Crucible of Command

by William C. Davis

  Years later people told that story and others as metaphors for tenacity of another kind in Grant. Jesse recalled ’Lys driving a cow when he was twelve, only to have the animal bolt and run with him holding resolutely onto its tail. When the cow jumped a wide mud puddle, the boy fell in the mud. Jesse said it showed “the bull-dog pluck and tenacity with which Ulysses always held on when he got hold of a good thing,” though Jesse often told tales that made his son look a fool as much as a hero.130 Still, ’Lys revealed an early determination not to give up. A steep hill west of Georgetown often stalled teamsters, who found that the Grant boy could get their teams to the top for them. “I never got stalled myself,” he supposedly told them, “and so my horses never got stalled either.” From an early age he expected to accomplish what he set out to do.131

  Ulysses gained a reputation for breaking horses and training pacers. Jesse retold many stories of his son’s feats. In time he had young ’Lys harnessing a horse when barely old enough to walk himself, riding at age five standing on their bare backs, at eight doing it balanced on one leg, and at ten taking passengers forty miles by wagon to Cincinnati. Sometimes the posturing father’s stories went beyond horses, to boast of his boy spending seven months at age twelve hauling huge logs to build the county jail. Like everyone else Ulysses knew his father’s boasts were more about himself. Georgetown heartily wearied of what some called Jesse’s “vain foolishness,” and got even when a traveling phrenologist came to town. They watched in glee as Jesse submitted ’Lys to examination, and then believed the charlatan’s discovery of a future president in the bumps on the boy’s head. The joke never died, and Jesse never got it. Years later he still boasted of the prediction. His embarrassed son never mentioned it.132

  If the father voiced approval, he usually ruined it quickly. When Jesse spoke of his son’s work ethic, he added either that it sprang from his own, or went on to say that he could hardly ever get the boy to work in the tannery. Jesse said “he was a most beautiful child,” then spoiled it by adding that “he did not grow up as handsome as our other boys.”133 Others saw how he treated his son, and years later Georgetown preferred to think that Ulysses got his brains from his mother.134

  His father even told a humiliating story demonstrating his son’s guilelessness, a lack of sophistication that often made him the butt of jokes. Schoolmaster White’s son remembered thirty years after the fact how the boys teased ’Lys when in about 1831 Jesse sent him to buy a horse. He was to offer $50 and settle no higher than $60. At the outset Ulysses innocently told the seller how high he was authorized to go, and not surprisingly paid $60.135 “It was a long time before I heard the last of it,” Grant recalled years later. Late in life he still recalled his “great heart-burning” embarrassment when people told the story. “This story is nearly true,” he confessed, but added context by explaining that he paid $25, not $60, got three years’ use of the horse until it went blind, and then still managed to sell it for $20.136 Offering no conclusion of his own, he let the facts say for him that it was not such a bad deal after all. The real lesson in the episode is that Grant adapted measures and wants to the conditions at hand, and assessed risk—in this case money paid—against a long-term return.

  From about age eleven ’Lys managed a plow and horse, tended all the animals, and continued going to school, all a lesson in application and discipline, which he would never lack. However difficult his parents might be, they rarely scolded or punished him, and gave him wide latitude to do and go as he wanted when not at work or study. He could go fishing, ride to visit his mother’s parents in the next county, and ice skate and drive the sleigh whenever the snow allowed. He enjoyed a golden childhood, free to stretch his mind and his muscle, and free from the constraints imposed on young Lee.137

  ’Lys’s horizons expanded in 1836 when his grammar schooling ended, and he was at an age at which most boys left school for good and found employment. Two newspaper publishers, Samuel Medary of the Ohio Sun at nearby Batavia and David Morris of Batavia’s Chronicle of the Times, each asked Jesse to let ’Lys come learn their trade. At odds politically with the Democrat Medary, Jesse occasionally wrote political pieces for Morris and might have favored his proposal had not Hannah protested that their boy was yet too young.138 Meanwhile, Grant’s friend Daniel Ammen left when Congressman Thomas L. Hamer gave him a midshipman’s appointment in the United States Navy, evidence that there were worlds and careers beyond Georgetown and tanneries.139

