Grant, Julia Dent (1826-1902) first lady Julia Dent was born at White Haven, Missouri, on January 26, 1826. Daughter of a slaveholding planter, she grew up in a close and affectionate family that included seven siblings. After attending an elite boarding school in nearby St. Louis, the 18-year-old Julia was introduced to her older brother’s West Point roommate, ULYSSES S. Grant, aged 22. Their two-year courtship and four-year engagement were conducted in the midst of Grant’s frequent absences in army service, including the Mexican-American War. Finally married in 1848, Julia accompanied Ulysses to an obscure military outpost near Sackets Harbor, New York. The life of an army wife was filled with uncertainty and loneliness, but Julia worked hard to ensure a happy family. A fun, lively, and charming woman, her great love and affection for Ulysses was returned in full. Within 10 years of their marriage she was busy raising four children.
Julia experienced many disappointments in the 1850s. Bored and frustrated with the professional military life, Ulysses resigned from the army in 1854. Returning to St. Louis, he tried his hand at various occupations, including farming. Almost totally dependent upon her father’s charity, Julia and Ulysses struggled with poverty and his depression. Despite a record of failure, Julia stoutly defended her husband, believing that one day his talent and intelligence would find an outlet. In 1859 they moved their family to Galena, Illinois, so that Ulysses could work in his father’s leather-goods store. When the war broke out in 1861, Ulysses volunteered his services immediately, and the next few years saw his swift rise to fame and glory as the Union’s top general.
If everyone else was surprised by her husband’s rapid elevation to hero of the Northern army, the ever-loyal Julia was not. She basked in his reflected glory and expanded her role as his helper and confidante. No other wife of a prominent general spent more time with her husband on campaigns. At the end of the war, Julia had developed a confidence that would impress citizens when she served as first lady during the eight years of her husband’s presidency, 1868-76. “My life at the White House was like a bright and beautiful dream and we were immeasurably happy,” she later said. The Grants and their young children became the object of a country’s adoration as they set a new style of friendly, casual, and constant entertaining. Julia also shared the setbacks of the Grant presidency as corruption and scandal marked their last years in WASHINGTON, D. C.
A few years after leaving the White House, the Grants retired to New York, where they expected to live out their lives in comfort. Unfortunately, in 1884, Grant lost all the family money in a financial disaster. Shortly afterward, he developed the throat cancer that led to his death in 1885. In his dying days, Grant completed his Personal Memoirs, which left Julia and the children financially secure. After his death, Julia lived for 17 years with her daughter in Washington, D. C., where she wrote her own Memoirs. She died on December 14, 1902. Julia Dent Grant is interred alongside her husband in General Grant’s National Monument (Grant’s Tomb) in New York City.
Further reading: Julia Dent Grant, The Personal Memoirs of Julia Dent Grant, ed. John Y. Simon (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1988); Ishbel Ross, The General's Wife: The Life of Mrs. Ulysses S. Grant (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1959).
Grant, Ulysses S. (1822-1885) commanding general of the Union army, 18th president of the United States Ulysses S. Grant was born on April 27, 1822, in Point Pleasant, Ohio. The oldest child of Jesse and Hannah Simpson Grant was raised on the rough-hewn Ohio frontier, first in Point Pleasant and then in nearby Georgetown. The young Hiram Ulysses (his first and middle names were later changed to Ulysses Simpson) struggled to live up to his ambitious father’s high expectations. Hiram was sensitive, moody, and well educated for his time and place. The decision to send “Lyss” to the United States Military Academy at West Point was ultimately a wise one. During his four years at West Point (1839-43) Grant was a middling student but a superb horseman. He clearly enjoyed the military life. A few years after graduation from West Point, Lieutenant Grant fought in the Mexican-American War, where he showed great courage and skill as a soldier, winning promotion and accolades. The young soldier had a talent for fighting and, even more, an impressive knowledge of the strategy and tactics of warfare learned from experience, not textbooks.
Despite his good record in the war and a solid marriage to the sister of one of his West Point classmates, Grant did not do well in the peacetime army of the late 1840s and early 1850s. Assigned to remote forts, Grant took to drinking and resigned from the army under a cloud of suspicion. The civilian world proved just as difficult. Grant failed as a provider for his family, as a farmer, and as a businessman. He lived on his father-in-law’s land outside of St. Louis, Missouri, until moving in 1859 to Galena, Illinois, to work as a clerk in his father’s store. Although these years were a low point in his life, there were some happy times. He was a loving husband to JuLiA Dent Grant and an unusually attentive and affectionate father to their four children. When the guns of Fort Sumter fired, Grant was eager to serve his country.
