Loses Temper

29

my gun; except, being detained over a day at Goliad, Benjamin and I concluded to go down the creek . . . and bring back a few turkeys. We had scarcely reached the edge of the timber when I heard the flutter of wings overhead, and in an instant I saw two or three turkeys flying away. These were soon followed by more. . . All this

time I stood watching the turkeys to see where they flew -with my gun on my shoulder, and never once thought of leveling it at the birds. When I had time to reflect upon the matter, I came to the conclusion that as a sportsman I was a failure, and went back to the house.

He did not want to kill animals, though he had no objection whatever to the killing of men; that is, to having them killed wholesale, in war. But even in that there was no sharp, knifeedge personal cruelty in his nature; and in some respects he was, as a soldier, unusually gentle and magnanimous.

Horace Porter, who was on Grant's staff during the whole of the 1864 campaign, says that Grant lost his temper only once during those trying months. One day the general and his staff were riding along a Virginia road in the route of the marching columns, when they came upon a teamster who was beating his horses in the face. Porter says that in the outburst which followed he realized for the first time that Grant had a temper. It is too bad, for history's sake, that he does not state exactly what his commander's words were, but he does say that there was a violent explosion of anger, and that before Grant rode away he had ordered the offending teamster to be tied to a post for six hours.

This incident is remarkable, for commanders of great armies do not pay attention, ordinarily, to petty incidents. Long before they reach war's lofty summit they have become accustomed to destruction, to burning houses, to dead and dying men. The Napoleons, the Wellingtons and the Lees disregard the wounded soldiers at their feet and fix their gaze on far horizons. Grant was a good horizon-gazer, too, but when

horses were being beaten in the face, it was for him a different matter.

A few days after this episode he launched his swarm of men against the impregnable Confederate defenses at Cold Harbor. There they were shot down in a slaughter that has never had a parallel on this continent. Then for three days hundreds of desperately stricken men lay in the bullet-swept space between the lines, under the torrid sun, dying within sight of both armies, while Grant and Lee haggled over the finicky terms of a truce for taking care of the wounded.

The key to these contradictions lies in the fact that Grant was a zoophile, an animal-lover. A strongly accentuated zoöphilism, such as an inordinate love of horses or dogs, throws the emotional nature out of balance; and those who are possessed by it are not likely to care very much for people.

In Grant's case it was probably a reflex of the attitude of Georgetown people toward him as a boy. Consider him as a sensitive child, pathetic in his hunger for love and appro bation, and finding himself nicknamed "Useless" and the butt of village jokes. The companionship that he craved came only from horses . . . and among horses he had the sense of power that was of such vital necessity to him.

Somehow during his early childhood he had acquired an extraordinary inhibition against turning back when he had once started anywhere. He would not retrace his steps, if he could avoid it, even in cases where a turning back would not make the slightest difference. When he lived in New York, after his two terms as President, he still retained this lifelong taboo. It was said that he would not even reënter his house to get his umbrella after he had reached the sidewalk. Before going back he would walk around the block if there happened to be no servant in sight to send back. Of this characteristic he wrote:

One of my superstitions had always been when I started to go anywhere, or do anything, not to turn back, or

A Superstition

31

stop until the thing intended was accomplished. I have frequently started to go to places where I had never been and to which I did not know the way, depending upon making inquiries on the road, and if I got past the place without knowing it, instead of turning back, I would go on until a road was found turning in the right direction, take that, and come in by the other side.

He calls his dislike of retracing his steps a superstition, but it had in fact the formidable dimensions of an obsession. This peculiar and powerful trait was in full play during the Civil War, and often dominated his actions.

& 3

He did not want to have anything to do with his father's tannery, though Jesse Grant expected his eldest son to become a tanner, as a matter of course. The Memoirs say, in their cool, restrained manner, "I detested the trade, preferring almost any other labor; but I was fond of agriculture, and of all employment in which horses were used."

To touch the bloody hides awakened in him a sleeping, shapeless repulsion which was made even more terrible because it had neither a form nor a name. But to be a tanner one had to scrape the hides as well as touch them. On one side of the skin the dried blood and scraps of flesh are removed by scraping; then the hide is turned over and the hair is taken off in a somewhat similar fashion.

In the beam-room of Jesse Grant's tannery the reeking skins were stretched from poles laid horizontally across the beams of the roof. A semi-dark, fetid place this was, with a musty smell of stagnant blood.

Ulysses managed to avoid the beam-room by various expedients. On occasion he would volunteer to grind the tanbark, and this would occupy his time. Outside of its monotony, the bark-grinding was not bad as a job. He had only to put

the slabs of oak bark in the hopper of a machine. But this job could not be made to last long enough; the bark was soon ground, and then there was more talk of the beam-room.

However, he found to his joy that other enterprises lying close at hand would take him away from the tannery altogether. One of these was the hauling of passengers from Georgetown to the steamboat landing on the Ohio river, ten miles away. He was engaged in that, at times, before he had reached the age of eleven.

And he drove a team forty miles to Cincinnati, carrying a load of rags which he sold for fifteen dollars. A more adventurous journey was one that he made halfway across the state with passengers who were on their way to Toledo. While he was still a child he had become-in the intervals of schooling and farm work-a sort of public hack-driver around Georgetown.

In the meantime, with the passing of years, his father was growing more and more well-to-do financially. He wanted Ulysses, before he entered the tannery as his successor, to have a better education than the Georgetown school could give, and in the beginning of the winter of 1836 when the boy was fourteen-he was sent to the Seminary at Maysville, Kentucky, across the river and about twenty miles distant from Georgetown.

He attended the Maysville school only one winter, and his career there was so colorless that he was recalled with much difficulty by his fellow-pupils when the name of Grant rose like a sun some twenty years later. He was an average scholar, better in mathematics than in anything else.

In the spring of 1837 he returned to his home in Georgetown, and the tannery nudged up nearer to him and began to make inviting gestures. He was almost grown up, in his sixteenth year; and it was time for him to walk in his father's footsteps.

Hears of West Point

33

One day his father said to him, "Ulysses, you'll have to go into the beam-room and help me to-day." It appears that there was a shortage of workmen at the time.

Ulysses said nothing at first, but as he and his father approached the tannery, he burst out in protest. "Father," he exclaimed, "this tanning is not the kind of work I like. I'll work at it, though, if you wish me to, until I am twenty-one; but you may depend upon it, I'll never work a day longer at it after that."

Jesse Grant was a kindly parent, notwithstanding his knockdown style of polemics. He put his hand on the boy's shoulder and they stopped in the road.

"My son, I don't want you to work at it now," he declared, "if you don't like it, and don't mean to stick to it. I want you to work at whatever you like and intend to follow. Now, what do you think you would like?”

Ulysses reflected a moment, and replied: "I'd like to be a farmer, or a down-the-river trader, or get an education.” Jesse thought that he might be able to procure an appointment as a cadet in the United States Military Academy at West Point for Ulysses. "How would you like that?" he asked.

"First-rate," the boy replied.

What I have just quoted contains Jesse Grant's account of this occurrence, as he related it thirty years later. It does not agree in all respects with that of his distinguished son, who said that he heard nothing of the West Point proposal at that time, and that he objected to it when he did hear of it.

At all events, it is certain that Ulysses made a determined objection to working in the tannery; that his father humored him, and that he began at once to try to get his son into West Point, though Ulysses may not have been aware of his father's intentions.

Appointments to the Military Academy were made by Congressmen and Senators, then as now, and at that time the in