Free Shiloh, 1862 by Winston Groom

had entered West Point, and his career since then had gone in a downward way. But it was there, on the banks of the northern Mississippi River, that war found him.
    Grant was not surprised by the firing on Charleston’s Fort Sumter by the new Confederate States of America. He had spent too much time with Julia’s family in Missouri and among his Southern West Point classmates and officers in the Mexican War to think that the South would not fight. Grant’s own feelings were ambivalent; he detested the notion of disunion and in fact had voted against the Republican ticket in the election of 1856 because he believed its success would cause the South to secede. He did not vote in the election of 1860. 2 He also disliked slavery yet kept his wife’s slaves within his own household and in fact even acquired aslave of his own, one William Jones, whom he freed in 1859 when Jones was 35. 3
    Matters had boiled over and a fight was quickly becoming the only thing that would settle it. Grant understood this, and, being a military man, he felt honor-bound to offer his services to the Union. As he saw it, if Washington allowed the South to secede, nothing would prevent other states from doing the same, until in the end the first and only true experiment in democracy the world had ever known would dissolve itself into a disastrous and irretrievable collection of petty states squabbling among themselves.
    He had also concluded that despite the Confederacy’s seizure of enormous Federal stores, munitions, and military equipment in Southern forts and armories, and the defection of so many West Point–educated officers, the war nevertheless would be a short one. The Northern population was nearly twice that of the South, and its industrial superiority would soon take the starch out of the rebellion. Once that had occurred, Grant wrote in a letter to his father, with the abolitionist Republicans in control of the government, the market for slaves would bottom out until “the nigger will never disturb this country again.” So reasoned Ulysses S. Grant.
    After the attack on Fort Sumter in April 1861, Lincoln called for the various states to raise 75,000 volunteers to put down the rebellion. This resulted in an overwhelming response in most Northern states, including Illinois, where Grant helped to muster in troops. It also resulted in the secession of four more Southern states. OnMay 4, 1861, Grant wrote a letter to the adjutant general of the U.S. Army offering his services. It was never answered. Puzzled, he went to Cincinnati to see his old West Point acquaintance George B. McClellan, who had just been made a major general. He waited for three days but McClellan wouldn’t see him. 4
    Grant was about to return to Galena, 39 years old and washed up, with the war passing him by, when a message came that the Illinois governor Richard Yates wished to see him. He went to Springfield, where the governor was waiting with an offer. There was a new regiment of volunteers, the governor said, who had revealed themselves as little more than a mob of chicken thieves led by a drunkard. Would Grant take charge of these people and try to straighten them out? He would have the rank of colonel. It was a stroke of fate that would change Grant’s life forever.
    In a month of hard work, patience, and liberal doses of the guardhouse, Grant had whipped these miscreants into such fine shape that Governor Yates turned over to him three other errant regiments. The number of troops under Grant now constituted a brigade, and technically the rank of brigadier general was his due. Still, Grant was stunned to read in the St. Louis newspapers that he had just been promoted, with some unexpected help from an acquaintance from Galena, Republican congressman Elihu Washburne. In two months Sam Grant had gone from a has-been former captain, failed farmer, and second-rate businessman to the command of several thousand men and induction into the most exclusive club the U.S.