After briefly holding a series of low-level positions, Lt. Col. Grant was given command of the 21st Illinois Volunteer Infantry Regiment. Rising swiftly through the ranks, Brigadier General Grant was placed in command of the large Union supply and training camp at Cairo, Illinois. In the fall and winter of 1861-62, Grant used his troops aggressively and, in conjunction with the U. S. Navy, captured the strategically important Fort Henry on the Tennessee River and Fort Donelson on the Cumberland River. When the Confederate commander of Fort Donelson sent Grant a note to discuss the terms of surrender for his army of 21,000 men, Grant replied: “No terms except unconditional and immediate surrender can be accepted.” Now famous as “Unconditional Surrender” Grant, he continued to display the winning ways that would bring him to the favorable attention of President Abraham Lincoln and the victory-starved North. Grant’s hard-won victories at Shiloh, Tennessee (April 6-7, 1862); Vicksburg, Mississippi (January-July 1863); and Chattanooga, Tennessee (October-November 1863) made him the leading Northern general of the CiviL War.
Grant and Lincoln enjoyed an unusually close relationship, and Grant developed political skills that complemented his military abilities. Unlike many Union generals, Grant believed firmly that the president’s role as commander in chief of the war was never to be questioned, even if he disagreed with an order. For example, Grant did not like the fact that many “political” generals were appointed simply because they were popular figures back home whose support Lincoln thought important to cultivate. Nevertheless, he accepted the reality and worked with the situation. Grant was an enthusiastic supporter of most of Lincoln’s policies, however, especially the use of black soldiers. Most importantly, the popular Grant denied emphatically that he had any interest in running for the office of the president. By the end of 1863, Lincoln realized that he had found the general that would lead the country to victory. In January 1864, Lieutenant
General Grant came to Washington, D. C., to accept command of all the Union armies.
Grant did not rise to his position without controversy. As he progressed up the chain of command, he was increasingly subject to attacks on his character and generalship. Charges of drinking, incompetence, and a brutal indifference to death and suffering dogged him throughout his career and affected his reputation after the war as well. There is no doubt that Grant did make mistakes. He was caught unprepared for the Confederate attacks at Shiloh, for example. He also quickly regretted an ill-advised order that banned Jews from trading cotton. As to the reports of Grant’s drunkenness, the historical evidence on his drinking shows that he rarely imbibed during the Civil War and never when it counted.
Grant began to implement his grand strategic vision during the spring and summer campaign of 1864. The plan, which involved the movement of all Union armies at the same time to attack and defeat the Confederates, drew Lincoln’s warm support and raised the hopes of the Northern nation for a quick end to the war. Unfortunately, it took longer than expected. The battles of the Overland campaign, where Grant and Robert E. Lee’s armies fought to bloody stalemate in the Battles of the Wilderness, Spotsylvania, and Cold Harbor, gave rise to the nickname of “butcher” for the general in chief whose main strategy seemed to be throwing bodies at the enemy. Subsequent military historians have ably defended Grant against the butcher charge, pointing out that Lee lost many more men in proportion than did Grant, but Northern citizens were unaware of this fact. Fortunately, Grant’s trusted western comrades, Gen. William T. Sherman and Gen. Philip H. Sheridan, under Grant’s direction, led victorious armies that made possible Lincoln’s reelection in the fall of 1864. On April 9, 1865, at Appomattox Court House, Virginia, Grant dictated the terms upon which the war ended and upon which the nation could begin the process of reconciliation.
Having led the Union army to victory, Grant emerged from the Civil War a popular hero, appearing to most of the people as a man who had character and upright morality. Like many, if not most, of his fellow countrymen, Grant had tasted the bitterness of defeat and failure. He also had a sharp intelligence that served him well in both plotting strategy and in dealing with the citizen-soldier of the Civil War. Grant had made many mistakes, but he had learned from them. Moreover, he had a deep and abiding faith in democracy and democratic institutions. Even his lack of political experience was, in the eyes of those who viewed politicians with contempt, a virtue. By 1866, the battles between President Andrew Johnson and Congress had left Grant as the most powerful man in the country. Nominated for president by the Republican Party in 1868, Grant swept to victory. He was aided by newly enfranchised Southern African Americans in states reconstructed by Congress as well as by his famous campaign slogan “Let Us Have Peace.”
When Grant took office in 1869, Reconstruction governments in which African Americans participated existed in all of the former Confederate states except Tennessee. Although Grant did his best to uphold these “Black Republican” governments, violence-prone white supremacists gradually overthrew them everywhere except in South Carolina and Louisiana before Grant left office. Even in South Carolina and Louisiana, which had black majorities, the Republican governments were sustained only by the presence of army detachments. Black Republicanism during Reconstruction failed not because of Grant but because of growing Southern white resistance matched by growing Northern white apathy.
