Ulysses S. Grant: Chronic Malaria and the myth of his alcoholism

Perhaps the most enduring controversy surrounding the American Civil War has been whether or not General Ulysses Grant was an alcoholic. Vague definitions and credulous or ill-disposed authors who accepted half-truths and rumors from questionable and often malicious sources have resulted over the years in markedly conflicting opinions. As a result the conventional wisdom of the general public now is that Grant was indeed an alcoholic, books published as recently as 2017 supporting this view, and this belief has now become embedded into the folklore of America.^{1,2, 3}

In the years 1852–54, Grant was stationed on the west coast where, due to boredom and loneliness, he was unquestionably a binge drinker of alcohol and this continued intermittently throughout the Civil War and possibly beyond. After the Civil War Grant continued to hold responsible positions, eventually being elected President of the United States. During his two terms in office, from 1868 to 1876, Grant became the target of many enemies. Some were just the usual political opponents but there were also many people who hated Grant because of his active efforts to protect the newly freed slaves, his suppression of the KKK, his firm support of Reconstruction, and his efforts to protect Native Americans. ⁴ Their favorite weapon was to smear him as an alcoholic. “If he ran a cotton trader out of town, found one of his outposts overrun by guerillas, missed a chance in battle or offended an important general … people would immediately say: Grant was drunk.” ⁵

In the innumerable claims that Grant was an alcoholic the most authoritative one is that of Charles A. Dana. He was a prominent journalist in pre-Civil War America and during that war he became a trusted confidential agent for Secretary of War Edwin Stanton and President Abraham Lincoln. Dana was sent to Grant's headquarters at Vicksburg in early 1863 because Stanton and Lincoln wanted a truthful and accurate appraisal of whether or not Grant was an alcoholic. ⁶

On June 6, 1863 Grant boarded a boat to investigate firsthand the situation around Satartia, Mississippi, inviting Dana to come with him. ⁷ Dana left no contemporary report of this trip to Satartia but on August 29, after Dana had left Vicksburg and returned to Washington he wrote about Grant to Lincoln's friend, Elihu Washburne, “The question they all ask, ‘Doesn’t he drink’ I have been able, from my own knowledge, to give a decided negative.” ⁸

However, years later he recounted the trip to Satartia very differently. After the Civil War Dana had returned to journalism, ultimately becoming editor of the New York Sun. He was a skilled writer and editor and if the news was otherwise dull, he urged his staff to "stir up the animals" by writing in a controversial manner. ⁹

For 14 years, from 1870 to 1884, Dana's newspaper had the largest circulation of any newspaper in New York City, peaking at 145,000 readers. ¹⁰ Then, in 1883 Joseph Pulitzer, who viewed The Sun as his direct competitor, started his newspaper, The World, and it quickly became popular. Because of this competition, the subsequent years had not been good for Dana and The Sun. The daily circulation had dropped to 80,000 readers by 1887 at a time that it was estimated that The Sun needed 60,000 to 75,000 readers to break even. ¹¹

Bankruptcy now threatened so in early 1887, 22 years after the end of the Civil War and with Grant now conveniently dead for two years, in the January 23, 1887 issue of The Sun there appeared an article by General Henry Van Ness Boynton, a Civil War hero turned newspaper correspondent, describing multiple episodes when Grant was drunk. ¹² General Sherman dismissed this article, describing it as only a rehashing of previous stories, “scratching up old forgotten scandals, publishing them as something new.” ¹³ However, Dana then immediately followed up Boynton's article with an editorial in which Dana now claimed that Grant had actually been drunk on the trip to Satartia. “It was a dull period in the campaign. … he [Grant] wound up by going on board a steamer, which he had ordered for an excursion up the Yazoo River, and getting as stupidly drunk as the immortal nature of man would allow; but the next day he came out as fresh as a rose, without any trace or indication of the spree he had passed through. So it was on two or three other occasions of the sort that we happened to know of.” ¹⁴ These claims certainly “stirred up the animals”, giving a much desired boost to the newspaper's publicity.

In his posthumous memoir written ten years later, in 1897, Dana did not repeat his claim that Grant was drunk on the trip to Satartia but reported instead that Grant felt “ill” and went to bed soon after they started. When told by a passing warship that the Confederates were already in Satartia he wrote that Grant felt himself to be too sick to decide and left it to Dana to cancel the trip. ¹⁵ It is claimed by some that when Dana reported in his 1897 memoir that Grant was ‘ill’, he was using the word as a euphemism for Grant actually being drunk. However, there is strong evidence that Grant indeed was truly ill. As Brooks Simpson wrote about Grant of the trip with Dana to Satartia, “It was a sick man that left headquarters that morning, although it is unclear exactly what was the problem.” ¹⁶

