Ulysses S. Grant

Ulysses S. Grant, who lived from 1822 to 1885, was an American general born in Ohio who graduated from West Point in 1843 and served with distinction in the Mexican-American War before a difficult civilian career marked by financial hardship in the years before the Civil War. After the war began in 1861 he rose quickly through the Union Army, achieving a decisive victory in the 1863 Vicksburg campaign that gave Union forces control of the Mississippi River, a success that led President Abraham Lincoln to promote him to lieutenant general and commander of all Union armies. Grant then confronted Confederate General Robert E. Lee directly through the grinding 1864 to 1865 Overland Campaign, ultimately forcing Lee's surrender at Appomattox Court House in April 1865 and effectively ending the war. As the eighteenth president of the United States, serving from 1869 to 1877, Grant worked to stabilize the postwar economy, supported Reconstruction, and backed the Fifteenth Amendment, prosecuting the Ku Klux Klan and establishing the Department of Justice to pursue civil rights enforcement, even as his second term was damaged by financial scandals within his administration and an ineffective response to the Panic of 1873. He remains historically significant both as the general who secured Union victory and as a president who actively defended the rights of formerly enslaved Americans during Reconstruction, a record that later Lost Cause era historians long downplayed before more recent scholarship restored it to prominence.