Ulysses Simpson Grant’s rise to fame began with the Civil War. Born in Point Pleasant, Ohio April 27, 1822, Grant graduated from the United States Military Academy at West Point in 1843. After a mediocre stint as a cadet, he performed well as a captain during the Mexican War (1846-1848), winning two citations for gallantry and one for meritorious conduct. After the fighting stopped, however, Grant was assigned monotonous duties at remote posts far from his wife and family. He began neglecting his work and started drinking heavily. He resigned in 1854 to avoid being drummed out of the service.

Grant spent the next six years in St. Louis, Missouri with his wife, Julia Dent Grant. After several short-lived pursuits, including a brief episode as a farmer, he moved to Galena, Illinois to be a clerk in his brother’s store. When the Civil War began in 1861, he jumped at the chance to volunteer for military service in the Union army. His first command was as the colonel of a regiment from Illinois, but he was promoted to brigadier general by September.

His 1862 triumphs at Fort Donelson and Fort Henry in western Tennessee won him the nickname “Unconditional Surrender” Grant and placed him before the public eye. After a disastrous first day of heavy casualties, however, at the Battle of Shiloh, Tennessee when his forces were surprised by the enemy, President Lincoln received several demands for his removal from command. Lincoln refused, stating, “I can’t spare this man. He fights.” (The Union won at Shiloh on the second day of battle.) Grant’s hard-won victory at Vicksburg, Mississippi, in 1863 was a strategic masterpiece.

After yet another victory at Chattanooga, Tennessee, Grant was elevated to the rank of lieutenant general and named general in chief of the Armies of the United States (March 1864). He conducted a war of attrition, hammering at Robert E. Lee’s Confederate army through battles in Virginia at the Wilderness, Spotsylvania, Cold Harbor, the crossing of the James River, the siege of Petersburg, the fall of Richmond, and—finally—Appomattox Court House. Grant’s forces were depleted by more than half during the last year of the war, but it was Lee who surrendered in 1865.

After the Civil War, President Andrew Johnson named Grant Secretary of War over the newly reunited nation. In 1868, running against Johnson, Ulysses S. Grant was elected eighteenth President of the United States. Unfortunately, though apparently innocent of graft himself, Grant’s administration was riddled with corruption, and scandal.

For two years following his second term in office, Grant made a triumphal tour of the world. In 1884, he lost his entire savings to a corrupt bank. To make up some of his losses, he wrote about his war experiences for Century Magazine. They proved so popular that he was inspired to write his excellent autobiography, Personal Memoirs of U.S. Grant, finishing the two-volume set only a few days before dying of cancer at the age of sixty-three on July 23, 1885.