On April 9, 1865, Robert E. Lee rode into the village of Appomattox Court House in Virginia to meet Ulysses S. Grant. The two generals, who had fought on opposite sides of the American Civil War for four years, sat down together and recalled their shared experiences in the war with Mexico nearly twenty years earlier.
Then they turned to the business at hand. Grant, authorized to offer generous terms, promised there would be few reprisals for Confederate soldiers who laid down their arms. Lee accepted. The Civil War, the deadliest conflict in American history, was effectively over.
The man who accepted that surrender had been born Hiram Ulysses Grant on April 27, 1822, in Point Pleasant, a small rural community in southwestern Ohio. His father, Jesse Root Grant, was a farmer, tanner, and leather merchant from Pennsylvania whose American ancestry stretched back to the founding of the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1630. His mother, Hannah Simpson, descended from Presbyterian Scots who had migrated to Ireland and then to North America. Ulysses was their first child, and he grew up in a large household with five siblings.
His father was an abolitionist, and the family was well enough off to provide the boy with a substantial education, including a stint at the Rankin Academy in 1838, run by the noted abolitionist John Rankin, who was prominent in operating the Underground Railroad that helped enslaved people flee the South. In 1839, when Ulysses was seventeen, his father arranged for him to be nominated to the United States Military Academy at West Point. Due to a clerical error, he was registered as Ulysses S. Grant, and the name stuck.
Grant was initially skeptical about military life and proved only an average pupil, graduating in June 1843 ranked twenty-first in a class of thirty-nine. He was assigned to the Fourth Infantry and sent to St. Louis, Missouri, as a brevet second lieutenant. At West Point he had befriended Frederick Tracy Dent, and through him came to know Dent’s sister Julia.
The two fell in love and became engaged in 1844, though their marriage was delayed by war. The war came over Texas. After Texas broke away from Mexico in 1836 and was annexed by the United States in 1845, a boundary dispute over the Rio Grande versus the more northerly Nueces River escalated into open conflict in 1846. Grant saw combat at the Battle of Palo Alto in May 1846, his first taste of battle, and later served in Mexico itself, earning commendation for his role at the Battle of Molino del Rey in September 1847.
The war ended in a complete American victory, and the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in February 1848 confirmed U. S. control over Texas and established the Rio Grande as the border. Grant returned to St.
Louis and finally married Julia Dent. The marriage caused a rift with Grant’s parents, who disapproved of the Dent family being slaveholders, but the couple remained devoted to one another. They would have four children. The years after the war were difficult.
Grant was moved through a series of postings, eventually being dispatched to California and Oregon in the early 1850s, leaving a pregnant Julia behind in the East. Business ventures failed, and he began drinking more heavily. Repeated acts of drunkenness and clashes with commanding officers led him to resign from the military in 1854. Back in St.
Louis, his fortunes worsened. He accepted a farm from Julia’s father but struggled financially, was caught in an economic recession in 1857, and was reduced to selling firewood on a street corner and pawning his gold watch. His life seemed to have run its course. The election of Abraham Lincoln in November 1860 changed everything.
Southern states, viewing the Republican president as a threat to slavery, began seceding. South Carolina left the Union in December 1860, followed by Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, and Texas, which formed the Confederacy. Armed conflict began in April 1861 when Confederate forces attacked the Union garrison at Fort Sumter, and several more states joined the rebellion. With the outbreak of the Civil War, Grant, absent from the army for nearly seven years, rejoined the service.
He spent the first year recruiting and training troops in Missouri and Illinois, operating in the border region between Southern Illinois, Kentucky, and Tennessee with a delicate touch, hoping communities straddling North and South could be won over to the Union cause. At the beginning of 1862, frustrated by a lack of major commands, Grant obtained permission from General Henry Halleck to launch an offensive. Marching south with 25,000 men, he won one of the war’s first major Union victories by besieging and capturing Fort Donelson on the Cumberland River in Tennessee, taking about 15,000 Confederate prisoners. When the fort’s commander asked for terms of surrender, Grant offered only one: unconditional surrender.
Promoted to major general, he was the senior Union commander at the Battle of Shiloh in April 1862, a costly victory that produced more than 10,000 Union casualties and damaged his reputation. Reports of heavy drinking followed him. Despite the setback, Grant persuaded his superiors to let him move against Vicksburg, a major Confederate stronghold on the Mississippi River. Six months later, on July 4, 1863, the city surrendered.
The capture of Vicksburg gave the Union control of the Mississippi, effectively cutting the Confederacy in two. On the same day, Robert E. Lee’s army had been decisively defeated at Gettysburg in Pennsylvania after three days of the bloodiest fighting of the war. Combined, the two victories put the Union on the offensive.
In March 1864, Grant was appointed lieutenant general and placed in overall command of the Union Army. His strategy was to use the North’s numerical superiority to pin Lee’s forces in Virginia while subordinate commanders campaigned elsewhere, seizing Georgia and other targets. The plan succeeded broadly, though Grant failed to take Richmond in 1864. After a bloody, inconclusive engagement at Cold Harbor, he settled into a nine-month siege of Petersburg, near Richmond.
By the autumn of 1864, Atlanta had been captured, and Union forces had reached the Atlantic coast. Lee’s troops, starving and hopeless, began deserting in large numbers. On April 9, 1865, Lee surrendered at Appomattox. The last fighting of the war occurred in Texas at the end of May.
Five days after Appomattox, Abraham Lincoln was assassinated at Ford’s Theater by John Wilkes Booth. Grant had turned down an invitation to attend the performance with the president, and allegations circulated that he too had been a target. The war’s end brought the beginning of Reconstruction, a difficult period aimed at ending slavery and rebuilding the South. Grant was drawn into politics.
