Ulysses S. Grant
Ulysses S. Grant | |
|---|---|
 | |
| 18th President | |
| Vice President | Schuyler Colfax (1869–1873); Henry Wilson (1873–1875) |
| Preceded by | Andrew Johnson |
| Succeeded by | Rutherford B. Hayes |
| Personal details | |
| Nationality | american |
| Political party | Republican |
Ulysses S. Grant (April 27, 1822 – July 23, 1885) was a Union general in the American Civil War and the 18th President of the United States (1869–1877).
Grant has been described by military historian J. F. C. Fuller as "the greatest general of his age and one of the greatest strategists of any age." He won many important battles, rose to become general-in-chief of all Union armies, and is credited with winning the war.
Although Grant was a successful general, he is considered by historians to be one of America's least successful presidents, who led an administration plagued by scandal and corruption. They agree that Grant was not personally corrupt; it was his subordinates in the executive branch who were at fault. He is instead mostly criticized for not taking a strong stance against the corruption, and not acting to stop it. More recent treatments have emphasized the accomplishments of his administration, including his struggle to preserve Reconstruction. His support for the legal rights of blacks to vote and hold public office were unpopular at the time, but have gained him more respect in modern times.
Biography
Grant was born Hiram Ulysses Grant in Point Pleasant, Clermont County, Ohio, 25 miles (40 km) north of Cincinnati on the Ohio River, to Jesse Grant and Hannah Simpson. His father, a tanner, and his mother were born in Pennsylvania. In the fall of 1823 they moved to the village of Georgetown in Brown County, Ohio, where Grant spent most of his time until he was 17.
At the age of 17, Grant received a cadetship to the United States Military Academy at West Point, New York, through his U.S. Congressman, Thomas L. Hamer. Hamer erroneously nominated him as Ulysses Simpson Grant, and although Grant protested the change, it was difficult to resist the bureaucracy. Upon graduation, Grant adopted the form of his new name with middle initial only, never acknowledging that the "S" stood for Simpson. He graduated from West Point in 1843, ranking 21st in a class of 39. At the academy, he established a reputation as a fearless and expert horseman. Grant drank distilled liquor and smoked huge numbers of cigars (one story had it that he smoked over 10,000 in five years) which may have contributed to his throat cancer of later life.
Grant married Julia Boggs Dent (1826–1902) on August 22, 1848. They had four children: Frederick Dent Grant, Ulysses S. (Buck) Grant, Jr., Ellen (Nellie) Grant, and Jesse Root Grant.
Military career
Mexican War
Grant served in the Mexican-American War under Generals Zachary Taylor and Winfield Scott, taking part in the battles of Resaca de la Palma, Palo Alto, Monterrey, and Veracruz. He was twice brevetted for bravery: at Molino del Rey and Chapultepec. On July 31, 1854, he resigned from the army. Seven years of civilian life followed, in which he was a farmer, a real estate agent in St. Louis, and finally an assistant in the leather shop owned by his father and brother.
Western Theater of the Civil War
On April 24, 1861, ten days after the fall of Fort Sumter, Captain Grant arrived in Springfield, Illinois, with a company of men he had raised. The governor felt that a West Point man could be put to better use and appointed him colonel of the 21st Illinois Infantry (effective June 17, 1861). On August 7, Grant was appointed a brigadier general of volunteers.
Grant gave the Union Army its first major victory of the American Civil War by capturing Fort Henry, Tennessee, on February 6, 1862, followed by Fort Donelson, where he demanded the famous terms of "unconditional surrender" and captured a Confederate army. Later in 1862, he was surprised by Gen. Albert Sidney Johnston at the Battle of Shiloh, but with grim determination and timely reinforcements, Grant turned a serious reverse into a victory on the second day of battle. In the campaign to capture the river fortress of Vicksburg, Mississippi, he spent the winter of 1862–63 conducting a series of failed attempts to overcome geographic and logistical obstacles to reaching the city. His eventual success in the spring and summer of 1863 is considered one of the most masterful in military history; it split the Confederacy in two, and it represented the second Confederate army to surrender to Grant.
Grant was given command of besieged Union forces in Chattanooga, Tennessee, decisively beating Braxton Bragg and opening an avenue to Atlanta, Georgia, and the heart of the Confederacy. His willingness to fight and ability to win impressed President Abraham Lincoln, who appointed him lieutenant general—a new rank recently authorized by the U.S. Congress with Grant in mind—on March 2, 1864. On March 12, Grant became general-in-chief of all the armies of the United States.
