GRANT’S VIRTUES—his reserve, his quiet determination, his courage in the face of adversity—were all present in the shy, awkward, withdrawn child who seemed unable to please his father and toward whom his mother showed an indifference that was remarked on even at the very beginning of his life.
In a place—a small town on the Ohio River, where his bustling, self-important, and ambitious father, Jesse Grant, ran the tannery—and at a time—1822—when the high rate of infant mortality must have made many women feel that getting too attached to a baby was tempting fate—Hannah Grant’s apparent lack of interest in her own son is still curious, and it appears always to have puzzled Grant. Even allowing for the fact that people on or near the frontier didn’t fuss about babies and small children as they do today—largely an emotional self-protective mechanism—her detachment is hard to explain, and her attitude actually became stronger as the boy grew older.
It took Hannah six weeks to name her firstborn, which was certainly unusual, and it appears to have been by her wishes that he was named Ulysses, a romantic and, as it turned out, inappropriate name, since as an adult Grant would be quite the reverse of the sly fox of Homer’s poem, who outwitted so many stronger warriors and whose cunning was legendary. The hunchbacked Duke of Gloucester, before he takes the throne, congratulates himself (in Shakespeare’s words) on being able “to deceive as slyly as Ulysses could,” but sly deception would never be one of Ulysses Grant’s strengths—he was guileless, straightforward, and incapable of deceit, “naïve as a baby,” as Mark Twain put it.
Nobody seems to know why Hannah, a woman of firm religious belief (of the Methodist persuasion) should have been attracted to a name out of the Greek classics—there are stories that when the Grants were unable to agree on a name for their son, they sat down with their friends and relations and asked everyone at the table to write a name on a slip of paper, fold the slip, and put it in a bowl, and “Ulysses” was written on the one Mrs. Grant pulled out (perhaps her mother’s). This seems unlikely—to Hannah Grant the whole procedure would have seemed a lot like gambling, and Methodists were as strongly against gambling as they were against drinking—but whatever the reason, she waited six weeks before naming the child and then picked a very odd name indeed. Ulysses’ father prefaced it with the name “Hiram,” but his mother stuck stubbornly to Ulysses or “Lyss” to the end of her life, and whatever his feelings on the subject, Jesse Grant eventually went along with it.
(The taste for classical names was something of a fad at the time. In much the same way that names like Tara, Bambi, and Tiffany have supplanted Elizabeth, Susan, and Ann in our own day, American Protestants, as they moved farther away from the Puritan heartland of New England, began to feel free to reject names based on the New Testament [John, Matthew, Mark, and so on], or those based on the Old Testament [Isaac, Abraham, Israel, Noah, and the like], in favor of names that had a more “classical” and less religious ring to them, such as Ulysses. Whether it was Hannah or her mother who chose it, Ulysses, with its classical and pagan connections, is hardly a name that Cotton Mather would have condoned for an infant 150 years earlier in Massachusetts.)
In the nineteenth century, presidential candidates liked to boast that they had been “born in a log cabin,” and some were, of course, but Grant was not among them. His birthplace in Point Pleasant, Ohio, was a well-situated farmhouse with a view of the Ohio River, not a log cabin in the woods. Jesse Grant had his failings—many of which were to plague his son Ulysses once he had become a great and famous man—but he was a good provider, by the standards of the day, and not a rude pioneer but a skilled craftsman determined to make his way up in the world as fast as possible. The Grants could—and did—trace their ancestry in America back to 1630, when Matthew and Priscilla Grant came over from England on the Mary and John, and claimed, possibly without justification—the matter is open to doubt—that Noah Grant, Jesse’s father, had fought as a captain of the militia at Lexington and Concord.
