Crucible of Command

by William C. Davis

  60REL to James Everett, August 1, 1852, Lee Family Papers, VHS.

  61REL to C. C. Baldwin, October 18, 1854, Bowery and Hankinson, Daily Correspondence, p. 229; Joseph Glover Baldwin, Party Leaders: Sketches of Thomas Jefferson, Alex’r Hamilton, Andrew Jackson, Henry Clay, John Randolph of Roanoke, including Notices of Many Other Distinguished American Statesmen (New York: D. Appleton, 1854), pp. 238–39, 355. See John Grammer, “The Republican Historical Vision: Joseph Glover Baldwin’s Party Leaders,” Southern Literary Journal, 25, no. 2 (Spring, 1993), pp. 3ff.

  62REL to C. C. Baldwin, October 18, 1854, Bowery and Hankinson, Daily Correspondence, p. 229.

  63REL to MCL, August 20, 1855, Adams, Letters, p. 51.

  64William Moran, The Belles of New England: The Women of the Textile Mills and the Families Whose Wealth They Wove (New York: St. Martin’s, 2002), p. 68.

  65REL to MCL, December 27, 1856, Adams, Letters, pp. 245–46.

  66Boston, American Traveller, December 28, 1857.

  67REL to the Editor, January 4, 1858, Arlington, Gazette, January 5, 1858.

  68Decker and McSween, Historical Arlington, pp. 80–81.

  69Pryor misreads the will when she states that it “called for land to be sold to pay the debts and legacies, and never states that these obligations should take precedence over freeing the slaves” (Reading the Man, p. 265). The Custis will is clear that lands are to be sold “to assist in paying my granddaughters’ legacies,” “to aid in paying my granddaughters’ legacies,” and “are charged with the payment of the legacies of my granddaughters” (italics author’s). Nowhere does he state or imply that the legacies are solely to be funded from land sales. And the will could not be more clear that the estates must be cleared of debt and the bequests funded before the slaves were to be emancipated. Indeed, the land could only be sold after cleared of debt, and after it had time to produce income to fund the legacies.

  70MCL to William G. Webster, February 17, 1858, quoted in Michael Fellman, The Making of Robert E. Lee (New York: Random House, 2000), p. 71.

  71REL to Edward Turner, February 12, 1858, Adams, Letters, pp. 459; 1860 Census, Fairfax County, Virginia. McQuinn’s family is enumerated immediately next to the Lees, indicating that he was living on the property.

  72REL to GWCL, January 17, 1858, Adams, Letters, pp. 456–57.

  73REL to MCL, January 7, 1857, Adams, Letters, pp. 257–58, REL to A. E. S. Keese, April 28, 1858, p. 473, REL to William O. Winston, July 8, 1858, July 10, 1858, Lee Family Papers, VHS; REL to Winston, July 12, 1858, Gilder Lehrman Collection.

  74REL to A. E. S. Keese, April 28, 1858, Adams, Letters, pp. 472–73; Baltimore, Sun, April 21, 1858.

  75REL to MCL, March 3, 1860, Adams, Letters, p. 579, REL to GWCL, December 5, 1860, pp. 702–703.

  76REL to GWCL, January 17, 1858, Adams, Letters, p. 456.

  77REL to Irvin McDowell, October 22, 1858, ibid., p. 504.

  78Wesley’s reference to his sister and fellow runaway Mary is somewhat confusing. Census records do not show a Mary Norris connected to the family until the 1900 census for Fairfax County, when a Mary Norris is shown living with her sister Selena Norris Gray, but her birth is given as December 1865 and her age as thirty-four. So she cannot be the Mary who escaped with Wesley in 1859. There is no question he had a sister known by that name at least between 1858 and 1862, for she appears as such on An Inventory of the Slaves at Arlington belonging to the Estate of G. W. P. Custis taken January 1, 1858 (reproduced in Arlington House [Washington: National Park Service, n.d.], p. 7), which lists Leonard and Sallie Norris and their children Wesley, Mary, and Sally, a “child.” Their other daughter Selina appears as Selina Grey on the list with her husband Thornton Grey. On December 29, 1862, in the document of final emancipation of the Custis slaves, the Norrises again appear as Leonard, Sallie, Wesley, Mary, and Sally (Robert E. Lee Papers, Museum of the Confederacy, Richmond, VA). In 1866 Wesley refers to her as Mary. Yet in the 1870 census for Fairfax County, Virginia, the Norrises enumerated are Leonard, Sallie, Wesley, and Sarah, now Sarah Hoffman, whom the 1900 Fairfax County census shows being born in February 1838. She is almost certainly the “Sally” referred to in the 1858 inventory and 1862 emancipation, though at age nineteen in 1858 her listing as a “child” seems odd. Wesley stated in 1866 that Mary was then living and working in Washington, and while several black and mulatto Mary Norrises can be found there in 1870 and beyond, none seem to fit her admittedly skimpy description.

