Ulysses S. Grant

Click on the links below for in-depth biographies of General Ulysses S. Grant. Sources include Scribner’s Dictionary of American Biography, Appletons’ Cyclopaedia of American Biography, the Federal Publishing Company’s The Union Army: A History of Military Affairs in the Loyal States 1861-65—Records of the Regiments in the Union Army—Cyclopedia of Battles—Memoirs of Commanders and Soldiers, Vol. VIII, Biographical, and Scribner’s Campaigns of the Civil War.

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Ulysses S. Grant - Scribner’s Dictionary of American Biography

GRANT, ULYSSES SIMPSON (April 27, 1822-July 23, 1885), general of the armies, president of the United States, was the descendant of a long line of hard-working, undistinguished Grants, of whom the earliest in America, Matthew Grant, landed in Massachusetts with his wife, Priscilla, in 1630. The progeny of this Puritan clung to New England until Captain Noah Grant, having served throughout the Revolution, emigrated to Pennsylvania in 1790 and later to Ohio. The Captain's second son, Jesse Root Grant, learned the trade of tanner and established himself at Point Pleasant, Ohio, where in 1821 he married Hannah Simpson, the daughter of a farmer. She had youth, strength, and health, and stood in need of them during the years of hard work and meager comforts that followed. In their little two-roomed frame cabin the future president was born. He was baptized Hiram Ulysses Grant. His youth was spent at Georgetown, Ohio, whither the family moved when he was a year old.

From his mother he seems to have inherited many of the traits that distinguished him. She was a silent, undemonstrative, religious woman, of great common sense and good judgment. The father, Jesse Grant, was an aggressive, hardworking person whose shrewdness and thrift were rewarded, in the passage of time, by business successes. Almost entirely self-taught, he desired for his children the educational opportunities that had been denied him. From the time he was six years old until he was seventeen, young Ulysses regularly attended school, but this did not exempt him from labor. Detesting the tannery, he was set to work on his father's farm. Like many silent people, the boy had no difficulty in understanding and in securing the obedience of dumb animals. His love of horses amounted to a passion. At seven he was hauling. wood with a team; at eleven he was strong enough to hold a plow; thereafter, until seventeen, he writes, "I did all the work done with horses" (Personal Memoirs, I, 26). During these years he developed the qualities that later marked him-fearlessness, self-reliance, resourcefulness, determination. In person he was rather short but sturdy and well-muscled; he was modest, reticent, clean-minded, and did not use profanity; he abhorred hunting and the taking of animal life.

In the winter of 1838-39, Jesse Grant applied for and received for his son an appointment to the United States Military Academy. The information roused no enthusiasm in the boy. In due time, however, he departed and, after several wonderful days in Philadelphia and New York, registered at West Point as Ulysses Hiram Grant. He had transposed his given names, fearing that his initials " H . U. G." would make him an object of ridicule. At West Point he was informed that his congressman had reported his name as Ulysses Simpson Grant. Failing to obtain a correction from the authorities, he accepted uncomplainingly the designation bestowed upon him (Edmonds, post, pp. 35-37; Wilson , post, pp. 7, 21-22 ). No high lights marked Grant's four years at West Point. Throughout this time he held a place near the middle of his class, though his work in mathematics was above average. As a rider he had no peer among the cadets, but in other respects he was colorless. Quiet, unobtrusive, as tidy as necessary, " Sam" Grant sought neither honors nor popularity. He had no intention of remaining in the army.

Upon graduation in June 1843, the best rider at West Point requested a commission in the cavalry but, as there was no vacancy in that arm, he reported for duty with the 4th Infantry. He served two years in Missouri and Louisiana, and in September 1845 joined General Taylor's small but efficient army at Corpus Christi, Texas. Later it moved to the Rio Grande River where a conflict with the Mexica ns occurred. "With the Mexican War, Grant was never in sympathy (Personal Memoirs, I, 53). Nevertheless, he took part actively in all of Taylor's battles except the last, Buena Vista. At Monterey he participated, as the only mounted man, in the charge of his regiment and repeatedly distinguished himself, making at one time a dash, mounted, through the city held by the enemy to obtain ammunition for the troops. For Taylor, Grant conceived a great admiration (Ibid., I, 100). He saw this rough and ready Indian fighter, individualized by bluntness, lack of ostentation, and by the uniform success of his operations, advance from a seat in the saddle to the president's chair. Unconsciously perhaps, he seems to have patterned his own habits and dress on those of Taylor (Coolidge, post, p. 30). After Monterey, Grant, with his regiment, was transferred to General Scott's army) and as regimental quartermaster made the long march from Vera Cruz to Mexico city. He took part in the hand-to-hand fighting at Molino del Rey and in the attack on the gates of the capital city, receiving mention in division orders and in brigade and regimental reports for bravery. From the war Grant emerged a first lieutenant and brevet captain, but no less averse to a military life than he had always been.

As soon as his regiment was settled in its new station in Mississippi he obtained leave and, on August 22, 1848, married Julia Dent, to whom he had become engaged shortly after graduation. The wedding journey ended at his new station, Sackett's Harbor, New York, where the southern bride with unimpaired cheerfulness made the best of a northern winter. The year 1852 witnessed his departure with his regiment for the Pacific coast by way of the Isthmus of Panama, a region so infested with disease that Mrs. Grant, who in 1850 had given birth to a son, did not make the journey. The transit of the Isthmus was a nightmare. Mules could not be obtained. Delays occurred. Cholera broke out and many died: Grant, the quartermaster, buried the dead, cheered the living, and by his energy and resourcefulness prevented a greater loss of life. From the mushroom, San Francisco, the regiment was ordered to Fort Vancouver, near the present city of Portland. Here Grant remained until September 1853, when promotion to a captaincy took him to Humboldt Bay, California. No place more dreary than this tiny frontier settlement can be imagined. With little to do, lonely as only the inarticulate can be lonely, hungry for his wife and children whom he saw no prospect of supporting on his pay, Grant at times drank more than he should have done (Coolidge, p. 35; Edmonds, p. 74; Meade, post, II, 162-63; W. C. Church, in Army & Navy Journal, June 6, 1908). A warning from his commanding officer was followed by his resignation, which was promptly accepted by Jefferson Davis, then secretary of war (Old Records Section, Adjutant General's Office).