While the Grants did not “come over on the Mayflower,” they still came over early enough for the family to maintain a strong pride in its roots—a fact that is important to bear in mind. The Grants did not rise to great wealth in the new world, and they moved restlessly westward from generation to generation in search of it, to places where the concept of “landed gentry” was unknown, but their family pride was quite as strong as that of the Lees of Virginia. Modern biographers and historians relish the contrast between the seedy-looking Grant, who was “born on the frontier,” and the aristocratic Virginian Lee, but they overlook the fact that Grant considered himself to be every bit Lee’s social equal: No child of Jesse Grant’s could have thought otherwise.
Grant was not a snob (although later in life he would relish the applause of crowds and the company of crowned heads), but he would never have stooped to play the country bumpkin, as Lincoln did so successfully, and much as he would dislike West Point, he never forgot that he had been there, and expected, in his quiet but firm way, to be treated like an officer and a gentleman. People might see him as an “ordinary man” who had—late in life, and improbably—made good, and many contemporary writers have in fact seen in his career the triumph of the “ordinary man” and taken that as the explanation for his two terms in the White House and the remarkable veneration in which he was held, but there is no indication that Grant ever thought himself as ordinary at all, or that the Grant family had ever considered themselves to be in the least ordinary.
The Grants may not have thought themselves better than anyone, but they certainly thought themselves as good as anyone—a very American attitude. Jesse Grant pulled himself up by his own bootstraps (as the saying went) to become a small entrepreneur in the leather business, and by the time Ulysses was one year old his father had moved the family to Georgetown, in the adjoining county, hardly a metropolis but offering a better scope for business.
Grant’s view of his own childhood takes up only seven of the more than twelve hundred pages of his memoirs, and he scarcely mentions Hannah in them at all, giving no hint of her feelings toward him or his toward her. Her reserve was such as to make some of Grant’s biographers speculate that she may have been retarded, but this seems unlikely, not only because it is hard to imagine that Jesse Grant, a talkative, ambitious busybody, would marry anybody retarded, but also because on the few occasions when Hannah is recorded as having said something, it is usually sharp, pithy, and to the point.
To those familiar with what is now called “the Midwestern character” (it was “Western” back then in the early nineteenth century, when Ohio and Illinois were still close to the frontier), Hannah’s silence, strong religious faith, reluctance to explore her own emotions, or talk to strangers would not seem unfamiliar or strange. There are still plenty of women out there today who don’t wear their heart on their sleeve and don’t gush over or about their children. Much is made of the fact that when Grant went back to see his mother after the war, she merely said, “Well, Ulysses, you’ve become a great man now,” and went back inside to her chores, but much the same stories are told about Ike’s mother and Harry Truman’s, and they need not necessarily mean that Hannah was not pleased by her son’s success. Perhaps what mattered most to Hannah Grant was that her son should not get “a swollen head” merely because he was the victorious commander of the U.S. Army, but if that was the case, she need have had no fears—Ulysses was the last person in the world to let success go to his head. His childhood might have been specifically designed to prevent it.
Descriptions of Grant’s childhood tend to sound a little like pages from Huckleberry Finn, but this is partly because Grant did not dwell on it much, so biographers have been left to invent most of it, in the manner of Parson Weems reinventing George Washington’s childhood as an improving tale. There does not seem to have been any conflict between Ulysses and his siblings (he had two younger brothers and three younger sisters), and there is no evidence that he was particularly unhappy—though of course in those days children weren’t expected to be happy, nor was life organized to produce happiness for them. A much-told story about Grant relates how, when he was an infant, he crawled out into the street and came to a stop between the hooves of a team of horses that was tethered outside. Terrified neighbors ran to inform Mrs. Grant of the danger her son was in, but to their surprise she did not run out to rescue him, figuring fatalistically perhaps that if Ulysses could get himself into that dangerous position, he could also get himself out of it. Or it may be that Hannah Grant had already learned one of the most remarkable things about her son—that he had a natural empathy for horses, a gift for calming them that was to last all his life. Ulysses was not afraid of horses, and they were not afraid of him, and from a very early age he gained a statewide reputation as an early-nineteenth-century version of “the Horse Whisperer,” a talent he never lost.
