Ulysses S. Grant

Front matter

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Contents

I. The Man 1

I. EARLY INFLUENCES 3

II. BOYHOOD 9

Introduction

General Grant was born on April 27, 1822, in a humble home on the Ohio River, a few miles below Cincinnati. The approach of his hundredth anniversary makes it appropriate that his countrymen, unswayed by the passions that moved his contemporaries, and with vision undistorted by nearness, shall do homage to the memory of a great soldier who was an honest and courageous President.

There are but a few left who fought under his command, and not many more who played a part in the political drama of which he was the center from the close of the Civil War to the end of his eight years of the Presidency. Those years roughly parallel those through which America is passing now. A great war preceded a period of inflation, industrial depression, and political unrest. Numbers of unemployed men tramped the country and furnished a problem for their time. The demobilization of great and splendid armies was followed by a reaction against military men and methods, and the ascendancy of the profiteer and the politician. As in our day, a great Massachusetts Senator, Chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, made forensic war on a President, and xvi INTRODUCTION

defeated a treaty to which the Executive attached great importance. Men talked of a Federation of the World and of the end of wars, and Grant himself established the principle of arbitration in international disputes, and dreamed of an International Court.

It is fitting that a Massachusetts man should write the Life of Grant, whose political career was tangent on so many sides to those of sons of the Old Bay State, — Boutwell, Butler, the Hoar brothers, Ames, Motley, Henry L. Dawes, Henry Wilson, Richardson, and Sumner, — and the author, Louis A. Coolidge, with a fine sense of relative values, has produced a model biography, compact, concise, and well balanced, complete in its treatment and charming in its style.

A third of the volume tells the story of the military commander from boyhood to West Point and through to Appomattox, painting with fidelity the courage, common sense, tenacity, judgment of men, coolness, and simple loyalty which are attributes of greatness in a soldier. An educated soldier, Grant's elemental view of the military art after his fame had been won was expressed to a young officer thus:

"The art of war is simple enough. Find out where your enemy is. Get at him as soon as you can. Strike at him as hard as you can, and keep moving on."

The brilliant Dana, who was sent West as the eyes

INTRODUCTION xvii

of Stanton, describes him in 1863 as " the most modest, the most disinterested, and the most honest man I ever knew, with a temper that nothing could disturb, and a judgment that was judicial in its comprehensiveness and wisdom. Not a great man, except morally; not an original or brilliant man; but sincere, thoughtful, deep, and gifted with courage that never falters; when the time came to risk all, he went in like a simple-hearted, unaffected, unpretending hero, whom no ill omens could deject, and no triumph unduly exalt."

In our War Department are hung the portraits of our Army commanders — Washington, St. Clair, Mad Anthony Wayne, Wilkinson, Scott, Taylor, Sherman, Sheridan, Grant, and others. Of all since the coming of photography, Grant's is the one face whose calm, confident self-sufficiency does not reveal the strain of being pictured for posterity. He never sought a promotion except through efficiency; he wore no borrowed laurels; he was neither unduly elated in victory nor cast down in adversity.

The span of Grant's Presidency covers one of the most interesting and important eras of our national life. It witnessed the earlier development of the great West, the laying of the great transcontinental lines, the revival of national credit, the reduction of war taxation and the great war debt, and the placing of xviii INTRODUCTION

our currency upon a sound basis. It brought the settlement of the Alabama Claims, the fisheries and boundary disputes, and the Virginius affair, and through the influence of Charles Sumner lost a treaty with Santo Domingo which would have solved questions that are still vexing us. It saw the birth of the Civil Service idea, and witnessed the tragic application of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments to the Black Belt, and the horrors of Reconstruction in the South. It was a period which has been followed too closely by great inventions and great events to have received its due attention from the political students of our time.

When he entered the White House, General Grant found himself confronted with political conditions in the South which might have staggered a statesman of lifelong experience, and for which he was in no way responsible, while domestic questions affecting the nation's financial credit, and foreign problems affecting its standing among the nations of the world pressed for consideration. As his biographer well says:

"In constructive achievements, coming as it did directly after the demoralization of the war and the upset of traditions due to Lincoln's military meas ures in that imperative emergency, Grant's Administration ranks second only to that of Washington, m

INTRODUCTION xix

who had to set the Government in motion under the Constitution. He might safely ' leave comparisons to history.' If we except the baneful Southern problem which was bequeathed to him, and where his fault, if fault there was, lay in the rigid execution of the law, it would be hard to place the finger now on an executive policy approved by him which subsequent experience has condemned."

