by Ron Chernow
Already possessing a literary bent, Grant often escaped into the world of fiction, devouring novels by Sir Walter Scott, Washington Irving, and James Fenimore Cooper and serving as president of the literary society. Shy, closemouthed, he did not dance and came up short with the ladies, especially compared with the polished young southern boys with their ingratiating manners. Perhaps most surprising was the talent he exhibited in a drawing course given by a popular instructor, Robert Walter Weir, who had studied painting in Italy and specialized in landscapes and historical subjects. With cartography in its infancy, West Point emphasized drawing so that future officers could sketch rough maps and record a battlefield’s topography. The clarity and acuity of Grant’s vision—his uncanny ability to visualize chaotic fighting amid the fog of war—would account in no small measure for his military triumphs. Grant executed fanciful Italian scenes and tender genre studies of Native Americans and, in one droll, delightful painting, showed a horse with its head drooping into a feed bag, a picture notable for its palpable affection for the creature.
Grant also thrived in horseback riding and was lucky that the academy introduced equestrian classes during his tenure. Cadets training to be cavalry officers were expected to leap over hurdles, their sabers flailing in the air. Everybody noted the perfect harmony that united man and animal when Grant sat erect in the saddle. “In horsemanship . . . he was noted as the most proficient in the Academy,” said Longstreet. “In fact, rider and horse held together like the fabled centaur.”18 As in Georgetown, knots of cadets would gather and stare with hypnotic admiration as Grant subdued unruly horses, and one said appreciatively, “It was as good as any circus to see Grant ride.”19 In scaling hurdles he exceeded all rivals, and when cadets competed in jumps, attendants would hike up the bar a full foot higher to spotlight Grant’s star turn.
During the Civil War, Grant attributed some of his success to a thorough knowledge of Confederate officers, stored up at West Point and in the Mexican War. Indeed, a goodly portion of the dramatis personae of the Civil War trooped through his academy life. He was mesmerized, if a bit appalled, by a zealous Christian cadet from a poor family in rural western Virginia, Thomas J. Jackson. “At West Point he came into the school at an older age than average, and began with a low grade. But he had so much courage and energy, worked so hard, and governed his life by a discipline so stern that he steadily worked his way along and rose far above others who had more advantages.”20 Grant remembered Jackson’s bouts of hypochondria, his belief in possession by demonic spirits, his tireless bent for self-improvement. Grant never directly faced Stonewall Jackson during the Civil War, when he fought like a man possessed, his eyes said to be fiercely lit by inner fires.
Among the older cadets, which included John Pope and Simon Bolivar Buckner, Grant was especially drawn to William Tecumseh Sherman, who was as witty and energetic as Grant was constrained in manner. He was “generous to everybody,” Grant recalled, and “one of the most popular boys at the Academy.”21 Grant’s critique of another older cadet, George H. Thomas, later hero of Chickamauga, prefigured his impatience with Thomas’s lumbering style of command. “At West Point, when he was commanding cadets in cavalry drill, he would never go beyond a slow trot. Just as soon as the line began to move, and gain a little speed, Thomas would give the order, ‘Slow trot.’ The boys used to call him ‘Slow Trot’ Thomas.”22 Among younger cadets the most impressive was the precocious George B. McClellan, who entered West Point at fifteen after two years at the University of Pennsylvania. By a strange juxtaposition of fate, his class included George E. Pickett of Gettysburg fame.
After two years of study, West Point rewarded cadets with a two-month furlough, and Grant celebrated this interlude as a long-awaited reprieve from his New York exile. “This I enjoyed beyond any other period of my life,” he stated, with understandable hyperbole.23 By now Jesse had followed his usual practice of trading up to ever-richer towns, moving from Georgetown to Bethel, a mere twelve miles away, but a distinct step upward in socioeconomic status. He and Hannah had moved into an imposing brick house recently owned by Senator Thomas Morris, and noxious fumes no longer floated in from a nearby tannery. Jesse had formed a partnership agreement with E. A. Collins under which Jesse would expand their Bethel tannery while Collins hawked its products in the Mississippi River town of Galena, Illinois, forging a connection that was to prove consequential for Ulysses. Jesse planned to groom his two younger sons, Simpson and Orvil, to take over his tanning business, a prospect pointedly spurned by Ulysses.
