Ulysses S. Grant - Michael Korda [20]
Transferred eventually to Fort Humboldt in Northern California, he was lonelier still—he did not even have a horse of his own to ride—and his drinking soon came to the attention of his commanding officer. Ordered to give it up, he tried hard; then he went back to drinking, and finally, in the spring of 1854, he took the drastic step of writing a letter resigning from the army, either under pressure from his commander or out of despair, ironically receiving by letter his promotion to captain on the same day. The captaincy had come too late to make a difference to Grant. His only thought was to get home, explain himself to Julia, and never leave her side again. With at last a purpose in mind, Grant set off as fast as he could, borrowing money for the journey from his West Point classmate Simon Bolivar Buckner. Grant was a civilian again for the first time since the day he had arrived at West Point.
Whatever Julia’s thoughts about the matter, Jesse was determined to set matters right. He, better than anyone, knew how unfit Ulysses was for anything other than soldiering, and was appalled at his son’s throwing away his career, however modest it might be. Jesse wrote at once to his congressman (not the unlucky Hamer this time) to request that the secretary of war reinstate his son Ulysses as a captain, and when that failed to have any effect, followed it up with a letter of his own. The secretary of war wrote back a rather snubbing letter pointing out that it was too late, that his decision on the matter was irrevocable, and suggesting between the lines that there were matters Captain Grant would probably prefer not to face publicly—perhaps a reference to rumors of his drinking on duty, perhaps to the missing thousand dollars.
The secretary of war at the time was, of all people, Jefferson Davis, future president of the Confederacy, and the one man, apart from General Hancock, whom Ulysses Grant in later life would treat as a personal enemy. Hancock, Grant forgave as he lay dying; Davis, who had snubbed Grant’s father, refused to reinstate Grant in the army, and then gone on and betrayed his own country to lead the Confederacy, Grant could never forgive.
After a good deal of correspondence and unnecessary travel back and forth between New York City and Sackets Harbor, Grant finally rejoined Julia in St. Louis, a failure at the early age of thirty-two, with no trade beyond the one he had just resigned. Since no help was forthcoming from Jesse, who did not disguise his feeling that Ulysses had thrown away a perfectly good position, or feel like supporting not only Ulysses but Julia and their two children (with a third already on the way), Grant was obliged to throw himself on the mercy of his father-in-law, and took over some of his brother-in-law’s farmland in Kentucky. With his own hands Grant built a house, which he called, with some accuracy (and perhaps a degree of irony), “Hardscrabble,” tilled the soil, and put in a crop. Julia adapted to this life of primitive yeoman farming—the kind of thing Jefferson had dreamed of as the backbone of the infant republic, but from which everybody who tried it was eager to escape—but she did not pretend to like it. She called the house “crude,” as indeed it was, and does not seem to have had much confidence in Ulysses’ ability to survive as a farmer, even with the help of the Dent family slaves. She would soon be proved correct. The presence of the slaves may have taught Grant something about the notorious inefficiency of slave labor—after all, hard work gained the slave nothing—but it did not save the farm. Still, the Grants survived nearly two years of backbreaking labor, poor returns, and mounting debt, while she bore him two more children, a girl, Nellie, and another boy, Jesse, named after Ulysses’ father—a sentimental gesture that failed to soften the old man’s heart.
Once again it was not for lack of hard work that Grant failed as a farmer—it was the business of farming that