Beschreibung:

GRANT, Ulysses S. Autograph letter signed ("U.S. Grant") to his father, Jesse R. Grant, St. Louis, Missouri, 12 March 1859. 3½ pages, 8vo (7¾ x 5 in.), remnants of mounting on upper margin of page 1, stain in margin of second leaf , otherwise fine. CIVILIAN GRANT EMBARKS ON A NEW OCCUPATION AND MENTIONS CONCERNS ABOUT A SLAVE An unusually early Grant letter written at the outset of his second attempt to achieve success after having left the army. Grant graduated from West Point in 1843, served in the Mexican War, and was assigned to posts in New York, Detroit, California and the Oregon Territory before resigning from the army in 1854. He tried to support his wife Julia and their three children as a farmer, but, in 1858, after a severe illness, was forced to sell the farm. Julia arranged for her husband to enter a real estate business with her cousin Harry Boggs in St. Louis. Here, as Grant prepares to embark on his new career, he writes optimistically to his father: "I can hardly tell how the new business I am engaged in is going to succeed but I believe it will be something more than a support. If I find an opportunity next week I will send you some of our cards which if you will distribute among such persons as may have business to attend to in this city, such as buying or selling property, collecting either rents or other liabilities, it may prove the means of giving me additional commissions." Grant writes his father about the small city home they have moved to: "We are living now in the lower part of the City, [a] full two miles from my office. The house is a comfortable little one just suited to my means. We have our spare room and also a spare bed in the childrens room so that we can accomodate any of our friends that are likely to come see us." Grant quickly found that the job was not to his liking, as one biographer has noted: "No one could have been less fit for the aggressive, shameless job of bill collector than Ulysses Grant" (McFeely, Grant , p. 64). By that summer, he began looking for a new career. When the Civil War began, he was working as a clerk in his father's leather goods store. When Grant began farming near St. Louis, the family owned five slaves--one man named Jones worked beside Ulysses, and two women and two boys served Julia. Grant apparently never contemplated selling or freeing the slaves before the war. Here, he acknowledges the situation that the heated atmosphere surrounding the debate over slavery had created: "Julia and the children are well. They will not make a visit to Ky. now. I was anxious to have them go before I rented but with four children she could not go without a servant and she was afraid that landing so often as she would have to do in free states she might have some trouble." Despite owning slaves, Grant remained neutral in his views of the institution: "[the evidence] suggests a straightforward attitude toward the people and the institution that foreshadowed both the liberality and the limitations of his racial policies during the war and during his administration as president" (McFeely, pp. 70-71).