In July 1854, after eleven years of service, Grant was out of the army, out of money, without an occupation, and a long way from home. Late in August he joined his family in St. Louis. In the six years that followed he was successively farmer, real-estate agent, candidate for county engineer, and clerk in a custom house. In none of these occupations was he successful. Finally, after a visit to his father, he was given a clerkship in a leather store conducted by two of his brothers at Galena, Illinois. He did not, however, remain very long. The turn in the tide had arrived. Following the bombardment of Fort Sumter in April 1861 and Lincoln's call for volunteers, Grant presided at a mass-meeting in Galena: He declined the captaincy of a company but announced that a war would find him in the service.

There followed a period of about six weeks during which he strove without success to find in the military hierarchy a place that befitted his training and experience. He was successively drillmaster of the Galena company, clerk in the state adjutant-general's office, and mustering officer. He wrote to the adjutant-general at Washington requesting the command of a regiment but never received a reply. He spent two futile days in Cincinnati cooling his heels in the outer office of George B. McClellan, then considered the coming man. Finally, in June, Governor Yates appointed him colonel of the 21st Illinois Volunteers. In a few days Grant had the regiment in camp at Springfield, hard at work. In a month it was ordered to Mexico, Missouri, where, in August, much to Grant's surprise, he was appointed brigadier-general (Personal Memoirs, I, 254; Wilson, p. 86; Woodward, post, p. 189).

In 1861 Illinois and the states west of the Mississippi constituted what was known as the Western Department, under the command of Major General John C. Fremont. The latter, in September, placed the new brigadier in charge of a district with headquarters at Cairo, Illinois. Throughout the next two months recruits poured in until Grant had nearly 20,000 men. The Confederate General Polk had converted Columbus, Kentucky, about twenty miles south of Cairo, into a strong fortification which controlled the traffic on the Mississippi. Across the river lay Belmont, a Confederate camp. Early in November, Fremont directed Grant to make a demonstration down the river toward Columbus. By converting this demonstration into an attack on Belmont, Grant nearly ruined a promising career. Having defeated the enemy on landing, his 3,100 boisterous recruits got out of hand and began to loot the captured camp. Meanwhile the Belmont garrison, reenforced from Columbus, had been rallied and interposed between the Union troops and their boats. Grant fired the tents to regain the attention of his men. They reformed, forced their way through the enemy, and, under heavy Confederate fire, piled pell-mell into the boats which hastily pulled out. Their commander was the last to embark (Badeau, post, .pp. 17-18; Personal Memoirs, I, 273,279; Battles and Leaders, I, 351).

At this time the Confederates under General Albert Sidney Johnston held the West Tennessee border and protected their great supply depot at Nashville by a line from Bowling Green, Kentucky, westward to Columbus. The flanks were strongly held, but the center was lightly guarded by Fort Donelson on the Cumberland River and Fort Henry on the Tennessee. Grant proposed to General Henry W. Halleck, who had succeeded Fremont, the capture of Fort Henry (Personal Memoirs. I, 287). He purposed to penetrate Johnston's vulnerable center, capture the forts, and cut in two the enemy's forces. In making this proposal, he was probably unaware that, since November 1861, General Buell at Louisville had repeatedly urged upon both McClellan and Halleck, without success, a similar movement in connection with a land movement against Nashville (Official Records, Army, I ser., VII, 451, 457, 487, 520, 527, 53 I). The recurrence of these recommendations caused Halleck to study the situation. Appreciating that the capture of the forts would cause the abandonment of Columbus, a place too strong to attack, he acceded to Grant's second request of January 28, in which Commodore A. H. Foote [q.v.] joined ( Official Records, Army, I ser., VII, 121; Badeau, p. 27; Wilson, pp. 103-04; Woodward, p. 215).

Preceded by gunboats, the expedition of 17,000 men started up the Tennessee five days later. Fort Henry surrendered to the gunboats, whereupon two of them steamed twelve miles upstream and destroyed the Memphis and Ohio bridge. Donelson, twelve miles eastward, was Grant's next objective. Heavy rains delayed his start until February 12, but by the 13th his army had invested the fort, then held by about 17,000 men. Foote attacked with the gunboats on the 14th, but was so roughly handled that he withdrew. In the freezing dawn of February 15, Grant, at the request of the wounded Foote, boarded the flagship for a conference. While this was in progress the Confederates attacked heavily and by 9:00 A. M. had driven back and broken the Union right and most of the center. The road was open for their escape.

While returning to his headquarters from the flagship, Grant was informed of the situation. A gallop along the line determined his conduct. With his right and center in confusion, he decided, with rare courage, to attack with his left. His order to General C. F. Smith to assault at once was magnificently executed. By nightfall the Union troops had possession of the entire outer line of Confederate trenches. The fate of the garrison was sealed. General Simon B. Buckner on the following morning requested an armistice. Grant replied: "No terms except an unconditional and immediate surrender can be accepted. I propose to move immediately upon your works" (Badeau, p. 48). So Buckner, who in 1854 had loaned Grant the money to rejoin his family (Wilson, pp. 77-78; Coolidge, p. 37; Edmonds, p. 78), surrendered over 14,000 men to his former classmate. When the telegraph announced this victory, the North became frantic with joy. President Lincoln at once named Grant a major-general of volunteers and the Senate promptly confirmed the nomination.

