by H. W. Brands
New York held him less long, in part because he feared he had spent too much money in Philadelphia. But there was also less to see in New York; its urban glory remained prospective. After three days he headed north to West Point and arrived there at the end of May 1839.
The academy wasn’t expecting him, at least not under his given name. Congressman Hamer knew him as Ulysses and assumed this was his first name. For some reason Hamer recorded Grant’s middle initial as S, apparently from the family name, Simpson, of Grant’s mother. In consequence the academy’s registry listed the new cadet as “U. S. Grant.”
Grant accepted Ulysses as a first name, having used it as such since he learned to talk. But he clung to Hiram, which he now adopted as a middle name.
The academy was unmoved. He had been appointed as “U. S. Grant,” and so he remained in the academy’s records. Grant’s classmates drew the inevitable connection to “Uncle Sam” and started calling him “Sam Grant.” Grant signed his papers “Ulysses H. Grant” or “U. H. Grant” until the weight of the army’s authority wore him down and he became “U. S. Grant” in his own hand.
His introduction to cadet life didn’t diminish his ambivalence toward a military education. “I slept for two months upon one single pair of blankets,” he wrote McKinstry Griffith, a cousin, at the end of the summer’s encampment that served as orientation to the academy. “I tell you what, coz, it is tremendous hard. Suppose you try it by way of experiment for a night or two.” The drilling was tedious and the discipline vexing. The more he reflected on what he had gotten himself into, the deeper his spirits sank. “When the 28th of August came—the date for breaking up camp and going into barracks—I felt as though I had been at West Point always,” he later recalled, “and that if I stayed to graduation, I would have to remain always.”
The autumn scarcely improved his mood. “We have tremendous long and hard lessons to get in both French and Algebra,” he told his cousin in late September. Though the cadets nominally earned twenty-eight dollars per month, he had yet to see any of it. The rules of daily life could be maddening. “If we want anything from a shoestring to a coat, we must go to the commandant of the post and get an order for it.” He missed the girls he knew from Ohio. “I have been here about four months and have not seen a single familiar face or spoken to a single lady. I wish some of the pretty girls of Bethel were here just so I might look at them.”
The code of conduct was rigid and enforced by a system of black marks. “They give a man one of these black marks for almost nothing,” Grant explained. “If he gets 200 a year they dismiss him.” A cadet from New York had received eight black marks for not attending church one Sunday and was confined to his room besides. Grant shook his head. “We are not only obliged to go to church but must march there by companies. This is not exactly republican.”
The uniforms struck Grant as ludicrous. “If I were to come home now with my uniform on…,” he wrote Griffith, “you would laugh at my appearance.… My pants sit as tight to my skin as the bark to a tree, 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.… It makes me look very singular. If you were to see me at a distance, the first question you would ask would be, ‘Is that a fish or an animal?’ ”
Yet there were compensations. The cadets received visits from important officials. Martin Van Buren had followed Andrew Jackson in the White House, and though Van Buren lacked the war record of the hero of New Orleans, he was president, the only one Grant had encountered thus far.
Winfield Scott was even more impressive. Scott had covered himself with blood and glory in the War of 1812, and unlike Jackson, who had left the military for politics, he had remained in the army. By 1839 he was the ranking American general and the model, in the eyes of Grant and the other cadets, of what a soldier should be. “With his commanding figure, his quite colossal size and showy uniform, I thought him the finest specimen of manhood my eyes had ever beheld, and the most to be envied,” Grant recalled.
Visits like Scott’s combined with his own adjustment to the ways of the military to make Grant think the academy wasn’t so bad after all. “There is much to dislike but more to like,” he wrote Griffith. “On the whole I like the place very much, so much that I would not go away on any account.” His teachers emphasized the usefulness of the education he was receiving, and he drew some conclusions of his own. “The fact is if a man graduates here he is safe for life, let him go where he will. I mean to study and stay if it be possible. If I cannot—very well, the world is wide.”
He did stay, although he never became a model cadet. He preferred novels to his schoolbooks, searching the academy library for works by Washington Irving, James Fenimore Cooper and others and ordering additional volumes from booksellers. Mathematics eventually came easily to him; French never did. All cadets were required to take drawing; Grant’s sketches showed a steady hand and an eye for detail and nuance.
During his first year Congress debated whether to continue funding the military academy. The financial panic of 1837 had crimped the federal budget, and a certain part of the electorate had long distrusted a professional army, which brought to mind Europe and what the citizen-soldiers of the American Revolution had rebelled against. The chill of winter and the chafing of regulations revived Grant’s earlier doubts about West Point, and he later recalled rooting for the opponents of the academy. “I saw in this an honorable way to obtain a discharge,” he explained. But the academy survived and he remained.
He made no strong impression on his superiors or classmates, except in horsemanship. James Fry was a few years behind Grant at the academy and remembered observing a riding exercise at the end of which the riding master placed the leaping bar more than six feet high and called out for 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,” Fry recorded. “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.”
