IN ENGLAND THERE WAS a vast social gulf between cavalry and infantry regiments (with the exception of the regiments of the Foot Guards), but that was not the case in the United States. Those cadets who graduated at the top of their class from West Point were appointed to the engineers (like Robert E. Lee) or to the artillery, both branches in which brains were thought to be in demand.
It cannot but have been a disappointment for a shy young second lieutenant who had hoped to serve in the cavalry to arrive at Jefferson Barracks, a few miles outside St. Louis, Missouri, to join the Fourth Infantry in 1843. Having failed to get into the cavalry, Grant had applied to be a teacher of mathematics at West Point, but this too was not to be. He was stuck in the infantry and would have to make the best of it, and make the best of Missouri as well.
Grant was not then nor later in life a man who was fussy about his surroundings, but an army post in those days would have been a lonely place for a youngster, and the endless parades, drills, and fussy inspections of the infantry cannot have done much to cheer him up. His fellow officers played cards, drank, smoked, and idled the day away, and spent as much time as they could off post in nearby St. Louis, attending dances and trying to meet young women—none of them pursuits of much interest to Grant, who had never learned how to dance. After seven long months the Fourth Infantry was ordered down the Mississippi River to a temporary posting in western Louisiana, on the Texas border—even less promising country, and with even less to do for a second lieutenant who loved horses.
At some point Grant became friendly with a big, bluff, cheerful young officer who had been in his class at West Point, Frederick T. Dent, and on returning to Jefferson Barracks, Dent invited Grant to his home, a farm near St. Louis. The Dents were a large family, on the borderline of being “gentry,” and Southern in their sympathies, their origins, and their traditions. Frederick’s father, “Colonel” Dent, was a slave owner on a small scale, affable and reasonably prosperous, but White Haven, though comfortable enough, was a simple farmhouse—a far cry from the great antebellum mansions of the Deep South—and later attempts by Mrs. Grant to portray the Dents as Southern oligarchs or White Haven as Tara, in the masterful phrase of William S. McFeely in his 1981 biography of Grant, were largely spurious.1
The Dents had made their way from Maryland to Missouri via Pittsburgh, and both there and in St. Louis, Colonel Dent had engaged rather languidly in “trade” to make the money to buy the farm, where he spent most of his time reading books and pontificating on politics. Laziness would seem to have been his besetting sin, rather than slave owning.
Mrs. Dent, who had genteel social ambitions and a flair for self-dramatization worthy of a mother in a Tennessee Williams play, is said to have deeply resented being stuck on a farm outside St. Louis rather than being at the center of that city’s social life, where she felt she belonged. The Dents had six children, four boys and two girls: Ellen, usually called Nellie, and Julia.
Making allowances for the differences between North and South, the Dents were not that much more elevated on the socioeconomic scale than were the Grants in Ohio, though Mrs. Dent was certainly a good deal more talkative and fashion conscious than the reclusive Hannah Grant, and Colonel Dent, though shrewd enough, was the very opposite of the kind of hard-edged, self-made, bustling Yankee businessman that Jesse Grant was. One can easily imagine, however, the effect that the lively Dents must have had on the lonely Ulysses Grant, and how much it must have meant to him to be accepted into the family.
Apparently the first of the Dent sisters that he met was Nellie, but shortly afterward he and Julia met, and there took place what the French call un coup de foudre—love at first sight—at least on Julia’s part. They were soon spending many hours riding together—it is unclear whether Julia was an enthusiastic horsewoman or simply guessed it was the best way of engaging Ulysses’ interest—and before long, despite his shyness and awkwardness, they reached an “understanding.” Grant had finally found somebody who brought him out of his lonely and self-imposed isolation, who loved and admired him, and with whom he could talk. As for Julia, she had found her beau idéal. Ulysses Grant was good looking, morally serious, and completely, if inarticulately, devoted to her. If ever two people qualified for the term “soul mates” they were Julia and Ulysses. For the rest of his days his marriage to Julia would be at the center of his life, and he would be, even after his death, the center of hers. Perhaps only the marriage of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert was as close and as satisfying to both partners—certainly the Grants would have one of the great marriages of the nineteenth century.
