Grant, Ulysses S.

Grant, Ulysses S. (1822–1885), Civil War general and eighteenth president of the United States.Born at Point Pleasant, Ohio, on 27 April 1822, and named Hiram Ulysses, young Ulysses (as his father called him) grew up in nearby Georgetown, across the street from his father's tannery, and acquired an intense aversion to the stench of death. He attended local schools, did farm chores, and demonstrated unusual skill with horses. Appointed to the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, he was mistakenly registered as Ulysses S., which he eventually accepted, though insisting that his middle initial stood for nothing.

Graduating in 1843, he was assigned to Jefferson Barracks in St. Louis County. In the Mexican War, 1846–48, Grant displayed commendable gallantry under Zachary Taylor, but chafed at assignments as quartermaster and commissary in the army of Winfield Scott until the final approach to Mexico City provided opportunity to earn brevet (temporary) promotion to captain. Grant encountered different styles of command and management, maintained an aversion to military protocol, and believed that the war represented aggression against Mexico.

In 1848, Grant married Julia Dent, daughter of a Missouri slaveholder, and in 1850 they had a son. Grant was soon separated from his family when the army assigned him to the Pacific Coast. Paid too little to reunite the family in California, he was miserably unhappy; nonetheless, tales of his heavy drinking then and later are unsupported. He resigned in 1854 to begin farming on his father‐in‐law's estate in St. Louis County. When his farm failed in the Panic of 1857, he could not find employment in St. Louis. By 1860, necessity forced him to his father's leather goods store in Galena, Illinois.

When the Civil War began, Grant, impelled by a sense of patriotic obligation, reluctantly left his wife and four children. He served Governor Richard Yates of Illinois temporarily as aide and mustering officer but failed to find an appropriate command in the frenzied pursuit of officerships for units of U.S. Volunteers. Yates eventually gave him a regiment, and Grant quickly established discipline and marched the 21st Illinois to Missouri. Before he engaged the enemy, he acquired promotion to brigadier general chiefly because an Illinois congressman had no superior candidate in his home district. Chance placed Grant in command at Cairo, Illinois, just as the Confederates occupied Columbus and Hickman on the Mississippi River in previously neutral Kentucky. Grant then boldly occupied Paducah and Smithland at the mouths of the Tennessee and Cumberland Rivers. On 7 November 1861, he led 3,000 troops from Cairo to Belmont, Missouri. Initially successful in overrunning a Confederate camp, Grant was unprepared for the counterattack that drove his men back to their transports in disarray. Because Grant had displayed aggressiveness and suffered no greater casualties than he had inflicted, this indecisive encounter provided experience without damaging his prospects.

In January 1862, Grant wrung permission from his conservative superior, Maj. Gen. Henry W. Halleck, to attack Fort Henry on the Tennessee River. Union gunboats compelled the fort's surrender (6 February) before the arrival of all Grant's forces, and much of the garrison fled to Fort Donelson on the Cumberland River. Grant followed, sending gunboats to the Cumberland and troops overland. Rather than await expected reinforcements, Grant then besieged the 21,000 Confederates with his own army of 15,000. On 14 February, the gunboats attacked unsuccessfully. The next day, while Grant visited the wounded naval commander on shipboard, a surprise Confederate attack rolled up the Union right and opened the road for escape. As the Confederate commander dawdled, Grant returned and launched a counterattack that removed all options save “unconditional surrender”—Grant's phrase that matched his initials and provided a popular nickname. Grant captured about 15,000 men and compelled the Confederates to fall back from Kentucky and much of middle Tennessee. The first major Union victory of the war won Grant promotion to major general.

Advancing up the Tennessee River to attack Corinth, Mississippi, Grant assembled troops at Pittsburgh Landing, Tennessee, where Confederates unexpectedly attacked at Shiloh Church (6 April) in the Battle of Shiloh. Pushed to the edge of destruction on the riverbank after a frightful encounter, Grant used reinforcements for a second day of fighting that recaptured the field. Grant's resilience and indomitability won acclaim, but heavy casualties and rumors raised questions that temporarily cost him his command. Not until Halleck left for Washington as general in chief did Grant resume leadership.