General-in-chief and strategy for victory
Grant's fighting style was what one fellow general called "that of a bulldog". Although a master of combat by out-maneuvering his opponent (such as at Vicksburg and in the Overland Campaign against Robert E. Lee), Grant was not afraid to order direct assaults or tight sieges against Confederate forces, often when the Confederates were themselves launching offensives against him. Once an offensive or a siege began, Grant refused to stop the attack until the enemy surrendered or was driven from the field. Such tactics often resulted in heavy casualties for Grant's men, but they wore down the Confederate forces proportionately even more and inflicted irreplaceable losses. Grant has been described as a "butcher" for his strategy, particularly in 1864, but he was able to achieve objectives that his predecessor generals had not, even though they suffered similar casualties over time.
In March 1864, Grant put Major General William T. Sherman in immediate command of all forces in the West and moved his headquarters to Virginia where he turned his attention to the long-frustrated Union effort to destroy the army of Lee; his secondary objective was to capture the Confederate capital of Richmond, Virginia, but Grant knew that the latter would happen automatically once the former was accomplished. He devised a coordinated strategy that would strike at the heart of the Confederacy from multiple directions: Grant, George G. Meade, and Benjamin Franklin Butler against Lee near Richmond; Franz Sigel in the Shenandoah Valley; Sherman to invade Georgia, defeat Joseph E. Johnston, and capture Atlanta; George Crook and William W. Averell to operate against railroad supply lines in West Virginia; Nathaniel Banks to capture Mobile, Alabama. Grant was the first general to attempt such a coordinated strategy in the war and the first to understand the concepts of total war, in which the destruction of an enemy's economic infrastructure that supplied its armies was as important as tactical victories on the battlefield.
Overland Campaign, Petersburg, and Appomattox
The Overland Campaign was the thrust needed by the Union to defeat the Confederacy. It pitted Grant against the great commander Robert E. Lee in an epic contest. It began early in May of 1864 when the Army of the Potomac crossed the Rapidan River, marching into an area of scrubby undergrowth and second growth trees known as the Wilderness. It was a terrible place to fight, but Lee sent in his Army of Northern Virginia anyway because he wanted to catch Grant off guard.
The Battle of the Wilderness was a stubborn, bloody two day fight. It was a fight in which there was no clear winner or loser. Afterwards, there came one of those rare moments when the course of history fell upon the decision of a single man. Lee backed off, permitting Grant to do what all of Grant's predecessors, as commanders of the Army of the Potomac, had done and that was to retreat. Grant, however, declined and ordered an advance around Lee's flank to the southeast.
At the Battle of Spotsylvania Court House, Lee committed all his reserves to prevent the Union forces from breaking his lines. Despite mounting casualties, Grant wrested the initiative from Lee. He was forcing Lee to fight Grant's style of fight, which would eventually force Lee inside his fortifications at Richmond. Lee knew that if that happened, the end of his army was merely a matter of time.
Most of Lee's great victories occurred when he was on the move. By making lightning strikes, when his opponents did not expect it, he knocked them off balance. Now Lee was fighting on the defensive. Unable to reinforce and reprovision the Army of Northern Virginia as he had always been able to do in the past, it became clear: Lee would never invade the North again. Even after the Battle of Cold Harbor, where Union forces suffered horrific casualties for no tactical gain, Grant pushed south. He stole a march on Lee, slipping his troops across the James River.
Despite beating Lee to Petersburg, Virginia, Grant failed to capture the rail junction city, because of his overly cautious subordinate commanders. Consequently, he was forced to settle down to a nine-month siege of Lee's army in the city. Now, with Grant's army stalled in Virginia and Sherman's army stalled in Georgia, it appeared to the people of the North that nothing was being accomplished. To make matters worse, Lee detached a small army under the command of Major General Jubal A. Early, who made a determined march on Washington D.C., threatening the city's inhabitants and embarrassing the Lincoln Administration. Abraham Lincoln's prospects in the Fall election were bleak.
Finally, in early September the efforts of Grant's coordinated strategy bore fruit. Sherman took Atlanta, and all of a sudden it became clear that the war was being won. Grant had already dispatched Philip Sheridan to the Shenandoah Valley to defeat Jubal A. Early and destroy the farms supplying Lee. Lincoln was reelected by a wide margin. Soon Sherman would began his March to the Sea.
At the beginning of April of 1865, Grant's relentless pressure finally forced Lee to evacuate Richmond and after a nine-day retreat, Lee surrendered his army at Appomattox Court House on April 9, 1865. There, Grant offered generous terms that did much to ease the tensions between the armies and preserve some semblance of Southern pride, which would be needed to reconcile the warring sides. Within a few weeks, the American Civil War was effectively over, although minor actions would continue until Kirby Smith surrendered his forces in the Trans-Mississippi Department on June 2, 1865.
