General Ulysses S. Grant was commander of all U.S. Army forces in the field during the American Civil War from the spring of 1864 until the conclusion of the conflict. He was appointed to command after successes in the Western Theater and accepted the surrender of Robert E. Lee’s Confederate Army of Northern Virginia at Appomattox on April 9, 1865. Ulysses S. Grant spent most of his time as overall commander in the field with General George Meade’s Union Army of the Potomac. After the war, Grant was elected to two terms as President of the United States. Ulysses S. Grant died in 1885 at the age of 63.
Ulysses S. Grant
The citizens of Vicksburg would scarcely remember a more beautiful evening. The sky on April 16, 1863, was cloudless, and as the ruddy glow of twilight faded, the vast expanse was speckled with stars. Read more
Ulysses S. Grant
A signal rocket set off by Confederate pickets streaked skyward in the damp early morning of February 4, 1862. Read more
Ulysses S. Grant
During the Civil War, the strategic importance of Vicksburg, Mississippi, was readily apparent to both the Union and the Confederacy. Read more
Ulysses S. Grant
Before the fighting even began, before the first impassioned chorus of “On to Richmond!” was raised by the men in blue, the soldiers comprising the Union Army of the Potomac during the Civil War had to create their own precarious living quarters in the forested wilderness of the Eastern Seaboard. Read more
Ulysses S. Grant
Around 8 o’clock on the morning of June 17, 1876, Brig. Gen. George Crook ordered his troops to halt along the banks of Rosebud Creek. Read more
Ulysses S. Grant
Horace Porter was born April 15, 1837 in Huntingdon, Pa. He traced his ancestry and family motto, “Vigilantia et virtute,” to William De La Grange, who accompanied William the Conqueror to England in 1066. Read more
Ulysses S. Grant
For the black-skinned, blue-clad soldiers deployed on the extreme left flank of the Union Army outside Nashville, Tennessee, the order to advance announced at dawn on December 15, 1864, was a long time coming. Read more
Ulysses S. Grant
Big battles make the history books. But for the soldiers, it was often the smaller, fiercer fights they remembered most keenly later in their lives. Read more
Ulysses S. Grant
When the Civil War started in 1861, there were only two officers in the Union Army who had commanded a force in battle larger than a brigade. Read more
Ulysses S. Grant
By the early spring of 1865, the Southern Confederacy was on the cusp of extinction. In every theater of the four-year-old Civil War, the gray-clad Rebels were getting the worst of things. Read more
Ulysses S. Grant
Peering through a pair of field glasses, Major General Nathan Bedford Forrest perched in an oak tree on Missionary Ridge, overlooking the Tennessee town of Chattanooga, and observed a Union army in complete disarray. Read more
Ulysses S. Grant
For weeks, Maj. Gen. William Rosecrans had been hearing increased grumblings from Washington about how he should move his army out of Nashville and strike General Braxton Bragg’s Confederate forces 30 miles away in Murfreesboro. Read more
Ulysses S. Grant
Safe behind its ocean barriers, the United States paid scant attention to the wars that raged abroad during the early 19th century, taking little notice of the lessons that might have been learned from the European experience with mass killing. Read more
Ulysses S. Grant
It was the afternoon of September 20, 1863, and the right wing of the Union Army of the Cumberland was in full flight at the battle of Chickamauga in northern Georgia. Read more
Ulysses S. Grant
The guide shook uncontrollably when the gray-clad general pointed his pistol at him in the backwoods of central Georgia on the evening of July 21, 1864. Read more
Ulysses S. Grant
Mr. Morris is the author of seven well-received books on 19th Century American history and literature. He has served as a consultant for A&E, the History Channel, and edited a three-book series for Purdue University Press on American Civil War and post-Civil War history, journalism and literature. Read more
Ulysses S. Grant
U.S. President Abraham Lincoln had no military experience and discarded most of Lt. Gen. Winfield Scott’s so-called Anaconda Plan, which critics deemed too conservative. Read more
Ulysses S. Grant
The American Civil War was the tragic culmination of divergent perspectives on the proper conduct of the government of the United States and socio-economic issues that had been frequently at the forefront of American political life for decades. Read more
Ulysses S. Grant
Born in Ohio in 1822, Ulysses S. Grant graduated from the United States Military Academy at West Point in 1843. Read more
Ulysses S. Grant
When the sun set on the Confederacy, the stars began to rise and shine, none more brightly for Northerners than that of Abraham Lincoln, and for Southerners than those of Robert E. Read more
