Ulysses S. Grant

April 27, 1822 – July 23, 1885

Union Army commander who won the Civil War and 18th President.

presidentmilitary leadercivil war

Ulysses S. Grant was born Hiram Ulysses Grant on April 27, 1822, in Point Pleasant, Ohio, the son of a tanner. He hated the family tannery and loved working with horses. His father secured him an appointment to the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, where a clerk's error entered his name as 'Ulysses S. Grant,' a name he kept for the rest of his life. He graduated in 1843, an unremarkable student ranked in the middle of his class but a superb horseman. Grant served with distinction in the Mexican-American War (1846-1848), where he was twice cited for bravery and learned lessons in logistics and bold movement that shaped his later generalship, even as he came to distrust the war's justice. Posted to lonely stations far from his wife, Julia, he resigned from the army in 1854. The years that followed were hard: he failed at farming and business and, by 1860, was working as a clerk in his family's leather-goods store in Galena, Illinois. The Civil War transformed his life. Grant returned to the army in 1861 and quickly showed a rare willingness to fight. His capture of Fort Donelson in February 1862, where he demanded 'unconditional surrender,' gave the North its first major victory, and he held his ground through the terrible bloodletting at Shiloh that spring. These wins marked him as a general who would press the enemy rather than hesitate. Grant's masterpiece was the campaign for Vicksburg, Mississippi. Cutting loose from his supply lines, he maneuvered his army inland, won a string of battles, and laid siege to the fortress city. When Vicksburg surrendered on July 4, 1863, the Union gained control of the entire Mississippi River and split the Confederacy in two. That victory came the same three days that the Battle of Gettysburg was fought in the East, where General George Meade commanded the Army of the Potomac against Robert E. Lee; Grant himself was not at Gettysburg, but the two triumphs together formed the war's great turning point. Impressed by his results, President Lincoln promoted Grant to lieutenant general in March 1864 and gave him command of all Union armies, a rank not held since George Washington. Grant devised a coordinated strategy to apply pressure across every front at once. In the Overland Campaign he drove relentlessly toward Richmond against Robert E. Lee, absorbing staggering casualties at the Wilderness, Spotsylvania, and Cold Harbor before pinning Lee's army in the long siege of Petersburg. The strategy worked. In April 1865, with Petersburg and Richmond fallen and Lee's army starving and surrounded, Grant accepted Lee's surrender at Appomattox Court House on April 9, 1865. His generous terms, letting Confederate soldiers keep their horses and go home, set a tone of reconciliation that Lincoln had urged. The victory made Grant the most celebrated man in the North. Elected the 18th President in 1868 and re-elected in 1872, Grant used federal power to defend the rights of formerly enslaved people during Reconstruction. He supported the Fifteenth Amendment protecting the right to vote and pushed the Enforcement Acts that broke the first Ku Klux Klan across much of the South. Though scandals damaged his administration, his commitment to civil rights stands out. Dying of throat cancer in 1885, he finished his acclaimed memoirs days before his death, securing his family's future and his reputation as one of the nation's greatest generals.

Ulysses S. Grant

Further reading