Ulysses S. Grant's lost years: six jobs in St. Louis, 1854–1860

In 1854, at Fort Humboldt, Ulysses S. Grant told a fellow soldier: "Whoever hears of me in ten years, will hear of a well-to-do Missouri farmer." He resigned from the army that year and went home to his wife's family estate, White Haven, outside St. Louis. For the next six years he tried one way of earning a living after another. None of them worked.

The Boggs and Grant building, St. Louis, 1859. Library of Congress

The farmer

Grant started at White Haven as a hand on the estate. When his father-in-law, Colonel Dent, moved into the city in 1857, Grant took over running the farm day to day. He had bad luck at every turn: droughts, his own illness, a failing economy and unseasonable frosts in the last years of the "Little Ice Age." It was not enough. By late 1857 he and Dent agreed to sell most of the farm equipment.

Alongside the farming, from 1854 to 1858, he cut oak and hickory on the 80-acre Hardscrabble farm, split it, stacked it in cords and hauled it into St. Louis to sell. It brought in some money, but not a living.

The businessman

In 1859 Grant went into real estate in St. Louis with Harry Boggs, a cousin of his wife Julia. Boggs ran the business; Grant's job was to collect the rent. He repeatedly failed to, and the two agreed to part.

The engineer who wasn't

Grant then applied to be St. Louis County Engineer. He had trained as an engineer at West Point and was strong at mathematics — a natural fit. So was the other applicant, Charles F. Salomon, a German-born engineer who would later serve under Grant in the Civil War. A three-member commission chose Salomon. A later St. Louis postmaster remembered Grant waiting on the courthouse steps for the result, and answering the friend who told him he'd lost with a grumble that he had been beaten "by a Dutchman."

Grant's letter to his father Jesse on September 23, 1859 shows how sore he was. The two Democratic commissioners had voted for him, he wrote, and the Free Soilers against him. "What I shall now go at I have not determined but I hope something before a great while." His father was a Free Soil antislavery man, and Grant hurried to reassure him: "I never voted an out and out Democratic ticket in my life."

The letter also shows a side of Grant that is easy to forget. He had once attended a meeting of the anti-immigrant Know Nothing party, and he complained that the Free Soilers had rewarded "a Dutchman" and that, as he saw it, almost no paying office in the county was held by a native-born American. Looking back in his memoirs decades later he did not apologise for his week as a Know Nothing, writing that he still thought native-born citizens "should have as much protection, as many privileges in their native country, as those who voluntarily select it for a home."

The clerk

Later in 1859 Grant wrote home that his name had gone forward for superintendent of the U.S. Custom House in St. Louis, and that if he did not get that, he would at least get a clerk's desk. He got the clerkship. It lasted about a month.

In May 1860 Grant and his family left St. Louis for Galena, Illinois, where he took a job as a clerk in his father's leather goods store. The Civil War was less than a year away.

Sources

Written from "Grant Searches for a Civilian Career," Ulysses S. Grant National Historic Site, National Park Service; a work of the United States government in the public domain. It draws on The Papers of Ulysses S. Grant, vol. 1; Grant's Personal Memoirs; Lloyd Lewis, Captain Sam Grant (1950); and Walter Stevens, Grant in St. Louis (1916).