We do not know how Grant went about “gentling” difficult and fractious horses, and he may not have known himself. He spoke to them softly and calmly, he stroked them, he never resorted to punishment with the whip—but the important thing was that somehow the horses sensed that Grant was their friend, and they trusted him. Had he been able to achieve the same effect with politicians and financiers, his presidency might have been more successful.
There has been a tendency to take Grant’s special feel for horses as a matter of small importance, or to claim that it was a skill shared by many people who grew up on a farm, but that is a mistake. Gentling and calming horses was a rare and valuable skill in the days when the horse was practically the only means of transportation, and the fact that people brought their horses to the young Grant from miles away must have made him something of a minor celebrity. We are told that even as a boy of ten he could ride horses nobody else could, and gentle horses everybody else had given up on—valuable accomplishments in an age when a farm horse represented a substantial investment.
Stories of Grant’s horsemanship—it was the sole subject in which he would excel at West Point—are legion, but one is worth retelling. Charged with bringing home an unbroken and difficult horse, the boy harnessed it to a buggy, only to have the horse run away with him and nearly take him straight off the edge of a steep cliff or embankment. The horse stopped, trembling and sweating, at the very precipice, and young Grant stepped out of the buggy as quietly as he could so as not to further alarm it. Then, after a moment’s reflection, he quickly bound his bandanna around the horse’s eyes, having heard somewhere that blind horses seldom run away. Blindfolded, the horse allowed itself to be calmed and then led back to the road. Once Grant resumed his seat in the buggy, the horse, still blindfolded, set off placidly, guided by the reins, and made no further attempt to bolt.
It is evident from this story that Grant not only had an innate sympathy for horses but used his intelligence to outwit them and calm their fears—he did not attempt to subdue horses, he outthought them. Not many adults, let alone boys, would have had the presence of mind to come up with the stratagem of blindfolding a runaway horse, or the courage to get back into the buggy and set off on a long trip with a horse that had just confirmed its reputation of being dangerous.
Grant was not outstanding at school, even in the undemanding “subscription” school at Georgetown, and though he was a hard worker on the farm Jesse soon bought, there was nothing unusual about that at a time when young boys were expected to work hard on a farm—indeed, one of the reasons people wanted large families was to provide a good source of obedient young workers. The young Grant was remarkable, though not necessarily admired, for his refusal to kill animals. He not only disliked all forms of hunting, an aversion that he maintained all his life, but also avoided eating meat whenever he could, and would only touch it if it was burned to a crisp—the sight of blood on his plate turned his stomach. Early on he developed a pronounced dislike for swearing and for smutty stories, and in later life would never allow either to take place in his presence, an unusual characteristic in an army officer.
It does not come as a surprise that the only occasion during the entire Civil War when Grant is recorded as having lost his temper was in Virginia, in late May 1864. He came across a teamster on the road, whipping a fractious horse about the head and face. After what was described as “an explosion of anger,” Grant ordered the offender tied to a post for several hours, then rode off down the road to launch the Battle of Cold Harbor, one of the bloodiest frontal battles of the war. Grant was clearly among the most unusual of men—one who could not bear to see bloody meat on his plate or an animal killed or a horse whipped, but who could send men into a battle that lasted almost a week and in which the last assault, by three Union corps, was repulsed with the loss of more than seven thousand men in less than half an hour. The wounded lay where they had fallen, in what was called “a slaughter pen,” for almost a week in the sweltering sun, picked off by Confederate sharpshooters or dying of thirst, before Grant could bring himself to request a truce to remove them. Though he later reflected in his memoirs, “I have always regretted that the last assault at Cold Harbor was made,” and though his conduct of the battle was by no means typical of Grant’s generalship, it is worth noting that it was the plight of a horse that drew his anger at Cold Harbor, not the plight of the men.
