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In Galena, Illinois, in early 1861, one would have been hard pressed to find two men less alike than Ulysses S. Grant and John A. Rawlins. The 39-year-old Grant was a failed former Army officer of limited horizons and dubious sobriety who passed his days as a clerk, shuffling around his father’s general store. Rawlins, nine years Grant’s junior, was an abstemious, ambitious attorney and the town’s leading Democrat. Although Rawlins represented Grant’s father in the store’s legal business, he and Ulysses were only passing acquaintances.

All that changed with the outbreak of the Civil War. On April 16, 1861, two days after Fort Sumter fell, town leaders held a meeting at the courthouse. Grant attended but said nothing. Rawlins, however, electrified the crowd. Dismissing talk of compromise, he proclaimed: “There can be but two parties now, one of patriots and one of traitors….Only one course is left for us. We will stand by the flag of our country, and appeal to the God of battles.”

A fellow lawyer, upon meeting Rawlins eight years earlier, had described him as “a strong, sturdy looking young fellow, swarthy in complexion, with hair and eyes black as night, which when they looked at you looked through you.” His arresting countenance masked what had been a difficult youth. Born in East Galena on Febru­ary 13, 1831, Rawlins received only a few months of schooling. He worked with his father cutting wood and burning it to create charcoal, needed to feed the furnaces and smelting works of Galena’s rich lead mines.

The elder Rawlins was a shiftless hard drinker, and John came of age hating liquor. Although known as somewhat of a prude, John Aaron Raw­lins could be generous and affable. But he also had a sharp temper and foul mouth. And he had the talent and drive needed to rise quickly to prominence. In 1854 he took his savings from the charcoal business and enrolled in a local academy. Three years later he became Galena’s city attorney.

Rawlins’ courthouse oratory convinced Grant to return to his first calling. He told his brother, “I think I ought to go into the service.” In August 1861, Grant became a brigadier general of volunteers, and he asked Rawlins to join him in Missouri as captain and assistant adjutant general on his brigade staff. Military service seemed the best path for Rawlins at the time, as he had just watched his wife slowly succumb to tuberculosis.

Grant had chosen Rawlins because of his sharp mind, sound judgment and blunt talk. But Grant also knew he could benefit from the attorney’s friendship with U.S. Congressman Elihu Washburne, also from Illinois.

The bereaved Rawlins assumed the role of Grant’s protector, shielding him from scheming officers and, in Rawlins’ mind at least, from Grant’s fondness for the bottle. He knew liquor had ruined Grant’s Regu­lar Army reputation just as it had his own father’s life, and he was vigilant for signs that Grant might revert to his old ways. Rawlins, however, knew nothing of military affairs. At the Battle of Belmont in November 1861, he was too green to do much more than draft orders and accompany the general into action. But he showed Grant that he could stand firm under fire. “I have been in one battle,” Rawlins wrote his mother, “heard the whistling of bullets and the whizzing of cannonballs, and I tell you I thought no more of the first than of the last. I never thought of running.”

Rawlins was surprisingly radical when it came to making war. Before Belmont he had told Grant to ignore Kentucky’s neutrality, arguing that “conditional neutrality [was] absolute hostility to the government.” This was a risky proposition that ran counter to Lincoln administration policy, but the Rebels had violated Kentucky neutrality first. Belmont convinced him that it was always best to strike the first blow. Afterward, whenever Rawlins thought Grant hesitant, he pushed for immediate action.

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