Read Online Ulysses S. Grant by Michael Korda - Free Book Online Page A

captaincy on the grounds that as a former officer of the Regular Army he was entitled to something better—a stroke of cunning and realism that was new to Grant but may simply have been the instinctive understanding of how the army works coming back to him, a West Pointer and regular officer, as if he had never taken off the uniform. For weeks Grant was in limbo, a civilian in a volunteer army that was slowly being put into uniform, with no rank or position. Looking at his Galena volunteers, he might have agreed with the Duke of Wellington’s comment on the first sight of his troops in thePeninsula: “I do not know what effect they will have on the enemy, sir, but by God, they frighten me! ” He lobbied his old senior officers of the Mexican War days, with no result; he paid two calls on Maj. Gen. George B. McClellan, whom he had known at West Point, and was twice ignored, left waiting and rebuffed; he begged Jesse to intercede for him and seek an appointment for him as a colonel; then finally, almost by accident, Grant himself hit upon the right lever to pull, and went back to Galena to seek the support of Representative Washburne, who saw in Grant something nobody else had seen (except Julia): a rare degree of determination, real experience of war, and, perhaps most important to Washburne, the fact that here was a fellow Galena man, somebody who would be grateful to the politician who gave him a push.
    Grant returned to Springfield, and on June 17, in his own matter-of-fact way, was able to write home that he had been appointed a colonel.
    The war was about to begin in earnest.

Chapter Five
    G RANT MAY HAVE BEEN a colonel, but he still had no uniform or horse. Opportunity had knocked before he was kitted out for it. The officers of the Twenty-first Illinois Volunteers, which had been formed at Mattoon, had complained bitterly to the governor that their commanding officer was incompetent and drunk, and when it was clear that they meant business (and were probably correct), the governor suggested Colonel Grant to replace him. Grant arrived to take command of his regiment in wrinkled civilian clothes and a battered hat, and found them “ragged and barefoot themselves,” as well as undisciplined. The uncertainty and sense of failure that had haunted him as a civilian seemed to drop away from him instantly. Men who were insolent to officers he had tied to posts and, when necessary, gagged; foul language he punished severely; saluting he insisted upon. Very shortly the Twenty-first became a model regiment, except for Grant himself, who still had no uniform, military equipment, or horse. His father, Jesse, and his brothers were not prepared to put up another penny toward Ulysses’military career, while his father-in-law now considered him a traitor to the Southern cause and made it clear that while there would always be a place at his table for Julia, there would henceforth be none for Ulysses (ironically, Colonel Dent would end up living in the White House as a kind of permanent house guest once Grant became president, surprising people with his staunchly Confederate views). Eventually a Galena merchant took pity on Grant and loaned him enough money for his uniform and equipment, and Grant took the Twenty-first to war.
    Grant marched his regiment into Missouri in search of rebels, particularly a certain Col. Thomas Harris, whose Confederate troops were plaguing local farmers and who was said to be a fiery and aggressive commander. Grant located Harris’s camp and advanced on it, writing years later that, as he led his men over the brow of a hill, “I would have given anything to be back in Illinois, but I had not the moral courage to halt.”
    He soon discovered that Harris and his men had already fled, and wrote, “It occurred to me at once that Harris was much afraid of me as I had been of him. This was a view of the question that I had never taken before; but it was one I never forgot afterwards.”
    Henceforth Grant