I

CROWDS AND FAMILIES

When the General finishes…those who have bellowed themselves hoarse, make themselves still hoarser.

—Newcastle Daily Chronicle, September 24, 1877

ULYSSES GRANT loved the sound of a crowd. The strangely silent hero heard its roar perhaps more often than any other American and in places all around the world. Once, on September 22, 1877, in Newcastle, in the north of England, some eighty thousand working people crowded special trains, jammed the railroad station, and pressed through the streets and out onto the town moor to become part of a great parade in honor of the American. Miners from the collieries with pictures of pit boys on their banners, tailors with pictures of Adam and Eve on theirs, metalworkers from the shipyards, carpenters, masons “massive in physique, strong in numbers, and walking solidly and steadily four abreast like trained soldiers,” sawyers, and tanners marched past the visiting general. The painters carried a “picture representing the breaking of the chains of slavery, with the inscription, ‘Welcome to the Liberator’…adorned with bunches of fresh, green fern.” The people came to welcome one of their own. In their England democracy had not yet been perfected, but here among them was a man who looked like them and who had left the stink of a tannery to lead the hosts of secular righteousness against the holders of slaves. First as general and then as president, Grant had been at the head of a nation they imagined to be a beacon of goodness ready to call in all who sought to live in freedom.¹

At last Ulysses Grant was loved as he needed to be loved. He stood “open-browed, firm-faced, bluff, honest and unassuming,” before huge crowds of people and “everybody at once settled in his own mind that the General would do. The cheers became warmer as that quiet, strong, thoroughly British face grew upon them; and as they increased General Grant, who had at first merely touched his hat to the multitude, bared his head, as an unmistakable everybody-joins-in-it ‘Hurrah’ roared out from fifty thousand throats, and rattled to the astonished birds circling overhead.”²

Only a few could hear his quiet voice as he rose, to “return thanks to the working men of Tyneside.” To the meeting’s chairman he said, “I accept from that class of people the reception which they have accorded me, as among the most honorable I can receive. We all know that but for labor we would have but very little that is worth fighting for, and when wars do come, they fall upon the many, the producing class, who are the sufferers. They not only have to furnish the means largely, but they have, by their labor and industry, to produce the means for those who are engaged in destroying and not in producing.” The local newspaper reported his speech as follows: “‘I was always a man of peace, and I have advocated peace, although educated a soldier. I never willingly, although I have gone through two wars, of my own accord advocated war. (Loud Cheers) I advocated what I believed to be right, and I have fought for it….’” Grant had seldom been so outspoken, even with platitudes, but seldom had the call to speak been so compelling. Although there had often been great crowds, there had been none as giving as this one: “The vast concourse, still rushing up from the turnpike…estimate the unheard speech after their own thoughts, and applaud every now and again with might and main. When the General finishes…those who have bellowed themselves hoarse, make themselves still hoarser….”³

These were indeed his people. He was one of them. But Grant had fooled them all. He had been denying them—denying himself—all his life. He believed that if he did not make that denial, he would be nothing but an anonymous failure lost in some similar American crowd. Instead of remaining with them, he had forced himself out of the world of ordinary people by the most murderous acts of will and had doomed himself to spend the rest of his life looking for approval for having done so. It was not that Ulysses Grant did not like other ordinary people. On the contrary, he was always entirely comfortable with them, whether among the crowds in Newcastle or in an army camp. He had the remarkably rare gift of being able to talk to any other man who happened to be sitting on a log along a wartime road. The problem was that he did not trust himself to remain in conversation with the man whose language he could speak. He did not dare embrace the comradeship of those marchers, those producers, those people, because he was afraid they would march off and leave him behind. So he had to push past them all, and when he had gone by them, he was very lonely.

