Personal Memoirs of General U.S. Grant, vol 1 | Page 6

family of nine children, and was drowned at
the mouth of the Kanawha River, Virginia, in 1825, being at the time
one of the wealthy men of the West.
My grandmother Grant died in 1805, leaving seven children. This
broke up the family. Captain Noah Grant was not thrifty in the way of
"laying up stores on earth," and, after the death of his second wife, he
went, with the two youngest children, to live with his son Peter, in
Maysville. The rest of the family found homes in the neighborhood of
Deerfield, my father in the family of judge Tod, the father of the late
Governor Tod, of Ohio. His industry and independence of character
were such, that I imagine his labor compensated fully for the expense
of his maintenance.
There must have been a cordiality in his welcome into the Tod family,
for to the day of his death he looked upon judge Tod and his wife, with
all the reverence he could have felt if they had been parents instead of
benefactors. I have often heard him speak of Mrs. Tod as the most
admirable woman he had ever known. He remained with the Tod
family only a few years, until old enough to learn a trade. He went first,
I believe, with his half-brother, Peter Grant, who, though not a tanner
himself, owned a tannery in Maysville, Kentucky. Here he learned his
trade, and in a few years returned to Deerfield and worked for, and
lived in the family of a Mr. Brown, the father of John Brown--"whose
body lies mouldering in the grave, while his soul goes marching on." I
have often heard my father speak of John Brown, particularly since the
events at Harper's Ferry. Brown was a boy when they lived in the same
house, but he knew him afterwards, and regarded him as a man of great
purity of character, of high moral and physical courage, but a fanatic
and extremist in whatever he advocated. It was certainly the act of an
insane man to attempt the invasion of the South, and the overthrow of

slavery, with less than twenty men.
My father set up for himself in business, establishing a tannery at
Ravenna, the county seat of Portage County. In a few years he removed
from Ravenna, and set up the same business at Point Pleasant,
Clermont County, Ohio.
During the minority of my father, the West afforded but poor facilities
for the most opulent of the youth to acquire an education, and the
majority were dependent, almost exclusively, upon their own exertions
for whatever learning they obtained. I have often heard him say that his
time at school was limited to six months, when he was very young, too
young, indeed, to learn much, or to appreciate the advantages of an
education, and to a "quarter's schooling" afterwards, probably while
living with judge Tod. But his thirst for education was intense. He
learned rapidly, and was a constant reader up to the day of his death in
his eightieth year. Books were scarce in the Western Reserve during his
youth, but he read every book he could borrow in the neighborhood
where he lived. This scarcity gave him the early habit of studying
everything he read, so that when he got through with a book, he knew
everything in it. The habit continued through life. Even after reading
the daily papers--which he never neglected--he could give all the
important information they contained. He made himself an excellent
English scholar, and before he was twenty years of age was a constant
contributor to Western newspapers, and was also, from that time until
he was fifty years old, an able debater in the societies for this purpose,
which were common in the West at that time. He always took an active
part in politics, but was never a candidate for office, except, I believe,
that he was the first Mayor of Georgetown. He supported Jackson for
the Presidency; but he was a Whig, a great admirer of Henry Clay, and
never voted for any other democrat for high office after Jackson.
My mother's family lived in Montgomery County, Pennsylvania, for
several generations. I have little information about her ancestors. Her
family took no interest in genealogy, so that my grandfather, who died
when I was sixteen years old, knew only back to his grandfather. On
the other side, my father took a great interest in the subject, and in his

researches, he found that there was an entailed estate in Windsor,
Connecticut, belonging to the family, to which his nephew, Lawson
Grant--still living--was the heir. He was so much interested in the
subject that he got his nephew to empower him to act in the matter, and
in 1832 or 1833, when I was