The boys' life of Ulysses S. Grant

Preface

This little book is based upon the " Personal Memoirs of U. S. Grant." For facts concerning the latter years of his life I have relied chiefly upon "Grant, His Life and Character," by Hamlin Garland, to whom I make my grateful acknowledgments. Other works freely used and consulted are the biographies by Coppee, A. D. Richardson, Chas. A. Dana, Wm. Conant Church, Walter Allen, and Owen Wister, Adam Badeau's "Grant in Peace," Horace Porter's "Campaigning with Grant," John Fiske's " Mississippi Valley in the Civil War," Henry Adam's "Historical Essays," "Abraham Lincoln: A History," by John G. Nicolay and John Hay, Vol. VII of the "Cambridge Modern History," Sherman's "Memoirs," John Russell Young's "Around the World with Grant," the "Congressional Globe," and various tables of official statistics.

But in a volume of this size the question is never so much what can be put in as what cannot vi PREFACE

be left out. The aim in this case has been to choose the incidents that would appeal particularly to the readers for which it is designed, and which, taken together, would not present a distorted picture of the great General.

Contents

CHAPTER PACE

I Just a Boy 3

II Uncle Sam's Scholar 2^

II UNCT^E SAM's scholar

THE one cloud that darkened his horizon as lie i^rew older was the dread that before long he would be re(juired to take his place in the tannery. He hated the place from the bottom of his heart. Already he had to grind oak bark to be used in turning the skins into leather. That was bad enough, wearisome for the muscles and tiresome for the mind, for the hopper-like mill stood under a shed where nothing was to be seen except the poor horse walking dismally round and round. Whenever he could do so he hired some other boy to grind for him, and escaped to the more congenial task of hauling the bark from the forest; but even the mill was Paradise compared with the beam-room where the fresh new skins were stretched and scraped — a place of nauseating odors and reeking hides, that made him sick, body and soul.

His father said nothing. Perhaps he did not notice how the boy manoeuvered to keep away from the evil-smelling place. Then came the respite of the winter in Maysville at school. Finally, when he was sixteen, the blow fell. His father was short of help, and Ulysses was called to the beam-room. He responded at once, but reluctantly enough. As they walked together toward the tannery he told his father that he would never follow that trade. He would work at it until he was twenty-one, but never a day after he became his own master. The lad might have saved himself those years of needless dread. Jesse Grant was reasonable, even lenient where his eldest son was concerned. Probably he had not known until that moment how heartily the silent, obedient boy disliked the tannery. He answered kindly that he did not wish him to work at any trade that he had no intention of following, and asked what he would like to do.

To this Ulysses had no ready answer. He would be a farmer, he said, or a down-river trader, or "get an education" — this latter somewhat vague proposal being thrown in very likely to appease his father, whose respect for learningwas one of his strongest traits. "Getting an education" seemed to the boy, modestly distrustful of his own abilities, a very unattainable thing, but it was the only part of his proposal that appealed to the older man. Beins: a farmer was all very well, but the land that Jesse Grant had cultivated in past years was now rented to some one else. A down-river trader he certainly did not want his son to be. An education was really the goal of his ambition for the boy, who had heretofore shown little interest in acquiring it. If he was waking up to a desire for it, something must be done. Times were hard enough, and an education was an expensive luxury. The father thought longingly of West Point. Four boys had gone to the Military Academy from Georgetown, and had done well. He asked Ulysses how he would like that, and Ulysses, thinking it a glittering daydream, and secure in the knowledge that there was no vacancy in that district, answered promptly, "First-rate."

Nothing more was said. That autumn Ulysses went to Ripley, Ohio, for another session with the well-remembered arithmetic, and spiritless repetition of "A noun is the name of a thing." The mind of Jesse Grant meanwhile ran on West Point. Bartlett Bailey, the boy neighbor who had the appointment, had failed once, and left the Academy to be tutored in a private school. Then he was reappointed, but before the next examination was dismissed. His father, disappointed and unforgiving, forbade him to return home. Nobody in town knew of the little domestic tragedy

— only the boy's mother had come to Mrs. Grant for sympathy in her son's disgrace and his father's hard-heartedness.

Here was an opportunity ready-made to Jesse's hand, but pride stepped in. The congressman who had the power of appointing young Bailey's successor was Thomas L. Hamer, an old friend with whom Jesse Grant had quarreled. Both regretted the misunderstanding, but neither would take the first step toward reconciliation. Even with his son's welfare at heart Jesse Grant could not make up his mind to write to him. Instead, he applied to the War Department through one of Ohio's senators. The Department answered that Mr. Hamer's consent would be necessary, whereupon Jesse pocketed his pride and sent the congressman a polite note. Mr. Flamer, glad of an opportunity to end the quarrel, made the appointment. Thus the very beginning of Ulysses' military career was to bring about peace.

