Penniless Addict Becomes President of the United States
It was 1854, and Ulysses S. Grant was broke, unemployed, trapped in New York City, and likely battling alcoholism.1
He was only 32 years old and his army career was already over. He’d been miserable, lonely, and too often inebriated, or had been too often suspected of it, while on the U.S. Army post that he had endured in California. The camp’s commander told him he might face a court martial.2 Grant resigned his captaincy and set out for home.
Having journeyed for weeks to reach New York City, going by sea to Central America, crossing overland to the Atlantic Ocean, and then taking another sea journey northward—the fastest way to travel from the United States’ West to its East Coast in those days—he’d just spent his last $15 on a hotel room where he’d run up a tab he couldn’t pay.
His future looked grim.
And yet in just eight years’ time, Grant would be a brigadier general leading the Union army to its first major victory in the American Civil War and gaining national fame.
Just two years after that, Grant would be the first officer since George Washington to attain the rank of lieutenant general. He would be given command over all U.S. military forces in the war. He would defeat the main army of the secessionist rebellion of 11 Southern states (the Confederacy), and win the Civil War for the cause of the Union and the end of slavery in the United States.
And four years afterwards, Ulysses S. Grant would become President of the United States. He would be America’s youngest elected President until John F. Kennedy nearly a century later, and the only president to serve two full consecutive terms between Andrew Jackson and Woodrow Wilson.
How did Grant achieve this amazing turnaround?
In the year of Grant’s 200th birthday, I am exploring his exceptional story.
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“Washington, Lincoln, and Grant...these three greatest men have taken their place among the great men of all nations, the great men of all time.”
Theodore Roosevelt, Governor of New York, later U.S. President, 1900
The Army was not Grant’s first choice for a career. His father, Jesse, worried that the 17-year-old Grant would not amount to much in life, so he got his son an appointment to the U.S. Military Academy in West Point, New York. Grant insisted he’d not go. Jesse insisted he would go, “and I thought so too, if he did,” Grant recalled later in his bestselling memoir, admitting to his cowed reaction.
Grant graduated in 1843 as a middling student, scoring poorly in military subjects like artillery and infantry tactics. He later wrote, “A military life had no charms for me, and I had not the faintest idea of staying in the army, even if I should be graduated, which I did not expect.”3
He hoped to be an assistant math professor instead. No, not a math professor, but specifically just an assistant math professor. 4 Grant throughout his life harbored quiet self-confidence, but ambition visited him only rarely.
Meanwhile, as Grant lingered in the army, the Mexican-American War erupted, and despite Grant being a quartermaster, he managed to see a fair amount of combat in Mexico, serving with distinction.
But after the war, a miserable existence at Fort Humboldt, California, drove him to homesickness and depression. To cope, he drank. And it seems that Grant could never just drink a little when he dared to. Alcohol affected him almost immediately, perhaps because of his small stature—5’8″ and 145 lbs. In 1854, Grant resigned from the army, quite possibly under threat of court martial related having been drunk on duty.
Grant’s failure in the Army threatened to dog him even years later, in 1861, after 11 Southern states took up arms to secede from the United States, triggering the American Civil War. At that time, Grant tried to get recommissioned in the regular U.S. Army. He was turned down. Instead, he was put in command over a regiment of unruly Illinois volunteers, seemingly hopeless as soldiers.
But within weeks, Grant first brought training and disciple to his regiment and then showed his skills in command. He was promoted to brigadier general of volunteers. And in September 1861, he led his troops to bloodlessly seize Paducah, Kentucky, a gateway town to the rebellious Confederate states.5
Less than six months later, Grant secured the Union’s first great victory of the war against the Confederacy by capturing Forts Henry and Donelson in Tennessee. Donelson’s defenders submitted to Grant’s demand that they must surrender unconditionally. This earned Grant the nickname “Unconditional Surrender” Grant, a play on his initials “U.S.”
