Grant

by Ron Chernow

whether the Nueces River formed the southern border of Texas, as Mexico believed, or the Rio Grande, 130 miles farther south, as the Polk administration insisted.

Corpus Christi, Texas, the spot where the Nueces River empties into the Gulf of Mexico.

Old Rough and Ready.

Already an acknowledged virtuoso on horseback, Grant specialized in breaking untamed horses that Mexicans rounded up from the countryside to sell.

President Polk resolved to bring the crisis to a head. “Texas had no claim beyond the Nueces River,” Grant later noted, “and yet we pushed on to the Rio Grande and crossed it. I am always ashamed of my country when I think of that invasion.”

[Grant’s] superb courage and coolness under fire.”

When called on to propose a toast at one dinner, Grant grew tongue-tied. “I can face the music,” he confessed blushingly, “but I cannot make a speech.”

The problem was neither the amount nor the frequency with which he drank, but the dramatic behavioral changes induced.

From the Panama ordeal sprang his later vision of a canal between the oceans that would do away forever with lengthy, hazardous journeys across the isthmus.

San Francisco was then aflame with Gold Rush fever,

The con artist and the scoundrel always found a ready target in U. S. Grant.

“He did not run after the women as some of the officers did,”

The Gold Rush inflated prices to stratospheric levels,

“He was the perfect soul of honor and truth, and believed everyone else as artless as himself.”

One glass would show on him,” his speech became slurred, “and two or three would make him stupid.”

Grant’s drinking lapses would be costly and ultimately ruinous to his reputation.

“Wish-ton-wish”—an Indian term meaning whip-poor-will—that

Grant anointed his log cabin Hardscrabble,

When she nearly yielded to depression, Julia decided instead to will herself to be happy.

Her devout creed was never to admit failure and to gaze unashamedly on the bright side of things. Her incurable optimism proved correct when it came to the special destiny reserved for her husband.

Grant was unusually bookish. “Most of his leisure time he spent in reading. He was one of the greatest readers I ever saw.”79

Anchored in the bosom of his family, free from loneliness, Grant was able to conquer his craving for drink.

In May 1856, Congressman Preston Brooks of South Carolina thrashed and nearly killed Senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts after the latter made a scalding antislavery speech,

in “Bleeding Kansas,” John Brown and his sons brutally executed five men who endorsed slavery.

in March 1857, Chief Justice Roger B. Taney handed down the infamous Dred Scott decision.

The court denied Scott’s right to sue on the grounds that he was a Negro, an inferior being, and therefore not a citizen.

the 1857 economic depression provoked widespread bank failures, massive unemployment, and precipitous declines in commodity prices, dashing any chance of an economic rebound for Grant.

Abraham Lincoln and Stephen A. Douglas, rivals for the U.S. Senate in Illinois, squared off in a series of debates that focused on slavery and Grant followed the newspaper coverage.

“When I was in St. Louis the year before Lincoln’s election, it made my blood run cold to hear friends of mine, Southern men—as many of my friends were—deliberately discuss the dissolution of the Union

Through it all, Julia maintained her custom of keeping slaves and had two slaves help with the children.

He had acquired from Colonel Dent the mulatto slave named William Jones who had worked on Dent’s farm and was now thirty-five years old. It was the only time Grant ever owned a slave and Jones may have come as a gift.

Grant could have earned a considerable sum had he chosen to sell Jones rather than liberate him.

the South’s “peculiar institution.”

As foreign laborers flocked to build railroads, native-born Protestant workers resisted their competition and banded together in the mysterious Order of the Star-Spangled Banner. To safeguard their secrecy, they were instructed to reply to outside questions: “I know nothing.”

John Brown and a group of abolitionist zealots raided the federal armory at Harpers Ferry, Virginia, hoping to seize weapons and foment a slave rebellion in the South.

nothing could distract from the unpleasant truth that Grant had been a failure, battered by life at every turn.

“He was a sensitive and retiring man, but behind his modesty was a fair estimate of his own worth.

As an adult, Jesse looked back fondly on his daily tussles with his father. When Grant mounted the long wooden stairs at day’s end, Jesse confronted him in mock defiance: “Mister, do you want to fight?” Grant countered: “I am a man of peace; but I will not be hectored by a person of your size.”

The issue of whether to extend slavery into the new territories had precipitated a final showdown over its future.

Slavery's future

On November 6, 1860, Abraham Lincoln was elected president

winning less than 40 percent of the popular vote,

Lincoln was deemed a mediocrity at best, a coarse bumpkin from the backwoods.

Rampant speculation arose that Lincoln’s election would bring southern secession,

It started to dawn on Grant that his West Point education and Mexican War experience had readied him for further service to his country,

on December 20, 1860, delegates in Charleston, South Carolina, voted to secede from the Union.

Suddenly Grant was fired by a mission, a clear sense of purpose,

A true believer, Davis would oversee the Confederacy with a fanatical zeal that never wavered.

Lincoln was inaugurated on March 4,

Lincoln invoked the “mystic chords of memory” that bound Americans, even as tense riflemen peered from every window

Pierre Gustave Toutant Beauregard—a freshly minted brigadier general in the provisional Confederate army,