In the months after the war, President Andrew Johnson sent him on a tour of the former Confederate states, where Grant was received favorably and recommended a lenient approach. In 1867, Johnson offered him the position of Secretary of War after removing Edwin Stanton. Grant accepted on an interim basis but resigned in January 1868 when the Senate refused to approve Stanton’s dismissal, splitting with Johnson in the process. The dispute nonetheless made Grant a viable Republican candidate for president.
At the Republican National Convention in Chicago in May 1868, Grant won the nomination and ran against Democrat Horatio Seymour on the slogan “Let us have peace. ” The popular vote was closer than expected, with Grant winning by 300,000 votes, but the Electoral College result was decisive: 214 to 80. On March 4, 1869, Ulysses S. Grant was sworn in as the eighteenth president of the United States.
He would serve eight years, winning a second term in 1872 by a much wider margin. Reconstruction dominated his presidency. Two weeks after taking office, he signed laws guaranteeing African Americans equal rights, and his administration pressured the former Confederate states that had not ratified the Fifteenth Amendment, guaranteeing black men the right to vote, to do so. By 1871, Georgia, Virginia, Mississippi, and Texas had complied and were readmitted to the Union.
But armed white supremacist groups, including the Ku Klux Klan, sprang up across the South, using violence and intimidation to roll back Reconstruction. Grant’s administration created the Justice Department and dispatched federal troops to key sites to maintain order and defend Reconstruction, crushing the Klan’s power for a generation. On the economic front, Grant passed the Public Credit Act, promising that Civil War-era banknotes would be repaid in gold- and silver-backed coin, curbing inflation and restoring confidence in the financial system. The economy recovered, but in 1873 the collapse of the brokerage firm Jay Cooke and Company, followed by financial failures in Europe, triggered a depression that lasted for the rest of his second term.
Known at the time as the Great Depression, the downturn is now called the Panic of 1873. In foreign affairs, Grant left policy largely to Secretary of State Hamilton Fish. The Treaty of Washington in 1871 resolved the dispute with Britain over its construction of ships for the Confederacy, with Britain paying more than $15 million in reparations. Grant attempted to purchase the Dominican Republic, seeing it as a strategic Caribbean foothold, but opposition in Congress defeated the scheme.
His policy toward Native Americans was comparatively progressive for the era, favoring assimilation and peaceful treaties. But gold discovered in the Black Hills in 1874 brought prospectors streaming into Sioux lands, and the Great Sioux War of 1876–77, marked by George Armstrong Custer’s defeat at the Little Bighorn, ended in a harsh peace that forced the Sioux onto reservations. Grant’s presidency was also tainted by scandal. During the 1872 election, the Credit Mobilier affair revealed that prominent Republicans had siphoned profits from the Union Pacific Railroad.
Grant himself was not implicated but was damaged by association. In 1875, the Whiskey Ring scandal involved federal officials and whiskey distillers defrauding the government of tax revenues; Grant’s private secretary and Secretary of War were implicated, though again Grant was not. The final act of his presidency was the disputed election of 1876. Republican Rutherford B.
Hayes faced Democrat Samuel Tilden. Tilden won 184 electoral votes, one short of the 185 needed, and Hayes had 165, with 20 votes contested in Florida, Louisiana, South Carolina, and Oregon. Grant instructed Congress to resolve the dispute and formed an electoral commission. The resulting Compromise of 1877 gave Hayes the presidency—by 185 to 184, the smallest margin in history—but at a price: in return for Democratic acceptance, federal troops were removed from the South, allowing Democrats to take control and impose Jim Crow laws that disenfranchised Black Americans for generations.
Grant was praised at the time for averting a constitutional crisis, though his legacy became tied to the deal’s consequences. After leaving office in March 1877, Grant, still only fifty-four, embarked on a two-and-a-half-year world tour with Julia, meeting Queen Victoria, Pope Leo XIII, Otto von Bismarck, and other notables. In 1879, while in Japan, he became involved in efforts to establish peace between Japan and China and reportedly got caught up in a conspiracy aimed at assassinating the Japanese emperor and Grant himself. On his return, he was urged to run for a third term, but at the 1880 Republican convention, deadlocked between Grant, James Blaine, and John Sherman, the party ultimately nominated James Garfield.
Grant’s post-presidential business ventures failed. He lost money on the world tour, and a Wall Street partnership with the fraudulent financier Ferdinand Ward in 1883 left him swindled. With his finances in ruins, Grant turned to writing his memoirs. Mark Twain offered to publish them, guaranteeing Grant seventy percent of the royalties.
The manuscript was finished in the early summer of 1885, but Grant, diagnosed with throat cancer in October 1884, died on July 23, 1885, days after completing it. The memoirs became a bestseller, earning Julia nearly half a million dollars. More than one and a half million people attended Grant’s funeral in New York City, where he was eulogized in terms comparable to George Washington. He was buried at the General Grant National Memorial in Upper Manhattan, the largest burial tomb dedicated to an individual in North America.
For much of the twentieth century, Grant was ranked among the worst American presidents. More recent assessments have been somewhat kinder, placing him around the middle of the presidential rankings. His military record, crushing the Confederacy in 1864 and 1865, stands on its own. His presidency guided the country through Reconstruction and the aftermath of civil war, crushed the Ku Klux Klan, and navigated a succession crisis.
He was a man of considerable flaws, including a lifelong struggle with drink, but across the most turbulent period in American history, he kept the ship of state on an even keel. That, ultimately, is to his credit.