Ulysses S. Grant by Michael Korda Read Free Book Online Page B

and, in the absence of orders, did not hesitate to use his own bold initiative.
    On September 14 American troops finally entered Mexico City, General Scott made his headquarters in the “Halls of the Montezumas,” and Ulysses S. Grant was promoted, at last, to first lieutenant, four officers senior to him in his regiment having been killed in a “steamboat explosion,” of all things. As always in the regular army, the death of officers senior to oneself, however it occurs, results in the promotion of those below, so Grant was promoted more by the operation of seniority than because of his personal bravery. On the other hand he was a regular officer, he knew the rules, and did not chafe at them.
    Whatever his reservations about the Mexican War—and they were many—and however much he sympathized with Mexico over the draconian peace terms that would deprive the country of all its territory north of the Rio Grande and make the United States, at last, a continental power—he was relieved to have done his duty and proved to himself that he was a soldier.
    America finally had its “Manifest Destiny”—and with it the now-burning question of whether slavery would be extended to its vast new territories—and Ulysses Grant was anxious to return home to his.
    He sweltered on the beach near Vera Cruz while fever raged through the troops, then shipped out to Pascagoula, Mississippi, and immediately obtained a four-month leave of absence.
     
    On August 22, 1848, in St. Louis, he married Julia Dent, perhaps the most important event of his life so far.

Chapter Four
    G RANT HAD WAITED a long time to marry Julia, and it is clear enough that while the Dents gave in to the inevitable, they were still not overjoyed. Active military service in Mexico had hardened Grant—he was lean, strong, tanned, very much the picture of a conquering hero—but he was still only an infantry lieutenant, and the son of a bumptious Northern leather tanner at that. Ulysses at last got his Julia, thanks to his patience and persistence, but both Julia and her family made it clear that henceforth it would be his responsibility to measure up to the privilege of marrying her. In a sense this was already something of a Grant family tradition—Jesse Grant had taken Hannah Simpson from the brick house her family lived in (brick houses were a rarity in Point Pleasant, Ohio, at the time), and the implication was that he had “married up.” Ulysses, too—at any rate in the eyes of the Dents—had done so, and curiously enough a brick house would play a role in his marriage as well, since Julia yearned for one but was compelled for many years to live in homes she considered beneath her.
    That Ulysses and Julia were happy together, physically and emotionally, is crystal clear from their correspondence. No hint of scandal or unfaithfulness would ever touch their lives—Ulysses was the most faithful and devoted of husbands (if not always the most demonstrative) and always would be, while Julia, though more demanding, invariably saw him through rose-colored spectacles. No matter how shabby and down-at-the-heels Grant became—and he would go a long way down before he rose up again—Julia refused to admit it, or possibly even to see it. “Captain Grant,” as she always called him once he reached that rank, even when he was clerking in his father’s leather-goods store, “was always perfection.”
    In the meantime the young couple’s happiness was in the hands of that most unreliable of institutions when it comes to what we now call “human resources”—the peacetime army, which proceeded to do everything possible to make their lives a misery. Grant was posted to Detroit, by no means an enviable posting to begin with in those days, but no sooner had the Grants arrived there than he was ordered, over his protests, to Sackets Harbor, N.Y., a remote outpost on Lake Ontario, where they spent a long, cold winter enjoying their first taste of domestic bliss.
    In