House in which Grant Lived in St. Louis in 1859.

Recruiting Office in City Hall Park, New York

Wartime Photographs of General Grant

General Robert E. Lee

The McLean House at Appomattox

General Grant as President

J

ESSE ROOT GRANT, the father of Ulysses, was the kind of man who becomes grim and purposeful too early in life.

Grimness, as admirable as it seems in the biographies of great generals, is really nothing less than bad manners when acquired by any one under the age of fifty. But Jesse Grant was grim and had a purpose at the age of twenty-five. His purpose was to make money; and his grimness was the result of an argumentative disposition carried to extremes. He was not very well liked by his neighbors.

By trade he was a tanner, a humble occupation which would have given him a fairly low social status in a wealthy or longsettled community, but not at Point Pleasant, Ohio, in the 1820's. Southern Ohio was then a backwoods region; every one was poor, and society was acidly plebeian. Any assump tion of elegance evoked invidious backbiting comments. Even moderately well-to-do people were few, and the culture that follows wealth had not arrived at all.

Behind Jesse Grant trailed a long American ancestry, sharply defined and easy to trace. He came of a race of Connecticut Yankees who had lived on their sorry New England farms from 1630 until poverty drove them westward a few years after the American Revolution. None of them had reached any distinction worth mentioning.

The history of these early Grants is an unbroken record of farming and procreation. They were an honest, hard

working lot, slow in thought and rough in speech. To read their names and the brief records of their careers reminds one of an old-fashioned family album, or the rain-washed epitaphs on the tombstones of a quiet country churchyard. A family of thin-lipped men with long beards and strong features, sitting in the placid chambers of the dead. Beside them one sees their women, worn with toil and care .. their meekly gentle eyes, their hair drawn back tightly, their hands lying wearily in their laps.

When Jesse Grant came to Point Pleasant around the year 1820, as the foreman of a small tannery, it was then, as it is now, a tiny place on the Ohio river, twenty-five miles east of Cincinnati. At that time the village dreamed of becoming a metropolis, and was filled with uneasy aspirations, which have long since dissolved into the past tense of hope. To-day it has a faint air of melancholy, and sits by its majestic river like a disappointed elderly man on a bench in a park; sitting there and mumbling of better years.

In 1821 Jesse Grant married Hannah Simpson, a freshfaced, vigorous country girl who lived in a neighboring settlement. Her family had come from Pennsylvania, and her father was prosperous, considering the limitations of the time. He owned a large farm and lived in a brick house. It would appear that Jesse married above his own condition in life, for he possessed nothing but his job. But these comparisons are mere phrases, for they assert a distinction that was ignored in reality. Her people, living in their brick house, belonged, like the Grants, to the common lot of humanity.

The home to which Jesse brought his bride, and in which Ulysses was born, was in keeping with the popular idea of what a President's birthplace ought to be. It is true that it was not a log-house, but this minor defect was remedied perhaps by the fact that it contained only two rooms and was of the dry-goods-box type of architecture, without porch, veranda or trimmings. In one room Hannah Grant cooked

The Mother of Ulysses

13

her husband's meals at a huge fireplace which had a swinging crane or pot-hook; in the other room there was a puffy fourposter bed and some country-made chests of drawers.

In the winter the wind thrust its sharp knives through the rattling window frames and under the doors. Snow came early and stayed late. Cold corners and the smell of cooking. Rather cheerless, it seems, but Jesse and his wife had the tough vitality of youth; and besides, the hardest winter would pass in time, and then the bare forest, quivering with new life, would dress itself in shimmering green. In the woods there was the metallic ring of axes on the far-speaking air. Birds with flashing wings and the lazy gray smoke of brushwood fires. The house, so gloomy during the months of snow, lay in a crystalline sea of sunshine. The warm odors of the reviving earth drifted through the open doors and windows. Along the road came wagons creaking heavily, with dusty horses and sleepy drivers.

Hannah Grant was a self-contained woman whose words were few, who never wept and rarely smiled. We know almost as little of her as we do of Mary Ball, the mother of George Washington-and this is strange, for there are scores of people alive to-day who remember her as an old woman. Yes, they are willing enough to speak of her, but their reminiscences are of little use, consisting as they do of trivial anecdotes without thread or motivation. Evidently she never said much to any one; her life unfolds in the half-light of silent shadows. She acted like a woman who is nourishing within herself a lifelong secret-but as to what that secret was, who can tell?

One of her qualities appears to have been a strange indifference to her children-to Ulysses in particular. When Ulysses was a small child he was seen by some of the neighbors crawling about among the legs of horses and swinging on their tails. There was neighborly excitement, of course, and a rush of startled women to tell Hannah Grant what her child was doing. She paid no attention to their fears and alarms, nor