Basic Facts:
Birth: April 17, 1822 at Point Pleasant, Ohio as Hiram Ulysses Grant
Death: July 23, 1885 at Mount McGregor, New York
Married: Julia Dent (1826-1902) on August 22, 1848
Children: 4: Frederick, Ulysses, Ellen, Jesse
President: Two terms beginning March 4,1869 and March 4, 1873
Family
Julia was introduced to Ulysses Grant in 1844 by her brother, a fellow student at West Point Academy. They married in 1848. His father objected to the marriage because Julia’s family owned slaves.
The Grants had three sons and a daughter:
- Frederick Dent Grant (1850–1912)—soldier, public official.
- Ulysses Simpson Grant, Jr. known as “Buck” (1852–1929) —lawyer. Grant served as personal secretary to his father while he was president. Grant then worked in private practice and became wealthy. He partnered in a banking and brokerage firm with Ferdinand Ward. Grant and his father each put $100,000 in the firm and asked veterans and millionaires to invest.
The Grants thought that they would share one-half of the profits from the firm, but realized that Ward was only interested in using the Grant name for his own interests. In 1884, the firm went bankrupt, and the Grants lost everything. Ward was convicted of fraud and served over 6 years in prison. Grant Sr. died the next year; Grant Jr. was never tried.
- Ellen Wrenshall Grant known as “Nellie” (1855–1922) —homemaker. At the age of 18, Nellie and 23-year-old Algernon Charles Frederick Sartoris were married in a lavish wedding held at the White House on May 21, 1874.
- Jesse Root Grant (1858–1934) —engineer. For several years he managed his brother Ulysses Jr.’s U.S. Grant Hotel in San Diego. In the 1890s, he helped to develop Tia Juana, now Tijuana, Mexico, as a gambling resort.
Julia was born with strabismus (more commonly known as “crossed eyes”) which prevents both eyes from lining up in the same direction. When she was younger, one of the best surgeons in the country offered to perform the simple operation that would fix them. Julia was not keen on surgery, however, and declined.
After her husband became president, Julia reconsidered surgery. “I never had the courage to consent, but now that my husband had become so famous I really thought it behooved me to try to look as well as possible.”
Ulysses objected: “Did I not see you and fall in love with you with these same eyes? I like them just as they are, and now, remember, you are not to interfere with them. They are mine and let me tell you, Mrs. Grant, you had better not make any experiments, as I might not like you half so well with any other eyes.”
Because her strabismus was never corrected, Julia almost always posed in profile for portraits.
Other
From History.com:
When he accepted the surrender of Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia in April 1865, Grant offered generous terms that paroled Confederate soldiers and officers and allowed them to return to their homes. He even permitted the men to keep their horses and mules for use as farm animals. Grant believed leniency was critical to achieving a lasting peace, and he was furious when a federal grand jury later negated the terms of his agreement and charged Lee and several other Confederate generals with treason. During a subsequent meeting with President Andrew Johnson, he stated his intention to “resign the command of the army rather than execute any order to arrest Lee or any of his commanders so long as they obey the law.” Unwilling to lose Grant’s support, Johnson reluctantly dropped the case.
Grant was the youngest president elected at the time. The former general was 46 years old and never held elected office when he took office in 1869. His inexperience would be a factor in a tumultuous eight-year term amid Reconstruction.
On Grant’s application to West Point, Ohio Congressman Thomas Hamer recorded his name as U. S. Grant earning him the nickname “Sam”–as in Uncle Sam–among fellow cadets.
After spending a decade in the army and serving with distinction in the Mexican-American War, Grant was reportedly forced to resign from the army for being caught drunk on duty. He spent the next seven years as a farmer, real estate agent and rent collector. He once had to eke out a living by selling firewood on St. Louis street corners, and when the Civil War erupted, he was toiling away in obscurity at his family’s Galena, Illinois leather business. Grant would later try his hand at business a second time after he left the White House, with equally disastrous results. A financial firm he started with his son and a man named Ferdinand Ward went belly up after Ward fleeced its investors, and by 1884, Grant was bankrupt. It was only after the posthumous publication of his memoirs that his fortune was restored.
Grant’s inauguration would see the first mass gathering of African Americans at the inauguration of a US president. Seeing the huge African American presence at his inauguration, Grant would use the opportunity to push for the ratification of the 15th Amendment, which was designed to give all African American men the right to vote.
He was responsible for dismantling the KKK during Reconstruction. Grant mobilized the Justice Department and secured thousands of indictments against their leaders. In 1871, he also oversaw passage of the so-called “Ku Klux Klan Act,” which armed him with the power to declare martial law and suspend habeas corpus in areas deemed to be in a state of insurrection. The KKK wouldn’t resurface in force until the 1910s.
In 1872, Grant signed legislation establishing Yellowstone as the nation’s first national park.
Grant remarked that the two best days of his life were when he left West Point and when he left the Presidency. However, he was alarmed at the administration of his successor, Rutherford Hayes, and agreed to run for President in the election of 1880. He lost the Republican nomination to William McKinley.
After leaving the presidency, Grant became ill and was financially destitute. His memoirs, written as he was dying from throat cancer, show a clear, concise style, and his autobiography, The Personal Memoirs of U.S. Grant, is considered among the best, if not the best, written by a President. Grant’s widow Julia received a whopping $450,000 in royalties, in part thanks to the efforts of Mark Twain to secure a lucrative publishing contract for Grant.
Grant used around seven to ten cigars a day, although many of them he did not smoke, chewing on them instead.
Return to The Presidents main page.
Sources:
Internet Public Library
History.com
Constitution Center.org
Greenman, Barbara. The Timeline History of U. S. Presidents and First Ladies Thunder Bay Press, San Diego, California, 2009.