Hiram Ulysses Grant entered the world in a two-room frame house along the Ohio River. A mediocre West Point student and a struggling civilian businessman, he found his calling in war, rising from obscurity to command all Union armies and accept Robert E. Lee's surrender at Appomattox in 1865, before serving two terms as president.
Ulysses S. Grant was born Hiram Ulysses Grant on April 27, 1822, in a modest cabin in Point Pleasant, Ohio, to a tanner father who ran a leather business. A clerical error at West Point rechristened him 'Ulysses S. Grant,' a name he kept for life, joking that the S stood for nothing at all.
His pre-war record gave little hint of greatness: unremarkable grades at the Military Academy, a resignation from the peacetime Army amid rumors of drinking, and a string of failed civilian ventures in Missouri and Illinois, including a stint selling firewood on St. Louis street corners. The Civil War changed everything. Grant's relentless, unglamorous style of campaigning—hammering at Vicksburg, grinding through the Overland Campaign—won him command of all Union forces by 1864.
On April 9, 1865, he accepted Lee's surrender at Appomattox Court House with notable magnanimity, allowing Confederate officers to keep their sidearms and horses. He later served two terms as president, an administration remembered for corruption scandals but also for real efforts to protect Black civil rights during Reconstruction.
Key people: Ulysses S. Grant, Robert E. Lee