Ulysses S. Grant

#1In 1860, Ulysses S. Grant didn’t look like a future commanding general.

#2Yes, he’d graduated from West Point. He’d fought in the Mexican-American War too. But none of that was helping much now. Farming had gone badly. When money got tight, he hauled firewood into St. Louis to sell. He tried real estate, struggled to collect rents, missed out on a county engineer job, and never found lasting stability in customs work.

#3So Grant moved to Galena, Illinois, and went to work in the leather-goods business run by his father and brothers.

#4Then the Civil War began.

#5And almost immediately, a life that had seemed stuck started moving again.

#6Civilian life had never really found a place for Grant.

#7War did.

#8Why?

#9Grant’s first exit from the army wasn’t simply the story of an officer failing out.

#10In 1852, he was sent to the Pacific Coast. His wife Julia stayed in Missouri with their young son, and she was pregnant when Grant left.

#11Their second son, Ulysses Jr., was born while Grant was away.

#12Grant had never seen him.

#13The separation dragged on, and his letters to Julia sound very different from the stone-faced general people remember later. He wrote about missing the children, asked for their pictures, and admitted how lonely he felt.

#14This was also the period when concerns about Grant’s drinking surfaced. Those concerns were real, but the neat version where he was simply fired for drunkenness goes too far.

#15Grant formally resigned from the army in 1854.

#16He wanted to be back with his family.

#17And that’s when his financial life really started falling apart.

#18He was home.

#19He just couldn’t seem to make a living there.

#20The farm failed. Other work didn’t last. Eventually he ended up behind the counter in his family’s store.

#21Maybe Grant’s problem wasn’t that he had no useful abilities.

#22Maybe he was living in a world that had almost no use for the ones he did have.

#23When Fort Sumter was attacked and war began, Grant wanted back in.

#24That didn’t mean an important command was waiting for him.

#25At first, the work that made him useful again wasn’t glamorous at all. He helped organize Illinois volunteers—mustering men, sorting units, turning civilians into something that could function as an army.

#26And suddenly, old skills mattered.

#27West Point. The Mexican-American War. Marching. Supply. Organization. Knowing what an army needed before it could fight.

#28The things that had been almost useless in civilian life now had a purpose.

#29Grant soon became colonel of the 21st Illinois Infantry.

#30Then Fort Donelson made his name.

#31At Fort Donelson in February 1862, Confederate forces were trapped.

#32On the morning of February 15, they hit one side of the Union line hard, trying to open a route out.

#33For a while, it worked.

#34Union troops fell back.

#35The road to escape started opening.

#36When Grant returned, his own army looked shaken.

#37But he focused on a different question.

#38Why had the Confederates attacked that way?

#39If they’d come out because they were trying to escape—not because they thought they could destroy his army—then the attack revealed something.

#40They were desperate too.

#41They’d been fighting for hours.

#42And after opening a way out, Confederate commanders failed to use it cleanly. Troops were pulled back toward the defenses amid confusion.

#43Grant counterattacked.

#44The Union recovered ground, and the escape window closed.

#45The next day, Confederate commander Simon Bolivar Buckner asked about surrender terms.

#46He and Grant had known each other before the war.

#47Grant’s answer was short: no terms except unconditional and immediate surrender.

#48That made headlines.

#49“Unconditional Surrender Grant” was suddenly famous.

#50But if the story ends there, Grant turns into something he wasn’t—a man who always read a battlefield perfectly.

#51Two months later, he got caught badly off guard.

#52On April 6, 1862, Confederate troops hit the Union army at Shiloh.

#53Grant’s side wasn’t ready for the full attack.

#54The first day was brutal. Union troops were driven back toward the Tennessee River. Rain came down. Grant himself was dealing with an injured ankle after a recent fall from a horse.

#55That night, William Tecumseh Sherman later remembered finding Grant in the rain.

#56Sherman recalled making a remark about the terrible day they’d just had. Grant, in Sherman’s later telling, answered that they’d beat the enemy the next day.

#57It wasn’t a transcript from the scene. It was Sherman’s memory years later.

#58But the next day, reinforced Union troops did counterattack.

#59The Confederates withdrew.

#60Still, Shiloh was no clean victory. The losses were enormous. Northern newspapers tore into Grant. Old drinking rumors came back.

#61And Grant himself came away with a different idea of what kind of war this was.

#62He later wrote that Shiloh ended his hope that a few victories might simply convince the rebellion to give up.

#63This wasn’t going to end that easily.

#64The Confederacy would have to lose the ability to keep fighting.

#65And then, almost immediately, Grant considered leaving the army himself.

#66After Shiloh, Grant’s superior Henry Halleck took direct control in the field.

#67Grant still had rank, but very little meaningful authority.

#68He hated it.

#69He asked to be sent somewhere else.

#70Eventually, he was preparing to leave.

#71So much for the simple version of Grant as the man who never quit.

#72He was ready to go.

#73Sherman stepped in.

#74He urged Grant to stay.

