Ulysses S. Grant

Their life

The failed farmer clerking in his father's store at thirty-eight who, given war, revealed relentless clarity — took Vicksburg, accepted Appomattox with grace, and, dying of cancer and broke, wrote the finest memoir in American letters to provide for his family.

Known for

• Union victory at Fort Donelson ('unconditional surrender')
• Vicksburg Campaign, 1863
• Commanding general of the Union Army
• Appomattox surrender terms to Lee
• Two-term U.S. presidency and Reconstruction enforcement
• Personal Memoirs, written while dying

The road they walked

He was born Hiram Ulysses Grant in Point Pleasant, Ohio, the son of a tanner, and reached West Point only because a congressman's clerical error changed his name to Ulysses S. Grant on the rolls — a name he kept rather than fight the paperwork. He was an unremarkable cadet, gifted mainly with horses, and won real notice in the Mexican-American War, where he served under both Zachary Taylor and Winfield Scott and came away convinced the war itself was unjust even as he did his duty in it. Peacetime soldiering exiled him to lonely postings in California and Oregon, away from his wife Julia and children; rumors of drinking followed him, and in 1854 he resigned his commission under a cloud. The years after were a slow demotion of expectations — farming failed land near St. Louis, trying to sell firewood on street corners, failing at a real-estate partnership — until by 1860 he was thirty-eight and clerking in his father's leather-goods store in Galena, Illinois, a man most of his neighbors assumed had used up his chances.

The Civil War found him a use no other institution had. Commissioned to raise Illinois volunteers, he rose fast because he did the one thing few Union generals reliably did: he fought, and he finished what he started. His demand for 'unconditional surrender' at Fort Donelson in 1862 gave the initials U.S. a new meaning and gave the North its first real victory in the West. The Vicksburg campaign of 1863 — a masterpiece of maneuver that split the Confederacy along the Mississippi — made him the North's indispensable general, and Lincoln, tired of cautious commanders, brought him east in 1864 as lieutenant general over all Union armies. The Overland Campaign that followed was brutal and costly, and critics then and since have called him a butcher of his own men; defenders point out he understood, correctly, that the Union's advantage in numbers and resources meant it could win a war of attrition the Confederacy could not survive. At Appomattox in April 1865 he offered Lee generous terms — men could keep their horses, officers their sidearms, no one would be arrested for treason — a grace note that helped set the tone for reunion rather than reprisal.

As president from 1869 to 1877, Grant used federal power to fight the Ku Klux Klan and defend Black citizens' newly won rights more aggressively than any successor would for nearly a century, even as his administration was riddled with corruption scandals — the Whiskey Ring, Crédit Mobilier, and others — that he himself was never personally implicated in but never fully cleaned up either. He left office popular enough to be urged toward a third term, declined, and toured the world to wide acclaim before a catastrophic investment in his son's brokerage firm, Grant and Ward, wiped out his savings in 1884 and left him effectively penniless.

How their story ended

In 1884 Grant was diagnosed with throat cancer, almost certainly from a lifetime of cigar smoking, just as his finances collapsed entirely. To provide for Julia and their children, he spent his last months in a race against pain and encroaching silence to write his memoirs, encouraged and published by Mark Twain, working through mounting agony until the manuscript was finished only days before he died at Mount McGregor, New York, in July 1885. The book became one of the great works of American nonfiction and earned his family several hundred thousand dollars — the last and most lasting campaign he ever won.

In their words

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