did she sally out to rescue her infant from his perilous position. "Trusting in God" was what the people of the community called her superb poise.

There are other informative anecdotes of this kind. At the close of the Civil War, when the name of General Grant was like a word written in the skies, to be seen by all men, Ulysses came back to his father's cottage for a brief visit. His mother appeared, in her working apron, her countenance without smile or elation. "Well, Ulysses," she said, "you've become a great man, haven't you?" With that remark she returned to her household duties.

Out of these reservations emerges the fact that Hannah Grant was a pious Methodist. Her religious faith was so profound that it carried her to the verge of an incalculable mysticism. If she had in truth a lifelong secret, locked closely in her bosom, it was perhaps the secret of her unity with God. In an older civilization she might have willingly passed her life in a convent, prostrate before an altar in the serene twilight of some medieval chapel, where she could have held herself forever apart from the ways and deeds of the world. This is, however, only a conjecture, a guess at her personality, made in the effort to reconstruct it from a handful of withered facts. That she was a good wife, a woman of piety and virtue, a person of common sense, with curious lapses into indifference and self-absorption, is all we know of her.

In the first year of her marriage, on April 27, 1822, her son Ulysses was born.

For six weeks he was without a name.

$2

Ulysses purrs on the tongue. A sugary name, Greek in origin, it sounded sibilant and foreign among the sturdy Johns and Alecks and Russells of the Ohio backwoods. It fell on Grant through accident, as it had been drawn by lot, and

Named Hiram Ulysses

15

must be classified among the incorrigible verdicts of destiny. It appears that there had been some argument over the naming of the child, and it was agreed finally to let chance decide the question. Then the assembled relatives and friends -so the story runs-wrote the names of their choice on slips of paper, folded up the slips, and drew one. It was Ulysses, the name that had been proposed by Grandmother Simpson.

Evidently the outcome was not wholly satisfactory to the masculine part of the family. Somebody who was there succeeded in tacking Hiram on in front of Ulysses, so the child was called Hiram Ulysses Grant. A virile name is Hiram, devoid of sweetness, and carrying a sense of muscular strength. No doubt it was hoped by the hard-handed tree-choppers of the family that Ulysses would fade into the obscurity of an anonymous middle initial. Futile hope. Children are known by the name their mother calls them, and Hannah called her son Ulysses, or "Lyss" for short.

Ulysses did not remember living in Point Pleasant, as his parents moved, when he was about one year old, to Georgetown in the next county.

Jesse Root Grant went at the task of dressing hides as cheerfully as if he were carving a piece of ivory. His esthetic sense was a negligible quantity, and he liked the work. He knew how to scrape the bloody lumps of flesh from the illsmelling skins, how to prepare the bark of trees for tanning solutions, how to steep the hides in vats, how to beat the skins into hard or soft leather. To get on in business was his main idea, and he set up a tanning establishment of his own in Georgetown. He hired men and profited by their labor. With a shrewd and calculating eye he bought raw skins at a low price from befuddled yokels and sold leather at a high price to city men in an equivalent state of befuddlement. Tanning,

with him, had ceased to be a trade and had become a business. Here we have the elements of financial success. Jesse Grant might have become the Leather King of Ohio or something else equally admirable if it had not been for his disputatious cocksureness on all subjects. In supporting his ideas he was pugnacious and opinionated to the last degree. He carried pamphlets in his pockets and argued about politics with his customers, usually convincing them that they were wrong. That was a very poor thing for a business man to do.

But there were not many tanneries, and much leather was needed. Ulysses' father did not make a fortune, but he accumulated money. Before the boy had reached the age of ten Jesse had acquired a farm or two, had built a substantial house for his family, and was looked upon by the people of Georgetown as a capable and disagreeable person. His Sunday coat appeared on his back every day, and he wore gold-rimmed eye-glasses.

Ulysses was a slender boy, small for his age, but possessed of astonishing physical strength. He was fairly good-looking, with his well-shaped body, his straight nose, his blue eyes and chestnut-brown hair that persisted in being wavy despite his boyish efforts to comb it straight. A healthy lad he was, wholesome in body-but slovenly in manner.

At that time there were no free schools in Ohio, but Georgetown, like many other communities, had a subscription school -so called because the parents of the scholars subscribed various sums for the support of the teacher. In this school a Professor John D. White, for three months in a year, scattered knowledge to his pupils as one scatters crumbs to sparrows. The crumbs were poor in quality and few in number, but this meant nothing to Ulysses, whose intellectual hunger was easily satisfied. The simple curriculum consisted of reading, writing, arithmetic, and nothing else.

Professor White was good at whipping-so say the Memoirs written by Ulysses many years later-and the boy got his

A Lonely Boy

17

share. perhaps more than his share, for he was slow at answers, and his negligent appearance seemed to invite physical correction. A fresh bundle of switches was brought in every morning, and by the close of the day the switches were usually worn out. These beatings do not appear to have caused any rancor in the heart of Ulysses; or he may have had a tough skin. “I never had any hard feelings against my teacher," he wrote pensively near the close of his life, "either while attending the school, or in later years when reflecting upon my experience."

One day, after he had become famous, he remarked that he read but few lives of great men because biographers do not, as a rule, tell enough about the formative period of life; that what he wanted to know was what a man did when he was a boy. To understand a man, he continued, one must know what happened to him at home and in school, for there is where his character is formed.

That this is an excellent observation, of impeccable wisdom, every one will agree.

But when he wrote his own autobiography he devoted only eight pages out of a total of twelve hundred and sixteen to the story of his boyhood and youth up to the age of seventeen. And in these eight pages he says practically nothing about his youthful desires and feelings, nor does he mention the name of even one companion or playmate. So far as the record in his personal Memoirs goes he might have been brought up in a childless desert, inhabited by two or three school-teachers and a number of horses. The only reference he makes to his mother in this chapter-or, indeed, anywhere in the two volumes -is to give her name and the date of her marriage to his father.

Rear-Admiral Ammen was reared in Georgetown and went to Professor White's school with Grant. This honest old seadog lived to an advanced age and died amid the murmur of recollections. He might have told something of real impor

tance about Grant's youth if he had possessed an eye for character and a mind for remembrance, but he was unfortunately without these qualities. In his confused saga there is a tale of Ulysses falling in the water while fishing and having to swim out and go home in wet clothes . . . and of his love for horses . . . and of his sluggishness of mind and body. As to the last observation, it is worth noting that Grant himself wrote that laziness was "my besetting sin through life.”

This may be so; but I cannot see where or when he managed to exercise his vice of indolence. Certainly his life in Georgetown was extraordinarily active. He wrote-I am referring to the Memoirs again: "When I was seven or eight years of age I began hauling all the wood used in the house and shops. I could not load it on the wagons, of course, at the time, but I could drive, and the choppers would load, and some one at the house unload. 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, such as breaking up the land, furrowing, plowing corn and potatoes, bringing in the crops when harvested, hauling all the wood, besides tending two or three horses, a cow or two, and sawing wood for stoves, etc., while still attending school."

Ulysses was the oldest child in a family of six childrenthree boys and three girls. After him there appeared, at intervals of three or four years, Samuel Simpson, Clara Rachel, Virginia Paine, Orvil Lynch and Mary Frances. They all grew up to maturity, living lives that were without the salt of vice or the sweetening of virtue. Merely people . existing.

§ 3

Ohio in those far-off days had some of the more restless aspects of a country fair. For twenty years settlers had poured into it like a river pouring across a broken dam. In