  Instead they enrolled ’Lys as a junior at the Maysville Academy across the Ohio in Kentucky.140 It was twenty miles from Georgetown, but the boy had been farther from home than that, inspiring his reticent mother to offer the compliment that ’Lys was “always a good traveler.”141 Virginia-born William West Richeson ran the academy with partner Jacob W. Rand. Richeson was accomplished in English, Latin, and Greek, and passionate about math, which boded well for young Ulysses. When he started his studies he found a number of other boys of about his age, among them Thomas and William Nelson and Absalom Markland. Some became his lifelong friends. In the way of boys they gave each other nicknames. For reasons mysterious, young Grant became “Toad.”142

  Richeson read and lectured to them from the writings of Caesar, Sallust, and his favorite Juvenal, as well as the Roman poets Virgil and Horace. He took the students on long walks up Kentucky mountains, and Grant would have been especially impressed to find that the professor was a daring, almost reckless horseman.143 Fellow students found “Toad” quiet, retiring, and studious, though the classics struggled to hold his attention. Sandy haired, freckled, still slightly chubby, the teenager seemed ever good-natured.144 Surprisingly Grant joined the Philomathea Society, a literary and debating club, and sat on the executive committee. Despite his Georgetown resolution, he spoke in debates, defending propositions like “females wield greater influence in society than the males,” “Socrates was right in not escaping when the prison doors were opened to him,” or “intemperance is a greater evil than war.” Despite Jesse’s views, he won a resolution that “it would not be just and politic to liberate the slaves at this time.”145

  He stood well in all his classes by the time he finished his one term, but in 1837 Jesse called him home.146 There was work to be done in the business, and ’Lys spent the next term back in Georgetown. He freely admitted he would much have preferred to be out with the horses, but he worked hard all the same.147 Especially he enjoyed going away on business. “I had always a great desire to travel,” he recalled of his youth. His father sent him on trips to Cincinnati and Maysville, even farther to Louisville and Lexington, Kentucky, to Chillicothe, 200 miles east to Wheeling, and 250 miles to Cleveland. By his midteen years ’Lys believed he was the best-traveled boy in Georgetown but for one other. At an age when young Robert E. Lee had scarcely been outside the immediate orbit of Alexandria, young Grant had traveled 1,500 miles or more, much of it on his own with responsibility for animals, wagons, and cargo.148

  The experiences of those travels stayed with him. When Grant was just fifteen he went to Flat Rock, Kentucky, a seventy-mile trip, taking postmaster Hugh Payne to see his brother. Both Paynes, like Jesse, were Democrats turned ardent Henry Clay supporters.149 Grant slept in Payne’s store during his visit, and helped his clerk get ready to open for business in the mornings.150 He also took a liking to one of William’s saddle horses and proposed to trade it for one of the two pulling his carriage. By now Jesse Grant let his son do as he liked when it came to horses, and Payne agreed to the trade. He even paid Grant $10 in the bargain when the boy pointed out that the new horse was not yet broken to harness, while the one he offered was accustomed to pulling a carriage. The supposedly feckless ’Lys had made another good deal.

  He believed he could break the horse by pairing him with the remaining animal on his carriage, the one steadying the other. It was almost a metaphor for the way a high-spirited man could be made productive by the lead of a steadier associate. The new horse did well until a barking dog s
pooked both animals, and they bolted and almost pulled the carriage over a steep bank. The forty-two-year-old Hugh Payne refused to ride farther and left, while the fifteen-year-old boy kept his head, tied a bandanna over the balky animal’s eyes to calm it, and drove the rest of the way home on his own. Grant liked to recall the story in later life. He had made a good trade and met difficulty with calm and ingenuity.151

  In the winter of 1838–1839 Jesse entered his son at the College of Ripley on the bank of the Ohio, which began auspiciously in 1830 headed by the noted abolitionist John Rankin.152 Ripley had attracted some notoriety for once admitting a black to its theology classes.153 It was barely holding on when sixteen-year-old Grant arrived. The school had little to teach him.154 Besides, there were distractions. He had learned to dance and he enjoyed it, going to every party he could, becoming what one young lady recalled as “a great gallant among the rural girls.”