  79Westminster, MD, Carroll County Democrat, June 2, 1859.

  80It is not possible to date the actual punishment, but extant sources combined would suggest sometime during the week of June 10–17, 1859.

  81Anonymous to the editor, June 19, 1859, New York, Tribune, June 24, 1859.

  82Ibid. The writer signed himself only as “A,” but he may have given away his identity when he ended his letter with a rant. “Next to Mount Vernon, we associate ‘the Custis place’ with the ‘Father of the free country’,” he wrote. “Shall ‘Washington’s body guard’ be thus tampered with, and never a voice raised for such helplessness?” Eighteen months earlier the Washington letter writer “Alpha” raised the same questions about the timing of freedom for the Custis slaves, and the supposed sequestering of the will, closing his letter with a similar allusion to Washington: “It would be awful if the last remaining member of the household of Washington should not be allowed, should be prevented by fraud, from carrying out those precepts which he had learned, standing by the knee, and hearing from the lips, of that immortal Sage.” (Boston, American Traveller, December 28, 1857.)

  83REL to Custis Lee, July 2, 1859. RR Auction Autograph Blog, August 3, 2011

  84Alexandria, Gazette, June 30, 1859.

  85Washington, Post in Rockford, IL, Republican, July 25, 1861; Hartford, CT, Daily Courant, May 14, 1863.

  86Sibley, “Robert E. Lee to Albert Sidney Johnston, 1857,” p. 102n.

  87REL to Lorenzo Thomas, June 16, 1859, Adams, Letters, pp. 534–35.

  88Milwaukee, Semi-Weekly Madison, March 31, 1866. This is the earliest appearance of the Norris statement found to date, though it could have appeared earlier.

  89No record of Lee ordering other whippings has come to light. Fellman, Lee, p. 65, says that “enlightened masters” often sent their unruly slaves to local jails to be whipped by constables, but provides no source.

  90Wesley Norris returned to Arlington within days of arriving at Union lines. On September 22 Union authorities gave Wesley a pass to enter Washington for ten days, and then again ten more days from October 6, to check on the safety of family members, perhaps looking for Mary. She found her way home, too, and got a pass into Washington on October 21, and again November 16, to visit the Syphax family, former Arlington slaves themselves. By the end of 1864 she was living with or near her parents at Arlington once more (Boston, Liberator, December 9, 1864). Over the next two years Mary got employment with the French legation in Washington, and then fell out of sight, while Wesley returned to Arlington and his family. There he lived with first his parents, and then his sister Sarah Hoffman and her family, until 1900, when he disappeared from the record (United States Census, 1870, 1880, 1900, Fairfax County, VA.

  91USG to Julia, August 7, 1848, PUSG, 1, p. 163.

  92USG to Roger Jones, December 17, 1848, ibid., p. 168.

  93USG to Oscar Winship, March 9, 1849, ibid., p. 181.

  94USG to John B. Grayson, November 12, 1851, ibid., pp. 231–32.

  95USG to Julia, April 27, 1849, ibid., p. 184, May 20, 1849, p. 187, May 26, 1849, pp. 188–89, USG to Ellen Dent, May 26, 1849, pp. 189–90.

  96USG to Oscar F. Winship, June 14, 1850, ibid., p. 194 and n. On August 10, 1850 a census taker found the Grants living with Julia’s parents in the 2d Ward, St. Louis, St. Louis County, Missouri. However, they appeared again on the census for the 4th Ward on September 9, 1850, as passengers enumerated aboard the Excelsior. 1850 Census, St. Louis County, Missouri.

