Ulysses Grant received an unexpected guest in this spring of 1863 when Charles Dana joined the team down on the Mississippi. A New England blue blood born in New Hampshire in 1819 and a Harvard alumnus, Dana got into the Transcendentalist movement and lived at the Brook Farm commune in the 1840s where he wrote essays, sang in the choir, gave lectures, taught classes, and showed a grain of common sense that was more common than usual in that lofty-headed pack of idealists, so that he eventually became a trustee of the commune. Brook Farm came to an abrupt end in 1846 when its main buildings were destroyed in a fire and Dana left to start a new career in journalism that took him to Horace Greeley's New York Tribune. He traveled to Europe in the revolutionary year of 1848 during which time he met Karl Marx and other European intelligensia. Back in the states a year later, Dana championed the abolitionist movement, compiled a best-selling volume of poetry, and began work on the American Cyclopedia.When the Civil War began, Dana found it increasingly difficult to deal with Greeley's erratic and mercurial beliefs and finally left the Tribune in April 1862. He then joined the War Department as a special agent assigned to investigate various frauds involving military contractors and suppliers of army equipment. As Dana was a widely traveled individual and a good judge of men, he was now being assigned to report on Ulysses Grant, a man that Lincoln and Stanton knew little about in spite of his commanding one of the nation's major armies. They had only heard the rumors, many of them hostile, about Grant's drunknesses and other supposed lapses of character, and Dana was now to serve as a high class spy for the War Department to find out just what Grant was actually like.
Dana's official duty was to report on the condition of the pay services in the Western armies, but his real job was to spy on Grant. After the president and Secretary of War had been deluged with complaints about Grant, they decided to check out what was up with him, and so in late March 1863 Dana arrived in Memphis to find out. Grant of course was not there, the garrison in that city was commanded by General Stephen Hurlbut, and Hurlbut told Dana what he knew about Grant's activities in the Vicksburg campaign, which to be honest wasn't much, so Stanton directed him to go to the general's headquarters and see for himself just what was going on there. Dana arrived at Milliken's Bend on April 6, the first anniversary of the great battle at Shiloh, took up quarters on a steamboat by the levee, wrote that the Mississippi countryside was lovely and picturesque, but also a depopulated wasteland since all the slaves had fled and there was no one to till the fields.As things would have it, Dana's secret mission was hardly a secret at all and everyone at Grant's headquarters knew exactly what he was there for. A few staff officers were offended enough to suggest that he be picked up bodily and thrown into the Mississippi River, but John Rawlins was more diplomatic and argued that since Dana was after all an official agent of the government, he should be treated with proper respect. The staff eventually agreed with Rawlins and Dana was soon welcomed as an official member of the team with full access to all the top secret army plans and Grant rather appreciated having him around since if Dana was keeping the War Department informed, it meant he himself would have fewer reports to write.
It was a new experience for Dana; a man as widely traveled as himself, but a polished Easterner, had never met these rough-hewn Westerners and didn't know what to make of them. The Army of the Tennessee loved Grant as the Army of the Potomac had loved McClellan, but their way of expressing their sentiment was a little simpler and not as formal. There was no pomp or flash in this army, jut a simple, business-like attitude. The soldiers had total confidence in Grant, but viewed him as an uncle or older brother figure rather than an Oriental potentate like in the Army of the Potomac.Others were getting the same impression. As that spring began, Mary Livermore led down a delegation from the Sanitary Commission and she also heard the stories, that Grant was a conscientiousness drunkard who boasted that he would sacrifice half his army to take Vicksburg, that he would move the big river out of its course and leave the town high and dry, and so forth, and the women from the Sanitary Commission knew men perfectly well and what could happen to an army that was not softened by a woman's touch.
And so Mrs. Livermore wrote that in fact Grant was not a drunk at all, she could see that, and "Had we been younger men and women I feel we would have all tossed our hats in the air and whooped for joy. Our eyes had become practiced in reading the diagnosis of drunkenness." Seeing that Grant was very busy, she made things short and asked one small favor from him. Livermore had a slip of paper listing the names of 21 soldiers in the Army of the Tennessee who were seriously ill and had to be mustered out of the service, but couldn't because their paperwork had gone missing. The men would certainly die if something wasn't done and the officers she had asked all protested that there was nothing they could do--army regulations required the men to have paperwork and without it, they could not be discharged, simple as that.Livermore instead went right to Grant's office on the steamboat. The air was dense with cigar smoke and a large pile of papers sat on the table. As she entered the room, Grant turned around, saw that a lady was there, and immediately became red-faced and embarrassed. He moved around a couple of chairs for her to sit in, put down his cigar, took off his hat, then replaced both without even knowing he was doing it, and asked Livermore what he could do for her. She quickly told Grant about the 21 sick soldiers who needed to be discharged before it was too late. Grant replied that this was really the army medical director's problem, but Livermore protested that there was no time for army bureaucracy. Grant told her that he would take care of it, and the next day a staff officer handed her a letter from Grant ordering the sick men discharged for health reasons, and that was that.