The next year, 1862, Grant, now a major general, accomplished more victories in the war’s Western Theater, capturing Vicksburg, Mississippi, and overseeing Union victory in Chattanooga, Tennessee. Then in March 1864, he was elevated to the rank of lieutenant general—a rank only George Washington had held before. President Abraham Lincoln called upon Grant to come to the Eastern Theater of the war to fight the Confederate army in Virginia.
Two previous Union generals-in-chief had spent three years trying but failing to end the war with a conclusive Union victory. It took U.S. Grant, as commander of the army, only 11 months from the start of his Virginia campaign to achieve it.
More than any other commander in the war, Union or Confederate, Grant grasped the war’s overall strategic situation.6 And he brought a correlation of strategy and logistics to the armies under his command.7 He defeated six Confederate armies during the Civil War, while his forces suffered proportionally fewer casualties than the Confederates did.8
Grant’s colleague General Sherman claimed, “Grant is the greatest soldier of our time if not all time.”9
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Ulysses S. Grant wrote that early in his adult life he was “never an abolitionist, not even what could be called anti-slavery.”10
At White Haven, the Missouri plantation of his father-in-law Frederick Dent, Grant at times oversaw, but also personally worked alongside of, the enslaved Black workforce. Later, Grant accepted as a gift or bought from Mr. Dent the enslaved man William Jones to assist him on his own farm.12, 13
However, in March 1859, Grant freed Jones, and did so at a time of great financial hardship for Grant and his family, refusing to sell Jones instead. As neighbors told it later, they deemed that Grant had never been “a slavery man.”11
As a general during the Civil War, Grant’s views about slavery changed, much as President Lincoln’s did—perhaps even more rapidly. Grant became committed to the cause of ending slavery. He wrote that “it become patent to my mind early in the rebellion that the North and South could never live at peace with each other except as one nation, and that without slavery.”14
By the time Grant became the 18th president of the United States in 1869, he was actively working to help advance former slaves in America’s postbellum society.
As president, Grant racially integrated the White House staff, and he ended the custom of having Black and white visitors enter the mansion separately.15
President Grant appointed the first Black diplomat in American history, Ebenezer D. Bassett, as minister to Haiti, and other Blacks to status positions. Abolitionist George T. Downing asserted Grant went “far beyond” Abraham Lincoln in the “numbers of our race [appointed] to important positions”16
Grant supported the Fifteenth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, which granted adult, male former slaves (“freedmen”) the right to vote, calling it “the most important event that has occurred since the nation came into life.”17
Grant’s presidential administration committed to Reconstruction (1865–1877). This government-led program sought to devise means by which whites and Blacks could live together after emancipation and enfranchisement, and to vigorously defend freedmen’s new rights to vote, sit on juries, run for public office, and more.
President Grant personally requested from the U.S. Congress the Civil Rights Act of 1871. The Act, also called the Third Enforcement Act or the “Ku Klux Klan Act,” empowered Grant as president to suppress the violent racist groups in the South, like the Ku Klux Klan (KKK), that were increasingly terrorizing Blacks, including freedmen voters, as the 1872 election approached. The result, as Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer Ron Chernow noted, was “the fairest presidential election in southern states until 1968.”18
During the years 1871–1877, Grant’s administration secured 1,143 convictions of white supremacists violating Americans’ civil rights. These actions by Grant’s administration crushed the KKK, as well as its offshoots like the Knights of the White Camelia. Unfortunately, the KKK would reemerge in new form some 50 years later.19
Additionally, President Grant signed into law the Civil Rights Act of 1875. It prohibited racial exclusion from public accommodations, transport, and juries. It would be 81 years before Congress passed another civil rights bill. (In the meantime, in 1883, the Supreme Court struck down the accommodations provisions of the 1875 act.)
Princeton professor Sean Wilentz said that Grant “created the most auspicious record on racial equality and civil rights of any president from Lincoln to Lyndon B. Johnson.”20
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Today, Grant seems almost as obscure as he was during his years before the Civil War. Why is that?