The boy most interested of course knew nothing about all this. While he was at home for the Christmas holidays his father received a letter. After reading it he turned to his son.

"Ulysses, I believe you are going to receive the appointment !"

"What appointment?"

"To West Point. I have applied for it."

The world whirled about him. Me thought of all one had to know to enter the Military Academy; of the very little he had learned; of the ignominy of failure; of the jeers of his comradevS if he should be rejected ; of the embarrassment of meeting Bartlett Bailey if he passed.

"But," he stammered, "I won't go."

'T think vou will!" his father answered; and Ulysses, noting his determined expression and firmly set jaw, hurriedly concluded, if that were the case, that he thought so too.

Then followed months of preparation— a season of inward shrinking and keen anticipation. He wanted, yet he did not want, to go. The neighbors openly scofTed at the appointment. "Why could n't they appoint a boy who would be a credit to the district?" they asked.

In truth. Grant was the most unmartial of boys. He cared little for guns, hated to see things killed, was slow of speech, sluggish of movement, unambitious in his studies. He could wTcstle fairly well— when he had to— and he sometimes fished; but these did not seem sufficient qualifications. Even the military exploits of his grandfather Noah, and the two family heroes of the French and Indian War failed to rouse his enthusiasm. It seemed a pity to waste a West Point education on him.

But he did want to see the world. West Point was very far away. A journey thither would give him a chance to see the two largest cities of the United States, Philadelphia and New York. When he thought of what lay beyond them, he hoped that kindly Fate would arrange a steamboat collision, or a railroad accident, or some other honorable means of delaying the ordeal.

Finally the day of departure came. There was no undue emotion in the family leave-taking. Hannah Grant bade him good-by in her usual self-repressed manner, and the others were equally composed. When Mrs. Bailey came running out of her house with a kiss and a tearful God-speed, he looked at her in wonder. 'Why," he said, "you must be sorry I am going! My mother did not cry."

He took passage on a steamer at Ripley for Pittsburg, about the middle of May, 1839. Western boats in those days did not make schedule time, but obligingly stopped as often and long for freight and passengers as occasion required. This time there were no delays, and he made a quick trip of three days. From Pittsburg he went by canal to Harrisburg— partly because the canal-boat was slower than the stage, and partly because it would afford a better view of the scenery.

From Harrisburg to IMiiladcIphia he had his first thrilhng experience of a railroad, which flew along at the astonishing rate of twelve or fifteen miles an hour, and seemed to fairly annihilate space. He stayed in Philadelphia five days, wandering about in his countrified ill-fitting clothes, seeing the sights; and was reprimanded, when his parents heard of it, for unseemly idling. His stay in New York was shorter, but he got a good idea of the city; and Fate not having arranged a convenient accident, he reported to the authorities at West Point on the 30th or 31st of May. Two weeks later, to his great surprise, he passed the simple preliminary examination in reading, writing, spelling, and arithmetic, and was enrolled as a cadet. He wTote his name in the Adjutant's book "Ulysses Hiram Grant," having made up his mind before leaving home that his initials, written the other way, H. U. G., would subject him to teasing and ridicule from his fellow-students. Congressman Hamcr, in asking for his appointment, had, however, given it as Ulysses S. Grant, •knowing his mother's maiden name to be Simpson, and evidently confusing the names of two of her sons. Ulysses asked to have the mistake corrected, but in vain. It stood Ulysses S. in the record, and of course the record was right. The fact that a boy might be, expected to know his own name had no weight, over against official red tape. As U. S. Grant it was posted with the names of other new-comers, and U. S. Grant it remained to the end of his Hfe. A group of first-class men, reading the list, began amusing themselves with the initials. "U. S.," they read,— "United States Grant — Uncle Sam Grant — Sam Grant"; and Sam Grant he was at the Academy from that hour.

He was at that time a short, unimpressive youth, less than five feet two inches tall. The required height for entering the army is five feet. It is a little startling to reflect that the difference of an inch and a fraction in this boy's height might have changed the whole history of .the United States.

Shy and silent, new to all the thousand and one customs and traditions of the famous war college, he was given the Book of Regulations and sent to report to the cadet officers. Being a "plebe" — that lowest of created animals in the eyes of upper classmen— he became at once a fair target for all the jibes and practical jokes and petty torments that lively boys, under military rule or out of it, contrive to inflict upon their fellows.

