by Ron Chernow
Unlike many great historical figures, Grant brooded on no vast dreams, harbored no spacious vision for his future, and would have settled for a contented, small-town life. Something solitary about farming pleased him, and he was happiest when riding, plowing crops, sawing wood, or milking cows. The one business for which he was clearly unsuited was his father’s tannery, which emitted a potent stench that clung to its workers. For a young man who adored animals and identified with their suffering, it was a sickening way for his father to earn a living.
Inside the dreaded beam room, Jesse soaked hides in vats in a lye solution before they were removed and stripped of hairs by knives. The floor grew slimy with blood and animal fat as giant rats swarmed through the mess. One day, short of help, Jesse commandeered Ulysses for the beam room, and he was revolted by the experience. “Father, this tanning is not the kind of work I like,” Ulysses explained. “I’ll work at it though, if you wish me to, until I am one-and-twenty; but you may depend upon it, I’ll never work a day at it after that.”61 To his credit, instead of pushing his son, Jesse inquired what he would like to do. The boy cited three pretty pedestrian possibilities: become a farmer, become a trader, or get an education. The depth of his disgust with tanning expressed itself in his lifelong insistence on eating meat burned to a crisp and free of blood. He refused to swallow meat that swam in its own juices, an abhorrence that extended to mutton, poultry, and game. “I never could eat anything that goes on two legs,” he admitted.62
By the time Grant reached early adolescence, his father had prospered in business and diversified his interests. Appointed an agent for the Columbus Insurance Company in 1835, he peddled fire insurance and also won a contract to build the local jail. Flush with cash, he packed Ulysses off the next autumn to an excellent private academy, Maysville Seminary, in Maysville, Kentucky, a two-story brick school on the banks of the Ohio River. Grant boarded with the widow of his rich uncle Peter, who had thrived in tanning, salt, and river shipping. At fourteen Ulysses was now “a stumpy, freckle-faced, big-headed country lad.”63 Aside from math, he remained an indifferent student. In the debating society, however, he displayed a keen interest in current affairs, especially the annexation of Texas, and in a debating club argued for the proposition that intemperance represented a more severe threat than war. After school, on warm days, he and his classmates cobbled together rafts from logs and leapt from them into the Ohio River, often swimming across and gathering fruit and mulberries on the Kentucky bank. “He was always very liberal and generous in sharing anything he had with other boys, as apples, cakes, etc,” said a companion. “He was an exception as a boy for truth, honesty and fairness.”64
This idyllic period ended the next spring when the 1837 financial panic forced Jesse to economize and bring his son back to Georgetown for a year before sending him to the Presbyterian Academy in nearby Ripley, Ohio. The school was run by the Reverend John Rankin, a famous antislavery cleric who had emerged as an early conductor on the Underground Railroad, attaining legendary status among abolitionists. In the window of his house, set on a bluff high above the Ohio River, Rankin would kindle lamps to guide to freedom fugitive slaves from Kentucky. William Lloyd Garrison and Henry Ward Beecher credited Rankin with exceptional influence in stamping out slavery, while Harriet Beecher Stowe collected material from him for Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Rankin, who said that slavery “hangs like the mantle of night over our republic and shrouds its rising glories,” served as minister of a nearby Presbyterian church, where Ulysses Grant heard him preach many times.65 That Jesse shipped his son to Rankin’s school suggests a possible attempt to imbue him early on with abolitionist ideals.
Grant’s classmates there remembered a stocky boy with a rustic air who seemed slow in speech, sluggish in movement, and careless in appearance. He was affable and well-liked, if not especially sociable, and seldom showed up at parties. He studied algebra, Latin, and math and was inquisitive in class, though never much of a talker. That he failed to dazzle classmates with his intelligence was shown by the reaction of one to later news that Grant had been accepted at West Point: “Well, if that numbskull could pass, I know I could.”66
By late 1838, Jesse had lost faith that his son could chart his own future and took his destiny in hand with brisk efficiency. Since the stalled economy had put a crimp in his business, he could not educate Ulysses further without withdrawing much-needed capital. It dawned on him that if the boy attended West Point, he would be schooled at government expense. At the time, many cadets avoided military careers, using the academy as a high-class vocational school specializing in math and civil engineering. Not bothering to consult Ulysses, Jesse wrote to the Ohio senator Thomas Morris, an impassioned opponent of slavery, about a possible place at West Point for his son. The senator informed him that a vacancy existed in Jesse’s district. By an extraordinary coincidence, G. Bartlett Bailey, son of Grant’s near neighbor, Dr. George Bailey, had been discharged from the academy for misbehavior and/or failing exams, which his shame-ridden parents had kept secret by forbidding their son to return home, banishing him to a private military school. Ulysses thought Mrs. Bailey disclosed the secret to his mother, perhaps prompting Jesse’s letter to Senator Morris.
