Ulysses S. Grant - Michael Korda [7]
Descriptions of Grant’s childhood tend to sound a little like pages from Huckleberry Finn, but this is partly because Grant did not dwell on it much, so biographers have been left to invent most of it, in the manner of Parson Weems reinventing George Washington’s childhood as an improving tale. There does not seem to have been any conflict between Ulysses and his siblings (he had two younger brothers and three younger sisters), and there is no evidence that he was particularly unhappy—though of course in those days children weren’t expected to be happy, nor was life organized to produce happiness for them. A much-told story about Grant relates how, when he was an infant, he crawled out into the street and came to a stop between the hooves of a team of horses that was tethered outside. Terrified neighbors ran to inform Mrs. Grant of the danger her son was in, but to their surprise she did not run out to rescue him, figuring fatalistically perhaps that if Ulysses could get himself into that dangerous position, he could also get himself out of it. Or it may be that Hannah Grant had already learned one of the most remarkable things about her son—that he had a natural empathy for horses, a gift for calming them that was to last all his life. Ulysses was not afraid of horses, and they were not afraid of him, and from a very early age he gained a statewide reputation as an early-nineteenth-century version of “the Horse Whisperer,” a talent he never lost.
We do not know how Grant went about “gentling” difficult and fractious horses, and he may not have known himself. He spoke to them softly and calmly, he stroked them, he never resorted to punishment with the whip—but the important thing was that somehow the horses sensed that Grant was their friend, and they trusted him. Had he been able to achieve the same effect with politicians and financiers, his presidency might have been more successful.
There has been a tendency to take Grant’s special feel for horses as a matter of small importance, or to claim that it was a skill shared by many people who grew up on a farm, but that is a mistake. Gentling and calming horses was a rare and valuable skill in the days when the horse was practically the only means of transportation, and the fact that people brought their horses to the young Grant from miles away must have made him something of a minor celebrity. We are told that even as a boy of ten he could ride horses nobody else could, and gentle horses everybody else had given up on—valuable accomplishments in an age when a farm horse represented a substantial investment.
Stories of Grant’s horsemanship—it was the sole subject in which he would excel at West Point—are legion, but one is worth retelling. Charged with bringing home an unbroken and difficult horse, the boy harnessed it to a buggy, only to have the horse run away with him and nearly take him straight off the edge of a steep cliff or embankment. The horse stopped, trembling and sweating, at the very precipice, and young Grant stepped out of the buggy as quietly as he could so as not to further alarm it. Then, after a moment’s reflection, he quickly bound his bandanna around the horse’s eyes, having heard somewhere that blind horses seldom run away. Blindfolded, the horse allowed itself to be calmed and then led back to the road. Once Grant resumed his seat in the buggy, the horse, still blindfolded, set off placidly, guided by the reins, and made no further attempt to bolt.
It is evident from this story that Grant not only had an innate sympathy for horses but used his intelligence to outwit them and calm their fears—he did not attempt to subdue horses, he outthought them. Not many adults, let alone boys, would have had the presence of mind to come up with the stratagem of blindfolding a runaway horse, or the courage to get back into the buggy