The White House Book

A tightly executed study on Grant's Pacific Coast years, with special focus on the allegations of alcoholism that originated from this time of Grant's life.

Ellington argues that the story of Grant being drummed out of the service because he was drunk on duty is nothing more than rumor turned over a dozen times by various interested parties, idle or malicious. He asserts Grant's reasons for leaving the army are much simpler and much easier to prove: he missed his family, and had begun making plans to resign more than a year before he finally did so, as is amply demonstrated in his letters to his wife. A careful analysis of the confused testimony of various witnesses to his supposed drinking proves that few are contemporary, and none are corroborated. Or, as D. L. Thornbury wrote in 1923, "IN order to have actually committed all the breaches of sobriety credited to him by the stories I have personally heard, he would have had to live in Humboldt four years and do nothing else!"