His campaign in the siege of Vicksburg, Mississippi, began in late 1862 with setbacks. Confederate cavalry captured Grant's supply base at Holly Springs and William Tecumsch Sherman's premature assault on Vicksburg failed. After a winter of frustration, Grant's supporting fleet ran past the batteries and landed troops south of Vicksburg. Grant then unexpectedly struck at Jackson, Mississippi, before turning toward Vicksburg. His lightning moves prevented the cooperation of two Confederate armies in Mississippi and led to eventual surrender of the besieged citadel of Vicksburg in July 1863. Grant's military masterpiece virtually opened the river and bisected the Confederacy. A smashing victory against Gen. Braxton Bragg at Chattanooga in November 1863 firmly established his reputation as the Union's finest commander.

Promoted to lieutenant general and given command of all Union forces in March 1864, Grant left Halleck in Washington as chief of staff while he accompanied the Army of the Potomac in Virginia. He planned a coordinated campaign with two western armies converging on Atlanta and three eastern armies aimed at Richmond. In spring 1864, Grant faced Robert E. Lee in a bloody series of encounters, including at the Battle of the Wilderness (5–6 May), fighting at Spotsylvania (7–19 May), North Anna (23–26 May), and Cold Harbor (1–3 June) in the Wilderness to Petersburg Campaign. Shocking Union casualties accompanied Grant's approach to Richmond, but a brilliant crossing of the James River then brought his armies to thinly defended Petersburg, Virginia, where subordinates immediately bungled a dazzling opportunity to end the war. Grant settled uncomfortably into siege. Four of five armies had failed to achieve their missions; only Sherman's victory in the Battle of Atlanta (2 September) redeemed his strategy.

Grant maintained pressure on Lee as Sherman's march to the sea again divided the Confederacy. In late March 1865, Grant launched another lightning campaign that drove Lee from Richmond and to surrender at Appomattox Courthouse (9 April). President Andrew Johnson tried to harness Grant's popularity in an effort to restore Southern statehood at the expense of the freed slaves. Grant's refusal to abandon his soldiers or his black veterans frustrated Johnson's attempt to replace Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton with Grant and drove him to support the Republican Party. Grant's reputation as a wartime commander carried him on to two terms as president (1869–77). Contrast between expectation and fulfillment in the political arena dimmed Grant's fame, which revived shortly after his death with posthumous publication of his Memoirs—a splendid military autobiography written with fairness, candor, and surprising humor.

Grant's popular reputation as an impassive “butcher” whose victories depended on luck and larger armies arose amid strivings for sectional reconciliation. Military analysis by the English soldier‐scholar J. F. C. Fuller and later by American military historians T. Harry Williams and Bruce Catton promoted reappraisal. Lincoln's understanding that Grant deplored politics but valued freedom in military matters formed the cornerstone of their effective partnership. Sherman, who also deferred to Grant's military mastery, became his ideal lieutenant. Grant's resilience, unpredictability, and strategic grasp continue to challenge scholars, as does Grant's meteoric rise from provincial clerk to military eminence. “The laws of successful war in one generation would insure defeat in another,” he wrote, but arguments that his innovations foreshadowed modern total warfare lack historical perspective.
[See also Civil War: Military and Diplomatic Course; Commander in Chief, President as; Reconstruction.]

Bibliography

U.S. Grant, Personal Memoirs of U. S. Grant, 2 vols., 1885–86.
Horace Porter , Campaigning with Grant, 1897.
J. F. C. Fuller , Grant and Lee: A Study in Personality and Generalship, 1933.
T. Harry Williams , Lincoln and His Generals, 1952.
Bruce Catton , Grant Moves South, 1960.
John Y. Simon, ed., The Papers of Ulysses S. Grant, 20 vols. to date, 1967–.
Bruce Catton , Grant Takes Command, 1969.
William S. McFeely , Grant: A Biography, 1981.
Brooks D. Simpson , Let Us Have Peace: Ulysses S. Grant and the Politics of War and Reconstruction, 1861–1868, 1991.
John Y. Simon , Grant, Lincoln, and Unconditional Surrender, in Gabor S. Boritt, ed., Lincoln's Generals, 1994.

John Y. Simon