The American Civil War, Ulysses S. Grant
Edited by: Robert Guisepi
2002
From humble beginnings, Ulysses S. Grant rose to command all the Federal armies in the Civil War and lead them to victory. So great was his popularity that the people twice elected him to the presidency.
His Birth and Boyhood
Ulysses S. Grant was born April 27, 1822, in a two-room frame house at Point Pleasant, Ohio, near Cincinnati. His father, Jesse Root Grant, was foreman in a tannery and a farmer. His mother, Hannah Simpson Grant, was a pious, hard-working frontier woman. When Ulysses was a year old, the family moved a few miles east to Georgetown. There his father bought a farm, built a house, and set up a tannery of his own. Five more children were born--two boys and three girls.
Lyss, as he was called, loved horses and early learned to manage them. When he was seven or eight years old he could drive a team and began hauling all the wood used in the house and shops. "When about eleven," he says in his 'Personal Memoirs', "I was strong enough to hold a plow. From that age until seventeen I did all the work done with horses; such as breaking up the land, furrowing, plowing corn and potatoes, bringing in the crops when harvested, hauling all the wood, besides tending two or three horses, a cow or two, and sawing wood for the stoves." Three months each winter he went to a one-room schoolhouse.
He Goes to West Point
When Lyss was 17, his father obtained for him an appointment to the United States Military Academy at West Point. The congressman who made the appointment did not know Ulysses' full name; so he left out Hiram and added the mother's name, Simpson, after Ulysses. The initials U.S. suggested Uncle Sam to Ulysses' classmates and they gave him the nickname "Sam." Ulysses was pleased with his new name because he disliked his old initials--H.U.G.
Cadet Grant did not care for military life and never expected to stay in the army. He was good in mathematics and hoped sometime to teach it. In other subjects he was about average. He was, however, the finest horseman at the academy. Quiet and shy, he made few friends.
He Serves in the Mexican War and Marries
When he was commissioned, Ulysses was ordered to Jefferson Barracks, near St. Louis, Mo. While there he met Julia Dent, daughter of a slave-owning Southern family. Within three months Grant proposed to her and was accepted; but since he had only his pay as a lieutenant, the wedding was postponed.
Grant was in almost every battle of the Mexican War. This experience, he said, was of great value to him, because he became acquainted with nearly all the officers of the regular army. Some of them--including the great soldier Robert E. Lee--were to be on the Confederate side in the Civil War.
Grant came back from Mexico a brevet captain, with favorable mention. He at once married Julia (Aug. 22, 1848) and took her to his new station, Sackett's Harbor, N. Y. Grant had formed the habit of drinking in the Mexican campaign. At Sackett's Harbor he joined a temperance society; but he forgot the pledge the next year when he was sent to Detroit.
He Leaves the Army
Grant's first child, Frederick Dent Grant, was born in 1850. In 1852 his regiment was ordered to the Pacific coast by way of the Isthmus of Panama. Mrs. Grant and her child remained with her parents. Cholera attacked the regiment in Panama. Grant, as quartermaster, showed great energy and resourcefulness in getting mules to carry the delirious men across the isthmus.
Grant spent two years on the Pacific coast. Homesick, he carried Julia's letters with him and liked to show the imprint of the hand of his second son, Ulysses, Jr., who was born while Grant was on the isthmus. He turned again to drink and wore slovenly uniforms. His colonel asked for his resignation, and Grant borrowed money to return home.
Julia's father gave Grant 80 acres to farm, near St. Louis. Grant called the place Hardscrabble. He cleared the land, built a log cabin, and worked hard but could not make farming pay. Two more children were born--Nellie, in 1855, and Jesse Root, three years later. In 1858 Grant sold his stock and implements and turned to selling real estate in St. Louis. He failed again and walked the streets looking for something to do. Finally his father persuaded his younger sons to take Ulysses into their leather business at Galena, Ill. Grant worked as a clerk, selling hides to saddle makers and cobblers. When the Civil War broke out he was 39 years old and was generally regarded as a failure.
Drilling Civil War Volunteers
After Fort Sumter was fired on (April 12, 1861), President Lincoln issued a call to arms. Within two weeks Grant was drilling volunteers in Galena, because, as he said, there was no one else to do the job. He went with the volunteers to Springfield, Ill., wearing his threadbare citizen's clothes.
At Springfield, the governor made him first a clerk, then a mustering officer. When the mustering was completed Grant left. A few weeks later the governor telegraphed him to come back and accept the rank of colonel because the men he had mustered in had asked for him. Grant still had no uniform and no horse (officers were expected to supply their own); but he enforced discipline on the rough farm youths and in a month had a trained regiment. He marched his men into Missouri, and in St. Louis he read in a newspaper that he had been made a brigadier general of volunteers.
