Ulysses S. Grant

About this figure

Ulysses S. Grant (1822-1885) was a Union general during the American Civil War and later the eighteenth President of the United States. A West Point graduate who had served in the Mexican-American War, Grant had left the army and struggled in civilian business before the Civil War gave him a path back to military command. He rose quickly through a string of Union victories in the western theater, including the capture of Fort Donelson in 1862 and the successful siege of Vicksburg, Mississippi, which fell on July 4, 1863, splitting the Confederacy along the Mississippi River. President Lincoln placed him in command of all Union armies in 1864, and Grant pursued a relentless strategy of coordinated pressure on multiple fronts that, after a grueling campaign against Robert E. Lee's army in Virginia, brought about Lee's surrender at Appomattox Courthouse on April 9, 1865, effectively ending the war.

Grant was elected president in 1868 and served two terms, from 1869 to 1877, during which his administration worked to enforce Reconstruction-era civil rights protections for formerly enslaved people in the South, even as it was also damaged by a series of corruption scandals involving subordinates, though Grant himself was not personally implicated in wrongdoing. After leaving office, Grant suffered severe financial losses from a fraudulent investment partnership and, diagnosed with throat cancer, spent his final months racing to complete his "Personal Memoirs" to secure his family's finances. Working with the encouragement and financial backing of Mark Twain, who published the book through his own company, Grant finished the manuscript just days before his death in 1885. The "Personal Memoirs," covering his early life and his account of the Civil War campaigns, were an immediate popular and critical success and are still widely regarded as among the finest military memoirs in American letters, prized for their plain, direct prose and their sober, unsentimental account of command.

Written by Epoch Voices. Not the figure’s own words.