How Ulysses S. Grant Answered the Fall of Fort Sumter

The Grant & Perkins leather store in Galena, Illinois. Galena State Historic Sites.

On April 15, 1861, shocking news reached the river town of Galena, Illinois: Fort Sumter, a federal fort in the harbor of Charleston, South Carolina, had surrendered to Confederates after a bombardment of nearly thirty-four hours from April 12 to 14. The Civil War had begun.

Among those who heard it was Ulysses S. Grant, a 38-year-old veteran of the Mexican-American War and a newcomer to town. After leaving the army in 1854, he had lived in St. Louis, farming with his family at White Haven, his wife Julia's childhood home, but struggled to make a living; in 1860 he, Julia and their four young children moved to Galena so he could work with his brothers in the family's leather goods store. Fort Sumter would change his life as it changed millions of others — turning a man looking for steady work into a Union general and, by the end of the decade, President.

The local expert

During the secession crisis, Grant's army past made him a sought-after voice. As he recalled in his memoirs:

"We had customers in all the little towns in south-west Wisconsin, south-east Minnesota and north-east Iowa. These generally knew I had been a captain in the regular army and had served through the Mexican War. Consequently, wherever I stopped at night, some of the people would come to the public-house where I was and sit till a late hour discussing the probabilities of the future."

He expected a short war — a view, he admitted, "I continued to entertain … until after the battle of Shiloh," fought almost exactly a year later.

The courthouse meeting

After Sumter, President Lincoln called for 75,000 volunteers for ninety days, and Galena was swept up in patriotism. Notices called citizens to the courthouse; businesses closed. "All was excitement," Grant wrote; "for a time, there were no party distinctions; all were Union men, determined to avenge the insult to the national flag."

The packed meeting chose Grant to preside — because, as he reflected, "although a comparative stranger…I had been in the army and had seen service." After speeches by leading citizens including John A. Rawlins and Elihu Washburne, Galena resolved to raise a company of volunteers toward Illinois's first quota of six regiments. Its captain was to be elected, but Grant stepped aside:

"I declined the captaincy before the balloting but announced that I would aid the company in every way I could and would be found in the service in some position if there should be a war."

Walking home, he told his brother Orvil, "I think I ought to go into the service." His business days were over: "I never went into our leather store after that meeting, to put up a package or do other business."

In his letters

Grant's letters that week show a firm commitment to the Union. On April 19 he wrote to his slaveholding father-in-law, Colonel Frederick Dent, at White Haven:

"the times are indee[d] startling but now is the time particularly in the border slave states, for men to prove their love of country…but now all party distinctions should be lost sight of and evry true patriot be for maintaining the integrity of the glorious old Stars and Stripes."

He added that "no impartial man can conceal from himself the fact that in all these troubles the South have been the aggressors and the Administration has stood purely on the defensive" — and, to Dent, "in all this I can but see the doom of Slavery."

Two days later he wrote his father, Jesse: "whatever may have been my political opinions before I have but one sentiment now. That is we have a Government, and laws and a flag and they must all be sustained." He explained why he hadn't taken the captaincy: "I do not wish to act hastily or unadvisedly in the matter, as there are more than enough to respond to the first call of the President." In truth, he was holding out for a better opportunity — a colonelcy — and within a few months he began the second army career that led to the presidency.

Sources

Based on "Ulysses S. Grant Reacts to the Firing on Fort Sumter," Ulysses S. Grant National Historic Site, National Park Service; a work of the United States government in the public domain, quoting Grant's Personal Memoirs and his 1861 letters.