Ulysses S. Grant was 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 who traced his American ancestry back to the founding of the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1630. His mother, Hannah Simpson, came from Presbyterian Scots who had migrated from Scotland to Ulster in the seventeenth century and then to North America in the eighteenth.
Ulysses was their first child, a deeply religious household where he grew up with five siblings. The family was prosperous enough to provide him with a substantial education at private schools, including the Rankin Academy in 1838, run by John Rankin, a noted abolitionist and educator prominent in the Underground Railroad, the network of safe houses used to help enslaved people flee the South. Grant came of age as the United States expanded rapidly westward, and as the nation’s social fabric shifted over the question of slavery. By 1800, several northern states had banned the institution, while the southern states remained resolute in its defense.
The stage was set for a titanic struggle between North and South, and Grant would eventually be forced into that conflict by a decision made by his father in 1839. At seventeen, Jesse Grant secured his son’s nomination to the United States Military Academy at West Point. The application succeeded, but an error in registration recorded him as Ulysses S. Grant, and the name stuck.
Grant was initially skeptical of life at the academy, but he grew into it, earning a reputation for his equestrian skills though only ranking as an average pupil. He graduated in June 1843, twenty-first of thirty-nine cadets, and was appointed as a brevet second lieutenant in the Fourth Infantry, sent to St. Louis, Missouri. While at West Point, Grant befriended Frederick Tracy Dent, a fellow cadent from White Haven near St.
Louis. Grant became a regular visitor to the Dent household and soon struck up a relationship with Dent’s sister Julia. They became engaged in 1844, though war on the southern border delayed their marriage. The Mexican-American War erupted in 1846 over the contentious position of Texas, which had broken away from Mexico in 1836 and was annexed by the United States in 1845.
Mexico refused to accept the annexation, and a boundary dispute over the Rio Grande versus the more northerly Nueces River spilled into open conflict. Grant fought at the Battle of Palo Alto in May 1846, his first taste of combat, and later served as a regimental quartermaster, earning a commendation for his role at the Battle of Molino del Rey near Mexico City in September 1847. The war ended in a total American victory, with the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in February 1848 establishing the Rio Grande as the border. This conflict was Grant’s only active military experience before the Civil War, and it served as his most significant training for the later struggle.
After the war, Grant returned to St. Louis and married Julia Dent. The marriage caused a rupture with his parents, who were displeased that the Dents were slave owners. Despite this family squabbling, Grant and Julia were devoted to one another.
She had a cast in her left eye and squinted as a result; years later, when Grant was president, she considered surgery to correct it, but he vetoed the idea, saying he loved her just as she was. They eventually had four children. Grant’s early family life was repeatedly interrupted by military postings, and in the early 1850s he was dispatched to California, where gold had been discovered and a heightened military presence was needed. Julia, heavily pregnant, remained in the East.
The next few years were bleak. Grant was moved across California and Oregon, entered several failed business ventures, and began drinking more heavily. Repeated acts of drunkenness and clashes with his commanding officers led him to resign from the military on September 31, 1854. At thirty-two, with no idea what to do next, he returned to St.
Louis. Life outside the military brought no relief. Grant accepted a farm allotment from Julia’s father but struggled financially, in part due to an economic recession. A real estate venture failed, and by the late 1850s he was reduced to selling firewood on a St.
Louis street corner and pawning a gold watch. His fortunes were about to take a striking turn. The election of Abraham Lincoln in November 1860 provoked a crisis. South Carolina seceded in December, followed by Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, and Texas, forming the Confederacy.
Hostilities began in April 1861 when Confederate forces attacked the Union garrison at Fort Sumter, and several more southern states joined the Confederacy. Grant rejoined the army after a nearly seven-year absence. In the initial stages of the conflict, he recruited and trained forces in Missouri and Illinois, and by the beginning of 1862, frustrated by a lack of major commands, he sought and received permission to undertake an offensive campaign. Marching south with 25,000 men, he won one of the Union’s first major victories when he besieged and captured Fort Donelson on the Cumberland River in Tennessee.
About 15,000 Confederate troops were captured. When the fort’s commander inquired as to terms of surrender, Grant replied that the only terms he offered were unconditional surrender. He was promoted to Major General. Two months later, Grant was the major Union commander at the Battle of Shiloh on April 6, 1862, where over 100,000 troops fought.
