A Presidential-Sized Comeback: The Story of Ulysses S. Grant

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And now, this is the story of our eighteenth President of the United States, Ulysses S.
Grant.
But this story isn’t about his time as Commander in Chief, but rather the events in his life up to that point that shaped and molded him as a man. Here’s our own Monte Montgomery on the story.
Ulysses S. Grant was born on April twenty-seventh, eighteen twenty-two, in the small town of Point Pleasant, Ohio, to parents Jesse Grant and Hannah Simpson Grant. Here’s Doctor John Marslac of the Ulysses S. Grant Presidential Library with more.
His mother and father were very, very important people in his life in different ways. His father is more or less of an abolitionist, and he also wrote for a newspaper which leaned in an abolitionist direction, so he’s very outgoing. The mother, she is a very, very shy person. She doesn’t give Grant the kind of love or support that you might expect for a mother to give. The father was always a presence in his life and always told him what to do, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Grant is much more like his mother than he is like his father. So, this whole idea of Grant being a quiet person, I think you could trace back to the time when he’s living at home. Grant is pretty much not interested in anything but farming, and not interested in doing much of anything else. He’s certainly not one of these people who wants to follow his father and his father’s footsteps, because one of the things his father did was his father worked in a tannery, or owned a tannery, actually, and Grant hated it. Grant loved horses. He reacted very well to horses, and he knew how to train them; he knew how to get them to do. He could do things with horses that nobody else could do. And there’s a very famous story of his experience with that where he really wanted his horse, and his father thought it was just the horse just wasn’t worth it; he shouldn’t do it. So, Grant kept working on him, working on, and working on him. So, finally, the father said, “Okay, go in there, but what I want you to do is make an offer for that horse. If a neighbor who owns this horse doesn’t accept the offer, then raise it up a little bit and raise it up again.” And so what Grant did, actually, he went to this neighbor and he said, “Well, my father told me that I should come and talk to you, and I should offer you this much, and if you didn’t take that, I should up it a little bit. And if you didn’t take that, I should finally, and pay no more than I think it was twenty-five dollars.” And so, you have a situation where Grant actually gets what he wants, but he does it in such a way that it’s something that he has to live down for the rest of his—or the rest of his life.
And well, Grant was busy developing a love for horses, Jesse Grant was busy developing a roadmap for his son’s education.
His father is a great believer in education, and so Grant was sent off out of town to schools where he learned, and he learned, I think, more about abolitionism than he learned about anything else. But he was a very, very much of a real supporter, was the father of Grant and getting as much education as he possibly could. He was obsessed with education. He wanted his children, and particularly Grant—his, you know, his most important child as he saw it—to have as much education as as possible.
Here’s Eddie Ring Gau of the Ulysses S. Grant Museum with more on Jesse Root Grant’s drive to have his son properly educated.
I think one of those important moments was his father’s drive to push.
him to think, to read, to be educated, so to speak. This is sort of unusual at
a time for Grant’s upbringing. He’s—he was an average person. He would have been expected to take over the family farm, but his father wanted him to study, to continue to learn, and so I think this drive that his father instilled in him, although they didn’t have a great relationship, it’s something that Grant is going to carry through the rest of his life as he develops at West Point. And then after that, he didn’t want to go to West Point. His father shows up one day and basically tells him, “I have secured an appointment for you to West Point.”
There was somebody in that town that didn’t make it, flunked out, basically, and so there was an opening, and Grant’s father was willing to go for.
And Grant is like, “What?” You know, it’s sort of that typical scenario that has happened over the centuries where parents tell their child that they are going to do something, or they will major in this, and their child sort of says, “Why?”
He thought it was a terrible mistake. He’d be a terrible soldier, he thought. And if he just disliked the military all his life, even when he was a famous general, he didn’t particularly care about this.
But the reason why his father really secures this appointment from him is because Jesse Ruth Grant knows that West Point will be free. He won’t have to pay for this education when he gets that appointment, and so, you know, that’s that’s reason number one. And then reason number two, and perhaps the most important, is that this education that West Point is going to provide for him.
will secure his future for the rest of his life.
Once Grant completes that degree, he doesn’t have to spend a lot of time in the military, and then, and then he can go and do whatever he wants with a world-class education. At the time, of course, and so he’s going to West Point sort of against his will, but this is, this is for his future.