Buell’s advance into Tennessee with about 37,000 effectives and Grant's control of the Tennessee determined the Confederates to seek a union of their forces south of that river. About 40,000 effectives were concentrated at Corinth, Mississippi, to crush Grant's army before it could be reenforced by Buell. A brief misunderstanding between Halleck and Grant, early in March, resulted in the replacement of the latter by General C. F. Smith. On March 17, Grant was reinstated (Personal Memoirs, I, 327; Badeau, I, 60, 65; Official Records, Army, l ser., X, pt. 2, pp. 3, 5, 6, 15, 17, 32; Woodward, pp. 225-27). While Smith commanded, he took the army up the Tennessee River, established headquarters at Savannah, and began operations for the capture of Corinth. When Grant rejoined, he retained the headquarters at Savannah, for no apparent good reason, and ordered the concentration at Pittsburg Landing of all his forces (about 38,000 men), except General Lew Wallace's division of 5,000 which was left at Crump's Landing, five miles below Pittsburg.

Although both Grant and his chief lieutenant, Sherman, were aware that the numerically superior Confederate army was only twenty-two miles distant, no intrenchments were constructed about the Union camp, no line of defense was established, no adequate system of reconnaissance instituted, no plan of action prepared. From March 17, when Grant reassumed command, to April 6, when Johnston's army attacked, the Union commander was in ignorance of the movements of his foe. Grant says: "When all reinforcements should have arrived I expected to take the initiative by marching on Corinth .... I regarded the campaign ... as an offensive one and had no idea that the enemy would leave strong intrenchments to take the initiative" (Personal Memoirs, I, 332). Less than one and a half miles from Sherman 's headquarters, Johnston's soldiers formed line of battle on the afternoon of April 5, and, without discovery, slept all night on their arms. That afternoon Grant had said: "There will be no fight at Pittsburg Landing; we will have to go to Corinth" (Official Records, Army, 1 ser., X, pt. 1, p. 331). That evening he had sent a telegram to Halleck: "I have scarcely the faintest idea of an attack (general one) being made upon us, but will be prepared should such a thing take place" (Ibid., 4, pt. r, p. 89). Before 6:00 A. M. on the 6th, the Confederates attacked. Notwithstanding desperate efforts, the Union lines were forced steadily back.

Grant, breakfasting at Savannah nine miles from the battle-field, heard the roar of the guns and hastened to Pittsburg Landing. On the battle-field he rode from division to division, encouraging officers and men, but otherwise exercising no influence on the combat (Personal Memoirs, I, 343). He sent an urgent appeal to Buell and ordered Lew Wallace to march to the battle. Johnston was killed about 2:30 in the afternoon. Beauregard, his successor, issued an order at 5:30, suspending the attack. At this time the leading regiments of Buell's army were moving into position on the heights above the landing to repel Confederate attacks. Grant spent the stormy night of April 6 on the river bank, nursing a swollen ankle. Lew Wallace arrived about 7:00 P. M. on his extreme right. Three divisions of Buell's army took position on the left. With 25,000 fresh men in line, there was no question as to the outcome of the struggle when it opened on the following morning. Resisting stubbornly, the Confederates were driven back all day and by nightfall were in full retreat toward Corinth. There was no pursuit.

No battle fought in the West ranks with Shiloh in severity. No major battle displayed less generalship, and none more courage on the part of the enlisted men. Doubtless, on the night of April 6, Grant, sitting under a tree in the rain, reviewed in his mind the things he had left undone. The results of this mental castigation became evident in the next campaign. In the storm of denunciation that followed, the captor of Donelson offered no excuses. Lincoln refused to relieve him, saying: "I can't spare this man-he fights."

During the remainder of 1862, Grant, at Corinth, devised plans for taking Vicksburg, the capture of which would give the Union army control, not only of the Mississippi, but also of the Confederacy's only remaining railroad leading east from that river. In November, Grant with 30,000 men marched south from Memphis in his first effort to take Vicksburg. Sherman's force was to cooperate by moving clown the Mississippi. Sherman was defeated. Grant's movement was halted when the enemy cut his railroad line of communications and burned his supply depot at Holly Springs, Mississippi. Back again in Memphis, he began on January 20, 1863, the formation of the second expedition. In this, several projects were attempted, all of which contemplated the cutting of waterways for placing the troops, by boats, south of Vicksburg, without encountering the Confederate river batteries.

Convinced, by the end of March, of the impracticability of these schemes, Grant decided to march the army, west of the river, to a point below the fortifications and then transport it by steamers to the eastern bank. Rear Admiral David D. Porter [q. v .] undertook to run the batteries with his iron-clad gunboats and transports and then place them at Grant's disposal. The plan was successfully carried out. On April 30 the invading force, consisting of 20,000 men, landed at Bruinsburg. It was one of the boldest movements in modern warfare (Wilson, p. 169). Abandoning his communications, Grant had placed his numerically inferior force in the heart of a hostile country. Behind him was a wide river controlled above and below his landing place by the enemy; between him and Memphis, his base, were Johnston's and Pemberton's armies. Knowing that he must live off the country he immediately sent out foraging parties. Before the three days' rations carried by his men had been consumed, ample supplies were on hand, and the army did not thereafter lack food.

Shiloh showed Grant at his worst; Vicksburg showed him at his flawless best. He skilfully interposed his army between the forces of Johnston and Pemberton and struck quickly and vigorously. With his right he defeated Johnston and drove him out of Jackson; with his left he defeated Pemberton at Champion's Hill. Pemberton withdrew to the fortifications of Vicksburg on May 20, to emerge therefrom as a prisoner of war. The garrison never had a chance. The surrender took place on July 4, 1863. When, ten days thereafter, Port Hudson fell, the Mississippi was Unionist from source to mouth. The Confederacy was cut in two.

