Read Online Grant and Sherman: The Friendship that Won the Civil War by Charles Bracelen Flood - Free Book Online
Authors: Charles Bracelen Flood
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mass meeting; Ulysses S. Grant, the only man in town who had served as an officer in the Regular Army, was pressed into duty as chairman. The citizens voted to form a company of foot soldiers to be known as the Jo Daviess Guards, named for Jo Daviess County, of which Galena was the county seat. Asked if he would take command of what soon became a hundred volunteers, Grant declined, saying that he intended to offer his services at a higher level, but he threw himself into the business of organizing the town’s company and readying these recruits to proceed to a camp outside the state capital of Springfield for training. “I never went into our leather store after that meeting,” Grant said, “to put up a package or do other business.”
Suddenly this quiet man was everywhere, helping the patriotically minded ladies of Galena order the right kind of cloth for uniforms from a dry-goods merchant appropriately named Felt, and telling the tailors at Corwith Brothers what the dark blue uniforms should look like. He showed the company’s newly elected captain how to drill the men: the entire state of Illinois had only 905 muskets and rifles on hand, 300 of which needed repairs, so the Jo Daviess Guards had their first instruction in the manual of arms using wooden laths instead of real weapons.
By the end of the first week, Grant had a tentative plan for himself: Galena’s congressman Elihu Washburne, who had given a fiery patriotic speech at the meeting that voted the Jo Daviess Guards into being, told Grant that he should go with the new company when they went to Springfield. At the state capital, Washburne told Grant, he would use his influence with the governor to find him a suitable position in the state’s effort to mobilize. Writing to his father in Kentucky, Grant urged him to come north from that border state, which might explode in violence at any time, and added that his own duty was clear: “Having been educated for such an emergency, at the expense of the Government,” he must offer his services in the conflict that had begun. At the moment he thought he might be gone for as long as three months. Of his wife’s reaction to both the national crisis and his intention to serve, he told his father that “Julia takes a very sensible view of the present difficulties. She would be sorry to have me go, but thinks the circumstances may warrant it and will not through [throw] a single obsticle [sic] in the way.”
That was not the entire picture of Julia’s feelings. A woman from a slaveholding family, married to a man who might soon be fighting against the South, she hoped that her home state of Missouri could be kept in the Union, and she had followed closely the events leading to the attack on Fort Sumter. Julia later wrote:
Oh! how intensely interesting the papers were that winter! My dear husband Ulys read aloud to me every speech for and against secession. I was very much disturbed in my political sentiments, feeling that the states had a right to go out of the Union if they wished to, and yet thought it the duty of the national government to prevent a dismemberment of the Union, even if coercion should be necessary. Ulys was much amused by my enthusiasm and said I was a little inconsistent when I talked of states’ rights, but that I was all right on the duties of national government.
The news of Confederate shells landing on a United States Army post at Fort Sumter evidently resolved the question of Julia’s loyalties. “I remember now with astonishment the feeling that took possession of me in the spring of ’61. When reading patriotic speeches, my blood seemed to course more rapidly through my veins.” She added, “Galena was throbbing with patriotism.”
Two days before his thirty-ninth birthday, Grant said good-bye to Julia and their four children and headed downtown, wearing a tired old civilian suit, a slouch hat, and the faded army overcoat he had worn peddling firewood in St. Louis,
Suddenly this quiet man was everywhere, helping the patriotically minded ladies of Galena order the right kind of cloth for uniforms from a dry-goods merchant appropriately named Felt, and telling the tailors at Corwith Brothers what the dark blue uniforms should look like. He showed the company’s newly elected captain how to drill the men: the entire state of Illinois had only 905 muskets and rifles on hand, 300 of which needed repairs, so the Jo Daviess Guards had their first instruction in the manual of arms using wooden laths instead of real weapons.
By the end of the first week, Grant had a tentative plan for himself: Galena’s congressman Elihu Washburne, who had given a fiery patriotic speech at the meeting that voted the Jo Daviess Guards into being, told Grant that he should go with the new company when they went to Springfield. At the state capital, Washburne told Grant, he would use his influence with the governor to find him a suitable position in the state’s effort to mobilize. Writing to his father in Kentucky, Grant urged him to come north from that border state, which might explode in violence at any time, and added that his own duty was clear: “Having been educated for such an emergency, at the expense of the Government,” he must offer his services in the conflict that had begun. At the moment he thought he might be gone for as long as three months. Of his wife’s reaction to both the national crisis and his intention to serve, he told his father that “Julia takes a very sensible view of the present difficulties. She would be sorry to have me go, but thinks the circumstances may warrant it and will not through [throw] a single obsticle [sic] in the way.”
That was not the entire picture of Julia’s feelings. A woman from a slaveholding family, married to a man who might soon be fighting against the South, she hoped that her home state of Missouri could be kept in the Union, and she had followed closely the events leading to the attack on Fort Sumter. Julia later wrote:
Oh! how intensely interesting the papers were that winter! My dear husband Ulys read aloud to me every speech for and against secession. I was very much disturbed in my political sentiments, feeling that the states had a right to go out of the Union if they wished to, and yet thought it the duty of the national government to prevent a dismemberment of the Union, even if coercion should be necessary. Ulys was much amused by my enthusiasm and said I was a little inconsistent when I talked of states’ rights, but that I was all right on the duties of national government.
The news of Confederate shells landing on a United States Army post at Fort Sumter evidently resolved the question of Julia’s loyalties. “I remember now with astonishment the feeling that took possession of me in the spring of ’61. When reading patriotic speeches, my blood seemed to course more rapidly through my veins.” She added, “Galena was throbbing with patriotism.”
Two days before his thirty-ninth birthday, Grant said good-bye to Julia and their four children and headed downtown, wearing a tired old civilian suit, a slouch hat, and the faded army overcoat he had worn peddling firewood in St. Louis,
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