In foreign affairs, Grant was obsessed with the idea of annexing Santo Domingo but was frustrated by opposition in the Senate. Grant’s greatest success in this area came when Secretary of State Hamilton Fish negotiated the Treaty of Washington (1871) and prevented intervention in a Cuban revolution before and after the Virginias affair (1873).
Although rank-and-file Republicans stuck by Grant, Republican intellectuals were disillusioned by his presidency. They had hoped that he would be above partisanship and appoint the “best people” (like themselves) to office. Indeed, Grant did ignore politics initially in his cabinet and other major appointments, but having gratified no one in particular by his independent course, he soon learned to please spoils-minded Republican senators like Roscoe Conkling of New York and representatives like Benjamin Franklin Butler of Massachusetts. Grant also proved to be too trusting, and while personally honest, he could be duped by unscrupulous friends and relations.
Reform Republicans were hostile to the spoilsmen and thus increasingly hostile to Grant. They disliked corruption in government circles and were opposed to special favors to corporations, whether in the form of land grants for railroads or protective tarills for manufacturers. Ultimately, the reform Republicans split with the administration and formed a new Liberal Republican Party. The party’s laissez-faire program included civil service reform, low tariffs, gold-backed currency, and no legislation aiding special groups, be they wealthy corporations or poor African Americans. Grant could not stand the selfrighteousness and superior airs of many reformers, but he recognized that some civil service reform would benefit the nation. He approved tariff reductions, and he endorsed gold-backed “sound money.” These actions somewhat undermined the Liberal Republicans. To the dismay
Ulysses S. Grant (National Archives)
Of the party’s leaders like Carl Schurz, the 1872 Liberal Republican convention nominated for president Horace Greeley, the eccentric editor of the New York Tribane. Although the Democrats also nominated Greeley, Grant triumphed handily in the election.
Grant’s second term was marred by a severe economic depression following the panic of 1873 and by the exposure of widespread corruption. For example, Orville E. Babcock, Grant’s personal secretary, was implicated in the Whiskey Ring that defrauded the government of millions of dollars in internal revenues. Grant’s secretary of war, William Worth Belknap, illegally sold an Indian-post tradership. The Republican Party was already disintegrating in the South, and the scandals and economic stagnation also caused it to decline in the North. Grant backed two important measures that bucked the ebbing tide: Despite financial struggles, Grant opposed even mildly inflationary measures and approved the Specie Resumption Act (1875) that would put the United States back on the gold standard on January 1, 1879. And despite flagging interest in aiding African Americans, he signed the Civil Rights Act (1875) that guaranteed African Americans equal rights in public places such as streetcars, theaters, and hotels and prevented their exclusion from juries. When the outcome of the presidential election of 1876 was in dispute from November 1876 to March 1877, Grant behaved circumspectly, supported the Electoral Commission Act (1877), and never once hinted that he would use his control of the army to declare fellow Republican Rutherford B. Hayes the winner.
Throughout his presidency, Grant remained steadfast in the belief that the goals of the war should be preserved, even as the country’s enthusiasm for Reconstruction of the South in the North’s image faded away. Grant’s final task as president harked back to his first, and perhaps most important, achievement: to ensure a stable transition between presidents. He succeeded in 1876, just as he had succeeded in 1868, and the country was reconciled for good. Few professional politicians could have done better, and most might have done far worse.
In retirement, Grant went on a world tour (1877-79), lobbied unsuccessfully for nomination to a third term as president, and went into the brokerage business. His firm, Grant & Ward, went bankrupt in 1884, leaving him broke. Mortally ill with throat cancer, Grant retreated to his home to write his Personal Memoirs, regarded by many as the greatest military memoirs since Caesar’s Commentaries. Grant was in a great deal of pain as he raced against the clock to complete his book, and he died within weeks of finishing the task. Upon publication, Grant’s memoirs sold hundreds of thousands of copies and recouped his fortune for his family. His memory as one of America’s greatest generals, if not one of its greatest presidents, was secured.
Grant’s legacy is deep and wide. By the time of his death on July 23, 1885, at Mount McGregor, New York, Ulysses S. Grant was an icon in the historical memory of the Civil War shared by a whole generation of men and women. Americans of that time compared Grant favorably to Washington and Lincoln. They believed that an appreciation of Grant could only come with the recognition that he was both the general that saved the Union and the president who made sure that it stayed together. On the same day that 1.5 million Americans attended Grant’s funeral in New York City and countless others commemorated his life in cities and towns across the country, a newspaper headline provided the perfect epitaph for the accomplishments of General and President Ulysses S. Grant: “The Union, His Monument.”
See also Chattanooga, Battle of; Shiloh, Battle of; Vicksburg campaign.