When he received the encouraging reply around Christmas, Jesse turned to his son and announced, “Ulysses, I believe you are going to receive the appointment.” “What appointment?” Ulysses asked. “To West Point; I have applied for it.” “But I won’t go,” replied Ulysses. Jesse insisted he would go “and I thought so too, if he did,” as Ulysses recalled his cowed reaction to this paternal edict. The young man had little confidence he could meet the entrance requirements. “I did not believe I possessed them, and could not bear the idea of failing.”67 It was a classic encounter between the domineering Jesse, exerting his will, and Ulysses, who lacked the strength to stand up and defy him and sheepishly consented.
The matter required a delicate next step. Jesse needed to write to his local congressman, Thomas Hamer, who had to nominate his son for West Point. There was time pressure involved: Hamer was a lame duck whose term ended March 4. Far more worrisome was that Jesse Grant and Thomas Hamer, quondam friends, had not spoken since they parted company over Jacksonian politics, when Jesse accused him of “gross deceit.”68 Ulysses later said both men, regretting the breach, wanted a rapprochement. Jesse addressed a businesslike letter to Hamer, making no allusion to past unpleasantness. It reached Hamer the night of March 3 and, instead of being vindictive, he graciously agreed to submit Grant’s name. In his haste, he listed the applicant as Ulysses S. Grant. The confusion came about either because Hamer confused Ulysses with his younger brother Simpson or because he assumed Ulysses was his first name and he had taken Hannah’s maiden name for his middle name. (Grant himself blamed Senator Morris for the long-lived error.) The mistaken name, which persisted at West Point and beyond, was the bane of the young man’s life and seemed symbolic of his almost comic passivity under Jesse’s heavy-handed tutelage. As Grant later confessed to his wife in frank exasperation, “You know I have an ‘S’ in my name and don’t know what it stand[s] for.”69
The young Grant was right to fret about whether he would pass the exams administered once he arrived at West Point, for many would-be cadets had graduated from college or taken preparatory courses especially designed for the academy. He was not reconciled to going. “I did not want to go to West Point,” he maintained. “My appointment was an accident, and my father had to use his authority to make me go.”70 The astonishing news that Grant, the country bumpkin, was heading off to West Point elicited condescending smirks around Georgetown. One Grant peer remembered that “none of us boys, high or low, rich or poor, could clearly imagine how Uncle Sam’s schoolmasters were going to transform our somewhat outré-looking comrade into our beau idéal of dandyism—a West Pointer.”71
CHAPTER TWO
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The Darling Young Lieutenant
ON MAY
15, 1839, Ulysses S. Grant bade his family a stiffly formal farewell and left behind the small, provincial world he had inhabited. At seventeen, he was tiny for his age, weighing a mere 117 pounds and standing five feet two inches tall; at West Point he would reach his full height of five feet eight inches. It was typical of Hannah that she extracted from him a promise he would never resort to profane language at West Point. One senses that Grant was starved for outright maternal affection, for when he crossed the street to say good-bye to the Baileys, Mrs. Bailey and her daughters stood bathed in tears. Grant was taken aback by the emotional display, which struck him as a revelation. “Why you must be sorry I am going,” he said with dawning wonder. “They didn’t cry at our house.”1 Grant lugged a suitcase imprinted with brass tacks of his initials. To avert teasing, he had rearranged H.U.G. into the far more palatable U.H.G, the shifting initials emblematic of his confused sense of identity.
The boy nursed a certain wanderlust, the first hint of some broader vision of life, and was eager to set eyes on Philadelphia and New York. Nevertheless, he experienced such foreboding about West Point that he daydreamed about a travel accident that would abort the whole trip. “When these places were visited I would have been glad to have had a steamboat or railroad collision . . . by which I might have received a temporary injury sufficient to make me ineligible, for a time, to enter the Academy,” he wrote with dry humor. “Nothing of the kind occurred, and I had to face the music.”2 He traveled by steamer to Pittsburgh, then switched to a canal boat for Harrisburg. From there he clambered aboard a train bound for Philadelphia and was thrilled as it accelerated to a maximum velocity of eighteen miles per hour.
