Ulysses S. Grant

I

Introduction

Ulysses S. Grant (1822-1885), 18th president of the United States (1869-1877). Grant was a puzzling figure in American public life. He was a failure in his early ventures into both business and military life. In four years of commanding Union forces he climbed to the highest rank in the U.S. Army and directed the strategy that successfully concluded the Civil War in 1865. His two terms as president of the United States are considered by many historians to be the most corrupt in the country's history. Yet from accounts of Grant's contemporaries, as well as from his own memoirs, there emerges a personality of strong character and considerable dignity.

II

Early Life

Ulysses Simpson Grant was the son of a frontier family. He was born Hiram Ulysses Grant on April 27, 1822, in a two-room cabin in Point Pleasant in southwestern Ohio. His father, Jesse Root Grant, was a tanner. Hannah Simpson Grant, his mother, was a pious, hardworking frontier woman. When Ulysses was one year old, his father moved the family to nearby Georgetown, where the boy grew up and attended school. He later went to nearby Maysville Seminary in Maysville, Kentucky, and the Presbyterian Academy in Ripley, Ohio. He also worked on his father's farm, remarking in his memoirs: “I did all the work done with horses.” When Ulysses was 17, his father secured his admission to the U.S. Military Academy at West Point through U.S. Congressman Thomas L. Hamer of Ohio.

Grant entered West Point in May 1839. He now became Ulysses Simpson Grant through Congressman Hamer's error in writing the name. His classmates dubbed him “U.S.,””Sam,” and “Uncle Sam” Grant. Although he excelled at horsemanship and mathematics, Grant liked drill and discipline no more than most cadets. After a ten-week furlough home, he confided: “The ten weeks were shorter than one week at West Point.”

Grant graduated in 1843 with a barely average scholarship record, ranking 21st in a class of 39. He had hoped to get a position teaching mathematics at the academy and later a professorship “in some respectable college,” but he was instead assigned to infantry duty on the southwestern frontier. For two years he served in various posts in Missouri and Louisiana. In 1845 he joined the command of General Zachary Taylor in Texas. He fought in the Mexican War (1846-1848), but although twice cited for bravery in combat, he had little heart for the campaign. Later he told a friend, “I do not think there was ever a more wicked war than that waged by the United States on Mexico. ... I thought so at the time, when I was a youngster, but I had not moral courage enough to resign.”

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Stationed in Missouri in 1848, Grant married Julia Dent, the daughter of a plantation owner and the sister of a West Point classmate. In the next ten years four children were born to Ulysses and Julia Grant: three boys, Frederick, Ulysses, Jr., and Jesse, and a daughter, Ellen. From 1848 to 1852, Grant served at army posts in Detroit, Michigan, and Sackets Harbor, New York. In 1852 he was transferred to the Pacific Coast, first to Fort Vancouver in Oregon Territory, then to Fort Humboldt in California.

Grant's Pacific Coast duty made him miserable. Because of the expense and hardship of the trip, his family did not go with him. High living costs in California, a legacy of the 1849 gold rush, left him without enough money to send for them. He tried to supplement his army pay by farming, woodcutting, selling ice imported from Alaska, and dealing in livestock. But all these enterprises were failures. Grant felt homesick and isolated, and grew morose. “How broken I feel here,” he wrote to his wife in February 1854. He took to drinking heavily and quarreled with his commander, Brevet Colonel Robert C. Buchanan. Two months later he was made to resign. He had reached the rank of captain.

Returning to Missouri in 1855, Grant and his family settled on 32 hectares (80 acres) that his father-in-law had given to Julia. Grant cleared the land, built a log house, farmed, and hauled wood to sell in St. Louis. Again he failed to make a profit. In 1857 he was even forced to pawn his watch and chain to buy his family Christmas presents.

Grant then accepted a partnership in a real estate and rent collection firm in St. Louis, but this did not work out either. For a month he held a job in the St. Louis customhouse, but he lost it when the collector died. Grant had started working in his brothers' leather shop in Galena, Illinois, when the Confederate States of America, or Confederacy, seceded from the federal Union and the Civil War broke out. Loyal to the Union, Grant applied to serve as an officer when a call for troops went out in Illinois.

III

Civil War

Grant mustered in a volunteer Galena regiment and took it to the state capital, Springfield. There he took charge of mustering several more regiments and came to the attention of the governor, Richard Yates. In June 1861 Yates appointed Grant colonel of the rebellious 21st Illinois volunteer regiment. Grant soon taught the unruly men military discipline and led them against pro-Confederate guerrillas in Missouri. Because of his demonstrated leadership ability, Grant was then made brigadier general in command of the volunteers district at Cairo, Illinois.

Grant fought his first battle, an indecisive action against the Confederates at Belmont, Missouri, in November 1861. Three months later, aided by Commodore Andrew H. Foote's gunboats, he captured Fort Donelson, on the Cumberland River, and Fort Henry, on the Tennessee River. These were the first major Union victories of the war. The Confederate commander, Brigadier General Simon B. Buckner, an old friend of Grant's, yielded to Grant's hard conditions of “no terms except unconditional and immediate surrender.” Buckner's surrender of 14,000 men made Grant a national figure almost overnight, and he was nicknamed “Unconditional Surrender” Grant. This victory also won him promotion to major general of volunteers.

A

Shiloh

Two months later, at the Battle of Shiloh in Tennessee in April 1862, Grant did not fare so well. Waiting for General Don C. Buell and the Army of the Ohio to join his own Army of the Tennessee for a major offensive, Grant was caught unaware by a Confederate attack. He had not fortified his position, and his forces suffered severe losses before Buell's army arrived and helped turn back the attack.

Abuse was heaped on Grant throughout the North. Some accused him of having been drunk or grossly negligent at Shiloh. Major General Henry W. Halleck took over command of the Union offensive, and although Grant was second in command, Halleck ignored him. Humiliated, Grant thought of resigning.

President Abraham Lincoln was pressed to remove Grant but would not do so. “I can't spare this man,” declared Lincoln. “He fights.” In the summer of 1862, Lincoln called Halleck to Washington as general in chief and made Grant commander of all Union forces in western Tennessee and northern Mississippi. Besides leading his own Army of the Tennessee, Grant now had authority over the Army of the Ohio.

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