During the months of the campaign, Grant had been denounced by the newspapers and would perhaps have lost the confidence of Lincoln but for the favorable reports of Charles A. Dana [q.v.], who "probably saved Grant's career" (Woodward, pp. 291-93; J. H. Wilson, The Life of Charles A. Dana, 1907, p. 193). Now, after the completion of one of the most brilliant military operations in American history, he was again acclaimed and promoted, this time to major-general in the regular army; and again, as at Corinth, his army was scattered. In September, by Halleck's direction, he ordered four divisions, under Sherman, eastward to cooperate with Rosecrans in the relief of Chattanooga. Before these started, Rosecrans had been badly defeated at Chickamauga and penned in Chattanooga while Bragg, perched on Missionary Ridge and Lookout Mountain, in control of all approaches waited for the Union army to starve into surrender.

In this plight the Administration turned to Grant. Secretary of War Stanton met him en route to Louisville in October, conferred on him command of all the territory from the Alleghanies to the Mississippi except the southwestern section, and enabled him to replace Rosecrans by Thomas (Personal Memoirs, II, 17-19; Wilson, pp. 184-85). Grant proceeded to Chattanooga, where he found the Union army not only perilously close to starvation but almost without shoes and clothing for the coming winter. Acting on plans that had been prepared before his arrival (Coppee, post, pp. 165-68; Edmonds, p. 197, note; Battles and Leaders, III, 717-18), Grant, within five days, had opened communications with his base at Nashville. The army was soon reclothed, well fed, and supplied with ammunition.

As soon as Sherman arrived at Bridgeport on November 14, Grant fixed November 23 for the execution of his plan for attacking Bragg. Accordingly, Thomas on that day took Orchard Knob, the right of the Confederate outpost line. On the 24th, Hooker captured the point of Lookout Mountain and Sherman seized the extreme right of Missionary Ridge. When, the following morning, Thomas attacked the Confederate center, his men, as directed, captured the first line of rifle pits; then, without orders, in a tremendous burst of patriotic fervor, swept up Missionary Ridge to its summit and drove their enemies from the field. Pursuit begun by Sherman was halted by Grant when Bragg's defeated army, the only obstacle between the Union forces and Atlanta, intrenched at Dalton, Georgia.

A gold medal, the thanks of Congress, and the grade of lieutenant-general, the latter to carry with it the command of the armies of the United States, were bestowed on Grant, together with the adulation of a grateful nation. He was undeniably the man of the hour. Repeatedly urged to become a candidate for the presidency, he invariably refused, stating that he had but one desire-to end the war (Woodward, pp. 307-08; Coolidge, p. 142). Lincoln sent for him, wanting to judge for himself what manner of man Grant was. He saw a short, round-shouldered, rather scrubby-looking man in a-tarnished major-general's uniform, with clear, resolute, blue eyes, a heavy jaw, and an inscrutable face partially covered by rough, light-brown whiskers which served to conceal its strength (Badeau, II, 20; Coolidge, p. 146). Lincoln liked him, believed in him; and remained his steadfast friend. When Grant became general-in-chief, the Union forces stood in need of nothing so much as unity of plan and coordination of effort. The new leader supplied both. For the first time since the beginning of the war a plan of action was prepared that covered the concerted movements of all the Union forces. In his letter of April 4, 1864, to Sherman (Personal Memoirs, II, 130), Grant proposed three simultaneous major movements: that of Meade's Army of the Potomac against Lee's army; that of Butler's Army of the James against Lee's communications and Richmond; that of Sherman's Army of the Tennessee against Johnston's army and Atlanta (Wilson, p. 223). For these he had available about 253,000 men. Grant's policy, to which he consistently adhered, was to use the greatest number of troops practicable against the armed forces of the enemy; to hammer those forces and their resources until by mere attrition, if in no other way, there should be nothing left to them but submission. On May 4 all the armies moved. Throughout the campaigns that followed, Grant, from his headquarters with the Army of the Potomac, kept in touch with them, directing and coordinating their operations toward the common end.

Meade's army crossed the Rapidan and bivouacked the night of May 4 in the Wilderness. Meade hoped to pass its tangled depths before Lee could intercept him, but that alert foe had decided that the Union army should fight in a locale where the ter rain compensated for his weakness. He had 65,000 men to Meade's 118,000. When Meade, early on May 5, moved southward, he was struck in flank by Lee. For two days the opponents, in the desperate battle that ensued, swayed back and forth through the dense forest, without material advantage to either. Undeterred by his appalling losses (17,666, Battles and Leaders, IV, 248), Grant then determined to march by Lee's right flank and interpose between him and Richmond. Sherman called this decision "the supreme moment of his [Grant's] life" (Battles and Leaders, IV, 248). But Lee, informed of the movement, beat his opponent to the objective-Spotsylvania Court House.

At Spotsylvania, after another bloody conflict, and again after North Anna, Grant repeated successfully his tactics of passing by Lee's right. When Lee, however, only twenty miles from Richmond, assumed an intrenched position past Cold Harbor to the Chickahominy, Grant realized that his former tactics would no longer avail, that he must attack Lee in front or abandon the campaign north of the James. A break through Lee's center would probably result in the capture of Richmond and possibly in the disintegration of Lee's army. So Grant attacked at Cold Harbor and lost nearly 6,000 men in an hour (Steele, p. 502; Battles and Leaders, IV, 148). Satisfied that he could not drive Lee from his intrenched position, he called off the attack and, on the night of June 12, withdrew from Lee's front to cross the James River. The Wilderness campaign was ended. The terrific losses of the Army of the Potomac were made up by heavy reënforcements, but in the public mind Grant's prestige was lowered (Woodward, p. 325). He had not defeated Lee during the entire campaign and had been regularly outmaneuvered ( Meade, II, 202), yet his policy of attrition had worn down his enemy and robbed him of the initiative. After the battle of the Wilderness, Lee did not again assume the offensive.