In this paper it is argued that on the trip to Satartia Grant was not drunk but that in fact he was ill from the disease of malaria - most likely caused by Plasmodium vivax. Malaria is caused by several species of a protozoan parasite of the genus Plasmodium. It has affected the human species for millennia and was clearly described by Hippocrates in the fifth century BCE. The organisms have a very complicated life cycle in the human body. Organisms are injected into a person's body by a mosquito and they then proceed to cells in the liver and reproduce. Periodically, these then spill out from the dying liver cells and infect red blood cells. The lysis of these infected red blood cells is associated with characteristic episodic chills and fever. The illness may be associated with muscle pain and can last for weeks, months, and sometimes years. Classically, the chills and fevers repeat periodically on a schedule different for each plasmodium species, although treatment may alter this unrecognizably. Between the episodes of fever, patients commonly exhibit various degrees of illness and malaise but some patients can appear to be remarkably well. Partial immunity usually results from an infection with a given Plasmodium species but re-infection may occur due to the patient being infected with a different Plasmodium species or by a new strain of the same Plasmodium species. If the treatment is not adequate the disease may recur and, depending on the species, malaria can lie dormant in the liver after infection for months or even years and then recur unexpectedly. ¹⁷

At the time of the Civil War, malaria was a well recognized disease. An extract from the July 20, 1861 issue of Scientific American gives a picture of the disease as it was known then.

The different forms of malarious disease

“The mildest type of malarious disease is intermittent fever. It is the same as fever and ague, only that the fever is not preceded by a chill or followed by perspiration. Every one, two, or three days, usually at the same hour of the day, the patient experiences a moderate attack of fever, lasting an hour or two, and the rest of the time he feels about as well as usual. The next type in severity is the most common form, the ordinary fever and ague. For an hour or more the patient is shivering and shaking with cold, frequently so violently as to make his teeth chatter; and this is as likely to occur in the hottest part of the day as at any other time. Presently the chill subsides and is succeeded by a violent, burning fever, which lasts usually three or four hours, and is followed in the graver forms of the disease by a copious perspiration. When the paroxysms of fever become so prolonged as to extend from one to the other, and occupy all of the time, the disease is called bilious fever.” ¹⁸

Dr Charles Deyerle was a post surgeon at Fort Humboldt in 1852, the year before Grant arrived there. He wrote of malaria to his family back east, “The ‘chills’ is an old friend of mine; I had it several times in Mexico, and some half a dozen times since I have been in California, so that I have become about accustomed to its freaks. The period of actual suffering is short, but the most disagreeable feature about the disease is the feeling of languor, debility, low spirits and general ‘malaise’ which follow an attack, usually for several days.” ¹⁹

Unlike today, in the nineteenth century malaria was a very common and widespread disease in North America. The Scientific American article above points out that it was common at that time in the New York City area. It also extended along the coast and river valleys of the South and along the course of the Mississippi River, extending up the Ohio River valley to north of Pittsburg. ²⁰ In their youths Abraham Lincoln in Illinois and James Garfield in Ohio were both sick with malaria. ²¹ , ²²

During the Civil War malaria was a constant presence in both the Union and Confederate armies. Although a soldier's death from malaria was very uncommon, the morbidity in terms of increased susceptibility to other diseases and decreased ability to perform their duties was significant. Union army records indicate that in the area of worst infection, Arkansas, soldiers had a mean annual rate per thousand soldiers of 1287. Theoretically, every soldier there got malaria 1.3 times in the course of a year. ²³ Actual numbers are hard to determine because many ill soldiers avoided doctors, preferring to stay in the ranks, but it is estimated that overall in the southern campaigns along the river valleys during the summer at least 15% to 20% of the union soldiers at any one time may have had malaria. ²⁴

Malaria could be chronic and affected soldiers of all ranks. General George McClellan was ill with his chronic ‘Mexican Disease’ for over a week at the time of the preparation for the Peninsula Campaign and W. F. ‘Baldy’ Smith was chronically ill with malaria throughout the Civil War. ²⁵ , ²⁶ Grant recounted that as a boy he had suffered from malaria, “Very severely and for a long time.” and he had then been exposed to malaria during his service in the Mexican War from 1846 to 1848 and again while crossing the isthmus of Panama in 1852. ²⁷

The effective medicines available to Civil War doctors were limited. The 'Big Three' were opiates for pain, quinine for malaria, and the 'Sovereign Remedy', alcohol — 'Good for what ails you'. The bark of the cinchona tree had been used for the treatment of malaria since the early 17^th century and after quinine was extracted from it around 1820 this had become the standard treatment for malaria because of its effectiveness. ²⁸

