As spring approached Grant became even more apprehensive over the ultimate result. Often visitors saw him pacing in the store, lost in thought, or walking the streets, the stoop-shouldered gait gone and his hat set squarely forward on his head. In his discussions with Rawlins he mused on the North’s ability to mobilize volunteers, and spoke more of his West Point education and Mexican War experience, and what they might fit him for in the crisis. He said he had a debt to his country.102 Then came April.
Grant was in the store when he saw a newspaper account of the firing on Sumter. On April 16, two days after Sumter’s surrender, citizens held a public meeting at the courthouse. Mayor Robert Brand first rose to speak. The Breckinridge Democrat called for calming passions and compromise and proposed a peace resolution. Outraged citizens wanted more than that, and the following speeches stood strongly for the Union and an armed response. Then Rawlins took the stage. Standing beneath the Stars and Stripes, he spent nearly an hour declaring that the time for compromise was gone and they must “appeal to the God of Battles to vindicate our flag.” One face in that crowd was Grant, who admired Rawlins’s stand for the Union.103
The next day Lincoln issued his call for 75,000 volunteers to serve for ninety days in putting down the rebelloion, and the following day men met again at the courthouse to initiate raising a local company. The meeting wanted a military man to preside, and suddenly Galena remembered Captain Grant. It needed prompting but he took the gavel, mumbled a few things about their reason for coming together, then called on speakers who held forth to arouse the crowd. Twenty-two men volunteered for a company they decided to call the Jo Daviess Guard. Someone logically nominated Grant as captain of the company, but he declined, though promised he would help in raising and training the company in any way he could.104
When the meeting concluded, Grant walked out of the courthouse and down the steps with his father’s friend C. R. Perkins. “I’ll not do much more work in the store,” he told Perkins. “I shall go into the army.” Asked how he proposed to go in, Grant said he would “do anything—take the first chance that offers and work my way up.” The nation had educated him and now it had a right to his services.105 Yet he turned down the captaincy of the Jo Daviess Guard. The reason was simple. Illinois’s quota was six regiments, and Grant told Rawlins and others that as an experienced soldier, even if only a captain, he hoped to get command of one. He thought a regiment was where he could best serve, and though he did not then say so, he had to know that whenever peace came, his prospects would be enhanced to some degree by being Colonel Grant.106
Over the next two days Grant, Rawlins, Smith, and others enlisted more men in Galena, and traveled to nearby Hanover and other towns, where Grant actually made a brief speech or two, his first since school. “In this season I saw new energies in Grant,” said Rawlins, and Grant himself felt the change.107 “Now is the time, particularly in the border Slave states, for men to prove their love of country,” he said, telling his father that “evry one must be for or against his country, and show his colors.” Democrats must work with Republicans, as did his friend Rawlins, and as Grant was doing insofar as he still felt himself a Democrat. Old party distinctions must yield to standing by the government and its laws. “Whatever may have been my political opinions before I have but one sentiment now,” he said. There were only two allegiances, “Traitors & Patriots,” and he predicted that the North would step forward in massive force. “I tell you there is no mistaking the feelings of the people,” he told Jesse. He believed Lincoln could enlist ten times his 75,000 if need be, and rightly gauged Northern willingness to sacrifice not only men but money to support them.
Grant blamed the crisis on the South, while crediting Lincoln with restraint. “In all this I can but see the doom of Slavery,” he forecast. Doubting that the North wanted to interfere with the institution where it existed, he predicted that Northerners would refuse to sanction slavery anywhere unless the seceding states came back. The rebellion would destroy the South’s domination of the cotton trade by stimulating other nations to accelerate production to guarantee a steady supply, and that, in turn, would depreciate the value of slaves until they were not worth fighting for.108 In rebelling to protect slavery, the South would destroy both it and itself.
