Ulysses S. Grant - Michael Korda [5]
You just had to look carefully, and most people hadn’t bothered.
Chapter Two
GRANT’S VIRTUES—his reserve, his quiet determination, his courage in the face of adversity—were all present in the shy, awkward, withdrawn child who seemed unable to please his father and toward whom his mother showed an indifference that was remarked on even at the very beginning of his life.
In a place—a small town on the Ohio River, where his bustling, self-important, and ambitious father, Jesse Grant, ran the tannery—and at a time—1822—when the high rate of infant mortality must have made many women feel that getting too attached to a baby was tempting fate—Hannah Grant’s apparent lack of interest in her own son is still curious, and it appears always to have puzzled Grant. Even allowing for the fact that people on or near the frontier didn’t fuss about babies and small children as they do today—largely an emotional self-protective mechanism—her detachment is hard to explain, and her attitude actually became stronger as the boy grew older.
It took Hannah six weeks to name her firstborn, which was certainly unusual, and it appears to have been by her wishes that he was named Ulysses, a romantic and, as it turned out, inappropriate name, since as an adult Grant would be quite the reverse of the sly fox of Homer’s poem, who outwitted so many stronger warriors and whose cunning was legendary. The hunchbacked Duke of Gloucester, before he takes the throne, congratulates himself (in Shakespeare’s words) on being able “to deceive as slyly as Ulysses could,” but sly deception would never be one of Ulysses Grant’s strengths—he was guileless, straightforward, and incapable of deceit, “naïve as a baby,” as Mark Twain put it.
Nobody seems to know why Hannah, a woman of firm religious belief (of the Methodist persuasion) should have been attracted to a name out of the Greek classics—there are stories that when the Grants were unable to agree on a name for their son, they sat down with their friends and relations and asked everyone at the table to write a name on a slip of paper, fold the slip, and put it in a bowl, and “Ulysses” was written on the one Mrs. Grant pulled out (perhaps her mother’s). This seems unlikely—to Hannah Grant the whole procedure would have seemed a lot like gambling, and Methodists were as strongly against gambling as they were against drinking—but whatever the reason, she waited six weeks before naming the child and then picked a very odd name indeed. Ulysses’ father prefaced it with the name “Hiram,” but his mother stuck stubbornly to Ulysses or “Lyss” to the end of her life, and whatever his feelings on the subject, Jesse Grant eventually went along with it.
(The taste for classical names was something of a fad at the time. In much the same way that names like Tara, Bambi, and Tiffany have supplanted Elizabeth, Susan, and Ann in our own day, American Protestants, as they moved farther away from the Puritan heartland of New England, began to feel free to reject names based on the New Testament [John, Matthew, Mark, and so on], or those based on the Old Testament [Isaac, Abraham, Israel, Noah, and the like], in favor of names that had a more “classical” and less religious ring to them, such as Ulysses. Whether it was Hannah or her mother who chose it, Ulysses, with its classical and pagan connections, is hardly a name that Cotton Mather would have condoned for an infant 150 years earlier in Massachusetts.)
In the nineteenth century, presidential candidates liked to boast that they had been “born in a log cabin,” and some were, of course, but Grant was not among them. His birthplace in Point Pleasant, Ohio, was a well-situated farmhouse with a view of the Ohio River, not a log cabin in the woods. Jesse Grant had his failings—many of which were to plague his son Ulysses once he had become a great and