Otherwise Grant simply did what was required, and that not especially well. As the cadets advanced from class to class, their leaders became the academy’s officers. Grant briefly made sergeant, but a rash of demerits knocked him back down to private.
Questionable health contributed to his failure to distinguish himself. Consumption—tuberculosis—ran in his family, killing two of his uncles and later two of his siblings. In his final year at the academy he suffered a cough that lasted six months and intimated an early end for him too. At graduation he weighed less than he had when he entered the academy, though he had gained half a foot in height.
The army registered its doubts in the assignment he was given on completing his studies. He requested the cavalry and should have gotten it on the basis of his equestrian talents. But he received the infantry instead.
He hid his disappointment behind the spanking blue uniform he ordered for his commissioning. He took his oath in July 1843 before a justice of the peace of Ohio’s Clermont County, to which his family had moved while he was at West Point. He mounted a horse and rode to Cincinnati, to see the sights and show himself off. “While I was riding along a street of that city,” he remembered many years afterward, “imagining that everyone was looking at me, with a feeling akin to mine when I first saw General Scott, a little urchin, bareheaded, barefooted, with dirty and ragged pants held up by a single gallows—that’s what suspenders were called then—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!!’ ”
The taunt stung, recalling, as he later admitted, the barbs of his boyhood mates after he paid t
oo much for his colt. When he returned to his parents’ town he caught another shaft. A drunken stableman saw him coming and donned blue pants with a strip of white down the sides, in mocking imitation of Grant’s uniform pants. “The joke was a huge one in the mind of many of the people, and was much enjoyed by them,” Grant wrote. “But I did not appreciate it so highly.”
2
NOT EVERYONE THOUGHT THE NEW SECOND LIEUTENANT LUDICROUS. Grant’s West Point roommate Fred Dent was from St. Louis, conveniently close to Jefferson Barracks, Grant’s first posting. The Dents opened their home to Fred’s friend, who visited during the winter and spring of 1843–44. Mary Robinson, a slave in the Dent household, remembered Grant as “an exceedingly fine looking young man.” Fred’s sister Julia shared the opinion or something enough like it to encourage the visits. Grant required little nudging. “At first sight he fell in love with Miss Dent,” Mary Robinson said. The visits grew more frequent.
The springtime of Grant and Julia’s romance became a summer of America’s discontent. For decades American expansionists had eyed Texas, initially a province of New Spain and then a state of the Mexican republic. Illegal American emigrants had crossed the Sabine River, the boundary between Louisiana and Texas, until the Mexican government, unable to populate Texas with Mexican nationals and hoping to build a buffer against the Comanche Indians, invading from the northwest, authorized Virginia native Stephen Austin to settle three hundred American families on Texas soil. But this simply opened the floodgates, and by the mid-1830s the Americans in Texas, most of whom had arrived illegally, outnumbered the Mexicans ten to one. In 1836 they declared independence, which they confirmed in a brief, bloody war. They then requested annexation to the United States.
The request reopened the debate over slavery. The debate had started at the Constitutional Convention of 1787, when the framers accepted the anomaly of slavery in a republic in order to secure the support of the Southern states. Most Americans, including many Southerners, expected slavery to decline and disappear. And so it might have done if cotton hadn’t emerged as a cash crop ideally suited to lands wrested from Indian tribes in the South during the early nineteenth century. As settlement spread west along the Gulf Plain, cotton and slavery spread with it, entrenching both in the minds of Southerners, who came to identify their region with the “peculiar institution.”
By 1820 the culture of cotton and slavery had reached Missouri, which was admitted to the Union as part of a grand bargain that balanced free-state Maine against slave Missouri and split the rest of the Louisiana Purchase into a northern region off limits to slavery and a southern region open to the institution. The balancing was essential to the deal, for by this time the free North had outstripped the slave South in population and therefore in seats in the House of Representatives. The Senate, with its representation by states, formed the crucial redoubt of Southern influence in Washington, and the Southerners insisted that each new free state be matched with a new slave state.
Northerners insisted on the same principle, reversed, and when Texas applied for admission they were the ones who objected. The Texans practiced slavery, and Texas was so large that it seemed likely to spawn multiple slave states. Such Northerners as John Quincy Adams, returned to Congress from Massachusetts after being evicted from the White House by Andrew Jackson, decried the Texas project as a slaveholder conspiracy. Adams and the adamant antislavery bloc formed a minority in Congress, but a minority was all that was necessary to prevent the Senate from granting a Texas treaty the two-thirds support required for ratification.
Rejected by Washington, the Texans embarked on a career as an independent republic. They established diplomatic and commercial relations with Britain and France, but their finances were in shambles and they couldn’t defend themselves against attack from Mexico, which refused to acknowledge the loss of its erstwhile state. Twice the Mexican army reoccupied San Antonio, deep in Texas territory.