In his Memoirs Grant chose to open his version of his lifelong struggle with a firm declaration: “My family is American, and has been for generations, in all its branches, direct and collateral.” This was his way of saying that the rock on which he built was steady. He was trying, from the start, to put off anyone who might doubt that his life was solid. He had been trying for all his years to convince himself of that uncertain fact. It was as if having asserted firmly, in print, that he was confident of the world from which he came, he would at last be comfortable in the place which he had reached. Or, at least, he hoped to persuade us that he was.⁴

The Memoirs was meant to suggest constant strength, generation after generation. His deft genealogical sketch is accurate until the point in the chronicle when his own memory intrudes. Then, with his account of his grandfather, he begins to get the story wrong, and the ground shifts under him. The Grants had not been constantly successful; instead of a steady generation-by-generation movement ahead, the family had experienced terrifying decline, and Grant spent his life erecting defenses against a repetition of that collapse in his own life. More often than not, his defenses crumbled. The image of a man, stolid and of infinite poise, that he put before the public fooled almost everyone save Grant himself. Courageously, at the end of his life, when failure was again a reality, he tried one last time to achieve solidity. He wrote a fine book—but it was the only truly firm stone in the building.

Before he got to the book, he had been through a lifetime of great contrasts between anonymous failure and vast public acclaim, and only a relentless plunge into the obscene exhilaration of war enabled him to achieve what others perceived to be a steady grasp on the world. This ordinary American man, with seven generations of Americans behind him, had thus gotten his grip at a terrible cost to a great many other ordinary Americans. What was more, the country that his war had so greatly changed was as uncertain of its ground as Ulysses Grant, the man who best symbolized it, was of his.

He was correct in suggesting that the Grants had made their start in America with assurance. Matthew and Priscilla Grant came on the Mary and John in 1630. Matthew Grant, in his twenties, helped mark out the lands of his town, Dorchester (now a part of Boston), and himself owned land and two cows and was in full communion with the church. Less than five years later, however, joining fellow townspeople, Grant traveled through the wilderness of central New England to found a second town, Windsor, on the Connecticut River. There he held two essential public posts, those of town clerk and surveyor. His hand gave people their place in the records of the world; his eye established the limits of their land. For forty years, according to “Rules which I have larned by experanc in practis for helpes in measuring land,” he marked the boundaries of farms as families increased and lots had to be multiplied in number and divided in size. Litigious New Englanders were beholden to their town surveyor, who established their property lines; Matthew Grant was an important man. What was more, his will suggests that his farm was profitable.⁵

Matthew Grant was also a man of intellect. His diary is an elegant record of a Puritan grappling with his relationship to God through his own poetry, and—in orderly notes—through the sermons of learned clergymen like Thomas Hooker, of nearby Hartford. Matthew Grant had a long life—he died in 1681—and no one in the family since has matched his ability to define, with intellectual precision, the boundaries of his world. When, two hundred years later, Ulysses Grant wrote about the Mexican War and the Civil War, his control of a martial world was as firm as Matthew’s had been of Heaven and Windsor, but he lacked his ancestor’s range of contemplation. The theological and intellectual world Matthew Grant had lived in so intensely was gone.⁶

Matthew’s eldest son, Samuel, as a member of the second generation, had to find his land outside town, to the east. There, in East Windsor, Matthew’s grandson, a second Samuel, and his great-grandson, Noah, were born. In 1718 this first Noah Grant was among the men who moved still farther from the river onto the beautiful but rocky Connecticut hills which resist farming. In their town, which they called Tolland, two more generations of Grants were born.⁷

The family continued to hold a relatively secure place in these communities until one of its men went to war. The Grants had been lucky in avoiding King Philip’s War, but eighty years later the second Noah Grant left his wife, Susanna Delano, and went off with his bachelor brother, Solomon, to fight in the French and Indian War. Captain Noah Grant led a company of Connecticut men—“Solo[mo]n Sipio and Jupiter Negro, Caleb Talcutt and Thomas Ellsworth” among them—through the bitter cold of the winter of 1755–56 to northern New York, on the Crown Point expedition. Fine storytelling has given this hazardous expedition historical glamour; contemporaries honored the men as well. In the spring of 1756 the Connecticut legislature passed a special bill awarding Noah Grant and Israel Putnam thirty and fifty Spanish dollars, respectively, for “Ranging and Scouting the winter past; for annoyance of the Enemy near Crown Point & Discovering their motives.” Putnam’s luck held till another war, but the Grants’ did not. Solomon was killed in June 1756, and the following September, Noah died in action. His widow was left so destitute that she took her children—among them her eight-year-old eldest son, the third Noah, Ulysses’ grandfather—to live with relatives across the mountain in Coventry.⁸

