On the Trail of Grant and LeeHill, Frederick Trevor
History
On the Trail of Grant and Lee
Hill, Frederick Trevor
Grant, Ulysses S. (Ulysses Simpson), 1822-1885; Lee, Robert E. (Robert Edward), 1807-1870
Deerfield, Ohio, was not a place of any importance when Captain Noah
Grant of Bunker Hill fame arrived there from the East. Indeed, it was
not then much more than a spot on the map and it has ever won any great
renown. Yet in this tiny Ohio village there lived at one and the same
time Owen Brown, the father of John Brown, who virtually began the
Civil War, and Jesse Grant, the father of Ulysses Grant, who practically
brought it to a close.
It is certainly strange that these two men should, with all the world to
choose from, have chanced upon the same obscure little village, but it
is still stranger that one of them should have become the employer of
the other and that they should both have lived in the very same house.
Such, however, is the fact, for when Jesse Grant first began to earn his
living as a tanner, he worked for and boarded with Owen Brown, little
dreaming that his son and his employer's son would some day shake the
world.
It was not at Deerfield, however, but at Point Pleasant, Ohio, that
Jesse Grant's distinguished son was born on April 27, 1822, in a cottage
not much larger than the cabin in which Abraham Lincoln first saw the
light. Mr. and Mrs. Grant and other members of their family differed
among themselves as to what the boy should be called, but they settled
the question by each writing his or her favorite name on a slip of paper
and then depositing all the slips in a hat, with the understanding that
the child should receive the first two names drawn from that receptacle.
This resulted in the selection of Hiram and Ulysses, and the boy
was accordingly called Hiram Ulysses Grant until the United States
government re-christened him in a curious fashion many years later. To
his immediate family, however, he was always known as Ulysses, which
his playmates soon twisted into the nickname "Useless," more or less
good-naturedly applied.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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