During five days in Philadelphia, he boarded with his mother’s relatives and roamed its streets with rapt attention, visiting the theater and touring Girard College. He looked like a hayseed from the heartland, “a rather awkward country lad, wearing plain clothes and large, coarse shoes as broad at the toes as at the widest part of the soles,” in the amused memory of one female cousin.3 In New York, Grant experienced a fateful encounter with a foppish young man from Missouri named Fred Dent, who stayed at the same hotel. As westerners, the two teenagers struck up an instant camaraderie, and, when they discovered they were both headed for the military academy, traveled up the Hudson River together.
Upon arrival at West Point, Grant registered under the name U. H. Grant, inscribing his name as Ulysses Hiram Grant in the adjutant’s office. He then discovered, despite his unavailing protests, that he had been nominated for West Point under “Ulysses S. Grant” and perhaps began to suspect that fate had pasted this label permanently on him. As soon as fellow cadets, including William Tecumseh Sherman, spotted the name “U. S. Grant” on the bulletin board, they made great sport of it and promptly branded the newcomer Uncle Sam Grant, or “Sam” Grant for short. Henceforth, he would be known as Sam Grant among the cadets. By the end of four years at West Point, he had capitulated to the tyranny of the clerical error and adopted Ulysses S. Grant as his new moniker for life.
Grant was surprised that he breezed through the entrance exams, especially since one out of four candidates flunked. The tests included a physical to see whether candidates had dental or skeletal defects as well as tests of penmanship and spelling. Once they passed, Grant and other new “plebes” had their heads shaved nearly bald and spent the next few months in “summer encampment,” sleeping in tents and drilling in an open area called the Plain before taking up barracks residence in September. Grant never forgot his initial glimpse that summer of General Winfield Scott, who came to review the cadets. A gigantic, stately man, standing six feet five inches tall, he was all aglow in a profusion of medals and gold lace. “I thought him the finest specimen of manhood my eyes had ever beheld . . . I could never resemble him in appearance, but I believe I did have a presentiment . . . that some day I should occupy his place on review.”4 For this shambling young man, short on ambition, it was an uncharacteristic mental leap into a shining military future.
On September 14, 1839, Grant signed his enlistment papers, which required him to serve in the Army of the United States for eight years. This was no idle act, and Grant would abide devoutly by this pledge. When the Civil War broke out, he repeatedly reminded people that he had vowed to serve his country in exchange for being educated in warfare, reinforcing a fervent indignation that Robert E. Lee and other Confederate generals who attended West Point had violated their sworn oaths.
The new cadet, blue-eyed and clean-shaven with a rubicund complexion, was quite handsome, bearing scant resemblance to the later general of the stubbly beard and weathered face. He was enchanted by West Point’s natural beauty, writing home about its bucolic wonders and sighing over the “beautiful river with its bosom studded with hundreds of snow[-white] sails.”5 When he visited a house once occupied by Benedict Arnold, his fiery reaction foreshadowed things to come as he patriotically denounced Arnold as “that base and heartless traitor to his country and his God.”6 Notwithstanding his reluctance to go to the academy, he quickly accepted its sound practicality on the economic grounds touted by his father. “The fact is if a man graduates here he [is] safe for life.”7
When he surveyed his freshly uniformed self in the mirror, he laughed at the spic-and-span figure suddenly staring back at him. “My pants sit as tight to my skin as the bark to a tree,” he told a friend, “and if I do not walk military, that is if I bend over quickly or run, they are very apt to crack with a report as loud as a pistol. My coat must always be buttoned up tight to the chin.”8 This snappy appearance did not last long, however, and Grant soon received demerits for careless deportment, untied shoelaces, and lateness for drills. He was so diminutive that when he donned a pair of overalls and went down to the riding hall, his spurs and huge clanking cavalry sword seemed to dwarf his boyish frame.
