Ulysses S. Grant Read Online Free PDF

Jefferson Barracks, a few miles outside St. Louis, Missouri, to join the Fourth Infantry in 1843. Having failed to get into the cavalry, Grant had applied to be a teacher of mathematics at West Point, but this too was not to be. He was stuck in the infantry and would have to make the best of it, and make the best of Missouri as well.
    Grant was not then nor later in life a man who was fussy about his surroundings, but an army post in those days would have been a lonely place for a youngster, and the endless parades, drills, and fussy inspections of the infantry cannot have done much to cheer him up.His fellow officers played cards, drank, smoked, and idled the day away, and spent as much time as they could off post in nearby St. Louis, attending dances and trying to meet young women—none of them pursuits of much interest to Grant, who had never learned how to dance. After seven long months the Fourth Infantry was ordered down the Mississippi River to a temporary posting in western Louisiana, on the Texas border—even less promising country, and with even less to do for a second lieutenant who loved horses.
    At some point Grant became friendly with a big, bluff, cheerful young officer who had been in his class at West Point, Frederick T. Dent, and on returning to Jefferson Barracks, Dent invited Grant to his home, a farm near St. Louis. The Dents were a large family, on the borderline of being “gentry,” and Southern in their sympathies, their origins, and their traditions. Frederick’s father, “Colonel” Dent, was a slave owner on a small scale, affable and reasonably prosperous, but White Haven, though comfortable enough, was a simple farmhouse—a far cry from the great antebellum mansions of the Deep South—and later attempts by Mrs. Grant to portray the Dents as Southern oligarchs or White Haven as Tara, in the masterful phrase of William S. McFeely in his 1981 biography of Grant, were largely spurious. 1
    The Dents had made their way from Maryland to Missouri via Pittsburgh, and both there and in St. Louis, Colonel Dent had engaged rather languidly in “trade” to make the money to buy the farm, where he spent most of his time reading books and pontificating on politics. Laziness would seem to have been his besetting sin, rather than slave owning.
    Mrs. Dent, who had genteel social ambitions and a flair for self-dramatization worthy of a mother in a Tennessee Williams play, is said to have deeply resented being stuck on a farm outside St. Louis rather than being at the center of that city’s social life, where she felt she belonged. The Dents had six children, four boys and two girls: Ellen, usually called Nellie, and Julia.
    Making allowances for the differences between North and South, the Dents were not that much more elevated on the socioeconomic scale than were the Grants in Ohio, though Mrs. Dent was certainly a good deal more talkative and fashion conscious than the reclusive Hannah Grant, and Colonel Dent, though shrewd enough, was the very opposite of the kind of hard-edged, self-made, bustling Yankee businessman that Jesse Grant was. One can easily imagine, however, the effect that the lively Dents must have had on the lonely Ulysses Grant, and how much it must have meant to him to be accepted into the family.
    Apparently the first of the Dent sisters that he met was Nellie, but shortly afterward he and Julia met, and there took place what the French call un coup de foudre —love at first sight—at least on Julia’s part. They were soon spending many hours riding together—it is unclear whether Julia was an enthusiastic horsewoman or simply guessed it was the best way of engaging Ulysses’ interest—and before long, despite his shyness and awkwardness, they reached an “understanding.” Grant had finally found somebody who brought him out of his lonely and self-imposed isolation, who loved and admired him, and with whom he could talk. As for Julia, she had found her beau idéal . Ulysses