Ulysses S. Grant - Michael Korda [21]
To some degree that was not his fault. “Manifest Destiny” had increased the power of Wall Street, and the world of high finance and railway building, over that of Jeffersonian yeomen, small farmers, and pioneers. The time had come “to pay the piper” for the enormous increase in America’s size, many times larger than what had been acquired by the Louisiana Purchase, and requiring huge amounts of capital for what we would now call “development,” in a nation with a largely unregulated banking system. As a result bank crises and a sharp decline in agricultural prices ruined many small farmers shrewder than Grant.
While he had been planting his crops and building Hardscrabble, the consequences of the annexation of Texas and victory over Mexico had been coming home to roost. The United States was now a continental nation, but the question of slavery still divided it. Mrs. Grant might gush over the loyalty and affection to her person of the Dent family slaves, but the burning question of whether slavery could be extended to the new territories of the West still perplexed and infuriated Americans. Slavery was no longer a debating issue but a fighting one.
In the North abolitionists took the gloves off. Mrs. Harriet Beecher Stowe wrote Uncle Tom’s Cabin, the book that caused Queen Victoria to cry, that made Simon Legree the symbol of Southern oppression, and that would eventually cause Lincoln to say to its author, on meeting her, “So you’re the little lady who started this war.” The North reacted with outrage to the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision, in the Dred Scott case, that a slave was merely property who could be hunted down and returned to his owner, even from the North. On the floor of the U.S. Senate, distinguished senators slashed at each other with canes, and members of both houses took to carrying Col. Samuel Colt’s new pocket revolver. And in the Kansas Territory, “Bleeding Kansas,” the question of whether slavery could be—would be—extended farther West was beginning to be played out in blood, not just ink.
It is against this background of rising tension and anger that Ulysses Grant’s failure as a farmer must be seen. Like the rest of the nation, he was waiting, appalled and impotent, for the storm to break. He could not have predicted the swift and dreadful chain of events—the spiraling outbreak of murder and lawlessness between abolitionist and proslavery factions in Kansas, culminating in the fearful outrage enacted by the followers of John Brown and his sons on the hapless slave-owning farmers at Pottawatomie Creek, whom Brown dragged from their beds and executed with a broadsword—the fearful plunge toward civil war that had been set in motion by the victories that Grant had helped to win. Still it was there, like a thunderstorm building over the plains, distant but threatening, and only the deaf failed to hear the ominous rumbling.1
These events did not, of course, take place at once, but sputtered, like a burning fuse, over nearly a decade of increasing acrimony and sporadic, often gleeful, butchery on the part of fanatics on both sides, as a war of words hardened into the prospect of a real war—perhaps the only profession for which Captain Grant, failed farmer and small entrepreneur, was properly trained. All over the country the state militias drilled, mostly clumsy country bumpkins, clueless; without uniforms; sometimes shoeless; armed, if at all, with weapons that went back to the War of 1812; guided, if they were lucky, by some old textbook on infantry drill in the hands of one of their elected officers; and by a firm belief in the national myth of the Minute Men at Concord and Lexington, the amateur soldiers who had left their homes and farms, hunting rifles in hand, to confront the Redcoats.
In the meantime Grant, having failed at farming, was forced to undergo the ultimate humiliation. In the summer of 1860 he was obliged to turn back to his father, tail between his legs, and ask for help. Jesse