Grant and Sherman: The Friendship that Won the Civil War Read Free

turned at the farther end and came into the stretch at which the bar was placed, the horse increased his pace and measuring his stride for the great leap before him, bounded into the air and cleared the bar, carrying his rider as if man and beast had been welded together. The spectators were breathless.
     

    During Grant’s four years at West Point, some cadets, when they had a free hour, would go to the riding hall just to watch Grant school York and the other horses. In one event, Grant and York cleared a bar placed so high that their performance set an academy record that stood for twenty-five years.
    Grant’s roommate in his last year at West Point was Frederick Dent, a cadet from St. Louis. When newly commissioned Lieutenant Grant was assigned to the Fourth Infantry Regiment stationed at Jefferson Barracks, a few miles south of St. Louis, his friend Dent urged him to call on his family at White Haven, the large nearby farm to which the prosperous Dents annually moved from their winter house in St. Louis to spend much of the rest of the year. White Haven was not one of the great Southern plantations, but it had twelve hundred fertile acres situated on the broad Gravois Creek. In addition to the white-painted main house with its traditional big porches running along both the ground floor and the bedroom floor above it, all covered with honeysuckle and other vines, there were eighteen cabins in which the Dent family’s slaves lived. The Dents’ daughter Emma later described the place:

    The farm of White Haven was even prettier than its name, for the pebbly shining Gravois ran through it, and there were beautiful groves growing all over it, and acres upon acres of grassy meadows where the cows used to stand knee-deep in blue grass and clover … The house we lived in stood in the centre of a long sweep of wooded valley and the creek ran through the trees not far below it … Through the grove of locust trees a walk led from a low porch to an old-fashioned stile gate, about fifty yards from the house.
     

    Emma was six years old when Lieutenant Grant came to call at this rural scene on a day when her eighteen-year-old sister Julia was away on a long visit to St. Louis. She described their first meeting: “I was nearing my seventh birthday, that bright spring afternoon in 1843 when, with my four little darky playmates, Henrietta, Sue, Ann, and Jeff, I went out hunting for birds’ nests. They were my slaves as well as my chums, for father had given them to me at birth, and as we were all of about an age, we used to have some good times together. This day, I remember, we were out in front of the turnstile and I had my arms full of birds’ nests and was clutching a tiny unfledged birdling in one hand when a young stranger rode blithely up to the stile.”
    In answer to this man on horseback’s “How do you do? Does Mister Dent live here?” Emma was speechless. “I thought him the handsomest person I had ever seen in my life, this strange young man. He was riding a splendid horse, and, oh, he sat it so gracefully! The whole picture of him and his sleek, prancing steed was so good to look upon that I could do nothing but stare at it—so forgetting the poor little thing crying in my hand that I nearly crushed it to death. Of course, I knew he was a soldier from the barracks, because he had on a beautiful blue suit with gold buttons down the front, but he looked too young to be an officer.”
    When Emma recovered herself enough to answer “Yes, sir,” after the lieutenant asked for the second time if this was the Dents’ house, this scene ensued:

    We children followed him up to the porch, trailing in his wake and close to his feet like a troop of little black-and-tan puppies … At the porch we heard him introduce himself to my father as Lieutenant Grant. Then my mother and sister Nellie came out to meet him … My own contribution to the entertainment of the stranger was one continuous stare up at his face … His