Ulysses Grant was born in Point Pleasant, a small town in rural southwest Ohio. Ron Chernow describes Grant’s place of birth as “little more than a nondescript cluster of makeshift cabins overlooking bustling river traffic” (3). His father Jesse Grant was a tanner and businessman with a “brusque manner” (4). The Grants were devout Methodists and were descended from Puritans who settled in Dorchester, Massachusetts (which later became a neighborhood of Boston). Among their ancestors were abolitionists opposed to slavery and veterans of the French and Indian War and (possibly) the Revolutionary War. Jesse was also opposed to slavery, to the point that this caused him to leave a job as a tanner’s apprentice with his brother in Kentucky.

Grant’s mother and Jesse’s wife was Hannah Simpson. She came from a family of well-off landowners in Ohio. Despite Hannah’s family being wealthier than Jesse, the two married in 1821. Hannah was a traditional, pious woman whom Ulysses claimed gave him his “good sense and moral compass” (6). However, Hannah was also extremely restrained, never known to cry or laugh, and rarely showed much affection to her children. Chernow thinks this may have contributed to Grant’s problems expressing his emotions to people other than his family in adulthood (6-7).