Therefore, when the Civil War broke out in 1861 and
President Abraham Lincoln asked for volunteers, Grant
responded. After forming a company of volunteers in
Galena, he went to the Illinois state capital, Springfield,
where he helped to form more companies. In June 1861,
Illinois governor Richard Yates gave Grant a commission
as colonel of the 21st Regiment of Illinois Volunteers,
and in August, at the request of Representative Elihu
B. Washburne, President Lincoln commissioned Grant
as a brigadier general. He was promptly sent to Camp
Girardeau, Missouri, as commander of the District of
Southeastern Missouri. There, he having learned the
Confederates were moving on Paducah, Kentucky, he
forestalled them by occupying the town on 5 Septem-
ber 1861 at the junction of the Mississippi, Ohio, and
Tennessee.
In February 1862, Grant seized Forts Donelson and
Henry. When Donelson was surrounded, and the Con-
federate forces refused to surrender, he demanded that it
give up without any terms, earning him the nickname
“Unconditional Surrender” Grant. For this act, he was
promoted to the rank of major general of volunteers and
made second in command to General Henry Halleck.
Although most historians consider Grant an excep-
tional general, he did make several mistakes in the field,
most notably at Shiloh, also called Pittsburg Landing,
on 6–7 April 1862. Though Halleck had ordered him
to move on Confederate forces at Corinth, Mississippi,
Grant was surprised by a Confederate attack at Shiloh.
The Southerners were forced back to Corinth before
Northern reinforcements arrived, but Grant’s forces
had suffered badly. Halleck, long a critic of Grant, at-
tempted to remove him from command and announced
he would take over the governance of the armies of the
Tennessee and the Ohio. But then Halleck was posted
to Washington in July 1862, and Grant replaced him.
He realized that controlling the Mississippi would split
the Confederacy, and he resolved to take Vicksburg, “the
Fortress of the West.” The campaign is still regarded as
one of the most tenacious campaigns of the war. After
Vicksburg fell on 4 July 1863, Grant was promoted to
the rank of major general and made commander of all
Union forces west of the Mississippi River. In late 1863,
he broke the Confederate lines at Chattanooga, Tennes-
see, ending southern control of the western theater.
In March 1864, President Lincoln turned to Grant
to command all the Union armies and was promoted to
lieutenant general on 12 March 1864. Pursuing a cam-
paign of attrition, Grant fought Robert E. lee’s army
in Virginia while William sherman, following Grant’s
strategy, marched his army to the sea, destroying the
South’s railway system and economic infrastructure as
he went. In April 1865, with the South defeated, Grant
accepted Lee’s surrender at Appomattox Court House,
allowing the defeated Southern soldiers to keep their
horses and giving them extra rations to take home with
them. With the war over, Grant explained to Henry
Yates Thompson, a British visitor to the United States,
why he was forced to send so many men into the slaugh-
ter of battle to win: “My object in war was to exhaust
Lee’s army. I was obliged to sacrifice men to do it. I have
been called a butcher. Well, I never spared men’s lives to
gain an object; but then I gained it, and I knew it was
the only way.”
Following Lincoln’s assassination in April 1865,
Andrew Johnson became president and promoted Grant
to full general. Johnson, however, became increasingly
unpopular due to his lenient treatment of the former
Confederate states. In 1868, Republicans turned to
Grant, a man who had never held political office, as their
candidate for president. He won the party’s nomination
and defeated New York governor Horatio Seymour, a
Democrat, to become the 18th president of the United
States.
In Grant’s two terms as president—he was reelected
in a landslide in 1872—his administration became
known as one of the most corrupt ever, although his-
torians cannot tie any of the corruption to Grant him-
self. From the “Whiskey Ring” to the “Indian Ring,”
numerous scandals broke out that soured the nation on
its military hero. Nevertheless, Grant did crack down
on the Ku Klux Klan and oversaw a mediation that led
to payments from the British government for their as-
sistance to the Confederacy during the Civil War. He
left office in March 1877, but the Republicans nearly
turned to him again three years later, when various party
factions at the 1880 Republican Convention wanted
to stop Representative James A. Garfield, the eventual
party nominee.
Left penniless by a downturn in the economy in
1884, Grant was forced to write his memoirs in an effort
to feed his family. When he discovered that he had can-
cer of the throat, he raced to finish the work, writing the
last pages just days before he died on 23 July 1885. He
was buried in the huge vault located in New York City
that is now called Grant’s Tomb.gRAnt, ulySSeS SimpSon