Crucible of Command

by William C. Davis

  There were things to experience beyond the confines of the school. Most exciting of all was October 16, 1824, and the visit of the Marquis de Lafayette, Revolutionary War hero and compatriot of Lee’s father. Lafayette stopped in Alexandria to be greeted that afternoon with a gala, including a parade marked by the young Lee’s first public appearance, representing his late father and family as one of several parade marshals.70 More thrilling still, later that day the marquis called at the Oronoco Street home to visit the family of his old revolutionary compatriot.71 There in the parlor Lee came face to face with someone who knew and admired his father from the heroic days before disgrace. At a dinner for Lafayette that evening, attended by Secretary of State John Quincy Adams, George Washington Parke Custis, and Brigadier General Alexander Macomb, the guests drank toasts to Lafayette, Washington, Patrick Henry, George Mason, Jefferson, and other great Virginians, but none to Light Horse Harry Lee.72

  The aged hero’s visit likely stirred something in Lee. Since boyhood he nurtured an ambition to be a soldier above all else.73 His brother Smith was on his way to a solid naval career that should protect him from want. Robert had seen classmate William Maynadier secure an appointment to the United States Military Academy at West Point two years before, with the prospect of a free education. Perhaps he could do likewise. The Lees still had the right blood and political connections. Even his older half-brother Henry, so mired in financial and sexual scandal that he was dubbed “Black Horse Harry,” maintained strong ties with the hero of the last war Senator Andrew Jackson of Tennessee, and Secretary of War John C. Calhoun, who held the power of appointment.

  Only his mother dissented. She could have afforded to send him to college, for all her concern over her finances. In her frail condition, she did not want the son she so depended on to leave her. As for Robert, even if warned that army life might be very different from the rapid promotion and lively times his father experienced, it did not matter. Knowing that he was likely to be saddled with responsibility for his mother and sisters indefinitely, the loneliness of distant assignments did not daunt him. Besides, the Academy was what he really wanted, and no compromise because of money. “I thought & intended always to be one & alone in the World,” he recalled a few years later.74 A uniform would get him away from Alexandria and into a world of men.

  He needed a quick decision, however, for if Secretary Calhoun could not give him the appointment, he had to find another career soon. Armed with endorsements from Leary, Fitzhugh, and others, Lee called on Calhoun in February 1824 in company with Custis’s influential sister Nellie Lewis. The South Carolinian told the young man, as he did all applicants, to write him a letter stating his age and what he had studied to date. Lee left the meeting sensing that he needed to enlist prominent supporters. He and Mrs. Lewis called on Jackson, to whom Lee’s name would not be unfamiliar.75 Aunt Mary Fitzhugh could also have lent some aid, as she enjoyed high esteem among many in Washington’s elite, including General Winfield Scott.76 Two congressmen wrote letters of endorsement, and one circulated his letter to the whole Virginia delegation for signature. Lee’s older brother Carter assured Calhoun that his brother’s intellect “seems to be a good one,” and, in what may have been an allusion to half-brother Henry Lee’s peccadilloes, morally “irreproachable.” “Black Horse Harry” wrote his own letter, based on the nation’s debt to their illustrious father. Finally Jackson offered the trump card when, as the leading candidate for the presidency that fall, he sent an endorsement.77

  On February 28 Lee himself wrote what he could expect to be one of the most important letters of his life. No wonder he misspelled a word, gave his birthday as January 29 instead of the nineteenth, and said he “completed” his eighteenth year that January when he meant to say “commenced.” He gave a full listing of his studies, citing Leary’s lukewarm endorsement, which he enclosed.78 He need not have been nervous. On March 11 Calhoun gave him the appointment, but because the Academy’s roster of cadets was full for the coming fall, Lee had to wait until July 1825. Calhoun let Jackson give the good news to Lee himself, and the young man immediately accepted.79

  So Robert Lee would go to the Military Academy, but not for another sixteen months. He and his family agreed that an additional course of study would better prepare him, so first he spent time that fall with recent Yale graduate James Watson Robbins, who nurtured, if he did not awaken, in Lee a lifelong appreciation of flora, and may have taken Lee out gathering specimens in the Fauquier countryside that fall.80 Meanwhile, Benjamin Hallowell and a partner announced their intent to open a boarding school in Alexandria to teach spelling, reading, writing, grammar, and geography, as well as arithmetic and several branches of math and their application to principles of natural science and chemistry. Of special interest was the announcement that they would admit a few pupils who lived in town as day students at greatly reduced rates.81

