Grant hardly needed another despotic father figure in his life, but that is exactly what he got. It did not help matters that the abolitionist Grants came to detest the slave-owning Dents and vice versa, leaving Julia and Ulysses caught in a cross fire that lasted for decades. It could only have damaged Grant to be at the mercy of both an adoring but overbearing father and a hypercritical future father-in-law who thwarted his desire to marry for several years. Trapped between these two men, the young officer was condemned to experience a prolonged adolescence in which he could never fully
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