Grant was theoretically victorious, repelling the Confederate incursion, but it was a pyrrhic victory, with over 10,000 Union troops killed or wounded. His reputation, which had soared after Fort Donelson, was now damaged, not helped by reports of his drinking. There is likely truth to allegations that he was prone to bouts of heavy drinking, though he often abstained for long periods and rarely drank heavily when an important task lay ahead. Despite these setbacks, by the end of 1862 Grant convinced his superiors to allow him to move against Vicksburg, one of the Confederacy’s major strongholds on the Mississippi River.
He succeeded, and Vicksburg surrendered on July 4, 1863. The campaign ensured Union control of the Mississippi, effectively cutting the Confederacy in two. The year 1863 proved decisive for the war as a whole. Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation, making the abolition of slavery in the Confederate states a stated war goal.
General Robert E. Lee, having defeated Union forces at Chancellorsville, undertook a campaign into Pennsylvania, culminating in the three-day Battle of Gettysburg from July 1 to July 3, the bloodiest engagement of the war. Lee’s army was heavily defeated, with nearly 25,000 of his 75,000 men killed or wounded. Combined with Grant’s seizure of Vicksburg a day later, the Union was now on the offensive.
In recognition of his accomplishments, Grant was appointed Lieutenant General in March 1864 and placed in overall command of the Union Army. His strategy was to use the Union’s numerical superiority to confine Lee’s forces in Virginia while his subcommanders conducted campaigns to the south and southwest, including seizing Georgia. The strategy was broadly successful, though Grant failed to take the Confederate capital of Richmond in 1864, even after a bloody engagement at Cold Harbor ended in stalemate. His forces settled into a nine-month siege of Petersburg.
By the autumn of 1864, Atlanta had been captured, and as winter set in, Lee’s troops began deserting in large numbers due to starvation and hopelessness. By the spring of 1865, Lee’s position was hopeless. On April 9, 1865, Lee met Grant at Appomattox Court House in Virginia to negotiate the surrender of the Confederacy. The two generals reminisced about their experiences in the Mexican War before ending the Civil War.
Grant was authorized to offer lenient terms, with few reprisals for those who laid down their weapons, and the surrender was quickly agreed to across the remaining Confederate forces. The last fighting occurred in Texas at the end of May. Grant, however, lived to see the end of the war but not the cessation of all its consequences. On April 14, five days after Lee’s surrender, Abraham Lincoln was assassinated by John Wilkes Booth in Ford’s Theater.
Grant had turned down an offer to attend the performance with the president, and allegations flew that he was also a target, but he was not harmed. The end of the war ushered in Reconstruction, aimed primarily at ending slavery and secession in the South. Grant was involved in Reconstruction politics even before his presidency, touring the former Confederate states at the behest of President Johnson and submitting a report recommending a lenient approach to help end the bitterness of the war. In 1867, Johnson removed Secretary of War Edwin Stanton and offered Grant the position, which Grant accepted on an interim basis.
A constitutional conflict arose over the Tenure of Office Act, and when the Senate refused to approve Stanton’s dismissal, Grant resigned, provoking a split with Johnson. This fallout positioned Grant as a potential presidential candidate within the Republican Party. At the convention in Chicago in May 1868, Grant won the party’s support, running on the campaign slogan “Let us have peace. ” The election was closer than expected, but Grant won the Electoral College 214 to 80 over Democrat Horatio Seymour.
He was sworn in as the eighteenth president on March 4, 1869, and served eight years, easily winning a second term in 1872. Reconstruction dominated Grant’s presidency. He signed laws guaranteeing African Americans equal rights, and his administration pressured the former Confederate states that had not ratified the Fifteenth Amendment to do so, guaranteeing black Americans the right to vote. In exchange, they would be readmitted to the Union.
By 1871, the recalcitrant states had complied. But armed bands of traditional southern conservatives, including the Ku Klux Klan and other groups collectively termed Redeemers, used violence and intimidation to reclaim control of the South. Grant’s administration created the Justice Department, charged with cracking down on these movements, and dispatched federal troops to maintain order. The administration crushed the power of the Klan for a generation, arresting hundreds of senior members and prosecuting its most powerful benefactors.
Yet by the mid-1870s, Reconstruction was largely failing, and Redeemer Democrats sought to create a society that, in the absence of slavery, would still disenfranchise and oppress the African American population. Grant’s presidency also faced economic challenges. He passed the Public Credit Act, promising that bank notes issued during the Civil War would be repaid in coin backed by the gold and silver standard, curbing inflation and restoring confidence. But in 1873 an economic crisis developed after the collapse of the New York brokerage firm J.
