Ulysses S. Grant
General of the Armies; 18th President of the United States
Ulysses S. Grant led Union forces to victory in the Civil War and served two terms as the 18th President of the United States.
Biography
Hiram Ulysses Grant (April 27, 1822 – July 23, 1885) was born in Point Pleasant, Ohio, the son of a tanner. An administrative error on his congressional nomination changed his name to "Ulysses S. Grant" — an identity he simply adopted and kept. He graduated from West Point in 1843, ranking 21st of 39 in his class. His academic record was unremarkable, but his horsemanship was the finest the Academy had seen in years.
Grant served effectively in the Mexican-American War under Generals Zachary Taylor and Winfield Scott, receiving a brevet promotion for gallantry at Molino del Rey. He privately believed the war unjust — he later called it "one of the most unjust ever waged by a stronger against a weaker nation" — but he served faithfully. Peacetime garrison duty in the Pacific Northwest, separated from his wife and children, led him to resign in 1854 under circumstances widely attributed to heavy drinking. The following seven years were marked by failure: a farm he called "Hardscrabble," failed real estate ventures, and work in his brother's leather goods store in Galena, Illinois.
The Civil War transformed everything. As a colonel commanding Illinois volunteers, Grant demonstrated the aggressive decisiveness that had been invisible in peacetime. The capture of Fort Donelson in February 1862 — demanding "unconditional and immediate surrender" — earned him the nickname "Unconditional Surrender Grant" and his first national fame. Victories at Shiloh, the Vicksburg Campaign (which gave the Union the entire Mississippi River), and Chattanooga made him the most successful Union commander in the Western Theater.
Lincoln promoted Grant to Lieutenant General in March 1864 — the first officer to hold that rank since George Washington — and placed him in command of all Union armies. Grant's strategy was straightforward and relentless: maintain unceasing pressure on all Confederate forces simultaneously, leveraging the Union's superior manpower and resources. The Overland Campaign of 1864 was enormously costly, but it drove Lee into siege warfare at Petersburg. On April 9, 1865, Lee surrendered at Appomattox Court House. Grant's terms were magnanimous: officers kept their sidearms, men kept their horses, and Confederate soldiers were fed from Union rations.
Grant served two terms as the 18th President (1869–1877), aggressively prosecuting the Ku Klux Klan and championing Black civil rights during Reconstruction. In his final years, bankrupt and dying of throat cancer, he raced to complete his memoirs. The two-volume Personal Memoirs of Ulysses S. Grant — finished days before his death — is widely considered the finest military memoir in American literature, praised by Mark Twain, who published it, and by critics ever since.
Major Achievements
Fort Donelson (February 1862) Grant's capture of Fort Donelson and his demand for unconditional surrender gave the Union its first major victory of the Civil War and established his reputation as the aggressive, decisive commander Lincoln had been searching for.
Vicksburg Campaign (1863) Grant's 600-mile campaign through Mississippi — crossing the river below Vicksburg, living off the land, winning five battles in 17 days, and then laying siege — is studied at military academies worldwide. The fall of Vicksburg on July 4, 1863 gave the Union control of the Mississippi River, splitting the Confederacy in two.
Overland Campaign and Petersburg (1864–1865) As General-in-Chief, Grant launched simultaneous offensives against all Confederate armies, refusing to allow Lee the operational pauses that had allowed Confederate recovery. Though costly, the campaign forced Lee into siege warfare that ended Confederate resistance.
18th President of the United States (1869–1877) Grant's presidency saw aggressive enforcement of Reconstruction, prosecution of the Ku Klux Klan under the Enforcement Acts, and passage of the 15th Amendment granting Black Americans the right to vote.
Personal Memoirs Grant's two-volume memoir, completed while dying of cancer, is considered a masterpiece of American prose — clear, modest, strategically acute, and free of self-promotion. It secured his family's financial future and his literary legacy simultaneously.
Connection to Academy Values
Grant's West Point career — 21st in a class of 39 — is the Academy's most powerful argument against judging potential by class rank. The most consequential military leader the institution ever produced graduated in the middle of his class and spent a decade failing in civilian life before circumstances revealed what he was capable of.
Grant embodied perseverance above all other West Point virtues. He failed repeatedly, was widely written off, and then rose to save the republic. His battlefield decisions combined moral clarity — he understood what victory required and refused to flinch from the cost — with genuine care for the soldiers under his command and, at Appomattox, for the men he had defeated.
His treatment of Lee's surrendering army at Appomattox — magnanimous, practical, humane — was not required by military necessity. It was an act of character that shaped the peace as profoundly as his generalship shaped the war. West Point teaches it as the difference between a soldier who wins battles and a leader who defines what victory means.
