Articles of Agreement Relating to the Surrender of the Army of Northern Virginia

About the Author

The eldest of six children, Hiram Ulysses Grant was born in a two-room cabin on April 27, 1822, at Point Pleasant, Ohio, to Jesse Root Grant and Hannah Simpson. Called Ulysses by his father, Hiram grew up across the street from his father's tanning factory, with the stench of animal hides and tanning chemicals constantly in his nostrils. As a boy he did farm work, and at age sixteen he worked in his father's tannery. Grant, small in stature and of a sensitive nature, was a mediocre student, dubbed “Useless” by other students. His singular talent was his skill with horses and horsemanship.

He was mistakenly registered as “Ulysses S.” when he was appointed to the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, and the error stuck with him the rest of his life. Grant was an unexceptional cadet academically, but his superior horsemanship made him a candidate for the army's elite cavalry. When he was arrested for striking a horse, however, Grant's chances of a career in the cavalry were ruined. Graduating near the lower half of his class, he was posted to the infantry, where he would command common, rather than elite, soldiers.

Grant was posted to a St. Louis regiment along with his West Point roommate, Frederick Dent, who introduced Ulysses to his sister, Julia. The Dent family was wealthy, owning twenty slaves. Grant fought in the Mexican-American War, receiving two citations for bravery. After the war, he was redeployed as a brevet captain in Missouri, where he married Julia. Repelled by the Dent family's ownership of slaves, Grant's parents did not attend the wedding. Grant and Julia eventually had four children.

The routine of peacetime army life did not agree with Grant. He was constantly transferred to bases on the West Coast, far from his wife and children. To relieve his loneliness, he apparently turned to alcohol. Grant biographers differ on the circumstances of his departure from the army and on his drunkenness. The consensus view holds that Grant was a binge drinker who indulged episodically to relieve depression. Relations between Grant and his commander deteriorated, and Grant resigned from the army in 1854 and returned to his family in Missouri.

Over the next six years Grant tried and failed at several undertakings. His father-in-law gave him land to farm, but he could not make a go of it as a farmer. In 1858–1859 he worked briefly as a bill collector In 1861 the Civil War rescued Grant from a tedious job working in his brother's leather shop. The need for experienced officers was so great that the army accepted Grant's reenlistment despite his delinquent record. His first assignment was to organize an infantry unit out of the ragtag 21st Illinois Volunteer Infantry. After leading the regiment to success against guerrilla units in Missouri, Grant was promoted to brigadier general. His capture of Fort Henry and Fort Donelson on the Cumberland River in northern Tennessee in early 1862 marked the first significant military victories won by Union forces. His audacity in the West stood in sharp contrast to the methods of the defensive-minded generals in the East, especially George B. McLellan, who had bungled a chance to end the war with a force of over one hundred thousand men in the Peninsula campaign the previous summer. The contrast was not lost on Abraham Lincoln, who saw Grant as a possible replacement for the timid and prickly McLellan.

When Union forces suffered massive troop losses at Shilo, Grant's rivals and their political allies in Washington blamed him, claiming that he was drinking again. In response to demands that Grant be discharged, Lincoln is said to have retorted, “I can't spare this man; he fights!” (Donald, p. 171). By 1862 Lincoln had promoted the cigar-smoking Grant to major general. At Vicksburg in the early summer of 1862, Grant took his army across the Mississippi River, bypassing the fort's heavy artillery before doubling back to capture the garrison from the rear. The Vicksburg campaign gave the Union control of the Mississippi River, splitting the Confederacy in two. By early 1864 with the generals George Henry Thomas, Sheridan, and Sherman, Grant had captured eastern Tennessee, opening the Confederacy to a two-pronged assault from the West, which would ultimately lead to Lee's encirclement in Virginia.

Lincoln promoted Grant to lieutenant general and commander of all Union forces in March of 1864. Grant devised a coordinated offensive strategy to simultaneously strike the Confederacy from several directions. As an adjunct to the strategy, Grant formulated the doctrine of “total war.” He broke with the conventional dictum that an army needed to maintain its supply lines or face starvation. Union forces penetrating deep into the South would rely on the enemy's own resource base, bringing the reality of war to the enemy population. As the army moved forward, it would make war on the enemy's means of making war by destroying railroads and bridges and by confiscating food supplies from the civilian population. Destroying the economic infrastructure that supplied the enemy armies was considered as important as tactical victories on the battlefield.