Of his triumphant journey around the world, the romantic stand of the Old Guard in those hot June days of 1880, and the Old Soldier's race with Death, with Honor for the prize, the story is well told. No patriot can read this volume without pride; no professional soldier, without profit.

J. G. Harbord Major-General, U.S. Army

Deputy Chief of Staff Washington, D.C.

January 3, 1922

ULYSSES S. GRANT CHAPTER I

THE MAN

No man who ever gained enduring fame was more the sport of chance than Grant. No character in historyhas achieved supreme success in war or the supreme reward of politics who owed less to his own ambition or design. A still and simple citizen, accustomed mostly to the ways of unkempt Western towns, ungifted with imagination, indifferent to the general stir of things, and barely equal to the task of furnishing his family such modest comforts as the neighbors had, he was untouched even by evanescent liking for a military life up to the moment when he flashed across the vision of the world — the greatest captain of his time. And when with war in retrospect he would have been content to live in quiet contemplation of his strange career, unskilled in politics, innocent of the arts of government, he was compelled by force of circumstance for eight eventful years to occupy the highest civil place his countrymen could give. He was the child of splendid opportunities which came to him unsought, for which he never seemed to care, and which he met with calm assurance of his own capacity.

He rode upon the turmoil which had tossed him to its top serenely confident in his ability to guide gigantic forces thrust into his hands. He saw his country reunited, well advanced upon a clearly marked and broadening road; then willingly went back to private life, rich only in the opulence of fame, unspoiled, unfretted by regrets, and undisturbed by dreams. When he was made Lieutenant-General and wrote to Sherman, acknowledging that soldier's aid in his advancement, Sherman with equal magnanimity replied : " I believe you are as brave, patriotic, and just as the great prototype Washington, as unselfish, kind-hearted, and honest as a man should be; but the chief characteristic is the simple faith in success you have always manifested which I can liken to nothing else than the faith a Christian has in a Saviour." So he seemed to one who saw him near at hand in war; thus looking back we all can now perceive his childlike trust in time of peace.

That this shy, silent man, after a humdrum life till middle age, should have beheld the span of his remaining years studded with triumphs and with tragedies presents a riddle to the student of his time. His mind was not attuned to notions of retreat, of

EARLY INFLUENCES 3

indirection, or diplomacy. He thought straightforward and was free from artifice — rare qualities which served him well in war and in most great executive emergencies, but were not fitted to the sinuous ways of peace, the strategy of politics, the mysteries of finance, the subtle schemes of courtiers and dishonest satellites; and so it came about that both as President and as private citizen the record of his truly great accomplishments is soiled with pages which we would tear out if we could. Yet we should hate to lose the last heroic chapter, even though its sordid prelude is indispensable to the complete disclosure of unstained nobility of soul.

I. EARLY INFLUENCES

Straggling along the northern bank of the Ohio, a hundred years ago, there was a broken line of settlements which served as landings for the lazy river craft. One of them, twenty-five miles southeast of Cincinnati, perched on a river bend, was called Point Pleasant. Most of its dozen families had drifted in there from the South. A few other settlers were scattered within a radius of twenty miles. Here in a two-room cottage, near the river front, Grant was born on April 27, 1822.

His father was Jesse Root Grant, a recent comer from the northeast corner of the State, who was running a small tannery for another settler. His mother, Hannah Simpson Grant, was the daughter of a thrifty farmer lately arrived in the county from Pennsylvania, a few miles out of Philadelphia. His name was chosen by lot at a family gathering on the Simpson farm six weeks after he was born. It is said a maiden aunt drew from a hat a slip bearing the name "Ulysses," the choice of Grandmother Simpson who had been reading Fenelon's "Telemachus" and liked the character of whom it was written : " His wisdom is, as it were, a seal upon his lips, which is never broken but for an important purpose." "Hiram" was added to please someone else, and he was "Hiram Ulysses" till he went to West Point, when the Congressman who sent him there rechristened him "Ulysses Simpson Grant" through a mistake in making out the papers. That is his name in history. The neighbors called him "Useless" as a boy; his nickname at West Point was "Uncle Sam" or "Sam." His soldiers spoke of him as "Unconditional Surrender."