  Better yet, Hallowell located in the house next door to the Lees.82 Late in November his Alexandria Boarding School was ready to admit scholars.83 A trickle of students commenced in January 1825 with Cassius Lee. Then in February Robert E. Lee paid $10 as a day student to spend the spring term studying mathematics.84 In the ensuing months he found much to engage his interest and imagination.85 Best of all was Hallowell himself. He was young, just past twenty-five, intellectually scrappy, but blessed with a keen mind and a passion for teaching.86 He viewed English grammar as more than rules and emphasized what he called “the philosophy of our language.” As a teacher he preferred books that exercised a pupil’s judgment, not just his memory.87 Hallowell also advocated opinions that mixed well with those of many of the Lees. The boys with whom Lee played and studied came from slave-owning families uncomfortable with slavery. In time they all espoused voluntary emancipation.88

  As a Quaker, Hallowell condemned slavery as a curse to both races, and soon founded the Benevolent Society of Alexandria for “ameliorating and improving the condition of the People of Color.” He was no abolitionist. Hallowell did not question the legality of slavery, but he did advocate ending it by gradual voluntary manumission, followed by colonization of the freed slaves back to Africa. Yet he also believed that blacks could not just be freed, for they were not the mental or moral equals of whites. They had to be taught how to think and act in their own best interests before they could be repatriated. Yet slavery must be ended, for he foresaw that it threatened “to sap the foundation of our free institutions” and would “involve us, or our posterity, in overwhelming calamity.”89

  He was a kindly professor, quaint with his Quaker “thee’s” and “thou’s,” and formed a bond with Robert, who years later sometimes banteringly included those “thy’s” and “thee’s” in his own letters.90 Hallowell saw how when the other boys left for a midday meal, Lee went home and made Ann Lee comfortable in her carriage against the cold, and took her for daily drives, bending every effort to keep her amused and entertained, while reversing their roles by giving her parental advice on staying cheerful despite her discomfort. When winter breezes gave her shivers, he made ersatz curtains for the coach’s windows by cutting them from a newspaper with a large jackknife, much to her amusement.91 In return she did what she could for him, even sending him to dancing lessons with his Lee cousins. She knew it would be a relief to him to get away even briefly, and he found it a respite from the pressures of home and school, where he found most classmates—“Hallowells boys” he called them—rather dull.92

  But Hallowell was hardly dull. His tutelage inspired good performance from Lee. When Hallowell demanded rote memorization, Lee delivered as expected. Not surprisingly, his conduct and adherence to the school’s rules were exemplary. If Hallowell noticed one thing in particular, it was that when Lee worked problems or drew diagrams on his slate, he did it with a finish and neatness suggesting it might be headed for the engraver rather than erasure. Even when demonstrating complex diagrams of analytical geometry, he drew every one with that same precision.93 Lee worked unstintingly, br
ought discipline and pride to his work, and Hallowell himself declared that he held the young man “in great favor” on a basis of “warm personal friendship.”94 Lee never forgot the teacher. Years later he still appreciated Hallowell’s instruction.95

  When that term concluded, Lee had precious little time before he was to leave for New York. This departure marked an end to boyhood. He had never traveled farther from home than summer trips to Fauquier County or Stratford. Now he was to go more than 250 miles to New York City and then steam up the Hudson to West Point. It was an adventure unlike any he had known before. If he succeeded, he would leave the Academy as a man with an education and a budding career. If his father and brother stained the Lee name, he might have an opportunity to cleanse it. He would not have been a normal young man if he did not feel excitement and anticipation, however torn he was at leaving his mother to be cared for by others. For Ann Lee it was to be no happy parting. “How can I live without Robert?” she complained. “He is both son and daughter to me.”96

  Whatever Lee chose to remember of his childhood, he said little of it in later years. There is no question that he understood duty. Of discipline and perseverance, as well as intellect, he had surely given good evidence thus far. Thanks to his mother he knew self-control and diligence, financial rectitude, and even the value of punctuality.97

