02 - Ulysses S. Grant by Owen Wister

Discover the remarkable life of Ulysses S. Grant, the celebrated Union hero of the Civil War and the 18th President of the United States. This engaging biography, presented in a concise 145-page pamphlet, offers a fascinating glimpse into the life of a man who shaped American history. Though the author is renowned for his captivating tales of the Old West, he also crafted a significant body of nonfiction that reveals much about Grants legacy. (Summary by David Wales)

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Section two of Ulysses s. Grant by Owen Wister. This
LibriVox recording is in the public domain Chapter three. Various
ardent pens have attempted to embellish Grant's boyhood. He has
even been given illustrious descent. It is enough to know

(00:21):
for certain that Scotch in blood and Americans since sixteen
thirty he was of the eighth generation and counted a
grandfather in the Revolution. Besides other soldier ancestors. The first Grant, Matthew,
probably landed at Nantucket, Massachusetts, May thirtieth, sixteen thirty. In

(00:43):
sixteen thirty six, he helped establish the town of Windsor, Connecticut.
He was its first surveyor and a trusted citizen. Samuel
Solomon Noah a Donnerum, that is what the Grants in
colonial Connecticut were called. And with such names as these,
they did what all the other colonial Noahs and a

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Donirams were doing. None of them rose to uncommon dimensions.
But they, and such as they were then, as they
are now, the salt and leaven of our country. After
the Revolution, as our frontier widened and the salt and
leaven began to be sprinkled westward, Captain Noah Grant went

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gradually to the Ohio River, leaving there no riches and
many children. One of these, Jesse, became a Tanner, and
in eighteen twenty one, married Miss Hannah Simpson from Pennsylvania.
On April twenty seventh, eighteen twenty two, at Point Pleasant
on the Ohio River, twenty five miles above Cincinnati, was

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born their eldest son, and christened Hiram Ulysses Hiram because
his grandfather liked them name Ulysses because his step grandmother
had been reading Fenilon. Seventeen years later, when the boy
was appointed to the Military Academy, mister Hamer, knowing missus

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Grant's name was Simpson and that we had a son
named Simpson, somehow got the matter a little mixed up
in making the nomination and sent the name in Ulysses
s Grant. Such is the father's narrative. And before leaving
Grant's plain self reliant, uncommercial ancestry, of which his own

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character is such a natural and relevant product, let it
be noted that Jesse, besides writing good clear prose, not
unlike his sons, could turn verses fairly well, and also
that a neighbor remarked of Ulysses that he got his
sense from his mother. As to Ulysses, and the congressional

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error in his name, he never succeeded in correcting it.
The consequences were that the boy came variously to be
known as Lysses, lyss useless, uncle Sam and unconditional surrender.
His whole story is here written in nicknames. Grant's boyhood

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is like his ancestry, wholesome, pastoral, inconspicuous, with a rustic schooling,
a love of the woods, a preference for idleness, and
an affinity for horse flesh. His recorded words and deeds,
save one, might be those not of a thousand, but
a million American boys. He repeated, A noun is the

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name of a thing, until I had come to believe it,
so he says himself. When I was seven or eight
years of age, I began hauling all the wood used
in the house and shops. When about eleven years old,
I was strong enough to hold a plow. From that
age until seventeen, I did all the work done with horses.

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While still quite young, I had visited Cincinnati, forty five
miles away, several times alone. I 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. The rod was
freely used there, and I was not exempt from its influence.

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This steadfast, manly not bright boy had quiet gray blue eyes,
a strong straight nose, straight brown hair, and a bulky build.
His understanding of horses and the manner in which he
was successfully trusted with them on overnight journeys while still
a child, bear witness to the tough fiber of responsibility

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and courage in him. Nor was he pugnacious, but rather
the reverse, and this too helps a portrait of the boy,
from which the features of the man seem a natural
slow development. It would be strangely inconsistent to find in
Grant's adolescence any signs of precocity, such as mark, for example,

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the early years of Webster, another rustic boy with very
similar antecedents. For intellect was Webster's gift, while character was Grant's,
and character finds no outward expression save in life's chances.
Napoleon owes his fame to himself, but Wellington owes his

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fame to Napoleon, and save for the Civil War, Grant's
force would have slumbered in him from the cradle to
the grave. Here is the single prophetic incident. It has
been told in many ways, and his own is the best.
As usual, there was a mister Ralston who owned a

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cult which I very much wanted. My father had offered
twenty dollars for it, but Ralston wanted twenty five. I
was so anxious to have the colt that my father yielded,
but said twenty dollars was all the horse was worth,
and told me to offer that price. If it was

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not accepted, I was to offer twenty two and a half,
and if that would not get him to give the
twenty five, I at once mounted a horse and went
for the colt. When I got to mister 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,

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I am to offer twenty two and a half, and
if you won't take that, to give you twenty five.
He was eight when this happened, and twhen, after all
his vicissitudes, he came to die the same native candor
and guilelessness like truth. At the Wells Bottom shown uncloudy

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in his heart. No experience of deceit seems to have
cured him of this inveterate simplicity, or warned him that
others did not possess it. Grant believes every one as
honest as himself. Was said of him during later days
of struggle. Is it wonderful that he failed in each