In conception and execution, the withdrawal from Lee's front and the movement across the James was a brilliant military achievement. The army began its silent march after dark on June 12. By midnight of the 16th it was south of the river. Lee was completely deceived and for four days lost his foe (Battles and Leaders, IV, 541; Lee, post, p. 348). Finally realizing what had occurred, he brought his army south of Richmond. The long-drawn-out siege of Petersburg was on-a siege made necessary by the failure of the left wing, under Butler, to capture Petersburg and invest Richmond during the progress of the Wilderness campaign (Adams, post, pp. 269-75; Coolidge, p. 170; Wilson, p. 223; Woodward, pp. 318-19, 346-48). From June 18, 1864, to April 2, 1865, the Army of the Potomac invested Petersburg, sapping, mining, assaulting, cutting Lee's avenues of supply and sending out flanking expeditions far to the west. In this long siege the Confederate commander, having the advantage of interior lines, was able to meet every attack that Grant made with a force large enough to stop it. But the siege was doing its work. The Confederate army stood desperately in need of food and transportation. Sherman's men, marching through Georgia, found it a land of plenty while Lee's heroic army was starving in the trenches.

Sheridan's victory at Five Forks on April 1, 1865, marked the beginning of the end. On the following day Grant assaulted the Confederate right, breaking it and forcing it back. That night Lee's army abandoned Petersburg and Richmond and marched westward, hoping to join General Joseph E. Johnston's army. Grant paralleled the march and sent Sheridan's cavalry far ahead to carry on a running fight and cut off Lee's retreat. At Appomattox Court House, Sheridan stood across Lee's path. The end was at hand. On April 9, 1865, Lee surrendered the Army of Northern Virginia on Grant's . terms, which were so considerate and magnanimous that they were never questioned by the Confederate chieftain (Personal Memoirs, II, 483-94). Seventeen days later Johnston surrendered his army to Sherman. The Civil War was over.

Grant's greatness lay in his ability to visualize the war in its essentials. He saw that as long as the Confederacy was an undivided unit its military forces and resources could be shifted to any point where they were needed. He saw, furthermore, that no great success could result from the capture of localities, that success could come only by the destruction of armies. As general-in-chief his strategy was sound: to cut the Confederacy into fragments; to engage all its armies at the same time so that one could not reenforce another; to destroy those armies by following them wherever they might go and by pounding them to pieces. To these principles he adhered and by them he won.

[Personal Memoirs of U. S. Grant (2 vols., 1885- 86);
Official Records (Army); Old Records Section, Adjutant-General's Office;
A. Badeau, Military History. of Ulysses S. Grant (3 vols., 1868-81);
Jas. G. Wilson, General Grant (1897) ;
W. C. Church, "The Truth about Grant," Army and Navy Journal, June 6, 1908;
F. S . Edmonds, Ulysses S. Grant (1915);
L.A. Coolidge, The Life of Ulysses S. Grant (1922);
W. E. Woodward, Meet General Grant (1928);
J. F. C. Fuller, The Generalship of Ulysses S. Grant (1929);
J. H. Smith., The War with Mexico (2 vols., 1919);
Battles and Leaders of the Civil War (4 vols., 1887-88) ;
J. C. Ropes, The Story of the Civil War (4 vols., 1894,- 1913);
J . F. Rhodes, History of the U. S., vols. III-V (1893);
C. F. Adams, "Some Phases of the Civil War," in Studies Military and Diplomatic (1911);
M. F. Steele, American Campaigns (1922);
H. Coppee, General Thomas (1893); Fitzhugh Lee, General Lee (1894);
Jas. Longstreet, From Manassas to Appomattox (1896)
George Meade, Life and Letters of George Gordon Meade (1913).

C.A.B.

The subsidence of conflict left Grant in command of the army of the United States, in a position under the President and the Secretary of War which was never clearly defined. He had been transferred rapidly from volunteer and temporary status to a commission in the permanent establishment; and in 1866 Congress revived the rank of general, unused since 1799, in the certainty that President Johnson would nominate Grant for the post. Trusting Grant more completely than it did the President, the radical Congress in the following year blocked removals from office by the Tenure of Office Act and required that all army orders must pass through the office of the commanding general. Johnson was as ready to give as Grant was to accept the position, for he was at the moment courting Grant. He forced him, in the month after the appointment, to join the presidential party in the memorable "swing round the circle," hoping to gain popularity from citizens who saw Grant on the same platform with himself. Grant declined to be ordered on a mission to Mexico for the President, and tried, but without skill, to avoid giving the prestige of his own name to Johnson's plans.

Demobilization, a shapeless affair, took place under Grant. The policing of the western border and the protection of the construction camps of the continental railroads came under his control; yet he was convinced that the whole Indian policy of the United States was corrupt and wrong. His most delicate duty, however, was in connection with the administration of the Reconstruction acts, passed over Johnson's veto and enforced by the army until such time as Congress was ready to declare the Confederate states restored. Grant had toured the South for the President, and thought the "mass of thinking men of the south" were willing to accept the result of the war (Senate Executive Document No. 2, p. 106, 39 Congress, 1 Sess.); but he supported Stanton who had become anathema to Johnson. Protesting the suspension of Stanton, Grant assumed the duties of secretary of war ad interim, August 12, 1867. For the next five months he was his own superior officer, for he retained the actual command as general. But he enraged Johnson by surrendering the secretaryship to Stanton after the Senate had declined to concur in the latter's dismissal. Johnson raised an issue of personal veracity (R. W. Winston, Andrew Johnson, 1928, p. 418), asserting that Grant had promised not to surrender the office but to force a case for judicial interpretation of the Tenure of Office Act. The merit of the issue seems beyond historical determination, but it ended the relations of the two men. Grant never forgave the President, and upon the occasion of his own inauguration in 1869 declined to ride in the same carriage with his predecessor (H. Garland, Ulysses S. Grant, 1920, p. 385).