Of course they had to get there first. Grant had few prospects—a second lieutenant’s pay was exiguous, and in peacetime, promotion was glacially slow—while Julia was, to put it kindly, “plain,” as even her nearest and dearest in the Dent family were obliged to admit. Indeed, “plain” seems like a generous description of Julia Dent. A photograph of her taken as a young woman, at about the time that Grant was courting her (or, to be more accurate, when she was courting him) reveals a lumpy nose, a strong chin, and what appears to be a pronounced squint in one eye, or perhaps, as McFeely suggests, strabismus, a weakening of the eye muscles combined with a squint (some people unkindly described her as wall-eyed), hair pulled back unflatteringly tight, and a compact, dumpy figure. The fashions of the times apparently do nothing to help her, and her expression in the photograph is severe, impatient, and unwelcoming. Although she was to come to think of herself as a Southern belle, a kind of border-state Scarlett O’Hara, Julia was by far the plainest member of the Dent family, and even the colored servants (slaves, of course) seem to have told her so.
Neither the Dents nor the Grants were much pleased by the prospect of this union. Even allowing for Julia’s plainness, her father, Colonel Dent, no doubt hoped for something better for his daughter than a second lieutenant whose father was a moderately successful leather tanner in Ohio; and as for Jesse Grant, he thought his son was too young to marry—Ulysses was twenty-two and Julia seventeen when they met—and was anything but pleased at the prospect of a daughter-in-law whose parents were slave-owning Southerners. It appears, however, that Grant screwed up his determination, perhaps for the first and most significant time, and his determination was more than matched by Julia’s—throughout their lives, her willpower, ambition, and determination would far exceed his. In any event, their devotion to each other, as in good novels, was so strong and self-evident as to overcome all obstacles and objections.
The British army had a saying that “A lieutenant must not marry, a captain may marry, a major must marry,” a rule that remained true until well into the twentieth century, but in the U.S. Army in the nineteenth century, lieutenants married young, and it was generally considered to be a good thing. Given the godforsaken outposts in which army units were stationed, mostly on the frontier, in the middle of nowhere, a wife and children had a steadying effect on young men who might otherwise have taken to drink, whoring, or gambling to fill up the time. Grant would eventually fall prey to one of these vices himself, but it is worth noting that when he became engaged to Julia he was abstemious, and that later on he usually drank when he was separated from her or, as in Galena, when he was plunged so deep into misery, failure, and debt that not even she could talk him out of it.
But that was in the future. The young people agreed, no doubt reluctantly, to a long engagement (it would last four years), but it must have been clear to everybody that however lengthy the engagement, nothing would change their minds about each other. There is a wonderful story—told in numerous versions—that when Grant rode out to White Haven from Jefferson Barracks to ask for Julia’s hand, he found a stream in full flood and was unable to ford it. Instead of turning back, however, he plunged in, swam his horse through a raging torrent, and had to borrow dry civilian clothes when he arrived at the Dents’ home. This incident is notable not only because it underlines Grant’s fearless horsemanship and his determination, but also because it is the first known example of a very important peculiarity of his character: Grant had an extreme, almost phobic dislike of turning back and retracing his steps. If he set out for somewhere, he would get there somehow, whatever the difficulties that lay in his way. This idiosyncrasy would turn out to be one of the factors that made him a formidable general. Grant would always, always press on—turning back was not an option for him.
The years of their engagement were those of a gathering storm—and here it is necessary to pause briefly and describe the political situation of the United States in the 1840s, as it was to affect Ulysses and Julia. In 1836 Texas, then largely populated by white Americans, had declared its independence of Mexico, and after a short and bloody campaign, seceded from Mexico and became an independent state. The Republic of Texas was soon recognized by the United States but not by Mexico, and American business interests moved quickly to finance the infant republic, while the administration of President Andrew Jackson surreptitiously provided the Texans with arms and volunteers.