  Still, there were lessons to be had in the noted seedbed of abolitionist sentiment, and the very first stop for many runaway Kentucky slaves on the so-called Underground Railroad. Townspeople still talked of the winter just past when a slave woman who had run away from Kentucky with her infant child walked across the winter-frozen Ohio River to Ripley with her baby in her arms. The president sheltered her in his house until he could spirit her north to freedom. Years later Harriet Beecher Stowe used the anonymous woman as one of the prototypes for a composite character she called Eliza in her 1852 novel, Uncle Tom’s Cabin.155

  Ulysses Grant was apparently unimpressed by the story.156 Neither was he impressed by the curriculum, which seemed to consist mainly of rote repetition of such basic axioms as “a noun is the name of a thing.”157 Grant was seventeen now, and though he later made light of his education, he knew what a noun was. He wrote easily and well, with a good vocabulary and facility of expression.158 His spelling was well above average for his time and place, and his punctuation was better than young Lee’s. Grant always showed some eccentricities in orthography, while Lee’s spelling was more precise, befitting a man who would marry a cousin of Noah “Dictionary” Webster.

  It took only one session for Jesse Grant to decide that the academy was not worth the $1.25 or so per week paid for his son’s board.159 A new prospect for a really practical higher education, with the potential for a life’s career, and at virtually no expense, suddenly arose. There might be an unfilled appointment to the United States Military Academy. Jesse wrote to the War Department in Washington, but the reply was discouraging. Things had changed since Lee’s day. Now Grant must persuade the sitting congressman for his district to nominate his boy, but that delegate was Thomas L. Hamer, whom Grant’s fellow Whigs had recently denounced as a “double dealing political swaggerer.”160 Still, Grant boldly wrote Hamer immediately to ask that he nominate Ulysses for the cadetship.161 Hamer wanted to heal the breach with Grant, and at the same time regain the support of one of his district’s more prosperous and influential men.162 Thus on March 22 young Grant secured the appointment.163 Hamer had not been intimate with the Grants recently, and Georgetown had virtually forgotten the boy’s full name, knowing him as only Ulysses, or just ’Lys. Amid all those sibilants Hamer thought he remembered hearing another, and sent his nomination in the name of Ulysses S. Grant.

  If the young Ulysses to date felt any affinity for the Field of Mars he kept it well hidden. He had no interest in guns, and his amiability scarcely hinted that he might feel the spirit of aggression so vital in a successful military man, but Jesse Grant’s children did what he told them. According to Jesse, when he asked ’Lys how he felt about going to West Point, his son replied “first rate.”164 As Ulysses remembered the story, his father told him he believed he would get an appointment, and ’Lys declared, “I won’t go.” Jesse said he rather believed he would, and Ulysses later confessed that “I thought so too, if he did.”165 It was neither the first nor the last little defeat at his father’s hands.

  ’Lys returned to Georgetown briefly before leaving for West Point, and said little about it to his friends until a few days before his departure.166 He always loved to travel, and a trip to New York would be his longest yet. The Military Academy placed a heavy emphasis on mathematics and engineering, and he could expect to find all of that interesting and challenging. Privately, however, he feared he might not pass his exams. ’Lys knew how his own father would take it if he failed to graduate.167 Caught between the force of Jesse Grant’s determination and fear of his father’s wrath should he fail, Hiram Ulysses Grant prepared to leave for New York with probably less enthusiasm than any cadet-to-be of his time.