The course of events of the spring of 1868 made Grant the inevitable nominee of the Republican party for the presidency. He had become the rallying figure for the opponents of Andrew Johnson, and was already the outstanding character in American life. He had no real party affiliation. Only once had he voted for president, and that time for James Buchanan, "because I knew Fremont" (L.A. Coolidge, Ulysses S. Grant, 1917, p. 270). But he embodied the forces that maintained the Union. Without enthusiasm he allowed himself to be nominated by the Republicans. He disliked politics as he disliked war; he had no vindictive spirit toward the soldiers who had sustained the Confederacy, but he had no intention of permitting the defeated leaders to direct the policy of the United States. He was aware that election would mean retirement from the comfortable salary and allowances of the general of the army (nearly $25,000 a year) and an exchange of a life post for the presidency, which meant eight years at most. He accepted the nomination in a brief note, four words of which have constituted his contribution to American opinion: "Let us have peace." His companion on the ticket was a popular Indiana politician, Schuyler Colfax.

Grant was elected president in 1868, losing the electoral votes of only eight states, though the popular majority was much smaller than these figures would indicate. He had taken no active part in the canvass and he admitted no one, not even his wife, to his confidence after election. The official family that he set up in the Executive Mansion was like an army headquarters, where work was done with military aides and orders were expected to receive in time of peace the same respect that they had commanded in time of war. Grant was in no sense a militarist, but the only way he knew how to work was the way of a commanding general. He picked his cabinet officers to suit himself, and so clumsily that the group had to be reorganized before it could function. The state department he gave to a personal friend, Elihu B. Washburne, to gratify his pride; he allowed a military aide, John A. Rawlins, to appropriate the war department to reward himself (J. H. Wilson, The Life of John A. Rawlins, 1916, p. 351); he picked a great merchant with whom he had dined, Alexander T. Stewart, to fill the treasury post, only to discover that his appointee was legally incompetent. The other places he passed around with no reference to the existence of a party that fancied it had a right to rule, or to popular sense of fitness in appointment; and he could not understand or forgive criticism of himself because of this.

He and his family enjoyed life in the White House. All four of the children were there part of the time, though Frederick Dent Grant [q. v.] graduated at West Point in 1871, went to Europe, and was then on active duty. The military guard that had remained on duty since Lincoln's time was dispensed with, and the mansion was opened to family and friends. A former mess sergeant became the butler until Mrs. Grant rebelled. There was a "spare room" for the casual guest. Mrs. Grant's father, Colonel Frederick Dent, still an unreconstructed Southerner but meticulously polite, was commonly much in evidence. The correspondents around the offices led him on to tell them how the General was a good Democrat but did not know it. Grant's own old father, Jesse, was sometimes there, though more often he was at his post-office at Covington, Kentucky, where Grant found him and left him. The vacations were likely to be spent in a cottage at Long Branch, where Grant kept out of ballrooms and took his keenest pleasure in driving in a light carriage behind a span of spirited horses. He did not care who gave him the horses. The old rumors about his excessive drinking hovered about him periodically, but most of the testimony is unreliable and none suggests that any of his official acts was ever affected by intoxication.

The financial status of the government was at the front among the problems of the Grant administrations. The Democratic party, in the preceding canvass, had made an appeal to the debtor farmers of the West and South, with an offer of greenbacks as a painless way of paying off the war debt. Earliest of the important bills to receive Grant's signature was one to establish the public credit by declaring a policy of ultimate redemption of legal-tender notes in coin. Steps were taken promptly to fund the confused mass of Civil War securities, and to baffle the gamblers in gold. These latter, on "Black Friday" (September 24, 1869), thought they had cornered the gold on the market and "fixed" the President by extending favors to his hangers-on (R. H. Fuller, Jubile Jim, The Life of Col. James Fisk, Jr., 1928, p. 361 ; New York Herald, October 8, 1869; House Report No. 31, 41 Congress, l Sess.). Grant ruined their hopes by releasing from the treasury such a flood of gold that it broke the corner. The financial collapse of 1873 increased the difficulty of currency deflation, for it was easy to array the debtor classes against any measure tending to appreciate the currency. But Grant vetoed an inflation bill in the following spring (April 22, 1874), and signed on January 14, 1875, an act setting January 1879 as the date for the resumption of specie payments.

For almost the whole of Grant's term of office Hamilton Fish [q.v.] was secretary of state. The two men never developed a friendly intimacy, yet Grant in general supported Fish in a firm and wise foreign policy. The attempt to annex the Dominican Republic in 1869, which produced a disastrous breach with Charles Sumner, was Grant's own venture, though it may have been the idea of political profiteers. He never receded from a belief in its wisdom, beaten though he was. Controversies with the British were cleared after the surrender of the latter on the Alabama claims, in the Treaty of Washington, May 8, 1871. Neutrality was maintained in spite of provocation given by Spain during her suppression of the Ten Years' War in Cuba.

The enforcement of the Fourteenth Amendment was attempted only half-heartedly and without success. Northern opinion reached its crest of militancy against the South in the spring of 1868. After the failure of the impeachment proceedings against Johnson there was never again adequate backing for a comprehensive interference with the gradual reestablishment of home rule at the South. Midway in Grant's first term began the terrorism of the negro electorate that deterred the negroes from exercising their right to vote. Despite the Force Acts of 1870-71, the Southern states elected white officers and advanced along the process of consolidation in Democratic ranks that ended in a Solid South by 1876. Grant came, by 1880, to fear the election as president of one of the Confederate leaders who had tried to wreck the Union, but as president himself he saw the impossibility of permanent coercion.

