Ulysses S. Grant got his famous initials from a congressman's paperwork mistake
His parents named him Hiram Ulysses Grant. When a congressman nominated him to West Point in 1839, he wrote the name wrong, and the army enrolled U. S. Grant. Classmates promptly called him Sam, for Uncle Sam. The mislabelled cadet went on to win the Civil War and serve two terms as president.
Grant was born in Ohio on 27 April 1822, son of Jesse Root Grant, a Whig and ardent abolitionist. As a boy he showed an unusual gift with horses and drove supply wagons for his father. His Methodist parents, unusually, did not make him attend church; he prayed privately all his life, never joined a denomination, and struck even his son as agnostic. He graduated from West Point in 1843, served with distinction in the Mexican-American War, and was back in civilian life and short of money by 1854.
The Civil War revived him. Joining the Union Army in 1861, he won in the western theatre in 1862, and his 1863 Vicksburg campaign handed the Union the Mississippi River. After Chattanooga, Abraham Lincoln made him lieutenant general over all Union armies. He wore down Robert E. Lee through the Overland Campaign until Lee surrendered to him at Appomattox. A split with President Andrew Johnson over Reconstruction preceded his unanimous Republican nomination and election in 1868.
As the eighteenth president, from 1869 to 1877, he steadied the post-war economy, backed Reconstruction and the Fifteenth Amendment, prosecuted the Ku Klux Klan, created the Department of Justice and set up the first Civil Service Commission in 1871. His second term drowned in scandals, and his answer to the Panic of 1873 failed to stop the Long Depression. He settled the Alabama Claims with Britain peacefully, though the Senate blocked his plan to annex Santo Domingo, and his policy toward Native Americans aimed at assimilation.
After leaving office he became the first president to travel around the world. Dying of throat cancer in 1885, he wrote memoirs that became a critical and commercial triumph after his death on 23 July. He was then the most popular man in America. Later, Lost Cause mythology spread by Confederate sympathisers dragged down his reputation, which has only begun to recover this century.
Source: Ulysses S. Grant