The press continued to hammer on Grant. Around mid-January, Murat Halstead, editor of the Cincinnati Gazette, wrote Secretary Chase a despairing letter about the Army of the Tennessee being totally demoralized all thanks to the incompetence of Grant and Sherman. The letter repeated the usual charges about sickness, the incompetent medical department, and doctors neglecting sick men while they drank and caroused in brothels while riding in army ambulances. Halstead asked why on Earth Grant was still in command of this army as he argued the old, tired rhetoric that C.F. Smith and Buell had won Donelson and Shiloh for him while he lay drunk in a tent and that the current campaign in Mississippi was a total disaster. "Our noble army of the Mississippi is being wasted by the foolish, drunken, stupid Grant. He can't organize or control or fight an army. I have no personal feeling about it but I know he is an ass."
Even worse was an attack from an ex-friend of Grant's, Brig. Gen Charles S. Hamilton. The two were old colleagues from the prewar Army, Hamilton had conducted himself well at Iuka and Corinth, and Grant had given him the command in west Tennessee when the Vicksburg campaign started. Hamilton wrote him a friendly letter wishing him success, but privately he was unhappy. Others were being promoted over him, in particular James McPherson, and Hamilton suspected this was due to favoritism. He had been brooding for a long time and on February 11, just two days after that friendly letter to Grant, he wrote Senator Doolittle of Wisconsin to say that Grant was a "bestial" drunkard unless his wife was there to supervise and keep him away from the bottle.Hamilton was barely able to contain his resentment. He also charged that General Hurlbut, commanding at Memphis was a drunkard, that McPherson did not earn his promotion to major general, and that John McClernand was untrustworthy (in an earlier letter, Hamilton had also turned his anger on the Army of the Cumberland, calling its General Gordon Granger a useless drunkard and that General Rosecrans was involved in cotton smuggling and was a coarse, profane alcoholic despite claiming to be a devout Catholic).There is no evidence that Grant ever found out about Hamilton's Dear John letters, but he did know that the latter wanted to get rid of McPherson and get command of the 17th Corps for himself. Grant wrote to Halleck to complain about it, and a little later, when Hamilton found himself unable to get along with Hurlbut and submitted his resignation, the War Department immediately accepted.
Grant, Sherman, and Sheridan promoted the idea that you can win a war by behaving as Genghis Khan with murder, rapine, and pillage of hapless civilians and their property instead of fighting like honorable gentlemen.
>>18462393You have electricity, can read and write enough to post on this forum, and aren’t crippled by pellagra. Say thank you, general Sherman.
>>18462393this is not true
>>18462331I think i just read about Charles Dana the other day because of a book I'm reading.
>>18462668Thanks for the reddit snark, sir.
>>18462343He was right btw, McPherson didn't really earn his general's stars and got them because of blatant favoritism.
>>18464343Major General James B. McPherson was highly regarded by his peers and superiors, General Rosecrans stated that McPherson "adds 20 per cent to any troops he commands".
>The alcohol rumors would persist, they persisted the following year when now general-in-chief Grant was accused by "Baldy" Smith of chronic drunkenness, They were so frequent and overused that they gradually ceased to be taken seriously--drinking was not generally viewed as a great vice to Americans of that generation to begin with, but it was also hard to overlook that most of the accusations seemed to come from officers who had a bone to pick with Grant, usually because they did not get a promotion or command they felt was owed to them (as was the case with Charles S. Hamilton) or they had disagreed with him on strategy or found some order of his oppressive. This led to Lincoln's famous quip that he should like to know what brand of whiskey Grant drank so he might give it to his other generals.
>>18464499Grant seems to have rubbed a lot of people the wrong way, which only makes his military competence that much more in evidence since nobody has any reason to promote him or follow him for any other reason.
>>18464518the regular army was a small club and as far as they were concerned, he was just some loser washout who gave up on the army because he couldn't hack it and took to the bottle. a lot of officers thought they were far more deserving of promotion. it was particularly apparent that Halleck in the early days of the war thought Grant was some retard who needed his hand held.
>>18462331The figure, briefly alluded to here, of horace greeley might be regarded as a sort of representative figure of the age bestriding through that anecdote like a colossus and that is horace greeley and also one of the figures that did get through the war only to lose in a landslide defeat loss in 1872 running against grant for president, that was horace greeley though