Out of the Western and Northern moderate opinion there developed a Liberal Republican movement based on a belief in the unwisdom of Reconstruction and a demand for a reform in the administration of the national government. Its first objective, which was unattainable, was the defeat of Grant for renomination and reelection in 1872. Horace Greeley, who received incongruous nominations from both the Liberal Republicans and the Democrats, was easily defeated. Grant again stayed out of the canvass. "I am no speaker," he wrote, "and don't want to be beaten" (A. R. Conkling, Life and Letters of Roscoe Conkling, 1889, p. 435). The storm of scandal broke around his head before he was reelected, and panic soon followed. A conviction was being driven home that as president he was a failure. "What wretched work. . . . They are tearing the government to pieces," Gideon Welles had written (Americana, April 1912, p. 403) ; "Can you really believe that the maker of the first Grant Cabinet ... is fit for a President? I cannot," asserted Greeley before he was himself nominated (W. B. Parker, The Life and Public Services of Justin Smith Morrill, 1924, p. 239). The New York Tribune (July 24, 1885) at Grant's death still believed that "the greatest mistake of his life was the acceptance of the presidency." "The crisis came," said the Nation (March 9, 1876), "when an ignorant soldier, coarse in his taste and blunt in his perceptions, fond of money and material enjoyment and of low company, was put in the Presidential Chair"

The personal criticisms of Grant during his second term were galling to him, for he knew no way of dramatizing a simple personal honesty, and his power of speech and pen was totally inadequate in a fight with fluent and impassioned reformers. He sometimes replied to opposition with destruction. Sumner denounced the Dominican project and prevented the ratification of the treaty; whereupon Grant forced his deposition as chairman of the Senate committee on foreign relations (R. Cortissoz, Life of Whitelaw Reid, 1921, I, 190; S. Welles, Naboth's Vineyard, 1928, I, 392), and recalled his friend Motley from the post of minister to Great Britain. Grant was capable of letting go without a word the most dependable of his advisers-Hoar, Jewell, Bristow. Yet, craving association, he had room in his entourage for Conkling, the Camerons, and Zach Chandler. He believed the prosecution of his private secretary, Orville F. Babcock, was only a disguised attack upon himself, and did not lose confidence in Babcock's integrity until long after most other Americans. Conkling, to whom among others he offered the chief justiceship after Chase died, had a nicer sense of the needs of the office than did Grant and declined it. Yet the final choice, Morrison R. Waite, was good. Grant's critics long alleged that he packed the Supreme Court after its first legal-tenders decision (Hepburn vs. Griswold, February 7, 1870, 8 Wallace, 603), by appointing Bradley and Strong, thus procuring a reversal in the second legal-tenders case, but the evidence for this seems unconvincing (Charles Warren, The Supreme Court in United States History, 1922, III, 238; American Historical Review, April 1929, p. 532).

The breath of personal scandal has not touched Grant in any plausible form, but it struck so close to him and so frequently as to necessitate the vindication of his honor by admitting his bad taste in the choice of associates. Babcock was under suspicion of improper interest in the Dominican matter (S. Welles, Naboth's Vineyard, 1928, I, 400), long before he was smirched by his connection with the whiskey ring. Grant allowed himself to appear in public as the guest of Jim Fisk. Belknap, his secretary of war, was proved to have accepted graft money from a post trader; and Grant by letting him resign protected him from the consequences of a successful impeachment. The accumulating criticisms that Grant incurred threw him into the arms of those who did not criticize, and these were not the best leaders in the nation or the party.

As the second term approached its end there was suggestion of a third. Grant, in a somewhat cryptic letter (New York Herald, May 31, 1875), declined to be a candidate. He could not see why his fellow citizens did not desire him to continue in the presidency, and his wife resented the fact that they did not; but he accepted retirement without complaint. He had some achievements, after all. He had inherited a situation with Great Britain that was full of threat, and left it with American esteem satisfied and Anglo-American relations more harmonious than they had ever been. He had brought the United States through the factional hazards that followed the attempt to remove a president, through the financial and moral uneasiness of a period of deflation and the panic of 1873, and through the uncertainties of an electoral contest that might have blossomed into another civil war (A. Badeau, Grant in Peace, 1887, p. 256). There were trying days during the electoral count. It was uncertain until a few hours before March 4, 1877, whether Grant would have a successor, and there was a possibility that he would be called upon to face a new crisis. The conviction that he would not have any hand in a coup d'etat helped to prevent one.

Grant left office with a few thousand dollars saved from his salary, and a craving to see Europe. With a family party, he sailed from Philadelphia in May 1877 for Liverpool and the foreign world. He embarked as a private citizen, but he landed as a world figure with whom the chamberlains of the European courts were uncertain how to act; for to treat him as a simple commoner would be grotesque, whereas he had no rank that would establish him in any rigid sequence of court precedence. It was left for his son Jesse to put Queen Victoria in her plate (J. R. Grant, In the Days of My Father General Grant, 1925, pp. 224...;.27), but it took a long time for the European governments to assimilate ex-presidents with their own ex-royalties. For more than two years the Grants went from capital to capital, with an increasing baggage train of gifts and souvenirs, and an increasing need for a fortunatus purse (J. R. Young, Around the World with General Grant, 1879). As the tour approached its end, a longing for home stimulated its progress, to Grant's political disadvantage.

Hayes had failed to get along with his party, and neither sought nor could have obtained a renomination. The friends of Grant were desirous for a return to the "good old days." The murmurings of labor presaged to the nervous a possible industrial revolt, and there was clamor, much of it inspired, for a "strong" man at the helm of state. The political advisers of Grant urged him to delay his return until the eve of the campaign of 1880, when his renomination might be accomplished on a wave of friendly publicity. He came back, instead, in the autumn of 1879, and the spreading third-term boom excited a stronger wave of opposition. At the Chicago convention in 1880 the faithful old guard, 306 strong, stood firm for Grant, and later struck off a medal to celebrate their loyalty; but they did him no good, for a coalition of his opponents defeated him by agreeing upon Garfield as the candidate.

The last phase of Grant's life was saddened by lack of means, by positive misfortune, by calumny, and at last by sickness until death. He took up his residence in a house in East Sixty-sixth St., New York, in August 1881, and lived with gratitude upon the income from a fund of $250,000 which some of his admirers placed in trust for him. The securities in which this was invested proved unreliable, and the income failed him (Woodward, Meet General Grant, 1928, pp. 476, 490). He went into business and was exploited. The failure of the brokerage firm of Grant & Ward (May 6, 1884) threw him into bankruptcy and humiliation. He had earlier used his swords and souvenirs as security for a loan which had been swallowed up. An attempt was made by his friends to care for him by reviving the office of general, which he had vacated upon entrance to the presidency, but political opposition delayed this until it was almost too late. On his last day in office President Arthur signed the revival bill, and it was left to a Democratic president, Cleveland, to deliver the commission that carried a salary for life.