Immediately after Lee's surrender, Grant had the sad honor of serving as a pallbearer at the funeral of his greatest champion, Abraham Lincoln. Lincoln had been quoted after the massive losses at Shiloh, "I can't spare this general. He fights." It was a two-word description that completely caught the essence of Ulysses S. Grant.
After the war, Congress authorized Grant the newly created rank of General of the Army (the equivalent of a four-star, "full" general rank in the modern Army). He was appointed as such by President Andrew Johnson on July 25, 1866.
Presidency
Grant was the 18th President of the United States and served two terms from March 4, 1869, to March 4, 1877. He was chosen as the Republican presidential candidate at the Republican National Convention in Chicago, Illinois on May 20, 1868, with no real opposition. In the general election that year, he won with a majority of 3,012,833 out of a total of 5,716,082 votes cast.
Grant's presidency was plagued with scandals, such as the Sanborn Incident at the Treasury and problems with U.S. Attorney Cyrus I. Scofield. The most famous scandal was the Whiskey Ring fraud in which over $3 million in taxes were taken from the federal government. Orville E. Babcock, the private secretary to the President, was indicted as a member of the ring and escaped conviction only because of a presidential pardon. After the Whiskey Ring, Grant's Secretary of War, William W. Belknap, was involved in an investigation that revealed that he had taken bribes in exchange for the sale of Native American trading posts.
Although there is no evidence that Grant himself profited from corruption among his subordinates, he did not take a firm stance against malefactors and failed to react strongly even after their guilt was established. He was weak in his selection of subordinates. He alienated party leaders by giving many posts to his friends and political contributors, rather than listen to their recommendations. His failure to establish adequate political allies was a factor in the scandals getting out of control.
Despite all the scandals, Grant's administration presided over significant events in U.S. history. The most tumultuous was the continuing process of Reconstruction. He favored a limited number of troops to be stationed in the South—sufficient numbers to protect rights of southern blacks and suppress the violent tactics of the Ku Klux Klan; not so many that would harbor resentment in the general population. In 1869 and 1871, Grant signed bills promoting voting rights and prosecuting Klan leaders. The Fifteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, establishing voting rights, was ratified in (1870).
A number of government agencies were instituted during the Grant administration:
- Department of Justice (1870)
- Post Office Department (1872)
- Office of the Solicitor General (1870)
- "Advisory Board on Civil Service" (1871); after it expired in 1873, it became the role model for the "Civil Service Commission" instituted in 1883 by President Chester A. Arthur, a Grant faithful. (Today it is known as the Office of Personnel Management.)
- Office of the Surgeon General (1871)
In 1876, Colorado was admitted into the Union. In foreign affairs the greatest achievement of the Grant administration was the Treaty of Washington negotiated by Grant's best appointment, Secretary of State Hamilton Fish, in 1871. In 1876 Grant helped to calm the nation over the Hayes-Tilden election controversy by appointing a federal commission that helped to settle the election.
Grant was known to visit the Willard Hotel to escape the stress of the White House. He referred to the people who approached him in the lobby as "those damn lobbyists," possibly giving rise to the modern term lobbyist.
Cabinet
| OFFICE | NAME | TERM |
| President | Ulysses S. Grant | 1869–1877 |
| Vice President | Schuyler Colfax | 1869–1873 |
| Henry Wilson | 1873–1875 | |
| Secretary of State | Elihu B. Washburne | 1869 |
| Hamilton Fish | 1869–1877 | |
| Secretary of the Treasury | George S. Boutwell | 1869–1873 |
| William Richardson | 1873–1874 | |
| Benjamin Bristow | 1874–1876 | |
| Lot M. Morrill | 1876–1877 | |
| Secretary of War | John A. Rawlins | 1869 |
| William T. Sherman | 1869 | |
| William W. Belknap | 1869–1876 | |
| Alphonso Taft | 1876 | |
| James D. Cameron | 1876–1877 | |
| Attorney General | Ebenezer R. Hoar | 1869–1870 |
| Amos T. Akerman | 1870–1871 | |
| George H. Williams | 1871–1875 | |
| Edwards Pierrepont | 1875–1876 | |
| Alphonso Taft | 1876–1877 | |
| Postmaster General | John A. J. Creswell | 1869–1874 |
| James W. Marshall | 1874 | |
| Marshall Jewell | 1874–1876 | |
| James N. Tyner | 1876–1877 | |
| Secretary of the Navy | Adolph E. Borie | 1869 |
| George M. Robeson | 1869–1877 | |
| Secretary of the Interior | Jacob D. Cox | 1869–1870 |
| Columbus Delano | 1870–1875 | |
| Zachariah Chandler | 1875–1877 | |
Supreme Court appointments
Grant appointed the following Justices to the Supreme Court of the United States:
- William Strong – 1870
- Joseph P. Bradley – 1870
- Ward Hunt – 1873
- Morrison Remick Waite (Chief Justice) – 1874
States Admitted to the Union
Later life
After the end of his second term, Grant spent two years traveling around the world. He visited Sunderland, where he opened the first free municipal public library in England. Grant also visited Japan. In the Shibakoen section of Tokyo, a tree still stands that Grant planted during his stay.