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business venture? When he was elected president? Such a combination
of firmness and integrity was an outlook which naturally filled
the politicians with dismay. They could not foresee that it
would prove a door wide open to every dollar which
they plotted to steal. When not far from his end,

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he was asked if such and such a thing had
not distressed him, and replied, no, nothing but being deceived
in people. And this sorrowful thought haunts the preface to
his memoirs. Yes, that old horse story is an omen.
It raises laughter, to be sure, but changed the figure

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of Farmer Ralston getting his undue price through the boy's
guilelessness into Belknap of the Fortsill and National Cemetery scandals,
into Babcock of the Whisky Ring, into Jay Gould of
Black Friday, into Ferdinand Ward the final thief who crossed
Grant's credulous path, and the old horse story grows less mirthful.

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His bringing up was evidently strict. Both his talk and
life were pure. He seems to have got on without swearing,
even in battle, as extreme a sign of calm force
as can be imagined, even Washington broke out at Monmouth
Court House. Grant's one weakness, drinking, has therefore been the

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more conspicuous. But in these early days at george Stown, Ohio,
where the family moved soon after his birth, he seems
to have been soberer than many in that region. As
for an army career, not only had it never entered
his head to be a soldier, but he was averse
to the notion when suggested to him by his father.

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A permanent position in some respectable college, he writes, was
his hope. Even after entering West Point, I had no
intention of remaining in the army. Indeed, in closely studying
Grant's temperament, it almost seems as if he were, not,
in the last analysis, a soldier, but a patriot compelled

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to fight. Like poets, the world's great captains are born,
not made the art of war. War for war's sake
struck no spark in Grant, but he brought to its
practice a sagacity and a grip of such dimensions as
after some experience, to serve as the equivalence of genius

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and instruction. This is sometimes cited to point the demagogic
moral that education is an American ben Butler, in his
book says Grant evidently did not get enough of west
Point in him to hurt him any. All the graduates
in the higher ranks in their classes never came to

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anything now. Robert E. Lee graduated second. It took four
years and some half dozen generals to beat him. But
Butler's book would be a joke were it not a stench.
When Grant was near seventeen, he told his father that
he would never do a day's work at Tanning after

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twenty one. The sensible Jesse saw no success for him
there if his heart was not in it, and asking
what would he like, was told farming or trading, or
to get an education. He had no farm to give
his son, nor money to send him to college, and

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but a poor opinion of a trader's life on the Mississippi.
But West Point offered free education. And subsequent honorable service.
The father settled the question, and this is the son's
account of it. Ulysses, I believe you are going to
receive the appointment. What appointment? I inquired to West Point.

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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. The italics are Grant's own, and
he seldom uses them. Since his career is offered as
an inspiration to American youth, it is a pity that

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his bringing up so rarely serves as a model for
American parents. A sound, sturdy wholesomeness in both fathers and
mother is the assisting cause of most that is admirable
in their son. They made no grief over saying good bye,
but across the street a friend and her daughter did,

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and the boy exclaimed, why you must be sorry, I
am going. They didn't cry at our house. At that house, however,
during a period of the Mexican War, when the absent
son could not write home, the mother's hair grew gray.
Local opinion of Congressman Hamer's choice was not flattering. I

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am astonished that he did not appoint some one with
intellect enough to be a credit to the district, said
a neighbor to the cadet's father, And no special achievement
during those four years of study contradicts this view. The
boy graduated twenty first in a class of thirty nine,

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good in mathematics and excellent in horsemen ship. But and
here again is the dimly felt moral fiber. He was
often umpire in disputes, and he was greatly liked by
his friends, who called him Uncle Sam. Indeed, he was
a very uncle like sort of a youth, writes a comrade,

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Henry Copey. His picture rises before me in the old
torn coat, obsolescent leather gig top, loose riding pantaloons with
spurs buckled over them, going with his clanking saber to
the drill hall. He exhibited but little enthusiasm in anything.

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Here is testimony to that mental indolence or torpor which
pervaded his nature. And he gives more himself. I rarely
read over a lesson the second time I read all
of Bulwers, Cooper's, Marriatt's, Scott's, Washington, Irving's works, Levers, and

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many others that I do not now remember. His letters
home show an appreciation of natural scenery, and this he
seems always to have had. During his furlough at home
after two years at the academy. It is narrated by
Richardson that, in accordance with an agreement between himself and

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classmates to abstain from liquor for a year, he steadily
refused to drink with his old friends. The object of
the cadets was to strengthen by their example one of
their number who was falling into bad habits. It has
never been narrated that C. F. Smith, the commandant of Cadets,

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sent for the boy once when he was in danger
of being dismissed, and told him that he was capable
of better things. The words that passed on this occasion
have died with the two that spoke them. But Grant
loved and honored Smith with a special fee, and a
great deal lies behind the short sentence in the second

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chapter of the Memoirs. So West Point bears consistent witness
to the good and the bad in Grant. He left
it in eighteen forty three, wishing naturally to be a dragoon,
but was commissioned brevet second lieutenant in the fourth Infantry,
to which he reported for duty on September thirty at

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Jefferson Barracks, Missouri. End of Chapter three