Why Ulysses S. Grant Was One of America’s Greatest LeadersRonald C. White / October 05, 2016
Friends at the Ulysses S. Grant National Historic Site near St. Louis tell me most visitors arrive with little knowledge of Grant—but leave with deep appreciation.
In my biography of Abraham Lincoln, I wrote of Grant, the decorated Civil War general, but I now confess: I did not fully know the man. Grant’s rise to fame has always remained something of a mystery. As I dug deeper, I discovered his intellectual journey was filled with surprises, detours, questions, and insights. His personality is a palette not unlike the rich colors he learned to paint with at West Point.
After growing up on the Ohio frontier, young Ulysses was accepted at West Point, from which he graduated in 1843. He subsequently served with honors in the Mexican War and then returned to marry Julia Dent, who accompanied him to his assignments in New York and Michigan over the next several years.
Forced to leave her behind when he was posted to the Oregon Territory and California between 1852 and 1854, he grew so heartsick that he resigned his commission. And for the next seven years he struggled to make a living for himself, his wife, and his four children, mostly on his pro-slavery father-in-law’s property outside St. Louis.
Then came the Civil War, and everything changed. In a story of transformation, Grant moved in the next seven years from clerk at his father’s leather goods store in Galena, Illinois, to commander of all the Union armies, and finally to being president of the United States. His remarkable rise constitutes one of the greatest stories of American leadership.
Although he was renowned at the time of his death in 1885, it was not long before Grant began to fall from favor. Historians writing under the influence of the Southern “Lost Cause” theory of the war lifted up Robert E. Lee and the Confederacy in “the War of Northern Aggression.”...
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