While serving on the west coast the stoical Grant's letters to his wife Julia were generally very optimistic. However, there is evidence that all was not well. In late 1852 he reported from Fort Vancouver that “I am in perfect health except I have suffered terribly of late from cramps. … I walk like an old man of eighty.” He ascribed these to a recent “terrible cold”. ²⁹ Two weeks later he added, “… for the last few weeks I have suffered terribly from cramp … . You know that I have always been subject to this affliction.” ³⁰ These cramps apparently persisted. In March, 1853 at a time when he was actively farming Grant wrote, “If I can only manage to keep up until next fall I hope to be well enough off for the future. At present however I am cramped all the time.” ³¹ In late June Grant reported that for the past couple of weeks, “… I have had a very sever (sic) cold.” ³² It is clear from this that Grant was very sick at Fort Vancouver for several weeks during this roughly 6 month period. The muscle cramps he described are of mysterious origin but are a nonspecific symptom that are frequently seen with electrolyte abnormalities due to the effects of acute or chronic diseases.

After he arrived at his last posting on the west coast, Fort Humboldt, in the 3 months that he was there several episodes of sickness are again recorded. A local civilian doctor, Jonathon Clark, routinely served as assistant surgeon at the fort when the regular physicians were unavailable. Six years later, at the time of the fall of Fort Donelson, Dr Clark recalled that he had treated Grant at Fort Humboldt for what Dr Clark described as “two severe attacks of illness” but he did not further describe their natures. ³³ Grant was listed in the fort's Post Returns as being sick in February and this probably is associated with a difficult tooth extraction Grant reported to Julia in a letter on February 6. ³⁴ , ³⁵ Then, he was again reported in the Post Returns as being sick in April. ³⁶ This was at the same time as the second “severe illness” described by Dr Clark. Grant's final episode of illness at Fort Humboldt occurred immediately after he had resigned from the army, on May 1 he was reported by the post's commanding officer as being too sick to leave as scheduled. ³⁷ There is no clear description of these later illnesses but their intermittent nature is certainly suggestive of chronic malaria. Whatever the cause, it is clear that during his short time at Fort Humboldt Grant suffered several severe episodes of illness.

After having resigned from the army and returned to his family, in 1858 while living in Missouri Grant undoubtedly suffered from malaria and suffered so severely that he was forced to stop farming. In his memoir, Grant describes his disease as “fever and ague” with a predictable “chill day”. ^{38 39} In her memoir, Grant's wife, Julia, writes of this time, “The Captain was then suffering from malaria and had chills and fevers every other day.” ⁴⁰ This of course is the classical febrile pattern of malaria due to P. vivax.

In early 1862 Grant was again sick with a chronic disease of an unknown nature that may very well have been malaria. Grant's father had visited him, leaving on March 5, and on March 15 Grant wrote to Julia, “I am much better than when Father was here but not by any means well yet“. ⁴¹ This was immediately followed by a second letter, “… I am well, something I could not say for the past 3 weeks”. ⁴² The next reference to this illness is a few days later in a March 17, 1862 telegram to Sherman where Grant writes, “although sick for the last two weeks, begin to feel better.” ⁴³ This was followed by a letter on March 29 to Julia, “I am again fully well. I have had the Diaoreah [sic] for several weeks and an inclination to Chills and Fever.” ⁴⁴

For over a year there is then a gap in our knowledge of Grant's health until just before his notorious June 6, 1863 trip with Dana to Satartia. On June 2 General Sherman sent a note to Grant describing a visit by Admiral Porter on May 31, two days before, “… the day before yesterday, the same on which I found you complaining about illness”. ⁴⁵ Dr McMillan, Chief Doctor at Sherman's headquarters, noticed during this visit to Sherman's that Grant was ill and, reaching into his limited pharmacopoeia, the good doctor apparently gave him a single glass of wine as medicine. For several days there is no further information about Grant's health until Grant's Chief of Staff and self-appointed guardian of Grant's sobriety, John A. Rawlins wrote a controversial letter at 1 a.m. on June 6 and then later hand delivered it to Grant as Grant and Dana were starting on their trip to Satartia. In this letter Rawlins wrote, “I have heard that Dr McMillan at General Sherman's a few days ago induced you, notwithstanding your pledge to me, to take a glass of wine.” Later in that same letter Rawlins observed that Grant had also been noticeably ill the night of June 5, “I may be, and trust that I am, doing you an injustice by unfounded suspicion, tonight, when you should, because of the condition of your health, if nothing else, have been in bed, [author's italics] I find you where the wine bottle has just been emptied,…”. ⁴⁶ Then, as already recounted, at breakfast on that morning of June 6, Dana in his 1897 memoir records that, in a quite normal manner and exhibiting no sign of illness whatever, Grant invited him on the boat trip to Satartia.

Although several days’ records in this period are lacking this entire description of an acute illness present on May 31 and recurring in the evening is entirely consistent with the classical repeating febrile pattern of malaria, including the fact that some patients appear remarkably well between their febrile episodes.