  97D
eposition, January 10, 1851, PUSG, 1, p. 195 and n. This is a curious document. As cited it comes from the original at the Detroit Historical Museum, which says the property owner was Antoine Beaubien, who had been a prominent early settler and city father. But Beaubien died in 1850, so would not have been the occupant in January 1851.

  The document first appeared in print in the Cincinnati, Daily Enquirer, March 10, 1868, but in this case shows the property owner as “Zachary” Chandler. The story first broke into print in that same issue of the Daily Enquirer, an anti-Grant paper whose story maintained that Grant was “drunk all the time” while in Detroit, and that after the court ruling in his favor he lashed Chandler with a rawhide whip on Jefferson Street. A pro-Grant rejoinder soon appeared, written by James Brisbin, who was working at the time on a biography of Grant, and claimed that he had the story from “an officer who was serving in Grant’s regiment at the time of the occurrence.” It appeared in the Cincinnati, Daily Gazette, April 14, 1868, and told a different story. Both versions agree that Grant himself suffered an injured leg and that Chandler defended himself before a jury by charging that the soldiers would not fall on his walk “if you soldiers would keep sober.” This was not necessarily a specific allegation of drunkenness aimed at Grant, but it is certainly implied. Supposedly Grant talked for several days about whipping Chandler, but then calmed and the affair ended. Brisbin’s April 1868 account is the earliest pro-Grant version, and was clearly the major source for Albert D. Richardson’s account appearing in A Personal History or Ulysses S. Grant (Hartford: American Publishing, 1868), pp. 134–35, in September 1868. Richardson amended the story by maintaining that fifteen years later in 1866, when Grant visited Chandler in Detroit, the two men laughed over the incident. Grant did, in fact, visit Detroit on September 4, 1866 (Salem, MA, Register, September 6, 1866), but at that time Chandler was in Philadelphia attending a convention (Boston, Daily Advertiser, September 5, 1866). Grant did not mention the subject in his memoirs, though he did describe Chandler running for mayor at the time he was stationed at Detroit. Consequently, it is uncertain just how much to make of either version of the document. It may be worth remembering that Richardson was probably the first pro-Grant biographer to assert that Grant did battle the bottle a few years later.

  98USG to Julia, May 28, 1851, PUSG, 1, p. 203, June 4, 1851, p. 205, June 7, 1851, p. 207.

  99USG to Julia, June 16, 1851, ibid., p. 210.

  100USG to Julia, June 22, 1851, ibid., p. 211, June 29, 1851, p. 214, July 3, 1851, pp. 216–17, July 13, 1851, pp. 219–20.

  101USG to Jesup, May 26, 1852, ibid., p. 232.

  102USG to Julia, June 24, 1852, ibid., p. 238, June 28, 1852, pp. 240–41, July 1, 1852, p. 243.

  103USG to Julia, July 5, 1852, ibid., p. 247.

  104USG to Julia, July 15, 1852, ibid., p. 248.

  105For an excellent, and generally reliable, extended account of this journey, see Charles G. Ellington, The Trial of U. S. Grant: The Pacific Coast Years, 1852–1854 (Glendale, CA: Arthur H. Clark, 1986), pp. 39–70 passim. See also Henry D. Wallen to “My Dear Colonel,” August 2, 1852, Plattsburgh, NY, Republican, September 11, 1852, and “An Officer of the Army to “My Dear Sir,” August 16, 1852, Washington, Daily National Intelligencer, September 16, 1852.

  106USG to Julia, August 9, 1852, PUSG, 1, pp. 251–52, October 26, 1852, p. 269–70; “An Officer of the Army to “My Dear Sir,” August 16, 1852, Washington, Daily National Intelligencer, September 16, 1852; St. Louis, Daily Missouri Republican, December 5, 1852.

  107New London, CT, Democrat, October 9, 1852.

  108USG to Julia, August 16, 1852, PUSG, 1, p. 255.

  109USG to Julia, July 15, 1852, ibid., p. 248.