That Noah Grant was given an important place in adulatory biographies of his grandson, in which he was presented as a hero of the Revolution and hence could be seen as a fit ancestor for the hero of the War of the Rebellion. Grant himself placed his grandfather at both Lexington and Concord and credited him with having “served through the entire Revolutionary War.” Other writers speak of him as having “fought gallantly.” But although his grandson remembered tales that stretched from Bunker Hill to Yorktown, it is unlikely that Noah Grant of Coventry, Connecticut, ever went off to fight against King George at all. Whether the stories of his military adventures were originated by Noah or were made up for him is not clear. In the frequently repeated accounts of Noah as Captain Noah Grant of the Revolutionary War, the details are always vague. The references to him as captain are probably the result of confusion arising from his father’s having held that rank in the French and Indian War, for the carefully maintained records of the Connecticut State Library reveal no service in the Revolution by this Noah Grant. The equally complete records of the National Archives tell of only one Noah Grant who fought in the Revolution, a militiaman from Lyme, New Hampshire, who took part in the attack on Quebec in 1775. The New Hampshireman’s distant cousin, Ulysses Grant’s grandfather—“Captain Noah” only in legend—apparently stayed in Coventry.⁹

Noah Grant is mentioned only nominally in the town-meeting records of Coventry. He was born in 1748 and married Anne Richardson, who bore two sons. He is said to have been a cobbler as well as a farmer, and in the precarious economy of the 1780’s, he speculated in land in Coventry and, possibly, in the Susquehanna Lands in Pennsylvania to which Connecticut men held claims. On September 24, 1788, the sheriff of Tolland County was ordered “to take the body of said [Noah Grant] and commit unto the keeper of the gaol” until he paid a fifty-three-pound debt, plus costs. A sentence to debtor’s prison, the grim certificate of failure feared by hill-town farmers throughout western New England, had come to Noah Grant. In December he sold his farm to a relative for four hundred pounds and, presumably, cleared either the debt for which he was jailed or a second one incurred to escape jail. He owned other lands as well but lacked the cash to farm them, and by early 1790 he had sold ten parcels, worth nine hundred pounds, and moved west. He left behind his grown elder son and the grave of his wife, high on beautiful Grant Hill.¹⁰

Taking with him his younger son, Peter, Noah Grant traveled across Connecticut and New York to Pennsylvania, where he settled in Westmoreland County, near Greensburg. There in 1792 he married Rachel Kelly. They had five children, the second of whom was Ulysses Grant’s father, Jesse Root Grant, born January 23, 1794. In 1799, with Rachel pregnant with her sixth child, the family traveled down the Monongahela and the Ohio rivers past Pittsburgh to settle across the Ohio border in East Liverpool. There two more children were born. In 1804 Noah moved the family again, to Deerfield, Ohio, and a year later, Rachel Kelly Grant died. Her grave is “in the cemetery at the Center”; if there was a stone, it does not survive. In Deerfield, Noah made shoes, and he is said to have worked alongside Indians, still numerous at that time in this region of northeastern Ohio. Legend has it that he drank with them as well.¹¹

With the death of Rachel Kelly Grant came a collapse of the family myth that the stability of Connecticut was maintained in the move west. The Grants were so poor that the family had to be broken up. Noah Grant could not provide for his children, and they were either put in the care of more prosperous relatives or, as Jesse was at age eleven, apprenticed. This disruption had long-reaching effects on the relationship between Noah’s son Jesse and Jesse’s son Ulysses. Jesse lived first with George Tod of Youngstown, a contentious, vigorous politician from whom he may have gotten his taste for political argument. But apparently, the apprentice was free to detach himself from his arrangements with Tod, for he left Ohio and went down the river to join his half brother Peter Grant, who was prospering in the tanning business in the busy town of Maysville, Kentucky. Jesse had almost no formal schooling. He became apprenticed to Peter, learned the business, and continued in it as an adult.¹²