After his first ordeal with the cadet corporals he was given his meager outfit — two blankets, a pillow, a chair, a water-pail, a broom, washbowl.

looking-glass, candlestick, and cocoannt (li|)per — and made to carry them amid the jeers of all the cadets he met, past the officers' qnarters to a dismal room on the npper lloor of the old North Barracks, a hnilding long since destroyed, where his fntnre room-mates gave him fnrllicr nngentle instrnction in what to do with them.

Thns he hcgan his four years' course, a course which seemed to embrace a little of everything from scrubbing floors to differential calculus, and which he was expected to master, so far as he could judge from that first day's experience, with the aid of sarcasm and ridicule administered bv his fellow-students.

The lawful discipline and restraints of the place were quite enough to bewilder a boy fresh from the care-free, go-as-you-please control of Jesse Grant. At home, if he got a substitute to do one piece of work, he was quite at liberty to take up another. Here all was military obedience and precision. There were regulations for walking, for standing, for talking; hours for this and ''calls" for that; drums to beat him to dinner, to drill, and to bed. No hour was free from some strange and unaccustomed duty. Even his uniform, tight to bursting, seemed made with a special view to keeping his body as uncomfortable as his mind ; and any failure to live up to these many and unfamiliar requirements was visited with plenteous demerit marks, and the haunting specter of final disgrace. Added to all these legitimate tortures, were the abuse and sly deviltry that went on behind the backs of the authorities. Grant got his share, though not as much as some of his comrades. The quiet reticence that hid his true feelings made it poor sport to tease him. He was small, too. It was not much fun to torment a fellow scarcely tall enough to be admitted to the Academy — and even then there was something in his clear, gray-blue eye that commanded respect. Of course he was homesick. "A military life had no charms for me," he wrote long afterward. *T had not the faintest idea of staying in the Army, even if I should be graduated, which I did not expect." But he put the best face upon it. He was there; he meant to stay and graduate if he could; and already the beauty of West Point was exercising its charm. He wrote a long letter to his cousin describing the Academy and his life. "I do love the place," he said. "It seems as though I could live here forever if my friends would only come too." The historic memories of the spot appealed to him, coming from a country too new to be burdened with tradition ; and the procession of great men that came and went — the President of the United States, generals, cabinet ministers,

UT.VSSES S. GRANT 33

and famous writers— filled his imagination with lively pictures of the outside world.

The West Point year is divided into two parts. From June until late August the cadets camp in tents, living according to all the regulations of an army in the field, their time being entirely given up to drills, guard duty, pyrotechny, and engineering. From September to June they live in barracks, studying, fencing, riding in the drill-hall, and being drilled as infantry on fine afternoons. The period of encampment began almost as soon as Grant entered the Academy. He found it very irksome. When the 28th of August came, the date for breaking up camp and going into barracks, he felt as though he had been at West Point for years, and that to stay until graduation would be to remain through all eternity.

The life in barracks he liked better— or pretended to. He wrote to his cousin: "I slept for two months upon one single pair of blankets. Now this sounds romantic, and you may think it very easy, but I tell you what, Coz, it is tremendous hard. . . . Glad I am these things are over." Then passing on to the present he described the new routine. "We are now in our quarters. I have a splendid bed (mattress), and get along very well. Our pay is nominally about $28 a month, but we never see one cent of it. H we wish anything from a shoestring to a coat we must go to the Commandant of the Post and get an order for it, or we cannot have it. We have tremendous long and hard lessons to get, both in French and algebra. I study hard, and hope to get along so as to pass the examination in January. This examination is a hard one, they say, but I am not frightened yet. If I am successful here you will not see me for two long years." "On the whole I like the place very much — so much that I would not go away on any account. . . . There is much to dislike, but more to like. . . . If I were to come home now with my uniform on, the way you would laugh at my appearance would be curious. My pants set 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 pi-siol. My coat must always be buttoned up tight to the chin. It is made of sheep's gray cloth, all covered with big round buttons. It makes one look very singular." The long postscript of this lively boyish letter was devoted to the Academy's system of "black marks," not in a spirit of complaint, but as interesting and rather incomprehensible news. "They give a man one of these 'black marks' for almost nothing, and if he gets 200 a year they dismiss him. To show how easy one can get y-lj^

ULVSSKS S. r.RAXT 37

these, a man by the name of Grant, of this State, got eight of these 'marks' for not going to church. He was also put under arrest so he cannot leave his room perhaps for a month; all this for not going to church. We are not only obliged to go to church, but must march there by companies. This is not Republican. . . . Contrary to the expectation of you and the rest of my Bethel friends I have not been the least homesick. I would not go home on any account."