#75Grant listened.

#76Years later, when Grant was directing the entire Union war effort, Sherman would become one of the commanders he trusted with its biggest independent campaigns.

#77Grant’s comeback wasn’t just one man grinding through everything alone.

#78At a moment when Grant was close to giving up on his own place in the army, someone else refused to give up on him.

#79Then came Vicksburg.

#80And this is where Grant’s real pattern gets much easier to see.

#81Vicksburg was one of the Confederacy’s key strongholds on the Mississippi River.

#82Take it, and the Union could dominate the river and split the Confederacy.

#83Grant wanted Vicksburg.

#84His first approach failed.

#85A Confederate raid disrupted his supply base and wrecked the overland campaign.

#86Sherman attacked at Chickasaw Bayou.

#87That went badly too.

#88So Grant tried something else.

#89A canal. No luck.

#90Yazoo Pass. Blocked.

#91Lake Providence. Steele’s Bayou.

#92Again and again, he tried routes that went nowhere.

#93For months, Grant could look like a general piling failure on top of failure.

#94Except there was a pattern.

#95He wasn’t giving up on Vicksburg.

#96He was giving up on ways of getting there.

#97Eventually he sent his army down the west bank of the Mississippi while Admiral David Dixon Porter’s gunboats ran past the Vicksburg batteries at night.

#98Grant wanted to cross south of the city.

#99Grand Gulf didn’t work.

#100So he changed the crossing point.

#101He landed farther south at Bruinsburg.

#102Then he moved inland instead of heading straight at Vicksburg.

#103Port Gibson. Raymond. Jackson. Champion Hill. Big Black River.

#104Then he came back toward Vicksburg from the east.

#105Finally, he was in front of the city.

#106Grant attacked.

#107It failed.

#108That was May 19.

#109Three days later, he tried again.

#110It failed again.

#111Union troops paid heavily.

#112So Grant changed the method one more time.

#113He stopped trying to smash through.

#114He laid siege.

#115Now time did the work. Food shrank. Soldiers and civilians inside Vicksburg found it harder and harder to hold out.

#116After forty-seven days, Vicksburg surrendered on July 4, 1863.

#117So yes, Grant was persistent.

#118But “he never gave up” misses the interesting part.

#119He gave up on plenty.

#120The canal. The water routes. The crossing point. The frontal assaults.

#121What he resisted giving up on was the objective.

#122And someone in Washington had been watching.

#123Abraham Lincoln.

#124Lincoln hadn’t agreed with everything Grant did at Vicksburg.

#125When Grant moved south and then inland, Lincoln thought another approach made more sense.

#126He believed Grant was making a mistake.

#127Then Vicksburg fell.

#128A few days later, Lincoln wrote Grant a letter. He laid out the parts of the campaign he’d doubted.

#129Then he admitted it.

#130You were right, and I was wrong.

#131That matters because it shows what Lincoln was starting to trust.

#132Grant wasn’t valuable because he always did what the president wanted.

#133Sometimes he did exactly what Lincoln wouldn’t have done.

#134Then he made it work.

#135After another important victory at Chattanooga, Lincoln’s confidence grew even more.

#136In March 1864, Grant became lieutenant general and general-in-chief of the Union armies.

#137Four years earlier, he’d been working in his family’s store.

#138Now he was responsible for the entire Union war effort.

#139Just before the next huge campaign in Virginia, Lincoln wrote him again.

#140This letter sounded different.

#141Lincoln said he didn’t know the details of Grant’s plans—and wasn’t trying to know them. He described Grant as vigilant and self-reliant.

#142After years of frustration with generals, Lincoln had found someone he didn’t have to keep prodding toward the next move.

#143And now Grant had to deal with Robert E. Lee.

#144In May 1864, Grant’s forces met Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia in the Wilderness.

#145The terrain was dense, confusing, and terrible for controlling large units.

#146The fighting was vicious.

#147Union casualties were huge.

#148Grant did not defeat Lee.

#149For veterans of the Army of the Potomac, this kind of ending felt familiar.

#150A massive battle. Terrible losses. Then a retreat north.

#151After the Wilderness, the army started moving.

#152There was a choice in the road.

#153North meant back.

#154South meant Spotsylvania.

#155Grant’s columns turned south.

#156The soldiers noticed.

#157And they cheered.

#158Not because Grant had won the Wilderness.

#159He hadn’t.

#160They were cheering because the campaign wasn’t over.

#161At Spotsylvania, Grant failed to break Lee.

#162So he moved again.

#163North Anna. Totopotomoy Creek. Still south.

#164But this is where it gets dangerous to turn persistence into a virtue by itself.

#165At Cold Harbor, Grant made one of the worst decisions of his career.

#166Lee’s army had built powerful defensive positions at Cold Harbor.

#167Grant ordered a major frontal assault.

#168It was a disaster.

#169Union troops were killed and wounded in large numbers for almost no gain.

#170Grant later wrote that he regretted ordering the final attack.