When Ulysses was a little over a year old, his father, having laid aside eleven hundred dollars, determined to set up in business for himself, and moved to Georgetown in the neighboring county, a backwoods settlement, twenty miles east and ten miles inland from the river. Though smaller even

EARLY INFLUENCES fl

than Point Pleasant, it had advantages from a young tanner's viewpoint: it was a county seat, likely to grow; it was in the midst of an oak forest accessible to bark. Its dozen houses — some of frame, a few of brick — were cheerless, primitive, and crude — a downstairs room in which the family lived and ate, a garret where they slept, a lean-to kitchen in the rear. Jesse Grant built him one of brick, to which he added now and then as family and fortune grew, till it was bigger and somewhat better than the rest, though it would be black-listed by the health authorities in any self-respecting town to-day. Here the boy lived until he went to school.

Life had few comforts and no graces for the Grants. The furniture was rough and scanty, the walls were bare, the reading limited to a few sermons, hymnbooks, and Weems's "Washington," unless they borrowed from the neighbors; the mother did her own housework like the other women in the village, cooking at an open fireplace with pots and crane; the children did the chores. The only thing resembling music was the wail of hymns in the tiny Methodist meeting-house, or the squeak of a fiddle in the primitive tavern where travelers dropped in off and on and the men of the village took their toddy, almost their only indoor sport. Throughout his life Ulysses Grant could never tell one note from another. " Old

Hundred" and the "Fisher's Hornpipe" were all the same to him.

And yet this ragged little place had its distinctions aside from having been the boyhood home of Grant. When the Civil War broke out it had a population of a thousand, largely of Southern tendencies. In some of the churches Grant himself has said that membership depended more upon hostility to the war and liberation of the slaves than upon belief in the authenticity of the Bible. There was no time during the Civil War when the majority would not have voted for Jefferson Davis for President instead of Lincoln, if they had had the chance. "Yet this far-off Western village," he writes, "with a population, including old and young, male and female, of about one thousand, — about enough for the organization of a single regiment, if all had been men capable of bearing arms, ■ — furnished the Union army four general officers and one colonel, West Point graduates, and nine generals and field officers of volunteers."

Jesse Grant stood well, but had his idiosyncrasies and was not over-popular. He was thrifty, industrious, and independent, held emphatic opinions on politics and other questions, not altogether palatable to his neighbors, and was not tactful in the time and manner of expounding them. A Northern radical among Southern sympathizers he did not bother to

EARLY INFLUENCES 7

adjust himself to his surroundings. He was a good debater, according to his son; read every book that he could borrow and remembered everything he read — almost his only education. He was muscular, six feet in height, and morally courageous, but credulous, ingenuous, garrulous, and disputatious. He was a rhymester, and some of his verses printed in the local weekly have been preserved, but he could write and speak tersely and forcefully. The tavern loafers with whom he did not fraternize laughed at his carriage and his gold-bowed spectacles, the first in the settlement, and were amused because of his transparent pride in young Ulysses, whom they called dull because he was not "smart" and "talky" like the other village boys.

Jesse had pride of ancestry and was at pains to trace his family to its New England source. He found that Matthew Grant in 1630 came from England to Dorchester in Massachusetts, and shortly moved to Windsor in Connecticut, where his descendants lived till his own father's day; that his grandfather had a commission in the English army and was killed in the French-and-Indian War. His father, Captain Noah Grant, was at the battle of Bunker Hill and served in the Continental Army through the Revolutionary War; after which he migrated first to Westmoreland County, Pennsylvania, and then to Deerfield, Ohio. Jesse had a half-brother, Peter, who went to Maysville, Kentucky, and grew rich. Noah, who was not forehanded, subsequently went to live with Peter, placing some of his other children in homes near Deerfield. Jesse worked for his "keep" with Judge Tod, the father of Governor Tod, and by a curious chance after learning his trade he worked for the father of John Brown of Ossawatomie, and lived in the house where John Brown himself was also living as a boy. Soon after he set up in business as a tanner chills and fever drove him to Point Pleasant, not far from Maysville, a seeming misfortune which he turned to good account; for with all his oddities he was resourceful in emergencies — a trait which he transmitted to his son.

From his mother Ulysses inherited the gift of reticence and self-restraint. Some said he got his sense from her. He never saw her shed a tear; she seldom laughed; she never tried to guide him save by her own sweet, silent influence. Deeply religious herself, she did not undertake to make him so against his will.

