The Man Who Saved the Union (10 page)

For Grant, however, and for the other professional warriors of the
regular army, the situation was reversed. War was what they trained for and what allowed them to advance in their profession. Peace promised only boredom and stagnation. For some, in fact, the outbreak of peace would produce career backsliding as officers promoted by brevet during the war reverted to their lower peacetime ranks.

Grant had other things on his mind, though. He was awarded a leave of absence when he arrived from Mexico; he traveled to St. Louis to see Julia, then to Ohio to visit his family and then back to St. Louis. Julia was as eager to wed as he was, and her father decided, amid the celebrations surrounding the American victory over Mexico, that she could do worse than marry a soldier. The ceremony came together quickly. “
I had had four years in which to prepare for this event and therefore required only a week or so to make the few last arrangements,” Julia recalled. The wedding was simple by the standards of St. Louis, as August was predictably hot and many persons who would have attended had left the city till fall. But the bride and groom hardly noticed their absence.

Their wedding trip took them up the Ohio River to visit his family. Julia had never been away from St. Louis nor ever on a boat. “
How I marveled at this great creature, as I felt it to be, gliding so swiftly along and obeying the slightest motion of the hand in the pilothouse,” she remembered. “It seemed to me almost human in its breathing, panting, and obedience to man’s will.” At Louisville they circumvented the Falls of the Ohio via the canal and locks there. “It was like a dream to me,” she said of the river journey as a whole.

The dream soured slightly when she met some of Grant’s cousins.
James Hewitt had married into the
Grant family and obviously done well at business. He and his wife lived a few miles from Louisville. “The approach to their beautiful residence was through broad meadows until we reached the hills covered with a fine old forest,” Julia recalled. “This house was filled with everything beautiful, suited to the wealth and cultivated tastes of our host and hostess.” Julia imagined herself living in such a house and shared her vision with Grant, who responded as she hoped. “My dear husband intimated very modestly that if he saw any chance for a business opening he would be happy to resign”—from the army. But neither Hewitt nor his associates showed an inclination to help. “Although these gentlemen had large business connections at New Orleans, New York, Liverpool, and, I think, Paris, not one of them offered even to introduce him to any businessman.” Julia added, years later, “I always remembered this, and did not forget it when my Lieutenant
was General-in-Chief nor when he was President of the United States.”

Her introduction to Grant’s immediate family went better. Jesse Grant welcomed her cordially. “His voice was low and pleasant,” Julia remembered. Hannah Grant greeted her as a daughter. “She was the most self-sacrificing, the sweetest, kindest woman I ever met, except my own dear mother,” Julia said. Grant’s brothers and sisters were curious about their sister-in-law. Simpson, Grant’s closest sibling at three years younger, was gone from the home, but Clara, Virginia, Orvil and Mary looked her over, and she them. Neither side of this scrutiny found much to complain of. “Altogether I was well satisfied,” Julia remarked of her new family.

T
he newlyweds traveled to Detroit when Grant’s leave of absence ended. The Fourth Regiment was now headquartered at this frontier town, and he reported for duty—only to be informed that the army needed him more at Sackets Harbor, New York. He and Julia journeyed east and endured a frosty winter on the shore of Lake Ontario. In the spring the army changed its mind and decided that Detroit, after all, was where Grant could serve his country best.

“
Two years were spent with but few important incidents,” Grant later wrote of his time at Detroit. Among the few was the establishment of Julia and his first real home. “
A little frame house, covered with wild grapes,” was how one of Grant’s fellow officers remembered it. “It always looked homey and cozy to me, a comfortable place for two young people just married.… Most of the officers lived in the hotel, all of the unmarried ones in fact, but Grant and his wife had their own little home.”

Grant’s professional obligations were undemanding, leaving him time for homemaking with Julia and outdoor activities with his comrades. “The town was full of lively fellows and there were many horses whose owners considered them to be fast,” Grant’s officer friend recalled. “On Saturdays the whole town seemed to get out on Fort Avenue and every man who had a horse took part.” Grant was a regular. “He was in the forefront of any racing that was going on.… Grant had that little black mare and it was a horse of tremendous speed. He was the best horseman I ever saw. He could fly on a horse, faster than a slicked bullet.”