#171Cold Harbor has to stay in the story.

#172Without it, persistence starts looking like magic.

#173It wasn’t.

#174Grant could push too far. He could make terrible calls. And when he did, soldiers paid for them.

#175What matters is what happened next.

#176Grant didn’t keep throwing men at the same defenses.

#177He changed the problem.

#178The Union army slipped away, crossed the huge James River, and moved toward Petersburg—a rail and supply hub that helped sustain Richmond and Lee’s army.

#179The first attempt to seize Petersburg quickly failed too.

#180So Grant changed methods again.

#181Now it became a long squeeze.

#182Cut railroads. Restrict supplies. Take away Lee’s room to maneuver.

#183And Grant wasn’t fighting a private duel with Lee in Virginia.

#184Sherman was moving in Georgia.

#185Other Union armies were tying down Confederate forces elsewhere.

#186Grant’s problem wasn’t one battlefield anymore.

#187It was the whole war.

#188Grant’s guidance to Army of the Potomac commander George Meade was simple.

#189Lee’s army was the objective.

#190Where Lee went, the Union army should go.

#191Richmond mattered, of course.

#192But taking a city wouldn’t end the war if Lee still had an army capable of fighting.

#193Grant kept pushing against the Confederacy’s ability to continue the war at all.

#194The pressure around Petersburg dragged on.

#195By spring 1865, Confederate defenses finally started collapsing.

#196Lee left Petersburg and Richmond.

#197Grant followed.

#198There was no reason to turn away now.

#199Lee’s army still existed.

#200A few days later, the two men sat down in a small Virginia community called Appomattox Court House.

#201On April 9, 1865, Robert E. Lee arrived first at Wilmer McLean’s house.

#202He was neatly dressed in uniform.

#203Grant came later, after days of pursuit, in much plainer field clothes marked by the road.

#204And they didn’t begin with surrender terms.

#205They started talking about the Mexican-American War.

#206More than twenty years earlier, both men had served in the same United States Army.

#207Grant remembered seeing Lee.

#208Lee didn’t clearly remember Grant.

#209For a while, the old war took over the conversation.

#210Grant later recalled that he almost forgot why they were there.

#211Then Lee brought them back to the surrender.

#212Grant wrote out the terms.

#213Confederate soldiers would lay down their arms, be paroled, and go home. Officers could keep their personal property and sidearms.

#214Lee raised another question.

#215Many Confederate cavalrymen and artillerymen had brought their own horses and mules. It was spring. Some would need those animals for farming once they got home.

#216Grant didn’t rewrite the formal terms, but he said his officers could let men take animals they claimed as their own.

#217Lee said that would help.

#218Then Grant learned Lee’s army was hungry.

#219He ordered 25,000 rations sent over.

#220Only hours earlier, these men had been the enemy he was trying to trap and defeat.

#221Now the objective had changed.

#222The job wasn’t to keep destroying Lee’s army.

#223The job was to end the war.

#224After Lee surrendered, Union artillery began firing in celebration.

#225Grant had it stopped.

#226The fighting was ending.

#227The Confederates in front of him had surrendered.

#228There was no reason to celebrate their humiliation in their faces.

#229Lee mounted his horse and rode away.

#230Grant and the officers around him watched him go.

#231A few years earlier, Grant had been selling firewood. He’d struggled to collect rents, failed to land jobs, and worked behind the counter in his father’s store.

#232Now he had accepted the surrender of the Confederacy’s most important army.

#233The easy explanation is that Grant had some superhuman refusal to fail.

#234The real story is stranger.

#235Grant failed all the time.

#236He was surprised at Shiloh. His Vicksburg plans kept collapsing. His frontal assaults there failed. He nearly left the army. At Cold Harbor, he made a terrible decision.

#237He didn’t conquer failure.

#238He often did something more practical.

#239He asked, in effect:

#240What failed—the method, or the objective?

#241If the method failed, he could change it.

#242Change the road. Change the crossing. Turn an assault into a siege. Move around the position. Cross a river. Try something else.

#243And if the objective still mattered, keep moving.

#244That’s part of why Lincoln eventually trusted Grant with the entire war.

#245He didn’t need to be pushed into creating the next move.

#246One battle could end, and Grant would still be thinking about the campaign.

#247One plan could fail, and he’d make another.

#248Then, on April 9, 1865, there was finally no next battle to make.

#249Lee had surrendered.

#250Grant stopped.

#251Almost twenty years later, Grant was a war hero and a former president—and nearly broke again.

#252In 1884, the investment firm Grant & Ward collapsed and took much of his money with it. Soon after, Grant learned he had throat cancer.

#253Now he had another deadline.

#254Finish his memoirs before he died, so the book could provide for his family.

#255Mark Twain helped arrange a publishing deal far better than Grant had initially been offered, and Grant kept writing as his illness worsened.

#256He finished the manuscript only days before his death.

#257The man who had once struggled to support his family after leaving the army ended his life racing the clock to provide for them one last time.