April 27, 1822. Grant is born in Point Pleasant, Ohio, to Jesse Root Grant and Hannah Simpson Grant, and named Hiram Ulysses Grant shortly thereafter after Jesse and Hannah conferred with relatives.
1823. October. Jesse moves the Grants to Georgetown, Ohio, where Jesse has also started a tannery and soon after that built a two-story brick house on the tannery’s block. This house would be Grant’s home throughout his boyhood. As a boy, Grant already preferred going by Ulysses—he disliked the name Hiram and that his initials were H.U.G.—and was referred to by those familiar with him as simply “Ulyss,” or “Lyss,” though as a result other children sometimes taunted him with the similar-sounding epithetic nickname “Useless.”
1823. December 2. President James Monroe outlines the policy later named the Monroe Doctrine: The U.S. recognizes existing European colonies in the Western Hemisphere but therein further European colonization or interference with sovereign states will be deemed a threat to U.S. security.
1835. October 2. The Texas Revolution begins against the Mexican government. It ends on April 21, 1836, and the Republic of Texas is formed but unrecognized by Mexico, and its borders remain disputed.
1836. June 15. Arkansas is admitted to the Union as the 25th state and a slave state, i.e., slavery and the slave trade are permitted in the state.
Fall 1838–spring 1838. Grant attends the Maysville Academy of John Brett Richeson and Jacob Rand, in Maysville, Kentucky.
1837. January 26. Michigan is admitted to the Union as the 26th state and a free state (i.e., neither slavery nor the slave trade are permitted in the state).
1838. Fall. Grant is enrolled by Jesse in the Presbyterian Academy of abolitionist Rev. John Rankin for the winter period, ending spring 1839. The academy is an active beacon on the Underground Railroad.
1839. March. At Jesse’s request, Member of the U.S. House of Representatives Thomas Lyon Hamer, agrees to nominate Grant for entrance to the U.S. Military Academy, West Point, New York. Hamer subsequently cites Grant’s name incorrectly as Ulysses S. Grant. The middle initial presumably implied the name Simpson. The error may have stemmed from the era’s relatively common custom of children having their mother’s maiden name as their middle name—Grant’s mother being a Simpson—or from Grant having a brother named Simpson. Regardless, upon reaching the West Point academy, Grant is told that his posted name is unalterable by academy policy, and Grant simply adopts it as his own for the remainder of his life.
1839. May 29. Grant arrives at West Point.
1839. American Slavery as It Is: Testimony of a Thousand Witnesses, written by abolition and women’s suffrage activists Theodore Dwight Weld, Angelina Grimké, and Sarah Grimké is published by the American Anti-slavery Society. More than 100,000 copies sell in 1839 alone. It inspires Harriet Beecher Stowe to write her 1850 novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin.
1843. July 28. Grant, age 21, graduates from the U.S. Military Academy, West Point, New York. He has placed 21st out of a class of 39 cadets. Automatically at the rank of brevet second lieutenant by virtue of his graduation, Grant is assigned to the Fourth U.S. Infantry Regiment and will report to Jefferson Barracks, south of St. Louis.
1844. February. Grant meets Julia Dent, younger sister of his friend Fred Dent, at the Dent’s family home, White Haven.
1844. May. Grant joins his regiment in western Louisiana where U.S. Army troops stand ready for a border dispute between the U.S. and Mexico, related to the anticipated annexation of the Republic of Texas by the United States. Grant writes later, “There was no intimation given that the removal of the 3d and 4th regiments of infantry to the western border of Louisiana was occasioned in any way by the prospective annexation of Texas, but it was generally understood that such was the case.”
1845. March 3. Florida is admitted to the Union as the 27th state and a slave state.
1845. April. Grant gets 20-days leave, travels to St. Louis to see Julia, and gains her parents’ approval to become engaged to her.
1845. December 29. Texas is admitted to the Union as the 28th state and a slave state.
1846. March 11. Grant and the Fourth U.S. Infantry, with Brigadier General Zachary Taylor, begins marching through disputed land, between the Nueces and Rio Grande Rivers, that is claimed by both the U.S.A. and Mexico.
1846. March 28. Brigadier General Taylor’s force reaches the Rio Grande River.
1846. May 8. Grant finds himself in combat for the first time, at the Battle of Palo Alto. Taylor’s U.S. forces win the battle.
