Grant: A Novel (26 page)

Grant rubbed his jaw and thought about it for awhile, and then rode off to get the advice of the elderly gent who was his second
in command—also (as it happened) the former commandant of West Point when both Grant and Buckner were students—who instantly flung the letter down on the ground and growled, “No terms for any damned
Rebels
!” Which sentiment Grant revised somewhat in one of the most beautifully concise little communications any soldier since Julius Caesar has ever written:

Buckner (no literary critic) grumbled that this was harsh to an old classmate and friend. Grant made no comment. But after he received his prisoners and signed all the military forms, he took Buckner quietly aside and pulled out his wallet and asked if Buckner needed any money to see him home. Nobody but Buckner observed the gesture. Nobody but Buckner
would
have understood.

Fact was, the last time the two had met was just about eight years earlier, when Grant was not a victorious general, not a general at all, not even a soldier. In midsummer 1854, having drunk himself right out of the army in California, Grant had stepped off the Panama steamer in New York City absolutely penniless. He wanted to check into a hotel and write his father for money, but the hotel clerk, sizing up his man, said cash in advance was required. Grant wandered out into the streets, hopeless, and somewhere along Broadway, at an army recruiting office, spotted his old friend Buckner, who (sizing him up as well) said he wouldn’t give him cash (which would likely be spent on drink), but he would guarantee his hotel bill and all his meals; and gratefully, humbly, soberly, Grant sat down to wait for a letter from home.

Not coincidence at Donelson, I guess, as much as Greek tragedy reversal. Or just old red Mars giggling and laughing up his sleeve.

Jesse Grant hadn’t giggled much when he got his son’s letter. First thing he did, as if Ulysses were a schoolboy in trouble with
his teacher, was to write the Secretary of War and ask if the army couldn’t overlook the lad’s hasty resignation. Grant, he wrote, hadn’t really known what he was doing. The Secretary wrote right back—more Greek reversal—resignation already accepted, matter closed, Yours truly, Jefferson Davis, Sec. of War.

There never was any question, evidently, of Grant’s going back to the tannery. Jesse was too humiliated by having a disgraced down-and-out son around, and Grant still clung to his youthful vow never to work at curing hides again. But Julia owned outright, in her name, some sixty acres of hilly wooded land near her father’s house in St. Louis, and these Grant eventually decided he would turn into a farm.

Colonel Dent was not much happier than Jesse Grant about his son-in-law’s failure. Still, Julia was his favorite daughter. The old man advanced the couple the money to buy seeds and tools, and rocked on his porch and watched.

For the first few months Grant set to work like a man possessed. Cleared fields, sold cordwood in St. Louis, started to build a two-story log cabin for Julia and the two little boys (he named it “Hardscrabble” in a dig at Colonel Dent’s pretensions). But as anybody at all could have predicted, nothing prospered.

He was too easy on the slaves, for one thing—they belonged to Julia and were supposed to work in the fields, but Grant could never bring himself to drive them hard. Neighbors shook their heads when he paid free Negroes for extra labor (overpaid them, by local standards) and talked about setting his own people free as soon as he was able.

Not a popular position in Missouri in the late fifties. Colonel Dent was far from the only pro-slavery man in the state. Just up the way in the Kansas Territory a crazed abolitionist named John Brown, soon to be heard from again, murdered five slave-holder settlers one day, and instantly hundreds and hundreds of armed Missouri vigilantes swarmed across the border to try and hunt him down—Grant’s kind of loose talk was only bringing a crisis closer (curiously enough, old Jesse Grant had gone to school with John Brown and remembered his playmate fondly).

Day by day Grant’s debts increased. When the crops came in poor he took to selling his cordwood in town himself. One day General William Harney, who had been a colonel back in the Mexican War, came riding down a St. Louis street in a brand-new
gold-trimmed uniform. Harney stopped beside a wagon and looked over at the driver, a shabby man in a faded blue army overcoat.

Looked again.

“Why, Grant, what in blazes are you doing here?”

Grant scraped his muddy boot on the buckboard. “Well, General. I’m hauling wood.”

Harney took him into a restaurant and bought him a meal.

Cump Sherman passed through town, likewise out of the army. He had been a banker in San Francisco till the bank went bust, and now he too was stone broke, on his way back to Ohio to work for his father-in-law. “I’m a dead cock in the pit,” he told Grant, and moved on.

General Edward Beale, who had known Grant back in California, ran into him one day outside the Planters Hotel and asked him to come inside and have supper.

Grant gestured at his filthy coat and boots and said he wasn’t dressed.

“Oh, that don’t matter,” Beale said, taking his arm, “not in the least.”