As restless as ever, Jesse donated his time to a dizzying array of causes, sitting on the board of the Methodist church and joining the local Masonic lodge. Still a stalwart Whig, he had campaigned heartily in 1840 for William Henry Harrison, whose slogan in the presidential race was “Tippecanoe and Tyler, too.” (Harrison had been the hero of the battle of Tippecanoe and John Tyler was his running mate.) Inspired by this slogan, Jesse took part in a campaign parade in which he pulled an oar in a gargantuan canoe mounted on wheels that was pulled down the town’s main street. Many locals were offended by Jesse’s ostentatious air of prosperity, his insufferable boasting about Ulysses, and his outspoken politics. “He was an uncompromising anti-slavery Whig, a strong temperance advocate, the richest man in town, owned a piano, wore gold-bowed spectacles, and sent his children to college,” explained one townsman.24 Yet the hard-driving Jesse was enterprising enough to be elected mayor of Bethel within a decade.
Encased in his starchy uniform, his frame well toned by parade ground drills, the Ulysses S. Grant who returned to Bethel by stagecoach had the upright carriage of a cadet instead of his familiar boyhood slouch. Training had made him lean and muscular. When he encountered his mother, she didn’t shower him with tears or hugs, but inspected him closely instead. “Ulysses, you have grown much straighter,” she commented, and he shot back, “Yes, that was the first thing they taught me.”25 The improvement proved only temporary. In the agrarian isolation of a small Ohio town before the railroad boom, Ulysses whirled in like some visitor from a faraway world who imparted strange lore of distant places. On Bethel’s streets, he was often surrounded by flocks of locals who listened, mouth agape, to his stock of West Point tales, relieved to find him free of his father’s vanity.
In the emotional desert of the Grant household, Ulysses was ripe for romance and found his first love interest in a young woman named Kate Lowe, who lived in nearby Batavia. He rode over frequently to see her and experienced the early transports of desire. Before returning to West Point, Grant, in courting mode, even sent the damsel rhymed couplets to testify to his affection: “Kindly then remember me / I’ll also often think of thee, / Nor forget the Soldier story / Gone to gain the field of glory.”26
Back at West Point in the fall, Grant was briefly accorded the honor of being named a sergeant who exercised leadership in one of four companies formed for military exercises. Instead of being galvanized into superior performance, Grant preferred to languish. As he confessed, “The promotion was too much for me.”27 As he accumulated demerits—in May 1842, he was confined to quarters for two weeks for speaking disrespectfully to a superior officer—he was stripped of his sergeant stripes and reverted to a private for his last year. Time hung heavy on his hands. “The last two years wore away more rapidly than the first two, but they still seemed about five times as long as Ohio years, to me.”28 As so often in Grant’s career, his mental depression acquired a physical correlative. During his last six months at West Point, he was gripped by a “desperate cough” that slimmed him down to 117 pounds—the same weight recorded during his entrance exam, even though he had gained six inches in height.29 Two of Jesse Grant’s brothers had died of consumption, perhaps adding an extra element of concern to Grant’s condition.