Jesse Root Grant used the land differently than had his father and their forebears. He neither speculated in properties nor farmed, but instead extracted from the land that which was commercially valuable. Gone was his father’s handicraft of shoemaking, and in its place was the manufacture of leather. Jesse and his fellow Ohio Valley tanners were classic examples of the transformation of American frontier settlers from subsistence farmers dependent on village co-operation to entrepreneurs in a capitalist economy of distinct functions and competitive marketing. He worked hard and made other men work equally hard tanning leather cheaply and selling it profitably. Having learned from his half brother in Maysville not only the process but more importantly the business, he returned to Deerfield to work in a tannery, then moved to Ravenna, where the signboard “Jesse Grant, tanner” marked the place of his business, and then went far down the river to Point Pleasant, Ohio.¹³

Business came first for the bachelor; he established his tannery in Point Pleasant. Then, at age twenty-seven, he married Hannah Simpson and settled in a small attractive house near the river. From its front door one looks to the right for a splendid prospect of the Ohio at one of its loveliest points. There, on April 27, 1822, was born Jesse and Hannah’s first child, who was given the name Hiram Ulysses Grant. When the boy was eighteen months old, the family moved to the new town of Georgetown, away from the river and near good supplies of tanning bark.

Jesse Grant was always struggling to establish himself. Because of his early experiences, the comfortable idea that a family is a secure joining of people in a relationship of mutual affection was foreign to him. His boyhood had demonstrated just the opposite—that relatives could not be trusted to provide security—and for him a family became a form of property, necessary for achieving economic stability. As a deserted person, Jesse had to fight to build an economic base to keep him safe in the world. When his children were grown, he both expected them to sustain him and doubted that they could be relied on to do so. He used the children, and his wife, to consolidate his grasp on his small but tightly held economic position, and he was always suspicious that they would disappoint him in this enterprise. Two of his sons joined him in the leather business, and none of his daughters married until their brother Ulysses was so prominent that they no longer had to be kept tied to family duties. Then they found ambitious husbands. Then, too, Jesse could at last look to his eldest son for support. This son, Ulysses, spent his life alternately repudiating Jesse Grant’s bleak world and trying to prove himself worthy of it.

Grant’s birthplace, Point Pleasant, Ohio. LIBRARY OF CONGRESS

Georgetown, a new county seat, was being developed when Jesse Grant moved there. On Cross Street, down the slope from the courthouse square (the courthouse itself was yet to be erected) he built his tannery and, very close by, his small but sturdy brick house. Business was good, but tanning was not a dainty trade. Hides came from animals which had been butchered and from aged animals which were penned, slaughtered, and skinned at the tanyard, with their carcasses then hauled away. The hides were cured in salt for storage, soaked in lye to loosen the hair, and placed in tubs of tannic acid to render them flexible and durable. The animals screamed as they died; the premises across a narrow street from Ulysses Grant’s bedroom stank. The boy detested the tannery and often said so; his hatred of it was not merely a sentiment attributed to him by later genteel writers seeking to give their heroic Ulysses noble sensibilities.

The brick house Jesse originally built across the street from the tanyard consisted of a bedroom on top of a kitchen. Five years later he added a wing larger than the original house, with a solidly respectable parlor and a hall in which a straight-banistered staircase rose to two bedrooms above. This was Ulysses Grant’s home for sixteen years. Here too his sisters and brothers were born: Samuel Simpson (known as Simpson) on September 23, 1825; Clara Rachel on December 11, 1828; Virginia Paine (Jennie) on February 20, 1832; Orvil Lynch on May 15, 1835; and Mary Frances on July 30, 1839.

