1822
President Grant Born
Ulysses S. Grant, Civil War leader and 18th president of the
United States, is born on this day in 1822.
The son of a tanner, Grant showed little enthusiasm for joining
his father’s business, so the elder Grant enrolled his son at West Point in
1839. Though Grant later admitted in his memoirs he had no interest in the
military apart from honing his equestrian skills, he graduated in 1843 and went
on to serve in the Mexican-American War, though he opposed it on moral grounds.
He then left his beloved wife and children again to fulfill a tour of duty in
California and Oregon. The loneliness and sheer boredom of duty in the West
drove Grant to binge drinking. By 1854, Grant’s alcohol consumption so alarmed
his superiors that he was asked to resign from the army. He did, and returned
to Ohio to try his hand at farming and land speculation. Although he kicked the
alcohol habit, he failed miserably at both vocations and was forced to take a
job as a clerk in his father’s tanning business.
If it were not for the Civil War, Grant might have slipped
quickly into obscurity. Instead, he re-enlisted in the army in 1861 and
embarked on a stellar military career, although his tendency to binge-drink
re-emerged and he developed another unhealthy habit: chain cigar-smoking. He
struggled throughout the Civil War to control the addictions. In 1862, he led
troops in the captures of Forts Henry and Donelson in Tennessee, and forced the
Confederate Army to retreat back into Mississippi after the Battle of Shiloh.
(After the Donelson campaign, Grant received over 10,000 boxes of
congratulatory cigars from a grateful citizenry.)
In 1863, after leading a Union Army to victory at Vicksburg,
Grant caught President Lincoln’s attention. The Union Army had suffered under
the service of a series of incompetent generals and Lincoln was in the market
for a new Union supreme commander.
In March 1864, Lincoln revived the rank of
lieutenant general—a rank that had previously been held only by George
Washington in 1798–and gave it to Grant. As supreme commander of Union forces,
Grant led a series of epic and bloody battles against the Confederate General
Robert E. Lee.
On April 9, 1865, Lee surrendered to Grant at Appomattox Court
House, Virginia. The victory solidified Grant’s status as national hero and, in
1868, he was elected to the first of two terms as president.
Grant’s talent as a political leader paled woefully in
comparison to his military prowess. He was unable to stem the rampant
corruption of his administration and failed to combat a severe economic
depression in 1873.
There were bright spots in Grant’s tenure, however,
including the passage of the Enforcement Act in 1870, which temporarily
curtailed the political influence of the Ku Klux Klan in the post-Civil War
South, and the 1875 Civil Rights Act, which attempted to desegregate public
places such as restrooms, inns, public conveyances on land or water, theaters,
and other places of public amusement. In addition, Grant helped heal U.S. and
British diplomatic relations, despite the fact that Britain had offered to
supply the Confederate Army with the tools to break the Union naval blockade
during the Civil War. He also managed to stay sober during his two terms in
office.
Upon leaving office, Grant’s fortunes again declined. He and his
wife Julia traveled to Europe between 1877 and 1879 amid great fanfare, but the
couple came home to bankruptcy caused by Grant’s unwise investment in a
scandal-prone banking firm. Grant spent the last few years of his life writing
a detailed account of the Civil War and, after he died of throat cancer in
1885, Julia managed to scrape by on the royalties earned from his memoirs.