Ulysses S. Grant

Ulysses S. Grant was a clerk in Galena when the Union needed officers who would move. He took Forts Henry and Donelson, held at Shiloh, opened the Mississippi at Vicksburg, and then came east to wear Lee down in a year of grinding that the country still flinches from. He was not a parade general. He was a man who understood that the rebellion would not end because a single capital changed hands.

Appomattox, on April 9, 1865, was the quiet end of that method. He gave terms that let Confederate soldiers go home with their horses. The war page remembers the soldier who would not stop and the victor who knew when to stop.

He was born Hiram Ulysses Grant at Point Pleasant, Ohio, on April 27, 1822. West Point miswrote the name and the army kept Ulysses S. He died at Mount McGregor on July 23, 1885, finishing a memoir so his family would not be poor. The tomb on the Hudson is a later argument. The campaign is the record.