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blouse
which he wore with the straps of a major general tacked on. I could remember
when he used to haul logs for his father's tanyard back home in Georgetown.
There was eight years' difference in our ages: a big span between boys, enough
certainly to keep me from knowing him except by sight: but I could remember
many things about him. He was called Useless Grant in those days, and people
said he would never amount to anything. Mainly he was known for his love of
animals. It was strange, he loved them so much he never went hunting, and he
refused to work in the tanyard because he couldn’t bear the smell of dripping
hides. He had a way with horses. Later, at West Point, he rode the horse that set
a high-jump record.
    When I watched him drill the militia at Georgetown after he
finished at the Academy—he graduated far down the list and had almost every
demerit possible marked against his name for deportment—I got the idea he hated
the army. Seeing him stand so straight and severe, maneuvering the troops about
the courthouse square, I thought how different this was from what he would
prefer to be doing. Then the Mexican War broke out, and though he only had some
administrative job down there, we heard that he had distinguished himself under
fire, going after ammunition or something.
    Next thing we knew, he had married into a slave-owning
family down Missouri way—which was something of a joke because Old Man Grant
had been one of the original Abolitionists in our county. However much West
Point might have changed him, his method of asking his girl to marry him was
just like the Ulyss we had known back home. The way I
heard it, they were crossing a flooded bridge, the buggy jouncing, and the girl
moved over and took his arm and said, "I'm going to cling to you no matter
what happens" (she was a Missouri girl, all right) and when they were safe
on the other side Grant said to her, "How would you like to cling to me
for the rest of your life?"
    For five or six years after that we didn’t hear of him at
all. Then one day everybody knew about him. Stationed on the West Coast, away
from his family, he took to brooding and finally drank himself right out of the
army. His father-in-law gave him an eighty -acre farm
near St Louis. Grant cleared the land himself, then built a log house there and
named it Hard-scrabble. It was about this time that a man from home went down
to the city on business and came back saying he'd seen Grant on the street,
wearing his old army fatigue clothes and selling kindling by the bundle, trying
to make ends meet. But it was no go. He sold out and went into town, where he
tried to be a real-estate salesman.
    Now you’d think if ever a man had a chance to succeed at
anything, it would surely be in real estate in St Louis in the '50s. But that
was no go either. So Grant moved up to Galena, Illinois, where his brothers ran
a leather business, and went to work selling hides for a living, the occupation
he had hated so much twenty years before. Mostly, though, he just sat around
the rear of the store, for he was such a poor salesman that the brothers did
what they could to keep him away from their customers. He had a highborn wife
and four children to support, and at thirty-eight he was a confirmed failure in
every sense of the word.
    Then came Sumter. But at first not even the declaration of
war seemed to offer him an opportunity. He served as drill-master of the Galena
volunteers, but when the troops marched away he stayed behind because his
position was not official. Then his real chance came. The governor made him a
colonel in charge of recruit training at a camp near Springfield, and not long
afterwards he picked up a St Louis newspaper and read where he'd been made a
brigadier. This had been at the insistence of an Illinois congressman who
claimed the appointment for Grant as his share of the political spoils. No one
was more surprised than Grant himself.
    He was neither pro nor anti on the slavery