Ulysses S. Grant: the general who saved the Union

Ulysses S. Grant was the general who would not let go. A failed farmer and store clerk in 1860, he rose in four years to command every army of the United States. He took Vicksburg and split the Confederacy, then fought Robert E. Lee across Virginia without pause until Lee's army surrendered. Encyclopedia Virginia's verdict is that no man in uniform on either side had more influence on the outcome of the Civil War.¹

Compare: Grant vs Lee

Early life

He was born Hiram Ulysses Grant on 27 April 1822 at Point Pleasant, Ohio, the son of Jesse Root Grant, a tanner, and grew up in Georgetown, Ohio. He hated the tannery but was good with horses. In 1839 his father secured him an appointment to West Point. Grant himself later wrote that military life had no charms for him.²

A mistake in his appointment papers entered him as Ulysses S. Grant, Simpson being his mother's maiden name, and he kept the name; Britannica adds that he claimed the middle initial stood for nothing. His classmates called him Sam. He graduated in 1843, 21st in a class of 39, an average student who excelled at horsemanship and mathematics.³

The Mexican War and the lost years, 1843 to 1861

Commissioned into the 4th Infantry and posted to Missouri, Grant met Julia Dent there and married her in 1848, after the war with Mexico. In that war he did well: the American Battlefield Trust counts two citations for gallantry and one for meritorious conduct. For much of it he served as his regiment's quartermaster and commissary, a post that, as Britannica notes, taught him a great deal about army supply.⁴

On 13 September 1847, the day Chapultepec fell, he showed the improvising streak that would mark his career. In his memoirs he tells how he found a church whose belfry overlooked the San Cosme gate of Mexico City, had a mountain howitzer carried there in pieces, persuaded a reluctant priest to open the door, and dropped shells on the defenders. The officer sent to fetch him to General Worth was John C. Pemberton, the man who would surrender Vicksburg to him sixteen years later. Britannica records the brevet promotions he won for his conduct that September.⁵

Peace brought lonely postings far from his wife and growing family, and from 1852 he served on the Pacific coast. In 1854, a captain at Fort Humboldt in California, he resigned. Why is disputed: the American Battlefield Trust says he resigned to avoid being drummed out for heavy drinking, while Britannica says that whether alcohol played a part remains open to conjecture.⁶

Six hard years followed. He farmed land near St. Louis that belonged to Julia's family, without success, and tried other trades. By 1860 Grant was a clerk in the family leather goods store in Galena, Illinois. Encyclopedia Virginia adds that his reputation as an abject failure in these years has been magnified.⁷

The western war, 1861 to 1863

When the war came in April 1861, trained officers were scarce. Grant helped drill the Galena volunteers and in June was made colonel of an unruly regiment, the 21st Illinois, which he turned into an efficient one. Promotion to brigadier general followed that summer; Encyclopedia Virginia dates the commission to 9 August 1861, and the American Battlefield Trust to July. He took command at Cairo, Illinois, and fought his first battle at Belmont, Missouri, on 7 November 1861.⁸

In February 1862 he took Fort Henry on the Tennessee River and Fort Donelson on the Cumberland, the first major Union victories of the war. When the Confederate commander at Donelson, Simon Buckner, asked for terms, Grant replied: "No terms except an unconditional and immediate surrender can be accepted. I propose to move immediately upon your works." The North began to say that U. S. stood for "Unconditional Surrender".⁹ › Battle of Fort Donelson, 1862

Two months later, on 6 April, a Confederate surprise attack at Shiloh drove his army back toward the Tennessee River; reinforced by Don Carlos Buell's troops, Grant counterattacked on 7 April and won the field. The losses brought a storm of criticism and calls for his removal. Lincoln, both the American Battlefield Trust and Encyclopedia Virginia report, refused, saying, in words recalled decades later by the Pennsylvania politician Alexander McClure: "I can't spare this man; he fights." For a time Henry Halleck took personal command and Grant was pushed aside.¹⁰

His answer was Vicksburg, the fortress on the bluffs that closed the Mississippi. After a string of failed attempts, in spring 1863 he marched his army down the west bank, crossed back to the east bank south of the city, and struck inland, sending part of his army under Sherman to take Jackson, the state capital, before turning on Vicksburg. When direct assaults failed, he besieged it. John C. Pemberton surrendered on 4 July 1863, and when Port Hudson fell days later the Confederacy was cut in two. Britannica sees in the campaign Grant's characteristic aggressiveness, resilience, independence and determination.¹¹ › The Siege of Vicksburg, 1863

That autumn he was sent to Chattanooga, where a Union army lay besieged. He lifted the siege and in November drove the Confederates off Lookout Mountain and Missionary Ridge. By then, Encyclopedia Virginia notes, he was the most successful Union general in the field.¹²

General-in-chief, 1864 to 1865

In March 1864 Lincoln made him a lieutenant general and general-in-chief of all the armies of the United States. Instead of running the war from Washington, Grant took the field with the Army of the Potomac. He kept George Meade in command of it, but in practice the army became his own.¹³