By April 20 enlistments rose to eighty, and the Jo Daviess Guard tried once more to elect Grant their captain, yet again he declined. He believed that so many men would step forward to fill Illinois’s quota that he would not be needed immediately. Meanwhile, he would do all he could to organize and equip the regiment, and agreed to take them to Springfield. His friend Smith had already been called there as an aide to the governor, and when he left Grant told him to tell the governor that “if I can be of any use to him in the organization of the regiments, I will be glad to do what I can.”109 Grant intended when he reached the capital to call on the governor in person to offer his services organizing volunteers. Meanwhile, Grant sought his father’s approval of his conduct thus far, a habit he never entirely broke, and advised his parents to leave Kentucky if they feared any retaliation for Jesse’s outspoken views on slavery. “I would never stultify my opinions for the sake of a little security,” he said, and knew Jesse would not either.110
The old quartermaster in Grant came to the fore now as he consulted local tailors and seamstresses to make uniforms for the volunteers, spending much of his time overseeing their completion.111 Remarkably, the men were all uniformed within a few days, and meanwhile from the morning after their enlistment Grant occasionally paraded them in a field, dividing them into squads and putting them through the elements of drill as they shouldered pine staves as mock muskets.112 By the afternoon of April 25, just a week after its birth, the Jo Daviess Guard were ready to leave for Springfield to muster into state service and join other companies in forming one of the new regiments. The city gave the volunteers a grand parade filled by two bands, the local Masonic lodge, the city council, and more. Only after a ceremony presenting the company with a flag did Grant appear carrying a carpetbag with clothes for the two or three days he expected to be away. He marched on with the company, not at its head, but in the last rank, until they reached the Illinois Central depot.113 As the volunteers boarded, Rawlins listened as Grant spoke of his hopes for getting a regiment and the right place for the faithful Rawlins in such a unit. When they parted Grant told him, “Rawlings [sic], if I see anything that will suit you I’ll send you word.”114 He never really lived in Galena again.
Grant and Lee were not men of big ideas. They reflected little if at all on man and his place in the universe, the nature of democracy, or freedom, or liberty. They were two one-time Whigs turned quasi-Democrats, at least in spirit, with one of them now drifting in the crisis back toward the Republicans. Competing loyalties drove Lee, yet he always knew there was only one way for him to turn in the end. Even as he felt himself nearing the close of a career he regarded as largely unsuccessful, now he looked ahead to a service he dreaded but could not refuse, in a cause he deplored, and which he feared might only cap his professional failure with personal and regional ruin. He was not a happy man and had not been for some years. He saw nothing ahead but questions for himself and his people, all at risk of being answered disastrously. For his part, Grant knew the face of failure intimately, but was finally achieving at least a kind of basic security and domestic stability he had not known before. He may not have been prosperous, but he was happy. The crisis brought no tugs on his loyalties. From the moment of the firing on Fort Sumter he saw through all secondary matters, like family or party alliances, that there was only one question and only one answer, and his was the Union at any cost.
Each man embraced instinctive feelings about what it meant to be an American and what his country ought to be. Within a matter of hours in the bloom of springtime, each committed himself to war to try to give those feelings life.
6
“WHAT HAS BECOME OF GEN. LEE?”—“WHO IS GENERAL GRANT?”
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bsp; GRANT DESCRIBED HIS trip to Springfield as “a perfect ovation.”1 At every stop crowds cheered the volunteers. During a three-hour delay at Decatur waiting for their connecting train, he took the company into a field near the station and drilled them to a crowd’s delight.2 When he delivered them to the rendezvous at Camp Yates, he expected to return to Galena but Governor Richard Yates asked him to inspect the state’s arsenal.3 Then on May 1 Yates assigned him to the state adjutant general’s office to impose order on a mountain of paperwork. Though little interested in the job, Grant resolved that “I am in to do all I can and will do my best.”4 At least he understood the forms, but he grew restive at clerk’s work in a dimly lit room with only a table and chair, seeing no one, for $2 a day. He told a Galena volunteer “I am tired of this” and resolved to return to Galena if need be. Prominent men in Galena even then advised Yates not to lose Grant and the governor listened, asked him to stay, and promised important work for him.5 “I do not know that I shall receive any benefit from this but it does no harm,” he told Julia.6
Meanwhile, he witnessed the mad log-rolling for colonelcies. “I was perfectly sickened at the political wire pulling for all these commissions,” he told Jesse. Of the first six colonels Yates appointed, not one had any experience, and only one was a West Pointer. With governors handing out the commissions, other politicians stood front of the line for places. Had Grant taken the captaincy of the Galena company, he would now be a subordinate officer in a regiment commanded by some politico. “I shall be no ways backward in offering my services when and where they are required,” he resolved, “but I feel that I have done more now than I could do serving as a Capt. under a green Colonel.”7 His time could yet come.
