Ulysses S. Grant - Michael Korda [23]
Grant returned to Springfield, and on June 17, in his own matter-of-fact way, was able to write home that he had been appointed a colonel.
The war was about to begin in earnest.
Chapter Five
GRANT MAY HAVE BEEN a colonel, but he still had no uniform or horse. Opportunity had knocked before he was kitted out for it. The officers of the Twenty-first Illinois Volunteers, which had been formed at Mattoon, had complained bitterly to the governor that their commanding officer was incompetent and drunk, and when it was clear that they meant business (and were probably correct), the governor suggested Colonel Grant to replace him. Grant arrived to take command of his regiment in wrinkled civilian clothes and a battered hat, and found them “ragged and barefoot themselves,” as well as undisciplined. The uncertainty and sense of failure that had haunted him as a civilian seemed to drop away from him instantly. Men who were insolent to officers he had tied to posts and, when necessary, gagged; foul language he punished severely; saluting he insisted upon. Very shortly the Twenty-first became a model regiment, except for Grant himself, who still had no uniform, military equipment, or horse. His father, Jesse, and his brothers were not prepared to put up another penny toward Ulysses’ military career, while his father-in-law now considered him a traitor to the Southern cause and made it clear that while there would always be a place at his table for Julia, there would henceforth be none for Ulysses (ironically, Colonel Dent would end up living in the White House as a kind of permanent house guest once Grant became president, surprising people with his staunchly Confederate views). Eventually a Galena merchant took pity on Grant and loaned him enough money for his uniform and equipment, and Grant took the Twenty-first to war.
Grant marched his regiment into Missouri in search of rebels, particularly a certain Col. Thomas Harris, whose Confederate troops were plaguing local farmers and who was said to be a fiery and aggressive commander. Grant located Harris’s camp and advanced on it, writing years later that, as he led his men over the brow of a hill, “I would have given anything to be back in Illinois, but I had not the moral courage to halt.”
He soon discovered that Harris and his men had already fled, and wrote, “It occurred to me at once that Harris was much afraid of me as I had been of him. This was a view of the question that I had never taken before; but it was one I never forgot afterwards.”
Henceforth Grant would always operate on the assumption that the enemy had as much reason to be afraid of him as he might be of the enemy, and “from that event to the end of the war, I never experienced trepidation upon confronting an enemy.”
Grant’s memoirs are pellucid and reveal not only a striking literary gift but an amazing memory; still, his modesty is such that he has to be read carefully. He is not writing here about fear or physical courage—he had already demonstrated his fearlessness in Mexico to his own satisfaction—he is writing here about what amounts to “stage fright” as a commander of men in battle. He had learned a lot by observing Zachary Taylor in Mexico, but as every young officer discovers in battle, it is one thing to give an order and quite another to know it will be obeyed. Here, in the unpromising countryside of Missouri, he had braced himself to order his men into battle, led them over “the brow of the hill,” and found, to his relief and theirs, that