In 1879, the Meiji government of Japan announced the annexation of the Ryukyu Islands. China objected, and Grant was asked to arbitrate the matter. He decided that Japan's claim to the islands was stronger and ruled in Japan's favor.
In 1883, Grant was elected the eighth president of the National Rifle Association.
In 1881, Grant placed almost all of his financial assets into an investment banking partnership with Ferdinand Ward, as suggested by Grant's son Buck (Ulysses, Jr.), who was having success on Wall Street. Ward was known as the "Young Napoleon of Finance." Perhaps Grant should have taken that name seriously; as with the other Young Napoleon, George B. McClellan, failure was in the wings. In this case, Ward swindled Grant in 1884, bankrupted the company, Grant and Ward, and fled. And to make matters worse, Grant found out at the same time that he was suffering from throat cancer. Grant and his family were left destitute (this was before the era in which retired U.S. Presidents were given pensions).
In one of the most ironic twists in all history, Ward's treachery led directly to a great gift to posterity. Grant's Memoirs are considered a masterpiece, both for their writing style and their historical content, and until Grant bankrupted, he steadfastly refused to write them. Only upon his family's future financial independence becoming in doubt, did he agree to write anything at all.
He first wrote a couple of articles for The Century magazine, which were warmly received. Afterwards, the publishers made Grant an offer to write his memoirs. It was a standard contract, one which they issued to most any new writer. Independently of the magazine publishers, the famous author, Mark Twain, approached Grant. Twain, who was suspicious of publishers, was appalled by the magazine's offer. He rightly realized that Grant was, at that time, the most significant American alive, and he offered Grant a generous contract, including 75% of the book's sales as royalties. Grant accepted Twain's offer.
Now, terminally ill and in what many historian's believe was his greatest struggle, Grant fought to finish his memoirs. Although wracked with pain and unable to speak at the end, he triumphed, finishing them just a few days before his death. The memoirs succeeded, selling over 300,000 copies and earning the Grant family over $450,000 ($9,500,000 in 2005 dollars). Twain called the memoirs "the most remarkable work of its kind since the Commentaries of Julius Caesar," and they are widely regarded as among the finest memoirs ever written.
Ulysses S. Grant died at 8:06 a.m. on Thursday July 23, 1885, at Mount McGregor, Saratoga County, New York. His body lies in New York City, beside that of his wife, in Grant's Tomb, the largest mausoleum in North America.
Memorials and trivia
In World War II, the British Army produced an armored vehicle known as the Grant tank (a version of the American M3 model, which was ironically nicknamed the "Lee").
Grant's portrait appears on the U.S. $50 bill.
There is a U.S. Grant Bridge over the Ohio River at Portsmouth, Ohio.
Grant's nicknames included: The Hero of Appomattox, "Unconditional Surrender" Grant, Sam Grant (originating at West Point, from "U. S." Grant suggesting "Uncle Sam"), and, in his youth, Ulys, Lyss and Useless.
Counties in nine U.S. states are named after Grant: Grant County, Arkansas; Grant County, Kansas; Grant County, Minnesota; Grant County, Nebraska; Grant County, New Mexico; Grant County, North Dakota; Grant County, Oklahoma; Grant County, Washington; and Grant County, West Virginia.
See also
- U.S. presidential election, 1868
- U.S. presidential election, 1872
- History of the United States (1865–1918)
References
- Eicher, John H., & Eicher, David J., Civil War High Commands, Stanford University Press, 2001, ISBN 0-8047-3641-3.
- Fuller, Maj. Gen. J. F. C., Grant and Lee, A Study in Personality and Generalship, Indiana University Press, 1957, ISBN 0-253-13400-5.
- Smith, Jean Edward, Grant, Simon and Shuster, 2001, ISBN 0-684-84927-5.
External links
- First Inaugural Address
- Second Inaugural Address
- Full text of Personal Memoirs of U. S. Grant, (1885) from Project Gutenberg
- Grant and Slavery
- White House Biography
