Ulysses S. Grant

Ulysses S. Grant was the general who led the Union armies to victory in the American Civil War and the eighteenth president of the United States, serving from 1869 to 1877. As president he used federal power to protect the rights of freed Black Americans in the South during Reconstruction, but his administration was also marked by corruption scandals. His reputation, long low, has risen considerably among historians since the late twentieth century.

He was born Hiram Ulysses Grant on 27 April 1822 in Point Pleasant, Ohio, the son of a tanner, and grew up in nearby Georgetown. His father secured him a place at the United States Military Academy at West Point, where a clerical error registered him as Ulysses S. Grant, the name he kept. He was an average student but an outstanding horseman, and graduated in 1843.

Grant served in the Mexican–American War of 1846–1848, fighting under Zachary Taylor and Winfield Scott and taking part in the capture of Mexico City. He later wrote that he considered the war, which took a vast territory from Mexico, one of the most unjust ever waged by a stronger nation against a weaker one. In 1848 he married Julia Dent, the daughter of a Missouri slaveholder. Posted to remote garrisons on the Pacific coast, far from his family, he was lonely and drank, and he resigned from the army in 1854. The following years were a struggle: he tried farming near St Louis, sold firewood and worked as a rent collector, and by 1860 was a clerk in his father's leather shop in Galena, Illinois.

When the war broke out in 1861 Grant helped raise volunteers and was soon made a colonel, then a brigadier general. In February 1862 he captured Fort Henry and Fort Donelson in Tennessee, the first major Union victories, and his demand for "unconditional surrender" made him famous. Two months later his army was surprised at Shiloh, where it held on after two days of fighting that cost some 23,000 casualties on both sides, a shock to the nation. In December 1862 he issued General Orders No. 11 expelling Jews from his military district, an antisemitic order that Lincoln quickly revoked and which Grant later regretted.

His campaign against Vicksburg, the Confederate stronghold on the Mississippi, ended with its surrender on 4 July 1863, splitting the Confederacy in two. After he broke the siege of Chattanooga in November, Abraham Lincoln promoted him to lieutenant general and gave him command of all Union armies in March 1864. Grant coordinated simultaneous offensives, including William T. Sherman's march through Georgia, while he himself fought Robert E. Lee in Virginia in a series of costly battles, from the Wilderness to Cold Harbor, before besieging Petersburg. Critics called him a butcher, but the strategy steadily wore down the Confederate States. Lee surrendered to Grant at Appomattox Court House on 9 April 1865, and Grant offered generous terms that allowed Confederate soldiers to go home.

After the war Grant remained commanding general and in 1866 became the first full General of the Army. He clashed with President Andrew Johnson over Reconstruction and aligned himself with the Republicans in Congress. Nominated by the Republicans in 1868 with the slogan "Let us have peace", he defeated Horatio Seymour and took office in March 1869 at the age of forty-six.

As president he pressed for the ratification of the Fifteenth Amendment of 1870, which prohibited denying the vote on grounds of race. He signed the act creating the Department of Justice and the Enforcement Acts of 1870 and 1871, including the Ku Klux Klan Act, and used federal troops and prosecutors to break up the Klan in South Carolina and elsewhere. Black Americans voted and held office across the South in large numbers. By his second term, however, northern support for intervention was fading, and white paramilitary violence, such as the Colfax massacre in Louisiana in 1873, was steadily restoring white supremacist rule.

In foreign policy, Grant's secretary of state Hamilton Fish negotiated the Treaty of Washington of 1871, which settled American claims against Britain over Confederate warships built in British yards through international arbitration. Grant's attempt to annex the Dominican Republic was defeated in the Senate. His "peace policy" towards Native Americans sought to replace corrupt agents with church nominees, but wars on the Plains continued, including the Great Sioux War after gold was discovered in the Black Hills.

Grant was personally honest but trusted friends and appointees who were not. Financiers tried to corner the gold market in 1869, leading to the Black Friday panic, and later scandals included the Crédit Mobilier affair, the Whiskey Ring tax fraud involving his private secretary, and bribery in the War Department. The Panic of 1873 began a long depression. He won re-election easily in 1872 against Horace Greeley, but left office in 1877 after the disputed election that brought Rutherford B. Hayes to power and ended Reconstruction.

Grant and Julia made a two-year tour of the world, meeting heads of state from Britain to Japan. A bid for a third presidential nomination failed in 1880. Settling in New York, he invested everything in a brokerage firm, Grant & Ward, whose partner Ferdinand Ward turned out to be a swindler; its collapse in 1884 ruined him. That year he was diagnosed with throat cancer. Racing against death to provide for his family, he wrote his Personal Memoirs, published by Mark Twain, finishing them days before he died at Mount McGregor, New York, on 23 July 1885. The memoirs sold hugely and are regarded as among the finest military autobiographies in English. He is buried in Grant's Tomb in Manhattan.

For much of the twentieth century, historians influenced by the Lost Cause view of the war portrayed Grant as a crude general and a failed president. More recent scholarship has emphasised his strategic skill and his commitment, unusual for his time, to the civil rights of Black Americans, while still acknowledging the scandals and the failures of his administration in the history of the United States.