Ulysses S. Grant

(1822 - 1885)

To escape working at his family’s tannery, Ulysses S. Grant enrolled at West Point in 1839. He stood only a little over five feet tall when he entered, took great interest in the required art classes, and ranked twenty-first in a class of thirty-nine. (His classmates called him Sam, a joking nod at his patriotic initials.) After fighting in the Mexican-American War—and surviving a miserable and lonely stint at a fort in California—he left the army to settle down with his family as a farmer. At the outbreak of the Civil War, Grant helped recruit and drill troops before securing his reputation as an aggressive and resilient general by winning key battles for the Union. He served as commander of the Union armies during the late years of the Civil War and later, in 1869, became eighteenth president of the United States by a margin of 300,000 votes. Before his death from throat cancer, Grant was eager to make money—after years of terrible financial decisions—for his family and quickly wrote his memoirs; Mark Twain helped him negotiate the best publishing deal, and Grant’s wife later received the largest royalty payment yet received from book sales.