Demands for the annexation of Texas as a state increased—the loans made to the republic would be more secure if it became part of the United States, so Wall Street was in favor of annexation; but, more important, if Texas came into the Union, it would come in as a slave state—or perhaps more than one slave state, for it was so big that there was talk of carving it into as many as four entities. Four states would have added eight proslavery senators to the Southern bloc in the U.S. Senate, giving the South a decisive advantage over the Northern states on the highly charged question of expanding slavery in the West, and securing the survival of the “peculiar institution,” as it was referred to by Southerners.
The skeleton of slavery had been rattling its bones in the closet of American politics ever since the Declaration of Independence—indeed the Declaration itself could never have been signed had not Jefferson found a way of evading the issue—and by the time Ulysses Grant went to West Point it was clear enough that while most people in the North did not condone slavery, they were prepared to live with it, if necessary, provided it was not expanded into the new territories to the West, or farther south.
Southerners saw the matter differently, of course—slavery was legal, however uncomfortable it might make people in Massachusetts or New York, and the South was entitled to expand it into the new territories and farther south into Mexico and the Caribbean if it could. The Missouri Compromise of 1820 had banned slavery from all territory west of the Mississippi River and north of a line drawn westward from the southern border of Missouri, but its constitutionality was under continuous challenge. In any event, the possible annexation of Texas was perceived as a threat by Northerners, and by Southerners as an opportunity to break out of what were increasingly seen as artificial restraints against the spread of slavery.
In the North only a small minority argued for abolition, while in the South an equally small minority advocated the unrestrained growth of a slave empire, but as is so often the case, the extremists on both sides soon began to dominate, then to define the argument. The notion that the Negro might be freed and made the equal of the white man was hardly more popular in the North than in the South, and what was to be done with the slaves in the event that slavery could be ended (if possible by gradual, peaceful means, with the slave owners compensated) remained a vexatious if academic question in American politics. The idea of repatriating the slaves to Africa was eventually responsible for the creation of Liberia, and the somewhat more practical idea of settling the slaves in a state or territory of their own was often discussed, but without much conviction or energy.
The fight over the annexation of Texas brought the slavery issue once again into sharp focus as the great national political divide, to the discomfort of many, but the matter was sealed when the Texans shrewdly set in motion negotiations in London to make the Republic of Texas part of the British Empire. Even staunch nonannexationists were startled and dismayed at the prospect of the British Empire reappearing on North American soil. This threat was one of the many factors that led to proannexationist James K. Polk’s victory in the presidential election of 1844, and to the subsequent annexation of Texas (which succeeded only by the skin of its teeth). Polk and the Southerners—not to speak of the Texans themselves, once they had joined the Union—had a greater ambition, however, which was to seize as much Mexican territory as they could, at least everything north of the Rio Grande. The unsettled dispute over the southern border of Texas, which had festered from the very beginning of the Texas Republic as a sore point between the Texans and Mexico, seemed tailor-made as a cause for war, if only the Mexicans could be provoked into beginning it. The Mexicans claimed that their border with Texas was on the Nueces River, while the Texans (and now the United States) argued that it was on the Rio Grande—a difference of about 120 miles. It was not much as a cause for war, but it was enough. Polk moved U.S. forces into the disputed region, calculating that their presence there would sooner or later provoke Mexico to fight.
The maneuverings that were to lead to the Mexican War were the background against which Ulysses and Julia’s engagement took place, meaning that during a great part of that time he was absent, as the Fourth Infantry was moved first to Nachitoches for a year, on the western edge of Louisiana, close to Texas, and then, via New Orleans, to Corpus Christi, Texas, a small part of a military show that was intended to overbear the Mexicans, and impress them with the might and the serious intentions of the United States. Grant was an unenthusiastic bit player in this drama—he was no friend to slavery, he disliked the idea of using the army to provoke the Mexicans into a war they would lose, and he had no great desire to fight Mexicans or anybody else. On top of which duty kept him separated from Julia, and from pressing Colonel Dent to agree to an earlier marriage.
