General Grant is pictured here with his staff at a military encampment. Grant is seated at far left.

Evan J. Cording
University High School, Urbana

Ulysses S. Grant is known as the victorious Northern general in the Civil War, but few realize how indirectly he came to his position of power and success. Illinois connections provided the springboards: the volunteers he was given in Galena to train, and the Twenty-first Illinois Infantry to lead. His major victories bolstered his reputation among colleagues in the Union army and in the estimation of President Abraham Lincoln.

Ulysses Simpson Grant was born on April 27, 1822, in southern Ohio. He regularly attended school there from age six to seventeen. In the winter of 1838, his father Jesse Grant applied for his son's admission into the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, and young Ulysses was accepted. He was not at all excited about this. The other cadets considered their first year at West Point torture, but Grant said it was "wearisome and boring." Grant's performance at West Point was summed up well in his own words, "I never succeeded in getting squarely at either end of my class in any one study during the four years." Grant enjoyed reading more than he liked studying and succeeding in his subjects. He also enjoyed painting during his time at West Point. Besides landscapes and buildings, he also drew horses, which he loved to ride. He was known as an excellent horseman.

When Grant graduated from the United States Military Academy in 1832, his application for cavalry was declined; instead he was sent to the infantry. This disappointed him, because he wanted to ride across the battlefield in his smashing cavalry uniform on those gallant horses he loved. He protested, but to no avail. In 1845 he was sent off to the Mexican War. Experiences in the Mexican War helped him succeed in the Civil War. He learned the tactic of moving swiftly without supply lines, a significant strategy in the Vicksburg Campaign. He studied the moves of his commanders and paid attention to which ones worked for them and won them battles. He also learned that volunteer armies are not very good in wars and that unprofessional troops often go into battle not knowing how to fight and fearful of facing horrible deaths.

In 1848 when Grant returned from the Mexican War he married his fiancee Julia Dent. After their marriage, the couple was seldom separated, except when he was sent off to a post in San Francisco during the peak of the gold rush from 1852 to 1854. In 1854 he resigned from the army because he had a drinking problem and because he did not enjoy serving as a peacetime military officer.

Despite being with his family, Grant faced seven tough years. Having given up the only trade he knew at thirty-three, he had to find a job to support his family.

He and Julia went to her father for help, who gave the couple some of his land to farm near St. Louis, Missouri. On that land Grant built a house, the first and only one that he ever built. It was called Hardscrabble. Grant was not a very good farmer, though, and he soon went to town to sell firewood on a street corner. The Grants were nearly broke. They went back to St. Louis to see Grant's father about helping them financially. In 1860 he

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sent Grant, Julia, and their three children to Galena, Illinois, where Grant and Julia took over the management of his father's store.

In 1861 Fort Sumter fell and the Civil War began. President Lincoln issued a call for volunteers, and Illinois Governor Richard Yates echoed the call. Illinois began to mobilize. The first six state regiments were the Seventh through the Twelveth. By August there were regiments as high in number as the Fifty-fifth, more than the state could handle. But after defeats at Shiloh with the Ninth Illinois and other regiments, volunteering began to decline. Later on, though, to avoid being forcefully drafted by the state, men again began to volunteer. In August 1862 regiments up to the 116th were organized. By September regiments up to the 125th were in the field, and the 129th was being recruited. By November Illinois had 125 infantry regiments, 16 cavalry regiments, 30 batteries of artillery, and a quota excess of 20,000 men. Illinois was the third-highest provider of troops in the Union.

Galena had no professionally trained men to lead the volunteers other than Ulysses S. Grant; hence he became the organizer, recruiter, and drill-master for the Galena volunteers. Governor Yates appointed him Colonel of the Twenty-first Illinois Infantry, and Grant took his men to Camp Yates in Springfield to train them. Through his congressman, Elihu B. Washburne, Grant was admitted back into the U.S. army as a Brigadier General.

In the Mexican War, Grant had been quartermaster, and he knew that he could not just give a group of volunteers some rifles and say, "Okay, now you're in my regiment, go out there and fight." Before he taught them how to fight he taught them how to organize, how to camp, how to work efficiently, and how to set up and maintain a supply line. Grant also taught them not to plunder private properties in Illinois for food and clothing, but to instead act like professional soldiers.

After being stationed at Belmont, Missouri, on November 7, 1861, to keep the Confederates from going up the Mississippi River and into Missouri, he gained national attention with his operations in the West, at Forts Henry and Donelson, Shiloh, and Vicksburg. Shiloh was Grant's only overwhelming defeat. Grant's lack of readiness and an ambush from the Confederates cost the lives of many men in the Twenty-first Illinois Infantry.

Vicksburg was the major and final battle for control of the Mississippi River. The town was situated on a bluff on the east side of the river, which formed a looping meander at the base of the bluff. The Confederates had placed their guns along the bluff, with fields of fire covering the loop of the river where it passed along the bluff. Grant's initial plan was to dig a canal between loops of the meander so that his boats could bypass Vicksburg and avoid traversing the loop of the river that passed beneath the Confederate guns. However, the Confederates relocated their guns on the bluff so that they could fire along the line of the ditch into the Union troops, forcing Grant to abandon the effort. (Ironically, ten years after the war, the river naturally cutoff at the location of the abandoned ditch, leaving Vicksburg off the river, on an isolated meander.)

Grant marched the troops around Vicksburg on the west side of the Mississippi then crossed the river south of Vicksburg on several ironclad vessels that had miraculously slipped past Confederate guns and headed northeast toward Jackson, the capital of Mississippi. Grant cut off his own supply line and placed himself between Pemberton's army in Vicksburg and Johnston's army located northeast of Vicksburg, above Jackson, Mississippi. As Grant moved to cut off the Vicksburg-Jackson Railroad, Johnston ordered Pemberton to move out from Vicksburg to meet him, in order that they could together destroy Grant. But Union generals McClernand and McPherson met Johnston near Jackson and drove him north to Canton. Even though he might have attacked Grant from behind, Pemberton moved on to Champion's Hill as ordered. Grant met Pemberton at Champion's Hill, pushing him back into Vicksburg. Vicksburg was heavily fortified; hence, a siege was begun on May 18, 1863. The Union sappers tunneled beneath the fortifications and set off explosives in an attempt to breach the walls. The siege ended on July 4, 1863, when the city and garrison, low on food and ammunition, were surrendered by Pemberton.

Thus Grant became a student of war. He believed that war was annihilation, that it was about killing people, and he learned how simple this kind of war is. It was not about slaves or anything political, it was about killing the other side before you were killed.

There were three things that made the Twenty-first Illinois under Grant so successful: the men from Illinois were pioneers and had lived on the edge of the frontier all of their lives. They had to labor in the fields, which made them strong; and they had to hunt for their own food, so they knew how to fire and use a rifle. Two of the regiments and their commanders already had field experience, and Grant's Twenty-first was always on the offensive.

Grant was promoted to Lt. General on March 9, 1864, after his victories around Chattanooga. Lincoln noted that he was the one general who would fight. On March 12, 1864, he was promoted to General in Chief of the Armies of the United States. His control of the tactics and strategy eventually led to die surrender of the Confederate army in Virginia and the end of a long, tragic war.—[From Mark M. Boatner III, "Grant, Ulysses Simpson," The Civil War Dictionary; Bruce Catton, Grant Moves South; Arthur L. Conger, The Rise of U.S. Grant; Victor Hicken, Illinois in the Civil War, Jerry Korn, War on the Mississippi; William S. McFeely, Grant.]

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