As the family grew, so too did Jesse Grant’s interest in politics. Once a Democrat (and always a Jacksonian), Jesse broke with the party and became a Whig. He clashed on personal grounds with the dynamic red-headed Democratic congressman Thomas Hamer, whose promising career was ended by his death in the Mexican War. Jesse was a Master of the Masonic lodge in 1830, and wrote doggerel about local politics for an abolitionist newspaper, the Castigator. The writings are curiously revealing, with self-deprecation disguising an off-pitch but fervent plea to be taken seriously. Occasionally he was; he served one term (1837–39) as mayor of generally Democratic Georgetown.¹⁴

If we know something of Mayor Grant and his charmless, ambitious, contentious, and sometimes successful activities—both in business and, briefly, in politics—we know remarkably little about his wife. Jesse Grant married up when he married John and Rebecca Simpson’s daughter, Hannah. The Simpson family, which owned six hundred acres in the Ohio Valley, remained in close contact with their firmly established relatives in Berks County, Pennsylvania, west of Philadelphia; by mail and with visits they retained their ties with the past in ways in which the Grants did not. The Simpsons had let neither their gentility nor their deeply rooted piety lapse in the move to the Ohio Valley. They were lettered people; indeed it was Hannah Simpson’s stepmother—a splendid grandmother of whom Ulysses was fond—who, inspired by her reading of a translation of Fénelon’s neoclassic epic Telemachus, provided the name for her Grant grandson.¹⁵

We actually know more about Ulysses Grant’s maternal grandparents and his uncles and aunts than we do about his mother. As general and president, Grant was the subject of an enormous number of biographies and biographical sketches. His mother was alive all through the period of his active public life—she died only two years before he did—and yet she is remarkably absent from these accounts. Her reserve, a trait her son was often said to have derived from her, will not suffice to explain the fact that in America, with its reverence for motherhood, the mother of a president of the United States failed to visit the White House once while her son lived there. Yet in those years she traveled from the Ohio Valley to New York. Reserve or even independence of spirit is insufficient to explain the absence of a visit so essential as a demonstration of a son’s respect for his mother. Neither is Jesse Grant’s description of his wife as “a plain unpretending country girl” convincing as evidence that Hannah Grant felt too plain to be comfortable at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. Even if she had been rustic, plainer people than Hannah Simpson have overcome their awe of the Executive Mansion; certainly, the Simpsons were not as crude as Jesse Grant, who himself enjoyed the White House.¹⁶

While Grant was president, a Cincinnati reporter crossed the river to Covington to interview his mother. No one had done so successfully, and the newspaperman was determined to get a story. He found the Grants’ house, close to the curb of a narrow street, and rang; Hannah Grant, home alone, answered. She was dark-haired, slender, erect—and grimly severe. The reporter’s excuse for the call was to get her to sign a tinted portrait of her son and thus certify the accuracy of the coloring. This she did, but he could not even report on the timbre of her voice; he heard only a yes and a no. Undaunted by the chill, he grew fulsome: “I think, madame, I am favored…. There are multitudes…who would be highly gratified to have an interview with the mother of General Grant.” It did not work: “Not by a word or an expression…did she show that she even heard me.”¹⁷

More gregarious souls than Hannah Grant have sometimes wished, after an interview, that they had handled reporters similarly. But one fears that she revealed something other than natural reticence or quick-witted wisdom in this encounter. There was something strange about her—something no one mentioned. Conceivably she was simple-minded, although it is difficult to imagine Jesse marrying a simple-minded woman and at the time of her death, one of her daughters made a point of mentioning that she had read her daily newspaper the day she died. Possibly Hannah Grant had a psychosomatic disorder; certainly she was shielded from the public by the family. Late in her life, Grant did take his children to visit “Grandma,” proving that no acrimony had permanently separated her from him. Nevertheless, an uncommon detachment existed in the relationship of son to mother.¹⁸

Grant’s Memoirs gives an uneven picture of his boyhood. He wrote no recollections of his mother’s activities to balance his recital of those of his father—such as the story of a trip Jesse made to Connecticut to attempt, unsuccessfully, to reclaim after seventy years a bequest from his great-uncle Solomon, who had died in the French and Indian War. Other of Jesse’s efforts to negotiate, which had indifferent success, caught Ulysses’ pained attention, but there is little discussion in the book of what the parents hoped their children would achieve. Once his children were grown, Jesse Grant demanded much of them, and depended on them to enhance his sense of importance, but there is no evidence that while they were children he exploited their labor to the detriment of their education. They had time to go to school and to roam the countryside. Grant recorded no parental scolding or punishment, and Jesse would seem to have indulged the boy’s disgust with his business and accepted the fact that he “did not like to work,” at least to the extent of allowing him to substitute chores involving draft horses for tasks in the tannery. “When I was seven or eight years of age,” recalled Grant, “I began hauling all the wood used in the house and shops. I could not load it on the wagons, of course, at that time, but I could drive, and the choppers would load, and some one at the house unload.” By the time he was eleven he was plowing, and from then until he left home he did “all the work done with horses.” He also farmed, sawed firewood, and each fall hauled a year’s supply of wood for the house and tanyard “while,” as he pointedly added, “still attending school.”¹⁹