He saw determination all around him, believing “there is such a feeling aroused through the country now as has not been known since the Revolution.”8 Reflecting on the sort of conflict that might lie ahead, he concluded it would be a short war, something over ninety days, with little bloodshed. Just as in Mexico, he studied a map, and his instinct suggested that control of the rivers and coastal waters might be more decisive than grand battles, and thought Lincoln should strike first at the forts guarding cotton state ports like Charleston, Savannah, Mobile, and New Orleans. That would isolate the rebellion from foreign support and trap cotton in the South where it could not finance insurrection. He also looked at Cairo at the southern tip of Illinois, where the Ohio flowed into the Mississippi, making it vital to keeping both rivers open to Union traffic.9 A Union victory would fatally cripple slavery, he concluded, and “the nigger will never disturb this country again.” Concerned that slaves might take advantage of Confederate defeat to rise up in mindless insurrection, he foresaw Northerners working with Southerners to restore order. Apparently he expected slavery to die of its own weight.10
When Yates sent Grant to muster companies, he got close enough to St. Louis to see Dent, arriving late on May 9 to find the city in two armed camps.11 Pro-Union citizens organized under Captain Nathaniel Lyon and Francis Preston Blair Jr. to protect the arsenal, while secessionists gathered at Camp Jackson commanded by Grant’s old friend Daniel M. Frost with that arsenal in their sights. The next day he learned that the Unionists were marching on Camp Jackson. “I very much fear bloodshed,” he scribbled to Julia, then went to the street himself.12 He found Blair forming men for the march. The two had not met before, but after introducing himself Grant wished Blair success. When he later heard that Frost surrendered without a fight, Grant returned to the arsenal to welcome the victors, who were stoned and fired at by secessionists along their march. Among the onlookers now was the manager of a streetcar company, William T. Sherman, himself soon to don a uniform.13
Grant finally returned to Galena on May 23 and wrote to Washington to offer his services, suggesting that he could manage a regiment of infantry. Washington never answered.14 Inactivity nagged him with a feeling that he was neglecting a duty to serve the Union, so he returned to Springfield, where he heard that some suggested he be handed a regiment he helped raise in Mattoon, now led by a colonel who could not cope. When he heard nothing more, however, he left for Covington and a quick visit to his parents.15 En route he stopped in Cincinnati to call on McClellan, now a major general in charge of Ohio volunteers, to seek a place on his staff, but the new general kept him waiting until he gave up and left. On the return trip Grant stopped in Lafayette, Indiana, to stay with his West Point classmate Joseph Reynolds, now colonel of the 10th Indiana Infantry. That evening they dined with Congressman Daniel Mace, and someone mentioned a rumor of a slave insurrection in Louisiana.16 An Ohio colonel declared that he would take his regiment out of battle, if necessary, to cooperate with Confederates in “reducing the slaves to obedience.” Quiet until then, as usual, Grant spoke up to say, “I must tell you a man who can express such a sentiment as that is, is not far from being a traitor.” Only Mace’s intervention prevented an altercation.17
Unexpected news came that evening in a telegram forwarded from Covington. Yates had appointed Grant colonel of the Mattoon regiment. Presented with a command, he suddenly felt a bit overwhelmed. Could he handle 1,000 men? he wondered. His host’s brother William Reynolds strongly urged him to accept, and ultimately Grant reasoned that he could do as well as many other new colonels he had seen.18 Appreciatively, he wrote Julia that his friend Reynolds “has just the nicest family of brothers you ever saw.”19
