Ulysses S. Grant

CHAPTER 1
 
“I WON’T GO”
 
When Ulysses Grant came mewling and spluttering into the world on April 27, 1822, in the remote settlement of Point Pleasant, Ohio, the American West was broad and green—the color of hope, of spring, of youth. The line of permanent settlements ran from the Wisconsin dells down to New Orleans. The nation had few decent roads, and its highways were the big rivers—the Hudson and the Susquehanna, the Delaware, the Ohio and the mighty Mississippi. The spring thaw each year unleashed a swiftly gathering stream of flatboats onto the Ohio River, carrying settlers from the East to claim a piece of the western future.
 
Life on the frontier was vigorous, the pace of change rapid. The hand of government was light upon the land and its people. Nowhere on Earth were people so free to move around, to speak their minds, to make money, or just make a new start as they were in the West. But this frontier was no earthly paradise. The western lands were driven by impatience, their privations made tolerable to many only by the heavy consumption of corn licker and vinegary wines wrung from indifferent grapes, from gulping down coarse beers stinking of yeast and rough applejack that brought a few fleeting hours of oblivion, followed by a headache that was slow to clear. Frontier life was cruelly hard on women, who fought never-ending battles against dirt, poverty and disease, a struggle that made many look and feel old at forty—if they managed to survive that long. Families were large, but death reaped a terrifying harvest among infants and small children. To preserve a family’s name and make some provision for old age, there was safety only in numbers.
 
The land they farmed, fished and hunted on had been wrested from the original inhabitants only since the Revolution. Many an early dwelling was a blockhouse, half buried in the ground and fortified against Indian attack. The War of 1812 had ended with the crushing defeat of Indian tribes from the Canadian border to the Gulf of Mexico. Their abandonment by the British broke forever the power of Native Americans to resist the white man’s advance to the Mississippi.
 
Massacres were the stepping-stones on the advance over the Alleghenies and into the dark green forests that cloaked the reverse slopes with huge oaks, sycamores and black walnut trees. The West was haunted in its winning. By the standards of the long-settled East, with its Indian wars now behind it, the western frontier when Grant was born was peopled by savages of every description. The veneer of civilization that separated the white man from the red was so thin that when conflict erupted it took an act of faith, or denial, to believe it even existed.
 
The settlers were almost without exception simple people, boasting little education or refinement. When they fell ill, they treated themselves with “sheeps’-turd tea” or potions that included human urine. As with farmers and artisans everywhere, theirs was a society where the hand that shook yours was almost certain to be strong and horny, with fingernails broken and black. The familiar elements of daily existence—the tick-infested bearskin coat hanging from a nail behind the door, the powder horn grubby with frequent handling on the bench next to the long Kentucky rifle, the jar of bear grease that men rubbed into their long, lank hair in a doomed pursuit of elegance, the feeble tallow candles and the whale-oil lamps with rags floating in them for wicks that filled the tightly closed, poorly ventilated small log houses with a smell of smoked fish, the itchy, louse-harboring homespun garments—were the fulfillment of nothing. They simply made a rude existence possible.
 
The hardships and privation of frontier life were there to be transcended, not embraced, the first muddy rungs on the ascent to a better life. Ulysses Grant was fortunate in having a father, Jesse Root Grant, who had already left the lowest rungs behind by the time his first child was born and was rapidly scaling the middle section of the social and economic scale. By 1822 Jesse was well on his way to putting the harshness and squalor of the typical frontier existence behind him. Jesse was a frontier success story, one of the handful who had made it. He had not risen to prosperity from nothing, but from less than nothing—from being the abandoned child of a drunken wastrel of a father who had squandered a substantial inheritance on rotgut whiskey.
 
The Grants had been established in America early. Jesse’s ancestors, Matthew and Priscilla Grant, landed in Plymouth, Massachusetts, one day in the summer of 1630 aboard the John and Mary. They were country people from Dorset, one of the most picturesque counties in southwest England. By the time of the Revolution, descendants of Matthew and Priscilla formed the core of a moderately prominent family in Connecticut. Jesse’s father, Noah Grant, claimed to have fought more than six years for American independence, beginning as a minuteman standing on Lexington Green when the first shots were fired and ending the war as a captain in the Continental Army. But neither the Revolutionary War records of Connecticut nor those in the National Archives contain any confirmation of his claim.
 