His plan was to strike everywhere at once. Meade would go after Lee's army rather than Richmond, while William T. Sherman drove into Georgia and smaller armies pressed on Lee's flanks. Encyclopedia Virginia calls these simultaneous offensives across the map his unique contribution to the Union war effort, and Britannica says of the plan simply: it worked.¹⁴

The Overland Campaign began in the first week of May 1864. The Wilderness (5 to 6 May), Spotsylvania and the North Anna were bloody draws, and at Cold Harbor on 3 June Grant suffered a lopsided defeat. Each time, instead of drawing back as his predecessors had done, he kept moving south toward the James, so that the battles followed one another without a pause. The cost was enormous, and critics called him a butcher; the Miller Center notes that he was both praised and criticized for his willingness to fight and accept heavy casualties.¹⁵

In June he reached the James and laid siege to Petersburg, the rail hub south of Richmond, cutting its supply lines one by one. His attack of 2 April 1865 broke Lee's lines, and that night the Confederates abandoned Petersburg and Richmond.¹⁶

Appomattox

Grant pursued Lee west and trapped his army near Appomattox Court House. On the afternoon of 9 April 1865 the two generals met in the parlor of Wilmer McLean's house. The heart of Grant's terms, as the National Park Service sets them out, was that Confederate soldiers would give up their weapons, equipment and flags; officers kept their horses and side arms, and all would be paroled and allowed to go home, not sent to prison camps. When Lee asked about the men's horses, Grant agreed in a separate order that cavalrymen and artillerymen could keep them, and he sent 25,000 rations to the hungry Confederates.¹⁷ › Battle of Appomattox Court House 1865

Grant felt no joy. In his memoirs, also quoted by Britannica, he wrote that his feelings were "sad and depressed" at the downfall of a foe who had fought so long and valiantly for a cause that was, he believed, "one of the worst for which a people ever fought." The other Confederate armies surrendered by early June on nearly the same terms. Union victory made the end of slavery permanent: the 13th Amendment, passed by the House on 31 January 1865, was ratified on 6 December 1865.¹⁸

Command style

Grant was quiet and soft-spoken and practically without flamboyance, yet he could inspire great bravery in his men. Encyclopedia Virginia finds his greatest strengths in seizing and holding the initiative, in his grasp of the political nature of modern war, and in a moral courage that kept him on his chosen course when predecessors in Virginia had blinked. Britannica credits his administrative ability, his openness to innovation, his versatility and his capacity to learn from mistakes, and notes that the Union had more men in Virginia throughout the war but that Grant was the first general to make the numbers count.¹⁹

His drinking has been argued over ever since. Encyclopedia Virginia finds no evidence that it ever influenced his behavior on a battlefield, while accepting that he handled alcohol badly. The same entry dismisses as unpersuasive the Lost Cause argument that he won only by weight of numbers, pointing to the campaigns of maneuver at Vicksburg and Chattanooga.²⁰

Later life and death

In 1866 Congress gave him the new rank of General of the Army of the United States. In 1868 the Republicans nominated him for president, and the last line of his letter of acceptance, "Let us have peace", became their slogan. He won that year and was reelected in 1872, serving from 1869 to 1877.²¹

As president he pressed for the Fifteenth Amendment, which barred denying the vote on grounds of race, and went to Capitol Hill to win the Ku Klux Klan Act of 1871, at times sending troops to protect Black Southerners. He also improved relations with Britain. But some of the men he trusted betrayed him, and corruption scandals among his appointees darkened his second term, although he was never personally implicated.²²

After leaving office he and Julia toured the world from 1877 and were received as celebrities. In 1884 the Wall Street firm of Grant and Ward, in which he had put his money, collapsed in a swindle and left him ruined. To provide for his family he wrote articles for the Century Magazine and then his memoirs, published with the help of his friend Mark Twain, while throat cancer slowly killed him.²³

He finished the book days before he died, at Mount McGregor, New York, on 23 July 1885, aged 63. The Personal Memoirs were a great success, secured his family's finances, and still rank among the finest military autobiographies.²⁴

Legacy and memory

Grant lies with Julia in Grant's Tomb on Riverside Drive in New York, the largest mausoleum in North America. It was paid for by public subscription; the National Park Service counts about 90,000 donors, Britannica almost 100,000 contributions. More than a million people came to its dedication on 27 April 1897, the 75th anniversary of his birth. Above the entrance are his own words: "Let us have peace."²⁵

His reputation has swung widely. For a long time historians ranked his presidency near the bottom, remembering its scandals; the Miller Center notes that recent rankings have risen sharply as scholars weigh his work for the rights of freed people, Native American policy and civil service reform. As a soldier he remains, in Encyclopedia Virginia's phrase, the man who won the war for the Union.²⁶

Follow his campaigns at Shiloh and Vicksburg, compare him with his great opponent in Grant vs Lee, meet his closest lieutenant William Tecumseh Sherman, or explore the greatest battles in American history.