Even in his hour of fame she rarely spoke about her son or talked of his achievements except to say that she was thankful he had done so well. When the boy left home for his first long absence at West Point, she made him ready' and said good-bye without a quiver of the lip. Thenceforth she saw him only at rare

BOYHOOD 9

intervals. When he was President she never came to Washington, which swarmed with less considerate relatives, but stayed at home working as usual about the house. It is written that she prayed for him constantly up to the day she died. " I have no recollection of ever having been punished at home either by scolding or by the rod," writes Grant; he never heard a harsh word from either father or mother, or knew either to do an unjust act; from West Point and from Mexico he wrote them letters full of gossip and affection. He was a natural, human sort of boy.

II. BOYHOOD A knack with horses was Grant's most noticeable boyish asset — a trick of use to him in later years. He had a way of sticking to a job till it was done, though he might have to figure out odd means by which to do it — a trait which stood him in good stead through life. The numerous anecdotes about his boyhood, current after he had won his fame, mostly illustrate one of these qualities, or both. Every one in the village who was at all well off worked with his hands; the better off, the harder. "It was only the very poor," Grant says, "who were exempt." He was a mere child when he began. His father had a farm as well as a tannery, with fifty acres of woods, a mile from the village, and before he was eight years old

Ulysses was hauling all the wood used in the house and the shops. He could not load it on the wagon, or unload it, but he could drive.

At eleven he was strong enough to hold a plough. "From this age till I was seventeen," he says, "I did all the work done with horses, such as breaking up the land, furrowing, ploughing corn and potatoes, bringing in the crops when harvested, hauling all the wood, besides tending two or three horses, a cow or two, and sawing wood for the stoves." For recreation there were fishing and swimming in the summer, — he was an expert swimmer and diver, — skating and sleighing in the winter. Nothing extraordinary about all this. The other boys in the village were fond of hunting. Grant never hunted in his life, or used firearms for amusement. The thought of killing was abhorrent to him. He loved horses — earned money by driving out into the country passengers arriving in Georgetown by stage; at nine had a horse of his own. At ten he used to drive a span of horses alone to Cincinnati, forty miles, and bring home a load of passengers. He could do stunts at riding, could teach horses to pace, could break them to harness. "If I can mount a horse I can ride him," he used to say. He could handle horses easily because he loved them. All his life he kept away from races. He thought them cruel.

BOYHOOD 11

When he was eleven his father, handy at making money in all sorts of ways, took a contract for building the county jail, a job which called for hauling a great many logs; he bought a horse called Dave for Ulysses, and set him to hauling. The woods were two miles from the site of the jail, the logs a foot square and fourteen feet long. Eleven men did the hewing and loaded the logs; the boy drove. One cloudy day the hewers were not in the woods, and Ulysses was left alone, but by his own ingenuity the boy did the job of several strong men. A fallen maple lay slanting with its top caught in another tree. Using this as an inclined plane the boy hitched Dave to the logs, hauled them up on the trunk till they nearly balanced, and then backing the wagon up to it hitched Dave to them again and snaked them forward upon the axles one at a time.

He was the best traveled boy in the village. At Flat Rock, Kentucky, on one of his trips he traded one of his horses for a saddle horse which caught his fancy. Here is his own illuminating story: "I was seventy miles from home with a carriage to take back and Mr. Payne said he did not know that his horse had ever had a collar on. I asked to have him hitched to a farm wagon, and we would soon see whether he would work. It was soon evident that the horse had never worn harness before; but he showed no viciousness and I expressed a confidence that I could manage him. A trade was at once struck, I receiving ten dollars difference." The next day with a Georgetown neighbor whose brother had swapped the horse he started home. The horses were frightened and ran away twice. "The road we were on struck the turnpike within half a mile of the point where the second runaway commenced, and there was an embankment twenty or more feet deep on the opposite side of the pike. I got the horses stopped on the very brink of the precipice. My new horse was terribly frightened and trembled like an aspen; but he was not half so badly frightened as my companion, Mr. Payne, who deserted me after this last experience and took passage on a freight wagon for Maysville. Every time I attempted to start my new horse would commence to kick. I was in quite a dilemma for a time. Once in Maysville, I could borrow a horse from an uncle who lived there; but I was more than a day's travel from that point. Finally I took out my bandanna . . . and with this blindfolded my horse. In this way I reached Maysville safely the next day."

He earned his first money by taking a load of rags to Cincinnati, and selling it for fifteen dollars. He was less than twelve years old and the business venture was his own device. " My best training," he con-

BOYHOOD 13

fided to Thomas Kilby Smith, at Vicksburg, "was before I went to West Point."

There is another story made much of by biographers given to drawing lessons, as showing the boy's guilelessness. It is about a colt which he was sent to buy. His father had offered twenty dollars, but the owner, Ralston, wanted twenty-five. "My father . . . 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 bring 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 to give you twenty -five ! ' It would not take a Connecticut man to guess the price finally agreed upon."

