Ulysses S. Grant (3 page)

Photographs of Jesse and Hannah, however, make it clear that tears were not an option for them, and therefore probably not for any child who wanted their approval, which Ulysses most certainly did. He learned stoicism early, though at a cost.

At school the one subject he seems to have excelled at was arithmetic, but most of his time was not spent in studies but in working on the farm, particularly with the horses, with which he could perform miracles. Though gratifying to Jesse, it was not enough to satisfy him. His firstborn son, he felt strongly, should follow him into his tannery business, learn the trade, and make something of himself.

But if there was one trade Ulysses knew he didn’t want to follow, it was tanning leather. The tannery was next to the house, with its noxious smells of rendered fat and dried blood, and from his room he could hear the lowing of the frightened old cattle that were penned up outside it waiting to be slaughtered, and their screams as they were killed.

Tanning began—it was the most important step—with removing the hide from the animal’s body, scraping all the fat and blood off the inside of it, then turning it over and scraping off the hair. For a young man who couldn’t bear to see animals killed and who from the beginning wouldn’t eat meat unless it was burned beyond recognition, this was not an apprenticeship he could have welcomed. It is
to Jesse’s credit that while Ulysses’ doubts about entering the tannery business may have dismayed him, he knew a lost cause when he saw one. On the grounds that an education might do Ulysses some good—it was that or let him become a farm worker—Jesse took the unusual step of writing to his congressman to propose Ulysses for West Point (without bothering to inform Ulysses). What Hannah thought of it we do not know, though she might have echoed Wellington’s mother, who said of him as a child, when it was decided he should be a soldier, “So my poor Arthur is fit for nothing but food for powder.”

His appointment to West Point was unusual in a good many ways, the most important being that Jesse, in his role as a politically ambitious busybody, had alienated Thomas L. Hamer, the congressman from his district. Hamer was a Democrat, while Jesse Grant was a Whig, and given to intemperate and outspoken political arguments, during the course of which he had said any number of things that offended Hamer when he heard about them. Nevertheless Jesse swallowed his pride and wrote to Hamer; and Hamer, perhaps out of good nature, or more likely because he thought it might shut Jesse up, agreed to give the vacant appointment in his control to young Ulysses Grant.

At this point in Grant’s young life (he was sixteen) his legal name was Hiram Ulysses Grant, but Representative Hamer could not be expected to know that, since everyone always referred to the boy as Ulysses. Hamer knew that Ulysses had a middle name and, taking a wild guess, made the assumption that it was probably Simpson, after Hannah’s family. He wrote to the War Department to inform them that his choice for the vacancy was Ulysses Simpson
Grant. Thus, accidentally, Grant’s name would be recorded by the War Department and at West Point as U. S. Grant.
¹

West Point, when Grant arrived there in May 1839, was not then the vast institution it is now, of course, and indeed the U.S. Army at the time was itself small and inbred. Many in the United States still regarded the whole idea of a professional army, however small (and of West Point itself), with deep suspicion. America was a democracy—the creation of a military elite seemed profoundly undemocratic. Quite apart from that, there was the question of what purpose the army served. The only enemy the United States had fought in the past was Great Britain, but relationships with the former mother country were becoming increasingly cordial, so apart from garrisoning a few forlorn forts against the Indians on the frontier, there was not much for the army to do. What is more, the legend of a “citizen army”—based on the experience of Concord, Lexington, and Bunker Hill—played a large part in the country’s national self-image. Great Britain and the European monarchies might have strutting “regulars” and an aristocratic officer corps, but despite the experience of the Revolutionary War and the War of 1812—both of which had eventually been won by trained regulars, not the militia—the ideal of the Minute Man leaving his farm with his rifle over his shoulder to fight the Redcoats, and voting to select his own officers, was a potent, mythic part of the national consciousness.

