Memorial and Biographical History of Dallas County, Texas. Page: 98 of 1,110
vii, 9-1011 p. incl. ill., ports. : ports. ; 28 cm.View a full description of this book.
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PRESIDENTS OF THE UNITED STATES.
%X2 S l r ' LYSSES SIMPSON
GRANT, the eighteenth
President of the
United States, i869-'77,
was born April 27, i822,
at Po int Pleasant,
3!1 ' "r-~c Clermont County,
Ohio. His father was of Scotch
I :I descent, and a dealer in leather.
At the age of seventeen he enl
, tered the Military Academy at
West Point, and four years later
l [ll graduated twenty-first in a class
, j of thirty-nine, receiving the
H 4 commission of Brevet Second
Lieutenant. He was assigned
to the Fourth Infantry and remained
in the army eleven years. He was
engaged in every battle of the Mexican war
except that of Buena Vista, and received
two brevets for gallantry.
In 1848 Mr. Grant married Julia,daughter
of Frederick Dent, a prominent merchant of
St. Louis, and in I854, having reached the
grade of Captain, he resigned his commission
in the army. For several years he followed
farming near St. Louis, but unsuccessfully;
and in 1860 he entered the leather
trade with his father at Galena, Illinois.
When the civil war broke out in I86I,
Grant was thirty-nine years of age, but entirely
unknown to public men and withoutany personal acquaintance with great affairs.
President Lincoln's first call for troops was
made on the i5th of April, and on the i9th
Grant was drilling a company of volunteers
at Galena. He also offered his services to
the Adjutant-General of the army, but received
no reply. The Governor of Illinois,
however, employed him in the organization
of volunteer troops, and at the end of five
weeks he was appointed Colonel of the
Twenty-first Infantry. He took command
of his regiment in June, and reported first
to General Pope in Missouri. His superior
knowledge of military life rather surprised
his superior officers, who had never before
even heard of him, and they were thus led
to place him on the road to rapid advancement.
August 7 he was commissioned a
Brigadier-General of volunteers, the appointment
having been made without his
knowledge. He had been unanimously
recommended by the Congressmen from
Illinois, not one of whom had been his
personal acquaintance. For a few weeks
he was occupied in watching the movements
of partisan forces in Missouri.
September I he was placed in command
of the District of Southeast Missouri, with
headquarters at Cairo, and on the 6th, without
orders, he seized Paducah, at the mouth
of the Tennessee River, and commanding
the navigation both of that stream and ofI _ _ _
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Lewis Publishing Company. Memorial and Biographical History of Dallas County, Texas., book, 1892; Chicago, Illinois. (https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth20932/m1/98/: accessed April 27, 2024), University of North Texas Libraries, The Portal to Texas History, https://texashistory.unt.edu; crediting Dallas Public Library.