But it mattered to others. The officers out at Jefferson Barracks took to looking the other way when Grant came by with his wood. Colonel Dent’s prosperous friends and neighbors would cross the street rather than speak to him. Jesse Grant sent a few stingy checks, but the farm kept gobbling everything up. Two days before Christmas 1858, Grant walked into a St. Louis pawnshop and handed over his gold hunting watch and chain so he could buy a few presents for Julia and the babies (three of them now, a fourth on the way). His health began to fail—a boyhood asthma came back, along with the shaking ague, courtesy of Panama—and the neighbors started to whisper that Captain Grant was taking to drink again.

In the fall of that same year he gave up on Hardscrabble and moved the family into a rented house in the poor section of the city for twenty-five dollars a month. Colonel Dent made one last effort and persuaded a friend named Harry Boggs to set his son-in-law up as a real estate salesman and rent collector. But Grant was too softhearted to press anybody with a hard-luck story for rent, and too shy and diffident ever to sell a house.

Worse, he slept late many days, out of bad health or just plain
temperament (even in the war Grant liked his sleep). Sometimes he would go up the street and waste time chatting with another merchant, William Moffett, who had a red-haired brother-in-law, steamboat pilot, liked to sleep late too. One afternoon the brother-in-law sat down at Moffett’s piano and made up a song about himself:

Mark Twain says that this was the first time they ever met; Grant just shakes his head and says he don’t remember.

In any case, Boggs had had enough. He fired Grant and turned him out of the office. For a few weeks hope fluttered—Grant applied for the job of County Engineer and thought that as a graduate of West Point, with a degree in engineering, he stood a good chance. But slavery politics entered into every part of government now, especially in Missouri. The board of appointments was anti-slavery. The son-in-law of Colonel Dent was presumed to share the old man’s pro-slavery politics. The job went to somebody else.

Grant pulled his hat down lower over his eyes and sat morose and listless in his rented room. Maybe, as rumor said, he opened a bottle or two when he could. People who knew him then remember he wandered downtown sometimes from office to office, just asking about jobs, looking haunted, shabbier than ever. In December 1859 they hanged his father’s old boyhood friend John Brown, who went to the gallows saying, “The crimes of this guilty land will never be purged away but with blood.” Grant was too down and broke almost to notice. He got a month’s worth of work as a customs house clerk, but the superintendent died and the politicians swept him out again.

By February 1860, two years exactly before Fort Donelson, he was living on borrowed money, from those few friends of Julia’s who would still take a little pity on the family. He had no job, no prospects, not even—for the first time in his life—a horse. Jesse Grant, fuming and disappointed and sitting on his tannery wealth, hadn’t spoken to his son for months, but Grant had nowhere else
to turn. Halfway through the spring, thirty-eight years old, he swallowed what was left of his pride. He scraped up train fare from somebody and went to Ohio to ask the old man for help. Anything at all, work, charity. Down to the bottom at last. Unconditional surrender. At about which excellent time, the war gods started to chuckle.

“Miss Esther Dudley is one of the most marked American types I ever saw.”

“What are the signs of the most marked American type you ever saw?” asked Hazard.

“In the first place, she has a bad figure, which she makes answer for a good one. She is too slight, too thin; she looks fragile, willowy, as the cheap novels call it, as though you could break her in halves like a switch. She dresses to suit her figure and sometimes overdoes it. Her features are imperfect. Except her ears, her voice, and her eyes which have a sort of brown depth like a trout brook, she has no very good points.”

“Then why do you hesitate?” asked Strong, who was not entirely pleased with this cool estimate of her cousin’s person.

“Miss Dudley interests me,” replied the painter. “I want to know what she can make of life. She gives one the idea of a lightly-sparred yacht in mid-ocean; unexpected; you ask yourself what the devil she is doing there. She sails gaily along, though there is no land in sight and plenty of rough weather coming. She never read a book, I believe, in her life. She tries to paint, but she is only a second rate amateur and will never be anything more.…”

T
O THE SURPRISE OF NEARLY EVERYONE WHO KNEW HIM
, Henry Adams had actually bought a typewriting machine, late in the year 1883.

Not for his personal correspondence, of course. There a quill pen was still required by courtesy and decorum, and not for the first draft of any really serious work such as his History. And not, certainly, for the purposes of his friend Henry James, who didn’t manipulate the instrument himself, but did send his manuscripts out now to a public stenographer’s office to be “typed.”

“It’s been the ruin of poor Harry,” Adams declared with a quick little grimace of satisfaction. “Thanks to the stenographer he can revise his novels effortlessly, over and over, and every draft is apparently more complicated and convoluted than the one before. Some of his sentences begin to seem to me like the whorl in a seashell, one long dizzy spiral. A literary historian might say his ‘style’ has been completely changed by technology. So you’re back, eh, Mr. Trist?” As if Trist had merely stepped around the corner. “From Paris, is it? Or London now?”