  Even if he did not win awards, still he won the good will and lifelong friendship of Leary and Hallowell. Testimony to his amiability suggests that a pleasing personality was formed, and his ability to make his mother laugh herself out of her black moods indicates an able sense of humor. Yet more shadows remain. Where did he believe he fit into the universe? Did he espouse the laissez-faire god of his father, or his mother’s more active Almighty, or neither? Did men control men’s affairs, or were events immutably ordained by God? How would he choose his friends and judge other men in that world beyond Alexandria? Would he love and marry? How steady was his moral compass? Were his ethics developing in ways that his father would approve? Did he have ingenuity? Was he cautious or brave? How would he make decisions? Could he be bold?

  A host of shadows, and more questions than answers, but as Lee stepped out of the anonymity of childhood, more light gradually began slipping through. Soon the shadows would begin to shrink.

  When Hannah Grant gave birth to her first son in a small cabin in the village of Point Pleasant, Ohio, on April 27, 1822, destiny promised nothing more for the boy than to become just one more faceless rural merchant. Ever a storyteller, Jesse Root Grant gave several explanations for his son’s name. The earliest credited Hannah’s stepmother with proposing Ulysses, she being a great reader of the classics, while Hannah’s father simply liked the sound of the name Hiram. They named the boy Hiram Ulysses Grant, though Jesse called him Ulysses, and soon family and friends shortened that to ’Lys.98

  Jesse Grant learned the tanning trade as a boy in Ohio and in Maysville, Kentucky, on the Ohio River, serving an apprenticeship in his midteens with Owen Brown, whose son John would one day help catapult Jesse’s son to fame.99 Later the young Grant started his own business, then moved to Point Pleasant where he married Hannah Simpson on June 24, 1821. Ten months later Ulysses appeared, and a year after that the Grant family moved to Georgetown, in Brown County, where Jesse’s business prospered almost immediately. It was a middling village of fifty families where ’Lys did not want for playmates.100 George P. Bailey lived virtually next door, Chilton A. White just two doors down, and the Ammens lived scarcely a hundred yards distant. Their son Daniel befriended young Grant, and surely shared stories of his older brother Jacob, then a cadet at West Point.

  ’Lys was a short, almost chubby boy by age eight, quiet and passive. He did not fight or swear like other boys, but that signaled no lack of daring.101 Once old enough to wander beyond his mother’s eye, Grant often joined his friend Ammen to fish in a modest creek near the village where ’Lys would crawl to the end of a slippery log over the stream to drop his hook. One day he fell in and nearly drowned before Ammen caught him.102 Some boyish sports held no allure for ’Lys. Other boys could outrun and outwrestle him. He showed no interest in guns or hunting.103 While friends terrorized squirrels with their rifles, Grant admitted that but for the occasional fish, he did not want to kill animals for either food or sport. When he joined friends for an extended hunt in the woods, he left them and came home without firing a shot, and never went hunting again. Years later, after sending hundreds of thousands of men into battle and possible death, he told Ammen that he had never in his life shot or killed any creature.104

  He did not find his parents easy to deal with. Jesse was vain, boastful, overbearing, and more critical and harder to please than a parent should be. He thought himself a wit and composed satirical poems on political affairs that he recited from memory, and sent caustic political letters to local newspapers. He had been friends with Thomas L. Hamer, a fellow Jacksonian Democrat representing Brown County in Congress, but the friendship soured when the anti-slave Grant wrote letters condemning Hamer to the local press. Despite his prosperity, Grant would never be a very popular man. Even his election as mayor of Georgetown in 1837 probably had more to do with voters staying on the good side of a difficult, if very successful, local businessman. When Andrew Jackson left the presidency in 1837, Jesse Grant aligned himself with Henry Clay’s more progressive Whig Party, not least because of his views on slavery. He never identified himself as an abolitionist, but he regularly voiced his opposition to slavery before friends and family.105 In that household, ’Lys later recalled, “I was a Whig by education and a great admirer of Mr. Clay.”106 Jesse Grant loved to argue and make speeches, to hear his own voice.107 Townsmen liked to poke holes in his inflated ego, even at the expense of his eldest son, making fun of the pretension of a name of mythic proportion like Ulysses engrafted on an unprepossessing boy. Some played at cruel anagrams and called him “Useless.”108

