Ulysses Simpson Grant had received the nickname of the great;
HERO OF APPOMATTOX,
this APPOMATTOX is the place where old country lanes crawled across the country, where Robert E. Lee, commanding General of the army of Northern Virginia, surrendered his men to Ulysses S. Grant, General-in-Chief of all United States forces on April 9.1865. This great event signaled the end of the Southern states attempt to create a separate nation.
Today this area is a 1800 acre National Park in central Virginia.
from the 'Memoirs and Selected Letters 1839-1865', Grant wrote"... about half my school-days in Georgetown where spent at the school of John D. White a North Carolinian and father of Chilton White..."
(see photo on the left)
the second half of his schooling was at West Point
(see photo on the right)
where his father succeeded in getting him appointed there. It was here through a bureaucratic error his name was changed, the Hiram was dropped and Simpson was added. When Grant found out he was furious but adopted the name anyway.
After graduation he met Julia Dent, she was the sister of a fellow classmate of his at West Point. The Lieutenant and Julia started seeing a lot of each other, and when not together they started to miss each other, they fell madly in love and later married and devoted themselves to each other the rest of their lives.
~ this is Grants West Point class photo ~
During the Civil War Julia visited the headquarters often and was a favorite of both the officers and enlistedmen. In 1852 Ulysses was transferred to the west coast. He could not bring Julia with him as she was soon to deliver another baby. So she moved back with her parents. Communication was so bad it took over 6 months before he learned that she had a boy. He missed his family so much. He tried to save enough money to bring them to him, but could not. This was a sad time for him, missing his family was getting so unbearable, so after 2 years with no leave to see his family he resigned his new grade of Captain and left the military, to return to his family.
He tried his hand at farming and was unsuccessful. He was running out of money to support his family and no longer received any military support, he later returned to his father's place of business and started work in the leather business in Galena, Ill. Some say these were the poor years, but he says it was his character building years. And he saw to it that his wife never had to lift a finger in cleaning the house, there was hired help for her.