Despite his infirmity, Grant rode regularly and astounded people with his equestrian theatrics, routinely clearing a bar set at five feet by the riding master, the Prussian sergeant H
enry Hershberger. The most fearsome horse in the academy stables was York, an intractable animal dreaded by most cadets. When one classmate warned Grant, “That horse will kill you some day,” he coolly responded, “Well, I can’t die but once.”30 The pinnacle of Grant’s horsemanship came at graduation time, when the senior class performed mounted exercises before a vast throng of spectators. A young onlooker named James B. Fry never forgot Grant’s bravura performance at the close:
When the regular services were completed, the class, still mounted, was formed in line through the center of the hall, the riding-master placed the leaping-bar higher than a man’s head, and called out “Cadet Grant!” A clean-faced, slender, blue-eyed young fellow, weighing about 120 pounds, dashed from the ranks on a powerfully built chestnut-sorrel horse and galloped down the opposite side of the hall. As he turned at the farther end and came into the straight stretch across which the bar was placed, the horse increased his pace, and, measuring his strides for the great leap before him, bounded into the air and cleared the bar, carrying his rider as if man and beast had been welded together. The spectators were breathless. “Very well done, sir!” growled “old Hershberger,” the riding-master, and the class was dismissed and disappeared; but “Cadet Grant” remained a living image in my memory.31
Grant established an academy record that stood for decades, and the story’s afterlife was no less remarkable. On his deathbed, when Fry called upon him, Grant could retrieve every detail of the memorable episode. “‘Yes,’ he whispered, ‘I remember that very well. York was a wonderful horse. I could feel him gathering under me for the effort as he approached the bar. Have you heard anything lately of Hershberger?’”32
When Grant graduated in June 1843, his rank was middling, not miserable: twenty-first in a class of thirty-nine. If one includes the many cadets who had already dropped out, Grant nearly stood in the top quarter of candidates who set out on the four-year marathon. The results were highly creditable in light of Grant’s lackadaisical work ethic and the fact that some students entered with college preparatory work under their belts. Ironically, Grant scored best in subjects that might someday be of service in civilian life (math, engineering, and geology) and fared poorly in strictly military subjects (artillery and infantry tactics), confirming his disinclination for military service. Because of Grant’s strong performance in math, Professor Albert E. Church soon encouraged him to return to the academy as an assistant professor, and Grant cherished this lowly aspiration. Although the feeling was far from universal, several cadets recognized Grant’s uncommon strength of character. Shortly before graduation, classmate James A. Hardie prophesied, “Well, sir, if a great emergency arises in this country during our life-time, Sam Grant will be the man to meet it.”33
Looking back on his life, Grant declared that his happiest day was his last as president—with the possible exception of graduation day at West Point.34 For all that, he retained enduring respect for the academy and an affection for those who had survived its exacting ordeals. “He preferred West Point men as soldiers,” wrote a later staff officer, “he loved them as friends . . . he thought higher even of Sherman and Sheridan because they were graduates of the Academy.”35
As he contemplated the military career to which he was now committed for several years, Grant coveted a cavalry assignment—an illustrious branch of service—and was crestfallen at being rejected. He had to settle for a commission as brevet second lieutenant attached to the Fourth Infantry Regiment, based at Jefferson Barracks, just south of St. Louis, Missouri. Grant spent a last summer in Ohio and ordered an infantry uniform from a local tailor. Evidently proud of his uniform and hoping it would impress the young ladies, he sported it on a trip to Cincinnati. “While I was riding along a street of that city, imagining that everyone was looking at me . . . a little urchin, bareheaded, barefooted, with dirty and ragged pants held up by a single gallows . . . and a shirt that had not seen a wash-tub for weeks, turned to me and cried: ‘Soldier! will you work? No, sir—ee; I’ll sell my shirt first!!’” That Grant recalled this chance encounter with a nameless mocking waif underscores his uncommon sensitivity to ridicule.