As a result he wrote—long, detailed letters, full of intelligent observations and interesting detail, in which his passion for Julia occasionally surfaces quite movingly. These are not the letters of an ordinary second lieutenant. During his days in West Point, Grant’s superiors had complained that he wasted his time reading “romantic novels” (improbable as that might seem in a young man as dour as Grant), but if that was the case it did more for his style as a writer than reading Jomini’s classic text on tactics would have done. Like the young Winston Churchill, also a failure at school and military college, Grant learned how to master the English sentence. His spelling left much to be desired, but his prose is direct, clear, and never ambiguous, as it was to be for the rest of his life, and his letters certainly served their purpose in keeping Julia’s attentions directed toward him and lobbying her father (unsuccessfully) to let them marry sooner. They also make clear that Grant, however much he missed his Julia, was stimulated by the unfamiliar countryside, and his descriptions of life in Texas and Mexico, as well as life in the camp, are lively, detailed, and thoughtful—just the thing to keep his fiancée, back in St. Louis, amused and interested.
It is interesting to note, for example, that in order to relieve the tedium of waiting in Corpus Christi, then a sleepy Mexican village, for the Mexican government to lose patience and go to war, the junior officers organized an amateur theatrical company. One of the productions they put on was Othello, in which Ulysses Grant, improbably, was persuaded to play Desdemona. James Longstreet (the future Confederate general) also played in the company, and complained that Grant’s portrayal of Desdemona was something less than convincing, and that he had to be replaced by a professional actress sent from New Orleans, but the sight of the future victor of Shiloh and Vicksburg in the costume of a young woman of sixteenth-century Venice must have been memorable indeed—a number of people who were present at Appomattox twenty years later certainly still remembered it vividly.2
More typically, struck by the huge herds of wild horses in the area, Grant purchased a large number of them at three dollars a head, hoping to sell them for twice that, only to lose his investment when they all ran away—a warning sign of Grant’s lifelong inability to bring even the simplest of commercial transactions to a profitable conclusion.
In the meantime the army had advanced beyond the Nueces, and when that did not persuade the Mexicans to fight, continued on, at a lethargic pace even for the day, toward the Rio Grande. In command of the army was Gen. Zachary Taylor, whose nickname, “Old Rough and Ready,” might have been chosen to emphasize the contrast between himself and “Old Fuss and Feathers,” General Scott. Zachary Taylor wore plain, dusty civilian clothes instead of a uniform, unpolished boots, and a slouch hat, and was in the habit of sitting sideways on his horse to observe the movement of his troops, with both legs hanging down over one side, as if he were lounging in an easy chair. It may be that Grant’s first glimpse of Taylor imprinted itself on his mind—or at any rate imprinted on it for future reference the notion that a general need not necessarily be a military fashion plate to succeed in battle.
Taylor’s strategy was to push toward the nearest big Mexican town—Matamoros, about 150 miles from Corpus Christi—a process that would take months, given the arid, uninhabited nature of the countryside, the paucity of wells, drinkable river water and fodder, and the fact that the army was moving at the pace of the mules and oxen that provided its transport. Eventually, however, Taylor got his army across the disputed territory and proceeded to build a small fort across the Rio Grande from Matamoras, a challenge which the Mexicans could hardly refuse, with the result that in April 1846 the administration, Wall Street, the Texans and the South finally got the war they had been looking for.
Grant was not overjoyed at the prospect—like General Taylor, he did not believe this was a just war, and he rather liked the Mexicans—but on May 8, at Palo Alto, he received his baptism of fire as the three thousand men of Taylor’s army, having finally encountered the Mexican army, formed a line of battle and advanced toward the considerably larger forces of the enemy. “I thought what a fearful responsibility General Taylor must feel,” Grant wrote later, “commanding such a host and so far away from friends.”
During the exchange of artillery fire that decided the battle—Taylor was equipped with more modern, longer-range artillery than the Mexicans, which fired exploding shells rather than solid balls—Grant was in the thick of things. “One canon [sic] ball passed through our ranks, not far from me. It took off the head of an enlisted man, and the under jaw of Captain Page of my regiment, while the splinters of the musket of the killed soldier, and his brains and bones, knocked down two or three others, including one officer, Lieutenant Wallen.” Grant’s matter-of-fact prose does not disguise the horror of warfare, then or now.