The first meeting with his regiment at Camp Yates was inauspicious. The men were not impressed with his appearance. “D—n such a Colonel,” some said in his hearing, and one who made to shadow box at him behind his back accidentally hit Grant between the shoulders. He was not amused, and promised them not to judge a man by his clothes.20 Still, he immediately went home and borrowed money to be fitted for a colonel’s uniform, and when he returned he took command at once.21 His predecessor had no concept of discipline, and the press declared that “a splendid regiment was being rapidly demoralized through the incapacity of their commander.”22 Grant combined discipline and leniency to turn them around, allowing no excuses for duties not performed, and promising swift punishment.23 The first time men tested him by leaving guard posts, he arrested the offenders and announced that the prescribed penalty was death. He withheld it this time, but promised “it will not be excused again.”24 He soon found that the men respected his strictness, and insubordination quickly disappeared.25 Grant and his officers themselves set example by abstaining from liquor and profanity. Word went out that Grant himself was a “total-abstinence” man and “bitterly opposed to profane swearing.”26
He took his regiment, now designated the 21st Illinois, to Quincy on the bank of the Mississippi opposite Missouri. Instead of going by train, he marched them the hundred miles to give them seasoning, covering forty miles in the first three days. On the way Grant reinforced his example by personally driving away a liquor salesman who tried to do business near his camp.27 When they reached Quincy on July 11, he found himself under the command of Brigadier General Stephen Hurlbut, one of the very political generals he hoped to avoid.28 Three days later came orders for what might be Grant’s first action. Mounted secessionists under Colonel Thomas Harris were threatening the North Missouri Railroad in the vicinity of Mexico, Missouri. Hurlbut told Grant to join two other regiments in driving them away. Resolved to do his best, he told Jesse that “I hope you will have only a good account of me,” yet he felt a strange apprehension, the anxiety of the responsibility of command. “My heart is in the cause I have espoused,” he wrote on the eve of leaving. “However I may have disliked party Republicanism there has never been a day that I would not have taken up arms for a Constitutional Administration.”29
Then he learned that he and his five hundred would be alone facing Harris’s reported twelve hundred, a number he thought exaggerated, but still he expected to be outnumbered. Nevertheless, he spoke confidently of dispersing the rebels, his optimism apparent again.30 Approaching Harris’s camp, however, he felt growing appr
ehension. Then as he crested a hill, immediate relief embraced him when he saw the camp abandoned. He had not considered that Harris might be just as fearful of him, as he had been of Harris. Grant learned by such experiences, and here he learned not to fear his foe. A day later he dismissed the episode as just “a little march south.”31
Something more than a little march led two ill-trained armies to clash on July 21 in northern Virginia, near Manassas Junction. As much by accident as design the Confederates won a fine victory, sending a shock of humiliation and resolve even to distant Missouri, where Grant found that “since the defeat of our troops at Manassas things look more gloomy.”32 It might not be as short a war as he expected. “I have changed my mind so much that I dont know what to think,” he told his sister Mary. The rebellion still could not endure for long. It might last through the spring of 1862, but he confessed “there is no telling when they may be subdued.”33 Visible evidence of that were the disloyal citizens in Missouri. His department commander, Major General John C. Frémont in St. Louis, gave no guidelines on dealing with them, so on his own authority Grant authorized seizure of wagon teams and provisions from the disloyal, but wanted it done “so as to make it as little offensive as possible,” hoping not to further disaffect citizens much like Julia’s father.34 He forbore pressing charges when possible, understanding that leniency could keep opposition from moving from words to action.35
Crucible of Command Page 17
