Ulysses S. Grant hated the West Point uniform

Though Grant's father anticipated that enrolling him at West Point would open doors for his son, the younger Ulysses S. Grant despised the formality of attending school. Throughout his tenure there, he was noted to be generally untidy and received demerits for his sloppy uniform habits (which he would continue during his time as leader of the Union Army during the Civil War).

A 17-year-old Grant wrote to his cousin, McKinstry Griffith, in an 1839 letter that he "would laugh at my appearance" if he saw the cadet in his uniform: "My pants are set as tight to my flesh as the bark to a tree." "They are quite apt to crack with a report as loud as a gun," he wrote, and "if you saw me from a distance, the first question you would ask would be 'Is that a fish or an animal?'"