One reason is the Lost Cause school of American history. It romanticized the secessionist cause for generations. And it perpetuated many negative verdicts about Ulysses S. Grant.21
Grant, according to the Lost Cause, was incompetent, a drunk, and a butcher of his own men—using them as cannon fodder—and winning the Civil War only because the Union had more resources.
But if that is true, why are Grant’s victories still lauded by military scholars today? Grant’s Vicksburg campaign in particular is seen as masterful. No general in American history has ever defeated more armies in the field than Ulysses S. Grant, not Washington, not Pershing, not Patton, not Eisenhower.
Grant, according to the Lost Cause, abetted corrupt Northern businessmen and federal government leaders motivated to war by crass economic self-interest.
But even a moment’s glance over the historical record shows that higher ideals like the preservation of the republic’s union of states and the emancipation of slaves fueled the Union war effort, and motivated Grant, too.
The presidency of Grant, according to the Lost Cause narrative, was only one of scandals, and a presidency that oversaw Southern Reconstruction that was doomed to failure because of the incompetence of Black elected officials and the corruption of white Republican politicians in the South.
But today, most Americans marvel to hear of what in fact were the profound electoral, professional, and societal achievements by Blacks during Reconstruction. And while it is true that Grant’s presidential administration was beset by numerous scandals, for which Grant cannot totally escape blame, none involved Grant directly, and he did not personally benefit from any of them.
They should not be allowed to overshadow his presidency’s accomplishments or its Reconstruction efforts.
What is more, while corruption existed among some Republican officials in the South during Reconstruction, it did so among Democratic officials, too. And such political misdealing should not overshadow the efforts in the South by Northern and other whites and Blacks who worked and sacrificed to establish schools, hospitals, and other institutions to benefit Black communities.
Grant, according to the Lost Cause, stood for Northern ruthlessness during the Civil War and an overbearing military occupation in the South during Reconstruction. According to the the Lost Cause, this stands in contrast to the underdog, Confederate cause reflecting Southern culture’s chivalry and honor, as well as kindness towards its enslaved workers. This perspective can be seen in the cinematic masterpiece, but appallingly racist, The Birth of a Nation (1915) and even in the highest-grossing film of all time, Gone With the Wind (1939).
But this view does not stand up well against the evidence of not only the equal valor of Union soldiers during the war but the deeply racist domestic terrorism unleashed on Blacks in the South after the war, and the reality that time and again in the South, only the presence of soldiers of the U.S. Army, and the work of federal judges and officials of the Department of Justice—newly formed under President Grant—could protect the rights of and ensure justice for Blacks during Reconstruction.
The Lost Cause interpretation of American history no longer reigns supreme, but it persists. Should U.S. Grant hold a better and bigger place in American history than that longstanding view allows for?
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“If the name of Washington is allied with the birth of our country, that of Grant is forever identified with its preservation.”
William Tecumseh Sherman, General of the Army, 1877
“Benjamin Butler…made the negro a contraband, Abraham Lincoln made him a freeman, and Gen. Ulysses S. Grant made him a citizen.”
Frederick Douglass, abolitionist and statesman, 1890
“Nothing heroic…and yet the greatest hero. The gods, the destinies, seem to have concentrated upon him.”
Walt Whitman, American poet, 1879
Callout quotations sources:
Roosevelt quote: Theodore Roosevelt, “Grant,” in The Works of Theodore Roosevelt, Volume 12 (United States: C. Scribner’s sons, 1924), 458.
Sherman quote: John Russell Young, Around the World with General Grant (New York: American News Company, 1879, repr. Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002), 5, quoted in Ron Chernow, Grant (New York: Penguin Books, 2017), 862. Kindle.
Douglass quote: Frederick Douglass, “The Race Problem,” in Great Speeches by Frederick Douglass, ed. James Daley (United States: Dover Publications, Inc., 2013), 93. Speech delivered October 21, 1890, Washington D.C.
Whitman quote: William White, “Walt Whitman to U. S. Grant: An Unknown Exchange,” Prairie Schooner 34, no. 2 (1960): 122.