The life was short. A dangerous cancer of the throat was wearing Grant away, though he was fighting the disease in order to carry to completion the only civil task that he had learned how to do well. In 1884 he wrote for the publishers of the Century Magazine an article (February 1885) on the battle of Shiloh. This paid him handsomely and was an immediate success, whereupon was conceived another Caesar’s Commentaries to be written by the victor of the Civil War. He set to work upon the Personal Memoirs, writing in the sickroom and in the quiet of the house at Mount McGregor where he was taken to die. Mark Twain, then in business as a publisher of subscription books, waited for the copy, to put upon the market one of the most successful of American books. The family of Grant received nearly $450,000 from this literary endowment (A. B. Paine, Mark Twain: A Biography, 1912, II, 816); but he himself died, simply and greatly, before he could know of its triumph. He was buried at last in a great mausoleum of granite on Riverside Drive in New York City. [Grant was not a bookish man, and he wrote as little as possible until he compiled the Personal Memoirs of U. S. Grant (2 vols., 1885-86).

There is no considerable collection of his manuscripts, and the printed salvage from his letters is fragmentary:
J. G. Cramer, ed., Letters of Ulysses S. Grant to his Father and his Youngest Sister, 1857-1878 (1912);
J. G. Wilson, ed., General Grant's Letters to a Friend [Elihu B. Washburne] 1861-1880 (1897).

The many biographies are rarely more than compilations from his Personal Memoirs, enriched with fragments from the two works by his military aide,
Adam Badeau, Military History of Ulysses S. Grant (3 vols., 1868-81); and Grant in Peace (1887).

The best of these biographies is W. E. Woodward, Meet General Grant (1928).

Others not already listed in the previous bibliography are:
J. S. C. Abbott, The Life of General Ulysses S. Grant (1868);
W. C. Church, Ulysses S. Grant and the Period of National Preservation and Reconstruction (1897);
Hamlin Garland, Ulysses S. Grant. His Life and Character ( 1898, new ed., 1920);
Owen Wister, Ulysses S. Grant (1900);
Chas. King, The True Ulysses S. Grant (1914).

Better than any of the biographies for the period of his presidency are:
J. F. Rhodes, History of the U. S., vols. VI-VII ( 1893) ;
E. P. Oberholtzer, A History of the U. S. Since the Civil War (3 vols., 1917-26); and
C . G. Bowers, The Tragic Era (1929), a spirited brief for Andrew Johnson by an eloquent Democratic historian.]

F.L.P-n.  



GRANT, FREDERICK DENT (May 30, 1850-April I11, 1912), soldier, son of Ulysses S. Grant [q.v.] and Julia (Dent) Grant, was born at St. Louis, Missouri, while his father was a first lieutenant in the 4th Infantry. As a boy he saw considerable active military service, for he frequently accompanied his father in the field, notably in the Vicksburg campaign, where he received a slight bullet wound and la ter contracted an illness which was very nearly fatal. He entered West Point as a cadet in 1866, graduated in 1871, and was commissioned second lieutenant in the 4th Cavalry. He was on leave of absence for a year and a half, during which time he visited Europe, before joining his regiment on the Texas frontier. After a few months there he was detailed as aide to Lieutenant-General Sheridan an assignment which at that time carried with it the pay and the temporary rank of lieutenant-colonel, and which he continued to hold until his resignation from th~ army in 1881. His regular station was in Chicago, at the headquarters of the Division of the Missouri, but he was in the field with the Yellowstone expedition in the summer of 1873, and with the Black Hills expedition in the summer of 1874. He married, October 20, 1874, Ida M. Honore, daughter of Henry Hamilton Honore of Chicago. His promotion to first lieutenant dated from June 28, 1876. In 1878-79 he accompanied his father in his journey around the world. He resigned from the army in 1881, being then a first lieutenant in the 4th Cavalry, and in 1886 became president of the American Wood Working Company. President Harrison appointed him envoy extraordinary and minister plenipotentiary to the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy in 1889 and he served at Vienna until 1893, when his successor was appointed by President Cleveland. From 1895 to 1897 he was commissioner of police of New York City. He was mustered into the volunteer service in the Spanish-American War, May 2, 1898, as colonel of the 14th New York Infantry, and on May 27, 1898, was appointed brigadier-general of volunteers. He commanded a brigade in camp at Chickamauga Park, Georgia, and after the termination of hostilities was stationed for some months in Porto Rico. Transferred to duty in the Philippines, he arrived at Manila in June 1899, and for nearly three years commanded a brigade in Luzon, operating against insurgents engaged in guerrilla warfare for a great part of the time. In April 1902 he took command of a brigade in Samar and Leyte, where he established civil government. Soon afterward he returned to the United States and took charge of the Department of Texas. Meanwhile, he had been appointed a brigadier-general in the regular army, February 18, 1901, and on February 6, 1906, he became major-general. After leaving Texas, he held other territorial commands, with headquarters at Chicago or New York; commanded the "blue army" in the Manassas maneuvers of 1904; and was in charge of the troops at the Jamestown Exposition of 1907. He died in New York and was buried at West Point.

[G. W. Cullum, Biog. Reg. (3rd ed., 1891), vol. III and Supp., vol. V ( 1910);
Association Graduates  U. S. Military Academy Annual Reunion, 1912, pp 149-52 ;
N. Y. Tribune, April 13, and N. Y. Times, April 13 and 14, 1912.]

T.M.S.

Source: Dictionary of American Biography, Volume IV, Edited by Dumas Malone, New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1930, pp. 492-501.