Can’t Dance, Don’t Ask Me: General Grant at the Ball

I recently posted a humorous anecdote involving Gen. Grant and a hissing torpedo. It was written by Eliot Callender, a Union sailor who professed to have witnessed the event aboard an ironclad on the western rivers in early 1862. Here is another Grant episode by the same author.

After the war, Callender went on the lecture circuit and self-published a collection of speeches. In an address titled “Some Early Days of Rebellion: Delivered before the Farragut Naval Veterans’ Association, Palmer House, Chicago, Illinois, October, 1900,” he tells the following tale.

Despite a humble enlisted rank, Callender was the scion of a prominent St. Louis family. At 18-years-old, he found himself aboard one of the new river ironclads in Cairo, Illinois, the naval base at the confluence of the Mississippi and Ohio rivers. Influential family connections earned him an invitation to a local ball. Paragraph breaks have been inserted for clarity.

This reminds me of a large party given one evening by a daughter of a leading banker of Cairo. I might not have been very handy at that time in reefing a topsail or splicing a rope, but I was at home in three or four different languages on the waxed floor, and was happiest in the society of the fair sex. At this party mentioned, there was a large attendance of the cream of Cairo society, as well as of the Army and Navy.

During the height of the festivities, “when eyes looked love to eyes that spoke again, and all went happy as a marriage bell,” I noticed an officer, rather under sized, who instead of participating in the festivities, looked a long way off from getting his money’s worth, as he stood plastered up against the wall, with an expression so unhappy and out of place with his surroundings, that he not only challenged my attention, but exercised my sympathies.

“Who is that officer?” I asked the hostess. She said it was General Grant. He had just at that time been made Brigadier General, and looked as if his single star had stuck to his stomach. “Can you not make him dance,” I asked. She said, “No, he has declined all overtures in that direction.”

I immediately hunted up a young lady, one of those careless, happy, vivacious, and dare-devil spirits who was up to anything that promised amusement, told her of my intentions, and taking her up to the General, introduced her, with the request that he fill up one of the sets then forming on the floor.

He stammered his declination, said he could not dance, was doing very nicely where he was, but while doing so, the young lady had hooked onto his arm, and assisted by me with the other arm, he was out on the floor, the unhappiest man in two continents, and fairly launched into a quadrille.

It is unnecessary to add that he wandered aimlessly around through the quadrille, stepping on everybody else’s feet, and running over the ladies on the corner, and put in most of his time hunting for his partner, while the bored and startled expression on his face would have stopped a clock.

But his partner, every now and then would gather him up, and dance him around under the call for “All promenade,” and I know the step he struck was never described in Hardee’s tactics. She finally took him over to his place against the wall when the set was over, covered with perspiration and confusion, and he then beat a hasty retreat from the room just as soon as his partner’s back was turned.

I went down to the General’s cottage at Long Branch, years afterwards, when he was President of the United States, with a request for a favor for a relative. He kindly acceded to my desire, and gave me the necessary order. He then asked me where he had seen me before. I recalled the episode of the dance at Banker Candee’s at Cairo. A quiet smile played around the General’s mouth, and he sententiously remarked, “You got that order just in time.” [1]

[1] Eliot Callender, Speeches of A Veteran (The Blue Sky Press, 1901), (unpaginated) 10th – 11th text page.