GRANT, ULYSSES S.
(1822-1885), Civil War general and eighteenth president of the United States. Born in Point Pleasant, Ohio, Grant was a plain, unassuming product of the Midwest. His life was one of pathetically ordinary failure in everything save the waging or writing of war. The son of a tanner, he had no taste for his father's trade. He graduated from West Point in 1843 and compiled a solid record of service in the Mexican War, but his army career collapsed in the peacetime boredom of a long isolated tour of duty in northern California and Oregon. A drinking problem hastened his resignation from the army in 1854. Next he tried farming and real estate ventures without success. When the Civil War broke out in the spring of 1861, he was working as a clerk for his father in Galena, Illinois.
Grant found his calling in the Civil War. The conflict energized him and restored his confidence. First commissioned as a colonel of the Twenty-first Illinois Volunteer Infantry, he was promoted in August 1861 to brigadier general of volunteers. He commanded the land forces that captured Fort Henry on the Tennessee River and Fort Donelson on the Cumberland River in February 1862. This was his first important battle and the first major Union victory of the war. Confederate armies counterattacked at the Battle of Shiloh in April 1862. Aided by timely reinforcements, a surprised and initially outgeneraled Grant was able to hold his position and force a Confederate retreat into Mississippi.
Grant's most stunning victory in the West came out of the Vicksburg campaign in the spring of 1863. In a brilliant display of strategic audacity, he outflanked the Confederate defenders of Vicksburg by using the Union navy to run his army downriver from the city. He then defeated surprised and scattered Confederate armies and successfully besieged Vicksburg from the east. The city, the last major Confederate position on the Mississippi River, surrendered on July 4, 1863. Having been given the top Union command in the West in October, Grant lifted the Confederate siege of Chattanooga the next month and routed Braxton Bragg's Confederate Army of Tennessee. The way was now open for the Union campaign against Atlanta.
Congress revived the rank of lieutenant general specifically for Grant, and President Abraham Lincoln appointed him supreme commander of the Union armies in March 1864. In a series of bloody, grinding encounters Grant finally wore down Robert E. Lee's Army of Northern Virginia between May 1864 and April 1865. Lee surrendered to Grant at Appomattox Court House on April 9, 1865.
Grant's postwar career was decidedly anticlimactic. To be sure, he was elected as a Republican to two terms as president (1869-1877), but his administrations were marred by indecisive leadership, an inconsistent policy on southern Reconstruction, and massive corruption. Coupled with a severe economic depression that began in 1873, administration scandals cost Grant much of his popularity. Nonetheless, his presidency did have some solid accomplishments. The Treaty of Washington in 1872 resolved a major dispute with Great Britain over damages inflicted on American shipping by Confederate raiders built in British shipyards during the Civil War. The Enforcement Acts of 1870-1871 broke the power of the Ku Klux Klan in the Reconstruction South, and the Civil Rights Act of 1875 marked an unprecedented attempt to extend federal protection of black civil rights to areas of public accommodations.
After returning to the United States from a world tour in the late 1870s, Grant went bankrupt as a result of foolish investments in the fraudulent banking firm of Grant & Ward. Though once again a failure in civilian life, Grant did much to redeem his place in history by writing his Personal Memoirs. Finished just before his death from throat cancer in 1885, his memoirs stand as one of the clearest and most powerful military narratives ever written.
Ulysses S. Grant, Personal Memoirs of U. S. Grant, 2 vols., reprint ed. (1982); William S. McFeely, Grant: A Biography (1981).
William L. Barney
See also Civil War; Elections: 1868, 1872. For events during Grant's administration, see Alabama Claims; Civil Service Reform; Corruption; Crédit Mobilier of America; Legal Tender Cases; Reconstruction; Slaughterhouse Cases; Tweed Ring.