Cook and Company, compounded by frailties in the global economy. The resulting depression, known at the time as the Great Depression but later renamed the Panic of 1873, lingered for the remainder of Grant’s second term. In foreign policy, Grant left matters largely to Secretary of State Hamilton Fish. Negotiations with Britain over its supplying naval support to the Confederacy resulted in the Treaty of Washington in 1871, with Britain paying over $15 million in reparations.
Grant also pursued the acquisition of Santo Domingo, but the scheme came to nothing due to opposition in Congress. His approach toward Native Americans was comparatively progressive for the time, favoring fair treatment and assimilation into Western education, economy, and government. Several peace treaties were negotiated during his first term, and conflict was at an historic low. But in 1874 gold was discovered in the Black Hills, and as prospectors streamed in, the Sioux, led by Red Cloud, Crazy Horse, and Sitting Bull, prepared for conflict.
The Great Sioux War of 1876 and 1877 ended in victory for the federal government, with the Sioux lands annexed and the Plains Indians forced onto reservations. Grant’s presidency was not without scandal. During the 1872 campaign, the Credit Mobilier scandal revealed that prominent Republicans had siphoned profits from the Union Pacific Railroad. Grant himself was scrupulously honest and not implicated, but the fallout damaged his administration.
In 1875, the Whiskey Ring scandal involved federal officials and whiskey distillers defrauding the government of tax revenues. Again Grant was not involved, but his private secretary and Secretary of War were, and resignations followed. The final act of Grant’s presidency came with the contentious election of 1876 between Rutherford B. Hayes and Samuel Tilden.
Tilden won 184 electoral votes, one short of the 185 needed, while Hayes had won 165, leaving 20 votes in dispute across Florida, Louisiana, South Carolina, and Oregon. Grant instructed Congress to resolve the matter legislatively, refrained from mobilizing the army, and formed an electoral commission. The result was the Compromise of 1877, under which Hayes was elected, though the Democrats demanded the removal of federal troops from the South in return. Their departure allowed the Democrats to tighten their grip on the southern states, rejecting Reconstruction and imposing Jim Crow laws that disenfranchised the African American community for decades.
Grant was widely praised at the time for averting a constitutional crisis, though his role in the compromise has since been tied to the oppression that followed. He could hardly have prevented the southern states’ path, however. Grant left office in March 1877 at the age of fifty-four. He and Julia undertook a world tour lasting two and a half years, traveling through Europe, meeting Queen Victoria, Pope Leo XIII, Otto von Bismarck, and others, before continuing to the Holy Land, Egypt, and Asia.
In Japan, Grant became involved in efforts to establish peace between Japan and China. Upon his return to the United States in September 1879, he received petitions to run for a third term, which tradition — though not law — discouraged. At the Republican convention in 1880, Grant secured the most votes initially but not enough to win the nomination, and after dozens of ballots, he threw his backing behind James Garfield, a fellow former Union general. Garfield won the presidency but was assassinated in September 1881.
Returning to private life, Grant’s business ventures failed as they always had, including a Wall Street scheme by his son Buck and a conman named Ferdinand Ward, which swindled Grant considerably. In the early 1880s, he began writing his memoirs. Mark Twain offered to publish them with a guarantee of 70 percent of royalties, an act of charity that proved transformative. The memoirs became a bestseller, earning nearly half a million dollars in sales, and provided Julia a comfortable later life.
Grant never lived to see them published. In the summer of 1884 he developed a throat problem, diagnosed as throat cancer in October. It advanced rapidly, and he died on July 23, 1885, at the age of sixty-three, just days after finishing his memoirs. Over a million and a half people attended his funeral procession through New York City on August 8, 1885, and he was eulogized as 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. Grant has suffered from a poor reputation in historical rankings, often placed among the worst presidents. That view has shifted somewhat in recent decades, but he still sits around the middle of the rankings. Such an impression is largely unfair.
As a military commander, he distinguished himself in the Mexican War, returned to service in the Civil War, and was the central figure in the final reduction of the Confederacy. Other Union generals had been given the same resources and failed; Grant succeeded. As president, he guided the country through the arduous early period of Reconstruction and economic stabilization, crushed the power of the Ku Klux Klan for a generation, pursued a comparatively progressive policy toward Native Americans, and handled the crisis of the 1876 election with restraint. He was flawed, certainly, and a heavy drinker at times, but he navigated many of the difficulties he encountered as well as he could.
There are many presidents more favorably regarded who, placed in his position between 1869 and 1877, might not have kept the ship of state on such an even keel in the aftermath of the only civil war the country has ever experienced.