The antithesis of this point of view was represented by Gen. Winfield Scott, a hero of the War of 1812, who commanded the army, and was known, though not to his face, as “Old Fuss and Feathers.” General Scott had grown so corpulent that he could no
longer mount a horse, and the magnificence of his uniforms and his plumed hat explains his nickname; but he still commanded great respect, and his authority in military matters was unchallenged. In some ways Scott reminds one of Lord Raglan, in Great Britain, who had been the Duke of Wellington’s devoted military secretary (and who lost an arm at Waterloo), then went on to command the British army. Like Scott, Raglan (after whom the Raglan sleeve is named) was both courageous and resolutely determined to stand in the way of change. It was Raglan’s habit, when any proposal for change in the army was brought up, to say, “Let us consider what the great Duke of Wellington would do,” and then to do nothing. So firmly rooted in the past was Raglan that even when he commanded the British army in the Crimea against Russia, with France as an ally, he was nevertheless in the habit of automatically referring to the enemy as “the French.”

Not even Scott, however, with his ponderous bulk, magnificent uniforms, and overpowering personality, could make the profession of arms respectable or desirable in the United States. At the time, people became soldiers because they had failed at everything else in life. As for West Point, it was virtually the only way to get a college education of sorts at government expense; and for many of those who went there, a vast social step upward.

Grant went there without enthusiasm or argument—no doubt it sounded a better bet than the tannery—and his first act was to accept the change of his name without putting up a fuss about it. It was mildly embarrassing to have his first initials become U.S., but not nearly as bad as having those on his trunk be “H.U.G.” Very shortly he was called “Uncle Sam,” and as a result he soon became
known to most of his fellow cadets as “Sam Grant.” After being taunted as “Useless” in school, this development must have come as a relief.
²

Grant did not do well at West Point—although his interest in mathematics was noted with approval, and not only was his horsemanship much admired, but he set a record height for jumping a horse that had remained unbroken for twenty-five years. His dress, deportment, and appearance were slovenly by West Point standards; he seemed to have no interest in girls or dancing or any form of social life; and his interest in military tactics was negligible. Neither then nor later did he read, study, or even own any of the great books on tactics, which perhaps merely confirms Napoleon’s remark that, “In war, as in prostitution, the amateur is often better than the professional.”

Not surprisingly Grant was put in the “awkward squad,” composed of young men who were no good at drill, and stayed there for an uncommonly long time, a misfit in the eyes of most of his fellow cadets—awkward, lonely, unmilitary in appearance and bearing, and happy only in the riding ring. Although he grew to five feet eight inches, not a bad height for the mid–nineteenth century, he was only five feet two when he arrived at West Point, and must therefore also have seemed more a child than a young man, despite his great strength. Although his classmates included James Longstreet, William Rosecrans, William Hardee, John Pope, Richard Ewell, and Buckner, all of whom went on to become generals on one side or the other in the Civil War, only Buckner seemed to remember him later on (though it did him little good when he sought surrender terms from Grant at Fort Donelson). Longstreet hardly remembered
Grant at all, despite three years together at West Point. He seems to have been about as invisible as a cadet can be. In later life, though he professed a great respect for West Point, he recalled, “The most trying days of my life were those I spent there, and I never recall them with pleasure.”

Even his graduation caused him no pleasure. Given his love of horses, he had hoped for appointment to a cavalry regiment, but since there were no vacancies he was obliged to settle for an infantry regiment instead. His one consolation was that in those days infantry officers usually rode, rather than marching alongside the soldiers and noncommissioned officers, so he would at least have a horse to keep him busy.

I
N
E
NGLAND THERE WAS
a vast social gulf between cavalry and infantry regiments (with the exception of the regiments of the Foot Guards), but that was not the case in the United States. Those cadets who graduated at the top of their class from West Point were appointed to the engineers (like Robert E. Lee) or to the artillery, both branches in which brains were thought to be in demand.