And, and, you know, for his benefit, so to speak.
He only went because he liked traveling, and so he thought, “Well, maybe this way I’ll get to see some of the country that I ordinarily won’t see.” He did it because his father—in fact, he said, “Since my father said I should go, I guess I better go. I better change him on on their goal.”
And you’re listening to the story of Ulysses S. Grant, and my goodness, without his dad’s influence, the world could have been changed—certainly Ulysses S. Grant’s world. When we come back, more of this remarkable life, the early life, the life before the life most of us know about Ulysses S. Grant, here on our American Story. Folks, if you love the great American Stories we tell and love America like we do, we’re asking you to become a part of the Our American Stories family. If you agree that America is a good and great country, please make a donation. A monthly gift of seventeen dollars and seventy-six cents is fast becoming a favorite option for supporters. Go to OurAmericanStories.com now and go to the donate button and help us keep the great American Stories coming. That’s OurAmericanStories.com. And we continue with Our American Stories, and we return with our look into Ulysses S.
Grant’s backstory.
When we last left off, Grant’s father, Jesse Root Grant, that secured him an appointment at West Point—an appointment Grant would rather not have taken. And here’s Doctor John Marzlac with more.
Grant is not a very popular figure at West Point. He doesn’t make a lot of, a lot of friends. He is not somebody that people look up to as one of the individuals who’s going to really make a difference. And everywhere they’re going to say, “Yeah, that Grant boy, when he gets, when he gets in the Army, he’s gonna, he’s gonna be a terrific person,” et cetera, et cetera. But it doesn’t. It doesn’t really work out. But even at West Point, he’s tired to stay; never read his lessons more than once because he just was bored by it. He spent most of his time reading novels more than anything else.
One of the important moments, I think, for Grant, even at a time where I think he’s very unhappy, but he begins to develop his love for horses a little bit more into, sort of, a more useful skill. Grant is actually a very good horseman. He breaks several records that
are going to stand for a long time at West Point.
This is a skill that later, especially in the Mexican War and in the Civil War as well, are going to be important.
Grant would graduate West Point in a middling position within his class, twenty-first out of some forty students, but he would meet someone there who would change his life and lead him to someone who would become very important to him.
I think two of the most important things that happened to him as he met two people. One person was a fellow named Fred Dent, at Dent, as his roommate. Dent said, “Look, you’re going to be going. You’re going to be going to the Saint Louis area. My father and my family has a place there, and you’re welcome to come anytime.” And so he does go there, and he meets his future wife, Julia.
Of course, Grant, like we said, comes from a very modest, abolitionist family from Ohio, and Julia is the daughter of a relatively well-to-do plantation owner with a pretty sizable number of enslaved persons working at the plantation, and so her family is part of this slave economy, whereas Grant’s is not.
Now, Julia’s father is not
very thrilled with the idea of her, you know, being courted by Grant, and Grant’s father, Jesse Ruer Grant, was certainly not thrilled with the idea of his son courting the daughter of a slave owner. Is my understanding that the Grant family—no members of the Grant family—showed up to the wedding.
One thing that really did draw them together, the one thing, was Julia liked to horseback ride, and so they would take rides together, you know, hey on his horse, and she had her horse along the plantation. And that, I think, helped them bring them together, and interestingly enough, Julia is one of the few people who thinks that Grant is going to amount to anything. Most people say he’s not going to be a good effect; the father, her father, didn’t like Grant at all and thought he was going to be, “He’s an absolute loser.”
Grant would soon find himself in a more uncomfortable position than simply dealing with an unimpressed father-in-law. He would be shipped out to the front in the Mexican-American War, and Grant went despite his personal opinion on the conflict and the fact he would be assigned to a job which he didn’t like: quartermaster paper-pusher. In the eyes of Grant.
He’s one of these people who believes that if you’re given an order—like with his father, if you’re given an order—you follow the order; you do what you’re supposed to do. And so you have a situation where Grant, in numerous occasions, is willing to do the quartermaster work, even though he doesn’t like it, but he’ll do it anyway. But yet, when he gets a chance, he sneaks into battle.
