Read Online Shiloh, 1862 by Winston Groom - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Winston Groom
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enhance his poor army pay Grant bought a piece of land and in his spare time planted a crop of potatoes and chopped wood to sell to steamships. Floods drowned the potato fields and washed away the wood. An endeavor to raise poultry and livestock likewise failed, as did Grant’s attempts to collect money he lent to fellow officers.
All this, and more, were reflected in melancholy letters to Julia, in which his gloominess and ennui were palpable. Not surprisingly, perhaps, Grant returned to drinking. It was commonly agreed that even a small amount of liquor had a disproportionate effect on him. After only a glass or two his speech would slur, and any more would “make him stupid.” By varying accounts he either became a “consistent” drinker or indulged in “sprees” that could last for days. On a certain occasion in the officers’ mess it was said that his conduct was taken account of by his fellow West Pointer George McClellan, whose surveying party Grant had been detailed to outfit.
After two years at Fort Vancouver Grant was reassigned to the even more remote outpost of Fort Humboldt, 250 miles north of San Francisco. There, with wife and family half a world away, he began to think of resigning from the army, but before that developed an unhappy incident occurred that haunted Grant for the rest of his army career. There are several accounts, but the gist of it was that Grant was discovered to be drunk while on duty as quartermaster on payday and was given the choice of facing court-martial or resigningfrom the service. Later, some of his friends defended Grant, saying that the commander “had it in for him,” but the end result was that in May of 1854 Grant wrote Julia that he was coming home.
Even before his hasty resignation from the army Grant had begun to picture himself as a gentleman Missouri farmer, but he had no savings and in fact had to borrow money from his West Point classmate Simon Bolivar Buckner just to get home. As a wedding present Colonel Dent had given him and Julia 60 acres of White Haven, which Grant planned to farm and expand until he could make a respectable living from the land, but this did not work out. Despite his toiling in the fields alongside Julia’s slaves, fluctuating crop prices, droughts, and other farming perils all conspired to undo farmer Grant. Barely able to make ends meet, Grant was finally reduced to cutting and hauling wood up to St. Louis, just as he had done as a boy back in Illinois.
During the panic and subsequent depression of ’57, Grant was so poor he had to pawn his gold pocket watch to buy Christmas presents for the family. Finally he gave up. A cousin of Julia’s helped him find a job at a St. Louis real estate concern, but Grant failed at that too. He hated collecting rents and despised the idea of evicting anyone. Instead he sought a position as county engineer, for which his West Point training had made him eminently qualified, but partisan politics cost him the job. At last he swallowed his pride and accepted a clerkship at his father’s leather-goods store in Galena, Illinois, near the Wisconsin border.
While Ulysses endured more than a decade of abject failures, his father Jesse Grant had become quite prosperous and ownedleathermaking enterprises in several midwestern states. He had also become an insufferable windbag, inserting himself into local politics and vilifying Julia’s family as “that tribe of slaveholders.”
In the spring of 1860 Grant rented out the family slaves in Missouri and made his way north to Galena, which was across the Mississippi River and a little southeast of Dubuque, Iowa. Customers at his father’s store there remembered him as an indifferent salesman, and that when the leaves began to fall he walked to and from work wearing his old army greatcoat and a dark slouch hat. That same autumn Abraham Lincoln was elected President, and talk of Southern secession electrified the air. It had been twenty years since Grant
All this, and more, were reflected in melancholy letters to Julia, in which his gloominess and ennui were palpable. Not surprisingly, perhaps, Grant returned to drinking. It was commonly agreed that even a small amount of liquor had a disproportionate effect on him. After only a glass or two his speech would slur, and any more would “make him stupid.” By varying accounts he either became a “consistent” drinker or indulged in “sprees” that could last for days. On a certain occasion in the officers’ mess it was said that his conduct was taken account of by his fellow West Pointer George McClellan, whose surveying party Grant had been detailed to outfit.
After two years at Fort Vancouver Grant was reassigned to the even more remote outpost of Fort Humboldt, 250 miles north of San Francisco. There, with wife and family half a world away, he began to think of resigning from the army, but before that developed an unhappy incident occurred that haunted Grant for the rest of his army career. There are several accounts, but the gist of it was that Grant was discovered to be drunk while on duty as quartermaster on payday and was given the choice of facing court-martial or resigningfrom the service. Later, some of his friends defended Grant, saying that the commander “had it in for him,” but the end result was that in May of 1854 Grant wrote Julia that he was coming home.
Even before his hasty resignation from the army Grant had begun to picture himself as a gentleman Missouri farmer, but he had no savings and in fact had to borrow money from his West Point classmate Simon Bolivar Buckner just to get home. As a wedding present Colonel Dent had given him and Julia 60 acres of White Haven, which Grant planned to farm and expand until he could make a respectable living from the land, but this did not work out. Despite his toiling in the fields alongside Julia’s slaves, fluctuating crop prices, droughts, and other farming perils all conspired to undo farmer Grant. Barely able to make ends meet, Grant was finally reduced to cutting and hauling wood up to St. Louis, just as he had done as a boy back in Illinois.
During the panic and subsequent depression of ’57, Grant was so poor he had to pawn his gold pocket watch to buy Christmas presents for the family. Finally he gave up. A cousin of Julia’s helped him find a job at a St. Louis real estate concern, but Grant failed at that too. He hated collecting rents and despised the idea of evicting anyone. Instead he sought a position as county engineer, for which his West Point training had made him eminently qualified, but partisan politics cost him the job. At last he swallowed his pride and accepted a clerkship at his father’s leather-goods store in Galena, Illinois, near the Wisconsin border.
While Ulysses endured more than a decade of abject failures, his father Jesse Grant had become quite prosperous and ownedleathermaking enterprises in several midwestern states. He had also become an insufferable windbag, inserting himself into local politics and vilifying Julia’s family as “that tribe of slaveholders.”
In the spring of 1860 Grant rented out the family slaves in Missouri and made his way north to Galena, which was across the Mississippi River and a little southeast of Dubuque, Iowa. Customers at his father’s store there remembered him as an indifferent salesman, and that when the leaves began to fall he walked to and from work wearing his old army greatcoat and a dark slouch hat. That same autumn Abraham Lincoln was elected President, and talk of Southern secession electrified the air. It had been twenty years since Grant
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