In the spring of 1861, Ulysses S. Grant was a thirty-eight-year-old clerk in a leather store on Main Street in Galena, Illinois, earning roughly eight hundred dollars a year. He counted hides for his younger brothers, sold saddles and harnesses, and collected debts from customers in the small river towns spread across the upper Mississippi. The man behind the counter was quiet, plain, and by all accounts remarkably reticent.
Most of the townspeople had no idea that he was a West Point graduate, a former captain in the regular army, and a veteran of the Mexican War who had stood inside the gates of Mexico City. The counter was the visible line between the man he had been and the man he had become. For six and a half years, Grant had been out of the army, and in that time he had failed at almost everything he had tried. The slow ruin had begun on a jungle trail in Panama in 1852, when he was a quartermaster responsible for moving some seven hundred soldiers and their families to the Pacific coast.
The crossing was a horror of rain and disease, and about one in seven of those who left New York died on the isthmus or in the bay beyond. Grant pushed the column forward as it thinned around him, but he arrived in California depressed and underweight. His pay would not cover the cost of bringing his wife and children west. He began to drink, and in 1854, under pressure from an unforgiving commanding officer, he resigned from the army.
He returned to his father-in-law’s plantation outside St. Louis and tried to make a living from the land. He built a cabin with his own hands, farmed potatoes and corn, and sold firewood on the streets of St. Louis in a faded blue army overcoat.
The farm failed. The panic of 1857 ruined credit across the country. He came down with malaria. A real estate partnership with his wife’s cousin failed.
He lost an application to become county engineer. In the worst year of his civilian life, he gave away his most valuable possession: a thirty-five-year-old enslaved man named William Jones, the only person Grant ever owned. Deep in debt, he could have sold Jones and walked away with money in his pocket. Instead, on March 29, 1859, he went to the St.
Louis Circuit Court and wrote out, in his own hand, a paper that set Jones free forever. By spring 1860, every door in Missouri had closed. Grant wrote to his father, a successful leather merchant in Ohio, and asked for help. His father offered him a job as a clerk in the family store in Galena.
Grant accepted. He loaded his wife Julia and their four children onto a steamboat and rode the river north. He was, by his own quiet admission, beaten. The store was run by his younger brothers, Simpson and Orville.
Ulysses came in not as a partner but as a salaried clerk. He measured hides by weight, sorted harnesses, and wrote out invoices in a clerk’s hand. He took sales trips into Wisconsin, Minnesota, and Iowa, collecting on accounts and taking new orders. The customers in those river towns often knew that he had been an army officer and had fought in Mexico.
As secession became a real possibility through the winter of 1860 and into early 1861, they wanted to talk. Grant told them more than once that if war came, it would be short. He was wrong on that point, and he would later admit he held that view until the great butcher’s bill of Shiloh proved him wrong. The thing he was waiting for arrived as a telegraph slip in mid-April 1861.
Confederate batteries opened fire on Fort Sumter in Charleston Harbor on April 12. The federal garrison lowered the flag on April 14. The news reached Galena on April 15, and it changed the conversation in every shop and tavern in town within the hour. On the same day, President Lincoln issued a proclamation calling for seventy-five thousand militia volunteers.
Town meetings began organizing within hours. In the leather store on Main Street that afternoon, the quiet clerk spoke openly for the first time in months about who he had once been. He told the men gathered in the shop that he had thought he was done with soldiering, but he had been educated by the government, and if his knowledge and experience could be of any service, he ought to offer them. On the evening of April 18, the Galena Courthouse filled to the doors.
The mayor rose first and counseled compromise. The crowd shouted him down. Then Elihu Washburn, the town’s congressman and a personal friend of Lincoln, stood up. Any man who tried to stir party prejudice at such a time, he told the room, was a traitor to his country.
The crowd roared. After Washburn came John A. Rollins, a young lawyer who spoke with a force that startled the room. We will stand by the flag of our country, he ended, and appeal to the god of battles for support.
In the middle of it all, the meeting needed someone to chair it. The crowd looked for a soldier. Ulysses S. Grant was called to the front and asked to preside.
He did not give a long speech. He took the chair, answered the practical questions, and was by every account plain and brief. When the call went out to elect a captain for the company that was forming, everyone assumed Grant would take the post. He declined before the balloting began.