The Western Campaign
Grant reached his headquarters at Cairo, Ill., Sept. 4, 1861. Two days later, without firing a shot, he occupied Paducah, Ky., on the other side of the Ohio River. In November his raw recruits made an unsuccessful attack on a Confederate camp at Belmont, Mo. Grant then set to work to prepare his men for a long, hard struggle. Volunteers poured in until he had nearly 20,000 men.
In February 1862 Grant advanced into Tennessee. With the aid of Commodore A. H. Foote's gunboats, he captured Fort Henry on the Tennessee River. Then he moved against the more formidable Fort Donelson, on the Cumberland River. While he was besieging this fort, the Confederate general, Simon B. Buckner--the officer who in 1858 had loaned Grant money to rejoin his family--asked for an armistice. Grant's answer became famous in American history: "No terms except an unconditional and immediate surrender can be accepted. I propose to move immediately upon your works." Buckner surrendered the fort with 14,000 prisoners. Newspapers in the North were filled with praise of "Unconditional Surrender" U.S. Grant, and Lincoln named him a major general.
The objective of the campaign in the West was to cut the Confederacy in two by winning the Mississippi Valley. The first major success came the next year in the battle of Shiloh in southern Tennessee. In two days of desperate fighting--April 6 and 7, 1862--Grant pushed the Confederate forces back to Corinth in Mississippi.
Losses on both sides were heavy. Grant was severely criticized for his conduct in this battle because he had failed to anticipate an attack by the enemy, but President Lincoln said, "I can't spare this man--he fights." Grant made no excuses but spent the rest of 1862 making plans to take Vicksburg, the great Confederate stronghold on the Mississippi River that served as a transportation point for the Confederacy.
Vicksburg was a brilliant operation and showed Grant at his best. The fort surrendered unconditionally on July 4, 1863, a day after the battle of Gettysburg. Five days later Port Hudson fell. Grant's son Frederick, 13 years old, was with him in the Vicksburg campaign. Grant said, "He looked out for himself in every battle."
As a reward for Vicksburg, Grant was given supreme command of all the armies in the West. When he returned to Tennessee, he set out to relieve a Federal army penned up in Chattanooga. The Confederates occupied the heights of Lookout Mountain and Missionary Ridge, which controlled the approaches to the city. On November 24 and 25, the Federal troops stormed the heights, and the Confederates fled into Georgia. All Tennessee was now captured, and the power of the Confederacy west of the Alleghenies was effectively broken.
"On to Richmond"
Meanwhile the war in the East had been dragging. Lincoln, still looking for a general to match against Robert E. Lee, asked Grant to come to Washington. In March 1864 Grant arrived at his hotel alone except for his son Frederick. Richard Henry Dana met him there and wrote: "I saw that the ordinary, scrubby-looking man, with a slightly seedy look, cigar in mouth, had a clear blue eye, and a look of resolution, as if he could not be trifled with." The next day Lincoln showed his confidence in Grant by appointing him lieutenant general commanding all the Federal armies.
Grant himself took command of the armies in the East. On May 4, 1864, the army crossed the Rapidan. Grant hoped to pass unmolested through the tangled forest of the Wilderness, but Lee attacked and Grant's army suffered appalling losses. Grant, however, did not turn back. "I propose," he said, "to fight it out on this line if it takes all summer."
Lee was to find that Grant did not retreat after a defeat or rest after a victory. The next year in April the Confederate capital, Richmond, Va., was occupied, and Lee surrendered. The next week Lincoln was assassinated. Grant was now the man of the hour.
He Is Elected President
Grant went to Washington to disband the army. In April 1866 congress revived for him the rank of full general, a title not used since George Washington had held it. The pay gave Grant financial security, and he became a familiar figure in the streets in his light buggy, driving a spirited horse. Gifts were showered on him. Galena and Philadelphia both presented houses to him. New York City gave him $100,000.
Grant had never been interested in politics and belonged to no political party. President Johnson hoped to put through Lincoln's mild plan of "reconstructing" the seceded states. The Radical Republicans in Congress demanded a harsh policy. Johnson hoped to have Grant's support, but Grant quarreled with him and was won over by the Radicals.
While the Senate was impeaching Johnson, the Republican convention in Chicago unanimously nominated Grant for president, with Schuyler Colfax of Indiana for vice-president. The platform was vague, and the campaign was fought over problems of reconstruction. Grant received 214 electoral votes as against 80 for the Democratic candidate, Horatio Seymour. Grant's popular majority, however, was small--only about 306,000 out of 5,720,250 votes. Black votes in Southern states decided the election.
Grant's First Term as President
Grant moved into the White House with Julia and his beautiful daughter Nellie. His sons were also there from time to time, and his old father, now a postmaster in Covington, Ky., made brief visits.