Further reading: Bruce Catton, Grant Moves South, 1861-1863 (Boston: Back Bay Books, 1990); Bruce Cat-ton, Grant Takes Command, 1863-1865 (Boston: Back Bay Books, 1990); Ulysses S. Grant, The Personal Memoirs of U. S. Grant (1885; reprint, New York, Penguin Books, 1999); William S. McFeely, Grant: A Biography (New York: Norton, 1982); Brooks D. Simpson, Ulysses S. Grant: Triumph over Adversity, 1822-1865 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2000); Jean Edward Smith, Grant (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2001); Joan Waugh, Ulysses S. Grant, American Hero, American Myth (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009).
Greeley, Horace (1811-1872) journalist, reformer, politician
Newspaper editor Horace Greeley was born in Amherst, New Hampshire, on February 3, 1811. In 1826 he entered into the world of journalism, serving as a printer’s apprentice for the Northern Spectator of East Poultney, Vermont. Over the next several years, Greeley worked for many different newspapers in the Northeast, editing several and forming a political partnership with two powerful figures in New York state politics, Thurlow Weed and William H. Seward. Greeley’s most important opportunity, however, arrived in 1841 when he founded and became editor of the New York Tribune.
Greeley’s role as editor of the Tribune not only established his legacy but also allowed him to promote his interests in reform, writing, and politics. He used his editorials over the course of three decades to battle against numerous vices and social problems, including tobacco, alcohol, gambling, prostitution, and slavery. He also pushed for land reform and a protective TARlff that would aid the American worker. Above all else, he strove for his vision of national unity and harmony. As a result, his support for labor did not encompass the encouragement of what he saw as divisive strikes. He stood for freedom and against slavery, yet in the 1840s and early 1850s he expressed his opinions carefully, for he saw radical abolitionism as a threat that could destroy the nation.
Greeley’s expansive nationalism found expression in his vision for the western lands. Although he did not invent the phrase, Greeley has long been credited with first saying, “Go west, young man.” He became a strong proponent of the development of railroads. In his mind, the open lands of the West would provide land for numerous free-labor settlers and bring prosperity for all, as long as the
Southern institution of slavery was not allowed to expand as well. Long a “Conscience” Whig who stood against the “Cotton” Whigs, Greeley helped found the Republican Party in 1854. His newspaper took a powerful stand against the Kansas-Nebraska Act and popular sovereignty, which he believed would aid in the growth of slavery. Heading into the crisis of the late 1850s, Greeley promoted peace and harmony above all else. Greeley was intent on keeping the nation together, even as he attacked slavery.
While he remained involved in New York state politics throughout his life, Greeley ended his partnership with Weed and Seward in 1854. He campaigned for John C. Fremont in 1856, and although he did not initially support Abraham Lincoln in 1859 for the Republican nomination, neither did he support Seward, whom he believed lacked the necessary national appeal. Throughout the years of the Civil War, Greeley maintained an alternately supportive and adversarial relationship with Lincoln through his editorials in the Tribune. In the hope of avoiding war in 1860, Greeley advocated letting the Southern states secede, for he believed that most Southerners did not support secession and that these “erring sisters” would soon be forced to return.
After the war began, the Tribune editorials revealed a shift in Greeley’s thinking. He began to advocate the abolition of slavery as a primary war objective and encouraged Lincoln to formulate an emancipation policy. Although his political positions aligned him with the Radical Republicans, Greeley still looked to find a compromise to end the war. As a result, in July 1864, he found himself in Niagara Falls, meeting with several Southern “peace commissioners.” Given permission to participate by an extremely skeptical President Lincoln, the Tribune editor failed to bring anything but derision upon himself for his efforts. As the war came to a close, Greeley stated his support for a moderate Reconstruction, one that allowed for universal amnesty and impartial suffrage while promoting the long-range goal of Republican predominance in national politics.
A man of principles, Greeley helped post bail for Jefferson Davis in 1867. This decision not only hurt his standing in the public eye but also dealt a blow to sales of the second volume of his history of the Civil War, The American Conflict. In the last years of his life, Greeley grew disenchanted with the Republican Party and was only a reluctant supporter of Ulysses S. Grant in the 1868 election. In 1871 he completely broke ranks with the party he helped found and joined the rising Liberal Republican movement. With his principles and national recognition firmly in place, Greeley became the Liberal Republican and Democratic nominee for president in 1872. In two emotionally crushing losses, Greeley suffered the death of his wife and defeat at the hands of Grant in early November.
Horace Greeley died in Pleasantville, New York, on November 29, 1872.
See also abolition.
Further reading: Coy F. Cross, Go West, Young Man!: Horace Greeley's Vision for America (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1995); Ralph Ray Fahrney, Horace Greeley and the Tribune in the Civil War (New York: Da Capo Press, 1970); Horace Greeley, The Autobiography of Horace Greeley, or, Recollections of a Busy Life (New York: Treat, 1872).
—John P. Bowes
World History
