Ulysses S. Grant - Michael Korda [19]
In 1852 Grant’s regiment was shifted to the Pacific Coast, and although Julia was eager to accompany him, she was pregnant again. It was, in those days, a daunting journey, first by sea to the Isthmus of Panama, then across the mountainous isthmus by mule, in a country where yellow fever and cholera were widespread, and finally the long, rough ocean journey to San Francisco. Many men died of sickness along the way, usually before reaching the Pacific coast of Panama, and no pregnant woman, even one as determined as Julia Grant, would be likely to attempt it.
Grant, it can be perceived, had no friends with influence in the army. He was, besides, ever so slightly under a cloud, having been held responsible for the theft of one thousand dollars while he was a quartermaster in Mexico. Nobody alleged that Grant himself had stolen the money, but the accounts were his responsibility, and he was therefore ordered to repay the sum. Neither his correspondence with the War Department nor Jesse’s on his son’s behalf was sufficient to straighten out the matter, and even a journey Grant made to Washington at his own expense to explain his case met with failure—partly, no doubt, because accounting was not one of Grant’s strengths, and also because he was not particularly forceful or articulate in his own defense.
In any event he sailed from New York City, leaving Julia behind, in the summer of 1852, and after a hazardous and difficult journey eventually reached San Francisco, 150 of the Fourth Infantry party having died of cholera in Panama on the way (about average for the time). Grant’s object was to make enough money by small side ventures to bring Julia and the children out to join him, but monotonously, one after another, each attempt failed. A partnership in a general store saw Grant’s investment vanish, along with the partner. An attempt to raise hogs failed, as did an attempt to grow potatoes. Whatever Grant tried, bad judgment, bad weather, bad luck got in the way, leaving him poorer than before. It was not from any lack of energy or hard work; Grant simply lacked business sense.
The army hardly kept him busy. He was eventually posted to the Columbia Barracks, at Fort Vancouver, in Washington Territory, as quartermaster—really a store clerk in uniform—and despite the beauties of the countryside, he grew gloomier and lonelier as the months wore on, and as one unsuccessful commercial venture followed another. Even Julia’s letters began to express a certain impatience with Ulysses, as she waited in Sackets Harbor with her two sons, Fred and Ulysses Junior (called “Buck” by everybody but his mother), the younger of whom Grant had not so far seen.
It was there, in full view of Mount Hood and the Pacific, that the stories of Grant’s drinking began. Let it be said first of all that Grant was never a convivial drunk. He did not haunt barrooms and exchange boozy anecdotes with fellow drinkers. Loneliness, depression, a sense of failure, and the inability to see any improvement in his condition led Grant to drink. He went on solitary binges, alone in his room with a bottle of whiskey. In later life, once he was a rising general, it became the object of his faithful staff to prevent this from happening and to conceal it when they failed to prevent it. Drinking did not make Grant cheerful—indeed his hangovers were made more acute both by his tendency toward migraine headaches, which was exacerbated by alcohol, and by shame at his own weakness in taking to the bottle.
To some degree, fame and a sense of purpose overcame Grant’s drinking problem after 1861, and the presence of Mrs. Grant usually appears to have kept him from the bottle. He was not a man who could withstand his own failure or Julia’s absence: It was as simple as that. At Fort Vancouver, however, he could not escape his own failure; he had no sense of purpose; and Julia was fifteen hundred