  110USG to Julia, August 20, 1852, ibid., pp. 257–58.

  111USG to Julia, December 3, 1852, ibid., pp. 274–75.

  112USG to July, July 13, 1853, ibid., p. 307.

  113USG to Julia, August 16, 1852, ibid., p. 255.

  114USG to Julia, September 14, 1852, ibid., p. 263.

  115USG to Julia, August 20, 1852, ibid., p. 257, September 9, 1852, p. 266.

  116USG to Jesup, September 8, 1853, ibid., p. 312n.

  117USG to Julia, September 19, 1852, ibid., p. 266.

  118USG to Julia, October 7, 1852, ibid., pp. 267–68.

  119USG to Julia, October 26, 1852, ibid., p. 269.

  120USG to Julia, December 3, 1852, ibid., p. 275.

  121USG to Julia, December 19, 1852, ibid., p. 278.

  122USG to Julia, January 29, 1853, ibid., p. 285, March 19, 1853, p. 294.

  123USG to Julia, February 15, 1853, ibid., p. 289.

  124USG to Julia, March 4, 1853, ibid., p. 291.

  125USG to Julia, March 19, 1853, ibid., p. 295.

  126USG to Julia, March 31, 1853, ibid., p. 297.

  127USG to Julia, May 20, 1853, ibid., p. 299.

  128USG to Julia, March 19, 1853, ibid., p. 296.

  129USG to Osborn Cross, July 25, 1853, ibid., pp. 308–10.

  130USG to Julia, June 15, 1853, ibid., p. 301, June 28, 1853, pp. 304–305.

  131USG to Julia, June 15, 1853, ibid., p. 301, June 28, 1853, pp. 304–305. During his California visit he made arrangements to “do a conciderable business, in a commission way, if I could but stay.”

  132USG to Thomas H. Stevens, July 13, 1853, PUSG, 32, p. 12, Court Docket, August 1853, 1, p. 416.

  133USG to Julia, June 28, 1853, PUSG, 1, p. 304, July 13, 1853, p. 306.

  134Letter of George Phelan to Sporting Life, 1900, Portland, Oregonian, July 15, 1900.

  135George Alfred Townsend, writing as “Gath” in the Philadelphia, Press, seemed to have considerable knowledge of this enterprise. Augusta, GA, Chronicle, December 28, 1879.

  136Lease, October 5, 1853, San Francisco, Bulletin, November 5, 1879. This lease has been a bit confused from careless readings. It is referenced in “Scraps,” Historical Magazine, 2d Series, 2 (September 1867), p. 179, mistakenly saying that Hall was Grant and Wallen’s partner, while the lessor was Stevens. The Historical Magazine is calendared in PUSG, 32, p. 144, where it is further confused by saying Grant had three officer partners, and that the lease stipulates that it is to be used “only as a private billiard room.” The original says nothing about the billiard room being “private,” only specifying that no business other than billiards was to be pursued on the premises. The day after signing the lease, Isaac M. Hall advertised the opening of the Union Hotel Billiard Saloon, suggesting that he operated it on behalf of the officer partners, since their postings required them to be elsewhere. San Francisco, Evening Journal, October 11, 1853.

  137Grant’s authorization is attached to Lease, October 5, 1853, San Francisco, Bulletin, November 5, 1879. It is printed with the date 1855, but this is clearly a typographical error. First Grant states that he is “of the 4th U.S. Infantry,” which was not the case in 1855, and he signs and dates the document “San Francisco,” whereas on that date in 1855 he was in St Louis. Augusta, GA, Chronicle, December 28, 1879.

  138USG to Vogelsandt & Gulliper, June 28, 1855, PUSG, 32, p. 144.

  139USG to Julia, May 20, 1853, PUSG, 1, p. 300, Z. Holt to USG, October 17, 1865, 32, p. 421. The Holt letter mentions a note Grant owed Hiram Thorn, or Thorns, dated January 4, 1854. Grant told Julia in his January 18, 1854, letter (p. 315) that it took him two days to reach Fort Humboldt by ship, and other records date his arrival at January 5. Hence, if the dates are all correct, Grant signed the note due to Thorns the same day his ship left San Francisco.

