Before the Civil War, Grant Failed at Farming and Sold Firewood on a St. Louis Corner

Ulysses S. Grant in 1849 and the St. Louis riverfront in 1859 (National Park Service, Library of Congress).

The man who would command the Union armies spent six years before the Civil War failing at one civilian job after another. From 1854 until 1860, Ulysses S. Grant lived in St. Louis, Missouri. According to the National Park Service, those years shaped him: he met slavery daily for the first time, struggled to find a career and tried to give his growing family a home.

From soldier to civilian

Ulysses S. Grant around 1844.

After graduating from West Point in 1843, Grant was ordered to the 4th U.S. Infantry at Jefferson Barracks in St. Louis. There he met Julia Dent, the younger sister of his West Point roommate, who lived nearby on the White Haven estate. After a short courtship he proposed there, and they married in St. Louis in 1848. Army postings took them from base to base, but White Haven stayed their anchor.

In 1852 the Army sent Grant to Fort Vancouver, on the Pacific coast. Julia was pregnant with their second child, and the route crossed the Isthmus of Panama, so she stayed at White Haven. Grant missed the birth and did not see Julia and the children for more than two years. They kept in touch by letter, and on January 29, 1853, he wrote to her that their news of the children nearly brought him to tears. After two and a half years apart he resigned his commission in 1854 as a captain and went home.

Five houses in six years

Grant wanted a settled home but moved often.

White Haven was built between 1812 and 1816 and was Julia's childhood home. Grant later bought it from his in-laws, planning to raise horses there in retirement, but that plan faded during his presidency.

White Haven in the 1850s (National Park Service).

Hardscrabble was Grant's own project. He built the log cabin starting in 1855 on an 80-acre property north of White Haven, near his fields. Julia did not like it, and the family returned to White Haven after her mother died. Wish-ton-wish burned in 1873.

Looking for work

Grant told a fellow soldier in 1854 that anyone who heard of him in ten years would hear of a well-to-do Missouri farmer. It did not work out.

• Farming. He worked as a hand at White Haven, and when Colonel Frederick Dent moved to the city in 1857 he took over the daily running of the farm. Droughts, illness, a weak economy and unseasonable frosts from the "Little Ice Age" defeated him, and most of the equipment was sold in late 1857.
• Firewood. From 1854 to 1858 he cut oak and hickory on the 80 acres of Hardscrabble, split the trunks and delivered them to the city. It earned a modest income. A statue now marks 12th and Market Streets, where he often sold it.
• Real estate. In 1859 he partnered with Julia's cousin Harry Boggs in a St. Louis real estate business. Grant collected the rents, did so poorly, and the partnership was dissolved.
• County engineer. He applied in August 1859, qualified by his West Point training in engineering and mathematics. A three-person commission chose Charles F. Salomon, a German-born engineer who later served under Grant.
• Custom house. He wrote home in 1859 that he hoped for a place at the custom house, got a clerkship and held it for only about a month.

Boggs and Grant, about 1859 (Library of Congress).

Confronting slavery

Grant grew up in Georgetown, Ohio, where slavery was illegal and mostly frowned upon, and his father Jesse wrote articles harshly criticizing slaveholders. It surprises many people that Grant later lived on a farm worked by enslaved people and owned an enslaved man himself.

At White Haven, he met slavery daily for the first time. His parents condemned it, but his father-in-law Frederick Dent considered it necessary. Enslaved African Americans worked the fields, cared for the Dent and Grant children and kept up the comfortable life of both families. Grant sometimes worked alongside them and knew the Dents' cook, Mary Robinson, who recalled him in an interview with the St. Louis Republican in 1885.

The remains of the summer kitchen at White Haven, where enslaved people prepared meals, about 1891 (Library of Congress).

At some point Grant acquired an enslaved man, William Jones, from Dent. Though short of money, Grant freed him at the St. Louis courthouse in 1859 instead of selling him. The Park Service says that what he saw in St. Louis had a deep effect on his work as general and president.

Sources

• National Park Service, Ulysses S. Grant National Historic Site, "Ulysses S. Grant in St. Louis 1854-1860" (https://www.nps.gov/articles/000/ulysses-s-grant-in-st-louis-1854-1860.htm); pictures from the National Park Service and the Library of Congress; the drawings of the houses and a photograph of a recent statue were left out; rewritten in hubnx's own words.