Ulysses S. Grant

Ulysses S. Grant (born Hiram Ulysses Grant, 1822-1885) was an American general and the eighteenth President of the United States (1869–1877). He achieved international fame as the leading Union general in the American Civil War, and his tenure as general is treated more favorably by historians than his presidency, which was marred by corruption.

Ulysses S. Grant in The Guns of the South
Ulysses S. Grant's great achievement in 1862-63 was to seize control of the Mississippi River by defeating a series of uncoordinated Confederate armies and by capturing Vicksburg in July 1863. After a victory at Chattanooga in late 1863, Abraham Lincoln made him general-in-chief of all Union armies.

He faced C.S. General Robert E. Lee during the Battle of the Wilderness through which he attempted to advance on Richmond. Grant's superiority in numbers came to naught due to the AK-47s supplied by the Rivington Men to Lee. A second defeat at Bealeton allowed Lee to advance on and capture Washington City.

Grant later served as an Election Commissioner during the Kentucky and Missouri state-wide referendum on whether they would remain with the Union or join the Confederacy. Although he had a reputation as a heavy drinker, Grant remained abstinent during the election campaign. However, the night of the vote, after it became clear Kentucky voted to join the C.S., he drank himself into a stupor.

Ulysses S. Grant in Southern Victory
While Ulysses S. Grant had achieved a string of victories in 1862, they came to naught; in the East, General George McClellan allowed his Army of the Potomac to be destroyed at Camp Hill, Philadelphia was taken by the Army of Northern Virginia, and British and French intervention forced the US to surrender. Grant became deeply depressed and reverted to his prewar alcoholism, of which he died some time after the Second Mexican War. (At the outset of that war, he was one of the few sympathetic members of a crowd in St. Louis addressed by Frederick Douglass.)

Nonetheless, he is remembered kindly in US history as the Union's only good commander in the War of Secession, and many Americans are haunted by the thought of how the war might have gone differently if he, rather than McClellan, had faced Robert E. Lee.