What is not in dispute is that Noah married during the Revolutionary War and his wife bore him two sons, but toward the end of the struggle, she died. What steadiness marriage and a settled family life might have provided was gone. Over the next five or six years he drank steadily, possibly heavily, and used up the inheritance that five generations of Grants had thriftily accumulated. His property and money gone, Noah did what countless Americans have done since—headed west to make a fresh start. He dumped his elder son, Solomon, on his parents-in-law and, taking his younger son, Peter, for companionship, lit out for western Pennsylvania. He wound up in a hamlet called Greensburg, a desolate spot twenty miles southeast of Pittsburgh, which was not yet a town, merely a remote frontier village of five hundred inhabitants.
 
To many, Greensburg might seem a better place to escape from than to, but for Noah Grant it was a kind of boozy Nirvana deep in the forest. Greensburg was located in Westmoreland County, whose role in the frontier economy consisted largely of brewing cider, beer and whiskey and shipping them downriver to Ohio and Kentucky. Here was a place where a hard-drinking man could pass for a (wobbly) pillar of the community. Noah scraped together a living of sorts as a trader in animal skins and married a young widow of these parts, Rachel Kelly. She bore him seven children and stoically shared his poverty. Rachel’s fourth child was Jesse Root Grant, born in January 1794, just as the frontier burst into flames.
 
Shortly before Noah Grant’s marriage, the Federal government imposed an excise tax on liquor to pay off debts from the Revolutionary War. Tempers were inflamed across the West, and in the summer of 1794 local militiamen burned down the home of the tax collector for western Pennsylvania. The Whiskey Rebellion brought the power of the new national government down hard on the stupefied malcontents. George Washington led an army over the mountains to impose Federal authority on the hard-drinking, tax-evading inhabitants of the West. Thirteen thousand soldiers with money in their breeches and energy to burn descended on Westmoreland County and Pittsburgh.
 
Everything that was edible, drinkable or fornicatory brought a high price. Many of the Whiskey Rebellion soldiers never went back to their old homes, having discovered a new world where land was cheap and the soil fertile. Within five years the village of Pittsburgh had been transformed into a thriving industrial town and forges pounded heavy metal on the outer rim of the civilized world.
 
It was time, Noah Grant decided, to move on. The man had a drifter’s soul. No place could hold him long. He loaded his wife, his children, his two cows and his horse aboard a flatboat and floated down the Ohio during the 1799 emigration season, coming to a halt in Fawcettstown, Ohio.
 
Three years later Noah set off again, eventually settling in a village in south-central Ohio called Deerfield. Shortly after arriving there, Rachel bore her seventh child; less than two years later she died, at the age of thirty-eight. At this point, Noah abandoned all pretense of bearing up under the responsibilities of fatherhood, scattered his children like chaff, and decamped to the home of his son Peter, who had started a tannery in Maysville, Kentucky.
 
Jesse, just turned eleven, was left to make his own way in the world. For three years he struggled as an undersize, underage hired hand on local farms until, twenty miles from Deerfield, he went to work for George Tod, a judge on the Ohio Supreme Court. Before he met the Tods, Jesse had not attended school for a single day, yet he was beginning to itch with a desire for learning. Mrs. Tod taught him to read, made sure his wages were sufficient to buy some decent clothes, and paid for him to go to school for six months.
 
The Tods introduced him to a better life than any he had glimpsed or even dreamed of in Noah’s wayward care. The Tod household possessed the epitome of culture to a rough-hewn western youth—silver spoons, not wooden dippers, and china bowls, not dull, gray hammered pewter, heavy in the hand and with a taste of tin and lead. Real china! Something deliberately made fragile and pleasant to the touch. What refinement. For the first time in his young life he had collided with the world beyond a rough frontier existence. Jesse yearned with all the intensity of an adolescent’s white-hot spirit to acquire silver spoons and china bowls of his own. A man who raised a silver spoon to his lips and supped from a china bowl commanded respect.
 
Jesse’s strategy for rising in the world could not have been simpler or more charged with emotion. It consisted mainly of being as unlike his father as possible. He intended to marry at twenty-five—but only if he could afford to support a wife. He would accumulate enough wealth to retire at sixty, unlike his father, who had forced himself in old age on one of his sons and eked out his last years as a useless lump that soaked up money and whiskey. Jesse would be sober, hardworking, reliable, and successful in life, a burden on no one, least of all his children. And whatever children he had, they would be cherished and supported, not starved of affection and thrown away when the going got tough.