At the same time he could not escape the barbs of small-town envy that had so bedeviled him before in Bethel. Because he wore a fancy uniform, some people scorned him as uppity. “The stable-man was rather dissipated, but possessed of some humor,” Grant wrote. “On my return I found him parading the streets, and attending in the stable, bare-footed, but in a pair of sky-blue nankeen pantaloons—just the color of my uniform trousers—with a strip of white cotton sheeting sewed down the outside seams in imitation of mine. The joke was a huge one in the mind of many of the people, and was much enjoyed by them; but I did not appreciate it so highly.”36 According to one resident, Grant had fallen victim to shafts meant to land elsewhere: “Such incivilities were really aired less at the genial unoffending Lieutenant than at his offending father who was known to be very proud of him.”37
In being assigned to Jefferson Barracks, Grant found himself posted to the largest military outpost in the United States, manned by two infantry regiments. As it had since the Lewis and Clark expedition, nearby St. Louis served as gateway to western expansion, the army post throwing a protective shield around white settlers threatened by Indian raids on the Great Plains. Graced with gray limestone buildings, an enormous parade ground, and white picket fences on softly rolling hills, Jefferson Barracks was a prized posting and port of call for a succession of future generals. More than two hundred Civil War generals passed through its expansive grounds. The commanding officer was Colonel Stephen Kearny, whom Grant valued as a model professional in the way he adhered to high standards without shackling soldiers with onerous rules.
The young Grant, twenty-one, who reported to Jefferson Barracks on September 30, 1843, misunderstood the nature of his special gifts. Ruddy and fresh-faced, he continued to train for a math professorship, plowing through mathematical studies as well as “many valuable historical works, besides an occasional novel.”38 He even contacted Professor Church, the West Point math instructor, to solicit a job as an assistant professor. Always attentive to his military status, he chafed at being shipped off to the infantry and made a futile request to be transferred to the dragoons, or mounted troops, who stood on a higher echelon.
While Colonel Kearny expected his men to snap to attention at drills and roll calls, he showed a more relaxed attitude toward social activities beyond the base. Officers were constantly drafted for parties and cotillions in St. Louis, which made Jefferson Barracks a good place to shop for a wife. James Longstreet, also sent to Jefferson Barracks, extolled the “hospitable city” and remembered wistfully that “the graceful step of its charming belles became a joy forever.”39 Grant hoped to see his West Point roommate, Fred Dent, who had grown up on a slave plantation known as White Haven that lay only five miles from the army base. When Fred was dispatched farther west into Indian country, he encouraged Grant to visit his family anyway; in the company of Longstreet, who was related to Fred’s mother, Grant made a courtesy call there that autumn. Fred had smoothed the way with glowing letters to his eldest sister, Julia. “He said, I want you to know him,” Julia remembered. “He is pure gold. I have never known him to use a profane or vulgar word . . . he is a splendid fellow.”40
The Ulysses S. Grant who galloped up to White Haven was something of a pretty boy, his face not yet careworn from drink, depression, and business failure. His skin was smooth and unclouded, his features attractively regular, and he cut a fine figure in a blue uniform with gold buttons running down the front. Although Julia Dent was then at boarding school in St. Louis, her younger sisters swooned over the second lieutenant. Emma Dent, age six, thought him “the handsomest person I had ever seen in my life” and left a detailed account of her first impressions. “He was very youthful looking, even for his age, which was just twenty-one. His cheeks were round and plump and rosy; his hair was fine and brown, very thic
k and wavy. His eyes were a clear blue, and always full of light.” His figure was “so slender, well formed, and graceful that it was like that of a young prince to my eye.”41 Nellie Dent, fifteen, equally smitten, began to indulge in romantic hopes. Warmly received by the Dent parents and with these adoring sisters panting after him, Grant began to canter out to White Haven with some regularity.
Enchanted by the family, Grant sometimes lingered there too long, returning late for meals at Jefferson Barracks. He possessed an easygoing side that never quite conformed to the strict dictates of army discipline. Captain Robert C. Buchanan, overseer of the Fourth Infantry mess, was a martinet of the old school who took sadistic delight in harassing recent West Point graduates, fining them bottles of wine for tardiness. Three times in ten days he levied this penalty upon Grant, who bristled at the unwonted reprimand. “Grant, you are late, as usual; another bottle of wine, sir.” “Mr. President,” Grant replied, “I have been fined three bottles of wine within the last ten days and if I am fined again I shall be obliged to repudiate.” “Mr. Grant, young people should be seen, not heard.”42 This exchange is noteworthy, for a decade later Buchanan would reemerge as a major nemesis in Grant’s career, with highly destructive consequences.