Ulysses S. Grant

Hiram Ulysses Grant was born on April 27, 1822, in Point Pleasant, Ohio, a hamlet on the Ohio River about twenty five miles upstream from Cincinnati. His father, Jesse Root Grant, ran a tannery and had firm opinions on nearly everything; his mother, Hannah Simpson Grant, was quiet and devout. The family moved to nearby Georgetown, Ohio, the following year, and it was there that the boy grew up, developing an unusual skill with horses that neighbors remembered for decades ^[1].

The tannery repelled him. He hated the smell of blood and hides, and his father eventually accepted that his eldest son would not follow the trade. In 1839 Jesse secured him an appointment to the United States Military Academy at West Point. The congressman who nominated him mistakenly recorded his name as Ulysses S. Grant, apparently borrowing the S from his mother's maiden name of Simpson. The cadet gave up trying to correct the error, and the name stuck for life ^[2].

Grant was an indifferent student who excelled mainly in mathematics and horsemanship. He graduated in 1843, ranked 21st in a class of 39, and was assigned to the infantry rather than the cavalry he preferred. Fellow cadets remembered him setting a high jump record on a horse named York, a feat that stood at the academy for years ^[1].

The Mexican War of 1846 to 1848 gave Grant his first taste of combat. Serving as a quartermaster under Zachary Taylor and later Winfield Scott, he fought at Monterrey, Veracruz, and Chapultepec, and he studied how both generals handled armies in the field. Privately he believed the war was an unjust act of aggression against a weaker neighbor, a judgment he repeated bluntly in his memoirs decades later ^[2].

In 1848 he married Julia Dent, the sister of a West Point roommate, and the peacetime army then scattered him across dreary frontier posts. Separated from Julia and their children while stationed on the Pacific coast, Grant grew lonely and reportedly drank, and in 1854 he resigned his captain's commission. The seven years that followed were the hardest of his life. He farmed a plot near St. Louis he named Hardscrabble, hauled firewood into the city for cash, tried real estate, and failed at all of it. By 1860 he was working as a clerk in his father's leather goods store in Galena, Illinois ^[3].

The attack on Fort Sumter in April 1861 changed everything. Grant helped drill a company of Galena volunteers, and the governor of Illinois soon gave him a colonel's commission over an unruly regiment. Promotion to brigadier general followed within months. In February 1862 he captured Forts Henry and Donelson on the Tennessee and Cumberland rivers, demanding unconditional surrender from the Confederate garrison at Donelson. Newspapers declared that his initials stood for Unconditional Surrender, and the North had its first major victories of the war ^[4].

Among the central Ulysses S. Grant achievements, the Vicksburg campaign ranks first for many historians. After surviving the near disaster at Shiloh in April 1862, where his army was surprised but held on and counterattacked, Grant spent months maneuvering against the Confederate fortress city on the Mississippi. In the spring of 1863 he ran gunboats past the batteries, crossed the river below the city, cut loose from his supply lines, won five battles in under three weeks, and besieged Vicksburg until it surrendered on July 4, 1863. The victory split the Confederacy in two and gave the Union control of the Mississippi River ^[4].

After breaking the siege of Chattanooga that autumn, Grant was promoted in March 1864 to lieutenant general, a rank previously held in full only by George Washington, and given command of all Union armies. He attached himself to the Army of the Potomac and drove relentlessly against Robert E. Lee through the Wilderness, Spotsylvania, and Cold Harbor, accepting fearful casualties while coordinating simultaneous offensives across the entire Confederacy. The strategy of constant pressure worked. On April 9, 1865, Lee surrendered to Grant at Appomattox Court House in Virginia, where Grant offered generous terms that let Confederate soldiers return home with their horses ^[5].

Elected president in 1868 on the slogan "Let us have peace," Grant used federal power to defend Reconstruction. He signed the Enforcement Acts of 1870 and 1871, deployed troops and suspended habeas corpus in parts of South Carolina to break the Ku Klux Klan, and supported the Fifteenth Amendment guaranteeing Black men the vote. He also created the first Civil Service Commission, established Yellowstone as the first national park in 1872, and settled the Alabama claims dispute with Britain through arbitration rather than war ^[6].

Grant's marriage to Julia Dent Grant lasted 37 years and anchored him through failure and fame alike. The couple had four children: Frederick, Ulysses Jr., Ellen (called Nellie), and Jesse. Julia came from a slaveholding Missouri family, a fact that created friction with Grant's abolitionist father, and Grant himself briefly owned one enslaved man, William Jones, acquired through his father in law. In 1859, though he was nearly broke, Grant freed Jones rather than sell him ^[3].

He was a shy man who disliked ceremony, off-color stories, and the sight of blood, preferring his meat cooked well done. Stories about his drinking followed him through the war and afterward. Biographers continue to debate their extent, though most agree the problem was episodic, occurring mainly when he was idle and away from his family, and that it never affected a battle ^[3].

Horses remained his lifelong passion. As president he was once stopped for speeding his carriage through Washington and, according to a widely reported account, paid the fine and praised the officer for doing his duty. He also loved cigars; well-wishers sent him thousands after his early victories, a habit that likely contributed to the throat cancer that killed him ^[1].

Grant's second term was battered by scandal. He was never shown to have profited personally, but men around him were: the Credit Mobilier affair tainted his vice president, the Whiskey Ring implicated his private secretary Orville Babcock, and his war secretary William Belknap resigned over bribery charges. The Panic of 1873 brought a punishing depression, and northern support for Reconstruction eroded during his final years in office ^[6].

After leaving the White House in 1877, Grant and Julia spent more than two years traveling around the world, dining with Queen Victoria, Otto von Bismarck, and the Meiji Emperor of Japan. Crowds greeted him everywhere as the general who had saved the American Union. A bid for a third presidential nomination in 1880 fell short at the Republican convention, and the Grants settled in New York City ^[2].

Disaster struck in 1884 when the brokerage firm of Grant and Ward collapsed. His partner Ferdinand Ward had been running what was essentially a pyramid scheme, and Grant was left nearly penniless. That summer doctors diagnosed throat cancer. To provide for Julia, he began writing his memoirs, first as magazine articles and then as a book that Mark Twain arranged to publish on generous terms. Racing his disease, Grant finished the manuscript at a cottage on Mount McGregor near Wilton, New York, days before he died there on July 23, 1885, at age 63 ^[7].

The Personal Memoirs of Ulysses S. Grant appeared shortly after his death and became one of the great publishing successes of the century, earning Julia roughly 450,000 dollars in royalties. Critics from Twain onward have praised its clear, unadorned prose, and it is still read both as history and as literature ^[7]. His funeral procession in New York drew an estimated one and a half million people, and in 1897 his remains were placed in the General Grant National Memorial on Riverside Drive, the largest mausoleum in North America, familiar to generations through the joke question about who is buried in Grant's Tomb ^[8].

For much of the twentieth century, historians influenced by the Lost Cause school ranked Grant near the bottom of presidents, painting him as a butcher in war and a naif in office. That verdict has been substantially revised. Modern biographers, including Ron Chernow and Ronald C. White, emphasize his strategic brilliance, his personal honesty, and above all his commitment to enforcing the civil and voting rights of freed people at a time when much of the country wanted to move on ^[5].

Anyone asking who was Ulysses S. Grant confronts a double figure: the failed clerk who became general in chief, and the war hero whose presidency mixed genuine achievement with the scandals of the Gilded Age. Among basic Ulysses S. Grant facts, one captures him best: he never lost a campaign he directed, yet he judged his own greatest victory to be the peace he offered a defeated enemy at Appomattox ^[5].