Description
In spite of an unremarkable childhood, mediocre grades at West Point and a lackluster military career up to the outbreak of the Civil War, Ulysses S. Grant became one of the most consequential leaders in American history. He became the greatest general of the Civil War and with the exception of Abraham Lincoln, no man did more to preserve the Union. As President, he confronted the Ku Klux Klan in order to protect the rights of millions of newly freed black Americans. Grant was a simple, humble Midwestern man who as Walt Whitman once put it was, “nothing heroic, and yet the greatest American hero.”
