He was a tough man. He was a man whose profession forced him to face terrible violence and brutality. He was a man whose life had been beaten down and nearly broken—as we talked about, it had reduced him once to selling firewood by the side of the road and pawning his watch to buy Christmas presents.
But Ulysses S. Grant would not break. He was too strong. He loved his family too much.
Yet he was also a complete and total softy. His family was his strength and his weakness—the wonderful kind. As General Horace Porter observed in City Point Virginia in 1864, Grant was a present, vulnerable and playful parent. Opening Grant’s tent—then the most powerful military figure in the country, the head of hundreds of thousands of men and in command of enormous destructive power—Porter was surprised to find…
[Grant] in his shirt-sleeves engaged in a rough-and-tumble wrestling match with his two older boys [Fred, then fourteen, and Buck, twelve]. The lads had just tripped him up, and he was on his knees grappling with the youngsters, and joining in their merry laughter, as if he were a boy again himself. I had several dispatches in my hand, and when he saw that I had come on business, he disentangled himself with some difficulty from the young combatants, rose to his feet, brushed the dust off his knees with one hand, and said in a sort of apologetic manner: “Ah, you know my weaknesses—my children and my horses.”
Grant had always been this way. We tell a story about him in The Daily Dad book which shows he’d been wrestling with his boys since they were little. He loved to let them win. He loved to let his guard down. They were his weakness. They were his joy in dark times and moments of distress.
As your own children must be. They are our wonderful weakness…and our incredible strength.
P.S. You can read about Grant wrestling with his boys and letting them win in today’s entry in The Daily Dad. In fact, the whole month of August is dedicated to this idea about the greatest gift you can give your kids—which is always being a fan. Grab a copy over at the Daily Dad store to read more!