On the ninth Grant fought in another battle, at Resaca, in which he took temporary command of a company, captured a wounded Mexican colonel, and observed that, “the battle of Resaca de la Palma would have been won, just as it was, had I not been there.” Tolstoy could not have put it better. Nevertheless, reading between the lines, it is possible to discern that Grant had demonstrated, if nothing else, a keen power of observation, a capacity for command, no tendency to panic or flinch under fire, and a strong stomach for the awful scenes of combat—in short, that he had the makings of a real soldier.
During the lengthy time that the army spent at Matamoras, Grant met many of the officers who would be his opponents or his fellow Union generals in the Civil War, and his sharp memory would pay dividends later on, for he could often guess what they would do in command based on how they had behaved in Mexico—hence his instinctive judgment that Buckner would cave under pressure at Fort Donelson. He served with such future Confederate generals as Lee, Joseph E. Johnston, and Albert Sidney Johnston (no relation), and later remarked in his memoirs, “My appreciation of my enemies was certainly affected by this knowledge. The natural disposition of most people is to clothe a commander of a large army whom they do not know, with almost superhuman abilities. A large part of the National army, for instance, and most of the press of the country, clothed General Lee with just such qualities, but I had known him personally, and knew that he was mortal [italics added].”
The problem of overestimating or even hero-worshipping successful enemy commanders in time of war was not, of course, confined to nineteenth-century America. In World War II “the Rommel factor,” much resembling the universal admiration for Lee, overcame the British public and most British generals until Gen. Sir Bernard Law Montgomery (as he was then) finally beat Field Marshal Erwin Rommel at El Alamein and put an end to Rommel’s reputation for invincibility and battlefield omniscience. Apparently undiminished by defeat, however, Rommel’s legend, like Lee’s, continues to impress historians and biographers.
Among the officers Grant met, surprisingly, was none other than Congressman Hamer, who had yielded to Jesse Grant’s request to get his son into West Point and was now a major of the Ohio volunteers, waiting to be appointed a brigadier general—an object lesson for Grant in the uses of political influence and in the ease with which amateur soldiers climbed the ladder of promotion in wartime, as opposed to professionals.
Eventually the army, now reinforced to 6,500 men, lurched through the Sierra Madre mountains to threaten Monterrey, the last major town on the long road to Mexico City, defended by a garrison of more than ten thousand. After a short siege Taylor attacked the city, and Grant was caught up in the street fighting that followed, distinguishing himself by volunteering to ride back through the streets under a hail of rifle fire to ask for more ammunition to be sent up. He rode at a full gallop, Indian style, clinging to the side of his horse to shield himself from the enemy’s fire, with one foot cocked over the cantle of the saddle and an arm around the horse’s neck—the kind of thing Kevin Costner (or his stuntman) might do in a movie today (not unlike the scene at the beginning of Dances with Wolves), but Grant did in real life in Monterrey, with real bullets whizzing around him and his horse’s hooves skittering on cobblestones that were, in some places, slippery with blood. The feat won Grant a considerable degree of respect.
At one point stopped by American soldiers, he entered a house and found it full of badly wounded Americans, including two he knew, a captain with a bad head wound and a lieutenant “whose bowels protruded from his wound.” He promised to send help, then got back on his horse to resume his run, but in the confusion of battle the wounded Americans “fell into the hands of the enemy during the night, and died.”
Here, in his usual clipped, unemotional prose is another perfect portrait of the horrors of war, a scene (and an outcome) worthy of Goya. By the next day Monterrey had been taken, and Grant’s pity was aroused by the sight of the Mexican prisoners of war, particularly the cavalry “on miserable little half-starved horses that did not look as if they could carry their riders out of town.”