1846. May 11. The U.S. Congress declares war on Mexico.
1846. August 19. General Taylor begins to move toward Monterey, and Grant begins serving as regimental quartermaster.
1846. September 21. At the Battle of Monterrey (September 21–24), Grant, though a quartermaster, which is not generally a frontline role, rides to the front and charges with his regiment. He is made regimental adjutant. On September 23, Col. John Garland seeks a volunteer to carry a message through enemy-occupied streets to Brigadier General David Emanuel Twiggs, (who carries the nickname “Bengal Tiger”). Grant volunteers and completes the mission, at one point riding on the side of his horse, one foot hooked on the saddle’s cantle and an arm around the horse’s neck.
1846. December 28. Iowa admitted to the Union as the 29th state and a free state.
1847. January 11. The U.S. Fourth Infantry is ordered to leave Major General Zachary Taylor’s force and join General Winfield Scott’s.
1847. September 8–15. Battle for Mexico City, Mexico, in which Grant takes part with distinction. In particular, during September 13’s assault on San Cosme Garita by U.S. forces, Grant orders a cannon placed in a church belfry where it can be fired effectively.
1848. January 24. James W. Marshall discovers gold at Sutter’s Mill in Coloma, California, triggering the California Gold Rush, which peaks the following year but lasts through 1855.
1848. February 2. The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo is signed by the U.S. and Mexico, ending the Mexican-American War, a decisive U.S. victory. In exchange for $15 million, plus $3 million to settle American suits against Mexico, Mexico gives up its claim to Texas and the U.S. adds more than 500 square miles of land in the areas that would in time become the U.S. states of California, New Mexico, Nevada, Utah, and Arizona, as well as parts of the states of Colorado, Kansas, and Wyoming.
1848. June 12. Grant along with the rest of Brevet Major General William Jenkins Worth’s First U.S. Infantry Division marches out of Mexico City.
1848. May 29. Wisconsin is admitted to the Union as the 30th state and a free state.
1848. July 16. Grant sails with his army unit from Vera Cruz, thus ending his period with the U.S. occupation forces in Mexico.
1848. July 23. Grant and the rest of the Fourth Regiment lands at Pascagoula, Mississippi.
1848. August 22. Grant marries Julia Dent at the St. Louis, Missouri, house of her parents Frederick “Colonel” Dent and Ellen Wrenshall Dent. Mr. Dents is, a slaveholding planter and merchant, he and Mrs. Dent’s principal residence being the White Haven plantation, west of St. Louis.
1848–9. The Grants are relocated from Detroit to the military garrison at Sackets Harbor, New York, on Lake Ontario.
1849. Spring. Grant returns to Detroit.
1850
May 30. Grant’s and Julia’s first child is born and named Frederick Dent Grant after Julia’s father, Frederick “Colonel” Dent.
September 9. California is admitted to the Union as the 31st state and, as a result of the Compromise of 1850, a free state.
1851
1851. The U.S. population reaches approximately 23 million, of which approximately 3.2 million are enslaved Blacks.
June. Grant returns to Sackets Harbor but alone, while Julia remains in St. Louis with Frederick. Grant helps to organize the Rising Sun Division, Lodge No. 210, of the Sons of Temperance and takes the temperance pledge. Julia finally arrives in September.
March 20. Harriett Beecher Stowe’s antislavery novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin is published and sells 300,000 copies in twelves months. It will become the second-bestselling book in the U.S. in the 19th century after the Bible and be translated into 20 languages.
1852
May. The Fourth Infantry is called West. Grant journeys to Governor’s Island, New York City, and Julia and his son stay with Grant’s parents.
July 5. Brevet Captain Ulysses S. Grant and the Fourth Infantry set sail from New York by sea aboard the steamer Ohio, the first phase of a long route to San Francisco, from where the regiment then is to go to Fort Vancouver, Washington. The journey requires traversing Central America. At the time, this is the common and less time-consuming, expensive, and dangerous route to the West Coast for Americans than an overland journey. While crossing Central America, one-seventh of the traversing party Grant accompanies die of cholera.
July 16. The Ohio anchors off Aspinwall (now Colón, Panama) on the isthmus of Panama.
July 22. Ulysses S. Grant, Jr., “Buck,” Ulysses’ and Julia’s second child, is born in Bethel, Ohio, while Julia is staying with Grant’s parents. His nickname was a nod to his birth in Ohio, known as the Buckeye State. (Buck will go on to become an attorney and successful businessman.)