He really learns a lot from General Sachary Taylor. He sees, the way he commands streams, the way he inspires, the way he leads his men from the front and not from the back. These moments are really important for Granted. Even though Grant opposed the Mexican War, he saw it as a war of aggression towards a neighboring state. He thought it was unjust. He understood that the political motivations behind it from President James K. Polk to essentially start a war with Mexico to gain this tear that Mexico would refuse to sell and continue to expand west to fulfill Manifest Destiny. Grant finds a problem with this, but nevertheless, his time in the Mexican War really becomes this really important moment for Grant.
And after the Mexican-American War, Grant was sent all across the expanded United States to remote forts in order to protect settlers, falling into a depression as a result of being away from home and family for so long.
In fact, one of the children he doesn’t even see until several years later when he shows up back at his house in Saint Louis. The child doesn’t even recognize him. And what Grant was doing: he was drinking during that time, and the reason he was drinking was because he missed his wife and his family so much. One could almost argue that he’s self-medicating himself.
And this led to problems with his superiors, especially a man by the name of Robert Buchanan, who would issue him an ultimatum after finding Grant hungover on the job.
Buchanan says, “You can’t be had like that. We can’t do that. So you have a choice: you either straighten out or you resign.” And so what actually happens is, is Grant doesn’t want to resign, but he has no choice.
This is where these rumors really that will follow him for the rest of his life originate of him being a drunk. He was not addicted to alcohol in the same sense that an alcoholic is as supposed to, perhaps, more of an abuse of alcohol to alleviate some of that depression or angst that he has.
That episode just made it so much more difficult for him, and he’s had to battle that for the rest of his life and even to the present day.
After resigning from the military, Grant would return home, and return home broke.
There’s a couple instances where he’s such bad shape that he’s got to sell firewood on the street corners of Saint Louis. And there’s a very famous, famous episode where Grant and Sherman, who don’t know each other all that well, meet, and I think Sherman says, “Well, heck of a thing for former West Pointers, isn’t it, Grant?” And Grant just said, “Yeah, I guess it is,” and that was about it. So he did that, and he also had to sell a favorite watch so he could buy his family, his kids, something for Christmas. So, you have some of that. So there’s just a number of instances where Grant tries things, and usually—come to think of it—usually it has something to do with farming, and that’s something he thinks he can really do well. But he doesn’t do well.
And with no other options, Grant would be forced to ask his father for a job.
What happened was he went to his father, which was an incredibly difficult thing for him to do: to go to his father and say, “Give me a job in your store where we sell these tan goods.” So Grant doesn’t like that. He’s not involved; he doesn’t do anything to do with tanning, but he’s involved in the selling, and he tours the Midwest, and he sells, and the father is doing quite successfully at this particular time. So, yeah, Grant convinces his father, “Nuke, I can’t make it on my own; give me a job in the store.” And he’s got a brother—an older brother who’s ill—and so he helps him. And it’s a very, very confused thing. But the result is that Grant does work for the father, and the father never lets him forget that, and so for the rest of his life, even when he’s president, the father is still trying to get stuff from Grant for some of his friends.
What a rich and complicated early history! Grant going to a college he doesn’t want to go to, doesn’t like the military, but while there develops this craft, this skill—horsemanship, by the way, that mattered if you were a soldier back in the nineteenth century—your ability to move and maneuver with a horse. And my goodness, the drinking! Well, we can understand it: away from his kid, his kid didn’t even recognize him when he comes back to see him and ultimately chooses to resign, knowing he won’t be able to give up drinking, comes back home selling firewood on a street corner and then, in the end, having to beg his dad for a job he never wanted. When we come back, more of this remarkable life story, the early life of Ulysses S.
Grant.
These were real-life people, folks who walked around before us, with real-life stories and real-life heartbreak. And when we come back, more of this remarkable story of Ulysses S.
Grant. Here on Our American Stories.
And we returned to Our American Stories and our look into the life of Ulysses S. Grant. When we last left off, Grant, he was at his lowest point. It was at this time that Grant would be given a slave by the name of William Jones. Here’s Eddie Rangel with more on that story.
His father-in-law gives him a—or I guess gives him a slave.
I guess what I’m trying to say.
And Grant works alongside him, which is something that would have been frowned upon by, you know, white, slave-owning society of the time. However, eventually, you know, even at his lowest, he realizes that, well, one, this is, this is not for him, and so he emancipates, or he frees William Jones, probably at one of his lowest times when he could really have benefited from the monetary value that—