"Truth Behind U.S. Grant’s Yazoo River Bender" Topic

"In March 1862, Major General Henry Wager ‘Old Brains' Halleck was a frustrated man. One of his brigadier generals, Ulysses S. Grant, was getting all the credit in the papers for the taking of Forts Henry and Donelson that February, credit that Halleck believed belonged to the department commander — himself.

Halleck was temporarily successful in his quest, for after the Battle of Shiloh Grant was removed from command of the drive on Corinth, Miss., but Grant proved resilient and regained field command later in 1862. Nonetheless, the notion of the general's supposed love for the bottle, the ‘former bad habits' to which Halleck referred, was baggage he had to carry throughout most of his Civil War career.

That reputation for overimbibing began years before the Civil War, when brevet Captain U.S. Grant was stationed on the West Coast, first at Fort Vancouver, Ore., and later at Fort Humboldt in California. Life at remote Fort Humboldt was tedious, and Grant sorely missed his wife, Julia, and their children.

Lonely Captain Grant began to drink, and reportedly to excess. On April 11, 1854, the day he was promoted to the permanent rank of captain in the Regular Army, Grant resigned his commission, allegedly hounded to do so by his commander, Colonel Robert C. Buchanan, and headed back to his family in Missouri…"
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Lincoln is supposed to have said, "Find out what he drinks and give it to my other generals."

What I find most interesting about Grant's career is that at the start of the Civil War he was a civilian, having resigned from the Army years ago. He was a nobody living an obscure life. But when the war started he felt it was his patriotic duty to volunteer to help where he could. It was through his skill and tenacity on the battlefield that he rapidly rose in rank and command. Grant was not a political general, but a real fighting general.

Grant was not a political general, but a real fighting general.

But he had the political savvy that many other generals lacked.

He understood that he could not waste good campaigning weather getting ready, unlike McClellan, Rosecrans and others. He did not have to be goaded from above to advance.

He made the most of his volunteer troops instead of bemoaning the lack of regulars, unlike Buell.

He had the killer instinct, unlike Meade and others.

When elevated to the top military position, he didn't try to unload responsibility onto Lincoln, unlike McClellan, Halleck and many others.

Isn't it time we retired the term "political general"? Grant, like many other professional officers at the start of the war owed his initial ACW assignments to political influence. Further many commanders who had no prior service in the U.S. Regular Army and who owed their initial appointments to political connections proved to be competent commanders. What matters isn't how they got their commands, but what they did when they got them.

You have a point. Logan was a politician turned general who made a good corps commander, while McClellan, Pope and Burnside were all West Point graduates, as were Bragg and Hood.

I think Grant had probably done a lot of drinking as a lonely young officer on the West Coast, separated from his wife and kids. From which he got a bad reputation in the Regular army. But otherwise, I don't think he was a heavy drinker. He might have been the type of person for whom a few drinks is too many, i.e. easily affected.

Part of his reputation for drinking comes from the numerous admonitions he received from his chief of staff, John Rawlins, a man whose father had been an alcoholic and thus was dead-set against ANY drinking.

As for the supposed bender on the trip to Satartia, Charles Dana was along on the trip and would have been duty-bound to report to Secretary of War Stanton had Grant been on a "bender," but he didn't. (And despite what the Egyptologists say, absence of evidence IS evidence of absence!) A newspaperman, named Cadwallader, wrote the story of the Yazoo bender years later and claimed to have delivered the drunken Grant to Rawlins, but I don't believe it. Neither did Bruce Catton.