Ulysses S. Grant
Quotes & Wisdom
Ulysses S. Grant: The Quiet Man Who Won the War
Ulysses S. Grant was neither the most brilliant strategist nor the most polished officer in the Union Army, but he possessed what his superiors lacked: the willingness to fight. Rising from obscurity and personal failure - he had left the military, failed at farming, and was reduced to selling firewood on street corners - Grant became the general who won the Civil War through relentless tenacity. As the eighteenth president, he championed civil rights during Reconstruction while his administration struggled with corruption. But his final act may be his greatest: dying of throat cancer, racing to finish his Personal Memoirs so his family would not be left destitute. Published by Mark Twain, those memoirs are widely regarded as the finest military autobiography ever written in English - proof that the man who won the war with action could also command the page with words.
Context & Background
Hiram Ulysses Grant was born on April 27, 1822, in Point Pleasant, Ohio, a small village on the banks of the Ohio River. His father, Jesse Root Grant, was a tanner whose ambitions for his son exceeded anything the modest family business could provide. Young Ulysses showed no enthusiasm for the tannery - he found the work revolting - but displayed an extraordinary natural affinity for horses. Stories of his horsemanship spread through the community, marking him as someone with unusual physical intuition even if his academic record remained unremarkable.
A clerical error at West Point changed his name permanently. Appointed to the academy through a Congressional nomination that mistakenly listed him as 'Ulysses S. Grant,' he found the bureaucracy unmovable and accepted the new identity. He graduated in 1843, ranking twenty-first in a class of thirty-nine - respectable but hardly distinguished. Nothing about the young officer suggested a future commanding general.
Grant served with distinction in the Mexican-American War under both Zachary Taylor and Winfield Scott, an experience that proved formative. He absorbed Taylor's straightforward tactical approach and Scott's ability to manage complex logistics over difficult terrain. But he also developed a lifelong opposition to the war itself, later writing that it was 'one of the most unjust ever waged by a stronger against a weaker nation.'
After the war, Grant married Julia Dent in 1848. Stationed at remote posts on the Pacific Coast, separated from his family, he sank into depression and heavy drinking. He resigned his commission in 1854 under a cloud of suspicion about his alcohol use. The years that followed were a catalogue of failure: unsuccessful farming, failed real estate ventures, and finally a humiliating position as a clerk in his father's leather goods store. By 1861, Ulysses S. Grant was a thirty-nine-year-old failure by any conventional measure.
The Civil War offered Grant something no other circumstance could: a problem worthy of his particular genius. While other Union generals hesitated, maneuvered cautiously, and demanded reinforcements, Grant attacked. His capture of Fort Henry and Fort Donelson in February 1862 produced the first major Union victories of the war and introduced his famous demand for 'unconditional surrender' - a phrase that became his nickname.
The Battle of Shiloh in April 1862 nearly ended his career. Caught off guard by a Confederate assault, Grant's forces suffered devastating casualties on the first day. Critics howled for his removal. When someone suggested firing Grant, Abraham Lincoln reportedly replied, 'I can't spare this man. He fights.' The president understood what Grant's critics did not: the Union's advantage lay in its superior resources, and only a general willing to sustain losses and keep pressing forward could exploit that advantage.
The Vicksburg Campaign of 1863 showcased Grant's strategic brilliance at its peak. Rather than attacking the fortress city directly, he executed a daring series of maneuvers - crossing the Mississippi below the city, living off the land, fighting five battles in seventeen days - that culminated in a siege and surrender that split the Confederacy in two. It was a masterpiece of operational art, and it secured Grant's appointment as commander of all Union forces.
As General-in-Chief from March 1864, Grant coordinated a multi-front strategy of simultaneous pressure that the Confederacy could not withstand. His personal campaign against Robert E. Lee's Army of Northern Virginia was a brutal war of attrition through the Wilderness, Spotsylvania, Cold Harbor, and the siege of Petersburg. The casualties were staggering - and Grant bore the criticism stoically. His logic was merciless but sound: the Union could replace its losses; the Confederacy could not.
Lee's surrender at Appomattox Court House on April 9, 1865, was handled with characteristic Grant generosity. Confederate soldiers were allowed to keep their horses and sidearms. Officers retained their personal baggage. Grant wanted reconciliation, not humiliation.
Grant's two terms as president (1869-1877) remain among the most debated in American history. Elected overwhelmingly as the hero who saved the Union, he entered office with enormous goodwill but little political experience. His administration pursued Reconstruction with genuine commitment - creating the Department of Justice, prosecuting the Ku Klux Klan, and championing the Fifteenth Amendment guaranteeing voting rights regardless of race.
Yet corruption plagued his administration. Grant's trusting nature, an asset in personal relationships, became a liability in politics. Scandals involving his appointees - the Credit Mobilier affair, the Whiskey Ring, the salary grab - tarnished his reputation, even though Grant's personal honesty was never seriously questioned. He trusted the wrong people, a failing he acknowledged with characteristic bluntness.
His presidency also saw significant achievements beyond civil rights: the Treaty of Washington settled disputes with Britain, the Yellowstone region was protected as the world's first national park, and his peace policy toward Native Americans, while imperfect, represented an improvement over outright warfare. Modern historians have substantially rehabilitated Grant's presidential legacy, recognizing his civil rights achievements as far more significant than previously acknowledged.
Grant's last years brought financial ruin and terminal illness - and produced his masterpiece. Swindled by a fraudulent business partner, he lost his entire fortune. Almost simultaneously, he was diagnosed with throat cancer, likely caused by his lifelong cigar habit. Facing destitution for his family, he accepted an offer from Mark Twain to publish his memoirs.
What followed was a race against death that Grant won by the narrowest of margins. Working five to seven hours a day despite excruciating pain, sometimes unable to speak and communicating by written notes, he produced approximately 336,000 words of prose that astonished the literary world. His writing was clear, direct, and free of the Victorian ornamentation that characterized most contemporary military memoirs.
Grant finished the manuscript on July 20, 1885. He died three days later, on July 23, at a cottage in Mount McGregor, New York. The memoirs became an immediate bestseller. The first royalty check to his widow Julia was for two hundred thousand dollars - roughly five million in today's currency.
Mark Twain called Grant's memoirs a literary masterpiece comparable to Caesar's Commentaries. Gertrude Stein praised their clean prose. Edmund Wilson ranked them among the greatest works of American nonfiction. The book's power lies not in dramatic embellishment but in its relentless honesty - Grant was as direct on the page as he was on the battlefield.
Grant possessed a remarkable visual memory that served him throughout the war. He could study a map once and recall its details weeks later, an ability that gave him an almost intuitive sense of terrain and troop positioning. Combined with his willingness to make decisions under uncertainty, this gift made him uniquely effective in the fluid, chaotic conditions of Civil War combat.
His views on the war evolved significantly over time. Though initially fighting to preserve the Union without disturbing slavery, Grant came to see emancipation as both morally necessary and strategically essential. His memoirs contain some of the clearest moral writing about slavery produced by any American leader, stating unequivocally that the Confederacy's cause was 'one of the worst for which a people ever fought.'
After leaving the presidency, Grant embarked on a two-year world tour that made him the first American president to visit the Middle East and Asia. He met with Otto von Bismarck, Queen Victoria, and the Emperor of Japan, serving as an unofficial ambassador and demonstrating that the quiet man from Point Pleasant, Ohio, could hold his own among the world's most powerful figures.