Ulysses S. Grant - Michael Korda [6]
While the Grants did not “come over on the Mayflower,” they still came over early enough for the family to maintain a strong pride in its roots—a fact that is important to bear in mind. The Grants did not rise to great wealth in the new world, and they moved restlessly westward from generation to generation in search of it, to places where the concept of “landed gentry” was unknown, but their family pride was quite as strong as that of the Lees of Virginia. Modern biographers and historians relish the contrast between the seedy-looking Grant, who was “born on the frontier,” and the aristocratic Virginian Lee, but they overlook the fact that Grant considered himself to be every bit Lee’s social equal: No child of Jesse Grant’s could have thought otherwise.
Grant was not a snob (although later in life he would relish the applause of crowds and the company of crowned heads), but he would never have stooped to play the country bumpkin, as Lincoln did so successfully, and much as he would dislike West Point, he never forgot that he had been there, and expected, in his quiet but firm way, to be treated like an officer and a gentleman. People might see him as an “ordinary man” who had—late in life, and improbably—made good, and many contemporary writers have in fact seen in his career the triumph of the “ordinary man” and taken that as the explanation for his two terms in the White House and the remarkable veneration in which he was held, but there is no indication that Grant ever thought himself as ordinary at all, or that the Grant family had ever considered themselves to be in the least ordinary.
The Grants may not have thought themselves better than anyone, but they certainly thought themselves as good as anyone—a very American attitude. Jesse Grant pulled himself up by his own bootstraps (as the saying went) to become a small entrepreneur in the leather business, and by the time Ulysses was one year old his father had moved the family to Georgetown, in the adjoining county, hardly a metropolis but offering a better scope for business.
Grant’s view of his own childhood takes up only seven of the more than twelve hundred pages of his memoirs, and he scarcely mentions Hannah in them at all, giving no hint of her feelings toward him or his toward her. Her reserve was such as to make some of Grant’s biographers speculate that she may have been retarded, but this seems unlikely, not only because it is hard to imagine that Jesse Grant, a talkative, ambitious busybody, would marry anybody retarded, but also because on the few occasions when Hannah is recorded as having said something, it is usually sharp, pithy, and to the point.
To those familiar with what is now called “the Midwestern character” (it was “Western” back then in the early nineteenth century, when Ohio and Illinois were still close to the frontier), Hannah’s silence, strong religious faith, reluctance to explore her own emotions, or talk to strangers would not seem unfamiliar or strange. There are still plenty of women out there today who don’t wear their heart on their sleeve and don’t gush over or about their children. Much is made of the fact that when Grant went back to see his mother after the war, she merely said, “Well, Ulysses, you’ve become a great man now,” and went back inside to her chores, but much the same stories are told about Ike’s mother and Harry Truman’s, and they need not necessarily mean that Hannah was not pleased by her son’s success. Perhaps what mattered most to Hannah Grant was that her son should not get “a swollen head” merely because he was the