For eight months there is no further information about Grant's health until February of 1864 when Grant, echoing his illness of March 1862, wrote to Julia about taking quinine at toxic doses, “I have not been very well for the last three or four days but hope to be all right in a day or two. I have been taking quinine enough to make my head buzz.” ⁴⁷ There is some evidence that this illness extended into the summer, Colonel Theodore Bowers, a member of Grant's staff wrote to Rawlins on August 20^th 1864, “The General is fully himself, though in impaired health”. ⁴⁸ Then on August 25^th Bowers wrote, “I regret to say that Grant has been quite unwell for the past 10 days. He feels languid and feeble and is hardly able to keep about, yet he tends to business promptly and his daily walk and conduct are unexceptional.” ⁴⁹ As we have seen, these symptoms are consistent with the illness and malaise commonly exhibited by patients with malaria between their spikes of fever. In conclusion, just like Generals McClellan and ‘Baldy’ Smith, Grant was afflicted with chronic malaria and this, not alcohol, accounts for his illness at the time of the Satartia trip with Dana.

How did Grant acquire the reputation of being an alcoholic? First, he did not publicly defend himself. Although hurt by the rumors, Grant felt it was inappropriate for him or others, even of his staff, to defend himself. Characteristically, he felt that the truth would come out and that his honesty needed no defense. ⁵⁰ "In contrast, the collected papers of Grant's opponents are voluminous. Numbering in their ranks the New England literary group and the editors of some of the most widely read newspapers, Grant's enemies were more literate than his friends. Consciously or unconsciously, they stuffed the ballot boxes of history against Grant." ⁵¹ A clique at Grant's headquarters including Charles A. Dana, James H. Wilson, Sylvanus Cadwallader and John A. Rawlins also played a role here. With General Henry Van Ness Boynton and William F. ‘Baldy’ Smith after Rawlins’ death, “Together these five men did a great deal to damage Ulysses S. Grant's reputation. They swapped information and leaked it to others.” ⁵² That they cooperated is shown by the strenuous efforts Dana and Wilson made to reconcile Dana's 1887 editorial of Grant drinking at Satartia with Cadwallader's ‘tall tale’ of Satartia written around 1890, a reconciliation they were never able to achieve. ⁵³

What motives lay behind their behaviors are largely unknown. Perhaps Van Ness Boynton as a newspaper correspondent was only being mercenary, giving the newspaper editor, Dana, whatever he wanted or perhaps he was simply actuated by jealousy of Grant. ⁵⁴ Wilson's behavior is described by the historian Brooks Simpson as a long-term “vendetta” against Grant. ⁵⁵ Wilson had not been appointed to several positions by Grant and even late in life was bitterly resentful of him. ⁵⁶ Dana had repeatedly sought the highly lucrative position of Collector of Customs at the Port of New York, first from President Lincoln and then President Johnson, and was disappointed each time. Finally, in 1869, he hoped to get the position from President Grant. Both Rawlins and Wilson had confidently assured Dana that President Grant would give him the appointment. ⁵⁷ When Grant did not, Dana apparently turned fiercely against Grant. ⁵⁸

The various claims of Grant's alcoholism conveniently supported a view of him as a heartless, drunken, butcher of men and were eagerly accepted by historians and authors such as Shelby Foote who were romantic supporters of the "Lost Cause". ⁵⁹ Other authors were attracted by an atavistic sense of schadenfreude, and for some writers, just as 'sex sells’, they found the controversy useful to sell their books and magazines. Most authors, though, were simply credulous, accepting the tales without doing any critical thinking. As in an echo chamber, these repeated stories reinforced each other's and strengthened the rumors of his drunkenness until it became commonly accepted that 'where there's smoke, there's fire'. ^{60 61}

Grant was clearly an occasional binge drinker both before and during the Civil War, and there is some evidence that after the war this pattern of periodic binge drinking continued. ⁶² However, binge drinking is not synonymous with alcoholism — the compulsive drinking of alcohol. If Dana and Hodges are correct in stating that the number of Grant's binges were ‘two or three each year’, he wasn’t even a heavy drinker by today's standard of ‘heavy drinking’ being 'binge drinking on 5 or more days in the past 30 days’. ⁶³ As Hodges put it, “Grant in civil life undoubtedly drank. He also drank in the second period of his Army life, but not enough to do any harm. He was a grand man and if he did drink a trifle it hurt nobody.” ⁶⁴

“A man can be typed, justly or unjustly, and the shadow of the past, the dark stain of officers’-mess gossip, deposited over the years, can stay with him. … He began as a Colonel and he became a lieutenant general; … making himself the completely trusted instrument of the canniest judge of men who ever sat in the White House, … but the stain deposited by the gossip is still there, and men still cock their eyes and leer knowingly when Grant's name is mentioned: He drank. For men who do not know him, that has been enough.” ⁶⁵