This Hallowed Ground - Bruce Catton [44]
Grant’s arrival at Cairo was not impressive. When his promotion came through he gave away his colonel’s uniform and sent for a brigadier’s outfit, and the new togs had not yet arrived; he showed up in civilian clothing, looking like anything but a soldier, and he wandered into the office of Colonel Richard Oglesby, the commanding officer, and wrote out an order relieving Oglesby and assuming the command himself. Oglesby looked at the order and then looked at Grant, and for a time he was undecided whether to obey the order or put this strange civilian under arrest as an imposter.1 He finally obeyed the order, whereupon a key piece in the machinery of the Civil War dropped quietly into place and began to function.
Frémont said afterward that he appointed Grant because he saw in him “the soldierly qualities of self-poise, modesty, decision, attention to details”; qualities which he was not seeing much of in the flamboyant crowd around headquarters in St. Louis. Other officers had warned Frémont not to do it, “for reasons,” said the Pathfinder primly, “that were well known.” Grant was a West Pointer and he had served in the war with Mexico, and the officer corps of the little regular army was a clubby group in which everybody knew and gossiped about everybody else. In all of this gossip Grant had been typed — a drunkard and a failure, a man who had been forced to resign as infantry captain on the west coast in 1854 because he could not keep his hands off the bottle, and who had come back to an excessively undistinguished civilian career as Missouri farmer, St. Louis real estate agent, and most recently as manager of his father’s harness shop in Galena, Illinois. But Frémont was not impressed by this gossip. He was no West Pointer himself, and the regulars had never admitted him to the club, and, said Frémont, something about Grant’s manner was “sufficient to counteract the influence of what they said.” Anyway, he made the appointment, and as September began Grant was installed at Cairo.2
He was not yet the Grant of the familiar photographs. An army surgeon who came on from the east coast about this time found him short, spare, and somewhat unkempt, with a long flowing beard and puffing constantly on a big meerschaum with a curved ten-inch stem; a man who did not seem to have much to say and who would sit quietly at his desk, methodically going through his paper work as if he were turning all sorts of things over in his mind. He was unprepossessing at first glance but there was something about him that made a man take a second look, and the surgeon wrote: “As I sat and watched him then, and many an hour afterward, I found that his face grew upon me. His eyes were gentle, with a kind expression, and thoughtful.”3
Grant was at Cairo, which was becoming one of the great gateways to the war. Immense quantities of army stores were beginning to cram its warehouses, and the place was alive with blue-coated soldiers; one of these said it was like the mouth of a vast beehive, with a never-ending coming and going of recruits.… “They came on incoming trains and up-river steamboats. They went away on outgoing trains and down-river steamboats, and meantime they crossed and criss-crossed the town in every direction. They crowded its stations, hotels, boarding houses and waiting rooms, and, if it must be said, its saloons as well.”4
Eight miles up the Ohio was the town of Mound City; a tiny place which had come into being as part of a real estate boom that it had never been able to live up to and which had been equipped by hopeful speculators with a range of brick warehouses to accommodate a river trade that had not developed.