The Personal Memoirs of General U. S. Grant | Page 3

Hill. He
served until the fall of Yorktown, or through the entire Revolutionary
war. He must, however, have been on furlough part of the time--as I
believe most of the soldiers of that period were--for he married in
Connecticut during the war, had two children, and was a widower at the
close. Soon after this he emigrated to Westmoreland County,
Pennsylvania, and settled near the town of Greensburg in that county.
He took with him the younger of his two children, Peter Grant. The
elder, Solomon, remained with his relatives in Connecticut until old
enough to do for himself, when he emigrated to the British West Indies.
Not long after his settlement in Pennsylvania, my grandfather, Captain
Noah Grant, married a Miss Kelly, and in 1799 he emigrated again, this
time to Ohio, and settled where the town of Deerfield now stands. He
had now five children, including Peter, a son by his first marriage. My
father, Jesse R. Grant, was the second child--oldest son, by the second
marriage.
Peter Grant went early to Maysville, Kentucky, where he was very
prosperous, married, had a 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