In Ohio, Grant had been the butt of taunts by town toughs, whereas the cadets discerned sterling qualities beneath his quiet, stolid manner. The academy counted 250 cadets in all, so that everyone mostly knew everyone else, and fellow cadets commended Grant’s honesty, candor, and generosity. Perhaps the highest accolade came from a tall, rangy cadet, James Longstreet, who hailed from the Deep South and later won renown as the man Robert E. Lee dubbed “my old warhorse.”9 With his doughty independence and integrity, he retained warm memories of Grant at West Point, citing his “girlish modesty; a hesitancy in presenting his own claims; a taciturnity born of his modesty; but a thoroughness in the accomplishment of whatever task was assigned him.”10 For three years, Grant roomed with Fred Dent, who also singled out Grant as “the clearest headed young man I ever saw . . . He always wanted to do what was right, and we all had great respect for him. He was a singed cat—a great deal better than he looked.”11 Grant also shared rooms with Rufus Ingalls, later distinguished as quartermaster general of the U.S. Army. Although Grant experimented with tobacco, which was forbidden, he did not acquire a smoking habit and only occasionally partook of liquor.
By stripping them of all luxuries and housing them in barracks of extreme simplicity, West Point introduced cadets to a rigorous military life. With two cadets squeezed into each cramped room, they had to fetch water from a downstairs pump, scrub floors, make their beds, and fold their sheets. At 5 a.m., they were roused from sleep by rumbling drums and marched off to the dining hall. Grant mostly obeyed institutional rules, with a few significant lapses. William B. Franklin recalled that cadets could not cook in their rooms, but often sneaked in meat and potatoes. One night Grant was “roasting a chicken in his room when an officer rapped.” Grant stood rigidly at attention as the officer alluded to a telltale cooking odor. “‘I’ve noticed it,’ replied Grant, and the officer retired, thoroughly impressed by the innocent look on the cadet’s face.”12 As in Georgetown, Grant refused to be hazed when a strapping cadet named Jack Lindsay kept shoving him from the squad as they drilled on the parade ground. When Lindsay pushed him once too often, Grant retaliated by knoc
king down the larger boy, flattening him with a punch. In time, Grant, despite his short stature, developed a reputation for a fearless sense of fair play and was regularly approached by other cadets to mediate their disputes.
The West Point curriculum was long on math, engineering, geography, and history. Though it presented courses on artillery, fortifications, and cavalry maneuvers, Grant later laughed at the primitive tactics, based on musket and flintlock weapons. In his first year, the course work emphasized French for a straightforward reason: the French were the foremost military theorists of the day. The reigning figure in military strategy was Antoine-Henri Jomini, a Swiss-born officer who had fought by Napoleon’s side. Jomini’s ideas came filtered through the mind of the academy’s most charismatic teacher, Dennis Hart Mahan, who transformed the study of Napoleon into a worshipful cult. He adapted French theory to American frontier conditions, teaching lessons about flexible supply bases, the rapid movement of troops, and concentration of forces that Grant would faithfully apply throughout the Civil War. Mahan remembered Grant fondly: “Grant’s mental machine is of the powerful low-pressure class . . . which pushes steadily forward and drives all obstacles before it.”13 It has often been said that Grant was ignorant of military history, but in later years he could recapitulate in minute detail the campaigns of Napoleon, Frederick the Great, and Julius Caesar, as the journalist John Russell Young discovered to his astonishment when he interviewed Grant in 1879.14
The stereotype of Grant as a flop at West Point is misleading. His performance was lackluster, not awful, and he proved modestly successful in selected areas. “I had no occasion for any aids in mathematics,” he said. “The subject was so easy to me as to come almost by intuition.”15 In a world of competitive young men, Grant could come across as a laggard. “In his studies he was lazy and careless,” said Rufus Ingalls. “Instead of studying a lesson, he would merely read it over once or twice; but he was so quick in his perceptions that he usually made very fair recitations even with so little preparation.”16 The academy suffered such a heavy attrition rate that, a year after Grant entered, his class was whittled down from eighty-two to forty-nine members. Although many of his letters speak fondly of the academy, he displayed small interest in military matters and portrayed his West Point stay as a trial to be endured. The furthest he allowed his fantasies to range ahead was to imagine himself an assistant math professor at the academy, followed by a college professorship. Only the specter of his father’s disapproval kept him firmly stationed on the Hudson. “If I could have escaped West Point without bringing myself into disgrace at home, I would have done so,” he reminisced. “I remember about the time I entered the academy there were debates in Congress over a proposal to abolish West Point. I . . . read the Congress reports with eagerness . . . hoping to hear that the school had been abolished, and that I could go home to my father without being in disgrace.”17