  ’Lys Grant enjoyed a happier childhood than Lee, though in a way they shared a common cause for such embarrassments as they felt—fathers. Lee never outgrew the impact of embarrassment over his father’s bankruptcy and fall from a hero’s perch; Grant suffered the frequent humiliation of a father constantly trying to make his son an extension of his own ego. Grant knew his father all too well, and his mother seemingly little at all. Thanks to having to be her doctor, nurse, coachman, and companion, Lee knew his mother perhaps too intimately, while his father remained little more than a name and a portrait. The boy Grant never knew want or the threat of insolvency. He lived rather an indulged, even privileged, childhood as the son of a rural magnate, and if Jesse was overbearing and Hannah cool and undemonstrative, still he did not have to contend with Lee’s teasing sisters and the self-pity and possible hypochondria of Ann Hill Carter Lee. In the context of their times and places, the two young men received roughly comparable “academy” education. Certainly both were sufficiently prepared to pass their entrance examinations at West Point. Lee had distinguished connections in the East far greater than Jesse Grant’s circle of Whig business and political cronies, but ’Lys’s experience of urban and rural America outstripped Lee’s limited Potomac horizons.

  The differences between them were largely cosmetic, growing far more from accident of birth than individual character and ability. Each demonstrated industry, application, and self-reliance; Lee by being the man of the house from far too early an age, Grant by his assumption of extraordinary work duties for his age. The Ohioan was more curious about the world beyond home than Lee, but then the Virginian’s responsibilities allowed him less opportunity to escape Alexandria. In tendencies mirroring their approaches to the world around them, Lee’s temperament and nascent distrust of much of society turned him inward, allowing him scant scope for friendships, whereas Grant was open and outgoing, naive perhaps, with an ever-widening circle of acquaintances. Hard to anger, Grant got along with the easygoing and the difficult, an essential attribute for managing people, while Lee was already somewhat stiff and formal, muffled beneath protective layers, with a high temper that he sometimes struggled to control. Yet both types of personality could win loyalty, and both young men established lifetime friendships in these years. Lee revered his father, and all his life defended him, while trying not to be like him. Grant already sought to escape being Jesse’s son. When he later told stories of his youth, he rarely included his father. If years later he had more to say of his father and his family than of Hannah and hers, it was recollection with an undercurrent of resentment against the grasping, bumptious, overbearing businessman of Georgetown. Each was more his mother’s son.

  Neither gave up on first encountering an obstacle. If he wanted something, he pursued it with determination, whether a coveted horse or better grounding in mathematics. Grant used ingenuity in problem solving, as well as trial and error, and had the capability of projecting solutions in his mind before putting them to the test. He made decisions by establishing in basic terms what he wanted to achieve and assessing his options as determined by resources and practicality. Lee as yet had less scope for demonstrating problem solving or decision making beyond the needs of coping with the care of his mother and sisters, yet he accomplished that effectively. Grant demonstrated daring and apparent fearlessness; if Lee did the same the memory was lost. Nothing suggests
that their moral and ethical compasses were different. Neither professed interest in religion. Blood and experience instilled in Lee the nucleus of his later fatalism, while the happy-go-lucky Grant approached life with an almost innocent optimism.

  Both boys had fun. Both loved to ride and felt affection for horses, though Grant’s went deeper. Both enjoyed other boys’ pursuits, but only Lee hunted game, while Grant avoided all blood sports. Neither showed a taste for telling jokes, yet each was developing a self-deprecating sense of humor; Grant’s was further influenced by the vogue for rural humor then made popular by backwoods wits like David Crockett, while Lee’s was sophisticated, involving wordplay and banter, often touched with an edge of sarcasm. Grant wanted to be a farmer. Lee wanted to be a soldier. Each was equipped to grow into a man of standing, just as two families in Virginia and Ohio expected. Just how considerable it might be, of course, would depend on what they did with the advantages given them, and the challenges and opportunities of events yet unforeseen.