Grant placed General Sherman in command of forces in the West and moved his own command to Virginia to restart the long-stalled Union objective of destroying Lee's Army of Northern Virginia and capturing the Confederate capital at Richmond. Sherman would capture Atlanta and move over land to Savannah on the coast before turning north through South Carolina to engage and destroy Joe Johnston's army in North Carolina. Grant began his final campaign against Lee in May 1864, leading the Army of the Potomac across the Rapidan River. Grant and Lee fought two murderous battles in succession at the Wilderness and then at Spotsylvania Court House, with massive casualties on both sides. Despite casualty rates that would have driven previous Union commanders to retreat, Grant pledged in a legendary dispatch, “I propose to fight it out along this line if it takes all summer” (McPherson, p. 731). Caring little about winning individual battles, Grant's strategy was to exhaust Lee by hammering at him with superior force in a relentless succession of battles. This strategy forced Lee to fight a long, defensive battle rather than using the slashing counterattacks and surprise assaults he had used so effectively in the past. An expert in trench warfare, Lee had his outnumbered troops dig a continuously lengthening line around Petersburg, the gateway to Richmond. Grant took such enormous casualties in the long struggle around Petersburg that the opposition press in the North dubbed him “the butcher.” The bloodiest carnage occurred at Cold Harbor on June 3. In his memoirs Grant conceded that the final third charge was a tactical error, but he continued to replenish his forces and press Lee.

Grant remained stalled before Petersburg through the summer of 1864, while Sherman was bogged down at Atlanta. As public patience in the North wore thin, the wisdom of Grant's strategy was increasingly challenged. By August, Lincoln confided to his aides that he expected to lose the upcoming election. Then, in September, Sherman took Atlanta, opinion in the North shifted, and Lincoln was easily reelected. In November, Sherman began his march through Georgia to Savannah and north to South Carolina.

By early April 1865 Grant's pressure forced Lee to overextend his lines. Eventually, Lee was forced to flee Petersburg, crossing the Appomattox River to the west. With the American flag flying over Richmond and no hope of breaking the Union containment to join Johnston in North Carolina, Lee sent surrender overtures to Grant. After a series of exchanges relating to the terms of surrender, Lee surrendered the Army of Northern Virginia at Appomattox Court House on April 9, 1865.

Despite being elected president twice, Grant's postwar career was anticlimactic. Grant opposed President Andrew Johnson's Reconstruction policy because he thought it was too lenient toward the former Confederates. This made him the choice of the radical wing of the Republican Party, who secured his nomination for president in the election of 1866. Grant's own policy was indecisive and inconsistent. As state after state was “redeemed” by conservative former Confederates, Grant stood by, claiming that defending Black rights in the South should be left to local militias rather than to the U.S. Army. On the other hand, the Enforcement Acts of 1870–1871 broke the power of the Ku Klux Klan, and the Civil Rights Act of 1875 was an unprecedented attempt to extend federal protection to Black civil rights in public accommodations.

In the ensuing years Grant's inexperience and his admiration of financially successful men led him into a series of scandals. In 1869, with the assistance of Grant's brothers-in-law the stock manipulators Jay Gould and Jim Fisk floated the rumor that the government would stop redeeming greenbacks, the paper currency issued during the war, for gold. In the resulting panic, the pair cornered the gold market, driving up the price of gold and bankrupting many legitimate businesses. When the president learned of the scheme, he belatedly intervened, directing the Treasury to sell four million dollars' worth of gold to lower the price. In 1872–1873 another scandal broke when it was revealed that Vice President Schuyler Colfax had been bribed with Crédit Mobilier stock in return for legislation favorable to western railroad companies. The 1874 Sanborn scandal involved tax farming by federal officials, while in the Whiskey Ring scandal treasury officials conspired with distillers to dodge excise taxes on whiskey. On top of the financial and graft scandals, speculation in railroad stock triggered the Panic of 1873, setting off a general economic depression for which the hapless Grant had no answer.

After returning from a celebrated world tour in the late 1870s, Grant was bankrupted by foolish investments in the fraudulent banking firm Grant & Ward. In a final act of courage and determination while dying of throat cancer, Grant kept himself alive long enough to finish writing his Personal Memoirs. Considered by critics a remarkable work of military memoir writing, Grant's memoirs earned enough money to pull his family out of debt. Grant died of throat cancer in 1885.