He had served nine years in the regular army, he told his friends. He had been a captain. He was fitted to command a regiment. To accept a captaincy of volunteers, with men of no military background being elected over him, would be a step backward he could not afford to take.
Walking home that night with his brother Orville, Grant said one of the most quoted sentences of his story. The exact words are uncertain, but the substance is firm: he had decided to go into the service. In his memoirs, he later wrote one of the cleanest sentences he ever sat down. I never went into our leather store after that meeting, he said, to put up a package or do other business.
The store ran on without him. The counter was there, the hides were there. Ulysses Grant did not stand behind that counter again. But the door he had walked out of was not yet replaced by another door he could walk into.
For the next six weeks, he lived in a strange middle place. He helped organize the Galena company and drilled the volunteers. He wrote letters. To his father-in-law, a Missouri slaveholder and southern sympathizer, he wrote that in all this he could see only the doom of slavery.
To his own father, he wrote that there were now but two parties in the country, traitors and patriots, and he intended to be ranked with the latter. The Galena company voted for its captain in the days after the courthouse meeting. They did not pick Grant. They picked Augustus Chetlain, the merchant who had befriended him in the store the year before.
Grant did not contest it. Late in April, the company left for Springfield. Grant went with them as far as the state capital, and Governor Richard Yates asked him to stay on, not as a commander, but as a clerk in the adjutant general’s office, drafting orders and processing musters. Grant took it without complaint, doing paperwork in his civilian coat while other men secured commissions over his head.
On May 24, he wrote directly to the adjutant general of the United States Army in Washington. He had served fifteen years in the regular army, he reminded the general. He had been educated at government expense, four of those years at West Point. He tendered his services for the war in any capacity.
In view of his age and length of service, he added, he felt himself competent to command a regiment. He sent the letter. No answer ever came. In early June, he traveled to Cincinnati, where his old Mexican War acquaintance George B.
McClellan had just been appointed commander of the new Department of the Ohio. Grant went to McClellan’s headquarters and asked to be received. He never got a meeting. He waited in the antechamber, came back, and left again without being seen.
Grant rode back to Galena in early June with no commission, no command, and no clear sign that the new army wanted him. He began to wonder if the country he had decided to serve simply did not need him. The door opened in the middle of June because someone else had failed. In the town of Mattoon, a regiment had been forming, and the men had elected a colonel of their own, a former militia officer named Simon Good.
Good carried himself with a flourish, but he turned out to be a disaster. He drank with his men and let discipline collapse. When the men were told they might soon face real combat, they asked for someone else to lead them. Governor Yates had seen Grant work in Springfield and had watched the quiet captain produce calm where there had been confusion.
Within forty-eight hours, he made the offer. The regiment would be remade under Grant’s command. Grant accepted at once. The commission was dated June 17, 1861.
Grant arrived at Camp Yates in his ill-fitting civilian clothes, with no proper uniform. The men, expecting a stately presence after their showy former colonel, saw a short, plain, sun-darkened man with a quiet voice. They laughed at him outright. They did not laugh long.
Grant began that same day to enforce regulations. He did not raise his voice. He did not threaten. He simply insisted that every regulation be followed, every guard kept, every drill performed.
One officer who watched it happen said that while the new colonel was quiet spoken, every man in the regiment quickly understood he meant exactly what he said. Within days, the same men who had laughed at his arrival were saluting him on the parade ground. It was the slow, unromantic process of turning a mob into a regiment. Less than two months later, on August 7, 1861, Grant was commissioned a brigadier general of volunteers on the recommendation of Elihu Washburn.
By the following February, he forced the surrender of Fort Donelson and earned the nickname that would carry him to the end of the war and into the White House. By April 1865, he would meet Robert E. Lee in a parlor at Appomattox. None of that was visible from the dusty parade ground at Camp Yates in June 1861.
What was visible was a quiet man in civilian clothes giving orders that men were beginning to obey. Back in Galena, the leather store stayed open. Simpson and Orville continued the business. The counter was there, the hides were there, the bell on the door still rang when customers came in.
Ulysses Grant did not stand behind that counter again. He had walked away from it in one afternoon, but it had taken six more weeks, three rejections, and the collapse of another man’s regiment to give the country a place where he could finally be of use.