In the autumn of 1849 Julia became pregnant, and as the time of her delivery approached, the post surgeon sent her to her family’s home in
St. Louis. Frederick Dent Grant was born at the end of May 1850. Grant took leave to see his wife and son before bringing them back, by way of Ohio, to Detroit.

The next summer the army sent him again to Sackets Harbor. He and Julia decided she and the baby would be more comfortable living with her family until his future became clearer, and he went east alone. He missed them terribly. “
Sackets Harbor is as dull a little hole as you ever saw,” he wrote her. “
Take good care of little Fred, and learn him to say pa.… Do you think he recollects me? Has he any more teeth?”

In the spring of 1852 the army found a new mission for the Fourth Regiment: protecting America’s recently acquired West Coast. The decision came suddenly, preventing Grant from
traveling to Missouri to visit Julia and Fred and say farewell. Julia was pregnant again, with the delivery expected almost any day, and he hated to leave without seeing her or their new child. “
It distresses me, dearest, to think that this news has to be broken to you at just this time,” he wrote. “But bear it with fortitude.” He would try to do the same. “Our separation will not be a long one anyway. At least let’s hope so.” He urged her to remember him at the birth of their child. “If it is a girl name it what you like, but if a boy name it after me. I know you will do this, Julia, of your own choice, but then I want you to know it will please me too.”

Army business unexpectedly called him to Washington ahead of his New York departure. He had never seen the capital before and wasn’t impressed now. “
I was very much disappointed in the appearance of things about Washington,” he wrote Julia. “The place seems small and scattering and the character of the buildings poor.” He arrived amid mourning for
Henry Clay, whose recent passing betokened an end of both the Whig party, which Clay had led for twenty years, and the spirit of compromise for which the Kentucky senator was famous. “
Mr. Clay’s death produced a feeling of regret that could hardly be felt for any other man,” Grant wrote.

T
he California gold rush revolutionized travel from America’s East to its Far West. The impecunious still trudged across the plains and mountains, but those with even a bit more money traveled by steamship to Panama, traversed the isthmus and caught another steamer to San Francisco.

The marine legs of the journey were swift and comparatively comfortable.
The testing part was the fifty miles in the middle. For the officers and men of the Fourth Regiment, the challenge fell peculiarly upon Quartermaster Grant. The regiment reached the town of Aspinwall, on the Caribbean side of the isthmus, amid the rainy season. “
The streets of the town were eight or ten inches under water, and foot passengers passed from place to place on raised footpaths,” Grant recalled. “At intervals the rain would pour down in streams, followed in not many minutes by a blazing, tropical summer’s sun. These alternate changes, from rain to sunshine, were continuous in the afternoons. I wondered how any person could live many months in Aspinwall, and wondered still more why any one tried.” The town was named for
William Aspinwall, the principal of the
Pacific Mail Steamship Company, which was building a railroad across the isthmus to take travelers to its docks at Panama City. By the summer of 1852 the railroad had reached the Chagres River, about fifteen miles inland; there travelers boarded boats for Gorgona, near the continental divide.

“Boats on the Chagres River were propelled by natives not inconveniently burdened with clothing,” Grant recalled. The long, narrow boats carried three dozen or so passengers apiece. The crew of each boat, typically six men arrayed on planks mounted on the two sides of the boat, propelled the craft with long poles. “The men would start from the bow, place one end of their poles against the river bottom, brace their shoulders against the other end, and then walk to the stern as rapidly as they could,” Grant explained. The river current was strong, but the boats made a mile an hour against it.

At Gorgona most of the soldiers of Grant’s regiment reverted to infantry form and marched off, going over the divide and down to Panama City on the Pacific. Grant kept a company behind to help him with the baggage and with the families who accompanied some of the soldiers to their new posting. He hunted up the man who had won the contract to supply the mules for the baggage and the women and children. The man, an American, didn’t have the mules on hand but promised to produce them the next day. The next day he said they would arrive the day after that. Eventually Grant realized there would be no mules; the crush of traffic on the isthmus and the consequent demand for transport had prompted the man to ignore the contract he had with the army and rent his beasts to higher bidders.