The story got out among the other boys, and it was a long time before he heard the last of it; but Grant was only eight years old. If we must have an incident disclosing Grant's guileless trust in others' honesty, we can find one more pertinent of a later date. There is a letter bearing date of October 24, 1859, when, writing to his younger brother Simpson from St. Louis, he says: —

"I have been postponing writing to you hoping to make a return for your horse — but as yet I have received nothing for him. About two weeks ago a man spoke to me for him and said that he would try him the next day, and if he suited give me $100 for him. I have not seen the man since; but one week ago last Saturday he went to the stable and got the horse, saddle, and bridle, since which I have seen neither man nor horse. From this I presume he must like him. The man I understand lives in Florisant, about twelve miles from the city. . . .

" P.S. The man that has your horse is the owner of a row of six three-story brick houses in this city and the probabilities are that he intends to give me an order on his agent for the money on the first of the month when the rents are paid. At all events, I imagine the horse is perfectly safe."

Chapter II

THE TRAINING OF A SOLDIER I. WEST POINT

Grant's early schooling, the best the village gave, and then two terms in private schools, at Maysville and at Ripley, was limited to the "three R's." He never saw an algebra till after his appointment to West Point, and as he studied no more than he could help, his scholarship left much to be desired. The love of learning which lured him from the tannery was probably as much his father's passion as his own. The knowledge which he found of greatest use in after years he garnered in the University of Common Sense. The ingenuity he showed in solving boyish problems was classified as genius when later put to harder tests.

He says that as a boy he did not like to work, " but I did as much of it while young as grown men can be hired to do in these days and attended school at the same time"; yet, when he was not stirred to swift decision in emergencies, he was of sluggish habit all his days. "As I grow older I become more indolent, my besetting sin through life," he wrote, in 1873, when he was President, to Adam Badeau. But in necessity he was a thunderbolt. This mingling of torpidity and force throws light upon the seeming inconsistencies of his career. Other men with contradictory traits have been conspicuous in history, but the career of none of them exhibits greater contrasts.

Most of the villagers thought him backward when they thought of him at all, but they were rather fond of him in spite of his slow ways. He was pure-minded and clean of speech. He never swore; "a good steady boy with no bad habits"; "awkward and countrified"; "quiet and slow"; "a great hand to ask questions"; "said little himself, but he could answer questions if you gave him time"; "always carried a stick; whittled most of the time, but never made anything"; "stumpy, freckle-faced, big-headed " ; "steadfast, manly"; "quiet gray -blue eyes, strong straight nose, straight brown hair and bulky build"; "not pugnacious"; "a lover of the woods"; "modest, unassuming, determined, self-reliant, decisive." These are some of the phrases those who knew him as a boy have given us. And then this suggestive line from one of them: "A favorite with the smaller boys of the village who had learned to look up to him as a sort of protector."

He loathed the tannery, shrank from the thought of taking up his father's trade, and on a fateful day, when home from Ripley for the holidays, he was condemned to help out in the beam room with its reeking hides, he told his father as he trudged along toward the repulsive task that he would work at it if necessary till he was twenty-one, but not a minute longer — that he had rather be a farmer or a down-the-river trader or get an education. Then Jesse Grant bethought him of West Point.

Five boys had already gone there from the county to get a start in life at government expense. The last of them, his nearest neighbor's son, had just been dropped for failure in examination, but was too proud to come back to the village, so that no one knew of his discomfiture except the Grants. Why not Ulysses for the vacancy? The Congressman, Thomas L. Hamer, belonged in Georgetown, and had once been Jesse's closest friend, but they had quarreled months before and were not then on speaking terms. He was a Democrat and Jesse was a Whig. So Jesse wrote to Thomas Morris, Senator from Ohio, but Morris turned the letter over to the Congressman, who, welcoming the chance to make up with his former friend, agreed to the appointment out of hand. This was the winter of 1838-39. When Jesse read the letter from Morris telling him that his request had been handed on to Hamer, writes Grant in his " Memoirs," "he said to me, 'Ulysses, I believe you are going to receive the appointment.' 'What appointmerit?' I inquired. 'To West Point; I have applied for it.' 'But I won't go,' I said. He said he thought I would, and I thought so too if he did. I really had no objection to going to West Point, except that I had a very exalted idea of the requirements necessary to get through. I did not believe I possessed them and could not bear the idea of failing."