As a boy he seems to have led a lonely life. His father, Jesse, was building up his business and beginning to seek a political career, or at least to become a citizen of importance, while his mother, Hannah, closed herself off from him. It is perhaps because of this that Ulysses relished the company of horses, and felt with them something he missed in his home life. Among the other children of his age in Georgetown, his peculiar first name was habitually turned into “Useless” Grant, and the combination of a strange name, a certain shy awkwardness, and a degree of prudery unusual among young boys then (or indeed at any time) must have made him a natural victim of taunts and bullying. He seems also to have been a sensitive and easily wounded boy, though determined to hide the fact as much as he could. Certainly he was never seen to cry as a boy, or later when he was grown up, but all photographs of him show a certain melancholy in his expression, which those who were closest to him in later life—General Sherman, for instance—recognized: Grant looked like somebody who would have cried if he could.
Photographs of Jesse and Hannah, however, make it clear that tears were not an option for them, and therefore probably not for any child who wanted their approval, which Ulysses most certainly did. He learned stoicism early, though at a cost.
At school the one subject he seems to have excelled at was arithmetic, but most of his time was not spent in studies but in working on the farm, particularly with the horses, with which he could perform miracles. Though gratifying to Jesse, it was not enough to satisfy him. His firstborn son, he felt strongly, should follow him into his tannery business, learn the trade, and make something of himself.
But if there was one trade Ulysses knew he didn’t want to follow, it was tanning leather. The tannery was next to the house, with its noxious smells of rendered fat and dried blood, and from his room he could hear the lowing of the frightened old cattle that were penned up outside it waiting to be slaughtered, and their screams as they were killed.
Tanning began—it was the most important step—with removing the hide from the animal’s body, scraping all the fat and blood off the inside of it, then turning it over and scraping off the hair. For a young man who couldn’t bear to see animals killed and who from the beginning wouldn’t eat meat unless it was burned beyond recognition, this was not an apprenticeship he could have welcomed. It is to Jesse’s credit that while Ulysses’ doubts about entering the tannery business may have dismayed him, he knew a lost cause when he saw one. On the grounds that an education might do Ulysses some good—it was that or let him become a farm worker—Jesse took the unusual step of writing to his congressman to propose Ulysses for West Point (without bothering to inform Ulysses). What Hannah thought of it we do not know, though she might have echoed Wellington’s mother, who said of him as a child, when it was decided he should be a soldier, “So my poor Arthur is fit for nothing but food for powder.”
His appointment to West Point was unusual in a good many ways, the most important being that Jesse, in his role as a politically ambitious busybody, had alienated Thomas L. Hamer, the congressman from his district. Hamer was a Democrat, while Jesse Grant was a Whig, and given to intemperate and outspoken political arguments, during the course of which he had said any number of things that offended Hamer when he heard about them. Nevertheless Jesse swallowed his pride and wrote to Hamer; and Hamer, perhaps out of good nature, or more likely because he thought it might shut Jesse up, agreed to give the vacant appointment in his control to young Ulysses Grant.
At this point in Grant’s young life (he was sixteen) his legal name was Hiram Ulysses Grant, but Representative Hamer could not be expected to know that, since everyone always referred to the boy as Ulysses. Hamer knew that Ulysses had a middle name and, taking a wild guess, made the assumption that it was probably Simpson, after Hannah’s family. He wrote to the War Department to inform them that his choice for the vacancy was Ulysses Simpson Grant. Thus, accidentally, Grant’s name would be recorded by the War Department and at West Point as U. S. Grant.1
West Point, when Grant arrived there in May 1839, was not then the vast institution it is now, of course, and indeed the U.S. Army at the time was itself small and inbred. Many in the United States still regarded the whole idea of a professional army, however small (and of West Point itself), with deep suspicion. America was a democracy—the creation of a military elite seemed profoundly undemocratic. Quite apart from that, there was the question of what purpose the army served. The only enemy the United States had fought in the past was Great Britain, but relationships with the former mother country were becoming increasingly cordial, so apart from garrisoning a few forlorn forts against the Indians on the frontier, there was not much for the army to do. What is more, the legend of a “citizen army”—based on the experience of Concord, Lexington, and Bunker Hill—played a large part in the country’s national self-image. Great Britain and the European monarchies might have strutting “regulars” and an aristocratic officer corps, but despite the experience of the Revolutionary War and the War of 1812—both of which had eventually been won by trained regulars, not the militia—the ideal of the Minute Man leaving his farm with his rifle over his shoulder to fight the Redcoats, and voting to select his own officers, was a potent, mythic part of the national consciousness.
