Reveille in Washington, 1860 - 1865 by Margaret Leech

[David Lockmiller]

I think that Margaret Leech is an excellent writer with a rather unique ability to package important history in a small bundle. In jumping about in her book "Reveille in Washington, 1860 - 1865," I came across this concise history of Grant with an emphasis on his early years and the period at the beginning of the Civil War. He came very close to not being a factor at all in the American Civil War and was saved in this respect by an undisciplined regiment of Illinois volunteers.

The Union had had some queer heroes, but none as unlikely as the one on whom, after three years of war, its ardent hopes were fixed. Grant had been a taciturn boy, who liked farming, and went to West Point only because his domineering father got him an appointment. He had never enjoyed military life. In the Mexican campaign, he had served as a quartermaster, hating the war. It was in Mexico that he began to drink. He was not a boon companion, but took his whiskey in morose solitude. Later, in the desolate life of a western Army post, the habit had grown on him until it became subversive of discipline, and he was forced to resign. Grant found himself a penniless civilian. He made fumbling attempts at farming, and then at business in St. Louis. The disgraced ex-soldier was going downhill fast, when his father made a place for the family failure in the family leather store in Galena, Illinois. Grant did not like the work, but he had a wife and four children, and he was glad to get it. He was there, thirty-nine years old, when the fall of Sumter awoke the Union to civil war.

Captain Grant, as he was called, assisted in drilling the Galena volunteers, but was not elected an officer of the company. He followed the boys to Springfield in his civilian clothes, and got a clerkship at the State capital. Having received his education at the Government's expense, he felt it his duty to offer his services, but the letter he wrote to Washington, rather diffidently suggesting that he was fit to command a regiment, was never answered. At last, he was given a chance in Illinois. A regiment of mutinous volunteers behaved so badly that they drove their colonel to resign, and Grant was put in his place. He soon whipped the regiment into shape. His former neighbor, Congressman Washburne, got him a brigadier's commission. The "unconditional surrender" at Fort Donelson made him a national figure.

Accidentally, in middle age, Grant discovered his one great aptitude: for dogged and obstinate fighting. He had a superstitious aversion to retracing his steps. It was not always an advantage in his military campaigns, but it was a new fault in Federal generals. The sentence in his dispatch to the Confederate commander at Donelson, "I propose to move immediately upon your works," is one of those phrases which echo coldly down the aisles of history, without seeming to have earned the right to be remembered. It thrilled a nation in the spring of 1862.

The clamor for his removal after the slaughter at Shiloh was drowned in the cheers for Vicksburg, and Chattanooga made him the unrivaled military leader of the Union. Although, when he was nobody, Grant's character had not seemed in any way remarkable, it became invested with power as soon as he was famous. His very ordinariness appeared marvelously sound. He was the apotheosis of the plain man, and the plain man admired and trusted him. His uncouthness was no handicap. Grant was in the American tradition. He had pluck and persistence and common sense, qualities which a young country understood and respected. There was no nonsense about him. He had no airs or falderols or highfalutin talk. He had, in fact, very little to say, either in speech or on paper. The Union, surfeited with boastful promises, liked his reticence. During a serenade at Willard's in March of 1864, Congressman Washburne introduced Grant as a "man of deeds, and not of words." The crowd cheered the inarticulate soldier to the echo.

("Reveille in Washington, 1860 - 1865," pages 311-12.)