The resulting delay might have been merely annoying but for the fact that the isthmus was one of the unhealthiest places on earth. Microbes
flourished in the warm, damp climate, and the human flood swamped the rudimentary sanitary system.
Cholera claimed one after another of the men in Grant’s company and an even larger portion of their family members. He sent most of the still-healthy ones off on foot to join the rest of the regiment at Panama City and scrambled to find other mules for the sick, the families and the baggage. After a week he paid a local the going rate—more than twice the contracted rate—to furnish the required transport. By then the cholera had spread, killing every third person with Grant. Nor did all those who had gone ahead escape; dozens succumbed, until more than a hundred—one-seventh of those who had set out with Grant from New York—had died.

Till now Grant had sometimes wished Julia and Fred had joined him on the journey west, but the epidemic erased such thoughts. “
My dearest, you never could have crossed the isthmus,” he wrote her from the safety of the ship to San Francisco. “The horrors of the road, in the rainy season, are beyond description.” Realizing she might fear for his own safety, he assured her he was fine. “We are fast approaching a better climate. The
Golden Gate
takes us nearly 300 miles per day.”

8

C
ALIFORNIA DURING THE GOLD RUSH ATTRACTED AMBITIOUS
, acquisitive types from around the globe, and nearly all of them entered through San Francisco. “
I consider that city the wonder of the world,”
Grant wrote Julia after a brief visit. “It is a place of but a few years’ growth and contains a wealthy population of probably fifty thousand persons.” What he learned from the locals of the city’s short history supplemented what he saw himself. “It has been burned down three times and rebuilt each time better than before. The ground where the houses are built have either been filled in or else the hills dug away.” The fill-ins were especially interesting. Saloons and gambling houses crowded the waterfront till they ran out of room, and then they pushed out over the water on pilings. Wooden streets serviced the new neighborhoods but not always well. “
Often broken places were found in the street, large enough to let a man down into the water below,” Grant recalled later, still astonished. “I have but little doubt that many of the people who went to the Pacific coast in the early days of the gold excitement, and have never been heard from since, or who were heard from for a time and then ceased to write, found watery graves beneath the houses or streets built over San Francisco Bay.”

The army knew enough not to expose its soldiers to the hazards and temptations of San Francisco longer than necessary. And even if it had not known, it couldn’t have afforded to keep them there. The gold from the mines fueled a ferocious inflation, sending prices to levels unimagined in other American cities. Appropriations that supported a regiment for a year in the East lasted a month in California; the exorbitant cost of living forced soldiers to moonlight to supplement their salaries.

After a few weeks at Benicia, across the bay from San Francisco, Grant’s regiment steamed north to Fort Vancouver, in
Oregon Territory, on the right bank of the Columbia River near its confluence with the Willamette River, several miles from the emerging town of Portland. The soldiers had little to do; the
Indians of the Columbia Valley were fighting a smallpox epidemic and had no energy to battle the uniformed intruders. “
During my year on the Columbia River,” Grant wrote, “the small-pox exterminated one small remnant of a band of Indians entirely, and reduced others materially.”

Grant nonetheless fell in love with Oregon. “
Everyone speaks well of the climate and the growing prospects of the country,” he wrote Julia. “It has timber and agricultural land, and the best market”—California—“in the world for all they can produce. Every article of produce can be raised here that can be in the states, and with much less labor, and finds a ready cash market at four times the value the same article would bring at home.” The region around Vancouver and Portland was particularly pleasing. “This is about the best and most populous portion of Oregon. Living is expensive but money can be made. I have made on one speculation fifteen hundred dollars since I have been here.” He explained that he had loaned a fellow officer some money to set up a store. “The business proved so profitable that I got $1500 to leave the concern.” And yet he kicked himself. “I was very foolish for taking it, because my share of the profits would not have been less than three thousand per year.” Even so, he couldn’t complain. “I have every confidence that I shall make more than five thousand within the year.”