Brave talk. Yet when a bill was introduced in Congress the following winter to abolish West Point, he read the debate with lively interest, hoping it would pass. A year later, though the days still dragged, he would have been sorry to have it succeed.

Time certainly did not hang heavy for lack of employment. The course of study embraced topographical drawing, landscape and figure drawing ; higher mathematics ; surveying and calculus ; French; algebra; military and civil engineering; pyrotechny; artillery practice; c-avalry and infantry drill ; electricity ; magnetism ; optics ; astronomy; chemistry; trigonometry; mineralogy; rhetoric; moral philosophy; Kent's Commentaries ; and dancing.

He showed little enthusiasm about anything. Mathematics were easy for him, so he passed the

January examination with credit; but he rarely read over a lesson the second time, and in French, the only other study at that time in the first year's course, his standing was lamentably low. "In fact, if the class had been turned the other end foremost, I should have been near head," he said in his Memoirs, when writing about his scholarship. "I never succeeded in getting squarely at either end of my class in any one study during the four years. I came near it in French, artillery, infantry and cavalry tactics, and conduct."

There is a fine library at the Academy, from which the cadets are allowed to get books to read in their quarters. He made liberal use of this for a private course in English fiction, not down in the regulations, reading all of Bulwer's novels then published, Cooper, Marryat, Scott, Washington Irving, and many others. Yet he kept a respectable if not brilliant place in his class, and on June 30, 1843, graduated twenty-first in a class of thirty-nine. "He always showed himself a clear thinker and a steady worker," says Professor Mahan, his teacher in engineering. "He belonged to the class of compactly strong men who went at their task at once and kept at it imtil they had finished ; never being seen, like the slacktwisted class, yawning, lolling on their elbows over their work, and looking as if just ready to sink down from mental inanity."

He was also a singularly clean-lipped boy. Profanity affected him like the beam-room of his father's tannery — as a nauseating thing to be kept away from. He tried to learn to smoke, but failed, and we know he did not drink, for he and some of his classmates entered into a compact to abstain from liquor for a year, in order to strengthen the resolution of one of their mates who seemed in danger of falling into bad habits.

At the end of the first two years the class received the customary furlough— the one holiday in the four years' course, and he went home for a vacation which lasted from the end of June to the 28th of August. "This," he tells us, "I enjoyed beyond any other period of my life." Yet there was no display of emotion at his home-coming. His family had seen him go away without a tear; they welcomed him back without demonstration. A fine new horse which had never been under harness was waiting for him in the stable, however, and it can be imagined with what furtive pride the self-repressed mother noted every detail of change and improvement. As for the more talkative father, he probably had as much to say to the neighbors about "my Ulysses" as when he bored them with tales of his infant cleverness.

"Those ten weeks," the Memoirs assure us, "were shorter than one week at West Point."

Then he and all his classmates were back again at the Academy, an increased number of demerit marks during the first month of the new term showing how hard it was for them to settle do-wn into their drudgery of drill and study. The last two years passed more rapidly than the first two, but they seemed five times as long as years in Ohio. Little happened to break their monotony. He served for a time as sergeant in one of the four companies into which the cadets are divided for military exercises, but in his senior year dropped back again to the rank of private.

'T remember him," says one of his classmates, "as a plain, common-sense, straightforward youth; quiet, calm, thoughtful, and unaggressive; shunning notoriety; quite contented while others were grumbling; taking to his military duties in a very business-like manner; not a prominent man in the corps, but respected by all, and very popular with his friends. His sobriquet of 'Uncle Sam' was given to him there, where every good fellow has a nickname, from these very qualities ; indeed he was a very uncle-like sort of a youth. He was then and always an excellent horseman, and his picture rises before me as I write, in the old torn coat, obsolescent leather gig-top, loose riding pantaloons with spurs liiickled over them, going with his clanking saber to the (h^ill-liall."

He was at his l)est in ihe saddle. The one real record that he made for liimself at the Academy, the one time that he excelled all his fellows, was at the final mounted exercises of his graduating class, when, riding a famous horse named York, he was called upon to clear the leaping-bar that the gruff old riding-master had placed higher than a man's head. He dashed out from his place in the ranks, a smooth-faced, slender young fellow on a powerful chestnut-sorrel, and galloped down the opposite side of the hall; turned and came directly at the bar, the great horse increasing his pace as he neared it, and then, as if he and his rider were one, rising and clearing it with a magnificent bound. The leap is still recorded at the Academy as "Grant's upon York," where it has never been surpassed.

