the Revolutionary
War. Financial reverses and the death of his grandmother broke up
the family; and his father, Jesse Grant, was given the kindest
of homes by Judge Tod of Ohio. Jesse, being as independent as he
was grateful, turned his energies into the first business at hand,
which happened to be a tannery at Deerfield owned by the father of
that wild enthusiast John Brown. A great reader, an able contributor
to the Western press, and a most public-spirited citizen, Jesse
Grant was a good father to his famous son, who was born on April
27, 1822, at Point Pleasant, Clermont County, Ohio. Young Grant
hated the tannery, but delighted in everything connected with horses;
so he looked after the teams. One day, after swapping horses many
miles from home, he found himself driving a terrified bolter that
he only just managed to stop on the edge of a big embankment. His
grown-up companion, who had no stomach for any more, then changed
into a safe freight wagon. But Ulysses, tying his bandanna over
the runaway's eyes, stuck to the post of danger.

After passing through West Point without any special distinction,
except that he came out first in horsemanship, Grant was disappointed
at not receiving the cavalry commission which he would have greatly
preferred to the infantry one he was given instead. Years later,
when already a rising general, he vainly yearned for a cavalry
brigade. Otherwise he had curiously little taste for military life;
though at West Point he thought the two finest men in the world
were Captain C. F. Smith, the splendidly smart Commandant, and,
even more, that magnificently handsome giant, Winfield Scott, who
came down to inspect the cadets. Some years after having served
with credit all through the Mexican War (when, like Lee, he learnt
so much about so many future friends and foes) he left the army,
not to return till he and Sherman had seen Blair and Lyon take
Camp Jackson. After wisely declining to reenter the service under
the patronage of General John Pope, who was full of self-importance
about his acquaintance with the Union leaders of Illinois, Grant
wrote to the Adjutant-General at Washington offering to command
a regiment. Like Sherman, he felt much more diffident about the
rise from ex-captain of regulars to colonel commanding a battalion
than some mere civilians felt about commanding brigades or directing
the strategy of armies. He has himself recorded his horror of sole
responsibility as he