Read Online Shiloh, 1862 by Winston Groom - Free Book Online Page A
Authors: Winston Groom
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sent home and details of the peace were worked out. Soon he became dismayed by the masses of peons, those “poor and starving subjects,” he wrote to Julia, “who are willing to work more than any country in the world,” and yet “the rich keep down the poor with a hardness of heart that is almost incredible.” If Grant made any correlation between this and the slaves of the South he never said so, perhaps out of deference to Julia’s slaveholding family.
Grant found occupation duty in peacetime dreary, which seems to have led to dissolution on his part, if a superior officer’s letter to his family can be believed: “[Grant] drinks too much, but don’t you say a word about it,” wrote the officer, who was from Grant’s hometown. His time in Mexico City also reinforced Grant’s aversion toward the pomp and circumstance of military life. In the first battles, including Monterrey, Grant had served under Gen. Zachary Taylor, whom he greatly admired and who usually dressed in an old leather duster and slouch straw hat. In the later stages of the war, however, Grant’s commanding general had been Winfield Scott, “Old Fuss and Feathers” himself, who Grant said, somewhat derisively, wore “all the uniform prescribed or allowed by law.”
It was also during this period that he found time for further reflection upon the Mexican War, which he decided had been trumped up by President Polk, a Tennessean, as a way of acquiring new U.S. territories from Mexico in order to create new slave states. Years afterward, Grant famously wrote in his memoirs that the conflict was “one of the most unjust wars every waged by a stronger nation against a weaker one.”
In August 1848 Grant returned to St. Louis and, with her father’s blessing, at last married Julia Dent. Among the army officers present were Longstreet, who was still recovering from battle wounds, and Cadmus Wilcox, who one day would face Grant as a Confederate major general commanding a division.
He was soon assigned to a quartermaster post in Detroit where Julia dutifully tried to fill the roll of army wife, but with no cooking or housekeeping experience, and no slaves to assist her, it was a trial. Two years later, Frederick Dent Grant was born and Julia began dividing her time between the army post and her more agreeable family home in St. Louis, which evidently added to Grant’s boredom and the attendant temptations. This, in turn, possibly led to his joining, at one point, the Sons of Temperance, with a pledge to stop drinking.
In 1852, with Julia pregnant again, and young Fred only two, the Fourth Infantry was ordered to the Pacific coast, and there was no question of Julia going with him. Instead, Grant set out from New York on a steamship with several companies of the regiment and their dependents, bound for the Isthmus of Panama and thence overland to the Pacific. The journey across Panama was risky and abominable under the best of conditions, but in Grant’s case it was nightmarish from the beginning.
Mules that the army had requisitioned to carry everyone through the fetid and pestilent swamps did not arrive, and Grant had to hire dugout boats operated by drunken knife fighters who spoke no English. People came down with tropical fevers, including malaria, and an epidemic of cholera broke out. By journey’s end more than a third of Grant’s party—a hundred soldiers, their wives, and their children—had perished in Panama. By all the participants’ accounts Grant was an angel of mercy to the sick and dying and worked tirelessly throughoutthe ordeal to save lives, but he soon got a taste of the capriciousness of the press after an English newspaper blamed him for the disaster.
When what remained of the party reached California, Grant was sent to Fort Vancouver at the mouth of the Columbia River in the wilds of the Washington-Oregon borderlands. Presently word arrived that Julia had given birth to a boy, Ulysses S. Grant, Jr. In an attempt to
Grant found occupation duty in peacetime dreary, which seems to have led to dissolution on his part, if a superior officer’s letter to his family can be believed: “[Grant] drinks too much, but don’t you say a word about it,” wrote the officer, who was from Grant’s hometown. His time in Mexico City also reinforced Grant’s aversion toward the pomp and circumstance of military life. In the first battles, including Monterrey, Grant had served under Gen. Zachary Taylor, whom he greatly admired and who usually dressed in an old leather duster and slouch straw hat. In the later stages of the war, however, Grant’s commanding general had been Winfield Scott, “Old Fuss and Feathers” himself, who Grant said, somewhat derisively, wore “all the uniform prescribed or allowed by law.”
It was also during this period that he found time for further reflection upon the Mexican War, which he decided had been trumped up by President Polk, a Tennessean, as a way of acquiring new U.S. territories from Mexico in order to create new slave states. Years afterward, Grant famously wrote in his memoirs that the conflict was “one of the most unjust wars every waged by a stronger nation against a weaker one.”
In August 1848 Grant returned to St. Louis and, with her father’s blessing, at last married Julia Dent. Among the army officers present were Longstreet, who was still recovering from battle wounds, and Cadmus Wilcox, who one day would face Grant as a Confederate major general commanding a division.
He was soon assigned to a quartermaster post in Detroit where Julia dutifully tried to fill the roll of army wife, but with no cooking or housekeeping experience, and no slaves to assist her, it was a trial. Two years later, Frederick Dent Grant was born and Julia began dividing her time between the army post and her more agreeable family home in St. Louis, which evidently added to Grant’s boredom and the attendant temptations. This, in turn, possibly led to his joining, at one point, the Sons of Temperance, with a pledge to stop drinking.
In 1852, with Julia pregnant again, and young Fred only two, the Fourth Infantry was ordered to the Pacific coast, and there was no question of Julia going with him. Instead, Grant set out from New York on a steamship with several companies of the regiment and their dependents, bound for the Isthmus of Panama and thence overland to the Pacific. The journey across Panama was risky and abominable under the best of conditions, but in Grant’s case it was nightmarish from the beginning.
Mules that the army had requisitioned to carry everyone through the fetid and pestilent swamps did not arrive, and Grant had to hire dugout boats operated by drunken knife fighters who spoke no English. People came down with tropical fevers, including malaria, and an epidemic of cholera broke out. By journey’s end more than a third of Grant’s party—a hundred soldiers, their wives, and their children—had perished in Panama. By all the participants’ accounts Grant was an angel of mercy to the sick and dying and worked tirelessly throughoutthe ordeal to save lives, but he soon got a taste of the capriciousness of the press after an English newspaper blamed him for the disaster.
When what remained of the party reached California, Grant was sent to Fort Vancouver at the mouth of the Columbia River in the wilds of the Washington-Oregon borderlands. Presently word arrived that Julia had given birth to a boy, Ulysses S. Grant, Jr. In an attempt to
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