Ulysses S. Grant is Born, April 27, 1822

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On This Day April 27, 2022

Point Pleasant, Ohio, U.S.A. Ulysses S. Grant (1822–1885) was born on this day, April 27, 1822, in Point Pleasant, Ohio. Grant was a taciturn Midwesterner beset by vocational failures in his 20s and 30s, and unremarkable to those who met him. But fate had more in store. He went on to lead the U.S. Army to victory in the Civil War (1861–1865) and serve two terms as the 18th President of the United States (1869–1877).

Grant’s military campaigns during the Civil War, especially his campaign to capture the city of Vicksburg, Mississippi, are still studied in military academies today. During the war, Grant defeated in the field and captured—defeated in full and forced the capitulation of—not one but three enemy armies in both the Western and Eastern theaters of the war. Beyond tactics and battlefield strategy, Grant, a former quartermaster, also understood and integrated logistics into military operations.

At various periods in his life after 1865—perhaps during most of it—he was quite likely the most famous living American in the world.

He was the youngest U.S. president ever elected (age 46 in 1868) until John F. Kennedy (age 43 in 1960).

While president, the Fifteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution was ratified with Grant’s ardent support, guaranteeing the right to vote for all adult American men regardless of race, including former slaves (freedmen).

Also, the Enforcement Act (or Civil Rights Act or “Ku Klux Klan Act”) of 1871 was passed at Grant’s insistence. It allowed him to use the U.S. military, the new Department of Justice, and federal judges to combat intimidation and violence against Blacks in the South during Reconstruction (1865–1877).

In his retirement, he undertook a world tour that inaugurated the global significance of American presidential influence through overseas goodwill demonstrations and direct interaction with foreign leaders abroad. He was met by crowds wherever he went, something that he had not anticipated given his genuine modesty and as strongly noted in writing by those in his tiny entourage. It was a family vacation that turned into a heralding of the arrival of the U.S.A. as a rising world power.

In 1884–1885, while he was dying of throat cancer, Grant penned a bestselling military memoir, published by Mark Twain, in order to provide for the future of his wife, Julia, and his family, after Grant and Julia lost everything in a Ponzi scheme. (Presidents didn’t receive a pension in those days.)

Nearly 1.5 million people came out for Grant’s funeral procession in 1885 in New York City, at the time the largest public gathering or demonstration in American history.

Until after World War I, his tomb in New York City’s Riverside Park received more annual visitors than the Statue of Liberty.

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President Ulysses S. Grant seated wearing a bowtie, jacket, waistcoat

Ulysses S. Grant, wet collodion glass negative, 1870–1880, Brady-Handy Collection, Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, Washington, D.C. 20540 U.S.A., https://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/2017893220. Note that the Library’s timeframe for the record would actually exclude, roughly, 1878–1879 when Grant was on his international travels.

Ulysses S. Grant is Born, April 27, 1822

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