The antithesis of this point of view was represented by Gen. Winfield Scott, a hero of the War of 1812, who commanded the army, and was known, though not to his face, as “Old Fuss and Feathers.” General Scott had grown so corpulent that he could no longer mount a horse, and the magnificence of his uniforms and his plumed hat explains his nickname; but he still commanded great respect, and his authority in military matters was unchallenged. In some ways Scott reminds one of Lord Raglan, in Great Britain, who had been the Duke of Wellington’s devoted military secretary (and who lost an arm at Waterloo), then went on to command the British army. Like Scott, Raglan (after whom the Raglan sleeve is named) was both courageous and resolutely determined to stand in the way of change. It was Raglan’s habit, when any proposal for change in the army was brought up, to say, “Let us consider what the great Duke of Wellington would do,” and then to do nothing. So firmly rooted in the past was Raglan that even when he commanded the British army in the Crimea against Russia, with France as an ally, he was nevertheless in the habit of automatically referring to the enemy as “the French.”
Not even Scott, however, with his ponderous bulk, magnificent uniforms, and overpowering personality, could make the profession of arms respectable or desirable in the United States. At the time, people became soldiers because they had failed at everything else in life. As for West Point, it was virtually the only way to get a college education of sorts at government expense; and for many of those who went there, a vast social step upward.
Grant went there without enthusiasm or argument—no doubt it sounded a better bet than the tannery—and his first act was to accept the change of his name without putting up a fuss about it. It was mildly embarrassing to have his first initials become U.S., but not nearly as bad as having those on his trunk be “H.U.G.” Very shortly he was called “Uncle Sam,” and as a result he soon became known to most of his fellow cadets as “Sam Grant.” After being taunted as “Useless” in school, this development must have come as a relief.2
Grant did not do well at West Point—although his interest in mathematics was noted with approval, and not only was his horsemanship much admired, but he set a record height for jumping a horse that had remained unbroken for twenty-five years. His dress, deportment, and appearance were slovenly by West Point standards; he seemed to have no interest in girls or dancing or any form of social life; and his interest in military tactics was negligible. Neither then nor later did he read, study, or even own any of the great books on tactics, which perhaps merely confirms Napoleon’s remark that, “In war, as in prostitution, the amateur is often better than the professional.”
Not surprisingly Grant was put in the “awkward squad,” composed of young men who were no good at drill, and stayed there for an uncommonly long time, a misfit in the eyes of most of his fellow cadets—awkward, lonely, unmilitary in appearance and bearing, and happy only in the riding ring. Although he grew to five feet eight inches, not a bad height for the mid–nineteenth century, he was only five feet two when he arrived at West Point, and must therefore also have seemed more a child than a young man, despite his great strength. Although his classmates included James Longstreet, William Rosecrans, William Hardee, John Pope, Richard Ewell, and Buckner, all of whom went on to become generals on one side or the other in the Civil War, only Buckner seemed to remember him later on (though it did him little good when he sought surrender terms from Grant at Fort Donelson). Longstreet hardly remembered Grant at all, despite three years together at West Point. He seems to have been about as invisible as a cadet can be. In later life, though he professed a great respect for West Point, he recalled, “The most trying days of my life were those I spent there, and I never recall them with pleasure.”
Even his graduation caused him no pleasure. Given his love of horses, he had hoped for appointment to a cavalry regiment, but since there were no vacancies he was obliged to settle for an infantry regiment instead. His one consolation was that in those days infantry officers usually rode, rather than marching alongside the soldiers and noncommissioned officers, so he would at least have a horse to keep him busy.