The government of Texas, headed by Sam Houston, once more turned to the United States. Houston, a protégé of Jackson’s, informed his retired mentor that if the American government continued to spurn Texas, he and the Texans would have no choice but to ally with Britain. Houston knew that the teenage Jackson had been taken prisoner during the Revolutionary War and been mistreated by his British captors; he knew that Jackson had unleashed his pent-up anger upon the British army at New Orleans in 1815; he knew that Jackson still smoldered whenever he pondered the perfidiousness of Albion. And he guessed that Jackson would move heaven and earth to prevent an alliance between Texas and Britain.
Jackson remained the dominant Democrat despite advanced age and ill health, and he responded to Houston’s challenge by insisting that the contenders for the 1844 Democratic presidential nomination pledge their support for Texas annexation. When Martin Van Buren, Jackson’s former vice president and then successor in the White House, waffled, Jackson singlehandedly crushed his candidacy. And when James Polk, a dark horse from Tennessee, enthusiastically endorsed annexation, Jackson ensured his nomination.
Polk’s embrace of Texas revived the opposition of Adams and others; it also roiled American relations with Mexico. The Mexican government asserted that annexation would be tantamount to a declaration of war against Mexico and that, if war came, Mexico would defend itself.
John Tyler, the current occupant of the White House, hadn’t been elected president, merely vice president, and when William Henry Harrison died shortly after his 1841 inauguration no one knew for certain whether Tyler became president or simply acting president, since the Constitution didn’t specify. But he did indeed act like a president, on no subject more than Texas. He ordered American troops to western Louisiana to meet any Mexican challenge.
Grant’s regiment, the Fourth Infantry, was part of Tyler’s deployment. The unit would join others near Fort Jessup, Louisiana, a short distance from the Texas border.
Grant had commenced a leave of absence to visit his parents in Ohio when the deployment order arrived. A message chased him up the Ohio and reached him in Bethel, where they now resided. His father told him that he had gotten all the good from the army he was likely to get and that he should quit to join the family business; Ulysses’s deployment, to the back of beyond, was just what he could expect of a military career. Grant didn’t like the leather business any more than he had as a boy, and he rejected his father’s advice. But neither did he immediately follow the army’s order. Instead of traveling straight from Ohio to Louisiana, he returned to Missouri for a parting word with Julia Dent.
He later recalled approaching the Dent home. The road from Jefferson Barracks to the Dent house crossed a creek, which in most seasons a man on a horse could splash across with no difficulty whatever. But recent rains had swollen the creek to flood stage. “I looked at it a moment to consider what to do,” Grant related. “One of my superstitions has always been when I started to go anywhere or to do anything, not to turn back or stop until the thing intended was accomplished. I have frequently started to go to places where I had never been and to which I did not know the way, depending upon making inquiries on the road, and if I got past the place without knowing it, instead of turning back, I would go on until a road was found turning in the right direction, take that, and come in by the other side.” On this day he had both a destination and a purpose, and there was no chance he would turn back. “I struck into the stream, and in an instant the horse was swimming and I being carried down by the current.” Horse and man were swept swiftly along, with both becoming thoroughly soaked and more than a little worried. But the horse proved a strong swimmer, and they eventually gained the far bank.
He arrived at the Dent home drenched but determined. He explained to Julia that the prospect of leaving for Louisiana and possibly going to war had made him realize how much he loved her. He couldn’t go without asking her to marry him.
She accepted his proposal conditionally. Her parents had mixed feelings about Grant. “Old man Dent was opposed to h
im, when he found he was courting his daughter, and did everything he could to prevent the match,” Mary Robinson remembered. “But Mrs. Dent took a great fancy to him in his venture. Mrs. Dent used to say to me: I like that young man.” Julia thought she and her mother could work on her father and eventually bring him around. But until he changed his mind, the engagement must be a secret.
Grant was elated. Frederick Dent’s veto centered on his judgment that army life was no fitting existence for his daughter; Grant considered this merely a temporary impediment, as he didn’t intend to make a career of the army. He at once wrote to his mathematics professor at West Point asking to be appointed his assistant, in which capacity he might serve out his obligation to the army and prepare himself to be a civilian mathematics professor. He laid a plan of informal study to extend his mastery of the subject. And he congratulated himself on having won his true love, in principle at least.
Meanwhile he had to report to Louisiana. He had never been so far south or seen anything like the swamps and bayous that constituted much of the state. “The country is low and flat and overflown”—by the Red River—“to the first limbs of the trees,” he wrote Julia of his journey up that stream. “Alligators and other revolting looking things occupy the swamps in thousands; and no doubt the very few people who live there shake with the ague”—the chills of malaria—“all summer.”
He was pleased to report that his regiment had found a better neighborhood for its camp. “We are on the top of a high ridge, with about the best spring of water in Louisiana running near.” But they had company. The pine forest surrounding the camp was “infested to an enormous degree with ticks, red bugs, and a little creeping thing looking like a lizard that I don’t know the name of.” The tents couldn’t keep the critters out. “This last vermin is singularly partial to society, and become so very intimate and sociable on short acquaintance as to visit our tents, crawl into our beds.” Water entered as easily. “We have had a hard shower and I can tell you my tent is a poor protection. The rain runs through in streams.”