Grant went regularly to schools in Georgetown, which required the payment of tuition. One of the schools was across the street and a bit up the hill; another was a few blocks farther away. In 1836–37 he stayed with relatives in Maysville while attending the Richardson and Rand academy, competently conducted in the prosperous Kentucky river town by two schoolmen—one from New England, the other from Virginia. In 1838–39, he studied in Ripley, Ohio. His was a standard and sturdy education, remarkable neither for deficiencies nor excellence. He was sure-footed in arithmetic, recited, “A noun is the name of a thing…until [he] had come to believe it,” and, generally, mastered a solid curriculum. Not his studies, however, but horses were Ulysses’ greatest interest. Jesse regarded horses as a source of hides for his business; the boy saw them as wonderfully differentiated individuals. He could size up each animal that he encountered: master this one’s truculence and urge that one to a feat of strength in hauling rock. His temperament was perfect for handling horses. There is a family legend that as a very young child he was able to toddle between horses’ legs and flick their tails without making the sharp sounds or moves that caused such a practice to be dangerous for other children. His skill lay in controlling the animals and through ingenious and sensitive guidance getting them to perform varied tasks. Although it is clear that he rode well, there are fewer stories of Ulysses in the saddle for headlong dashes or feats of great endurance. He retained his unromantic understanding of horses throughout his life. He could exercise masterful control over them as he could not over himself or other people.²⁰

One boyhood experience haunted Grant all his life. He referred to it often, usually giving the appearance of laughing it off; but something that must be laughed off repeatedly cannot be dismissed. It is recorded in his Memoirs:

…a Mr. Ralston living within a few miles of the village,…owned a colt which I very much wanted. My father had offered twenty dollars for it, but Ralston wanted twenty-five. I was so anxious to have the colt, that after the owner left, I begged to be allowed to take him at the price demanded. My father yielded, but said twenty dollars was all the horse was worth, and told me to offer that price; if it was not accepted I was to offer twenty-two and a half, and if that would not get him, to give the twenty-five. I at once mounted a horse and went for the colt. When I got to Mr. Ralston’s house, I said to him: “Papa says I may offer you twenty dollars for the colt, but if you won’t take that, I am to offer twenty-two and a half, and if you won’t take that, I am to give you twenty-five.” It would not require a Connecticut man to guess the price finally agreed upon. This story is nearly true. I certainly showed very plainly that I had come for the colt and meant to have him. I could not have been over eight years old at the time. This transaction caused me great heart-burning. The story got out among the boys of the village, and it was a long time before I heard the last of it. Boys enjoy the misery of their companions, at least village boys in that day did, and in later life I have found that all adults are not free from the peculiarity. I kept the horse until he was four years old, when he went blind, and I sold him for twenty dollars. When I went to Maysville to school, in 1836, at the age of fourteen, I recognized my colt as one of the blind horses working on the tread-wheel of the ferry-boat.²¹

In the Memoirs, Grant presented this incident as having provided a lesson well learned in his education as a maturing businessman, but actually it functioned in the opposite way. It reminded him every time he had business to do that he was not good at it, that he was still an embarrassable boy. What was more, he had been humiliated and mocked not for being discovered secretly doing something nasty, but for being innocent and open; in effect, he had been told that grown-up things, business things, were the affairs of men who laughed at boys who were direct about what they wanted. The mockery came not from the horse, but from the boys in town who feigned sophistication, from the owner of the horse, and very probably from his father, who without malice but with great ability to harm, may have laughed at the boy’s ingenuousness. If the story is seen as demonstrating a second point, Ulysses’ love of horses, the blinding of the animal sours the effect. “My colt”—that unspoiled beautiful mount—became a broken animal, and in the terrifyingly cruel end to which the creature had come Grant saw himself. The blinded beast walked nowhere in ceaseless drudgery. Trivial though the story of the purchase of the horse may seem, Grant spent a lifetime not getting over the transaction with Mr. Ralston.