Few other officers would have been equally moved by the distressing sight of enemy troops taken prisoner and by that of the charnel house of wounded American officers and men, but Grant had that rare quality among professional soldiers, even at the very beginning of his career, of feeling deeply for the wounded and dead of both sides. It was not weakness—it was that he spared himself nothing. Grant saw what happened in war, swallowed his revulsion, pity, and disgust, and went on. He did not, in Yeats’s famous phrase, “cast a cold eye on life, on death”; he cast a saddened and mournful one—one has only to look at photographs of him—which nevertheless did not prevent him from doing his job.
In the meantime the war’s growing importance was emphasized by the administration’s decision to send the aging General in Chief Winfield Scott to take command in Mexico. Scott had no faith in Taylor’s attack from the north, and proposed to advance on Vera Cruz, seize it, then march inland on Mexico City. Old Rough and Ready continued his own advance, while his rival, Old Fuss and Feathers, decked out in every feather, sash, and gold decoration the law allowed (as Grant sourly observed) marched slowly on Vera Cruz, both generals having their eyes firmly fixed, in the great American tradition, on the next presidential election.
In the event Taylor moved faster and fought and won the decisive battle of Buena Vista (February 22–24, 1847) with his army of volunteers, against a much larger Mexican force, thus guaranteeing his nomination by the Whig Party and his election as president in 1848.
As for Grant, his regiment was transferred from Taylor’s army to Scott’s, where Grant found both the slow pace and the insistence on military formality and correct uniforms at all times difficult to bear. He served under Gen. William J. Worth, of whom he commented trenchantly, “Some commanders can move troops so as to get the maximum distance out of them without fatigue, while others can wear them out in a few days without accomplishing so much. General Worth belonged to this latter class.”
Grant participated in the siege of Vera Cruz and the Battle of Cerro Gordo (in which Capt. Robert E. Lee played a dashing and glamorous role), after which Grant was appointed quartermaster and sent off with a train of wagons to “procure forage,” a position of no glamour but considerable responsibility. If Grant had not bothered to read Napoleon’s comment on war—“An army marches on its stomach”—while he was immersed in novels at West Point, he soon got a chance to observe the truth of this maxim in the field as a quartermaster. He also got a chance to compare Taylor and Scott in action, and noted, “Taylor was not a conversationalist, but on paper he could put his meaning so plainly that there could be no mistaking it,” a description Grant might as easily have applied to himself.
Scott’s army now was in place to advance on Mexico City, and Grant fought at Contreras, Molino del Rey (where he had the quick wit to use an upturned cart to climb onto the roof of a building and overwhelm the Mexicans defending it), and Chapultepec (where his quick action under fire led to the taking of a key portion of the town’s defensive line with a few troops he had hastily scratched up). Although he was to write in his memoirs that the Battles of Molino del Rey and Chapultepec were “wholly unnecessary,” there is no doubt that he fought courageously in both of them and, in the absence of orders, did not hesitate to use his own bold initiative.
On September 14 American troops finally entered Mexico City, General Scott made his headquarters in the “Halls of the Montezumas,” and Ulysses S. Grant was promoted, at last, to first lieutenant, four officers senior to him in his regiment having been killed in a “steamboat explosion,” of all things. As always in the regular army, the death of officers senior to oneself, however it occurs, results in the promotion of those below, so Grant was promoted more by the operation of seniority than because of his personal bravery. On the other hand he was a regular officer, he knew the rules, and did not chafe at them.
Whatever his reservations about the Mexican War—and they were many—and however much he sympathized with Mexico over the draconian peace terms that would deprive the country of all its territory north of the Rio Grande and make the United States, at last, a continental power—he was relieved to have done his duty and proved to himself that he was a soldier.
America finally had its “Manifest Destiny”—and with it the now-burning question of whether slavery would be extended to its vast new territories—and Ulysses Grant was anxious to return home to his.
He sweltered on the beach near Vera Cruz while fever raged through the troops, then shipped out to Pascagoula, Mississippi, and immediately obtained a four-month leave of absence.
On August 22, 1848, in St. Louis, he married Julia Dent, perhaps the most important event of his life so far.