The Training Ground Read Free Page B

States and Mexico not increased over the next two years. When they did, however, Scott would remember Lee and call upon him to prove himself on the field of battle.
    S OMEWHERE IN THE middle of the West Point alumni hierarchy, between the capricious nature of the class goats and the perfection of Lee, was a small young man from Ohio. His given name was Hiram Ulysses, but his fellow cadets called him simply Sam — or if a last name was required, Sam Grant. The Ohioan wanted little to do with the army and had only come to West Point to please his father. Grant was clean shaven and square jawed, stood five eight, and weighed just 120 pounds; he had steel blue eyes, auburn hair that he would part on the left until the day he died, and, concurrent with his arrival along the Hudson, a nagging cough — compliments of West Point’s drafty dormitories — that made him wonder if he had tuberculosis. Friends considered him noble and powerfully loyal and thought it obvious that the introverted young man had little if any experience when it came to the opposite sex. Yet they marveled at the way he sat a horse and at his almost spiritual connection with those animals. Still basically a boy, he was already complicated.
    Grants had lived in America for eight generations, dating back to the arrival of the Englishman Matthew Grant, who sailed to Massachusetts on the
Mary and John
in 1630. Sam’s great-grandfather had been a commissioned officer in the British army who died in 1756 during the French and Indian War. His grandfather Noah fought for the colonists at the Battle of Bunker Hill and then served clear on through the Revolutionary War, mustering out after the grand finale at the Battle of Yorktown. Afterward, Noah joined the large number of settlers marching westward in search of opportunity. He ended up in Ohio, where he fathered nine children. Unable to support them all, Noah sent the more capable off to make their way in the world. Noah’s fourth child, Jesse, was kicked out at the age of eleven. Never having forgotten the years of poverty that ensued, he grew into a tightfisted and controlling man with an ironic fondness for personal luxury. A tanner by trade, he married the warm and devout Hanna Simpson in 1821. Their first child, a son, was born on April 27, 1822, in Point Pleasant, Ohio. Selecting the boy’s name was no easy matter. Relatives gathered from far and wide to offer their opinions before the family finally settled on Hiram Ulysses — his father being partial to the former and his grandmother having a fondness for the Greek hero. His father’s preference would go to waste when Grant applied to West Point seventeen years later. The congressman making the appointment knew that the child went by Lyss, so he assumed Ulysses to be a first name. He also made the mistake of believing that the Grants had followed the common practice of using the mother’s maiden name in the middle. Thus Hiram Ulysses Grant became Ulysses S. Grant. Lyss didn’t learn that his name had been changed until he signed in at West Point, and officials there, showing the stubborn military logic that Grant would come to despise, refused to reverse the blunder. His fellow cadets soon took the mistake a step further. “I remember seeing his name on the bulletin board, where the names of all the newcomers were posted,” noted William Tecumseh Sherman, a cadet three years ahead of Grant. “I ran my eye down the columns, and there saw ‘U.S. Grant.’ A lot of us began making up names to fit the initials. One said, ‘United States Grant.’ Another ‘Uncle Sam Grant.’ A third said, ‘Sam Grant.’ That name stuck to him.”
    Jesse Grant had submitted Sam’s application without telling his son; Grant got his revenge by being an indifferent cadet. “A military life had no charms for me. And I had not the faintest idea of staying in the army even if I should be graduated, which I did not expect,” he once explained. “I did not take hold