As a boy—indeed, all his life—Grant was restless. He liked to get out and away from home often, and his competence with horses provided the means of doing so. If a Georgetown family had to make a trip, he was frequently hired as the driver. Sometimes by boat, and as often as possible when driving horses, he visited Louisville, Chillicothe, Maysville, and Cincinnati. Once, while taking a neighbor to Flat Rock, Kentucky, Ulysses spotted a fine horse and traded one of his own team for it on the spot, although the young animal had never been harnessed to a team. On the return trip, the new horse behaved until it was frightened by a dog. Ulysses calmed it and they went on, but on the turnpike into Maysville the horse became terrified by the twenty-foot embankment and began shaking uncontrollably. At this point the passenger (not surprisingly) hitched a ride with a freightman, and Ulysses, left alone, quieted the animal by blindfolding it with his bandanna. There was no sentimental wooing of the beautiful horse; instead he overcame his fear, and perhaps his dislike, by subduing the beast. And, in telling this tale of self-reliance, he pointed no moral about business acumen. His act was simply and importantly an assertion of power.²²

These trips put Ulysses Grant in contact with slaves and slavery across the river in Kentucky. Years later his father claimed that he had refused to live in the slave South and had left Maysville, Kentucky, in order to raise his family on free soil, but the only contemporary evidence we have of Jesse’s sympathies with the antislavery cause is the fact that he wrote for the Castigator. The paper was edited by David Ammen, whose son Daniel was Ulysses’ schoolmate and friend. Ammen was a close associate of John Rankin, the staunch abolitionist who from his house in Ripley, high on a bluff overlooking the Ohio River and Kentucky beyond, aided runaway slaves. It was in this house that Harriet Beecher Stowe is said to have heard the story of one woman’s wintertime escape on which she based the episode of Eliza crossing the ice in Uncle Tom’s Cabin. But though this powerful literary image may have originated close by, there is no evidence that the slavery question was a critical one in the Grant household. The fact that Jesse Grant moved to Covington, in slaveholding Kentucky (after Ulysses had left home, to be sure), saps his claim of lifelong fervent avoidance of contamination by the peculiar institution.

Jesse Grant was largely self-taught, and it has been suggested that he was determined to give his eldest son the advantages he had lacked, to enable him to succeed through education. The extent of Ulysses’ schooling, and his matriculation at West Point, tend to confirm this view. Yet Jesse seems not to have had similar aspirations for his other children, preferring that his daughters stay at home and that his other sons go into his business instead of continuing their education. He seems, in fact, to have admired them for so doing more than he admired his army-officer son. Indeed, apparently he despaired of making a tanner of Ulysses, wondered just what to do with him, and saw in the United States Military Academy a prestigious solution. When his overtures to Senator Thomas Morris for Ulysses’ appointment failed, Jesse swallowed his pride and turned for help to his political rival Congressman Thomas Hamer. Perhaps he was less concerned about securing his son’s future than about demonstrating his ability to pull strings in attaining the place. According to Grant, his father arranged the appointment without telling him that he was doing so and, when he did tell him, was not entirely sure the boy would accept it. “He thought I would go,” Grant stated. West Point had a mixed press in Georgetown: Daniel Ammen’s elder brother Jacob taught there; Bartlett Bailey, the richest boy in town, had been dismissed (and had been refused permission to come home by his father as a result). It was this dismissal that gave Ulysses his opportunity. West Point had undoubted charms for Jesse Grant. It was free, and it seemed to provide a secure future for his son. For Ulysses, going to the academy represented less the fulfillment of a career aspiration than a chance to get out of Georgetown: “I had always a great desire to travel.”²³