It cannot but have been a disappointment for a shy young second lieutenant who had hoped to serve in the cavalry to arrive at Jefferson Barracks, a few miles outside St. Louis, Missouri, to join the Fourth Infantry in 1843. Having failed to get into the cavalry, Grant had applied to be a teacher of mathematics at West Point, but this too was not to be. He was stuck in the infantry and would have to make the best of it, and make the best of Missouri as well.

Grant was not then nor later in life a man who was fussy about his surroundings, but an army post in those days would have been a lonely place for a youngster, and the endless parades, drills, and fussy inspections of the infantry cannot have done much to cheer him up.
His fellow officers played cards, drank, smoked, and idled the day away, and spent as much time as they could off post in nearby St. Louis, attending dances and trying to meet young women—none of them pursuits of much interest to Grant, who had never learned how to dance. After seven long months the Fourth Infantry was ordered down the Mississippi River to a temporary posting in western Louisiana, on the Texas border—even less promising country, and with even less to do for a second lieutenant who loved horses.

At some point Grant became friendly with a big, bluff, cheerful young officer who had been in his class at West Point, Frederick T. Dent, and on returning to Jefferson Barracks, Dent invited Grant to his home, a farm near St. Louis. The Dents were a large family, on the borderline of being “gentry,” and Southern in their sympathies, their origins, and their traditions. Frederick’s father, “Colonel” Dent, was a slave owner on a small scale, affable and reasonably prosperous, but White Haven, though comfortable enough, was a simple farmhouse—a far cry from the great antebellum mansions of the Deep South—and later attempts by Mrs. Grant to portray the Dents as Southern oligarchs or White Haven as Tara, in the masterful phrase of William S. McFeely in his 1981 biography of Grant, were largely spurious.
¹

The Dents had made their way from Maryland to Missouri via Pittsburgh, and both there and in St. Louis, Colonel Dent had engaged rather languidly in “trade” to make the money to buy the farm, where he spent most of his time reading books and pontificating on politics. Laziness would seem to have been his besetting sin, rather than slave owning.

Mrs. Dent, who had genteel social ambitions and a flair for self-
dramatization worthy of a mother in a Tennessee Williams play, is said to have deeply resented being stuck on a farm outside St. Louis rather than being at the center of that city’s social life, where she felt she belonged. The Dents had six children, four boys and two girls: Ellen, usually called Nellie, and Julia.

Making allowances for the differences between North and South, the Dents were not that much more elevated on the socioeconomic scale than were the Grants in Ohio, though Mrs. Dent was certainly a good deal more talkative and fashion conscious than the reclusive Hannah Grant, and Colonel Dent, though shrewd enough, was the very opposite of the kind of hard-edged, self-made, bustling Yankee businessman that Jesse Grant was. One can easily imagine, however, the effect that the lively Dents must have had on the lonely Ulysses Grant, and how much it must have meant to him to be accepted into the family.

Apparently the first of the Dent sisters that he met was Nellie, but shortly afterward he and Julia met, and there took place what the French call
un coup de foudre
—love at first sight—at least on Julia’s part. They were soon spending many hours riding together—it is unclear whether Julia was an enthusiastic horsewoman or simply guessed it was the best way of engaging Ulysses’ interest—and before long, despite his shyness and awkwardness, they reached an “understanding.” Grant had finally found somebody who brought him out of his lonely and self-imposed isolation, who loved and admired him, and with whom he could talk. As for Julia, she had found her
beau idéal
. Ulysses Grant was good looking, morally serious, and completely, if inarticulately, devoted to her. If ever two people qualified for the term “soul mates” they were Julia and
Ulysses. For the rest of his days his marriage to Julia would be at the center of his life, and he would be, even after his death, the center of hers. Perhaps only the marriage of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert was as close and as satisfying to both partners—certainly the Grants would have one of the great marriages of the nineteenth century.

