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exactly clear why the Southern states expressed such indignation. In 1850 only 1,011 slaves ran away to the North, and ten years later, in 1860, the number had diminished to 803. It is entirely probable that the total, in twenty years, was less than fifteen thousand-while there were three million slaves in the Southern states.

The explosive element in the situation lay, not in the money value of the fugitive slaves, but in the active threat against the whole institution of slavery. One of the historic results of this agitation was to bring slavery forward as the chief national issue, and to obscure the underlying financial and economic problems. In other words, the slavery question was swiftly becoming a moral as well as a political controversy; it was spreading from a small group of reformers outward through the mass of people; and the growing capitalism of the North was getting ready to adopt the "Down with Slavery" slogan as a means of acquiring control of the national govern

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During these years Grant's political opinions were drifting away from the abolitionist ideas of his father and moving toward the pro-slavery, Democratic notions of the Dent family. His habitual indecision in the field of intellectual conceptions kept him from being plainly either one thing or the other. He was not an eager student of large affairs, nor the kind of man who seizes a newspaper and, devouring its contents, talks about it all day. He had horses to talk about, and the doings at the post, and his reminiscences of the Mexican War.

Yet if we are to place him at all, at this period of his life, we must include him among the Democrats. He voted in only one presidential election. That was in 1856, and his choice for President was James Buchanan, the Democratic nominee. He wrote:

It was evident to my mind that the election of a Republican President in 1856 meant the secession of all the slave states, and rebellion. Under these circumstances I preferred the success of a candidate whose election would prevent or postpone secession. . . . I therefore voted for James Buchanan for President.

During the Civil War, on August 3, 1862, he wrote to his father, "I have no hobby of my own with regard to the negro, either to effect his freedom or to continue his bondage." But his wife owned slaves, and kept on owning them while the Civil War was being fought.

CHAPTER IX

THE LEAN YEARS

§1

"N the slack years that followed Grant's return from Mexico we see him drifting into a sort of frowzy stagnation. With

I

in the narrow frame of his life-picture we can discern nothing but horses, the taproom scenes of a sutler's store, some piddling work about a quartermaster's office, and a wife and baby; all of them the pursuits and interests of a rural youth who had miraculously become an army officer.

He was weighed down by the lethargy of those who find themselves out of place. He was easy-going and indolent, but beneath his indolence there was ambition and energy which had no outlet. He was stirred into action only by external circumstances. No; circumstance is not a strong enough word. What he needed was not a circumstance but a predicament. He was at his best in the midst of dire confusion. He mounted to fame on a ladder of desperate situations.

A distressing predicament occurred while the Fourth Infantry was crossing the Isthmus of Panama on its way to the Pacific Coast. This was in the summer of 1852. The contractor who was expected to furnish mules at the railway's end could not get them. He threw up his contract, and the regiment—without means of transportation-sat down in the tropic jungle and waited while the colonel wondered what he ought to do. In a few days cholera ran through the regiment like fire in a field of dry corn; and men began to die.

Then the stodgy quartermaster came to the front. He managed somehow to get together a few mules and a gang of

climate-hardened natives. The regiment, under the inspiration of Grant's energy, struggled to its feet. The sick men and the soldiers' wives were put on mules, while the rest of the regiment started out on foot. There were children, too, in the expedition; they were carried on the backs of natives.

The command got across the Isthmus, but it was a pilgrimage of agony... delirious men by the score; lost squads who could not keep up; and pale-faced stragglers who wanted nothing in the world but to lie down and die. In one day thirty-seven men died, and altogether the regiment lost about one-fourth of its personnel. Without Grant's resourcefulness the loss would have been much larger. His "great activity and efficiency were generally recognized," says one of his biographers-but apparently not by the War Department. There was no official commendation of his work. The only thing that happened was a silly, red tape inquiry into the circumstances of the march. Later in the year we find him writing a letter from California in reply to an official demand from the Department to explain why some of the government's property had been lost or abandoned on the Isthmus.

For two years he was on the Pacific Coast; first at Fort Vancouver, on the Columbia River, near Portland, Oregonwhich was then a village inhabited by shaggy pioneers-and afterwards at Fort Humboldt, in northern California. His duties at Fort Vancouver, translated into commercial terms, were simply those of a shipping clerk. He received supplies and distributed them. Fort Vancouver was the distributing point for more remote posts in the interior. But most of Grant's work was done by soldier subordinates, and he spent his time riding horses and moodily hating the army and all its works. One who knew him there said, "He was one of the kindest and best men I ever knew. He seemed to be always sad; that is, he never seemed jovial and hearty, like most of the officers."

In August, 1853, he was made a captain in the line, and

Whisky at Ryan's Store

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was sent to Fort Humboldt to command a company. He had the lounging habit, as we have seen, and as soon as he got to Fort Humboldt he looked about to find a good lounging place. There was a good one in the near-by village of Eureka, at the store of a man named Ryan. This person was an odd character, and the chief man of the neighborhood. He ran a store and a sawmill, besides acting as a surveyor, preacher, bartender, Indian trader and general arranger of things.

A barrel of whisky always stood on tap in Ryan's store. It must have reminded Grant of the old days in Detroit. But the scene was different. As he sat on the store's wooden porch he could look down the squalid, muddy little street and fill his eyes with the dreariness of pioneer life. Men in checkered shirts and fur caps, with pistols in their belts; Indian squaws begging or peddling; tied horses stamping at their hitching posts. The forest closed sharp and hard around the unpainted, flimsy houses-and, despite the tinkling of banjos and hoarse, carousing songs, the air held the brooding sadness that strikes deep in the soul of man.

Some enterprising historical society ought to mark the site of Ryan's store with a memorial tablet, for it was on that spot -or thereabouts-that Grant drank himself out of the army. But, one may ask, why commemorate an event so foreign to lofty historical traditions?

The reason is that if Grant had not drunk himself out of the army he would probably never have had a chance to command more than a regiment during the Civil War. When the war began the regular army, with all its trained officers, was stupidly kept together by the government. The states were expected to drill and equip their volunteers as well as they could without technical supervision. Everybody with military experience was in demand in the volunteer forces. Grant's chance came because he was a West Pointer, and out of the army.