Grave problems confronted the nation. The war had brought poverty and desolation to the South. To the North it had brought prosperity. Speculation was rife, and there was widespread corruption in both political and business life.
In 1869 two speculators, Jay Gould and James Fisk, attempted to corner gold and brought pressure on Grant to keep the United States treasury from selling it. Foreign trade was almost stopped. On Black Friday, Sept. 24, 1869, the United States treasury, with Grant's approval, suddenly put up for sale 4 million dollars in gold. The price plunged, causing the ruin of many speculators.
The Radical Republicans hoped to gain Black votes in the South by the 15th Amendment to the Constitution (1870), which provides that "the right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged . . . on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude." The immediate result of the amendment was an increase of terroristic acts against Blacks to prevent their voting.
In foreign policy Grant usually supported his capable secretary of state, Hamilton Fish. The United States had claims against Great Britain for damage done by the Confederate cruiser Alabama and other commerce destroyers built in England. In 1871 a treaty was signed in Washington agreeing to submit the Alabama claims to an arbitration tribunal to meet at Geneva, Switzerland, the next year. This was the first important case of arbitration in United States history. Grant wanted to annex the Dominican Republic to the United States, but his treaty failed in the Senate.
Grant's Second Term
Led by Carl Schurz and other reformers, a group in the Republican party set out to defeat Grant for reelection. They organized the Liberal Republican party, which called for civil service reform, an end to corruption in government, and the withdrawal of troops from the South. The Democratic party joined with them in supporting Horace Greeley, founder of the New York Tribune, for the presidency. The regular Republicans, called Stalwarts, renominated Grant. Grant received 286 electoral votes. Since Greeley died shortly after the election, his 63 electoral votes were divided among other candidates.
Grant's popularity declined as evidence of serious political corruption came to light. The government had given money and land grants to the new railways in the West. In 1873 it was found that certain members of Congress had been bribed to vote in the interests of the Union Pacific Railroad. The bribes were in the form of stock in a railway construction company, the Credit Mobilier. In 1874 the Whiskey Ring scandal was uncovered. The ring was a combination of distillers and tax officers who defrauded the treasury of the revenue tax on whiskey. Grant was not personally implicated in the scandals, but he gave appointments to unfit people and stood by them after they had been shown to be dishonest.
The wartime boom ended with the great panic of 1873. Five years of hard times followed. Businessmen urged the government to return to a sound currency and call in the "greenbacks"--paper money issued during the Civil War. The greenbacks were not based on gold or silver in the treasury and had therefore declined in value, causing a steep rise in prices. Grant vetoed a bill calling for more paper currency. In 1875 he signed the Specie Resumption Act, which made greenbacks redeemable in gold or silver coin.
His Last Years
Grant reluctantly announced that he would not be a candidate for a third term because he knew that the scandals of his administration had turned the voters against him. Both the Republicans and the Democrats nominated "reform" candidates. The election was so close that the results were disputed until March 2, when a Congressional committee decided in favor of Rutherford B. Hayes
For the next two years Grant, with his wife and son Jesse, toured Europe and Asia. He returned home with many gifts, but his money was nearly gone. In 1880 the Stalwart Republicans tried to have him nominated for a third term, but the "half-breeds" prevailed and nominated James A. Garfield. Grant, however, was still the people's hero, and his friends raised a large fund for him by popular subscription. Grant went to New York City and bought a house at 3 East 66th Street.
Grant's daughter, Nellie, had been married at the White House in 1874 to a wealthy Englishman, Algernon Sartoris. Frederick was a lieutenant colonel in the army. Jesse was a lawyer. Ulysses, Jr., was in a Wall Street brokerage firm, Grant and Ward.
Grant unwisely invested all his money in Grant and Ward. He paid no attention to its operations, and his son apparently knew little about the business. Ferdinand Ward was a dishonest speculator. The firm crashed in 1884 and left Grant penniless and humiliated. Ward was sent to the state penitentiary.
To earn money, Grant turned to writing. Samuel L. Clemens, better known as Mark Twain, was then a subscription book publisher. He offered Grant a high royalty for his memoirs, and in 1885 Grant began to dictate them. A pain in his throat was finally diagnosed as cancer, but Grant went on, writing with a pen, to provide for his wife after he was gone.
In the summer of 1885 Mrs. Grant took her husband to the Adirondacks near Saratoga. There he finished his 'Personal Memoirs' about a week before he died on July 23. Written frankly, the work ranks high among military biographies. It was so popular that Mrs. Grant received nearly $450,000 from its sale. She died in 1902. A granite tomb to Grant's memory was erected on Riverside Drive in New York City. In 1959 it became a national memorial.
