Poker & Pop Culture: Gambling U.S. Grant and Reproachful Robert E. Lee

Our ongoing tour of the tables has carried us through saloons and steamboats of the 19th century. This week we turn to soldiers playing poker, specifically those of the Union and Confederate armies who in their packs carried packs of cards with which to engage in less bloody conflicts in between battles.

We’ll start this week with the commanders — Ulysses S. Grant and Robert E. Lee — who perhaps unsurprisingly demonstrated contrasting attitudes towards the embattled nation’s most popular card game. Then next week we’ll look more closely at the soldiers’ poker playing, a prelude of sorts to later discussions of poker during wartime.

Ulysses S. Grant: Glad to Gamble

Commanding General of the Union Army, Ulysses S. Grant would later join the list of poker-playing presidents when he’d subsequently serve two terms in the nation’s highest office during reconstruction. On such a list he’d join the man with whom he worked to lead the Union, president Abraham Lincoln, who likely learned the game as a young man when sailing a flatboat carrying produce from Illinois to New Orleans.

Grant was a card player from his youth right through his final years. He played while a cadet at West Point where he arrived in 1839 and graduated in 1843, despite rules forbidding (among other things) alcohol, tobacco, and card playing.

Ulysses S. Grant

During Grant’s first year there he’d join a secret group called T.I.O. or “Twelve in One,” described by historian Charles Bracelen Flood as “a dozen classmates who pledged eternal friendship and wore rings bearing a significance only they knew.” Among the T.I.O.’s pastimes was “a card game called Brag,” one oft-mentioned as a precursor to poker.

Despite poker being a favored proclivity of Grant’s, he never himself bothered to chronicle his own card playing that much. His great end-of-life autobiography, the Personal Memoirs of Ulysses S. Grant (published by the poker-proponent Mark Twain shortly after Grant’s death in 1885) shares no stories of his own poker playing and only casual references to that of others. In fact, there are only a few small, mostly incidental references to cards in all 31 volumes of The Papers of Ulysses S. Grant.

Grant once mentions in a letter sending $10 to the U.S. Senator James W. Nesmith on February 14, 1867, calling the payment a “Valentine” and adding “this is the day for distributing such things.” A notation clarifies the money “was a little balance on a poker transaction.” Another note shares journalist John Russell Young’s 1879 diary entry describing a poker game with Grant.

In the Papers there also appears evidence of Grant’s notorious feud with Captain William J. Kountz, one of a few military men with whom Grant butted heads during the war. Kountz oversaw river transportation for the Union forces, and Grant’s displeasure with him escalated to the point of Grant having Kountz arrested. Kountz would later file formal charges against Grant in retaliation, including famously accusing him of being a drunk.

A list of Kountz’s charges appears in the Papers, and among the incidents of drunkenness listed, there’s a reference to Grant “playing Cards for money while he was a disbursing Agent (disburseing secret service money).” While the episode didn’t help Grant’s reputation, he would be the one to ascend into prominence while Kountz would fade into obscurity.

The Papers also includes one other account of Grant’s poker playing made by the journalist George A. Townsend best known for his reporting on both the war and Lincoln’s assassination. Townsend shares how Grant’s love of gambling games went against both his West Point upbringing and his father’s wishes. “He was dumbfounded,” wrote Townsend of Grant’s father, “that Grant would play poker or occasionally faro.”

Townsend goes on to connect Grant’s poker style to his ability as a military commander, emphasizing as others would that his readiness to take risks proved especially beneficial on the battlefield.

“You know how a man of Grant’s temperament would bet,” says Townsend. “The first wager he made would be with all he had for all on the cloth. ‘All the downs’ was his favorite bet. He did the same in war…. He felt the spirit of the game and played for big victories and promotions.”

Grant Picks Off Fightin’ Phil’s Bluff

A more explicit discussion of Grant’s poker playing would finally come well after his death in 1909 via one Ferdinand Ward, the entrepreneur who partnered with Grant’s son and infamously lost a fortune through corrupt financial deals that landed him six years in Sing Sing. Grant himself was ruined by the scheme, having invested heavily as well.

Well afterwards Ward shared his story, including …

continue reading in source www.pokernews.com