THE STORY of the first forty years of Ulysses S. Grant's life is one of
dismal failure. Thereafter, the story is one of sudden success, of nu-
merous rewards, and of unexpected honors. However, the forty years of
adversity had no uses. They did not give rise to the twenty succeeding
years of accomplishment, nor did they serve as an adequate preparation
for glory. These two periods--Grant's entire career--were so neatly
severed from each other by the Civil War that they might easily have
been the careers of two separate individuals. Except for a few idiosyn-
crasies of manner and habit which Grant the general and Grant the
President shared with the ante-bellum Grant, the careers were practically
without connection. Had it not been for an occasional ghost of the first,
rising to haunt the second, even Grant himself might have forgotten his
first four decades of futile existence.

A life thus segmented could have been possible only to a man whose
personality was essentially colorless. Strong personalities, possessions
of men who roughhew their own destinies, seldom conform to the rules
in the copybooks. Their success or failure is absolute and final. In
achieving it, they mould themselves. Only a plastic person, following
purblindly conventional axioms of his day, could experience both fail-
ure and success. Only a person devoid of dramatic characteristics, of
dynamic force, and of any definite direction could emerge so calmly
from years of adversity and as inertly proceed to years of success. The
negative elements in Grant's nature very positively conditioned his
career. Ambition was foreign to his makeup. He evinced no desire to
hold political office or to rise beyond his appointments. Once having
tasted sweets, however, he clung to them with stubborn tenacity. Essen-
tially, Grant's was a submerged personality--an unimaginative, albeit
sensitive soul which shrank from contacts with the world, and hid its
sensitiveness under an impervious and taciturn shell.

To a large extent this suppressed personality was a result of parental
influences. Unfortunate in his parents, neither of whom possessed char-
acteristics which he cared to imitate, Grant inherited no abilities toward
adjustment in the world from either his verbose, aggressive, and eccen-

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