Of course they had to get there first. Grant had few prospects—a second lieutenant’s pay was exiguous, and in peacetime, promotion was glacially slow—while Julia was, to put it kindly, “plain,” as even her nearest and dearest in the Dent family were obliged to admit. Indeed, “plain” seems like a generous description of Julia Dent. A photograph of her taken as a young woman, at about the time that Grant was courting her (or, to be more accurate, when she was courting him) reveals a lumpy nose, a strong chin, and what appears to be a pronounced squint in one eye, or perhaps, as McFeely suggests, strabismus, a weakening of the eye muscles combined with a squint (some people unkindly described her as wall-eyed), hair pulled back unflatteringly tight, and a compact, dumpy figure. The fashions of the times apparently do nothing to help her, and her expression in the photograph is severe, impatient, and unwelcoming. Although she was to come to think of herself as a Southern belle, a kind of border-state Scarlett O’Hara, Julia was by far the plainest member of the Dent family, and even the colored servants (slaves, of course) seem to have told her so.

Neither the Dents nor the Grants were much pleased by the prospect of this union. Even allowing for Julia’s plainness, her father, Colonel Dent, no doubt hoped for something better for his daughter than a second lieutenant whose father was a moderately
successful leather tanner in Ohio; and as for Jesse Grant, he thought his son was too young to marry—Ulysses was twenty-two and Julia seventeen when they met—and was anything but pleased at the prospect of a daughter-in-law whose parents were slave-owning Southerners. It appears, however, that Grant screwed up his determination, perhaps for the first and most significant time, and his determination was more than matched by Julia’s—throughout their lives, her willpower, ambition, and determination would far exceed his. In any event, their devotion to each other, as in good novels, was so strong and self-evident as to overcome all obstacles and objections.

The British army had a saying that “A lieutenant must not marry, a captain may marry, a major must marry,” a rule that remained true until well into the twentieth century, but in the U.S. Army in the nineteenth century, lieutenants married young, and it was generally considered to be a good thing. Given the godforsaken outposts in which army units were stationed, mostly on the frontier, in the middle of nowhere, a wife and children had a steadying effect on young men who might otherwise have taken to drink, whoring, or gambling to fill up the time. Grant would eventually fall prey to one of these vices himself, but it is worth noting that when he became engaged to Julia he was abstemious, and that later on he usually drank when he was separated from her or, as in Galena, when he was plunged so deep into misery, failure, and debt that not even she could talk him out of it.

But that was in the future. The young people agreed, no doubt reluctantly, to a long engagement (it would last four years), but it must have been clear to everybody that however lengthy the engagement, nothing would change their minds about each other.
There is a wonderful story—told in numerous versions—that when Grant rode out to White Haven from Jefferson Barracks to ask for Julia’s hand, he found a stream in full flood and was unable to ford it. Instead of turning back, however, he plunged in, swam his horse through a raging torrent, and had to borrow dry civilian clothes when he arrived at the Dents’ home. This incident is notable not only because it underlines Grant’s fearless horsemanship and his determination, but also because it is the first known example of a very important peculiarity of his character: Grant had an extreme, almost phobic dislike of turning back and retracing his steps. If he set out for somewhere, he would
get
there somehow, whatever the difficulties that lay in his way. This idiosyncrasy would turn out to be one of the factors that made him a formidable general. Grant would always, always press on—turning back was not an option for him.

The years of their engagement were those of a gathering storm—and here it is necessary to pause briefly and describe the political situation of the United States in the 1840s, as it was to affect Ulysses and Julia. In 1836 Texas, then largely populated by white Americans, had declared its independence of Mexico, and after a short and bloody campaign, seceded from Mexico and became an independent state. The Republic of Texas was soon recognized by the United States but not by Mexico, and American business interests moved quickly to finance the infant republic, while the administration of President Andrew Jackson surreptitiously provided the Texans with arms and volunteers.

