Ulysses S. Grant - Michael Korda [9]
But if there was one trade Ulysses knew he didn’t want to follow, it was tanning leather. The tannery was next to the house, with its noxious smells of rendered fat and dried blood, and from his room he could hear the lowing of the frightened old cattle that were penned up outside it waiting to be slaughtered, and their screams as they were killed.
Tanning began—it was the most important step—with removing the hide from the animal’s body, scraping all the fat and blood off the inside of it, then turning it over and scraping off the hair. For a young man who couldn’t bear to see animals killed and who from the beginning wouldn’t eat meat unless it was burned beyond recognition, this was not an apprenticeship he could have welcomed. It is to Jesse’s credit that while Ulysses’ doubts about entering the tannery business may have dismayed him, he knew a lost cause when he saw one. On the grounds that an education might do Ulysses some good—it was that or let him become a farm worker—Jesse took the unusual step of writing to his congressman to propose Ulysses for West Point (without bothering to inform Ulysses). What Hannah thought of it we do not know, though she might have echoed Wellington’s mother, who said of him as a child, when it was decided he should be a soldier, “So my poor Arthur is fit for nothing but food for powder.”
His appointment to West Point was unusual in a good many ways, the most important being that Jesse, in his role as a politically ambitious busybody, had alienated Thomas L. Hamer, the congressman from his district. Hamer was a Democrat, while Jesse Grant was a Whig, and given to intemperate and outspoken political arguments, during the course of which he had said any number of things that offended Hamer when he heard about them. Nevertheless Jesse swallowed his pride and wrote to Hamer; and Hamer, perhaps out of good nature, or more likely because he thought it might shut Jesse up, agreed to give the vacant appointment in his control to young Ulysses Grant.
At this point in Grant’s young life (he was sixteen) his legal name was Hiram Ulysses Grant, but Representative Hamer could not be expected to know that, since everyone always referred to the boy as Ulysses. Hamer knew that Ulysses had a middle name and, taking a wild guess, made the assumption that it was probably Simpson, after Hannah’s family. He wrote to the War Department to inform them that his choice for the vacancy was Ulysses Simpson Grant. Thus, accidentally, Grant’s name would be recorded by the War Department and at West Point as U. S. Grant.1
West Point, when Grant arrived there in May 1839, was not then the vast institution it is now, of course, and indeed the U.S. Army at the time was itself small and inbred. Many in the United States still regarded the whole idea of a professional army, however small (and of West Point itself), with deep suspicion. America was a democracy—the creation of a military elite seemed profoundly undemocratic. Quite apart from that, there was the question of what purpose the army served. The only enemy the United States had fought in the past was Great Britain, but relationships with the former mother country were becoming increasingly cordial, so apart from garrisoning a few forlorn forts against the Indians on the frontier, there was not much for the army to do. What is more, the legend of a “citizen army”—based on the experience of Concord, Lexington, and Bunker Hill—played a large part in the country’s national self-image. Great Britain and the European monarchies might have strutting “regulars” and an aristocratic officer corps, but despite the experience of the Revolutionary War and the War of 1812—both of which had eventually been won by trained regulars, not the militia—the ideal of the Minute Man leaving his farm with his rifle over his shoulder to fight the Redcoats, and voting to select his own officers, was a potent, mythic part of the national consciousness.
The antithesis of this point of view was represented by Gen.