ULYSSES S GRANT BOOK HOW TO

He found, when he reached the school, that his name had been changed. Now Ulysses did not have the least desire to be a soldier and did not want to go to this school one bit, but he had always obeyed his father, and started on a fifteen days' journey from Ohio without any more talk than the simple statement: 'I don't want to go, but if you say so, I suppose I must.' Talking so much with grown men gave him an old manner, and as his judgment was pretty good he was called by merchants a 'sharp one.' He would have been contented to jaunt about the country, trading and colt-breaking, all his life, but his father decided he ought to have military training and obtained for him an appointment at West Point (the United States' school for training soldiers that was started by George Washington) without Ulysses knowing a thing about it. Sometimes he went alone, and sometimes he took one of his chums with him. When he was only twelve, his father began sending him seventy or eighty miles away from home, on business errands. Because he was not a shirk and always told the truth, his father was in the habit of saying, after the farm chores were done: 'Now, Ulysses, you can take the horse and carriage and go where you like. Still he usually had his lessons and was decidedly bright in arithmetic.

In the winters Ulysses went to school, but he did not care for it as much as he did for outdoor life and work with his hands. His father and all the neighbors had Ulysses break their colts.

ULYSSES S GRANT BOOK HOW TO

He must have been a strong boy, for at the age of eleven he used to hold the plow when his father wanted to break up new land, and it makes the arms and back ache to hold a heavy plow! He was patient with all animals and knew just how to manage them. When he was seven, it was part of his work to drive the span of horses in a heavy team that carried the cord-wood from the wood-lot to the house and shop. He liked best of all to be around the horses, and before he was six years old he rode horseback as well as any man in Georgetown. As Ulysses got old enough to help at any kind of work, it was plain he would never be a tanner. There his father built a nice, new, brick house and managed a big farm, besides his regular work of tanning leather. While Ulysses was still a baby, his parents moved to Georgetown, Ohio.

Then Hannah Grant, who could not bear to have him disappointed, answered: 'Let him have both names!' So the baby was christened Hiram Ulysses Grant. But I wanted him to be called Hiram, who was a good king in Bible times.' 'Well,' murmured the grandfather, 'our dear child is named for a great soldier of the olden days. The slip she drew had the name 'Ulysses' on it. 'Now,' said the father to one of the aunts, 'draw from the hat a slip of paper, and whatever name is written on that slip shall be the name of my son.' These slips of paper were all put into grandpa's tall, silk hat which was placed on the spindle-legged table. At last, the father, mother, grandfather, grandmother, and the two aunts each wrote a favorite name on a bit of paper. In that house there were four people besides themselves to suit. So off they rode from their little cottage, carrying the baby with them.īut at grandpa's it was even worse. He was a darling child, and as the weeks went by, and he grew prettier every minute, it was harder and harder to think of a name good enough for him.įinally Jesse Grant, the father, told his wife, Hannah, he thought it would be a good plan to ask the grandparents' advice. Once upon a time, at Point Pleasant, a small town on the Ohio River, there lived a young couple who could not decide how to name their first baby. Stimpson's time reference when you read it with your children. Grant for young children was excerpted from Mary Stoyell Stimpson's book, A Child's Book of American Biography (1915). Uncle Tom's Cabin - Harriet Beecher Stowe.The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett.The Red Badge of Courage - Stephen Crane.The Scarlet Letter - Nathaniel Hawthorne.

Ulysses s grant book