The dollar coin honoring our 18th president has been issued by the United States Mint. I have a roll of the coins sitting here on my desk, and it brings to mind the story of how he became known as Ulysses Simpson Grant.
When he was born, his mother was confounded by all the relatives offering their opinions about what and after whom he should be named. To avoid offending anyone, she told them all to write their choice on a piece of paper, which she would put into a hat, and whichever one she drew would be the baby's name. It was her mother-in-law, who had been reading the classics, who submitted the winning entry, Ulysses.
His grandfather, meanwhile, was so put out that the boy wasn’t given his name that the only way to appease him was to add it, and so the child was christened Hiram Ulysses Grant. He went by his middle name, though, and his chums called him Lyss.
The congressman who wrote his recommendation to the U. S. Military Academy didn’t know Grant’s full name, but he knew the families and assumed that he had been given his mother’s maiden name, so he filled in the name as Ulysses Simpson Grant. Grant decided he could straighten it out when he got to West Point.
Upon his arrival there, however, he happened on a list of the incoming cadets tacked to a bulletin board on which he was listed as U. S. Grant. He liked that so much, thinking it the perfect name for an American army officer, that he never had it corrected. His classmates teased him by calling him Uncle Sam Grant, and for the rest of his life he was known to his comrades as Sam.
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