September 20. Grant arrives at Fort Vancouver, Oregon (later Washington) Territory. He has a fairly miserable existence there, one marked by loneliness and failed attempts to supplement his meager pay.
December 3. Grant, in Fort Vancouver, finally learns that Julia has given birth to Ulysses Jr.
1853
July. Brevet Captain George B. McClellan’s survey crew arrives in Washington state and McClellan witnesses an inebriated Grant.
September 30. Grant gets notice that, following a vacancy, he has been promoted to the rank of captain effective August 5, and is ordered to Fort Humbolt, California, which proves personally calamitous. Already suffering from depression, Grant begins drinking to excess more frequently.
1854
1854. Abraham Lincoln helps manage the reelection campaign of Richard Yates for a third term as an Illinois member of the U.S. Congress. Yates strongly opposes slavery’s expansion into the western territories, and had shifted his affiliation from the Whig Party to the Republican Party in his second term. He is narrowly defeated by his Democratic challenger.
April 11. Grant suddenly resigns from the U.S. Army on the same day he receives his official commission as captain. Though throughout his life his stated reasons for resigning are marked loneliness and longing to be with Julia and his children, he may also have been facing the threat of a court martial or other serious disciplinary measure stemming from drinking.
June 1. Grant boards the Sierra Nevada to travel by sea to Nicaragua as part of the long journey back to the U.S. East Coast and then home. Before departure, Grant is swindled out of money, and not for the first or the last time.
June 15. Grant arrives at the west coast of Nicaragua, after which he makes the overland journey to the Nicaraguan east coast and from there goes by sea to New York City.
June 25. Grant arrives in New York City aboard the Prometheus. He is penniless. His father Jesse, from his Covington, Kentucky, home, sends Grant’s younger brother Simpson to rescue Grant from the city and settle his hotel bill.
1854
Grant begins supervising his father-in-law Frederick Dent’s enslaved workforce at the Dent family’s White Haven plantation and will continue to do so until 1859.
1855
1854/1855. Violent civil confrontations, known as Bleeding (or Bloody) Kansas, begin between pro-slavery “Border Ruffians” and anti-slavery “Free-Staters” in Kansas following local elections in 1854 that were often marred by acts of intimidation and fraud. The confrontations and acts of mayhem last until 1859, will spill over slightly into western Missouri, a slave state, gain national attention, and presage, in the opinion of some commentators even at the time, a national civil war.
Spring. Grant and Julia move from a farm that they had been living at by White Haven plantation to one a mile farther away.
July 4. Ellen (“Nellie”) Grant is born, Ulysses S. Grant’s and Julia Grant’s third child.
Fall. On land he is farming, Grant builds and raises a four-room log cabin that he dubs Hardscrabble. He also resorts to selling wood in St. Louis to stave off poverty.
1855
Grant hires two Black men for pay, while Julia’s father gives him the gift of a slave named William Jones to work on the farm. According to the writer Hamlin Garland, who interviewed the farm’s neighbors decades later, Grant felt shame at using slave labor and “was not a slavery man.”
1856
May 22. U.S. Representative Preston Brooks of South Carolina grievously assaults abolitionist and U.S. Senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts in the chamber of the U.S. Senate after Sumner’s “Crimes Against Kansas” speech condemning slavery and senators who support it, including Andrew Butler, a relative of Brooks.
September. The Grants move into Hardscrabble.
November 4. Grant votes for the Democratic Party’s nominee for president, James Buchanan—a former U.S. secretary of state and former U.S. senator from Pennsylvania—fearing that a victory by slavery opponent and Republican candidate John C. Frémont—a veteran of the Mexican-American War and a former U.S. senator from California—would trigger the secession of slave states. Grant later writes in Personal Memoirs of U.S. Grant: “It was evident to my mind that the election of a Republican President in 1856 meant the secession of all the Slave States, and rebellion. Under these circumstances I preferred the success of a candidate whose election would prevent or postpone secession, to seeing the country plunged into a war the end of which no man could foretell. With a Democrat elected by the unanimous vote of the Slave States, there could be no pretext for secession for four years. I very much hoped that the passions of the people would subside in that time, and the catastrophe be averted altogether; if it was not, I believed the country would be better prepared to receive the shock and to resist it. I therefore voted for James Buchanan for President.”
1857
January 14. Julia’s mother, Ellen Wrenshall Dent, dies. Grant and Julia move out of Hardscrabble and into White Haven so Julia can care for her father, who rents to Grant 200 acres of plowed farmland and 250 woodland acres of the White Haven plantation’s total acreage.