It was natural that upon his graduation he should want to enter the cavalry, but the United States Army w^as very small at that time, numbering barely 7500 men, and there was only one regiment of horse, or "dragoons" as they were called. That already had its full complement of officers. The Fourth Infantry being his second choice he was assigned to that as brevet second lieutenant.

He still had no love for the Army. Only one moment of enthusiasm for the service had come to him in the four years. That was during his first encampment, when General Scott came to review the cadets, and loomed upon the little plebe in all the glory of his imposing person and military splendor. The lad, gazing upon him, thought he had never seen such a magnificent man, and with sudden prevision of what lay before him, saw himself—not so big or so gorgeous, of course— but occupying the same exalted station. He breathed no syllable of this sudden ambition, for fear of ridicule, and the vision passed. His modest hope at the time of his graduation was to be detailed in the course of a year or two as Assistant Professor of Mathematics at the Academy, and after a term of service there to secure a permanent position in some college.

Meantime all the members of the graduating class had leave of absence until the end of September. He went back to Ohio, where another new saddle-horse awaited him ; but he could not enjoy this vacation as he had the former one. For the last six months at West Point he had been afflicted with a desperate cough, and he was very much run down, weighing only as much as he had at the time of entering the Academy, though he had grown six inches during the four years. There was a tendency to consumption in tlic family; two of Jesse Grant's children died of it, and the silent mother watched and said nothing", hut was troubled about the health of her soldier son.

He, however, was far from thinking of his latter end. He had ne\cr been a dandy. Most of his demerits at the Academy had been for lack of promptness, or for little negligences in dress ; but now he developed a quite normal interest in his new uniform, which had to be ordered and sent to him after he learned that he had been assigned to the infantry and not to the dragoons. He longed to get it on, and see how it looked — more especially to let others see how he looked in it. It came at last, and he rode forth in it to Cincinnati, feeling that he brightened the sunshine by his presence, and that he must be making as great an impression on the populace as General Scott had madeuponhim. But while theuniform was still very new two things happened which gave him a distaste for military splendor that lasted the rest of his life. In Cincinnati a ragged,- dirty little streeturchin, taking in with a quick glance his complaisant satisfaction, turned and called after him with wicked glee, ''Soldier, will you work? No siree. I 'd sell my shirt first !" The crestfallen brevet second lieutenant wheeled his horse and started for home. Opposite his father's house stood a tavern where cheer was dispensed for man and beast. The stableman was a dissipated old wag, who also discovered the young soldier's secret. Grant found him parading the street in solemn travesty of his own military walk, barefoot, clad in a pair of sky-blue nankeen pantaloons, just the color of his new uniform trousers, with a strip of white cotton cloth sewed down the outside seams to imitate the stripes. A group of neighbors was watching him, convulsed with merriment, but Grant, crimson with mortification, could see no humor in the proceeding.

Ill

Ills L'.ArXISM OF FIRE

LATE in September, 1843, Grant joined his / regiment, the Fourth Infantry, at Jefferson Barracks, near St. Louis. His duties were Hght, though drill and roll-call came with j)rovoking frequency. Having brought with him his saddle-horse — the one on which he first aired his new uniform — he made many excursions in the neighborhood during his hours of leisure, and rode often "out on the Gravois Road" to White Haven, the family home of his classmate at the Academy, Frederick T. Dent. Colonel Dent, the master of White Haven, was an imposing, hot-tempered old gentleman, who lixcd in a comfortable farmhouse surrounded by his slaves and his children, cjuite the ideal of a southern planter. He paid scant attention to his son's friend, but Mrs. Dent gave him a motherly welcome; and even after Fred went to join his regiment, the house full of young people continued to be the goal of many of his rides. The eldest daughter of the Dents, Julia, a girl of seventeen, he had not yet seen, for she was spending the winter with friends in St. Louis. After her return White Haven became doubly attractive. Indeed, so many of his rides ended there, despite the old planter's frowning indifference — for Colonel Dent saw no merit in a youngster whose salary was $779 a year, whose prospects were only slow promotion in the Army, and who was saddled with a troublesome cough — that the young lady had to bear much teasing about her "little lieutenant with the big epaulets." As for the little lieutenant himself, he did not realize what was happening to him. He probably thought in all seriousness that his mind was full of mathematics and history. According to the plan made before leaving West Point, he had asked to be detailed as Assistant Professor of Mathematics at the Academy, and felt that his chances were good to receive the appointment. Accordingly he laid out for himself a line of study, reviewing his West Point mathematics, reading history, and indulging for relaxation in an occasional novel. If that and his military duties were not enough to fully occupy his mind, there was the all-absorbing political question, the annexation of Texas, which was being discussed wherever discussion was possible, from the halls of Congress to the remotest cross-roads settlement.