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 history has 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

indirection, or diplomacy. He thought straightfor

ward 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 Fénelon'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 some one 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

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