  Hannah Simpson Grant was cool and aloof, much under Jesse’s sway, and notably reticent, though she did not fear to speak her mind. Her son mirrored her quiet and even-tempered nature.109 What Ulysses and the siblings to follow missed in her was affection. Surely she loved her children, but she showed emotion sparingly. Young ’Lys told his friend Ammen that he had never seen his mother’s tears, either for sadness or joy.110 She was a devout Methodist, and Jesse joined the church in 1832, but neither parent forced their children to attend church or avow faith other than to observe the Sabbath.111 Hannah kept Ulysses well dressed for school, but gave little evidence of her love beyond that.112 Perhaps that is why the boy became especially fond of her more affectionate mother, Sarah Simpson.113 Grant heard his father’s stories so many times he never forgot them, but when he wrote his memoirs he recalled not one detail of his mother’s life.114

  ’Lys got a better than average education for his time and place. He first attended Georgetown’s small subscription academy, presided over by a North Carolinian, John D. White. In winter the boys squirmed on uncomfortable wooden benches before him, from just after dawn until shortly before sunset. White was prone to fall asleep at his desk on warmer days. If the pupils woke him with their play, he took up a beech switch and swatted indiscriminately, assuming that a few blows were bound to hit the right boys. White could use a whole bundle of switches in a single day. “He only followed the universal custom of the period, and that under which he had received his own education,” Grant recalled, never forgetting those switches and how “they performed that part of my education.”115 Recurring bouts with foot and leg cramps did not help ’Lys with concentration on lessons.116

  The curriculum began with the alphabet, reading, and spelling, and later geography, grammar, and mathematics, though White undercut the math lessons by solving the difficult problems in his head without explaining the process.117 Grant soon found that he could do them in his head, too. “His mind seemed exactly fitted for solving such problems on a moment’s notice,” recalled classmate James Sanderson. When others bar
ely had the puzzler in their minds, Grant was already shouting the answer.118

  Grammar was another matter, and he always believed he never really learned it.119 He tried to avoid doing the brief 150-word essays his teacher assigned, yet produced a few of merit. Credit for that went to his reading. Though he claimed not to care for reading, he read well and grew to love books. Jesse Grant had perhaps three dozen titles at home, running from Washington Irving to tomes on Methodism. He encouraged his son to read them, even if ’Lys sometimes absent-mindedly scrawled his name on the fly leaves.120 From the earliest surviving examples of his composition, it is clear that by reading and listening he absorbed sufficient style and grammar to express himself succinctly and precisely. Grant used words sparingly and chose the most direct approach both in writing and speaking. Schoolmates thought he was just dull, and teased him.121 Actually he was revealing the beginnings of a style of his own.

  Grant could scarcely speak in front of the class. After butchering a piece from George Washington’s farewell address, he vowed never to speak in public again regardless of the consequences.122 He did demonstrate one other skill, though, a fine eye for visual detail and a good grasp of proportion and perspective. Classmate Chilton White noted that “he could draw a horse and put a man on him.”123 In fact what his friends saw were the beginnings of a talent for pencil and brush, especially if a horse was in the frame—all early evidence of a quick visual study and power of observation.

  Grant was “one of the quietest boys I ever knew,” recalled Sanderson. Still, he was popular and usually up for a swim or a romp, but nothing excited him like riding.124 ’Lys loved horses and from an early age revealed a notable rapport with the animals. He usually rode bareback or on a blanket at breakneck speed, sometimes down Georgetown’s main street.125 Occasionally a horse proved too much for him, as when Ammen’s colt threw him over its neck into a stream, but that was an anomaly.126 At horsemanship, as young Sanderson said, he was “the best anywhere in our locality.”127 A small circus on an Ohio tour in 1837 made a stop in Georgetown when Grant was about fifteen.128 In one act a monkey rode a pony, and then the impresario invited boys to try riding the apparently docile animal. As soon as a boy mounted, the pony raced, twisting, turning, and bucking, until the hapless boy lay in the dust. When the handler asked for another volunteer, Grant stepped forward. The handler gave a sharp crack of his whip and the pony bolted off, then reared high on its back legs, kicked until all four were off the ground, and returned to a headlong gallop. Grant kept his seat through it all.129