February 7. Grant writes to his father about his very difficult financial straits stemming from unsuccessful farming, and about his need to supplement income by selling wood in St. Louis he writes, “I regard every load of wood taken, when the services of both myself and team are required on the farm, is a direct loss of more than the value of the load.” (Papers 1:337)
March 6. The U.S. supreme court issues the Dred Scott decision, written by chief justice Roger B. Taney. It deems Scott and all Blacks as being excluded by the U.S. constitution from any of the rights of U.S. citizenship. The ruling also strips the U.S. congress of the authority to prohibit slavery in U.S. territories, thus annulling the Missouri Compromise, which prohibited slavery in the lands of the Louisiana Purchase, except for Missouri, north of the 36°30′ parallel.
December 23. Grant pawns his gold watch & chain for $20 (Chernow 102).
1858
February 6. Jesse Root Grant II is born at White Haven, the fourth and last child of Ulysses S. and Julia Grant.
Spring. Grant rents out his farm, Hardscrabble, and rents his father-in-law’s White Haven plantation.
1858. Grant is beset by fevers and chills, which have troubled him before. He may have had malaria.
May 11. Minnesota is admitted to the Union as the 32nd state and a free state.
August 21–October. The seven Lincoln-Douglas debates take place in Illinois between the Democratic U.S. senator Stephen A. Douglas and his Republican challenger Abraham Lincoln. The debates gain national attention and focus significantly on the issue of slavery’s extension in U.S. territories.
Fall. Grant gives up on farming and sells off his farm’s stock, equipment, and crops. His father-in-law gets the vast majority of the profit of the sales. Grant then joins in a real estate company venture, Grant and Boggs Real Estate, in large part as a rent collector, a position he proves to be ill-suited for.
1859
January. Grant rents a room from the Boggs in St. Louis. In March, he rents a cottage and the rest of his family ends their temporary living situation at White Haven and joins him.
February 14. Oregon is admitted into the Union as the 33rd state and a free state. As a singular occurrence among all states’ constitution upon admittance to the Union, Oregon’s includes a clause excluding Blacks from settling in the state.
March 29. Grant frees his slave William Jones.
1859. Grant and Boggs Real Estate is wound down after having been unprofitable.
Summer. Grant stands for appointment by the board of commissioners for St. Louis county to the position of county engineer. Disliking Grant’s presumed Democratic Party affiliations, the board does not appoint Grant.
July 4. A 33rd star is officially added to the U.S. flag to indicate Oregon. (The exact arrangement of stars in U.S. flags is not fixed until an executive order is first issued to that effect for the 48-star flag in 1912.)
1859. During the decade of the 1850s, approximately 914,000 immigrants have arrived to the U.S. from Ireland (and approximately 424,000 from Great Britain).
1860
April. Grant arrives in Galena, Illinois, to work at his father’s leather goods store at age 38 in a position junior to his younger brothers Simpson and Orvil.
May 18. Former U.S. representative from Illinois, Abraham Lincoln, is nominated in Chicago, Illinois, to be the Republican Party’s candidate for the U.S. presidency.
June. Democrats nominate U.S. Senator Stephen Douglas of Illinois at the party’s convention in Baltimore, Maryland, to be their candidate for the U.S. presidency, but only after delegates from Alabama and Louisiana walk out of the party’s earlier 1860 convention in Charleston, South Carolina, in protest of the party’s failure to adopt a federal slave code plank in its platform. Skipping the reconvened convention in Baltimore that nominates Douglas, breakaway Southern Democrats meet, also in Baltimore, five days after Douglas’s nomination, and nominate U.S. Senator John C. Breckinridge of Kentucky as their presidential nominee.
November 6. Lincoln wins the presidential election with less than 40% of the popular vote and fails to carry any slave states. He had not even been on the ballot in 10 of the Southern states. Grant had not lived in Illinois long enough to be eligible to vote.
November 8. Galena Republicans hold a victory celebration in Jesse Grant’s store.
December 20. South Carolina secedes from the United States and soon afterwards begins to seize strategic assets within the state that are under the jurisdiction of the U.S. federal government, including forts and arsenals.
SOURCES
Chernow, Ron. Grant. New York: Penguin Books, 2017. Kindle.
The Papers of Ulysses S. Grant. Edited by John Y. Simon et al. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1967–2012. https://scholarsjunction.msstate.edu/usg-volumes/.
