a perfect desert without him & his mother & there is no comfort in it.” He felt the absence of his bedfellow, confessing that “the want of so much that I have been accustomed to drives me from my bed sometimes before day.”92 It was scant compensation to help his boyhood friend Lieutenant Maynadier organize a dance at the post with cake, lemonade, wine, and harder spirits, if Mary was not to be there with him.93 Even the arrival of the Sauk Indian war leader Black Hawk and the Winnebago prophet Wabokieshiek in April 1833, sent to prison at Fort Monroe after their failed uprising in the northwest, captured little of his attention, with his thoughts at Arlington.94

  His tendency toward the didactic offended her independent nature. When Mary’s parents tried to help them set up house, Lee admonished that they were just starting out and “ought to contract our wishes to their smallest compass and enlarge them as opportunity offers.”95 He scolded her for not showing good sense if she suggested anything conflicting with his duty. “I must not consent to do aught that would lower me in your eyes, my own & that of others,” he told her. Rather, she must prepare to “cheer up & pack up; to lay aside unavailing regrets, & to meet with a smiling face & cheerful heart the vicissitudes of life.”96 In short, she needed to be more like him, but Mary was a wild card that did not easily fit the well-ordered pattern of his life as he saw it. Lee gradually softened his controlling impulses with Mary. There was never a lessening of affection, but rather a growth of respect and tolerance on his part, mixed with resignation at what he knew he could not change but could live with, while for her part Mary did much the same. There were tender moments, too, and passionate ones, and almost every night he read aloud to her while she sewed clothes for their growing family.97

  If Lee felt two years was too long a wait to claim his bride, Lieutenant Grant’s road to matrimony seemed endless, though in other respects the two had much in common. ’Lys soon climbed back to 137 pounds, proudly filling out his new uniform until he saw the alcoholic stableman at the inn across from the Grant home parading in a pair of light-blue pants with a strip of white sewn down the trouser seams in mimicry of Grant’s uniform. “The joke was a huge one in the mind of many of the people, and was much enjoyed by them,” Grant ruefully remembered. “I did not appreciat
e it so highly.”98 What he did not see was that the mockery was aimed at his father, Jesse Grant being an unpopular man in town.99 The son never entirely recovered from that hurt pride about his uniform. It left in him a “distaste” for military finery that never left him. With Grant, hurts felt were not soon forgotten, and sometimes never.

  Showing his disinclination to stop at the first obstacle, Grant requested transfer to the dragoons just weeks after reaching Missouri, only to be turned down.100 It is just as well, for Jefferson Barracks proved a happy posting, not least because his Academy roommate Frederick T. Dent’s family lived only a few miles away. Weekly visits from Lieutenant Grant became daily after February 1844 when seventeen-year-old daughter Julia Dent came home from school in St. Louis. Neither a plain nor a handsome girl, she suffered strabismus, as one eye wandered out of focus, making her reluctant to be photographed. She lacked beauty, but her features were strong and illuminated by smiles and laughter.

  If not immediately smitten, Grant soon was. For “two winged months,” as Julia called them, they rode almost daily.101 In April, before he left for home on a leave, Grant made a clumsy effort to propose that she somewhat flippantly dismissed. Then came orders for the 4th Infantry to leave for Louisiana, and Julia despaired of seeing him again. Grant was not to be deterred. On his way from Ohio to Louisiana he came by way of St. Louis to spend a week with the Dents, and asked her again more directly to marry him. Without saying yes, she accepted his West Point class ring as a token, saying she thought being engaged would be wonderful, but she was not sure about marriage. As Lee discovered more than a dozen years before, there was a game to be played, and it included long engagements, often long separations, and almost ritualized correspondence. Lee’s game lasted just nine months; Grant’s would be more than four years.102