  140USG to Julia, February 2, 1854, PUSG, 1, p. 317, March 6, 1854, p. 323.

  141It may be significant that no letters from Grant to Julia have survived for the six months prior to his arrival at Fort Humboldt. This could be read as a sign of withdrawal and depression, though more likely it is simply a case of failure to survive the years. Grant’s January 18, 1854, letter clearly implies that Julia already knew where he was going, which in turn is evidence of earlier correspondence now lost.

>   142USG to Julia, February 2, 1854, ibid., pp. 316–18.

  143USG to Julia, February 6, 1854, ibid., pp. 320–22.

  144USG to Julia, March 6, 1854, ibid., pp. 323–24, March 25, 1854, p. 326.

  145USG to Julia, February 6, 1854, ibid., pp. 320, March 25, 1854, p. 326.

  146“The Brett Street Idea,” Architectural Legacy, 2, no. 3 (Spring/Summer 2011), p. 2. The barkeeper’s given name is sometimes stated as William, but in the 1850 census for Eureka he gave his name as Richard Brett and in the 1860 census for Eureka as Richard W. Brett. See Ellington, Trial, p. 176.

  147There is an extensive body of legend that Grant at this stage in his life was either an alcoholic or at least drank so excessively at Fort Humboldt and elsewhere on the Pacific Coast that he was virtually forced to resign in disgrace to avoid dismissal. This is all based on a considerable array of mythology, and virtually no contemporary evidence. Some appears in Clara McGeorge Shields, “General Grant At Fort Humboldt In The Early Days,” Eureka, CA, Humboldt Times, November 10, 1912, in Ulysses S. Grant Association Newsletter, 8, no. 3 (April 1971), pp. 23ff, a highly unreliable retailing of recollections that were, for the most part, almost sixty years old when the author collected them. More will be found in the recollections collected by Hamlin Garland for his Grant biography; they are almost as old, being for the most part written in the 1890s. Moreover it should be remembered that, in fact, up until 1862, there is only one directly contemporaneous source claiming that Grant drank too much, the John W. Lowe letter May 12, 1848 (see chapter 2), and context makes its veracity muddy at least. Only one extant document from Grant’s Pacific Coast period directly links him with alcohol, and that is his purchase, as quartermaster and commissary, of a dozen bottles of brandy for one of the railroad survey expeditions he fitted out (Invoice, July 23, 1853, PUSG, 32, p. 144). Not one of the other sources associating Grant with alcohol in California or Oregon 1852–1854 are contemporaneous. For instance, the earliest known claim that Grant drank to excess in California dates from 1863, and is a ten-year-old thirdhand account of Grant’s supposedly spending a winter at Knight’s Ferry where “he did nothing but drink whiskey and get tight” (Ellington, Trial, p. 88). Grant spent only two winters on the Pacific Coast, the first (1852–1853) entirely in Oregon more than seven hundred miles from Knight’s Ferry, and the second (1853–1854) uninterruptedly at Fort Humboldt almost three hundred miles distant. In fact, Grant’s only visits to Knight’s Ferry were in August 1852 for no more than a few days, something less than a week in late May 1853, and possibly a week or more in May 1854 on his way home (USG to Julia, August 20, 1852, PUSG, 1, p. 256, August 30, 1852, p. 258, May 20, 1853, p. 299, May 2, 1854, p. 332). After this one deeply flawed source (which could have been influenced by the 1862 press reports on Grant’s drinking), almost a quarter century passed before anyone else came forward claiming to have knowledge of Grant’s drinking habits in California. A good compilation of these various sources is in Ellington, Trial, pp. 165–89, though the author fails to adequately assess the context of some of the examples he includes. Several indicate that Grant was not a drunkard or habitual drinker, though he might go on “a spree” two or three times a year, while others attest that he suffered alcoholism, knew it, and drank spirits only sparingly as a result. One former officer of the 4th Infantry did claim that Grant was a habitual drinker of whisky, gulping down large glasses of it several times a day. However, that same officer was dismissed from the service for disloyalty in 1863. After the Civil War Grant lent him no assistance as he fought for reinstatement, hence his account of Grant’s drinking, written in 1897, can hardly be accepted as disinterested.