On the Trail of Grant and Lee | Page 9

and boarded with Owen Brown, little
dreaming that his son and his employer's son would some day shake the
world.
It was not at Deerfield, however, but at Point Pleasant, Ohio, that Jesse
Grant's distinguished son was born on April 27, 1822, in a cottage not
much larger than the cabin in which Abraham Lincoln first saw the
light. Mr. and Mrs. Grant and other members of their family differed
among themselves as to what the boy should be called, but they settled
the question by each writing his or her favorite name on a slip of paper
and then depositing all the slips in a hat, with the understanding that the
child should receive the first two names drawn from that receptacle.
This resulted in the selection of Hiram and Ulysses, and the boy was
accordingly called Hiram Ulysses Grant until the United States
government re-christened him in a curious fashion many years later. To
his immediate family, however, he was always known as Ulysses,
which his playmates soon twisted into the nickname "Useless," more or
less good-naturedly applied.
Grant's father moved to Georgetown, Ohio, soon after his son's birth,
and there his boyhood days were passed. The place was not at that time
much more than a frontier village and its inhabitants were mostly
pioneers--not the adventurous, exploring pioneers who discover new
countries, but the hardy advance-guard of civilization, who clear the
forests and transform the wilderness into farming land. Naturally, there
was no culture and very little education among these people. They were
a sturdy, self-respecting, hard-working lot, of whom every man was the
equal of every other, and to whom riches and poverty were alike
unknown. In a community of this sort there was, of course, no
pampering of the children, and if there had been, Grant's parents would
probably have been the last to indulge in it. His father, Jesse Grant, was
a stern and very busy man who had neither the time nor the inclination
to coddle the boy, and his mother, absorbed in her household duties and
the care of a numerous family, gave him only such attention as was
necessary to keep him in good health. Young Ulysses was, therefore,
left to his own devices almost as soon as he could toddle, and he
quickly became self-reliant to a degree that alarmed the neighbors.

Indeed, some of them rushed into the house one morning shouting that
the boy was out in the barn swinging himself on the farm horses' tails
and in momentary danger of being kicked to pieces; but Mrs. Grant
received the announcement with perfect calmness, feeling sure that
Ulysses would not amuse himself in that way unless he knew the
animals thoroughly understood what he was doing.
Certainly this confidence in the boy's judgment was entirely justified as
far as horses were concerned, for they were the joy of his life and he
was never so happy as when playing or working in or about the stables.
Indeed, he was not nine years old when he began to handle a team in
the fields. From that time forward he welcomed every duty that
involved riding, driving or caring for horses, and shirked every other
sort of work about the farm and tannery. Fortunately, there was plenty
of employment for him in the line of carting materials or driving the
hay wagons and harrows, and his father, finding that he could be
trusted with such duties, allowed him, before he reached his teens, to
drive a 'bus or stage between Georgetown and the neighboring villages
entirely by himself. In fact, he was given such free use of the horses
that when it became necessary for him to help in the tannery, he would
take a team and do odd jobs for the neighbors until he earned enough,
with the aid of the horses, to hire a boy to take his place in the hated
tan-yard.
This and other work was, of course, only done out of school hours, for
his parents sent him as early as possible to a local "subscription" school,
which he attended regularly for many years. "Spare the rod and spoil
the child" was one of the maxims of the school, and the first duty of the
boys on assembling each morning was to gather a good-sized bundle of
beech-wood switches, of which the schoolmaster made such vigorous
use that before the sessions ended the supply was generally exhausted.
Grant received his fair share of this discipline, but as he never resented
it, he doubtless got no more of it than he deserved and it probably did
him good.
Among his schoolmates he had the reputation of talking less than any
of the other boys and of knowing more about horses than all of them
put together. An