Demands for the annexation of Texas as a state increased—the loans made to the republic would be more secure if it became part
of the United States, so Wall Street was in favor of annexation; but, more important, if Texas came into the Union, it would come in as a slave state—or perhaps more than one slave state, for it was so big that there was talk of carving it into as many as four entities. Four states would have added eight proslavery senators to the Southern bloc in the U.S. Senate, giving the South a decisive advantage over the Northern states on the highly charged question of expanding slavery in the West, and securing the survival of the “peculiar institution,” as it was referred to by Southerners.

The skeleton of slavery had been rattling its bones in the closet of American politics ever since the Declaration of Independence—indeed the Declaration itself could never have been signed had not Jefferson found a way of evading the issue—and by the time Ulysses Grant went to West Point it was clear enough that while most people in the North did not condone slavery, they were prepared to live with it, if necessary, provided it was not expanded into the new territories to the West, or farther south.

Southerners saw the matter differently, of course—slavery was legal, however uncomfortable it might make people in Massachusetts or New York, and the South was entitled to expand it into the new territories and farther south into Mexico and the Caribbean if it could. The Missouri Compromise of 1820 had banned slavery from all territory west of the Mississippi River and north of a line drawn westward from the southern border of Missouri, but its constitutionality was under continuous challenge. In any event, the possible annexation of Texas was perceived as a threat by Northerners, and by Southerners as an opportunity to break out of what were increasingly seen as artificial restraints against the spread of slavery.

In the North only a small minority argued for abolition, while in the South an equally small minority advocated the unrestrained growth of a slave empire, but as is so often the case, the extremists on both sides soon began to dominate, then to define the argument. The notion that the Negro might be freed and made the equal of the white man was hardly more popular in the North than in the South, and what was to be done with the slaves in the event that slavery could be ended (if possible by gradual, peaceful means, with the slave owners compensated) remained a vexatious if academic question in American politics. The idea of repatriating the slaves to Africa was eventually responsible for the creation of Liberia, and the somewhat more practical idea of settling the slaves in a state or territory of their own was often discussed, but without much conviction or energy.

The fight over the annexation of Texas brought the slavery issue once again into sharp focus as the great national political divide, to the discomfort of many, but the matter was sealed when the Texans shrewdly set in motion negotiations in London to make the Republic of Texas part of the British Empire. Even staunch nonannexationists were startled and dismayed at the prospect of the British Empire reappearing on North American soil. This threat was one of the many factors that led to proannexationist James K. Polk’s victory in the presidential election of 1844, and to the subsequent annexation of Texas (which succeeded only by the skin of its teeth). Polk and the Southerners—not to speak of the Texans themselves, once they had joined the Union—had a greater ambition, however, which was to seize as much Mexican territory as they could, at least everything north of the Rio Grande. The unsettled dispute over the southern
border of Texas, which had festered from the very beginning of the Texas Republic as a sore point between the Texans and Mexico, seemed tailor-made as a cause for war, if only the Mexicans could be provoked into beginning it. The Mexicans claimed that their border with Texas was on the Nueces River, while the Texans (and now the United States) argued that it was on the Rio Grande—a difference of about 120 miles. It was not much as a cause for war, but it was enough. Polk moved U.S. forces into the disputed region, calculating that their presence there would sooner or later provoke Mexico to fight.

The maneuverings that were to lead to the Mexican War were the background against which Ulysses and Julia’s engagement took place, meaning that during a great part of that time he was absent, as the Fourth Infantry was moved first to Nachitoches for a year, on the western edge of Louisiana, close to Texas, and then, via New Orleans, to Corpus Christi, Texas, a small part of a military show that was intended to overbear the Mexicans, and impress them with the might and the serious intentions of the United States. Grant was an unenthusiastic bit player in this drama—he was no friend to slavery, he disliked the idea of using the army to provoke the Mexicans into a war they would lose, and he had no great desire to fight Mexicans or anybody else. On top of which duty kept him separated from Julia, and from pressing Colonel Dent to agree to an earlier marriage.